by James Atlas
From time to time, I would be ambushed by a critic who, like a soldier stumbling out of the jungle, didn’t know the war was over. One was Steven Zipperstein, the biographer of Isaac Rosenfeld, who charged me in the Jewish Review of Books with reducing Bellow to “a crabbed man, as vain as a movie star and as promiscuous as an alley cat.” I was incensed. Look, Steve, I lectured him in my head, we all do this kind of thing, we’re all capable of treachery; but say I did depict Bellow that way (and I don’t think I did): you still couldn’t have written your book without me. I’m the one who salvaged Rosenfeld’s papers! Don’t be a jerk.
But then, life being the unaccountably strange experience it is, I rise from my desk, where I’ve been tinkering with this passage (would “Grow up” be less harsh than “Don’t be a jerk”?) to go hear a reading by Philip Roth at the 92nd Street Y, only to find myself seated next to…Zipperstein! I refuse to shake hands and say to a woman seated beside him, who I presume is his wife (no alley cat he), “Steve did a bad thing: he took a swipe at me after I saved Rosenfeld’s papers.” Zipperstein seems flustered and says, “Let’s not talk about that now. We have other things to talk about.” And we did: Roth, Bellow, brief biographies (he was the editor of a series called Jewish Lives). Let it go: I was too old for these feuds. He gave me his card, and we parted friends, or at least not enemies.
There were also periodic phone calls from a woman who’d had an affair with Bellow in the 1940s and wanted “to catch up”—we had Bellow in common. One time she launched into a confession about an affair she’d had while married to her husband, who had died the year before. She had never told anyone about it. But I’m only interested in your affair with my subject, I felt like saying—not your affairs in general. What is your adultery to me? All the same, I listened. For a biographer, there is no such thing as retirement.
One of the most poignant letters was from a woman who had known Isaac Rosenfeld’s son George; she had been in his seventh-grade class at a school in the Village:
When I think of him now, I see him as he was at 13: smart, curious, perceptive, humane. I see him living on Barrow Street with his mother and sister, surrounded always by books, music, and animals, especially reptiles. All vibrant…Since I will never learn the answers from him, I must ask: what branch of medicine did he study? Did he get married / have kids? Did he remain close with his mother and sister? Did music continue to be a joyful thread in his life?
By the answers I hope to be reassured that he did not die of a broken heart.
I couldn’t say. But in the literal sense, he did. George died of a heart attack in 1994, at the age of forty-eight—a decade older than his father had been when he dropped dead in his cheerless (or not) apartment on East Huron Street.
*1 There were also many positive ones, but who remembers those?
*2 If not when I was writing this passage, then surely by now, unless I were to come across her photograph in one of those morning TV shows that celebrate the birthdays of centenarians.
*3 Am I being “ageist” here? Listening to myself on our answering machine, I’m disheartened by my own “old-man” voice.
*4 Why did I never interview Lou Reed? What a missed opportunity: a rock star in the 1960s, the height of my own rock’n’roll–obsessed youth. Too late now—the refrain of old age.
XXVIII
Adam Bellow and I had kept up. One day about a decade after my book was published, I got an e-mail from him suggesting lunch.
It was a sunny summer day, and I didn’t recognize him at first when he came through the door. He was heavier than I remembered—not the young man he’d been when we first met—but handsome like his dad. Those eyes! I could only imagine how old I must have looked to him—a round-faced, white-haired man of sixty-two.
We sat down, and I made a little joke, calling him “lad.” His face crinkled, and I recognized with shock the same expression I had studied for so many years, passed on to the next generation through the miracle of genetics. Sometimes it was a nose, a chin, a mouth. Adam had gotten the whole face.
Since Bellow’s death in 2005, Adam had grown more estranged than ever from his father’s world. Philip Roth had walked right by him on the street: “I was stunned. What had I done?” He recalled in a wistful voice the time when he had spotted Roth and the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld in the window of the Éclair Bakery on West 72nd Street, and Roth had beckoned him to join them. “I remember thinking, ‘This is good.’ Now I’ve been cut out of the story. It’s as if I don’t exist.”
He told me about his father’s funeral. It was at the cemetery in Marlboro, Vermont, not far from Bellow’s summer home. His three sons were there, and Janis with Rosy, and Bellow’s old friends; not many were left by this time. “The literary crowd”—Martin Amis and Leon Wieseltier and the critic James Wood—“sat off by themselves. They had closed ranks.” When Adam tried to approach Philip Roth, Roth waved him away: “He was off by himself in his pain.”
Adam referred me to Roth’s account of the nameless protagonist’s funeral in Everyman. “You weren’t there,” he said, clarifying my absence in his mind. A strange thought: how could I have been there, given the way things had turned out? That wasn’t how Adam saw it: as far as he was concerned, I was the Biographer, not the Enemy.
Bellow and his boys Credit 28
It had been hard for the boys, Adam told me. “Greg threw a handful of dirt on the grave and said, ‘Rest easy, Pops.’ I couldn’t lift the shovel. I was numb and overcome with an emotion I couldn’t even explain to myself until I figured out it was rage.”*1
A few weeks after the funeral, Adam and his younger brother, Dan, had driven up to the Vermont house in a U-Haul to collect Bellow’s old rolltop desk, which he’d bequeathed to Dan.*2 Bellow’s lawyer, Walter Pozen,*3 had greeted them, explaining that Janis was upstairs; Adam had to ask to see her. She came down and sat in the kitchen and explained that she was “taking time off” and didn’t want to correspond or talk with the boys for a while. Then she excused herself and went back upstairs.
Adam’s original bequest was five hundred books, but the will had been changed—as he had discovered when a revised version came in the mail. When he wandered into his father’s library to take a final look around, Pozen rushed in after him as if he were worried that Adam was about to steal a book. “Yes, it’s too bad,” Pozen said. But he was still reluctant to leave Adam alone. As he was leaving, Adam asked Pozen if Janis would be willing to send him a recorder of Bellow’s—“one of the older ones, worn smooth and oiled by his fingers and lips over many years of playing.” Six months later a “newish” model came in the mail, “along with a pair of Saul’s glasses—broken!”*4
He wasn’t even allowed access to letters from his father, which he had turned over to the Regenstein. “Not that he wrote that many,” Adam said ruefully. “They were mostly postcards: ‘This is a castle.’ ” He noted bitterly that his father had played the boys off against each other. “He would tell each of us that we were his favorite son. He never liked having us all together. He feared us, like old Karamazov.”
Adam told me an amazing story. He had been invited to speak before a conference of psychoanalysts in Boston about what it was like to be the son of a famous man. Joining him on the panel was the daughter of the psychologist Erik Erikson and the daughter of Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun, “who went on and on about how little time her father had for her, but it didn’t matter because ‘Roe v. Wade was for all women.’ ” When it was Adam’s turn, he told the eager crowd that he hadn’t prepared anything. “So I’ll just wing it.”
Then, to his own astonishment, he declared: “I have two things to say: I’m glad he’s dead and fuck you. You all have father issues or you wouldn’t be here.” There was a stunned silence, followed, after a long pause, by a roar of laughter. The joke was on them, but it was funny anyway.
We laughed until tears came to our eyes. “Back went the head, down came the lids, up went his chin, and there it
was,” as Amis once described Bellow’s laugh. Adam had it, too.
I had listened to his account with mesmeric attention. It was a part of the story I knew nothing about—Bellow’s life after the publication of my biography, Adam’s life after Bellow’s death. The story I’d missed. The sequel. The end and the post-end.
Now, still agonized after a decade, I poured out my doubts about my book. I’d been unfair to his father; I’d gotten it wrong. I told Adam about the twelve Post-its I’d attached to pages in the Modern Library edition to indicate where I’d been snippy or unkind. I could have fixed the whole thing in three hours.
“I never felt like I knew him,” I said to Adam. “I never felt that I got him.”
“You got him,” Adam said firmly. “You have to own your book. It’s part of you.” I fought off an impulse to ask Adam what his father had thought of my book. I didn’t want to know—and anyway, I probably did know. Sammler: “Both knowing and not knowing—one of the more frequent human arrangements.”
Out on the street, we shook hands, awkward but connected in some deep way. I recalled my encounter with Adam and Dan after Bellow’s last reading at the Y. I’d seen them standing in the aisle and was weighing the possibility of trying to slip past when Adam called out: “It’s the last brother!”*5
My eyes filled with tears. Only this time they weren’t from laughing. “It’s the eternal same story,” Dr. Tamkin says to Tommy Wilhelm, trying to comfort him after Wilhelm recounts an argument he’s just had with his father: “The elemental conflict of parent and child. It won’t end, ever. Even with a fine old gentleman like your dad.”
And he wasn’t even my dad.
—
Two years later I get an invitation to attend a memorial service for Adam’s mother, Sasha, who has died at the age of eighty-one. I met her only once, when I interviewed her for my book; it’s out of feelings for Adam that I decide to go.
The service is held in a nondescript modern church with redbrick walls and shiny pews and a linoleum floor. It’s a good turnout, maybe just over a hundred. Adam spots me when I come in and seems glad to see me. I walk over and shake hands. He looks handsome, with that fine-boned Bellow face, relaxed and confident. Greg is also there, dressed in an olive-green corduroy suit; his walrus mustache makes him look like Mark Twain.
Adam reads a fine eulogy, recalling his mother’s hardships raising him on Long Island. Divorced at twenty-nine, she had no money and couldn’t pay the phone bill; she supported them by going into the city to write abstracts for an engineering journal. She designed jewelry that she sold at the crafts fair on Columbus Avenue. She didn’t want her son to be deprived of culture. She dragged him all over Europe to see every church, every painting, every monument; stuffed books down his throat; made him learn Hebrew and French. Adam reads from a story Sasha wrote on his old high school typewriter about a woman, eclipsed by her movie star husband, who has an urge to lie down on the street. It’s very well written. She doesn’t lie down.
Afterward we go down to the basement for a Zabar’s spread of cold cuts and a big birthday cake. This would have been Sasha’s eighty-second birthday.
I see Maggie Simmons, and we embrace. Maggie maintained a close relationship with Bellow for half a century and was, according to many, the love of his life. With her short cropped hair and big teeth, she’s still beautiful, a stunner with blue eyes and golden hair and “the sort of face you might have seen on a Conestoga wagon a century ago.”
I learn at the funeral that Adam is working on two books, including one about the evolution of his politics. Greg tells me he has written a memoir of his father. “Bloomsbury is going to publish it. I just said what I had to say, without notes—I wanted him to be seen as a human being.”
“I thought I did that,” I say.
“No, but not as a biographer. It’s called Saul Bellow’s Heart. You’ll enjoy it, though I take you to task once or twice. I thought you got carried away by your admiration for Saul.” Greg is irate about the edition of Bellow’s letters that has just come out: they can still hurt people, including him. “Why does he get to have the only version?” He tells me that the villainous cuckolder Jack Ludwig is, incredibly, still alive. Zach Leader, the new biographer, interviewed him. “He’s a digger,” says Greg.
The idea of this biographer interviewing Ludwig claws at my heart.*6 Why hadn’t I made an effort to track him down? Had it been some unconscious reluctance to meet a figure so crucial to the story? The person Bellow conjured up in Herzog was more real than the person I would have interviewed. How could any corporeal being compare in vividness, in the sheer power of being, with the imaginary one?
Whenever I thought about all the people I hadn’t interviewed, I was gripped by a maddening sensation of incompleteness. Ludwig, the family in Cincinnati, people in Israel, the secretary he saw every day, for God’s sake! I’d had research fatigue. The new collection of Bellow’s letters introduced names that were unfamiliar to me. Who was Sam Hammersmark (the owner of a bookshop on the Northwest Side), or Ilya Konstantinovski, a Russian émigré novelist Bellow got to know in Paris? What about Bellow’s uncle William, a brushmaker? (A brushmaker? What kind of profession was that?) And who knew what manuscripts were still out there? I had come across a reference somewhere to a novel called Ruben Whitfield that had vanished. And what about the “lost cache of billets-doux” written to Bellow’s high school girlfriend Eleanor Fox?
You could never get it all down. The story would always remain unfinished. It was a hazard of the trade.
One day I came across a passage on the last page of Kohut’s The Analysis of the Self: “Patient and analyst may, upon the termination of the treatment, share in the acknowledgment of the fact that the analysis itself has of necessity remained incomplete.” His words struck me with tremendous force. Biography, like analysis, remains incomplete; the subject, like the patient, remains unknown. I was reminded of a passage in Herzog: “The dream of man’s heart, however much we may distrust and resent it, is that life may complete itself in significant pattern.” Isn’t that the biographer’s dream? To find the pattern in a life, even if it isn’t there?
—
Whose life was it, anyway? It’s not only money that the survivors of the deceased fight over, not only the silver and the Steinway piano. The emotional legacy—who was loved the most—is just as hotly contested. What could be more valuable than knowing you had a special bond, that you were the one? The dead can no longer love us, but we can imagine that they do—and for a biographer, everyone who loved your subject has a different story to tell.
Bellow had three sons: Greg, Adam, and Dan.
He also had three disciples: James Wood, Leon Wieseltier, and Martin Amis. These three were—I won’t say pseudo-sons, because their affection for Bellow was so deep as to be almost filial—but surrogate- or substitute- or perhaps alter-sons, whose love was uncomplicated by anger and the unruly demands of hereditary sons. Easier to choose your sons than to deal with the ones you have.
Eight years after Bellow’s death, in 2013, Greg published the memoir of his father that he had told me about at Sasha’s funeral. Saul Bellow’s Heart is a raw book in which the oldest son accuses his father of neglect, emotional manipulation, and other kinds of parental malfeasance even as he tries (with some success) to forgive him. His purpose, writes Bellow fils, is “to reassess my patrimony as a writer’s son, and to have my say.”
Born in 1944, Greg was the progeny of what was sometimes called in intellectual circles in those days “the first wife”—the one who lived through the early stages of a writer’s career and set up a bourgeois household that eventually became suffocating and ended in divorce. This was the kind of home Greg grew up in—though his mother, Anita, was herself a person with a formidable intellect and drive.
His parents divorced in 1952, producing the usual heartache of a broken home. “I was lonely, sad, and now a latchkey kid living with a depressed mother,” he wrote. Saul was an absent fathe
r. When he picked up Greg for a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, “he was often late and sometimes did not show up at all.”
Yet there was another side to the story. Greg claims in the book that his father was his “best friend,” and I believe him: “Saul understood my black moods because he had so many of them, and because he felt responsible for my sadness.” Sometimes, when he wasn’t being a friend, he acted like a parent. When Anita died, Bellow tried to comfort his sobbing son: “Come to Chicago. Your loving father will be waiting.” They fought the way only fathers and sons can fight: stubbornly, needily, and with a sense, not always acknowledged or even understood, that their consanguinity was the source of their bond.
When we write about the dead, we imagine that we’re mourning them, and often we are, but just as often we’re doing other things, too: asserting our place in the narrative; dictating the way we would like the subject to be depicted; dictating the way we would like to be depicted. As usual, it’s all about us. Greg’s complaints about his father’s prolonged absences sounded a bit whiny at times, but the memoir was poignant; you feel that his aching need for a father will never go away.
Adam, too, had his struggles with his father’s legacy. “Missing: My Father,” published on the editorial page of The New York Times two months after his father died, gave a sense of how he saw their connection. Like his siblings, Adam had “a fond but highly attenuated bond with a frequently distracted, often absent, and much older father,” “a father who was never there”—even when he was. They rarely spent holidays or family vacations together. “He just sat up there like Wotan on his mountain, in Vermont, or in his aerie overlooking Lake Michigan, and I made pilgrimages by bus or car or plane.” Still, they had a bond. Bellow, “though absent,” was “deeply, unpredictably, stubbornly present” through the agency of his son. To nip and tuck Wordsworth’s celebrated line, the man is father to himself.
