The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  In later life, Bellow speculated on the dangers as well as the creative benefits of such a position. In an undated notebook entry, from the mid-1960s, he jotted down a series of remarks related to the intensity of early experience:

  Unwillingness, reluctance to recognize the reality of the present moment because of attachment to something in childhood.

  Therefore a brother rather than a father to the children.

  And the great fatigue of a struggle of fifty years. Feel it in my arms, in my very fists.

  Locate the Old System with passion—not so other things.

  Maggie [Simmons, a girlfriend] is part of this. Has the purity of earliest connections.

  Miraculous to have accomplished so much in the world while in such bondage.

  But they heard my childish voice—and their own childhood in it.

  Nadine [Nimier, another girlfriend] said T’es un bébé.

  Here, fidelity to the past is “bondage” as well as creative boon; the past alone is located “with passion”; what is “pure” is what is found in what is “earliest.” In the late novella The Actual (1997), the narrator, Harry Trellman, “after forty years of thinking it over,” describes his feelings for his high school love, Amy Wustrin, as “an actual affinity,” explaining that “other women might remind me of you, but there was only one actual Amy” (pp. 100–101). Amy is “actual” because she came into Harry’s life at the moment of erotic awakening, when his capacity to feel was most intense. In an interview, Bellow also attributes the strength of his Judaism to early attachments: “That’s where the great power of it comes from. It doesn’t come from the fact that I studied the Talmud or anything of that sort. I never belonged to an orthodox congregation. It simply comes from the fact that at a most susceptible time of my life I was wholly Jewish. That’s a gift, a piece of good fortune with which one doesn’t quarrel. It is what exists in feeling that matters.”25 How much of a “bondage” attachments like these were for Bellow, how true it was that they rendered him “unwilling” or “reluctant” to “recognize the reality of the present,” will be discussed (like the notebook entry) in later chapters. That Bellow himself sometimes saw them as such, though, is clear. Nor was he alone in doing so. “He can’t form permanent attachments,” Marvin Gameroff, grandson of Rosa and Max, said of Bellow, whom he loved and admired. “His fidelity is to his past.”26

  The great drama of that past, in the Lachine and Montreal years, was Abraham Bellow’s struggle to support his family. In “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” Pa Lurie’s situation broadly parallels Abraham’s, though there are differences. The Bellows arrived in Canada with money smuggled out of Russia. Much of this money was quickly spent on land purchased in Valleyfield, Quebec, some forty miles southwest of Lachine, not far from the Gameroffs’ summer house in Huntingdon, along the Chateauguay River. Abraham seems to have intended at first to farm the land. Bellow’s account of why the venture failed comes in an interview: “They were out in the bush somewhere and the wolves howled at night. There weren’t enough Jews for a minyan, a congregation, very disturbing and the kids kept getting lost in the woods. My mother complained, so we moved back into Lachine.”27 In “Memoirs,” much the same account is given. Though Ma Lurie, like Liza, was “not a city woman by upbringing,” it is she who objects most clearly to life in the country: “It was plain enough. No synagogues, no rabbis, no kosher food, no music teachers, no neighbors, no young men for Zelda [Jane’s Russian name]. It would be good for the health of the younger children, that was true, but she wasn’t going to have us grow into cowherds, no finer feelings, no learning” (p. 43). The major difference between fictional and real-life accounts is that in real life the land seems not only to have been purchased but the family actually lived on it for a period, or so Bellow says in the same interview. In “Memoirs” the Luries merely scout out the farm: “It was an excursion” (p. 43), one that occurs after the family moves from Lachine to Montreal. In reality, the episode took place earlier: “so we moved back into Lachine where my father was temporarily employed as a baker.”

  More precisely, as the driver of a bakery wagon. Bellow remembers this job “very well because I was often on the seat with him” (this was when he was three).28 In “Memoirs,” Pa Lurie invests the remainder of the money he had brought from Russia in a partnership with three other men who owned a bakery. He then falls out with them, as they were “quarrelsome and rough … swore obscenely and held Pa for a dude.” The partners’ view of Pa was not groundless, since “the misery of his sudden fall [from St. Petersburg affluence] was too hard to hide,” as was his distaste for the job his partners gave him, that of harnessing a horse and driving the bakery wagon. “He had never before harnessed a horse. Over there, only coachmen and teamsters knew how to harness. Pa had to learn to do it by lantern light in the cold Canadian nights, with freezing hands.” The partners were unsympathetic, in the manner of Aunt Rosa: “Why should it be so terrible to have become one of them?” There were physical fights and finally “Ma insisted” and Pa “gave up the partnership” (p. 35). Had he not withdrawn, he agreed, he’d either have killed one of his partners or been killed by one of them.

  Of the other aborted professions listed in “Memoirs”—junk dealer, marriage broker, shop owner, manufacturer—the one that came closest to success was manufacturer. Pa Lurie goes into business with Aunt Taube’s husband, Uncle Asher. They set out to manufacture burlap bags or sacks, Uncle Asher having somehow obtained an order for munitions bags during the war. A loft is rented and some machines, two women are hired to sew the bags, but the first order is deemed not up to specification and canceled. “When this happened there was a big family quarrel. Everyone got into it.” Aunt Taube, like Aunt Julia, wore the pants in her family, and haughtily criticizes Pa Lurie. Ma Lurie takes exception to her criticisms, which she calls ungrateful. It was Pa Lurie, when flush in St. Petersburg, who had loaned Asher and Taube the money not only to get married but to come to America. For his part, Pa Lurie blames Asher for the failure: “He tried to save money on the material. That was why we lost the contract” (p. 39).

  What is known of the real-life story differs in several respects from Bellow’s fictional version. A possible model for Asher was Max Cohen, husband of Annie, Abraham’s younger sister, though those of their surviving offspring I have talked to recall no stories of the failed venture.29 Joel Bellows heard of it “from my father, from Sam, from Saul.” As he tells it, Abraham went into business with a “ne’er-do-well” cousin: “Just as Grandpa was not suited to a life of crime, this cousin was not suited to making a living by any honest means.” Somehow the partners got a contract with the Canadian Pacific Railroad to provide burlap sacks for coal. For a while the business did well. Then they cheated on materials, not double-stitching, or doubling-over the seams, or lining the sacks. The sacks began to break. “It was a disaster. Grandpa had to move into Montreal.” Why exactly Abraham had to move to Montreal is not explained. Perhaps he was fleeing creditors? Perhaps hard words were exchanged, as in “Memoirs,” and he or Liza or both wished to get away from their Bellow relations? This was one of a number of instances in the family’s history in which business ventures caused tensions and ruptures between relations. Though it is unclear from Joel’s account which of the partners was most at fault, the episode reinforced a widespread belief in the family that Abraham was not, for all his devotion to business, very good at it.30

  The move to Montreal took place when Bellow was three, sometime before November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, which he remembered “because there was a tremendous noise. All the kids were standing on the front steps. We were all outside yelling, though I didn’t know why exactly.”31 The apartment the family found was at 1092 St. Dominique Street, in the heart of Montreal’s Jewish neighborhood.32 St. Dominique Street is two blocks east of St. Lawrence Boulevard, or Boulevard St.-Laurent, known as the “Main.” The Bellows lived in a second-floor apartment in a row of unprepossessing two-flats. The apartment c
onsisted of four bedrooms, a water closet down the hall, a kitchen, and a parlor, which contained a piano for Jane and an imitation oak sideboard, on which stood the family samovar and candlesticks from St. Petersburg.33 At the rear, behind the kitchen (in Herzog the kitchen is described as primitive, sunless, cavelike), was the coal bin and a small annex used as a sort of shed. The back staircase, “with its dried cat shit,” led down to a tiny backyard (in “Memoirs” the backyard is too small for a grown person to walk in).34 The three boys shared one room, Jane had another, the parents a third, and there was a room for a boarder to help with the rent. The rent for a comparable six-room cold-water flat on the same block was $15 a month.35 Napoleon Street, only five blocks long, was just to the north, Roy Street was just to the south. The closest synagogue, also on the second floor of a two-flat, was at the corner of Napoleon and St. Dominique. Two blocks north of Napoleon, straight up St. Dominique, was an open-air market on Rachel Street. Here the Bellows’ drunken boarder, Daitch (Ravitch in Herzog), worked at a fruit stall. To the west of the Main, and parallel to it, was St. Urbain Street, where the novelist Mordecai Richler and the poet Irving Layton (né Izzie Lazaroff, Bellow’s exact contemporary) grew up. Richler writes of St. Urbain Street as the center of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto: “Where Duddy Kravitz sprung from the boys grew up dirty and sad, spiky also, like grass beside the railroad tracks. He might have been born in Lodz.”36 But St. Urbain Street was a step up from St. Dominique Street. According to Bellow’s neighbor and childhood playmate Willie Greenberg, who lived at 1088 St. Dominique, the great hope was “to get out of the ghetto and move to St. Urbain or Esplanade.”37

  Joseph, the protagonist of Bellow’s first novel, Dangling Man, grew up on St. Dominique Street, which he describes as “in a slum between a market and a hospital [the Montreal General Hospital, on Dorchester Street, now Boulevard René-Lévesque].”38 From stairs and windows Joseph watched the life of the street and what he saw “remained so clear to me that I sometimes think it is the only place where I was ever allowed to encounter reality” (pp. 60–61). A similar claim is made by Moses Herzog on behalf of Napoleon Street: “rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather.… Here was a wider range of human feelings than he had ever again been able to find.… What was wrong with Napoleon Street? thought Herzog. All he ever wanted was there” (p. 557). The Jewish Main was an unlikely paradise, a place of high-density tenements, gloomy yards, stale, pungent cellars and stores, small clothing factories and workshops (by 1921 the garment trade, centered on the Main, employed fully one quarter of all workers in the city),39 kosher butchers, barrels of herring, pickle barrels (a dipper of pickle brine cost 3 cents [“Memoirs,” p. 103]), “syphon” or seltzer men, pushcarts selling shoes, pots, clothing, bagels on a string. According to Irving Layton, “for a poet nothing could have been better. Nothing. Raw, vulgar, dynamic and dramatic.… Sometimes I’m sorry for my children who lived in the suburbs and never had anything like this.”40 The harshness or ugliness was part of the poetry—the snow “spoiled and rotten with manure and litter, dead rats, dogs” (Herzog, p. 556), fog rising “from the yawning river,” the “rancid sugar smell” of the local grocery, its “terrible dust of nutrition” (“Memoirs,” pp. 118, 4).

  Everything was out in the open, not only at home, where cramped quarters meant no privacy, but in the street. In Dangling Man, Joseph remembers as a child looking into a curtainless room near the market and seeing “a man rearing over someone on a bed” (p. 61). Joshua Lurie sees something similar in “Memoirs,” while walking with Pa Lurie to synagogue on a clear summer’s evening: a man approaches a bed by an open window, lies on top of a woman, whose ribbed cotton top barely covers her large belly, and “their black eyes turn and together meet those of the father and the son” (p. 11). Death was in the open as well. During the great flu epidemic of 1918–19, Bellow and his brother Sam used to sit in the front window watching the funeral processions: “I can remember the corbillard [hearse], the bands, the funeral marches, and the cortege with its black horses.”41 The son of the Bellows’ landlady died in the epidemic; Bellow remembered seeing the white face of the dead boy, surrounded by flowers.42 Herzog, too, “had seen everything.” On Napoleon Street “he was spattered forever with things that bled or stank.… He remembered chicken slaughtering … those fiery squawks when the hens were dragged from the lath coops, the shit and sawdust and heat and fowl-musk, and the birds tossed when their throats were cut to bleed to death head down in tin racks, their claws going, going, working, working on the metal shield. Yes, that was on Roy Street.”43

  As in Lachine, not all the Bellows’ neighbors were Jewish. An English family named Saunders lived across the street. The father was a cabinetmaker and Bellow spent much time in his basement shop; Herbert Lionel Saunders, the son, known as Davey, who would become a distinguished physicist, was a playmate. A pair of French Canadian old maids lived in a neat little house set back from the street, with a chokeberry bush in the front yard, from which Bellow and Willie Greenberg stole berries. Catholic girls marched to school in twos, escorted by nuns. Highlanders in kilts strolled from barracks on Pine Street, one block south of Roy. “The only trouble we kids ever had,” according to Willie Greenberg, was from a French Canadian beat cop.44 But Bellow remembers French Canadian schoolboys shouting obscenities and insults: “I soon understood that I was a Zhwiff—a muzhi (maudit) Zhwiff at that.”45 There were also Chinese in the neighborhood, running laundries and other small businesses. As a child, Bellow was struck by the resemblance of his first Hebrew teacher, Reb Shika Stein, to a Chinese. Reb Stein was small, and his yarmulke reminded Bellow of the skullcaps worn by Chinese men.46 Non-Jews, though, were very much in the minority. From 1880 onward, and particularly after 1900, Yiddish-speaking Jews from Russia flooded into Montreal. By 1905 Yiddish was the third most spoken language in the city, after English and French, and Jews made up its largest immigrant community. The Main was safe, shtetl-like, but also, as Bellow puts it, “surrounded by the others, by the goyim.”47

  The Montreal goyim were divided geographically: to the west of the Main, they were mostly Anglophone, to the east, mostly Francophone. The cultural and linguistic duality of the nation as a whole helped the Bellow family retain its Yiddish roots, as Michael Greenstein, a Canadian critic, puts it, “somewhat longer” than if they had immigrated directly to the United States.48 Growing up in a Canadian rather than an American shtetl, Bellow felt less need to conform to New World ways, which may partly explain the ease with which he later accepted or acknowledged his mixed cultural heritage. As he told the audience at the Lachine library,

  I never felt it necessary to sacrifice one identification for another. I’ve never had to say that I was not a Canadian. I never had to say that I was not Jewish. I never had to say I was not an American. I took all of these things for granted and in me you see a sort of virtuoso act of integration of all these diverse elements and I feel no particular conflict. I never felt any special discomfort over any of these elements. I’ve taken them all for granted because they are part of my history. I think a human being has to be faithful to his unique history. If that history is mixed, scrambled, anomalous, difficult for any outsider less exotic to put together for himself, that’s not my fault.… I was faithful to what I was. I lived that way and I tried to write that way.

  For Bellow, such faithfulness was a form of piety, which he thought of in Santayana’s terms, as “reverence for the source of one’s being.”49 Piety in this sense could also be said to underlie Bellow’s mixed language or style. At home, he spoke to his parents in Yiddish. They spoke to each other and to the older children in Yiddish or Russian. At school he spoke English. In the street he spoke English or French. And from the age of three he studied Hebrew. As a young child, “I didn’t know what language I was speaking and I didn’t understand if there was any distinction among these various languages.” Linguistic multiplicity “was a common thing in Europe—it was much less common in
the United States where everybody had one ambition: to become an American as quickly as possible and to speak English. We didn’t have that. We were in Canada.”50

  Bellow wrote little about his schooling in Canada, and rarely spoke of it in interviews. At five he balked at attending kindergarten, then bitterly regretted not going, “because all the kids were at school and I was alone in the street.”51 At six he entered the Devonshire School on St. Cuthbert Street, just west of the Main, a Protestant Board School where pupils sang “God Save the King” and recited the Lord’s Prayer (in 1923, the Prince of Wales visited Montreal, and Maury and Saul went to see him as he passed in parade, waving his gloves at the crowd).52 At seven Bellow attended the Strathearn School on Jeanne-Mance Street, a new school, with bright classrooms and large windows, and only a short walk from home, perhaps fifteen minutes.53 Here, too, the education was English and Protestant, with British schoolbooks, and a drummer in a Boy Scout uniform marching pupils to school. The route from St. Dominique to Jeanne-Mance passed a synagogue on Milton Street, where Bellow attended cheder (at some point, Abraham seems to have decided that Reb Shika was too soft, the reason Pa Lurie gives for removing Joshua from the fictional Shika in “Memoirs”). When classes were out at the Strathearn School, at three in the afternoon, Bellow and his schoolmates ran to Milton Street. In “Memoirs,” the boys tumble into the cheder, quarreling, conspiring, punching one another, chewing sunflower seeds, choking the inkwells with the husks. The rabbi—whiskered, hatted, scowling, the rabbi who calls Bentchka a mamzer—“pummels” them into silence (p. 22).