by Bellow, Greg
As their marriage spiraled downward, Susan urged Saul to see Dr. Heinz Kohut for what turned out to be a brief stint of therapy. Troubled by yet another marital failure, Saul began to weep during the session. My father told me that Dr. Kohut pushed a box of Kleenex forward, commenting that there should be no more of that! After Dr. Rayfield’s encouragement of the uninhibited expression of emotions, Saul was dismayed now that he was being urged to control himself. Not surprisingly, he stopped the sessions.
Three-year-old Daniel was very upset by his father’s departure, and this was compounded when Susan fired Gussie, who had become a luxury she could no longer afford. Fond of my cute little brother, I continued to visit them. Dan took to expressing his distress by peeing on the white carpets I so hated, and I have to admit that the yellow stains on them greatly pleased me.
Saul came to enjoy affluence in his own way. He hired a tailor named Armando to make his suits, which always featured colorful silk linings. My graduation present from college was one of Armando’s suits, although I chose a conservative lining. Some years later, at Adam’s wedding, we were joking about the suits and, to prove my point, I went over and exposed the paisley lining of our father’s jacket. He also started buying custom shoes from a shop in London that had wooden lasts of my father’s feet.
When Saul moved out he was determined that his new apartment be furnished in better taste than the co-op Susan now occupied. He took unusual care in the selection of his furniture, and purchased a fancy Oriental rug and a Mercedes. Susan continued to drive their white Chevy around Hyde Park for years, which Saul attributed to her desire to shame him for withholding money. Bent on making Saul pay for leaving her, Susan used their joint credit cards to force him to pay for whatever she bought, and she proved to be a formidable adversary in court. Charges and countercharges flew back and forth. Several legal cases went on for years, becoming incredibly expensive, and Daniel was eventually dragged into court, much to his detriment. According to Saul, a series of legal teams did not satisfy him. They were no doubt hampered by his custom of expecting quick, positive results. Saul’s increasing wealth allowed him to hire wave after wave of lawyers and financial advisers who each in turn were fired, vilified, and then replaced by willing teams who suffered their predetermined fate.
Alone after their separation, Saul rekindled friendships with earthy pals from the old neighborhood whom Susan found objectionable as well as friends around Hyde Park. Dick Stern was a frequent late-afternoon and evening companion who blundered by encouraging Mark Harris to become Saul’s biographer. Harris’s Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck, published in 1980, is his account of how my father, no doubt flattered and amused, led his hopeful biographer on a merry chase. Obviously Saul wanted no part of the project but was incapable of directly refusing. Instead he emulates his favorite rodent, the woodchuck, who, when it perceives danger, disappears into a burrow that has enough exits to ensure a ready escape. It was an apt description of my father’s indirect style of communication; he simply absented himself rather than saying a hurtful no directly to Harris.
In Drumlin Woodchuck Harris catalogs the flood of Saul’s attractive women companions just after his breakup from Susan. Saul disliked evenings spent alone in Hyde Park and felt a keen desire to reaffirm his sex appeal at fifty-five. Sam Freifeld and Dave Peltz, his old pals from Humboldt Park, introduced him to available women. These casual liaisons occurred when I wasn’t around, but once Saul rushed me out of his apartment so he could prepare for “some guests.” As I left, I saw Dave walking down the street joking affably with two women in tow. My father would have called them “suicide blondes,” as such women, Saul punned, had “dyed by their own hand.”
The intellectual companionship afforded by the university also appealed to Saul, notably the crusty Edward Shils. The three of us often walked through a dangerous neighborhood to a dreary Chinese restaurant under the Sixty-third Street El. For reasons that escaped me, both men liked the place, which was staffed by waiters in ill-fitting tuxedos. Edward called the restaurant “the Chinks.” When I complained to Saul about what a sign of prejudice this was, my father, always loyal to the friend or wife who was currently in favor, defended him. Eventually Edward and Saul fell out. I do not know the details of their disagreements, but years later when I was visiting my father in Boston, Philip Roth called him to ask about his relationship with Edward. I overheard Saul say that he could not tolerate Edward’s trying to control his thinking. Saul’s breaking free of the powerful intellect of a pure rationalist like Edward appears to come from a resistance to control that is also apparent in many of his novels, most notably Augie March. But while he frequently severed ties when he felt too controlled by someone as forceful as Edward or by wives who made demands he didn’t want to fulfill, he waited to complain until after decadelong relationships had soured; these complaints were largely for public consumption and to disguise how dependent Saul had felt. In one such instance that involved Alexandra, his fourth wife, Saul and Morrie were fighting over the financial proceeds of a real estate deal in which my father had invested with his older brother. Alexandra offered to go to Florida to mediate and try to make peace between the brothers. At the time Saul extolled her offer as an act of nobility, but after their marriage fell apart Saul reversed course, complaining bitterly about her greed as they were negotiating a settlement, completely ignoring his previous praise.
Saul also reconnected to Chicago and a neighborhood structure that he found sustaining. He met my girlfriend, now wife, while I was in graduate school. After about ten minutes of conversation, Saul asked if JoAnn had been raised in West Rogers Park, a Chicago neighborhood. Shocked and a little irritated, she asked how he had figured it out. Saul said, “I’ve made a study of Chicago accents, neighborhood by neighborhood. I could tell by the way you pronounce certain words.”
Along with fortune came fame. Initially refusing to become what he called a “ribbon cutter,” someone who presides over public cultural events, Saul gained a reputation for being publicity shy. But the public eye also appealed. He enjoyed readings, any opportunity to joust with reporters, to respond to critics, and to make known his views on cultural and social issues. Symbolic of his status, Saul had a bit part in Woody Allen’s movie Zelig where he, the child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, and Irving Howe, author of The World of Our Fathers, were cast as three contemporary Jewish wise men. Dissatisfied with the script, he rewrote his dialogue before filming. Saul was also made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government. He proudly wore the ribbon for decades until encountering a Frenchman with an identical one in his lapel. When Saul discovered the man’s award was for raising prize pigs, his ribbon disappeared.
A long line of admirers now flocked to my father’s door. Brent Staples, a young black man from Hyde Park, wanted to meet my father and published a strange account of trying to approach him. Mystified by Staples’s quandary, Saul wondered why he didn’t simply call and make an appointment with his secretary. But I found Staples’s awe an illustration of how Saul’s public persona had taken on a mythical quality, drawing people who were interested because he was famous, and feeding his already substantial self-centeredness. And Saul was not blind to the price of fame and how it interfered with the honest give-and-take that characterized his early friendships and rivalries with respected peers like Isaac Rosenfeld, Alfred Kazin, and dozens of other intellectuals. After the art critic Harold Rosenberg died, Saul said he most missed the sound of Harold’s voice on the phone excoriating him with “I can’t believe the latest crap you just wrote.”
Humboldt’s Gift, published in 1973, even before he won the Nobel Prize, is my father’s literary meditation on the fame that “good” fortune brings and on the two meanings of “culture” in American society. Von Humboldt Fleisher, a poet destroyed by modern life, pickets the opening of a play by his old friend Charlie Citrine, who has achieved critical and financial success. Humboldt accuses Citrine of modeling the play’s main character
after him and exploiting their treasured ideas about spreading high culture. Citrine’s success stands in stark contrast to Humboldt’s failure and his later anonymous death. The danger for the poet in America is voluntary isolation from society, a painful but necessary self-exclusion that can contribute to the frequent madness of poets, who are too often celebrated, if at all, after death. The opposite danger is of being smothered by architects and psychiatrists anxious to rub shoulders with cultural heroes at cocktail parties. Meditating on Humboldt’s fate and upon his own commercial success, Citrine confesses to having been seduced by consorting with the enemy they had both once despised: the rich, successful Philistines with no real commitment to culture.
Humboldt’s Gift mirrors the decline and death of Delmore Schwartz. Delmore’s health had spiraled downward as his substance abuse grew out of control. He lived with Isaac Rosenfeld’s widow, Vasiliki. Her son George, even as a young adolescent, understood that Delmore was mad but found his antics amusing. During Delmore’s last years, Saul, flush with fame, saw his decrepit friend on the street in New York and hid, a shameful act to which he confessed in the novel.
The 1972 suicide of Saul’s dear friend John Berryman also confirmed his view of the price poets pay. Soon after Berryman’s death, we were at a dinner given by the McCloskys in Berkeley. Saul spoke with Ellen Sigelman, a good friend of Berryman’s in Minneapolis, about his suicide. My father said he could easily understand why John would not want to stay in this world. What he could not comprehend was how he could turn his back on King Lear—that is, on art.
I understood that writing is hard work whether the results are poems or novels. I remember seeing Saul, winter and summer, emerge from his study with his shirt soaked through with sweat. The physical and mental toll that writing took on my father was like the effect of climbing an electric pole, taking hold of the high-tension wires, and letting the current run through him for a long, long time. Saul occasionally quipped, “It was safer to be addicted to sex.” He meant that sex was a more favorable vice for a writer than the alcohol that plagued John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, and Delmore Schwartz, and the high price his friends paid for their devotion to writing.
My deep respect for Saul and his writer friends fueled the fierce way I tried to protect his privacy and my acceptance of the line he drew between art and life. As a result, I was predisposed to react negatively to Saul’s fame and it got worse when it spilled over onto me. Soon after the publication of Herzog, I went over to visit Saul and Susan. As I walked through the lobby of their fancy Chicago apartment building, I nodded a friendly hello to the doorman. When he let me pass without calling upstairs, another tenant asked him who I was. “Oh, that’s Mr. Bellow’s son,” he told her. She turned to me and said in a snooty tone, “There’s no reason to be rude, Mr. Herzog.”
I considered Saul and Anita’s long-held left-wing political attitudes to be closely intertwined with permissive child rearing, minimal discipline, and encouragement of my independence that characterized our family ethos. Certainly the ethos came from both parents, but Anita remained more militant than Saul. In 1959, at my junior high school graduation, Anita had refused to stand for the national anthem, and Saul chided her for an excessive demonstration of her radicalism. The tenets of our family included a deep appreciation for art and culture, outright contempt for the kind of ostentation Morrie represented, a complete lack of religious observance, sympathy with people who had been disadvantaged or suffered discrimination, support of organized labor in that we did not cross picket lines, respect for people of all races, and a commitment to fairness embodied in the socialist ideal of each according to their needs. Anita expressed that ethos in her work, first in Paris with refugees, then by running a Planned Parenthood clinic, and finally by working for single-payer health plans that she considered socialized medicine.
At ten I knew all about Margaret Sanger and birth control. After my brief foray into capitalism, by sixteen I was committed to world socialism. At seventeen I had decided on a career as a lawyer for the NAACP. I went so far as to find a program that would allow me to finish college and get a law degree in five years. Anita looked at the curriculum and vetoed my plan, insisting I get a general education first. For several years I had envied the intellectual sophistication of my parents and their University of Chicago–educated friends. By the time I was eighteen, I came to agree with my mother. I set my heart on the university because I wanted more than anything else to be able to think like them and was willing to study hard to ensure I’d be admitted. My career as a socialist ended after I fell asleep during a lecture on Marxist dialectical materialism, and soon thereafter I dropped my interest in the law. But I left Chicago in 1968 committed to the adage of my generation that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, an adage by which I have lived and in which I continue to find great merit. I never heard a word contrary to the spirit of that adage from my mother or, before 1968, from Saul.
Anita actively encouraged my radicalism, buying me books on Sacco and Vanzetti and the Russian Revolution for birthdays and Hanukkah. My father’s friends were former Trotskyites, and he was even afraid of being called to testify before Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC, but his politics were not as easy to pin down as they once had been. I take the optimism that pervades his 1948 novel, The Victim, to confirm “young Saul’s” view that we are all our brothers’ keepers.
Within the prevailing family ethos it is easy to understand how the civil rights protests, the Vietnam War, and the turmoil in American society during the mid- and late 1960s came up during my long conversations with Saul in his university office. We supported the civil rights movement but disagreed about the escalating conflict in Vietnam. I felt the United States was involved in an immoral war. Saul made the subtle argument, typical of an immigrant who had been welcomed by this country, that America was a good society that offered its citizens freedom, which made its government worthy of their support. Saul was not perturbed when I joined members of my generation in protest rallies in Chicago and Washington, D.C., or even when I made arguments against participation in the war. But when my refusal to cooperate put my welfare at risk, our arguments got more heated. The force behind our disagreements abated when I got into graduate school to study social work, which extended my draft deferment and temporarily reduced both of our anxiety.
In 1968, as my education neared completion and the war in Vietnam was raging, my options boiled down to two unpleasant prospects: Canada or jail. Saul didn’t like the idea of moving to Canada, but he was repelled by the idea of my going to jail, where he feared I would come to harm by violence or as the victim of homosexual rape. As our arguments became more vehement I loudly reminded him that he was once a man whose bookshelf included the works of Gandhi. Often I stormed out of his new apartment in a huff, leaving my father in a rage.
Postadolescent arguments with Saul and Anita were actually a prelude to the candid conversations I began to have with both of them during graduate school, conversations that continued for the rest of their lives. Saul’s regular inquiries into my inner life played a pivotal role in my thinking deeply about my feelings and taking my own opinions seriously. What we came to call our “real conversations” gradually shifted away from his recurrent explanations about divorcing my mother to a reciprocal honesty that signaled his recognition of my adult status.
Our talks were certainly not as introspective as my therapy, but they were honest, direct, and psychological in the way Saul used the word: filled with examples of irony, logical contradiction, and runaway vanity as parts of the human comedy, and mortality. They were about what Saul called “the bare facts” and often ended with shared bafflement at human behavior. It was not what Saul said that I treasure. It was what he confessed to not understanding, questions without good enough answers, that made me feel close to him because we were puzzled together.
Our “real conversations” were also a way to resolve conflict, as neither of us could tolerate unresolved
ill feelings about each other. Family members were shocked that I’d broach sensitive issues so directly with my father. Forty years of those conversations and my career as a psychotherapist have left me with a deep sense of what is truly important between people: an appreciation for the unvarnished emotional truth, a dislike for mincing words, and a fondness for human folly. The primordial connection between Kenneth Trachtenberg and his uncle Benn Crader in More Die of Heartbreak most reminds me of what it felt like to so engage with my father.
The details of any one conversation blend with the others, as they were so regular a feature of our visits. But a snippet about death after my cousin Lynn Bellows, Morrie’s daughter, passed away so captures their directness that it remains fixed in my memory. Saul had received a call from his frightened niece as she was being wheeled into surgery. Lynn said, “I love you, Uncle Saul,” and, he continued, “I said I loved her, too … She must have been afraid of not making it,” he then mused. “Absolutely,” I responded. “She was staring at her own death right in the face.”
My anger at Anita for failing to pay her half of my college expenses had abated, and our arguments stopped. I visited her in South Pasadena, where we also began to have long talks in her beloved garden that are my happiest adult recollections of her. Over coffee and the soft French cheese that was one of her dietary indulgences, we spoke about my life, her new life in California, our careers as social workers, and the values we shared of seeking the truth, treating people fairly, and social justice.