According to Greg, an hour after leaving the house he returned, fearing that this would be the last time he’d see his father alive. “I tried to find a way to say goodbye without using the word death. I was standing by his bedside and Saul put his hand on my heart. I told him that I loved him as I always had. I kissed him and walked out of his room. Saying ‘Goodbye, Pop’ under my breath, I wished him a peaceful end.” As so often in his final years, Bellow rallied from what seemed like the end. There were other visits and phone calls from Greg, calmer ones. On one visit, Greg reports, Maria, “the kind woman now charged with his physical care, reported that Saul called me his ‘little boy’ and spoke of me often.”29 At what turned out to be Greg’s last visit, in the winter of 2004, Bellow called him “Sonny Boy,” mimicking Al Jolson, as he’d done when Greg was a child (“Climb upon my knee, Sonny Boy”). In their last phone conversation, “I remember shouting into the phone, ‘I love you sweetheart,’ the last thing I ever said to my father.”30
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IN THE SPRING OF 2003, Bellow taught his last course. He had been teaching literature in universities for over sixty years. His original plan was for James Wood to co-teach with him again. But Wood procrastinated, couldn’t bring himself to say yes or no (or to explain that he thought 2002 should have been Bellow’s last year of teaching). Then Claire Messud got a position teaching creative writing at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, which made commuting weekly out of the question. On October 2, 2002, Bellow wrote to John Silber with a plan for having weekly visiting lecturers teach with him. The names he gave Silber were Martin Amis, the only lecturer to come from outside the United States; Jonathan Wilson, who taught at Tufts; and Ruth Wisse, Keith Botsford, Stanley Crouch, Roger Kaplan, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth. In a follow-up letter of October 21, Bellow estimated that the travel and accommodation costs for these lecturers would be nine thousand dollars. Silber agreed, and in the end all but Roth taught on the course. In addition, Keith Botsford volunteered to lead the seminars each week, an arrangement with which, as Will puts it, “Saul more or less agreed.” Will himself attended all the seminars, and helped with course administration. According to several attendees and lecturers, Botsford not only led the seminars but took them over, intruding not only on Bellow but on the visiting lecturers, some of whom complained of condescension and impertinence in his attitude to Bellow. “He would call Saul ‘Ducky,’ ” Will remembers. “Saul would turn to a page and he’d say, ‘No, Ducky, the other page.’ It was very belittling….I thought he was cruel, maybe unintentionally.” Bellow was “not particularly aware of it….He had a serenity. I think he did notice but he couldn’t do anything about it….He was tired. It was bad.”31 Like Bellow, Botsford was touchy and had a high opinion of himself. He must often have suffered as well as benefited from being in Bellow’s shadow.
What Ruth Wisse and others noticed about Bellow in the last two years of his life was that “he began to tune out. He couldn’t hear very well and didn’t want to, I felt….I realized one day that he didn’t need to hear any more, preferred to sit at the table having things go on around him.” Increasingly, “he wasn’t interested anymore in making the effort, and he would smile.”32 Wisse describes Bellow’s smiling silence as “noble….He never complained, never, never alluded to anything that was missing.” Maggie Simmons, whom Bellow often called, felt “he did mellow out and he did become humble….He certainly did become gentler.” She was also impressed that as he approached death he was “not at all afraid.” Martin Amis remembers that in the last year or so, he saw Maria, the housekeeper, carry Bellow up the stairs. “She’d put her arms around his chest, lean backwards, and carry him.” Bellow’s expression was “resigned.” “It was very sweetly done, cheerfully done.” Was there a mellowing? Had he become nicer? “Nicer!” said Daniel. “He was never ‘nice.’ It’s too weak a term in relation to him.” Yet, at the end, Daniel remembers, “he just loved me….It was just sweet at the end.” Adam has similar memories. “He became sweet and childlike. He calmed down….I like to think he became more plantlike, more like a flower, which he was always fascinated by, the life of plants and trees.” Some thought Bellow had softened because he had no choice, being so reduced and dependent upon others, but not all elderly people soften when reduced. James Wood emphasizes that “he was surrounded by people who were acolytes and vastly his junior, people like Martin and me and Will; it wasn’t the old tussling thing like with Kazin. The most Kazin-like relationship was with Botsford—and it was quite fraught….If you played along he was serene.” In Wood’s case, the playing along was sometimes literal, as when Bellow played the recorder and Wood the piano, or when Wood accompanied him on the piano when he sang from a book of French folksongs, the words of which he knew by heart. A number of friends said how much he liked to sing in his last years.
Bellow’s silences provoked questions. Many times a day, people would ask him what he was thinking or how he was feeling, which he found tiring. “I’m making a list,” he once told Will, “of the things I’ve done and the things I haven’t done.” On another occasion, he said, “I feel that I lost my way some days ago and I’m not sure that I can find my way back.” Will reassured him: “There’s still time. Don’t worry.” To which Bellow answered, “Yes, but I have to devote all my energy to the project.” “There’s a person inside of these symptoms,” Oliver Sacks told Will, during a visit to the Bellows in Vermont. Wood recalls telling Bellow about Henry Green’s novel Loving. At one point, the serving maid goes into her mistress’s room and finds her in bed with a man. In her shock, the mistress sits up and her breasts are exposed. Later, the servant tells the butler of this incident, describing how the mistress sat up “with her fronts bobbin’ at him like a pair of geese.” “Bellow stopped and said to me: ‘Fronts?’ ‘Yes, fronts,’ and then he sat back with his slow quiet laugh: ‘Ah, ah, ah, ah.’ ” Later, “quite near the end,” Wood remembers, at dinner, “we were talking about George Herbert, and Janis said Saul loves that poem ‘The Flower,’ and she said, ‘Saul, why don’t you read it?’ Saul said, ‘I don’t want to,’ and Janis said, ‘Well, I’ll read it.’ And Janis started reading it, and there’s a moment about having been in a long winter and then the artist, like the spring, awakening (‘once more…I relish versing’) and clearly it had been a great text for Janis and Saul about recovering after the fish incident. And Janis got to that bit, and there was a catch in her voice, and she was clearly overcome, and Saul said, ‘I’ll read it,’ and then Saul read the whole poem out. That was an extraordinary moment. He read it to the table.” Here, as at other moments, as Will puts it, “Saul was still Saul.” In June 2004, he received an honorary degree from BU and climbed up to the stage unassisted. The last time Martin Amis saw Bellow, “he could still give you a very good idea of that Norwegian fascist, Knut Hamsun.” Amis remembers reading him a passage from an article in the Atlantic in which Bellow was called the greatest American novelist. “I said the only American novelist who gives you any trouble was Henry James, and there was a cry from the bed: ‘Jesus Christ!’ It was very funny.” Amis then amused Bellow by “slagging off Henry James a little bit. James has a terrible stylistic flaw, which is elegant variation. ‘He crossed the Ponte Vecchio and looked back at that noble structure.’ Instead of ‘it.’ Pretending you give a bit of extra information. I think Saul is a greater writer than Henry James.”
The most painful consequences of memory loss for Bellow involved deceased friends and relations. Greg Bellow remembers him trying to call Sam Freifeld and breaking into tears when told he was dead. Janis remembers the same reaction when she had to tell him, in the spring of 2004, that David Grene had died two years earlier. Several times, Bellow asked about his sister, Jane, who died in 2003, and each time he was devastated to learn she had died. Wood remembers “a time (and I think Martin had this, too) when each time I met him he would say ‘Hello, James.’ So he got the name right, but then there
was an abyss. You felt he didn’t have any available data except you were a face and a name.” One way to get Bellow to talk, Wood remembers, was to prod him with a name. “You’d say, ‘Like John Berryman, Saul,’ except that would backfire when he would say, ‘Is he still alive?’ and Janis would say, ‘No, he’s dead, Saul,’ and that was awful.” In addition to memory loss, there were terrible delusions and anxieties, often about travel: He thought he’d lost his wallet. He didn’t have a passport. Will would say, “You have it here, you’re all set.” He thought he was in a hotel when he was at home. “I want to check out,” he told Will. “Give me ten dollars, get me out of here.” When put right, Bellow would say, “I’m all mixed up today.” “During the day you didn’t see the dementia as much,” Janis recalls, but “during the night he would put his fists up and think there was someone in the room. And I would have to get out of bed.” He also had terrible delusions about Janis’s betraying or leaving him. Nathalie Botsford used to visit on Sunday afternoons, when Maria was off, so that Janis and Rosie “could go off and do things.” Before the very end, she and Bellow would do the New York Times crossword together, but later she’d just sit by his bedside. “One day I was sitting next to the bed, and he knew I was there, but when he said what he said I realized he didn’t know who I was. I thought he was sound asleep, and all of a sudden, in a very loud clear voice, he said, ‘Did you sleep with that guy last night?’ And I thought, he’s talking in his sleep, and I didn’t say anything. I’m not going to answer. And thirty seconds later he said, ‘I’m still waiting for an answer.’ ”
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ROSIE WAS A GREAT SOLACE to Bellow. She was a beautiful child; she didn’t ask him what he was thinking; there was no question of forgetting who she was; she was a daughter, not a son (to Harvey Freedman, “The blessing of a granddaughter far surpasses that of a grandson…being cherished by a granddaughter”). She also reminded him of his own childhood memories, which never left him. Will once said of Rosie, “Looking at her just exhausts me,” and Bellow said, “No, she enacts my feelings.” Will has film of Bellow patiently dandling Rosie on his knees in the summer of 2001, on the porch in Vermont. At two and a half, Rosie’s behavior became worrying, to Janis and others if not to Bellow. She was willful, wouldn’t follow, wouldn’t be led or listen to instructions, wouldn’t eat with a spoon. She was prone to tantrums, in Will’s words, “beyond what you’d think as normal.” As Nathalie Botsford recalled, it became more and more difficult to have a conversation at dinner if Rosie was present. “Why are you always holding her wrists?” Janis remembers being asked. “To prevent her from suddenly running out into the street.” At this time, Rosie was diagnosed with ASD (autism spectrum disorder), a term encompassing a range of symptoms and conditions that impede social interaction and communication. The symptoms were acute for Rosie in her early years but have, now that she’s in high school, tapered off. She is a gifted musician, a violinist (her father’s first instrument was the violin), and is now a member of the New England Conservatory Youth Symphony.
For the most part, Rosie’s condition passed Bellow by, as his problems were unrecognized by her. For Janis, in the last two years of Bellow’s life, caring for them both was exhausting, mentally as well as physically. Neither could be left alone. Maria helped out, and Will, and Rosie’s therapists. “We had a little family: it was all the caregivers…and the occasional visitor” (Stephanie Nelson, who was a young Classics professor at BU, previously a student and then companion of David Grene’s at the University of Chicago, Nathalie Botsford, Ruth and Len Wisse, Brenda and Monroe Engel, Chris Walsh, Gene Goodheart, and from farther afield, Walter Pozen, Joan and Jonathan Kleinbard, Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Janis’s family). Nathalie Botsford jokingly took to calling herself “Janis’s catastrophe friend,” because “if she ever called me it was often when Saul was in the hospital—which was University Hospital, nearby to where I lived—so I could help Janis by going over there when she really did need to be at home with Rosie, or I could bring him some hot food, which was better than hospital food. What was amazing about Janis was that she was doing all this and trying to preserve the air of some sort of normalcy….It was almost as though she could will it to be something that was okay and manageable, even though that wasn’t necessarily the case”—“I don’t know how she did it.” One of the worst memories for Janis was of the time Bellow fell and she had to call 911 because she couldn’t get him up. Another was Christmas Eve, 2004, when all the caregivers were away and she was alone in the house with Bellow and Rosie. “What am I supposed to do? I’ve got Saul in the hospital bed, and Rosie, and I could not take care of the both of them at the same time, because if I got up to take care of her he’s going to get up out of bed and fall….I could hear him when he tried to get out of bed.” On Christmas Day, “he thought I was on a train somewhere and there was all this jealous stuff.” Rosie’s teacher came over that morning and took her out for the day.
Rosie has memories of her father. Of going to the zoo, being pushed by him in a stroller, seeing the lions (“He was crazy about the lions”), being waved to as she rode the carousel. She has no memory of Bellow’s ever being angry with her. She remembers sitting by his bed and watching him sleep. He sang songs to her in French, picked blueberries in Vermont and fed them to her. And they would read together.33 In March 2002, Bellow wrote a fan letter to the children’s author Arnold Lobel (who had been dead for about a decade and a half). “As an octogenarian who continues to father children,” it begins, “I think it only right that I should tell you how grateful I am to you for your delightful children’s stories. Every time I read Uncle Elephant to my two-year-old daughter Naomi Rose, I think how I used to labor through Dr. Seuss and other boring texts….Any line that I miss my little daughter knows by heart, so I can admire both her powers of memory and your gift for writing kid’s books. Respectfully yours, Saul Bellow.” A letter of February 19, 2004, to Eugene Kennedy, perhaps the last he wrote, gives a sense of how stimulating Rosie was for Bellow, for his memory as well as his spirits. He was eighty-eight at the time.
I don’t do much of anything these days and I spend much of my time indoors. By far my pleasantest diversion is to play with Rosie, now four years old. It now seems to me that my parents wanted me to grow up in a hurry and that I resisted, dragging my feet. They (my parents, not my feet) needed all the help they could get. They were forever asking. “What does the man say?” and I would translate for them into heavy-footed English. That didn’t help much either. The old people were as ignorant of English as they were of Canadian French. We often stopped before a display of children’s shoes. My mother coveted for me a pair of patent-leather sandals with an elegantissimo strap. I finally got them—I rubbed them with butter to preserve the leather. That is when I was six or seven years old, a little older than Rosie is now. It is amazing how it all boils down to a pair of patent-leather shoes.
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DR. BARBER BELIEVES THAT in his last days Bellow had a series of minor strokes and that that’s how he died, of slow vascular insufficiency. There was no evidence of a main-vessel stroke. The idea of putting him in the hospital at the very end was considered but rejected; the prognosis was not good, but he didn’t need to be in the hospital. Bellow died on April 5, 2005, at 5:15 p.m. In the last months before his death, according to Will, there were repeated ups and downs: “He would be terrible, and then he’d be okay, and we were thinking he’d be able to get out somewhere.” Adam saw him for the last time three months before he died. “I went to the house, and Janis had got him up and dressed him, and he was waiting for me at the entry hall. He looked puffed up, like the Michelin Man, wrapped up in layers….He knew me, but when he sat down with me on the sofa in the living room, he asked me a couple of questions; I asked him a couple of questions. He tired very quickly, but I still felt a spiritual connection, a deep connection.” Later, over the telephone, Bellow told Adam: �
�� ‘I want you to know you’ve been a good son and I’m proud of you.’ And I felt he was telling me something he wanted me to know. So I took that and put it in the bank.” Daniel remembers a lunch in the winter of 2004–5 at a Thai restaurant on Commonwealth Avenue, a short walk from Crowninshield Road. He and Heather and their two children, Stella and Ben, were visiting, and Bellow was well enough to leave the house and join them, along with Rosie and Janis. “All the kids were a handful, especially Rosie, and so all the adults were in a man-to-man defense and Pop was kind of dreaming away with nobody paying him much attention. After we had eaten all the yummy ducks and squids and other Thai delights, they brought in the dessert tray and Pop looked at me clear as day and he said ‘Daniel, you’d better not eat any of that, it’s full of nuts’ ” (Daniel has been allergic to nuts since infancy). “I said, ‘Pop, I’m forty years old, I’m a big boy, I can take care of myself.’ He drew himself up proudly and said ‘I’m your father!’ ”34
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