Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  In addition to the gruesomeness of the disease itself and of Gajdusek’s experiments, the journals contain disturbing accounts of sexual practices in New Guinea, particularly concerning children. In the journals, he discusses the Anga tribe in New Guinea, whose young boys come to manhood by having sex with older village men. Gajdusek records having been offered children as sexual playmates, or having boys themselves openly approach him for sex, and describes sleeping in the same bed with boys. In the mid-1960s, he began bringing boys from New Guinea back to the United States to live with him. When he won the Nobel Prize, several of them accompanied him on the stage to receive the award. In later years, seven of the boys Gajdusek had adopted testified that they had had sex with him, and Gajdusek admitted having masturbated boys and approving of incest. In April 1996, he was charged with child molestation, and spent a year in prison. From the time of Bellow’s first denguelike symptoms on St. Martin, he was, according to Janis, “tortured” by details from Gajdusek’s journals, the source material for the New Guinea scenes of “Marbles.” But he did not give up the novel. After leaving hospital and finishing “By the St. Lawrence,” he returned to “Marbles” once more. On June 1, 1995, according to Janis’s journal, he began yet another new version, “handwriting again from PAGE ONE.” In this version, the model for Hilbert Faucil was no longer Nathan Tarcov. Now it was Philip Roth, “a P.R. who late in life decides he might still love” (an idea sparked by a conversation Bellow and Roth had during a visit Roth paid to 73 Bay State Road, after Bellow’s return from the hospital). Another factor drawing Bellow back to “Marbles,” according to the June 1 journal entry, was his eagerness “to incorporate his new sense of what it means to be old, and ‘to have two wheels over the median line.’ ”

  For a while, Bellow went at the novel with renewed confidence, even sending a twenty-eight-page extract to Bill Buford at The New Yorker. “I must finally be feeling strong about this book,” he told Janis, “otherwise I would never have consented to publish part of it.” It was the first time in five years that he had “felt up to letting any part of it go.” But again, as the same June 1 entry records, confidence waned, partly because he lacked stamina. In Vermont, in the summer of 1995, Bellow found he could no longer follow his usual routine. “I know he’s in trouble when he suggests, as he did a couple of days ago, that we do the grocery shopping in the morning. This morning over breakfast he told me that he’s tired of the book again.” Roth hadn’t worked out as a starting point for Hilbert; now he was considering Arthur Lidov, the starting point for Basteshaw in The Adventures of Augie March.41 In the June 1 entry, Janis admits: “I’ve given up trying to guess whether Hilbert will make it or not. I asked B why this book had gotten hold of him and tied him up for 5 years, and he said, ‘Well, love in old age is a subject that interests me.’ ” Four months later, in an entry of October 15, Janis records that the model for Hilbert has become Lou Sidran, Bellow’s friend from high school. She also records Bellow’s complaint that he “doesn’t know anymore” where he is in the novel, in the current draft of the novel, so many drafts have there been. The strand of the novel he’s at work on now is “confused with other strands from other drafts.”

  There was also a problem of tone or register. On the one hand, “there’s this absorption with death (at least every third thought). And there’s this central q[uestion] he brought back from his own crisis, which is, What did I fight for? B didn’t come back for the sake of a Brillig’s [Hilbert’s tabloid], or a Magnusson [Hilbert’s old friend, part Peltz, part “Kappy” Kaplan], or even a Chickie [Hilbert’s girlfriend, some forty-plus years younger].” On the other hand, “this is a comic novel.” Although it is perfectly possible to mix the silly with the serious, Bellow couldn’t find the right key. As Janis puts it in the journal: “What B has experienced in coming back from death is far more serious than anything he is allowing Hilbert. What he has seen or felt on the comic side he has rendered brilliantly in Herzog, but his own history is not the history of a schlemiel.” This problem Bellow and Janis discuss throughout the morning, invoking Heidegger and Nietzsche and Flaubert and Lear and Measure for Measure. At the end of the journal entry, Janis asks: “Have I succeeded in transmitting any of this morning’s talk? We were both very excited….We went into a lot more detail about Flaubert than I have indicated here.”

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  THREE MONTHS LATER, on January 26, 1996, Bellow began writing a completely different fiction, The Actual, a novella published in April 1997 as a Viking Penguin paperback (like A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection). Its original title was “Changing Places”; its theme, Bellow told Janis, was “how out of place love is in the modern world,” though it soon became apparent that “love in old age” would also be a theme. The idea for the novella came from an episode in “Marbles.” Hilbert Faucil, at ninety-three, encounters the spitting image of his high-school love, Nellie Bassix, whose face “I had carried in recollection upwards of seventy years and saw more regularly than the orbits of the moon.”42 In The Actual, the lovers in question, aging if not old, are Harry Trellman, a businessman returned to Chicago after years in the Far East, and Amy Wustrin, a divorcée, twice married, who decorates the apartments of North Shore notables. Harry has loved Amy, whom he dated briefly in high school, for more than forty years. That they never became lovers or married is his fault, and he bitterly regrets never declaring himself, never competing for or pursuing her. The figure who brings them together resembles the wealthy benefactors of Victorian fiction: Sigmund Adletsky, a “trillionaire” businessman aged ninety-two. Adletsky is small and shrewd; his wife, Dame Siggy, also shrewd, is even smaller. Seated in their warm limo, Dame Siggy looks “something like a satin-wrapped pupa….Her bird legs, aslant, were laid together or set aside until they should be called upon to move.”43

  The real-life starting points for these characters were fixed early. According to Janis’s journal entry of May 6, 1997, Bellow identified Herb Passin, a friend since high school, later a professor of East Asian studies at Columbia, as the model for Harry Trellman; Marilyn Mann, the second wife of Sam Freifeld, also a friend from high school, as the model for Amy Wustrin (Marilyn Mann, too, was an interior decorator); and Freifeld himself as the model for Amy’s second husband, Jay Wustrin, about whom we hear many unflattering things. Other characters have comparably recognizable points of origin. Adletsky resembles Abe Pritzker, founding father of the Pritzker business empire (Hyatt hotels and the Royal Caribbean cruise line, among other enterprises) and many Chicago philanthropies (the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, the Pritzker School of Law at Northwestern University, Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Music Pavilion in Millennium Park). Like Adletsky, Pritzker lived to a ripe old age. He died aged ninety, having turned the family businesses over to his sons and grandchildren (Adletsky’s sons and grandchildren now run his businesses, though they “still report to him” [p. 5]). According to Marilyn Mann, Pritzker several times consulted her over questions of interior design and decoration.

  Although no trillionaire, Harry Trellman is rich, having “a gift for putting together business deals” (p. 3). One such deal, buying damaged Burmese antiquities, shipping them to Guatemala City to be restored cheaply, then selling them in North America, has earned him “a lifetime income” (p. 9).44 Harry’s habitual reserve, useful in business, is inherited from his mother, who “kept her own counsel.” He has a vaguely Asiatic look, enabling him “to drown my emotions in my face, Chinese style” (p. 67). Like Herb Passin’s mother, Harry’s mother had a disability (“She limped”), which she used as an excuse to place her son in a Jewish orphanage; then she traveled “from sanitarium to sanitarium, mainly abroad” (p. 2), trips paid for by her brothers, rich sausage-makers. Harry’s father, a carpenter, seems not to have objected. Perhaps because Harry is so reserved, people confide in him, “though I didn’t ever encourage confidence.” He’s Bellow’s cat who walks alone, deriv
ing “an almost incomprehensible satisfaction to deny almost everyone access to my thoughts and opinions” (pp. 62–63). Among the many things most people didn’t know about Harry are “what I did in Indochina or Burma. Whether there were women in my life. Or children” (p. 69). What the reader knows is that he had a wife, who strayed, but no children, and that there were other women. Hence, in part, Amy’s assumption “that I could never be domesticated” (p. 84).

  When Adletsky meets Harry at a dinner party, he finds him astute and intriguing. “In my active years,” he tells Harry after summoning him to his office, “I did very little socializing. I have to do it now. And there must be a way to make it pleasanter” (p. 16). Harry, another “first-class noticer” (p. 15), is enlisted by Adletsky to be such a way. He will explain the forces at work on such occasions as the recent dinner—the motives, the interests, the powers. Harry will also be called upon to advise Adletsky “on matters of taste” (p. 16), an additional topic not much attended to by the businessman. Adletsky, Harry thinks, is like Napoleon on St. Helena, bored in exile: “Old age was Adletsky’s exile” (p. 75). When Adletsky asks Harry why he’s returned to Chicago, Harry answers with characteristic reserve: “I have a connection here” (he means Amy). He might also have said: “I was fond of winter, of the snow on the ground and the old-fashioned raccoon coats high-school girls used to wear—coats with big braided-leather buttons….I valued highly the smell of animal musk released from the fur by the warmth of Amy’s body when she unfastened those buttons” (p. 76), a passage that recalls Bellow’s memories of petting with Eleanor Fox, his high school love, in wintry Humboldt Park, versions of which appear in “Something to Remember Me By” and Humboldt’s Gift.45 “By and by I came to see what kind of hold she had on me,” Harry says of Amy: “Other women were apparitions. She, and she only, was no apparition” (p. 84). When asked why, he answers: “After forty years of thinking it over, the best description I could come up with was ‘an actual affinity’ ” (p. 100). “What made it actual?” Amy asks. “Other women might remind me of you, but there was only one actual Amy” (p. 101). Although Adletsky hears none of this, he, too, it turns out, is a first-class noticer. At the end of the novel, he brings the two lovers together at the graveside of Amy’s second husband. As Harry puts it, “At ninety-two, Adletsky was pioneering in compassion, a new field for him” (p. 81).

  Amy is Harry’s erotic ideal, in part because he encountered her in adolescence, the time when “this tremendous feeling came…this love, direct from nature, came over me” (p. 70). For forty years, “I kept her preserved as she had been at fifteen years of age” (p. 19). Encountered in later life, the real Amy is at first unrecognizable. Ten years ago, Harry ran into her in the Loop and didn’t know her, “the woman with whom I was virtually in daily mental contact” (p. 19). Over the years, “with their crises and wars and presidential campaigns, all the transformations of the present,” the Amy of memory is unchanged. “There’s the power of Eros for you” (p. 21). That Harry failed to recognize her in the Loop, looking “as gray-faced as a maid-of-all-work—an overworked mother,” was because she “was in the real world. I was not in it” (p. 19). Like many Bellow characters, Harry lives much of his life, his most vivid life, in memory. Amy is indignant, furious not to have been recognized, and as he collects himself, he sees her as she is: “More mature. Or subdued. I’m looking for a tactful way to say it” (p. 19). Then he considers the circumstances. “Under the el tracks when the weather is overcast, everything turns gray….The thick, dried urban gumbo of Lake Street made everything look bad.” In addition, “her difficulties with her husband, Jay, were acute just then, and she feared she wasn’t fit to be seen” (p. 19).

  In the narrative present, ten years later, Harry encounters Amy at the Adletskys’, where she has come to advise them on furnishings. She is dressed in a blue knitted suit, wearing a good deal of makeup, “especially around the eyes, where it was most needed. Her round face was calm, though her inner reckoning machines ran at high speed” (p. 35). The Loop meeting is forgotten: “Age sometimes brings slovenliness to a woman of a full build. But it was plain that she was still in control of her appearance; her traits and faculties were rounded up—they were on view in the corral. She was a beauty, her skin still smooth; she even breathed like a beauty” (p. 35). As ever, Harry’s way of talking makes Amy uneasy (as Bellow’s way of talking made Eleanor Fox uneasy). But Amy knows full well the place she holds for him (as Eleanor Fox knew full well the place she held for Bellow). As they talk, Harry pictures Amy, the Amy in front of him, in the shower: “The double cheeks of her backside are still well modeled, and she washes with the experienced hands of the mother who has bathed small children. A whole lifetime of self-care is apparent in the soaping of her breasts” (p. 21). The process of blending the ideal Amy and the flesh-and-blood Amy has begun.

  Amy’s sexual allure is not wholly a creation of memory or adolescence. A real thing, it has survived both time and the sullying of the world, of Jay Wustrin in particular. In high school, Jay, “an attractive man with a deliberate erotic emphasis in his looks” (p. 22), took Amy from Harry. He and Amy then split up and found others to marry. After those marriages fell apart, they got together again. Before they married, Jay, a swinger, invited Harry to join them after lunch in a threesome in the Palmer House, a postprandial shower (the reason Harry pictures the current Amy in the shower). Jay’s aim, Harry believes, was “to cure me of my sentiments…his version of cure or correction in accordance with realistic principles” (p. 64). Amy agreed to the shower, Jay tells Harry, with a shrug. “Why not?” (p. 24). (On another occasion, Harry observes, “When she shrugged, the soft breasts in her sweater added weight to her shrug” [p. 83].) After twenty minutes, Jay, a lawyer, is called away to appear in court. “It was then that I kissed her under the breast and on the inner thigh” (p. 24). At some point, Harry recalls, “Amy opened her mouth toward me, yearningly. But she didn’t speak. Nor did I” (p. 25). And that was it. “At the Palmer House, when you had the opportunity, you didn’t take it,” Amy recalls. Harry has thought long and hard about this moment and has his answer to hand. “Just because you were available to me. As you had been available to Jay,” an explanation Amy understands: “The generic product, as druggists say, not the name brand. Not you and me, but any male with any female. Looking back, I might have felt like a sex tramp” (p. 20).46 After Jay and Amy married, Harry recalls, “I was a frequent dinner guest. Friend of the family” (p. 25).

  Jay Wustrin was piggish about sex, always on the make, kinky, gross. Five years before his death, he sued Amy for divorce, having secretly taped her sex talk with a lover from New York. These tapes he played to the judge in chambers (and to Harry). Amy was left penniless, an object of salacious gossip. Harry is unfazed: “I wasn’t jealous of Jay Wustrin gripping Amy before the wall mirror or of the New York man….I couldn’t have expected Amy to mark time while I was inching toward her” (p. 21). It is important that Amy’s erotic appeal is set in the context of such doings, also that Harry knows of them. When Amy asks Harry if Jay recounted his sexual antics, Harry tells her, “I didn’t care to hear the blow-by-blow.” To the reader, Harry is more forthcoming: “I looked down on his activities, but I never tired of hearing (translating them into my own terms) about these seductions. Of the girls by him. Of him by them. More than forty years of it, starting with his father’s laundry…On bags of soiled towels and bedding, after five p.m., when his Pa put him in charge of locking up for the night” (p. 65).

  The erotic ideal Amy embodies for Harry is realizable in the flesh, and always has been. In addition to the warm musk of the raccoon coat as she opens it to him, Harry was drawn to the adolescent Amy by other particulars:

  The imperfect application of her lipstick was another point of identity. That was the whole power of it—the beauty of this flesh-and-blood mortality. Just as mortal was the shape of her bottom as she walked, a mature woman swinging a schoo
lbag. She didn’t walk like a student. There was also the faulty management of her pumps. They dropped on the minor beat. This syncopation was the most telling idiosyncrasy of all. It bound the other traits together. What you were aware of was the ungainly sexuality of her movements and her posture [p. 20].47

  The novel ends with Harry’s proposal, and a final scrutiny. “I stood back from myself and looked into Amy’s face. No one else on all this earth had such features. This was the most amazing thing in the life of the world” (p. 104). “I stood back from myself” suggests that what Harry sees is not solely the Amy of memory. “This is the time to do what I’m doing now,” he tells her in the novel’s last sentence, “and I hope you’ll have me.” Not all love in the modern world need be profane; love in age is a reality.

  Harry conquers his habitual reserve, but Amy’s feelings remain unclear, her pain in particular. This is a point Philip Roth raises with Bellow, in a letter of April 22, 1997. He has now read the novella several times, calling it “a delight in its masterful ease of movement and its sharp momentary effects—the quick portraits of people, weather, the surprises…yet it seemed to me that undetonated impulses of either thought or sentiment kept reining it in….There isn’t much that is recognized or depicted as pain. The pain is treated as far, far away…and the invention and the recording of the pain may be what I felt missing.” To this letter Bellow replied on May 7. Given the “ ‘humorously’ cynical” nature of the characters (Harry is cynical about everyone except Amy), “I concluded that the pain had to be taken for granted”: “Probably they feel they can wear their pain out, or attenuate it, or outlive it.” As for Amy, Bellow admits that Harry “gave her no inducement to think of him. Still, he does see that he has come somehow to belong to Amy. Because she is his actual.” Not everyone will think this much of an answer. The emphasis remains on Harry and his feelings.