Saul Bellow's Heart by Greg Bellow – digested read
John Crace reduces the memoir written by the son of the American literary titan to a reputation-changing 600 words
John Crace
Sun 14 Apr ‘13 17.00 BST
I
n the painful days after Saul's death, I resolved to keep my grief private. But as I listened to yet more parvenus, such as the in-all-senses-diminutive Martin Amis, seek to claim my father as their own, I felt a need to put a halt to the absurd conflation of literary figure and family man. These self-appointed, self-serving narratives described a deified figure I didn't recognise. Saul was an intensely private man who would have hated to see his shortcomings ruthlessly exposed. But tough: he was a mean, cantankerous old sod, and it's about time I got some emotional and financial payback.
As a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist of some 40 years standing, you might have expected me to adopt a holistic approach to understanding my father. But I have found it much more helpful to divide his life into two: the Young Saul, who loved me greatly and was generally a good bloke; and the Old Saul, who found it hard to show how much he loved me and was generally a bit of a shit. This way I don't need to make sense of why he appeared to have a complete personality change. Or, indeed, examine the more troubling possibility that he never did care for me, and that I and the rest of his family were inconvenient physical manifestations of his narcissism.
The Young Saul was born in Canada in 1915 and, though his father was consistently abusive and his brothers bullied him, he came to look on his early years as "a very paradise", as even the most simplistic reading of Herzog will show you. The Bellow family moved to the coalyards of Chicago in 1924, where a loss of innocence ignited Saul's desire to be a world-famous writer; when he met Anita, they embarked on the Gypsy Years.
Saul loved Anita greatly, though his leftwing views forced him to rebel against petit-bourgeois monogamy by shagging almost every woman he met. I was born in 1944, and I clearly remember him saying: "My life is complete now I have a first-born son" as I appeared from the cosy, warm embrace of Anita's womb. Following my appearance, Saul's literary genius took wing and with The Adventures of Augie March he found a wealth and success that allowed him to leave my mother and have sex with even more women.
Before long, Saul had got remarried, divorced, remarried again, divorced again, remarried yet again and divorced yet again. "The reason I see so little of you," he would say, "is that my love for you is so intense that were we to meet more often my heart would explode with joy." How I enjoyed the 10 minutes I spent with Young Saul when he reluctantly invited me to Oslo for the Nobel prize ceremony – an award he never felt he deserved – and it is with great fondess I recall us discussing the failure of his Reichian therapy.
Such was the greatness and intensity of Saul's writing during this period (and it was with great reluctance that he changed the title of Greg's Gift to Humboldt's Gift) that he failed to notice I had got married and had children. Yet still I felt a unique filial bond between myself and the Young Saul. All this changed when he met Janis, a mere teenager with whom he had a daughter. Now he became Old Saul, a bitter and twisted, demented, mean old conservative who cast aside his old family and in whose last book, Ravelstein, it is clear that all his works were nothing but thinly disguised second-rate autobiography, a lashing out at all those whom he truly loved.
Yet, somehow, now I have completed my own book I feel reconnected to the father whom I truly loved and who loved me more than anyone else. The hatred and misunderstanding is past. The skies are clear. I forgive you, Father, for you know not what you did.
Digested read, digested: Oedipus Schmoedipus.
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