Love and Strife (1965-2005)
Page 4
Adam Bellow was more quietly troubling and more troubled, scarred by the wars between his parents. What he remembers of outings with his father in Chicago when he was three is that “I would somehow find myself in the Loop. There’d be a handoff, like a football. He’d take me somewhere….We wouldn’t talk very much and he’d ask me questions as though I were a stranger, and then there would always come a point when my mother would come up, as a subject…and then he’d become very angry.” At this period, “I was not happy—jittery and scared of my father. I would usually wet the bed after I saw him.”51 In 1964, Bellow and Sasha remained locked in bitter disagreements about money. Visits to his father remained “tense,” “uncomfortable,” partly, he feels, because Bellow sensed his unease, “felt insecure,” “felt rejected by me.” “Right through the Herzog period, he was so enraged with [Sasha]” that “psychologically he really needed [me],” by which Adam means “needed me to take his side”: “He expressed it.” Another source of tension derived from Bellow’s “mystical sense of family resemblance,” a sense shared by the protagonists of his fiction (for example, Joseph in Dangling Man, Rogin in “A Father-to-Be”). “He was constantly gauging how much Bellow there was.” When Adam said he didn’t like Aunt Jane’s borscht, Bellow’s response was “What kind of a Litvak are you?”—the sort of joking remark often made in families, but one Adam thinks may have been more pointed in his case. All Bellow’s sons resemble him physically, Adam in particular, but early on, “he may have had some cause to wonder if I was his son.” At gatherings in Chicago, “my experience of the Bellow family is that I was like little Pearl in The Scarlet Letter.”
Adam’s memories of summers with his father at Tivoli begin with boredom. “It seemed there was always this cocktail party going on,” “a forest of legs.” There were no books for children, there was no television, and for the most part there were no other children. His isolation, however, “was as much my fault as anyone’s. I came from an isolated background. It was just my mother and I, and we moved around a lot. I became a very introverted child.” That the children he met at Tivoli (the Hoffman children, the Botsford children) came from “actual families” “only increased my sense of alienation.” He was a “moony, depressive” child, “not good at anything,” and his father “didn’t like that and just didn’t know how to deal with it.” Though Bellow was “in many ways a very tender papa, as was his father,” with “lots of hugging and kissing,” he could also be “the Old Testament God,” like Abraham. Also like Abraham was Bellow’s belief that it was “up to the son to make himself worthy,” a belief Adam feels “explains my whole career.” At Tivoli, Adam’s mornings were spent alone or with Susan, whose job, Adam felt, was “in large part…to protect [Bellow]” from interruption, a job taken on by succeeding “surrogate mothers.” In the afternoons, Bellow would make himself available, “be up for things.” They’d go for walks or to the river. At Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons, they’d go to the beach. “He’d explain to me about the various flora, he knew all sorts of stuff, and that was fun.” He taught Adam how to make a fire, how to pick a ripe tomato, how to plant corn. As a teacher, he was “laissez-faire—if you did something on your own, he would comment on it, say if you were doing it right.” Later in the day, at some adult gathering, “there’d be cocktails on the lawn…and he’d be glowing.” From time to time, Greg, who was thirteen years older than his half-brother, would come to stay; they’d play catch together, or he’d take Adam to the zoo. “He was very important to me.” As for Adam’s baby brother, with whom Susan was besotted, “I absolutely refused the existence of Daniel.”52
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SUSAN’S ABSORPTION WITH Daniel “wounded” Adam (“nobody was interested in me”), and her reaction to fame offended Greg. Greg found fame “chafing,” like his new wool suit; Susan, in contrast, “was in her element. Outgoing and dressed to kill for every event, she found living in the public eye in New York to be precisely how she envisioned being married to Saul Bellow.”53 When the family returned to Chicago, Susan threw herself into the task of creating a home fit for her famous husband. This home was a co-op apartment at 5490 South Shore Drive, in a handsome high-rise built in 1917 and boasting the largest luxury apartments in Hyde Park. The one she and Bellow chose, purchased by him with the help of a loan from the university, overlooked Jackson Park and the lake, only a block from the modest two-bedroom apartment they had lived in at 1755 East Fifty-Fifth Street. Their fellow co-op owners were psychiatrists, architects, and physicians, not the sort of university types Bellow was used to, and very unlike the writers and intellectuals of the Village or the Upper West Side. Writing to Richard Stern from Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard, at the end of the summer of 1965, Bellow signed off: “Back to the lakefront, the twelve rooms, the psychiatric neighbors and the clap doctor magnates.”
The neighbors were not the only aspect of his new home Bellow came to dislike. Susan hired an interior decorator, and the result was for him both too elaborate and too expensive, in a style Adam Bellow calls “conventional Chicago dentist.” There was plush green carpet fitted throughout, and the enormous living room faced the lake, as did Bellow’s study, with its floor-to-ceiling mirrors, which he hated. Stanley Katz, Susan’s cousin, remembers the apartment as “beautiful,” “sumptuous”—“everything was always perfect.” When Adam came to visit in 1965, he was struck by how much grander it was than the places he and his mother lived in, an impression likely to inflame Sasha, whose fights with Bellow over money were now conducted almost entirely through Marshall Holleb, Bellow’s lawyer. Greg “despised” what he calls the apartment’s “ostentation,” which he saw as Maury-like. When he complained to Bellow about the elaborate furnishings, he was told that they “were of no interest to him, and that wealth did not stop him from writing.”54 But the size of the apartment embarrassed Bellow (Daniel remembers him referring to it in later years as “the Vatican”). It was not where he belonged, for reasons comparable to those offered by Benn Crader in More Die of Heartbreak, in explaining his reactions to his in-laws’ vast penthouse: “Wandering through endless fields of furniture, strange surroundings, yes, but he was not so impressed as Mrs. Layamon probably felt he should have been. It wasn’t the difference in station that got him; not the class idea ‘They’re bourgeois’; his mind didn’t work that way. It wasn’t the objects that bothered him but the persistent sense of being in a false position. This was what these articles of furniture symbolized.”55
The social life Susan arranged for Bellow was as alienating as the apartment’s size and decoration. Diane Silverman, who remembers Bellow as “incredibly charming” but also “really self-centered,” describes an awkward dinner party at the new apartment, to which Susan had invited the Silvermans and another couple. Diane’s husband, “everybody’s favorite dinner guest,” was tall, smart, political, a property developer with “a fairly large ego.” “We had a completely uncomfortable dinner,” she recalls. “Saul just wasn’t interested in any of the men….These were Susan’s friends and he just wasn’t interested. He didn’t make an effort.” Bellow’s behavior suggests that relations with Susan were already strained, but even in good times he would have had problems with such guests. He was like Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift, who “didn’t behave well with the mental beau-monde of Chicago.”
Denise invited superior persons of all kinds to the house in Kenwood to discuss politics and economics, race, psychology, sex, crime. Though I served the drinks and laughed a great deal I was not exactly cheerful and hospitable. I wasn’t even friendly. “You despise these people!” Denise said, angry. “Only Durnwald is an exception, that curmudgeon.” This accusation was true. I hoped to lay them all low. In fact it was one of my cherished dreams and dearest hopes. They were against the True, the Good, the Beautiful. They denied the light. “You’re a snob,” she said. This was not accurate. But I wouldn’t have a thing to do with these bastards, the
lawyers, Congressmen, psychiatrists, sociology professors, clergy, and art-types (they were mostly gallery-owners) she invited [pp. 59–60].
If Bellow had no patience for Susan’s friends, she had no patience for David Peltz and other old buddies from Humboldt Park (though she got on well enough with the Tarcovs). Peltz could be coarse. “He was vulgar,” Susan’s friend Barbara Wiesenfeld remembers, “larger than life, and he was crude.” He was also earthy, warm, tactile, whereas Susan “wasn’t earthy….She was a very high-standards person…but she lacked that earthiness.” Wiesenfeld puts the difference in terms of Jewishness. Bellow and Peltz “had a lot of Yiddishkeit; she didn’t have enough, though she had a real connection to her Jewishness.” Peltz tells of going to visit Bellow and having to meet him in Jackson Park, outside the apartment, because Susan “didn’t like his ghetto friends.” Bellow would call, and Peltz would drive up from his home in Indiana Dunes, and the two friends would “sit on a bench there and talk and he would unload.” On one occasion, Bellow was in an especially bad way, hyperventilating. “I said, ‘Saul, you can’t breathe, get the fuck out of that relationship. It’s smothering you….’ He said, ‘Come upstairs and maybe Susan will let you have supper with us. She made a pot of chili.’ I went up there, and she said, ‘No, Saul, we don’t have enough.’ So I wheeled around and left.” Bellow reproduces this scene in Humboldt’s Gift, describing Denise as “warlike and shrill” as she refuses to have George Swiebel over for supper. Because of her background, Charlie speculates, “she hated George fiercely.” “There’s not enough. It’s just half a pound of hamburger,” she cries. “Don’t bring him to the house….I can’t bear to see his ass on my sofa, his feet on my rug.” Denise is impervious to George’s vitality, as Susan was impervious to Dave’s vitality: “You’re like one of those overbred race horses that must have a goat in his stall to calm his nerves,” she tells Charlie. “George Swiebel is your billy goat.” Later she adds: “Your weakness for your school chums isn’t to be believed. You have the nostalgie de la boue. Does he take you around to the whores?” (pp. 41–42). George’s view of Denise was more circumspect: “that she was a great beauty but not altogether human.” This view Charlie comes to share. “Denise’s huge radial amethyst eyes in combination with a low-lined forehead and sharp sibylline teeth supported this interpretation. She is exquisite and terribly fierce” (p. 40). Matilda in More Die of Heartbreak also has unearthly eyes. Benn describes them as “hyacinth” or “frosted lilac” as well as “amethyst” (p. 116). Like Denise and Susan, she has no time for higher realms or the “strangeness of life” (“Not again with the strangeness!”). For Benn, however, “those huge eyes of hers gave him a frequent thrill of precisely this, of ‘unknowable sources’ ” (p. 119).
“Exquisite and terribly fierce.” Barbara Wiesenfeld saw the fierceness in the friend she loved, as well as the beauty. “There was nothing relaxed in her,” she recalls. “There was a demanding way about her….It wasn’t like she could edit it or stop and think about it.” When Susan was hurrying or if she had to rest, she was “peremptory,” “imperious.” “She didn’t understand that she should have tempered that.” Barbara thinks Susan’s decoration of the new apartment “wasn’t all that extravagant,” but she blames her for not considering Bellow: “She did not temper it to his taste,” “it was thoughtless,” “she should have been more sensitive to his life style…it didn’t fit”; when he objected, “she had a hard time with his criticism.” Bellow wanted a wife to take care of him, and Susan thought that’s what she was, but “they saw life very differently; she couldn’t defer to that.” For Susan, Peltz believes, being married to Bellow meant being “an important social person. He didn’t want to be used that way.” Dr. Layamon tells Benn in More Die of Heartbreak: “My daughter will organize a life ideal for your final years. She can be a real bitch, but her bitchiness will be working for you” (p. 140). Matilda also wants “a brilliant position for herself,” the Doctor elsewhere adds, but that “is no more than a woman like that is entitled to” (p. 161). “I guarantee that your life will be enjoyable,” he tells Benn, “if you can learn to like company. You’re kind of solitary, but Tilda is very social” (p. 154). When Benn asks Matilda whom they will be entertaining, her answer is “Desirable connections in this town” and “Visitors passing through, people like Dobrynin, Kissinger, Marilyn Horne, ballet dancers, Günter Grass” (p. 144). (Günter Grass was an enemy of Bellow’s by the time More Die of Heartbreak was published, as we shall see.) In Humboldt’s Gift, Denise complains to Charlie, “I tried to make a life for you when you insisted on moving back here. I put myself out. You wouldn’t have London or Paris or New York. You had to come back to this—this deadly, ugly, vulgar, dangerous place. Because in your heart you’re a kid from the slums. Your heart belongs to the old West Side gutters. I wore myself out being a hostess” (p. 43). Denise, like Matilda, has almost none of what Barbara Wiesenfeld calls Susan’s “sweetness,” or the warmth she showed to Diane Silverman and her three children, “who really loved her.” The closest Bellow comes to granting the Susan-characters softer qualities is when Charlie admits that Denise’s scolding was “mixed with affection. When I came home in a state over Humboldt, she was ready to comfort me. But she had a sharp tongue, Denise did. (I sometimes called her Rebukah.)” (pp. 115–16).
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DANIEL BELLOW THINKS there was a political element in Bellow’s objection to Susan’s friends, the real-life equivalents of Matilda’s “desirable connections in this town.” “He didn’t want to talk to these people,” Daniel says, “because they were all Stevenson people” (by which he means liberals interested in political personalities and electoral politics). He remembers his father saying to him, “Don’t disappoint me, don’t be one of those people who just line up.” As for Adlai Stevenson himself—as opposed to Stevenson people—“my father’s view was that he was a putz, he was a dreamer, didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. He liked looking at all the big Daley Machine people who ate up Stevenson. And my mother was one of the Stevenson people. Classic Jewish liberal.” These views were communicated to Daniel in his adolescence, when Bellow’s impatience with liberal pieties was greater than it was in 1964, but something of it was alive at the time, prompted by student unrest and by pressure from fellow writers and intellectuals to protest against the Vietnam War. Here he is on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times Book Week in an article of October 3, 1965, entitled “On Chronicles and Partisans”: “We now have a large and increasing group of comfortable and privileged citizens who discuss political questions. It is indeed a mark of privilege to sit talking about the highways, De Gaulle, Kashmir. An assured income makes people moderately responsible and even idealistic. Then, too, the pursuit of pure happiness in the personal sphere to which the country was devoted with regressive blindness during the Eisenhower period ended in high frustration. With Kennedy’s election came renewed interest in public affairs.”
Although suspicious of this interest in public affairs, Bellow was hardly immune to it, nor could he be described as on the right in 1964, in spite of his disapproval of doctrinaire liberals. That was the year in which he seriously considered writing a book about Hubert Humphrey, a man he admired. An editor at Doubleday, Evelyn Metzger, prompted in part by a conversation with Bellow’s friend Max Kampelman, now a Washington lawyer, and influenced by the success of a recent Doubleday book entitled A Day in the Life of a Surgeon, thought someone should write a comparable book about a day in the life of a United States senator. It was Kampelman who suggested Bellow as author and Humphrey as subject. Metzger jumped at the idea, and Bellow was intrigued, talking of “Liebling’s job on Earl Long” as a possible model, though worrying also that Humphrey was too likable for such treatment. “I like the man too well to do him any injury,” Bellow wrote in a letter of January 17, 1964, to the Southern journalist Tom Sancton, “but I don’t want to paint the conventional oil painting either.”
In a letter of April 14, 1964, Metzger wrote to Bellow expressing delight “that negotiations on the Humphrey book have reached the stage where you are ready to come to Washington to talk to Humphrey about it.” On May 10, after meeting with Humphrey, Bellow agreed to do the book in September, providing LBJ didn’t choose Humphrey as his vice-president. When Johnson did just that, the project was dropped. “There was no point in writing about poor Hubert’s misery as Vice President,” Bellow recalled in a letter of November 23, 1983, to Carl Soberg, quoted in chapter 8 of To Fame and Fortune. “He was LBJ’s captive.” Yet the idea of a political portrait continued to interest Bellow. In the Chicago Sun-Times Book Week article of October 3, 1965, for example, he weighs the dangers of writing about politicians one admires, citing his friend Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s writings about Kennedy. Bellow describes Schlesinger as “a sophisticated, experienced, cultivated man who writes particularly well when he is angry and mordant, less well when he is generous, and very badly when he is tender.”
A year after abandoning the Humphrey book, Bellow accepted an invitation from Life magazine to write a profile of Robert Kennedy. This assignment, too, he abandoned, after a frustrating week in June 1966 shadowing Kennedy. Atlas quotes Bellow as explaining how the problem was that “every other sentence was off-the-record….He would say all kinds of things about Johnson, then say ‘Don’t quote me.’ ” Bellow also said that Kennedy treated him, in Atlas’s phrase, as “an intellectual tutor. ‘He had a lot of catching up to do: “Tell me about Veblen, Walter Lippmann, H. L. Mencken.” ’ ”56 In an undated letter, Schlesinger tried to persuade Bellow to do the Kennedy profile, arguing that “circumstances have to some degree cut him [Bobby] off from those who could be his natural allies…and I believe that the sooner the liberal-intellectual community begins to perceive Robert Kennedy as he is, and not according to the stereotype, the better it will be both for Bobby and for the liberals.” Schlesinger also doubted that Kennedy “held much back from you in your five days of inspection.” Bellow was not convinced. Nor was he tempted when Gilbert Harrison, editor of The New Republic, asked him to write a profile of Lyndon Johnson. “We would print whatever you write, whatever its length,” Harrison wrote in a letter of March 6, 1966; “we would hope to pay whatever you ask.” Bellow’s scrawled reply (on the letter itself, suggesting that he now had use of a secretary) was a polite refusal. “I’ve always wanted to write about Washington and politicians and while I was between books I made several attempts to involve myself in politics. I found, however, that one was either inside the [circle] or on the fringes.”