Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  AS BELLOW’S SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY approached, he often wrote of feeling his age. The years 1985 to 1990 had seen the deaths of close friends and relations, beginning in 1985 with his brothers Maury and Sam and his first wife, Anita. Bernard Malamud and his childhood friend Sydney J. Harris died in 1986. Paolo Milano died in 1988. In June 1989, Barley Alison died, the editor to whom he was closest, “a dear and devoted friend and one of the most generous persons I ever knew”;64 in September, Robert Penn Warren died, “a great-souled man.”65 At the beginning of 1990, on January 16, Edith Tarcov died, at seventy. Two months later, on March 13, Sam Freifeld died, at seventy-three. “For a man approaching the seventy-fifth year of his age I am not doing badly,” Bellow wrote to John Auerbach on February 5. But they were chopping in his part of the woods. “As more news of deaths arrives,” Bellow wrote, “(the latest death was that of Edith Tarcov, a dear woman whom I think you knew) the less I feel the victory of my survival. There is a strange scratchiness in the viscera when I think matters over.” There may also have been remorse. Both Edith and Sam Freifeld thought Bellow had treated them badly. Shortly after Freifeld’s death, Bellow encountered his ex-wife, Marilyn Mann, at a theater in Skokie. “He was visibly shaken,” she recalled to Atlas. “ ‘They’re really going,’ he told her.”66 Bellow attended Edith Tarcov’s funeral in New York, but according to her son, Nathan, the two old friends had been estranged for some time. “There are no letters from Edith’s later years,” Nathan recalls, the years following Bellow’s hurtful refusal to write an introduction to a volume of Oscar Tarcov’s shorter fiction.

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  WITH THE LOSS OF HIS BROTHERS, of Sam in particular, Bellow took on something of the role of family protector, especially for his sister, Jane, but also at times for his nieces and nephews and their children. About his brothers and sister he remained clear-sighted. On March 11, 1988, in a letter to Lesha’s daughter, Rachel Schultz, he wrote frankly not only about her grandfather Samuel Bellows but about Maury and Jane as well.

  I loved him without any expectation of a return [which is not to say he received no return]. He forgave me even my numerous and preposterous marriages, by which he must have, in some way, felt threatened. But I didn’t ask him for anything and I knew that he would never understand what I was up to. I learned to love both my brothers and my sister to the extent that they were lovable and even a bit beyond and it made not the slightest difference to me that I couldn’t even begin to talk to them. I had to forgo all communication except what long-standing family love going back to childhood made possible. But that was a great deal. Some four-thousand years of Jewish history went into it—I don’t mean Talmudic history or anything of that sort, I mean the history of Jewish feeling.

  Two months later, on May 25, Bellow wrote to Rachel’s uncle, Shael Bellows, Sam’s son, on behalf of his widowed aunt Jane. Jane was an investor in the rest-home business Shael had taken over from his father, and her dividends as a limited partner had recently been much reduced. According to Shael, this was in part because revenues “simply aren’t what they used to be” (Bellow’s paraphrase or quote from the letter of May 25), in part because Shael felt that his father “made overlarge distributions to his limited partners…he ‘spoiled’ them.” Although Jane often complained about money, in this case she was in genuine difficulties. She had already lost one son, Larry (whose suicide was described in chapter 13 of To Fame and Fortune), and her other child, Robert, was gravely ill in Florida with AIDS. Since Robert was too weak to work, Jane was obliged to pay his bills, “about fifty thousand dollars since the beginning of the year.” Bellow wrote to Shael in his capacity “as your Aunt Jane’s only surviving brother.” He reminded Shael that his father “left Jane (and other members of the family) in your care, and he would most certainly have expected you to look after them, especially in their declining years. Jane is part of your legacy….You can’t blame her for being shaken, nor can you blame me for asking you to behave less like a general partner and more like your father’s son.” On July 19, Bellow wrote again, agreeing with Shael that Jane should sell her holdings, and raising another family matter. Lisa Westreich, a cousin, and her daughter, Sabina Mazursky, had written to Bellow asking if he would intercede with Shael to find out what had happened to the money they had sent to him for investment and about which they had heard nothing. Bellow wrote Shael: “The amounts are trifling to us but these are the slowly accumulated savings of Lisa and her daughter and I feel that it would not be out of place to give an explanation of what you are doing. You need not send your explanation to them, send it to me and I will transmit the information.” Bellow signed the letter “Your affectionate Uncle, Saul.”

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  A WEEK AFTER THE LETTER to Shael, Bellow wrote to Sanford Pinsker, an English professor at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, a specialist in Jewish literature and culture, in response to an invitation. “Because I don’t travel as easily as I once did,” Bellow explained, “I have been obliged to set a minimum fee to discourage invitations. Although I would dearly love to see you at Franklin and Marshall I have set a fee of $10,000 per engagement. Even at that price I am obliged to refuse invitations….You will understand this if you will remember that I am somewhere between my seventy-third and seventy-fourth birthdays….I simply have to limit my air miles and conserve my strength.”67 These complaints about reduced powers often occurred when Bellow was turning down invitations, and must be measured against evidence to the contrary: a travel schedule as crowded as ever; the production of his best short fiction; Janis’s sense of his strength and vigor. Nor were there signs of mellowing. On June 5, 1990, five days before he turned seventy-five, Bellow wrote to the scholar and critic Roger Shattuck apologizing for a recent bout of ill-temper. Shattuck had teased him about some aspect of the language of his novels, at a dinner party at the poet Rosanna Warren’s house in Vermont, and the next day Bellow “burst into” Shattuck’s office at BU with a list of references in support of his usage. This behavior he calls “unforgivable,” but “when I am criticized in a matter of usage I can be a bit crazy.” “If we knew each other better, I’m sure I’d come to accept this teasing, even to enjoy it, and you might make friendly allowance for an occasional eruption.” The letter closes with a reference to the possibility of a permanent move to Boston University. “The daring of a major move at my time of life,” he writes, “sets my teeth on edge but nothing is impossible to unrealistically (perversely?) youthful types like me.”

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  BY THE DATE OF THIS LETTER—by the date also of the 1988 Pinsker letter, with its talk of conserving energy—Bellow had taken steps to maintain his youthfulness. He had become a patient or customer of Dr. Harry B. Demopoulos, whose “pure” vitamins and amino acids, if consumed in large enough doses, promised “to slow or even reverse the aging process.” According to an article of November 8, 1989, in The Wall Street Journal, in consuming Dr. D’s costly “Fountain of Youth” pills, Bellow joined such celebrities as Doris Duke, William S. Paley, Sylvester Stallone, and Clint Eastwood. So convinced did he seem to be of the efficacy of the pills that he agreed to appear in advertisements for a book Dr. Demopoulos co-wrote to promote them, Formula for Life (1989). In advertisements for the book, Bellow praised its “detailed and reliable information” about preventing “the premature slipping away of vital mental powers.” It was Jonas Salk (a fellow evaluator for the MacArthur Foundation) who first told Bellow about Dr. Demopoulos—a reason, perhaps, for Bellow’s faith in him. “I’ve been on the regime for four years,” Bellow told the Journal. “My energy level has been high, there has been no decline in my mental abilities. I can work for long stretches of time.”68

  In “All Marbles Still Accounted For,” a figure not unlike Dr. Demopoulos appears. Hilbert Faucil, at ninety-three, is in “excellent” conditio
n, partly attributable to medical assistance he describes as “a dense, complex and partly uncomfortable side of my existence.” At a spa called the Doral Saturnia, a “super-elegant health-resort,” Faucil meets Dr. Clavel, who takes an interest in his remarkable strength and liveliness. Faucil goes to the Saturnia for “the inimitable pleasure of sitting under a warm waterfall, or maybe a cascade. I do it by the hour while I test my memory of poems that have been very important to me” (p. 47). Although he thinks of the fitness craze in America as “one of the more demeaning aspects of modern life” (p. 49), when he is introduced to Dr. Clavel, a “world famous” endocrinologist now into geriatric medicine, he is impressed by the strong color in his face, his “black hair growing straight up,” his “peremptory eyes,” his “man-of-the-world style” (p. 51). Dr. Clavel no longer practices, but he advises “a few people in Hollywood as well as prominent TV personalities and sports figures” (p. 54). “He gave me a narrow look, the narrowest yet….He was offering me access to scientific knowledge such as only he in all the world had at his specialized fingertips” (p. 56).

  “For your stage of life, I know exactly what to recommend,” says Clavel. “People who take it actually grow younger from it” (p. 59). “It” here is human growth hormone, which “restores your muscle mass….You get your legs back. To an extent you eliminate signs of age from your skin. It tends to turn crepey on the inner arms, the inner thighs and the neck. There’s also a rise in the energy level. Think what life could be if you were back at normal energy for, say, age fifty” (p. 59). After Clavel talks to Faucil “about free radicals, anti-oxidants, and dietary methods of fortifying the body against cancer,” he offers to take him on as a patient and to provide him with the requisite medication.

  “I do have an inside line. After decades of research. I think I could promise you a twelve-month supply.” He asked me to guess what the price would be.

  “Good I was warned. I’ll brace myself….Ten thousand?”

  “What would you say to forty-grand?”

  “I’d say it was a deal….”

  His look expressed considerable respect. “Well, you are a plunger. I don’t even hear you asking about possible risks in this therapy. It’s taken intramuscularly by injection.”

  He was amused by my way of doing things….On the physical side I always was a headlong type [pp. 61–62].

  These scenes recall Bellow’s fictionalizing of his Reichian therapy in the “Zetland” manuscripts, in which admiration for the therapist, Dr. Sapir, combines with clear-eyed skepticism. It also recalls his inability, in life as in his novels, wholly to commit to the theories of Rudolf Steiner, even as he continued to pore over and recommend his writings.69

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  IN MAY 1990, while Bellow and Janis were in Britain, over a hundred of his friends and relatives received invitations to a surprise birthday party for him on Saturday, June 9, the day before his actual birthday. The party was organized by Janis and held at Le Petit Chef in Wilmington, Vermont, where Betty Hillman, Libby and Herb’s daughter, was chef, and where the Bellows often dined. Guests came from all over. There was a Chicago contingent, including Zita Cogan, Al Glotzer, the Kleinbards, Bette Howland, the Missners, and Wolf Baronov, Bellow’s cousin from Riga, who gave a toast in Yiddish (Allan Bloom and Michael Z. Wu were in Paris; Yetta Barshevsky Schachtman, Bellow’s friend from Tuley High School, was unable to travel; Richard Stern and Alane Rollings were absent because of Richard’s recent surgery; all sent long letters explaining why they couldn’t come). Eleanor Clark was there—a year after the death of Robert Penn Warren—as was their daughter Rosanna Warren, who brought John Auerbach, to whom The Bellarosa Connection was dedicated, and his wife, Nola Chilton, who had come from Israel. Other Russian cousins came, only recently arrived from the Soviet Union. Philip Roth and Claire Bloom were there, as were William Kennedy and his wife, and William Arrowsmith and his wife. Janis’s parents couldn’t come—Harvey, her father, was ill—but Sonya’s brother came, accompanying their mother, Janis’s grandmother, who had initially opposed Bellow’s marrying Janis. Among the New York guests were Maggie Simmons, Harriet Wasserman, Vicki (Lidov) Fischman (a friend from the 1940s), Walter Pozen, and Saul Steinberg, who arrived by helicopter. Vermont neighbors and friends came: the Hillmans, of course, and the Copelands, Ann Malamud, Frank Maltese (who built Bellow’s house), even the owner of the Marlboro inn that Janis had completely filled with party guests (finding hotels for guests, she remembers, “was the hard part”). Lesha and Sam Greengus came, as did their daughter Rachel Schultz and her husband and two-year-old son. Adam Bellow and family were there (Cynthia Ozick was offered a ride with Adam, but was too shy to accept). Daniel and his family came, and though Greg was absent, having just returned to California after touring colleges on the East Coast with Juliet, his daughter, Greg’s son, Andrew, came with his mother, to represent the family.

  Bellow had no idea about the party. The RSVPs had been sent to Janis’s parents in Toronto, no one let the secret out, and Bellow and Janis were abroad most of May. Janis invited everyone she could think of, including ex-girlfriends and would-be girlfriends (“I didn’t realize…how many women were still in love with him”). When Bellow and Janis arrived at Le Petit Chef, he looked at all the cars in the parking lot and said: “Oh shit, it looks like somebody’s having a party tonight.” As they entered the restaurant, “there was grandson Andrew and John Auerbach from Israel, and the Russian cousin Baronov.” Atlas quotes an unnamed guest on the moment of arrival: “Whammo! great screams and cheers!”70 As Bellow later told Janis, “He had the sensation that it was as though there was some meeting after you die where all the people come together.” To Philip Roth, the party “was Chekhovian…with people popping up suddenly to make speeches, to break into tears, to tell you how much they loved you. Chekhov and no one else would have thrust forward the Russian cousin to announce, ‘I chav a song!’ The little Jewish chef of Vermont, her proud mama, your very different sons, the exquisite tiny Lily [Adam’s daughter], the speech by your niece (‘even though he is seventy-five…’), Maggie’s kisses and tears…enough to keep the Moscow Art Theater busy for many, many seasons.”71 In addition to speeches and songs and tears, there was champagne, a lavish meal of smoked salmon, boeuf Wellington, and chocolate cake. Bellow, according to Janis, “loved it, he just loved it. Totally surprised him. It was a triumph.” Julian Behrstock, his old friend from Northwestern days, couldn’t come from Paris, but sent a birthday message. On June 26, Bellow wrote to thank him and to offer a brief description of what he’d missed: “You would have enjoyed the occasion. It was attended by seventy people, two of them greenhorn cousins of my own age just out of the Soviet Union. And children, of course, and grandchildren and old pals, the durable kind like yourself.” Bellow described Janis as “an incredibly gifted organizer” (“he was so proud of me,” she recalled). The next day, on Bellow’s actual birthday, everyone came over to the house. Betty Hillman did all the cooking. Guests wandered in and out, under the maple tree, down the stone steps, by the pond. On July 10, Bellow reported to Saul Steinberg that, “after the birthday shouting, the silence of Vermont came back. Real life is represented by the cat, who appeared just now to show us the bird he had killed, and to fill Janis’s mind with thoughts of vegetarianism.”

  SB and Janis on their wedding day, Vermont, August 25, 1989 (courtesy of Janis Bellow)

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  Papuans and Zulus

  AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER 1990, Janis and Bellow returned to Chicago and a second seventy-fifth birthday party: this one a grand celebration organized by Mayor Richard M. Daley, on October 6. “The scene was unprecedented in Chicago,” the reporter from the Tribune wrote. “Chicago politicians chatting up literary savants over sautéed medallions of veal.” Richard Stern, who had recently recovered from surgery, was amazed, calling the event “downright un-American.” The dinner was held at the Art Institu
te, where the mayor praised Bellow in a speech Stern described as “very awkward and touching.” Not only had Bellow brought “vitality” to the city through his works, he had inspired the mayor personally, helping him to become “a more compassionate man.” In addition to the dinner and the speeches, performers from the Lyric Opera sang songs and snatches from Bellow’s favorite arias. Allan Bloom flew in from Paris to toast his friend. In his speech, Bloom declared: “Bellow is to Chicago what Balzac was to Paris. He has always understood that even if you are on your way from Becoming to Being, you still have to catch the train at Randolph Street.” The mayor’s wife, Maggie, presented Bellow with a handcrafted volume containing a selection of his writings about the city, illustrated by original woodcut drawings; Janis received a bouquet of roses. The mayor announced that a sculpture of Bellow would be commissioned and displayed in the new Chicago Public Library. On October 30, Bellow praised the party in a thank-you letter. “It was not a ceremonial occasion but a real party not something ‘laid on.’ Everyone (almost without exception) was simple and natural. You and Maggie were the source of this easiness. You said exactly what you felt and thus liberated us from stiffness and artificiality.” At the dinner itself, Bellow’s parting words to the mayor were “You’re a class act.”1