goodbye

I just found out the sad news that Saul Bellow died. This news brought a flood of memories.

Many years ago, when I was in graduate school, Cynthia worked as his assistant. Through this connection, she and I were chosen to house-sit his huge apartment during the summer, when he and his wife went to their home in Vermont. Although he was one of the most famous professors at U. Chicago, he was reclusive, and I had never seen him on campus. His apartment was in a building nicknamed the "Nobel Buiding" because several Nobel Prize winners lived in there: Milton Friedman, the economist, and a physicist with a long amazing Hindi name that I cannot remember, among others. The apartment had walls of glass. On a high floor, it had four bedrooms and two bathrooms and a panoramic view of the lake. Best of all, from this vantage point you could not see the university, so while it was practically on campus, I could pretend, while staring out at Lake Michigan, that school did not exist, which was very helpful for my psyche since I was finishing my dissertation and was riddled with anxiety over it. The central air-conditioning was a godsend (Chicago can be an inferno in the summer, and in previous summer, in my top-floor apartment on Harper, with no AC, I sometimes had to sleep in the bathtub to keep from getting heat stroke). From Mr. Bellow's bathtub you could see the storms roll in over Lake Michigan. The bed I slept in had a hand-made mattress, the most comfortable bed I have ever known. Two cleaning ladies came every Saturday and scrubbed, and most amazing, did the laundry, going to far as to iron my boxers.

The previous April Cynthia took me to meet Mr. Bellow for his approval (to make sure that we were suitably appropriate to live in his house and guard his privacy). I was quite nervous. Mr. Bellow had a reputation for having a sabre tongue, and while it was clear that he was not one to suffer fools, he was quite charming, gracious and funny. I met with his approval and we moved in five weeks later. I sublet the Harper apartment to two undergraduate women, who it turned out were such slobs that the landlord was furious. I didn't care, as I never returned to that apartment; I moved to NYC at the end of August, leaving everything behind except my music, books and clothes.

In that apartment was able to successfully finish my dissertation. I will never forget living in a place that was suffused with the presence of a great genius, and I had never lived in a home of such subtle affluence. We were instructed never to reveal Mr. Bellow's whereabouts or phone numbers; such a famous writer was constantly beseiged by all sorts of lunatics, and well-meaning but persistent admirers. One evening the phone rang (the private line), and I answered as I had been instructed, revealing nothing. "This is Philip Roth," a voice said. "I need to speak with Saul Bellow." I was frozen. Was I to treat Philip Roth, whom I knew was a close friend of Mr. Bellow's, like another anonymous caller? Then I grew suspicious. Philip Roth was a close friend of Mr. Bellow's, and surely he knew that Bellow never spent the summer in Chicago. Suddenly the voice burst into laughter. It was my friend Richard. He was just goofing on me.

Saul Bellow as a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest, and behind his bristly intimidating façade I sensed he was a man of great humanity and sympathy. It is a sad day.