The second incident pertained to a high school friend of the writer’s, whom he hadn’t seen for decades. Unexpectedly bumping into him on a Chicago street — again after returning from Stockholm — Bellow was pleased to hear news from him about their schoolmates and hear about the friend himself. At last, the friend remembered to exhibit some curiosity of his own. “And you, Saul, what do you do for a living? How do you make a buck?”
Hammered by unpleasant questions, the elegant, cordial, and detached Saul Bellow didn’t display the unease he felt in the course of his visit, but he discussed it with some Romanian acquaintances. “He lived through a kind of psychosis … He believed he was always followed on the street, that there were microphones everywhere,” Antoaneta Ralian, his Romanian translator, wrote in Observatorul Cultural, an important Romanian cultural weekly, in 2000. “When he saw that at the residence where he was staying they put pillows on the telephone and that the radio was turned up all the way, so that the conversation couldn’t be recorded by police listening devices, he was completely shocked.”
I had my first conversation with Saul Bellow not in Bucharest but in Newark in 1992, at the writers’ conference on Eastern Europe organized by Partisan Review, the magazine that Bellow had been associated with in the 1950s and 1960s, and was partially associated with later on. To me, he seemed distant and troubled. I suppose that my Romanian identity wasn’t a favorable recommendation, nor did my essay “Happy Guilt,” on Mircea Eliade, recommend me to him, for there I opened up troubling questions about a man who had been a good friend of his.
At any rate, because our breakfast was limited to conventional matters, I didn’t use the telephone number he had given me as we said goodbye, and our closeness grew slowly, little by little over the following years, owing, I suppose, to some mutual friends.
We got to know each other better in the first two consecutive summers he invited us, that is Cella and me, to his summer home in Vermont. In the mornings he wore a T-shirt and jeans with many pockets, a baseball cap with a long, blue visor; in the evenings, at the restaurant Le Petit Chef where he was a kind of celebrity guest, he was elegant and eccentric, with pink or red shirts, and bow-ties in unusual designs. He had a natural, open manner, without pretentiousness or affectation. He seemed to be a farmer, or an old aristocrat, or an artist on vacation.
He asked me about Bard College, where he had taught in his younger days and where he’d lived together with his friend Ralph Ellison, a sort of literary “aristocrat” himself, and, like Bellow, of modest social origins. He knew that Hannah Arendt was buried at Bard, but be didn’t admire her. “She had one foot in Nazism with Heidegger,” Bellow recalled, “the other in communism with her second husband Bleicher, a philosophy professor at Bard. He’s been in the leadership of the German communists, I believe. She never talked about this. She knew too much; she fled from confessions.”
When he came as a young writer to teach at Bard, Bellow entered quickly into conflict with the old guard of literature professors, fervent guardians of “great literature” and skeptical of modern writers. The prevailing Great Lady was Irma Brandeis, the head of the Italian department, a translator, and a former virgin lover, people said, of Montale. A strong personality, formed by “classic” convictions, and intellectually aggressive. The young Bellow naturally found himself on the side of the rebels, but after only a few years he came to understand that youth “revolutions” rarely live up to their promise.
After a few decades, preparing to evoke his outworn sentiments in the story “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” Bellow called Leon Botstein, the president of Bard, complaining that he couldn’t remember Irma Brandeis’ voice anymore. Leon invited him to a special dinner where Irma would be present, too. An amicable, pleasant evening full of amusing recollections. In the end, Bellow declared that he had returned to Bard not just to remember the atmosphere of another time but to ask in public for Mrs. Irma Brandeis’ forgiveness over their conflict in which, as he had learned over time, he was on the wrong side.
I had already lived at Bard for more than ten years myself, housed in Irma Brandeis’ former bungalow, Casa Minima. I knew by now in what way novels like Herzog and Henderson the Rain King were tied to the space and time the author knew at the college that hosted me; I discovered local anecdotes about his life in the region that had become so familiar to me as sometimes to resemble my own lost Bukovina.
I didn’t insist, however, on our rehearsing the old Bard days during our dialogue in Vermont. I was more interested to know what the novelist thought about the present. According to Bellow, the modern era seemed to have confirmed at least one of the Marxist predictions: the victory of man over nature. Bellow didn’t seem at all enchanted by this “progress.” Of course, he conceded, there have been enormous improvements in medicine, feeding the poor, instant communication, the ease of moving from one place to another. Inevitably certain values are lost, they change; new values and criteria appear. But Bellow routinely referred to something essential that seemed to be lost, something not only alluded to but obsessively emphasized in his novels. What is said to sink the heart in Bellow’s fiction is the reliance on brutal pragmatism in American society, the banality of ordinary discourse and the appetite for scandal. These matters were often brought up in his conversation as well. Who would have suspected, he said, that a writer like himself would sometimes be categorized as “reactionary”?
All the same, he assured me, his books sold, even in today’s market, 60,000–70,000 copies with each new American edition. He continued to receive many letters from readers, some of them anti-Semitic. In spite of this, and the banality, and the scandal, Bellow kept up a moderate optimism. He hoped that American common sense might resist the idiocies of present public and political life. He considered himself lucky to be by disposition a skeptic and to have maintained a clear distance from his daily environment. He had even found himself, at last, in old age, a young and ideal partner. Intelligent, refined, and totally devoted to her husband.
“My own future wife will be a Jew from Little Tokyo,” I told him as I said goodbye, looking at Janis and her almost Japanese, Semitic face.
Bellow’s affectionate wit was seductive, and you knew unmistakably when he had accepted you as an intimate. His sentiment was discernible in all the small courtesies we enjoyed in his Vermont home, where he prepared for us roasted French coffee in the morning, showed me the library and the nearby lake, discoursed on the flowers and the tomcat, and told me about the course he taught at Boston University.
I noted — it was impossible not to notice — his courteous manner around women, that of a conqueror once famous for amorous adventure and for numerous marriages and divorces. With women he became again the easily eternal cavalier, mastering the special idiom of direct, American, affable courtship, the charm, the seductiveness impressive, though obviously tame by comparison with what it had been in earlier years.
I spent time with Bellow also in the tense period before the appearance of a biography about him. He showed me, at a certain moment, the passport that his mother used to leave tsarist Russia. “Am I charged with falsifying my origins? In order to deny my Jewishness, that is? My family name in Russian is Belìi, meaning white. White. It’s just like that. Look: Liza Belia. It became Bellow here, but not somewhere else. But what, really, does this mean for people who are looking for scandal? Does it mean anything?”