The “eager heart” of the child Ijah (whose adult vision of cousinhood, as this passage suggests, narrows radically) is like the “state of excitement” of the child Bellow, a state that made it easy to pick his pockets.88
To his fellow students, Bellow was remembered as controlled and knowing in class.89 Esther Robbins describes the first time she set eyes on him, in Mr. Boehm’s science lesson: “We must have been twelve or thirteen.… He was a very handsome boy, with a thoughtful, analytical and often brooding expression and a somewhat sardonic smile that gave him an air of superiority.” When Mr. Boehm catches Bellow having copied from another pupil’s notebook and threatens to punish him, “in spite of the threat Saul was adamant in his refusal to ‘tell’ and I was so impressed I wrote him a note telling him how wonderful I thought he was.” They became sweethearts. “We went to parties together where we played spin the bottle, went on hikes in the Forest Preserves, bird-watching and catching bugs and butterflies which he helped me mount.” At Sabin, they were involved in dramatic readings for school clubs. In Miss Herzer’s English class Bellow played Petruchio to Esther’s Kate in The Taming of the Shrew. In Mrs. Jenkins’s drama class they had parts in an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s Penrod and Sam, and performed to a paying audience in the school auditorium. Both excelled in English and journalism, vying for honors, arguing a good deal, often heatedly. At Christmas, when made to sing carols, they composed their own “ethnic” versions90; in summer, they spent long evenings talking on the front steps of Esther’s building. Upon graduation they were designated “The Boy and Girl Most Likely to Succeed.” As Esther saw it, what drove them was a desire “to be American in every sense of the word.”
Though Bellow often visited Esther’s home she was never invited to 2226 Cortez Avenue or to the third-floor apartment at 2200 Cortez, where the family lived until 1930. “In all the time we spent together,” she writes, “he rarely spoke of his family.” She suspected he might have been ashamed of his parents’ foreign accents and ways. Esther’s parents had come to America at an early age and were more Americanized than the parents of most of her friends. When she discovered, from reading To Jerusalem and Back, that Bellow wore the traditional “tzitzes” or “fringes” under his shirt until he was six, she thought he might also have been embarrassed by his family’s religious Orthodoxy.91 Although in later years Bellow had no difficulty acknowledging all aspects of his background, the adolescent Bellow seemed to act at times as though he did. Esther recounts a moment one summer at the Oak Street Beach, the packed beach Rebecca West writes about,92 when Bellow suddenly leapt up saying, “Quick, there’s my aunt! Let’s run!” As they grabbed their things, all the money from Bellow’s pockets fell into the sand and was lost. They had to walk home, giving Esther blisters for a week. Was Bellow ashamed to be seen with a girl by his aunt, or was he ashamed of the aunt, or of the girl herself (though Esther was a nice Jewish girl, “certainly presentable enough, with a trim little figure that did credit to a bathing suit”)? “We were so terribly insecure,” she concludes, “and so very sensitive.” The anxieties of Bellow’s parents may also have figured in this context. “Of course they were all very suspicious of my outside contacts,” he recalls of his family, “afraid these were all alienating influences.” Abraham might subject Esther to a grilling about her background, the sort he gave Ruth Miller. Finally, there was the matter of his mother’s health. Not long after the family arrived in Chicago, Liza was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. “So that was the main drama of family life,” Bellow recalls, “and my father was frantic and didn’t have time to bring up the children himself, and he wouldn’t have known how to do it anyway. So what happened was we had a dying mother, as we discovered after a few years in Chicago.”93
BELLOW THOUGHT LONG and hard about the anxieties of immigrant Americans and their children. “The distortions they suffered in Americanizing themselves,” he recounts in interview, “also charged them with a certain energy.” It was this energy “that built the great cities” (in addition to making Esther Robbins the girl most likely to succeed). The cost was assimilative anxiety, perhaps expressed in Bellow’s reluctance, or seeming reluctance, to introduce Esther to his family, or her insecure, or seemingly insecure, speculation about its sources. “Though everybody wanted to be an American,” Bellow agrees, “everybody’s secret was that he hadn’t succeeded in becoming one.”94 This is a theme in several Bellow stories. In “Cousins,” there is Cousin Mendy, who “had a peculiar relish for being an American of his time.” Mendy is “a complete American, as formal, as total in his fashion as a work of art” (p. 228). “He was a man-and-boy Midwesterner, living out of a W. C. Fields script. And yet in the eyes under that snap-brim fedora there had always been a mixture of Jewish lights, and in his sixties he was visibly more Jewish. And, as I have said, the American model he had adopted was now utterly obsolete” (p. 230).95 The Jack Dworkin character in “Cousins” is “mountainous” Cousin Shimon, with huge hands and a “hump of strength” like Five Properties’ “bole.” Cousin Shimon “cares nothing for the seersucker jacket that covers his bulging back. He bought it, he owns it, but by the way he wears it he turns it against itself. It becomes some sort of anti-American joke” (p. 220). The Americanized narrator, Ijah, makes this observation, which is partly admiring, even though Cousin Shimon doesn’t like him.
In a 1974 commencement address at Brandeis, Bellow talked of the pain involved in assimilation (“I find it hard to think of anyone who underwent the process with joy”). Those who were lucky enough to escape this pain were either oblivious or indifferent, like the Cousin Shimon character, or clueless, lacking imitative talents. “I remember a cousin,” Bellow told the students, “Arkady from the old country who declared that his new name was now, and henceforth, Lake Erie. A most poetic name, he thought.” When someone set him straight, Arkady “simply became ‘Archie’ and made no further effort to prove himself a real American.”96 In the story “Him with His Foot in His Mouth” (1982), the narrator-protagonist, Herschel Shawmut, cannot stop himself from making hurtful remarks, wisecracks, jokes. The remarks are uncontrollable, like seizures or hysterical symptoms, and Shawmut is “as astonished by them as anybody else.” Most of the wounding remarks he utters, Bellow himself had uttered, he admitted in an interview, and the story offers a wide and brilliant survey of their possible origins. One such origin, reductive but not wholly dismissed, is offered by Shawmut’s supposed friend, Eddie Walish, who eggs him on when a wisecrack is approaching but is “careful not to be incriminated as an accessory.” According to Walish, “I had raised myself by painful efforts from immigrant origins to a middle-class level but that I avenged myself for the torments and falsifications of my healthy instincts, deformities imposed on me by this adaptation to respectability.”97 Shawmut identifies Walish’s interpretation as the sort of “clever, intricate analysis” popular in the Greenwich Village of the time, but he also admits that “it was hard for me to acquire decent manners, not because I was naturally rude but because I felt the strain of my position.” He then offers a perfect example, because so coarse, of assimilative anxiety, of doomed and distorting effort: “Of course I overdid things and wiped myself twice where people of better breeding only wiped once. But no such program of betterment could hold me for long” (p. 378).
ESTHER ROBBINS WAS NOT Bellow’s first childhood love. In elementary school, he developed a crush on Rosalyn Tureck, born a year before him. Tureck, at nine, was a promising musician, had made a professional debut, and would go on to become an acclaimed pianist and harpsichordist, particularly as an interpreter of Bach. Bellow remembers her as flirtatious, lively (like Esther), and out of his league, though in later years, after both were famous, they corresponded warmly. In “Cousins,” the character of Virgie Dunton, Ijah’s childhood love, is a harpist, who has had a long and successful career, like Tureck, and Ijah is smitten with her from the start. “Whenever possible, I attended her concerts; I walked in
her neighborhood in hopes of running into her, imagined that I saw her in department stores” (p. 233). Ijah’s wife, Sable (Isabel), mocks his childhood mooning. Whether Liza Bellow knew of her son’s mooning over Tureck, the son does not say. Liza had musical as well as rabbinical ambitions for her children. If Bellow was not to be a great lamden, he might be a great violinist, like Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Mischakoff, of the Chicago Symphony, or Toscha Seidel. Hence the weekly violin lessons he went to in the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Boulevard, a long trolley ride away. There Bellow was taught by Grisha Borushek, “a stout gloomy man from Odessa seeking a prodigy.”98
Bellow had some talent as a child violinist, enjoyed playing, and at twelve had performed Bohm’s “Moto Perpetuo” in a student recital at Kimball Hall. But he was no prodigy, no Rosalyn Tureck, and when he made mistakes, the peevish Borushek, impatient for the next Heifetz or Menuhin, “would snatch the bow and whip my bottom with it.” Bellow forgave him (“obviously I lacked the gifts he was looking for”), was grateful for the instruction, and until middle age “sought out opportunities to play with other amateur musicians, in duets and trios.” He was also grateful to his musical sister, Jane, “a perfect metronome (metrognome) of a pianist,”99 for introducing him to Mozart. The family now owned a radio and on Saturday afternoons there were live broadcasts from the New York Philharmonic.100 Through such means, as he explained in a speech of December 5, 1991, delivered on the occasion of the Mozart Bicentennial, “although I was not trained in a conservatory, I absorbed a considerable amount of music, and while I preferred books to instruments, there were odd corners of my existence reserved for Handel, Mozart, Pergolesi, etc.”101 In music periods at Sabin, the teacher wound up the gramophone and played “Chaliapin singing the ‘Song of the Flea’ or Galli-Curci the ‘Bell Song’ from Lakmé or Caruso or Tito Schipa or Madame Schumann-Heink.”
The emotions these recordings elicited were anatomized by Bellow in a speech he gave in 1974 to open a conference of Verdi scholars. Chief among them was a sense that classical music, like all high art, was irrelevant: “tough or sensitive, we somehow grasped the tacit Chicago assumption that this was a rough place, a city of labor and business, gangs and corrupt politics, ball games and prizefights.… This was a place where matter ruled, a place where stone was value and value stone. If you were drawn towards a higher life—and you might well be, even in the city of stockyards, steel and gangsters—you had to make your own way toward it.”102 The “prodigious power” of the city, Bellow realized early on, “lay in things and the methods by which things were produced. What Chicago gave to the world was goods—a standard of living sufficient for millions.”103 No American city in the 1920s was a bigger manufacturer. When not making goods, the city made money moving and trading them, as market and transportation hub.104 “Chicago,” Bellow writes in the “Chicago Book,” “is for me one of the terms that expresses the depth of our penetration into the physical world.”105
Much the same lesson was gained from Bellow’s experiences as an unpaid usher at the Auditorium Theatre, one of the city’s great cultural institutions. It owed its existence to business moguls, principally Ferdinand Peck, a real estate tycoon and philanthropist, but also, among others, George Pullman, of railroad fame, Marshall Field, the department store magnate, and Martin Ryerson, the lumber and property tycoon, whose intentions were to build the world’s largest, grandest, most expensive theater, a rival to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The firm of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan was engaged to design and build the auditorium, which was finished in 1889. Frank Lloyd Wright described it as the “greatest room for music and opera in the world.” Until 1929, it was the home of the Civic Opera, and Bellow recalls attending performances by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the San Carlo Opera, probably while still in junior high school.106 The wealthy audience members Bellow ushered to their seats, especially the men, were often reluctant or inattentive spectators. “In Chicago the normal male despised this female sickliness,” he writes in the first of the Jefferson Lectures, “the phony singing dagos wearing rompers and carrying knives.… I know those attitudes well. As a student usher at the same Auditorium Theater during the annual visits of the San Carlo Opera Company, I struggled with my own vulgarity.”107 Chicago may have “earned the right to be considered the center of American materialism—the classical center,” but for Bellow its cultural pretensions “aren’t very significant.” He associates them with boosterism: “The rich, growing more boorish and ignorant with every decade, put up money for museums, orchestras, opera companies, art associations, arty clubs and so on,”108 but such expenditures, concessions to culture, “were not and never would be the main thing.”109
THE KEY FIGURE IN Bellow’s “Americanization” was his brother Maury. When Bellow enrolled in Lafayette Elementary as a third grader, Maury enrolled as a senior at Tuley High School. Almost immediately, he “made a beeline for the Loop,”110 the city center. In the 1920s, the Loop was as lively at night as it was during the day, a “hustling, brawling place of small shops, busy crowds, cooking odors,”111 quite unlike the Loop today, all office buildings and gleaming skyscrapers. Jazz musicians hung out on Randolph Street, prizefighters at Trafton’s Gym, there were huge billiard halls, like Bensinger’s, where crack pool players and hustlers vied, and vaudeville houses, where stars like Jimmy Durante or Sophie Tucker performed. After graduating from Tuley, Maury enrolled in a Loop law school “for city boys from the immigrant neighborhoods.”112 To pay his tuition, he found work with an Italian lawyer named Roland V. Libonati, a member of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1928 to 1942 (later a state senator, then a United States congressman). Maury worked in Libonati’s office answering calls, complaints, and letters; then he became Libonati’s bagman, “a collector of tribute, graft-dollars from Chicagoans who needed things done.” Libonati was an advisor and lawyer for Al Capone, and a lifelong friend (“I liked him, because he respected me”). As a legislator, he was associated with the syndicate-backed West Side Bloc, which opposed or circumvented anticrime bills for over forty years, from Prohibition onward. Maury collected money for Libonati in a little Gladstone bag, skimming off a portion for himself, half of which he gave to his mother (“before branching out into haberdashery and women”).113 “He never got caught and that’s lucky,” Bellow told Philip Roth in their interview, “because they would have broken his hands.” In the story “Something to Remember Me By,” set in 1933, the narrator’s elder brother, Albert, is described as “a night-school law student clerking for Rowland, the racketeer congressman. He was Rowland’s bagman, and Rowland hired him not to read law but to make collections.… Toward me, Albert was scornful. He said, ‘You don’t understand fuck-all. You never will.’ ”114
Maury eventually obtained a law degree, but he never practiced (his illegal status may have prevented him from taking the bar examination). He quickly established himself as what Bellow calls “a businessman and a blowhard.”115 He wore loud, expensive clothes (Albert wears a derby, “called, in those days, a Baltimore heater … and a camel’s-hair topcoat, and pointed, mafiosi shoes” [p. 424]). His manner was brash, full of “Loop know-how,” boastful, often about influential friends, including syndicate friends, but also about how much he knew, “all sorts of outrageous knowledge—political, financial, erotic. He was very proud of his extraordinary group of connections, his cynicism, his insiderhood.”116 At home, Maury set his face against family sentiment and religion. He was “full of contempt” for kashruth (dietary laws) and Jewish observance.117 He was “for total Americanization”: “from the first he would say to me when we arrived from Canada, ‘Enough of this old crap about being Jewish’ and so forth.” In the Bellow family, “there was a great deal of affection floating around very freely,” and Maury “wanted to get rid of it immediately because it enslaved [him] to my father’s will.”118 To a lesser extent, Bellow thought this was true also of Sam, the middle brother, “but the rest of us enjoyed t
his affection and kindness.”119 Maury was not without feelings for his family, but he was against their open expression. In Herzog, Moses’s rich older brother, Alexander, or Shura, has similar feelings, and similar attitudes toward those feelings. The adult Shura is described as Moses’s “handsome stout white-haired brother, in his priceless suit, vicuña coat, Italian hat, his million-dollar shave and rosy manicured fingers with big rings.” A figure of “princely hauteur,” he “knew everyone, paid off everyone, and despised everyone.” Moses calls him a disciple of Thomas Hobbes in his contempt for universal concerns—the concerns that bedevil Moses. What softens his contempt for Moses is “family feeling.” Also, “it amused Shura that his brother Moses should be so fond of him” (p. 494).120
Lesha Greengus, Sam’s daughter, remembers Maury as “the most volatile” of the brothers, more volatile even than Abraham. But she also remembers him as capable of being “very charming.” Mark Rotblatt, Maury’s grandson, remembers him as “ruthless, tough, could cut you and just turn his back and walk away, but also there was a level of deep emotion.” “He freezes when he’s offended,” Bellow writes of Maury in a letter postmarked January 9, 1962, to his third wife, Susan, “and if you think I’m vulnerable, I recommend you study him.” Maury’s daughter, Lynn Rotblatt, Mark’s mother, spent much of her life fruitlessly seeking his approval; she called her father and his cronies “the Animals.” As a schoolboy, Bellow was dazzled by Maury: “his histrionics had a dramatic influence on our feelings, and the fact that he was physically impressive—big and stout, aggressive, clever—simply added to the effect.”121 It was Maury who introduced Bellow “to the idea of chasing women, drinking, being wild at parties.” Maury read books, read voraciously, but didn’t want anyone knowing that he did, “liked to be thought of as a tough guy and a non-reader.”122 When Maury visited Bellow’s apartment in later years, especially in company, “he’d pour it on. He’d take a book off the shelf and he’d say, ‘Who’s this guy Prowst you keep reading? Who’s this Prowst?’ I’d say ‘Oh he’s some Jew or other.’ ”123
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