Free Saul Bellow's Heart by Greg Bellow

Minneapolis. Our gypsy lifestyle was wearing on her. She wanted to settle down and have another child. Somewhere in Europe, frustrated by too many moves, she went on strike, planting her bottom on our trunks and refusing to go to our next destination. Saul had to move the luggage and carry my intransigent mother as well.
    American money went far in postwar Paris, and we lived in relative comfort. But daily life was a physical challenge. All three of our apartments during the time in Paris were coal heated, and there was no refrigeration. Shopping was a daily or even twice-daily matter; Anita would go out with her filet , or net, to shop, and then return to cook our next meal. Fresh milk was hard to come by, but we had access to the military PX, where we bought dreadful-tasting powdered milk. Anita resorted to adding cocoa to make the mixture more palatable, although a repellent scum still formed as soon as it cooled. My parents hired a maid named Augusta to cook, clean, and look after me. She came to her job interview immaculately dressed but showedup to work in carpet slippers and hair curlers, and minus her false teeth. Augusta made me sit in the stairwell while my parents were out, and they fired her after I told them. Lillian Bodnia, a Danish Jew who had hidden with her family during the Holocaust, became my nanny. She and I cut and pasted hearts and made long chains of colored paper ovals, and she introduced me to stamp collecting.
    Anita did not want me to begin first grade in a French public school, so I spent an extra year in a private bilingual kindergarten. I was already shy, and our frequent moves made it worse. The few children among my parents’ friends were my only playmates. Surrounded by adults, I became proficient at amusing them. My imitation of Americans trying to speak French was a big hit. I roller-skated in the Tuileries and liked to jump over the fences and run in the grass. However, I was poorly coordinated and fell so often that I acquired the nickname “Tomato Knees,” as they were always painted in red Mercurochrome. Years later, on a visit to Paris, I was surprised to see how low the barriers around the lawns in the Tuileries actually are.
    Paris was teeming with young American expatriates, among them Herbert Gold, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin, whose apartment had no shower. Baldwin came over regularly to use ours, usually showing up around dinnertime, Saul wryly noted. Saul and Jesse Reichek, a young American painter, used to meet after work in a café and play casino over beer in the summer and hot cocoa in the winter. Several Chicago friends, including Julian Behrstock and Harold “Kappy” Kaplan, who worked for the U.S. State Department, now lived there. But even friendships held little cheer for a very depressed Saul during our early months in a dreary Paris.
    I learned about how Saul’s mood was intertwined with a literary dilemma from the letters he wrote years later to Philip Roth, which Roth published right after my father died. Saul was stuck on a novel with a morbid theme titled The Crab and the Butterfly . Though abandoned and never published, the novel reveals the literary breakthrough brewing within my father. It centers on two men: one is in a hospital dying while the other urges him to cling to life. The death of one character and the survival of the other, I think, reflect two parts of Saul Bellow, a novelist in transition. The character who dies is the part of Saul that clung to the familiar, though doomed, academic fictional forms of his European “mentors.” The survivor is the writer with a freewheeling style of writing who was about to burst forth in the pages of The Adventures of Augie March .
    As this struggle was going on within, Saul was walking down the street watching merchants hose fruit and vegetables that had gone bad into the Seine, ridding themselves of once useful commodities that had lost their value and creating tiny rainbows of water in the gutter. At