The Life of Saul Bellow Read online

  The Atlantic crossing, the last episode of the family’s removal to the New World, is lost to memory, too. What is known is that the Bellows departed from Southampton on the Ascania, a ship of the Cunard Line, and arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on December 26, 1913. The Ascania was built in 1911 and carried two hundred first-class passengers and 1,500 third-class passengers. Three details of the actual crossing survive, from the recollections of Bellow’s sister, Jane: that her brother Sam, two at the time, was the sole member of the family not to suffer from seasickness; that he jumped from bunk to bunk in high spirits; and that the children were ordered to call Abraham uncle not father, as he was traveling under false papers. In the ship’s manifest, directly below the names of Lescha and the children, the name “Rafael Gordin” appears, the original of Robert Gordin, Lescha’s brother from South Africa. “Rafael” is listed as twenty-nine years old (Abraham’s age in 1913); his place of birth, like that of Lescha and the children, is listed as “Russia”; his “race or people,” like theirs, as “Hebrew”; and his occupation as “Labourer.”58 Abraham was indebted to Robert for lending him his name as well as his money.

  “SOMEBODY OUGHT TO DO a monograph on the Jewish responses to the various lands of their exile,” declares Kenneth Trachtenberg in More Die of Heartbreak. “Russia was peculiarly nasty, but Jews nevertheless were strongly drawn to the Russians” (p. 17). This claim was certainly true of Kenneth’s creator. Bellow was proud of his Russian heritage, in literature, even in politics (at least for a while), and in temperament. In high school, he and his bookish circle dubbed themselves the Russian Literary Society. “We were so Russian as adolescents,” he told Stanley Elkin, writing of himself and Isaac Rosenfeld in a letter of March 12, 1992. “As an adolescent I read an unusual number of Russian novels,” he told an interviewer. “I felt it was the Heimat, you know.” “The children of immigrants in my Chicago high school … believed that they were also somehow Russian,” he writes in an essay of 1993, “and while they studied their Macbeth and Milton’s L’Allegro, they read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well and went on inevitably to Lenin’s State and Revolution and the pamphlets of Trotsky.”59 As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Rosenfeld rented an “apartment” (in fact, a whitewashed coal cellar) on Woodlawn Avenue in Hyde Park. Its virtues, in addition to how little it cost, are described by Bellow in “Zetland: By a Character Witness” (1974): “It was bohemian, it was European. Best of all, it was Russian! The landlord, Perchik, said that he had been game-beater for Grand Duke Cyril. Abandoned in Kamchatka when the Japanese War began, he trudged back across Siberia. With him Zet had Russian conversations.”60

  The influence of Russian literature on Bellow’s writing is clear. Dostoyevsky is the spirit presiding over his first two novels (along with a daunting “Flaubertian standard”), and he remains a presence throughout his career. V. S. Pritchett identifies Dostoyevsky’s influence in the “sense of looseness, timelessness and space” in Bellow’s novels and stories,61 the room they find for historical and philosophical depth, for ideas and theories. It is there also in the comic depiction—more pronounced in Bellow than in Dostoyevsky, but Dostoyevskian nonetheless—of the fictional spokesmen of these ideas and theories, even those who are most dangerous or pathological. Tolstoy’s influence is more diffuse, a matter of balance or objectivity, as in Bellow’s attraction to, and intimate knowledge of, the worlds he deplores and seeks to rise above, worlds of sensual glamour, social complexity, and material power. Tolstoy also offers Bellow a model of the writer’s life and method. “I carry numerous projects with me in endless gestation,” he writes to a correspondent in 1980. “Now and then I am happily delivered of one of them. This, come to think of it, is the method preferred above all by Tolstoy.” “Pretty soon I’ll be unassailable,” he jokes to Herbert Gold, the novelist, “and I can write philosophy like Tolstoy,”62 a remark made in the handsome, ramshackle, dachalike house in rural New York Bellow purchased in 1956, a little Yasnaya Polyana. Here Bellow lived briefly with his second wife, Sondra Tschacbasov, known as Sasha.63

  In politics, the Russian influence also played a part. “You have to understand the Jews of my generation, whose parents were usually born in Russia,” explains Bellow’s sometimes friend Alfred Kazin (“Avrahm Gedolyevitch Kazin” in the correspondence, to Bellow’s “Saulchick”). For these Jews “czarism was hell” and the Russian Revolution “would give them for the first time some kind of freedom.”64 Kazin was Bellow’s exact contemporary, born five days before him (on June 5, 1915). In A Walker in the City (1951), the first volume of Kazin’s autobiographical “New Yorker Trilogy,” he re-creates the vision of socialism he held as an adolescent: “one long Friday night around the samovar and the cut-glass laden with nuts and fruits, all of us singing Tsuzamen, tsuzamen, ale tsuzamen! Then the heroes of the Russian novel—our kind of people—would walk the world—and I—still wearing a circle-necked Russian blouse à la Tolstoy—would live forever with those I loved in that beautiful Russian country of the mind.”65 In more sober terms, in a letter of November 5, 1990, to a correspondent from behind the Iron Curtain, Bellow explains “the great power of 1917 over us”:

  Among intellectuals the Revolution was the most prestigious event of the century and Lenin had an enormous influence: Lenin the thinker and Lenin as a most desirable human type, the chief representative of a modern intellect and an example of how intellectuals might obtain political power.… We—and I am thinking of Jewish adolescents in Chicago in the Thirties—we drew the line at Stalin and by the time the war began we understood how wrong we had been about 1917. Marxism Leninism fell away completely during and after World War II. From that time the Soviet Union represented despotism in its most boring form. But I needn’t go on in this vein. I’m sure it’s all quite clear to you. Old hat. I’ve told you all this to make clear to you how peculiarly Russian the young Jews of my generation were.66

  Abraham saw “1917” very differently, as did Bellow’s grandfather, judging by suggestions from the fiction. When the revolution began, Berel Belo was in his eighties and still energetic. He traveled from Dvinsk, where he was living, to St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd), when and why is not remembered, and at one point took refuge in the Winter Palace.67 We have no details of his adventures there, though Grandpa Herzog also ends up in the Winter Palace, where he is depicted as a combination of pious scholar and business shark, like Berel:

  With the instinct of a Herzog for the grand thing, he took refuge in the Winter Palace in 1918 (the Bolsheviks allowed it for a while). The old man wrote long letters in Hebrew. He had lost his precious books in the upheaval. Study was impossible now. In the Winter Palace you had to walk up and down all day to find a minyan [the quorum of ten Jewish males required for public prayer and other religious obligations]. Of course there was hunger, too. Later, he predicted that the Revolution would fail and tried to acquire Czarist currency, to become a millionaire under the restored Romanoffs (p. 555).

  Abraham shared Father Herzog’s skepticism about the revolution. “When I brought people home,” Bellow recounts, “especially people who had been to the Soviet Union, young Americans who had done some kind of work there, he gave them a hard time. ‘You don’t know Russia. You don’t know what’s happening there.’ And he was right. But I felt ashamed that he should be such a reactionary.”68

  Bellow did not feel ashamed of his father’s open expression of emotion, a quality he thought of as Russian as well as Jewish. “The Jews valued Russian emotionalism very much,” he told the same interviewer, “as long as the emotionalism didn’t turn into murder, as often happened.” In a 1961 profile of Nikita Khrushchev, he locates the Soviet premier’s power and appeal in just this emotionalism: “we praise the gray dignity of our [Western] soft-spoken leaders, but in our hearts we are suckers for passionate outbursts.”69 “Russian in his rage” is how Zetland’s father is described (p. 249); for the Russian scholar Kenneth Trachtenberg, “there is a special Russian asset, wh
ich is the belief that Russia is the homeland of the deeper and sincerer emotions. Dostoyevsky among others promoted this reputation for unlimited passion” (p. 91).70 At the start of Bellow’s career, Dostoyevsky was his idol and “American” reticence his enemy. Dangling Man (1944), his first novel, opens with a challenge to “hard-boileddom … an American inheritance”: “Do you have feelings? There are correct and incorrect ways of indicating them. Do you have an inner life? It is nobody’s business but your own. Do you have emotions? Strangle them. To a degree, everyone obeys this code.… If you have difficulties, grapple with them silently, goes one of their commandments. To hell with that! I intend to talk about mine.”71

  Another aspect of Bellow’s Russian inheritance is the incongruity or unpredictability of the emotions expressed, as well as their intensity and openness. The volte-face or unexpected turn, from benevolence to cruelty, and back, is a stock feature of Russian life and letters. It is crucial to the power of the scene that opens this chapter, when Abraham “whales on Maury” (as the oldest of Bellow’s three sons, Greg, puts it). Unanticipated, disproportionate reactions such as Abraham’s even have a name in Russian, proizvol, “of which no closer translation than ‘arbitrariness’ suggests itself.”72 Dostoyevsky’s novels are full of these reactions, as are Babel’s stories. Both authors are drawn to the sorts of characters who produce them, notably faux bonhommes or malign buffoons, of whom Fyodor Karamazov is the best-known example (Bellow likens Khrushchev to him).73 In The Victim (1947), Bellow’s second novel, we get a version of the type, in the figure of Kirby Allbee, an anti-Semite who torments the novel’s central character, Asa Leventhal, a Jewish subeditor on a trade magazine. Allbee is based in part on Father Karamazov-like figures in two Dostoyevsky stories, “The Eternal Husband” and “The Double.” Though of WASP heritage, he’s a Russian type, volatile, querulous, “slightly jeering, slightly presumptious,” yet with “no hint of amusement” in his eyes.74 The mocking self-pity of Allbee and other such figures connects them to Yiddish as well as Dostoyevskian prototypes, to the schlemiel of Jewish folk humor and the stories of Sholom Aleichem. According to Bellow’s friend, Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish at Harvard, the schlemiel is “the Jew as he is defined by the anti-Semite, but reinterpreted by God’s appointee.”75 “It was clear that the man was no fool,” says Leventhal, whom Allbee blames for his troubles, “but what was the use of not being a fool if you acted like this” (p. 200). In The Victim, the anti-Semitic doppelgänger, appropriately, recalls a Jewish type (the novel’s title applies to Allbee as well as Leventhal, the result of what Bellow describes as “a perverse kind of favoritism toward outsiders and strictness with the beloved children—which originates, I think, with my father”76). Allbee’s faux humility and faux good humor are like those of Pavel Pavlovitch in “The Eternal Husband,” Golyadkin’s double in “The Double,” and Father Karamazov, but they are also like those of Pa Lurie, capering in self-parody, “to throw himself free of the creature of misery.” The Russian type and the Yiddish type fold together.

  Abraham was a difficult father for Bellow to deal with not only because of his Russian Jewish background, but because he was an immigrant. “Yes, I had a tyrannical father,” Bellow wrote to Irving Halperin. “Russian-Jewish fathers were naturally tyrannical. But they knew, as their children did not, how very different from the Russian life of their own boyhood our lives in America were.… Our lives seemed to them a paradise which we had done nothing to deserve.” While fathers like Abraham strained to negotiate a foreign land in a foreign language, they watched their children do so with comparative ease. They also found themselves forced to rely on their children, to interpret, explain, translate. “The great loss was the loss of language,” writes Bernard Malamud, who also had a Russian Jewish immigrant father. “You have some subtle thought and it comes out like a piece of broken bottle.”77 The injured pride of such fathers was particularly expressed in front of their sons, or when sons resisted, something their new surroundings seemed to encourage. As Bellow continues in the letter to Halperin: “Our fathers lacked the support of a tyrannical society, and we were not in awe of their authority. Sensing this, they turned up the heat. But without an authoritarian society to support them, they seemed quite weak, alas, and their storming did not impress us.”

  Sons with fathers like Abraham often developed a prickly, combative manner. Philip Roth invokes this manner and the background that produced it when explaining his wariness of Bellow, with whom he did not become close until the late 1980s, almost thirty years after they’d first met. To Roth, born in 1933, Bellow’s generation of Jewish writers and intellectuals, men like Kazin, Philip Rahv, and Lionel Abel, “a formidable bunch,” seemed difficult and unwelcoming. But then “these are almost all guys who had really tough times with their immigrant fathers. And even when they didn’t have a tough time with an immigrant father, they had an immigrant father.” Roth remembers Kazin arguing with him, wagging a finger under his nose and saying: “You don’t understand a word I say. You don’t even understand when I say you don’t understand.” Irving Howe, author of World of Our Fathers (1976), also had a Russian Jewish immigrant father. On the day his father died, Howe stood by his hospital bed, feeling “almost nothing,” staring “at the shrunken body of the man who would never again greet me with an ironic rebuke.” Earlier, on the way to the hospital, his father “still had enough strength to argue against my proposal that we hire a private nurse. He didn’t need one. And what could a nurse do, make him young again? His eyes glinted as he said this, waiting to see if I would record his last stab at paternal irony.… I hired a private nurse and, to no one’s surprise, my father accepted her without protest. His obligation had been to argue against hiring her, mine to hire her.”78

  Roth stresses the differences as well as the similarities between the Jewish American writers and intellectuals of Bellow’s generation. “Saul was unlike any of the others, and none of them resembled him, but they shared certain characteristics.” The differences extended to relations with fathers. Though all had difficult immigrant fathers, these fathers were difficult in different ways. Though their sons all argued with them (Greg Bellow remembers “terrible screaming fights” between his father and grandfather), and could be argumentative and prickly in turn, what they felt for them differed. When Howe’s father’s died, “close to the end he told my son that finally I had been a good son. He did not say a loving son.” Howe implicitly accepts the truth of this judgment when he adds that “he, perhaps not such a good father, had been a loving one, always ready, after his opening sarcasm, to accept my foolishness and chaos.”79 Abraham Bellow was a loving father if not a good one, while his son was a loving son. The fathers in Bellow’s fiction are almost all difficult or deficient; the ones modeled on Abraham are also loving.

  These reflections may help to explain Bellow’s fictional versions of Abraham, more particularly his versions of Abraham’s return from the hijacking, which omit Maury’s beating. In “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” when Joshua is sent to find his father, he discovers him already at the workplace: “I ran in panting and said, frightened, ‘Pa, Pa!’ and Pa said, ‘It’s all right, my son,’ and put his hand on me to quiet me. ‘Don’t be frightened, Joshua’ ” (p. 140). In Herzog, the father is met not in the workplace, but at home, by the whole family. He enters the kitchen bloody, bruised, his clothes torn: “ ‘Sarah!’ he said. ‘Children!’ He showed his cut face. He spread his arms so we could see his tatters, and the white of his body under them. Then he turned his pockets inside out—empty. As he did this, he began to cry, and the children standing about him all cried” (p. 564). Leaving out the violent encounter with Maury can be seen as the act of a good son, a loving son, an American son. There are also narrative grounds for the omission. The scene is recalled by a narrator like Bentchka or Schloimke; Moses Herzog is the youngest son not the oldest, and has been least subject to the father’s violence (“I was the child and plaything of everyone and I was spared th
e harsher aspects of family life,” Bellow recalled of his upbringing80). The scene is narrated from the point of view of a child not an adolescent, with a childlike vision of the father and the world.

  This childlike vision was particularly powerful for Bellow; it never left him, and was cultivated. Like Victor Wulpy in the story “What Kind of a Day Did You Have?,” Bellow believed that “genius must be the recovery of the powers of childhood by an act of the creative will.” As a child, Bellow saw his father in biblical terms: “My childhood lay under the radiance (or gloom) of the archaic family, the family of which God is the ultimate father and your own father is the representative of divinity.” He saw the Bible, moreover, in familial terms: “[the Pentateuch] was not a fairy tale. It was a holy book, in Hebrew, and you knew that it had to be true, because it said God created the world—and here was the world. Here’s the proof. Right outside the window was your proof.” The biblical Abraham, the father of his people, and Abraham Bellow were somehow the same: “It was impossible for a child of eight to make all the necessary distinctions, and I didn’t even try to make any distinctions.… I felt very cozy with God, the primal parent, and by the time I was up to the Patriarchs (I was five or six years old), I felt they were very much like members of my family. I couldn’t readily distinguish between a parent and the heroic ancestors—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the sons of Jacob, especially Joseph.”81 This is the way Victor Wulpy as a child remembers thinking of the Old Testament. In 1912, in his basement cheder on the Lower East Side,

  The street, the stained pavement, was also like a page of Hebrew text, something you might translate if you knew how. Jacob lay dreaming of a ladder which rose into heaven. V’hinei malachi elohim—behold the angels of God going up and down. This had caused Victor no surprise. What age was he, about six? It was not a dream to him. Jacob was dreaming, while Victor was awake, reading. There was no “Long ago.” It was all now. The cellar classroom had a narrow window at sidewalk level, just enough to permit a restricted upward glance showing fire escapes under snow, the gold shop sign of the Chinese laundry hanging under the ironwork, and angels climbing up and down (p. 321).82