Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  The novella has its imperfections. There are improbabilities of plot, as in Adletsky’s initial contacting Harry for advice, or the “joke” that Jay contrives, occasioning his reburial (having himself buried next to Amy’s mother, who hated him). Also improbable, or uncharacteristic, is Harry’s sudden denunciation of the debased modernity of “commonplace people…lacking in higher motives” (p. 43). This is the bit of the novella Roth liked best: “where the narrator comes out of hiding and lets the judgment rip.” James Wood, writing in The New Republic, called it “a marvelous Bellovian tumble of accusations.”

  They were run-of-the-mill products of our mass democracy, with no distinctive contribution to make to the history of the species, satisfied to pile up money or seduce women, to copulate, thrive in the sack as the degenerate children of Eros, male but not manly, and living, the men and women alike, on threadbare ideas, without beauty, without virtue, without the slightest independence of spirit—privileged in the way of money and goods, the beneficiaries of man’s conquest of nature as the Enlightenment foresaw it and of the high-tech achievements that have transformed the material world. Individually and personally, we are unequal to these collective achievements [pp. 42–43].48

  Harry is thinking these accusations, not speaking them—to speak them would be wholly out of character—but it is hard to imagine him even thinking them, or thinking them in these terms. Although he is said to “look down on” everyone, Amy excepted, there is little evidence elsewhere in the novella to suggest that he sees the world from this elevated perspective, so transparently Bellow’s perspective, the perspective of the Mandel Hall lecture. Like Bellow, Harry is devoted to higher motives, but these motives are particularized, not built into a theory. It is Amy he seeks. More believably Bellow-like is his chancing his hand in love, at last declaring himself.

  The view from the Flamboyant Beach Villas, Grand Case, St. Martin (courtesy of Flamboyant Beach Villas; photo by Ralf Hildebrandt)

  At the time The Actual was written, Bellow himself was chancing his hand. Janis’s devotion to him in his weeks of illness and recovery had kept him alive. They had been together for more than a decade. He loved her and needed her. Now, on the eve of her forties, she desperately wanted a child. He was in his early eighties; his record as a father had not been good; he had more work to do, and less energy. These were his realities. He told several friends he did not want another child. Janis’s realities were also to be considered. He was unlikely to have many years left; the clock was ticking; with a child, he would live on for her, their life together would live on, and not only in memory. One way of looking at the decision Bellow made was that he needed Janis and he owed her; another way was that he knew how much Janis wanted a child and that he did it for her. In other words, he did it for love.

  12

  Ravelstein

  IN THE “MARBLES” TYPESCRIPT, dated June–October 1994, Hilbert Faucil, aged ninety-three, also chances his hand.1 Chickie MacNellis, the daughter of Hilbert’s housekeeper (in New Hampshire, where he summers), has been his girlfriend for many years. Every other week, Hilbert flies to her from his home in Florida. They have traveled together to Paris and Budapest. Chickie is a contemporary of Hilbert’s granddaughter Immy, who now sees her as a threat to her inheritance. By the age of eighteen, Chickie was Hilbert’s lover, but when she pressed him to marry her, he demurred. “You’re never going to do it,” she says. “You’d be embarrassed to marry a teenage girl. Besides you’re one of those widowers that play the field” (p. 69). So Chickie marries MacNellis, a veteran of the Korean War, who has been in and out of prisons and VA hospitals. Now, in her early forties and divorced from MacNellis, she and Hilbert are together again, and she wants his baby.

  Chickie has made a name for herself as a brewer or fermenter of miso, “familiar to all who shop in healthfood markets…as common here as baseball and topless bars are in Japan” (p. 69). In addition to taking Dr. Clavel’s human growth hormone, Hilbert has been adding her miso to his soups and fishes, as well as taking it “neat by the spoonful like cod liver oil.” Chickie knows nothing of Dr. Clavel’s magic pills and credits Hilbert’s “all around physical soundness” (p. 70) to her miso. She loves Hilbert and explains to him her reasons for wanting a child at forty. “I don’t care how you argue it, while you’re not exactly out of commission it’s not a one hundred percent pleasure to look into the future. So why not have a child? What woman wouldn’t be delighted to have one by a prodigy like you” (p. 232)? Chickie has no illusions about Hilbert, despite her sense of him as prodigy. “It wasn’t as though she didn’t know my failings and shortcomings. She saw important human qualities—the abiding ones in me. I must add that she did not think those qualities were well-represented in my descendants” (p. 72). It is these descendants who figure in Chickie’s current feelings about marriage. “I regularly offered to take her to the altar,” Hilbert says. “No, she said, she wasn’t going to be denounced as a gold-digger. But she was still capable of conceiving and would remain so for a few years yet, and if she conceived and delivered she would accept my marriage offer. It would have to be an absolutely foolproof case of paternity. With the now dependable genetic tests nobody could accuse her of putting it over on a doddering sugar-daddy. Anybody could see that I was of sound mind, ‘If Immy takes us to court’ ” (p. 72).

  Although vain about his health and appearance, Hilbert has a clear sense of what it is like to make love to a nonagenarian and what his chances are of getting Chickie pregnant. As he admits, “there is something messy—simian—about people in old age, grotesquely disfigured, deeply wrinkled, but still performing the act of love” (p. 58). Performance is no problem: “Whenever I felt inclined to do it, it has always been doable. Imagination is at the bottom of it if you ask me….I’m sure it’s the affection of the woman and the expectation she has of you. So it is the appeal to your imagination” (p. 57). It helps that Chickie is the sort of woman for whom “the act of love is as natural as breathing” (p. 72). Her attitude to parenting is similarly easy. She advises Hilbert “to consider how you’d really feel about becoming a daddy and having to bring up a child,” but she assures him, “Naturally I promise to spare you the night feedings, diaper changing, crying and fussing. All you’d have to do is dandle the kid when you felt like it” (p. 222). When Hilbert warns that “there couldn’t be the usual baseball or football or any of that all-American stuff,” Chickie suggests, “You could recite The Owl and the Pussycat or Mother Goose.” In wishing to have a child with Hilbert, Chickie claims to have the greater good in mind, as well as her own needs: “In human terms it would be a great loss to life in general if your type wasn’t preserved” (p. 222)—though what of granddaughter Immy? one wonders.

  Hilbert is a celebrity, and his reputation is that of an eccentric. Fathering a child at his age will be “a fabulous send-up, setting a record for screwball ingenuity.” Dr. Clavel takes a similar view, dreaming of money and fame. When he is told what Hilbert intends: “Bang! His color changed….The blood that came into his face and even under his chin-beard was a cranberry flood.” “If at my time of life I could be somehow engineered into fatherhood,” Hilbert says of Clavel’s reaction, he “would join the band of Twentieth Century immortals headed by Einstein and the double-helix twins Watson and Crick….The covers of Time and Newsweek were a sure thing” (pp. 83–84). Yet there’s Chickie to consider. “I would never involve Chickie in anything macabre or suspect—nothing that would subject her to cynical comment or be a source of vulgar amusement. I dearly love Chickie MacNellis. By which I mean to say our souls are connected….I had to wait sixty years or so for a female profile to fit my own” (p. 78). Hilbert’s fears for Chickie are sparked in part by past history. In “primitive” rural New Hampshire, when she was a teenager and he a long-haired city slicker at least three times her age, “there was a small satellite of suspicion circling us….Go tell such people that the broadening of Chickie’s min
d was based on love and that true educational impulses have an erotic base.” It was Chickie who made the first move. “She simply stated one day that the time had come. It’s common knowledge that there are girls who find old men sexier than young ones. To her my baldness and my wrinkles seemed to have been signs of character” (p. 79).

  When Chickie sings Hilbert’s praises—“a person of a rare type…rare types owed it to society to reproduce themselves”—he immodestly agrees. Yet he is not without modesty. “It was painfully blissful to hear such things. She had a way of spreading them on my responsive quaking heart like honey butter. Though you know yourself too well to believe such stuff. It still sends tremors through the system. It may be that the good in you, even if you have offended or betrayed it hundreds of times, has refused to give up” (pp. 79–80). Hilbert thinks of the Bible story of Sarah and Abraham: “how she had laughed to think of conceiving at her age, and asked whether she would be pleasured after the manner of women. But her pregnancy is an event of vast historical significance.” Immediately Hilbert regrets his presumption, declaring, “The only resemblance is that of great age and the improbability of conception” (p. 81).

  Although kindly, Hilbert’s impulses are also violent. The desire to be strong, he admits, is only partly a product of motives connected with Chickie. “I could never get rid of fantasies of retribution for offenses going back seventy years. It comes over me that I should still be ready to punch so-and-so in the mouth. And if so-and-so has gone to his reward, as is usually the case, I have to get what emotional satisfaction I can from his death.” These feelings Hilbert sees as “pathetic and almost painful—an old man who is still a street kid and won’t back away from a fight” (p. 111). “If you ask me whether it isn’t unseemly to fancy at ninety that you can drive your fist into a hated face my answer is, ‘Sure thing, certainly. I will never stop trying to shake it off’ ” (p. 112). Here, as elsewhere in “Marbles,” one thinks of Bellow, an identification not always fictionally plausible. For example, Hilbert attributes his feistiness to his experiences as an artist—experiences little in evidence in “Marbles.” “Some of this I conclude reflects the struggle of an artist, having to stand up to the dazzling cultural changes experienced during and after the pop-Sixties. One had to fight. Willy-nilly we slipped into something like the state of nature and the war of all against all. In such a war you get no protection from the former reverence for the aged and the sage” (p. 111). At this point, Hilbert recalls the story of former Secretary of Defense Brushmore pouring wine over his tie, a fictionalized version of the incident in which former Secretary of Defense Schlesinger poured wine over Bellow’s tie.

  The “practical difficulties” connected with Hilbert’s decision to father a child with Chickie much preoccupy him. “First off,” he is sent by Dr. Clavel to “a private, discreet lab” for a sperm test. He is also prescribed Pergonal, a hormone specifically aimed at increasing fertility. At the lab, he faces “the humiliation of having to produce samples, the astonishment and disbelief of biotechnicians in their white jackets who evidently thought I was funny as hell and coming to them with senile delusions, and their hair-raising experience of finding viable sperm. It was also the burden of justification, not least to myself” (p. 131). When the baby comes, Hilbert’s response is:

  The baby!

  At my age!

  What have I done!

  Then, to himself: “Don’t give me that. You’ve done just what you wanted….Glad to have the capacity still, nearing the century mark” (p. 245). When, later, he questions the morality of “begetting an orphan. How else was I to think of it with a life expectancy like mine,” his next thought is that “it was heroic to become a dad at ninety-five” (p. 263). The final word on Hilbert’s fathering a child at his age is Chickie’s. “I think you kept alive because of me. Also you go to the trouble of dreaming up new projects because you won’t die as long as you have unfinished business. Behind it all maybe is the fact that you had to wait so long to find the woman in your life and you’re not ready to part with me. I believe also I got into miso to lengthen your life and then it occurred to me also that we could have a kid together” (p. 268).

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  BELLOW AND JANIS THOUGHT of having a child “long before we were married.” “From day one” they never took precautions. Before marriage, they also began consulting fertility charts “and schlepped them with us everywhere we traveled”; “Those were in the days when you took your temperature and then made sure to have a lot of fun at those peak times. He didn’t have to be coerced—it was something he very much wanted. As long as I was prepared to change all the diapers, he was in!”2 The difficulties they faced were of several sorts. In addition to worries about the viability and motility of Bellow’s sperm, Janis had fertility problems. Despite the absence of symptoms, she turned out to have severe endometriosis and was operated on. When she recovered, she got pregnant, around the time of Bellow’s seventy-fifth birthday. A “terrible” miscarriage followed, but they did not give up. As she later told an interviewer, speaking of this painful period, “I wasn’t the kind of person who was interested [in babies], only then it grabbed me with a ferocity.”3 They turned to IVF (“an extremely expensive process,” Bellow told Walter Pozen), which can not only overcome female infertility but also aid male fertility. Four failed attempts at IVF followed, one of which led to pregnancy and a second miscarriage. A fifth attempt remained, but Janis “had given up.” It was Bellow who encouraged her to try one final time. “Everyone else said enough, enough for God’s sake. He was the only one who said you’ll never forgive yourself.” On the fifth and last attempt, Janis conceived, the pregnancy was carried to term, and on December 23, 1999, Naomi Rose Bellow was born.

  Janis’s parents were among those who had given up. “I had reconciled myself that she would be childless,” Harvey Freedman recalled in an interview. “I don’t know how many miscarriages she had,” Sonya Freedman added, “at least three.” Harvey remembers twice talking to Bellow about becoming a father again, including once after Janis was pregnant with Rosie. “On both occasions he started, ‘Am I nuts? Am I nuts?’ and I said that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a fait accompli, and I said it’s going to turn out either beautifully or it’s going to be a disaster and it’s not up to you, it’s up to this unborn child. If it’s a winning child with a decent temperament it could be the best thing that ever happened to you, if it’s the opposite it could be terrible.” “He knew how much Janis wanted it” is Sonya’s view. “He did it for her.” Most of their friends were delighted at the news. Bette Howland, however, to whom Bellow had confessed reservations, thought that Janis’s family had “worked on” him, “indoctrinated” him, and that he “just folded.” Howland became angry, and “by the time Rosie was born,” she recalled, “I couldn’t take any more.” “Everybody was totally surprised,” Jonathan Kleinbard recalls. “When Janis had the baby, Bette totally broke off.”

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  —

  BELLOW WAS EIGHTY-FOUR when Rosie was born. Four months later, on April 24, 2000, his last novel, Ravelstein, was published, to acclaim and controversy. Once again Bellow was in the news, partly for admitting that Bloom was the model for Ravelstein, partly for “outing” him as a homosexual and suggesting that he died of AIDS, and partly because he’d produced a work of such quality at eighty-four (as Newsweek put it, “What else would you expect from an 84-year-old man who fathered his fourth child last December?”4). The idea for writing the book, a fictional memoir, came, Bellow claimed, from Bloom himself. That Bloom expected Bellow to write about him was clear to his companion, Michael Z. Wu. That he would have wanted a book as revealing as Ravelstein Wu denies. Several of Bloom’s closest friends, friends also of Bellow, dispute the suggestion that the novel was solicited by Bloom, as Ravelstein solicits Chick to “do me as you did Keynes, but on a bigger scale. And also you were too kind to him. I d
on’t want that. Be as hard on me as you like. You aren’t the darling doll you seem to be.”5 For Wu, who is depicted in the novel as Ravelstein’s partner, Nikki, this speech is pure fiction: “I just don’t believe it’s true that Bloom said write about me and be honest.”

  Whatever the book’s origins, Bellow was thinking about it as early as the spring of 1990, well before Bloom’s death in October 1992. In an April 1991 journal entry largely devoted to Bellow’s problems with “A Case of Love,” an entry noted earlier, Janis records, “At the center for him now is the Bloom book.” In Paris, in the spring of 1993, the “Bloom book” was again Bellow’s prime concern, according to Roger Kaplan. It seemed to Kaplan that Bellow was trying to decide whether it should be a novel or a memoir or a mixture of the two. The solution to this dilemma—if solution it was—did not occur to Bellow for more than three years. On July 17, 1996, four months after reading to Janis the final pages of “Changing Places,” soon to become The Actual, her journal records: “HE HAS STARTED THE BLOOM BOOK!”

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  RAVELSTEIN SPARKED A COMPLEX CONTROVERSY, one that needs recounting before the novel itself is discussed. Bloom’s homosexuality was no secret to his friends and to those who followed his career, but he rarely discussed it with them and said nothing of it in print. “Allan was a very private person,” Jonathan Kleinbard declares. “We never talked about Allan’s homosexuality…until he was dying.” Wu speaks of valuing “discretion, manners, it’s just private things; what is your life is your life.” In addition, “there are people who accept you but do not want to know details….You don’t say anything and they don’t ask.” (“It was sort of, don’t ask, don’t tell,” Bloom’s student Paul Wolfowitz, Philip Gorman in the novel, told an interviewer from The New York Times.) The prudence of this view, especially in influential conservative circles, is suggested in a Wall Street Journal article of February 2, 2000. The article was written by Sam Tanenhaus, a friend of James Atlas, and titled “Bellow, Bloom, and Betrayal.” It was accompanied by a drawing of a man being stabbed in the back. Tanenhaus, who had not yet read the novel, implies that Bloom’s reputation could be undermined by its revelations. “This is important because Bloom has lost the iconic status he once enjoyed among conservatives, who initially hailed his work but have been more subdued in recent years, owing mainly to uneasiness about his homosexuality.”6