Saul Bellow's Heart (18 page)

Saul’s objection to blacks and women who were agitating for a voice and a place at the table seemed to me an obvious parallel with the attitudes held within WASP-dominated departments of English about Jews in the 1940s. That he was capable of ignoring this parallel shows how angry Saul was and how the strife over power in academia had so gotten under his skin. By 1982, when he wrote
The Dean’s December
, his scorn had come to include the social and racial anarchy he thought had by then thoroughly infected society, and how political correctness had infected the universities.

I found Saul’s switch from the position of a rebellious son to that of a patriarchal father the most painful because it entailed a reversal of his attitudes toward authority and an accompanying pressure to conform that was to become a sore point for decades. Long gone was Saul’s tolerance of my adolescent back-talk, and an eight-year-old Adam was told “Honor thy father” after trying to speak up for himself. When my daughter Juliet attended college and graduate school on the East Coast in the 1990s, she visited her grandfather. Juliet was eager to engage
Saul in intellectual discussions, but he irritated her by repeatedly sidestepping her overtures to talk about art and culture and, instead, urged her to marry and start a family before she turned thirty.

Saul’s opposition to the younger generation’s social anarchy and lack of respect were hardened during a 1968 lecture he gave at San Francisco State, a campus ripped asunder during that tumultuous year. The event made its way, practically word for word, into
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
. After the lecture, a member of the audience shouted my father down, characterizing him as old, irrelevant, and impotent. I do not know which was worse for Saul: the attack on his virility, the discounting of his political relevance, or the fact that no one from the faculty came to his defense. Saul was deeply offended, and the sting stayed with him for years, crystallizing what was already a growing negative feeling about the thoughtless radical left and liberal academics who tolerated such insolence.

A friend who witnessed the scene told me that Saul seemed unable to parry the kind of attack that other academics had to learn to expect and to weather, letting the criticisms get under his skin, responding with anger, and counterattacking. Instead of the positive advocacy for the traditions of Western culture that was sorely needed, Saul’s blind anger led him to articulate sociopolitical positions so repellent that even I lost sight of our basic agreement about the value of what dead white men had to say about political life and human experience.

In 1987 Allan Bloom published
The Closing of the American Mind
, in which he argued that overly liberal attitudes had actually closed the American mind in the name of openness. After a careful reading, I found the book so closely paralleled views I
was hearing from my father that I considered it a joint intellectual venture by two friends who had grown ideologically close. Bloom put forth views that appealed to social, cultural, and political conservatives in the Reagan White House, and Saul did not protest being included among thinkers with whom he often agreed. When Saul and I discussed the book I expressed distress that it was filled with “aristocratic notions.” I took his silence about my characterization as tacit agreement and as a measure of the extent to which my father’s mind had closed to anything but “superior” forms of culture, an attitude that bordered on the elitism I found in Allan’s book that was the exact opposite of my understanding of “young Saul’s” views. Bloom went after his enemies in public much as Saul had to me in private, with venom, ridicule, and contempt designed to obliterate opposing views rather than to consider any potential worth in them or offering a contrasting position.

When “young Saul” became “old Saul,” my father changed from a young man full of questions to an old man full of answers. Virtually gone was Saul’s early optimism about making the world a better place. Worse, from my point of view, was the loss of his puzzlement about human nature, which I shared and treasured. “Old Saul” now took everything, including himself, so seriously that he lost the ability to laugh at himself or at the comic side of life’s contradictions. In earlier years, his pointed questioning of abstract solutions that offered little help to suffering human beings had seemed to me a form of leveling that brought great thinkers down to earth. My father was now siding with the thinkers he had once challenged, promulgating a set of answers and solutions to problems, both social and personal, that I found distinctly patriarchal, authoritarian, and hierarchical.
My gut impressions of Saul’s reversals—that what he was backing away from was the basic fairness of the family ethos with which I had been raised—never wavered. I was and remain saddened by the toll Saul’s disillusionment and pessimism took on him and on us.

In midwinter 1978, Saul and Alexandra hurriedly flew to Bucharest to help her gravely ill mother. Her parents had many former colleagues in the medical community, and Alexandra tried to pull strings in order to secure the help of the doctors her father had trained. The Romanian authorities were bent on making Florica and her daughter, who had escaped to the West, suffer. The government officials adhered to harsh bureaucratic regulations, refusing to call in specialists and limiting family visits. Alexandra’s mother died a few days after their arrival. Family and friends helped as much as they could, but it was a bitter experience. When they returned to Chicago, Alexandra fell into a state of nervous exhaustion, and it took months for her to recover fully.

The Dean’s December
is set in Bucharest, where Dean Albert Corde and his wife, Minna, go to help her dying mother. In the novel my father contrasts the brutality of the Romanian regime that makes it impossible for a woman to die with her family nearby against an equally ghastly series of events in Chicago, where political and social anarchy have eroded the social fabric. Contrasting what Saul called the hard nihilism of the Eastern Bloc and the soft nihilism of the West, he found little fundamental difference in the pervasive evil within human nature under a totalitarian government and in a political system where freedom had run amok.

Despite being in poor health, Basil, Anita’s husband, had ambitious retirement plans that included a desire to live at the beach and to travel. Anita was happy to stay in the home they had shared. Work, pottery, her garden, and walks with Basil along the beach they so loved were sufficient for her. Their differences became so pronounced that Basil rented an apartment near the Pacific Ocean, though he stopped by their home after his classes almost every day. At first Anita was upset, but she soon accommodated herself to living alone and to visiting us without her peripatetic husband.

Basil moved back into their home about a year later, but by then his energy and health had waned. In late 1984, he died of a massive stroke in mercifully brief seconds. When I told Saul about Basil’s death, he asked whether he should call Anita to offer his condolences. Unsure how she would react, my father feared stirring up Anita’s unrequited love for him. Unwilling to push my father to do something he really did not want to do, I left it up to him. He never called, though he should have.

Soon after Basil’s death, Anita and I sorted out her finances. She said that for the first time in her life she felt rich and asked me what she should do with the money. Referring to her fantasy about Saul’s fame and fortune after their divorce, I joked that she should buy herself a gold Cadillac and drive past Saul’s house. That was our final good laugh together.

A few years earlier, Anita had suffered a “silent” heart attack. Though she was not hospitalized, her heart had sustained damage. Basil had to force the usually stoic Anita to tell me about the attack. Within weeks of Basil’s death, my mother began an accelerating downward spiral of cardiac illness that soon took her life. A lifelong smoker whose heart was much weaker than
I realized, she could not be stabilized with medications, and surgery was impossible.

On her last day in the ICU, several of her closest friends and I took turns keeping her company. None of us could bear watching her die. There were tubes everywhere, including one that prevented her from speaking. From somewhere deep within me, the right words came. I thanked her for her years of devotion and expressed regret that we seldom spoke aloud about loving one another. I said I knew she loved me, and she nodded her head in vigorous affirmation. Rick and Jeanne Busacca, Basil’s children, each said a private goodbye to their stepmother of twenty-five years. After a brief flicker of green light on the monitors, Anita died. I sat alone with her before turning her body over to the hospital staff.

The next day Saul called. My father was at his absolute best as I sobbed into the phone. Saul’s tenderness was palpable as he said, “Come to Chicago. Your loving father will be waiting.” By then many barriers existed between us, but seeing me suffer always cut through to our fundamental emotional connection. After the loss of my mother, I could better understand Saul’s sensitivity to suffering and why death remained a constant thought. When Anita’s estate was settled, I tearfully told Saul I missed her so much that I’d gladly forgo every cent for just five minutes with her. “I know,” he said.

Three months after Anita’s death, Juliet and I went to Chicago to visit Alexandra and Saul. He asked for the details of Anita’s final illness, and commented that she had gotten “a quick ticket,” meaning that she did not linger or suffer. A few days before we arrived, my uncle Morrie had passed away, and my uncle Sam was on his deathbed in Chicago. The month before,
Saul had visited a terminally ill Morrie at his home in Georgia and offered to return on a moment’s notice. But Morrie was hours from death when his second wife, Joyce, called. Saul and his niece Lesha hurried to Georgia. When they arrived, Joyce said, “He’s in there,” indicating the next room, and both Saul and Lesha were shocked when they found only a jar of ashes. Saul had just returned from Georgia when we arrived, and as my shaken father sat next to Juliet, then about eleven, and stroked her hair, I watched as his granddaughter’s touch sustained him.

Sam’s prostate cancer had metastasized. He was at home but had stopped eating in order to speed death along. Nina was beside herself. Sam relented and asked for veal Marengo, one of his favorites. Nina insisted that no one tell him that Morrie had died, but Sam, no fool, had gotten the picture when his brother Saul and his daughter Lesha hurried out of town without explanation and when nobody gave him a straight answer when he asked after his older brother’s health. Sam died a few weeks later. He was buried in Israel, where he and Nina had lived for part of each year. With Anita, Morrie, and Sam dead, Saul and I were down in the dumps, but, he added, “at least we’re down there together!”

The three deaths were the beginning of the end for Saul and Alexandra. After the trip to Romania, her energy had returned, and it appeared to me that they spent a number of happy years together. I particularly remember how much he and I enjoyed explaining American idioms to her. They took a vacation in Spain and returned with elegant capes they wore to a family dinner at their favorite Italian restaurant, where as favored fans
of the Chicago Light Opera, Saul and Alexandra often joined the singers and their colorful director for postperformance meals that ran late into the night. During an academic semester they spent in Israel, Alexandra taught and Saul studied the Middle East in preparation for writing
To Jerusalem and Back
.

But the appearance of contentment papered over growing marital frictions. After summering in Vermont for years, they decided to build a vacation home. It quickly became a sore point when Alexandra did not take sufficient interest in the myriad construction decisions, placing those burdens on Saul. Lesha, who vacationed nearby, saw their marriage deteriorate into the same cold war of interminable silences that I had witnessed between Saul and Susan twenty years earlier. During their last few years together, Saul told me that Alexandra’s devotion to her career wore on him, but, as he did not want to go through another divorce, he claimed to be reconciled to living in a marriage that lacked warmth.

I do not know when Allan Bloom began meddling directly in Saul and Alexandra’s marriage, but he and my father loudly espoused views about gender roles so slanted toward men that they irritated the women who heard them. Alexandra was a professor of mathematics, a field dominated by men, and she was duly proud of her accomplishments. She found Bloom arrogant and came to resent his persistent claims on her husband’s favor. She was furious when Allan barged into their bedroom once when she had not finished dressing. Worse, both men trivialized her complaints and Allan made it worse by chalking up her anger to her “conventional attitudes.”

The fundamental incompatibilities between Saul and Alexandra are reflected in a scene from
The Dean’s December
. In the
first private moment between husband and wife after the funeral of Minna’s mother, they take a walk in the bitter cold. Though Minna has rejected Corde’s physical comfort, she seeks his help in understanding the flood of confusing emotions brought on by her bereavement. Corde knows it is impossible, but he tries to translate a lifetime of his attempts to understand the human condition into the scientific forms of thought Minna uses to understand the physical world. All too soon, his explanation begins to sound like a lecture. Minna, infuriated for a moment, soon comes to see that she has asked the impossible.