“I am sympathetic to the problems of intellectuals and I know you may get into special preoccupations that aren’t lucrative. But I understand that this Maharishi fellow by teaching people to turn their tongues backward toward the palate so that they can get the tip of their tongue into their own sinuses has become a multimillionaire. Many ideas are marketable and perhaps your special preoccupations are more lucrative than you realize,” he said [p. 226].
By October 1971, Bellow had dismissed Stanton Ehrlich and his associate, Chuck Sproger, who in Bellow’s fictional account become Charlie Citrine’s lawyers, Forrest Tomchek and Billy Srole, “two honest-looking deceitful men” (p. 214). In real life, Bellow’s new lawyer was Barry Freeman, who took over his appeal against Susan’s petition. Susan, meanwhile, had replaced her original lawyer, from the firm of Lipnick, Barsy and Joseph, with Jerome Berkson, who would later become partner in the LaSalle Street firm of Beermann, Swerdlove, Woloshin, Barezky, and Berkson. In Humboldt’s Gift, Denise is represented by Maxie “Cannibal” Pinsker, “that man-eating kike,” a “brutally hairy” man who enters court in a bright-yellow double-knit suit and “a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette” (p. 224). On the side, Denise also receives legal advice from “Gumballs” Schwirner, with whom Srole thinks she is carrying on. “ ‘That son of a bitch,’ said Tomchek, violent. ‘If I could prove that he was banging the plaintiff and interfering in my case I’d fix his clock for him. I’d have him before the Ethics Committee’ ” (p. 215).
Bellow’s lawyer-friend Sam Freifeld advised him against employing Stanton Ehrlich, as he was later, in a letter of December 19, 1966, to warn him against underestimating his projected income. Perhaps as a consequence, the two friends had a serious falling-out, and their relationship never recovered. Freifeld may have wanted to represent Bellow himself. Bellow may have been angry with Freifeld for interfering (at one point, Freifeld wrote to Ehrlich to caution him against overcharging). In Humboldt’s Gift, the Freifeld character is Alec Szathmar, who thinks Tomchek is too important for Charlie. “He wouldn’t put you in his fish-tank for an ornament.” “He’s a crook all the same,” Charlie replies. “Denise is a thousand times smarter. She studied the documents and caught him in a minute. He didn’t even make a routine check of titles to see who legally owned what” (p. 204). Like Denise, Susan spotted who owned what, being obsessed with the case as well as intelligent. Early in 2015, Daniel Bellow boxed up his mother’s papers relating to the divorce and shipped them to me to look through and then deposit “in the midden heap of the Regenstein to gross out future historians.” The papers are covered with Susan’s shrewd, bitter, furious instructions, queries, and outraged interjections, often directed at her own lawyers. “Dear Miles,” begins a handwritten note dated March 16, 1982. “It’s nice to know you are still practicing law, but I must confess I gained no particular information from your note….Equal Justice Under Law says the pediment on the Supreme Court Building. Under Law is a pretty dark and heavy place to be.” Atlas quotes Herb and Mitzi McClosky. “It was her profession,” they claimed, speaking of Susan’s involvement in legal proceedings. “She wanted to divorce Saul and punish him and still stay married to him.”51 “Of course Berkson’s documents are tendentious,” writes one of Bellow’s lawyers in 1982, fourteen years into the case. “If they weren’t, Berkson wouldn’t be Berkson (besides he has Susan to try to control).”52 This is not to say that Susan’s vigilance was misplaced.
As soon as Judge Linn ruled in Susan’s favor, Bellow appealed, arguing that what remained of the $150,000 granted in the original settlement (some $130,000) had first to be returned. This appeal was denied and on July 1, 1977, Judge Mary Ann McMorrow entered an order for Bellow to pay temporary alimony and child support pending final disposition of the case. Susan was to receive alimony of $2,500 a month if unemployed, $1,500 a month if employed, plus $650 a month child support. In addition, Bellow would pay all Daniel’s medical bills and private-school fees. Joel Bellows, now acting for his uncle, urged Bellow to accept the judgment, which he thought a good one. Instead, Bellow fired Joel and appealed the ruling, refusing to pay the interim alimony. On October 18, 1978, some $11,500 in arrears in alimony payments, Bellow was ordered by Judge McMorrow either to pay up or to post bail of $50,000. If he failed to post bail, he faced a ten-day jail sentence for contempt of court. The next day, Bellow’s new lawyer, George Feiwell of Feiwell, Galper and Lasky, 23 North LaSalle Street, declared that Bellow would pay up only if Susan agreed to return the $130,000 left over from the original settlement. Then Bellow posted bail. On October 20, articles about the threatened jail sentence appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times. Eleven days later, Newsweek reported that, “for now, Bellow is spared the slammer.”53 It was not until May 17, 1979, that the Illinois Appellate Court upheld Judge McMorrow’s July 1, 1977, ruling, and Bellow was forced to pay Susan the sum of $45,634.66.
By this date, such a sum must have seemed to Bellow a drop in the ocean. Half a year earlier, in September 1978, a “final” judgment had at last been rendered on his appeal against Judge Linn’s 1974 ruling. This judgment, handed down by Judge James Bales of the Circuit Court, a downstate appointment from Dixon, Illinois, awarded Susan alimony of $650,000, minus the original $150,000. Like Judge Linn, Judge Bales did not care for Bellow. Atlas reports that he told one of Bellow’s lawyers, “I don’t like that son of a bitch, he writes pornography.”54 According to Daniel Bellow, it was “true that the judge hated him.” Bellow’s view was that “the judge was an anti-Semite….He thought [Bellow] was a Jew who wrote dirty books.” The amount awarded Susan included all her legal expenses, amounting to $200,000 (having to pay them, the judge said of Susan, “would exhaust her meagre savings and undermine her economic stability”). In addition, Bellow was ordered to pay $800 a month child support, an increase of $150 a month, plus medical and educational expenses. Against the advice of his lawyers, Bellow appealed Bales’s judgment and received an order to stay payment, excepting child support. “If the brutal order holds in the Appeals Court,” Bellow wrote to Edward Shils on September, 3, 1978, “I shall have to borrow to pay my persecutors, and I have no reason to be confident in the judgment of the Court of Appeals….The whole thing is monstrous—simply monstrous. It has taught me a great deal, though. I don’t say this menacingly, or with excessive bitterness. I plan no vengeance. I mean only to say that it has expanded my understanding of human beings very considerably.” To Julian Behrstock, his friend from Northwestern, in a letter of October 9, 1978, Bellow described the sum he had to pay as “stupendous, and the legal fees, two hundred thousand, also stupendous. If these judgments hold I will be where I was in 1937 on the campus, living on an allowance of three bucks a week. I may ask the President to revive the WPA for my sake.”
Two years later, the Appellate Court modified Judge Bales’s order. In addition to lawyers’ fees, Bellow had now to pay Susan a lump sum of $102,000, plus child support and monthly alimony installments of $2,000 until Daniel’s eighteenth birthday (some 121 months, totalling $242,000). In 1981, Bellow wrote to his Tuley High School friend Hyman Slate “of news of a new lawsuit by Susan. The wicked never let up. The lawyers learn no kindness. My own are as bad as hers.”55 A year later, Bellow fired George Feiwell, in a letter of August 16, 1982, complaining, “I haven’t heard from you in some time. My questions are not answered, my calls are not returned, you have offered no suggestions….Since I have no notion what actions the other side may be preparing, and since there is not the slightest sign of interest or concern from you I have no choice but to find another lawyer.” In the letter to Behrstock, Bellow likened Susan’s lawyers to the Philistines hounding Samson—though, “come—oddly—to think about it, most of the fellows who have ganged up on me are fully and legitimately circumcised.” Eventually, the lump sum was reduced, the $102,000 figure whittled down to $59,209. In 1984, Susan’s lawyers were still busy, begging her to sign papers allow
ing them to sue Bellow for failure to pay certain legal fees. By then, after sixteen years, Susan had had enough. Two years earlier, she had declared herself “the doubly defrauded party and the big loser in this nightmare of legal entanglement. It is a bit hard to end up on the losing end with my lawyers as well….The costs of ‘justice’ or ‘equity under the law’ or whatever I thought I was after have been terrible for Daniel and me.”56 For over a dozen years, both parties had been unyielding. Atlas quotes one of Susan’s lawyers on Bellow: “He didn’t want to resolve it, he wanted to go on fighting.” He also quotes Bellow’s lawyer George Feiwell: “They wanted to hurt each other. It was a matter of who was going to hurt who the worst.”57
It was Daniel who was hurt the worst. From when he was four to the age of sixteen, his parents were at war, with only rare truces. “I am coming to Daniel’s bar mitzvah,” Bellow wrote to Richard Stern on October 1, 1977, “but I may be arrested in front of KAM [a synagogue in Hyde Park] next Saturday despite my truce agreement (for the weekend) with Susan. The court held me in contempt because—I will tell it in legal language—pursuant to advice of counsel I refused to comply with the alimony assessment of the court but appealed the decision. Until the appeal is formally filed, I am in contempt.” The bar mitzvah boy’s parents were civil to each other at the bar mitzvah, even danced together at the party after the ceremony. Two days later, they were back in court. The adult Daniel is clear on their behavior: “It’s like a textbook approach about how not to get divorced. I mean, if I ever get divorced I hope I’ll act with a lot more class than either of them. I see people get divorced all the time, but they behave with some dignity and some restraint and with some compassion for their children. None of that happened.” When Susan decided to leave Hyde Park for the North Side, removing Daniel from the Lab School and sending him to a school associated with “this big macher [big-shot] synagogue on the North Side,” Bellow objected. “My father said, ‘I wasn’t consulted about this.’ My mother said, ‘Fuck you, I’m not married to you, I can do what I want.’ ” Exchanges like these helped to turn Daniel into “a willful, headstrong, angry child.” “Like all bright children, I learned to do what my parents do,” he recalls. “I don’t want to discuss my mother with you,” twelve-year-old Daniel had announced to his father (both parents ran each other down to Daniel), in a tone that caused Bellow to slap him, something he did “maybe three or four times.” Bellow had been slapped by his father, but there was a difference: “Saul felt bad when he hit me, and his father didn’t feel bad when he hit him.” Daniel knew his father loved him, as Bellow knew his father loved him, but Bellow “could make you feel so bad, so small, so disgusting. He didn’t need to hit you, he could just look at you.”
The worst moment for Daniel came when his father sued for custody and Daniel was called to testify. Throughout what came to be known among Bellow’s friends as “The Long Divorce,” Daniel’s welfare was a key battleground. In an undated document from the early 1970s, Susan sought child support “at a level that will protect me from Bellow’s view of Daniel’s interests and his conviction that money for Daniel means money for me. I do not want to be hassling with Bellow year in year out about whether Daniel needs psychiatric care (it took from the time Daniel was 4 until he was 9 to convince him of that) or whether 8 weeks in camp will do him good.” These complaints about Bellow and child care were not unique to Susan, as she well knew. Bellow also “suffered over writing child support checks to his two older sons.”58 In addition, as a way of getting back at her, Bellow suggested she was a negligent parent, a charge she often leveled against him. On February 14, 1972, Barry Freeman, Bellow’s lawyer, wrote to Jerome Berkson, Susan’s lawyer, to convey a complaint. When seven-year-old Daniel returned from school, he sometimes found no one at home. “In these situations he is instructed to walk three blocks to a drug store, crossing Hyde Park Boulevard in the process, and to read in a phone booth until his mother comes for him. The perils of this practice should be obvious.”
On March 31, 1977, Susan wrote a ferocious letter to Bellow, accusing him of neglecting Daniel and caring only for himself. “You’re the father, not the child. You still grieve over how your father treated you. Do you have a tear or two left for Daniel….Doesn’t your prized human understanding perceive even a fraction of all this. You’re a fraud.” The letter is three pages long, single-spaced, every sentence a damning accusation. In a letter of May 7, 1979, she tried to persuade a therapist of Daniel’s to be deposed by her lawyer, as part of a campaign to get Bellow to pay Daniel’s “extraordinary medical expenses,” which the court had ordered him to pay. Susan’s lawyers were eager to rebut Bellow’s “usual charge that treatment for Daniel is a whim of mine.”59 Four months later, on July 12, 1977, Bellow wrote to Shils that “the disgraceful, disheartening legal battle continues….Wicked wastefulness, gratuitous destructiveness. I was summoned to appear although Susan knew that I had just brought Daniel to the summer place, and although no judge had been assigned to the case….Harassment was the only object, and my lawyers, not always effective, got me out of that at least.” On February 22, 1979, Bellow wrote to Jack Goldstein, dean of the Graduate School at Brandeis University, “Litigants and lawyers still keep me nailed down in Chicago, and there is simply no escape possible until the court has ruled on my appeal. There are subtle and delicate threads that hold me down like Gulliver. I am bristling with Lilliputian arrows, they itch horribly. I am putting myself under the care of a dermatologist—that is literally true.” Bellow’s enemies were not only Lilliputians, they were midges, blackflies, spiders.
Daniel was not consulted about Bellow’s plans to gain custody. “It was very unpleasant,” he recalls. “He didn’t say, ‘Dan, would you like to come live with me?’ He’s like, ‘I’m suing for your custody because I don’t think it’s right for you to be living with [your] mother.’ And I said, ‘But I want to live with my mother.’ ” This was in 1978. “I was fourteen years old and I didn’t want to leave my mother. What was my mother going to do without me? It was just so implausible. It was ridiculous. He said, ‘We’ll fix up the room for you….You could go to the Lab School with all your friends.’ ” Instead, Daniel went to New York with his mother.60 Joel Bellows thinks Bellow may have been “helplessly” (the quotation marks were conveyed vocally by Joel, signaling irony) swept along “by a lawyer who said, ‘Have Daniel testify and suggest he stay with you.’ ” I had no choice, Bellow might have said, or so Joel conjectures, which was partly how Bellow justified his decision to dismiss Joel as counsel, on the grounds that Edward Levi advised him to hire a lawyer from the firm used by the University of Chicago. As Joel reconstructs his uncle’s thinking, “What’s a man to do?”
Much of the wrangling over Daniel concerned therapy and schooling. Bellow had little faith in psychiatry, and he thought Daniel’s problems in school were largely of his own making.61 On April 3, 1979, he wrote to Susan objecting to Daniel’s changing schools, the third change since the seventh grade. It wasn’t the school’s fault that Daniel was unhappy and doing poorly; “I see no reason why he should not turn in his homework.” Daniel’s problem, Bellow claimed, was Susan. “I can’t see him making any progress solving his problems as long as he is with you.” At the time of this letter, Daniel had only just turned fifteen and was unhappy at his school on the Upper West Side, near where he and Susan had moved from Chicago. A handsome boy, he was charming, mischievous, and hard to control, as at the Nobel ceremony. While still in Chicago, he recalled in an interview, “At thirteen I walked into court one day and I said to the judge, Let me take you to lunch and we’ll figure out how to sort this out. My father never forgave me for that, never. I just wanted my parents to stop fighting.” Daniel often cut classes, to hang out in the park or at CBGB, the New York punk-rock club. Susan was working, entirely taken up with the divorce, and “I don’t think she noticed. They didn’t tell her, but I wasn’t showing up in school….I was cutting school because
I was miserable and the teachers were clueless and the kids were really mean.” Although the second school Daniel went to in New York was better than the first, it wasn’t until Susan took Bellow’s advice and sent him to board at Northfield Mount Herman in Massachusetts that his life improved. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I had a great time,” Daniel remembers. “I made a great group of friends. I didn’t have to live at home anymore, that was what was needed, and I did okay in school, so everybody left me alone.”
* * *
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THE DIVORCE GROUND ON into the early 1980s, draining money, souring Bellow’s mood, helping to account for his bad behavior. It may also have played a part in his increasing attraction to Steinerian ideas. In Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine is enmeshed in the material realm of money, power, sex, crime, “the human world and all its wonderful works” (p. 305). Lately, though, he has begun to think “the painted veil isn’t what it used to be. The damned thing is wearing out. Like a roller towel in a Mexican men’s room” (p. 20). Worldly preoccupations have a similarly soiling effect on Charlie’s character, for which “I’ll never get any medals” (p. 13), especially after he becomes a celebrity. Being known—a “notable,” in Chicago parlance—makes Charlie “ambitious cunning complex stupid vengeful” (p. 209). Vain, too, as well as undignified, as when he finds himself considering plastic surgery to remove the bags under his eyes (p. 190). “Once you had picked up the high-voltage wire and were someone, a known name, you couldn’t release yourself from the electrical current” (p. 305). You also required increasingly powerful jolts. Forced by the small-time gangster Cantabile’s threats onto the “fiftieth or sixtieth floor” of a half-finished skyscraper, “a headless trunk swooping up, swarming with lights,” Charlie finds himself in open space. With “the wind ringing in the empty squares of wound-colored rust and beating against the hanging canvases,” he clings to a pillar, fearful of falling to his death. Yet “my sensation-loving soul was also gratified. I knew that it took too much to gratify me. The gratification-threshold of my soul had risen too high” (p. 102).62
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