The Life of Saul Bellow

by Zachary Leader

  you plugged into Jewish aggression and Jews as businessmen and the Howes of the world [he means Irving Howe] always identified the Jewish success in America with what was in fact the Jewish failure: socialism. The Jewish success in America is obvious, it’s business. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that out but when he writes his big book on Jews in America [World of Our Fathers] he doesn’t mention business. It’s all about the unions, it’s all about socialism, and it’s all about the whole Europeanized side of Jewishness, the pushcarts, and so on. But the real thing the Jews did in America, their great, their real genius and success, was in business, and that drives him crazy, he doesn’t want to hear about it. But that’s what’s at the heart of your book, which is the small-time lawyers, the owners of the middle-sized businesses, the conniving and cheating. You were not ashamed of Jewish aggression because you saw it as American aggression.… It was Chicago aggression.

  “My eldest brother was a lesson to me in this respect,” Bellow answers. When Roth asks: “Was he an American lesson for you?” Bellow answers: “Yes.” Roth’s conclusion is: “So you were lucky the overpowering brother was the totally American brother.… So he overpowered you and made you write Augie March. You were your brother’s creature.” Roth is speaking very freely here, the transcript is unrevised, and Bellow withdraws slightly, pointing out that Maury “didn’t like [Augie] when I wrote it.” Roth then interrupts Bellow, partly, it seems, to correct any impression he may have given that Bellow was passive in the making of the novel: “You spin out of his American—this is an oversimplification—But if you think of your father’s Roger Williams [that is, Abraham’s interest in American history] and your brother’s exploitative nature and big aggressive being, you’re the next.… You spin off of that into that America.” “That’s right,” Bellow answers: “I just spin off both of them.” “And the spin they gave you,” Roth concludes, “is much greater than the impact of these guys in New York talking their European talk.… The father and the brother were in you.” Later in the interview, Roth corrects or refines his sense of Bellow’s America, “because really the passion in the book is for Chicago.… Really Chicago is your America.” To which Bellow replies, “That’s true.” The discussion of Maury’s role in the making of Augie, of Maury as Chicagoan, and of Chicago as America, ends with the following exchange:

  ROTH: So your brother’s spirit—your brother is the household deity of Augie March.

  BELLOW: In a way.

  ROTH: You can give him credit now, Saul.

  Lynn, Marge, Maury, and Joel (ill. 3.1)

  BELLOW: Yeah. Poor Maurice, he’s gone.…

  ROTH: What did he make of—You told me he didn’t like Augie March. What did he say to you?

  BELLOW: Well, he was just concerned with the image of himself as it came through. He didn’t give a damn about anything else. Of course, he pretended to be far more vulgar than he was.135

  In the edited version of this exchange, the version printed in The New Yorker, only Bellow speaks, incorporating Roth’s words and attributing to Maury a wider and more generous sense of the book’s achievement—out of brotherly love, or family feeling, or need:

  For me, the overpowering brother was the totally American brother. He overpowered me and in a sense he led me to write The Adventures of Augie March. He didn’t like the book when he read it, but he granted that I had in my cockeyed way done something significant and it was necessary that he should figure in the book. He was aggressive and I recognized in him the day-to-day genius of the U.S.A.136

  4

  Tuley

  IT WAS LIZA who in 1928 prodded Abraham to leave the Imperial Bakery and start his own business. If he stayed, she argued, he would always be an employee. She also provided crucial capital, from what in Yiddish is called a knippl, the money a wife saves out of household funds (in “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” Pa Lurie accuses Ma Lurie of saving in this way for her brothers in Russia). The business Abraham started supplied bakeries like Imperial with wood chips to fuel their ovens. He found premises in the railroad district of the city. A cousin of Liza’s, Lazer Bailen, originally from Dagda, was briefly enlisted as partner.1 Abraham traveled to lumberyards in Michigan and Wisconsin, arranged deals to buy wood scraps and rejected pieces of wood, then had them shipped in freight cars to Chicago. Once in Chicago, the wood was trucked all over the city. For a man with only rudimentary English, who was used to conducting business in Yiddish, making such arrangements cannot have been easy, even with contacts gained through cousin Louis (according to Sam’s children, Lesha Greengus and Shael Bellows, while still at Imperial, Abraham began gathering the names and addresses of wood salesmen who dealt with Chicago bakeries).2 For the adolescent Bellow, the new business was an eye-opener: “Before I knew it I was in the railroad district … which very few kids of my background ever got close to. And we knew all the Jewish bakeries in Chicago. That was a great privilege for me.”3

  The business was a modest success, a first for Abraham in the New World, and the Bellows began to enjoy a degree of prosperity. In 1931 they moved to an apartment on the west side of Humboldt Park, at 3340 Le Moyne Street, just below North Avenue,4 where rents were higher, and people ran their own businesses. To escape the boiling summers, Liza and the children stayed on a farm in Benton Harbor, Michigan, with Abraham joining them at weekends (Benton Harbor is where Augie meets the Fenchal sisters, Esther and Thea, in Chapter 8 of The Adventures of Augie March). Then the nature of the business changed. Gas ovens were brought in by the bakeries, for which coal was needed, not wood. Abraham found himself, as Bellow puts it, in “another non-Jewish business,” one he “never in his wildest imagination dreamed about.” In 1931 new premises were found for what became the Carroll Coal Company, on West Carroll Street, southeast of Humboldt Park. These premises—a coal yard and rudimentary office—were surrounded by what Bellow describes as “a sort of slum, semi-industrial neighborhood where there was light industry and there were poultry markets, wholesale markets all around, along with railroad people coming in.” The coal yard Simon leases in Augie is similarly located: “the first rains made a marsh of the whole place. It had to be drained. The first coal was unloaded in the wet. The office itself was a shack; the scale needed expensive repairs” (p. 640). Across the way “was a stockyards siding, dusty animals bawling in the waiting cars, putting red muzzles to the slats; truck wheels sucked through the melting tar [it is high summer], the coal split and tarnished on the piles” (p. 642). Two years later, in 1933, property was rented from the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad at 1800 West Carroll Avenue near Wood Street, a block west of the company’s original premises. The advantage of the new site was that it added a spur track and overhead facility for unloading the coal directly.

  The neighborhood around Carroll Coal was tough: “fighting and guns were common; the unions were present, and there was a lot of strife.”5 While in high school, Bellow worked some weekends at Carroll Coal, mostly on the scales (in Augie, “that long, brass, black-graduated beam where I weighed” [p. 699]). When there was nothing to weigh, he’d sit in his father’s office and read. He recalls one occasion when he was interrupted by a raid on the brothel (a “Negro whorehouse” in Herzog [p. 652]) across the street, probably for nonpayment of protection money. From the window of the office, he could see the police tossing beds, bedding, and furniture onto the sidewalk. When he had work, it was routine: first he’d weigh trucks when they were empty, then he’d weigh them when they were loaded, billing their owners for the coal bought. The business started out with three used trucks, eventually acquiring as many as fifteen. Outside contractors also brought in trucks, between ten and thirty, depending on the weather.6 During the Depression, some of these trucks, including those owned by the company, would drive up and down the street selling coal by the bag (rather than by the ton) for domestic heating and cooking. Bellow’s friend David Peltz remembers carrying the company’s white canvas bags (presumably stronger than those Abrah
am manufactured in Montreal) up icy back staircases in winter. On one occasion in Augie, Simon sends Augie out with his yard manager, Happy Kellerman, to drum up business. They find coal-and-ice dealers in local taverns, or in their sheds, or “by the church, by the funeral home, or on a moving job” (p. 644). As Augie watches, Happy cons the dealers “with specious technical information about BTU’s [a standard measurement of heat] and ash percentages,” enticing them “by undercut prices and the pick of the coal” (p. 645). Happy is terrified when driving in the neighborhood: “His fear in the Bohunk streets was that he would run over a kid and a crowd would tear him to pieces in its rage” (p. 644). Simon also sends Augie into Chinatown to pass out handbills advertising coke, “which the laundry Chinese favored above other fuel” (p. 645). As Bellow recalled, Carroll Coal “brought me into the slums in a way I never had access to before.”7

  Both Maury and Sam were involved with the coal company from the start. It was they who ordered the glistening Pocahontas coal from West Virginia; it was they who paid the bills and organized sales; who arranged for the coal to be packed in bags and trucked; who found new customers. Because of Abraham’s immigrant English, and the fact that he couldn’t drive, he depended more and more on his sons. Sam’s daughter, Lesha, explains: “He couldn’t make calls on current customers. He couldn’t make cold calls on potential new customers. He couldn’t go to the bank for loans. He couldn’t negotiate the purchase and sale of real estate. He couldn’t deal with the lawyers, judges and politicians.” In Augie, Bellow makes much of Simon’s handling of these tasks: “Simon was wised up as to how to do things politically—to be in a position to bid on municipal business—and he saw wardheelers and was kissing-cousins with the police; he took up with lieutenants and captains, with lawyers, with real-estate men, with gamblers and bookies, the important ones who owned legitimate businesses on the side and had property. During the chauffeurs’ and hikers’ strike he had squad cars to protect his two trucks from strikers who were dumping coal in the streets” (p. 645). At one point during a strike, Augie is dispatched by Simon to the police to let them know when a load is setting out from the yard. At another, he is sent to the morgue to identify an employee, a coal shoveler, “shot with our pay envelope empty in his shirt pocket.” Augie recognizes the employee: “his black body rigid, as if he died in a fit of royal temper, making fists” (p. 669).

  Abraham remained the nominal head of Carroll Coal, but what he mostly did was keep the books and watch over the scales used to weigh the coal. Business decisions, particularly those involving investment and expansion, were made by Sam and Maury, often after having to meet or overcome Abraham’s objections. Some months before the move to 1800 West Carroll Street, and before marrying Marge, Maury left the business, tired of arguing with his father. In 1933, with money from Marge’s family, he started a coal company of his own, Capitol Coal, later Bellows Coal, a move Abraham and Sam seem to have accepted (there was no break in relations, at least none reported by Bellow, or recalled by his nephews and nieces). “Both businesses were so small,” Maury’s son, Joel, explains, “and the retail coal business was then so huge, that they could easily survive without knowingly competing.”8 With Maury gone, Sam alone guided Carroll’s growth (it was he who negotiated with the CE & I Railroad for new premises), patiently answering, quietly circumventing his father’s worries, principally about real estate deals and the investment of company profits. “Far mir iz genug. Di altitshke est,” Abraham would say: “For me it’s enough. The old lady is eating.” Sam had begun working for his father in the wood business (while Maury was in law school) and continued working with him at Carroll Coal for a further twenty years, until Abraham’s death in 1955. Sam married in 1935 and moved from the family home to an apartment near Lincoln Park, but two years later he and his wife returned to Humboldt Park to an apartment on Kedzie and Division, within walking distance of his father. Every workday morning at 5:30, Abraham would ring the doorbell of Sam’s apartment to go with him to the office. On Saturdays, they went to shul together. Sam was the brother who stayed at home and built the family business. According to Greg Bellow, speaking also of his maternal aunt, Catherine Goshkin, “the lore was, there was a designated child, designated by the family, to take care of the parent, and that was Sam’s role. My father always would say, you see the way Catherine takes care of Sonia [her mother, Greg’s maternal grandmother]? Well, it was implied that Sam was the one who stayed at home and his charge was to make sure Grandpa was okay.”

  It was a charge Sam complied with dutifully, just as he dutifully set out to make a fortune in business. But making a fortune in business was not his original ambition, as it had been for Maury. After graduating from Tuley High School in 1929, Sam attended Crane Junior College, as would Bellow. Crane, the first junior college in the United States, offered an abbreviated liberal arts program for $5 a semester. After a year, Sam applied to Northwestern University Medical School, to which he was accepted. However, the tuition fee at Northwestern was $250 a year, and when he asked his father for help, Abraham turned him down: the money was needed to buy a car for the business, and Sam was needed as a driver.9 Sam then went to Northwestern itself to inquire about financial aid. He was turned down. Some fifty years later, in 1983, after his granddaughter, Rachel Greengus (later Schultz), had been accepted into medical school at the University of Cincinnati, Sam set up an education trust to pay for her tuition. The granddaughter had for many years spoken of her wish to become a doctor, but only at this point did she learn of her grandfather’s thwarted ambitions. “Zayde [Grandpa] was a very modest and private man,” she explains. “The private side of him did not need to be reminded of his early life when a lack of money meant unfulfilled dreams.” That he set up the trust, amounting to some $100,000, suggested to the granddaughter how deeply he felt this early disappointment.10 According to Lesha Greengus, Rachel’s mother, Sam sometimes talked wistfully about the medical careers of friends but “never uttered a word of complaint.”

  Keeping quiet about one’s feelings, keeping one’s cards close to one’s chest, keeping in the background: these were characteristics of Sam. “Everybody in the family had a family title except Sam,” Bellow said of his brother at a speech celebrating Sam’s sixtieth birthday. “Sam had no handle … but he was dear to us just the same.”11 Elsewhere, Bellow described Sam as “a mild person, clever and thoughtful,” “a clean man; a real stand‑up man.”12 In a letter of July 16, 1985, Bellow’s friend Israeli novelist John Auerbach recalls first meeting Sam: “He came late because of a minor traffic accident, and I remember how cool and composed he was and how unconcerned about his damaged Cadillac—he was joking and in a good mood and [I] admired and envied the quietness and cool temper of this man.” In Herzog, Moses’s middle brother, Will, is similarly cool: “substantial, shrewd, quiet.… In a family of passionately expressive people like Father Herzog and Aunt Zipporah Will had developed a quieter, observant, reticent style” (p. 725). It was the style of an anti-Maury. According to Greg Bellow, Sam was “as smart and worldly as Saul or Maury, but didn’t flout conventionality” (to Bellow, although Maury was the “American” brother, Sam was “certainly American in hatching deals and multiplying bank accounts”).13 In addition, as Greg puts it, he was “very sweet and kind, a nice guy, he had social graces.”

  When most under Maury’s influence, but at other times as well, Bellow saw Sam’s “niceness” as weakness: “My two brothers were very different,” he said in an interview. “One of them was just contemptuous and the other was frightened to make a move on his own. The bold one married a non-Jew [Maury’s second wife, Joyce] and the timid one married a Rabbi’s daughter, so his house was super kosher. I became conscious that my oldest brother was doing me good. That is to say, he couldn’t Americanize himself fast enough; the middle brother just hung back.”14 Hanging back was not what the adolescent Bellow needed or could manage. Later in life, though, he presents Sam-like qualities as admirable. Toward the end of Herz
og, when Moses is most frantic, his middle brother, Will, comes to his aid. Moses has had a traffic accident and has been arrested. There’s a pistol in the car (to shoot his adulterous wife, Madeleine, and her lover, Gersbach), he hasn’t money to post bail, and he looks terrible, as if in the midst of a breakdown (in fact, he’s about to emerge from one). Moses advises his brother not to go by appearances: