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AT THE BEGINNING OF DECEMBER 1991, shortly before acute diabetes almost killed Bloom, Bellow and Janis traveled to Italy, where Bellow had agreed to give a talk to mark Mozart’s bicentennial. The invitation came from Bruno Bartoletti, artistic director and principal conductor of the Chicago Lyric Opera, to which Bellow and Janis subscribed. In addition to his jobs in Chicago, Bartoletti was director of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, a music festival in Florence, and it was at his house in Fiesole that the Bellows had dinner the night after the talk. The night before, they and the Bartolettis dined with the mayor of Florence and his wife, and Bellow began to worry about his speech. “As often happens,” he recalled to Ruth Wisse, in a letter of February 20, 1992, “I was obliged to rewrite my talk in the hotel room.” He was pleased with the result, and two years later chose the talk, retitled “Mozart: An Overture,” to open the prose collection It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future (1994).
“Mozart: An Overture” begins, as do a number of pieces in the collection, autobiographically, with recollections of his sister, Jane, at the piano, early violin lessons, student years as an unpaid usher at the Auditorium Theatre. Then it turns to the question of Mozart’s genius, in particular to its seeming independence from “environmental or historical theories.” Einstein is invoked, calling Mozart “only a visitor upon this earth.” Mozart’s genius “forces” one “to speculate about transcendence,” but such speculation makes Bellow uncomfortable, since it is often associated “with crankiness or faddism—even downright instability and mental feebleness.”13 Bellow persists, convinced that “there is a dimension of music that prohibits final comprehension and parries or fends off the cognitive habits we respect and revere” (p. 5). About this dimension, Mozart himself was in the dark. He was, says Bellow, “a ‘stranger’ who never understood the nature of his strangeness” (p. 11).
There are implicit, perhaps unconscious, connections in the talk between Bellow and his subject. Mozart’s powers as a letter writer are likened to those of a novelist. He has the novelist’s “gift of characterizing by minute particulars….His manner of seeing comes directly from his nature, perhaps from a source close to the source of his music. The two styles, the verbal and the musical, have something in common” (p. 7). Mozart was only peripherally interested in politics, and his management of his own affairs, his biographers agree, was “disastrous” (p. 9). His music was “fertile, novel, ingenious, inexhaustible”; it came to him “readily, easily, gratuitously” (p. 11). At the same time, as in Bellow’s writing, “we recognize also the signature of Enlightenment, of reason and understanding” (p. 11). How, Bellow wonders, does one reconcile this “signature” with Mozart’s “clownishly demonic” behavior, his “liking for low company,” his “tricks,” “gags,” “insults,” “lewdness” (p. 10)? This recalls Herschel Shawmut, who senses a connection between his propensity to put his foot in his mouth and creative power. Shawmut describes a put-down he receives from his mentor, Kippenberg, “prince of musicologists,” as “genius…it was a privilege to have provoked it” (p. 384). “I never intentionally insulted anyone,” Shawmut claims in a passage quoted in part in chapter 4; his insults were involuntary, a product of “seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, Fatum, divine madness….The better people are, the less they take offense at this gift, or curse” (p. 412).
Mozart’s “gift, or curse,” a much greater thing than Shawmut’s, is illustrated for Bellow by a story involving “a certain Frau Pichler.” As she sat at the piano playing “Non più andrai” from Figaro, Mozart came up behind her, pulled up a chair, and, while she played, “began to improvise variations so beautifully that everyone held his breath, listening to the music of the German Orpheus. But all at once he had had enough; he jumped up and, as he often did in his foolish moods, began to leap over table and chairs, miaowing like a cat and turning somersaults like an unruly boy.” Bellow quotes Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Mozart’s biographer, who calls outbursts like these “physical necessities, automatic compensation for a transcendent mind” (p. 10). Here and throughout his essay, Bellow pays wondering tribute to Mozart’s genius and to his irreducible individuality. The writing has a relaxed, meandering quality and ends: “How deeply (beyond words) he speaks to us about the mysteries of our common human nature. And how unstrained and easy his greatness is” (p. 14).
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INSTEAD OF RETURNING DIRECTLY to Chicago after the Mozart speech, the Bellows traveled by train to Siena, then drove into the countryside near Montalcino, where they stayed for a week. Bellow wrote a travel piece about this stay, “Winter in Tuscany” (1992), also reprinted in It All Adds Up. Like the Mozart talk, the piece has a relaxed, informal feel. It begins with a description of the view from their hotel in the Tuscan countryside, all the way to Siena, a distance of some forty kilometers. The ancient landscape “carries the centuries lightly,” as do the region’s ancient ruins and buildings. “Romanesque interiors in fact are a good cure for heaviness.” December in Tuscany is cold. On the day of their arrival, “the tramontana was battering the town….It forced open windows in the night and scoured our faces by day” (p. 252). Coming in winter, however, has its advantages. Everyone is welcoming. “They take your off-season visit as a mark of admiration for the long and splendid history of their duchy” (p. 253).
At the cellars of the Fattoria dei Barbi, a tourist highpoint, the vats of wine “resemble the engines of 747 jets in size.” The guide, Angela, “a young woman whose pretty face rivals the wine display in interest,” has an assistant, “a cat with a banner tail.” The cat leads the group “up and down, in and out, from cellar to cellar. We take to this tomcat, who has all the charm of a veteran of the sex wars.” At the tour’s end, “the cat leaves the building between our legs” (p. 254). Later, at the Taverna dei Barbi, Bellow samples the Brunello wine. “Your susceptibility returns at the same rate as the glass fills. Once again it makes sense to be a multimillionaire. The Brunello fragrance is an immediate QED of the advantages of the pursuit of riches” (p. 254). Less expensive pleasures follow. On the way to the Palazzo Piccolomini in Pienza, “a fine group of old gents standing outside the open door of a café acknowledge us with dignity as we move down the all-stone pavement” (p. 254). Once inside the palazzo, Bellow discovers “that fifteenth-century popes were reading Thucydides and even Aristophanes, and as we enter the papal bedroom I think how difficult it would have been to handle these folios in bed.” The palazzo is freezing, and though the fireplace in the bedroom is wide enough to accommodate eight-foot logs, “you’d have to stoke it for a week to drive out such an accumulation of cold” (p. 255). Outdoors, there is a café. They order cappuccinos, which “lose heat so quickly that you’d better down them before ice forms” (p. 256).
The article ends with two very different outings. The first is to an herbal specialist in Montalcino, where Bellow goes to treat a sprained shoulder. Known in the village as “Il Barba,” the herbalist is an immensely tall old man with a stubbly beard. In his long, narrow kitchen, Bellow is seated on a stool and asked solicitously about the cause of his sprain. “I took a header over the handlebars of a bike last summer in Vermont,” he tells the herbalist, an answer that, given Bellow’s age, “doesn’t make much sense to him.” As Bellow strips to the waist, the herbalist pours a mixture into a small saucepan and heats it over the stove. Olive oil is added to the mixture, which is then rubbed into Bellow’s shoulder. Il Barba uses his hand “like a housepainter’s brush.” His diminutive wife, in close attendance throughout, produces a salve to follow the oily mixture, also applied by hand. Bellow enjoys the treatment, even thinks it might cure him, “because I have a weakness anyway for secret herbal remedies, and the treatment in the kitchen has its occult side” (p. 256). As he and Janis leave, Il Barba holds the door open for them: “He is so tall that we don’t have to duck under his arm. We go down the stairs into
the night very happy” (p. 257).
The second outing describes a pleasant but unprofitable truffle hunt in the woods near San Giovanni d’Asso, led by a guide and hunters who seem impervious to the cold. A black thread has come loose from the guide’s cap and hangs over his face unnoticed, so intent is he on his explanatory lecture. “With his large objectives,” Bellow explains, “he didn’t notice trifles” (p. 257). Here, too, there are noteworthy animals: three dogs, Lola, Fiamma, and Iori. Although the ground is frozen, the dogs “will sniff out a truffle under a foot and a half of earth….Hurrying after them, you find yourself breathing deeper, drawing in the pungent winter smells of vegetation and turned-up soil.” The hunt yields a mere three truffles. Before getting into the car, Bellow and Janis shake hands with the guide and the other hunters. Their ungloved hands “are warmer than ours. For all our leather and wool and Thinsulate.” On the drive back to Montalcino, “we consider the mystery of the truffle. Why is it so highly prized? We try to put a name to the musk that fills the car. It is digestive, it is sexual, it is a mortality odor.” Bellow is no fan. “Having tasted it, I am willing to leave it to the connoisseurs. I shall go on sprinkling grated cheese on my pasta” (pp. 259–60). So the piece ends.
For all its pleasures, the Italian jaunt was fatiguing. But instead of flying home, Bellow and Janis flew to Israel, for two or so weeks in Jerusalem, from December 16 to January 3, 1992. Here they saw old friends (David and Shula Shahar, Judith Herzberg, Dennis Silk), relatives (Nota Gordin, Lisa Westreich and her daughter, Sabina Mazursky), and assorted notables (Nathan Sharansky, the mayor of Bethlehem, and the director of the Jerusalem Museum, who took them on a private tour). Bellow gave a reading of “Something to Remember Me By” to a large audience at Mishkenot, where, apart from a visit to the Auerbachs at their kibbutz, Sdot Yam, they stayed throughout. Teddy Kollek, ever “the schemer, the finagler, the arranger,” once again treated them royally, while pressing Bellow to write a book “using the concept of the ties of Jews of the Diaspora to Jerusalem…a fascinating subject. It would be good if it could appear by the end of 1995.”14 In a letter to John Auerbach on March 2, 1992, Bellow described the return to Chicago:
I took to my bed for some weeks—most of January—with accumulated fatigue. Then there were more weeks of testing—medical knocking and rapping, blood tests and tubes in the esophagus, prostate examinations. From all this I came out relatively clean. An increase in quinine doses and a new prescription for reading glasses. They (the doctors) say, “You’re in good condition,” and they add “for a man of your age.”
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A YEAR LATER, five months after the death of Allan Bloom, Bellow and Janis took up François Furet’s invitation to come to Paris for a quarter, from March to May 17, 1993. A comfortable apartment was found for them on the Left Bank, at 141 Rue Raymond Losserand, in the Fourteenth Arrondissement. It belonged to the American poet William Jay Smith, and, though hardly luxurious, it was good for writing. As usual, Bellow worked at home every morning, while Janis exercised, shopped, prepared meals, walked through every quartier in the city, often retracing her steps with Bellow in the afternoon. She also wrote a review in Bostonia magazine of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, which she and Bellow thought had been “unfairly manhandled by the press.”15 After lunch, when not retracing Janis’s morning walks, they strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens to the École des Hautes Études, where Bellow’s teaching duties are recalled by her as “not taxing” (“several lectures at the Raymond Aron Institute,” is how he described them to Teddy Kollek, in a letter of February 26, 1993), or visited places they especially enjoyed: the Picasso Museum, the Marais, St-Germain. At night, there were dinners with Harold “Kappy” Kaplan, his old Northwestern friend Julian Behrstock, Furet, and other Paris acquaintances and friends. But there were also quiet evenings at home or at a favorite local brasserie, L’Univers, in the Rue d’Alésia.
Twice in April the Bellows left Paris for brief excursions. The rector of the Collegium Budapest invited Bellow to give a talk entitled “Intellectuals in the Period of the Cold War.” They were put up for three nights, April 2–4, in the Hotel Gellért, overlooking the Danube, and taken to a late night performance of Handel’s Solomon, described by Janis as “the most stirring and beautiful concert we had ever attended.” (Rosamund sings a chorus from Solomon, having heard it “in Budapest a few months earlier,” as she sweeps Chick through the water in Ravelstein [p. 186].) Later in the month, Bellow was invited to give a talk in Lisbon by the Fundaçao Luso-Americana, established in 1985 to further relations between Portugal and the United States. Again they were put up in splendor and entertained lavishly. At one dinner, Janis found herself seated next to Manuel Soares, the president of Portugal. A car and driver were made available to them during their stay, and they spent several nights in the nearby resort town of Sintra, where Bellow wrote outdoors and “many happy hours” were passed wandering the cliffs overlooking the sea.
The person the Bellows probably saw most of in Paris, aside from Furet, was Roger Kaplan, Kappy’s son, in part the model for Kenneth Trachtenberg in More Die of Heartbreak. With Kappy himself, there was an element of rivalry, over women, over writing, over Kappy’s Francophilia. According to Roger, “Saul felt my Dad did not work enough in developing his talent….I think he felt that a life in the foreign service and the careers that followed, however much work that all represented, was a way to avoid the hard work Saul thought Dad should have done in writing.”16 With Roger, himself a writer, relations were easier, helped by the fact that he lived near the Bellows’ apartment. After the death of Roger’s mother, Celia, with whom Bellow was especially close, Kappy married a Frenchwoman and moved from a small rented place on the Boulevard St-Michel, which he retained, to her large apartment in a house in the Parc Monceau, on the Right Bank. Roger describes that apartment as “the most beautiful place you ever saw,” and his stepmother as “behaving like a grande dame.” Another reason for the closeness between Roger and the Bellows was that he was nearer Janis’s age than most of the other people they saw in Paris.
Bellow had long encouraged Roger in his writing; after asking to see an early unpublished novel, he not only wrote him “a fabulously nice letter,” but passed the novel to an editor at St. Martin’s Press, a former student, though nothing came of it. In Paris that spring, Roger was working as a journalist for the Reader’s Digest. Bellow urged him “not to let that ‘lost’ novel discourage me from starting another one.”17 As has been mentioned, Roger had no objection to the Kenneth Trachtenberg character in More Die of Heartbreak. On the contrary, “I was quite taken with the way Saul used me and my own problems. I think over the years he saw in me and my awful and comic (viewed objectively) relations with women some of his own experiences….He realized very well that the stories he drew from his own experiences were universal….It was scarcely me, but all kinds of men of his and my and the next and the next and the previous and the previous generations who would have these experiences.”
In 1989, Roger wrote an article for the Reader’s Digest about François Furet, to coincide with the bicentennial of the French Revolution. In addition to being a historian, Furet was a well-known public intellectual in France. For many years, he had written about contemporary politics in L’Observateur (later Le Nouvel Observateur), which he had helped found, and he had served for eight years as president of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (1977–85). Furet was the foremost French theorist of the Revolution (as Roger saw it, “number two isn’t even running on the same track”), but it took some persuading to get the Digest to agree to Roger’s writing the article. What helped was Furet’s famous formula of “dérapage” (from the verb déraper, meaning to skid out of control), used to describe the effect the Jacobins had on the Revolution once they seized control of the Assembly. Roger remembers talking about this formula with Bellow, who characterized Furet’s opponents as bien
pensants, sophists who “found all kinds of clever reasons to say it was all worth the horror, because they really wanted to hit somebody else, somebody today, you know, in their own time.” He and Bellow often talked more generally about France, since, “like Saul, I have a tic about the French and how they think.”18 Bellow thought Roger should write a book about France.
“Just write a first paragraph and get it going,” he said. “ ‘France is a country in Western Europe whose capital is Paris. When I arrived here a few years ago, the Socialists were in power, and they were interested in staying in power more than in applying socialist policies.’ That’s it. There’s your lead. The reader knows right off you are writing on France and more specifically you are writing about the end of the doctrinaire left….It isn’t easy. You just have to have confidence you will get it done. Look, it is not the most interesting theme in the world, let’s face it, but I have always liked what you have written and I see no reason why you shouldn’t make something with all this data you have collected.”
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