Saul Bellow's Heart (7 page)

Anita, whose job curtailed her ability to travel, remained in Chicago, but Saul, excited by his
Partisan Review
connections and the freedom of New York, began to make regular visits there. On our frequent walks around the Village during the early 1960s, Saul used to point out places where he had stayed years earlier, omitting the women he no doubt saw on those trips.

My father was at loose ends in Chicago during most of World War II. He had to have a hernia operation in order to be healthy enough to join the military. However, the entire Bellow family lacked U.S. citizenship, which prevented Saul from joining the service and Morrie from taking the bar exam. A friend of Anita’s who worked at the Immigration Department helped the Bellow family resolve the problem caused by its illegal entry fifteen years earlier. Saul had to return to Canada and reenter the country legally. He later told me that Anita and her friend’s success with the family’s immigration status “made his stock go up in the Bellow household.”

Saul’s narrator in
Dangling Man
, his first published novel, is at loose ends as well. Looking toward an ill-defined future, an increasingly alienated Joseph finds himself at odds with family, friends, neighbors, and even a wife who is growing more independent of him. Plagued by paralytic doubts, he dangles between
the job he has quit and the army, which he hopes to join. Whatever personal insecurities my father may have felt as he dangled in the early 1940s did not stop him, an unknown Jewish novelist, from throwing down the gauntlet to the American literary establishment personified by Ernest Hemingway. In the first pages of
Dangling Man
, published in 1944, Saul advocated redefining heroism as resulting not from outer accomplishments achieved in distant battle but rather from the inner world of thought, reflection, and emotional turmoil. According to Anita, Saul and his friends would read Hemingway out loud, deriding his spare and choppy prose. Given Saul’s eventual impact on American fiction, his first published paragraphs, about the centrality of what my father called the “inner life,” contain a literary prophecy. My father’s strong critical sensibility already extended to his own work. When John Howard Griffin published
Black Like Me
in 1961, Anita told me that during the mid-1940s Saul had written a novel entitled
The Very Dark Trees
, in which a white man wakes up black. Saul was dissatisfied with the manuscript and burned it. Only years later did I learn that his novel had been favorably received by a potential publisher. Saul must have had a lot of faith in himself to burn
The Very Dark Trees
.

Chapter Four
Our Gypsy Life Ends: 1944–51

My 1944 birth was harrowing. I became detached from the placenta and Anita had to have an emergency cesarean. Saul did not know if either of us would live through my first night. Every April 16 my father repeated the story of my birth: the heroic Dr. Koffman who saved our lives, the cold and drizzly sky that greeted a much-relieved Saul as he walked over to Beebee’s, and the breakfast of a dozen fried eggs she cooked him.

From the time I was an infant, Saul thought that the upper half of my face resembled the Bellow side of the family, while the bottom half resembled the Goshkins. My baby book is replete with revealing comments in Anita’s hand about my father taking an active role, as neither parent wanted me to become a “mama’s boy.” As soon I could chew solids, Saul insisted on feeding me pickled herring. After I could understand directions, he involved me in his irreverent sense of humor. Saul would say, “Gregory, point to your ass.” When I did so, he followed with “Point to your elbow,” and would break into gales of laughter as he said, “Now you know more than a Harvard graduate.”

As World War II came to an end, Saul was finally able to join the merchant marine. Anita and I lived with the Goshkins during the six months he was stationed in Brooklyn and Baltimore. Saul spent most of his free time reading in the Baltimore public library, which he preferred to visiting what his fellow sailors called “Clapp Hill.” Saul was given a psychiatric examination because he refused officers’ training despite a high IQ. When the psychiatrist asked about his interests, Saul said he was reading about John Dewey’s theory of pragmatism. The psychiatrist’s notes, which Saul read when the doctor left the room (perhaps purposefully), indicated that my father’s lack of purpose disqualified him from being an officer. Saul was so deeply wounded by the psychiatrist’s comments that years later, he had his narrator Moses Herzog address a letter to a Dr. Zozo, candidly telling his psychiatric examiner of the anguish he had caused in an uncannily similar incident.

Immediately after his discharge, Saul decided on a move to New York. We stored our furniture in the basement of a hotel Morrie owned. Through Alfred Kazin he met Arthur Lidov, a painter whose wife, Vicki, Saul had known since his undergraduate years. They had been living in Brooklyn but had decided on a move to the country. Anita, Saul, and I joined them in upstate New York during a bitterly cold winter. Just as the adults thought they had succeeded in warming up the house, they looked down at two-year-old me toddling closer to the floor and could see my breath. Vicki told me my parents’ relationship was very physically passionate. But that did not deter Saul from openly seeing other women when he went down to New York to teach at NYU. Arthur made a sketch of my father hitchhiking as an available woman passes by riding a bull, which captures
Saul’s passive yet eager availability to engage in extramarital sexual liaisons. Even after eight years of a marriage plagued by infidelities, Anita tolerated Saul’s affairs, telling herself and Vicki that he was still sowing his wild oats.

We returned to New York City, but by the fall of 1947 we were off to Minneapolis, where Herb McClosky helped my father get a job in the humanities department of the University of Minnesota. Eric Bentley, who became a distinguished theater critic, was also invited there by Joseph Warren Beach, the department chairman who attracted talented young faculty members with a small teaching load that allowed time to write. As late as the late 1940s, academic departments of English would not hire Jews, who were presumed incapable of understanding great literature, let alone creating it. The systemic exclusion of Jews angered Saul, and Mitzi McClosky described how his nostrils flared at even a hint of that pervasive anti-Semitism. But Saul frequently described his early novels,
Dangling Man
and
The Victim
, as his M.A. and Ph.D. My father’s point was that he was self-taught as a writer and that academia had little to offer him. Yet he was still writing in a style largely shaped by the same scholars who had rejected Jewish writers, trying, I believe, to prove his worth to them.

Our domestic life in Minneapolis began with residing in a Quonset hut—basically half of a large inverted tin can with no insulation. The two families it housed were separated by a barrier of sheet metal. The heating was terrible and, according to Anita, we had to choose between the half with a kitchen sink and the half with a toilet. We chose the side with the sink because, she said, “at least you could pee in a sink.” Grandpa Abraham visited us in Minneapolis but stayed with
the McCloskys, as the Quonset hut was unsuitable. Every day, dressed in a suit and tie, he sat at their dining room table, though he refused to eat their nonkosher food, and regaled Herb and Mitzi with boastful stories about the financial success of his other children.

We lived in a large house during our second year in Minneapolis and rented a room to Max Kampelman, a conscientious objector during World War II who had just been discharged. Max’s alternative service was to participate in a study of human survival, recently described by Todd Tucker in
The Great Starvation Experiment
. Max had had to live on a minimal number of calories and was so thin that Anita said he looked as if he had been in a concentration camp. She joked about his raiding the icebox at all hours.

Anita and Eric Bentley’s beautiful young wife, Maja, were faculty wives who took care of the everyday details of life for their creative husbands. Anita and Mitzi also became friends, and I was frequently at the McClosky house playing with Jane, Herb and Mitzi’s daughter. According to Mitzi, at four o’clock, Saul would excuse himself from campus activities to “go home and play with my kid.” He entertained me while Anita made dinner.

Our house became a social center where my increasingly gregarious father brought people over at all hours. Saul entertained visitors with jokes, stories, and readings from drafts of
The Victim
. Anita did her best to accommodate the guests, often feeding large numbers of people with no forewarning. Eventually, she became irked with entertaining and bored by hearing the same stories and jokes. Just as Saul got to a punch line, Anita would show her frustration by interrupting him to
say the garbage needed to be taken out. According to Mitzi, Saul’s chronic philandering finally became an increasing irritant to my mother. As a way to undermine his running around, Anita cultivated friendships with the women who showed interest in her husband.

As part of his development as a writer, Saul thought it necessary to move away from his cultural and religious roots. He rejected religious practice and custom, but his identification as a Jew was apparent in his resentment of the anti-Semitic biases in academia. And, according to Anita, if pushed too hard in an argument, Saul’s fallback position was to accuse his opponent of anti-Semitism.

The anti-Semitism embedded in New York’s literary and critical hierarchies permeates his 1948 novel,
The Victim
. In a crucial scene, a magazine editor refuses to consider hiring the narrator, Asa Leventhal, a Jewish job applicant with moxie. During the interview a nasty argument ensues after the busy editor gruffly asks Asa why he applied for a job without the requisite background, a broad allusion to Asa’s Jewish roots.

A similar scene occurred between my father and Whittaker Chambers, then arts and literature editor at
Time
magazine, who turned Saul down for a job. During the interview they had a heated dispute about Romantic poets. Saul often repeated the story, although he did not describe their literary disagreement or bring up the editor’s anti-Semitism. More than once he said the reason for Chambers’s rejection was his envy of Saul’s good looks.

Leaving the contentious job interview, Asa, Saul’s narrator, also fumes. But in
The Victim
, which I consider my father’s most optimistic novel, even a subject as dark as anti-Semitism
does not alter “young Saul’s” benign view of human nature. The images of harmony and reconciliation with which Saul ends the novel convince me that my father’s optimism still prevailed in 1948. Several times he mentioned that the theme of reconciliation received scant critical attention, but his tolerance and universal humanism resonate with me because they were the prevalent values in our household. I find a confirming residue of Saul’s utopian hopes in a letter to Oscar Tarcov that contains a comment about meeting the world’s material needs as a prelude that will “enable
Hamlet
.” I believe Saul refers to the Trotskyite idealism he and Oscar shared a decade earlier: that in order for the appreciation of culture to be more than a luxury for mankind, a new world order must first provide food and shelter.

In 1980, in Chicago to celebrate Saul’s sixty-fifth birthday, I learned a bit more about Saul’s youthful optimism. My father and I were taking a walk and encountered the aged Nathan Leites, who greeted us stiffly on the street and then passed on. As we continued walking, Saul told me that he was the former professor who, forty-five years earlier, greeted him in Hyde Park with the friendly question “How is the
romancier
?” Even decades later, Saul remained mystified that Leites could have so mischaracterized him as a romantic. To the contrary, I was mystified that my father could not see, or could no longer see, that his youthful idealism had been readily apparent to his teacher.

By 1948 Saul had published two novels, but his sales were minuscule and did not generate enough money to live on. But my father was granted a one-year Guggenheim Fellowship that enabled us to go to Paris for a year. The three of us squeezed into a tiny cabin on a broken-down tub named the
De Grasse
. Saul chose
Paris because of its literary and cultural history. Cold, dreary, and uninviting, postwar Paris was nothing like what he imagined. A biting wind or a pea-soup fog made my walks to school miserable. Saul’s constant run-ins with landlords and bureaucrats reminded him of Dostoyevsky’s accounts of life in Paris. When I was ill, my father sought permission to buy an extra ration of coal from the Parisian authorities. After filling out numerous forms, the clerk would not approve the request because the perforations on the doctor’s authorization form were on the wrong side. My father, angered at a useless bureaucratic exercise, threatened to buy the coal on the black market. The clerk merely shrugged.

But Anita did not want to leave Minneapolis. Our gypsy lifestyle was wearing on her. She wanted to settle down and have another child. Somewhere in Europe, frustrated by too many moves, she went on strike, planting her bottom on our trunks and refusing to go to our next destination. Saul had to move the luggage and carry my intransigent mother as well.

American money went far in postwar Paris, and we lived in relative comfort. But daily life was a physical challenge. All three of our apartments during the time in Paris were coal heated, and there was no refrigeration. Shopping was a daily or even twice-daily matter; Anita would go out with her
filet
, or net, to shop, and then return to cook our next meal. Fresh milk was hard to come by, but we had access to the military PX, where we bought dreadful-tasting powdered milk. Anita resorted to adding cocoa to make the mixture more palatable, although a repellent scum still formed as soon as it cooled. My parents hired a maid named Augusta to cook, clean, and look after me. She came to her job interview immaculately dressed but showed
up to work in carpet slippers and hair curlers, and minus her false teeth. Augusta made me sit in the stairwell while my parents were out, and they fired her after I told them. Lillian Bodnia, a Danish Jew who had hidden with her family during the Holocaust, became my nanny. She and I cut and pasted hearts and made long chains of colored paper ovals, and she introduced me to stamp collecting.