by Saul Bellow
I think this is a fault of all American books, including my own. They pant so after meaning. They are earnestly moral, didactic; they build them ever more stately mansions, and they exhort and plead and refine, and they are, insofar, books of error. A work of art should rest on perception. “Here” in other words, “is my vision, be meaning what it may.” The rest doesn’t count a bit. Ralph is wrong to think that it did. I tell him so often.
And I can’t understand the passion for adding meaning to meaning in a work of art, and making meaning proliferate from ordinary incidents. The original guilty parties are perhaps Proust and James. Let us assume that Proust at least could not help himself. But this is a hanging matter with James, and with the rest of us. Aren’t there jungles enough—personal, racial, national, historical? Must we make more snakes, grow more lianas, more leaves, cause more heat, sting and cause more scratching? May I say one last thing? Writing should derive from the Creation, and not attempt to add to it. We should require things to be simpler and simpler, greater and greater.
Anyway, with your permission, I will send your essay to Delmore S[chwartz]. He may want it in shorter form. Do you mind? I’ll phone you when I’m in town next weekend to discuss your visit to Bard. I think you’d like it here. Meanwhile, curse me if you must; forgive if you can, your old and faithful pal,
Bellow first met Ruth Miller in 1938 at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, where she was his student. Delmore Schwartz was at this time an editor at Partisan Review. In 1991 Miller would publish Saul Bellow: The Biography of an Imagination, which ended their long association.
To Pascal Covici
[n.d.] [Barrytown]
Dear Pat:
Have done most of Wilhelm over de novo. What do you think of Seize the Day as a title?
Plus a few words from Flaubert to the effect that tears are to the heart what water is to fishes.
Can you send me (ominous words) a copy of A. Miller’s last play or plays?
The 15th, your deadline, is a Sunday. So let’s make it the week of the 15th. Don’t forget that in addition to everything else I have to entertain a friend of yours who is arriving the day after tomorrow. I am working like a miner, so there’s no lack of earnestness, only a certain aged slowness of the mind and fingers.
Love and kisses,
To Henry Volkening
October 19, 1955 Sutcliffe Star Route, Reno, Nevada
Dear Henry:
I’ve simmered down, by slow degrees. As you have guessed, it isn’t easy to follow this course. I’m living alone, thirty miles from anywhere, in the desert. The ranch proved too expensive, and I have taken this cabin, or shack, decent and pleasant in its way, but its isolation is beyond anything you’ve ever seen. I thought it would be better to live like this for a while and study my soul, and I still think it is the wise course for me. I have even begun to work again, after weeks of idleness. But there are times when I must, and literally do, howl.
In answer to your question, this is my permanent address in Nevada. How long I will stay here depends on my wife. And henceforth, that is all that does depend on her wish. After six weeks, I will be free under the laws of Nevada to move about as I wish, and I will keep my cabin and spend a good deal of my time in San Francisco, where I have friends. Nevada divorces are valid everywhere after a year.
Sondra is in Los Angeles. We both felt it to be wiser for her to be there. I have no intention of bouncing from divorce into marriage. When I have lived for a year or so freed from my burden and still feel as I do about Sondra we will begin to think about marrying.
I have not forgotten the Illinois piece. It’s about half done now, and should be ready about the middle of November.
Thanks for your patience, Henry. I value your friendship.
Best,
To Pascal Covici
November 1, 1955 Sutcliffe Star Route, Reno, Nevada
Dear Pat:
Sand and poison, eh?
Look, Pat, let’s not make baby talk. I am not one of your money-mad writers, and whatever you and Henry decide upon will be acceptable to me. You know perfectly well why I was sore. But I’ll spell it out for you, so that you can’t possibly avoid my meaning.
I am not Andrea del Bellow the faultless writer; I am a sinner like the rest. I can’t expect to please everyone, I know, least of all some of your editorial colleagues. They, I realize, are indispensable to you, whereas I am not. But you are my editor, aren’t you? Now when they grumble about me, I hear the echo from you, and should I deny my own hearing? And should I be pleased about it when complaints about my unpleasantness come down to me? And should I be happy when it is necessary to submit my stories, like any lousy beginner, before a contract can be drawn? The stories should have come to me for reworking, and when I was satisfied with them it is my opinion that Viking should have received them and published them without a single damn syllable of protest.
If you don’t want these stories you needn’t take them. I won’t get my sand and poison up and bolt Viking. I love you too much for that and I don’t want my books to be published by a canning concern. But stand by me honorably, and don’t give me any Madison Ave. double-talk, but consider my pride as a workman. I am not unqualifiedly enthusiastic about everything I write. When I have read through them, I myself may not want to publish these things. But that should rest with me.
As for the advance, I am not one of your four-star generals weighted to the balls with medals and prestige; nevertheless you haven’t lost much dough on me yet.
You old bat, if I didn’t love you like a parent I’d never get so worked up.
Yours,
To Ruth Miller
November 5, 1955 Reno
Dear Ruth:
I sit here drinking Ming Cha tea and eating Belgian biscuits and looking at Irving’s picture. You’ve done a good thing, the two of you, you’ve made me very happy. Because it is so good to be remembered, especially when you are absolutely, unconditionally and almost astrally alone. After several weeks at a place for dudes, I took a cabin in the desert. Solitude isn’t so difficult; I’ve developed a taste for it. But it is rather dangerous in its own fashion, and it’s part of your good deed to have recalled me from this one-man lotus banquet.
I found that I had acquired such a charge during the last few years in New York that it gave me a case of the bends to change pressure. I’ve been here now for almost six weeks and have almost fulfilled the minimum residence requirement. Of course, unless Anita is converted I shall have to be here a good while longer; and if she is on some Road to Damascus it’s odd she hasn’t [arrived] yet, for she’s been around the earth several times, in miles. I don’t expect her to stop persecuting me. All the same, she’s in for a bit of a shock herself. Sometimes it strikes me funny, and when I laugh no one hears. I can whoop my head off out here; it startles only the coyotes.
Next week I’m going down to San Francisco for a while, to see how civilization will affect me. I’m horribly excited by it, and can hardly sleep. I can scarcely adjust myself to Reno, with its slot machines. What will I do in San Francisco where I have friends, and where I’m to meet Sondra? She has been in Los Angeles all this while.
It was wonderful of Irv to send me the picture; I sit and admire it, and perhaps my judgment isn’t altogether artistic; the thing has values of sentiment for me. I thank you both with all my heart.
Do I get a letter too?
Love,
To Samuel Freifeld
November 5, 1955 Reno
Dear Sam’l:
Here I sit in the desert. I took a very remote place, by preference. I needed such a place, and it has served its purpose—though no purpose is ever served as fully as the words would have it. But it’s been fair enough. You will be astonished not to hear complaints, but I haven’t any. Oh yes, now and then it’s gone a little hard with me, but nothing mortal has happened. And now the first six weeks are almost out, and I find myself almost regretting that they’ve gone so quickly. This sort of li
fe suits me more than I would have thought possible. I fish and ride, and walk and read and write; at moments I even think. On Columbus Day I lit a little candle, for isn’t this what America was supposed to have been? Wasn’t one supposed to think a bit here?
Next Wednesday I’m going down to visit the McCloskeys. Aren’t you surprised to hear that they’re in Palo Alto? Herb is with an outfit called The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, an Institute like the one in Princeton but for social scientists. I found him out there and now I’m about to visit, and I’m in a state of rare excitement, for Sasha is going to meet me there, after many weeks alone in L.A.
I’ve been getting carbons of your letters to Covici. You’re far too good to the old bat, believe me. I shall have him do something very special for you, something I haven’t conceived of yet, but something.
I shall throw myself down and cry, “Gentlemen, study my behavior, if you please!” I’ll show them behavior!
I presume you haven’t heard from my brother [Sam]. I’ve sent him a few postcards, and have had a single letter from him. I’m growing fond of my brother again.
The Illinois piece is almost done. It’s scandalous here and there; I mean there are ironies in it that permit a complex reading. I would have been a great legalist, I bet you. Incidentally, Anita should soon be served with my complaint. I love that.
Send me a little note, old pal. Remember you occupy one of the top compartments of my heart.
Regards,
“Illinois Journey,” commissioned by Holiday, would initially be rejected for publication, then printed two years later.
To Alfred Kazin
[n.d.] [Reno]
Hurrah, hurray, hurray!
For Adams, Donald J.
He stands for the best of everything
In his column on Sunday.
Ah, Fielding and Tolstoy
He loves like an old boy.
But give a boost to Joyce or Proust
And he straightaway cries out “Oy!”
“Give me a yarn to read.
I ask for nothing subtle.
The best is what I understand—
The rest you can damn well scuttle.”
L’envoi: “My brow is as high as yours, buddy.
It’s only my green eyeshade that makes it seem lower.”
J. Donald Adams was a regular (and much despised) book reviewer for The New York Times.
To Alfred Kazin
[n.d.] [Reno]
Dear Alfred:
In this wilderness, and that is no figure of speech, I haven’t seen your book yet. But I did chance to see the review in the Times, which I thought so foul that I wanted to bang [Cleanth] Brooks on the head. Eastern white-collar? Why, he might as well have come out flatly with “Jew.” What vileness! How I detest these “rooted” Southerners among us poor deracinated Hebes of the north. I notice that they teach at Yale, though, or Minnesota. If they are not missionaries from Southern culture they are liars and cowards. Christly heavens, what chutzpah!
Accept my double congratulations, on book and baby, and never mind these hookworm victims.
Love,
Brooks had reviewed Kazin’s essay collection The Inmost Leaf in The New York Times Book Review.
1956
To William Faulkner
January 7, 1956 [Reno]
Dear Mr. Faulkner,
The first three proposals seem fair enough although, with the exception of the recommendation on the McCarran Act, rather vague. Of course I agree that it would be a good thing to bring people from Bulgaria and Poland and Hungary here to see America provided that they are not harmed by the police of those countries when they return.
But I am writing this letter in order to give you my views on your suggestion (made, I assume, after I left the meeting) that we ask for the release of Ezra Pound. “While the Chairman of this Committee,” you say, “was awarded a prize by the Swedish Government and was given a decoration by the French Government, the American Government locks up one of its best poets.” This is a truly astonishing piece of reasoning. You, Mr. Faulkner, were deservedly honored by these governments. But you did not, to my knowledge, try to overthrow or undermine either of them. Besides, Pound is not in prison but in an insane asylum. If sane he should be tried again as a traitor; if insane he ought not to be released merely because he is a poet. Pound advocated in his poems and in his broadcasts enmity to the Jews and preached hatred and murder. Do you mean to ask me to join you in honoring a man who called for the destruction of my kinsmen? I can take no part in such a thing even if it makes effective propaganda abroad, which I doubt. Europeans will take it instead as a symptom of reaction. In France, Pound would have been shot. Free him because he is a poet? Why, better poets than he were exterminated perhaps. Shall we say nothing in their behalf?
America has dealt mercifully with Pound in recognizing his insanity and sparing his life. To release him is a foolish and feeble idea. It would identify this program in the eyes of the world with Hitler and Himmler and Mussolini and genocide. But I am not so much concerned with the practical side of the matter here. What staggers me is that you and Mr. Steinbeck who have dealt for so many years in words should fail to understand the import of Ezra Pound’s plain and brutal statements about the “kikes” leading the “goy” to slaughter. Is this—from The Pisan Cantos—the stuff of poetry? It is a call to murder. If it were spoken by a farmer or a shoemaker we would call him mad. The whole world conspires to ignore what has happened, the giant wars, the colossal hatreds, the unimaginable murders, the destruction of the very image of man. And we—“a representative group of American writers”—is this what we come out for, too? A fine mess!
Sincerely yours,
Bellow had been tapped by New York Times journalist Harvey Breit to participate in “People to People,” a committee of writers and publishers established to counter Soviet propaganda and to promote pro-American values abroad. President Dwight Eisenhower had appointed Faulkner as chairman.
To Philip Rahv
[n.d.] [Reno]
Dear Phil:
I have been rewriting Wilhelm, and he’s lengthened a little. Not a great deal. A few thousand words, perhaps, which is proportionately not much. I’m supposed to turn the manuscript over to Viking, soon, and as I hear from Volkening that you don’t need copy until the first of June I have asked Covici to send you galleys. I hope everything works out smoothly. I’ve been so long in this desert banishment, I’ve lost all sense of civilized processes. But we’ll be coming out of this soon. I’m calling this story Seize the Day. Maybe Tamkin ought to say it in Latin: Carpe Diem. That isn’t plausible, however. Anyway, until later in the year, Hail and Farewell. (You can see what a Roman I’ve become in Nevada.)
Best wishes, and many thanks for accepting the story.
To Ruth Miller
[n.d.] [Reno]
Well, honeychild, from first to last, from beginning to end your story is an unbroken and brilliant success. For once you will hear no criticism, nothing but praise and admiration and words of happy pride. Everything you do advances the excitement, the pity, the knowledge. This is what we live for, and when we have suffered and labored for our faults, finally it is given us to say something necessary, and in a world which threatens us with extinction through superfluity, the saying of something necessary is an act of heroic virtue. And this is how I feel towards your story. In order to get the gift and achieve the power you’ve had to go to the hospital more than once. I am sorry for the price. But you’ve well repaid yourself.
The progress of the thing is continual. [ . . . ] Many a wreck takes place before our eyes. Husbands go down. Children. As we swim away from the wreckage we count our blessings.
Kid, God bless you. Take it from me, you have fully deserved his blessings.
Now, comes the practical question: Where will you print it? Have you given it to Henry V[olkening]? I am sure he can place it. Try him with it. Should you be disappointed in him we will
try some magazine editors I know.
Have you gotten the wedding announcement? Probably. I shan’t be beside myself twice in the same letter. I shall let a Yiddish word speak for me: glucklikh [53].
When can I come back? I wish I knew. Anita still wields her wicked power. She wants money, money, money, money, or failing money, blood. Now she wants to insure my life, too, with a term policy. This is her way of telling me that she is betting I will die soon. No man knows. But not even my death would improve her. The boy writes to me, and I to him. The separation is a bad business.
Do you need the mss. or may I keep it?
And thanks for the pickles.
And tell Irv I take great comfort from his print, and thank him once more.
Love,
I had the h[emorrhoid]ectomy myself, once, and you have my active sympathy. Hope the worst of it is over.
Love from Sondra.
Bellow had married Sondra Tschacbasov in February.
To Granville Hicks
[n.d.] [Reno]
Dear Granville Hicks:
An excellent idea. I have been giving it serious thought and I am very much in favor of such a book and I think no one is better fitted than yourself for the job. I can, however, understand Wright Morris’s hesitation. I too am working at a new novel, as Henry may have mentioned, and it is rather like enjoying the girl and defending her from attackers at the same moment—difficult, very difficult!
