by Saul Bellow
Do you like Woodstock? I lived across the river for eight years. Was it living? But the place was not to blame. It was beautiful.
Yours,
PART FOUR
1970-1982
You know? There’s the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live.
—Humboldt’s Gift
1970
To John Berryman
January 19, 1970
Dear John—
Without preliminaries, we have a magazine—Harold Rosenberg, Keith Botsford and I, and of course no magazine involving me can work without you. Poems are essential. Could you also, as with Shakespeare at thirty, think of doing Mozart at twenty, or Bach at forty? [ . . . ]
I am going to London for three weeks to escape the book reviews.
Love,
The magazine was Anon, a single issue of which would appear.
To Margaret Staats
February [?], 1970
[Postcard of “Tippoo’s Tiger” at Victoria and Albert Museum]
The sultan had the device wound up, and the British soldier being killed would cry “Help, Mercy.” It gave the sultan endless pleasure.
As ever,
To Frances Gendlin
[Postmark illegible; postcard of
Debre Berhan Selassie Church, Gondar, Ethiopia]
Dear Fran—
Now Ethiopia. Swept through Kenya and Uganda. Minimum of dysentery. Great fatigue. Bought a mine with Peltz. Feeling grand but I miss you.
To Frances Gendlin
February 9, 1970 New Avenue Hotel, Nairobi, Kenya Well, the whole mining deal was pure con. Peltz’s man w’d not appear. Evidently it was an intercontinental swindle. Hugely funny.
So we are making a safari, and this is written on a bucking plane en route to Kampala, to Murchison Falls. We shall see elephants and crocodiles.
I’d have been very glad if you had joined me, for I do miss you, and no number of elephants and crocodiles can take your place. Nights especially. Forgive me for hoping mildly that the weather is bad in Chicago. African planes are hot. I’m sweating. But in Africa one must. Imagine: “He toured Africa without sweating” (said of a cold man, and I am not cold).
Love,
To Frances Gendlin
[Postmark illegible; postcard of two lionesses, Uganda]
Dear Fran—
This, the Upper Nile, is simply astonishing. If the tsetse fly doesn’t bite me I shall never forget it. If it does, give away my Mercedes and burn my bills. I sh’d have asked you along.
Love,
To Frances Gendlin
[n.d.] Hotel Raphael, Rome
I am writing with a ballpoint quill in the lobby of this hotel—an original idea. Why didn’t I think of it? The hotel is entirely like that, up-to-date Renaissance. You’d adore it.
I planned to go back to London today, but it’s raining fiercely in Rome and I haven’t the flying stomach for it after the trips from Addis Ababa to Asmara to Khartoum to Cairo to Athens and here, twelve hours that left me somewhat vacant and pill-bilious (for the troubled gut, for malaria and for sniffles I took a weird mixture of tablets, and Peltz and I drank beer continually, dying of thirst and fearing the water).
This trip I think has met the purpose. I am better, more settled in mind and am willing—no, longing—to come back to 5805 [Dorchester Ave.]. You’re a lovely woman, Fran, I’ve been fortunate, and I’ve missed you greatly. I’ll phone from London in a few days. I expect to depart from Europe about the 26th.
Love,
To Edward Shils
February 25, 1970 Chicago
Dear Ed—
The porter at King’s [College] said that you were in the U.S. and that you were expected on Thursday, therefore I was certain I would see you in Chicago but we must have missed each other by a few hours, for on Monday (Feb. 23rd) you were already gone.
I didn’t want to spend time in Europe: I was eager to get to Africa. It did not disappoint me. Murchison Falls and the White Nile stunned me. With my “civilized” habit of diminishing or scaling down large impressions in advance, I had thought myself ready for Nature’s grandeur (having seen the movies) but all my preparations were (luckily) driven away by the actual sight of the great river.
In Nairobi, Peltz and I seem to have acquired an interest in a beryllium mine. Of course it is mere playfulness for me. I did it in a carnival spirit. Peltz I think is very earnest about it. In any case, it absorbed and amused me for a while and helped to clear my mind of shadows.
I’m sorry we missed each other. When will you come again?
Love,
To Jean Stafford
[n.d.] [Chicago]
Dear Jean,
Since our little visit and since your kind note was written I have flown to and from Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Texas and Florida, and have just returned from DeKalb, Illinois. Next week I must go—Must? How strange these self-imposed musts are!—to Lafayette, Indiana, Cincinnati, Ohio, and St. Cloud, Minnesota. Why I am doing all this I can’t easily explain. A golf ball may have gotten in among my genes. I am not one of those monsters of ingratitude of the type you and I have so often met; I was very grateful to you for visiting that cold house with the giddy staircase. I was tempted strongly to buy it but there was only one room that suited me, and it looked out over the swimming pool and all the wild jollity would have assailed me as I tried to finish a sentence. As you perhaps observed in my last book, I have very nearly given up on sentence endings and matters would only have gotten worse in a noisy house. I have not quite given up on East Hampton. Now I am in touch with people in Montauk and Shelter Island and I am sure to turn up soon. I remind myself of those German commandoes who used to come down in parachutes disguised as nuns or dog catchers.
You are going to receive a very long essay in which I attack everyone. I think you will enjoy reading what I had to say about some of our dear old Village pals.
Much love,
Stafford lived in the village of Springs, New York, north of East Hampton. She had done Bellow the favor of going to examine a house he was interested in buying. The all-attacking essay would be “Culture Now: Some Animadversions, Some Laughs,” shortly to appear in Philip Rahv’s Modern Occasions.
To William Maxwell
March 14, 1970 Chicago
Dear Mr. Maxwell,
I am greatly honored by your invitation. I am also taken aback by it. For two weeks I have been writing a polemical essay—Contra Tutti. It is intemperate, and names names. I’ve worked myself into a bad mood. Your kind letter makes me recognize what I have been up to, and how unfit I have made myself for composing a Blashfield Address. If you had asked for fulminations, for wickedness, I’d have been able to accept.
I remember our meeting at Smith. You were the one speaker in that symposium who did not misbehave. I admired, and envied, your conduct.
Sincerely yours,
Novelist, story writer and editor William Maxwell, at this time president of the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, had invited Bellow to deliver the organization’s annual Blashfield Address.
To Inge Feltrinelli
April 1, 1970 Chicago
Dear Inge,
Of course I am well. I don’t know whether I am happy, and can’t undertake the necessary research. [ . . . ] I saw Letizia Ciotti Miller in Rome; she wants to translate Mr. S. I have heard also from Sr. Mantovani, who wrote me a passionate letter which I have not been able to answer and which fills me with embarrassment whenever I shuffle through my letters (a most depressing exercise). Paolo Milano prefers Letizia for this job and, since drinking coffee with her, I too favor her. I like
d her very much. She is something between a crushed rose and a cabbage—that is to say, large, vegetable, fragrant and damaged. It is up to you to translate my feelings into executive orders, and to satisfy Mantovani, and give the book to Letizia. I suppose, though, that Erich Linder should have something to say about this.
Can’t you find a beautiful sanctuary in the Mediterranean for me this summer?
Inge Feltrinelli (born 1931) was president of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, a position she had assumed after the death of her husband. Erich Linder (1924-1983), the leading literary agent in postwar Italy, represented Bellow there.
To Stanley B. Troup, M.D.
April 1, 1970 Chicago
Dear Dr. Troup:
The title of your symposium intrigues me greatly, and I should certainly attend if I were free. My duties at the University, however, will keep me here in Chicago.
It was Samuel Johnson who said, “Grief, Sir, is a species of idleness.” Though I do not quite agree with the old boy, I think he deserves to be taken seriously. It would certainly do many grievers good. I myself have been braced by it.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Troup was organizing a conference on grief.
To Melvin Tumin
April 11, 1970 Chicago
Dear Mel
I’m delighted! Thanks. As to how I do it—I suppose I do as my mother did, baking strudel.
Roth has been kind about the book, too. It rather set me up.
As for Life—even at best one feels deprived of something. I’m not of the stuff of which Public Figures are made. You don’t want to be ignored, but there ought to be a saner mean.
Or, in Yiddish: Di kale is tzu sheyn? [83]
Much love,
To Bracha Weingrod
April 24, 1970 Chicago
Dear Mrs. Weingrod:
Your idea is a fine one but I had to decide years ago whether to write in English or in Yiddish, and when I opted for English the Yiddish began to wither. To members of my immediate family (of my own generation) I still speak Yiddish, and I sometimes read a Yiddish book, but I doubt that I could write a play in mother tongue. If I did my mother would not be amused.
Sincerely yours,
To Sara S. Chapman
May 30, 1970 Chicago
Dear Miss Chapman:
You may be right about Augie March and the romantic tradition, but I am afraid that I can offer little in the way of support to your theory. When I wrote Augie I had of course read Moby Dick and the stories of Melville, but I knew nothing then about Pierre. I am somewhat ashamed of the dark ignorance that enclosed me then. Though I was in a state of great enthusiasm I was not thinking clearly. I wish I had known more about certain matters. But I became absorbed in the Chicago scene, the social history of the late Twenties and the depression, and I had not the insight to realize that the naiveté of my hero was very unsatisfactory indeed. To my mind he is more like the Sherwood Anderson gee-whiz ingénue than like the gothic and far more interesting romantic hero of Melville’s book. As to romanticism, anyone who attended the public schools of Chicago prior to 1932 was immersed in Long-fellow, Whittier, Bryant, Fenimore Cooper and the Transcendentalists. We were all infected by this New England moralizing and were weighted down by a certain idealism which, in our surroundings, was comically irrelevant—simply funny. Like Gatsby in love.
Sincerely yours,
To Toby Cole
August 25, 1970 Dear Toby,
[Roman] Polanski has agreed with me about the way to approach Seize the Day and I think if he can get Eli Wallach to play Dr. Tamkin and somebody like Alan Arkin for Wilhelm we may have something after all. I have suggested both these names and on that basis I am willing to negotiate the sale. I don’t say that I will absolutely insist on the actors but I think both are obtainable and would prefer them above any others I can now think of.
Adam and I will be in Nantucket. I’d like to cross over to the Vineyard for a couple of days, though Adam has a thing about sharing his holiday with his little brother. Under my tactful management he’ll probably explode when I suggest it. But I have a concrete bunker, and an asbestos suit from the Father’s Department of Brooks Brothers.
Love to all of you,
A film version of Seize the Day would appear sixteen years later, but directed by Fielder Cook and starring Robin Williams as Tommy and Joseph Wiseman as Tamkin.
To Benjamin Nelson
September 11, 1970 Chicago
My dear Ben—
Le destin has been against me, using its familiar agents—children, hostages to fortune. I longed to go to Montauk, but Gregory announced that he would be married in August, in San Francisco. He chose the middle of the month, just to make things interesting—a little test of his value to his dear Pa, with a slender golden edge of the Will to Power. To pass this new test I had to spend a large part of August in San Francisco. Next it was the turn of Adam, who is thirteen, to do his stuff. His choice fell on Nantucket. No, it hasn’t been one of my better summers. It isn’t retirement I dream of, only the majority of my sons. One will keep me going yet, for a long time. I will be seventy when Daniel gets out of college. Something had better be done to rescue me.
[ . . . ]
I hope you and Marie loved Russia. (Itself, of course; who could love the superstructure?) Please write me a forgiving note.
Ever yours,
To Robert Penn Warren
September 19, 1970 Chicago
Dear Red:
There can’t be too much philanthropy in this aging heart of mine but I’m going ahead with the publication of the magazine at my own expense. To borrow a term from crooks, I’m doing it as a public service, for the Locations gentlemen have fallen away, welshed out (as they put it in Chicago, which is still basically underworld in its sympathies). I’m going to call the magazine The Ark [subsequently Anon]. With three sons, I qualify as a Noah. I’m writing a book which will run as a serial and will set some sort of standard for the fiction. You’re right absolutely. People will say, After such a squawk what sort of stuff are they giving us. I’m hoping that there will be stuff. No demons of optimism misleading me here. We shall have to wait and see whether good writers will turn up. With few exceptions the people of talent I’ve known these last thirty years haven’t shown much spirit. After an early show of quality there seems little more than a love of status. We could forgive the sins of people who offered us at least something to read, but there isn’t much of that either, I’m afraid. All right, we’ll ship out the Ark and wait for Ararat.
I’m delighted that you liked the piece. I thought you might. And of course you’re busy; I’m glad of that and hoped you would be. What I really should have explained more clearly is that the magazine will publish all sorts of comment, unsigned. Something of the sort must surely come over you from time to time. You’ll be getting the first number soon and will see for yourself what Botsford and I have in mind. Why not have a Menckenian column? It’s a fine idea.
Yours most warmly,
To Margaret Staats
September 27, 1970 Chicago
Dear Maggie,
I’m in the state I was in in Oaxaca, writing something while the days speed by as though I were on the safety island in the midst of zooming traffic. What I’m doing may be far less good than it feels to me. Delusion is always possible. Meantime, the hasting days fly by with full career, etc. I wake at five or six. I am afraid of being deluded.
Last year you sent me some pills I didn’t take for an ailment I didn’t seem to have. I don’t know what happened to those tablets. Maybe Daniel played with them. You can try to get a copy of the prescription for me, or another batch of pills. Better yet, two batches, to give me a reserve. I don’t like to bother you about this but I haven’t the time to fuss with doctors.
In the end Adam condescended—he gave his hand like a princess. I had the inexpressible privilege of bearing him away to Nantucket. I was at work daily at 7:00; he slept until 11:00, very obliging. We ha
d lovely afternoons in the water, and he taught me to hiss like a karate expert. Indispensable in Chicago. Best is to stay in nights.
I was delighted to see you looking so well and talking so sensibly and the affection we felt towards each other was a great improvement over states we’ve known. Barley wrote a letter of pure praise; she loves you dearly and wants you to come to London.
This is Daniel day—Sunday afternoon, pro football, kid programs, and I’m cooking spaghetti.
As ever,
To Margaret Staats
October 26, 1970 Chicago
Dear Maggie,
Come to think of it, I’ve never before dictated a letter to you and never imagined that I would. So I apologize right off. It’s this siege I’m under, with rocks flying over walls while I crouch down and scheme against my enemies. You were good about the pills, thank you very much. This time I’ll make sure that Daniel doesn’t play marbles with them. And of course the Ferrers can use me as a reference. I often think how Joe [Ferrer] held out against amputation; for certain dangers of life he has become my model. It occurs to me also—and this has to do with Penny [Ferrer]—that I am wearing my newest suit today which shows me off to splendid advantage and makes me look only half my age which is at the moment a hundred sixty-five. I too have heard from Barley. I read her letters and feel deeply grateful that I am not paying her by the word. When she comes to New York she ought to have a grand party and if she’s not planning to visit Chicago I’ll come in and of course I’ll help you with the tab. She has knocked herself out for me and I’m no ingrate, whatever else. There’s plenty else.
