Saul Bellow's Heart (10 page)

Sasha was a tough little girl who once climbed to the top of a jungle gym where she threw rocks at bullies who had chased her. She attended local public schools until the age of eight, then went off to a boarding school about an hour outside of New York City. As a teenager Sasha was an athletic swimmer and a fearless diver. During her high school years, the family moved into the Chelsea Hotel. As Sasha grew to maturity, she accused her father of sexually abusing her. Sasha put an end to the abuse after about a year, but she never forgave him and remained so angry that she never allowed her son, my brother Adam, to meet his maternal grandfather.

At seventeen, Sasha left for college at Bennington. After graduation, she returned to New York and worked briefly at the
Partisan Review
, where she met Saul. During these years, she was taken with the mystery of the Catholic Church, took instruction with Bishop Fulton Sheen, and converted. After she left the
Partisan Review
Sasha worked as an editor on two Catholic magazines. Saul found Sasha’s commitment to Catholicism an obstacle to sex. He determined that Ted Hoffman, a lapsed Catholic now living in New York, should go and “reason” with Sasha. He coached Ted to make the logical argument that Protestantism was based in “protest” against the strictness of
the Catholic Church. Ted chuckled as he told me the story years later, musing on why he ever undertook such a fool’s errand.

To lighten the burdens of child care on him and to provide playmates for me, Saul would attach himself to intact families with children. But I wanted to be with Saul and found these children poor substitutes. Monroe Engel, Saul’s editor at the Viking Press, left publishing and went to Princeton for a Ph.D. The Engels and their children became a big part of our family life for several years. Sasha, by now in a serious relationship with Saul, became such a regular visitor in Princeton that for many years I thought the Engels had introduced her to Saul. With the help of Delmore Schwartz, my father found a temporary teaching position at Princeton. Delmore lived with his wife, Elizabeth Pollet, up a dirt road in rural New Jersey. Once again I was the only child surrounded by adults. Saul, Delmore, and Elizabeth took time out to toss a football around with me, but I entertained myself during their interminable conversations playing with Delmore’s miniature pool table, a toy he eventually gave me.

Delmore was descending into madness, most likely bipolar disorder. His expansive ideas, full of charm and delivered with amazing conviction in an incessant flow of grandiose notions, predicted a cultural transformation of America during the administration of Adlai Stevenson he fully anticipated. He was convinced that democracy was about to deliver on its potential to change the world by spreading culture in a golden age to come—a notion that greatly appealed to my father. Delmore’s already precarious mental state soon spiraled downward, landing him in Bellevue’s psychiatric ward. He abused pills and alcohol and got progressively worse.

In Manhattan, Saul attached us to Pat and Dorothy Covici for holiday meals at their apartment. Pat, John Steinbeck’s longtime editor, had taken over as Saul’s editor at the Viking Press when Monroe left. According to my father, Steinbeck depended so heavily on Covici’s editorial advice that the relationship took on a father-son dimension. Saul maintained that his author-editor relationship was not one of dependency, but my father’s letters to Pat, including one addressed to “Father Covici,” show how much my father also relied on him.

For several years we spent a month of summer on the far end of Long Island or on Cape Cod. During my weekend visits, Saul would take a day off from writing, but during the summer I was left to entertain myself every morning while Saul wrote. Swimming filled most afternoons, and there were frequent cocktail parties in the early evenings. Anticipating my boredom as the only child in attendance, Saul let me bring Lizzie to these parties. I set myself up on lawn furniture and fed the dog potato chips that went right through her. Before attending a party at Edmund Wilson’s Wellfleet home, Saul appeared quite nervous. He told me our host was a famous literary critic and asked me to be on my best behavior. The weather must have kept us inside. When I fed Lizzie her quota of potato chips with the usual results, a mortified Saul had to clean the dog poop from Wilson’s Oriental carpet.

Unable to divorce Anita in New York State, Saul went to Nevada in 1955. He lived at Pyramid Lake in a shack surrounded by tumbleweed and sent me a fragrant sprig that I kept by my bed and sniffed frequently during his long absence. He was soon joined by Sasha, whom he was anxious to marry. They went
into Reno about once a week to shop and play blackjack at Harold’s Club. Arthur Miller was near Reno, too, and also divorcing his first wife. Marilyn Monroe visited him there, and the two couples struck up a friendship.

Back in New York, the foursome made a date for dinner. Over a drink in the Millers’ home, Arthur entertained Saul and Sasha while Marilyn was dressing. After an hour or more, Arthur excused himself. Soon he returned and urged Sasha to go into the bedroom and help Marilyn decide what to wear. Sasha quickly helped her choose something and the famished couples went out to Rocco’s, a favorite restaurant of Saul’s on the northern edge of Little Italy. Marilyn wore some sort of disguise, but word of her presence got out. Having recently thrown over Joe DiMaggio for Arthur, she was none too popular in the Italian community, and an unruly crowd formed on the street. Saul had to get his car and pull right in front of the restaurant so Marilyn could get into it without an ugly scene. For several years, Saul brought me greetings from Marilyn. When I was thirteen, I met her when he and Arthur were inducted into the National Academy of Arts and Letters. I remember her as very beautiful and surrounded by men, but she took a minute to say hello to me. Anita was upset that I met famous people though Saul. She felt left behind, and the gold Cadillac in which she imagined Saul was now full of celebrities.

I went with Anita to Chicago, where Grandma Goshkin and Grandpa Bellow both lived, but more often I went with Saul. He and I took the eighteen-hour train ride from New York on the Twentieth Century Limited. I drank ginger ale in the club car while we played casino—to me it was the height of luxury. If Saul and I drove, we’d pass the time singing “Old Hogan’s
Goat,” “The Eddystone Light,” “Anne Boleyn,” and the songs Aunt Jenny had sung to Saul in Lachine during the First World War.

I most remember Fanny’s sloppy kisses and Jewish dishes such as boiled tongue and stuffed cabbage. I was supposed to kiss Grandpa but found his face rough from intermittent shaving. Abraham was in the habit of distributing silver dollars to his grandchildren. I kept mine in a metal cigarette box acquired in France, along with a huge wad of czarist Russian rubles Saul had given me to play with. During a summer visit, I decided to water the flowers in Grandpa’s backyard. I was wearing socks but no shoes and he anticipated that I’d make a muddy mess. I insisted that I could keep them dry and refused to take them off. Saul, still an indulgent parent then, stuck up for me. Grandpa was right. I did make a mess.

During Grandpa’s last years, the entire Bellow family, including Saul when he was in town, would go over to Abraham and Aunt Fanny’s for Sunday afternoon meals. The regular attendees were Morrie, his wife, Marge, and their children, Lynn and Joel; Sam, his wife, Nina, and their children, Lesha and Shael; and Jane, her husband, Charlie Kauffman, and their sons, Larry and Bobby. When Grandma Lescha’s name came up, her children spoke of her with great reverence. The afternoons were largely harmonious until the conversation turned to money, which shattered the superficial the goodwill. While the parents visited, the kids played intensely competitive games of Monopoly.

Abraham found financial threats the best way to reassert his waning paternal authority. His frequent fights with his children often ended with his announcement that he was changing his
will and disinheriting the current offender. He would go so far as to call his lawyer, often in the middle of the night, with instructions to draw up a new will excluding that child. Morrie tired of this routine early on and turned his nose up at his share to emphasize its paltry size, but Abraham’s mercurial threats had serious consequences for Sam, Jane, and Saul, whose fragile finances made him particularly vulnerable. My father would rush back to Chicago to learn about the new will. By the time the family had assembled at Grandpa’s insistence to hear of the new asset division, he and the offending child had patched things up and the crisis would blow over until Abraham pulled the same stunt again and the whole scene was repeated.

My grandfather was often provocative, setting even his grandchildren against one another. On the night before my cousin Joel’s bar mitzvah, he and our cousin Shael stayed at Abraham and Fanny’s. Oblivious to Joel’s nervousness before he was to read from the Torah in public, Grandpa compared him unfavorably to Shael, whose family was more religious. The next morning at the synagogue, in a typical disruptive gesture, Abraham took a public shot at Joel’s father. Morrie had invited business associates and political connections, Jews and non-Jews, on whom he wanted to make a good impression. But when my grandfather rose to speak after the reading, he asserted that if you have a choice, you should “always do business with a Jew!”

When
The Adventures of Augie March
was published, my grandfather took considerable pride in his rabbi’s praise of the book. Despite turning down my father’s requests for money, he continued to worry about Saul’s financial prospects and told Sam to watch out for the welfare of his kid brother.

In 1955, when he was seventy-eight, Grandpa had a fatal heart
attack. Morrie used his connections to secure a police escort complete with sirens from the synagogue to the cemetery. Saul joked about the irony that Abraham, who was running from the police most of his life, was accompanied by them on his last journey. After the funeral Aunt Fanny confessed to Saul that Grandpa had wanted to have sex the evening before he died, but she put him off because he had the sniffles. Her story cemented my father’s awe of Abraham as a tough, horny old bird. Despite their arguments, one of which included a threat by Abraham to come after Saul with a gun if he asked for money again, Saul grieved deeply. When Ruth Miller, a former student, came to pay a condolence call, she found my father weeping as he listened to Mozart’s
Requiem
.

Seize the Day
reflects Saul’s lost hope of approval from his father. Abraham was not only unable to show Saul his love but also had formed a critical judgment of his youngest as an overgrown crybaby who had failed to absorb the lesson life taught him: the necessity for emotional toughness. I think that my father agreed but could do little to control his emotions. A film version of the novel was produced three decades later. The actor Joseph Wiseman, who played Dr. Adler, Tommy Wilhelm’s father, bore an uncanny physical resemblance to Grandpa and perfectly captured his harshness toward his son. After having witnessed such scenes between my father and grandfather, I was riveted to the screen as Tommy begs his implacable father for money. I mentioned to several family members how struck I was by the film, and my words of praise got back to my father. Saul, who believed that writing was a far superior way to capture the essence of people than film, took offense. On our next visit, he complained about what he took to be my lack of appreciation
of his novel and extended his criticism to my lack of interest in literature as a whole. I told him that I continued to read and love great writers of fiction, but that I could not appreciate his books as literature. “They’re just too close,” I said. As was his habit whenever, like it or not, he was confronted with an irrefutable position, he remained silent and never again brought up the subject.

Despite his threats Abraham did not disinherit any of his children, and Saul’s share, about fifteen thousand dollars, was sufficient to buy a large house in the Hudson Valley. But Grandpa’s threats had a salutary effect on Saul’s behavior about money with his sons. Our father made it clear that each son was responsible for his own finances, thereby avoiding the destructive Bellow practice of mixing family and money matters.

After the death of their father, my uncles, aunt, and their families settled into midlife routines. Morrie was a wheeler-dealer in Chicago, and Marge ran their hotels day-to-day with a heavy but effective hand. Marge took great pride in her business acumen, and their relationship, half marriage and half business partnership, created a formidable team. Morrie, Marge, Lynn, and Joel lived in the penthouse of the Shoreland Hotel, which seemed palatial when I visited. As a teenager, Joel would use ten towels to dry off after a bath.

Freed from the constraints of watching over the Carroll Coal Company, Sam hit his stride as a businessman. He began a chain of profitable nursing homes and offered family members financial participation. I believe Sam hoped that spreading ample profits among the Bellows would promote the family concern and togetherness that he, too, prized from their days in Lachine. His wife, my aunt Nina, was a woman of ambition and
energy, but in an era when having a working wife reflected poorly on a husband’s ability to provide for his family, Sam forbade her to work outside the home. Nina, who came from a family of rabbis, prevailed at home. My cousins Lesha and Shael were raised in an observant Jewish household, and Sam rarely intervened.

Jane married Charlie Kauffman, a dentist who treated the Bellow family and, reportedly, possessed minimal technical skill. As a young husband, Charlie, bored by his marriage, led a double life. He went through the motions of domesticity but spent many hours gambling with shady characters. Jane was, by all accounts, a smothering mother to her children, Larry and Bobby. Anita derided Jane’s germ phobias and her custom of boiling oranges before peeling them and wiping the rails of my cousins’ crib with chemicals more harmful than any germ they might encounter licking them.

I did not live in Chicago after 1946 and had almost no relationships with my Bellow aunts, uncles, or cousins. I was used to the generosity of the doting Goshkins, all childless, who sent birthday presents and candy on Valentine’s Day. My aunts Ida and Catherine stayed with us when they visited New York to attend the theater and Catherine offered to take me to any restaurant I named, although I always chose the Automat. I was hurt by the lack of attention I received from the Bellows and asked Anita why my rich uncle Morrie never sent me anything for my birthday.