Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  At the end of More Die of Heartbreak, published two years after Maury’s death, aspects of his final years, including his relations with Joel and Bellow, are woven into the narrative. Benn Crader, the novel’s central character, flies to Miami a day after the death of his uncle, Harold Vilitzer. “The last time we saw him he was in a bad way,” Benn tells his nephew Kenneth, “but he was still a man, a person. Now he’s a packet of ashes, inside a black box” (p. 312). On his arrival, Benn immediately asks to see the body: “I had been preparing to have my last look at him on this earth” (p. 315). There is no body, but “just inside the wide plantation-style door…on a red marble or porphyry shelf there was a box.” The box is “no bigger than my binocular case.” Benn’s surprise at seeing his uncle reduced to ashes “came up from the ground, as it were, and caught [him] around the knees, so that he had to sit down” (p. 315). Kenneth wonders why Benn is so moved, since Vilitzer had cheated him in a development deal. “He didn’t really care for you, and I don’t see why you’re broken up over that old crook” (p. 312). Kenneth also wonders why Vilitzer wasn’t buried. “Harold arranged all that himself,” Benn explains. “His order was immediate cremation, Fishl [Vilitzer’s son] told me. The minute the death certificate was signed. Before sunset it was done, and he was brought back and set on the shelf. It turns out that he couldn’t bear the very idea of a burial. Couldn’t stand to be underground. He was revolted by it” (p. 315). As Kenneth comments, “There are some who can’t wait to get rid of themselves. Whereas others can’t bear to let anybody go.” “It’s true,” Benn replies, “I couldn’t bear to surrender Uncle Harold. It’s also the way with my memory. Once my memory has fastened on to some phenomenon it grips it tight” (p. 316). Fishl is like Joel in that he has been estranged from his father (“He’s no son of mine,” Vilitzer once told the press [p. 165]). When he learns his father is dying, Fishl flies down to Florida immediately, “determined to make up [with him]. Wishing the impossible as so many of us do” (p. 313).

  Joel’s sister, Lynn, refused to go to Thomasville. In 1961, Maury had reneged on a business promise to her husband, Leonard Rotblatt, who oversaw the finances of several of Maury’s businesses. Leonard had married the boss’s daughter, and after the birth of their first child, Mark, the boss offered him a deal. Maury had recently acquired a failing chemical company. If Leonard turned the company around within six months, he would give him half-ownership. This Leonard did, but Maury had second thoughts. He had been funneling profits from the company to Joyce. Now he decided she should take full ownership, at which point all relations between Maury and his daughter and her family were severed.112 It was not until Leonard’s death—fourteen years later, at the age of forty-five—that father and daughter saw each other again. At Joel’s urging, Maury attended Leonard’s funeral in May 1975, where he met Mark and Maureen, his grandchildren, for the first time. For the next three years, according to Mark, “my mother and Maury tried to have the semblance of a relationship.” Lynn, though, made the mistake of asking Maury’s advice about Leonard’s business, and, as Mark puts it, “Of course he came in and said, This is wrong and this is wrong, and made all these changes…and basically he took control.” Lynn finally accepted that it was impossible to maintain a relationship with her father, and in 1978 they broke apart and never saw each other again. “Do you not feel bad that your father died?” Mark asked his mother in 1985. “I feel bad that I don’t feel bad,” she answered. “My father died many years ago.”

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  SAM BELLOWS DIED ON June 1, 1985, within weeks of Maury’s death. He had been ill with colon cancer since the previous November, as well as having prostate cancer. On December 1, 1984, the colon cancer was operated on at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York. Sam was in the hospital for a month. The cancer was stage D, incurable, but back in Chicago, Sam bowed to pressure from Nina, his wife, and agreed to undergo chemotherapy. According to Rachel Schultz, his granddaughter, a medical student at the time, the chemotherapy was unlikely to prolong his life and was “just awful—against everything he stood for.” Rachel and Bellow tried to persuade Nina to discontinue treatment, as Sam himself wished. So enervating and humiliating were the side effects of the chemotherapy that Sam stopped eating and on several occasions tried to pull out his feeding tube. Bellow was at Sam’s bedside much of the time. He had been in New York for the operation, staying in the same hotel as the family. In Chicago, “he made a concerted effort to be there all the time.” He also made an effort to get on with Nina, whom he did not like. Unlike his brothers, Sam steered clear of conflict, hated it, believing in the religious ideal of shalom bayit (Yiddish for “domestic harmony”). On Bellow’s visits, Rachel remembers, before Sam was bedridden, the two brothers would sit in the den, a “dark, soothing room,” just talking. When Bellow and Lesha flew to Georgia, Nina tried to hide the news of Maury’s death from Sam, but, as Greg puts it in his memoir, Sam was “no fool, had gotten the picture.” Ruth Miller asked Bellow how he and Sam got on: “Sam, he said, always tried but he never knew what to say to his brother Saul.” The two men had lived very different lives. Sam was frum, observant, correct, dutiful, deeply embedded in the Jewish community of North Chicago. He remained married to the same woman, stayed at home, looked after his father and sister, always made money, eventually a great deal of money. Although he may not have known what to say to Bellow, he loved him. Bellow, he told Rachel, was “the only sibling I have who doesn’t give me a hard time.” In his last days, Sam was surrounded by friends, including what Rachel calls a “Disney parade” of rabbis, some of whom, Bellow told Miller, were “trying to get him to leave a large sum of money to the synagogue, the yeshiva, an old people’s home, to this, to that, and he greeted them all.”113 The funeral service was held at the Hebrew Theological College in Skokie. Bellow sat shiva with the family. The obituary in the Chicago Tribune described Sam as “a leader in Jewish education and causes for Israel,” the recipient of “many honors and awards,” and the brother of Saul Bellow. No mention was made of his problems with the law, or of stories in the press about his nursing homes.

  “As we began so are we ending,” Sam told Bellow on his deathbed. “You were there at the beginning. You’re here now. It’s all on you now.”114 Bellow took the injunction seriously, making time for nephews and nieces and their children, offering advice but not pushing, writing references, making calls when needed. Lesha and Lynn, in particular, adored him, as did their children. “He was wonderful,” Mark Rotblatt remembers. “It’s far less complicated to be the uncle. I really loved Uncle Saul, because I was so grateful that he gave my mother what she needed. She needed approval….And Uncle told her she was smart, she was attractive.” Mark remembers trips to Vermont with his sister and mother. Before leaving Chicago, they would go to a North Side delicatessen, “and my mother would get, like, five pounds of corned beef and the rugula, the big rugula. We’d carry it on the plane and get off in Gentile Brattleboro, and we’d lay it all out in the kitchen, and Uncle Saul was, like, in heaven. And it was nice, because he was appreciative. It was also love, what my mother was so appreciative to do. One of the things that he loved about my mother was that my mother really looked to him for emotional approval. So many people who cozied up to him were looking for something else.” Bellow was also close to Lesha Greengus, offering advice and encouragement in correspondence, inviting her to accompany him on trips. Before going to medical school, Rachel Greengus majored in English at Cornell. She remembers that Bellow sent her lists of books to read, and contacted M. H. Abrams, the Cornell Romantics scholar, to make sure she was well looked after. The great-nephews and great-nieces, like the cousins (the Dworkins, Missners, Gameroffs, Gordins, Ullmans, Baronovs), mostly remember Bellow as “generous,” “warm,” “full of family feeling,” “funny,” “appreciative,” “with a lot of joy in life.” Keeping in touch with family was more than an obligation or a source of material for Bellow, it was
also centering, as it is for Ijah Brodsky in Bellow’s story “Cousins” (1974). “I had remembered, observed, and studied the cousins,” Ijah declares, “and these studies seemed to fix my own essence and to keep me as I had been” (p. 239). With his immediate family, his sons and wives, matters were different.115

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  NINE DAYS AFTER SAM’S DEATH, Bellow turned seventy, a fact that “obsessed” him, according to Aaron Asher, now at Harper & Row. In a memo to colleagues who were already worried about Bellow’s unhappiness with the marketing of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories, Asher warned against saying anything about the birthday, much less making a fuss over it. Bellow wanted “no congratulations or any other acknowledgment of this event.”116 On May 28, just days before Sam died, Bellow had business in New York, where Gerald Freund, unaware of his feelings, unaware also of the current state of his friendship with Alfred Kazin, held a joint birthday dinner for the two men, born five days apart (Kazin on June 5, Bellow on June 10). Freund had been the first director of the MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellows Program, for which Bellow served as an “evaluator.”117 When Bellow’s term as an evaluator expired, he became an evaluator for the Whiting Writers’ Awards program, which Freund headed.

  The small dinner party Freund and his wife, Peregrine, arranged for Bellow and Kazin was held at their apartment on the East Side. The only guests were Bellow and Alexandra, Kazin and his third wife, Judith Dunford, and Adam Bellow and his girlfriend, Rachel Newton, soon to be his wife. Newton, the main reason Adam left Chicago for New York, had been Gerald Freund’s assistant at the MacArthur Program, her first job after Harvard. Bellow and Kazin had known each other for over forty years. But they did not always get on. Bellow never fully forgave Kazin for his hostile review of Mr. Sammler’s Planet in The New York Review of Books, and Kazin found it difficult to stomach Bellow’s increasingly right-wing politics.118 The most recent of their infrequent meetings, however, had been civil. On May 8, 1979, when Kazin was in Chicago, Bellow took him to lunch at the Arts Club. They had not seen each other since 1970, the year of the Sammler review. In a journal entry for that day, Kazin described Bellow at the lunch as “quiet, very cordial, elegant and precise in his speech and manner…Sad in a reserved kind of way…The waiters all bowing to him.”119

  At the Freund dinner, according to Dunford, everything “started off reasonably well,” with a “feeling of nostalgia” between the two men: “All these years, we have all these years together.” Then politics entered the conversation. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kazin remained steadfastly on the left (“militantly” on the left, according to his biographer, Richard M. Cook). Israel was discussed, and Kazin made clear his hatred of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the Likud Party.120 There was also talk of Leon Wieseltier’s criticisms of Hannah Arendt in The New Republic.121 Bellow was no fan of Arendt’s writing; Kazin deeply admired her. When Spain was discussed, according to Cook, Bellow mentioned that Franco had at least saved the Jews, which “outraged” Kazin. “But Bellow stood his ground. ‘I was a Trotskyite and you were writing for Luce!’ he retorted.”122 In Adam Bellow’s words, the atmosphere was “awkward,” “embarrassing.” Kazin mentioned that The New York Times was becoming increasingly conservative, to which Bellow replied, “How can you call a paper conservative that publishes Anthony Lewis?” Looking back on this moment, Dunford says of Bellow: “I don’t think he meant to create a bad mood. I don’t agree with his politics at all, but I think he was saying something which was a reasonable thing to say…when you have Anthony Lewis [an unwavering liberal] writing two or three times a week.” In Cook’s account, Bellow “blew up” when he made the Lewis point. Adam Bellow describes his father as “loaded for bear when we arrived.” But Dunford remembers Kazin as the one who lost control: “It was waiting to come out. That was often the case with Alfred….Alfred was furious and hurt; it was very hard with Alfred to tell the difference between furious and hurt.”

  The next morning, in his journal, Kazin was bitter about Bellow, “congested in his usual cold conceit…the little pasha…He did not even try last night to offer much conversation, and I, determined not to taunt the little ‘conservative,’ went on talking just to avoid a case of the blahs.” On June 1, 1985, the day of Sam’s death, Kazin was still angry: “God how I hate these princelings baked in their own conceit. The Big Ego always throws me into a rage—no doubt of envy as well as principled antagonism to dictators, despots, spiritual bullies and the like.”123 Dunford, too, recalled Bellow’s “sense of his own importance,” while also being struck again by his intellect, “a sort of electric halo of intelligence that some people have, as though you’re near a live wire.” In Kazin’s journal, it is Bellow’s manner, as much as his politics, that infuriates. Unlike Bellow, in Dunford’s view, “Alfred felt that he could scramble for something, not that he was destined for something.” When Bellow left the party—after a birthday cake had been brought out, with one candle for Bellow and one for Kazin—he did not say goodbye, or so Kazin claimed. Adam remembers the birthday cake, “a nice touch,” but not that his father left without saying goodbye. It is hard to imagine Alexandra leaving without saying goodbye; Adam and Rachel “certainly did.” That Bellow avoided saying goodbye to Kazin is not hard to imagine.124

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  ADAM BELIEVES THE DEATH of Maury and the impending death of Sam partly accounted for his father’s combativeness at the Freund dinner. “I know he took the deaths of both his brothers very hard. He also had a terrible time with turning seventy.” Only days after Sam’s death, Bellow left Chicago with Alexandra to spend the summer in Vermont, their third summer in the West Halifax house built for them on the land Bellow had purchased in 1982. She describes herself as “ecstatic” over this house, for which she organized a housewarming in June 1983. In 1985, her mood was quite different. She and Bellow celebrated his seventieth birthday “quietly,” and two months later celebrated her fiftieth birthday “contentiously.” The marriage was by now in its end stage. In 2010, in notes for the draft “Chronology” Benjamin Taylor was to include in his forthcoming edition of Bellow’s Letters, Alexandra offered additions to the entry for 1984. She suggested he add the following sentences: “In March Bellow and Alexandra travel to Paris, where Bellow is awarded the order of Officer of the Legion of Honor. The marriage begins to disintegrate.” The trip to Paris had been “dismal,” she recalled in an interview. To a sentence about Bellow’s traveling to Capri in September for the Malaparte Prize, she suggested Taylor add: “Alexandra does not accompany him.” At the end of the 1984 entry, she suggested he add the following sentences: “The marriage continues to unravel. Hopes that the new house will stabilize the marriage, begin to fade, as the tempestuous year 1984 ends.” She then offered additions to the beginning and end of the 1985 entry: “The downward spiral of the marriage continues, at an accelerated pace, as the calamitous year 1985 unfolds”; “In December Alexandra asks for divorce.”125

  In my interviews with Alexandra, she was reluctant to elaborate on the causes of the split. In “A Mathematical Life (Una Vida Matematica),” her brief memoir of 2001, all she says of the split is that “balancing a career in Mathematics and marriage to a writer was an arduous, demanding task….By and large life together was high-voltage and a study in contrasts. In the end the needs of a writer and the needs of a mathematician were so divergent, that the marriage dissolved in 1985, after 11 years.” The paragraph that follows bears indirectly on the breakup: “I had gone from East to West, from the Old World to the New World, I had crossed the bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences and I had paid my dues. If there was one constant in my life, it was Mathematics.”126 Alexandra’s reticence, her habitual reserve, was reinforced by emotional pain. When her mother was dying, as we’ve seen, she found everything “so traumatic and so somber and so macabre” that “many of the details have faded from me, perhaps out of an in
stinct of self-defense.” So, too, with details of the Freunds’ disastrous birthday dinner, which “is all a big blur in my mind, too much upheaval, too much confusion, too much heartache at that time.” Subjected to nasty gossip after the breakup, she maintained a dignified silence: “I’m not going to disparage or demonize Saul or our marriage, out of respect for the eleven years we spent together and ultimately out of respect for myself. I should also add that I learned very much from Saul and he opened many vistas for me, he enriched my life tremendously.”

  Family and friends have been less reticent about the causes of the breakup. Adam Bellow offers several explanations, beginning with Bellow’s mood that summer, a product of “his ensuing depression over the deaths of both his brothers and his own hastening decline. He was always moody, but these events really put him in a dark place that must have made him hard to live with.” The “childlike” quality Bellow and others noted in Alexandra (discussed in chapter 4) he now found irritating rather than endearing. For her part, according to Adam, Alexandra “felt she had been misled.” Bellow “told her a version of his life story in which he was always innocent….The only thing that could be said against him was that for some reason he had attracted these people like Gersbach and Madeleine [from Herzog] and Cantabile.” Initially, Adam believes, the marriage was “a reform project” for Bellow. “He was delighted to have an opportunity to redeem himself,” not only by having a successful marriage, but by marrying a woman of distinction. It was not true, Bellow hoped to show, that he was incapable of sustaining a marriage. One thinks of Herschel Shawmut’s motives for marrying his late wife, Gerda, in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”: “Which was the real Shawmut, the man who made insulting jokes or the other one, who had married a wife who couldn’t bear that anyone should be insulted by his jokes?” (p. 390).