The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  I had interviewed the first three, all of whom were willing, no doubt out of vanity, to violate patient/doctor (or psychologist) confidentiality. Kohut was dead, but I suspect he alone would have honored the contract the others were so cavalier about. He took his vocation seriously; his books were all about how important it was for the analyst to establish his patient’s trust through the “tool” of empathy. The subtlety and ethical gravitas Kohut displayed in his work made it unlikely that he would have consented to be interviewed by a biographer.

  It was George Sarant who tipped me off that Bellow had been in treatment with Kohut, and it seemed plausible. They had lived in the same building in Hyde Park for a time during the 1970s. More important, Kohut’s work explored in a sympathetic and nuanced way the origins and traits of the narcissistic personality—my layman’s diagnosis of Bellow’s condition. Kohut identified this type as “the crumbling, decomposing, fragmenting, enfeebled but also powerfully self-realizing self” who is driven to collect women “not by libidinal but narcissistic needs.”

  Reading this passage in the middle of the night during one of my insomniac spells—I can still remember the moment many years later—I rose off the living room couch in a state of high excitement. Here was one of the greatest psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, Chicago-based (always a plus), making a diagnosis that, whether or not it referred to Bellow in particular, described his type, and without censure.

  Kohut’s method focused on the chaos and psychic pain caused by a condition that was especially hard to treat because the patient didn’t want to be treated. Herzog suggests that “people of powerful imagination, given to dreaming deeply and to raising up marvelous and self-sufficient fiction, turn to suffering sometimes to cut into their bliss, as people pinch themselves to feel awake.” Yes, that was it: to cut into their bliss. Bellow experienced the joy of creativity, but it was sometimes so intense that it required a dose of masochism to contain it. And masochism hurt.

  The problem was that I had no written evidence that Bellow had actually seen Kohut. How to nail it down? Annie had come up with a clever solution: “Why don’t you just ask him what it was like seeing Kohut? Then he can either deny that he ever saw him or lie outright—a possibility you’ll have to live with.”

  When I arrived at Bellow’s apartment, we chatted for a while about the difficulties of living in New York. He asked me where I lived—one of the few times he’d ever asked me anything about myself—and noted that Philip Roth was my neighbor. This casual validation of my biography, attesting as it did to the fact that I had a life outside of his life, was gratifying: there were moments when I felt ghostly, a spectral presence shadowing my subject, notebook in hand, all but invisible even to myself.

  We drove off in their forest-green Range Rover, Janis in back, and headed toward the Northwest Side on I-94. I noted that Bellow was a good but cautious driver; he was clearly proud that he knew his way around town.

  Soon we were in his old neighborhood—again. We drove down Cortez, a tree-lined street with small grassy front yards, wrought-iron fences, and elaborately carved wooden doors with lozenge-shaped glass windows. Bellow had lived here from the ages of ten to fourteen, first in a ground-floor apartment, then down the street in a larger three-bedroom with a side yard that was the landlord’s garden.

  As we loitered on the sidewalk, Bellow fell silent. I thought of the apartment house where my grandparents had lived when I was a child, around the corner from their drugstore on Mozart: the tiny plot of grass out front, the cracked sidewalks, the dark vestibule…In writing this book, I was retrieving not just Bellow’s past but my own.

  “I’m not showing you where my girlfriends lived,” he said suddenly. “Those are the memories I really treasure.”

  “You don’t need to,” I murmured.*9

  At the end of our tour—Division Street, Tuley School, Humboldt Park, stops as familiar to me by now as if I’d grown up there myself—we pulled into the parking lot of Jewel Food so Janis could pick up some things for dinner. Bellow and I sat in the car. He was in the front seat, and I was in the back. We talked for a while about the trio of known psychiatrists: Bellow played down his sessions with Dr. Raphael: “That wasn’t psychology; that was zoology.” We laughed. Bellow loved to laugh at his own jokes, and now he had company. I brought up Dr. Ellis: wasn’t he Dr. Edvig in Herzog?

  “No, that was Paul Meehl.” Come on, Atlas! You should know these elementary facts by now.

  Why did he go see Ellis? I pursued. Bellow looked at me narrowly: “You know why.”

  I did: Sasha (as Sondra was familiarly known), impotence, adultery…“Which I’m not going to talk about,” he announced emphatically. A strange assertion, since the whole story was in Herzog.

  Now was my chance. I counted to seventeen and said, “So what was Kohut like?”

  Bellow sat in silence for a few seconds, weighing his options, then explained, with great deliberation, that he had seen Kohut only “a few times” during “a period of turmoil” in his life. Yes! It was clear that he didn’t want to talk about this particular figure in his psychoanalytic history, but it didn’t matter. I had what I needed.

  The next day I called him up to find out how he had weathered our tour of the old neighborhoods. He said he’d had a good time, but it had left him “in a mood” (no adjective). He was “metaphysically bushed.” He quoted a Berryman poem: “ ‘Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. / Nobody is ever missing.’ ” Then he said, “There are many missing.”

  —

  Driving through Hyde Park, Herzog thinks of it as his Chicago:

  massive, clumsy, amorphous, smelling of mud and decay, dog turds; sooty facades, slabs of structural nothing, senselessly ornamented triple porches with huge cement urns for flowers that contained only rotting cigarette butts and other stained filth; sun parlors under tiled gables, rank areaways, gray backstairs, seamed and ruptured concrete from which sprang grass; ponderous four-by-four fences that sheltered growing weeds.

  This was Bellow’s great gift: he had shown, neighborhood by neighborhood, sometimes block by block, what the city looked and smelled and felt like, from Hyde Park (see above) to the glittery high-rises of Lake Shore Drive to the West Side slums. He was a metaphysician of the ordinary. He gave meaning to what he saw by simply describing it.

  For me, though, there was also my Chicago, less epic, less visually stunning, less immense (somewhere Bellow speaks of the “galactic number of bungalows”), not even, to be accurate, mine. Our house in Evanston was a block from the city line, which didn’t hide the fact that it was in the suburbs.*10 Well, okay, so it was my Evanston. I harbored a deep attachment to my hometown. The 31 Flavors was still there, on the corner of Davis and Main Street. I used to go for a walk with Mom and Dad after dinner on summer nights more than thirty years ago for ice-cream cones: I always had cherry vanilla.

  Sometimes I stayed at the Homestead, an old white-pillared residential home near Northwestern where my grandma Liz had lived as she made her downsizing journey from a burgundy-brick house by a golf course in Wilmette to her final home in California, an assisted-living residence called Chateau La Jolla. I adored the Homestead, with its reverberant associations of a safe haven, a place where you could seek refuge from the storms of life. The name had an Old West connotation, but Grandma Liz had arrived from the other direction: a town named Ekaterinoslav in Ukraine, site of bloody pogroms. She sat in her book-lined room, her wrists wreathed in bracelets, a batik kerchief wrapped around her head, Chagall prints on the wall, and recited Pushkin by heart to entertain me. I loved the Russian shushing sounds.

  One time I stayed with John Blades, a Chicago Tribune reporter who lived in Evanston and covered the “Bellow beat.” His house was a few blocks from the Homestead. As I got out of the car on the dark tree-lined street, the scent of the fresh-cut grass was fragrant. He put me in his son’s room, adorned with Cubs pennants and other adolescent paraphernalia: a model airplane, a Bulls jersey, a gui
tar. A radio stood on the bedside table. I had an impulse to turn it on and find WLS, the rock music station I’d listened to late at night as a teenager. I wondered if the disk jockey Dick Biondi was still there; he called himself the Screamer. I remembered the number on the dial: 890. But I’d had a long day buried in the Tribune archives. I wanted to lie on the bed of John Blades’s son and think about the strange set of events that had brought me here.

  Pulling up the red flannel cover, I could have been in my own bedroom ten blocks away listening to the Lovin’ Spoonfuls’ “Summer in the City.” It was a trivial youth compared to Bellow’s in Humboldt Park, with its vivid family dramas and rich cultural life. The death of his mother; the brutal fights with his father; the sound of accordions and player pianos floating through the neighborhood on summer nights; the barrels of used books in front of Walgreens; the trips down to the Fine Arts Building across from the Art Intitute for violin lessons; the basement apartment, furnished with Salvation Army furniture, where Bellow took his girlfriends to make out. How could Saturday night dances at the Plant Room and solitary dinners at the Hut deli compete? But it was the only past I had.*11

  —

  I marveled at my good luck that our little summerhouse in Vermont was only forty-five minutes away from Bellow’s. The proximity wasn’t just convenient. It seemed to me a sign of our mutual bond (bondage?). I had once asked him what had drawn him to Vermont; he was such a city boy. His explanation was that it reminded him of the rural countryside around Montreal, where he’d grown up and where the family went by train on summer outings.

  We never talked about the fact that we were near-neighbors—or, as I’ve noted, about anything else that touched on my own life. All the same, I wondered if the fact that I, too, was drawn to Vermont had a positive reverberation for Bellow (if he thought about it at all). It was another affinity, along with my family’s Chicago roots and my biography of Delmore, that had made me a logical choice to be his biographer—or so I hoped.

  The first time I visited, Bellow instructed me to drive to his house in a tiny hamlet a few miles from Wilmington, over the mountains from Bennington, and asked me not to divulge its name.*12 I was to call him up from the general store. There was nothing cloak-and-dagger about this plan; Bellow’s house was deep in the countryside, on a dirt road reached by other dirt roads, and I got lost more than once in the years that followed, even after I’d driven there several times.

  The store was quintessential Vermont—sawdust sprinkled over the creaky floorboards, a taxidermy of stuffed wild and semi-wild animals affixed to the wall; old snowshoes and crossed wooden skis; cords of fatwood and tenting equipment stacked in the corner; fishing rods and vintage Vermont license plates; shelves crammed with maple syrup, lures, roll-your-own tobacco, camouflage hunting caps, sterno cans, pocket knives, compasses for if you get lost in the woods, cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. A scene out of Norman Rockwell.

  On the porch was a pay phone that required a dime.

  Bellow picked up after a few rings. He seemed glad to hear from me and said he would be right over: “Find a way to amuse yourself.”

  Fifteen minutes later he drove up in the Range Rover, Mozart drifting out the window from his tape deck. We were both constrained about shaking hands and finally didn’t. I have no idea what went into this decision. Uncertainty about where things stood between us? Was I a literary colleague? A friend? Would shaking hands be too formal?

  The plan was for me to follow him to the house. The narrow country roads wound among lily-coated ponds and white farmhouses and fields of goldenrod. Then we were on a dirt road through a forest before turning in at a driveway with a mailbox that had no name on it. The house was a two-story salmon-colored dwelling they had built a few years before. It was modest but handsome—the house of an affluent but not wealthy man. A new wing was being added on to accommodate Bellow’s books—one large room, he explained as he gave me a tour, “big enough so that I can throw my weight around.”

  Janis showed me the garden, and we picked blueberries together while Bellow was on the phone, “taking a call from Chicago.” She was proud of the spring-fed pond they had dredged themselves: “Saul swims in all weather, like a member of the Polar Bear Club.” In a field behind the house they were growing sprouts and cucumbers, basil and a patch of corn.

  When Bellow had finished his call, we sat in the garden, and I took out my notebook. I apologized for asking him the same questions over and over. “You could fix up some lights and give me the third degree,” he said, “except I haven’t done anything wrong.” I raised my hand and waved away the idea. But there were times when he did seem to feel guilty, as if he were harboring some secret that he couldn’t reveal even to himself.

  We talked for a while, and I brought up the matter of access to his letters, this time taking a different tack. “It’s one of the great literary correspondences of our time, probably the last one,” I said—which it is.*13 Bellow wrote to his literary friends—Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth—to his Tuley friends, to his girlfriends, to his family, with a Herzogian lack of inhibition. There were times when I was convinced he had one eye on posterity as he wrote them, but at other times I could see he was just dashing them off. They were about his life at that moment.

  I was invited to stay for dinner. Soon afterward Walter Pozen, Bellow’s friend and final lawyer—he had a house nearby—drove up in his pickup truck, and it was clear he was staying, too, which effectively ended our interview, though I continued to ask questions on the sly.

  Janis served us salmon and corn, followed by blueberries with frozen yogurt and fudge sauce. They were going to watch a Wallace Beery movie, sent by their Chicago friend Eugene Kennedy, after dinner. They didn’t ask me to stay for the movie, but I didn’t mind. It was time to go home.

  As I was about to leave, I laid out my wares on the table between us like a rug dealer displaying his Persian carpets. There were letters requesting transcripts from Northwestern and the University of Chicago, which Bellow signed; and a second request for grammar school transcripts. “Why do you want to see these?” he said, all at once suspicious. “I need facts,” I answered. Then after thinking about whether he would find it funny: “Why? Did you get a bad grade in math?”

  No, he had gotten good grades, but that was the end of the matter. He wouldn’t sign.

  On my way home, driving over the mountains in the mild summer evening, it suddenly occurred to me: He doesn’t want me to know that his name was Solomon—the name he was given at birth. It was too Old World. “I am an American, Chicago born,” proclaims Augie. An American, not just an immigrant Jew.

  —

  My Chicago pilgrimages were acquiring a pattern. I generally flew in on Saturday nights, when fares were cheapest, and rented a car at the airport. Most of the time I stayed at the Quad. It was pretty empty on weekends, and I felt at home with its seedy decor, which I associated with Chicago.

  I called Bellow on Monday morning; Sunday was a day of rest for biographer and subject.

  He seemed pleased to hear from me: I, meanwhile, was ready to submerge myself in his life again, like a deep-sea diver poised to go under in search of tropical fish. I asked how he was, and he said, “Harassed.” The phone had been busy. He seemed to be at the mercy of everyone who called up. He explained that he had to go to the dentist. “I’m sorry to bring you more pain,” I said. I offered to drive him, an idea he dismissed as “silly”—which it was. I was the biographer, not the chauffeur.

  The truth is, I didn’t mind playing a servile role in Bellow’s life. Normally a proud and stubborn person, easily wounded and short-tempered when “dissed,” I was in Bellow’s presence someone else entirely: meek, shy-eyed, muttering a Prufrockian “Do I dare and do I dare?” as I shuffled down the sidewalk by his side. Why this reversion to a second-grade self, afraid of girls, sports, Skate Nights? Hadn’t that timid character been toughened up by life? Could it be that I feared my own aggression?
That the chauffeur might inadvertently slam his passenger’s fingers in the door?

  Bellow asked me how much time I would need. I asked for an hour and a half; beyond that would have felt like pushing it. He said, as he always did, “What is it you want to talk about?” The 1930s and ’40s, I replied. That was as far as I’d gotten in the narrative. We agreed to meet at five.

  I showed up promptly at the appointed hour, having loitered on the sidewalk for a few minutes to make sure I would get there on the dot. Bellow came to the door in a red bow tie and a tweed jacket. He offered me tea but seemed relieved when I refused it: “I’ve been running around and want to sit down.”

  “First the dentist, then the biographer,” I said. “What a day.” He laughed.

  I noticed a paperback edition of The Brothers Karamazov on the table. “How does it hold up?” I asked. A dumb question. If Dostoyevsky didn’t hold up, who would?

  “Very well,” Bellow answered. “It’s even older than I am.”

  “Do you reread it every year?”

  “No, it’s not like Yom Kippur.” This time I was the one who laughed.

  We got down to work. As usual, I had a list of questions. I heard about how he had met his first wife, Anita: it was during the summer of 1935, on the El at 51st Street (just like Daisy in Herzog): “We walked up to the university together. She was extraordinarily beautiful, with fair hair and green eyes. We were both socialists.”

  Bellow’s mother had taken out a life insurance policy, and Bellow got the money—$500—after she died. (I scribbled in my notebook, fast, almost indecipherably: “mother—life ins policy—B got money after she died $500.”) His father insisted the money belonged to him (why? I forgot to ask; this happened all the time), but Bellow kept it and went off to Mexico with Anita on a Greyhound bus. An edition of D. H. Lawrence’s letters was the book that inspired them to go. In Mexico City he met up with Herb Passin, a friend from his Humboldt Park days, and they arranged to interview Trotsky at his fortified home in Coyoacán. When they arrived, they saw his corpse laid out on a table, a bloody bandage around his head. The assassin sent by Stalin had gotten there first.