Daniel, too, faced accusations. In a letter of January 16, 1995, less than two weeks after Bellow’s release from the hospital, Daniel wrote to him both to explain why he had been unable to come to Boston “when you called to say there was a crisis” and to regret Bellow’s anger in reply. “I’m sorry you took it so badly and said the things you did. I’m quite aware of the fact that you nearly died, because I watched the whole thing from the side of your hospital bed and it scared me worse than anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve been sure only since Christmas, as your voice sounded stronger with every phone call, that you were going to make it.” Bellow’s outburst had occurred “just as things were getting so much better between us. I was so happy to be able to see you so often and have the kinds of conversations we’ve been having. I take what you say very seriously, so you should be careful what you say to me. It pains me that you seem to believe things about me that just aren’t true, and that you don’t seem to know other things that are true.” The letter ends with a desire to come to Boston to “clear the air,” perhaps that weekend: “Just call me. I hope Janis is feeling better. Heather and I send our love.”
A second and much more painful confrontation occurred three or so months later, in Vermont. Bellow had invited Daniel up “for our favorite lunch of salami and rye bread and pickles, and I was happy to see he was doing better after the nightmare winter he had had. He told me about the dream he’d had in the hospital…about Alexandra, which was just as disquieting as it later looked in print [in Ravelstein]. Everything was going OK until he said ‘I hear my sons were discussing my inheritance in my hospital room while I was there unconscious.’ ” It took Daniel a minute to compose himself. Then he asked Bellow: “Who told you that?” At this point Janis entered the room: “Oh, here she is!” Daniel said. He was furious and deeply hurt. “That’s the most despicable lie that I ever heard told about me.” He remembers feeling “hot all over”; tears came to his eyes. “I nearly lost my job because of all the time I spent down in Boston by your bed. I don’t get to go on vacation this year because you were sick. I was afraid you would die!” As he said this, Janis was “white in the face” while Bellow “was watching us both.” Daniel felt his father “was forcing me to enact the first scene of King Lear. And my stepmother was telling lies to set him against me….I’d read enough Russian novels to know things were to go very badly for me and my brothers.” As the silence continued, Daniel finally said, “Do you believe it?” “No,” Bellow answered. “No I don’t.” The tension in the room eased, but Daniel was still furious. “I’ve been a better son to you than you deserve,” he told Bellow. “ ‘I have to go back to work now.’ I left them both there and slammed the door on my way out.” Later, Daniel wondered if Bellow was testing Janis as much as himself. Although he speaks of his father with love and affection, he describes Bellow’s behavior at this moment as “disloyal, and in a way I never forgave him for it, never trusted him again.”13
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GREG, LIKE DANIEL, believes that Janis may have been the source of Bellow’s accusations. This she denies. She claims to have said nothing to Bellow about the behavior of his sons or of Lesha. “There were plenty of other people who talked to him about this, people who were there.” In his memoir and in interviews and emails with me, Greg speaks only of the worry and concern he and his brothers felt on their father’s behalf.14 What Adam recalls is that Janis “took very ill the well-meaning but also dismissive interference of people who felt they had to step in.” He also speaks of a “general coldness of the family towards her—especially on the part of the old inner circle…Lesha, Gregory, Harriet.” Daniel speaks of “a lot of conflict between Janis and Greg in the ICU,” with Greg “acting like he should be in charge. And if Janis felt stiffed by that, she was. But everybody was under such tremendous strain.” Greg compares Janis’s actions in the months that followed Bellow’s release from hospital to “a coup d’état,”15 presumably because they overthrew the influence of this circle. Adam remembers that Lesha, who had been Bellow’s executor and often advised him about financial matters, felt “driven out” by Janis, which, in a sense, “she was,” though relations were hardly severed.16
Daniel doubts Janis acted alone, as Gregory suggests, because “she never did anything that he [Bellow] didn’t want her to do.” This view irritates Janis. “I stood up to him plenty….When he said ‘poor me,’ played the Herzog role, I teased him mercilessly. I never let him talk in a way that was ridiculous. ‘Poor you. Of course Alexandra should have come home from a day of mathematics and gone straight to the kitchen to cook you brisket.’ He wanted to be checked; he loved me to disagree with him. I let him have it often.” Chris Walsh remembers a drive to the airport. He and Bellow were sitting in the front, Janis in the back. Bellow said something about delays and women with their cosmetics. “WHAT?” came a cry from the backseat. “What did you say, Saul?” It was mock outrage, but it was also calling Bellow out. Chris could mock as well, as when Bellow complained about Janis’s frequent calls to her mother and sister. “Why not lock her up? Then she’ll have no chance to talk to them.” Only once—when Bellow could no longer be allowed to drive—did Janis’s defiance lead to a serious fight. “He loved to drive, he loved his cars,” Janis recalls. “When he finished Ravelstein he bought himself a little black BMW as a treat.” The fight happened sometime after Bellow had agreed not to drive, which on this occasion he either forgot or chose to forget. Janis hated driving, had only become confident behind the wheel when Bellow was in the hospital. When Bellow refused to move, she threatened to walk home. Furious, he finally gave in. In this sense at least, out of necessity, Janis was in the driver’s seat.
Greg emphasizes the role money played in the distancing and disaffection between father and sons. As he puts it in the memoir, both he and Lesha knew that “touching on filial greed and patricidal wishes elicited the most powerful forces in the Bellow family—the spectre of Abraham’s chronic threats to disinherit his children, along with images of King Lear and the hated father Karamazov.”17 Early in his stay in intensive care, when it looked as though Bellow would not survive, Janis was focusing exclusively on his immediate comfort and treatment, but there were talks among his sons and others about what needed to be done if he died. The Bellows are emotional people and feelings were especially high during this period. In such circumstances—when discussing power of attorney, costs, conflicting advice from lawyers and doctors—heated or tactless remarks, hurt feelings, fears, and suspicions are common, even in the most harmonious or unemotional families. In Greg’s words, not always borne out in his memoir: “I’ve learned never to draw any permanent connotation from how people act when under duress.”18
Janis will say nothing of the behavior of the sons during Bellow’s time in the hospital. She has “no wish to say negative things about the boys,” and repudiates the suggestion that she was responsible for distancing them from their father. Of Greg she will only say, “I’m not going to go anywhere near Greg and his behavior in intensive care.” When she and Bellow married, “I wanted the sons to be made happy,” describing attempts to bring the family together as “reparations.” “I had this Pollyannaish idea—I come from this [close] family—we can all be a family. I would do anything to make this happen.” Bellow was not optimistic: “ ‘No, this is going to be difficult.’ And I would say, ‘Come on, we can do it, let’s have a family dinner.’ I didn’t understand how complicated and how difficult this was, but I tried very hard, very, very hard, and also to help him after these little gatherings. For all his faults, he loved his kids. He was not some ogre, some beast.” Janis readily acknowledges that the sons returned Bellow’s love; she has sympathy for them, even for their attitude to her. “These poor kids. I mean, what can you expect: And here’s another woman. What am I going to be? The step-step-stepmother? They’d already each had a stepmother. What a bizarre thing to have to accept. No, they couldn’t accept me
. But at the minimum what you would want would be some kind of respect, decency, getting along, but it wasn’t to be….You know why I stood it? I stood it because I loved their father. I would have done anything to make things better, and I swallowed quite a lot. That’s not really my nature, but I did it.”
Greg, too, remembers swallowing a lot, especially “being demonized when my brothers and I tried to protect Janis and our father while both were so vulnerable.” He was “incensed” at Bellow’s “accusation of malice and greed,” which “followed on the heels of what appeared to be Janis’s friendliness and cooperation,” and what he calls his “accession” to her status as Saul’s caretaker (“accession” is a strange word to use in this context, given that Bellow had been living with Janis for nine years and married to her for five). A year and a half later, “when Bellow had recovered most of his strength,” Greg returned to Boston “to clear the air.” Bellow, he writes, apologized for not having remembered that Greg had been there when he was in a coma, and said he no longer believed that his son had been “sitting around in the hospital waiting for him to die so that I could get my hands on some dough.” He also acknowledged Greg’s “thirty years of financial independence.”19 On June 10, 1995, long before this apology, Bellow turned eighty. Atlas says Janis threw a party for him in the house in Vermont, “with all three sons and their children,”20 but Janis has no recollection of this party (or any record of it in her journal), nor have Gregory, Adam, or Daniel, though Daniel thinks it possible “that Heather and I, and maybe Adam and Rachel, went out [to Vermont] to dinner.” If there was a party, Daniel believes, “I can’t imagine it was much fun.” A week after the birthday, on June 16, Daniel sent Bellow a Father’s Day card with a poem: “Roses are reddish / Violets are bluet / You’re my ol’ man / And that’s all there is to it.”
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ON JANUARY 23, 1995, within a month of Bellow’s release from the hospital, Edward Shils died. As Bellow knew through the Kleinbards, Shils had been terminally ill with cancer for some time. Before the trip to St. Martin, Kleinbard encouraged Bellow to attempt a reconciliation. When Shils learned of this, he rejected the idea. “I’m not going to do that,” he told Kleinbard. “It’s over. He behaved badly.” To Joseph Epstein, Shils said much the same thing: “I’m not making it easy for that son of a bitch. I don’t want him over….I’m not going for this sentimentality at the end.” Shils’s intense animus toward Bellow had long been clear but is given its fullest expression in his annotations to the draft of Atlas’s biography. These annotations are contained in two letters, dated March 17 and April 13, 1994, amounting to some thirty-two single-spaced pages. Shils begins by describing the draft as “compellingly readable,” “vivid,” and “very well written.” As with his annotations to Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a novel he greatly admired, Shils corrects what he sees as mistakes of fact and emphasis, the sort any author would be grateful to receive. These corrections also consistently malign Bellow’s character and work. “Consecration to his art” is the only virtue Shils allows his former friend: “With all his troubles mostly of his own making he has never lost that sense.”
According to Shils, Bellow’s failings as man and artist are various. He advises Atlas to say more of “the wider setting of European romanticism which had seeped into the United States. I refer specifically to the image of the artist as a spurned and misunderstood genius whose sensitivity separates him from and elevates him above the rest of philistine humanity.” This image, Shils claims, helps to account for Bellow’s “hostile and resentful attitude to American society and particularly to Goyim,” a quality “he shared but with additional vehemence with the other young Jewish intellectuals of his generation.” Bellow has “no sense of obligation to any other human being or to any institution. They were there for him to enjoy, benefit by and discard, as the spirit moved him.” More generally, “A great novelist has to have some moral sense. That has been Bellow’s blind spot in most of his writings.” Bellow’s heroes “are self-indulgent persons—‘slobs’—yielding to every impulse. Bellow has always written about them with obvious sympathy.” His supposed love of Chicago Shils characterizes as nostalgie de la boue. “In many respects [the city] represents to him the dregs of all human existence. It must be recognized that Bellow has a powerful attraction to dregs….He is fascinated by corruption, obscenity, sheer dishonesty, cruelty. He has a nose for bad odors to the point where he seldom smells anything else.” Shils claims that Atlas is wrong to suggest that Bellow has any sense of citizenship. “I had countless conversations with him. He never spoke of any sense of responsibility for any events occurring in the public sphere in the United States or any other country. There was never anything about which he thought he ought to do something.”
When Atlas quotes Bellow on the need “to work out one’s destiny freely,” Shils scoffs. “This is characteristic of Bellow’s nonsense….I do not think there was ever a world in which individuals are free to work out their destiny freely. So, he is even more ignorant than I thought he was.” Elsewhere, Shils condemns Bellow’s refusal to “take sides….That is, in fact, one of his greatest deficiencies as a writer….If Bellow really took the moral life seriously, he would have taken it seriously. There is no evidence that he did as he floated from one woman to the other. The one thing he took seriously was his literary art and that is something very different from moral seriousness.” In daily life, Shils writes, Bellow was ungenerous. He “practically never” invited anyone to dinner, and when he himself was invited “he tried to monopolize the conversation, took affront easily and acted as if he were the most important [person invited] to the dinner and that everyone else had been invited to have the distinction of having his company.” Bellow’s attempts to persuade the Committee on Social Thought to hire Edith Hartnett and Bette Howland, neither of whom was “remotely qualified,” need “more refined analysis.” Only his “subterfuge” and threats “to leave the University” explain their having been considered. He put them forward for personal reasons, “at the expense of the University of Chicago….In the case of Mrs. [Howland] I know very well that he was very connected with her sexually. This kind of ‘generosity’ seemed to be more characteristic of him than in many more of the ordinary kinds.” On March 24, 1994, Atlas wrote back to thank Shils for his “percipient and just” comments (the sort of thing anyone might say in a letter of thanks). Then he went on: “I think what you have to say about Bellow as a Romantic, and about his attitude toward America, is very provocative. It’s obvious to me that, despite whatever personal differences you and he may have had over the years, you see this man with remarkable clarity.”21
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SHORTLY AFTER BELLOW got out of the hospital, he began work on a new story, “By the St. Lawrence,” a work “planned and matured…under the respirator and with only intervals of clear consciousness.”22 The story would be a test, Bellow told Richard Stern, “to see whether there was a charge still in the batteries. And of course repetitions—deploying old troops—wouldn’t do.”23 The story was published in the July 1995 issue of Esquire, for reasons Bellow explains to Julian Behrstock in a letter of September 13: “The New Yorker was willing to print me, but I was told that the word rate was lower for fiction than for non-fiction—i.e. libelous ‘exposés’ and the trashing of quite inoffensive people. So I accepted Esquire’s higher offer. Their fiction editor, Rust Hills, has a soft spot for me.” “By the St. Lawrence” is the last story Bellow published. Six years after it appeared in Esquire, he chose it to open his Collected Stories. Whether it is free of “old troops” is open to question, as it draws on thinly fictionalized characters and situations from Bellow’s childhood, some of whom, and some of which, appear in earlier works (“The Old System,” Herzog, “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son”). The narrator, Rob Rexler, only just recovered from “a near-fatal illness,”24 feels a need to return to the place of his birth, Lachine, Quebec (as Be
llow, just out of the hospital, returns to Lachine in writing the story). Rexler recalls how “more than seventy years ago” his mother, “mute with love, had bundled him with woolens and set him down in the snow with a small shovel” (p. 2), a real-life incident recounted by Bellow on several occasions. Rexler’s aunt Rozzy is the last of several fictional versions of Bellow’s aunt Rosa Gameroff; her sons, Rexler’s cousins, are modeled on Bellow’s Gameroff cousins.25
What is new is the story’s fascination with viscera and body parts. Rexler’s body is contorted by polio, contracted in his twenties. The disease turns him into “a crustacean” (p. 3), humping his back and curving the bracket of his left shoulder into “a contorted coop or bony armor” (p. 11). He walks through Lachine “with a virile descending limp, his weight coming down on the advancing left foot” (pp. 3–4). It is autumn in the narrative present, but in Rexler’s mind it is a day in June, when he was seven or eight. On that day, his much older cousin, Albert, an homme à femmes, takes him along on what he says is an errand. They pull up in front of a large bungalow with a spacious porch. Albert tells Rexler to stay in the car, that he is likely to be some time. From the car window, Rexler watches as young women “came and went on the broad porch. They walked arm in arm or sat together on the swing or in white Adirondeck chairs.” Albert’s “errand” takes “as much as an hour” (p. 5), and the adult Rexler wonders if his child self had any idea what Albert was up to in the house. “He might have had,” he decides, given “all those young women passing through the screen door, promenading, swinging between the creaking chains” (p. 5). He certainly knew not to “say anything to Aunt Rozzy about the house with all the girls” (p. 7).
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