Saul Bellow's Heart (16 page)

By the mid-1970s she was a professor of mathematics at Northwestern and a divorcée. I am not sure whether Alexandra’s dissimilarities to Saul’s previous wives, including not being Jewish and having a deep commitment to her career, played a role in his decision to marry her. But he must have been unsure about his next step. Before marrying Alexandra, Saul made an impulsive proposal of marriage to Edith Tarcov. Mercifully, she declined.

When I learned about Alexandra’s career, one that required hours spent alone, immersed in her own form of abstraction, I hoped that her singular passion for mathematics would be a good fit with my father’s life as a writer. After they married, Saul brought Alexandra to California to introduce me to her. I was already married to JoAnn and had a baby daughter, Juliet. Saul was excited by the prospect of a new generation of Bellows and told me that Juliet made him feel part of the continuity of the human race. On subsequent visits, Alexandra and Juliet stole off to a local shopping center for hot chocolate and shopping sprees. Alexandra would hole up in a back room of our house for hours, and when she left the floor would be strewn with sheets of paper covered with abstract mathematical symbols. When I asked if she wanted them, she always said no.

Saul moved to Chicago’s North Side, where Alexandra owned an apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. Finding the space too confining, she bought the adjoining apartment, which allowed
them both to have studies where they could pursue their intellectual interests without distraction. Alexandra was a very private person. Saul, who prized his privacy while working, missed the companionship he had found in Hyde Park after his writing day was done. Saul joined Alexandra at professional conferences, but conversing with quirky high-level mathematicians was not sufficiently sustaining for him.

Maintaining a geographic distance from Saul was the first in what became a series of insulating layers that afforded me some protection from his demands for attention and control. When rural Vermont became a summer destination for Saul and Alexandra, we trekked there while Juliet was young. On the way to swim in a local pond, our three-year-old little girl joyfully bounded ahead of the grownups. Saul turned to Alexandra and called his granddaughter “a delicious little girl.” But sitting around all morning and keeping a lively child quiet while my father wrote and Alexandra did academic work reminded me of my childhood boredom. Eventually I balked at such family vacations and stopped making the effort, placing yet another barrier between us.

Saul put up barriers too, most often with critical judgments that upset me. On occasions when I felt strongly, however, I disagreed and even openly defied his wishes. When I married JoAnn in 1970, I invited all of the doting Goshkins and Saul, but none of the other Bellows—all of whom had ignored me during my childhood—to my small, self-financed wedding. Saul was sore as a boil and complained bitterly at having his family snubbed, being outnumbered by Goshkins, and seeing Anita happily settled in Los Angeles with Basil while he was between marriages.

But Saul always exerted more influence on me than I wished. More often than not, I went along with a man who always argued his viewpoints cogently. But by my late twenties I had tired of judging myself by his standards, although I was never completely free from being hurt by his displeasure, whether it was expressed, implied, or conveyed by others.

Saul had an amazing capacity to make his wishes crystal clear without saying a word. Mysteriously, he was, I believe, able to transform a desire to please others into a capacity to elicit behavior from them that pleased him. (Since I felt that pressure so often, I easily recognized it.) Usually people simply acted as he wished, but frequently they took the extra step of speaking for him without being asked to do so. Surrounded by a cadre of people all too willing to carry what were portrayed as his messages, my father protected himself from delivering bad news, from the danger of being directly refused, or from talking to people with whom he was angry. As a result, there was always a background “buzz” around him.

Unhappy with being on the receiving end of his indirect communication, I stopped his spokespeople in their tracks by insisting that I “accept no substitutes for my father.” My brother Adam was too young to take that option. During Saul’s long, bitter legal battle with Daniel’s mother, Susan, our father did everything he could to avoid speaking with her. When he wanted to talk to Daniel, he would call Adam to deliver the message that his father wanted to speak to him.

But my persistent father would not give up when thwarted. When rational argument and indirect communications failed, Saul destructively took to complaining about people behind their backs. Chronically irritated by my relative independence
from his influence, he complained about me to my brothers, my wife, and eventually my daughter. JoAnn had almost no relationship with Saul after she refused to listen to his complaints about her husband. But Saul had little use for a daughter-in-law who did not side with him. For years, Daniel defended me to our father, though my brother never specified the sin of which I was guilty. But I knew what it was: I had grown sufficiently far from Saul to have established an independent life. The messages my kid brother was to deliver were also thinly disguised cautions to Dan. He was not to follow in footsteps that led away from our father.

The apex of the convergence between fame and fortune occurred when Saul was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976. Anita sent him a telegram affirming her long-held faith in his talent. She added that she knew Lescha, Abraham, and Sonia Goshkin also would have been proud. I went to Stockholm for the Nobel festivities, which turned out to be a grand party. Our group was assigned a majordomo and a chauffeured limousine to get us to a host of receptions and celebrations. Saul and Alexandra had a suite in the Grand Hotel, and I had a room on the other side of their sitting room. Adam, then about twenty, and Dan, about twelve, shared a nearby room. Adam and Harriet Wasserman, my father’s literary agent, were chiefly responsible for keeping Dan under control, but he still managed to order a great deal of food from room service, which infuriated Saul when the bill arrived.

Morrie was a conspicuous absentee. I can only surmise that he could not abide being eclipsed by his kid brother. The rest of the Bellow party—Jane, Sam, Nina, Lesha, Lesha’s husband,
and their three daughters—were at the same hotel. Alexandra’s mother and her aunt were given permission by the Romanian government to attend.

Saul worked on his acceptance speech in the hotel for hours. He took the public forum offered by the award as an opportunity to deliver a message about literature as the gateway to man’s beleaguered soul. Quoting Joseph Conrad’s preface to
The Nigger of the “Narcissus,”
Saul read that art is an “‘attempt to render the highest justice to the visible universe.’” He continued quoting Conrad, saying that the artist appeals “‘to that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition … to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity … which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.’”

Saul contrasted the public attention to the monetary component of the Nobel Prize with the lesser interest expressed in his books as yet another symptom of the elevation of money over culture. Several times he complained about his privacy being invaded, as it was by the traditional St. Lucia ceremony, where a girl with a crown of candles entered their bedroom to serenade Saul and Alexandra. There is a very cute picture of Saul’s fellow Nobel laureate, the economist Milton Friedman, in pajamas looking out of his door to find the source of the singing. Later, my father told me the only thing he enjoyed about the week in Stockholm was a quick visit to August Strindberg’s study on his way out of town.

Just before we left for the ceremony, I told Saul how proud I was of him. The presentation ceremony, reception, banquet, and ball were elegant. The men were dressed in rented ties and tails, and I joked that I could have passed as a headwaiter at any
fancy restaurant. The recently crowned queen of Sweden, a former German beauty queen, far outshone the king, who for a moment stood alone during the reception. I felt a rough pull, was dragged over to His Highness, and was told to make conversation. Later, Count Something-or-other, the man who had grabbed me, apologized and explained that it was not seemly for the king to have no one with whom to speak. After the ball, Saul, Alexandra, and her mother and aunt were driven back to the hotel. The driver forgot to come back for the rest of us. With Sam’s whole family freezing and damp, I approached another limousine driver, who took us to the hotel. My father praised my taking care of them, calling it an act of family feeling, a phrase that he used as a remnant of immigrant life in Lachine.

My brief exposure to the full glare of fame had its pleasures, but I soon became outraged by it. As we entered an event, a reporter shouted a personal question at Saul. Without thinking, I blurted out, “My father’s books are in the public domain. He is not.” Alexandra, pleased, congratulated me on being “a fighter.” At one Stockholm reception, a pleasant man engaged me in what seemed like a friendly chat about families, mostly his. Across the large room a young woman was engaging Adam in a similar conversation. Two days later we found our unguarded comments in the Swedish version of
People
magazine. I was furious, but Saul merely cautioned us to watch what we said. I felt betrayed by the reporter’s dishonesty and was determined to keep my relationship with my father strictly private from then on. Adam, also distressed, had a set of T-shirts made up for the whole family that read NOBEL SAVAGES, in part a nod to a literary journal called the
Noble Savage
that Saul had edited
more than a decade earlier, but also to the savagery to which we were all exposed.

Saul had expressed concern that winning the Nobel Prize would impair his writing, as he felt the work of previous winners had dropped off significantly after the award. Ted Hoffman sent a letter of congratulation that touched on those fears, expressing a preference for the vitality, freshness, and curiosity of Augie March and Moses Herzog over the darkness of Artur Sammler. Ted told me he thought Saul had been carried away by his own fame. But Ted’s letter drips with envy and self-pity couched in faint praise. The letter hurt and angered my father, who ended his long friendship with Ted.

During the twelve-year span that began with the 1964 publication of
Herzog
and ended with the awarding of the Nobel Prize, the idealistic “young Saul” became the pessimistic “old Saul.” I cannot fully explain the changes that were brewing in my father.
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
hints at how the political tumult of the late sixties affected Saul, and
Humboldt’s Gift
addresses the downsides of the fame and fortune that reached a crescendo in Stockholm. From my viewpoint it was during these pivotal years that the optimism and hope I loved and admired in “young Saul” were buried under anger, bitterness, intolerance, and preoccupations with evil and with his death, which lasted for the rest of his life.

More than anything else I attribute the changes to disillusionment and disappointment—disillusionment that the Marxist ideas in which he had placed so much faith had become a rationale for murderous totalitarian dictatorships, and disappointment in the failure of art to transform the world into a less materialistic place, a place where the human solidarity of which
Conrad writes about might have nourished a second Renaissance.

But by then, nearing forty, I had to find a way to live with the “old Saul” who emerged in the late 1970s, a man who had lost his faith in the ability of collective action to better mankind and had adopted his father’s stance of paternal authority I found excessive. What I have come to see as a thirty-year cold war between my father and me was a struggle between two men with antithetical attitudes toward both social change and generational compliance who were also two men who loved one another and sought to keep their relationship alive.

“OLD SAUL”:
THE LITERARY PATRIARCH

Chapter Eight
A Failure at Spirituality: 1977–86

After the festivities in Stockholm, Saul was particularly fatigued in spirit when he returned to Chicago. Even the spiritual ideas of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher Saul had studied for a number of years, who held complex notions about the possibility of an expanded consciousness that continued after physical death, were proving insufficient to ward off his deepening pessimism.

Steiner claimed to be a clairvoyant and had developed a theory of an evolving consciousness that included individual and collective memories as well as past, present, and, most crucial to Saul, future lives. The possibility of
spiritual
self-improvement offered Saul a way to try to cleanse his soul, an antidote to the contamination wrought by fame and fortune. My father found little solace in organized religion, but he had a lifelong preoccupation with death. Steiner claimed that anyone who takes the time and effort to develop their faculties can gain such expanded capacities. In private, Saul put Steiner’s meditative techniques into regular practice for years. Steiner’s books were all over his apartment, left open and upside down, as if he had just paused after reading a passage.

At Saul’s recommendation I read a few of Steiner’s complex books and it became clear to me that the idea of the human soul returning, over and over, in a more refined state of enlightenment held a great appeal to a man left bereft and lonely after the loss of family and friends. As his interest in Steiner deepened, the phrase
inner life
came to be replaced by the human soul in our conversations, and he infused the term with a spiritual component that convinced me he had come to believe in the soul’s immortality. This made me uneasy; I was more comfortable with the idea of a self without transcendental aspects. However, unlike our other disagreements where my father tried to prevail, he was perfectly tolerant of my resistance. I always suspected that Saul’s uncharacteristic lack of argumentative ardor reflected his lingering doubts about spirituality.