Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  A LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR after Cheever’s death, on November 13, 1983, Bellow’s lawyer friend Sam Goldberg died of cardiac arrest, after a long period in and out of emergency wards and hospitals. Bellow had known Goldberg since the early 1950s (he is partly the model for Mintouchian, the divorce lawyer who appears at the end of The Adventures of Augie March). In addition to practicing law, Goldberg, a bibliophile, once thought seriously of going into business as a book dealer. Bellow described him as “an eccentric rich Manhattan lawyer…whose hobby it was to buy rare books for nickels and dimes from Fourth Avenue dealers who didn’t know what they were selling.”91 Goldberg bought many books for Bellow—not rare books, but new ones, mostly of social and political theory and history and philosophy. He was also a serious art-collector (not just of the paintings of his friend Nahum Tschacbasov, Sasha Bellow’s father). It was Goldberg who arranged the sale of the manuscript of Mr. Sammler’s Planet to the New York Public Library, persuading Frances Steloff, founder of the Gotham Book Mart, a client of his for over forty years, to donate twenty-five thousand dollars anonymously to the library’s Berg Collection. Without this donation, the library could not have met the sixty-thousand-dollar asking price for the manuscript. The Gotham Book Mart was a New York institution and a Bellow haunt. Goldberg also helped to set up the Steloff Lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Steloff was “particularly proud” when Bellow agreed to deliver the first such lecture.92

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  IN LATE FEBRUARY 1984, Bellow and Alexandra traveled to Paris, where, on March 1, he was made Commander of the Legion of Honor by François Mitterrand. As Mitterrand tied the decoration around his neck, Bellow told an interviewer, “I said to him in French, ‘Better to be decorated than hanged!’ I hope he didn’t hear me….At a solemn moment, you know, when a man puts his arms around you and he’s fastening a knot around your neck…”93 Later in the spring, Bellow received a second honor, one that moved him to tears. A letter arrived from the mayor of Lachine, Quebec, Guy Descary, announcing that the town library was going to be renamed the Saul Bellow Municipal Library, and inviting him to attend a naming ceremony on June 10, his sixty-ninth birthday. “He seemed genuinely moved by the gesture,” the mayor recalled. “He said he had nothing named for him anywhere.”

  Bellow returned to Lachine with Alexandra, his niece Lesha Greengus, his sister, Jane, and Harriet Wasserman, his agent, who had also arranged for People magazine to cover the event. On the way to the ceremony, they stopped in Stowe, Vermont, to visit Marvin Gameroff, son of Shmuel David Gameroff, in part the model for Isaac Braun in “The Old System.” They arrived in Montreal several days before Bellow’s birthday, to stay at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, on Sherbrooke Street, a far cry from St-Dominique Street, in the Jewish district of the city, where the Bellows moved after Lachine. That night, there was a big family dinner, attended by a number of relatives, including Marvin Gameroff, who drove up separately from Stowe (with his newly adopted son, Lamont, a ten-year-old African American boy). In the morning, Bellow and his party, including a photographer from People, drove to Lachine, where they visited his birthplace, the modest two-flat house at 130 Eighth Avenue. A French Canadian woman in her thirties came to the door and graciously showed them round the apartment.94

  The ceremony at the library, at 3100 St-Antoine Street, began around noon. It was a hot and muggy Sunday, but when Bellow and his party alighted from Mayor Descary’s limousine, they were greeted by what Wasserman describes as “the whole town,” plus an orchestra, L’Harmonie de Lachine, playing “Chicago,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and “Happy Birthday.”95 The street in front of the library was closed to traffic, and a tent was set up on the library lawn. The mayor gave a brief speech of welcome, calling Bellow “le plus grand écrivain de notre époque.” A plaque was unveiled at the library entrance, and Bellow, tearful again, gave a speech, in French and English. This speech, much drawn on in chapter 2 of To Fame and Fortune, recalled Bellow’s happy childhood in Lachine. After the ceremony, there was an “exclusive” hundred-dollar-a-plate brunch for 250 people at the Maison de Brasseur, a converted brewery bordering the St. Lawrence, the proceeds of which were to go to the Lachine Hospital. Among the invited guests were Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen. A second brunch was held the next day, for what the Montreal Gazette called “the less-famous.” It was free. There was singing and dancing on the library grounds, and nothing like the number of speeches from the day before. Among the sixteen speakers at the first brunch was Ruth Wisse, who taught Yiddish literature at McGill (she would not become professor of Yiddish at Harvard until 1993).96 The next night, Bellow had dinner with Wisse and her husband and another of the speakers, Louis Dudek, also a professor at McGill. Wisse, a hard-line conservative, took Bellow to task over politics, accusing him, among other misdemeanors, of “temporizing” in his support of Israel. Bellow took no offense.97 In fact, she recalls, “he loved how passionate we were about Israel.” At another party during the visit, Wisse and Bellow sat next to each other and conversed in Yiddish. When Wisse got up to bring sweets and fruit to the table, Bellow, playing on her name, said, “Zi heist rut nor zi rut nisht,” which Wisse translates as “Her name is Ruth but she does not rest.”98

  More awards and recognition brought 1984 to an end. In September, Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and his wife, Masha, visited the Bellows in Vermont, and Bellow traveled to Capri to receive the Malaparte Prize. In October, he was interviewed by Diane Sawyer, “that blonde beauty,” on 60 Minutes and gave readings in San Francisco and New York. Though The Dean’s December had received very mixed reviews, Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories, published in May 1984, was much praised.99 In addition to the title story, the collection included “What Kind of Day Did You Have?,” “A Silver Dish,” “Cousins,” and “Zetland: By a Character Witness.” Typically, only Anatole Broyard of The New York Times failed to see merit in these stories.100

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  A YEAR AND A HALF AFTER Sam Goldberg’s death, Bellow’s first wife, Anita, died, in March 1985, four months after her second husband, Basil Busacca, to whom she had been married for twenty-five years. Anita had worked all her life. At the time of her death, she was running the Hollywood office of the Department of Social Medicine at Kaiser Permanente, a large health-care company in California.101 When Bellow heard of Busacca’s death, he asked Greg whether he should call Anita to offer his condolences. Sensing that this was “something he really did not want to do, I left it up to him. He never called, though he should have.” When Anita died, however, Bellow “was at his absolute best….Saul’s tenderness was palpable as he said, ‘Come to Chicago. Your loving father will be waiting.’ ” For all the tensions in the relationship between Bellow and his oldest son, “seeing me suffer always cut through to our fundamental emotional connection.”102

  Within two months of Anita’s death, Bellow’s seventy-seven-year-old brother, Maury, died from colon cancer.103 Maury had been unwell for some time, with prostate cancer and heart trouble. He died in Thomasville, Georgia, where he had moved from Miami in 1976 with his second wife, Joyce, and their two children. They lived on a fifteen-acre plantation named White Haven, where Joyce raised Paso Fino horses, prized for their smooth gait; at one point, she owned twenty-two of them. Maury was then in the antiques business, buying up fine furniture on twice-yearly visits to England and storing his purchases in large warehouses in Thomasville. Shortly after his death, Ruth Miller paid a condolence call on Bellow, at the apartment on Sheridan Road. Bellow told her that, on his last visit to Thomasville, in April, he’d bought three pieces of furniture from Maury: “a revolving bookcase, a fine old bureau, and a small desk. He didn’t need them, but he bought them and they were beautiful.”104

  Maury knew he was dying at the time of Bellow’s visit but talked only of how lucky he was. “He told Bellow,�
� Miller reports, “how all his life was good, was right, how fine a woman his second wife was, and his children, and his home, and all his fine furniture, and Bellow sat there listening, grieving.”105 The brothers knew they were unlikely to see each other again, but Bellow said he would return if Maury needed him, he would fly right down. Maury did, in fact, call, according to Miller, advising Bellow that, “if he meant it, if he wanted to come, now was the time. He had better come now.” Before Bellow left for the airport, he received a second call, from Joyce: Maury had died.106 As Bellow recounted the story of his brother’s death, he sipped aquavit; he was okay, he said, not panicky. Miller was struck by the suit he was wearing, “a beige silk and wool suit, a very dashing well-cut suit with a vest.” It had belonged to Maury, who had bought it after losing a great deal of weight. Fat again, and dying, Maury pressed the suit on Bellow, who did not want it but took it anyway. As Miller puts it, “Maury was always giving Bellow a suit, and so, at the last, they reenacted the ritual between them.”107

  In “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” Herschel Shawmut flies to Texas to visit his older brother Philip on his estate near Houston. “Here he lived in grandeur, and when he showed me around the place he said to me ‘Every morning when I open my eyes I say, “Philip, you’re living right in the middle of a park. You own a whole park.” ’ ” Shawmut senses something false in his brother’s praise of the estate, as if “he was stuck with it. He had bought it for various symbolic reasons, and under pressure from his wife” (p. 395). This wife, Tracy, raises pit bulls, not horses, terrifying animals “bred for cruelty” (p. 398). “She was difficult to know but she was a true woman,” Philip said of her, “her fanatical fidelity to him was fundamental.” “Tracy is a wonder, isn’t she? There’s terrific money in these animals. Trust her to pick up a new trend. Guys are pouring in from all over the country to buy pups from her” (p. 397). Philip is fat, unwell, seeing a doctor, and on a physical-fitness program designed by Tracy. Herschel is made to watch him work out, “to witness that under the fat there was a block of primal powers, a strong heart in his torso, big veins in his neck, and bands of muscle across his back” (p. 398).

  The visit to Texas partly involves business. Some time ago, Philip cut Herschel in on a deal. By investing six hundred thousand dollars in an auto-wreckage business, “a foolproof investment” (p. 394), the brothers became partners. With money to invest, Herschel at last gained Philip’s attention. “For once he spoke seriously to me, and this turned my head” (p. 395). The problem now was that he was yet to receive anything back. “We waited and waited, and there was not a single distribution from the partnership. ‘We’re doing great,’ Philip reassured him. ‘By next year I’ll be able to remortgage, and then you and I will have more than a million to cut up between us. Until then you’ll have to be satisfied with the tax write-offs’ ” (p. 399). What Herschel discovers is that, “on the credit established by my money,” Philip and Tracy had been acquiring and reselling land, much of which “lacked clear title, there were liens against it. Defrauded purchasers brought suit.” Philip is convicted of fraud, jumps bail, escapes to Mexico, is caught and extradited, and dies “while doing push-ups in a San Antonio prison” (p. 402). Herschel then discovers that Philip “had made all his wealth over to his wife and children.” As the sole general partner in the business, “I was sued by the creditors.” In court, Herschel is represented by “energetic but unbalanced” Hansl Genauer, his wife’s brother (Hansl is the lawyer whose eyes are “like the eyes you glimpse in the heated purple corners of the small-mammal house” [pp. 409, 412]). It is Hansl who advises Herschel to hide his assets and flee to Canada.

  The real-life business dealings between Bellow and Maury were in several respects similar to those between Herschel and Philip. When Bellow came into money, after the success of Herzog, Maury involved him in several business ventures (mentioned in chapters 4 and 5). By 1972, according to Maury’s son, Joel, Bellow had invested “maybe $100,000” ($130,000 in fact) in the purchase of a large four-story apartment building well located in North Miami. Joel was Bellow’s accountant at the time, while also keeping books for Maury. He, too, was involved in the deal, as was his aunt, Jane Kauffman, Bellow and Maury’s sister. Like the fictional deal, the real-life one failed to produce returns. Bellow began to complain, unconvinced by Maury’s excuses. As Joel recalled in an interview, “Saul didn’t want to hear about drawdown, real-estate taxes.” Joel knew about such matters, but he, too, questioned the inexplicably high expenses and vacancy rates his father cited by way of explaining the absence of returns. The most aggrieved investor was Jane, who, according to Joel, “really loved money” and “could push Saul Bellow’s buttons; Jane was working over Saul, who was working over me.”

  In the summer of 1976, Joel and Bellow flew down to Florida to confront Maury about the lack of returns. “I became Jane and Saul’s link to Maury,” Joel remembers, “a lever with which to pry money.”108 Hoping to be a peacemaker between his father and his uncle, he had little sympathy “for either of them and certainly none for Jane.” On the flight from Chicago to Miami, Bellow talked to Joel “about what was really important in life.” This talk Joel describes as “the highpoint of my relationship with my uncle.” From it, he absorbed a conviction that “knowing,” “the process by which one knows,” was “paramount,” a lesson that changed his life, but one that, in hindsight, he saw as ironic, since at the time Bellow “was going for the money that it was obvious he wasn’t gonna get.” The meeting with Maury took place at a steakhouse on Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami. “We sat down without pleasantries. Then Saul turned to me and said words to the effect of ‘Tell him why you wanted me to come’ ” (which “wasn’t the only time that he ducked responsibility”).109 Feeling “like a patsy,” though still affected by their talk on the plane, Joel complied:

  I told my dear father that he had become unilateral in his dealings with his investors. Fortunately, Maury did not prolong the discussion. He said to us, “You will piss blood before you see a penny from me.” We stood up and left before our drink order was served. We got on a plane and went home without exchanging another word until we landed at O’Hare.110

  Whether Maury had been cheating Bellow is not clear. “In a way” he was, Joel believes. “There were too many excuses. We should have got something from the investment. I didn’t think the situation could be so difficult that there couldn’t have been something.” Maury was “taking liberties,” using money invested by Bellow, Jane, and Joel to support other ventures. “For guys like Maury,” Joel explains, “there’s little they won’t do or say to justify their actions to themselves.” His attitude was “Who the fuck are you to question my word?” When consulted about the deal, Sam, who hadn’t gone in on it, said only, “Well, you know Maury.”

  In a letter of August 27, 1976, after the meeting, Maury dispensed with Joel’s services as accountant and attacked him as unfeeling: “It seems at this time that your heart has shrunk to a walnut.” On November 18, 1976, “after serious consultation with Saul and prolonged soul searching,” Joel wrote to his father to protest his having “liquidated our interests at an amount which you claimed to be the fair market value of the property,” but which “less than six months later, you sold…for a $400,000 profit. In the latter transaction you appropriated all the cash at the closing; certainly, we were entitled to a portion of those funds.” After further complaints, Joel declared, “Saul and I are weary of what we can no longer consider to be a modest fucking and request that you desist from unilateral and arbitrary decisions regarding our interests.”

  In a letter of reply of December 1, Maury invites Joel to examine the books for the period in question, one in which Joel not only acted as an accountant for Maury and his companies, but was well aware, Maury claims, of the reasons for his decisions. Maury finds “offensive” Joel’s and Bellow’s “insinuations of dishonesty” and will not change his way of doing business. The let
ter ends defiantly: “You are welcome to pursue your options.” According to Joel, “Eventually, the property was sold and Saul and I received no part of the proceeds. Shit happens. But, I finally realized that familial feelings notwithstanding, I had better things to do than be used by my father in games with his brother, or by my uncle in much more subtle games with my father. That said, this round definitely went to Maury.”

  Several years later, on his birthday, Joel received a phone call from Maury. It was the first conversation they had had since the confrontation in Miami. After brief small talk, Joel, “meaning no disrespect,” asked about Maury’s health, assuming that something must have been wrong with it for him to call. Maury admitted that he’d just undergone cobalt treatment for prostate cancer. From then on, until Maury’s death, father and son exchanged phone calls on each other’s birthdays. Bellow’s relations with Maury took longer to repair, judging at least from the letter he wrote to Maury’s illegitimate son, Dean Borok, on June 17, 1980, quoted in chapter 3 of To Fame and Fortune. “He sees none of us,” Bellow reported, “brothers, sister, or his two children by his first marriage, nor their children—neither does he telephone or write.”

  After the news of Maury’s death, Bellow and Sam’s daughter Lesha flew to Georgia. Joel was already there, along with his son, Kyle, who had arrived from Florida, where he was at university. Joel got to Thomasville in time to say goodbye. “I kissed him and told him, ‘I love you Dad.’ He said, ‘I love you too David’ [Maury’s son from the second marriage]. As I say, one has to have a sense of humor.”111 When Bellow and Lesha arrived, after an arduous journey (a flight from Chicago to Tallahassee, then a four-hour drive to Thomasville), Bellow immediately asked Joel to drive them to the undertakers. “And I said: ‘He’s here.’ So Uncle’s taken aback. I said, ‘In the other room.’…We start walking to the front of the house and they’re looking around in the parlor for where the casket is and I say ‘Right there.’ And it’s one of those black canisters….I think it’s the first time that either of them had ever seen or heard of cremation for a Jew. The two of them in unison just sat down.” Joel thinks Maury wanted to be cremated because he “just did not want anyone pissing on his grave, and that was that….And undoubtedly Joyce had influence.” A small service in the backyard, overlooking the pasture and stables, was conducted by a friend of Maury’s, a local minister. A rabbi did the blessing, but the minister gave the eulogy, which Kyle remembers as “about what a kind soul Maury was and how he had this wonderful warmth and community sense and love of the land and the people. And we’re sitting there like, who the hell is he talking about?”