The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  This way is characterized by Charlie’s first serious girlfriend, his first love, without rebuttal, as “phoney.” The mother is not being blamed here—the fault is Charlie’s, for projecting an intensity he knows he does not feel, and for requiring and arousing the genuine article in women. The mother-son bond affects all subsequent relations, but for Charlie there was nothing of Hamlet or Oedipus in it, no erotic component, an absence psychoanalysis would attribute to repression. The relevant model is Romantic, that of the child’s oneness with the mother, then with Mother Nature or the outer world (after the mother’s early death, in the case both of Wordsworth and Bellow), followed by an inevitable fall into separation or adulthood.80

  That the Liza figure’s qualities were to Bellow strengths as well as weaknesses—values—is seen most clearly in The Adventures of Augie March. Rebecca March (“Mama”) is at sea in Chicago, meek, nervous, simpleminded. Her eyesight is failing, she has very few teeth left, her hands are rough and reddened from domestic drudgery. She has three sons and no husband (her husband deserted the family). The sons are Simon, the oldest, Augie, the middle child, and Georgie, who is “mind-crippled” (p. 440). “Simon and I were her miracles or accidents,” Augie tells us. “Georgie was her own true work in which she returned to her fate after blessed and undeserved success” (p. 389). The family is run by Grandma Lausch, a Rosa figure, to whom Mama, guilty over her failure as a wife, surrenders her powers, partly in penance, partly out of incapacity.81 “Against the old lady’s authority she didn’t dare to introduce her feelings,” says Augie, “but when she took me into the kitchen to put a compress on me she nearsightedly pored over my scratches, whispering and sighing to me, while Georgie tottered around behind her” (p. 395). Ma’s soft sighs and whispers counter the Machiavellian hardness of Grandma Lausch, all “guile, malice, and command” (p. 387) (Grandma Lausch has feelings, but keeps them tightly controlled). It is Grandma’s aim, Augie says, “to wise us up”: “the trustful, loving, and simple surrounded by the cunning-hearted and tough, a fighting nature of birds and worms, and a desperate mankind without feelings” (p. 391). Grandma Lausch has the wisdom to negotiate hard Chicago, hard America. Mama, in contrast, possesses a wisdom “without any work of mind, of which she was incapable” (p. 443), and Georgie does, too. This wisdom is “the oldest knowledge, older than the Euphrates, older than the Ganges,” “something full of comment on the life of all of us” (p. 438). Ma and Georgie cannot take care of themselves, but they “do with [the] soul.” Like Wordsworth’s “Idiot Boy,” Johnny Foy, Georgie has the look of “a seraph” (p. 441), “a far traveller” (p. 445). The wisdom he and Mama transmit, a matter of love and feeling, lies beyond the material realm.

  Liza’s wisdom, Bellow suggests in an interview, was like that of Mama March, but Liza was not Mama. Mama March could never read Tolstoy, Liza’s favorite novelist (in Augie, it is Grandma Lausch who reads Tolstoy). Nor was Liza as passive or downtrodden as Mama March. Bellow borrows real-life qualities and oppositions in drawing his characters, then exaggerates them to meet dramatic or fictional ends; his characters, he explained, have more “esprit” (or less, as in the case of Mama March) than their real-life prototypes.82 Liza Bellow’s life in Canada, and later in Chicago, was hard; she was dependent, dreamy, and melancholy, but unlike Mama March she could put her foot down, as she did over the farm in Valleyfield. The character who comes closest to Liza in Bellow’s fiction is Ma Lurie in “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” itself the most autobiographical of Bellow’s fictions. Ma Lurie is often a steadying influence on Pa Lurie. When despairing, Pa calls himself a bettler (beggar), a dirty, half-mad figure, the sort frequently encountered “in the yellowish streets of Jewish Montreal.” Ma Lurie answers soothingly, smilingly: “Not yet, by any means” (p. 40). Later in the manuscript, we are told that Pa “had conversations by the hour with Ma, in their bedroom. She gave him comfort” (p. 134). After the Luries set up as marriage brokers, as did the Bellows, Ma takes almost as big a part in entertaining and interviewing as Pa: “Pa put on more of an exhibition. There was more of poetry in Ma’s way. Ma’s way was sober; Pa’s was likely to be striking” (p. 66). Ma tells a prospective couple about a movie she has seen: “ ‘Oh, it is harzreisend,’ said Ma. It was the greatest compliment Ma could give a movie to say it had torn her heart” (p. 67). When Pa is away from home, Ma talks to Zelda and Joshua, the two eldest children, about schemes to raise money for a shop of some kind (p. 130). She even delivers the occasional bottle of bootleg whiskey: “it was hard for her … she was not shy but she had her own sort of ladylike ways. There was no place for these now” (p. 104). It is Ma who nerves Pa up to approach Aunt Julia for a loan: “You have to do it. They can give you the money, and Jomin doesn’t have a bad heart” (p. 49). When Aunt Julia visits on another occasion, there is a violent quarrel: Ma calls her “a black spider,” Julia curses her, and Ma bursts into tears (p. 73). When Julia refuses Pa the loan and denounces weakness, Ma cries: “And I hate wickedness.” After this exchange the two women “stared at each other in wild agitation” (p. 146).

  The sequence of events that leads in “Memoirs” to Pa Lurie’s flight to Chicago begins with his arrest for bootlegging. A lawyer with influence is found, one used to dealing with immigrants in trouble. There is the matter of bail, which Ma sets out to raise, but the manuscript breaks off before we learn if she succeeds. In its last scene, Ma and Joshua walk up the Main, having just left the lawyer. It is Indian summer (at which point the narrator, Joshua, interjects, “I simply can’t help it, it was,” stressing the scene’s documentary truth). Ma is depicted as tired, dressed in heavy clothing: “Her cheeks were drawn in, making you aware of bone, and teeth and eyes. The pulses were beating strongly in her throat, where a blue vein was stretched” (p. 171). With difficulty, throatily, Ma declares: “We won’t stay here in Canada any more. I refuse. We fell in here. We have to climb out and leave. If we don’t, it will be the same thing again and again. This time I have decided, and Pa will do as I say for a change. We will go to the States.” Pa has a favorite cousin in Minneapolis, one Ma had known and liked in der Heim. This cousin owns a bakery and will employ Pa. Ma also has relatives in St. Paul and Minneapolis. But Ma has another reason to remove the family from Montreal: “Your father’s sisters have no respect for me. I can’t struggle against them any more. They even made fun of me when I was carrying Ben Zion. I am not going to spend my life under that Julia. She wants to devour me. She lives off my miseries.… Your father will obey me for a change” (p. 172).

  Nothing like this scene is recounted by Bellow in interview. But then he offered very few specifics about the removal from Canada to Chicago, where a real-life cousin, Louis Dworkin, owned a bakery. “My father left for Chicago in the winter of 1924,” Bellow told Keith Botsford. “It was nearly summer when I rejoined the family [from the hospital]. I didn’t go back to school. That same summer, my mother brought the children to Chicago.”83 Both Abraham’s entry to the United States in winter and the family’s entry in summer, on the Fourth of July, were illegal.84 Bellow was nine and still very much under the influence and protection of his mother, “clinging to affection and the family,”85 clinging also to the mother’s faith. “My mother was very religious and I grew up in a religious family, the religious feeling was very strong in me when I was young and it persisted.” In Chicago, however, Liza’s influence would come under threat, in “a great struggle between the street and the home.”86 In Chicago, when away at school or playing with friends, Bellow recounts, “I had to be shrewd and a good manager and a wiseacre and a smartass and all the rest of it. In my family, of course, my mother wasn’t at all like that, but the rest of the family made haste to acquire the necessary smarts.” Bellow’s father and brothers deplored Bellow’s “dreamy side,” an inheritance from Liza, and mocked it. But this side, he came increasingly to feel, was crucial to his achievement as a writer. Like memories of his childhood in Canada and of his mother, it was something “I’ve always
tried to protect.”87

  Liza and the children, Lachine, 1918 (ill. 2.1)

  3

  Chicago/Maury

  LATE IN 1923, Abraham Bellow wired his cousin Louis Dworkin to say he was on his way to Chicago. Cousin Louis, a tall, energetic man, fifteen years younger than Abraham, met him at the station and brought him to the home of his sister, Flora Baron. Flora and her husband, Isidor, a newspaper distributor, lived in a small brick bungalow on Hamlin Avenue in the Humboldt Park area of northwest Chicago, a neighborhood of Poles, Swedes, and Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. Louis and Flora both came from Druya. They were related to Abraham on his mother’s side (Bellow’s paternal grandmother was their aunt). Flora, a member of the Bund, came first, fleeing political persecution, or the fear of persecution; Cousin Louis followed in 1912, to avoid the draft. The first leg of Louis’s lone journey, at sixteen, was to Dvinsk, by horse and buggy; there he spent a night with Bellow’s grandparents, Berel and Shulamith. The next morning he set off for St. Petersburg to board a ship bound for England; from Goole, in East Yorkshire, where the ship disembarked, he traveled to Liverpool, boarded a ship for New York, from where he traveled by train to Chicago, arriving with a piece of paper on which was written Flora and Isidor’s address.1

  Cousin Louis and the Barons were generous to the Bellows, helping family as they’d been helped in turn. When Louis arrived in Chicago in 1912, he had been offered a job by one of Isidor’s cousins, Meyer Teitelbaum, owner of the Imperial Baking Company, located at 1012 North Marshfield Avenue near Augusta Boulevard. Louis’s first job at the bakery was cleaning pans, at $6 a week. Then he drove a horse and buggy, delivering orders. The bakery was small, little more than an oven and a garage for the buggy. Louis worked hard, saved his money, and soon learned all aspects of the business (in Druya, his father, Abraham Dworkin, had been a miller). Within three years of his arrival he married Rose Fasman, “a warm, dark, blue-eyed woman,”2 in Bellow’s words, to whom he had been introduced by Flora. Rose was a shrewd businesswoman. In 1919, partly at her urging, Louis purchased the bakery from Teitelbaum. He and Rose, who did the books, were joined in 1922 by Jack Dworkin, Louis’s younger brother, newly arrived from Druya. Louis, Rose, and Jack formed a corporation, expanded the bakery’s production and product line, and moved farther west to larger premises, at 1011 North Damen Avenue (previously Robey Street, in the neighborhood now known as Wicker Park). That the expansion and the move were partly financed by a relative of Rose’s helps to explain her equal partnership in the corporation: each of the partners, Louis, Jack, and Rose, owned a third. “She was not one of your grannies,” Bellow writes of Riva, a Rose-like character in “Cousins” (1974), “she had been a businesswoman.” Riva, in her eighties in “Cousins,” is too old to drive, but she “overruled everybody and would not give up her Chrysler.”3 Rose Dworkin, in her twenties, was the first woman Bellow ever saw behind the wheel of a car, which she drove “more effectively and certainly more safely than Cousin Louie himself.”4

  Abraham, at forty-three, was put to work in the bakery by Cousin Louis, on the night shift. From twilight to dawn he worked, stacking “boxes”—large, awkward wooden trays—onto wagons, harnessing horses, lugging sacks of flour and sugar, barrels of jelly, tubs of shortening, learning to ferment rye bread dough in long troughs (the bakery’s “Imperial Famous Rye Bread”), stoking the ovens with scrap lumber and mill edgings, the bark still visible, easing loaves in and out of the ovens with fourteen-foot wooden spatulas or peels. At the end of the night shift, Abraham returned to sleep on a folding cot in the Barons’ kitchen. (Cousin Jack, who also lodged with the Barons, had the second of the bungalow’s two bedrooms; there were four rooms in total in the house.) The bakers Abraham worked alongside during the day were Poles. The delivery wagons were driven by Jews. In the second of his Jefferson Lectures in the Humanities, an honorary lecture series established in 1972 by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bellow recalls hearing how Petrush, the watchman, who had lost a finger in one of the machines, “slept drunk on the flour sacks, and the rats hopped over his feet.”5 “Everyone was dusted with flour,” Bellow writes in the “Chicago Book.” “Boots and overalls were clotted with dough. The bakers worked in undershirts, big-muscled men and very white-skinned, scooping the loaves up with quivering long-handled peels and pummelling at the kneading-vats, slapping down the unbaked loaves loudly.”6 Bellow was fascinated by the bakery and its workings, memories of which find their way into unexpected passages of the fiction. Well-born Eugene Henderson, for example, from Henderson the Rain King, remembers tormenting the local miller during boyhood summers in the Adirondacks. He would run into the mill with a stick, club the flour sacks until he was “almost choking with the white powder,” then rush out through the dust as the miller yelled and cursed. This memory returns to Henderson in Africa, sparked by a magical pink light that appears on the side of his white hut, its color identical to that “on the floury side of the mill as the water dropped in the wheel.”7

  At the Imperial Bakery, Abraham worked, in Bellow’s words, “with angry efficiency.” From the start, as in the past, he had trouble accepting the role of employee: “He did not consider himself a worker, but he was not an owner either. He was somehow between management and labor. It would have been temperamentally impossible for him to refrain from sharing the managerial overview. He thought of inventories, bills, orders.”8 It is a tribute to the good nature of the Dworkins, and to their sense of family, that they never quarreled seriously with Abraham, and that when he left the bakery to start up a business of his own, one that drew on contacts made through it, there were no hard feelings. Louis’s daughter, Vivien Missner, remembers her father and Abraham as “very close cousins,” constantly consulting in Yiddish, joking and laughing. Vivien’s description of her father as “very warm and gregarious … charitable, caring” was seconded by Bellow and other members of the family. As befitted a younger cousin, Louis deferred to Abraham and his reputed business success in St. Petersburg, and cousin Jack was also respectful. Bellow remembers Jack as “obstreperous, a big, shrewd, good-natured, rowdy man who handled the wooden boxes as if they were tin cafeteria trays.”9 In The Adventures of Augie March, Jack can be seen in the character “Five Properties,” Anna Coblin’s “immense” brother, while Anna and her husband, Hyman, are modeled on the Barons. Five Properties is a fabulous grotesque, “long armed and humped,” with a head growing directly off a “thick band of muscle as original as a bole on his back,” hair “tender and greenish brown” (picking up the tree imagery of “bole”), eyes “completely green, clear, estimating, primitive, and sardonic,” and “an Eskimo smile of primitive simplicity … kidding, gleeful, and unfrank.” Here is Five Properties at work:

  He was the life of the quiet little lard-smelly Polish groceries that were his stops, punching it out or grappling in fun with the owners, head to head, or swearing in Italian at the Italians, “Fungoo!” and measuring off a chunk of stiff arm at them. He gave himself an awful lot of delight. And he was very shrewd, his sister said. It wasn’t so long ago he had done a small part in the ruin of empires, driving wagons of Russian and German corpses to burial on Polish farms; and now he had money in the bank, he had stock in the dairy, and he had picked up in the Yiddish theater the fat swagger of the suitor everybody hated: “Five prope’ties. Plente money.”10

  Jack Dworkin took no offense at the Five Properties character, unlike another purported real-life model, an uncle of Bellow’s boyhood friend Sam Freifeld. This uncle thought the character defamatory, threatened to sue Bellow, and Freifeld, an attorney, had to dissuade him. Though only a few of the outraged uncle’s qualities were those of Five Properties, and his family was quite unlike the Coblins, the two had enough in common, as Freifeld’s daughter, Judith, puts it, “that that was the story.” The “plente money” part certainly fit, as did the Coblins’ generosity. Freifeld’s uncle made a fortune in the hotel business, his son made even more money, and in 2007 the fami
ly donated $35 million to the University of Chicago.

  It took Abraham six months to earn enough money to bring Liza and the children to Chicago. The family was smuggled across the border by bootlegging associates. When their train arrived at the Harrison Street station (in some accounts the Dearborn Street station) on the Fourth of July 1924, Abraham and Cousin Louis were there to meet it.11 The journey had been hot and uncomfortable. The family came by coach, sitting up the whole night. Because of the heat, the windows were open and cinders and soot from the locomotive blew into the carriage and over the passengers; the dark green mohair of the seats bristled the children’s legs.12 Most memorable of Bellow’s impressions upon arrival was the appearance of his father, whom he had longed to see: Abraham had shaved off his mustache and the bareness of his upper lip “was a shock to me.”13 After greetings and embraces, the St. Petersburg trunk was retrieved from the baggage car—with its samovar, thick-handled silver, taffeta petticoats, old family photographs and locks of hair, the treasures Liza refused to part with—and the family climbed into Louis’s Dodge touring car. Bellow was now, he thought, having recently turned nine, too old to be dandled on his father’s knee, a matter only of partial regret, since the disappearance of Abraham’s “cigarette-saturated” mustache “made another man of him, temporarily.”14 The route to the Barons, where the family was to stay, followed the trolley lines up Milwaukee Avenue to the city’s northwest side. As it was the Fourth of July, the air was full of the smell of gunpowder from World War I veterans shooting off rifles brought home from France, and from powder caps (“sonofaguns”) taped to the trolley tracks by children and set off by passing streetcars.