The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  101. ​SB, “Mozart: An Overture,” SB, IAAU, p. 2.

  102. ​SB, “A Matter of the Soul,” in SB, IAAU, pp. 73 (for the music teacher’s gramophone selections) and 73–74.

  103. ​SB, “Jefferson Lectures,” SB, IAAU, p. 121.

  104. ​Even today, it is the largest container port in the Western Hemisphere, the third largest in the world. See Deanna Isaacs, “Fall Books Special: Chicago’s Life Story,” an interview with Dominic Pacyga, in Chicago Reader (5 November 2009); see also Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography, pp. 404–9.

  105. ​SB, from the “American Materialism” section of SB, “CB,” p. 4.

  106. ​For the Auditorium Theatre, see Pacyga, Chicago: A Biography, pp. 133–37. As for the date of SB’s unpaid ushering, the theater shut down during the Depression, the Crash occurred in October 1929, and SB did not enter Tuley High School until September 1930.

  107. ​SB, “Jefferson Lectures,” SB, IAAU, p. 122.

  108. ​“Interview with Saul Bellow,” reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 199.

  109. ​SB, “CB,” p. 14; see also SB’s Council of Scholars speech (20 November 1980), p. 19: “It is clear … that there would be no art if we were governed in all things by the collective state of mind which has given us our visible achievements in the material sphere.”

  110. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 293.

  111. ​Koch interview.

  112. ​The “Something Chicago College of Law” is as close as SB could come to the school’s name (in the Roth/SB interview transcript). Maury’s son, Joel Bellows, never knew the name.

  113. ​This quotation was remembered by Lesha Greengus, Maury’s niece (email of 27 February 2011).

  114. ​Roth/SB interview transcript; SB, “Something to Remember Me By,” Esquire (July 1990), reprinted in SB, CS, p. 424.

  115. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 10.

  116. ​From the last page of a four-page typescript in the Regenstein, mostly about Isaac Rosenfeld, with handwritten corrections. Across the top, in another hand, is the message: “Saul, Sent Roth a copy of this, warning him of its drafty nature.” The message is signed, but I cannot make out the signature or hand, nor is there a date on the typescript, clearly part of the “extended written interview” project Roth first proposed in the summer of 1998.

  117. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 11.

  118. ​The quotation about Americanization comes from the Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 293; for the quotation about family affection, see Roth/SB interview typescript.

  119. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 9.

  120. ​Kyle Bellows, Joel’s son, provides an example of Maury’s feeling for family: “When I was a small child I had a very life-threatening surgery where I had to have a kidney removed and he flew in to see if he could be a possible organ-donor match. That really was very, very special.” It was also, Kyle adds, “essentially out of character for him.” Most of what Kyle learned of Maury came from his maternal grandfather, who knew Maury from the Covenant Club, for affluent Russian Jewish businessmen (it is thinly fictionalized as Simon’s club in The Adventures of Augie March): “He [Kyle’s maternal grandfather] really thought of him as—how do I put this in a way that’s not derogatory—an immoral scumbag. I don’t mean to be glib about this. I know he had a very tough, a very punitive upbringing. When put into context, it’s understandable how somebody could come out that way. But in the long run, who really cares?”

  121. ​Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 293.

  122. ​Koch interview.

  123. ​Roth/SB interview typescript.

  124. ​Koch interview.

  125. ​The one member of the Dworkin family Maury became close with was Alvin Baron, son of Flora and Isidor. Alvin was the model for the gangster Tanky Metzger in “Cousins.” Through Maury, Alvin became close to Jimmy Hoffa and Allen Dorfman, who managed the Teamsters’ investments. Dorfman was close to the Chicago and Cleveland syndicates, to Las Vegas gangsters, and to all the varied interests funded by the Teamsters. He was murdered near Vivien Missner’s home in Skokie when it was thought he might testify against the mob. Alvin Baron succeeded Dorfman as the union’s “Asset Manager.” When he, too, was indicted, like Tanky Metzger, he refused to disclose information and was sentenced to prison. Before sentencing, SB wrote a letter to the judge attesting to the good character of Alvin’s family, as Ijah writes a letter attesting to the good character of Tanky’s family. Alvin remained silent, served his time, moved to Las Vegas, where influential “friends” set him up in business, and lived a prosperous life. See Steven Brill, The Teamsters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978).

  126. ​Amos, Joseph’s older brother in SB’s first novel, Dangling Man (1944), might join this list, but Amos is more conventional and family-minded than Maury, in this respect more like Sam Bellows.

  127. ​This anecdote recalled by Lesha Bellows Greengus (email, 27 February 2011).

  128. ​For Updike review, see “Draping Radiance with a Worn Veil,” New Yorker (15 September 1975); for the quotations about Rabbit, see Rabbit at Rest (London: André Deutsch, 1990), pp. 164, 90.

  129. ​The Sherry was the first high-rise hotel on the South Side of Chicago. When Marge and Maury bought it, it was an apartment-hotel, which they renovated and turned into a commercial hotel. Other real estate and business ventures followed. In 1955 they sold the Sherry and in 1956 bought the thousand-room Shoreland Hotel, again on the South Side, just north of the Sherry at 5454 South Shore Drive. Al Capone used to conduct business in the Shoreland under previous ownership. Jimmy Hoffa kept a room there during the time the Bellowses owned it, as did the economist Milton Friedman.

  130. ​So, too, with Marge and Maury. According to their grandson, Mark Rotblatt, “they were both crazy people.… Tough, tough people.” Marge “used to like to say she was Leona Helmsley before Leona Helmsley, and proud of it.” When they fought, “they were like throwing the most expensive Steuben bowls, the Baccarat vases. If it didn’t have value it wasn’t worth throwing … and the screaming and the carrying on.”

  131. ​Roth/SB interview transcript.

  132. ​Maury’s way of driving seems to have been passed on to his daughter, Lynn. Greg Bellow remembers driving with her: “She was cutting in and out of traffic, people were honking at her, she was driving on the edge of the roadway, passing people, weaving. I don’t even think we were late. I said, ‘You drive like this all the time?’ She said, ‘Yeah, sure, my father drove like this.’ ” When Lynn’s son, Mark, was learning to drive, “I’d be real aggressive and I’m still pretty aggressive and my grandma [Marge] would say: ‘He’s Maury Bellows behind the wheel.’ ”

  133. ​A similar doubleness is expressed about Chicago: “I have had an odi et amo attitude towards Chicago for nearly fifty years. I am greatly attached to it, I am also deeply estranged from it” (“Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” p. 3).

  134. ​According to Lesha Bellows Greengus, after she and her family returned from the Nobel ceremonies, Maury expressed interest “in the monetary size of the prize, whether it was tax free, and whether Saul could keep it in an offshore account. He did express genuine affection for Saul and pride in his world-class honor; at the same time he was quite certain that Saul would not be able to hold on to the money. ‘He is going to piss it away’ ” (email, 27 February 2011).

  135. ​Roth/SB interview transcript.

  136. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 80.

  4. TULEY

  1. ​Lazer Bailen was the son of the sister of Sara Gurevich Gordin, Moses Gordin’s wife. According to Jane Bellow Kauffman, SB’s, Sam’s, and Maury’s sister, as recalled by Lesha Bellows Greengus, Maury was “madly in love” with Mildred Bailen, Lazar’s daughter, “who jilted him for a wealthier catch, who turned out to be Jack Dworkin (Louie’s younger brother)” (email, 6 February 2011). This episode is fictionalized in Chapte
r 8 of The Adventures of Augie March, when the beautiful Cissy Flexner jilts Simon, who is “powerfully in love” with her, for Five Properties, (p. 552). Lazer Bailen eventually went into the real estate business (“by which we believe he managed some real estate properties”), lost everything in the Depression, moved the family to Philadelphia, then returned the family to Chicago permanently (according to Lesha Bellow Greengus, in the email of 6 February 2011, and Susan Missner, Louis Dworkin’s granddaughter, in an email of 12 February 2011).

  2. ​According to Lesha (email, 6 February 2011), Abraham did not break completely with Imperial until 1931; there was a period of several years, therefore, in which he was both selling wood to other bakeries and working for cousin Louis. SB offers a fictional account of the new business in “Far Out,” a novel he worked on in the 1970s but never finished. It was sent in installments to Harvey Guinzburg of Harper and Row and exists in its most finished form in a hundred-page typed manuscript (deposited in the Regenstein, along with earlier draft material). The novel is set in the 1950s and on p. 28 of an early draft its hero, Peter Vallis, recalls his father’s business in Chicago “selling lumbermill scraps to bakers for their ovens. He had a yard on Cherry Street, near Fulton—‘poultry, eggs and fish’—and the wood came in freight cars from mills in the Upper Peninsula and was stacked up in swaying piles. Deliveries were made in a busted Diamond Truck with solid tires. There was a little office with a wagon-scale under the window and a wooden bench from a waiting room where Isidro [Peter’s father] took his siesta.… He needed Pete to drive the old Willys Knight Whippet to Northern Wisconsin to buy mill-ends or trimmings, and around town to make sales or collections.”

  3. ​Manea, “Conversation,” pp. 10–11.

  4. ​There is a problem here about addresses. When SB took his wife Janis on a tour of the old neighborhood, he identified the address of his family’s apartment on Le Moyne as either 3245 or 3246 Le Moyne, in a building no longer standing. The Chicago phone directories list the address as 3340, the address Atlas gives in Biography, p. 31. Nathan Tarcov, the son of SB’s friend from Tuley High School Oscar Tarcov, believes Oscar’s family lived at 3340. He has envelopes addressed to his father at 3340 Le Moyne. He also has a letter to his father from July 1937 addressed to 3340 but then changed to 3342. The Chicago phone books have no listing for Oscar’s father, though there is a listing for Anita Tarcov, Oscar’s much older sister, at 3342 Le Moyne. Perhaps the Tarcovs and the Bellows lived in sepa rate apartments in the same building on Le Moyne, or the Tarcovs lived there after the Bellows. That no one from either family remembers this being so, however, is puzzling, as are Janis Bellow’s notes identifying the street number as 3245 or 3246.

  5. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 12.

  6. ​These numbers come from Sam’s son, Shael Bellows, as relayed to Lesha Bellows Greengus, who includes them in a “Bellow/s Family Chronology 1923–1962” (email, 6 February 2011).

  7. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 12.

  8. ​Joel Bellows, email, 30 January 2011. Bellows Coal lasted until Maury bought Bunge Coal and Oil in the late 1940s, then the fourth largest coal company in Chicago. Joel thinks that there must have been some arrangement between Maury and his father and Sam about not competing for customers. Lesha Bellows Greengus remembers that Maury’s first coal yard was farther west than Carroll Coal.

  9. ​Sam told his son, Shael, according to Lesha Bellows Greengus (email, 6 February 2011), that Abraham had had an accident the first time he tried to drive, and that he never tried again.

  10. ​Rachel Greengus Schultz, email, 31 January 2011.

  11. ​SB’s quotation comes from a tape recording played for me by Lesha Bellows Greengus.

  12. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 11; Stuart Brent, the Chicago bookseller, recalls this description of Sam in a letter to SB, 4 June 1985.

  13. ​“I Got a Scheme!,” p. 79. For the genesis of this article, a product of conversations between SB and Philip Roth, see Chapter 3, note 11.

  14. ​Manea, “Conversation,” p. 8.

  15. ​On 3 March 1963, the Chicago Jewish Community honored Sam Bellows as its “Man of the Year” at a dinner at the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel on North Michigan Avenue. The program for the evening (a copy is in the Regenstein) lists Sam’s charitable activities: chairman of the board of the Chicago Jewish Academy, president of the Academy Associates, president of the Orthodox Congregation Tifereth Zion, member of the board of directors of Associated Talmud Torahs, Hebrew Theological College, and Chicago Jewish Academy, and active supporter of Religious Zionists of Chicago and the Israel Bond Organization of Chicago.

  16. ​Irving Cutler, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), p. 230.

  17. ​Lesha Greengus, email, 6 February 2011.

  18. ​SB, “Chicago and American Culture: One Writer’s View,” p. 8, a talk delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the Chicago Public Library on 10 October 1972. A version of this talk was later printed under the same title in Chicago (May 1973), pp. 82–89. I have quoted from a twenty-one-page typescript of the talk itself, with handwritten corrections, in the Regenstein. On the same page, SB is, if anything, harder on the conspicuously “cultured”: “the fairly low-grade morons and buffoons—that portion of the public which put on cultural airs—did not inspire kindly amusement in the rest.” A second typescript of the talk in the Regenstein is titled “Address at the Chicago Public Library.”

  19. ​That Adelsky is loosely based on the Chicago billionaire Abram (A. N.) Pritzker, a client of SB’s friend Marilyn Mann, an interior decorator, the second wife of Sam Freifeld, was suggested by Mann herself, who resembles Amy Wustrin in some ways. SB’s dual attitude toward business success recalls Theodore Dreiser, an early and continuing influence. The scenes in Simon’s coal yard in Augie are partly drawn from real-life experiences and locations, but they also have something of the atmosphere of the railroad scenes toward the end of Sister Carrie (Chapters 43–44), in which George Hurstwood scabs during a strike by motormen and conductors and narrowly escapes serious injury.

  20. ​Koch interview.

  21. ​SB, “The Old System” (1968), in CS, p. 101 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  22. ​Judith Greengus thinks SB, too, was frightened of women, certainly strong women, “with financial independence, a career, and birth control” (a view relayed by her mother, Lesha Greengus, in an email of 2 February 2010). For SB on Sam’s view of women, see Manea, “Conversation,” p. 8.

  23. ​Ibid., p. 9.

  24. ​According to SB’s agent, Harriet Wasserman, in Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow: A Memoir (New York: Fromm International, 1997), p. 130, when she visited him in Vermont in July 1978, and Daniel, his youngest son, was fourteen, SB told her: “ ‘When I was Daniel’s age [thus in 1929, the summer of Jane and Charlie’s wedding, though presumably before the wedding], my mother was sitting with me outside on a day like this. She took her blouse off because she thought the sun would be healing.’ Saul saw the terrible scar of the missing breast, and she said to him, ‘You see. This is why your father doesn’t come near me anymore.’ It struck me, then, that Saul had really been traumatized at an early age.” This story was heard also by Joel Bellows.

  25. ​See SB, Herzog, p. 668, when Moses quarrels with Father Herzog over money: “ ‘Idiot!’ was what the old man had shouted. ‘Calf!’ Then he saw the angry demand underlying Moses’s look of patience. ‘Get out! I leave you nothing! Everything to Willie and Helen! You … ? Croak in a flophouse.’ Moses rising, Father Herzog shouted, ‘Go. And don’t come to my funeral.’ ”

  26. ​“She could be darling,” Rachel Schultz insists, in the same email (22 February 2011) in which she talks of her grandmother’s signature dishes, “but she was never docile.”

  27. ​This quotation and the one that follows come from the “American Materialism” section of SB, “CB,” p. 6.

  28. ​Chicago May “
used to throw her escorts’ clothes out of the window to her accomplice in the alley” (The Adventures of Augie March, p. 601). See also the practices of the real-life Mickey Finn, who ran a whorehouse in the Levee district, Chicago’s red-light district, just south of the business area of the city. Finn opened the Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden in 1896. It was here that he developed the knockout drink that bears his name. As the Chicago historian Dominic A. Pacyga, in Chicago: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 107, describes it: “After being drugged Finn dragged the victim into a small room at the rear of the Palm Garden … stripped him and took his money. Finn often kept the man’s clothes and substituted old clothing before throwing the target out into the alley.”

  29. ​SB, “CB,” p. 6. The Edgewater Beach Hotel was in this neighborhood, so it was easy for Kid Weil to hire his naked prostitutes.

  30. ​SB, “Something to Remember Me By,” in SB, CS, p. 423 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).

  31. ​Relayed in an email from Lesha Greengus, 2 February 2010.

  32. ​Atlas, Biography, p. 42. This business of the names is puzzling. Though the Chicago phone books for 1931–32 and 1933 list Abraham’s name as Abraham Bellows not Bellow, SB’s official records at Tuley High School and Northwestern University list him as Bellow.

  33. ​Koch interview.

  34. ​According to an “Official Record” of SB’s years at Tuley supplied by the Chicago Public Schools Department of Compliance.