18. Koch interview.
19. Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 298.
20. William Hazlitt, “My First Acquaintance with Poets” (1823), in “Sketches and Essays” and “Winterslow,” ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (London: George Bell, 1902), p. 271.
21. The quote beginning “When I was a very small child” is from the Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 298; subsequent quotes are from the Koch interview. SB’s faith in physical appearance as a key to character was shared by Sherwood Anderson, a key early influence. Winesburg, Ohio (1919), the book that made Anderson’s reputation, and a book SB frequently taught, begins with a story called “Hands,” about a character who had long been a mystery in Winesburg: “Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression.… Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it.… They became his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame. Also they made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality” (Winesburg, Ohio [1919; New York: Random House, 2002], pp. 9–10). Tolstoy, too, SB felt, saw character in facial features and gestures. In a letter of 26 January 1966 to Edward Shils, he writes: “I’m convinced that Leo was a somatological moralist. Eyes, lips and noses, the color of the skin, the knuckles and the feet do not lie. The tone of Speransky’s laughter [in War and Peace] tells you his social ideas are unreliable. It’s not a bad system. I seem to have used it myself, most of the time.”
22. These quotes come from Manea, “Conversation,” p. 42.
23. SB, The Dean’s December (1982; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 116 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).
24. See also SB to Eugene Goodheart, 21 April 1980. Goodheart wanted to stay at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the guesthouse for artists and scholars in Jerusalem, and SB agreed to write to Kollek on his behalf: “Teddy and I have a payola relationship and I am one-up on him. He won’t dream of refusing.”
25. “A Conversation with Saul Bellow,” by Chirantan Kulshrestha, Chicago Review 23.4–24.1 (1972), reprinted in Cronin and Siegel, eds., Conversations with SB, p. 92.
26. Atlas, Biography, p. 363.
27. Koch interview.
28. Ibid.
29. Max and Annie Cohen had three daughters, as do Uncle Asher and Aunt Taube in SB, “Memoirs,” and there are other similarities between real and fictional characters; but there are also differences (for Asher and Taube, see SB, “Memoirs,” p. 39).
30. In “Here and Gone,” an unfinished and undated autobiographical story, the SB-like central character tells a reporter: “My father devoted his life to business but he wasn’t really good at it. His talent was for failure. The big emotions were what he invested in” (p. 27). “Here and Gone” resembles “By the St. Lawrence” in that it recounts the return of an elderly writer, Mr. Immenitov (the birth name of SB’s maternal grandfather, Moses Gordin), to Lachine and Montreal. The manuscript can be found among SB’s papers in the Regenstein.
31. Koch interview.
32. The houses on St. Dominique Street were renumbered after the Bellows left Montreal in 1924. What was 1092 is now 3902. Today’s 1092 is a vacant lot just past Boulevard René-Lévesque, much closer to the harbor and the heart of Chinatown than the old 1092, which was between Roy and Napoleon Streets.
33. In SB, “Memoirs,” the Luries’ second-floor apartment, also in a row of unprepossessing two-flats, is said to contain a single painting: of Moses holding up the Tablets (p. 57).
34. The description of the back staircase is from the fictional apartment in “Here and Gone,” p. 4, rather than from an interview. Since in other respects the fictional apartment conforms to SB’s descriptions of the real-life apartment, I include the description of the back staircase here.
35. According to Willie Greenberg, a neighbor and playmate of SB’s on St. Dominique Street, interviewed in Alan Hustak, “St. Dominique St.’s Legacy Recalls ’20s Era,” Montreal Gazette, October 1990.
36. Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 45.
37. Hustak interview, “St. Dominique St.’s Legacy Recalls.” Esplanade is one block farther west than St. Urbain. It is the setting for “Mr. Katz, Mr. Cohen, and Cosmology,” one of the earliest of SB’s short stories, published in Retort: A Quarterly of Social Philosophy and the Arts 1, no. 2 (June 1942): 12–20, and never reprinted. The two title characters walk through the Esplanade to a little wood near Outremont, where they sit and reflect on the formation of mountains and the nature of time. See also note 37 in Chapter 2.
38. The Montreal General Hospital has now merged with the Royal Victoria Hospital, located on Mount Royal, at the corner of Cedar Avenue and Côte-des-Neiges Road.
39. See Pierre Anctil, Saint-Laurent: Montreal’s Main (Montreal: Septentrion, 2002), p. 40.
40. Aline Gubbay, A Street Called the Main: The Story of Montreal’s Boulevard Saint-Laurent (Montreal: Meridian, 1989), p. 107.
41. Interview with Keith Botsford, “A Half Life,” in SB, IAAU, p. 288.
42. Atlas, Biography, p. 15.
43. Herzog, p. 708. There was a shochet or ritual slaughterer who lived near the Bellows on St. Dominique Street, near Roy Street. His name was Mr. Aspler and he was a much honored figure in the neighborhood. See Dusty Vineberg, “Last Vestiges of the Ghetto: Memories of the Rich in Spirit,” Montreal Star, 24 January 1972.
44. These details about the St. Dominique Street neighborhood come from Willie Greenberg (in the Hustak interview, and the Vineberg article, above), also from “Here and Gone,” p. 3.
45. See “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 75.
46. Koch interview.
47. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 2.
48. Michael Greenstein, “Bellow’s Canadian Beginnings,” Saul Bellow Journal 7, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 33.
49. Santayana’s definition of piety is quoted by SB in a speech given to the Anti-Defamation League on 14 November 1976. A month later, on 14 December, the speech was printed in The New York Times under the title “I Said That I Was an American, a Jew, a Writer by Trade.” The extended passage from the Lachine library speech comes from pp. 4–5.
50. The quotation about not knowing what language he spoke comes from the Lachine speech, p. 2; the quote following is from Manea, “Conversation,” p. 2. That SB began studying Hebrew at three he tells Philip Roth in “I Got a Scheme!,” p. 75: “At the age of three, I was sent to Mr. Stein across the way to learn Hebrew.”
51. In the interview with Koch, SB speaks of having been enrolled in kindergarten at the Devonshire School at age five and refusing to go.
52. Interview with Eleanor Wachtel, on CBC Radio, broadcast 4 March 2001.
53. Koch interview.
54. The Forward was first imported from New York to Montreal in 1902 by Hirsch Hershman, a bookseller on the Main. For an account of Hershman, see Israel Mendes, “The Influence of the Jewish Press on Life in the U.S.A. and Canada,” Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 19 September, 1952.
55. See Pierre Anctil, ed., Through the Eyes of the Eagle: The Early Montreal Yiddish Press, 1907–1916 (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 2001), p. 141.
56. Among SB’s papers at the Regenstein is a nine-page handwritten document entitled “Memories,” written by Fannie Wiener and dated February 1985. In it she recounts how her family moved from Russia to Lachine, where her father went into the bakery business with two partners. He then bought “a very fine farm with a partner in Valleyfield. I remember that on a holiday weekend we had some cousins come in from Lachine, one day it was discovered that their little boy was missing, after looking around for a while the men got on the horses and rode out
looking for him—after riding around on the roads, they sighted a man on horseback with a little boy, and happily, it was the missing child, he was three years old then. I mention it now because that little boy grew up to become a famous writer by the name of Saul Bellow.” Elsewhere in “Memories” Fannie Wiener mentions that her mother had two brothers in Montreal, and that her father had a brother in New York. Annie Cohen had two brothers in the Montreal area (i.e., Lachine): Abraham and Willie. The Cohens emigrated from Lachine to Georgia, then moved back to Montreal.
57. Atlas, Biography, p. 300.
58. “He [SB] was a nice, quiet young boy, studious and polite,” recalled Meyer Gameroff, the middle of the three male Gameroff cousins (quoted in Charles Lazurus, “St. Dominique Neighbor Recalls Nobel Winner Bellow’s Boyhood,” Montreal Star, 22 October 1976). But see “Memoirs” (p. 51) and “The Old System” (p. 95), in which SB provides a counterinstance. The narrator, at seven, is staying in the country with relatives very like the Gameroffs. He irritates an older cousin and his girlfriend by refusing to leave them alone, is roughly dismissed, and in fury attacks the cousin with a piece of wood. As punishment the cousin slaps him hard, boots him in the rear, and the child is sent back to Montreal.
59. Rexler uses this phrase to describe his cousin Albert in “By the St. Lawrence,” p. 10.
60. Or so he told Janis Bellow.
61. This quotation comes from a tape recording of a speech given by Samuel Bellows at his sixtieth birthday party. The recording is in the possession of his daughter, Lesha Greengus.
62. SB’s reference to his draining wound comes in a letter to Stephen Mitchell, 22 June 1991. The detail of the syringe comes from “Here and Gone,” p. 17. The diaper pin detail comes from the unfinished novel “Charm and Death,” p. 43, a thinly fictionalized account of SB’s friend and rival Isaac Rosenfeld. The short story “Zetland: By a Character Witness” (1974), reprinted in SB, CS, pp. 240–54, began life as section 2 of “Charm and Death.”
63. Interview with Botsford, “A Half Life,” in SB, IAAU, p. 289.
64. For the absence of chairs, see “Here and Gone,” p. 17. It is in the Lachine speech that SB says he spent “four to five” months in the hospital; Atlas, Biography, p. 15, says six months. It is impossible to confirm the exact length of SB’s stay, or
details of his treatment and of hospital regulations, since all medical records from the Royal Victoria Hospital prior to 1940 were destroyed in a fire (according to the hospital’s Medical Record Archivist, Nathalie Andrignon, in a letter to the author, 10 August 2009).
65. Manea, “Conversation,” pp. 13, 41.
66. Ibid., pp. 6, 7.
67. SB spoke of his mother’s mocking Christmas in the radio interview with Eleanor Wachtel. The tree and stockings are mentioned in SB to Werner Dannhauser, 13 December 1995.
68. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 15. Manea asks SB if he felt guilty about eating the pork: “Sure, but I knew enough about Jewish tradition to know that this was permitted—anything was permitted that keeps you alive, right?” (p. 16).
69. Wachtel interview.
70. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 40.
71. SB’s remarks about his reading come from Manea, “Conversation,” p. 16, and the Botsford interview, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 289; see also Herzog, where Moses imagines having an embarrassing conversation with “the Christian lady”: “ ‘Where do you live, little boy?’ ‘On Napoleon Street.’ Where the Jews live. ‘What does your father do?’ My father is a bootlegger. He has a still in Point-St. Charles. The spotters are after him. He has no money” (p. 439).
72. Koch interview.
73. This friend was Walter Pozen.
74. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 16.
75. Ibid., p. 8.
76. The anecdote about the movie theater comes from Bette Howland, recounted in an interview.
77. For references to Henderson’s mother, see pp. 113, 123, 127, 132, in SB, Henderson the Rain King (1959).
78. Nothing at all is said of Benn Crader’s mother in More Die of Heartbreak, though Kenneth Trachtenberg’s mother, Benn’s sister, is alive and unimpressed by her son: “She was disappointed in me, even angry. She had wanted me to be a big shot. I should have been the Times’s number one man in Paris, or chef de bureau for Le Monde in Washington, or NBC’s head for Western Europe with thirty people under me, or Porte-parole at the Moscow Embassy” (p. 89). In The Actual, all we learn of Harry Trellman’s mother is that she was impatient, “had a disease of the joints that sent her from sanitarium to sanitarium” (p. 2) and used to call him “You little gonif,” signifying “that I had a masked character” (p. 71).
79. Chick in Ravelstein could perhaps be added to this list. He calls himself “a child of the Depression,” as SB often did, and many of the events in his fictional life are undisguisedly taken from SB’s life. But when Chick tells Rosamond he is convinced “that half a century later I feel I haven’t seen the last of my mother” (p. 163), he and Rosamond have already moved to Boston. SB and Janis Freedman Bellow moved to Boston in 1993, when he was seventy-eight. For Chick’s mother to have died in his adolescence he would have to be younger than SB when he moved to Boston, which he might or might not be. As for Charlie Citrine in Humboldt, he, too, might have been added to this list, though there are only hints of his age at the time his mother died. We know she is long dead. Charlie’s older brother Julius can barely remember what she looked like. Menasha Klinger, who boarded with the Citrines during Charlie’s adolescence, refers to her as “your kind poor mother” (p. 323), which he would not have done were she still alive when Charlie, early on in his life, became rich and famous. In Dangling Man, we are given no clues at all as to Joseph’s age at the time his mother dies. In Henderson all we know of the death of the hero’s mother is that it took place before he was sixteen (p. 132).
80. Charlie’s view of the mother-son bond is closer to that of the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, an “object-relations” or “post-Kleinian” psychoanalytic theorist, than to that of Freud. Winnicott’s theories of child development and creativity draw upon the writings of the English Romantic poets, especially Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well as upon those of psychoanalytic predecessors. See Leader, Writer’s Block (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 96–103.
81. Grandma Lausch thinks the marriage ought never to have taken place, only did so because Mama, characteristically, gave away her affections “too easily” (p. 395).
82. For “esprit,” see D. J. R. Bruckner, “A Candid Talk with Saul Bellow,” New York Times Magazine, 15 April 1984: “Although no character in his stories exactly reproduces a real person, anyone who knows many of the people Bellow is interested in can recognize bits and pieces of them, very large bits in some cases.… He borrows his motto from Stendhal: ‘I take someone from real life and give him more esprit than he has.’ ”
83. Botsford, “A Half Life,” SB, IAAU, p. 290. There is a puzzle about dates here. If SB entered the Royal Victoria Hospital in the winter of 1923, sometime before Christmas, and stayed for between four, five, or even six months, he got out of the hospital in April or May 1924. That he did not return to school for the few months before the family removed to Chicago in July fits this dating. But if the dating is correct, it means that when Abraham left for Chicago (in, say, January or February 1924), SB was still in the hospital. There must therefore have been a period of several months in which only the mother and the siblings came for weekly visits. It is odd that SB should have said nothing about this period, either in interviews or to family members.
84. In The Adventures of Augie March, during the Depression, Augie’s friend Joe Gorman, with whom he’s previously been involved in a robbery, offers him money for “running immigrants over the border from Canada, from around Rouse’s Point over to Massena Springs, New York.… If you want to come along and be my relief on the road as far
as Massena Springs I’ll give you fifty bucks and all expenses.” Augie needs the money and “as for the immigrants, my thought about them was, Hell, why shouldn’t they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There’s enough to go around of everything, including hard luck” (p. 567).
85. Manea, “Conversation,” p. 10.
86. Bruckner, “A Candid Talk with Saul Bellow.”
87. Koch interview.
3. CHICAGO/MAURY
1. Louis Dworkin’s history comes from interviews with his daughter, Vivien Missner, and her daughter, Susan Missner. Toward the end of her grandfather’s life, Susan Missner took detailed notes of a conversation she had with him about his early years in Chicago. The other major source for these early years is SB’s “Chicago Book” (henceforth cited as SB, “CB”), for which, see Chapter 2, note 17. The detail about Abraham wiring Louis from Montreal comes from the autobiographical section of SB, “CB,” p. 26, as do all the page references in this chapter, unless otherwise specified.
2. SB, “CB,” p. 28.
3. SB, “Cousins,” reprinted in SB, CS, p. 215 (henceforth cited within the text by page numbers).
4. SB, “CB,” p. 28.
5. Quoted from the second of SB’s Jefferson Lectures (1977), reprinted in SB, IAAU, p. 144; Petrush and the rats but not the finger are mentioned in SB, “CB,” p. 27. SB’s predecessors as Jefferson lecturers were Lionel Trilling (1972), Erik Erikson (1973), Robert Penn Warren (1974), Paul A. Freund (1975), and John Hope Franklin (1976). The overall title for SB’s lectures was “The Writer and His Country Look Each Other Over.”
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 90
