When free of rabbis and school, Bellow and his friends collected and traded treasures: empty cigarette boxes (Nizams, Honeysuckles, Sweet Caporal), chocolate wrappers (crimson and gold, brown and silver), acorns and chestnuts (from Mount Royal, Montreal’s largest park). Bellow was obsessed with Indians as a child, read many westerns, and practiced stalking through the park like an Indian scout, careful not to crack twigs. In “Memoirs,” his fictional alter ego, Bentchka, “always playing with things he found in the gutter,” makes a bow and arrows out of the ribs of a discarded umbrella, firing them into empty chicken coops stacked in the yard (p. 74). Although not allowed a dog, the Bellows had cats. In “Memoirs,” the Luries’ cats “belonged to Bentchka” (p. 57) (the adult Bellow also had cats). On Sunday mornings, the boarder, Daitch, would take Bellow, or one of his brothers, to the schwitz or steam bath (a block away, at the corner of Napoleon and Colonial, and still in operation). He also gave the boys presents and taught them to play chess. When it was too cold for Bellow to go outside, he helped his mother in the kitchen and listened to her stories. It was not until he was eight, in his last year in Montreal, that he became a reader, nor does he seem to have written stories as a child. According to Willie Greenberg, however, he had a reputation as a talker or teller of tall tales, a chip off the old block. “Oy, is dos kind a bluffer!” Greenberg remembered his mother saying, an exclamation translated in the Montreal Gazette as “Is this kid a bullshitter!”
In the absence of radio, the family provided its own entertainments. Jane played the piano. Abraham read aloud from the stories of Sholom Aleichem (the year Bellow was born, Aleichem visited Montreal and gave a reading at the Princess Theatre, southwest of the Main). Abraham also, like Max Gameroff, read aloud from the Yiddish papers, not only from Der Forvertz (The Forward), with its popular “Bintl Briv” or “mail bundle” column, but from Der Kanader Adler (The Canada Eagle), founded in 1907.54 When Aunt Zipporah visits the Luries in Herzog she brings a present of one fresh egg, “wrapped in a piece of Yiddish newspaper (Der Kanader Adler)” (p. 564). From the Eagle, the Bellows learned the basics of Montreal political life; they also read items of national and foreign news, particularly concerning the key cities of European Jewry, such as Paris, St. Petersburg, and Rome. The Eagle was left-leaning. It campaigned for workers’ rights and raised funds for worthy causes, including the philanthropic Baron de Hirsch Institute (where Jane took piano lessons, like those deplored by Aunt Zipporah) (p. 599). The Eagle also ran humorous pieces and a range of tabloid attractions. The wife of Pa Lurie’s bootlegging partner was a great reader of the Yiddish press: “She would take the Yiddish papers, lock the door and read the serial romances, the Bintel Brief and the murder trials” (p. 105).55
Nature figured in young Bellow’s life not only on visits to Mount Royal, but in summers with his Gameroff cousins, both in Lachine and in their cottage in Huntingdon. The whole Bellow family sometimes visited for short periods in Huntingdon, staying in what Bellow describes as a “shack” on the Gameroff property.56 Several of Bellow’s stories draw on episodes and settings from these summers. In “By the St. Lawrence,” Rexler recounts an experience in his seventh or eighth summer when running errands with Cousin Albert. Though the story is mostly set in Lachine, it is a summery Lachine, with fragrant tomato plants, shaded periwinkle, sunlight shining through June leaves. In “The Old System,” the Quebec countryside becomes the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York, a landscape dominated by the Mohawk River, remembered as “powerful and dark, an easy, level force” (more like the Chateauguay than the St. Lawrence). Braun, the story’s narrator, also recalls a huge sycamore tree by the river, “like a complicated event, with much splitting and thick chalky extensions” (p. 92). Here and elsewhere in his fiction, Bellow is a close and knowledgeable observer of nature. Though he was the great novelist of urban America, his attraction to the countryside was lifelong and powerful: early in his career, in the 1950s and early 1960s, he owned a house in the Hudson Valley; in the 1970s he began spending summers in Vermont, and eventually he built a house there. Part of the appeal of both locations was their resemblance to the Quebec countryside of his youth.57 Bellow was also a frequent summer visitor to Aspen, Colorado, bought land there, and for some time intended to build a house on his property.
The appeal of Bellow’s Lachine and Huntingdon summers owed much to his Gameroff cousins, Shmuel David, Meyer, Louis, and Lena. These cousins were older, the boys strong, handsome, playful, and affectionate.58 The oldest, Shmuel David, was fifteen years Bellow’s senior, more an uncle than a cousin. He is in part the model for Isaac Braun, the hero of “The Old System.” Cousin Isaac was “born to be a man, in the direct Old Testament sense” (p. 92). He was also an homme à femmes59 (“ ‘I fought on many fronts,’ Cousin Isaac said, meaning women’s bellies” [“The Old System,” p.102]). “They were all sexy people,” recalls Rexler of his Lachine cousins, identical in number, age, and birth order to Bellow’s real-life cousins and to the fictional Braun cousins. In “The Old System,” seven-year-old Samuel is initiated into the mysteries of sex by Cousin Tina, as Bellow was at roughly the same age by cousin Lena (thirteen at the time).60 Tina is sullen and stout, with “smoky black harsh hair”; as she lifts her dress and petticoat, her belly and thighs swell before Samuel, and the little boy experiences “agonies of incapacity and pleasure.” Excited and frightened in equal measure, “Braun felt too small and frail for this ecstasy” (pp. 94, 95). The association of large women with sexual excitement recurs in Bellow’s fiction. In “What Kind of a Day Did You Have?,” Katrina Goliger, Victor Wulpy’s mistress, is described as “the full woman, perhaps the fat woman, woman-smelling” (p. 335), and her sexuality revivifies. In The Bellarosa Connection, the heroine, Sorella, is so big “she made you look twice at a doorway. When she came to it, she filled the space like a freighter in a canal lock” (p. 60). Sorella is courageous, clever, formidable. She’s also attractive, with neat ankles, small feet, and a pleasant feminine voice. “She set her lady self before him, massively,” the narrator tells us. “The more I think of Sorella,” he later admits, “the more charm she has for me” (p. 68).
Months after the episode with Lena, young Bellow’s life altered dramatically. In the winter of 1923, when he was eight, he suffered an attack of appendicitis. After an emergency appendectomy at the Royal Victoria Hospital on Mount Royal, he developed serious infections, including peritonitis. He got these infections either because the appendix had burst, or begun to burst, or because the operation was ineptly performed (the chief surgeon at the Royal Vic, Sir Henry Gray, was “credited with killing more American soldiers than the Germans did,” according to Bellow’s brother Sam),61 or simply because infections can occur whenever one operates, especially in an age before the availability of antibiotics. In addition to the peritonitis, Bellow developed pneumonia. There were more operations, four abdominal operations, and Bellow remembers drifting in and out of consciousness (he was anaesthetized with ether, dripped onto a gauze mask over his mouth and nose). When recuperating from these operations, “my belly was haggled open—it was draining. I stank” (in the unfinished story “Here and Gone,” eight-year-old Imminitov’s wound is drained by a doctor carrying a big syringe, the sort used for basting in the kitchen; in the unfinished novel “Charm and Death,” the protagonist recalls an identical wound at an identical age, drained by a “tube into his open belly secured by a diaper pin”).62 For a while the doctors feared that Bellow had contracted tuberculosis (this is what Charlie Citrine is hospitalized with in Humboldt’s Gift, also at eight). “I was very sick, close to death,” Bellow told an interviewer, nor was he the only boy close to death in Ward H, the small boys’ ward. “Occasionally one of the kids would die and then the stretcher would be brought in and in the morning there was an empty bed.” The boys knew what an empty bed meant, “although nobody talked about it” (partly because the distance between beds prevented discussion). When boys disappeared at night, “you had to make your own r
ecord of them.” Bellow knew his condition was perilous; on occasion he was well enough to climb out of bed and read his chart: “it was very unpromising.”63
Bellow spent “four to five” months on Ward H, where it was hospital policy to allow child-patients only a single visit a week, from a single visitor. These visits were meant to be short; there were no chairs in the ward.64 Bellow’s parents took turns visiting, in a winter he remembered as especially harsh, with “heavy snows, fantastic icicles at the windows, streetcars frosted over” (in Herzog, which briefly fictionalizes the hospital stay, the icicles are described as “like the teeth of fish, clear drops burning at their tips” [p. 439]). Bellow had never before been separated from his family, never been in a situation where “you can’t call out in the night for anybody, because nobody is going to come.” “I loved new experiences,” he said, “but even for me, it was a little much.”65 What his time in hospital taught him was that he was on his own: “I had nobody to depend on but myself, so I began to make all kinds of arrangements for myself,” including arrangements involving his parents. There were “things you couldn’t tell the parents. You protected them in a way.”66 Chief among these things was the anti-Semitism of the nurses, especially pronounced at Christmas, a holiday Bellow remembered his mother mocking (the hospital made a fuss at Christmas, with a tree in the ward and a gift stocking at the foot of each bed).67 Bellow also remembers keeping quiet about meals (“eating diced pork on a tin plate. Horrible food!”).68 When a nurse said to him, “You don’t have napkins on St. Dominique Street,” he said nothing to the nurse or to his parents, “though I knew we had napkins.”69 “You were a little Jewish kid and they kept reminding you of it,” he recalled, “which would make me very angry. I was mad enough to kill. But I was also very puny. I was eight years old and I weighed forty pounds or something like that.”70
It was in hospital that Bellow became a reader, “read everything I could get my hands on,” not only his hospital chart, but the funny papers, stacked beside the patients’ beds: Katzenjammer Kids, Barney Google, Boob McNutt, Happy Hooligan, Slim Jim, Mutt and Jeff. He also read Raggedy Ann, Black Beauty, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His most important reading, though, was kept from his parents. “There was nobody to talk to except the ladies from the Bible Society, the Christian ladies we used to call them, with copies of the New Testament” (elsewhere, “a New Testament for children”).71 He and the ladies would read passages aloud, and when they went away he read the whole book himself. The Gospel stories in particular “were a real shocker, because I didn’t have any idea about all this other side of things.” He’d heard of Jesus, but only “marginal information, unfriendly (why should it have been friendly?).”72 He was shocked when Jesus died, never having read a story in which the hero died. “I was nuts about the guy,” the adult Bellow recalled to a friend73; “I was moved out of myself by Jesus,” he wrote in a letter of June 22, 1991, to the biblical scholar Stephen Mitchell, “by ‘suffer the little children to come unto me,’ by the lilies of the valley … by his deeds and his words.” That Jesus was a Jew “counted heavily” in his favor. At the same time, “I would never have joined the enemies of the Jews as supporters of Jesus. That would have been impossible.” The charge that the Jews crucified Jesus troubled the eight-year-old. “I thought the Jews should really not have done that,” he remembers thinking. He was also worried about being blamed: “How could it be my fault? I am in the hospital.” As he concluded at the time, “I didn’t have it all quite straight.”74
Bellow was most concerned to protect his mother. In “Here and Gone” the mother of eight-year-old Imminitov brings vanilla ice cream. It is too frozen to get a spoon in, so cold has the journey been from home. The mother is remembered turning her face to the side as she looks at Imminitov, slightly favoring her left eye, a trait her son inherits (p. 17). She stands by the bed and says very little, certainly in comparison to the boy’s father on his visits. In “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” it is Joshua, the Maury figure, who is hospitalized. Joshua is a bold, forward boy, as was Maury, and Ma Lurie cautions him “to remember that we were poor and that we were Jews from St. Dominique street and therefore must not provoke anyone” (p. 77). When Ma Lurie enters Ward H in her felt galoshes, she has a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, “for she suffered with her teeth in the cold” (p. 79). Hospital visits take place in the afternoon. When they end and the day begins to darken, dinner trolleys clatter in the corridors; at such moments, even brave Joshua feels like giving in to tears.
It is the mother Bellow associates with tears, with fearfulness, with religious piety. Liza’s male ideal was her father, a man of great learning and piety. Her hope was that all her sons would become lamdonim (rabbis or scholars), though Bellow, the youngest, “was born to it—you could see” (words Ma Lurie applies to Bentchka in “Memoirs,” p. 81). Bellow was moi kresavitz, my beauty, the favorite, for several years the only child at home, too young for school. On St. Dominique Street, Liza’s life, trailed by the watchful child, was one of continuous washing, cooking, cleaning, mending, dreaming. “I often wonder about my mother,” Bellow told an interviewer, “how she lived under those circumstances.”75 In Herzog, the “withdrawn” side of Moses’s mother’s face is described as “melancholy,” “dreaming,” as if she were always “seeing the Old World,” the lost St. Petersburg world of servants and fine linen and dachas. Moses’s six-year-old daughter, Junie, has a comparably withdrawn expression: “the bit of melancholy in her beauty—that was his mother … pensive, slightly averting her face as she considered the life about her” (p. 676). This life was not only materially impoverished and arduous but confined. Bellow’s father was out in the world, speaking English, however imperfectly. The children were at school or playing in the street with friends. Liza was at home, never learned to speak much English, never learned to read it at all. When she went out, it was mostly with family, to visit relatives. A great treat for Liza was a movie matinee on the weekend. Bellow sometimes accompanied her and remembered a low rumbling in the theater, that of dozens of child translators, himself included, whispering in Yiddish to their mothers.76
In Bellow’s fiction, there are hard mothers and soft mothers, Rosa types and Liza types, though no two characters possess identical traits, and some combine the traits of both (as does Artur Sammler’s mother, who is haughty, lacking in compassion, an enthusiast of Schopenhauer, after whom Artur is named, and indulgent, spoiling her son with croissants and hot chocolate). Soft mothers in the Liza mold are, variously, melancholy, pious, sensitive, sickly, dreamy, superstitious, unworldly, weak in mind, and passionately devoted to family. In Dangling Man, Joseph’s dead mother is mentioned only twice. In the first instance, Joseph is four and his mother refuses to cut his curls; Aunt Dina, “a self-willed woman,” defies her sister and takes him herself to the barber. When they return, the mother is given an envelope with Joseph’s curls, and begins to cry (p. 53). In the second instance, Joseph recalls the night his mother died. The nurse calls out to the family and “from all parts of the house we came running.” Moments before her death, Joseph notices that “her lips seemed to move crookedly in a last effort to speak or kiss” (p. 83). In The Victim, Leventhal’s “unfortunate” mother is mentioned only once. What he remembers of her, he tells us, is her “abstracted look,” which might also be a look of madness, though “he had only his father’s word for it that she died insane” (p. 185). Tommy Wilhelm’s mother in Seize the Day dies in the winter of 1934 or 1932 (he and his father argue about the date), a year before or after Liza Bellow died. What he owes her is “sensitive feelings, a soft heart, a brooding nature, a tendency to be confused under pressure” (p. 21). In Henderson the Rain King (1959) we learn a good deal about Henderson’s distinguished father. What we learn about his mother is that she wrote poetry, was treated badly by the father, and was dead by the time Henderson was sixteen.77 In Herzog, the hero’s mother, as we have seen, shares many traits with Bellow’s mother. What she dreams of on Napo
leon Street, in addition to St. Petersburg finery, is her lost family: “her father the famous Misnagid, her tragic mother, her brothers living and dead” (p. 555). Why her mother is tragic is not explained, as if motherhood itself were sufficient explanation. It is on Napoleon Street that Ma Herzog’s hair turns gray, her teeth fall out, and “her very fingernails wrinkled. Her hands smelled of the sink” (p. 556).78 Ma Herzog, like Tommy’s mother, like Albert Corde’s mother in The Dean’s December, like Louis’s mother in “Something to Remember Me By,” like Bellow’s mother, dies when the son is an adolescent.79
In Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine reflects on the legacy of the mother-son bond. Though Bellow had little time for psychoanalytic explanation, Charlie sees the “intense way of caring” he and his mother shared as creating problems for him in later life:
I never lost this intense way of caring—no, that isn’t so. I’m afraid the truth is that I did lose it. Yes, sure I lost it. But I still required it. That’s always been the problem. I required it and apparently I also promised it. To women, I mean. For women I had this utopian emotional love aura and made them feel I was a cherishing man. Sure, I’d cherish them in the way they all dreamed of being cherished (p. 293).
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 10
