Saul Bellow's Heart (5 page)

Saul graduated from high school midyear and went to a junior college for one term. In the fall of 1933 he enrolled at the University of Chicago and moved to nearby Hyde Park. Deeply depressed, with a vague sense that academia was not what he needed, Saul could not do much schoolwork. He read mostly what pleased him, played pool in the Reynolds Club, and got poor grades. In Hyde Park Saul met young people with unconventional attitudes and behaviors to match, including Beatrice Freedman, who was affectionately called Beebee. Though my father had yet to meet my mother, Beebee was the cousin and childhood playmate of Saul’s wife and would become a big part of our lives.

Beebee was taken with romantic notions, unconventional behavior, and a flair for the dramatic; she danced, painted, and put her cash in the icebox because, after all, it was lettuce. Saul loved to tell of a long conversation on the icy porch of her boardinghouse where she, oblivious to the cold, stood in her bare feet. He used that story, and others about her fruitless attempts to instill creative interests in her first husband, to show how little attention Beebee paid to the real world. In later years, when Saul became critical of women with excessively romantic views, he called her a “fey girl,” a pejorative term he
applied to women who affected imaginary notions to excess at the expense of reason.

Morrie and Marge moved to the South Side of Chicago, close to where Saul lived during the two years he spent at the university. Saul would come over to dinner and then retire to another room to read Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
. Marge was puzzled that Saul could spend so much time reading just
one
book. My father later said, “What was I supposed to do, go back into the other room and play gin rummy with Morrie and his political cronies?”

During Saul’s sophomore year, one of the employees of the Carroll Coal Company was killed on the job. My grandfather had failed to pay his accident insurance premiums and the policy had lapsed, so the death caused a financial crisis that forced Saul to move home before his junior year. Depressed and without academic direction, Saul was floundering at the University of Chicago. On his long El rides to campus on the South Side, Saul went over Balzac or Tolstoy sentence by sentence to see if he could improve on them, often telling me that he was giving himself writing lessons that no academic training in literature could rival.

Adding to Saul’s malaise was Abraham’s open skepticism about of how his son’s pursuit of literature might be put to a practical use. He pressured his youngest son to abandon college for the steady income of the coal business. When Saul resisted, Abraham derided him and his bookish friends with a vicious tongue. In a letter to Oscar Tarcov, Saul repeats Grandpa’s claim to have read the great writers like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in Russian, but accuses him of not understanding the literary intent of fiction that was so important to Saul and his lateadolescent friends.

In preparation for a planned transfer to Northwestern in the fall of 1935, Saul took summer school courses at Chicago and continued to commute. For weeks he admired a beautiful young woman who also rode the El every morning before finally gathering the courage to approach her. A transfer student from the University of Illinois at Urbana, Anita Goshkin had moved home (after her father’s death pinched her own family’s finances) and was also commuting to summer school. Their first date included a swim in Lake Michigan near the university. That fall, Saul enrolled at Northwestern but continued to see Anita, who kept commuting to Hyde Park, where she quickly warmed to its atmosphere of left-wing political activity and to Saul’s friends.

The Goshkin family had emigrated from Crimea after the pogroms that followed Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1905. My maternal grandfather, Morris, left first and settled in Lafayette, Indiana, near members of his extended family. In 1908 my grandmother Sonia arrived at Ellis Island with their four children. My mother was born in 1914 and named Anita after Sonia’s sister, a nurse who had died from an infected needle. Anita was a menopausal baby. When she was born, her brother Jack was nineteen, her sisters Catherine and Ida were sixteen and fourteen, respectively, while her brother Max was ten.

Morris’s father, called Beryl Moshe by the family, lived in their home during Anita’s first five years. Great-grandfather Goshkin had a big white beard and looked distinctly Asian, as did Morris and, to a lesser extent, Anita. His unworldly appearance and “old Russian” habits like spitting to ward off evil spirits made a deep impression on the imagination of Anita and her
cousin Beebee, whose family lived nearby and visited often. An irritation to Sonia, who had to tolerate the spitting and keep a kosher home while he was alive, Beryl Moshe often went with Anita down the street to buy candy or to a nearby park. Because he was growing a little addled, Ida later joked that no one was sure who was taking care of whom, Beryl Moshe or four-year-old Anita.

Sonia Gadaskin Goshkin came from a family that educated its boys
and
girls. A woman with liberal ideas and a forceful personality, Sonia insisted that her children, particularly her daughters, pursue good educations. Her husband, Morris, was quiet, kind, and gentle. A milkman, he arose at 3:00 A.M. so he could deliver fresh dairy products to Lafayette households before breakfast. Later, the family milk business expanded to include an ice cream store. When Morris retired in 1931, my grandparents and Anita, aged sixteen, moved to Chicago, where several Goshkin children lived and where my grandfather would pass away three years later.

My uncle Jack married a woman named Ina while he was away at college and fathered a son, Jack Jr., my only Goshkin first cousin. But Sonia did not approve of Jack’s gentile wife. Pressured by his domineering mother, Jack divorced Ina and returned to the family home after completing law school. He lived there for twenty years until he passed away from cancer in 1946, at fifty-one. Catherine and Ida attended college in the 1920s, and both later earned master’s degrees in library science. So fierce was their independence that neither married. They proudly retained the title of “Miss Goshkin,” correcting anyone who tried to address them with the politically correct “Ms.” when that title came into fashion. Both worked in public
libraries and enjoyed years of retirement in New York. Max became a machinist and lived in the family home until he married a piano teacher of great cultural pretension. Like Sonia, Esther Berger Goshkin ruled her household. She and Max moved to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, ostensibly for her health, but more likely because Esther wanted to substitute her influence on her husband for Sonia’s.

During the summer of 1932, Anita’s seventeenth year, the three sisters and their cousin Ethel took my uncle Jack’s Hudson for an extended camping trip to as far west as Yellowstone Park. In the early years of the Depression, it was incredibly risky for four unaccompanied women to be driving around the country, let alone camping. Anita, one of two who could drive, took so much pride in the adventure that for the rest of her life she carried a picture in her wallet of the four campers in front of the Hudson.

Anita’s family was filled with socialists and deeply committed to left-wing causes. She became involved with a Trotskyite circle at the University of Chicago and proudly told of the night she and Oscar Tarcov were arrested after a pro-union demonstration near a steel mill and spent a night in the Gary, Indiana, jail. In those days politics ruled every part of one’s life, including one’s love life. Oscar, a Trotskyite, dated a girl who belonged to a Stalinist group. Both factions ordered the romance terminated, and, after a final steak dinner, the couple complied.

According to Saul, Anita was the only woman to participate in Trotskyite debates until Celia Kaplan joined the group when she and her husband moved to Hyde Park in the early 1940s. Celia’s husband, Harold “Kappy” Kaplan, told me that the men were interested in debating the fine points of theory, while
Anita always turned to the practical issue of direct action. Decades later, when she took me to an admissions interview at the University of Chicago, my mother proudly led me to the spot in the lobby of the Social Science Building where she had sold more than one hundred copies of the Trotskyite magazine
Soapbox
in an hour. Saul wrote articles for the magazine.

By 1936 Saul and Anita were both living on the North Side of Chicago, dating frequently, and often dancing at the Aragon Ballroom on Lawrence Avenue. One Saturday night Saul borrowed the car and his father’s suit. Quite a fuss ensued when the box of condoms Abraham found in his jacket pocket made it clear that Anita and Saul were having sex.

Saul hit his academic stride at Northwestern, where he completed his B.A. cum laude with majors in English and anthropology, but he also got a taste of anti-Semitism in Evanston, where he was turned down for a date by a sorority girl because he was Jewish. There were few Jews on the Northwestern faculty, but the anthropology department was a bit more open to them. Saul studied with Melville Herskovits, who supported his application to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin.

In the fall of 1937, Saul began graduate school in Madison, where he shared a room with Isaac Rosenfeld. During the few months he spent there, Saul sent his shirts home to be laundered by Aunt Fanny, who put five dollars in a shirt pocket before she sent them back. Saul was miserable. No doubt he missed Anita, who began her program at the School of Social Work at the University of Chicago that semester. Saul also fought with his father, who could understand college but drew the line at graduate study as an impractical waste of time and money. Mostly, Saul was disenchanted with anthropology. One
of his professors recognized his passion for writing, commenting that his papers had the flavor of short stories rather than academic exercises. My father returned to Chicago for the Christmas break and never returned to Madison. Saul and Anita joined their friends Herb and Cora Passin and eloped on New Year’s Eve, 1937. The double marriage ceremony was “festively” capped off by dinner in a Chinese restaurant. Isaac was charged with sending Saul’s clothes and books back to Chicago.

Saul was beset with a dilemma. He did not want to comply with Abraham and go into the coal business, academia held no further interest, and he felt an intense desire, though it is hard to say exactly how well formed, to write. There is a hint of how early Saul had decided to fulfill his literary ambitions in his late novella,
The Actual
. At seventy-plus, Saul’s central character, Harry Trellman, belatedly proposes to his high school sweetheart, seeking to correct what he now claims to be the error of rejecting the middle-class life Amy Wustrin represented. Amy, however, correctly reminds Harry that at eighteen he had convinced himself of the necessity of living an unconventional life in order to fulfill ambitions that were well enough established to overrule his affection for her.

Saul’s choice to pursue a literary life was his version of the epidemic of self-interest that took over the Bellow family after Lescha’s death. In contrast to the mutual sacrifices of family life in Lachine, I believe Saul came to feel that he and the Bellow famil
y
had lost the paradise of innocence after a decade of material success in Chicago.

The losses were multiple. First was his mother. Then his home: eighteen-year-old Saul could not live with his mercurial father and his new wife. But the most important loss was the
absence of communal interest Lescha had engendered, a loss that was not fully apparent to Saul until Abraham’s death twenty years later. While his father was alive, Saul still hoped to penetrate Abraham’s mask of family civility and reach the love he sought. But what my father had hidden from himself was that his father hated his softness and vulnerability. When Grandpa died in 1955, my father’s losses came to include the false innocence he had created as a young boy when he elevated a father brought low by failure to the status of a hero.

Nowhere is the loss of innocence clearer than in
Seize the Day
, which Saul wrote soon after his father’s death. The narrator, Tommy Wilhelm, aspires to be an actor despite being ill suited to a profession where one must hide one’s feelings behind the traditional theatrical mask. Dr. Adler, Tommy’s father, is a better actor than his son—a man of consummate emotional control. A desperate Tommy makes one last desperate try to penetrate Dr. Adler’s social façade and touch his heart by tearfully attributing the end of family life to his mother’s death and by accusing Dr. Adler of feeling relief at her passing. Caught out in his lack of feeling, Dr. Adler still gives no quarter, offering only platitudes. Tommy, after failing once again to elicit a human response from his father, asks himself if he has falsely sentimentalized the past. Anticipating a future stripped of illusion, Tommy needs to mourn his compound losses and wanders into the funeral of a total stranger, a place where a grown man can cry freely.

Chapter Three
The Gypsy Life with Anita: 1938–43

Late in her life, my mother counted the homes she had shared with Saul. Anita’s total, twenty-two in their fifteen years together, stands in stark comparison with her two residences between Saul’s departure in 1952 and her death in 1985.

Saul felt marriage should alter his status with Abraham. Not so his father. Soon after their wedding, Saul and Anita visited his father and Aunt Fanny. Saul said something that angered his father. As usual, Abraham raised his hand to strike his son, but Saul grabbed it in midair and said, “I’m a married man, Pa. You cannot hit me anymore.” Grandpa did not hit Saul again. But Saul’s marriage did not alter Abraham’s rudeness. Following the polite custom among middle-class families, Abraham and Aunt Fanny invited Sonia and Catherine Goshkin and the newlyweds to a Sunday lunch. Most likely unhappy at his guests’ liberal attitudes, Abraham finished eating and, without a word, rose from the table, retired to a nearby enclosed porch, and, in full sight of all, lay down, pulled a newspaper over his face, and went to sleep. The proper Goshkin women were stunned into silence by such ill-mannered behavior. Saul and Anita were mortified.