by Bellow, Greg
But I was to make a crucial refinement in our family value of directly facing the truth. With the help of the psychoanalysis I undertook once I moved to San Francisco, I began to hold stating emotional truth as a central value, an addition to the family ethos that made both of my parents uncomfortable. Anita avoided her deepest emotions. She was well aware of her reserve and it sorely distressed her. And I was critical of her when she didn’t offer the comfort or reassurance I sought. Saul battled harder with all of his confusing emotions. Despite his lifelong inability to manage the effects of tender human feeling, it was at the core of my father’s being. Rather than fight my soft side, as my parents did, I eventually came to actively cultivate it in myself, to see its value in my life, and to use it in my work.
Luckily, when my graduate school studies ended and the draft approached, I secured a rare commission in the United States Public Health Service working in a hospital in San Francisco where I felt that I could serve returning casualties from Vietnam in good conscience. Anita said I had fallen into a schmaltz gribble, a Yiddish term for a sweet fat spot in life. Saul was relieved that I had avoided jail or Canada and was perfectly happy that I was living in San Francisco until it became clear that I had no intention of returning to Chicago.
The turmoil of the late sixties and its aftereffects on society and in academia caused a gradual though massive personal and political shift in Saul that profoundly and permanently altered our relationship. Within the context of our family ethos I characterized the changes in him as political, though we rarely discussed electoral politics. The shift involved positions he eventually took in the battles over culture—demands for power by groups openly angry about their ongoing disenfranchisement. Its personal side involved Saul’s return to his Jewish roots in public and in private, along with a shift in generational attitudes I characterize as a reversal from the position of a rebellious son to those of a patriarchal father. In the dozens of arguments between us, and in long diatribes I endured, most often in private, the personal and the political seemed inseparable in his mind and in mine.
The outlines of reversals to come, of which Saul gave no verbal hint to me, can clearly be seen in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, his novel about blinding yourself and awakening to the full implications of painful truths. My father shared several forms of blindness with his narrator, Artur Sammler. Like Artur and many Jews, my father kept his eyes closed to the full horror of the Holocaust for two decades. But there were also forms of shared blindness that began well before the Holocaust: the prewar excess of optimism fed by a utopian ideology about the betterment of mankind; the excess vanity of talented young men lauded by their peers and friends; and the disavowal of their Jewish origins as the two ambitious men sought to widen their cultural horizons and gain acceptance.
My father rarely mentioned the Holocaust before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war broke out. But Saul immediately asked Bill Moyers, then publisher of Newsday, to secure him press credentials so he could cover the war as a journalist. After I called him several times and got no answer, I learned that he was in Israel. When Saul returned, I was angry and complained about his disappearing without warning and exposing himself to such danger. His answer was simply “I had to go.”
Artur Sammler undertakes an identical journalistic assignment where firsthand exposure to the sights, sounds, and smells of war’s death and decay and to the threat of a second Holocaust via the destruction of Israel brings home to him, as it did to my father, the full horror of the Holocaust and of modern life as no political argument or logical construct could ever do.
The social nightmare to which Mr. Sammler awakens is the deterioration of New York, which Saul fears is a harbinger of man’s perilous future on earth as humans prepare to set foot on the moon. Saul’s causal explanation for the breakdown in social order was that the excessive hope and optimism about human nature he shared with radicals of his generation had grown like a cancer into the unbridled freedom of the late 1960s.
Anarchy on the street is mirrored by private forms of disorder, the breakdown of authority within the family that needs to be reasserted. Mr. Sammler takes a dim view of an often disobedient younger generation, favoring only those children who comply with his wishes. The extensive debt children owe their parents emerges as Elya Gruner, an overly indulgent father, lies on his deathbed. Outside his hospital room, Mr. Sammler pressures Elya’s daughter to apologize while she still can for the sexual transgressions that so upset her father. Perhaps more egregious is the heartless way Mr. Sammler nips his daughter’s love in the bud simply because he thinks the object of her infatuation will make a poor match, and that she complies with barely a whimper!
Some people become more politically conservative as they age and often rue their misspent youth. Others, like my mother and her older sisters, do not. But the solution implied in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, according to the newly minted “old Saul,” is a restoration of generational authority. In life, my father’s assertion of authority he hadn’t previously wielded ushered in friction and acrimony between the two of us that played out for the rest of his life. It was a decade after the publication of Sammler before the battle lines were drawn in the culture wars and before “old Saul’s” social pessimism took full hold of him. But I rebelled against Saul after his support for the younger generation, whose questioning of established forms of knowledge my father had advocated in life and in his novels, was replaced with demands for respect and compliance with elders who now knew what was best for everyone—elders who had drawn the United States into an immoral war.
I had not met Alexandra Bagdasar Ionescu Tulcea before she married Saul. An established mathematician when they met, Alexandra was born and raised in Romania. Her father, Dumitru Bagdasar, was a neurosurgeon trained in the United States by the famous Harvard neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing. Her mother, Florica, was a child psychiatrist. Her parents had met in medical school, and both walked the political tightrope between their dedication to patient care and their roles as health ministers in a totalitarian state.
Alexandra was born in 1935, and her father died when she was eleven. After Dumitru’s death, Florica, apparently as punishment for accepting help from the Allies during World War II, became politically persona non grata. Life for mother and daughter became precarious. Alexandra then studied mathematics and married a former teacher. In 1957 her husband was offered the rare opportunity to participate in a special research program in the United States. The couple left for Yale University, determined not to return.
By the mid-1970s she was a professor of mathematics at Northwestern and a divorcée. I am not sure whether Alexandra’s dissimilarities to Saul’s previous wives, including not being Jewish and having a deep commitment to her career, played a role in his decision to marry her. But he must have been unsure about his next step. Before marrying Alexandra, Saul made an impulsive proposal of marriage to Edith Tarcov. Mercifully, she declined.
When I learned about Alexandra’s career, one that required hours spent alone, immersed in her own form of abstraction, I hoped that her singular passion for mathematics would be a good fit with my father’s life as a writer. After they married, Saul brought Alexandra to California to introduce me to her. I was already married to JoAnn and had a baby daughter, Juliet. Saul was excited by the prospect of a new generation of Bellows and told me that Juliet made him feel part of the continuity of the human race. On subsequent visits, Alexandra and Juliet stole off to a local shopping center for hot chocolate and shopping sprees. Alexandra would hole up in a back room of our house for hours, and when she left the floor would be strewn with sheets of paper covered with abstract mathematical symbols. When I asked if she wanted them, she always said no.
Saul moved to Chicago’s North Side, where Alexandra owned an apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. Finding the space too confining, she bought the adjoining apartment, which allowed them both to have studies where they could pursue their intellectual interests without distraction. Alexandra was a very p
rivate person. Saul, who prized his privacy while working, missed the companionship he had found in Hyde Park after his writing day was done. Saul joined Alexandra at professional conferences, but conversing with quirky high-level mathematicians was not sufficiently sustaining for him.
Maintaining a geographic distance from Saul was the first in what became a series of insulating layers that afforded me some protection from his demands for attention and control. When rural Vermont became a summer destination for Saul and Alexandra, we trekked there while Juliet was young. On the way to swim in a local pond, our three-year-old little girl joyfully bounded ahead of the grownups. Saul turned to Alexandra and called his granddaughter “a delicious little girl.” But sitting around all morning and keeping a lively child quiet while my father wrote and Alexandra did academic work reminded me of my childhood boredom. Eventually I balked at such family vacations and stopped making the effort, placing yet another barrier between us.
Saul put up barriers too, most often with critical judgments that upset me. On occasions when I felt strongly, however, I disagreed and even openly defied his wishes. When I married JoAnn in 1970, I invited all of the doting Goshkins and Saul, but none of the other Bellows—all of whom had ignored me during my childhood—to my small, self-financed wedding. Saul was sore as a boil and complained bitterly at having his family snubbed, being outnumbered by Goshkins, and seeing Anita happily settled in Los Angeles with Basil while he was between marriages.
But Saul always exerted more influence on me than I wished. More often than not, I went along with a man who always argued his viewpoints cogently. But by my late twenties I had tired of judging myself by his standards, although I was never completely free from being hurt by his displeasure, whether it was expressed, implied, or conveyed by others.
Saul had an amazing capacity to make his wishes crystal clear without saying a word. Mysteriously, he was, I believe, able to transform a desire to please others into a capacity to elicit behavior from them that pleased him. (Since I felt that pressure so often, I easily recognized it.) Usually people simply acted as he wished, but frequently they took the extra step of speaking for him without being asked to do so. Surrounded by a cadre of people all too willing to carry what were portrayed as his messages, my father protected himself from delivering bad news, from the danger of being directly refused, or from talking to people with whom he was angry. As a result, there was always a background “buzz” around him.
Unhappy with being on the receiving end of his indirect communication, I stopped his spokespeople in their tracks by insisting that I “accept no substitutes for my father.” My brother Adam was too young to take that option. During Saul’s long, bitter legal battle with Daniel’s mother, Susan, our father did everything he could to avoid speaking with her. When he wanted to talk to Daniel, he would call Adam to deliver the message that his father wanted to speak to him.
But my persistent father would not give up when thwarted. When rational argument and indirect communications failed, Saul destructively took to complaining about people behind their backs. Chronically irritated by my relative independence from his influence, he complained about me to my brothers, my wife, and eventually my daughter. JoAnn had almost no relationship with Saul after she refused to listen to his complaints about her husband. But Saul had little use for a daughter-in-law who did not side with him. For years, Daniel defended me to our father, though my brother never specified the sin of which I was guilty. But I knew what it was: I had grown sufficiently far from Saul to have established an independent life. The messages my kid brother was to deliver were also thinly disguised cautions to Dan. He was not to follow in footsteps that led away from our father.
The apex of the convergence between fame and fortune occurred when Saul was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976. Anita sent him a telegram affirming her long-held faith in his talent. She added that she knew Lescha, Abraham, and Sonia Goshkin also would have been proud. I went to Stockholm for the Nobel festivities, which turned out to be a grand party. Our group was assigned a majordomo and a chauffeured limousine to get us to a host of receptions and celebrations. Saul and Alexandra had a suite in the Grand Hotel, and I had a room on the other side of their sitting room. Adam, then about twenty, and Dan, about twelve, shared a nearby room. Adam and Harriet Wasserman, my father’s literary agent, were chiefly responsible for keeping Dan under control, but he still managed to order a great deal of food from room service, which infuriated Saul when the bill arrived.
Morrie was a conspicuous absentee. I can only surmise that he could not abide being eclipsed by his kid brother. The rest of the Bellow party—Jane, Sam, Nina, Lesha, Lesha’s husband, and their three daughters—were at the same hotel. Alexandra’s mother and her aunt were given permission by the Romanian government to attend.
Saul worked on his acceptance speech in the hotel for hours. He took the public forum offered by the award as an opportunity to deliver a message about literature as the gateway to man’s beleaguered soul. Quoting Joseph Conrad’s preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Saul read that art is an “‘attempt to render the highest justice to the visible universe.’” He continued quoting Conrad, saying that the artist appeals “‘to that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition … to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity … which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.’”
Saul contrasted the public attention to the monetary component of the Nobel Prize with the lesser interest expressed in his books as yet another symptom of the elevation of money over culture. Several times he complained about his privacy being invaded, as it was by the traditional St. Lucia ceremony, where a girl with a crown of candles entered their bedroom to serenade Saul and Alexandra. There is a very cute picture of Saul’s fellow Nobel laureate, the economist Milton Friedman, in pajamas looking out of his door to find the source of the singing. Later, my father told me the only thing he enjoyed about the week in Stockholm was a quick visit to August Strindberg’s study on his way out of town.
Just before we left for the ceremony, I told Saul how proud I was of him. The presentation ceremony, reception, banquet, and ball were elegant. The men were dressed in rented ties and tails, and I joked that I could have passed as a headwaiter at any fancy restaurant. The recently crowned queen of Sweden, a former German beauty queen, far outshone the king, who for a moment stood alone during the reception. I felt a rough pull, was dragged over to His Highness, and was told to make conversation. Later, Count Something-or-other, the man who had grabbed me, apologized and explained that it was not seemly for the king to have no one with whom to speak. After the ball, Saul, Alexandra, and her mother and aunt were driven back to the hotel. The driver forgot to come back for the rest of us. With Sam’s whole family freezing and damp, I approached another limousine driver, who took us to the hotel. My father praised my taking care of them, calling it an act of family feeling, a phrase that he used as a remnant of immigrant life in Lachine.
My brief exposure to the full glare of fame had its pleasures, but I soon became outraged by it. As we entered an event, a reporter shouted a personal question at Saul. Without thinking, I blurted out, “My father’s books are in the public domain. He is not.” Alexandra, pleased, congratulated me on being “a fighter.” At one Stockholm reception, a pleasant man engaged me in what seemed like a friendly chat about families, mostly his. Across the large room a young woman was engaging Adam in a similar conversation. Two days later we found our unguarded comments in the Swedish version of People magazine. I was furious, but Saul merely cautioned us to watch what we said. I felt betrayed by the reporter’s dishonesty and was determined to keep my relationship with my father strictly private from then on. Adam, also distressed, had a set of T-shirts made up for the whole family that read NOBEL SAVAGES, in part a nod to a literary journal called the Noble Savage that Saul had edited more than a decade earlier, but
also to the savagery to which we were all exposed.
Saul had expressed concern that winning the Nobel Prize would impair his writing, as he felt the work of previous winners had dropped off significantly after the award. Ted Hoffman sent a letter of congratulation that touched on those fears, expressing a preference for the vitality, freshness, and curiosity of Augie March and Moses Herzog over the darkness of Artur Sammler. Ted told me he thought Saul had been carried away by his own fame. But Ted’s letter drips with envy and self-pity couched in faint praise. The letter hurt and angered my father, who ended his long friendship with Ted.
During the twelve-year span that began with the 1964 publication of Herzog and ended with the awarding of the Nobel Prize, the idealistic “young Saul” became the pessimistic “old Saul.” I cannot fully explain the changes that were brewing in my father. Mr. Sammler’s Planet hints at how the political tumult of the late sixties affected Saul, and Humboldt’s Gift addresses the downsides of the fame and fortune that reached a crescendo in Stockholm. From my viewpoint it was during these pivotal years that the optimism and hope I loved and admired in “young Saul” were buried under anger, bitterness, intolerance, and preoccupations with evil and with his death, which lasted for the rest of his life.
More than anything else I attribute the changes to disillusionment and disappointment—disillusionment that the Marxist ideas in which he had placed so much faith had become a rationale for murderous totalitarian dictatorships, and disappointment in the failure of art to transform the world into a less materialistic place, a place where the human solidarity of which Conrad writes about might have nourished a second Renaissance.