The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Some part of the child’s reverence for the father lived on in Bellow, as it does in his characters. In the incident recounted in the story “Something to Remember Me By” (1990), which ends with a paternal clout to the head (“My father rose from his chair and hurried toward me. His fist was ready”), the narrator is a high school senior, hence seventeen or eighteen not six, but he’s a younger not an older son, no Maury. He still thinks of his father’s “blind, Old Testament rage” not “as cruelty but as archaic right everlasting.”83 The adults in Bellow’s fiction, or some of them, share as well as inculcate this childlike view. In The Adventures of Augie March, the child Augie spends summers with his mother’s cousin, a woman of “great size and terrific energy of constitution.” Her excesses of emotion—“Cousin Anna wept enough for everybody and plastered me with kisses at the door of her house, seeing me dog-dumb with the heartbreak of leaving home”—were “untamed by thoughts.” She observed every Jewish holiday, including the new moons, prayed with fervor, “her eyes dilated and determined,” and had “her own ideas of time and place, so that Heaven and eternity were not too far” (p. 401). Cousin Anna thought it a duty to teach Augie about the Bible:

  It was a queer account I got from her of the Creation and Fall, the building of Babel, the Flood, the visit of the Angels to Lot, the punishment of his wife and the lewdness of his daughters, in a spout of Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, powered by piety and anger, little flowers and bloody fires supplied from her own memory and fancy.… She was directing me out of her deep chest to the great eternal things (p. 412).

  Bellow the child, instructed like Augie, saw the world as did the child Moses Herzog. When Father Herzog, beaten and ashamed, begins to cry, and his children begin to cry, Moses is overpowered: “It was more than I could bear that anyone should lay violent hands on him—a father, a sacred being, a king. Yes, he was a king to us. My heart was suffocated by this horror. I thought I would die of it. Whom did I ever love as I loved them” (p. 564).

  Bellow’s decision to leave Maury’s beating out of published versions of Abraham’s return owes something to feelings like these—feelings inherited from Abraham himself. When news came from Russia of Berel Belo’s death, Bellow remembered, Abraham “burst into tears then took a razor and cut his vest,” as Jewish custom demands.84 In “Memoirs,” Pa Lurie’s father writes letters to his son in Canada after the October Revolution. Like Father Herzog, Father Lurie has taken refuge in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the “Tsarskoe Seloe.” In elegant Hebrew he complains of the absence of a synagogue, how cold it is in the palace, how people are being shot in the streets. “Shall I ever again see the faces of my children?” he asks. Pa Lurie’s voice sticks as he reads the question and he has to leave the room. This scene appears in Herzog in almost exactly these words, and ends with the father leaving the room (p. 555). In “Memoirs,” though, Bellow has the narrator, the oldest son, reflect on the father’s reaction: “When something like this happened, I was much moved, like the rest. But I knew I was a sucker. I spoke to my heart and said that it was a sucker. I knew that before long I would run afoul of Pa, and he would forget that after all I was a son, too, and would lay into me. In a burst of temper, he could slap you with both hands before you had a chance to cover your face. He was powerfully fast. When the color of anger came into it, his face was powerfully clear” (p. 14). There are narrative grounds for omission of this passage in Herzog. The scene is narrated from the point of view of nine-year-old Moses, like nine-year-old Bentchka.

  Grandpa Belo was not the only member of the family to suffer after the revolution. Lescha’s brothers, the family’s benefactors, lost everything. In 1919 the Bolsheviks came in search of Nahum Gordin to confiscate his property. According to his son, they entered Nahum’s buildings, slashed open the beds, and smashed the furniture in search of gold and jewels. Nahum hid in the attic above one of his restaurants, caught pneumonia, and died in May 1919.85 All his properties were confiscated, though his widow and children were allowed to rent two rooms of the twelve-bedroom apartment they had once owned, with use of a now communal bathroom. In these rooms the widow lived with her four sons and brother-in-law, Robert, who had also lost his property, and was drinking heavily.86 When news reached Lescha in Canada of her brother Nahum’s death, she was inconsolable. Here is how Ma Lurie reacts in “Memoirs”: “On the day she received the news of Aaron’s death, when she had been doing a Monday wash, she sat sobbing by the tub. Except to mourn, Jews were forbidden to sit on the floor. She hung over the tub, and her arms in gray sleeves, trailed in the water.” Joshua reaches down to lift her up and feels the beating of her heart, “racing, furious, sick and swift” (p. 33). This scene appears in Herzog, in much the same words, and, again, what follows in “Memoirs” is cut. As soon as Joshua lifts his weeping mother, Pa Lurie rages at her, beside himself with suspicion that she has been sending money to her brothers and mother. “When he flew into a rage, he forgot himself altogether, and lost his sense of shame” (p. 32).

  In a letter of June 14, 1955, to Leslie Fiedler, while at work on and still pleased with “Memoirs” (“a handsome new book, which is so far highly satisfactory”), Bellow describes himself as “creep[ing] near the deepest secrets of my life.” In later years, he is said to have thought “Memoirs” too sentimental to publish. But the novel could also be thought of as too tough to publish, unflinching, unforgiving. From this perspective, suppressing the manuscript was the act of a pious and loving son. After 1964, there was also a practical impediment, since a number of characters and key episodes from the manuscript had appeared in Herzog, reworked from the younger son’s perspective. These reworkings suggest the complexity and intensity of Bellow’s feelings for his father. One element of Abraham’s life, however, has only been hinted at here: the shame produced by the series of humiliating failures in Canada that preceded his bootlegging. These failures belong to the chapter that follows, though they obviously played a part in his violence toward Maury after the hijacking. They shaped and shadowed Abraham, and Bellow’s feelings toward him, even after the family rose to prosperity in the Chicago years. As the adult Moses Herzog puts it: “I am still a slave to Papa’s pain” (p. 566).

  In a letter of October 19, 1953, after the publication and great success of The Adventures of Augie March and while still at work on “Memoirs,” Bellow reassured his friend Sam Freifeld, who had had a difficult conversation with Abraham:

  I don’t know what anyone can do about my father except to change his character and that lies within the power of no one. Therefore, whatever you said, you said on your own account or in the name of justice, but practical effect I think there should be none. Myself, I have tried to hold no grudge and I had already answered his letter before yours arrived. I see no reason why I should not be faithful to whatever was, in the past, venerable in my father and I do the best to make allowances for the rest. I wouldn’t be uneasy about this at all if I were you. It’s just like my father to begin to be generous long after the rest of the world has begun. He’s impressed by my new fame and even more by the sales of the book and so now he feels uneasy and wants, too late, to go on record as a good parent. I try to make him feel there is plenty of time.

  It is not clear which letter Bellow is referring to here. The only one to survive around this date was written on September 23, 1953. In it Abraham sends money for further copies of Augie, tells Bellow he is feeling all right, though just out of the hospital after suffering a slight heart attack, praises the success of the book, and reports that everyone else in the family is fine. The letter ends: “Wright me. A Ledder. Still I am The Head of all of U.” It is signed: “Pa A. Bellow.”87

  Abraham Bellow, passport photo, 1913 (ill. 1.1)

  2

  Canada/Liza

  THE ASCANIA DOCKED AT Halifax, Nova Scotia, in December 1913, the day after Christmas. Abraham’s sister, Rosa (originally Raisa) Gameroff, and her husband, Max (Mikhail), were present to meet the new arrivals. Max had come fi
rst to the New World, summoning Rosa and their four children from Dvinsk in 1908, after he’d found work as a laborer on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Rosa, born in 1876, five years before Abraham, was followed by two other Belo siblings, a younger brother and sister: Willie (Elya Velvel), married to Jenny; then Annie (Channah), married to Max Cohen. Willie and Jenny eloped and came to Canada partly for political reasons, fearing persecution for having joined the Bund, the Jewish socialist organization. Berel Belo so disapproved of Willie’s youthful politics that he apprenticed him to a brushmaker. “The Bellows did not work with their hands,” Saul Bellow explains, “they were not tradespeople, and to apprentice Willie to a brushmaker was meant to be especially humiliating and punitive because he would be working with hog bristles.” In Canada, Willie found work as a grocer, though later, after moving to Brownsville in Brooklyn, New York, he returned to brushmaking. Bellow “loved him dearly. He was a very feeling, cheerful, generous humorist, without much power of self-expression.” Max Cohen, Annie’s husband, owned a small dry goods store in Canada, and would eventually move to Augusta, Georgia, “selling schmattes [cheap clothing] on the instalment plan to black field hands.” Bellow described him as “a cheerful, engaging, hand-to-mouth ganef [thief].”1

  The three Belo siblings and their families lived in Lachine, Quebec, a quiet working-class town, previously a village, about nine miles southwest of Montreal (since 2002 an incorporated borough of the city). Lachine’s most prominent feature is the Lachine Canal, on the St. Lawrence River. The canal affords passage to and from the North Atlantic and the Great Lakes, bypassing the dangerous Lachine Rapids; the kept waters of its locks and reaches border the town, distancing and softening what Bellow describes as the river’s “platinum rush.”2 When the Bellows arrived in 1913, factories and warehouses lined much of the canal and the river beyond, for stretches blocking them from sight. The town’s inhabitants, immigrant laborers from Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Scandinavia, Sicily, Poland, Italy, and Hungary, were further cut off by close-packed stucco and brick bungalows and two-flats.3 The major employers along the canal were the French Canadian Dominion Bridge Company, the Dominion Textile cotton mills, Canada Malting, Brights Wine, lured to the town by access to water for hydraulic power, industrial processes, easy shipping. By 1909 the number of immigrant Jews in Lachine had grown sufficiently to found a small synagogue, the Beth Israel on Ninth Avenue, on the east side of the town. In an article of October 1, 1909, in the Canadian Jewish Times announcing the synagogue’s opening, its congregation was described as made up largely “of artisans and mechanics in one or other of the large industrial establishments surrounding the town.” By 1917, a second synagogue had opened, Tiferes Israel, on Sixth Avenue. The house the Bellows were taken to by the Gameroffs, the house where Bellow was born, was at 130 Eighth Avenue, described by him as “in a Jewish enclave,”4 though one also containing families named Davis, Miller, and Dunsimore. The house was one block from the shops and businesses of Notre Dame Street, the town’s main thoroughfare, and between the two synagogues.

  When Rob Rexler, the narrator of “By the St. Lawrence” (1995), Bellow’s last published story, returns to Lachine, after more than seventy years away, he finds it much changed. In 1984, Bellow, too, returned to Lachine, after a comparable absence, to attend a ceremony renaming the town’s library in his honor. The house Rexler describes as his birthplace, “on Seventh Avenue or on Eighth,” was like Bellow’s birthplace, a modest brick two-flat. The Gameroffs lived above the Bellows, in a slightly larger apartment, with a bigger stove. Uncle Willie had his fruit store nearby, on Notre Dame Street, where Bellow remembers him “flipping open brown bags with a smart crack.”5 As a child, Rexler felt “hemmed in” on his street; seventy years later most of its houses have gone, replaced by vacant lots, though his own house survives, as does Bellow’s today. From its narrow front yard Rexler can see “the wide river surface—it had been there all the while, beyond the bakeries and sausage shops, kitchens and bedrooms” (p. 2).

  The river is a potent symbol in “By the St. Lawrence,” a source of the sublime. For Bellow the child, however, the canal was what mattered. Only minutes from the house, its soothing presence recalls Wordsworth, a lifelong influence on Bellow’s writing, on the River Derwent, which flowed past the garden of his birthplace, composing his thoughts “to more than infant softness.”6 Also prominent in Bellow’s Lachine memories was tiny Monk Park, Monkey Park to the Bellow children, an island of banked earth, maple trees, a level expanse of grass, and benches. Here Bellow was taken by his mother or brothers and sister, or the young Native American nurse who tended him as an infant. Entrance to the park is at Seventh Avenue, across a simple iron footbridge. In Bellow’s day, barges moved slowly through the nearby locks; the Caughnawaga Indian reservation was visible downstream on the far bank of the river.7 Bellow remembers his nurse chewing his meat for him before putting it into his mouth, a detail that recalls Artur Sammler in childhood, covering his mouth, when he coughed, “with the servant’s hand, to avoid getting germs on his own hand” (p. 49). The nurse is one of several affectionate female protectors to figure among Bellow’s earliest memories: Mrs. Dettner, from the neighborhood candy store on St. Louis Street, giving him molasses candy and buttoning his rompers; Mrs. Mancuso, the Italian landlady, kissing him till he was “dizzy”; his mother, “mute with love,” bundling him in woolens and setting him down in the snow with a small black stove shovel. Lachine was “paradise,” he told the audience at the library’s renaming. “I never found it again.”8

  The Gameroffs played a crucial and complex role in the life of the Bellow family. Bellow himself adored them, his parents were much in their debt, but there was friction and bad feeling between Rosa and Abraham and Liza. In 1905, when the Bellows moved to St. Petersburg, Max Gameroff was a conscript in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5). In “By the St. Lawrence,” he is fictionalized as Uncle Mikhel, who is said to have deserted the Russian army after Japan’s victory, somehow reached western Canada, then labored for years for the Canadian Pacific Railroad (p. 7). In “The Old System” (1968), Uncle Braun has a similar history, stolen from his young family “to eat maggoty pork” in a despised “goy” war, escaping through Manchuria when the war was lost, arriving in Vancouver on a Swedish ship, laying track for years (p. 92). The same figure appears as Uncle Yaffe in Herzog and Uncle Jomin in “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” where in both he is also said to have served in the Caucasus: “A finsternish! [a darkness] … too cold for dogs.”9 In all his fictional incarnations, Uncle Max is described as short, powerful, with a tight or close beard, and feeling brown eyes (in “By the St. Lawrence,” each of these eyes has “a golden flake on it like the scale of a smoked fish” [p. 7]). Intelligent, mild, with “a grim humor about him” (the phrase is from “Memoirs,” p. 46), like all the Gameroffs he was also salty and satirical. Bellow remembers him with his sons, up on the back porch of the Eighth Avenue apartment, reading aloud the matrimonial advertisements from the Yiddish papers: “Young widow, well endowed, looking for a husband.”10 Uncle Braun entertains his family in similar fashion in “The Old System”: “all but Tina, the obese sister, took part in this satirical Sunday pleasure” (p. 94).

  After leaving the railroad, Uncle Max started a business buying and selling scrap metal out of his yard; he also worked as a carpenter and sold used furniture. In Herzog, Bellow describes Uncle Yaffe stooped over piles of old plumbing and electrical fixtures, tires, rusted metal, junk of all sorts: “Without straightening his back he could pitch pieces of scrap where they belonged—iron here, zinc there, copper left, lead right, and Babbit metal by the shed” (p. 559). When World War I broke out, scrap metal was much in demand, for shipyards and the Western Front. The fortunes of the Gameroffs thrived in the years the Bellows lived below them. “Moneywise, they were among the first families,” we learn of their fictional equivalents in “Memoirs.” “They lived simply and they were known as hard dealers. In the synagogue, they rated very h
igh and had seats against the eastern wall, the best because closest to Jerusalem” (p. 48).

  Rosa Gameroff was the power in the family and a figure of fascination to Bellow. Tough, irascible, grudging, she was “at war with everyone” (words from Herzog, p. 558, but applicable to her fictionalization in “Memoirs” and the stories). “When she said something about you,” we learn of Aunt Julia, the Rosa character in “Memoirs,” “you were criticized to the heart. It was merciless, for she was a harsh judge of character.… She uttered the most damaging and shrewd remarks conceivable, a sort of poetry of criticism, fault-finding and abuse”; Aunt Julia had “a great genius with words”; in the women’s section of the Lachine synagogue, she prayed and read from the Hebrew “as well as any man” (pp. 46, 48). When she learns that Pa Lurie has become a bootlegger, her scorn has nothing to do with the profession’s illegality. What she scorns is her brother’s deluded belief that he could succeed at it. “Can a gipsy build an iron bridge? Can a bear make pancakes?” (p. 133). “Why should anyone comfort you,” she asks after the hijacking. “Here are people who are playing for high stakes. Ships and factories, do you hear? Fortunes of money, whole distilleries. And you come creeping along with your six tins of whiskey and your cockroach partner in his Model T” (p. 145).