* * *
—
MARTIN AMIS THINKS Bellow never took in September 11, 2001, but Beena Kamlani, who was in Boston at the time, is pretty sure that he understood, at least for a moment. At Crowninshield Road, “we were glued to the television,” but “at that point he wasn’t always separating reality [from delusion].” The next morning, scanning the newspapers, “he asked me what is all this excitement about, and I explained, and he shook his head with such horror that I think he did get it, but he was trying to connect the dots.” Several weeks later, she recalls, “in one of those full-on moments, he understood exactly what had happened.” (A year and a half later, on March 19, 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, Eugene Goodheart told Bellow, “It looks like we’re going to war.” “With whom?” Bellow replied.) In a letter of condolence of April 16, 2002, to his Vermont friend Herb Hillman, after the death of Herb’s wife, Libby, Bellow’s difficulty separating reality from delusion is explicitly acknowledged.
Dear Herb,
Just as I was sitting down to write this note I discovered that my elder brother, Sam, had died. He died not this year, or the year before, but in 1990 [in fact, he died in 1985]. Until half an hour ago I had assumed he was alive and well. Eighty years ago, I could have told you what sort of dinner he had eaten last night.
This is what life prepares for us in our closing years. In his closing years, no man can assume that his mind is as it once was—intact.
I should have written weeks ago to tell you how marvelous a woman your wife was.
You could, if you were familiar with my handwriting see for yourself that I am, as the kids like to say, “all shook up” and not to be held strictly accountable.
Janis and I—and Rosie as well—hope to see you in June.
As you know well, we have no choice but to soldier on—Rosie, sporting a new barrette or pony-tail holder, has come to claim my attention. Janis is at the University today.
Yours affectionately,
Saul
My original intention was to try to comfort you for your great loss but my mind is not following orders today. My heart appears to be in the right place but my mind is only lightly attached.
Around the time of this letter, Andrew Wylie traveled to Boston to spend a day with Bellow, “and when I came back I reported to Philip [Roth] that I thought Saul was depressed, and Philip’s response was like a Zen master’s. It was said with a hardness. ‘You’d be depressed too if that universe was shutting down on you.’ ” Adam Bellow tells of the first time he began seriously to worry about his father. It was sometime in 2002. Janis had gone to Toronto to visit her parents, “and I was filling in.” He and Bellow decided to go out to lunch at a local pizza place. Bellow was wearing the long down coat he liked, but on this occasion, it seemed to Adam, the coat made him look like a homeless person. After they ordered a couple of slices of pizza, Adam watched as “the guy gives him some change. Saul doesn’t say anything. He just stands there, looking kind of off, mouth slightly open, expression glazed, maybe he’s having an episode.” Finally, the pizza man gave Bellow another bill, and Bellow returned to Adam. “That guy was trying to cheat me. So I just stood there, and finally he gave me the ten.” What struck Adam about the episode was that he couldn’t be sure whether what Bellow said was true “or some sort of delusion.” The look on Bellow’s face was so odd and vacant that Adam seriously considered that the pizza man might have thought him a homeless person and given him the money “to get rid of him. And that’s when I thought he wasn’t going to get better.”
* * *
—
ONE INCIDENT IN PARTICULAR in Bellow’s last years was especially distressing to his family. On September 26, 2002, Greg Bellow’s daughter, Juliet, married Charlie Schulman, a close friend of Daniel’s. The wedding was to be held in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and Juliet was keen for Bellow and Janis to attend. According to Janis, “We fully intended to go, we were longing to go….He loved Juliet, and he would never have denied her in a million years. I had bought the tickets to go, and Saul got sick, and Dr. Barber advised against him going. And it’s a hassle to cancel Amtrak tickets.” “He could not go,” Janis reiterates; “the doctor said he could not go.” Juliet and her father do not believe this account. “I was very upset,” Juliet remembers. “He kept saying he was going to come, and then he didn’t….I was so angry. We were willing to do anything to get him to come.” She remembers Bellow telling her, “ ‘You’ll have to forgive me’…It wasn’t like ‘please forgive me.’ ” “My father called [him] and said: ‘This is it, if you do this to me.’ ” Juliet admits that “it is possible” that Bellow was, indeed, too sick or weak to come.20 “But my ninety-year-old grandmother, who was deathly afraid of flying, got on a plane to come from Chicago. If you want to be somewhere, you’ll do it. But it is possible. It’s not my understanding that he was [bedridden], but I was not there.” “I only saw him once after that.”
Adam remembers attempting to intervene. “I took on a role that I don’t usually take. I tried to persuade him.” Bellow told him: “My doctor’s advice is that I shouldn’t go, and so I can’t.” Adam suspects that Bellow “didn’t want to go,” though “part of it is that he was elderly and unwell.” “The wedding was held outdoors in Prospect Park….There was no place he could have gone to rest and recuperate….[though] he didn’t know that. But it was just as well he didn’t come. He would have been miserable.” Adam also suspects that Bellow’s not coming “must have had something to do with Gregory, the unresolved conflict between them.” Greg offers a detailed account of this episode in his memoir. When the wedding was announced, Bellow called promising to move “heaven and earth” to be there. But “a few weeks before the wedding,” he called again. “Offering no explanation, he said, ‘You must forgive me, but I cannot come to your wedding.’ ” There was then a “heart-wrenching” conversation between Greg and Juliet “about how Saul could inflict so much pain by making commitments and failing to fulfill them.” Bellow’s reversal, Greg believes, was the moment Juliet realized why “I had erected the self-protective barriers between my father and myself.” At Adam’s prompting, Bellow called Greg again, but “simply announced he would not be at the wedding, again offering no explanation.” In a third call, “a few days later,” Bellow at last offered an explanation. He “laid the responsibility on his doctor, who forbade travel. But in his belated medical excuse, I recognized a familiar pattern of hiding behind someone else when he had done something hurtful.”21
It is hard to believe that Bellow would have lied about his doctor’s advice, or that Janis would join him in doing so, though this is what Greg and Juliet believe. Easier to believe is that, out of pride or something in Greg’s manner that irked him, Bellow replied defensively, stubbornly refusing to offer reasons for his decision. Dr. Barber could not remember the specifics of the episode, but among his records is a note about seeing Bellow on September 4, 2002.22 Adam telephoned Will, asking, as Greg puts it, “if there was any constructive way for him to intervene. Will said no,” an answer that Greg took as “confirming my impression that Saul had dug his heels in and would not budge.”23
This is not how Will remembers Bellow’s reasons for staying in Boston during the wedding. In an interview, he said nothing of Bellow’s digging in his heels. “Saul was not able to go, physically not able [to go] from Boston to New York.” Of Greg, he says: “I spoke with him. Janis might have tried to avoid speaking with him. I didn’t have a break with them [the sons]. I would think that what I was saying would seem to be somewhat objective. I’m not lying to them.” When he received the invitation, “Saul was beginning to be on a roller coaster of pneumonia and not pneumonia….Now he’s better, now he’s worse. He had basically been in bed for two weeks, three weeks, and beginning to lose mobility and barely coming downstairs. He couldn’t have made a trip. It would have been terrible. And Gregory wouldn’t accep
t that. What couldn’t you accept? He couldn’t make the trip.” When reminded that, three weeks after the wedding, Bellow was well enough to fly to Cincinnati to see Jane, again accompanied by Daniel, Will said simply, “His condition had improved.” Asked about this recovery, Dr. Barber replied, “I can imagine easily…that he was in an unsteady state…and that it may have felt impossible to make the trip to Juliet’s wedding, and then he was more stable a short time later.”24 Greg’s conclusion, given the trip to Cincinnati and a later trip with Janis and Rosie to Toronto at Christmas, was that “clearly he was able to travel….He did not attend because, surrounded by those who knew him well, he could not hide memory losses and did not want to be embarrassed in public.”25 This is Daniel’s view as well:
I knew how bad Greg wanted Pop to come, and I knew how bad it would be if he didn’t. So, when Janis said he couldn’t make it, I offered to come and get him in Boston and drive him to Brooklyn and take care of him the whole time. My offer was rebuffed, even though I accurately predicted to Janis how bad it would be if she didn’t let me do it. My theory, developed through close observation of him the next month, was that he was just compos-mentis enough to know he was not capable of playing the role of Saul Bellow in public, where everyone wanted to meet him and say something clever and have him acknowledge it. He was very dependent on Janis and really didn’t like to go anywhere without her. And she didn’t want to go, because she hates Greg.
On the day of the wedding, Bellow wrote a letter to Juliet enclosing a check. The letter is typed and may have been dictated:
Dear Juliet,
Your grandfather sends you his best wishes for a long and lasting marriage together with the enclosed check to give the situation more reality than such wishes generally are joined to. If you should decide to spend it on a bash, you have my approval in advance. This, I realize, is an old-fashioned gesture, but I am bound to these fashions by my age and other limitations. My whole life testifies to my belief in the institution of marriage. I need only point out that I am, at my great age, still married. I would not allow myself even to dream of dying single. While I have not had a history of durable unions, I do believe in them, and I hope yours will be—all kidding aside—endlessly durable. I wish you endless happiness.
With grandfatherly assurances,
Saul Bellow.
Three weeks later, on the trip to Cincinnati, there were times when Bellow didn’t know where he was. Daniel also remembers that Bellow was stopped at airport security for carrying toenail clippers in a wash bag. He was threatened with a strip search. Jane Kauffman, Bellow’s sister, was ninety-five in 2002, both her sons and her husband were dead, and she was living in what Bellow called a “luxury funny farm.”26 Lesha Greengus and her husband, Sam, lived in Cincinnati, and she was the relative responsible for Jane’s care. Lesha had summoned Bellow to Cincinnati to get his opinion about whether Jane should be transferred to what Daniel calls “a really horrible part of the old folks’ home.” Jane was as feisty as ever. “Which one are you?” she asked Daniel. “Who was your mother?” “The pretty one,” Daniel answered. “Oh, yes, the pretty one. She thought she was better than us, she went around with her nose in the air.” Daniel replied: “That’s what she said about you.” “Pop laughed at that.” When it came time to look at the wing of the old folks’ home to which Jane might be transferred, Bellow refused to go. “Dan, you go look and bring me a full report” (Dan remembers often being asked to bring back full reports). “It’s just awful,” Dan said after seeing the wing. “It looked pretty depressing up there, and you wouldn’t want to be there.” Dan thinks that, at some point after this exchange, Bellow may have thought “we were going to ditch him there.” He remembers telling Lesha: “Don’t you see? We’re the grown-ups now.”
After his last telephone conversation with Bellow, Greg did not speak to him again until early spring of 2004, eighteen months later. “I did not wish to see him, talk to him, or hear about him.” He did, however, write Bellow two letters, neither of which Bellow answered. The letters, quoted in full in Greg’s memoir, are moving and characteristically conflicted. In January 2003 (no day of the month is given for the letters), Greg began by accusing Bellow of being incapable of putting anything “beyond your own needs” and as a consequence rending “the fragile fabric that holds this family together.” He claimed no longer to be concerned about Bellow’s welfare, having “no desire for contact—to visit, to speak to you, or to hear family reports.” If Bellow wished to re-establish contact, “the initiative rests with you.” If Greg didn’t hear from Bellow (personally, not through surrogates), he would take it to mean “either you did not receive this letter, you are incapable of remedying the situation, or the absence of a relationship going into the future is your desire.” How, exactly, Bellow was to be faulted if the first of these possibilities was the cause of his silence seems not to have been considered. Nor is anything said about the possibility that illness or debility, as opposed to pride or pique, might be the cause of Bellow’s silence (perhaps because other family members had kept Greg apprised of Bellow’s health). The letter ends, “In any case I remain your son—even in absentia.”
Although this letter received no reply, Greg wrote again in May 2003 (he did not call, “as I did not want a repeat of our last phone conversation”). Nothing in the May letter is said about either Bellow’s nonattendance at the wedding or the January letter’s insistence that contact would only be re-established if Bellow took the initiative. The impediments to the relationship were now said to be disagreements “about politics, money, educational philosophy, or the nature of family obligations.” Greg wishes these disagreements weren’t so strong, but “as we both get older changes have occurred. You, on the one hand, have become less tolerant of differences between yourself and others. I have come to have faith in myself and the correctness of my own ideas.” Although Greg sees little hope of improved relations, “as a child you are my pop and I love you. This will never change. As a man I will not abandon myself and you should not ask me to do so. I never mean to hurt you, but when it comes to a choice between my values and hurting someone—even you—my values will prevail. This is the man my parents brought me up to be and this is the man I am. G.”27
Bellow was almost eighty-eight and suffering from dementia when he received this letter. If he took it in, it is unlikely to have pleased him, given his notions of the respect due to a father. What Greg wanted was for his father “to apologize to me or to his granddaughter.” Some months after sending his May 2003 letter, Greg received an email from Monroe Engel, “gently trying to encourage me to visit my ailing father” (that Engel showed “no interest in my side of the story” leads Greg to describe him as “just another messenger on an errand from Saul”). Greg then called Will to discuss a possible visit. When Will “insisted on putting him [Bellow] on the phone”—something Greg hoped to avoid, given their last calls—Greg said he’d be coming to Boston soon and would like to see him. It was now the autumn of 2004, and Bellow “was bedridden, and was not expected to survive.” When Greg arrived at Crowninshield Road, Janis and Rosie were out. He was led up to Bellow’s room by Maria, the housekeeper. Bellow was in bed, drifting in and out of sleep. When awake, he “spoke coherently though softly.” “I needed to clear the air as we always had,” Greg writes, “particularly if this was to be our last conversation.” So he told Bellow of the pain he felt at his not attending Juliet’s wedding. Bellow answered, “I did not mean to hurt you, but the disease takes over.” In his memoir, Greg describes what followed:
“But you did hurt me and my child!” I exclaimed. Just then his attendant came in, ostensibly to check on him, though she immediately insisted that Saul was a very sick man who could not tolerate any emotional upset. Alone again, I asked if there was anything more he wanted to say. He said no. I ended with “We always had an honest relationship and I don’t see any reason to change it now.” He nodded in agreement
. As I left to have lunch, the attendant was giving Janis, who had returned, a report. I concluded that she had been instructed to listen at the door and interrupt if I brought up the problems between us.
In looking back on this moment, Greg begins by saying, “Saul’s statement that he wished me no harm went a long way toward healing my wound.” Although he was often angry about Bellow’s behavior, Greg writes that he had mostly been spared “the kind of pain Saul could cause when he let people down.” As a child, he was protected by fatherly love; as an adult, by his own efforts, principally “physical distance and layers of emotional insulation.” In the case of Juliet’s wedding, however, “I had let my guard down out of love for Juliet, and I had paid the price….The disappointment I had experienced was just a full dose of the selfishness everyone else had been enduring for years.”28
Will Lautzenheiser offers a different account of Greg’s visit, which he describes as having ended with a “meltdown.” “Greg threw a tantrum. Saul was in the hospital bed, and Greg screamed at him [presumably the moment in the memoir in which Greg says he “exclaimed,” “But you did hurt me and my child!”]. He was upstairs talking, and he started accusing his father of indifference and not going to the wedding and all this kind of thing. Saul was helpless. He was physically frail, he was mentally frail at that time. It was horrible, and Greg had no excuse [what he told Sasha, Adam’s mother, was “I felt I had to tell him off”]. He left: ‘I’m going to get a pizza.’ Janis wasn’t there. She’d make sure she was away. She’d orchestrate being away.” Will himself was in the house but in another room. “The person who was actually there, who said, basically, You have to go, was Maria, the housekeeper; Maria was bringing something up or whatever….It was supposed to be a reconciliation or something. I do know that, but it’s not the way it went.” As Will saw it, “Saul was very impaired and Greg let his anger run away….Saul didn’t know what was happening, didn’t understand Greg’s anger, had no way of responding.” Maria told Janis that she was so alarmed by Greg’s behavior that she considered calling the police.
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