The Life of Saul Bellow Read online

  In the period the Belos lived in St. Petersburg, according to Kenneth Trachtenberg, the narrator of Bellow’s late novel More Die of Heartbreak (Kenneth’s specialism is “Czarist culture in its final phase”), the city was “a mixture of barbarism and worn out humanist culture” (p. 179). Its atmosphere is brilliantly evoked by Andrei Bely in his novel Petersburg (1916), described by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four great masterpieces of twentieth-century prose (the others are Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and “the first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time”).39 Bely’s novel swarms with conspirators, terrorists, suspected terrorists, police informers, and double agents. It opens in 1905 and closes in 1913, the exact years the Belos lived in the city. Its central characters, aside from the variously personified city itself (with its living statues, louring mists and clouds, and ominously expanding spheres, presaging explosion) are Apollon Apollonovich, an obvious figure of the hated Pobedonostsev (also of Tolstoy’s Alexei Karenin), and his son, Nikolai, a character straight out of Dostoyevsky. Nikolai, a student of philosophy, has become entangled in a terrorist plot to blow up a high government official: his father (as Kenneth puts it, “he didn’t really want to be a parricide. An apparent ethical logic drew him on. But by and by it … crumbled away” [p. 179]).40 Nikolai’s chief contact among the plotters is an impoverished radical named Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, who, like many a radical or suspected radical, is resident in the city on forged papers. Several scenes involving Dudkin are set in restaurants on or around Nevsky Prospect. Almost all the characters in the novel are frightened of something: discovery, betrayal, disorder, assassination. As a consequence, their movements and reactions are extreme, immoderate. In their translation of Petersburg, Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad offer an explanatory note for the sentence “Apollon Apollonovich opened the door to his office.” It reads: “This is one of the rare instances in the novel when a door is simply opened. As in Dostoyevsky, they usually fly or swing open (or shut) with some violence.”41

  Neither Abraham nor Lescha Belo was a radical nor much interested in politics, but their circumstances were, inevitably, anxiety-inducing (in “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” Pa Lurie is described as “nervous as a fox” [p. 13]). In later years, Bellow remembers his mother talking of “how wonderful it was in the Heim [homeland, Old Country] for them. Well, it was not the Heim for them.”42 Though the family was affluent, their prosperity was founded on deception. The official Jewish population of St. Petersburg in the period the family lived there was not more than 2 percent, though the unofficial or illegal population was much higher (in 1878, the city governor thought the number of illegal Jewish residents “considerably greater” than the legal population). According to Benjamin Nathans, a historian of late-nineteenth-century Russian Jewry, illegal residents like the Belos

  were often referred to as living na dvorianskikh pravakh (with a courier’s rights), where dvorianskii alluded both to aristocrats (dvoriane) and the apartment house courtyard superintendents (dvorniki) whom it was necessary to bribe in order to preserve the fiction. Similarly, a Jew who bribed a doorman (shveitsar) was known as shveitsarskii poddany, a triple pun signifying “a subject of Switzerland,” “a subject of the doorman,” and—to Yiddish ears—“a sweating subject.”43

  For eight years the Belos lived na dvorianskikh pravakh. There were servants, coachmen, fine linens, a dacha (in Herzog and “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” the dacha is located in nearby Finland). Louis Dworkin’s wife, Rose, remembered the gloves Lescha brought with her to Chicago (from St. Petersburg via Montreal): they were “bejeweled and very fancy” and with other fine items left the impression that “there had to be money there.” “That was a golden time for my mother,” Bellow told an interviewer, of the St. Petersburg years, “that was when she was a young bride and there was plenty of money, and they were living in the Capital, and they went to Café Chantants and so forth and so on.”44 It was in Petersburg that she began to be called Liza instead of Lescha, and in Petersburg that she first read Tolstoy in Russian, and Abraham all of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky, as well as Tolstoy (or so he claimed). Between 1869 and 1910, Nathans reports, “the declared native language of nearly half the city’s Jews shifted from Yiddish to Russian, at nearly identical rates for men and women.”45

  Yet fears of betrayal or discovery remained, and were eventually realized. Sometime in 1912 or 1913 Abraham’s illegal residence was made known to the authorities. Perhaps he was informed on, or failed to pay a bribe, or was late with a bribe, or was implicated by forgers or their intermediaries? Perhaps he himself was charged with supplying false papers? In later years, Abraham would take out a tattered copy of a journal article detailing his arrest, conviction, and subsequent escape to Canada. Bellow describes the article as written in the Russian alphabet on green newsprint. Joel Bellows, his nephew, remembers seeing the article, as does Bellow’s niece, Lesha Bellows Greengus. According to Joel, it contained a photograph of Abraham in the top right-hand corner, and a headline reading: “A Jew Escapes.” The article has disappeared and attempts to find it among Bellow’s papers at the University of Chicago or in newspaper archives in Russia have proved fruitless. Only four documents have surfaced of potential relevance to Abraham’s case, two from the Russian-language Jewish periodical New Dawn, and two from the Russian-language newspaper Early Morning. They concern a group of Jews arrested for forging papers for illegal residency, and for possessing such papers. The second of the New Dawn articles, published on March 21, 1913, reports that the Jews who received the forged papers were declared innocent and released from custody, not having known the documents were forged. Those who supplied the documents, however, were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Their names were Kurkovskz, Isakovich, and Belousov. Belousov might be Belo or Belous. The dates of the case accord with family history, as does the length of sentence. But the initials given for Belousov in the Early Morning articles are “H.L.” not “A.B.” (for “Abraham Berelovich”), and the trial took place in Moscow.46 In the end, all that can be said for certain of Abraham’s arrest and imprisonment is what is said of Pa Lurie in “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son”: “Pobedonostyev’s police had arrested Pa and Pa had escaped from them” (p. 12).

  What would it have mattered, though, if one could prove that Abraham Belo was Belousov, a seller or supplier of illegal papers as well as a purchaser? Would that make one think differently of him, or make him more of a criminal? “The big criminal!” Abraham’s son, Sam Bellows, is remembered as saying, when the tattered article was brought out and read to grandchildren (“in the spirit of ‘look where we came from, look how fortunate we are’ ”): “All he wanted to do was to make a living.” A Jew who wanted to make a living in Russia in 1905, certainly a good living, would be unlikely to get anywhere if he obeyed the law. To obey it thirty-five years later would get him killed, as it did many of Abraham’s and Lescha’s relatives who remained behind in the Pale.47 The literature of Jewish “criminality” in St. Petersburg makes just this point, in novels, stories, and poems by or about Jews whose illegal residence and employment in the capital are their only or initial crimes.48 That an ambitious and energetic illegal resident such as Abraham might get involved in supplying forged papers or bribing officials is neither improbable nor, it could be argued, especially blameworthy, except insofar as it exposed him and his family to greater risk.

  This background—of systematic discrimination and forced, some would say victimless, crime—underlay not only Abraham’s and his family’s subsequent attitudes to the law, but Bellow’s fascination with those who lived outside it. In The Ghost Writer (1979), Philip Roth’s fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, identifies Bellow’s fictional alter ego, Felix Abravanel, as “a New World cousin” of Isaac Babel, by which he means the Isaac Babel of the Benya Krik stories, about the Jewish mobster-king of Odessa: “the gloating, the gangsters, all those gigantic types. It isn’t that he throw
s in his sympathy with the brutes—it isn’t that in Babel, either. It’s their awe of them. Even when they’re appalled, they’re in awe. Deep reflective Jews a little lovesick at the sound of all that un-Talmudic bone crunching. Sensitive Jewish sages, as Babel says, dying to climb trees.… It’s Babel’s fascination with big-time Jews, with conscienceless Cossacks, with everybody who has it his own way.”49

  Not having it one’s own way was the reality for Abraham, in Montreal as in Russia, and it had its effect on all the members of the family, even after their various successes in Chicago. In “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” Pa explains to Joshua why he became a bootlegger:

  Driven to the wall. No alternative, Yehoshua my boy. You see what die Mama and I have gone through to keep coats on your backs and shoes on your feet and bring you up as Jews and not as enemies of Jews.

  When Pa spoke such things in his whisper, wide-eyed, he bent his knees—his body sank a little, he swayed it sidewards towards his knees as he had done when he told Bentchka that he didn’t have a penny in his purse. It was a way of poor Jews and had humor and despair. Out of bitterest feeling Pa pressed his shoulders upward and spread his fingers wide and gave a hiss of laughter and talked to himself like a buffoon by his own name. “… Ah, Yankov, Yankov, you poor fool and eternal pauper / There’s nothing in your till and nothing in your hopper.” … He behaved like a painted man on the stage in the role of a poor Jew. Yet he did it to throw himself free of the creature of misery (pp. 97–98).

  The mature Saul Bellow was anything but powerless, was a man who seemed from the outside to have “had it his own way” more than most. But that is not how it felt to him, often enough for friends, relations, and colleagues to remark on it. “Somehow, under deep layers, the old irremovable feeling lurks that I am a born slightee,” Bellow writes to his friend Melvin Tumin on April 21, 1948, in a letter announcing that he has just won a Guggenheim Fellowship. According to his nephew Joel, a characteristic gesture of Uncle Saul’s, as characteristic as the sideways tilt with which he’d watch the world, or the way he’d throw back his head in laughter, was a gesture very like Pa Lurie’s. With arms bent at the elbow, shoulders raised, palms up, he’d act out or ask: “What’s a man to do?” Which is to say, I’m powerless, the situation is out of my control, it cannot be helped. This gesture is familiar in Jewish literature, particularly from Eastern European writers in Yiddish, such as Sholom Aleichem, a great favorite of Abraham Belo’s and an author his son later translated. In the introduction to his 1963 anthology, Great Jewish Short Stories, Bellow describes the outlook of these writers: “We must make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it—the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.”50 Something of this attitude is retained, I am suggesting, even by Jews who defy state authority, as did Abraham Belo in Russia in the early 1900s, or cultural authority, as did Saul Bellow in America in the early 1950s.

  In Abraham’s case, though, in St. Petersburg in 1913, the result of defiance was prison, or would have been, had it not been for his escape. Bellow seems never directly to have said how his father managed this escape, either in interview or to family members, for all his interest in stories of di heym (die Heimat in German), the sorts of stories Abraham often told. “What I especially remembered of those Sunday afternoons,” Lesha Greengus reports, “was that these folks would spend hours retelling their stories from the past, which included terrible suffering and loss.” She remembers the tattered article but no details of Abraham’s escape from his prison sentence, nor does she remember anyone asking for details, “though if anyone would, [Saul] certainly would have.”51 The “Memoirs” manuscript offers little help in this regard: “Then Pa was seized by the police for illegal residence. My uncles got him out of prison, and we escaped to Canada” (p. 35). In Herzog, the article on green newsprint is alluded to, but almost nothing is said about the escape: “Father Herzog sometimes unfolded it and read aloud to the entire family, translating the proceedings against Ilyona Ivakovitch Gerzog. He never served his sentence. He got away. Because he was nervy, hasty, obstinate, rebellious” (p. 554).

  In The Bellarosa Connection, published in 1989, twenty-five years after Herzog, Bellow offers a story in some respects like Abraham’s. At the heart of the novella is a miraculous escape. Harry Fonstein, a Jew living in fascist Rome under false papers, is caught by the authorities: “A police check was run, my papers were fishy, and that’s why I was arrested.”52 One night a stranger comes to Fonstein’s cell as he awaits deportation by the SS: “The message from this Italianer was: ‘Tomorrow night, same time, your door will be open. Go out in the corridor. Keep turning left. And nobody will stop you. A person will be waiting in a car, and he’ll take you to the train for Genoa.’ ” Fonstein asks who has arranged his rescue and is told “Billy Rose” (the Broadway producer, gossip columnist, sidekick of gangsters, of whom Fonstein has never heard). Rose (née Rosenberg) is running an underground operation helping European Jews to escape from Italy in World War II (“He must’ve seen Leslie Howard in The Scarlet Pimpernel” [p. 40]). The next night, “the guard didn’t lock my door after supper, and when the corridor was empty I came out.” The escape itself is described in detail:

  So I opened every door, walked upstairs, downstairs, and when I got to the street there was a car waiting and people leaning on it, speaking in normal voices. When I came up, the driver pushed me in the back and drove me to the Trastevere station. He gave me new identity papers. He said nobody would be looking for me, because my whole police file had been stolen. There was a hat and coat for me in the rear seat, and he gave me the name of a hotel in Genoa, by the waterfront. That’s where I was contacted. I had a passage on a Swedish ship to Lisbon (p. 41).53

  In a fascinating account of the genesis of The Bellarosa Connection, Bellow’s wife Janis tells of a dinner they were given at the home of Vermont neighbors in May 1988. At the end of the dinner the host told a story about a friend and colleague who had been a European refugee in the early 1940s in fascist Italy. This was the seed or spark from which the novella sprang. The host’s colleague had been imprisoned in Rome, but had managed to write to Billy Rose on the advice of a friend; Rose had Italian contacts who organized an escape; the friend ended up in Cuba, from which he eventually made his way to the United States. The host’s recounting of the escape was detailed, though Janis was distracted at the dinner and cannot be sure how much of it Bellow reproduced in the novella, how much he added or altered. Almost as soon as he began work on the story the next day, however, it was “no longer about [the host’s] friend.”54 The ingredients Bellow wove into The Bellarosa Connection were various. Janis identifies them as “event, accident, memory, and thought—what he had read, what we had discussed, and the contents of his dreams.” In the writing, they became new: “When pieces of life begin to find their way into the work, there is always something magical about the manner in which they are lifted from the recent—or distant—past or the here and now, and then kneaded and shaped and subtly transformed into narrative.… To watch these details working their way into or out of the novella is nothing like the cutting and pasting of actual events. Biographers, beware: Saul wields a wand, not scissors” (p. ix).

  The idea that Abraham’s escape from prison in St. Petersburg is one of the ingredients “kneaded and shaped” into The Bellarosa Connection is suggested partly by the intensity and particularity with which Fonstein’s escape is imagined, partly by the story’s fictional frame. The unnamed narrator of the novella hears the full story of the escape at a Sunday family gathering, in the presence of his “keen-eyed” father (p. 37). The father “had a passion for refugee stories,” had heard this one many times, and had himself told the narrator about it before Fonstein does. The narrator in turn will hear it many times on many Sundays, “in episodes, like a Hollywood serial.” There are similarities in background between narrator and author, both earning their living through memory (the narrator runs
something called the Mnemosyne Institute, “as profitable as it was unpronounceable,” says his father, with the “comic bewilderment” Bellow’s own father sometimes adopted when speaking of his son’s profession55), and it is tempting to believe that the escape owes something to Abraham. Behind this belief lie several prior assumptions: that the phrase “escapes” from the remembered headline “A Jew Escapes” means “escapes from prison,” as opposed to “escapes from sentencing, or serving a sentence”; that the phrase “got him out of prison” from “My uncles got him out of prison, and we escaped to Canada,” from “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” means “broke him out of prison,” as opposed to, say, “put up bail (which he skipped, escaping to Canada).”56 In the absence of police records (destroyed by fire in 1917), one can only surmise. Janis Bellow says: “The Bellarosa account didn’t borrow from family adventure.”57 If she’s right, then the particulars of Abraham’s escape from prison (in whichever sense one takes the phrase) remain oddly unimagined in Bellow’s writing, as well as oddly unrecalled in interview, personal reminiscence, and correspondence.