Letters

by Saul Bellow

  Love,

  To Susan Glassman

  May 5, 1960 [Tivoli]

  Dear Susan:

  No, I haven’t forgotten to write, only I’ve been so pressed, harried and driven, badgered, bitched, delayed (and even—in Maryland—taken into custody by the State Police) that I haven’t even had time to sit down and cross my legs. Till now, in Tivoli. Good old Tivoli. There are so many ghosts in this old joint that my own, in new sheets, are like laughable freshmen. Come, we’ll cut the grass and play croquet with spooks.

  Love,

  To Stanley Elkin

  May 13, 1960 Tivoli, N.Y.

  Dear Mr. Elkin:

  I approve very highly of your story and am sending it on to the other editors with the hope that they will share my admiration for it. I’ll let you know their decision as soon as I know it myself.

  Sincerely yours,

  P.S. I particularly liked the grocery on 53rd Street and the employees and shoppers, but I was not at all sure that the last passages really bore the accumulated weight. It is too easy to float to a conclusion with the support of certain Jewish symbols. I am a little bit suspicious of the use you make of them.

  Elkin’s story was “Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers.” It would appear in Perspective rather than in The Noble Savage.

  To Herbert and Mitzie McCloskey

  [n.d.] [Tivoli]

  Dear Herb and Mitzie,

  I’m sure you made the right decision abt Mpls. Time to bust out. It had given you about all it could give. Anyway, change is one of my elements—money for Morgan, fire for phoenixes and salamanders, and new addresses for me. Ergo!

  I’ll spare you the sad details of my visit to Mpls. I crept back to Tivoli, where I’m by myself, with too much on my mind to fill the solitude yet. I’m winding up the play The Last Analysis. I am getting ready to write a novel. Now that I’ve been thrown out of middle-class security I can’t avoid being a writer. Though I’m one of the finest avoiders in the land.

  Greg and Adam are fine, and I’m not too bad. I miss all of you. I hope you’re all well and have had an end of bad news. Send me a note or at least a copy of the Soviet book. Now the gov’t. admits espionage, I don’t see why they didn’t supply you with material.

  Much love to all of you.

  On May 1, 1960, a U-2 spy craft had been shot down over Sverdlovsk by a Soviet surface-to-air missile. President Eisenhower initially claimed that it was a weather plane. When Khrushchev announced a week later that the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was alive and the aircraft mostly intact, Eisenhower was forced to acknowledge that the United States had been conducting espionage flights. McCloskey and John E. Turner had just published their book The Soviet Dictatorship.

  To Susan Glassman

  May 31, 1960 Tivoli

  Dearest Susie—

  Guilt smote me when I got back. The train looked seedy. I might at least have gone on it with you. I suppose I was exercising my power of autonomy. Anyway, love is better to feel than guilt. In future, I’ll try to be reasonable though human.

  When I returned the Ashers arrived. They might have phoned en route!

  Susie, we had a beautiful time. A beautiful time is its own reward.

  Immer dein [61],

  To Susan Glassman

  June 9, 1960 [Tivoli]

  I’m a little bit miserable today. Lillian H[ellman] admires what I’ve written but insists it’s not a play. Well, perhaps it’s not. It’s a pity to have wasted so much time, but (I’m great at finding compensations—it’s so Jewish) I wasn’t fit to write anything else last year.

  And then, one more reason for misery. I think Sondra is getting married [to Jack Ludwig] in October, which makes her conduct throughout even worse. She didn’t have to try to demolish me in order to re-marry. Ach! It’s not a great deal, but it’s something and temporarily it depresses me.

  You un-depress me. I feel better already, Susie. [ . . . ]

  With kisses and only slightly sad smiles.

  Yours,

  Sondra Tschacbasov and Jack Lugwig would not marry in October, or ever.

  To Susan Glassman

  June 15, 1960 [Tivoli]

  Dearest Susie:

  The Burroughs [novel, Naked Lunch] is shocking for a few pages and then becomes laughable because it’s so mechanical. Grand Guignol. It doesn’t have much human content, and I think it’s just the other side of all the “niceness” and “cleanliness” and “goodness” in the country. On one side the scrubbers and detergent-buyers, and on the other the dirty boys, equally anal. Black and white are the colors of paranoia, nothing in between. If I’m using clinical language, it’s because Naked Lunch forces it on me. It’s clinical. And that would be all right if it were the beginning of something. Raskolnikov must have been crazy, but he was more. Here there isn’t more. But I was glad of a chance to read it. Do you want it sent back?

  The trouble I have reading your letters brings me to this machine. My handwriting is nearly impossible, too.

  Yes, it took me an awfully long time to grow up, but I take comfort from Vol. II of [Ernest] Jones on Freud which begins “In 1901 Freud, at the age of forty-five, had attained complete materity, a consummation of development that few people really achieve.” So there, I can’t even spell maturity. One of these days I’ll tell you all about my therapeutic adventures. Of course I sat in a box. It removed the warts from my fingers.

  All week I’ve felt like a man who is trying to fill a test tube under Niagara. It’s not a bad simile. The rain has bent everything double for three days and I feel very wet and peevish. But your letter this morning was a very fine stimulant.

  Immer dein,

  To Leslie Fiedler

  June 24, 1960 Tivoli

  Dear Leslie:

  I’ve just read your [Karl] Shapiro piece in Poetry, and I really think you’re way out. How you got there I don’t know but it’s time to come back. I’m in earnest. You have a set of facts entirely your own, and you interpret people’s motives most peculiarly. What is this “marketable” Jewishness you talk about? And who are these strange companions on the bandwagon that plays Hatikvah? It’s amusing. It’s utterly wrong. It’s (I don’t like the jargon but it can’t be avoided here) Projection. What you think you see so clearly is not to be seen. It isn’t there. No big situations, no connivances, no Jewish scheme produced by Jewish Minds. Nothing. What an incredible tsimis [62] you make of nothing! You have your own realities, no one checks you and you go on and on. You had better think matters over again, Leslie. I’m dead serious.

  Fiedler had just published “On the Road; or the Adventures of Karl Shapiro” in Poetry.

  To Susan Glassman

  June 29, 1960 [Tivoli]

  Dearest Susie,

  All present and accounted for. I think I’ve found the right channel and I’m feeling very cheerful. That is, I’m too busy to dwell on being cheerful, but I must be cheerful somewhere below, in the engine room. More soon.

  With Sondra, I’ve had the regulation four-bladed duel about seeing Adam, and after being stabbed only a few times I am being allowed to have him for a week in Chicago, in August. I’m getting off easy. (She doesn’t bleed except in the natural course.)

  Is Augie March such a drone? Hmmm! I don’t know, myself. I made the discovery in it about language and character from which Henderson arose but Augie itself is probably crude. My Ur-Faust. In the evening of life, about thirty years from now, I may amuse myself by doing it right. I still love Grandma, Einhorn, Simon, Mimi!! And Mintouchian. And the eagle.

  To Susan Glassman

  July 4, 1960 [Tivoli]

  Dearest Susie:

  No, nothing at all wrong, only the unusual usual. Toil, tears, sweat and business-wriggling: I seem to be a great operator on a small sector. That is, I’ve always lived like a sort of millionaire without money. Never any question of “neediness” on the one side nor of greediness on the other. Somehow I’ve managed to do exactly what I like. There are certain phil
osophers (Samuel Butler, if he is one) who say we really do get what we want. Question: Can we bear it when we get it? That’s the question that’s the beginning of religion.

  No, darling, I’m very well. I hope you are, too, and that you look forward to the 15th as I do.

  To John Berryman

  July 4, 1960 Tivoli

  Dear John—

  Not bad, now. I’m divorced and better for it. One madness at a time. It’s the least Justice can allow us. And I’m writing something, too.

  Savage #2 has gone to the printer, and very good, though not as good as it would have been with the Taj, which we had to lay over till #3, so you’ll probably appear with Vachel Lindsay and me instead of D. H. Lawrence and Louis Guilloux.

  Are you really coming to visit me in Tivoli? It’d be a great event. I am not likely to be in Mpls. much. Perhaps to see Adam now and then, though if that is “played” on me, or if my veins are going to be used to string Sondra’s harp, the child and I will not see much of each other.

  Don’t you think the Bennington alumnae association owes us both wound-stripes?

  Say hello to McCloskeys. And write down those squibs for [Savage] #3. What did you think of #1? You’ve never said.

  Transcontinental blessings,

  To Edmund Wilson

  July 30, 1960 Tivoli, N.Y.

  Dear Edmund—

  I understand from Monroe Engel that you like the Noble Savage. This encourages me to ask you for a contribution. I think you would find yourself in good company.

  With best wishes,

  To Susan Glassman

  September 1, 1960 [Tivoli]

  Baby, I know you’re going through all kinds of difficulty, enough to account for all the strange phenomena. It is all the more important now that I should not lose my bearings, too, and you should not be displeased by my holding on to them. One of us must, if we’re not both to be overboard. I do have myself in pretty good order, and I can help you when you come East. Much that seems very difficult to you will look fairly elementary to me, and as long as we keep this balance we needn’t fear panic on all fronts. The move East is not so hard. Towards your parents you’ve always had an independent bearing but you’ve never been independent in naked fact. Well, that’s not so difficult. What will be more formidable will be making a life of your own in a strange city, but that’s not too awful either, once you’ve seen the world. And you have seen it, and it’s the world you’ve got to cope with, not NYC or Chicago. Besides, in me you have a friend. I’ve never refused my friendship, now have I? I said I wasn’t going to write a letter, and I’ve gone and done it. Shows how much I know my own mind. But I’ve got myself tranquil at the center, somehow. Maybe it’s my convalescence. And it doesn’t even bother me to be ignorant of my next moves.

  Be my sweet and balanced Dolly.

  To Alice Adams

  [n.d.] [Tivoli]

  Dear Alice -

  I’m very sorry to hear of this, and I hope you’re better. I always have more to say about life when it’s myself that’s in trouble. The most useful thing perhaps I can say is that I’ve always had a great liking for you and thought you very vital, a woman evidently built to make it.

  Sometimes what I’m sorriest about and most puzzled by is this feminine belief that one makes it in love, only in love, and that love is a kind of salvation. And then women, and sometimes men, too, demand of each other everything—everything! And isn’t it obvious by now that no human being has the power to give what we require from one another. When I saw that, the external world began to come back. My great need had made it almost disappear.

  I hope the worst of this is over for you, or will soon be: I hate to think of you suffering. Never mind what I said earlier. I said that for myself. For you I’d prefer something else.

  Yours very affectionately,

  To Alice Adams

  September 10, 1960 [Tivoli]

  Dear Alice -

  The only sure cure is to write a book. I have a new one on the table and all the other misery is gone. This is the form any refusal to be unhappy takes now, and I suppose it saves me from a merely obstinate negative. Because it isn’t merely for oneself that one should refuse a certain alternative. It’s also because we owe life something.

  Do you ever come East? I don’t think I’ll be in SF for a while. In January I go to Puerto Rico to teach for four months. My first assignment in more than two years.

  Don’t fly through these parts again without notifying me.

  Yours affectionately,

  To Keith Botsford

  October 4, 1960 [Tivoli]

  Dear Keith,

  [ . . . ] I want the magazine to go on, want it badly, but I haven’t come up to expectations, and have to go into this with myself very honestly. This is a great age for sleepers, myself snoozing with the rest, now and then sending out a call to awaken. No, it’s not as bad as all that, but it’s not what I had planned and hoped. But let’s not quit yet. [ . . . ]

  All the best,

  Love,

  To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

  October 12, 1960 Tivoli, N.Y.

  Dear Mr. Ray:

  Thank you for your letter. I’ve seen lots of stuff since I was so rash as to become an editor—new stuff, that is. Most of it is pretty poor, of course, but there are six or eight young writers, relatively unknown, who are first-rate. James Donleavy who wrote The Ginger Man is to my mind one of our best writers. I don’t think his book sold well, and I can’t say how he supports himself. Then there’s Grace Paley (The Little Disturbances of Man), a housewife with two or three children and a husband who earns a rather modest living. Thomas Berger who wrote Crazy in Berlin is very good; so is Richard G. Stern, author of Golk. I’m sorry you were unable to give a fellowship to Leo Litwak who applied last year. He’s got it, I think, and he should be encouraged to apply again. I hope this list will be useful to you.

  With best wishes,

  Gordon Ray had succeeded Henry Allen Moe as president of The Guggenheim Foundation.

  To Jonas Schwartz

  October 19, 1960 Tivoli

  Dear Jonas:

  Wise of you to write. If I had the dough I’d be glad to accept your kind offer. But I can’t have checks bouncing, and right now I’m broke. The play is no more, and I owe Viking ten grand. I’ll find the dough and get it to you next month. As for Adam, he can always count on his monthly check. I love that boy, and I have a hunch that in the end that love is going to count for more in his life than the “protection” of lawyers and courts. But I don’t want to get into an argument with you; I’m fond of you and I think your heart is in the right place. The thing is over, though as a father I think you may understand that against my better judgment I sometimes long for Adam. I haven’t seen him since August nor have I heard about him. In October I got a wire from Sondra—SEND MONEY AT ONCE—giving me the new address. I had sent it to the old because I didn’t have the new. The money goes out regularly, and so do requests for one word of news about the child. I ask also for my recorders, one of them a gift from Isaac which I have kept and used for twenty years. No answer. Jonas, is it criminal of me that she decided to divorce me? Is it nothing that I’m the child’s father? Do I have to be slandered and smeared in Minneapolis? I know that you [ . . . ] think she’s a darling girl. I happen to think differently. But I don’t want to win an argument with you, vindicate myself or damn her. I want to make a deal to send the checks regularly on the 1st provided I get one postcard a month about Adam. I see no point in being unilaterally obliging. So the answer to your generous proposal is no, until such time as my feelings towards Adam are recognized. I am something more than an automatic source of checks. I am a mensch. I tried to be a husband to that poor castrating girl—an odd desire, but I had it. Now that I’ve lost it I am, on that side at least, a happier man. All right, no more infancy, no more self-pitying grief, but for every concession I make there’ll have to be a concession traded from here on in.


  I’m glad your children are doing so well. They’re good girls, both of them, and do you [ . . . ] credit. Don’t worry about Berryman. He’s the soul of honor in everything that involves his responsibilities as a teacher, and I can assure you that Miriam [Schwartz’s daughter] will be treated fairly. Poets are a strange breed. Greet the bourgeoisie of Minneapolis for me. They all come to your cellar to drink your whiskey and enjoy your emotional outbursts.

  I have arthritis of the cervical spine, and headaches, but apart from that I am in good heart and working well. I see Greg often. Last week he told me he had Sondra’s word for it that I am a rat but he loves me just the same.

  Yours in Christ,

  To Richard Stern

  [n.d.] [Tivoli]

  Dear Dick:

  Herzog has got me down. As sometimes happens by the hundredth page, my lack of planning, or the subconscious cunning, catch up with me, and so I’m back in Montreal in 1922, trying to get a drunk to bed and I’m not sure I’ll know what to do once he’s sleeping. God will provide. Consider the lilies of the field—do they write books? [ . . . ]

  Suddenly Greg, who is a junior, says he’d like to attend the U[niversity] of C[hicago]. He’s got good grades in everything except trigonometry, he tells me. As soon as the Bellows have learned to add a check at Walgreen’s they lose interest in mathematics. Are there any scholarships he could put in for? [ . . . ]

  Yours from the perihelion of his orbit,

  To Gertrude Buckman

  October 22, 1960 Tivoli

  Dear Gertrude,

  I’m no longer in a position to give you much news of Delmore, because he now has me in his subversive files. He accuses me of slandering him and, when last heard from, was threatening me with a lawsuit. I had asked a friend of mine from the Payne Whitney Clinic to visit him at Bellevue and although Delmore received this man without hostility, he seems later to have worked it out in his mind that I had meant to railroad him. Dr. Hatterer’s opinion was that Delmore was not in need of extended treatment and what he mainly needed was a period of rest. There was no need therefore for Delmore to enter Payne Whitney which never accepts patients for periods shorter than three months. Anyhow no one had authority to intervene for Delmore and he was, and so far as I know still is, at the mercy of the lawyers and detectives he has hired, and the creeps whose good offices are always free and always available. I hope with all my heart that they won’t hurt him, that he will not hurt himself. He seems to have devised for himself a system for survival in the midst of crises he generates himself—the eye of the cyclone or the brink of disaster. That’s a very crowded brink. My own life is usefully quiet. I suppose that means that I am out of things. I couldn’t be gladder. Thanks for the book you sent; one of these days I shall certainly read it, but just now I am writing one myself which I hope you will have the charity to read when it comes out.