Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

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  BELLOW’S DIFFICULTIES WITH earlier biographers, or would-be biographers, ought to have prepared Atlas for this treatment. He had read and reviewed Mark Harris’s Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck (1980), a book, as we’ve seen, about Harris’s failed attempts to write Bellow’s life. “Mr. Harris received no decisive rebuff, and implies that Bellow even gave tacit encouragement,” Atlas wrote in the review. “When the biographer, after a decade’s elusive pursuit, demanded to know whether Bellow wished him to discontinue his project, Bellow replied with an amiable postcard that made no reference whatever to the question.”56 As Atlas recounts in his biography, Richard Stern had warned Harris that Bellow would say neither yes nor no—just as he was to say neither yes nor no to Atlas. When an extract from the book came out in The Georgia Review, Bellow told Harris that he hated the way it made him look (“I don’t see myself that way”). When the book itself was published, he didn’t read it, or so he told William Kennedy, in a letter of January 7, 1991, “and I rather enjoy the pummeling he’s getting in the press.”57

  Atlas also knew what had happened to Ruth Miller, Bellow’s lifelong friend and ex-pupil, when she sent him a draft of Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination (1991). At the last minute, after the manuscript had been typeset, Bellow refused Miller permission to quote from unpublished letters and manuscripts, threatening her publishers with legal action unless “a satisfactory resolution” of his many objections to the book’s claims and assertions was found. These objections were set out on four typed pages, single-spaced; enough of them were met to avoid legal action.58 In addition, the following sentences were added to the end of the book’s introduction:

  To thank Saul Bellow for the many hours of conversation we have shared over a long span of years may suggest he is in part responsible for what I have written. He is not. Indeed, I understand that Bellow disagrees with much of what I say in this book and, I am told, now denies having said many of the things I quite clearly recall him saying, things I often recorded in my journal at the time. Of course, I must stand by my memory and my notes. I express my gratitude to him for allowing me to read his letters and papers deposited in the archives of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, although he ultimately decided not to let me quote from them.59

  Bellow felt “burned” by Miller’s book. He wrote to the publisher Herb Yellin on July 9, 1991, describing its “attacks” on him as “horrifying.” “I abominate Ruth,” he told Yellin. “She is a stinker, vulgar and vile.” At the same time, he admitted to having been “largely to blame” for the book. “I should have known better, even half a century ago—not extended my patronage to her or let her think I had admitted her to intimacy.” This was the mistake he made with Mark Harris and then with James Atlas, or so he would come to feel. Adam Bellow describes the mistake as habitual, by no means confined to biographers or would-be biographers. All sorts of people, his children included, wanted things from Bellow, wanted time with him. “He had this tremendous appeal, and people wanted more and more of it…the whole invasive thing, the constant promising things.” When faced with requests, Bellow’s responses, Adam believes, were often ways “of keeping people at bay….He couldn’t just say no, that was the thing. He couldn’t say yes and he couldn’t say no.” If people later assumed that they knew what he thought or that they had his approval, “he’d act very surprised…even indignant.”

  Bellow’s complaints when the Miller book came out were less about content than style. “In truth,” Atlas writes in his biography, “Miller did have a tin ear. She made Bellow sound earnest and solemn….‘Between the time she’d left my apartment and the time she got home, she forgot what I’d said, so she made it up herself,’ he complained” (presumably in an untaped interview with Atlas, which he, too, went home and reconstructed in his journal). In the letter to Yellin, Bellow describes his friends as unaware of “how thick my protective armor is. The fact is I have not suffered horribly from her attacks.” But this is not the impression conveyed in the letter itself, or in other correspondence. What makes Bellow’s behavior difficult to understand in this instance, if what Miller told Atlas is to be trusted, is that when she showed him the final draft, in Vermont during the summer of 1990, he embraced her and said it was “ ‘the best book, bar none, written about him.’ ”60 In Atlas’s May 24, 1995, letter to Bellow, he had assured him that he was “not Mark Harris or Ruth Miller.” This is not how Bellow saw him, or came to see him.

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  ON MARCH 13, 1994, three days after the appearance of Bellow’s Papuans-and-Zulus op-ed piece, the London Sunday Times asked leading authors and critics in Britain to name the greatest of living writers in English. Bellow came first. Later that spring, Viking published It All Adds Up, to mostly admiring reviews (even Prescott in The New York Times admitted, “Mr. Bellow couldn’t write a dull page if he tried”). The collection had been Harriet Wasserman’s idea.61 Bellow had published no book-length fiction in five years. His most recent short story, “Something to Remember Me By,” had been published in 1990. “Case” was nowhere near finished (three years had passed since its April 1991 delivery date), and neither was “Marbles,” the work that now, according to Wasserman, “wanted his full attention.”62 “Why not such a collection in the year or two before the new novel would be finished and brought out?” Bellow was resistant at first, worrying that the book would be seen as “a kind of filler.” Only after he was assured that he would be able to select, organize, introduce, and where necessary revise the pieces himself, as well as give the volume its title, did he approve the project.63 Meanwhile, he plowed on with “Marbles. “The rumors of a novel are true,” he wrote to Andrew Noble, a lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, on June 12, 1994. “I’ve been trying for a couple of years now to bring it to completion. This summer one of us must crack.” In August, he turned down an invitation from Rebecca Sinkler of the Book Review to write an essay on James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a neglected classic and a book Bellow greatly admired. “I am finishing a book which was several years in the writing,” he told her, in a letter of August 9, “and I can’t possibly do an essay on the Justified Sinner, or any other sort of sinner until I have rid myself of my burden.”

  By the end of the summer, “Marbles” was still not finished. The final section was to be set in New Guinea, and Bellow’s plan was to complete it in November, in a tropical setting like the one he would be writing about. Jonathan and Joan Kleinbard had suggested Grand Case, a small fishing village on the French half of the Caribbean island of St. Martin. There the Bellows stayed in a beach-front apartment in a complex called Flamboyant Beach Villas. “The blue of the Caribbean I see from this open door,” Bellow wrote on November 10 to Gene Kennedy. “We have no phone in our small flat…and no newspapers are available. NO mail is being forwarded. My one daily lapse or cop-out—cheating on the cure—is literary. I work each morning on my Marbles book. I may actually get that monkey off my back before X-mas.” The “cure” in question was from “too much festination [pathological shortening of the stride and quickening of the gait; more loosely, frenetic activity], as Dr. Oliver Sacks would put it….His account of festination and catatonia went straight to that waiting throbbing target, my heart.” The blue of the Caribbean, Bellow writes, “is my form of El Dopa.” Twice a day, he and Janis bathed in the sea. The “daily lapse or cop-out” he explained to Wasserman in a telephone conversation: “ ‘After I write, we sit on the beach and read Shakespeare. The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Can you send me some Shakespeare? And if you want, you can send me a little treat.’ The treat he meant was chocolate and caramels, his favorites.” She sent the books and some chocolate turkeys and caramels by Federal Express, so that they would arrive in time for Thanksgiving.64

  Janis remembers the apartment on Grand Case as “unpleasant f
rom the beginning. There were trails of little insects that appeared near the tables in the kitchen where Saul wrote. We kept the doors and windows open for the breeze, but it seemed stifling inside. I remember the terrible pink artificial smell of the Jergens lotion that we would rub on our hands and feet at night.”65 The bed in the apartment was small; the bedroom was narrow and airless. The only relief came from a little terrace at the front, with beautiful hovering butterflies and a lime tree for shade. During the mornings, Bellow worked surrounded by the anthropological studies they’d lugged from Boston, gruesome texts about cannibalism. In the afternoons, when they swam, “we did carry each other in the water and sing Handel duets from Solomon.” At dusk on the terrace, they drank wine and ate olives and watched the calm sea before walking out along the beach in search of supper, “carrying our sandals, and talking about the day’s work.” One evening, some days before Thanksgiving, they found a restaurant in town. Bellow ordered red snapper, served cold with mayonnaise. In Ravelstein, Chick, on holiday on St. Martin, orders just such a fish at just such a place and time. “The snapper at room temperature was clammy,” he recalls. “The mayonnaise was like zinc ointment.” Rosamund, the Janis figure, tastes it and agrees: “It wasn’t cooked through. It was raw at the center” (p. 188). Bellow, like Chick, couldn’t finish his meal. Within a week, he was in the hospital, in a coma, close to death.

  Janis, SB, and Allan Bloom, at the belated birthday party given for SB by Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago, October 6, 1990 (courtesy of Janis Bellow)

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  Intensive Care

  THE RED SNAPPER was contaminated with a toxin called ciguatera. Just to the north of Grand Case, the fishing village where the Bellows were staying, is a coral reef, an island tourist attraction. Ciguatera toxin is found in over four hundred species of coral-reef fish, of which red snapper is one. The toxin is tasteless and odorless and cannot be removed by ordinary cooking. Its initial effects on Bellow were general malaise, loss of appetite, aversion to food. Janis took him to a local doctor, who diagnosed dengue, a mosquito-borne fever, the first symptoms of which are similar to those of ciguatera. Dengue can be treated and usually passes within a week; there is no effective treatment or antidote for ciguatera poisoning, though in some cases recovery can be aided by vitamin supplements and steroids. Ciguatera poisoning can last for weeks or years; in extreme cases, it results in long-term disability and death.

  The local doctor did not help. Soon Bellow developed other symptoms: headaches, muscle aches, numbness, vertigo, hallucinations. He collapsed on the bathroom floor, and Janis refused to take him to the local hospital (in Ravelstein, which offers a fictional version of the trip to St. Martin, an ambulance is summoned, and Chick, the Bellow character, refuses to get in). After consulting with her father, Janis insisted that they return to Boston immediately. John Silber arranged for Bellow to be admitted to the Boston University Hospital on Thanksgiving Day, by which time he was suffering from double pneumonia, the principal concern of the doctors who received him in intensive care; other problems, either caused or exacerbated by the toxin, including threatened heart failure, had also to be treated. Dr. John Barnardo, a pulmonary specialist, saw Bellow the day he arrived: “He was quite ill…and he got sicker and sicker and developed respiratory failure and had to be put on a ventilator. I thought if he were not treated with the ventilator he wouldn’t have made it.” Bellow hated the ventilator, tried to pull it out, and tried also to pull out the IV tubes to which he was attached. When he was particularly agitated at one point, Janis climbed into bed and held him to keep him still, as Woody Selbst climbs into bed to still his struggling father, Morris, in “A Silver Dish.” The doctors in ICU then put Bellow into a medically induced coma.

  Dr. Barnardo was not sure that Bellow would make it, and said so to Janis. “The thing that worried me,” he remembers, “was not only whether he would come out of this, but how he’d come out of it.” Janis remembers the following possibilities: “(A) he’s going to die, (B) if he doesn’t die he’s going to be hooked up to machines for the rest of his life, (C) if he ever should come out of this…he’ll be in a chronic care facility.”1 When word of Bellow’s condition reached his niece Lesha Greengus, she informed her daughter, Rachel Schultz, an anesthesiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. As Rachel remembers it: “Uncle Saul was already on a ventilator and when I first talked to Greg and Janis about the specifics (the vent settings and such), it didn’t look good. We all thought this might be the end, and my initial concern was that he be made comfortable. I know how miserable it can be on a ventilator.” When Bellow’s ventilator settings began to stabilize, and it looked as though he might pull through, Rachel began to worry that the doctors in Boston wouldn’t be able to get him off the ventilator, because of the drugs they were using to sedate him. “So I spoke with the doctor in the ICU…about using a different more short-acting sedative.” According to Janis, the doctors knew full well the effects of the sedatives they were administering. The drug Bellow was switched to was Versed, which cost more: “To me it was a no-brainer,” Rachel recalls, “and I insisted that they make the switch. Not everyone was happy about the extra expense, but I really pushed for this. And about a week later, Saul was extubated!”2

  Rachel was not the only person with views about Bellow’s treatment. The day after Thanksgiving, Adam Bellow left a message on Harriet Wasserman’s answering machine saying that his father had been flown from St. Martin to Boston and was in intensive care. Wasserman then received a call from Harvey Freedman, Janis’s father: “Janis asked me to call,” he told her. “Saul is a very, very sick man. We have to pray for him, he’s in a very bad way.” Adam also called her to say that one of Bellow’s lungs had ceased functioning and that the other “was having difficulties.” In addition, there were problems regulating his heartbeat. Wasserman asked Adam “for permission to get hold of the infectious-diseases specialist who had prescribed exactly the antibiotic that saved my life when I got [a] staph infection.” Adam said okay, but then Greg Bellow called her from California “and bawled me out. ‘You’re not to call that specialist. We are only going to have one line here. I’m the oldest and I’m in charge. I’m in touch with the infectious diseases doctor and Saul’s primary doctor. You are not to interfere.’ ” Wasserman asked if she could come up to Boston for the weekend. “ ‘No. You are not to come this weekend.’ ” Later, she was called by Walter Pozen, who had been called by Harvey Freedman, who had been called by Janis. Could she advance money to cover bills at the beginning of the month? “If you can’t do it,” Pozen said, “I’ll do it.” Wasserman told Pozen there was plenty of money; she had recently deposited two large checks into Bellow’s account. Just in case, Pozen wrote Janis a check for ten thousand dollars. More phone calls followed, “including one asking who had power of attorney.” Then Greg called to apologize “for having raised his voice. I told him I understood.”3

  By the time of Greg’s apology, he and his brothers had joined Janis in Boston. As he saw it, “Our tiny world was like a series of concentric circles that surrounded and protected him. In the innermost ring was Saul, protected by Janis. She was in a complete state of exhaustion after staying up for days, and her health worried the nurses and the three of us. But Janis refused to go home, claiming she needed nothing but a toothbrush and a few clean T-shirts. The next ring held Dan, Adam, and me; we agreed our primary job was to protect Janis and Saul. Once the news of his illness got out, that job expanded to keeping people who were worried about him informed but at bay. Lesha wanted to come to Boston but agreed to settle for phone calls several times a day. She, in turn, kept the rest of the family up-to-date. The ring beyond his immediate family included his agent, Harriet Wasserman, his lawyer, his friends, and his colleagues.” According to Greg, when Wasserman pressed to come to Boston, he and Adam did put her off, knowing that “her meddling would upset Janis. We tried to keep her occupied with a chor
e: securing some ready cash for Janis, who, it turned out, did not have access to Saul’s bank accounts.” When Wasserman persisted and would not agree to stay in New York, “I lost my temper and she relented.”4

  Everyone was overwrought. When Janis brought a recording of Handel’s Water Music to the hospital, to play to Bellow as he lay unconscious in bed, Greg thought of his mother, who would have been eighty that day, as well as of “the good times during my childhood. I burst into tears and ran out of the room as the impact of losing one parent and the possibility that I’d lose the other hit me. When I returned I explained my tears to a sympathetic Janis.” While in Boston, Greg learned of the death of Isaac Rosenfeld’s son, George Sarant, to whom he had become close. “With my emotions already worn thin, I could not remain sitting in a hospital room. I needed a break and went to New York.” He extended his stay to attend Sarant’s funeral: “After Saul’s failure to attend Isaac’s or Oscar Tarcov’s funeral, I was determined to ensure a Bellow was present at the time.”5

  Janis was quickly bolstered by her family. Sonya Freedman came immediately, for the first of three visits during Bellow’s hospitalization (Harvey Freedman was unwell at the time). Janis’s sister, Wendy, also arrived to help, relaying news to the rest of the Freedman family and taking care of domestic chores. Janis remembers a rare night at home, after days and nights of sleeplessness at the hospital. “Blessedly back in my own bed…I was unable to calm myself.” Wendy was there, and “she spent most of the night reading Auden poems to me.” At dawn, Janis headed back to the hospital.6

  Janis’s state worried everyone, not just the Bellow sons and the ICU doctors and nurses. When Sonya arrived in Boston, she found her daughter “sleeping on a chair. She was a wreck.” “I was very concerned,” she recalls. “She just neglected her health. She didn’t leave him for a moment. She was beside him, talking to him, reading poetry to him, singing to him, and a lot of people said, What are you doing? This is ridiculous. But it turned out that when he regained consciousness, he was aware.” “No one should take anything away from Janis’s dedication to him,” Adam believes. Nor was this dedication without benefit to Bellow’s recovery. Although overwrought, Janis took meticulous notes about symptoms and medicines; she was also clear and controlled when consulting with doctors. As Adam puts it: “There’s a part of Janis that’s very capable, but she was not looking after herself….There was a real question of whether she was capable….She was not willing to look after herself….She has to be willing to listen to help.” One bit of help she listened to was forced upon her. “In and around this time,” she recalls, “I had two day surgeries—removal of what turned out to be non-malignant tumors.”7