The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  “What were you doing with that gun?”

  “You know I’m no more capable of firing it at someone than Papa was. You took his watch chain, didn’t you? I remembered those old rubles in his drawer and then I took the revolver too. I shouldn’t have. At least I ought to have emptied it. It was just one of those dumb impulses. Let’s forget it.”

  “All right,” said Will. “I don’t mean to embarrass you. That’s not the point.”

  “I know what it is,” Herzog said. “You’re worried.” He had to lower his voice to control it. “I love you too, Will.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “But I haven’t behaved very sensibly. From your standpoint.… Well, from any reasonable standpoint. I brought Madeleine to your office so you could see her before I married her. I could tell you didn’t approve. I didn’t approve of her myself. And she didn’t approve of me.”

  “Why did you marry her?”

  “God ties all kinds of loose ends together. Who knows why! [ … ] And then I put all that money into the house in Ludeyville. That was simply crazy.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Will. “It is real estate, after all. Have you tried to sell it?” Will had great faith in real estate (p. 726).

  Moses turns down Will’s invitation to have dinner at his home, complaining that he looks a mess, “as if I’d just arrived in this country.… Just as we arrived from Canada.… On the Michigan Central. God, we were filthy with the soot” (p. 727). Will does not respond. Like the eldest Herzog brother, Shura, he has no time for reminiscences. In this, Will is not only like Maury but like Sam, described by Lesha as “not one to dwell on the past.” After the exchange about real estate, a paragraph describes Will: “He was an engineer and technologist, a contractor and builder; a balanced, reasonable person, he was pained to see Moses in such a state. His lined face was hot, uneasy; he took a handkerchief from the inner pocket of his well-tailored suit and pressed it to his forehead, his cheeks, under the large Herzog eyes.” Sam was not an engineer, but he was technically minded and good with figures. Lesha remembers him quickly adding up an entire page of numbers in his head without a pencil. At the police station, Will persuades Moses to visit a doctor; Moses is “not entirely surprised … to learn that he had a broken rib” (p. 727). While Moses and the doctor banter, Will “faintly” smiles, arms folded, Moses notes, “somewhat like Father Herzog … [with] a bit of the old man’s elegance.” Will has as little interest in this banter as in reminiscence: “He had no time for such stuff … running a big business.… He mixes grout to pump into these new high-risers all over town. He has to be political, and deal, and wangle and pay off and figure tax angles. All that Papa was inept in but dreamed he was born to do. Will is a quiet man of duty and routine, has his money, position, influence, and is just as glad to be rid of his private or ‘personal’ side” (p. 728). With such qualities, Sam built Carroll Coal, always the core family business, into a profitable company, and with associated real estate and development deals, became a millionaire and a pillar of the Jewish community in Chicago.15

  Sam’s wife, Nina, the daughter of Rabbi Moses Wolf Kahn, of the Orthodox Tifereth Zion congregation at Wolcott and Division, helped to steer her husband to Jewish Orthodoxy. But so, too, did Liza. As Lesha puts it, “My father must have seen in my mother and her family the religious ideals that were so vital to his dying mother.” The courtship began in South Haven, Michigan, “a miniature Catskills borscht belt,”16 in the summer of 1932, when both the Bellow and Kahn families were vacationing at the same kosher resort, Yashenovsky’s. Bellow’s earliest surviving letter, to a girlfriend from Tuley, Yetta Barshevsky, was written one night from the resort, while “my brother next door snores softly, insistently” (the brother was most likely Sam). Sam and Nina’s courtship was complicated by Liza’s illness and the fact that the Kahns had already picked out someone, a rabbi, for their daughter to marry. From 1932 to 1935, while Sam worked for his father, the couple continued to see each other, with little contact between the families. They finally married on May 20, 1935, a little over two years after Liza’s death, and a year after Abraham’s remarriage. When the families got together to celebrate religious holidays, Abraham and Rabbi Kahn would discourse on Talmudic matters, and Bellow would spar with them both. The discussions were always in Yiddish. As Lesha remembers, Rabbi Kahn would quote from the Bible and Bellow would quote from Shakespeare.17

  Bellow fought fiercely against pressure from his father and brothers to go into business. What he wrote about businessmen was often deeply unflattering and very funny, especially when discussing culture. In an October 1972 speech at the Chicago Public Library, he reported the following remark from a Chicago building contractor: ‘My wife made me go to see the Sistine Ceiling when we were in Rome and I want to tell you [he said from the corner of his mouth] it was a lot of crap.’ For a connoisseur of Chicago business gorillas, there is a certain charm in this, but you have to grow up here to savor and appreciate it.”18 His feelings about businessmen, however, were not wholly negative: business shrewdness is given its due in the fiction (as in the depiction of Sigmund Adelsky in The Actual, loosely modeled on the Chicago billionaire A. N. Pritzker), as is business toughness (even in a character as appalling as Harold Vilitzer in More Die of Heartbreak).19 Toward Orthodox Jewry he was often hostile, and he sometimes spoke of his brother Sam as imprisoned in the world he’d chosen. “I was brought up in an Orthodox household,” he wrote to Herman Wouk in a letter of May 21, 2000, “and I came to consider orthodoxy intolerable. One of my brothers married into a rabbinic family which expected him (as a proster yid) to provide financial support for the brothers-in-law and dowries for the sister.” A proster yid is a common, ill-mannered, unlearned Jew. Bellow’s use of the term reflects his family’s sense that the Kahns regarded themselves as better than the Bellows, proper Jews in several senses. The Old World expectations of Sam’s in-laws, the letter suggests, were viewed by Bellow through New World eyes. Though Saul and Maury were divided over business, “we were united in our disapproval of brother Sam and his formal orthodoxy.”20

  In “The Old System,” however, discussed in Chapter 2, Bellow enters sympathetically into the mind of a hero who is both an Orthodox Jew and a shrewd and daring businessman. Isaac Braun, eldest son of hard Aunt Rose and steady Uncle Braun, makes a fortune after World War II by financing and building shopping centers and cheap housing developments. Isaac built “with benevolence,” but “was stingy with land, he built too densely” (“all such places,” the story’s narrator pronounces, “are ugly”).21 Isaac is in dispute with his sister, Tina. He won’t cut her and their two brothers into his deals, “where the tax advantages were greatest. The big depreciation allowances, which she understood as legally sanctioned graft. She had her money in savings accounts at a disgraceful two and a half per cent, taxed at the full rate.” The reason Isaac won’t do business with Tina and their brothers is that they abandoned him at a crucial moment in his career, “a desperate moment, when the law had to be broken.” Bellow imagines this moment with all the suspense of Harry Fonstein’s escape from prison in The Bellarosa Connection. Isaac gains inside information about the relocation of the Robbstown Country Club, for WASPs only, where he and his brother, Mutt, used to caddie as boys in the 1920s. For $100,000, “the entire amount to be given under the table,” the head of the club’s board of directors, Ilkington, “a long, austere man with a marbled face. Cornell 1910 or so. Cold but plain. And in Isaac’s opinion, fair,” undertakes to persuade the club’s board to accept Isaac’s bid for the property. Once the property is developed into a shopping center, the deal will be worth $500,000 apiece to the Brauns. Isaac will do all the contracting himself. He has a friend on the zoning board who will “clear everything for five grand” (p. 98). Although he put the deal together, and undertakes to do the actual building, if each of the Brauns contributes $25,000, they will be equal partners. On the morning of the day Isaac is to deliver the money to Ilkington, they reneg
e:

  “How do you know Ilkington can be trusted?”

  “I think he can.”

  “You think. He could take the money and say he never heard of you in all his life.”

  “Yes, he might. But we talked that over. We have to gamble” (p. 99).

  They refuse. At this point in the story, Bellow recounts Isaac’s business history, which is close to that of Shmuel David Gameroff, the eldest son of Rose and Max Gameroff (as Chapter 2 suggests, Isaac’s family is partly based on the Gameroff family). “Cousin Isaac had put his stake together penny by penny, old style, starting with rags and bottles as a boy; then fire-salvaged goods; then used cars; then learning the building trades. Earth moving, foundations, concrete, sewage, wiring, roofing, heating systems. He got his money the hard way” (p. 100). Instead of letting the deal collapse, Isaac goes directly to the bank and borrows $75,000 at full interest. This he gives to Ilkington in his parlor, with its “pork-pale colors of gentility.” Bellow imagines the courage Isaac’s gamble involves, how alien he finds the territory he has entered:

  Ilkington did not touch Isaac’s briefcase. He did not intend, evidently, to count the bills, or even to look. He offered Isaac a martini. Isaac, not a drinker, drank the clear gin. At noon. Like something distilled in outer space. Having no color. He sat there sturdily but felt lost—lost to his people, his family, lost to God, lost in the void of America. Ilkington drank a shaker of cocktails, gentlemanly, stony, like a high slab of something generically human, but with few human traits familiar to Isaac. At the door he did not say he would keep his word. He simply shook hands with Isaac, saw him to the car. Isaac drove home and sat in the den of his bungalow. Two whole days. Then on Monday, Ilkington phoned to say that the Robbstown directors had decided to accept his offer for the property. A pause. Then Ilkington added that no written instrument could replace trust and decency between gentlemen (p. 101).

  Isaac becomes a millionaire, leader of the congregation at the synagogue, appointed to state commissions, but lives an increasingly traditional or Orthodox life, “an ample old-fashioned respectable domestic life on an Eastern European model completely destroyed in 1939 by Hitler and Stalin” (p. 104). Tina is scornful: “He reads the Tehillim [Book of Psalms] aloud in his air-conditioned Caddy when there’s a long freight train at the crossing. That crook! He’d pick God’s pocket” (p. 98). The more successful and Orthodox he becomes, the more, ironically, Isaac feels the pull of American business reserve, a counterweight to American business daring: “what you showed, among these people, you showed with silence. Of which, it seemed to Isaac, he was now beginning to appreciate the wisdom. The native, different wisdom of Gentiles, who had much to say but refrained” (p. 109). He could never, for instance, discuss Tina with these people: “they would never discuss a thing. Silent impressions would have to do. Incommunicable diversities, kindly but silent contact. The more they had in their heads, the less people seemed to know how to tell it” (p. 110).

  This way of behaving is just the opposite of what the story presents as “the Old System,” the Jewish way of intense and voluble family feeling, of the open expression of anger and love. The Jewish way, the narrator admits, is easily exploited (as in the “circus of feelings” [p. 116] orchestrated by Tina in the story, or Moses Herzog’s “potato love”), but intense feeling, weeping from the heart, also offers “an intimation of understanding. A promise that mankind might—might, mind you—eventually, through its gift which might—might again!—be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived. Why life, why death” (p. 116). The story closes on a sublime or cosmic note balanced between affirmation and pessimism. About its central figure, however, it is largely idealizing. For all Tina’s scorn—of Isaac’s “Orthodox cringe”—he retains a dignity rooted in Jewish tradition. This dignity is seen in the Yiddish he speaks, “unusually thick in Slavic and Hebrew expressions. Instead of ‘important people, leading citizens,’ he said ‘Anshe ha-ir,’ Men of the City. He, too, kept the Psalms near. As active, worldly Jews for centuries had done” (pp. 97–98). Only once does the narrator distance himself from Isaac’s piety, when he imagines him thinking “the world had done for him exactly what he demanded.… That meant his reading of life was metaphysically true. Or that the Old Testament, the Talmud, and Polish Ashkenazi Orthodoxy were irresistible” (pp. 101–2). The next paragraph begins: “But that wouldn’t altogether do.”

  Sam Bellows was not Isaac Braun. Sam was a small man, unlike Isaac, the shortest of the Bellow brothers, dapper, witty, quiet but not solemn. Inside the home, he was a traditional father and husband; outside it he was reserved with women, a little frightened of them, at least according to his granddaughter Judith and Bellow himself.22 Isaac is the Braun brother who boasts of having “fought on many fronts,” a joke Sam would appreciate but not have made about himself. Isaac has sexual magnetism: “upstate women said he gave out the positive male energy they were beginning to miss in men. He had it. It was in the manner with which he picked up a fork at the table, the way he poured from a bottle” (p. 101). “Saul made you think that he was big,” remembers Vivien Missner, who was fond of both brothers. “Sam didn’t have that.” Similarly, though Sam was frum (pious, Orthodox), he was neither as austere nor as removed as Isaac, who “belonged to no societies, never played cards, never spent an evening drinking, never went to Florida, never went to Europe, never went to see the State of Israel” (p. 104). Sam did all of these things. He not only visited the state of Israel, but purchased a large apartment in Jerusalem, where the family often stayed.

  What connects the real man, Sam, and the fictional character, Isaac, in addition to business acumen and Jewish Orthodoxy, is tsuris (trouble, worry) with family. Abraham was not the only figure in the Bellow family Sam had to placate over business. In addition to helping his in-laws by including them in real estate and other ventures, and doing deals with Maury (which were sometimes rocky), he helped both Saul himself, who several times invested with him, and Jane, their sister, whose character was in some ways like that of Tina in the story. Physically, Jane was not at all like Tina: Jane was pretty, neat, concerned with appearances. She was also vain, the pampered only daughter in a patriarchal family. “As the Jews would say, she was the princess of the family,” Bellow told an interviewer,23 the one with her own room, the one with piano lessons, the one used to getting her way. In the summer of 1929, after her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer, Jane married Charlie Kauffman, a dentist. There was a civil ceremony on 20 August, but because Liza was too ill to attend, a religious ceremony was also held at home.24 Liza wanted security and respectability for her children. At the time of the wedding, Maury was studying law, Sam was at Crane Junior College preparing for medical school, and Jane had found a professional man to marry (only Saul was a source of worry, without practical interests or ambitions). Partly so Jane could take care of her mother, the newlyweds lived at home, only moving into a place of their own after Liza’s death in 1933.

  Jane was ambitious for status and money and like Tina had a strong will. “Nobody could sway Tina,” we learn in “The Old System,” “she had consulted her own will, kept her own counsel for so long, that she could accept no other guidance. Anyone who listened to others seemed to her weak” (p. 97). “She had a totalitarian air.… Her aim must have been majesty. Based on what? She had no great thoughts. She built on her own nature. On a primordial idea, hugely blown up.… Her eyes had an affronted expression; sometimes a look of sulphur; a clever look, also a malicious look—they had all the looks, even the look of kindness that came from Uncle Braun” (p. 103). According to Lesha, “that entire section where Saul describes Tina is the way he would talk about Jane.” Tina’s great concern in the story is money; Jane “was always scheming about money. Her usual object was my father who was in business with his father; of course my grandfather played into her crazinesss as well. He was forever threatening to change his will depending on who was in his good graces at any particular time.”25 Lesha has symp
athy for Jane: “She was just as interested in doing deals as the boys were. She suffered for being a woman in that family.” That Lesha’s own mother, Nina, a tiny woman, but a powerhouse, was so active in Chicago’s Orthodox Jewish community, in women’s organizations and clubs, charities and educational foundations, may partly be explained by Sam’s refusal to allow her to work. He also discouraged her from learning to drive. In “The Old System,” Isaac’s wife “was obliged to forget how to drive. She was a docile, darling woman, and she was in the kitchen baking sponge cake and chopping liver” (p. 104). Nina Bellows was neither docile nor, in Bellow’s eyes, particularly darling, though as her granddaughter, Rachel Schultz, points out, sponge cake and chopped liver were among her “signature” dishes.26

  Jane’s husband, Charlie, was “a broad blocky man,”27 easygoing, without professional ambition. He began his practice around the time of the marriage in a second-floor walk-up on Argyle Street in the North Side uptown district, a mixed neighborhood of Scandinavians, Jews, Irish, and Germans. The practice consisted of a waiting room, reached by a dark corridor that smelled of Charlie’s cigars, a tiny lab, little more than a closet, where he made dentures, and a room with a dentist’s chair where the dentures were fitted. The practice stayed in this location for forty-four years, until Charlie’s death in 1974. Here is how Bellow describes him in the unpublished “Chicago Book”: “Times changed but not the techniques he had learned at the Loyola School of Dentistry. Nor his relaxed ways. He locked the office and went out to the track. He played cards after hours with the pharmacist below, and professional pals from the street, Dr. Leef and Dr. Soloway. He liked plain food, broad jokes, did not care to follow new developments in dentistry. His wife, my sister Jane, was impressed by the affectations of the high-powered dental gentry downtown who talked about the courses they were giving and the papers they read at conventions. Charlie paid them no mind.” While at Tuley, Bellow had an after-school job delivering wreaths for a florist, sometimes in Charlie’s neighborhood, at 50 cents an afternoon, as does seventeen-year-old Louie in the story “Something to Remember Me By.” Louie’s story is set in February 1933, the year and month Liza dies, which makes him Bellow’s age. His brother-in-law is a dentist like Charlie, looks like Charlie, has Charlie’s character and history, and an office identical to Charlie’s in a building where Charlie’s building is located. This building is where Louie is robbed of his money and his clothes by a prostitute (in exactly the manner described in the autobiography of the prostitute Chicago May, a book read “often” by the Mexican book thief, Padilla, a friend of Augie March’s from Crane Junior College).28 Given the neighborhood, Louie’s misfortune is unsurprising. In the “Chicago Book” Bellow describes it as “known for its handbooks, hookers, and clip joints,”29 hardly a location to please Jane, who was keen on refinement (“refined, that was the highest thing you could say about somebody,” Greg Bellow remembers of her) and respectability. “My sister wants him to open a Loop office,” Louie explains, “but that would be too much of a strain. I guess he’s for inertia.”30