Saul Bellow - Collected Stories

Saul had also seen Billy Rose in Jerusalem. What did he look like? I asked. Well, he was small, Jewish; he might have been handsome but for the tense lines in his face. He looked strained, greedy, dissatisfied with himself.”

When we got to town Saul borrowed a book on Billy Rose from the library. We couldn’t turn up any information about Wolfe.

The next day the sun shone again, and when Saul returned from work he said only, “I’ve figured out a way to write this story.”

On May 29 we dawdled to the studio together, and Saul read me the first few pages—handwritten on lined yellow legal-size paper. What struck me at first was how intently he had listened to Herb’s tale. Saul had remembered that the protagonist was in Italy when he had been imprisoned. In Rome the man had managed to become a clerk at a hotel. Thanks to his gift for languages and his false papers, he had such freedom of movement that he’d even found himself at a gathering where Hitler had made an appearance. And so on. Now I’ve always prided myself on my attentiveness—to Saul I am a “genius noticer.” This time it didn’t matter that I’d been less than alert: Saul had been fully present. When he is on to a story, his capacity for hearing and absorbing details expands exponentially. I realized then that a writer does not need to be tuned in all the time. In fact—forgive me, Henry James—being “someone upon whom nothing is lost” is too distracting. A writer keeps to himself, broods, sits quietly. But from the moment when he attaches himself to a story, everything is rearranged. Suddenly, as Saul puts it, the wakeful writer has “feelers all over the place.”

From an after-dinner story came one luminous strand of silk, and over the next few days and then weeks I watched as Saul wove event, accident, memory, and thought—what he had read, what we had discussed, and the contents of his dreams—into that oriental carpet of a novella “The Bellarosa Connection.” This mingling of elements, however, has very little to do with facts, with autobiography. It is so rare and complex and strange a use of human material that even if I were to unravel every thread that found its way into the work, and to describe the process by which each was carded and dyed and woven and tied, I would still come no closer to the secret of its composition.

Saul had already decided that the story would have two central characters: not only this European Jew, Fonstein, who made his escape, but an American Jew as well. He wanted his reader to be able to feel the difference in tone between the two men’s lives. He could mine his own experience and call upon his memories of Wolfe for the American, but who would be the model for his European character? On June 2, Saul told me a long story about his stepmother’s nephew. Over the winter he had learned that this nephew was dead, and he had been oppressed by the fact that the death had occurred some time ago, and that he hadn’t known that the man was gone. At one time he had been very fond of this chess-playing sober young refugee. They had sought each other out at his stepmother’s boring Sunday gatherings. What does it mean to say that you are close to someone, Saul wondered, when you discover that you are relying only on scraps of memory about that person? From these musings came Saul’s notion of the “warehouse of good intentions.” Someone occupies a place in your life, takes on some special significance—what it is, you can’t really say. But you have made a real connection—this person has come to stand for something in your life. Time goes by, you haven’t seen the party, you don’t know what has happened to him, he may even be dead for all you know, and yet you hang on to the idea of the unique importance of that individual. What a shock to discover that memories have become a standin for that warehoused person.

So much of our conversation about the Jewish question revolved around memory. Now it would be Saul’s memories of this late immigrant arrival with his singsong Polish accent, his gift for languages, and his business smarts that would give flavor to his European character, Harry Fonstein. The American narrator in “The Bellarosa Connection” would find out about the death of Fonstein in much the same way that Saul learned of the death of his stepmother’s nephew.

When pieces of life begin to find their way into the work, there is always something magical about the manner in which they are lifted from the recent—or distant—past or the here and now, and then kneaded and shaped and subtly transformed into narrative. Saul did have a nightmare like the one that wakes his narrator. He described what it felt like to be overcome by midnight dread, to be in that pit without the strength to climb out. And he did have a stepmother who parted her hair in the middle and baked delicious Strudel. And while lecturing in Philadelphia we had visited a grand old mansion much like the home Saul’s narrator would find himself uncomfortably, awkwardly inhabiting. And there are so many bits that never find their way into the narrative. Here’s one I loved: The European, Harry Fonstein, tells the American about the way he grieved for his mother, whom he had buried in Ravenna, by speaking of his aversion to a particular shade of blue-gray. This was the color of the shroud in which he had buried his mother. In our hotel room in Philadelphia, Saul and I had been talking about the way certain colors impress you. He had told me then that his own mother had been buried in a blue-gray shroud.

To watch these details working their way into or out of the novella is nothing like the cutting and pasting of actual events. Biographers, beware: Saul wields a wand, not scissors. He is no fact-collector. Better to imagine Prospero at play. Or to picture Saul as he lights out for the studio: a small boy with his satchel and his piece of fruit.

Most mornings we linger. Work will wait. We tour the “giardino” and see which flowers have appeared. This June there is a white anemone of which Saul is enormously proud (there’s never been another before or since—the moles seem to get at the bulbs). The giant red-orange poppies are budding, the peonies will flower this year in time for Saul’s birthday, and there’s one early bright purple cosmos blossom. We admire a fat sassy snake curling among the wild columbines. “The whole world is an ice cream cone to him,” Saul laughs as he disappears into his studio.

Everything must be taken up nimbly, easily, or not at all. You can’t read Saul without being aware of the laughter running beneath every word. He has always been playful. Now he is also firm and spare. There is also the matter of taste. Sometimes a detail is borrowed because the flavor is right (like Charlus and the telephone in the narrator’s mansion—never mind the anachronism). Saul generally steers clear of puzzles and riddles. Lovers of word games must look to Joyce or Nabokov for the serious pleasures of the anagrammist. What we find instead is Stendhalian brio—laughter, whimsy, lightness of touch. Odd, perhaps, that I should speak of laughter in considering what is essentially Saul’s darkest look at one of the century’s most serious subjects. But “Bellarosa” wasn’t born in anger. Everything that moved Saul deeply at that time found its way into the novella, and what moved him deeply, no matter how serious, was a source of energy and ultimately of pleasure. This was a time when we were often up toward dawn—discussing the story, his memories of New Jersey or of Greenwich Village, and most often the history of the Jews. But perhaps because we were young lovers then my memories ofthat spring are anything but dark. Saul was writing this powerful, even horrible book with intense heat and joy, dipping into his brightest colors.