Letters

by Saul Bellow

  Thank you for coming to talk to me.

  Sincerely,

  To Owen Barfield

  July 24, 1975 Carboneras, Almería, Spain

  Dear Mr. Barfield:

  Your letter was very welcome. I’m glad you saw some merit in Herzog. At the Athenaeum [Barfield’s London club, where he and Bellow had lunched] I was a totally unknown quantity and felt that I had failed to show why I should be taken seriously. I continue to pore over Unancestral Voice and it is most important that you should be willing to discuss it with me. I can readily see why you would take little interest in contemporary fiction. Those who read it and write it are easily satisfied with what your Meggid calls lifeless memory-thoughts. For some time now I have been asking what kind of knowledge a writer has and in what way he deserves to be taken seriously. He has imagination where others have science, etc. But it wasn’t until I read your book on Romanticism that I began to understand something about the defeat of imaginative knowledge in modern times! I don’t want to labor the point which you yourself have brought to my attention; I only want to communicate something in my own experience that will explain the importance of your books to me. My experience was that the interest of much of life as represented in the books I read (and perhaps some that I wrote) had been exhausted. But how could existence itself become uninteresting. I concluded that the ideas and modes by which it was represented were exhausted, that individuality had been overwhelmed by power or “sociality,” by technology and politics. Images or representations this side of the mirror have indeed tired us out. All that science did was to make the phenomena technically (mathematically) inaccessible, leaving us with nothing but ignorance and despair. Yes, psychoanalysis directed us to go into the Unconscious. From the dark forest—a sort of preserve of things unknown—painters and poets like good dogs were to bring back truffles . . .

  Tomorrow my Spanish holiday ends. My wife and I are returning via London and will be there for about ten days. I hope you will be kind enough to give me a few hours more of your time.

  It was very good of you to send me the Steiner book. Will you have lunch with me (as my guest this time) in London? You speak of yourself as the servant of your readers, but this reader, though eager to talk with you, hesitates to impose himself.

  Sincerely yrs,

  To Philip Roth

  August 8, 1975 [Chicago]

  Dear Philip,

  As your Czechoslovak-writers-aid program was to have run for only one year and, as Mrs. [Esther] Corbin tells me, that year is coming to a close, I should like to know whether you propose to continue. For my part, I’d be glad to go on sending fifty bucks a month.

  The party last June was the one and only party in memory that felt to me like a real party. I didn’t know what I was saying or doing. It was bliss. I do remember trying to talk to you about The Jewish Writer but I was quite drunk and you were wasting your time. So let’s try again.

  My wife is going to Jerusalem to give mathematical lectures. I shall be carrying her lecture notes. We will stop in New York en route (about the 8th of November). Shall we try to have a sober conversation or let well enough alone?

  Yours sincerely,

  To Margaret Staats

  September 15, 1975 [Chicago]

  On the death matter: With me or without, the preoccupation would have returned. After that night [ . . . ] I cried with relief but psychically the death (in the shadow-style of the psyche) took place. Many times (Yeats isn’t the first to tell us) we die, many times rise again. As for the terror, it drives us to think—it has its function. We don’t go without that.

  I don’t know how I ever came to believe that a death-comedy had to be written. Perhaps it was Measure for Measure that put it into my head. Charlie [Citrine, narrator-protagonist of Humboldt’s Gift] himself is in and out of the grave continually. Of course I might have spared you but we were bound together in this comical-death complex, were appalled together and laughed together. We wore the same team cap for a few years. It didn’t occur to me that you would be affected so strongly.

  But here I am, writing to you on Yom Kippur!

  Early this morning Samuel S. Goldberg telephoned and asked whether I had read the review in The New Yorker by that “anti-Semitic pornographer.” And I remembered that you had mentioned Updike. If I hadn’t taken Daniel to see Jaws I suppose I might have been upset. Jaws gave me perspective. No one has ever accused me of writing bad English—I’m sure I slipped up here and there, in a book of more than five hundred pages that would be inevitable. This morning I’m actually frozen, covered with a thick ice of Jewish inhibitions. Shall I write my next book in Yiddish? But perhaps the grammatical lapses were all Charlie’s. Besides, did H. W. Fowler ever write an American novel?

  Send me a comforting note. Forgive me for making D[emmie]’s plane crash.

  Love,

  In Humboldt’s Gift, Demmie Vonghel, a character unmistakably based on Maggie, dies in an airplane crash. In The New Yorker, John Updike had criticized Humboldt as overwrought and shapeless, comparing it unfavorably to The Adventures of Augie March.

  To Mark Shechner

  September 30, 1975 Chicago

  Dear Mr. Shechner:

  I liked your Rosenfeld lecture very much. I agreed with most of it. Perhaps I wouldn’t write to you about Isaac even if I were not running because I am still thinking about his life, his character, his thoughts and his death and am not yet ready to discuss him. But I will say this: He combined all the reticence and shyness of a small sickly Jewish boy from Chicago with heroic ideas about destiny. And after all, history would not have been history without these apparently timid and inconspicuous Jewish children.

  May I keep your essay to refer to another time or do you want it returned? I am leaving Chicago for a few months but my secretary, Mrs. Esther Corbin, will return it if you need it.

  Many thanks for letting me see it.

  Sincerely yours,

  Mark Shechner (born 1940) edited Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader (1988) and has written numerous books including The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays (1990).

  To Ruth Miller

  [n.d.] Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Jerusalem

  Dear Ruth:

  That was a welcome letter. I haven’t forgotten you, either. If I was your first teacher, you were my first pupil, and my heart hasn’t altogether turned to stone. I’ve often reproached myself for my impatience towards you. I mitigate nothing by telling you that I’m like my poor father, first testy then penitent. One must free one’s soul from these parental influences. Poor Papa’s soul was his, after all, and mine is mine, and it’s sheer laziness to borrow his behavior. We all do that, of course. He did it, too. Only he was too busy with life’s battles to remove his father’s thumbprints and cleanse the precious surfaces. We’ve been luckier. We have the leisure for it.

  I read [Louis] Simpson’s piece in the Times before your letter came, and I didn’t quite know how to deal with it. It was cheap, mean, it did me dirt. I had thought Simpson was paying no more attention to me than I’ve paid to him over the years. One can’t look into everything, after all. I was indifferent to his poetry and it was only fair that he should pay no attention to what I wrote. I had no idea that he was in such a rage. But age does do some things for us (nothing comparable to what it takes away) and I have learned to endure such fits. I don’t ask myself why the Times prints such miserable stuff, why I must be called an ingrate, a mental tyrant, a thief, a philistine enemy of poetry, a narcissist incapable of feeling for others, a failed artist. Nor why this must be done in the Sunday Magazine for many millions of readers. Such things are not written about industrialists, or spies, or bankers, or trade-union leaders, or Idi Amin, or Palestinian terrorists, only about the author of a novel who wanted principally to be truthful and to give delight. It doesn’t stab me to the heart, however. I know what newspapers are—and what writers are, and know that they can occasionally try to destroy one another. I’ve never done it m
yself, but I’ve seen it done, often enough. [ . . . ] Louie’s hatred and my discomfort are minor matters, comparatively. He can’t kill me. He’s only doing dirt on my heart (by intention—he didn’t actually succeed). [ . . . ]

  But I was upset to find you mentioned in his piece, and this is why I say that I didn’t quite know how to deal with it. I wondered why you should find it necessary to testify against me and say that I was an artist manqué. After many years in the trade, I’m well aware that the papers twist people’s words and that at times their views are reversed for them by reporters and editors. But you were angry with me, and Stony Brook isn’t exactly filled with my friends and admirers. Nor do I, from my side, think of Stony Brook as a great center of literary power in which a renaissance is about to begin, led by Kazin and Jack Ludwig and Louie. (Not that I’ve written reviews and articles about them.) So I didn’t expect you to say kind things about me. But I didn’t expect unkind things in print, and I was shocked by the opinion attributed to you that Humboldt was my confession of utter failure. Louie I could dismiss. A writer who doesn’t know quality when he sees it doesn’t have to be taken seriously. A reader who doesn’t see that the book is a very funny one can also be disregarded—one can only wonder why the deaf should attend concerts. But you I don’t dismiss. And I thought, “I’ve steered Ruth wrong. What has this girl from Albany Park gained by ending up in Stony Brook? It is possible that she should have become one of these killers?”

  I began to compose a few Herzog notes in my mind. But I wouldn’t have sent any of them. You might not have been guilty of any offense. I do not defend myself anymore (in the old way). I have other concerns, now. But then your letter arrived. And you are what I always thought you were, and I am still your old loving friend,

  Louis Simpson’s attack on Bellow in The New York Times Magazine was “The Ghost of Delmore Schwartz.”

  To Edward Shils

  December 8, 1975 Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Jerusalem

  My dear Ed:

  [ . . . ] The Committee [on Social Thought], though you may not agree, is a very useful thing; it has developed several extraordinary students in recent years. It is no small achievement to turn out Ph.D.s who know how to write English and are at home in several fields—intelligent people who have read Thucydides and Kant and Proust and who are not counterfeits or culture snobs. They will not disgrace the University of Chicago. I’ve met many graduates from other departments of whom the same cannot be said. I myself have not done all that might have been done for the Committee. I had books to write and problems to face, many of these arising from my own unsatisfactory character, but I have nevertheless taken my duties seriously. Now I think it’s the University’s turn to be serious and to demonstrate that it considers the Committee to be something more than a celebrity showpiece. The celebrities are beginning to dodder in any case. Unless new appointments are made the Committee will cease to exist. In about five years it’ll be gone.

  As for that other dying institution, Encounter, I’ll contribute five hundred dollars for the coming year, and five hundred more in 1977, if there should be a 1977 in Encounter’s destiny. I think Mel Lasky should write to Thomas Guinzburg of Viking Press (Viking and Penguin have just merged) and say that I have told him that I’d be greatly disappointed if Viking didn’t make a contribution.

  I wish we had the time to stop in Holland en route. I’d love to see you and to talk with you about Israel and other matters. A conversation with you is all-too-rare a pleasure, these days. But my son Gregory is in Chicago for the holidays and we want to see him before he goes back to California.

  With most affectionate good wishes for the New Year,

  1976

  To Owen Barfield

  February 25, 1976 Chicago

  Dear Mr. Barfield:

  It’s not a case of out of sight, out of mind. I think often of you and compose quite a few mental letters. But I have no progress to report; much confusion, rather. I mustn’t be altogether negative; there are trace-elements of clarity. I continue to read Steiner and to perform certain exercises. I am particularly faithful to the I Am, It Thinks meditation in the Guidance book you so kindly gave me. From this I get a certain daily stability. I don’t know what causes so much confusion in me. Perhaps I have too many things going on at once. I had promised myself a holiday after finishing the last book. I think I told you last summer that I was going to Jerusalem with my wife. She gave some lectures at the Hebrew University in Probability Theory. My intention was to wander about the Old City and sit contemplatively in the gardens and churches. But it is impossible in Jerusalem to detach oneself from the frightful political problems of Israel. I found myself “doing something.” I read a great many books, talked with scores of people, and before the first month was out I was writing a small book about the endless crisis and immersed in politics. It excites me, it distresses me to be so immersed. I can’t mention Lucifer and Ahriman, I don’t know enough for that. Neither can I put them out of my mind.

  I didn’t mention Humboldt’s Gift to you because I thought you weren’t greatly interested in novels. I thought it might even displease you. Besides I tend to think of a book just completed as something that has prepared me to do better next time. You asked me, very properly, how I thought a writer of novels might be affected by esoteric studies. I answered that I was ready for the consequences. That was a nice thing to say, but it wasn’t terribly intelligent. It must have struck you as very adolescent. You asked me how old I was. “Sixty,” I said. Then you smiled and said, “Sixteen?” It was the one joke you allowed yourself at my expense, and it was entirely justified. It’s a very American thing to believe that it’s never too late to make a new start in life. Always decades to burn.

  As if this weren’t enough, we’ve had to travel a great deal, my wife and I. In the last month we’ve been to San Francisco, Boston and Miami. We had promises to keep. We’d been away for three months, and couldn’t put things off until spring.

  I’m a bit ashamed to present such a picture of confusion. You probably knew it wasn’t going to be easy to change from one sort of life to another. This is not a very satisfactory letter but I feel that I owe you some account of myself—I feel it because I respect you and because you tried so generously to help me.

  Best regards,

  The book about Israel that Bellow had set to work on, To Jerusalem and Back, would appear first in back-to-back issues of The New Yorker in July, then in book form in the autumn.

  To Walter Hasenclever

  March 3, 1976 Chicago

  Dear Walter,

  We were delighted to see you in Jerusalem—the best sort of bonus, the unanticipated and undeserved. It isn’t altogether true that I had recovered my spirits in Jerusalem—I was still suffering from my concluding efforts with Humboldt. Teddy Kollek kept telling me that I must have a holiday. But to have a holiday in Jerusalem is something like consummating a marriage in a laundromat. I’m glad to hear that K[iepenheuer] & W[itsch] approves your translation [of Humboldt’s Gift]. I’m sure they are right. The yeoman in Ivanhoe was right too: “A man can do but his best.” It was only Sir Walter who was not doing at all well. Now you had better get a good rest in the Austrian mountains because you will soon be facing a new task, my short book on Jerusalem. I spend half the night boning up on my subject, half the day writing; the rest of my time I’m free to devote to my wife, my children, the University of Chicago and my business affairs and my duties as an unpaid cultural functionary.

  Now let me try to answer a few of your questions:

  1. Drag racing is the strictly illegal sport of adolescent amateur automobile mechanics who transform an ordinary car into a racer. They hold outlaw matches on back roads, attain speeds of a hundred fifty m.p.h. or better, and are often killed.

  2. One can “cock” the wheel of a Thunderbird—that is the driver’s wheel can be pushed forward so that the driver may seat himself without inconvenience.

  3. I don’t remember what I meant b
y an axle type but I may have been thinking of [Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s] Axel, the one about the young man who says, “As for living, our servants can do that for us.”

  4. Hog belly should really be pork belly. Pork bellies are traded in the commodities market.

  5. A pig-in-a-wig is reminiscent of a pig-in-a-poke in the old saying, poke being an old word for sack or bag. Then there is pig-in-a-blanket or ground meat cooked in cabbage leaves. Lastly, we come to the nursery rhyme Barber, barber, shave a pig, how many hairs to make a wig? Put this all together and you get the image of a porcine man wearing what looks to be artificial hair.

  6. A Roto-Rooter man is an expensive American specialist who unstops clogged drains by inserting a long phallic segmented steel instrument called a “snake.” And that is what a Roto-Rooter man is.

  7. “Pet” [means here] arbitrary—one’s favorite form of obstinacy or crankiness.

  8. Vacate the personae simply means to abandon one’s favorite masks.

  9. To launder money is a well-known Mafia expression. The illest-gotten gains of gangsters cannot legally be declared as income. The underworld has its own ways of making dirty money respectable by sending it through channels, etc.

  10. Castro is a manufacturer of folding beds or “hideaway” sofa beds. These generally have dangerously prominent hinges which have been known to injure hasty lovers.