Saul Bellow's Heart (12 page)

Beebee did not have children, but, as her careers as an editor and author of marvelous children’s books illustrate, she was always a child at heart. She doted on me. She read books to me in utero and spoiled me with attention and birthday gifts carefully picked every year to reflect my current interest. I repaid
her by getting Beebee into the petting zoo in Central Park, which she loved but which adults could not enter without an accompanying child under twelve.

Beebee, Francis, Anita, and I celebrated Thanksgiving and my birthday with elegant dinners that were often followed by a play or skit Beebee orchestrated. When the Tarcovs moved to New York in the late 1950s, they became part of our family. I had become a huge baseball fan, and on their first visit to our apartment I kept showing Oscar items of interest in a book full of baseball statistics. Oscar must have recognized that a hunger for a day-to-day father was behind my attempt to monopolize his attention. The Tarcovs joined us for holiday celebrations and Oscar often ended these family parties with his dance of joy, a few expressive steps that ended with his long frame draped on the nearest couch. No other man I knew openly expressed warmth. Oscar’s love for his children and his wife were palpable, and there was room in his heart left over for me.

My father’s heart was also full of such warmth, but he could not express it as freely as Oscar. And yet, early on, I vaguely sensed that my father understood my emotions in a way that Anita did not. My first direct hint of the importance of warm sentiments to me, to Saul, and between us came when I was sixteen. I bought Saul a humorous Father’s Day card addressed “To Me Fodder.” It was unusual for me to take any note of Mother’s or Father’s Days, because both parents considered them capitalist excuses to buy greeting cards. I overcame my usual hesitation because the interior of the card read, “You’ve been like a mudder to me, fodder,” a line that contained a grain of truth about the emotional differences between Saul and Anita as parents.

Beginning in my adolescence, when the two of us were alone, my father would inquire after what he termed my inner life. Initially I was a bit confused, but soon realized he was asking me to consider whether or not I was content with myself. This began a regular dialogue we came to call “real conversations.” At first they were dominated by Saul’s recurrent explanations about why he had left Anita, including her rigidity, the envelope in her dresser with his name on it, and even her boring recipe for a tasteless tuna casserole, a dinner staple that we both disliked. The content expanded over decades to include family, our sociopolitical differences, and eventually our shared past; they remained a significant feature of our time together.

Saul and Sasha kept me insulated from their marital battles, and he refrained from telling me the details of her affair with Jack for several more years. I witnessed a great deal from the sidelines, and my later reading of
Herzog
provided an additional perspective on what I remember and was offered by Saul and Sasha by way of explanation.

When it came to the affair between Sasha and Jack Ludwig, my father kept his head in the sand for an astronomically long time. He accepted Sasha’s explanations, rationalized Jack’s visits to Brooklyn, and was convinced of their loyalty, partly because he basked in Jack’s fawning. By thirteen I had begun to argue with Saul. During a conflict one summer that lasted a few days, Jack offered to be my confidant, “in case you needed someone to talk to.” I spurned his overture; something about his tone gave me the creeps. I’d venture that Jack was trying to enlist my trust as he had my father’s, by being my “pal.”

In my teens I had been too young to recognize Jack’s
chronic fawning over my father. Ten years ago I met Joseph Frank, the biographer of Dostoyevsky, and his wife, who were at the University of Minnesota when Saul, Sasha, Jack, and Laya Ludwig left Bard for Minneapolis. Both Franks went out of their way to decry the extremity of Jack’s sycophantic behavior. As deferential as he may have been to Saul and to the Franks, he was pompous and full of himself with Bard undergraduates. Ted Hoffman described walking across campus with Jack while he loudly dispensed unsolicited advice on the best kind of condoms to incredulous students passing by. Jack accompanied Ted and Lynn Hoffman to Poughkeepsie when she went into labor. Ted thought he ought to stay at the hospital, but Jack, who claimed to “know all about these things,” told him the labor was going to take hours and took Ted out for a beer. Ted returned to the hospital in the nick of time, almost missing the birth of his first child.

After several separations and what must have been horrific arguments, Saul hoped the already rocky marriage might get a new start in Minneapolis, where he had been offered a teaching appointment for the academic year 1958–59. Saul was once again relegated to Minnesota’s humanities department, but after the publication of
Augie March
he was able to insist on a teaching appointment for Jack. Still blinded by misplaced trust, Saul shipped Sasha and Adam off to Minneapolis to find an apartment. Soon Jack showed up, and he and Sasha went off “apartment hunting” for days while Mitzi McClosky took care of Adam.

Saul mistrusted therapy after his Reichian analysis, but in Minneapolis he agreed when Sasha demanded that he try it again, no doubt a sign of his desperation to preserve their marriage. A
decade earlier when we had lived in Minneapolis, Herb McClosky had urged Saul to meet Dr. Paul Meehl, a brilliant academic psychologist who collaborated with Herb’s research in political science. Saul had been favorably impressed by his intelligence and, in the interim, Dr. Meehl had secured some clinical training. Saul now sought him out as a therapist.

After more than six months of individual analysis with Saul, Dr. Meehl took on Sasha as a patient as well. His dismissive attitude toward clinical boundaries, which included kissing Sasha in front of Saul during a party at the McCloskys’, underscored his arrogant failure to refer Sasha to a colleague as soon as he learned she was having an affair with Saul’s best friend. Not surprisingly, Saul became less interested in self-examination than in pressing Dr. Meehl for information about what Sasha was up to.

Dr. Meehl was yet another expert Saul brought in when practical matters, in this instance a deteriorating marriage, were too complex to be ignored. Rather than investigating their competency, Saul chose advisers on the basis of personal trust and expediency. In exchange, Saul expected loyalty and quick results, no matter how difficult the task. Dr. Meehl delivered neither, but failure never stopped Saul from soliciting more advice. For years he continued to laud successive reality instructors who arrived full of optimism and were all too happy to shower my desperate father with even more conflicting and often nonsensical advice.

My father’s novels are full of well-meaning friends, lawyers, schemers, and advisers brimming with helpful solutions for a series of narrators. Like Saul, his narrators usually ignore the advice and follow their own misguided instincts, which draw them
into a destructive vortex. In life, as in his novels, Saul’s failed advisers were foils for his contradictory impulses and became the perfect scapegoats to shoulder most of the blame for the disasters that ensued. Many years later, as Saul was in the process of firing his umpteenth set of lawyers and accountants, my father confided that he never really gave practical matters any consistent attention and deserved the treatment he got.

Moses Herzog is my father’s prototypical example of a trusting man surrounded by an army of betrayers, figurative and literal. The figurative betrayers are men, great and small, whose abstract advice fails to be of sufficient help to a desperate man. Hoping for more clarity in one instance, Moses chides the philosopher Nietzsche’s discussion of the quotidian—an overly abstract concept that offers little comfort to a man merely trying to live through yet another day filled with suffering. The literal betrayers are Madeleine Herzog, a wife who repays Moses’s protective sentiments by sleeping with his best friend; Valentine Gersbach, his erstwhile confidant, to whom Moses pours out his heart while Valentine is sleeping with Madeleine; and Dr. Edvig, the cerebral psychiatrist who appears blind to both Madeleine’s guile and how important his therapist’s allegiance had become to a desperate Moses.

Sasha maintained that the true passion of the affair was between Saul and Jack. She underlined her point by calling Jack
Saul’s
valentine, not hers. Near
Herzog
’s conclusion, Moses accuses Valentine of seeking him through Madeleine’s flesh. Regardless of Jack’s intentions toward Saul, Sasha’s willingness to persist in the affair had much to do with her anger about the vivid details of Saul’s own affairs that my father (perhaps bragging) told Jack about and that Jack relayed to Sasha. Were that
not enough, Saul had dumped the tasks of the Tivoli kitchen remodeling on Sasha and disavowed a second parenthood.

Sasha was not motivated solely by retaliation, as the affair continued long after her marriage to my father ended. Sasha and Adam moved to Great Neck, where Jack had a nearby teaching appointment. Five years later, Sasha and I had a nasty fight about Jack, during which I criticized and she defended the continuing affair. A decade later, Adam, then sixteen, asked me why I thought his parents’ marriage did not work out. I answered that both of his parents were so intensely in love that neither knew how to handle their passions.

Saul was attracted to Sasha’s beauty, wit, and charm. A bohemian past made her a better candidate to continue the freewheeling gypsy life that Anita would not. But Sasha, a young woman who had escaped from an abusive father and was a brief convert to Catholicism, was a damsel in distress I believe Saul sought to rescue. There is a poem my father recited to me as a child that recurs throughout
Herzog
and, I believe, sheds light on his expectation of trust from Sasha:
I love little pussy her coat is so warm, and I’ll sit by the fire and give her some food, and pussy will love me because I am good
. The helpless little creature in the poem is supposed to love you, to be grateful to you, and to return your affections if simply kept warm and fed. Saul expected loyalty in return for his protective love. But the last phrase of the poem reveals that Saul understood the selfish side of his love. Despite how well they are treated, kitties grow into independent cats, and damsels who appear to be in distress may actually have strong wills. After he “rescued” Sasha, Saul counted on her gratitude to keep her loyal, while he continued to do as he
wished. Sasha did not share Saul’s agenda, and gave him a heaping tablespoon of his own philandering medicine.

In my view, Saul’s connection to Jack resided in the man’s tolerance for suffering, his capacity to absorb feelings, and his ability to appear sympathetic to Saul’s constant complaining. Jack suffered palpably every day. One leg was far shorter than the other, and he walked with a pronounced limp. Worse, he suffered from a joint disease that flared up painfully and forced him to remain in bed until it subsided. Jack’s palpable suffering in silence made a deep impression on my father. Perhaps it reminded him of Abraham’s stoicism in Lachine, which he contrasted unfavorably with his own chronic complaining. No matter the reason, Saul’s trust in Jack remained unshaken for years, likely because my father could not let himself suspect disloyalty or deception from a fellow deep sufferer.

In the pages of
Herzog
, Moses Herzog is attracted to Valentine Gersbach’s “great heart,” which is so big that it “could absorb an ocean of feelings.” Moses attributes that heart to a terrible accident that Valentine suffered in childhood. The suffering Valentine endured while he continued to absorb Moses’s pain stands in direct contrast to Dr. Edvig’s cold, clinical manner. After a disappointing therapy session that makes him feel
worse
, Moses immediately turns to Valentine for the solace he so desperately needs. In one of his letters Moses castigates Dr. Edvig, ending with the line “I was your patient …” It is a protest and a plea that reveals Saul’s genuine desire for help and his expectation of loyalty from a psychiatrist Saul thought Sasha was able to wrap around her little finger.

I have wondered why Saul was so blind to such blatant
deception. The answers lie in his facility with logic, his inclination to trust, and his inability to see guile in others that his hardheaded older brothers would never have missed. My father could and did argue either side of a question with equal vigor and conviction. He used or misused logic to compartmentalize his life, to behave as he wished without palpable guilt, and to deceive. He was thus able to convince himself of facts not in evidence, in this instance that Jack and Sasha were trustworthy.

When Saul finally wised up, he was like a wounded animal. He bad-mouthed Sasha and Jack to anyone who would listen. On a visit to Vasiliki Rosenfeld’s not long after he realized what was going on, I could hear him ranting through the closed door. In my favorite Chinese restaurant in 1960, he began to complain to me about her. Sixteen years old and fond of Sasha, I stuck up for her. In my own defense as much as Sasha’s, I claimed that Anita’s experience as a social worker had taught me something about understanding people, and that knowledge assured me that Sasha was a good person. It was a ridiculous argument Saul pretty much demolished. But I was not deterred and kept up my relationship with Sasha for the rest of her life.

Herzog
describes a man, Moses, clawing his way back to sanity after a terrible betrayal by two people he dearly loved has sorely taxed his grasp on what is real. Saul’s protagonist rights himself much as my father must have. After the infidelity, Moses engages in a highly erotic affair that reaffirms his sexual desirability and, after a mishap, finds reassurance in belonging to a protective family. A highly agitated Moses gets into a car accident during a custodial visit with his young daughter, and
is pulled over by the Chicago police. Instead of keeping his wits, he takes flight into a set of abstract, speculative ideas, which is exactly what my father did when he was overwhelmed by real events. But Moses Herzog cannot find sufficient solace in mere ideas, and I am convinced Saul was never sufficiently comforted by them either.