The Shadow in the Garden

by James Atlas

  —

  Not long after the appearance of Greg’s memoir, James Wood, a member of the “other,” nonconsanguineous brotherhood, published a curiously harsh review of it in The New Yorker. Wood read the book as “angry,” “a child’s complaint” that “displays an unconscious hostility toward his father’s writing.” It was “a migraine of unreliability,” “a fake narrative of psychic closure.” “He seems to struggle with resentment at the very idea of Saul Bellow’s having an independent literary existence; which is to say that he finds it hard to credit that his father was a writer at all.”

  At least Wood was up-front about his partisanship: he mentioned that he had co-taught a course with Bellow at Boston University. And if you looked back to a tribute in The New Republic Wood had written eight years earlier, just after Bellow’s death, it emerged that they had been close friends: their daughters had played together; Wood and Bellow had played piano (Wood) and recorder (Bellow) duets. And they grew still closer toward the end: “In the final year of Bellow’s life, as he became very frail, I would read some of his own prose to him.” I was envious. How lucky for Wood that he could appreciate Bellow without having to judge him.

  Leon Wieseltier, writing in the same issue, recalled a summer afternoon in 1977: “We were sunk in Adirondack chairs on the grass behind the shed of a house that he was renting in Vermont, and sunk also in a sympathetic discussion of Owen Barfield’s theories of consciousness.” Barfield, a knotty British philosopher whose work Bellow admired, caused even the intellectually agile Wieseltier to balk; it was a relief to be brought back to the world of literature. “Soon it was twilight. For a beautiful hour we sat before the fire and Saul read from the ‘Zetland’ manuscript”—the novel about Isaac Rosenfeld—“which was again in his typewriter.” Thus does another son step forward to claim the right to call Bellow “Saul.”

  I’m just being spiteful: Wieseltier had earned his familiarity. Bellow’s long letters to this most enthusiastic of disciples validate his claim: “It made me happy to see you.” “We have a good deal to tell each other.” And they did: they corresponded about “that superior Krautess” Hannah Arendt, Israeli politics, the Holocaust, and other weighty topics. I recognized the Bellow described in Wieseltier’s tribute, a charmer “with melancholy eyes, except when they sparkled,” and “a recreational savager of pieties.”

  The most famous “son” was Martin Amis, who met Bellow in 1983, when The Observer sent him to Chicago to interview his literary hero on the publication of The Dean’s December. Their affinity was instant and would last, with growing intimacy, until Bellow’s death in 2005. On Amis’s part, the disposition toward friendship was already there. “Bellow has made his experience reverberate more than any living writer,” he would write in The Observer.

  But it wasn’t just about the books. Amis also had father issues, as he freely acknowledged—not that you would have had to look far to find them on your own. Both Martin and his father, Kingsley, who enjoyed a reputation as England’s major novelist until his son entered the scene, made public acknowledgment of Amis senior’s dismissive attitude toward the novels of Amis junior. Kingsley was “suspicious” of his work, Martin confirmed with admirable docility in his Paris Review interview, while claiming that his father had once flung Money—one of Amis’s best books—across the room.

  We all need fathers, and it was natural for Amis to fix upon Bellow as a substitute for the defective one he had. Here was a great novelist who would return his affection and appreciate his books without ambivalence. And just as Amis loved Bellow like a father, Bellow loved Amis like a son. The day Amis’s father died, he called Bellow and said, “You’ll have to be my father now.” Bellow replied: “Well, I love you very much.” Theirs was no ordinary friendship.

  Amis visited Bellow in Vermont and Boston; accompanied him to a conference on Bellow’s work in Jerusalem, where they had their first “nonprofessional” encounter, tea on a rooftop overlooking the city; and talked regularly on the phone. (A footnote in Amis’s Bellow-heavy memoir, Experience, reports: “Today—10/6/99—is the author’s eighty-fourth birthday. He is due a call.”)

  That there were other, “real” sons in the picture wasn’t lost on Amis, and he wasn’t insensitive to the jockeying for position: “I mustn’t encroach on the territory occupied by Gregory, Adam, and Daniel.” But he did, despite his best intentions; they all did.

  I, too, had wanted to be a son—only to discover the spot was taken by several others.*7 Anyway, I was the biographer—assigned to be objective. Like the designated driver, I needed to have a clear head.

  —

  At his father’s funeral, listening to the literary troika deliver its tributes, Greg thinks to himself: “What is it with all these filial narratives? Did they all have such lousy fathers that they needed to co-opt mine?” As the three brothers drove away, he recalls in Saul Bellow’s Heart, he asked Dan how many sons he thought were in attendance. Dan’s answer, literally correct, was three. “I disagreed, feeling that almost everyone there considered him—or herself to be one of Saul’s children.”

  I was moved by Greg’s indignant cry, which expressed the thwarted longings, the desperate competition for attention, the anguish of unmet needs that torment the forsaken son: “After all, he was my father!” That’s what you think.

  One day Greg calls up out of the blue and invites me to lunch. He’s friendly but states his agenda: he wants to talk about his father. We meet at an outdoor café in Chelsea. Greg’s resemblance to his father is eerie: he has Bellow’s eyes, his voice, even his taciturnity.

  He tells me about his children. He’s visiting his granddaughter; his daughter is a professor of art history. He’s a psychiatric social worker living in a suburb of San Francisco, just retired after forty years. He’s become obsessed with biography and has just read James Breslin’s book on Rothko—I tell him that Breslin had invited me out to Berkeley for a conference a few months before he died of a heart attack at the age of sixty. It turns out that his widow is in Greg’s book group.

  At this point, my biography has been out for over a decade, but I still don’t know how to refer to Bellow. “I’ll call him Saul,” I say boldly, “something I could never do in his lifetime.” Sometimes Greg calls him Bellow. Sometimes I call him “your father” or “your dad.” It’s not a good sign that even now I can’t resolve this nomenclatural issue.

  Greg thanks me for having given an accurate and sympathetic depiction of his mother. I apparently described Anita as “the ‘real’ wife”—I have no memory of this, but I can see that it was important to him. His feelings toward his father are clearly more conflicted. “My father wanted me to do what he said, the way his father was with him. I had a bad time in Stockholm, when Bellow won the Nobel. I didn’t want to be part of that world. My feeling was, ‘Fuck that. I’m not going to put up with this shit.’ ” Wow. The anger is still there.

  Greg has two questions: What was it like for me to write my book? And what happened afterward? I try to be succinct, though I could go on for as long as Mr. Memory in The 39 Steps. I describe my regrets about the Twelve Errors (since narrowed down, you’ll recall, to six); my wish that I’d written more about the books and less about the women; and the fear that I was too much of a scold and should have given Bellow a pass on his promiscuity. “I never bought into the idea that genius exempts you from playing by the rules.”

  “He made up his own rules,” Greg says. Then, mildly alarmed by my anguished outpouring: “I didn’t mean to stir this all up.”

  “You didn’t stir anything up,” I assure him. “I’ve thought about it for years.”

  Greg mentions an angry letter he wrote to “Saul” when he was an adolescent. “I didn’t see that,” I say. “Yes, you did,” he reproaches me. “You quoted from it.” I feel foolish. I can’t even remember what’s in my own book.

  I ask about Janis and the estate. She, too, has claims on Bellow’s posthumous affections. She is “ungenerous,”
Greg says, confirming that the boys have been denied access to the archive at the University of Chicago. He has written Bellow’s agent, who didn’t reply. “They’re stonewalling me.”

  Greg has stirred things up. After he leaves, I go back to my office and sit at my desk for a long time. In the end, my “overt” biography, for all the Chicago connections I shared with my subject—the schools and old neighborhoods and family friends—camouflaged a profound disparity between us.*8 While I was ambling through the Dinosaur Hall at the Museum of Natural History with my children, Bellow was off somewhere*9 writing the beautiful stories in Something to Remember Me By. His work was the center of his life, which makes sense: he was a genius, and geniuses don’t have unlimited time. “How, really, could the drama of paternity have competed with the drama of creativity?” asked Wood. For Bellow, “The writing was the living.” But couldn’t he have put his work at the center of his life and still left some room around the edges for others? I could never understand Bellow’s almost boastful confession that he had “turned into a beast” when he was writing The Dean’s December. It’s not even that good.

  As the years passed and the number of Post-its in the pages of my Bellow dwindled, I began to realize that it wasn’t the Twelve Errors that had made me dissatisfied with my book. And it wasn’t anything that could have been fixed in three hours, as I had said to Adam Bellow. Maybe it could have been fixed if I’d written the book now, toward the end of my life, and known more about its capacity to wound. Maybe it could never have been fixed. The key to writing biography is the capacity to be empathic; Holmes’s image of the biographer extending “a handshake” toward his subject stayed with me. At some point, without realizing it, I had withdrawn my hand.*10

  Why? Maybe I had failed to grasp the extent of Bellow’s suffering—or he had failed to make it seem authentic. Despite the psychic misery he inflicted on himself with his multiple marriages and public provocations, Bellow enjoyed his life when he wasn’t tearing it up. He told jokes, he wrote great books, he slept with a lot of women, he traveled and had friends; he received a tremendous amount of attention. (He said to the photographer of Newsweek’s cover story on him, “I can’t get any famouser.”) He made light of his anguish: “I am to suffering what Gary is to smoke.”

  And he did suffer. One has only to read the opening scene of Herzog, where “that suffering joker” lies on a sofa in his New York apartment and tries to take in the fact that his imperious wife, Madeleine, is divorcing him: “He dreaded the depths of feeling he would eventually have to face, when he could no longer call upon his eccentricities for relief.” She makes her announcement while Herzog is putting up a storm window. I could only imagine how painful that moment must have been, whether it happened to Herzog or to Bellow, or to both. But hadn’t that been my job? To imagine another’s pain?

  Anyway, it’s not as if he got away with it. There was a lot of wear and tear. He was battered by alimony fights and operatic love affairs. As a father, he was a disaster. Even Janis, whose love for Bellow was unconditional, acknowledged in an interview after his death that “he failed his children; he left them, and it was a wound he carried around.”

  Of course, Bellow was famous as a writer, not as a father, and no biography should devalue a writer’s achievement just because the writer’s family has been thrown under the bus. His Nobel wouldn’t have been rescinded if he fell behind on his child support payments. But did the greatness of the work mandate the censoring of the life? Could the biographer ignore the sexual adventures and misadventures that fueled Bellow’s fiction and wreaked havoc on his domestic arrangements? They were crucial to the story.

  I had never been able to convince myself that it was justifiable for Bellow to diminish his friends and family members by making them “material.” When Dave Peltz reprimanded him for putting a story Peltz had told him in Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow lectured him about the sanctity of the artist: “I should think it would touch you that I was moved to put a hand on your shoulder and wanted to remember you as I took off for the moon.”

  I remain unpersuaded by the casuistical argument put forward by James Wood: “The number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than could be counted on two hands, yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers.” Was I missing something in this creepy moral calculus? Was Wood suggesting that it was okay to hurt your own wives and friends and children in the service of literature? “Does the reader care that Dave Peltz was a little wounded?” I did. Dave was my friend.

  As I sat there thinking about the sons, I realized that my disapproval and Wood’s excuses were equally misplaced. It wasn’t his job to defend Bellow any more than it was mine to judge him. The work and the lives that inspired it were intimately connected, but they could not be placed on the same balance sheet. Wood explained away his math as “an awkward but undeniable utilitarianism.” Dwight would have called it a weasel.

  *1 When I got home, I looked up the passage from Everyman. It was virtually the same as Adam’s description, except for Roth’s attribution to the son of a lack of feeling for his father: “ ‘Sleep easy, Pop,’ Randy said, but any note of tenderness, grief, love, or loss was terrifyingly absent from his voice.” I doubt that was how Greg felt. On the other hand, I reminded myself, Roth had written a novel, not a memoir. Randy didn’t have to feel the way Greg felt.

  *2 Advertisement in The New York Review of Books, February 16th, 2016: “FOR SALE: Saul Bellow’s Desk $10,000 mahogany roll top, leather writing surface, pigeonholes. Part of the furniture of his house, appears in book jacket photo.”

  *3 Known in the family as “Walter Poison.”

  *4 “Apparently these objects were too numinous to part with,” Adam wrote me: “Which is of course exactly why I wanted one.”

  *5 A reference to Joe McGinnis’s biography of Ted Kennedy, The Last Brother.

  *6 A year later I learn that Leader hadn’t interviewed Ludwig. They had only exchanged e-mails, in the course of which Ludwig complained that I had “Swiftboated” him—as if a literary biographer with liberal politics left over from the 1960s could be mistaken for the angry veterans who sank John Kerry’s presidential bid. It gave me an aura of military swagger that improved upon my self-image as a timid scholar groping, mole-like, among his books.

  *7 Let’s say I was an honorary son. “Jim wrote the book as if he were a son,” Adam told a friend, who reported it to me. A son who could neither idealize the father nor win his approval. A bad son.

  *8 Would a biographer who was gay or a woman or who had a divorce or two under the belt have told Bellow’s story differently? Probably, if they wished to write his story at all. Maybe the author’s note should be more transparent—not James Boswell is a barrister and a regular contributor to European Review; but James Boswell is a sot, a frequenter of prostitutes, a terrible husband and father, and a man with a strong inclination to worship famous men. This way the reader could be on the lookout for bias.

  *9 Not even the most assiduous biographer can keep track of his subject’s whereabouts at every moment.

  *10 Or was Bellow’s grip on it so tight that I had to let go?

  XXIX

  A decade or so after the publication of Bellow, there “came into my hands” a manuscript from which I would learn more about my subject than I had in all my years of tracking him down, puzzling over his work, both published and unpublished, reading his correspondence, studying his manuscripts and his books, and all the other labors that I undertook in my efforts to understand this man. It was a kind of epistolary memoir—letters back and forth, interspersed with commentary—by a woman from the Chicago area, a decade younger than Bellow, who had written him in 1956 to ask if she could show him a novel she had in the works.

  The writer was a housewife in a midwestern university town, taking courses, doing the laundry, and trying to raise two young children while writing her novel. Her name was Bobby Markels. She had moved out to California in the 1960s and e
nded up in Mendocino, where she wrote a column for the local paper called “Babbling with Bubbeleh.” She had been on my radar, but I had never managed to track her down.

  Bellow was patient with Markels; he read the novel carefully, offered advice, and persuaded her that it was a thing worth doing. None of this prevented her from having a nervous breakdown. Her memoir of their relationship, one that would last for almost half a century, offered a more vivid portrait of Bellow than any I had ever read. (In later years, it was platonic, but they stayed in touch until the end.)

  When they finally met, in New York, after corresponding for a year, Markels was excited: Bellow reminded her variously of someone who hung around pool halls, Humphrey Bogart, and “a Jewish shoe salesman.” They talked awhile, then Bellow announced that “he had a friend in the loony bin (Delmore Schwartz) he had to go and see and he added, ‘Why more people aren’t there I’ll never know.’ ”

  Bobby Markels Credit 29

  Over the next year, they continued to write, Bellow from Yaddo and the White Elephant, his Victorian estate in Tivoli, New York; Markels from Chicago and Columbus, Ohio. He cautioned her against writing too much about herself: “This is the danger of the autobiographical element; it causes the nostrils to swell with infatuation.”

  Markels’s description of Bellow lacked literary art but brought him to life: “Saul was not a large man physically but he was a huge presence—bright and overflowing with humor, gaiety, laughter, verbosity, intelligence and his energy, his aura, his psyche, whatever you want to call it, was tremendous.” She recalled a dinner in Tivoli: “Saul dominated the whole evening; he was the captain of a ship stalled in harbor with the crew sitting around the table listening to his commands, his jokes, ribald laughter….He loved having people around, he loved ‘performing’ for and with them but unlike a lot of egomaniacs he knew how to listen.” He could be attentive, too: