Saul Bellow's Heart (15 page)

My deep respect for Saul and his writer friends fueled the fierce way I tried to protect his privacy and my acceptance of the line he drew between art and life. As a result, I was predisposed to react negatively to Saul’s fame and it got worse when it spilled over onto me. Soon after the publication of
Herzog
, I went over to visit Saul and Susan. As I walked through the lobby of their fancy Chicago apartment building, I nodded a friendly hello to the doorman. When he let me pass without calling upstairs, another tenant asked him who I was. “Oh, that’s
Mr. Bellow’s son,” he told her. She turned to me and said in a snooty tone, “There’s no reason to be rude, Mr. Herzog.”

I considered Saul and Anita’s long-held left-wing political attitudes to be closely intertwined with permissive child rearing, minimal discipline, and encouragement of my independence that characterized our family ethos. Certainly the ethos came from both parents, but Anita remained more militant than Saul. In 1959, at my junior high school graduation, Anita had refused to stand for the national anthem, and Saul chided her for an excessive demonstration of her radicalism. The tenets of our family included a deep appreciation for art and culture, outright contempt for the kind of ostentation Morrie represented, a complete lack of religious observance, sympathy with people who had been disadvantaged or suffered discrimination, support of organized labor in that we did not cross picket lines, respect for people of all races, and a commitment to fairness embodied in the socialist ideal of each according to their needs. Anita expressed that ethos in her work, first in Paris with refugees, then by running a Planned Parenthood clinic, and finally by working for single-payer health plans that she considered socialized medicine.

At ten I knew all about Margaret Sanger and birth control. After my brief foray into capitalism, by sixteen I was committed to world socialism. At seventeen I had decided on a career as a lawyer for the NAACP. I went so far as to find a program that would allow me to finish college and get a law degree in five years. Anita looked at the curriculum and vetoed my plan, insisting I get a general education first. For several years I had envied the intellectual sophistication of my parents and their
University of Chicago–educated friends. By the time I was eighteen, I came to agree with my mother. I set my heart on the university because I wanted more than anything else to be able to think like them and was willing to study hard to ensure I’d be admitted. My career as a socialist ended after I fell asleep during a lecture on Marxist dialectical materialism, and soon thereafter I dropped my interest in the law. But I left Chicago in 1968 committed to the adage of my generation that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, an adage by which I have lived and in which I continue to find great merit. I never heard a word contrary to the spirit of that adage from my mother or, before 1968, from Saul.

Anita actively encouraged my radicalism, buying me books on Sacco and Vanzetti and the Russian Revolution for birthdays and Hanukkah. My father’s friends were former Trotskyites, and he was even afraid of being called to testify before Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC, but his politics were not as easy to pin down as they once had been. I take the optimism that pervades his 1948 novel,
The Victim
, to confirm “young Saul’s” view that we are all our brothers’ keepers.

Within the prevailing family ethos it is easy to understand how the civil rights protests, the Vietnam War, and the turmoil in American society during the mid- and late 1960s came up during my long conversations with Saul in his university office. We supported the civil rights movement but disagreed about the escalating conflict in Vietnam. I felt the United States was involved in an immoral war. Saul made the subtle argument, typical of an immigrant who had been welcomed by this country, that America was a good society that offered its citizens freedom, which made its government worthy of their
support. Saul was not perturbed when I joined members of my generation in protest rallies in Chicago and Washington, D.C., or even when I made arguments against participation in the war. But when my refusal to cooperate put my welfare at risk, our arguments got more heated. The force behind our disagreements abated when I got into graduate school to study social work, which extended my draft deferment and temporarily reduced both of our anxiety.

In 1968, as my education neared completion and the war in Vietnam was raging, my options boiled down to two unpleasant prospects: Canada or jail. Saul didn’t like the idea of moving to Canada, but he was repelled by the idea of my going to jail, where he feared I would come to harm by violence or as the victim of homosexual rape. As our arguments became more vehement I loudly reminded him that he was once a man whose bookshelf included the works of Gandhi. Often I stormed out of his new apartment in a huff, leaving my father in a rage.

Postadolescent arguments with Saul and Anita were actually a prelude to the candid conversations I began to have with both of them during graduate school, conversations that continued for the rest of their lives. Saul’s regular inquiries into my inner life played a pivotal role in my thinking deeply about my feelings and taking my own opinions seriously. What we came to call our “real conversations” gradually shifted away from his recurrent explanations about divorcing my mother to a reciprocal honesty that signaled his recognition of my adult status.

Our talks were certainly not as introspective as my therapy, but they were honest, direct, and psychological in the way Saul used the word: filled with examples of irony, logical contradiction, and runaway vanity as parts of the human comedy, and
mortality. They were about what Saul called “the bare facts” and often ended with shared bafflement at human behavior. It was not what Saul said that I treasure. It was what he confessed to not understanding, questions without good enough answers, that made me feel close to him because we were puzzled together.

Our “real conversations” were also a way to resolve conflict, as neither of us could tolerate unresolved ill feelings about each other. Family members were shocked that I’d broach sensitive issues so directly with my father. Forty years of those conversations and my career as a psychotherapist have left me with a deep sense of what is truly important between people: an appreciation for the unvarnished emotional truth, a dislike for mincing words, and a fondness for human folly. The primordial connection between Kenneth Trachtenberg and his uncle Benn Crader in
More Die of Heartbreak
most reminds me of what it felt like to so engage with my father.

The details of any one conversation blend with the others, as they were so regular a feature of our visits. But a snippet about death after my cousin Lynn Bellows, Morrie’s daughter, passed away so captures their directness that it remains fixed in my memory. Saul had received a call from his frightened niece as she was being wheeled into surgery. Lynn said, “I love you, Uncle Saul,” and, he continued, “I said I loved her, too … She must have been afraid of not making it,” he then mused. “Absolutely,” I responded. “She was staring at her own death right in the face.”

My anger at Anita for failing to pay her half of my college expenses had abated, and our arguments stopped. I visited her in South Pasadena, where we also began to have long talks in her beloved garden that are my happiest adult recollections of her.
Over coffee and the soft French cheese that was one of her dietary indulgences, we spoke about my life, her new life in California, our careers as social workers, and the values we shared of seeking the truth, treating people fairly, and social justice.

But I was to make a crucial refinement in our family value of directly facing the truth. With the help of the psychoanalysis I undertook once I moved to San Francisco, I began to hold stating
emotional
truth as a central value, an addition to the family ethos that made both of my parents uncomfortable. Anita avoided her deepest emotions. She was well aware of her reserve and it sorely distressed her. And I was critical of her when she didn’t offer the comfort or reassurance I sought. Saul battled harder with all of his confusing emotions. Despite his lifelong inability to manage the effects of tender human feeling, it was at the core of my father’s being. Rather than fight my soft side, as my parents did, I eventually came to actively cultivate it in myself, to see its value in my life, and to use it in my work.

Luckily, when my graduate school studies ended and the draft approached, I secured a rare commission in the United States Public Health Service working in a hospital in San Francisco where I felt that I could serve returning casualties from Vietnam in good conscience. Anita said I had fallen into a
schmaltz gribble
, a Yiddish term for a sweet fat spot in life. Saul was relieved that I had avoided jail or Canada and was perfectly happy that I was living in San Francisco until it became clear that I had no intention of returning to Chicago.

The turmoil of the late sixties and its aftereffects on society and in academia caused a gradual though massive personal and political
shift in Saul that profoundly and permanently altered our relationship. Within the context of our family ethos I characterized the changes in him as political, though we rarely discussed electoral politics. The shift involved positions he eventually took in the battles over culture—demands for power by groups openly angry about their ongoing disenfranchisement. Its personal side involved Saul’s return to his Jewish roots in public and in private, along with a shift in generational attitudes I characterize as a reversal from the position of a rebellious son to those of a patriarchal father. In the dozens of arguments between us, and in long diatribes I endured, most often in private, the personal and the political seemed inseparable in his mind and in mine.

The outlines of reversals to come, of which Saul gave no verbal hint to me, can clearly be seen in
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
, his novel about blinding yourself and awakening to the full implications of painful truths. My father shared several forms of blindness with his narrator, Artur Sammler. Like Artur and many Jews, my father kept his eyes closed to the full horror of the Holocaust for two decades. But there were also forms of shared blindness that began well before the Holocaust: the prewar excess of optimism fed by a utopian ideology about the betterment of mankind; the excess vanity of talented young men lauded by their peers and friends; and the disavowal of their Jewish origins as the two ambitious men sought to widen their cultural horizons and gain acceptance.

My father rarely mentioned the Holocaust before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war broke out. But Saul immediately asked Bill Moyers, then publisher of
Newsday
, to secure him press credentials so he could cover the war as a journalist. After I called him
several times and got no answer, I learned that he was in Israel. When Saul returned, I was angry and complained about his disappearing without warning and exposing himself to such danger. His answer was simply “I had to go.”

Artur Sammler undertakes an identical journalistic assignment where firsthand exposure to the sights, sounds, and smells of war’s death and decay and to the threat of a second Holocaust via the destruction of Israel brings home to him, as it did to my father, the full horror of the Holocaust and of modern life as no political argument or logical construct could ever do.

The social nightmare to which Mr. Sammler awakens is the deterioration of New York, which Saul fears is a harbinger of man’s perilous future on earth as humans prepare to set foot on the moon. Saul’s causal explanation for the breakdown in social order was that the excessive hope and optimism about human nature he shared with radicals of his generation had grown like a cancer into the unbridled freedom of the late 1960s.

Anarchy on the street is mirrored by private forms of disorder, the breakdown of authority within the family that needs to be reasserted. Mr. Sammler takes a dim view of an often disobedient younger generation, favoring only those children who comply with his wishes. The extensive debt children owe their parents emerges as Elya Gruner, an overly indulgent father, lies on his deathbed. Outside his hospital room, Mr. Sammler pressures Elya’s daughter to apologize while she still can for the sexual transgressions that so upset her father. Perhaps more egregious is the heartless way Mr. Sammler nips his daughter’s love in the bud simply because he thinks the object of her infatuation will make a poor match, and that she complies with barely a whimper!

Some people become more politically conservative as they age and often rue their misspent youth. Others, like my mother and her older sisters, do not. But the solution implied in
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
, according to the newly minted “old Saul,” is a restoration of generational authority. In life, my father’s assertion of authority he hadn’t previously wielded ushered in friction and acrimony between the two of us that played out for the rest of his life. It was a decade after the publication of
Sammler
before the battle lines were drawn in the culture wars and before “old Saul’s” social pessimism took full hold of him. But I rebelled against Saul after his support for the younger generation, whose questioning of established forms of knowledge my father had advocated in life and in his novels, was replaced with demands for respect and compliance with elders who now knew what was best for everyone—elders who had drawn the United States into an immoral war.

I had not met Alexandra Bagdasar Ionescu Tulcea before she married Saul. An established mathematician when they met, Alexandra was born and raised in Romania. Her father, Dumitru Bagdasar, was a neurosurgeon trained in the United States by the famous Harvard neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing. Her mother, Florica, was a child psychiatrist. Her parents had met in medical school, and both walked the political tightrope between their dedication to patient care and their roles as health ministers in a totalitarian state.

Alexandra was born in 1935, and her father died when she was eleven. After Dumitru’s death, Florica, apparently as punishment for accepting help from the Allies during World War II, became politically persona non grata. Life for mother and
daughter became precarious. Alexandra then studied mathematics and married a former teacher. In 1957 her husband was offered the rare opportunity to participate in a special research program in the United States. The couple left for Yale University, determined not to return.