Free Saul Bellow's Heart by Greg Bellow Page A

that very moment, the first lines of The Adventures of Augie March poured out of him as if they had been sitting there for a long time. Saul Bellow threw out his garbage—ending his literary apprenticeship by abandoning a fictional style designed to please academics in favor of a naturally flowing prose style that signaled a breakthrough in American literature.
    Saul’s grant money was running out after our first year, but Anita now did not want to leave Paris. My father later maintained that going back to the States meant “facing the music” about ending a marriage they both knew could not survive. In order to support our second year, Anita got a job at Joint Distribution,where she was to find adoptive parents for Jewish orphans who still had no homes four years after the war. I recall sitting in long, frightening hallways when my mother had no choice but to take me on a last-minute visit to an orphanage.
    With a novel that seemed to be writing itself, Saul’s dark mood and demeanor changed radically. He became a jauntily dressed young man about town who participated in a free-spirited café life with writers, painters, and intellectuals. Saul and Kappy Kaplan readily took to these Parisian circles. Both men maintained that they should explore all that life had to offer, including adopting the French tolerance of infidelity as yet another rationale. Fashioning himself an unofficial cultural attaché, Kappy threw large parties where my father often met women who were attracted to him and did not see his marriage as an obstacle to sleeping with him. Soon Anita refused to accompany him, and finally grew intolerant of Saul’s now epic philandering. My parents would rarely complain about each other to friends, but Saul’s sexual roving got so bad that Anita openly commiserated with Celia Kaplan, who suffered even more deeply from her own husband’s open sexual liaisons. A particularly sore point was a serious affair Saul had with a woman named Nadine, whom he had met at one of Kappy’s parties. Nadine had been Kappy’s lover at the time, and threw him over for Saul. The men fell out over it, and Anita, claiming Celia was responsible for introducing Saul to Nadine, ended their friendship, wounding a close friend with a false accusation.
    That affair became a tipping point between Anita and Saul, but according to Herb Gold, Saul had women stashed all over town. In the late 1980s, I spent a week in Paris with my father. During my stay Kappy explained the mores that had prevailedin their youth, which included classifying lovers as first-, second-, and third-tier in emotional, but not sexual, priority. On that visit a belatedly chastened Saul told me how guilty he felt about his behavior forty years earlier, saying “I can’t walk around a corner without thinking of the pain I caused your mother.” But indulging so fully in the sexual freedom Saul found in Paris was just a symptom of the sad state of my parents’ marriage. Anita had had her fill of the gypsy lifestyle. My elementary school education could no longer be postponed, so we left Europe. But by then the marriage was doomed.
    Before returning to the United States, we took a grand cultural tour of Europe. Saul taught at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, which was housed in the Schloss Leopoldskron. I had the run of a castle filled with suits of armor on the landings. It was heaven for a six-year-old boy. I recall playing in a marshy area dotted with statues of sea horses, which I joyfully rode. A very young Ted Hoffman, who became a longtime friend of Saul’s, ran the seminar in an informal way. Eric Bentley was also there with his wife, Maja. Fluent in English and German, Maja got a job with the U.S. government’s occupying forces, which required travel between Salzburg and Vienna, a city still cordoned off by Russian troops. When our month was over Maja took Anita and me to Vienna in her car. I was curled up on the backseat in the middle of the night