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IN 1996 THE BELLOWS MOVED from Bay State Road to a house in Brookline, on Crowninshield Road, a quiet residential street off Commonwealth Avenue. The house had four bedrooms, four bathrooms, separate studies for Bellow and Janis, a dining room, a living room, a front porch, a television room, and a kitchen with a central station. The Bellows fell in love with it as soon as they saw the light-filled kitchen and the yard beyond, with its handsome chestnut tree. The property was rented from the university, a five-minute subway ride away (on the Green Line). Sometimes Bellow and Janis walked to BU along the back roads that run parallel to Commonwealth Avenue, past grand Victorian mansions, a bird-and-wildlife sanctuary, a large pond. The urban attractions of Brookline were first outlined to Bellow by the novelist Alan Lelchuk, who stressed its Jewish character. In a letter of March 27, 1976, in anticipation of Bellow and Alexandra teaching for a semester at Brandeis, Lelchuk praised Brookline’s “solid bourgeois Jewish familiarity and warmth….I think this is a better town than Newton because it’s not really a suburb, but a town in itself with a center or two, and it’s right down the street from Boston, across a little bridge from Cambridge.” While at Brandeis, the Bellows lived in Cambridge but had been attracted to Brookline. In a letter to Lelchuk of March 22, 1976, Bellow said that Brookline reminded him of “the Montreal I knew when I was a kid.” Twenty years later, a Brookline resident, he ate nearby at Rubin’s Kosher Deli on Harvard Street, described by Ruth Wisse as “the best we can do in Boston,” bought his fish at Wulf’s Fish Market, and shopped and browsed at other stores at Coolidge Corner, a neighborhood much frequented by Russian Jewish immigrants, including several Gordin cousins. As Janis puts it, Coolidge Corner “replicated all the little shops and things of Chicago,” and “you could hear Yiddish spoken there.”
In May 1999, Chris Walsh, Bellow’s assistant, finished his Ph.D.15 As his thesis adviser, as opposed to his boss, Bellow had been “pretty disengaged, but that was what I wanted.” As his boss, in addition to being considerate, he’d been fun, full of silly stories and cracks: about the BU philosophy professor described as “always dropping his own name” (followed by “That was pretty good, wasn’t it?”); about addictions (“mine’s to ill-nature”); about feeling low (“Whenever you are feeling down, Chris, remember it’s a blessing that you were not born with Russian cousins”); about a poor student (“Always a disappointment when you find a Jewish kid who’s not smart. I think his father’s Irish,” a crack aimed at Walsh); about a sentence in a Russian novel: “He had one rather clean shirt” (“a very Russian sentence”). After finishing his dissertation, Walsh was keen to return to Africa, where he’d been with the Peace Corps before coming to BU. In May 2000, having been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, he accepted a two-year teaching post in Burkina Faso and was replaced as Bellow’s assistant by an ex–BU student who would remain on the job for five years, until the end of Bellow’s life.
The student’s name was Will Lautzenheiser. An English major, he had graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude in 1996. For the next four years, he worked first at the James Joyce Research Center at BU, under the eccentric Joyce scholar John Kidd, and then for the provost of the university. When he heard that Bellow was looking for a new secretary, he immediately emailed Walsh, who told him to come by the house. Will had never met Bellow, or taken any courses with him, though as a senior he’d attended a reading Bellow gave of “Leaving the Yellow House.” The only Bellow novels he’d read were Herzog and Henderson the Rain King. The interview took place in the living room at Crowninshield Road. Janis was nursing six-month-old Rosie. Moose, the cat, introduced as “an important member of the family,” was present throughout. Bellow was relaxed and easy. “I see this as a very simple thing,” he told Will. “I want you as my secretary.” “It was very intuitive,” Will recalls, it “wasn’t even an interview.” Will’s father was also born in 1915, he told Bellow; “Well, that should inspire filial piety,” Bellow answered. “And he was right about that; the bond that was established happened very quickly.”
The first job Will was given was to help move the family to Vermont at the end of the month. Once the Bellows were settled, Will returned to Boston to collect mail from the Crowninshield Road house and Bellow’s office at BU. Every two weeks, he returned to Vermont “for a few days or even a week,” armed with Bellow’s correspondence. Sitting together on the front porch of the Vermont house, they would go through the hundreds of requests Bellow received. At first, Will recalls, “I ran most everything past him,” but he soon learned “what he wouldn’t do.” Later, Will was set the task of organizing Bellow’s books in Vermont, which were grouped by country. Frank Maltese was called in to build more bookshelves. The first literary conversation Will had with Bellow concerned Melville, how funny he was (in the sense of amusing). That summer, there were lots of visitors and nights out, concerts at Marlboro, family outings for ice cream. There was a morning routine. Bellow would come downstairs at nine or nine-thirty, have his coffee. The papers came a day late, through the mail, and most mornings Bellow would read a little of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. Then he’d go to his office in the house, on the ground floor, not to the outside studio, “and he’d do some reading, and he would write, and he’d sometimes do some letters.” His manner with Janis was “loving”; the first summer with infant Rosie was “beautiful, magical.”
Bellow was now eighty-five, and the writing he returned to was “Marbles.” He could write paragraphs, Will remembers, “but that was all.” After Ravelstein, he also turned his attention to the ordering of his Collected Stories, helped by Janis as well as Beena Kamlani. James Wood wrote an introduction to the volume, Janis a memoirlike preface, and Bellow a brief afterword, in which he confessed to “emphatically agreeing” with Chekhov’s “mania for shortness,” a necessity in modern America, with its “plethora of attractions and excitements—world crises, hot and cold wars, threats to survival, famines, unspeakable crimes” (p. 440). He makes no mention of age as a factor in writing short. Kamlani continued to visit Bellow after Ravelstein. “My prime function,” she recalls, “was to get him started.” “For a while, something would capture his imagination, and he’d say, Okay, let’s give it a shot. And we’d spend four mornings working on it, and then it would peter out….But of course he was old by then, and his attention span was not quite what it was.”
In addition to visitors—the boys and their families, Janis’s family, Lesha and family, Joel Bellows, friends from Chicago and Boston—there were Vermont friends—the Copelands, Walter Pozen, the cellist David Soyer of the Guarneri Quartet and his wife, Janet Putnam, a harpist, and Laura and Franklin Reeve, she a novelist, he a poet and Russianist, as handsome as his son Christopher. Especially welcome were visits from Rosanna Warren and her husband, Stephen Scully, a classicist, often accompanied by their teenage daughters. Rosanna had inherited her parents’ Vermont house, along with a family tradition of reading Shakespeare plays out loud. On several occasions, the Bellows joined in. They read The Tempest, with Bellow as Prospero and Janis as Miranda. When they read King Lear, Bellow was Lear and Janis was Cordelia. Bellow was Falstaff in the Henry IV readings. “If you wanted to, you could prepare,” Warren remembers, “but we’d all been living with these plays all the time.” The readings began at 6:00 p.m., and the first three acts were read before supper; the last two acts were read after dessert. The children were given minor parts, and other parts were switched around, but with Lear and Prospero “there was no question of his being someone else.” As an actor, Bellow “was extremely expressive…completely magical and with such authority. Everybody was intensely gripping our texts….The room was no longer Vermont. In a weird way it was no longer Saul. We were all alive to the complex registers of Saul having such roles.” On these evenings, Warren was struck by how generous Bellow was with her children, “really attentive, very sweet to them….The children loved it.”
Bellow’s difficulties with his writing, his inability to concentrate, his lapses of memory, were apparent when he and Will went through office work, including finances and correspondence. “We would sit down with the checkbook,” Will remembers, and Bellow would ask, “What is this?” or “What is this Verizon all the time?” “He’d make a joke out of it, but it was real.” In the following spring, when Bellow taught a course on Conrad, there were one or two complaints from students about being asked to look at passages they’d looked at just previously. Will attended all the classes. “There was some impairment, but we got through it.” As James Wood understands it, that spring someone had gone to the dean to complain. Silber was informed, but his view was “When you get a really great eagle, you don’t clip his feathers.” Bellow had no desire to give up teaching—quite the contrary. He enjoyed the contact with young people. One solution was for him to co-teach, as he’d done in Chicago (with Bloom and David Grene and others). Fortunately, just the right co-teacher was at hand. In autumn 2001, James Wood’s wife, the American novelist Claire Messud, had taken a job as writer-in-residence at Amherst College. In 1995, after five years as lead fiction reviewer at The Guardian, Wood had become a senior editor at The New Republic. When he visited Boston, Martin Peretz, the owner of The New Republic, held a dinner for him. Peretz invited Janis and Bellow, who was just out of the hospital after the poisoned-fish disaster. Wood was struck by how much older and weaker Bellow looked, how “his hand trembled as he passed the salad bowl. But we talked happily. We talked about Dreiser and how much he liked Dreiser.” By 2001, Wood was living in Northampton, within driving distance of Boston, and he and Messud were frequent visitors to the Bellows. Sometime that autumn, Janis asked Wood if he’d help out with Bellow’s spring-semester course. A meeting was arranged with the dean at BU, who eagerly approved the arrangement, and almost immediately Wood and Bellow devised a syllabus: “Just a few things Saul liked and a few things I liked. It was a fairly light course in terms of reading….“ ‘The Dead,’ The Secret Agent, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, some Chekhov stories, Notes from Underground, Hunger [Knut Hamsun], Sea and Sardinia [Lawrence].”
By the spring of 2001, Bellow’s memory problems had been drawn to the attention of his doctor, Thomas Barber, an internist who had been the family physician since Bellow’s release from the ICU in January 1995. In mid-April, Bellow contracted pneumonia and was admitted to hospital for four or five days. After his release, “something was acutely worse,” according to Barber. Tests were conducted, and on May 9, 2001, Barber recorded a “probable diagnosis of dementia,” a scan having shown a “suggestion of early Alzheimer’s.” Martin Amis was visiting Boston at this date, and, over a meal at a restaurant near the Crowninshield Road house, was told of the diagnosis the day it was delivered. “He was very resilient about it,” Amis remembers, “more so than Janis, refusing to be daunted.”16 Bellow’s physical health was pretty much normal for an eighty-five-year-old middle-class male: “moderately high cholesterol, moderately high blood pressure, slightly overweight, living a North American lifestyle.” His pacemaker, installed in August 1998, had kept atrial fibrillation in check; he could again drink coffee and wine. As for the memory loss, among patients in their eighties, “it’s the minority who have all their mental faculties.” According to Janis, even as Bellow suffered increased confusion, “anecdotes, limericks, songs [were] bubbling up all the time, a huge poetic energy.” Barber, too, remarked on Bellow’s energy: the moments of not being himself, of slowed mental capacities, were moments, at least up until a year or so before his death. “He never had full-blown Alzheimer’s.” At times, especially when physically unwell or under stress, “he’d be distant and an old man and sometimes he’d be on the phone and wholly there.” “Even on bad days,” Will Lautzenheiser recalls, “he could seem well….His sense of humor, his wit, never diminished.”
That August, a distressing incident highlighted Bellow’s increasing confusions. Janis had been invited to attend a conference in Toronto on Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Toronto was where her family lived, and help would be available, so Rosie and Bellow accompanied her. Will drove the family to the airport the day before the conference, and “everything was going to go wonderfully.” The next night, Will went to the movies, a six-hour showing of the whole of Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom. When he returned to his apartment at 1:00 a.m., there was a message on his answering machine, recorded a half-hour earlier. It was from Bellow: “I am coming in from the airport and should be home in forty minutes.” Will immediately called Crowninshield Road and got no answer. When he finally made contact (he can’t remember if he called again or received a call), Bellow “seemed anxious and exhausted”: “He was home and said I’m just in. I said I’d be right over. It’s a mile away and I ran. I’d never run so fast in my life, through the dark [the streetlights weren’t working; there’d been a power outage in Brookline].”17 Will asked Bellow why he’d come home alone, and Bellow answered that “he felt like Janis was leaving him.” “No, no, Janis loves you,” Will told him. “Well, that’s what I’ve always thought. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure today.” Will told him it would “all be sorted out,” and Bellow “seemed skeptical but hopeful, too.” How had Bellow got to Boston? “I bought a plane ticket.” When Will called Toronto, “everyone was terrified, there was a police search.”
Will later learned that, when Janis went off to the conference in the afternoon, the plan was for Bellow to wait in the hotel room until he was picked up to be taken to dinner with friends, Clifford Orwin and his wife, Donna. He thinks Bellow “was in the hotel and he felt like he was being neglected.” He may also have felt anxious when left alone. Harvey Freedman, Janis’s father, thinks “he wasn’t used to the fact that this was her thing.” Janis thinks he acted on “a flash of pique [which] he apologized for and regretted.”18 There was also, according to Will, “some tension between the in-laws and Saul….Maybe that’s what he meant when he said I’m just not sure that Janis loves me.” This tension or irritation he communicated to others—to Walter Pozen, Philip Roth, Maggie Simmons. He was spending too much time with Janis’s family, he complained; he was being treated “like a piece of excess baggage.” It was the Orwins who discovered he’d gone. At the hotel, they were told that Bellow had checked out. How Bellow managed to get himself to Boston baffled everyone. As Will puts it, “We were all kind of laughing at it—because he had actually done it. We were all elated to some extent.” At the airport, Bellow had bought a ticket not to Boston but to New York; he thought he was living in New York. “Then somehow he was redirected. Someone at the airport—some good Samaritan working for the airline—redirected it….He had to swap tickets and they got him on the right plane.” Will has no idea how Bellow found his phone number and was able to call from the airport; “he certainly hadn’t memorized it.” At Crowninshield Road, “he was totally calm. He was sad if anything, because he felt like the relationship was in trouble. He was defeated. We might as well have been talking at one in the afternoon instead of in the [morning]. Then I put Walter on the phone with him and Walter was very reassuring and then Saul calmed down. And I got him upstairs and into bed. And that was it, and I stayed there.” Janis was “beside herself.”
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IN THE SPRING OF 2002, James Wood thought Bellow had “the ability to concentrate long enough to read a hundred pages or so….But in class, he was quite capable of forgetting what had been said fifteen minutes before.” Yet “you could still touch the brain for the deep meaning. That was part of my job. One part of my job was to do some formal close reading…take the students through passages; the other part was just to say to Saul: ‘Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, there used to be an either/or battle when you were growing up, and you had to choose one or the other,’ and he’d be off, telling what it was like being a young man reading Tolstoy in Chicago….And there were wonderful formulations, too. He was sometimes absent or a bit supine or
a little bit sleepy, and other times he proved that he was absolutely still there.” Wood remembers Bellow’s describing hate in Dostoevsky (a desire for revenge, rage, resentment) as “really a love.” Another time, he spoke of “the secret resources of the weak.”19
Wood was struck by the pleasure Bellow took in teasing the students. He also recalls his “losing a sense of chronology.” In one class, he described Dostoevsky’s antiheroes as wandering the streets of St. Petersburg, fulminating with rage against its peaceable citizens. They reminded Bellow of a character in the funny papers in Chicago when he was growing up. The character’s name was Desperate Ambrose. Then he looked around and asked, “Any of you remember Desperate Ambrose?” Since the faces of the students were blank, he described how “Desperate Ambrose would go sloping around the streets of Chicago muttering to himself—‘Too tame! Too tame!’ ” The memory delighted Bellow, and he “put his head back and laughed, and if anyone joined in laughing it was only because they were enjoying his self-pleasure. They weren’t getting it at all.” On this occasion, Wood was not sure if Bellow was teasing when he asked his students whether they remembered Desperate Ambrose. There were other such moments in the course, but overall Wood thought it “wonderful.” There were “a lot of mature students, quite a number of auditors, it was always full (easily over thirty), with people standing. Sometimes Keith Botsford would turn up, and Beena—let’s say eight to nine auditors, grad students. There was just a good feeling. It was an exciting class.” Before class, Wood and Bellow would have lunch together at Crowninshield Road and talk about the day’s reading, then they’d drive or take the subway to campus. After class, “a group of us” would go back to Crowninshield Road. “We’d have tea or sometimes dinner, and then I’d drive back to Northampton late at night. I never wanted that to end. On the other hand, I felt that that should have been Saul’s last year, and it wasn’t.”
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