Saul Bellow's Heart (17 page)

Saul could not have chosen a greater challenge to his logical abilities than to convince himself of Steiner’s ideas about a spiritual life after physical death. The doubts Saul and I shared about what could be explained, including the limits we found in logic, cemented our relationship. I found that view confirmed in several revealing conversations soon after my fortieth birthday. I expressed a brief interest in philosophy and asked Saul to recommend some readings to me, which pleased him. I became puzzled by what seemed to me Hegel’s logical contradiction about Napoleon and the end of history, and asked Saul to explain it. He replied, “These guys [philosophers] just think themselves into corners they can’t get out of.”

I found our shared skepticism about how great thinkers are removed from life’s everyday problems most clearly exemplified near the end of
The Adventures of Augie March
. On a sea voyage Augie meets Bateshaw, a philosophical shipmate preoccupied
with abstract theories about improving the human condition. After a shipwreck, they are almost drowned until they come upon a lifeboat. Augie helps his companion into the vessel. But as soon as Bateshaw is no longer in danger, he gets so lost in his own thoughts about how to save the world that he fails to help Augie aboard. Implicitly my father is asking how much faith the world can place in any set of ideas when the “great thinkers” are so engaged in finding ways to save mankind that they cannot be bothered to rescue a drowning man.

Several of Saul’s friends had strong personal reactions to this passage that illustrate the difficulties in equating literary characters with specific people. More than a few came to believe or were told by “knowledgeable” third parties that they were the model for Bateshaw and expressed irritation to me at being characterized as super-rationalists with their heads in the clouds—or worse. Saul knew many such thinkers, and it was certainly not beyond him to insert a detail so personal as to make it crystal clear to one reader that he had him in mind.

But as tempting as it may be to equate characters with people, only my mother, who found a detail in
Seize the Day
that convinced her that Saul had put it there out of spite, has ever claimed to have found him- or herself directly identified. Though I find eerily familiar descriptions of people, places, and life events, I cannot assuredly form direct equations with real people, with the notable exceptions of my father’s narrators. Though their eyes and in their voices I see a lifelong series of emotional snapshots that reveal my father’s point of view, his frame of mind, and, most revealing, a novelistic soul-searching rarely present even in our real conversations.

By the mid-1970s Saul had renewed his friendship with Hyman Slate, who lived near Saul and Alexandra on Chicago’s North Side. On Sunday afternoons they would get together over a pot of tea and talk about all sorts of worldly matters. But the question of immortality soon came to dominate, and they formed a two-man study group dedicated to reading and discussing theories about death and the afterlife.

A few years later Hyman was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that would quickly claim his life. By then Saul had divorced Alexandra, had married once again, and was living in Boston. My father and I called Hyman to say goodbye. Saul ended the conversation by telling his old friend how much he admired the bravery Hyman showed in the face of death. Some months earlier, I had visited Hyman in Chicago and had found his health already precarious. He expressed a fond desire to reread Isaac Rosenfeld and Saul’s Yiddish translation of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which had circulated among Saul and Isaac’s friends in Hyde Park, including the sociologist Daniel Bell. Moved by Hyman’s request, I took it upon myself to secure a copy for him. Daniel Bell’s daughter Jordy, an undergraduate classmate at the University of Chicago, told me her father had transcribed the poem from memory, and I quickly forwarded a copy to Evelyn Slate, Hyman’s wife, who read it to him on his deathbed. Evelyn told me how much he appreciated hearing her read the poem, and I passed their gratitude on to Saul.

In his 1976 Nobel lecture, Saul had expressed an optimistic view about the universal capacity of art to bind humanity. But just a year later, a dark pessimism that must have been fermenting
in him since the late sixties emerged full-blown. In 1977 Saul was invited by the National Endowment for the Humanities to give the Jefferson Lectures, an honor for scholarly contributions. He delivered two stern lectures about the uneasy balance between the fragility of art and the fate of the artist in a materialist American culture that took little notice of either. As the second lecture ended he expressed deep concern about the deterioration of the social and political structures that had nurtured him as a young man and that extended to the fragile state of the entire human endeavor.

In
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
, a dark book by any measure, Saul worried that the future of civilized society was at risk. A decade after the defiance of civil authority at the 1968 Democratic Convention, on university campuses, and on the streets, Saul worried that these upheavals might well unravel the traditional bonds that hold society together. Angry objections to inequalities expressed by my generation, by women, and by blacks now in political power posed a threat to the twenty-five hundred years of Western culture Saul had studied and to which he had devoted his life.

In the late 1970s and ’80s, Saul began to criticize the growing tide of political correctness in society and began to take conservative positions on matters of race and gender. Saul’s refusal to consider the merits of disenfranchised groups seemed a reversal that was out of character, and I was upset to hear views from an increasingly embittered father that diverged from our family ethos of fairness, respect, and concern.

His anger interfered with the subtlety of “young Saul’s” arguments, which were replaced by the same kind of dogmatic stridency he had once found objectionable. However, as unfair as I
found his arguments to be, I need to make a crucial distinction between the organized groups whose demands for the redistribution of power he resisted and individual blacks and women whom he respected and liked, intellectuals like Ralph Ellison during the 1950s and later Stanley Crouch, a black music critic.

But what stands out are several conversations, initiated by my father during the mid—’60s, about the concerns Saul felt for the dangers faced by Gussie, Saul and Susan’s maid, a woman he genuinely liked and whose courage he respected, and her daughters. Gussie was raising two teenage girls who lived in a housing project a short bus ride from Saul’s apartment. Her responsibilities entailed serving dinner and cleaning up, and Gussie did not get home until 8:00 P.M. Saul worried that her daughters were exposed to a violence-ridden environment for many hours without Gussie to protect them and that they’d be caught up in a whirlpool that would destroy the girls.

I could never resolve my dislike of the contrast between that personal respect and concern and his cold rejection of demands by populations too long silent of whom I became an unapologetic supporter. Our arguments may well have brought out the worst in my father. Arguing with him only increased his ferocity and prolonged what amounted to tirades. However, even when I refrained from objecting in the hopes of ending painful-to-endure diatribes sooner rather than later, I was appalled at what he said. At times I felt some resistance was necessary: partly to remind him of how he had changed and partly because I was appalled to hear such bile flowing out of the father I loved.

After having lauded the successes of the civil rights movement in the South, Saul took an increasingly negative view of the militancy among blacks in Chicago. Hyde Park was a black
ghetto long before his return to the University of Chicago in 1961. Never a safe neighborhood, it was now a place where students were immediately cautioned about where it was safe to walk. An undergraduate was murdered near the campus in 1968, my last year in school. Everyone was frightened and Saul became increasingly cautious and troubled by the urban decay that was destroying the Chicago he fondly remembered.

In the late 1970s Saul tried to escape Hyde Park by moving into Alexandra’s apartment on the northern tip of Chicago, but that did not remove him from a city tensely divided along racial lines. By then the once all-white North Side had changed to a veneer of luxury lakefront buildings that was only two blocks deep. My aging father had me walk with him to the local supermarket because he wanted to show me he had to walk through an all-black neighborhood that frightened him in order to buy a bag of groceries.

When black elected officials expressed elation about wielding political power, Saul was furious. And when some of them made anti-Semitic statements, including an accusation that Jewish doctors were spreading AIDS in the African American community, he was outraged. He counterattacked in public, blaming black politicians and journalists for not contradicting these statements. He found an ally and later a friend in the second Mayor Daley, who, citing his status as a lawyer, demanded proof for such inflammatory accusations from the black leaders. Saul thought Daley heroic for taking that stand.

“Old Saul’s” reversal of his sociocultural views mirrored changes on a personal and generational level that I found equally if not more objectionable. The once rebellious and irreligious son now found favor in the wisdom of the older generation and
in the Jewish roots from which he had distanced himself during my formative years.

I believe my father’s anger over black anti-Semitism had become intertwined with generational issues, now also reversed. Given the contribution of Jews to the civil rights movement, the demands of newly enfranchised blacks smacked to him of the ingratitude of spoiled children, now grown, toward the parents who made earlier sacrifices for them. Saul had adopted attitudes much like his father’s toward ungrateful children and made snide comments, usually wrapped in humor, about their lack of appreciation for the long-suffering parents who always paid when the bill came due. Even though I paid for my children’s orthodontia, Saul could not resist a recurrent though clever bon mot that revealed a deep-seated resentment about generational ingratitude, that went, “The good thing about children having straight teeth is that they leave a clean mark when they bite the hand that feeds them.”

An angry Saul ruffled feathers when he served on the board of the MacArthur Foundation. Dissatisfied with the intellectual quality of the work by women and black applicants, he fought against their grants. And Saul offended everyone when he publicly asked, “Who was the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” In a feeble defense, he cited his years as an anthropology student and claimed to be drawing a distinction between literate and preliterate societies. His explanation satisfied no one.

In most respects generations of Bellow men had not viewed women as anything approaching equals. Morrie’s daughter Lynn thought herself intellectually inferior to the Bellow men, and Sam’s daughter Lesha complained about how poorly the family treated women. When Lesha and her husband, also named
Sam, wanted to send their three bright daughters to the best colleges, her father said it was a waste of good money. While Saul treated Anita very much as an equal in their early years, her independence became a sore point as their marriage soured. And Saul hated Anita’s friend Maja because she advocated that women should be as free to sleep around as men.

To say that Saul did not respect individual women disregards the love he felt for many and the trust he placed in several. Harriet Wasserman was his longtime literary agent, and my cousin Lesha was a trusted adviser in his financial dealings for decades. Lesha and Alexandra thought Saul’s attitudes toward women got worse when he and Allan Bloom became friends. But Allan, like Isaac Rosenfeld decades earlier, articulated a rationale for self-serving attitudes about gender that justified and even glorified men taking advantage of feminine self-sacrifice that, to me, shows how Saul’s social positions bled into personal attitudes to which Saul had long subscribed.

Once again, there were differences between the trust Saul placed in individuals and his enmity for groups and disagreeable beliefs. Saul had little sympathy with feminist ideas, the increasing presence of women in academia, or prominent women writers. When my stepbrother’s partner of twenty years, Mary Ryan, was awarded a Bancroft Prize in American History, I mentioned it and Saul commented that she was, no doubt, the most qualified woman, implying that she was given preference because of her gender.

Candace Falk, a former student of Saul’s and former director of the collection of the anarchist Emma Goldman’s papers, told me a story that perfectly captures Saul’s views on militant blacks and women as well as his love for a bon mot. As a graduate
student, Candace took Saul’s seminar on James Joyce. During that quarter, a student strike was declared in protest over the bombing of Cambodia and the imprisonment of the Black Panther Bobby Seale. Candace approached Saul very politely and requested that he cancel his seminar as a political statement. Later, when she stood before the class and urged them to leave with her and join the strike, Saul shot back, “I’ll be damned if I support anything that has to do with Bobby Seale,” and added, “The only thing you women’s liberationists will have to show for your movement in ten years will be sagging breasts!” Candace left the class insulted and crestfallen.