The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  Maury began drawing away from the family almost as soon as they arrived in Chicago. As Bellow remembers it, “being older, he had a more urgent sense of the need to Americanize himself, to repudiate the family.… He was old enough to go his own way.”124 Vivien Missner, Louis Dworkin’s daughter, recalls very little of him, except that he was distant, standoffish, “not particularly impressed by my father, one way or another,” and often absent from family gatherings.125 With his own family he was ruthless. After a business dispute with Lynn and her husband, Leonard Rotblatt, Maury cut the family off completely. Mark, their son, first met his grandfather when he was fourteen, at his father’s funeral. “He walked in, he was very much the distinguished elder gentleman. He had on this camel hair jacket, very dapper, with the silk scarf, very elegant.” After the breakup of his first marriage, Maury moved to Florida, visiting Chicago mostly for business reasons. “Maury would blow into town,” Greg Bellow remembers, “he’d be like a house on fire, he was just on the go all the time, constantly wheeling and dealing, constantly putting deals and people together.… He loved to abuse waiters, I saw him do it. He loved to lord it over people.” Greg moved to California after college and remembers Maury showing up for a Super Bowl (Miami was playing) “with a claque of friends. He must have brought twenty people with him, and they were all, fundamentally, deferring to him and he was the star of the show. He loved it.” Maury had a son out of wedlock, but never saw him. On June 17, 1980, in a letter to the son, Dean Borok, Bellow tried to warn him not to expect much from his father. Borok had written to Bellow after reading The Adventures of Augie March, which he thought contained a thinly fictionalized account of his birth: “He sees none of us—brothers, sister, or his two children by his first marriage, nor their children—neither does he telephone or write. He had no need of us. He has no past, no history.… He probably has some money—he thought of little else all his life.”

  Bellow’s fascination with Maury can be gauged by the number of Maury figures in his fiction. In addition to Shura in Herzog and Albert in “Something to Remember Me By,” there’s Simon in The Adventures of Augie March, Philip in “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” and Julius (Ulick) in Humboldt’s Gift.126 Each of these characters is the narrator’s older brother. Each is stout, rich, flashily dressed, self-assured, and boastful. In Humboldt’s Gift, Julius is a real estate operator in Corpus Christi, Texas (after leaving Chicago, Maury was a real estate operator in Florida, then bought an estate in Thomasville, Georgia, for his second wife, where she raised horses). “I loved my stout and now elderly brother,” declares Charlie Citrine. “Perhaps he loved me too. In principle he was not in favor of strong family bonds. Possibly he saw brotherly love as an opening for exploitation” (a possibility in real life that was to lead to problems between Maury and Bellow). Charlie is prepared to take some blame for Julius’s distance. “My feelings for him,” he admits, “were vivid, almost hysterically intense, and I could not blame him for trying to resist them. He wished to be a man entirely of today, and he had forgotten or tried to forget the past” (p. 239). Charlie’s girlfriend, Renata, can’t understand why he’s so crazy about Julius: “Let me recall a few of the things you told me about him. When you were a kid playing with toys on the floor he would step on your fingers. He rubbed your eyes with pepper. He hit you on the head with a bat. When you were an adolescent he burned your collection of Marx and Lenin pamphlets. He had fist fights with everyone, even a colored maid” (p. 346).

  Julius makes his first fortune, his Chicago fortune, as did Maury, “somewhere between business and politics … connected with the underworld although without being a part of it” (Jimmy Hoffa was a guest at the wedding of Maury’s daughter, Lynn, in 1956). When divorce wipes Julius’s fortune out, as it did Maury’s, he moves to Texas, starts a second family, and makes a second fortune in property. “It was impossible to think of him without his wealth. It was necessary for him to be in the money, to have dozens of suits and hundreds of pairs of shoes, shirts beyond inventory” (p. 346). According to his son, Joel, Maury owned 300 suits and 100 pairs of shoes, would return from trips to Europe with great laundry baskets full of “perfumes and watches and clocks and shoes and dishes and glassware.… And people would come over—Saul and Sam and Nina [Sam’s wife] and their kids—and my father would hand these things out; it was like the King of France.” One summer in the 1940s, when Sam and his family and Abraham and his second wife were on holiday in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, Maury hired a small plane to come visit for the day. When he left, he had the pilot buzz the resort, which thrilled Abraham.127 In Humboldt’s Gift, Julius, like Maury, plays the anti-intellectual, but Charlie knows that he often “shut himself up in his office with a box of white raisins and read Arnold Toynbee and R. H. Tawney, or Cecil Roth and Salo Baron on Jewish history. When any of this reading cropped up in conversation he made sure to mispronounce the key words” (p. 379). Why Charlie wanted to be an intellectual was beyond Julius, but if he had to be one, “why couldn’t you be the tough type, a Herman Kahn or a Milton Friedman, one of those aggressive guys you read in The Wall Street Journal?” In disgust, Julius adds: “Pa should have slapped you around the way he did me” (p. 374).

  All his life, Maury was “a fattie” (son Joel’s phrase). In Humboldt’s Gift, Julius’s appetite is compulsive. On the day before open heart surgery (Maury’s surgery was a quadruple bypass), while entertaining potential backers for a large real estate deal, Julius begins eating. At a fish place he buys smoked shrimp and smoked marlin for his wife, pulling off pieces of the marlin “before the fish was removed from the scale.” By the time he returns home, he’s eaten it all. He then stops at the fruit stall to buy persimmons: “The fish had been eaten. We sat with him under a tree sucking at the breast-sized, flame-colored fruit. The juice spurted over his sport shirt, and seeing that it now had to go to the cleaner anyway he wiped his fingers on it as well.” After viewing the property, Julius suggests that the party get a drink “and something to eat.” At a Mexican restaurant, he devours a plate of chicken breasts with bitter chocolate mole sauce. When Charlie can’t finish his, Julius does: “He took my plate. He ordered pecan pie à la mode, and then a cup of Mexican chocolate” (p. 387). Back home Julius and Charlie sit in the garden. Charlie is exhausted, but “arrogant, haggard” Julius is full of financing schemes and architect’s plans. While talking, he “reached gloomily into one of his trees and picked handfuls of fruit.… He stood plucking and eating, spitting out stones and skins, his gaze fixed beyond me” (p. 388). John Updike wrote a largely unfavorable review of Humboldt’s Gift when it appeared in 1975, which upset Bellow. Fifteen years later, in the fourth of his Rabbit books, Rabbit at Rest (1990), he gives Nitrostat-popping Rabbit Angstrom a comparably junky and compulsive appetite, for similarly, if more explicitly, representative reasons. “It’s a typically American heart,” Rabbit’s doctor tells him, “full of crud.” Heartless, too, servicing a paunch “that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child.” Julius, like Maury, like Updike’s Rabbit, identifies wholly with American materialism.128 He’s more heartless than Rabbit, but less heartless than Maury, judging at least from the testimony of Maury’s children and grandchildren, who are not as forgiving as Bellow.

  In Bellow’s fiction, this sort of greed and aggression often go with something poignant. In The Adventures of Augie March, Simon is as monstrous as Julius. Like Maury, he marries a woman with money and political clout. This woman, Charlotte Magnus, proves an excellent businesswoman, as did Maury’s first wife, Marge Yudkoff (Maury would cut the deals, according to Greg Bellow, and Marge would see that they worked: “they made a very good team”). When the family got together on Sundays and discussion turned to business, Marge was the only woman to take part. But the business powerhouse from Marge’s side of the family was her mother, Fanny Yudkoff, who founded a string of shoe shops, then small department stores. Grandma Yudkoff’s affection for Maury meant that he was never at a loss for risk capital. It
was her money that helped the Bellowses buy the first of their hotels, the Sherry, on the corner of South Shore Drive and 53rd Street.129 Simon’s Charlotte, like Maury’s Marge, is heavy and plain, though she’s shrewd, tough, and clearly mad for Simon, as Marge was for Maury. Simon argues with her a lot, but also likes her.130

  How Simon treats women we learn first in a scene at the North Avenue beach, where he makes “bullish approaches” to ones he finds attractive, “his eyes big and red.” When a girl bends over “to choose a plum from her lunch bag … he’d start to blare like brass and he’d hit me on the arm and say to me, ‘Look at the spread on that broad.’ ” Then he’d get “violent and lustful” and make a brute charge. Yet “the girls were not always frightened of him; he had a smell of power, he was handsome” (p. 648). Simon’s brute appeal, and the manners or tone of the world he moves in, are memorably evoked in the scene in which he brings Augie home for dinner. Though Charlotte joins them, her mother, Mrs. Magnus, has been temporarily banned from Simon’s sight for wearing cheap dresses. At the end of the meal, Augie makes Charlotte bring Mrs. Magnus in for cherries and coffee:

  Simon worked himself into a rage at Mrs. Magnus in her brown dress. He tried to read the paper and cut her—he hadn’t said a word when she came in—but finally he said, and I could see the devil in him now. “Well, you lousy old miser, I see you still buy your clothes off the janitor’s wife.”

  “Let her alone,” said Charlotte sharply.

  But suddenly Simon threw himself across the table, spilling the cherries and overturning coffee cups. He grabbed his mother-in-law’s dress at the collar, thrust in his hand, and tore the cloth down to the waist. She screamed. There were her giant soft breasts wrapped in the pink band. What a great astonishment it was, all of a sudden to see them! She panted and covered the top nudity with her hands and turned away. However, her cries were also cries of laughter. How she loved Simon! He knew it too.

  “Hide, hide!” he said, laughing.

  “You crazy fool,” cried Charlotte. She ran away on her high heels to bring her mother a coat and came back laughing also. They were downright proud, I guess.

  Simon wrote out a check and gave it to Mrs. Magnus. “Here,” he said, “buy yourself something and don’t come here looking like the scrubwoman.” He went and kissed her on the braids, and she took his head and gave his kisses back two for one and with tremendous humor (pp. 872–73).

  Maury was like this. “He took up with a succession of shiksas,” Bellow recalls, “but he didn’t drop the Jewish women altogether. He was quite a collector of ladies.”131 Looking out the window of his Gold Coast apartment, Maury’s grandson, Mark Rotblatt, points to a building where “all my grandfather’s contemporaries, all of them very wealthy older Jewish men, had their mistresses.” The building is ugly: “the one building on the Gold Coast that was cheap.” It was also convenient: “You could keep your mistress and you could go visit her when you tell your wife you’re going out for a paper or a cigar or something.” There Maury kept the woman who would become his second wife. He and his friends called it the nafke building, from the Yiddish word for “whore.” In this context, as Mark explains, it means “whore-pig” or “sex-pig.”

  Before Simon checks out the women at the North Avenue beach, he goes for a swim. It is here, very briefly but clearly, that Bellow registers the price Simon pays for the life he has chosen, for the person he has made himself. When Simon dives into the water off the point, Augie worries that he does so “with a thought of never coming back to the surface alive, as if he went to take a blind taste of the benefits of staying down. He came up haggard and with a slack gasp of his mouth and rough blood in his face. I knew it made a strong appeal to him to go down and not come up again” (p. 647). Earlier, Augie sees suicidal impulses in “the way [Simon] drove and the way he leaped forward in arguments, hit him who would; he kept a tire tool under the driver’s seat for his weapon in traffic arguments, and he cursed everybody in the street, running through lights and scattering pedestrians” (p. 640).132 Julius Citrine is subject to similar impulses. When Charlie goes to Europe, Julius asks him to purchase a marine painting for him. Charlie spends hours in antique shops and art galleries in Madrid in search of the sort of painting his brother wants: “But in all the blue and green, foam and sun, calm and storm, there was always a rock, a sail, a funnel and Julius wasn’t having any of that.” As Charlie puts it, “nobody cared to paint the pure element, the inhuman water, the middle of the ocean, the formless deep, the world-enfolding sea” (p. 410). Philip Roth remembers Maury searching for this painting in London, when he met him with Bellow. In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow has Charlie speculate on the attraction of such a painting, which he partly attributes to Julius’s recent heart operation: “Maybe he had had it with the ever-alert practical American soul. In six decades he had spotted all the rackets, smelled all the rats, and he was tired of being the absolute and sick master and boss of the inner self. What did a seascape devoid of landmarks signify? Didn’t it signify elemental liberty, release from the daily way and the horror of tension?” (pp. 410–11). Charlie briefly considers going to the Prado, finding a painter to paint an empty seascape, paying him $2,000, and then, as a sort of tribute to Julius, charging him $5,000.

  Such saving vulnerabilities evoke no real-life echoes in Maury’s children and grandchildren. They are as tough on Maury as he seems to have been on them. After he hit or was verbally abusive to his children, Joel remembers, Maury “would, indeed, feel badly about it, but there was nothing compensatory, there was no offset.” His attitude was: “ ‘You had it coming.’ … And when it was over, it was over. ‘What was it we were talking about before I hit you?’ ” This quickness both to anger and to release from anger, Joel also ascribed to Bellow, as did Bellow himself. The crucial difference was one of degree, between nasty or angry remarks, on the one hand, and physical abuse and rage, on the other. For Joel, Maury was like Abraham, when Abraham beat Maury after the hijacking. Bellow never suffered Maury’s level of abuse. “This is so repetitious,” Joel says of Maury’s beating after the hijacking. “When my father would come home and I’d run to meet him, I never knew whether he was going to hug or kiss me or whether he was just going to start slapping me.” Joel’s sister, Lynn, he claims, had it worse: “he’d kick her, slap her, push her, verbally abuse her.… My sister, she was just a stationary target, I mean she didn’t have a chance.” Bellow knew of Maury’s behavior, had himself, to a much lesser degree, been subject to it in childhood, and wrote about it, but he never lost the love and admiration he felt for his older brother, the brother who lifted him onto his shoulders to see the Prince of Wales pass by. “No matter what Maury did,” Bellow’s oldest son, Greg, recalls, “Saul would always forgive him.” “The instant I saw him I loved him again,” declares Augie of Simon, after Simon had, in effect, abandoned him. “I couldn’t help it. It came over me. I wanted to be brothers again” (p. 865).

  Bellow’s attitude to Maury, who was to die in 1985, was like his attitude to American materialism, against which he set his face, but to which he was powerfully drawn.133 It also relates to his attitude to money. As we will see later, Bellow valued money, valued having it more than spending it, though he never valued it enough to know much about it or to put himself out to make any. Something of his attitude is revealed in the story “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” in which the narrator, Herschel Shawmut, gets involved in a deal with his older brother, Philip, a businessman. Philip is rich, fat, aggressive, and located now in Texas. When he learns that Shawmut, a musicologist, has earned serious money by writing a college textbook for introductory classes in music appreciation, he’s both impressed and affronted (according to Mark Rotblatt, when Maury learned that Bellow had won the Nobel Prize, he was affronted, which is why he never considered accepting Bellow’s invitation to attend the ceremony, as did Bellow’s sister, Jane, and brother Sam: “How dare Saul win the Nobel Prize” was how Mark reconstructs Maury’s thinking, “when I
’m really the smart one, I’m the one”).134 In Bellow’s story, older brother Philip asks Shawmut what he’s going to do with his money, whether he’s going to invest it, how he’s going to protect himself against taxes and inflation. “His interest in my finances excited me,” confesses Shawmut. “For once he spoke seriously to me, and this turned my head.” Similar feelings seem to have played a part in Bellow’s several business ventures with Maury, also with other relatives, as speculator, investor, developer. “Vu bin ikh?” (“Where am I in this?”) Bellow would ask when the brothers talked of possible deals. His eagerness expressed a wish to count in his siblings’ eyes, or to be counted among them, as well as to make money. For Lesha Greengus, “Where am I in this?” became a Bellow catchphrase, like “What’s a man to do?” and the gesture that went with it. In “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” Shawmut admires his brother for reasons he can explain only as “a given, a lifelong feeling, a mystery” (p. 395). To Philip, Shawmut’s fondness for him is “contemptible in an adult male,” a reaction Shawmut sees as “American.” “He abominated these reminiscences of mine,” Shawmut reports, “for he was thoroughly Americanized” (p. 395).

  In the unedited transcript of one of Bellow’s interviews with Philip Roth, dated December 2, 1999, Maury enters the conversation in connection with The Adventures of Augie March. For Roth, as for others, Augie is the first of Bellow’s novels to give voice to “the language you spoke and the stuff you heard, the American argot that you heard on the street.” In a discussion of the novel’s reception, Bellow mentions Lionel Trilling, a crucial early supporter of his writing, remembered here as “dead against” Augie. After Bellow showed him the novel’s first hundred or so pages, Trilling’s reaction was: “It’s very curious, it’s very interesting but somehow it’s wrong.” This reaction Bellow calls “the academic view.” Roth then asks Bellow if he thinks Trilling was “blind to the American?” by which he means the American language, the language of the American street. Bellow answers that Trilling “didn’t have much feeling for it.” As the interview progresses, “Trilling” becomes shorthand not so much for “the academic view” as for the New York view, in particular that of the Partisan Review crowd. For Roth, this crowd “didn’t have much feeling for America as a subject … for the lives of the people in the city houses as a subject” (a judgment that will be considered more closely in later chapters). Nor, Roth adds, did Trilling have much understanding of Bellow’s sense of himself as a Jew. According to Roth, “there was a way of being a Jew and that was Trilling’s way, but this [Bellow’s way] was a strange way because it was both a way out and a way in. Because it wasn’t just that you were finding a way out of being a Jew; you were finding a way as a writer into being a Jew without doing what Malamud did.” Bellow admired Malamud, who was a friend, but in the exchange with Roth he characterizes Malamud’s “way” as “shtetl stick adapted to the U.S.A.” “That’s right,” Roth pitches in, “with all the sentimental baggage that comes with it.” In Augie March, Roth continues,