by Saul Bellow
To Barnett Singer
November 9, 1972 Chicago
Dear Barney Singer—
[ . . . ] When I visited Seattle in 1951, I lived in something called the Hotel Meaney and made the rounds with [Theodore] Roethke whom I adored, and Dylan Thomas whom I admired and pitied. I couldn’t keep up with them, though, for I’m not a real drinking man.
Thanks for your note.
Barnett Singer (born 1945) has for many years been a professor of history at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario. He is the author of, among other works, Maxime Wiegand: A Biography of the French General in Two World Wars (2008).
1973
To Nicolas Nabokov
February 20, 1973 Chicago
Dear Nicolas,
Your Stravinsky recollections are delightful. Your mss. gave me nothing but pleasure. To read it made my evening.
I have a few remarks to offer, not to be taken as criticisms but only as suggestions for improvement. First, then, let me say that to address Stravinsky in the second person is confusing and unnecessary. There are long passages of exposition during which the device is forgotten, and then one is jolted by the return of the “you.” I think it would be far better to say Stravinsky or, for informality, Igor Fyodorovich. What you have to tell us is so lively that it needs no grace notes. A second suggestion is that you cut much of the technical discussion of Les Noces. On the whole your musical discussions are rueful and illuminating but this one is too lengthy and unless you could dramatize your meeting with the pedantic musicologists it would be better to cut. About my third and last point you may be rather sensitive—it has to do with Robert Craft, whose image in the end is not entirely clear. One feels how much is left unsaid. Perhaps other people, possibly Auden, would not mind being quoted. But when Craft is mentioned, you fall into psychological diplomacy, ambiguity, etc. This is very different from the free mordant observation which makes the rest of your memoir so delightful. [ . . . ]
Yours affectionately,
To Louis Lasco
March 5, 1973 [Chicago]
Esteemed Zahar Neoplasmich:
The famous columnist [Sydney J. Harris] appears in my hometown paper. Should I, wishing to glance at the Final Markets or the Obituaries, read a few of his lines by mischance, my feet begin to swell. He gives me edema. Still, I am grateful for your good intentions and your wish to share your delight with me.
You will be interested to hear that when I recently spoke at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, Benny Shapiro’s brother Manny turned up with his frau and an elegant young son in a Smith Bros. beard. We reminisced about old times on Cortez St. I mentioned that I had heard from you. We decided that if you were still going to Las Vegas it was a heartening sign of virility, and the fires of life had not been banked in L. Lasco. The young man asked what he should do to become a writer. I said, “Shave!” He was much offended, nettled, and turned away from me.
They said that Benny was selling electrical supplies. Now that capital punishment has ended he’s probably selling old electric chairs. There’s a story for you, a promoter who tries to peddle old electric chairs to South American dictators. For a small percentage, I give you this idea. I’m always glad to hear from you. I send you fraternal greetings.
S. B. Pamunyitzoff
To Zero Mostel
March 16, 1973 Chicago
Dear Zero,
I can’t recall that I was ever able to persuade you to do anything but the University of Chicago wants me to try, so here goes: Would you be willing to come to Chicago in May to give a lecture on a subject close to your heart—Painting, for instance? The University has a series called the William Vaughn Moody Series. Only very eminent persons are asked to deliver Moody Lectures (I suppose I mean people like W. H. Auden). The students have a festival of the arts in May and spring has not yet drowned in dust. Harold Rosenberg will be there and you’ll have a jolly time, I’m sure.
Yours, with best wishes,
A decade earlier Mostel had declined to star in The Last Analysis, signing instead to play Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
To Frances Gendlin
April [?], 1973 Monks House, Rodmell, East Sussex Well, it’s beautiful and spooky, the gardens are grand, the house cold, everything creaks but I was not haunted by the ghost of Virginia. I am exhausted, but well. I have no telephone and as yet no car, but I sh’d get the car. The phone is doubtful.
Can you ask Esther to mail me some Committee on Social Thought stationery, immedjiat?
I miss you.
Love,
Bellow was at the start of a six-week residency in East Sussex at what had been the country house of Virginia and Leonard Woolf.
To Frances Gendlin
[n.d.] [Cambridge]
Cara mia Francesca,
To meet you (but on which of two dates?) I can come into London. It means staying overnight at Barley Alison’s, but that’s feasible. It involves a backgammon tournament, with me rolling disgusting dice. Even worse than in Chicago. I look forward to your arrival (not because of the backgammon). Anyway we can speak on the phone now. This A.M. I am in Peterhouse, Cambridge, black tie unused—an amusing story which I will tell you after more important things (which I have terribly missed).
Lewes is one hour from London. I leave the car and take the train. Then getting to the airport isn’t easy, so I’ll come a day earlier. Phone me.
Love,
To Frances Gendlin
June 16, 1973 Belgrade
Dear Fran:
Like a Western sheriff with guns drawn, ready to shoot anything that moves—that’s [Samuel S.] Goldberg with his dollars. “How much—what is it?” Bang bang. Yesterday he bought four heavy rare volumes of American history. He has them at home in paper, but this edition is worth forty bucks. How will he get them home!? The Serbs have never heard of book-rate postage to the US. So we tote the hilarious bundles while Sam scouts for a Hermès shop. All the old broads in his office have commissioned him to buy perfume, which I daresay they desperately need. Today I’m dragging him off to visit unbuyable monasteries. But we look forward to cheap strawberries.
I’m well but tired, and miss you and my Dorchester [Avenue] comforts. And Daniel. I had my troubles with Adam. I think I told you I was not “received” by his mother—should say not vouchsafed an audience. But soon there will be bills. [ . . . ]
Much love,
To Ralph Ross
August 14, 1973 Aspen
Dear Ralph:
The subject was painful but your letter was very pleasant. I don’t know what we survivors should do with this slaughter-legacy our old friends have made us (I think of Isaac, of Delmore Schwartz). Maybe my little foreword made things too easy. It had the conventional charm for which John himself had a weakness or talent. I was sincere enough, but there were terrible things to say, and I didn’t say them. You touched on some of those in your letter. John telling you that he’d never drink again, that he wanted more love affairs. At the same time he knew he was a goner. One moment the post-tomb Lazarus, the next Don Juan, and much of the time someone who merely looked like John, as you put it. I knew that feeling.
Having written a few lines about him I now have the “privilege” of observing the attitudes of people towards the poet and his career. There’s something culturally gratifying, apparently, about such heroic self-destruction. It’s Good-old-Berryman-he-knew-how-to-wrap-it-up. It’s a combination of America, Murderer of Poets, and of This Is the Real Spiritual Condition of Our Times. Perhaps you’ve seen Boyd Thomes’s review of Recovery. Maris [Thomes] sent me a copy. It may not have reached you, so I’ll quote a few sentences.
“This combination of erudition and progressively more suicidal chaos has become his subject matter, and it was his artistic triumph to create a style sufficiently flexible and powerful to express it . . . John did more to elevate the potential of paranoia than anybody of our generation.”
Then he speaks of John as a “poetry-making machine”
and so forth. Boyd’s all right, one of the Minnesota pals and all of that, but there’s something amiss with John’s disaster as confirmation of the views on life and society of a sophisticated medical gentleman—“elevating the potential of paranoia.” It rather scares me to see how very satisfactory John’s life and death can be from a certain point of view.
On this green and sunlit Colorado afternoon, that’ll be enough of that.
You’re entirely right about these great spaces and the psychic damage they do. Let’s repair some of this damage in November. Gregory and his wife are making a grandfather of me then and I shall come out [to California]. Herb and Mitzie will be gone, but the rest of us can, and should, have a grand party. I’ll keep in touch.
Yours affectionately,
Bellow had contributed a foreword to Berryman’s unfinished, posthumously published novel, Recovery (1973). Boyd Thomes, M.D., was Berryman’s doctor in Minneapolis.
To Margaret Staats
September 14, 1973 [Chicago]
Where am I? I wish I knew. I’m going to be in New York next week. What about Sat. afternoon? I’ll telephone.
I hear that [—] is a women’s lib fighter. So is Susan Bellow. I am glad that these poor abused women are fighting back. I am for them a hundred per cent and think their demands should be met in full and at once. In court last week I pleaded for eight hours. I wanted the judge to realize that Susan is a freedom fighter. She belongs to some sort of national women’s organization.
Only she doesn’t agree with the alimony plank in the platform.
Love and kisses,
To Evelyn [?]
December 14, 1973 Chicago
Dear Evelyn—
I was visiting with cousin Louie Dworkin the other night, and when he spoke of you I found that I could recall you vividly. You had one blue eye and one brown eye, and you were a charming gentle girl in a fur (raccoon?) coat. I thought you might like to know how memorable you were, so I asked cousin Louie (who loves you dearly) for your address, and I take this occasion to send you every good wish.
1974
To The New York Times
January 7, 1974 Chicago, Ill.
To the Editor:
Andrei Sakharov and four other Soviet intellectuals have appealed to “decent people throughout the world” to try to protect Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from persecution.
The word “hero,” long in disrepute, has been redeemed by Solzhenitsyn. He has had the courage, the power of mind and the strength of spirit to speak the truth to the entire world. He is a man of perfect intellectual honor and, in his moral strength, he is peculiarly Russian. To the best Russian writers of this hellish century it has been perfectly clear that only the power of the truth is equal to the power of the state.
It is to be hoped that the Brezhnevs and the Kosygins will be capable of grasping what the behavior of such a man means to the civilized world. Persecution of Solzhenitsyn, deportation, confinement in a madhouse or exile will be taken as final evidence of complete moral degeneracy in the Soviet regime.
We cannot expect our diplomats to abandon their policy of détente (whatever that may mean) or our great corporations to break their business contracts with Russia, but physicists and mathematicians, biologists, engineers, artists and intellectuals should make it clear that they stand by Solzhenitsyn. It would be the completest betrayal of principle to fail him. Since America is the Soviet Government’s partner in détente, Americans have a special responsibility in this matter.
What Solzhenitsyn has done in revealing the unchecked brutality of Stalinism, he has done also for us. He has reminded every one of us what we owe to truth.
To Alfred Kazin
March 20, 1974 Chicago
Dear Alfred:
Your letter came on a day when I had a genuine grief, and that helped me to keep matters in perspective. [ . . . ] I have never met Mr. [Philip] Nobile. I can’t remember that I ever wrote to him or spoke to him. Are you sure that I did say the things he attributes to me? Have you any real evidence that I actually said them—whatever they are? By living in Chicago I hoped to avoid all this sort of literary nastiness but there’s evidently no way to avoid it. So far as I can see this sort of slander and idiocy is all the literary culture we have left.
It’s true that I didn’t like your review of Sammler. I didn’t dislike it more than other pieces of yours, but I disliked it. It appeared more than a year after publication of the book and I had heard that an earlier and more friendly review had been rejected by the editors, but knowing what gossip is I did not take this to be a fact. It was the conclusion of your piece—“God lives!”—that offended me. You meant evidently that I was a megalomaniac. But this didn’t seem to me to be literary criticism. About my books you may say what you like. (I seldom reply either to praise or to blame, which is why you heard no “peep” out of me when you wrote the introduction to Seize the Day—was an acknowledgment necessary?) For that matter, you may say what you please about my character, too. You haven’t much gift for satire and “God lives!” didn’t hurt much. What offended me was that you were not reviewing my novel, you were saying that its author was a wickedly deluded lunatic. As for [V. S.] Pritchett, I may not have cared much for his opinion of Herzog and perhaps I muttered in my whiskers about it. That again is no great matter. But how do you know what I said? And why didn’t you ask me, as an old friend, whether I had really expressed myself in that manner? Your complaint is based on nothing but silliness, gossip and slander.
I know my own sins well enough. They distress me, and I struggle with them. You may not believe this but I can, oddly enough, bear to be corrected. Unfortunately, I found nothing very helpful in your letter. Nor does your huffiness at the Century Club contribute much to the improvement of my character or the progress of the species.
“Though He Slay Me . . . ,” Kazin’s review of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, had appeared in The New York Review of Books.
To Daniel Fuchs
April 10, 1974 Chicago
Dear Daniel—
What do I think? For one thing you know modern literature; for another you write intelligently; you correctly describe the course I took and my view of modernism; you are right about my Flaubertian and Lawrencian criticism; not quite right about my hostility towards Eliot—Eliot I respect more than you would guess, but on the evidence you are correct.
This having been said, let me add that I don’t like to read about myself—I recoil from it, heart and bowels. That is, in its own way, self-criticism. I’m not ready for judgment, the facts aren’t in; I know I’ve done wrong; we haven’t gotten to the pith and nucleus yet. We’re seeing the limbs, the heart and belly aren’t in the picture yet (etc.). Why so slow? I can’t say. Maybe it’s the situation; maybe a certain timidity or tardiness or sluggishness or laziness—or sleep (Henderson, via Shelley, wants to burst the spirit’s sleep). But you should know that I have learned (gathered, inferred) one awful thing from you. This is that I’ve been arguing too much—debating, infighting, polemicizing. The real thing is unfathomable. You can’t get it down to distinct or clear opinion. Sensing this, I have always had intelligence enough (or the intuition) to put humor between myself and final claims. And that hasn’t been enough by any means. Hattie in “The Yellow House” and Henderson and “The Old System” seem to me my most interesting things because they are not argued. You’ve made me see this more plainly and I’m much obliged. Sammler isn’t even a novel. It’s a dramatic essay of some sort, wrung from me by the crazy Sixties. The trouble, in these mad times, is that so many adjustments and examinations have to be made for the sake of some balance and nothing else, and the expenditure of mental energy for mere equilibrium is too costly.
Anyway—many thanks and good luck.
Daniel Fuchs’s Saul Bellow: Vision and Revision would appear in 1984. It remains among the best accounts of Bellow’s work.
To Ann Birstein
May 22, 1974 Chicago
Dear Ann—
My correspondence with Alfred was disagreeable, so I didn’t associate you with it at all. You and I have never had disagreeable relations. I hope we never shall.
There used to be something like a literary life in this country, but the mad, ferocious Sixties tore it all to bits. Nothing remains but gossip and touchiness and anger. I’m past being distressed by it—I mean merely distressed.
So there it is! Nobody will speak for you to me. One of these days I hope we will have our own private conversation. It’s been a long time.
As ever,
To Lionel Trilling
July 7, 1974 [Carboneras, Almería, Spain]
Dear Lionel:
You may think me silly when you read a piece I’ve written for Harper’s. I’ve had regretful second thoughts about it, myself. Such remarks as I make about you are based solely on your Commentary essay “Authenticity and the Modern Unconscious” and refer only to the first part and the impossibility of being held “spellbound.” It was certainly wrong of me not to read the whole book before sounding off. I feel guilty—no, that won’t do—I feel remorseful about it. You do, however, appear to agree with the views of Eliot and Walter Benjamin, and you do say that the narrative past has lost its authenticating power, and perhaps you are too ready to take for permanent what I see to be a mood. What is permanent in this age of upheavals is hard to make out, but I am reluctant to grant moods their second papers. For writers the most important question is simply, What is interesting? I try, inadequately and frivolously, to say something in my article about what it is that intellectuals do or do not find interesting. I’ve thrown no light on this, and perhaps I’ve even thickened the darkness a little, but the matter was worth mentioning. I take it we agree, as square old liberals, that without individuals human life ends in a cold glutinous porridge—despite our different opinions as to what makes an “identity.” Freudian theory is, to me, another story, albeit a fascinating one. I take the Unconscious to be what we don’t know, and don’t see that it advances us much to take this unknown psychologically. Why not metaphysically? However, I prefer to remain an amateur in these matters. What I wish to say here is that it was idiotic of me to fix on one chapter of your book. I shall get a copy of it when I come back from Spain later in the month and read it attentively.
