Saul Bellow's Heart (22 page)

When you are as different from your fellow men as Saul, it is natural to be drawn to someone like Allan Bloom, with whom he shared personal, intellectual, and political views. Allan’s deep knowledge of Plato’s ideas about the soul, his study of Romanticism, and his inveterate matchmaking sufficiently endeared him to Saul that my father overcame a lifelong aversion to homosexuals and even added Allan to his long chain of reality instructors. My visits with Saul became less frequent during these years, and I never met Allan, but his influence loomed
large. Saul’s last work,
Ravelstein
, is a magnificent memoir of Bloom, barely disguised as a novel, so filled with actual events, feelings Saul shared, and matters the entire family spoke about that I take the book as largely a work of nonfiction.

Bloom and Saul taught courses together on Flaubert and Stendhal, whose romantic novels revolve around characters who extend themselves to achieve capacities they once only imagined. Allan illuminated these expansive notions with discussions of the power of Eros and Plato’s explanation of the yearning between the sexes. According to Plato, men and women were once physically united and their long-lost union underlies their mutual attraction.

The ability to move beyond one’s personal limitations and the attraction between man and woman merge into what I call Bloom’s love formula: the plausible rationale he offered Saul when his optimism about love was at its lowest. As Saul’s marriage to Alexandra was failing, Allan challenged his friend to overcome his misgivings and to try love once more. Janis was also captivated by Allan’s ideas about the transformative power of love and by the idea that there is a perfect match out there waiting to be made. Surely, such a bright, well-educated woman needed a reason to justify marriage to a man who would leave her childless and a young widow. And that reason, the truest love for Saul, swept away fears of her future.

At seventy and recently divorced for the fourth time, it is no wonder that my father was cautious about love. Saul wanted to look carefully before leaping into another marriage, especially one so tinged by imbalances that his self-interest was too transparent to deny. I expected that my father, after following so much bad advice over a lifetime, would have been able to kick
the reality instructor habit. But, like his advice-giving predecessors, Bloom sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. His advice about love was good enough for Saul to put his faith in a gay man dying of AIDS. Ignoring a lifetime of lambasting similar romantic notions he decried in Beebee, my father opted to let Bloom ply his philosophical wares and followed his advice because it offered a rationale to divorce Alexandra and marry Janis.

Bloom’s theories are manifest in the wisdom of Abe Ravelstein, the novel’s title character, who has it all figured out—history, politics, philosophy, money, and the relationship between the sexes, to mention a few subjects. Why shouldn’t Chick, the novel’s pseudo naive narrator, allow Abe to instruct him in matters of love? After all, Abe has already made an assessment of Chick’s problem with women: what he calls Chick’s nihilism is insufficient to allow him to recognize and accept the love Rosamund feels for him. Abe thinks that Chick is so constrained by knots of conventional morality that he cannot take the necessary, though self-interested, steps that would make him happy, dumping his wife, Vela, for Rosamund. Abe argues that Vela is insufficiently feminine. There is no cooking, no loving, too much independence, and not enough warmth in the marriage. Abe thinks it’s no wonder Chick’s soul is in a state of need. Furthermore, Abe will have none of his friend’s self-denial and urges Chick to say to himself, “To hell with convention. The woman loves you. Go for it.”

Saul’s two dearest friends, Isaac Rosenfeld and Allan Bloom—the men who understood him most fully, represented by two literary characters—make an identical and wholly accurate assessment
of my father. Isaac as King Dafu and Allan as Abe Ravelstein realize that their complementary characters, Gene Henderson and Chick, both suffer from an inability to give and take love freely. I believe that to have been Saul’s greatest personal flaw, and through the mouths of Dafu and Abe, my father seems to agree.

Saul demanded more from family than he gave. As witness to all of his marriages, I saw that my mother, her successors, and all three sons expected more attention and emotional support than my father could provide. Our hard edges were rightly sharpened by disappointment, but Saul could give no more.

However, Allan Bloom’s formula fueled a genuine love and a long marriage between Saul and Janis. Despite my initial reservations, their relationship stands apart. There is no doubt that she broke through the icy cold to which Saul had resigned himself after his marriage to Alexandra failed. And, I would add, Janis is unique in maintaining that she does not suffer from the disappointments other family members feel.

I have concluded that Saul’s observation about love in
Ravelstein
holds the key. Matters of the heart should not to be second-guessed by “objective” outsiders, including myself, who thought Janis’s love was overly selfless. As far as my father was concerned, her love was “just the ticket,” as he used to say when highly pleased.

Chapter Ten
Saul in Decline: 1994–2005

Saul almost died during the Thanksgiving weekend of 1994. A winter trip to the Caribbean intended to cheer my father, who was still grieving Allan Bloom’s 1992 death, went totally wrong. Saul’s fictionalized account in
Ravelstein
closely matches the whirlwind chain of events as I understand them: a warm swim, a toxic fish at dinner, confusion over a man who was very sick, a flight to Boston, an ambulance ride to the emergency room, more confusion, and a life almost lost several times during his first night in the hospital. Dan, Adam, and I soon joined Janis in Boston. Saul’s diagnosis remained uncertain and he lay in a medically induced coma as day after day passed and we sat in his hospital room, analyzing each new tidbit of medical news. Janis, saying that Saul would want a full report when he awoke, took notes on a large yellow pad.

All but the most pressing practical considerations were blotted out. Our tiny world was like a series of concentric circles that surrounded and protected him. In the innermost ring was Saul, protected by Janis. She was in a complete state of exhaustion after staying up for days, and her health worried the nurses and the three of us. But Janis refused to go home, claiming she
needed nothing but a toothbrush and a few clean T-shirts. The next ring held Dan, Adam, and me; we agreed our primary job was to protect Janis and Saul. Once the news of his illness got out, that job expanded to keeping people who were worried about him informed but at bay. Lesha wanted to come to Boston but agreed to settle for phone calls several times a day. She, in turn, kept the rest of the Bellow family up-to-date.

The ring beyond immediate family included his agent, Harriet Wasserman, his lawyer, his friends, and his colleagues. Harriet, who had recently recovered from her own serious medical problems, was convinced that only the doctor who had saved her life could save Saul’s. She pressed to come to Boston even before I got there, but Adam and I knew Harriet’s meddling would upset Janis. We tried to keep her occupied with a chore: securing some ready cash for Janis, who, it turned out, did not have access to Saul’s bank accounts. But Harriet soon started hounding me again and would not agree to stay in New York until I lost my temper and she relented.

As I sat by Saul’s bedside on what would have been Anita’s eightieth birthday, Janis played a CD of Handel’s
Water Music
, a composition that always reminded me of the good times during my childhood. I burst into tears and ran out of the room as the impact of having lost one parent and the possibility that I’d lose the other hit me. When I returned I explained my tears to a sympathetic Janis. While Saul was still in a coma, another loss occurred. I received a call from my wife telling me that George Sarant, Isaac Rosenfeld’s son, had died of a fatal heart attack, much like the one that had killed Isaac almost forty years earlier. With my emotions already worn thin, I could not remain sitting in a hospital room. I needed a break and went to New
York, where my daughter, Juliet, then a college student, and Beebee sustained me for several days. I made sure that my visit allowed me to attend the memorial service for George. After Saul’s failure to attend Isaac’s or Oscar Tarcov’s funeral, I was determined to ensure a Bellow was present this time.

Janis and I talked about how to tell my father, knowing that the news of George’s death would devastate Saul, who would awaken frail and weakened. I needed to hold off telling him until Janis told me Saul was strong enough to tolerate such a blow. But about two weeks after my return to California, I became concerned that one of his visitors would let slip that George had died. After consulting with Janis, I called to deliver the awful news. In one of our most painful yet binding moments, tears flowed on both ends of the phone after Saul’s wail of pain as he learned that Isaac’s son had died just like his father had.

As Saul was about to be wakened from his induced coma, Janis made it clear that she was in charge and, despite appearances, had the strength for the job. After two weeks of sitting in his hospital room, hanging on every medical detail, sharing concern for Saul’s welfare, and cooperating in the plan to tell Saul that George Sarant had died, I had no reason not to trust Janis. I told her that I had no wish to be burdened with his physical care or to make decisions. Silently I thought that a man who had left three sons in the custody of their mothers could not expect to call on those sons to care for his day-to-day welfare. And my conversations with Saul about Alexandra’s inability to take care of him and about the sacrifices Janis would make by marrying him showed how well he understood the need to bank on someone other than us during the years when he feared, correctly, he would be in decline.

I ardently hoped that nearly dying would change Saul into a man glad to be alive and desirous of improving our tattered relationship. Not so. After several months dominated by reports of Saul’s returning strength, Lesha visited with him in Vermont. With Janis sitting quietly by, Saul, in a rage at his sons, told her that while he was in a coma, Adam, Dan, and I expressed a desire for our father to die so that we could inherit his estate. Lesha shot back, “That’s ridiculous, the boys came to Boston to help.” Further angered, Saul challenged Lesha to check it out for herself if she didn’t believe him. Shocked and frightened by the damage that could result, Lesha called me. Angry about a report I knew to be false, I grudgingly repeated the entire chronology that I had relayed to her over the phone from Boston while Saul was in a coma.

Lesha and I speculated whether Janis could be the source of Saul’s information. No one but she and his three sons were present. And Janis had taken notes throughout those days because, she said, Saul would want to be fully informed when he awakened. As well, both of us knew that touching on filial greed and parricidal wishes elicited the most powerful of forces in the Bellow family—the specter of Abraham’s chronic threats to disinherit his children, along with images of King Lear and the hated father Karamazov.

I never questioned Janis’s love or devotion to Saul. However, I have come to believe that after caring for a husband in a weakened condition for six months and the prospect of having to do so perhaps for years, Allan Bloom’s notions about making sacrifices purely for love no longer proved a sufficient rationale. Based on a series of actions taken over the next months and years that, in my mind, amounted to a coup d’état, I can
only presume Janis had come to feel a need to go beyond ensuring her primacy in Saul’s affections to exert a level of control that expanded well past his daily life to include financial, legal, and literary decision making. Her actions could have easily driven a powerful wedge between Saul and his sons, but had the opposite effect on my father and me.

I did not mind honoring Janis’s authority by fading further into the background than I already had. What I did mind was being demonized when my brothers and I had tried to protect Janis and our father while both were so vulnerable. I remained incensed at his accusation of malice and greed which followed on the heels of what appeared to be Janis’s friendliness and cooperation, and my accession to her status as Saul’s caretaker.

Eighteen months later, when Saul had recovered most of his strength, I visited him in Boston determined to clear the air. I said that I wanted to speak with him about what had transpired during his illness. Saul interrupted with an apology for not remembering that I was in Boston while he was in a coma. “Hard as I’ve tried, I can’t remember a thing, and everything I know about what happened comes from Janis.” I told Saul I didn’t expect him to remember me but continued by asking whether he believed I was “sitting around in the hospital waiting for him to die so I could get my hands on some dough.” “No, we don’t have that kind of relationship” was his immediate response. My father was alluding to my thirty years of financial independence, which had spared us the arguments over money that had so plagued the other branches of the Bellow family.

My question whetted Saul’s curiosity, as the rumors about Janis’s state of mind must have reached him. In response to his
question, I described the concentric circles around them and how Janis had protected Saul for days on end with little sleep and eating almost nothing. I continued, “Lord knows what she went through, but it must have been hell. In a crisis like that everyone is affected, but I’ve learned never to draw any permanent connotations from how people act when under duress.” Saul, in his usual response to having received a satisfactory explanation, was silent.

A decade later, Zachary Leader, a new biographer for Saul who had been selected by Janis, shed a clearer light on her behavior toward me and Lesha during and after Saul’s illness. According to Leader, a biographical source had told him that Lesha and I had hatched a secret plan to declare Janis legally incompetent, strip her of her control over Saul, and take him to Cincinnati to be near his sister, Jane. Leader asked Adam and Dan about the plan. Of course they knew nothing of a nonexistent plan to disenfranchise Janis and essentially kidnap Saul. Until that point, I had not been willing to discuss my father with Leader, but my brothers were so distressed by his questions that they insisted I speak freely with the biographer about the matter. After denying a story about events that were never contemplated, let alone discussed, I asked Leader about his source for such a wild idea. He refused to identify the person other than assuring me that it was not Janis. I took the opportunity to caution Mr. Leader about the credibility of anyone who would spread such a story without evidence and added that my brothers and I had been similarly maligned and remained sensitive.