To Beena Kamlani, whose kindly function is to face me in the right direction. Her respectful and grateful author. —S. B.
Preface
Yesterday my husband and I took our year-old daughter, Naomi Rose, for a stroll in the neighborhood. The weather was ferociously cold—what the forecasters in these parts unaccountably describe as “blustery.” To escape the icy wind we headed for the Brookline Booksmith. Now when Saul ducks into a bookstore, chances are he’s going to be there for some time. I pulled Rosie out of her snowsuit and attempted to distract her with the dust jacket of Ravelstein. “Who’s this, Naomi Rose? Who’s the man in the picture?” And turning to point at Saul, she answered in that bell-like infant voice of hers that could be heard all through the store, “Dad, dad, dad.” Now Dad was muffled in turtle fleece to the eyebrows, but his face emerged to give her a most delicious smile.
This morning, as I begin to write, I imagine Rosie the reader, a couple of decades deeper into the century. When Rosie is ready for Saul’s books, what memories will there be of Dad at his desk? And does memory need an assist? Will someone produce an accurate portrait of her father at work? Why not begin, I ask myself, with this little preface? To say for Rosie’s sake, and for scores of others who will never see the man sitting down to write—this is how it was done.
Proximity has been my privilege. I was there, for instance, when “The Bellarosa Connection” was born.
It began innocently enough. In the first week of May 1988 en route from Chicago to Vermont we stopped in Philadelphia, where Saul gave a lecture, “A Jewish Writer in America,” for the Jewish Publication Society. In the weeks before he delivered this talk, and for the remainder of that month—during the drive from Philadelphia to Vermont; while exploring Dartmouth, where he was a visiting lecturer; and later in Vermont; where we were doing battle with the blackflies to lay in a garden—our conversation was about nothing but the fate of the Jews in the twentieth century. Just then Saul was facing the final revisions on “A Theft,” and he was wrestling with A Case of Love_—a novel he would never finish. Meanwhile, he was waiting to hear whether “A Theft” had been accepted by The New Yorker._ Both Esquire_ and the Atlantic Monthly_ had already decided the story was too long. It wasn’t in Saul to mope alone by the telephone. Every morning over breakfast he diverted me with puns or entertained me with possible subjects for stories, and often he came downstairs to say that he had dreamed up a new way to jump-start A Case of Love._ Why not introduce an eccentric Parisian pianist of the old school who would teach his heroine about love? We were reading and rereading the proofs of “A Theft.” Saul habitually revises well beyond the last moment. The ending wasn’t right—too many ideas, not enough movement. He would rework it by day and each night I would type and retype the latest pages. In the middle of May we got word that The New Yorker_ had also turned down his story, but Saul was too busy to be checked by bad news. He was reflecting deeply on what should come next, and the weather wasn’t being cooperative. Now I ought to explain that Saul is extremely weather-sensitive. High-pressure azure skies—those of late May and early June—have always turned him on. But in that spring of‘88 the gloomy rain fell day after day. Saul would light a fire in the kitchen, drink his coffee, and then slosh out to the studio through the blackfly-infested soppy grass. He wasn’t writing, he told me; he was going there “to brood.” And he added, “That’s how I’ve always done things—you separate yourself from editors, lawyers, publishers. You set down your burdens and you brood.”
Our Vermont friends and neighbors Herb and Libby Hillman, looking to lift our sagging spirits, invited us to dinner. Over Libby’s homemade bread and roast chicken, the conversation turned once again to the Jewish question, and Saul introduced an idea we had been debating since his Philadelphia lecture. Should the Jews feel shame over the Holocaust? Is there a particular disgrace in being victimized? I was ferociously opposed to this suggestion. As we awaited dessert we let go of the argument. The smell of chocolate announced that the drowsy end of the evening was upon us. Serious subjects gave way to gags, jokes, old chestnuts. But as we were getting ready to leave, our host, a retired chemist specializing in house paints, began to tell the story of one of his colleagues. This man, now dying of lung cancer after a lifetime of exposure to toxins, had been a European refugee in the early forties. I have to admit: while I was scraping the last of the chocolate from my plate, my mind was already on the rain and the slippery ride home. I was not attending as closely as I might have been.
May 24: The first fine day of the season. When Saul came back from the studio for lunch he had that shining-eyed look that made me anticipate his announcement: “I’m on to something new. I don’t want to talk about it just yet.” Next day as we were driving into Brattleboro for our weekly supplies, he elaborated: “I haven’t found a shape for the new story yet, but it’s based on what Herb told us over dinner.” Did I remember the details? No. But fortunately, Saul did: A refugee is imprisoned by the Italian Fascists, but prior to his imprisonment, having become aware that his arrest is imminent, he has written overseas to the Broadway impresario Billy Rose on the advice of a friend. (In the story as Saul eventually wrote it, the hero makes no such appeal to Billy Rose and in fact has never even heard of him.) A mysterious plan is concocted while he waits in his prison cell. He learns that his door will be left open at a certain hour on a certain night. Someone will meet him in the street behind the prison and indicate that he has been sent by Billy Rose. There will be money and instructions about which city to go to until the next contact appears. All happens as planned, and with the aid of these emissaries he escapes to the States. There, he is denied entry because of the quotas, but makes it to Cuba. Years later when he is back in the United States he tries to contact Billy Rose and to thank him in person. But it seems Rose, who has helped a lot of people, will have nothing to do with the refugees he has saved, perhaps fearing that they will lean on him or mooch from him indefinitely. The rescued man is quite shaken by the cold shoulder he gets from Broadway Billy.
Such were the bare bones of the story, as sketched by Saul that day on the way to town, a story no longer about Herb’s friend, but already about a character—Harry Fonstein—“Surviving Harry,” as Saul would later call him, borrowing from John Berryman’s “Dreamsong” (dedicated to Saul) about “Surviving Henry.” Saul, it turned out, knew quite a lot about Billy Rose. For in his Greenwich Village days he had known Bernie Wolfe, who was Rose’s ghostwriter. A Wolfe-like character might become the intermediary between Rose and the protagonist. Wolfe had been a very bright, very savvy and strange man who took an unusual interest in New York people and their obscure motivations. Such a man would be sympathetic to the Fonstein character. Saul then told me a story about going to Wolfe’s place in the Village and noticing an old, worn woman dusting and scrubbing the apartment. On Saul’s way out Wolfe turned to him and said, That lady is my mother.” He hadn’t introduced her or paid her any heed. Why make the confession then? Oh, people had ideas about being open in those Village days, Saul added. They prized their singularity. At that time they worried a great deal about their mental health. What a contrast such low-level American antics would provide to the somber seriousness of the European story.
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 s
tudio 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.
That’s not to say the writing always came easily or that the work went on uninterrupted. By early June Saul had begun turning the yellow pages into manuscript. I remember hearing the sound of the typewriter one morning, and feeling a thrill that his breakfast forecast—“I think I’ve got something here”—was being realized. He was working in the house, and when I took him his tea, I stood by and listened for another volley of staccato fire. Saul hunts down his words with the keys of his Remington. He revises as he types, and spots of silence are followed by these racy rattling rhythmical bursts. He looks forward to this cup of hot tea with one round slice of lemon floating on top. The proper drink for a European Jew on an overcast day, Saul first observed when he visited the empty Jewish quarters of Polish cities. The lemon stands for the sun; the sugar and caffeine give the jolt you need when the surge from your morning coffee subsides. How he was managing to write at all was fairly mysterious, since he would accept no protection from distractions. And there had been many: a visit from a neighbor; phone calls from an agent, a lawyer, a friend (I could always tell from the roars of laughter when it was Allan Bloom on the line). After each interruption the study door would close and the wonderful ack-ack-ack_ of the typewriter would begin again.
A week before his birthday on June 10, Saul read me
the first dozen typed pages of the story. The account of Fonstein’s escape from the Italian prison made me hold my breath then, and every time I’ve heard it since. The narrator would be an older man, recounting a story that had been told to him by Fonstein years earlier.
Though Saul was bushed, he was putting on speed so as to have as much done as possible before we took off for Paris and Rome in the middle of the month. What? Europe, now? Well, we would see Bloom in Paris, and in Italy the Scanno Prize was being offered to Saul. The details of the award—a bag of gold coins, a stay in a hunting lodge in the remote Abruzzi region—had too much of the flavor of adventure to resist. Saul never takes it easy when he is overworked and beginning to feel run down. He continued to ride his mountain bike, to chop up the fallen limbs of an apple tree, to remove boulder-sized rocks from the garden, to carry in logs for the morning fire. I was convinced he had a horseshoe over his head that spring. He tripped while cutting brush and scraped his face; he had a gashed shin to show for a tumble from his mountain bike; his eye was bloodshot; there was a bleeding nose. Of course he worked the morning of the nosebleed, lying down on the futon in the studio whenever the bleeding started, and then getting up to scrawl out a new paragraph. When he hadn’t returned for lunch I carried a bite out to him and found him typing vigorously, his face and his T-shirt covered with blood. Composing for Saul is an aerobic activity. He sweats when he writes, and peels off layers of clothing. When he is concentrating particularly hard, he screws up his left eye and emits a sound that’s a cross between the panting of a long-distance runner and a breathy whistle: “Windy suspirations of forced breath.”
Saul’s birthday—at least for the fourteen years I have celebrated it with him—is always a his-kind-of-working-weather day—blue skies, copper sun, the atmospheric high of high pressure. But there would be no writing today. I should add that time off is something unheard of for Saul. No holidays, no Sabbaths. A birthday is like any other day—a chance to type another couple of pages. He was, however, high as a kite. Family was on the way, and at his request I was baking a devil’s food chocolate cake with chocolate icing and toasted coconut.