Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Bellow and Alexandra had what Adam calls “a good long run,” including “at least four or five largely happy years.” By the early 1980s, however, their differences began to tell. Alexandra’s intelligence was unquestioned, as were her independence and seriousness, but her knowledge of Bellow’s world, of literature, culture, politics, was “limited.” She didn’t get his references or his jokes; it made no sense for him to read her what he was writing. Like all three of Bellow’s sons, Adam is fond of Alexandra and grateful to her for her kindness and for the influence she had on Bellow as a father. That “she was not comfortable outside mathematics,” he believes, was a problem for the marriage, as was Bellow’s sense that she treated emotional life “like mathematics.” Bellow may also have sensed, Adam came later to believe, that as he aged, Alexandra “was not going to take care of him,” that “on a deep level the attachment was not strong enough for him to rely on.”

  “How’s the marriage going?” Adam remembers asking his father. “There are days when I feel like throwing myself off the balcony,” he replied. In the terrible summer of 1985, Adam and Rachel visited Bellow and Alexandra in Vermont. At dinner at Le Petit Chef, a favorite local restaurant, Alexandra asked the waiter if the veal was good. Bellow turned to the table and said, “This is her feeble-minded idea of asking the help what he thinks of the food.” Alexandra remembers “walking about in a daze” that summer, “totally bewildered by the anger, the hostility that my mere presence provoked.”127

  As Bellow lost patience with Alexandra, she lost faith in him as a man. “It was a moral question for her,” Adam believes. “He was a man who used other people.” Three years into the marriage, Alexandra had sided with Bellow when Dave Peltz, whom she was especially fond of, was upset over the story “A Silver Dish,” which fictionalizes episodes from his life. As with material Bellow drew on in Humboldt’s Gift, Peltz asked him not to use these episodes, which he intended to write about himself. Alexandra, with Bellow’s agreement, asked Adam to read the story and give his opinion about whether “Saul has the right to do this and Dave has the right to be upset.” Adam read the story (“one of the greatest things I’d ever read”) and answered “Yes” to both questions, which relieved Alexandra. What especially struck Adam about Bellow at this moment, when the marriage was strong, was how “vulnerable” he seemed “in this ‘seminar’ over which Alexandra presided.” “He was really hanging on my judgment, and I felt that I had to be careful.” In later years, Alexandra changed her views about an author’s right to draw on real-life characters and episodes. Adam remembers her complaining about the use Bellow made of her family in The Dean’s December. It had been “wrong” to depict her mother in the novel, “however admiringly.” Her privacy and that of her mother and aunt had been violated. As Daniel puts it, Alexandra is “very old-school, very old-fashioned, very private.”

  Greg Bellow remembers other complaints in the last years of the marriage. Alexandra did not take sufficient interest in the building of the Vermont house, leaving Bellow to make all the decisions. Bellow was furious, Greg remembers, at finding himself “being forced to choose from a catalog filled with bathroom fixtures.” Although he was impressed by Alexandra’s achievements as a mathematician, her devotion to her career, Bellow told Greg, “wore on him”128 (one recalls Henderson’s first wife, Frances, in Henderson the Rain King: “When Berthe [the children’s governess] had her appendix out there was nobody but myself to visit her in the hospital. My wife was too busy at the Collège de France” [p. 212]). Bellow complained that the marriage “lacked warmth”; he was only sticking with it “as he did not want to go through another divorce.” At the end, the bad feeling between Bellow and Alexandra was unignorable. Lesha, who also spent summers in Vermont, described “the same cold war of interminable silences that [Greg] had witnessed between Susan and Saul twenty years earlier.”129 To Alexandra’s friends the Copelands, the strains first came to the surface “as the house was being built. We went over for dinner one evening…and the bleakness was just stultifying, stifling….That house never had any warmth in it from the time it was built.”

  This is not the way Alexandra remembers matters. One of the reasons she was “ecstatic” about the house was that “I really loved Vermont.” It was to be “a dream house for our retirement.” She has warm memories of entertaining and overnight guests (Harriet Wasserman, Barley Alison, John Auerbach, Allan Bloom, various family members). She “loved my little office on the second floor with its wrought iron balcony and the view of the forest.” “I had hoped that the beautiful new house in Vermont would strengthen the marriage. Instead the marriage deteriorated to the point of no return. The summer of 1985 was nightmarish.”130

  Bellow’s complaints about making all the decisions concerning the house are only partly corroborated by Frank Maltese, who built it. Maltese, a local handyman, had been helping the Bellows in Vermont since 1977. A straight talker, Maltese “bonded very quickly” with Bellow. What he especially liked about him as an employer was that “you didn’t have to explain things twice….He didn’t pull punches, he said what he meant. We got along real good, there was no dancing around.” Maltese had never built a whole house before, but Bellow gave him free rein. “He wanted it to be brown and he wanted it to have a slate floor and he went to Europe and it was done.” As for billing, “He told me what he would like to spend and the price was agreed” (partly because, as Maltese puts it, “he wasn’t going to be around”). When bills came in, Bellow “always complained about the price,” but, then, “everybody likes a deal, and Saul liked a deal.” In previous Vermont summers, it was Alexandra who found places to stay, paying for them herself. With the new house, Maltese dealt exclusively with Bellow. This arrangement he approved, since “men want the job done…and women want to control how the job is done.” He knew Bellow well enough to know what he wanted. He wanted “quietude,” so Maltese made sure all the rooms were properly insulated for sound. He also wanted escape, so Maltese thought carefully about ingress and egress. “In Saul’s house every room has two doors,” he explains, “because he didn’t ever want to be cornered in any place.” What Maltese remember of Alexandra is that she “wasn’t comfortable” in the country, “didn’t like the isolation.” But what she was uncomfortable with was the marriage, and being isolated in the country with Bellow.

  Harriet Wasserman visited Bellow and Alexandra in Vermont late in the summer of 1985. Bellow was at work on More Die of Heartbreak, and when Harriet arrived “the atmosphere was extremely tense.” Alexandra had been “going into rages,” Bellow complained. To Wasserman, Alexandra was “very polite,” but she and Bellow “barely spoke to each other.” When a close friend of Alexandra’s invited them over for a visit, there was a tug of war between Bellow and Alexandra over whether to accept. Bellow wouldn’t go, but Wasserman felt she had to, though she feared “Saul’s wrath” for “siding” with Alexandra. In past years, Wasserman recalled, Bellow had found Alexandra’s “somewhat halting” English and odd inflections attractive. Now “he had taken to teasing her with jokes and statements she couldn’t quite follow.” At one point, over drinks at the house, the teasing was so mean that Wasserman felt she had to intervene. On the drive to Le Petit Chef, no one spoke. After dinner, the plan was to watch a video of The Godfather Part II. Bellow started the video while Alexandra was upstairs fetching a sweater. When Wasserman protested that Bellow should wait, he “sat back in his seat, all excited with the satisfaction of one-upmanship.”131 Wasserman’s memoir is bitterly anti-Bellow, but the tension and hostility she describes were noted by others.

  Ruth Miller heard complaints about Alexandra’s lack of warmth as well as her absorption in her work. Bellow had at least tried to understand her world. In contrast, he claimed, she took “no interest at all in what he was doing.” He also began questioning the value of her research. “The power of even the ablest mathematicians begins to decline in the third decade,” he wrote to Barley A
lison. “Alexandra is now in her fifties [so the letter, which is undated, was written sometime after August 30, 1985, when Alexandra turned fifty]. She may enjoy trotting around to congresses where she is sure of a warm welcome because she is pretty and, thanks to me, well-heeled, also. She can stand the young prodigies to lunch, but she has little to contribute to the proceedings. She told me with heavy emphasis not many months ago that for a long time she had not been able to obtain significant results in her researches, and that it was ALL MY FAULT.”132

  Back in Chicago in September, tensions increased, partly because of the proximity of Bellow’s colleague Allan Bloom, whose friendship with Bellow will be discussed in the next chapter, along with the relationship of his politics to Bellow’s. On October 6, Bellow began a letter to the Chicago novelist Harry Petrakis by apologizing for having been out of touch. “The communication system is the first to go when I’m having personal difficulties. I had rather a bad summer.” He and Alexandra had been traveling a lot since leaving Vermont, and “the traveling hasn’t quite stopped—Alexandra has to go to Vancouver, and I have to go abroad briefly.” The trip abroad was to Dublin, where Bellow spoke at Trinity College, on October 12, after which he spent several days in London.133 He returned to Chicago for a week, then flew to New York to address the Whiting Foundation Writers’ Program Ceremony on October 31.134 In New York, he caught flu; as he wrote to William Kennedy on November 21, “It was all I could do to get through the ceremony much less greet my friends.” The flu would not go away, he reported to John Auerbach from Chicago, in a letter of November 18, which meant he could not return to New York on November 25, “to be one of twenty speakers at a banquet in honor of [Teddy] Kollek.” In a letter of December 6 to Kollek, Bellow describes the flu as “real and earnest…involving the head and the gastric regions and exorbitant thermometer readings.” They would see each other soon, though, as he and Alexandra had been “pressed into attending” the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem, where they would be in residence at the Hilton from December 24 to 30.135

  Then the marriage finally came apart. Sometime before the end of December, Alexandra asked Bellow for a divorce, just over half a year after his seventieth birthday and the deaths of his brothers.136 It was a decision he claimed took him by surprise. That he’d been difficult to live with he knew; it was “unnatural to grieve so much,” he admitted to Barley Alison in a letter of September 6. But Alexandra’s kicking him out and demanding a divorce left him, as William Hunt recalls, “pretty broken up.” The decision to end the marriage was hers. “I wasn’t the architect.”137 Her reasons for doing so, he decided, had less to do with how difficult he had been than how difficult he would become. As his son Greg puts it, in words that recall Adam’s conjecture about Bellow’s fears of not being taken care of, “he had convinced himself that Alexandra lacked the emotional strength to see him through his final passage.”138 Alexandra herself described the breakup as inevitable. “It had to happen sometime,” she told Barley Alison.139 Thirty years later, in 2016, she elaborated, attributing the fault to Bellow, as he had attributed the fault to her: “He needed to renew himself….He needed new sources of inspiration. Toward the end of our marriage he would say, ‘Look, she locks herself up in her study, I don’t hear from her all morning, she doesn’t care about me’—but that’s the way things were from the very beginning, when he took great pride in me. He needed change, the old muse had to be deposed, and the new muse was waiting in the wings to be installed and anointed. So that was the natural process of things, I think now, in retrospect, but at the time I was very bewildered.”140

  SB’s brothers, Maury and Sam Bellows (courtesy of Joel Bellows; courtesy of Lesha and Sam Greengus)

  8

  Janis Freedman/Allan Bloom/Politics

  THE NEW “MUSE” DID NOT THINK of herself as such. Her name was Janis Freedman, she was a graduate student at the Committee on Social Thought, and she had been Bellow’s secretary since June 1982, working twelve hours a week, mainly handling correspondence. Janis took the job, as had her predecessor, Lillian Doherty, after finishing her fundamentals examination, a requirement for all Committee students. Her duties, Bellow explained to a university official, would “be mainly of a literary nature, and these should assist and enhance her studies. As Miss Doherty will be glad to testify, her duties have in no way interfered with her preparation for the Ph.D.” Janis herself could determine her working hours. There would be “no interference with classwork, and the tasks are such as to leave ample study time. Miss Doherty has signified her willingness to train Miss Freedman in the organization of my papers and in the handling of correspondence.”1

  Janis Freedman’s training was mostly a matter of learning “who was important and who wasn’t,” as the scale of the correspondence was impossible to deal with without form letters. Bellow “wasn’t around very much.” When he did come to the office, it was to receive mail or dictate letters. His relations with his new secretary, a slim, dark-haired young woman with a warm, intelligent voice, were friendly but professional. He was “Professor Bellow” to her, as he was in the courses she took from him. In her first year at the Committee, in the fall quarter of 1980, she took a seminar co-taught by Bellow and Allan Bloom on Machiavelli’s Mandragola and several plays by Aristophanes. The following year, she took a second Bellow-and-Bloom seminar, on Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse, and arranged a reading course with Bellow on Balzac’s Lost Illusions. She was, she recalls, “fascinated by him from the first time I set foot in class. He was extraordinary. I thought he was, hands down, the most intelligent person I’d ever met. But did I have a crush on him, the way I had a crush on teachers in high school or university? No.” For his part, Bellow thought highly of Janis as a student, judging at least by the reference he wrote for her when, being a Canadian, she applied for a fellowship to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada:

  This quiet and polite young woman turns out to be a person of considerable intellectual force and independence. She doesn’t so much attend seminars as ingest them. In class she is superattentive, most intense, I have seldom been made to feel even by the most alert students that I am being not only anticipated but perhaps exceeded. Her comments show this to be a distinct possibility. She seems to be traversing the subject, going back and forth on an invisible high wire. As you can see I hold a very high opinion of Miss Freedman. I expect her to accomplish great things.2

  Janis enjoyed her work as Bellow’s secretary, especially when he dictated letters to her, “because I learned so much.” In addition to admiring Bellow, “I grew to like him a lot. He was a good boss,” “very grateful for help” (the mass of correspondence, he told her, “weighed on him and made him sick”). Although happy to please him, Janis claims not to have had romantic illusions about their relationship. “He was so distant from my student life. He lived in another world. He lived in the North End. He had a very glamorous wife. He was a Nobel Prize winner. He was also very much older than me.” Forty-three years older. Janis had met Alexandra, and they had got on well. She’d had Bellow and Alexandra to dinner, and in the summer of 1984 she was invited to Vermont for a few days to go through “a whole stack of letters.” Alexandra was “very pleasant” during the visit; there wasn’t “a single bad vibe.” In the mornings, while Bellow wrote and Alexandra did her math, Janis did her own work; then she and Bellow had sessions with the correspondence. Janis met Alexandra’s friends the Copelands, and went riding or took walks with them. “I had a great time.” Unlike other visitors that summer, she was struck by “how nicely” Bellow and Alexandra greeted each other, how physically affectionate Bellow was with her.

  Eighteen months later, after Alexandra broke with Bellow, Janis and others of Bellow’s students helped to move his things from the Sheridan Road apartment back to 5825 Dorchester, where Jonathan Kleinbard had found him an apartment two floors below the apartment he’d lived in with Alexandra before their move to She
ridan Road. He was not at that time the building’s only Nobel Prize winner. Milton Friedman lived there, as did George Stigler, also an economist, and S. Chandrasekhar, the physicist. According to Janis, Bellow had “some sort of hideous flu” at the time of the move, which “looked like pneumonia.” Lesha came to Chicago to look after him and to cook him chicken soup. Alexandra herself was alarmed, inviting Janis to lunch and telling her Bellow “was in bad shape” and needed extra help. In Ravelstein, Vela, the Alexandra figure, harbors suspicions about Rosamund, the Janis figure. “Your little Rosamund is dying to take care of you,” she tells Chick. After visits to their lakeside apartment to help Chick with his calls and correspondence, Rosamund likes to go for a swim. Vela thinks she does so, she tells Chick, “because you can see her beautiful figure” (p. 119). Janis thinks this exchange is completely fictional: Alexandra “thought of me as beneath her notice”; besides, “she looked better in a bathing suit than I did.” Janis felt affection and sympathy for Bellow, but that, she claims, was all. “Still there was nothing. This was an old sick person who had been beat up.”