Saul Bellow's Heart (9 page)

No doubt partly because he was disenchanted with Anita and our increasingly conventional lifestyle, Saul followed Isaac Rosenfeld into Reichian analysis. A fringe version of psychoanalysis based on Wilhelm Reich’s late-career ideas about cosmic energy and heightening sexual gratification, Saul began therapy with Dr. Chester Rayfield. Dr. R., as my parents called him, practiced in Forest Hills. According to Saul, Reichian technique emphasized breaking down intellectual resistance to maximize the power of the body and emotion. In the middle of the winter with the window wide-open, Saul lay on the couch in his underwear while Dr. R., wearing an overcoat, characterized his bodily postures as defenses and encouraged him to express his bestial impulses. Roaring like a lion became a favorite activity that he and I continued for years whenever a loud subway train pulled into our station.

We had an orgone box, a device designed to capture and intensify celestial energy. About the size of a telephone booth and lined with Brillo pads, it occupied a niche in the hallway. Isaac and Vasiliki Rosenfeld had a two-seater in their tiny Barrow Street apartment. Perhaps because adults went into it nude, at seven I grasped its purpose and sat in it for long, uninterrupted masturbatory sessions that neither permissive parent thought to stop.

Hoping to save her marriage, Anita went to Dr. R. for a few visits and must have placed great faith in the therapist’s opinion. Sixty years later I still shudder when I recall Anita’s plaintive tone as she asked Saul about Dr. R.’s view on some matter. My mother hoped in vain. Dr. R.’s assessment was that Anita’s character was too rigid. He advocated a divorce. Reichian analysis merely confirmed Saul’s opinion that Anita was an unsuitable wife and supported his complaints about her narrowness and controlling nature.

Anita was the major family breadwinner and kept a series of envelopes in her dresser drawer, neatly labeled and filled with the money needed to pay each bill. As their marriage deteriorated, my father was dismayed to find an envelope labeled “Saul” in her dresser, as if he were just another expense. For decades Saul used his horror at finding that envelope to justify the divorce to me. Years later, as my father repeated the story about using his windfall from Lescha’s insurance policy to finance my parents’ 1940 trip to Mexico, I asked how exactly he had spent the five hundred dollars. After decades of complaint about Anita and her envelopes, Saul sheepishly confessed that he had turned the cash over to her.

Saul and Anita slept in separate rooms for many months while he vacillated about leaving for good. Anita’s enthusiasm for the gypsy life may have worn off after fifteen years, but she loved Saul and clung to the marriage. As they were separating, my grandmother Goshkin came to New York to “talk some sense” into him. She failed. In Saul’s play
The Wrecker
, written during these years, his protagonist uses a crowbar to demolish the apartment he and his wife shared. He explains to his mother-in-law that in order to go forward the past had to be destroyed.
Two decades later, Saul told Barley Alison, his English literary agent, “Reichian therapy broke up my first marriage.”

In late 1951 Saul returned to Salzburg and Paris, probably to be with Nadine. In his absence, the rebellious eighteen-year-old daughter of a neighbor moved into our apartment to take care of me and to escape her mother. According to her, my mother had a brief affair with her hairdresser while Saul was away. The night of his return, Anita went to bed early, provocatively leaving him alone with the highly attractive sitter. Both told me they began to neck. Saul later said that he quickly realized it was crazy and stopped. The sitter reported that Anita came out of the bedroom, by the sitter’s account to prevent her from revealing Anita’s affair, though my view is that Anita was testing Saul and that he had failed. The young woman went home, and I can only imagine the argument that followed.

Saul told me about the impending end of the marriage on a bench in Central Park. I responded by making a snowball and letting fly at a nearby pigeon. What I really wished for was the courage to hit my father with the snowball. Under the childhood anger my father expected and hoped to see was sadness born of losing the parent who understood me best. At eight, I felt like a deep-sea diver cut off from my air supply.

Saul wrote
Augie March
during the lowest point in my parents’ marriage. In the novel he describes Augie’s trip to Mexico with a woman companion, Thea Fenchel, who invites him to help her to train an eagle to hunt giant iguanas. Contrary to its reputation as a wild animal, the great hunter dislikes the dangers of the chase and soon comes to prefer being tethered and hand-fed. In an echo of the near end of my parents’ marriage in Mexico a
decade earlier, Augie, no doubt to prove to himself that he is unfettered, is all too easily seduced into helping another woman escape a failing romance. Augie returns from his mission of mercy to find that Thea has gone off on yet another adventure with a new male companion. She rejects the lonely Augie’s belated proclamation of love and leaves him to fend for himself.

Just as Saul’s literary character uses one woman to sever the ties that bind him to another, my father used an epidemic of philandering in Paris to escape what he considered Anita’s control and to communicate that he wanted out. But Augie’s ruminations about freedom’s illusions reveal my father’s deepest feelings about his marriage to my mother. Saul, like Augie, knew he had wronged Anita by going off with other women. In a harsh novelistic self-indictment, Saul cedes my mother the moral high ground, comparing his love, tainted by chronic sexual and personal selfishness, with her unselfish love. Saul’s post-divorce “freedom” was to be short-lived. His romance with Alexandra Tschacbasov, who became Saul’s second wife—a woman from a truly bohemian family and a damsel also in distress—was already deepening. It was Anita, the more independent of the two, who was to be free for a decade.

Chapter Five
Heartache: 1952–56

Saul’s departure split my life in two. My father, in many ways a kid who never grew up, who often worked at home, and who understood my feelings, was no longer an everyday presence in my life. After six years of the gypsy life, I had few friends from the neighborhood and was painfully shy. I was lonely, sad, and now a latchkey kid in the Forest Hills apartment living with a depressed mother. Every other weekend and for one summer month I had emotionally sustaining visits with Saul that I tried desperately to prolong but that ended in sadness at being away from the person who was essentially my best friend. Shuttling between two existences only worsened my misery.

In Forest Hills I went off to school with a liverwurst sandwich in my lunch box and came home to an empty house with a snack in the fridge. After eating I would dress myself head to toe in a cowboy outfit and head upstairs to our neighbors’ apartment to watch
The Lone Ranger
and
Hopalong Cassidy
while I waited for Anita to come home. My mother was mortified that I had so readily abandoned the European culture she and
Saul had tried to cultivate for American television. Anita was tending her own wounds and had less room than usual for my sadness. At dinner soon after the separation, I asked for kumquats for dessert. Anita said no. I complained that we used to have them when Saul was there and we were a family. She countered, “We’re not a family anymore.” I left the room, crushed.

Anita wrote a stoic letter to Sonia about the marriage ending but refused to grant Saul a divorce. The legal wrangling dragged on for years. Strapped for funds, Anita appealed to Grandpa Bellow for the money to buy a winter coat. She intended to make Saul look bad, but crying poverty did not endear her to the Bellows. Even after fifteen years of relying on her income, Saul wrote letters to friends and family during their legal battles about Anita wanting blood, making her out to be money hungry. The very idea of making regular payments, most of all alimony, infuriated him. When Saul dropped me off from custodial visits, it was rare that he left without taking a piece of fruit from the fridge, fruit for which he felt he was paying, and putting a few books under his arm. And he needled Anita. With one monthly check my father included a sarcastic note that read, “Hooray for socialism in one country!” His implication, clear to my mother, was that if Trotsky’s notions for worldwide revolution had prevailed as they had both hoped, he would not have to send her alimony. Years later Anita told me that during their long, bitter financial battle, she had a recurrent fantasy that Saul was going to pick me up for custodial visits in a gold Cadillac. Despite the windfall provided by
Augie March
, he thought of himself as a starving artist who should not be burdened with mundane concerns like money. Beginning with his first successful
novel, for decades Saul was never sure he had another novel within him that would sell, let alone sell well.

Anita avoided dating and even discouraged attention from men. But, given her great beauty, they were drawn to her. Lillian Blumberg, then living in Greenwich Village with the art critic Clement Greenberg, tried to maintain friendly relations with both Saul and Anita when they separated. In the spirit of women’s equality, liberalism, and Reichianism, Lillian invited both to a party. A male guest flirted with my mother and, despite their separation, Saul got so upset that the two men got into a fight in the street over Anita.

When the final divorce papers were served, my usually stoic mother went into her bedroom, closed the door, and sobbed. Anita righted herself after several unhappy years. She went into therapy, developed a more positive self-image than she had during my parents’ marriage, and completed her social work master’s degree in 1957. She remained a strong proponent of personal and political freedom, liberation, idealism, tolerance, socialism, free speech, and birth control. On a visit with the McClosky family about two years after Saul moved out, a reinvigorated Anita confessed to Mitzi that she now repeated the same amusing stories Saul had told and retold in Minneapolis that had so irritated her. On that same visit Anita delivered a description of sexual intercourse and birth control methods to me, aged eleven, and Jane McClosky, one year my senior, so graphic that it became family lore.

During the school year Saul picked me up for bimonthly visits. Anticipating a few happy hours with my father, I’d watch for him out the front window as I waited. He was often late and
sometimes did not show up at all. I do not remember either parent criticizing the other during those years, but decades later Anita told me how crushed I was when disappointed by my father not showing up. Going to meet Saul one day, Anita and I were on the subway but the train would not budge from the stop before ours. I panicked, fearful that he’d leave and not calmed by Anita’s reassurances. Finally we got out of the subway and took a cab two blocks, where we found him.

On cold winter Saturday afternoons, Saul and I would go to MoMA, look at the pictures, eat looking out at the sculpture garden, and watch an old movie in the basement theater. Or we would go to the Met, where I enjoyed the armor. Another amusement was joining Sam Goldberg, Saul’s lawyer and friend, during long hours in the used-book stores just north of the Village. Sam’s love of books exceeded even my father’s. Books spilled out of his dresser drawers and were piled high in every room of his two houses. The reward for my patience in the bookstores was lunch at the Eighth Street Delicatessen. My favorite outing was to attend a double or triple feature of W. C. Fields and Mae West or the Marx Brothers. Saul and I knew every quip by heart and laughed until our sides hurt. For years my father used humor to jolly me out of the bad mood that always overtook me when it was time to say goodbye.

Saul understood my black moods because he had so many of them himself, and because he felt responsible for my sadness. His life was moving very fast. Saul was never in the same place for long, worsening our visits because I was often in new places and with unfamiliar people, mostly adults. Our summer month was better because we established a daily routine and had plenty of time with each another. After one summer visit I remember
as particularly happy, I returned to Forest Hills and Anita made my favorite dinner to celebrate. After she went to work the next morning, I found myself alone in the apartment. Lonely and upset, I called Saul, and he met me for lunch at the Met. His understanding of my sadness was comforting that afternoon but offered no real substitute for his daily presence in my life.

After the first miserable year with my parents apart, I hit upon the idea of a dog. Lobbying hard with both parents, I clinched the deal with the promise “If I got a dog, I’d never be sad again.” Anita agreed after setting the condition that Saul house-train the dog. By then Saul’s future second wife, Alexandra Tschacbasov, was joining us during some of my visits. Anita Phillips, a former roommate of Alexandra’s, owned a dachshund about to have puppies, and she gave me one. My father named her Lizzie after Elizabeth Barrett Browning, because both had sad eyes. Saul and I trained Lizzie that summer and I took her with me on visits to him until I left for college.

Alexandra Tschacbasov, whom I always called Sasha, was an only child born in 1931. Her mother, Esther, was a gentle, kindhearted woman. By the time I met Esther she had left Sasha’s father but lived a few blocks from him. After Saul and Sasha married, Esther joined us for weekends, entertaining me with card games during the interminable mornings when my father was writing and everyone else was supposed to remain quietly occupied.

Sasha describes her father as completely self-centered. Dissatisfied with his middle-class Chicago origins and the life of a businessman, he took the family to France when Sasha was
one so he could study painting. For three years he studied with Fernand Léger and adopted the name Nahum Tschacbasov, which was similar to that of his original Russian family. They returned to New York and moved frequently between lofts and studios in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Sasha was a favorite subject, and Nahum’s paintings of her as a little girl still adorn her walls.