by Bellow, Greg
Unable to divorce Anita in New York State, Saul went to Nevada in 1955. He lived at Pyramid Lake in a shack surrounded by tumbleweed and sent me a fragrant sprig that I kept by my bed and sniffed frequently during his long absence. He was soon joined by Sasha, whom he was anxious to marry. They went into Reno about once a week to shop and play blackjack at Harold’s Club. Arthur Miller was near Reno, too, and also divorcing his first wife. Marilyn Monroe visited him there, and the two couples struck up a friendship.
Back in New York, the foursome made a date for dinner. Over a drink in the Millers’ home, Arthur entertained Saul and Sasha while Marilyn was dressing. After an hour or more, Arthur excused himself. Soon he returned and urged Sasha to go into the bedroom and help Marilyn decide what to wear. Sasha quickly helped her choose something and the famished couples went out to Rocco’s, a favorite restaurant of Saul’s on the northern edge of Little Italy. Marilyn wore some sort of disguise, but word of her presence got out. Having recently thrown over Joe DiMaggio for Arthur, she was none too popular in the Italian community, and an unruly crowd formed on the street. Saul had to get his car and pull right in front of the restaurant so Marilyn could get into it without an ugly scene. For several years, Saul brought me greetings from Marilyn. When I was thirteen, I met her when he and Arthur were inducted into the National Academy of Arts and Letters. I remember her as very beautiful and surrounded by men, but she took a minute to say hello to me. Anita was upset that I met famous people though Saul. She felt left behind, and the gold Cadillac in which she imagined Saul was now full of celebrities.
I went with Anita to Chicago, where Grandma Goshkin and Grandpa Bellow both lived, but more often I went with Saul. He and I took the eighteen-hour train ride from New York on the Twentieth Century Limited. I drank ginger ale in the club car while we played casino—to me it was the height of luxury. If Saul and I drove, we’d pass the time singing “Old Hogan’s Goat,” “The Eddystone Light,” “Anne Boleyn,” and the songs Aunt Jenny had sung to Saul in Lachine during the First World War.
I most remember Fanny’s sloppy kisses and Jewish dishes such as boiled tongue and stuffed cabbage. I was supposed to kiss Grandpa but found his face rough from intermittent shaving. Abraham was in the habit of distributing silver dollars to his grandchildren. I kept mine in a metal cigarette box acquired in France, along with a huge wad of czarist Russian rubles Saul had given me to play with. During a summer visit, I decided to water the flowers in Grandpa’s backyard. I was wearing socks but no shoes and he anticipated that I’d make a muddy mess. I insisted that I could keep them dry and refused to take them off. Saul, still an indulgent parent then, stuck up for me. Grandpa was right. I did make a mess.
During Grandpa’s last years, the entire Bellow family, including Saul when he was in town, would go over to Abraham and Aunt Fanny’s for Sunday afternoon meals. The regular attendees were Morrie, his wife, Marge, and their children, Lynn and Joel; Sam, his wife, Nina, and their children, Lesha and Shael; and Jane, her husband, Charlie Kauffman, and their sons, Larry and Bobby. When Grandma Lescha’s name came up, her children spoke of her with great reverence. The afternoons were largely harmonious until the conversation turned to money, which shattered the superficial the goodwill. While the parents visited, the kids played intensely competitive games of Monopoly.
Abraham found financial threats the best way to reassert his waning paternal authority. His frequent fights with his children often ended with his announcement that he was changing his will and disinheriting the current offender. He would go so far as to call his lawyer, often in the middle of the night, with instructions to draw up a new will excluding that child. Morrie tired of this routine early on and turned his nose up at his share to emphasize its paltry size, but Abraham’s mercurial threats had serious consequences for Sam, Jane, and Saul, whose fragile finances made him particularly vulnerable. My father would rush back to Chicago to learn about the new will. By the time the family had assembled at Grandpa’s insistence to hear of the new asset division, he and the offending child had patched things up and the crisis would blow over until Abraham pulled the same stunt again and the whole scene was repeated.
My grandfather was often provocative, setting even his grandchildren against one another. On the night before my cousin Joel’s bar mitzvah, he and our cousin Shael stayed at Abraham and Fanny’s. Oblivious to Joel’s nervousness before he was to read from the Torah in public, Grandpa compared him unfavorably to Shael, whose family was more religious. The next morning at the synagogue, in a typical disruptive gesture, Abraham took a public shot at Joel’s father. Morrie had invited business associates and political connections, Jews and non-Jews, on whom he wanted to make a good impression. But when my grandfather rose to speak after the reading, he asserted that if you have a choice, you should “always do business with a Jew!”
When The Adventures of Augie March was published, my grandfather took considerable pride in his rabbi’s praise of the book. Despite turning down my father’s requests for money, he continued to worry about Saul’s financial prospects and told Sam to watch out for the welfare of his kid brother.
In 1955, when he was seventy-eight, Grandpa had a fatal heart attack. Morrie used his connections to secure a police escort complete with sirens from the synagogue to the cemetery. Saul joked about the irony that Abraham, who was running from the police most of his life, was accompanied by them on his last journey. After the funeral Aunt Fanny confessed to Saul that Grandpa had wanted to have sex the evening before he died, but she put him off because he had the sniffles. Her story cemented my father’s awe of Abraham as a tough, horny old bird. Despite their arguments, one of which included a threat by Abraham to come after Saul with a gun if he asked for money again, Saul grieved deeply. When Ruth Miller, a former student, came to pay a condolence call, she found my father weeping as he listened to Mozart’s Requiem.
Seize the Day reflects Saul’s lost hope of approval from his father. Abraham was not only unable to show Saul his love but also had formed a critical judgment of his youngest as an overgrown crybaby who had failed to absorb the lesson life taught him: the necessity for emotional toughness. I think that my father agreed but could do little to control his emotions. A film version of the novel was produced three decades later. The actor Joseph Wiseman, who played Dr. Adler, Tommy Wilhelm’s father, bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Grandpa and perfectly captured his harshness toward his son. After having witnessed such scenes between my father and grandfather, I was riveted to the screen as Tommy begs his implacable father for money. I mentioned to several family members how struck I was by the film, and my words of praise got back to my father. Saul, who believed that writing was a far superior way to capture the essence of people than film, took offense. On our next visit, he complained about what he took to be my lack of appreciation of his novel and extended his criticism to my lack of interest in literature as a whole. I told him that I continued to read and love great writers of fiction, but that I could not appreciate his books as literature. “They’re just too close,” I said. As was his habit whenever, like it or not, he was confronted with an irrefutable position, he remained silent and never again brought up the subject.
Despite his threats Abraham did not disinherit any of his children, and Saul’s share, about fifteen thousand dollars, was sufficient to buy a large house in the Hudson Valley. But Grandpa’s threats had a salutary effect on Saul’s behavior about money with his sons. Our father made it clear that each son was responsible for his own finances, thereby avoiding the destructive Bellow practice of mixing family and money matters.
After the death of their father, my uncles, aunt, and their families settled into midlife routines. Morrie was a wheeler-dealer in Chicago, and Marge ran their hotels day-to-day with a heavy but effective hand. Marge took great pride in her business acumen, and their relationship, half marriage and half business partnership, created a formidable team. Morrie, Marge, Lynn, and Joel lived in the penthouse of the Shor
eland Hotel, which seemed palatial when I visited. As a teenager, Joel would use ten towels to dry off after a bath.
Freed from the constraints of watching over the Carroll Coal Company, Sam hit his stride as a businessman. He began a chain of profitable nursing homes and offered family members financial participation. I believe Sam hoped that spreading ample profits among the Bellows would promote the family concern and togetherness that he, too, prized from their days in Lachine. His wife, my aunt Nina, was a woman of ambition and energy, but in an era when having a working wife reflected poorly on a husband’s ability to provide for his family, Sam forbade her to work outside the home. Nina, who came from a family of rabbis, prevailed at home. My cousins Lesha and Shael were raised in an observant Jewish household, and Sam rarely intervened.
Jane married Charlie Kauffman, a dentist who treated the Bellow family and, reportedly, possessed minimal technical skill. As a young husband, Charlie, bored by his marriage, led a double life. He went through the motions of domesticity but spent many hours gambling with shady characters. Jane was, by all accounts, a smothering mother to her children, Larry and Bobby. Anita derided Jane’s germ phobias and her custom of boiling oranges before peeling them and wiping the rails of my cousins’ crib with chemicals more harmful than any germ they might encounter licking them.
I did not live in Chicago after 1946 and had almost no relationships with my Bellow aunts, uncles, or cousins. I was used to the generosity of the doting Goshkins, all childless, who sent birthday presents and candy on Valentine’s Day. My aunts Ida and Catherine stayed with us when they visited New York to attend the theater and Catherine offered to take me to any restaurant I named, although I always chose the Automat. I was hurt by the lack of attention I received from the Bellows and asked Anita why my rich uncle Morrie never sent me anything for my birthday.
Our years in the Hudson Valley anchored the only domestic life I had with my father after the divorce. Saul got a job teaching at Bard College and I summered on or near campus for years. At first he lived in a carriage house on the estate of Chanler Chapman, a wealthy local character who was related to the Astor family. Saul attended parties at the mansion house and must have been treated as a celebrity because he had to explain the word lionize to me when he used it to describe how he was treated there.
Ted and Lynn Hoffman, whom I already knew from Salzburg, lived on campus and often looked out for me. The Hoffman girls were too young to be of any interest, but I delighted in Ted’s wit and infectious laugh. Curled up in a big chair in the Hoffman living room, I spent hours poring over the joke books Ted bought me. During Saul’s second year at Bard, he shared the house with Ted during the week because Lynn had an editorial job at the Viking Press and stayed in Manhattan. Lynn told me that her presentation to the Viking marketing department about The Adventures of Augie March was interrupted by the delivery of an elegant package from California. John Steinbeck had sent his manuscript East of Eden in a hand-carved wooden box. It so impressed everyone that she could not turn their attention back to Saul’s novel.
In fair weather we played volleyball or swam at the Bard pool. In foul we played basketball in the gym, where Sasha taught me to shoot the ball with one hand, since Saul knew only the old-fashioned two-handed set shot of his youth. Keith Botsford, a flamboyant character who attached himself to Saul for decades, lived on campus with his then wife, Ann. Saul, always in search of child care and entertainment for me, hit on the fine idea that Keith should give me tennis lessons. I believe Keith’s father had played tennis on the Olympic team, and he was an excellent player. “Tennis lessons” consisted of his hitting shots difficult even for a skilled adult to return and me running after tennis balls. One of the most transparently competitive people I ever encountered, Keith could not stand to lose. Even in a game of Scrabble at the Hoffmans’, he used the word nuncio, but substituted a t for the c. When challenged by Lynn, he went wild, claiming that it was an alternate spelling and refusing to admit defeat even when the dictionary failed to back him up.
Jack Ludwig was another flamboyant Bard character. He had a deep basso voice and sang in a college choral group that included Sasha. I don’t know when Sasha and Jack’s affair began, but by 1956 it was common for Saul, Sasha, and me, in some combination, to see Jack and his family almost daily. I spent endless adolescent hours in a nearby tree. In that favorite niche I was able to avoid both the boring adult conversation and having to play with Jack’s daughter Susie, who was five years my junior, though, no doubt, bored as well.
Saul jokingly called the house he bought with his inheritance “Bellowview.” Several miles from Bard, it was in a town called Tivoli. Just before we moved in, the Lane brothers, antique dealers who owned the house, held an auction I attended with Saul and his constant companion Jack. Included in the sale were the house’s huge window screens; Saul was furious at having to pay for something he thought he already owned. He was convinced that the Lane brothers had removed valuable chandeliers too as well.
The house was huge. Half of the first floor was taken up by an elegant ballroom longer than a bowling alley, its fourteen-foot ceilings replete with ornate plaster foliage. The cost of heating the ballroom was beyond Saul, but the African violets that Ralph Ellison, who visited often and later lived in the house, cultivated in its cool air flourished, even if we did not. Across the hall were the living room and Saul’s study. Four large bedrooms, also with high ceilings, made up the next floor. You could see the Hudson River from the second-floor windows when the leaves had fallen. Above that was another floor, with smaller rooms once used to house servants but which was now sealed off also to prevent losing heat. Across from our front lawn, Chanler Chapman grew feed corn for his cows in a large field, and Saul often walked the narrow path around its perimeter alone or with adult friends. Behind the house there was a large overgrown garden where he and I picked our dessert from the raspberry bushes that grew half-wild on its edges.
For months we cooked and ate in an upper room because the basement, where the kitchen was planned, had no viable plumbing. Saul hired a contractor that fall but found that the interminable hammering interfered with his writing. He took off for the quiet of Yaddo, a writers’ colony a few hours away, leaving Sasha to manage the contracting, which greatly irritated her and set the stage for disaster.
One morning in the summer of 1956 a phone call woke us with news that Isaac Rosenfeld had died in Chicago. Saul was inconsolable. Although I had only scattered memories of Isaac, I was saddened as well. According to his daughter Miriam, Oscar Tarcov lay on the couch all day immobilized in shock after he got the news. Saul could not make himself go to Isaac’s funeral. Vasiliki, his widow, was furious with him, but my father was unable to see beyond his own grief.
Yet death, spiritual maladies, and suffering pervade Henderson the Rain King, written soon after Isaac and Grandpa died. Chanler Chapman, a huge physical specimen who had correspondingly large appetites and a disdain for convention, served as the model for Eugene Henderson, Saul’s tragicomic title character. Saul included Chanler’s nihilistic habit of breaking bottles with his slingshot on a beach in Miami, leaving it covered with dangerous shards of glass. That oft-repeated story was a source of family amusement, but many years later Chanler’s nephew (who became a friend of mine in California) told me his uncle was hurt by Saul’s novelistic exaggeration of his eccentricities.
In Henderson the Rain King, Gene Henderson chooses a life path that brings him into contact with suffering and death. He is haunted by the biblical line “a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief,” a phrase embedded in my memory after listening to Handel’s Messiah over and over on Saul’s hi-fi. Born to material ease, Henderson’s deepest desire is to be helpful. A zealous blunderer who cannot contain his impulse to improve the lives of others, he brings only more trouble to his intended beneficiaries. The scorn he heaps on himself when he fails merely fans his desire to be even more helpful. In the middle of Africa, Gene meets a soul mate, King Dafu
, a highly educated man to whom he confides his dreams and fears. Dafu is on a quest to find his deepest nature by calmly approaching a lioness who has been captured and kept in a cave but is allowed to move unfettered in an attempt to commune with the spirit of an animal that can kill him at any moment. Inspired by his friend’s courage and eager to capture the beast’s powers with his own soul, Henderson agrees to follow along. Neither falls prey to the wild beast, but Dafu is done in by lethal human ambition.
I believe the rapport between the literary characters Gene Henderson and Dafu touches on my father’s deep connection with Isaac Rosenfeld. First in the books they read and later in the larger scale of their own lives, these soul mates searched in ideas and in experience for the deepest essences of humanity. After Isaac’s death, Saul compared himself unfavorably with his friend, who was willing to take risks my hesitant and more skeptical father was not. Isaac fully embraced life, including Wilhelm Reich’s emphasis on the body and on powerful emotion. Isaac showed courage that bordered on recklessness, for which Saul believed he paid the ultimate price of an early death. As opposed to Seize the Day, where Saul caricatured Reichianism, Henderson the Rain King expresses my father’s respect for Reich’s emphasis on emotion as an unadulterated expression of what is essentially human, an emphasis that Saul’s rational side could never fully accept.
Chapter Six
Betrayal: 1957–62
Sasha said that when she became pregnant with Adam, Saul told her that raising one child was enough for him, pretty much disavowing the responsibilities of parenthood. However, I remember walking up hills with them to prepare her for childbirth, conversations about the baby’s arrival, and going to see Adam in the hospital with an excited Saul. I recall Sasha at Tivoli when Adam was an infant. But by that summer Sasha and Adam were nowhere to be seen. My father, in a deadpan tone of voice, announced that she was moving to Brooklyn to “get away and think.” Meanwhile Jack Ludwig was driving down to Brooklyn on a regular basis, ostensibly to “mediate” between Saul and Sasha.