Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  BELLOW’S CONNECTIONS TO HIS SIBLINGS and their families were especially close in this period. In November 1973, he traveled to Montreal to receive an honorary degree from McGill University and to give a lecture on James Joyce. Accompanying him were his sister, Jane Bellow Kauffman, his brother Sam, and Sam’s daughter, Lesha. Together they visited Gameroff relatives in Lachine and Montreal. Maury was by now living in Florida, but Bellow remained in contact through joint business ventures.65 In December 1971, Maury began construction of a sixty-unit apartment building in North Miami, a deal for which his son Joel did all the tax work. Bellow initially invested forty-four thousand dollars in the deal. Pleased with Joel’s work, in August 1973 Bellow made him his tax accountant.66 A year later, Bellow invested in a second deal with Maury, for the development of a warehouse and shopping center, again in Dade County (Bellow had 25 percent interest in the scheme, Joel 10 percent , Maury 48.75 percent, and a fourth partner 16.25 percent). Other deals would follow, and although Bellow made money from them, in the end they generated bad feeling. The money mattered to Bellow in this deal-making, but so did the closeness to Maury. “I admired my brother, not because he was a ‘creative businessman,’ as they said in the family,” admits Herschel Shawmut in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” “that meant little to me—but because…Well, there is no ‘because,’ there’s only the given, a lifelong feeling, a mystery” (p. 395). In Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine describes a comparable admiration for his brother Julius, known also as Ulick. “Are you fluid?” Ulick asks. “Have you got about fifty thousand? I may be able to put you into something.”

  From time to time Ulick telephoned me from Texas and said, “Send me a check for thirty, no, make it forty-five.” I simply wrote the check and mailed it. There were no receipts. Occasionally a contract arrived six months later. Invariably my money was doubled. It pleased him to do this for me, although it also irritated him that I failed to understand the details of these deals and that I didn’t appreciate the business subtlety. As for my profits, they had been entrusted to Zitterbloom [accountant], they paid Denise, they subsidized Thaxter, they were taken by the IRS, they kept Renata in the Lake Point Towers, they went to Tomchek and Srole [lawyers] [p. 372].

  Other investment opportunities and stock tips came from Sam. Though Jane initiated no deals, she was a keen investor, and often badgered Bellow and Sam to press Maury about dividends and returns. Joel Bellows describes her as “really single-minded about money,” “mean as a snake” (according to Lesha and her daughters, Jane was in part a model for Isaac Braun’s sister Tina in “The Old System”). Bellow may have been, as Joel says, “an amateur when it came to thinking about money,” but part of his sense of what it was to be a man was to be involved with money.

  It also mattered to be an involved parent. Bellow’s efforts to be a good father were mixed in this period. Greg, the most prickly of his sons, was now himself a father. In addition to living farthest away from Bellow, he was wary of Bellow’s efforts to keep in touch. “Maintaining a geographic distance from Saul was the first in what became a series of insulating layers that afforded me some distance from his demands for attention and control.” Complaints about lack of attention from his father now alternated with complaints about threats to his independence. Shortly after Bellow and Alexandra married, they began spending summers in Vermont. For the first few years, Greg and his wife, JoAnn, and daughter, Juliet, joined them for family vacations. “But sitting around all morning and keeping a lively child quiet while my father wrote and Alexandra did academic work reminded me of my childhood boredom. Eventually I balked at such family vacations and stopped making the effort, placing yet another barrier between us.”67 In Greg’s view, Bellow was too critical, too controlling. “By my late twenties I had tired of judging myself by his standards.”68

  Relations were better with Adam, now a teenager and relatively happy at the Dalton School, after a rocky first year.69 What Adam describes as “the experience of feeling like nobody” had begun to fade. He became involved in drama at Dalton, developed a circle of friends, had a growth spurt, and slimmed down. Increased confidence fed a lively wit and turn of phrase, judging at least from letters kept by Bellow. “Dear Papa,” begins a letter of October 27, 1970, written when Adam was thirteen:

  How are things at your end of the line? Everything here is pretty much fastened to the deck. How’s your book, your apartment, your family, your peace of mind, and your squash? I just finished reading “Ethan Frome” for English. You have heard tell of this strange, dull book, mayhap? It matters but little. All I can say is, if they want us to write essays, can’t they make the subjects a bit more interesting? Anyway, if this sneak preview of life at Dalton (such as it is) alarms you, don’t let it! Nohow and contrariwise, I consider figuring out how the Greeks lived from painted vases quite interesting.

  Sasha attributes Adam’s newly confident manner with his father in part to her being out of the picture. Adam and Bellow could now arrange visits and meetings directly; she was no longer “the referee.”70 These were the years in which her own relations with Bellow began to improve, as noted previously. On February 8, 1973, she received a letter from Stewart Richardson, an editor at Doubleday. “Saul Bellow suggested that I contact you,” the letter begins, “I am writing in the hopes that we can get together to discuss editing and job opportunities in the field.” Nothing came of the contact, but it is evidence that Bellow had softened toward Sasha.

  Daniel was the son Bellow saw most of in the 1970s, and Daniel was having a rough time. He was six at the beginning of the decade, seriously asthmatic and emotionally fragile. Bellow saw him every Sunday and during the holidays. Daniel knew from an early age that his father was a celebrity. Everywhere he and Bellow went in Hyde Park, “people wanted to shake his hand. High-school students on the bus would say, ‘Tell me about your father.’ I’m, like, ‘I’m only seven.’ ” The Sunday routine was for Daniel as it had been for Adam when he and Sasha lived in Skokie. “We’d go to the museum, we’d take a walk in the park, we’d go to Daphne’s [a greasy spoon at Fifty-Seventh and Dorchester].” Or they’d visit relatives or friends of Bellow’s. After moving from 5490 South Shore Drive back to an apartment at 1755 East Fifty-Fifth Street, both within minutes of the Lab School, the Cloisters, and Bellow’s office, Susan decided to move with Daniel to the North Side. Bellow was furious. “My father said, I wasn’t consulted about this. My mother said, Fuck you, I’m not married to you, I can do what I want.” When asked if Bellow could control himself in talks with Daniel about Susan, Daniel answered, “No, nor she about him. They would yell at each other—‘you’re poisoning the child against me.’ ” Bellow and Susan reached an initial divorce settlement in 1968, when Daniel was four, but continued to argue about money and child care and were soon back in court.

  For more than a decade, while producing novels, essays, a book about Israel, lecturing all over the world, chairing the Committee on Social Thought, advising foundations and grant committees, visiting the White House, winning a Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer Prize, a third National Book Award, Bellow was up to his ears in lawyers. They bogged him down and bled him dry, in one of the longest, most expensive and acrimonious divorce settlements in Illinois history. Neither he nor Susan would give in. Struggles over the divorce wore at Bellow’s nerves and his patience, hampering his efforts to be the man he wished to be. At his desk, however, these struggles proved a source of rich material, much of it, as we shall see, very funny.

  SB and Alexandra on train platform in London, mid-1970s (private collection)

  5

  Distraction/Divorce/Anthroposophy

  IN JANUARY 1975, Bellow was invited to address the University of Chicago Board of Trustees’ Annual Faculty Dinner. His subject, “distraction,” was introduced by a quotation from Wordsworth, who “in 1807 warned that the world was too much with us, that getting and spendi
ng we lay waste our powers, that we were giving our hearts away and that we saw less and less in the external world, in nature, that we could respond to.” As Bellow saw it, the situation was worse today: “We are in a state of radical distraction, we are often in a frenzy,” he declared, a state produced by “the history of the twentieth century,” “an unbroken series of crises.” “Social and economic problems” wholly preoccupy us: “taxation and terrorism…street crime, racial tension, corruption in government, inflation, depression, Arab oil, détente, the technological future, arms talks.” Culture—high culture, that is—barely figures, even in the thoughts of what he calls “serious people,” “American intellectuals,” the assembled faculty he is addressing. Such people “cannot be said to take literature very seriously. It is simply not that important to them. It is not a power in life. Power is in science, in technology, in business, in institutions, in government and politics, in the mass media, in the life of nations. It is not in novels and poems.”1

  At the end of the month, on January 30, a third visit to the White House offered corroborating evidence of the lack of attention to literature and culture, at a banquet given in honor of Harold Wilson, the British prime minister, described by Bellow as “fatty, stooped, and short, without the slightest interest in the people being introduced to him.”2 In the East Room, Bellow and Alexandra joined the other guests: Cary Grant, Danny Kaye, Henry Kissinger. The only person there Bellow could actually claim to be acquainted with was Hubert Humphrey, who was “in one of his public states. The fit was on him. He couldn’t bear to be confined to the two of us. He was looking for someone more suitable, for the most suitable encounter, the one it could be death to miss.”3 Nelson Rockefeller, the vice-president, walked over to Bellow to shake his hand. “He had taken me for someone else and recognized his error in mid-course when it was too late to turn aside. He did the handshake bit, I murmured my meaningless name, and the Vice President went on to seek a more significant encounter.”4 After the banquet, there were difficulties finding a cab to the hotel. Back in the room, Bellow lay in bed and “understood a little the phenomenon described by neurologists as an insult to the brain. As I closed my eyes, the night opened mercifully before me and my spirit gracefully left this world.”5

  The theme of distraction—the seedbed of such insults to the brain—was not new to Bellow, but it became especially prominent in his writing from 1975 onward, for personal or biographical as well as historical reasons.6 It is at the center of Humboldt’s Gift, in which the lesson Charlie Citrine learns from Humboldt is that “you don’t make yourself interesting through madness, eccentricity or anything of the sort, but because you have the power to cancel the world’s distraction, activity, noise, and become fit to hear the essence of things” (p. 305). In his Nobel Prize lecture in December 1976, Bellow says the novelist’s job is “to cut through the whirling mind of a modern reader…to reach the quiet zone.”7 In “An Interview with Myself,” conducted in the Ontario Review (founding editor Joyce Carol Oates), Bellow begins with how difficult it is “to possess your soul in peace for a few minutes”:

  It is easy to observe in bars, at dinner tables, everywhere, that from the flophouse to the White House, Americans are preoccupied by the same questions. Our own American life is our passion, the problems of our social and national life with the whole world as background, an immense spectacle presented daily by the papers and the television networks—our cities, our crime, our housing, our automobiles, our sports, our weather, our technology, our politics, our problems of sex and race and of international relations. These realities are real enough. But what of the formulae, the jargon, adopted by the mass media—the exciting fictions, the heightened and dramatized shadow events presented to the great public and believed by almost everyone to be real. Is reading possible for a people with its mind in this state?8

  This question persisted for Bellow, in essays such as “The Distracted Public” (1990) and “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About” (1992), and in correspondence as well, often in the form of excuses. He has had no time to write letters, he complains; he is hounded by worthy causes, political, literary, and educational. “I am writing a short book about life in Jerusalem,” he reports to Karyl Roosevelt, in a letter of November 7, 1975, “while with the left hand I try to keep my novella going and, in spare time, study a bit of Hebrew and with my fanny direct operations at the U of C and follow up half a dozen other serious interests. Women used to take up so much of my time that I thought marriage w’d free my mind. Not a bit!” A year later, back in Chicago after three months in Jerusalem, he writes to Teddy Kollek on November 19, 1976: “People of America have begun to talk of the protection of natural resources. I have decided that I am such a national, and even international, resource and am issuing an appeal for protection. Here and now I have a choice to make between becoming a Jewish diva [Kollek wanted him to attend fund-raising events for Jewish and Israeli organizations] or remaining a writer. Your situation is different: you have a political vocation and you have to deal with all of these outfits. My duty—to myself, I mean—is to say no to all of them.” “I have too many things going all at once,” he complains in an undated letter to Mel Tumin, “and all keep me in that essential state of turmoil which, Pascal says, prevents people (saves them) from thinking about salvation. I hump along among unfinished works, promises unkept, things undone, lawsuits without end and the rest of the weak comic furniture of Life.” “Stone walls may not a prison make,” he writes to Barnett Singer, a Canadian academic and fan soon to figure more prominently in his life, “but I have enough manuscripts here for a lockup. Today I was presented with three, yours and two others of the same dimensions, all required reading sous peine d’amende. When am I supposed to cook curry, wash the dog or examine my toes?”9

  The demands on Bellow multiplied in 1975, with the publication of Humboldt’s Gift in August, the award of the Pulitzer Prize the following May, and the publication of To Jerusalem and Back in October 1976, accompanied by a front-page rave review from Irving Howe in The New York Times Book Review (it began, “The best living American novelist is also a man of brains”).10 Five days after Howe’s review, Bellow was named winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, the eighth American writer to be so honored. This was followed by a rush of congratulations, further honors, and invitations, most notably to deliver the Jefferson Lectures for the National Endowment for the Humanities, to receive the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for the Novel, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature, and the Emerson-Thoreau Medal. He was also asked to be a judge at the 1976 Miss USA Contest. On March 23, in a letter of invitation from Cindy Adams, a contest official, Bellow learned, “A poll of contestants of the Miss USA Pageant reveals that you are their number one author. Thus, they would like me to invite you to join the celebrated panel of Judges at the 1976 Miss USA Beauty Pageant which comes out of Niagara Falls. Last year we had Leon Uris, the year before Robin Moore, the year before that Jacqueline Susann and Irving Wallace.”11

  “I suppose I could have said ‘No’ to all the publicity like Beckett did and seen nobody,” Bellow told a reporter from The Guardian, “but I thought I would go along for a bit and see what it was like and then draw the curtains again.”12 The day before the Nobel announcement on October 21, he received a call from the Swedish Embassy asking whether he’d accept the Prize if offered it. That night, he and Alexandra went to dinner with a reporter from Newsweek, who had arrived in anticipation of such a call. Alexandra had scheduled movers to arrive the next day, to transport Bellow’s things to her apartment at 5901 North Sheridan Road. When a reporter from the Chicago Tribune arrived at Bellow’s apartment that morning, he found the new Nobel laureate on the sidewalk, surrounded by armchairs, padded tables, sofas, chiffoniers. As the president of the university, John T. Wilson, waited impatiently to drive Bellow to the campus for a formal press conference, Bellow instructed the movers about which pieces of furniture
were to go to Sheridan Road and which into storage. He was stylishly dressed in a matching green turtleneck shirt and suit and a black leather jacket—a dude. Newsweek described him as “silver-haired and trim at 61.”13 When asked by the Tribune reporter whether the award meant he was now going to be more engaged politically, Bellow answered: “It’d be a good idea if more people were out of politics.” When asked what the award meant to him, he answered, “It means I can stop thinking about recognition. Now I can think about more serious matters.”14

  At the press conference, Bellow claimed to have no plans for the $160,000 prize. “At this rate,” he quipped, “my heirs will get the money in a day or so.” What was he feeling? “I’m glad to get it. I could live without it.”15 The phone hadn’t stopped ringing, he said, with calls from family and friends, also “old professors who are pleased with my progress.”16 His sister, Jane, called and wept to remember their father’s contempt for Bellow’s literary ambitions. Maury called from Georgia (where he’d bought a property big enough for his wife, Joyce, to keep horses). Greg called from California, and Bellow joked, “Now you know why I was after you to be quiet thirty years ago.”17 In a sidebar to its report on the prize, the Chicago Daily News unearthed the authors of the two undergraduate stories that had been judged better than Bellow’s “The Hell It Can’t!” at Northwestern in 1936 (in a competition discussed in chapter 5 of To Fame and Fortune). Neither author went on to write fiction; both warmly welcomed Bellow’s success.18 Also pleased was Sydney J. Harris, in a Chicago Daily News column of November 15, 1976 (“One of Us Won the Nobel Prize…”), recalling how forty years ago he and Bellow “sat around our dining room table and planned the books we were going to write.” Harris felt “reflected pleasure,” not “reflected glory,” “that these two steeds did actually come out of the same stable, even though one of them is Pegasus and the other Dobbin.”