Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  In his last months, Bellow’s nature, according to Will, “was usually very gentle and thankful, grateful and sweet….‘Thanks, Will, I don’t know what I’d do without you.’ ” In his last weeks, he was having trouble breathing and swallowing. And he mostly slept. It was at this time, slipping in and out of consciousness, that he asked Eugene Goodheart the question quoted on the opening page of To Fame and Fortune: “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Will thought the end was very close, but “people were saying, ‘Oh no, no, no, he’ll pull through it,’ and other people said ‘No, he won’t pull through.’ So I called around the family, saying, ‘Look, this is not good.’ I called all the sons, and the friends, Walter or Philip, saying, ‘Look, I’m really not sure.’ ” The day before he died, Greg asked, “Should I come out?” Adam: “Should I come out?” “They were asking me, and I’m like, ‘I can’t make this decision….You’re a mature adult; if you want to come out, come out.’ And Greg was saying, ‘Well, I don’t want to get there and he’s unconscious,’ or ‘I don’t want to get there and he’s dead already.’ ” Will said: “ ‘This is pretty dire. We’re not sure’—and we weren’t sure.” In the end, given the uncertainty, none of the boys came.

  On the morning of the day Bellow died, both Chris Walsh and Will were in the house, Will in Bellow’s room. As Will recalls, “Saul was very confused about where we were, thought we were on a boat, a transatlantic boat, didn’t really know who I was. That was the worst time for me.” Then Bellow lapsed into sleep. By that time, his food was almost all liquid, with a thickener, but he wasn’t eating or drinking. “Basically, we sat with him all day, and it was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to pull through, so I left the room and Maria left the room.” Over these months, Janis had been getting no sleep. While looking after Rosie and Bellow, she was also keeping up with her teaching job.35 “She was always on call,” Will remembers. “It was just incredible that she kept it all together.” Rosie’s teachers knew Bellow was dying and came and took her out for the day, and Janis “spent an hour or two with Saul.” Then Will and Maria came back into his room. “Maria sat on one side of the bed and I sat on another, and Janis was at the head of the bed, leaning over Saul and stroking his head, and his breathing was very labored and sounded awful. So you knew he was dying, and it was very hard to be there. His breathing was slowing…and so Janis kind of started talking to him. ‘It’s okay, my baby, it’s okay,’ and she said something his mother would say to him, a Russian phrase…and he kept on breathing, and he opened his eyes and he looked at her, and she looked at him, and he was in awe, he was, like, okay. It was really beautiful, a transcendent moment. He looked at her with such love, and she at him, and then he died. It was incredible. He had been going in and out of a coma for weeks. He was totally unconscious for a day or two. That he gave that look was like a gift, and it was right at Janis, a focused, direct look, and then he died. It was beautiful. We were all weeping and sat there for a long time.”36

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  WHEN THEY GOT UP, the world flooded in, with its animosities, anxieties, importunities. Will called the sons, then called Walter Pozen and Stephanie Nelson, “and pretty soon there were phone calls all night.”37 Within an hour and a half, two hours at most, news of the death was on television and radio. Greg maintains he was not called. Will says, “I certainly tried, but obviously didn’t reach Gregory….I certainly wasn’t going to leave a message like ‘Saul died’ on an answering machine….I was floored/shocked/appalled when the phone rang—maybe Mark Rotblatt [Bellow’s great-nephew]?—and we learned that Saul’s death was on the news—because I knew we hadn’t gotten through to all the sons. The timing was very, very fast—I’m talking fifteen or twenty minutes after I tried making calls….The fact that the story got out to the press so quickly was a distressing element in a very distressing day. I did my best to inform people, but it got away from me.” Greg had “spent the day on tenterhooks, anticipating the call from Boston that never came”;38 he learned of Bellow’s death on his car radio. His daughter, Juliet, also heard of the death through the media.39 Both blamed Walter Pozen. “I will never forgive him for that,” Juliet said in an interview. “It’s the most degrading, humiliating thing to have happened to a person, and I’ll never forgive him for that.” Juliet doesn’t blame Janis but is convinced that “somebody called The New York Times and told them before they told the family members.” “My dad wouldn’t deal with any of these people,” Juliet says, referring to what Greg calls the surrogates. “His line was ‘I’ll only deal with Saul.’ He didn’t pay fealty to any of them….That didn’t win him any friends with those guys.’ ”

  As Walter Pozen remembered it, “Will called me to say that Saul had died, minutes before. And I said, ‘How’s Janis?,’ and he said, ‘Well, Walter, as you can imagine.’ And I said, ‘You better call Andrew [Wylie].’ He called Andrew, and Andrew called me right back. This all happened within minutes.” Wylie then called the Associated Press and told them what had happened and gave out Pozen’s number, as Pozen was Bellow’s lawyer and the executor of the Bellow estate. “And before I could even collect my thoughts, the phone rang. It was The New York Times.” The calls never stopped; he was on the phone for two hours straight. “I was just wiped out.” When told that Greg never received a call and learned of his father’s death on the car radio, his reply was “I don’t know who should have done what….I didn’t even think of that.” Pozen, it is true, was no admirer of Greg, but he seems to have assumed that someone at Crowninshield Road would have informed family members. The next day, he traveled to Boston with Philip Roth. Martin Amis was already there.

  The funeral, attended by a hundred or so family and friends, was held in the Jewish section of the Morningside Cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont. The Jewish section of the cemetery is green and peaceful, but it is reached through a litter-strewn gully, or at least it was in 2005.40 Not all the family, certainly not Greg or Lesha, approved. Lesha had found a gravesite in Chicago, adjacent to that of Bellow’s parents and of his sister, Jane, and her family. It was for sale and, as Greg puts it in his memoir, “sufficient to hold Saul, Lesha, and her husband.” He says nothing in the memoir about whether it would have held Janis. As Greg saw it, “Burial next to his parents would confirm the sentimental connection between Saul and his family of origin in perpetuity. But when Lesha pressed Saul for a decision, she was met with obfuscation and delay. Finally, with my father present but silent, it was Janis who told Lesha that the two of them would be buried together in Vermont.”41

  There was crying at the funeral, but also much worldly agitation. What Nathalie Botsford dreaded about the ceremony was the possibility that Keith might not be included among the pallbearers. Keith thought Martin Amis and Andrew Wylie were talking business at the gravesite. Adam’s wife, Rachel, wore fishnet stockings and a short skirt, which Nathalie Botsford saw somehow as aimed at Janis. Rachel asked Will what he was planning to do now that Bellow had died, describing the funeral as a good place to network. Adam could not stop crying. When he saw his father’s coffin, it made him think of the loss not only of his father but of his writing self. When Adam gave up writing in order to become an editor and to support his family, “I think it disappointed him and may have made it harder to see himself in me….From that point on he began to feel ambivalence toward me, which he would express to others (Roth, my brothers, everyone).” Sasha, Adam’s mother, came to the funeral, which raised eyebrows (“I was certainly invited, personally invited by Saul’s family”). She was affected not only by Adam’s sobbing and Greg’s “stony” expression, but by how “decrepit” Monroe and Brenda Engel looked (the Engels had not been nice to her many decades ago, in Princeton). Sasha spoke at the little gathering after the burial and then returned to New York. Greg presided over the speeches and spoke in praise of Janis. Ruth Wisse spoke of Bellow’s Jewishness, Martin Amis of his achievements as a writer.42 Rabbi William Hamilton, of Congreg
ation Kehillath Israel in Brookline, closed the gathering with a speech about the love between Janis and Saul, which for Greg “solidified my view of how she romanticized their relationship.”43

  Bellow wanted a plain, traditional Jewish burial. The rabbi explained the parts of the funeral and how, in Jewish tradition, as Ruth Wisse puts it, “friends have to bury the deceased themselves without leaving it to strangers.”44 In his memoir, Greg describes the scene at the gravesite:

  Pins with black ribbon were affixed to the mourners and were roughly torn to represent our loss and grief. Saul’s thin wooden casket was so light that I had to remind myself that I was carrying my father, who had often seemed larger-than-life. At the gravesite, the black cloth with a white Star of David was removed from the casket, and Saul was lowered into the ground. Next to the rectangular hole stood a pile of sand with a shovel placed back side up to represent the unusual task to which it was about to be put. Janis carefully balanced a bit of sand on the shovel’s back and threw it into the casket, where it landed with a hollow sound. Next came my turn. I picked up a handful of sand, kissed it, said “Rest easy, Pop,” and threw it into the hole. Adam and Dan followed with their shovels of sand before the other mourners took their turns at the required task of filling the grave level to the earth.45

  It was a warm April day, overcast, and Nathalie Botsford was worried when she saw some of the old men among the mourners shoveling dirt on the coffin: “I thought we might be burying more than one man here.” James Wood remembers the three middle-aged Bellow boys “hugging each other by the side of the grave.” During the burial, Philip Roth told Wylie, “I wonder if the earth knows what it has just received.” Frank Maltese, who had built Bellow’s house, took on the lion’s share of burying, along with younger mourners such as Chris Walsh. When Leon Wieseltier stepped forward to do his bit, he staggered and was steadied from behind by Roth. In an interview, he urged me to include this detail as “the only known act of kindness in Roth’s life” (a crack easily countered, not least by Roth’s kindness to Bellow). When Lesha’s brother, Shael, took his turn, Greg shouted for him to “put one in for Grandpa.” Then Shael also put one in for his father, Sam, for Jane, and two for Maury, “whom we all agreed required an extra because he took a double share of everything.” Harvey Freedman, Janis’s father, thought Greg’s behavior “flippant,” “disrespectful.” After the funeral, Greg’s family and Lesha’s family gathered at Dan and Heather’s house, “where we shared family stories over dinner.”46 Neither Lesha nor Bellow’s three sons came to the shiva at Crowninshield Road, which was attended by Bellow’s Boston friends and neighbors, Janis’s family, and Martin Amis, who came every day for the whole week. “He was like a son,” said Harvey Freedman of Amis, one of several spiritual sons at the funeral. At the shiva, Ruth Wisse was struck by how bereft Amis looked, “as though he were experiencing the death of his own father again.” Roger Kaplan remembers being told by Dan’s wife, Heather, “You’re the fourth Bellow boy.”47 At the shiva, in addition to stories about Bellow, people sat in the kitchen and recited passages from his books—in Wood’s and Amis’s case, often from memory.

  To Ruth Wisse, it was Philip Roth who seemed, among all the mourners at the funeral, “the most bereft.” She was not the only mourner to remark on Roth’s appearance. To Harvey Freedman he seemed “more in grief than anyone there.” To James Wood and Claire Messud, he looked “old and hollowed out…dazed. He seemed to wander around all day with his mouth open, looking lost.”48 Roth’s grief was obvious, but he was also, in the spirit of the man he mourned, at work. Within a year, he published a short and harrowing novel, Everyman (2006), which begins with the protagonist’s funeral. Among the mourners at this funeral “were his two sons, Randy and Lonny, middle-aged men from his turbulent first marriage, very much their mother’s children, who as a consequence knew little of him that was praiseworthy and much that was beastly and who were present out of duty and nothing more.” The detailed description of the sons at the beginning of the novel was seen by a number of mourners, including Adam and Daniel, as taken from Bellow’s funeral:

  Then came the sons, men in their late forties and looking, with their glossy black hair and their eloquent dark eyes and the sensual fullness of their wide, identical mouths, just like their father (and like their uncle) at their age. Handsome men beginning to grow beefy and seemingly as closely linked with each other as they’d been irreconcilably alienated from the dead father. The younger, Lonny, stepped up to the grave first. But once he’d taken a clod of dirt in his hand, his entire body began to tremble and quake, and it looked as though he were on the edge of violently regurgitating. He was overcome with a feeling for his father that wasn’t antagonism but that his antagonism denied him the means to release. When he opened his mouth, nothing emerged except a series of grotesque gasps, making it appear likely that whatever had him in its grip would never be finished with him. He was in so desperate a state that Randy, the older, more decisive son, the scolding son, came instantly to his rescue. He took the clod of dirt from the hand of the younger one and tossed it onto the casket for both of them. And he readily met with success when he went to speak. “Sleep easy, Pop,” Randy said, but any note of tenderness, grief, love, or loss was terrifyingly absent from his voice.49

  The protagonist of Everyman is not Saul Bellow, and his sons are not Bellow’s sons, but there are resemblances between the real-life people and the fictional characters. In a later passage, the sons are described by their father as “the source of his deepest guilt,” but the impatience with which this admission is made is Bellow-like. The protagonist has given up trying to explain his behavior to his sons.

  He had tried often enough when they were young men—but then they were too young and angry to understand, now they were too old and angry to understand. And what was there to understand? It was inexplicable to him—the excitement they could seriously persist in deriving from his denunciation. He had done what he did the way that he did it as they did what they did the way they did it. Was their steadfast posture of unforgivingness any more forgivable? Or any less harmful in its effect? He was one of the millions of American men who were party to a divorce that broke up a family….What could have been avoided? What could he have done differently that would have made him more acceptable to them other than what he could not do, which was to remain married and live with their mother? Either they understood that or they didn’t—and sadly for him (and for them), they didn’t.50

  There are two burials in Everyman, one of the protagonist, the other of his father. The father, like Bellow, was buried according to Jewish tradition. The protagonist stands at the edge of his grave and watches as the dirt reaches the coffin lid with its carving of the Star of David: “His father was going to lie not only in the coffin but under the weight of that dirt, and all at once he saw his father’s mouth as if there was no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down on him, filling up his mouth, blinding his eyes, clogging his nostrils, and closing off his ears.” “I’ve never seen anything so chilling in my life,” the protagonist’s daughter says. “ ‘Nor have I,’ he told her.”51 Roth’s stricken expression at the Bellow funeral might have owed something to his picturing just this “chilling” image. It might also have owed something to literature, to the moment when Woody Selbst climbs into his father’s hospital bed in “A Silver Dish.” Woody’s dying father, referred to as “Pop,” is writhing about in bed, “the dirt already cast into his face.”52

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  THE DEATH OF SAUL BELLOW was front-page news around the world. The next day, April 6, The New York Times published a long obituary, written by Mel Gussow and Charles McGrath. On April 7, it published an “Appreciation” of Bellow on its editorial page. The author of this appreciation, entitled “Mr. Bellow’s Planet,” was Brent Staples, who recounted his first sighting of Bellow in Hyde Park and claimed to have learned
from him “how books were put together.” Nothing was said in the appreciation about Staples’s subsequent stalking of Bellow, or about his objections to the racist attitudes of Bellow’s characters. That same day, Staples’s colleague James Atlas sent a fax to Janis. The New York Times Book Review had asked him to compose a page drawn from Bellow’s earliest writings, including unpublished letters and pieces of college journalism. Atlas needed Janis’s signed approval “by the end of today or tomorrow,” which he would then forward to the Regenstein. He admitted that his biography of Bellow had not turned out as Janis, or he himself, would have liked, but “suffice it to say that I loved him very much….I would like to do this for Mr. Bellow and his readers.” He offered to have his name removed from the page. Across the top of the fax, now among Bellow’s papers in the Regenstein, Janis has written: “IGNORE” and “Absolutely NOT.”

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  THESE, THEN, WERE BELLOW’S WORLDS—a love world, or spiritual world, figured in the final intense look at Janis; and a world of strife and jostling, figured in the animosities and anxieties exhibited at the funeral and in the hours after his death. In this world, among other things, romantic love is doubted or mocked or cheapened. Both worlds live in Bellow’s fiction. The possibility of love is rendered movingly, with delicacy and tact, as is the possibility of the soul or the existence of God. The world of flux and worldly ambition is rendered with comic gusto as well as fierce criticism; the energies, pleasures, and temptations of American materialism, seen from the inside, are crucial to Bellow’s style and are as much the object of his intense noticing as any spiritual intimation. The fullness of the fiction mirrors the fullness of the life. In the end, as Bellow himself acknowledged, it is the fiction, not the life, that is most admirable, honorable, and truthful, for all his desire to love, to be worthy of love, to be a man, not a jerk; for all his feeling for family and for right conduct; for all his regret and remorse. The fiction is his great gift—the great gift of his life.