Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir by Greg Bellow – review

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Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir by Greg Bellow – review

Greg Bellow's memoir about his father Saul lacks literary weight
  • The Observer,
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  • Greg Bellow pictured with his father Saul in 1969. Photograph: Michael Mauney/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
    If the real children of great men and women are their deeds (their books, in the case of writers), where does that leave mere flesh and blood? Stranded, with a sense of profound but broken connection. This state is likely to become permanent with the death of the parent, but Greg Bellow got used to it early. His father left the first Mrs Bellow, Anita, when Greg was eight.
    1. Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir
    2. by Greg Bellow

    1. Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
    Greg Bellow is a retired psychotherapist, someone who has made damage and healing his life's work. He should be well placed to reconcile his father's contradictions, or to reconcile himself to them, though it doesn't work out that way. Therapists don't necessarily understand their own drives, any more than novelists, also traders in insight, necessarily understand theirs.
    It needn't be a stumbling block that Bellow junior doesn't himself have a literary background. True, he reads novels as if the personal impulses that have gone into them could be reconstituted without difficulty, though you might as well try to turn cider back into apples. But then so do many literary biographers. He does go badly wrong when relaying a conversation he had with his father in Chicago in 1980. They ran into a former professor who had once greeted Saul chafingly with the question, "How is the romancier?" As Greg recalls it: "Even decades later, Saul remained mystified that Leites could have so mischaracterised him as a romantic. To the contrary, I was mystified that my father could not see, or could no longer see, that his youthful idealism had been readily apparent to his teacher." Even quite a small French dictionary would have told him that romancier means only novelist, having no direct connection with romanticism.
    Still, that's the book's thesis, that Saul Bellow was a young rebel, a political and social radical, who turned into an authority figure, after which he spent a lot of effort erasing from the official picture such youthful follies as a flirtation with the ideas of Wilhelm Reich. Greg remembers an orgone box installed in the hallway of one apartment, like a telephone booth where all calls were made naked.
    This isn't a worthless reading of Bellow's development, from "a young man full of questions to an old man full of answers". There's certainly a shift in world-view between Herzog in 1964 and Mr Sammler's Planet in 1970. It's just that Greg's need to claim the Saul Bellow he remembers from his childhood (or has reconstructed from it) as the essence of the man overwhelms any nuance of interpretation. It's all very well to talk about "the young father I loved and wanted to preserve" but that impulse denies more of the past than it respects. Both Bellows saw the armed conflicts of the 1960s as crucial, for instance, but for Greg what mattered was Vietnam, while for Saul it was the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Rewinding the tape isn't a possibility.
    The tone is suspect from the first paragraph, a memory of a "terrible argument" Greg witnessed as an eight-year-old, conducted in Yiddish, between Saul and Saul's father while on a visit to Chicago, after which Saul wept bitterly in the car. "I knew his heart was breaking. I knew because of the bond between my father's tender heart and mine." That's not how any eight-year-old could feel about family anger and a parent's loss of control. Besides, if Greg was eight then the argument is likely to have been about Saul's imminent departure from his marriage (Yiddish wasn't a household language in Greg's childhood, though knowledge of German later enabled him to follow it). A poignant or else preposterous moment to claim a connection with your father's vulnerability, when he's on the point of abandoning you.
    Greg refers to Bellow "raising" three sons, but that's just what he didn't do. James Atlas in his biography refers rather patly to Bellow leaving a wife when he felt displaced by the arrival of a son, and could no longer himself be the child. The other sons, Adam and Daniel, had an even shorter time of nurturing than Greg.
    If softness was at Saul Bellow's core, then it follows that he needed to keep it out of sight as much as possible. The only letter from Saul to Greg in the published volume of Bellow's correspondence is caustic and needling, after Greg (aged 16) had protested against his father paying less than the full alimony to Anita: "I've never billed her for the pain she caused me. Or is it a one-way street?" Greg presents a soft-focus version of this in Saul Bellow's Heart – "he asked me to be fair to both parents" – and plays down the pain that made him write his own letter, which included the line "Don't make me ashamed to admit I'm your son".
    Greg is proud of having struck out independently from his father, making his own decisions, but his independent status is a paradoxical thing if he craved his father's approval for it. He was deeply hurt when Saul, near the end of his life, failed to attend the wedding of Greg's daughter, and though he claims to have minded on her behalf it's hard to imagine that the bride's big day was spoiled by Saul's absence, as her father's was.
    The strangest thing in the book is its unacknowledged hostility towards Janis, Bellow's fifth and final wife. In the account of Bellow's funeral at the beginning of the book, Greg mentions that he stood up, without being prompted, to praise Janis for her devotion. Yet by the time the funeral is referred to again at the other end of the book, references to a "coup d'etat" by her and even a "kidnapping" of Saul have intervened. Greg's own eulogy is forgotten. Instead he criticises the rabbi's tribute for romanticising the relationship between Janis and Saul.
    The title of the first section, "Awakened by a Grave Robbery", at first seemed to express in a rather overpitched way Greg's sense that he was marginalised when his father died, by the way so many people claimed the privilege of bereavement. By the end of the book it seems to refer more directly to the fact that Janis had Saul buried in Vermont, far from where he had earlier wanted to lie, next to his parents.
    Even without these manifestations of the anger he denies, Saul Bellow's Heart would be a forlorn project. It's just not possible for Greg Bellow to win the race he insists on running, when he's up against the athletes on his bookshelves, ink in their veins instead of blood – the books that have usurped him.

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