Saul Bellow's Heart (21 page)

Edith Tarcov, by then widowed, lived in a tiny apartment across the street from my aunts, and Saul continued to visit her regularly. Edith, who never really recognized my parents’ divorce, kept him apprised of the welfare of his “sisters-in-law,” as she called Anita’s sisters Catherine and Ida, and arranged for Saul to join them for a cup of tea, steeped, of course, in the old Russian fashion. Catherine took advantage of his visit to exact her revenge for Abraham’s snub almost fifty years earlier, when he had left a family lunch to take a nap; she noted that Saul “had certainly come a long way in life, considering …” Her meaning was not lost on Saul, who was wounded when reminded of that infamous postwedding lunch and the Goshkins’s judgment of his family as lowly and ill-mannered.

Several years later, my aunts joined my family for a week on Cape Cod. Catherine died soon after returning to New York. Ida, now living alone, thought that Edith Tarcov would outlive her and be a source of support. But Edith had poor lungs. When Beebee’s daily call was not returned, she let herself into Edith’s apartment to find that she had died alone. After the police came to Edith’s apartment, Beebee was unwilling to leave
her body until one of Edith’s children came. The officer told Beebee that the apartment had to be sealed for several days after the coroner removed the body. Beebee was concerned about Edith’s beloved African violets. “Who will water them?” she asked. The officer responded, “Get real, lady.” When I told Saul the story about Edith’s flowers, he went into his usual diatribe that Beebee was a “fey girl” who paid little attention to the real world. I countered in irritation that Beebee had always been devoted to me and, long ago, had been equally devoted to Saul and Anita. As far as I was concerned, I went on, Beebee was the woman who scoured New York markets to find fresh strawberries because she knew how I loved them and wanted to make sure they were available for my early-spring birthday celebrations. I never heard another bad word from him about her and wished I’d spoken up earlier.

After the deaths of Edith Tarcov and Ida Goshkin, Beebee began to suffer from a brain syndrome that caused a rapid deterioration in memory. Soon she had to have full-time care, and she died a few years later. When I called to tell Saul she had died, we shared a moment of deep sorrow, and he was pleased when I sent him a copy of the tribute I wrote, which her nephew read at her memorial service.

About ten years before his death, in a rare semiconfessional moment, Saul mused aloud about his family. The Bellow family contained, he said, a sadist (Morrie), a masochist (Sam) … Fascinated, I moved to the edge of my chair in anticipation of what he might say about himself, but his voice trailed off. I knew what should have come next, but he was unwilling to address his self-preoccupation or that of his sister.

Saul’s novels contain occasional refreshing outbursts of honest regret that contrast with the revisionism about the past that filled our conversations. Artur Sammler’s admission of having blinded himself to his true history by turning away from his Jewish roots is the most genuine of these novelistic confessions, since Saul actually did return to his Jewish roots after covering the 1967 war. In
The Dean’s December
, published ten years after his 1977 Jefferson Lectures, Saul’s narrator, Albert Corde, has long conversations with a high school friend and rival, Dewey Spangler. Spangler has become a journalist and a man of the world, while Corde seems to have drifted during a career that has culminated in his deanship. When Corde publishes two controversial articles laying out a dark vision of American life, generating a storm of protest, Spangler, a man all too familiar with both the pitfalls of writing about public matters and Corde’s youthful idealism, chastises his old friend for the obvious misstep of writing so boldly about public issues. In Spangler’s criticisms I see my father chastising himself for falling victim to the seductions of fame by making pronouncements in his Jefferson Lectures that went well beyond literature.

Charlie Citrine’s inability to rid himself of the contamination caused by the pleasures of fame and fortune closely parallels my father’s disappointment with himself and disillusionment with the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. But Saul’s curiosity about an afterlife and his quest for a path to immortality never stopped. In
More Die of Heartbreak
, Saul lodges in Kenneth Trachtenberg a deep knowledge of mysticism that may have paralleled Saul’s continued reading post-Steiner. And at moments Saul certainly appeared to have transferred his concerns from this world to the next. At a lecture in San Francisco, Saul
gave near the end of his life, he responded to an audience question about what happens after death with “It’s the only
real
question.” To me that comment dismissed equally important questions about living in this world, on which Saul appeared to have given up. And, in that light, I was not surprised when told that a well-worn copy of the New Testament was on Saul’s bedside table during his final illness.

But moments of self-doubt, tacit apologies, and even admissions of error by Saul’s narrators are not equally genuine, as his backward-looking novella,
The Actual
, reveals. Harry Trellman appears to be reconsidering his rootless life when he makes a proposal of marriage to his high school sweetheart, Amy Wustrin. He now insists that the sincerity of his love for her was genuine, even though in high school his life direction was already firmly set in his mind. But Amy, who knows better, challenges Harry, saying he was much more interested in high-flown philosophical ideas than he was in her.

And so, I believe, was Saul, who chose a life of singular literary purpose and a lifelong pattern of selfish conduct that he could neither deny nor completely bury. I fought his revisionism and held tightly to pleasant memories, but only later did I realize that I did so because I was far closer to Saul as a child than I was as an adult. Saul recognized the ill effects of the distance between us more clearly than I. He sent me the photo that became the dust jacket of this memoir inscribed on the back with words about father-son closeness, which for us was sadly long past. I keep that photo before me as I write, even today.

If burying our past were not enough, our relationship was further strained by my father’s discomfort and notable lack of
interest in the priorities I gave to my family and my career as a psychotherapist. Saul’s disinclination to introspection, no doubt something he considered a way to protect his creativity, always made him wary of my career. Saul maintained, with considerable pride, that he had decided to ignore his psychological problems. Long ago he had put his faith in willpower. Anita told me that Saul had overcome his extreme ticklishness by simply deciding to stop. As a child I often tested him and, sure enough, he never flinched when I tickled him. During our Paris years, Saul stopped smoking his pipe overnight when sores in his mouth were diagnosed as precancerous.

But a purposeful rejection of his personal weaknesses explained only in part his skeptical attitude toward what can be learned from looking inward to explain one’s motivations and behavior. He felt that neither of his therapies had been very helpful, and perhaps believed the opposite. He was taken with Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about emotion, but was never convinced by Reich’s foolish late-life ideas about orgone energy. Later however, Saul told Barley Alison, his British publisher, that Reichianism had precipitated his divorcing my mother. His analysis with the cerebral Dr. Meehl could only have compounded his suspicions about insights gained from therapeutic introspection. Saul ridiculed psychiatric overuse of interpretation in his novella
A Theft
. And, no doubt, he found Freud’s boiling down creativity to the sublimation of libido an offensive notion.

I found that psychoanalytic theory best encompassed the complexity I knew was also central to Saul’s view of man and thought an appreciation of the mysteries of human nature was central to the common ground between us. After positive experiences
as a patient, unlike Saul’s, I found introspection to be a valuable form of facing emotional truth, for my patients and for myself. I came to see the unconscious as a personal asset and an ally in my work, but it made Saul uneasy. He was interested in a psychology that explained behavior that was contradictory or mysterious only if it contained a comprehensible logical thread. Once, Saul was puzzled when a friend’s marriage fell apart after the death of an adult child under suspicious circumstances. In a rare exception at odds with his usual lack of interest, he asked me why the parents were acting so savagely toward one another. I explained that, in their grief, they could not afford to blame the child and took their anger out on each other. Satisfied with an explanation that melded the inner life with rationality, Saul thanked me without further comment.

Saul’s antipsychoanalytic views softened a bit after he read the book I gave him by Heinz Kohut, whom he had consulted briefly at Susan’s insistence as their marriage deteriorated. Kohut’s theories on the self were an alternate psychoanalytic theory I found sufficiently appealing to make it the subject of my doctoral thesis. His ideas appealed to Saul and became part of our debate about the differences between a “human soul,” which included a spiritual dimension, and an “inner self” I limited to the secular realm.

I have wondered if Saul’s dislike of my career stemmed from a fear that I could see through the barriers he took such pains to cultivate with everyone. Perhaps on some level he anticipated that I’d use my understanding of him in a public account. No matter the causes of our disagreements about psychoanalysis, we simply stopped discussing the value of introspection.

I was unhappy about Saul’s distance from my family. He
never got along with my wife after she refused to listen to his complaints about me. Though he expressed excitement about becoming a grandfather, Saul showed little desire to spend time with Juliet or Andrew on our visits to Chicago, where all of the grandparents lived, unless I accompanied them. His trips to California were not to visit me or my family per se. He usually arranged to deliver a lecture or attend a large public event in his honor and then tacked on a few days with us, during which he complained about not receiving the same kind of grand receptions from us that he got from his lecture hosts.

Neither of my children grew close to their grandfather, and in acknowledgment of his scant attention, I told them when each turned eighteen that their relationships with Saul were in their hands. Juliet had hurt her grandfather’s feelings by choosing Columbia over the University of Chicago, but when Saul and Janis moved to Boston, Juliet, encouraged by her uncle Adam, traveled there several times in hopes of cultivating her own relationship with Saul. These visits were often unpleasant for Juliet, as Saul vacillated between complaining about family members and peppering her with questions about Andrew’s lack of interest in academic subjects. When she began to date Charlie Schulman, her future husband and a longtime friend of my brother Dan’s, Saul took to grilling both Juliet and Charlie about Dan’s welfare rather than expressing interest in their lives.

I knew how engaging Saul was and how much fun he could be with children. I had hoped the attention he lavished on me as a child would extend to my children, and while I was not thinking about it consciously, perhaps I hoped that the closeness that had waned between us would be revived through
Juliet and Andrew. I was never sure if his reticence was a sign of resentment that my energies were not directed toward him or a reflection of his own fatigue with parenthood after raising three sons.

With our relationship at its lowest point, I took to visiting Saul in Boston by myself. Occasionally our emotional bond would reassert itself spontaneously. I was a mediocre student in college, but when I received my doctorate in clinical social work in 1981, Saul, on a visit to California, was moved to tears and said, “My Herschele [a diminutive of my Yiddish name] got a Ph.D.”

More often than not, however, I had to make deliberate efforts to keep our tattered connection alive. Saul loved to build fires, and even in summer he took the chill off the Vermont mornings with a bright little blaze. As he aged, I began to think of my efforts to reestablish a now-elusive closeness as stirring up fireplace embers that grew dimmer every year as we fondly remembered a familiar cast of characters from both sides of the family and a long list of friends.

During the first years of their marriage, Janis was friendly toward Saul’s sons. She asked after our children and correctly took no maternal role with me, as I was about fifteen years her senior. Certainly Janis owed us no debt, and perhaps she was put off by our initial resistance to their marriage. But there was a level of restraint that had been absent in my relationships with Sasha, Susan, and Alexandra, who made efforts to get to know me apart from my tie to Saul. Sasha and I had grown close. Susan was pleasant to me, and Alexandra acted as another grandmother to Juliet.

All three sons were used to our father remarrying. We lived with different mothers and had custody arrangements that resulted in rarely having to share Saul with one another. I was thirteen when Adam was born and in college when Dan arrived, circumstances that muted sibling rivalry. We each had time alone with Saul, who found ways to show his love for all three sons. Now grown, we were more than willing to cede Janis the primacy in Saul’s affections she appeared to desire. But I believe she misunderstood that we had become used to sharing his love with each other and with each new wife. Janis also seemed not to understand that all three sons were used to taking his chronic complaining about us when irritated in stride—knowing it would soon blow over.

During Saul and Janis’s first years together, they traveled to a number of public events in the United States, Europe, and Israel. They moved to Boston to be nearer the recently completed Vermont house, where old friends like Vicki Lidov Fishman and Zita Cogan and new ones like Stanley Crouch and Martin Amis visited. Now that Saul and Alexandra were divorced, Allan Bloom was once again a welcome figure in Saul’s home.