The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  In all versions, the Rosa figure has a thin face, pinched nose (“to cut through mercy like a cotton thread” [“The Old System,” p. 93]), high and alarming color (a product of hypertension), “cruelly” thick legs, “wildly overdeveloped” buttocks (“so that walking must have been a torment”) (“By the St. Lawrence,” p. 8), and an enormous bosom. Both Joshua from “Memoirs” and Moses from Herzog spot a large bankroll tucked in this bosom, rent money from tenants. It was Rosa not Max who invested in real estate, buying up vacant lots at the edge of town, then small buildings, trudging painfully from property to property. In “By the St. Lawrence,” the Rosa figure is Aunt Rozzy, with “the fiery face of a hanging judge,” “wicked to everyone. Except, perhaps, little Rexler” (p. 8). In “The Old System,” she is Aunt Rose, described as “the original dura mater—the primal hard mother,” a woman who takes pleasure in her hardness, “hardness of reckoning, hardness of tactics, hardness of dealing and of speech” (p. 93). When upbraided for a comparable hardness, Aunt Julia attacks: “Weakness makes me sick. It turns my stomach. When the rest of the world turns kind then I’ll be kind, too, but not until. I hate fools” (p. 146).

  Rosa Gameroff’s initial impression of her newly arrived relatives was not favorable, or so the fiction suggests. “I can still see you getting off the train at Halifax,” comments Aunt Zipporah to Father Herzog, “all dressed up among the greeners. Gott meiner! Ostrich feathers, the gloves” (p. 559).11 It was the family’s pride, “the caste madness of yichus [family status or prestige]” (p. 558), that offended Aunt Zipporah. She had been irritated by it from the start, back in der Heim. In “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” the extravagance of the Lurie wedding, and of Ma Lurie’s rich brothers, puts Aunt Julia’s nose out of joint: “Aunt Julia and Aunt Taube [the Annie figure] felt Ma’s people to be too proud. Ma’s wedding had been overly grand for them” (p. 18). In Herzog, Aunt Zipporah complains of the extravagance of St. Petersburg: “You got used to putting on style … with servants and coachmen.” Though marvelously biting to her brother, much of Zipporah’s criticism is aimed at his wife. The Liza figure is seen as snobbish in her delicacy and refinement, also in her ambition for her children, the wrong wife for a husband without steady work. In the Bellow family, it was Liza who insisted that daughter Jane have piano lessons, at $3 a month. The Herzog daughter, Helen, also has piano lessons, but as Aunt Zipporah points out, she is no musician. Helen “plays to move the family,” an indulgence, like Ma Herzog’s mooning over the lost life in der Heim, instead of working. “Everyone must work. Not suffer your whole life long from a fall. Why must your children go to the conservatory, the Baron de Hirsch school, and all those special frills? Let them go to work, like mine” (p. 559). Similarly, while Father Herzog lived comfortably in St. Petersburg, thanks to Ma Herzog’s brothers, and escaped to Canada, again thanks to the brothers, Zipporah’s husband came alone and unaided to the New World, after freezing in the Caucasus. Only until he’d found steady work and saved enough money did he send for the family: “But you—you want alle sieben glicken [all seven lucky things]. You travel in style, with ostrich feathers. You’re an edel-mensch [refined]. Get your hands dirty? Not you.” These words are from Zipporah’s answer to a request for a loan. “If I started to give, and indulged your bad habits,” she continues, “it would be endless. It’s not my fault you’re a pauper here” (p. 561).

  Saul Bellow was born on June 10, 1915. He was delivered, according to family legend, by a French Canadian doctor who had to be fetched from a saloon and “was quite drunk when he arrived.” The narrator of “The Old System” is delivered by an Anglo Canadian version of this doctor, “faltering, drunken Jones, who practiced among Jewish immigrants before those immigrants had educated their own doctors.” The first thing Jones does is to tie Mother Braun’s hands to the bedposts, “a custom of the times” (p. 93). Once delivered, the infant Braun is washed, covered with a mosquito netting, and laid at the foot of his mother’s bed.12 In an undated letter, probably written in the early 1980s, Bellow’s sister, Jane, seven in 1915, remembers coming home from school and finding “a beautiful white bundle with an angelic face covered with white cheesecloth lying at the foot of Ma’s bed. I was happy with the arrival of a new baby, yet disappointed because I so much wanted a sister! I felt a sense of responsibility for you while you were growing up and kept a watchful eye.… Ma was tired and busy with her chores and I had to help out.”13 Maury, the elder of Bellow’s two brothers, was seven at the time of the birth; Sam, the middle brother, was four.14 In “Memoirs,” Joshua, the Maury figure, describes his baby brother, Ben Zion or Bentchka, as having been delivered “after great trouble.” When Joshua is allowed into the room to see the baby, his father is also present: “This is a clear vision in me, of the white infant, the iron bedstead, white bed cover, Ma holding the child to her side while Pa’s moustaches gently touched its head. Ma’s dark eyes in this warm room seemed to see what they had longed to see” (p. 7).

  Bellow’s earliest memories went “back to the age of two” and when checked with his sister proved “quite accurate.”15 In his speech at the Lachine library he described these memories as “vigorous and … in bright colors.” From infancy, perception was for Bellow “a consuming appetite,” an active process, no wise passiveness. The world was “grasped … tightly with my senses, and perhaps just as energetically with intuitions.” Among specific memories, he mentions the banter between passing bargemen and the people alongside; he recites the first verse of a bargemen’s song: “The cook she’s nam was Rosie, she came from Mo’real. And was chamber maid on a lumber barge in the Grand Lachine Canal.” The wonders of Lachine included a Native American policeman named John, from the Caughnawaga reservation, a huge man said to be capable of “driving a spike into a fence with the palm of his hand”; a man named Isvolsky “who owned a famous goat”; an older gentleman “who had invented a perpetual-motion machine powered by springs.” But everything was a wonder to the infant Bellow. “Looking back, I think I had a kind of infinite excitement going through me,” Bellow said, speaking of his sense of the world at two or three, “of being a part of this, of having appeared on this earth. I always had this feeling … that this is a most important thing, and delicious, ravishing, and nothing happened that was not of deepest meaning for you—a green plush sofa falling apart, or sawdust coming out of the sofa, or the carpet that it fell on, the embers dropping through the grates.… Everything is yours, really. There’s nothing around that you don’t possess.”16 For Bellow the child, as for Wordsworth the child, “every common sight / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light.” As he puts it in the “Chicago Book,” an unpublished, unfinished work of nonfiction, much mined for The Dean’s December (1982), “I grew up convinced of the Wordsworthian linkage of ‘a life and a soul, to every mode of being.’ ”17

  Part of what strengthened the infant Bellow’s sense of the world as his possession, a delicious and important place, was the closed-off existence of the immigrant family, of the immigrant mother especially:

  The sense that you got from your parents and from your uncles and your aunts and their families, cousins, etc., was that you had been brought by stormy seas and cast up on this shore and that you clung to each other and that your mother was the source of all human connectedness. And that what happened to the family, and what happened to her children, was of the utmost importance. Nothing more important. So that when you fell down the stairs and got a big bump on your head … her crying aloud and solicitude made you feel that you were—it never even entered your mind that you were anything but—cherished, and so you returned the feeling, of course. And I think it had something to do with the sense of being helpless aliens.18

  In The Adventures of Augie March, as soon as Augie’s family disintegrates, “common sights” cease to shine: “The house was changed also for us; dinkier, darker, smaller, once shiny and venerated things losing their attraction and richness and importance. Tin showed, cracks, black spo
ts where enamel was hit off, threadbarer, design scuffed out of the center of the rug, all the glamour, lacquer, massiveness, florescence, wiped out” (p. 448). That the adult Bellow returned so frequently in his writing to childhood scenes, and held his extended Lachine family so dear, derived in part from a sense that he owed to them both his extraordinary powers of observation, powers he sought to draw on and keep alive, in Victor Wulpy’s words, “by an act of the creative will.”

  These powers were visionary as well as empirical. In “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” the infant Bentchka is repeatedly described as watchful, a quality unexpectedly linked with dreaminess: “Bentchka had a habit of drooping his head and dreaming at things with one eye” (p. 42). The preposition “at” in the phrase “dreaming at” suggests that the looseness of dream, or dreaminess, is somehow part of the act of perception. A much later passage is similarly unexpected in its mix of mental processes: “Bentchka listened and smiled in his dreamy, analytical way. His face was like satin, and he looked at things from the left side, with a slightly turned head” (p. 132). The faculties described here are in part sensory, in part something deeper. “Analytical” suggests a conscious process, but in an interview Bellow says his infant observation “wasn’t entirely voluntary. It wasn’t based on ideas. It was the given.” When challenged by his interviewer to explain how “the physicality of someone or something” wasn’t an idea, he replies: “The abstraction came later. Actual life was always first.”19 By “analytical,” then, Bellow means something like “imaginative,” which fits with “dreamy.” The surface, “actual life,” is in itself a source of fascination, but it is also the way to meaning, to what it is Bentchka is “dreaming at.” Moses Herzog reflects on “the family look, the eyes, those eye-lights” (p. 650), moving from surface to something inward, from or through “eyes” to “eye-lights,” a movement Bentchka seems also to be making in observation, which is partly why he is called “watchful and intelligent beyond his years” (p. 99). Bellow depicts him—an imagined version of his infant self, perhaps even a recalled version—sitting in his crib in winter looking through its bars “at the sparrows as they ruffled on the wires and on the glass clusters of the telephone poles and dropped down to peck in the horse-churned, sleigh-tracked snow. You could leave him alone; he’d amuse himself for hours” (p. 49). This sort of looking, through what Chick in Ravelstein calls “metaphysical lenses” (p. 98), recalls Hazlitt on the adult Wordsworth, marked by “a severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eyes … as if he saw something in objects more than the actual appearance.”20

  Much of Bellow’s intense looking, from infancy onward, was at bodies, faces, ways of moving. “When I was a very small child,” he told his friend Keith Botsford, it wasn’t what people said, “so much as the look of them and their gestures, that spoke to me. That is, a nose was also a speaking member, and so were a pair of eyes. And so was the way your hair grew and the set of your ears, the condition of your teeth, the emanations of the body. All of that. Of which I seemed to have a natural grasp.” Bellow believed, “all my life,” that the person, or something in the person, was inseparable from his or her appearance. “If a man or woman looked a certain way then it meant something to me, about their characters.”21 In “Memoirs,” for example, on the eve of the hijacking, the skin around Pa Lurie’s eyes, and the way he holds himself, tell us everything we need to know about his situation, his state of mind, even his fate: “Something appeared to have got him by the back of the neck and the head and twisted them forward so that he could not recover his normal posture. It was painful to see. The skin was tightened at his eyes so that his eyes would sometimes suggest those of an animal picked up by the scruff of the neck” (pp. 134–35). In “By the St. Lawrence,” Uncle Mikhel’s fortitude, shrewdness, and solidity find expression not in what he says but in his body and bearing:

  Though his hands were palsied, Uncle Mikhel could weed and tie knots. His head, too, made involuntary movements but his eyes looked at you steadily, wide open. His face was tightly held by the close black beard. He said almost nothing. You heard the crisping of his beard against the collar oftener than his voice. He stared, you expected him to say something; instead he went on staring with an involuntary wag of the head (p. 7).

  The perfectly weighted pauses in this last sentence, the unerring punctuation, vivify what is seen. Similarly, in “By the St. Lawrence,” when cousin Ezra, one of the sons of the Uncle Max figure, has business thoughts, his solemnity is enacted in the writing: “He brought his white teeth together and a sort of gravity came over him” (p. 4).

  Often Bellow describes parts of the face or body rarely noticed or seen as expressive, or expressive in the ways Bellow describes. In Seize the Day (1956), when the conman Tamkin’s face grows resolute, “on either side of his mouth odd bulges formed under his mustache” (p. 65), a characteristically close and idiosyncratic observation (idiosyncratic because resolve is conventionally located in the set of the jaw). Elsewhere, Tamkin is described as “pigeon-toed, a sign perhaps that he was devious or had much to hide” (p. 52), which works once one recalls the posture of shy or guilty children. On other occasions, Bellow’s descriptions of bodily appearances and processes are harder to understand. In The Adventures of Augie March, Clarence Ruber is described as having “a slow, shiny Assyrian fringe on his head” (p. 560). “Shiny” and “Assyrian” are clear, but why “slow”? In Humboldt’s Gift, an old girlfriend is identified by “the neat short teeth, the winsome gums, the single dimple in the left cheek” (p. 290). The odd phrase here is “winsome gums” (because pink, young, healthy, presumably). Given the descriptive riches of Bellow’s fiction, how much he notices, one is reluctant to question such details, especially when what is mystifying is immediately preceded by what is striking or right (the girlfriend’s “neat short teeth”). A similar juxtaposition, also from Humboldt’s Gift, occurs in the description of the gangster Cantabile: “His mouth was wide, with an emotional underlip in which there was the hint of an early struggle to be thought full grown. His large feet and dark eyes also hinted that he aspired to some ideal, and that his partial attainment or non-attainment of the ideal was a violent grief to him” (p. 88). The expressive properties of “large feet” in this passage are occult, a product of what Chick, from Ravelstein, calls “private metaphysics,” “a way to communicate certain ‘incommunicables’ ” (p. 95). They testify to Bellow’s faith in his perceptual powers, even when the meanings they yield cannot be defended in rational or adult terms. This faith derives from what are for the child comparably inexplicable “first epistemological impressions” (Chick’s phrase, p. 96). Although the most sophisticated and learned of men, the adult Bellow described himself in an interview as “clinging to the discovery of the world that occurred when I was very young,” a discovery experienced in something like “a state of intoxication.” “How can anybody possibly say he understands this [world] with his intellect,” he continued. “You understand this with your instincts and with your heart and with your passions.”22

  Another way of clinging to the child’s sense of the world is to surround oneself with larger-than-life characters. The narrators and central figures of Bellow’s novels share this propensity. “It would be against my rule of truthfulness,” confesses Kenneth Trachtenberg in More Die of Heartbreak, “to conceal the fact that I am fond of preposterous people” (p. 209). “I loved the way you would carry on,” Albert Corde tells Dewey Spangler in The Dean’s December (1982). “You were extravagant. You’d holler and bawl at your poor mother, and call her a whore.… It gave me terrific pleasure. I never saw anything like it.”23 “I had a weakness for characters like Cantabile,” confesses Charlie Citrine, “demonstrative exuberant impulsive destructive and wrong-headed” (p. 171) (which also explains his attraction to the wild-man poet Von Humboldt Fleisher). All the novels contain characters who balloon into Dickensian or Balzacian monstrosity, to the amusement or wondering dismay of their narrators. Here is e
ight-year-old Moses Herzog attending cheder in the cellar of a local synagogue:

  The pages of the Pentateuch smelled of mildew, the boys’ sweaters were damp. The rabbi, short-bearded, his soft big nose violently pitted with black, scolding them. “You, Rozavitch, you slacker. What does it say here about Potiphar’s wife, V’tispesayu b’vigdi …

  ‘And she took hold of … ’ ”

  “Of what? Beged.”

  “Beged. A coat.

  “A garment, you little thief. Mamzer [Bastard]! I’m sorry for your father. Some heir he’s got! Some Kaddish [son]! Ham and pork you’ll be eating, before his body is in the grave. And you, Herzog, with those behemoth eyes—V’yaizov bigdo b’yodo?”

  “And he left it in her hands.”

  “Left what?”

  “Bigdo, the garment.”

  “You watch your step, Herzog, Moses. Your mother thinks you’ll be a great lamden—a rabbi. But I know you, how lazy you are. Mothers’ hearts are broken by mamzeirim like you! Eh! Do I know you, Herzog? Through and through” (p. 548).

  Whether the rabbi here derives from a real-life prototype, as does Bentchka’s teacher, gentle Reb Shika, modeled on a man Bellow describes in interview in terms identical to those used for the fictional Shika, is unknown. But Von Humboldt Fleisher does, as does Dewey Spangler, as does Aunt Zipporah (Rozzy/Rosa/Julia). “Saul was no monster,” Philip Roth warned me, “but he loved monsters, and you’re going to have to interview them.” Some of the people Bellow loved could well be described as monstrous, others were larger-than-life in endearing or admirable rather than alarming ways. In To Jerusalem and Back (1976), Bellow depicts the city’s mayor, Teddy Kollek, as “a furiously active man.… A hurtling, not a philosophical soul”: “His nose is straight, short, thick, and commanding; his color is ruddy; his reddish hair falls forward when he goes into action. Balzac would have taken to the mayor.… But no category will hold a phenomenon of such force” (p. 86).24 Part of what Bellow enjoyed about Kollek, according to Kollek’s son, Amos, was “the way my father knew how to manipulate people, including himself [Bellow, that is], hooking them into doing something for the city.” Amos remembers the smile on Bellow’s face as he watched Kollek work him. “Everyone serves his ends,” Bellow writes of the mayor, approvingly, “and no one seems harmed by such serving” (p. 86). Bellow’s enjoyment of Kollek and other larger-than-life figures can be explained as typical of novelists, always on the lookout for characters, and as admiration for a species of energy and unself-consciousness available to him only vicariously (in this view, Bellow is like Charlie Citrine, who describes himself as “a nicely composed person, [who] had had Humboldt expressing himself wildly on my behalf, satisfying some of my longings” [p. 107]). Neither view is incompatible with the one expressed here, that for Bellow the vividness of real-life Dickensian or Balzacian types not only re-creates something of “first epistemological impressions” but allows him to observe from the position of the child.