Saul Bellow's Heart (4 page)

Unlike Saul and Sam, Morrie hated to talk about the family’s past, but I have little doubt that my father’s portrait of Simon March, Augie’s older brother in
The Adventures of Augie March
, sheds light on the origins of Morrie’s cynicism. In this novel about life in America for first-generation Jews, Simon exemplifies how the hardness just under the veneer of the American dream can take its toll on an idealistic young man. In the book’s early pages, Simon is the high school valedictorian
and an Eagle Scout who fully embraces the myth that everything is possible if you subscribe to the nation’s values and try hard. His romantic notions of happiness are shattered after he falls in love but is disqualified as a suitor because he has insufficient wealth and status to suit his beloved’s family. Landing with a thud, Simon quickly absorbs the correct social lesson. Everything is possible in the good old U.S. of A. if you have the money.

Morrie suffered a similar romantic disappointment. The life lesson my uncle extracted was that warm sentiment, even of the kind exemplified by Lescha, was a sucker’s game. Whatever softness he may have had was kept hidden from the world, though it likely fueled his propensity for throwing his financial success in everyone’s face, particularly his baby brother’s. For decades Morrie called Saul a sap for letting the opportunities and benefits available in America pass him by. Even as late as my childhood, a trip to Morrie’s included a visit to his closet, from which my uncle would extract “old” suits and shirts and toss them on the bed. “You look like shit,” he’d say to Saul. “Take these.” And take them Saul did. Until I was a teenager, Saul’s dress shirts were monogrammed with MGB, Morrie’s initials.

Sam was successful at avoiding conflict with family, but he paid a high price. As a young man, Sam was accepted to medical school and was about to start when the family determined that he would go into the coal business. While my grandfather was the titular boss, Sam ran the business for decades and subtly kept his father in check. Lesha told me that he got up early and made sure to get to work before Grandpa because Sam did not trust his judgment. Under Sam’s direction the business continued to prosper. I remember visits to the coal yard in the early 1950s with my grandfather and uncle camped out around a
potbellied stove in a dreary, sooty wooden shack surrounded by a yard full of what looked like mountains of coal. Sam once said, likening himself to the mentally retarded brother in
Augie March
, “So I’m the dummy who stayed home.”

Jane’s special treatment continued in Chicago. She was given her own room and a fur coat, luxuries that irritated her brothers, since the always-contentious family assets were now lavished upon its marriageable daughter. Jane sacrificed a love match to marry my uncle Charlie, who had the one and only necessary qualification to be a son-in-law: a dental degree. Jane readily perpetuated Abraham and Lescha’s aspirations, becoming a middle-class wife and mother who emphasized appearance at all cost.

By the time Saul entered Tuley High School in 1929, the Bellows had lived in Chicago for five years. The coal business was providing a comfortable income and the family had moved to the affluent side of Humboldt Park. The Bellow children grew older and everyone in the family, with the exception of Grandma Lescha, expanded their horizons. In the narrow world of Lachine, Lescha’s old-world attitudes had held sway. But, as Saul’s poignant story of their trolley rides illustrates, in Chicago she was out of her element. In the 1920s, you could identify pharmacies by the large mortar and pestle that hung above the street entrance. On rides home, Grandma, who never learned to read or write English, prepared to get off every time she spied a mortar and pestle because there was one near the Bellow house. Saul had to tell her each time that they were not home yet, and she would sit down, only to rise again at the sight of the next one.

In Saul’s early teens, two contradictory forces exerted their pull. He was reading voraciously, spending his free time in
libraries, and soaking up books and ideas like a sponge. At the same time, he was lured by street life. When it came to street smarts, Saul’s friend Sam Freifeld had a huge head start on my father. Sam’s politically connected father, Benjamin Freifeld, owned a pool hall where the boys spent their free time. Benjamin, who was confined to a wheelchair, was a man who somehow mixed complex notions about life with a passion for life that Saul found appealing. My father told me that Sam’s father was the model for William Einhorn in
The Adventures of Augie March
, a man Augie describes as “superior,” who takes the impressionable lad under a protective wing and teaches him valuable life lessons.

Einhorn is the prototype for a series of men Saul called “reality instructors” who filled his life and his novels, men who either understood or purported to understand how the world works. Augie March, a young man hungry to acquire worldly knowledge, moves from one person’s scheme for living to the next. Throughout his life, my father also sought out advice when he could not understand or did not want to deal with what a writer’s life threw at him. Yet, despite relationships that often lasted for years, most of the “reality instructors” and the ideas they put forward sooner or later failed to satisfy. But Saul’s characterization of William Einhorn stands out because Einhorn cares deeply about Augie and offers the impressionable young man a model of thinking about living that goes beyond the abstract ideas from books that so disappointed in life application. Abraham also cared deeply about Saul, but an immigrant father could not offer him the lessons about life in America that his son desperately sought.

By 1932, the year of Saul’s high school graduation, the Depression
had tightened its grip on America. Radical political ideas became popular, particularly among Jewish immigrants who hadn’t been free to express their opinions in the Old World. The optimism spawned by Karl Marx, the Russian Revolution, and, most of all, the idealism of Leon Trotsky took hold of Saul and his friends. Saul’s commitment to left-wing ideas put him directly at odds with Abraham, who, despite experiencing the burdens of living under the czar, was dead-set against the communists. Bitter arguments, some over politics, erupted between father and son and continued to do so for decades.

The Humboldt Park neighborhood was on fire with a political consciousness that fueled left-leaning factions at Tuley High School. Saul attended rallies and debates, but he was never willing to commit wholeheartedly to any faction. Leon Trotsky’s
A History of the Russian Revolution
had just been published in English and was on sale at Marshall Field’s, a large department store in Chicago’s Loop. The book’s brisk sales caused concern for my father’s friend Rudy Lapp and his, presumably Stalinist, faction. In keeping with the politically passionate character of the times and the bitter rivalry between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists about the merits of expanding the revolution beyond Russia, Rudy’s comrades initiated a direct action by assigning him the mission of going downtown to steal the remaining copies, presumably to prevent them from falling into the “wrong” hands, which Rudy did with success.

In Humboldt Park and at Tuley High School, Saul was surrounded by a circle of brilliant young men who also honed their minds with intensely competitive verbal battles. First among these was Isaac Rosenfeld, who, at age thirteen and still in short pants, delivered an impressive lecture to the Tuley philosophy
club on Nietzsche. Even less worldly than Saul, Isaac was universally admired for his grasp of complex ideas and for a remarkable capacity to convey them with clarity. From the moment Isaac stood up and opened his mouth, he and Saul became fast friends, drawn together by a shared desire to penetrate life’s mysteries. Isaac went on to study philosophy at the University of Chicago and in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. He also read fiction and shared Saul’s ambition to write. Oscar Tarcov, a Tuleyite several years their junior, grew closer to Isaac and Saul after he arrived at the University of Chicago. Saul and Sam Freifeld were friends before they attended Tuley, but Sam’s passion for philosophical ideas lacked the necessary level of intensity to be taken seriously by Saul, Oscar, and Isaac.

The Tuley crowd was also sophisticated in literary matters. Somehow able to procure a banned copy of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Saul and his classmates quickly read the book and passed it from hand to hand. As soon as the ban on the book was lifted, a review was published in the school literary magazine, the
Tuley Review
.

Sydney Harris, later a syndicated columnist for Chicago newspapers, was a classmate who shared Saul’s love of literature. They spent their free hours absorbing books, reading to one another, and writing at the Harrises’ kitchen table. Mrs. Harris’s tolerance extended beyond giving the boys a place to write. Sydney, showing off to his pal, talked back to his mother with a rudeness that shocked Saul, as it would have gotten him the back of my grandfather’s hand. Eventually Saul and Sydney’s love of writing produced a joint effort, a work of fiction they thought worthy of publication. They concocted a scheme: one
of the boys would go to New York and get their book published. Sydney, the winner of the decisive coin flip, rode the rails east after swearing Saul to secrecy. Mrs. Harris was frightened by Sydney’s disappearance and naturally was suspicious of Saul’s complicity. Through the first round of questioning, Saul held his silence. However, after a few more days with no word, the police were brought in and Morrie, by now well connected to the Chicago police, seized the opportunity to terrorize his kid brother. Morrie told them that Saul was Sydney’s friend, and the police grilled him so hard that he eventually gave up the missing boy’s location. The book was never published, but the two remained friends and rivals for years. As high school graduation approached, Sydney confided to Rudy Lapp that Saul “did not have what it takes” to be a writer.

Saul joined the Tuley track team, an extension of his earlier effort to build up his physical strength. He trained by running around the lagoon in Humboldt Park. Even much later in his life, Saul still loved to run. In the late 1950s, he and I took to racing down Seventy-sixth Street in New York City. Beginning at the corner of West End Avenue, we’d start to sprint, skirting garbage cans, until we arrived, breathless, at the Tarcovs’ at Riverside Drive. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I could beat him.

On one of Saul’s visits to Rudy’s, Mr. and Mrs. Lapp, thinking Saul could not understand Yiddish, spoke about his appearance. Mr. Lapp noted that Saul was handsome, to which Mrs. Lapp retorted that the devil was also handsome. Her comment stung Saul deeply, as he felt that Rudy’s mother had seen evil in him. On a walk Saul and Rudy passed a streetside photo booth and Rudy decided they should have their picture taken. Saul,
unhappy with how his likeness came out, scratched out his face. Rudy, whose nickel had paid for the photo, insisted on keeping it and retained the picture for more than sixty years. Decades later, Rudy still did not seem to understand that Saul had effaced himself from the picture out of wounded vanity.

Vanity was something the men in the Bellow family shared, as they thought themselves handsomer and smarter than everyone else. This perceived superiority was often their self-entitled rationale for bending or breaking rules that displeased them. While Sam tempered his feelings of entitlement, Abraham, Morrie, and Saul ignored social convention and viewed people who held contrary opinions with barely veiled contempt. My grandfather routinely dismissed objections with a backhand wave across his face, accompanied by the expression “feh,” which meant, variously: I don’t agree with you; you are wrong; you are ignorant; you are full of beans (or worse); end of discussion. But as his authority over his four nearly grown children slipped away, my grandfather redoubled his insistence on compliance by loudly demanding respect. In reaction, Morris and Saul rebelled openly, while Jane and Sam quietly did as they pleased.

Lescha was diagnosed with cancer in the late 1920s. Despite a mastectomy, my grandmother’s cancer spread, and by 1932 it was clear that she was terminally ill. As his mother’s strength ebbed, Saul would come directly home after high school to be with her. Once, she confided to him that her husband had turned away from her sexually. By way of explanation, she exposed the mastectomy scars on her chest. During Lescha’s lingering illness, Abraham expressed unseemly interest in other women. When the shameful word got back to the family, Saul’s
anger about his father’s disloyalty to his mother boiled over in a terrible argument between father and son, though I doubt either mind was changed.

In her last weeks, Grandma was bedridden and medicated with a narcotic drip. Saul portrayed her lingering illness and the heartbreak in the Bellow household in “Something to Remember Me By.” The story ends after a young man successfully sneaks back into the house wearing a dress, the consequence of a prank played by his brother-in law’s friends. Relieved not to be discovered, he is still greeted by a wordless smack when his father comes home, a sign of relief from a man whose terminally ill wife has survived one more day.

Lescha died in February 1933 at the age of fifty-three. At the funeral, Saul, seventeen and already harboring literary ambitions, eagerly engaged a family friend in the newspaper business in a conversation about writing. The guest, who thought Saul showed insufficient respect for his mother, expressed his disapproval to Abraham, who later lit into Saul, shaming him for putting his literary ambitions above his grief. Over the years Saul would introduce Lescha’s early death into our frequent conversations about mortality with a grief as fresh as if he had just lost her.

Lescha’s death removed the last constraint on the self-interest brewing in the now firmly established Bellow family. Openly citing his unfulfilled sexual needs, Abraham set about finding a new wife. Saul and Abraham were both on the prowl and Morrie was dating Marge. As the youngest, my father rarely got to use the sole family car for Saturday night dates. Grandpa soon married a recently widowed woman we called Aunt Fanny, and in Morrie and Marge’s 1934 wedding photo Fanny sits in front
next to Abraham, holding the place of honor that Lescha would have occupied. Morris, claiming his marriage to be loveless, rationalized his choice by touting the investment capital Marge brought to the match. Jane married a dentist and began a family. Forced to abandon hopes of a medical career by his father, Sam married and stayed in the coal business. Saul’s version of Bellow family self-interest was to take another form, his singular pursuit of writing.