BELLOW’S LIFE AWAY from the desk was rich in incident, with ample evidence of affection, warmth, generosity, and loyalty, but there are times when his nonwriting life does not show him in an honorable light, especially when it interferes with or impedes the work. To some writers, the prospect of biography poses no threat. “I remain completely indifferent to how people think about me,” V. S. Naipaul, another Nobel Prize winner, has written, “because I was serving this thing called literature.” The access Naipaul granted his authorized biographer, Patrick French, results in a book of astonishing frankness, in which the most intimate and damaging revelations come from Naipaul himself.35 Bellow was not like that: he acknowledged the human costs of his service to literature. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, when the hero’s good-hearted but dim daughter steals a manuscript she thinks of vital use to her father’s book, she does so out of the conviction that he’d “pay any price” to serve creation: “A creative person wouldn’t stop at anything. For the creative there are no crimes. And aren’t you a creative person?” (p. 163). This is neither Sammler’s view nor Bellow’s, though both knew full well why it might be thought so. Writing came first, but it was not everything. In this, Bellow was like Benn Crader, the botanist-hero of More Die of Heartbreak (1987), a world-renowned figure. “Uncle didn’t have to get into this,” his nephew, Kenneth, the novel’s narrator, tells us, speaking of Benn’s impending marriage. “He had his science. The trouble was that he was ambitious. Asked too much. The happiness of a recluse wasn’t enough for him, nor were his telepathic powers with plants.”36 What Bellow was ambitious about was love. “The one thing I don’t regret is having fallen in love often,” he said in an interview toward the end of his life. “What was I trying to prove, that I wasn’t a beast, that I had a heart after all, instead of a dried-out, soured nut in an old nutshell?”37 Although not always a mensch, the man he wished to be, he was no jerk, a term more easily applied to Naipaul as he presents himself in public and in interviews.
This attitude explains some of Bellow’s unease with his own biographers, as well as with those who saw his writing as biographical or autobiographical. He did not like the prospect of biography, partly for reasons that might apply to all persons passionate about their work. “The greater your achievements,” the narrator of More Die of Heartbreak tells us, “the less satisfactory your personal and domestic life will be.… The personal facts often are base. The scientist who didn’t recognize his own son, the student waiting on tables, has set up housekeeping with one of his male graduate students. Never mind his sexual preferences (one of the blessings of the new indifference), but the private life is almost always a bouquet of sores with a garnish of trivialities or downright trash” (p. 31). When I began work on this biography in 2007, one of the first people I interviewed, Monroe Engel, Bellow’s initial editor at Viking, told me that I had one great advantage over my predecessors: Bellow was no longer alive. Bellow’s previous biographers or would-be biographers—Ruth Miller, Mark Harris, James Atlas—had all been able to ask him questions about his life and work. I owe much to what he told them, as to the interviews they recorded with those of his friends and acquaintances who died before I came on the scene. Bellow was wary with all three biographers, sometimes helpful, especially at first, sometimes prickly, often evasive. The wariness colored or shaped what they wrote, obviously in the case of Harris, where it became pretty much his book’s subject. After initially, if fitfully, helping Atlas, Bellow withdrew and turned against him, helping to produce the note of resentment some have heard in Atlas’s book, on which he labored for almost a dozen years, reading reams of manuscripts and correspondence, conducting hundreds of interviews.38 I encountered Bellow only once, at a garden party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1972. He had come to Harvard to be awarded an honorary degree (along with the British politician Roy Jenkins and the economist Paul Samuelson, among others). It was a hot afternoon and some of the men at the party were wearing shorts and Hawaiian shirts. Bellow wore a brown silk suit and what I assumed was a Borsolino hat. Standing in front of a table surrounded by admirers, he looked bored or stern, certainly not cheerful. I was a graduate student in English and a fan of his writing so I joined the circle and listened for a while. I remember nothing of what he said.
Bellow was fifty-seven in June 1972, when Harvard awarded him that honorary degree. Three days earlier he had received an honorary degree from Yale. His most recent book, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, had, the previous year, won his third National Book Award. As I now know, he had plenty of reasons not to be cheerful that afternoon. The story of his life is long and complicated. He would continue writing, publishing, and teaching for another thirty or so years, well into his eighties. He was a gregarious man, quick to laugh, very funny, often charming, by no means always forbidding. Despite his grudge bearing, he had a wide acquaintance and made efforts to keep in touch with old friends. He liked to go out and do things and meet people after his morning stint at the desk. In 1970, when he was probably the most acclaimed novelist in America, he took on the job of chair of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He served on numerous boards and fellowship committees, exercising significant power in the literary world, helping certain writers and intellectuals he approved of to find agents, editors, publishers, fellowships, and teaching jobs, thwarting the hopes of those he disapproved of or disagreed with, always excepting the genuinely talented.39 He was a restless man as well as a gregarious one and traveled widely, one of several reasons why, though he valued family, he found family life difficult. He loved and neglected his three sons, each from a different mother. A fourth child, Naomi Rose, was born when he was eighty-four, to his fifth wife, Janis. Handsome and flirtatious, he had a number of serious affairs, as well as many shorter ones. He took a keen interest in his wider family, in nieces, nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, many of whom appear as characters in his stories and novels. He was often embroiled in public controversy, over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of the culture, the fate of the novel. He read deeply in a range of fields and literatures, and for over thirty years spent several afternoons a week discussing works of literature, philosophy, and social and political theory with graduate students and colleagues at the University of Chicago. Gore Vidal called him “the only American intellectual who read books.”40 He also, of course, knew and relished the culture of the streets, disconcerting visiting intellectuals such as Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt with anti-glamour tours of Chicago, including the roughest of skid row bars, neighboring slums, a coal yard where he once worked.
BELLOW’S FULL LIFE ACCOUNTS FOR the length of this biography, to be followed by a second volume covering his last forty years. Long biographies are often deplored, especially by reviewers. In 1960, Bellow’s friend Richard Ellmann won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for his biography of James Joyce. At the awards ceremony Ellmann defended the book’s length on several grounds. “If an individual life is described too leanly,” he declared, “we grow anxious, we suspect distortion, we wonder if the essences are really there.” These essences grow out of particulars, many of them social: “We want to see the personality of the subject as a series of concomitant relations with other people. Longing for his total embodiment, we are dissatisfied if we are shown merely or principally his private self.” Moreover, “if we want to see the social self, we do not want to see it only in its formal stances.” This view is buttressed by Samuel Johnson, who thought the domestic life best suited to display a subject’s “prudence and virtue”; today, Ellmann thought, readers want also to know a subject in less flattering lights, “when they are exhibiting bad temper, fear, or boredom.”41 I share Ellmann’s assumptions about what literary biography ought to do or be. Unsurprisingly, I take issue with the view that biography is invariably lowering, or that the motives of biographers are invariably base. What Ellmann leaves out in his defense of long biographies, oddly given his strengths as a critic, is discussio
n of the writing. The detailed attention given to Bellow’s writing in this biography will show or remind readers how rich and deep it is, and how pleasurable.
FINALLY, a word about names. I have made the decision to refer to Bellow’s girlfriends, of whom there were many, by their first names, because this is the way he referred to and thought of them, because their last names often changed, and because to refer to them by last names sounds anachronistic. The matter of names irritated Bellow when raised by biographers (though no writer, Dickens excepted, was better at them). Bellow had a sister named Zelda who became Zenka then Jenka then Jane. Maury and Sam, his elder brothers, changed their surnames from Bellow to Bellows. Maury had been Moishe, Sam had been Schmuel. Bellow himself had been Schloimo or Schloimke, then Solomon, then Saul. Why these changes, I asked Bellow’s middle son, Adam, a question he himself had asked his father. Bellow told him a story. There once was a Polish Jew named Max Pisher who moved to Germany and changed his name to Mauritz Wasserstahl. Then he moved to France and became Maurice de La Fontaine. This story explains the Bellow family’s changes of first names, but what of last names? Daniel Bellow, Bellow’s youngest son, thinks the change to “Bellows” might have had something to do with the brothers not wanting to be thought Italian (when introduced or when the name was spoken). Atlas says Sam and Maury were “modeling themselves after Charlie Bellows, a well-known Chicago criminal lawyer who had once been the Bellows’ neighbor,”42 an explanation that fits the Pisher story. Spellings were also unfixed. In a letter of December 19, 1972, Maury signs off: “Your loving brother, Morris or Maurice. Take your choice.” (He is Maury in what follows, as in many letters and documents.) There are similar changes or instabilities in the names of a number of Bellow’s childhood friends and acquaintances. Such refashioning and uncertainty are part of immigrant experience, of the negotiating of old and new worlds or “systems,” to use a Bellow term. Understanding Bellow’s inheritance from immigrant experience is crucial to understanding both the man and the writer. So we begin in Russia, before he was born.
1
Russia/Abraham
A STORY IS TOLD in the Bellow family about a moment of violence in the life of Abraham Bellow, the novelist’s father. In the summer of 1923, in Montreal, Abraham was in trouble. Deep in debt, with a wife and four children to feed, he had failed in a succession of jobs: as farmer, baker, dry goods salesman, jobber, manufacturer, junk dealer, marriage broker, insurance broker. Now he was a bootlegger on a small scale, pursued by agents of the revenue (in part because he was too poor to pay bribes). He and his partner, determined to make a killing, borrowed money to rent a truck, loaded the truck with crates of bootleg whiskey, and at nightfall headed for the border. Their plan was to sell to rumrunners up from New York, serious criminals. They never made it to the border. They were hijacked on the road, everything was taken, the liquor, the truck. When Abraham tried to resist, he was beaten, tossed in a ditch, and left to find his way back home on foot.
The whole family knew of the planned sale, even eight-year-old Saul, who helped to paste fake labels on the whiskey bottles. When morning came and Abraham had not returned, Saul’s oldest brother, fifteen-year-old Maury, was sent to find him. He ran to the partner’s place of work and waited. Eventually, he saw a figure in the distance, running “like the demons of hell were following him.” It was his father, in torn clothes, bloody, in tears. Reaching out to him, the boy said, “Pa, Pa! What’s wrong?” In the version of the story told by Maury’s son, “then my grandfather just beat the shit out of my father.”1
To explain this moment one must know something of Abraham’s history. He was born in Russia in 1881, the first son of Berel and Shulamith Belo (from the Russian byelo or bely meaning “white”). Berel was remembered by his children and grandchildren as a man of great learning and fierce temper. He was a traveling salesman for a wholesale grocer.2 He had red in his beard, “like all the men in our family,” drove a hard bargain, and was alleged to have been one of only seven men behind the Pale of Settlement, the area of czarist Russia to which most Jews were restricted, to know the Talmud by heart, a story of dubious authority told also of the narrator’s grandfather in Humboldt’s Gift (1975), where the number of such men is ten not seven.3 In “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” a thinly fictionalized autobiographical novel begun and abandoned by Bellow (after 172 typed pages) in the first half of the 1950s, around the time of The Adventures of Augie March (1953), the Berel figure is described as “a famous Chassid.” Hasidism, a movement of pietistic enthusiasm among Orthodox Jews, particularly poor Jews from Eastern Europe, was associated with dance, song, storytelling, mysticism, and scholarship. In the novel, when the Abraham character, Jacob Lurie or “Pa,” has a drink, a rare occurrence, he is said to “lay his head on one shoulder and snap his fingers and dance a few Chassidic steps.”4 Abraham’s mother was the daughter of a flax merchant from Druya, the town where Abraham was born, on the border of Belarus and Latvia.
Druya was a small town, a shtetl rather than a village.5 Abraham went to cheder or Hebrew school in Druya, where he learned his alphabet (“Aleph, an ox. Beth, a house”) and how to read the prayer book and the Bible. Once the alphabet was mastered, “without further waste of time, the book was opened and you read Bereshith boro Elohim—the old story. God created heaven and earth” (p. 20). For boys who were willing and talented, yeshiva followed, where one studied the Torah (the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses) and Talmud (rabbinical and other commentary and disputation concerning Jewish laws, customs, ethics, history). Abraham was sent away to yeshiva at a very young age.6 There he froze and starved, was infected with lice, and was soon back home. The family moved around, at some point settling in Dvinsk (Daugavpils), the nearest big town, thirty-six miles west of Druya.7 In the “Memoirs” manuscript, Abraham’s fictional alter-ego, Jacob Lurie, is said to have been at yeshiva till he was eighteen (p. 2), though Bellow later has him brag that “at thirteen I was a young man. At fifteen I earned a living. At seventeen I had my own business in Kremenchug [in central Ukraine]” (p. 6). It has also been said that Abraham pursued rabbinical studies in Vilnius (Vilna), “the Jerusalem of Lithuania.”8 He was vain of his knowledge of the Talmud and disdainful of fellow Jews who had not attained some level of yeshiva education. One of his granddaughters remembers him dismissing the Jewish learning of an acquaintance with a Yiddish phrase, lernen ken er vi di vant, “his learning is as flat and featureless as a wall.” She also remembers him conversing knowledgeably on Talmudic matters with her maternal grandfather, an ordained rabbi.9
Abraham was not one for the life of learning. He was restless, a traveler, “a good raconteur,”10 quick to anger, very loving one minute, very angry the next. In a 1990 interview Bellow described him as “violent, strong, authoritarian. He seemed to us as children an angel of strength, beauty, and punishment. His affections were strong, too. He was a passionate person.” Though neither a big man nor especially muscular, he was hot-blooded or ungehapteh (Yiddish), fighting with everyone. Bellow admired his father’s bravery. “He was a very feisty man, enviably I think.… He was just willing to fight.” In an undated letter to Irving Halperin, a professor of humanities at San Francisco State University, Bellow described his father as “a furious man, whirling with impatience.… a heavyweight tyrant following the example of Grandpa Bellow.”11 The oldest son, Maury, bore the brunt of Abraham’s hot temper, which he inherited, and Maury’s son, Joel, is understandably tough on his grandfather. “He liked tumult, he liked to cause a lot of hell.” He was “unmannerly, undisciplined, a troublemaker.” What Joel remembers hearing of Abraham’s time at yeshiva is a story about mixing pepper in the rabbi’s snuff.12 He also remembers his grandfather having fistfights in the street, into his sixties, after he’d become a prosperous Chicago businessman. If the old man was crossed, “he’d go at it physically.” There was a fistfight over the next door neighbor’s wife, with whom he was carrying on. He was hot-blooded in several senses. “I suspected h
e had his adventures,” Bellow told an interviewer, “must have had.” (“It’s an exceptionally smart man who isn’t marked forever by the sexual theories he hears from his father,” declares the narrator of Bellow’s story “A Silver Dish.” Bellow, of course, was an exceptionally smart man.13) “He was a dude,” Joel concludes of Abraham, “Very important. Very important to all the boys. A tough guy. Tough emotionally? I don’t think so.”
Like Maury, Bellow was beaten by his father, but he was loved by him, and loved back. In the novella A Theft (1989), the narrator, Ithiel Regler, describes watching a television program about child abuse:
Most of what they showed was normal punishment in my time. So today I could be a child-abuse case and my father might have been arrested as a child-beater. When he was in a rage he was transformed—he was like moonshine from the hills compared to store-bought booze. The kids, all of us, were slammed two-handed, from both sides simultaneously, and without mercy. So? Forty years later I have to watch a TV show to see that I, too, was abused. Only, I loved my late father. Beating was only an incident, a single item between us. I still love him. Now, to tell you what this signifies: I can’t apply the going terms to my case without damage to reality. My father beat me passionately. When he did it, I hated him like poison and murder. I also loved him with a passion, and I’ll never think myself an abused child.14
This was Bellow’s own attitude to his father, whose capacity for love and affection he recalls as vividly as his impatience and rage. The sixteen-year-old narrator of “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” Joshua Lurie, is the oldest child in the family. Like Maury, he is fat and most frequently in the line of fire. “I never could do much to please my father” is the novel’s first sentence. The middle son, Willie, is asthmatic, quiet, like the middle Bellow son, Sam. Willie keeps a low profile, gliding in the firstborn’s slipstream. The youngest, Ben Zion, is described as watchful, intelligent beyond his years, dreamy, his father’s favorite. He is seven when the novel opens and is called Bentchka, as Bellow was called Schloimke in his family, an endearing diminutive of Schloimo, Yiddish for Solomon. When Joshua doubts his father’s love, it is the mother who reassures him: “Loves you? He loves all his children. Only his troubles are sometimes too much for him. You must understand that” (p. 8). When she describes how his father kissed Joshua’s head the day he was born, as he kissed the heads of all his newborn infants, Joshua feels the kiss “in my scalp, under my hair and even in the mouth, the palate” (p. 7). When she upbraids the father for berating Joshua, “Pa would end up by being astonished that she should think he didn’t care for me. ‘Why,’ he’d say. ‘I love all my children. My children are everything to me’ ” (p. 7).
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 3