Letters

by Saul Bellow

  Please remember me to Irma [Brandeis]—I didn’t know of her tender attachment to cyclamens. It doesn’t surprise me [ . . . ]

  All best,

  Mrs. Shafer had remarked in her letter that like Albert Corde, hero of The Dean’s December, Irma Brandeis was a cultivator of cyclamens.

  To Louis Lasco

  May 29, 1982 [Chicago]

  Dear Polykarp:

  Many thanks for the poetical greetings. We missed you at the Tuley reunion. Not all the classmates were well. Bananas Landau didn’t seem quite himself, although physically not greatly changed. With many it was, “We meet again—and so farewell.” My sharpshooting memory brought down scores of targets. The ladies were flattered. “You knew me!” One was from the third grade at Lafayette.

  I hope you’re happy in retirement, and haven’t retired on all fronts.

  Yours ever,

  Gapon Khoraschevsky

  To Eleanor Clark

  May 30, 1982 Chicago

  Dear Eleanor—

  I sh’d think Paolo Milano would answer your questions about [G. G.] Belli. He hasn’t answered my letters. The reasons? Ill health, bitterness, general shrinkage. A cook-butler-valet takes care of him, a short peasant, a discreet death-watch kind of man. Paolo is so stooped by now that he has to force his gaze upwards when he wants to look at you. He reads more than ever—i.e. continually—and shares his bed with books. But you don’t want all this, only his address.

  I think I’ll be able to give some money to Yaddo. A man named Brown, in N.Y., says he can sell some of my manuscripts.

  We look forward with pleasure to the summer and our annual meetings.

  Affectionately,

  To Alfred Kazin

  June 7, 1982 W. Halifax

  Dear Alfred,

  A happy birthday to you, and admiration and love and long life—everything. Never mind this and that, this and that don’t matter much in the summing up.

  Love from your junior by five days,

  Your daughter is a charming young woman. We had drinks together in Chicago two weeks ago.

  To Marion Meade

  June 16, 1982 W. Halifax, Vermont

  Dear Ms. Meade,

  Dorothy Parker was the nicest of all the participants in the Esquire symposium mainly because she was the quietest. Miss Parker was far from young when we first met and seemed depressed when she didn’t, more sharply, appear heartbroken. I can’t remember that we ever had a personal conversation although I met her on several occasions. We were occasionally invited by Lillian Hellman for tea, and Lillian and Dashiell Hammett did most of the talking. I said little because these great figures were my seniors and Miss Parker said little because she was evidently downcast.

  Sincerely,

  Biographer Marion Meade was researching Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? which would be published in 1988.

  To Nathan Gould

  August 4, 1982 W. Halifax, Vermont

  Dear Natie:

  [ . . . ] I attended the Tuley reunion and it was a depressing affair, on the whole—elderly people nostalgic for youth and the Depression years. There seemed nothing for them (for us) to do but to turn into middle-class Americans, all supplied with the same phrases and thoughts from the same sources. Some came from far away (Rudy Lapp from Oakland, Cal.) and some were crippled and required wheeling. Some, built for stability, appeared not greatly changed, like Bernice Meyer Landau. Her brother [Bananas] who seemed well preserved turned out to have a hereditary disorder affecting his memory so that he was groping, while we talked, and his new wife was deeply uneasy (but behaving well). As for some of the others you name, I haven’t seen Passin in some years. We had lunch in Chicago four or five years ago and he was in many respects like a Japanese mask, a bright man but devious. Freifeld a stumbling old chaser and thoroughly undistinguished lawyer. Melancholy. Miserable. George Reedy, whom I used to see in Washington when he was Johnson’s press secretary, has remained lively and quite original. He’s Dean of the Journalism School at Marquette, in Milwaukee. But my closest friends were Oscar and Isaac, dead for many years. In every decade I try to think what they might have been like had they lived.

  As for me, Natie, I have become a sort of public man, which was not at all my intent. I thought, in my adolescent way, that I would write good books (as writing and books were understood in the Thirties) and would have been happy in the middle ranks of my trade. It would have made me wretched to be overlooked, but I wasn’t at all prepared for so much notice, and I haven’t been good at managing “celebrity.” That’s a long story and I shan’t go into details. I can’t do the many things I’m asked to do, answer the huge volume of mail, keep up with books and manuscripts and at the same time write such things as I want and need to write. I write to you because I remember you so vividly and affectionately from the old days, and I would feel alienated from my own history, false, if I didn’t make time (something like creating a dry spot under this Niagara of mail). I’m delighted to hear from you, I’d be happy to see you, we could talk for many evenings. But to write an introduction for the collection of Mr. [Arthur] Leipzig, clearly a distinguished photographer, I would have to put aside my own manuscripts—give up my frontline defenses against chaos.

  A word about Jewish Life: I do my best, but I seldom write anything about Jewish Life that pleases Jewish Opinion. First thing I know there’s a brawl, and I come out of it with a shiner.

  All the best to you,

  To Owen Barfield

  August 21, 1982 W. Halifax, Vermont

  Dear Owen:

  Clifford Monks sent me your review of the Dean with the suggestion that I write a reply—take issue with you, perhaps? It would be inappropriate to do such a thing. I wouldn’t dream of trying to overturn your opinion. Perhaps your understanding of the book is better than my own. After all, one can never answer fully for what one has written. Besides, the Dean is not a “fiction” in the conventional or formal sense. It is, as some people have told me, people whose judgment I value, a very strange piece of work.

  I was touched by your close reading of the book and by your interest in (affection for?) its oddball author. It’s natural, however, that I should read my reader, criticize the critic, even the friendly and affectionate critic, or try to make out the shape of his thoughts. Besides, I am an apprentice Steiner-reader whereas you are a respected veteran, so I am bound to take an immense interest in your views. Here is a man who has been studying Anthroposophy for fifty years. What effects has this had? What is his vision of the modern world? Etc. And I felt as I read your review that you found me very strange indeed. I was aware from our first meeting that I was far more alien to you than you were to me. American, Jew, novelist, modernist—well of course I am all of those things. And I wouldn’t have the shadow of a claim on anybody’s attention if I weren’t the last, for a novelist who is not contemporary can be nothing at all. Rimbaud’s Il faut être absolument moderne [94] is self-evidently true, for me. Perhaps for you, too, but you would qualify moderne in so many ways that it would no longer be the same thing. In any case, the fact that you find me so alien proves that it is not the same. And why do I say that you are less alien to me than I to you? Well, because you have qualities familiar to me: English, of an earlier generation, educated in classics, saturated in English literature. Your history is clearer to me than mine can ever be to you. I have led an “undescribed life,” as it were. Few Europeans really know anything about America. [Denis] Brogan knew a bit, and so does [Luigi] Barzini, but there is something really very different (not in every respect a good difference) on this side of the Atlantic. And I hope you won’t take offense at this, but in my opinion you failed to find the key, the musical signature without which books like mine can’t be read. You won’t find anything like it in any of the old manuals. There is nothing arbitrary in this newness. It originates in one’s experience of the total human situation. But there is no point in lecturing on the self-consciousness of Americans and how it is to be
represented, or why the reflections in the Dean are “crowded” into the small corners of sentences. Without the signature the Dean is impossible to play. Reading becomes a labor, and then of course one needs frequent rest, and the book has to be put down. And what is this mysterious signature? It is Corde’s intense passion. If the reader misses that he has missed everything.

  And this is where I think your reading goes wrong, for you see “extremity of self-consciousness” rather than passion, Henry James in shorthand. Not at all. Nothing like it. The Dean is a hard, militant and angry book and Corde, far from being a brooding introvert, attacks Chicago (American society) with a boldness that puts him in considerable danger. But he is far more concerned to purge his understanding of false thought than to protect himself. Indeed, what is there to protect when the imagination has succumbed to trivialization and distortion?

  Autobiography? Only in the vaguest sense. If I had been writing about myself I would have recorded that the Dean was reading [Rudolf Steiner’s] Leading Thoughts and The Michael Mystery, and that he saw himself between Lucifer in the East and Ahriman in the West. It’s not so much “unwillingness to essay the leap beyond” extremity of self-consciousness as it is dependable and certain knowledge of what the leap will carry you into that is the problem.

  I’m quite sure that I haven’t changed your mind about anything. I wasn’t really trying. I esteem you just as you are.

  Yours with best wishes,

  About the “leap beyond”: “certain knowledge” isn’t it either, but it would have to be a leap into a world of which one has had some experience. I have had foreshadowings, very moving adumbrations, but the whole vision of reality must change in every particular and the idols [must be] dismissed. Then one can take flight. It can’t be done by fiat, however much one may long for it.

  “East, West, and Saul Bellow,” Barfield’s review of The Dean’s December, had appeared in Towards.

  To Saul Steinberg

  December 26, 1982 [Chicago]

  Dear Saul:

  It’s an act of special generosity to send us these Steinbergs. I need them in cold Chicago as an aid to survival. As I used to hear them say in Parisian music halls, “Ça réchauffe un peu.” [95] I take a particular interest in the Strada Palas because of its vision of childhood—a man-sized boy striding the streets of Bucharest in primordial Romania. The absence of the world-as-represented-by-anybody-else is what I most appreciate. On occasions when I set myself to ponder the “problem of art” I always end up with this. I have my own version of the boy going down the street. If I were to rummage about for technical terms I would say that I had “unmediated percepts” in those days. Life was furnished with objects which hadn’t yet been tampered with. These objects were a product of the collaboration of God and Man, with Man contributing the shabbiness. I had words of my own for such things when I was a kid, syllables that came to me unsolicited. To this day I have never spoken them aloud. The faces you put in the windows of Strada Palas, the sunflowers, the rain-barrel, the dinosaur-hackled cats on the roof may have come from the same psychic source. I lived on St. Dominique St. in Montreal where orthodox Jews mixed with French Canadians, soldiers from the barracks on Pine Ave., and also cats, many cats, and quite a few nuns. The year was 1920.

  I hope we can meet this summer. Alexandra and I have been putting up a house in Vermont. An act of chutzpah, at my age (Jewish hubris?).

  Many thanks, and blessings,

  PART FIVE

  1983-1989

  What were we here for, of all strange beings and creatures the strangest? Clear colloid eyes to see with, for a while, and see so finely, and a palpitating universe to see, and so many human messages to give and to receive. And the bony box for thinking and for storage of thoughts, and a cloudy heart for feelings. Ephemerids, grinding up other creatures, flavoring and heating their flesh, devouring this flesh. A kind of being filled with death-knowledge, and also filled with infinite longings.

  —“ Zetland: By a Character Witness”

  1983

  To Alfred Kazin

  January 24, 1983 Chicago

  Dear Alfred:

  Sorry you fell down. I am confident though that Martinique will heal your hip and you can leave the walker down there for some old party who really needs it. You say that sleep is tough but sitting up at the desk is possible, which proves that you haven’t yet realized how many writers do their sleeping at the desk. I’m glad you enjoyed my story. I don’t see that further comment is required. The first criterion is enjoyment, and so are the second and third criteria. The fact that you found it in part puzzling only signifies that you have fallen (temporarily, I hope) into the bad habit of puzzling over such matters. What? You didn’t notice how innovative “Him [with His Foot in His Mouth]” was in execution, and failed to notice how different it was from 99.9999 percent of stories recently published (say, past ten years or so)? Well, I forgive you these omissions.

  As to your lengthy postscript, I don’t like the activists of the Free World Committee (except Midge [Decter] whom I do like for old times’ sake), but I belong because the other side smells so bad. Unbearable! And when I read of Gromyko’s visit to Bonn and see how effectively the Russians are working to disarm Western Europe unilaterally, then I think frantically of a No-blank big enough to accommodate my name. However, I never attend the meetings of such organizations because it interferes with the writing of stories. Enjoy the Plaza.

  Yrs. ever,

  Kazin attended the neoconservative Committee for the Free World’s meeting and would write critically about the organization in “Saving My Soul at the Plaza,” in The New York Review of Books. In February of the following year, Bellow resigned from the Committee for the Free World.

  To Robert Penn Warren

  February 4, 1983 Chicago

  Dear Red—

  Your letter made me so happy that I couldn’t think how to answer it. (“The problems of pleasure,” a philosopher would say.) Well, thank you for liking the story. When I say that I seem to have found a congenial way to get off a story, I feel like an old prospector with a new hunch. Then it comes to me with amusement and affection that we belong to a small band of old guys mad about writing, wandering in the desert.

  I congratulate you on becoming grandparents. One can become a parent simply by fooling around. There’s something fortuitous about it: Comedy of Errors, not necessarily a serious thing. But to be a grandparent fits you into the species. You have your place now in the endless list of “begats.”

  The [new] house [in W. Brattleboro] is almost ready—seven rooms without a chair, a teaspoon or a pillowcase. I’m coming out towards the end of May to buy second-hand furniture from Bolster’s Warehouse in Brattleboro. So we’ll be seeing you very soon—no small part of the happiness of being in Vermont.

  My affectionate greetings to you both.

  Yours as ever,

  To Jeff Wheelwright

  February 4, 1983 Chicago

  Dear Mr. Wheelwright:

  Many thanks for your letter. Was I really attacking journalism in the Dean? It might be nearer the truth to say that I was contemplating a great modern mystery—why, in this age of communication, are we so near the border of total incoherency? The literate masses desire information. A crowd of technicians informs them. Why the information should be haunted by unreality is the great mystery. Some people insist that mass society must kill true meaning. Others (like me) suspect that the confusion may have an epistemological root (of “me,” I should add that I occasionally have the metaphysical falling-sickness). The language of science is clear enough, within its limits, but all other important questions are up for grabs. Maybe because for science they have no true meaning. They have been surrendered to an incoherency which assumes various guises, or disguises, of meaning. An interesting variation on “ye have eyes and see not”: “ye have words and mean not.” Since we desire nevertheless to be informed we turn on the tube and read the papers but it’s all like a strip-tea
se in which the lights never fail to go out before we can get to the Main Thing. Today, for instance, I tried to read Flora Lewis in the Times on the Bulgarian connections of the man who tried to kill the Pope. Flora said that perhaps [Yuri] Andropov was aware that the attempt would be made. We can’t afford to know this fact, if it is a fact, because that would bring to us a new, deadlier Sarajevo. If the Russians were provoked by our knowledge of the truth they might be driven to destroy us all (themselves as well) with nuclear weapons. So we had better refrain. I’ve been reading such items since—oh—1930. The epistemological fits are much more fun. Better than the illusion of communication.

  Yrs. sincerely,

  Jeff Wheelwright is a science writer for the Los Angeles Times and the author of Degrees of Disaster: Prince William Sound: How Nature Reels and Rebounds (1994) and The Irritable Heart: The Medical Mystery of the Gulf War (2001).

  To Teddy Kollek

  February 9, 1983 Chicago

  Dear Teddy,

  I long to get back to Jerusalem and I keep looking for opportunities to get away from Chicago. The problem is always one of coordination—I simply can’t get my variety show together so that I write, teach, correspond, fend off lawyers, balance accounts, perform the duties of a father and husband, doctor myself, etc. like a large troupe of trained seals. What all this comes to is that my dream of returning to Jerusalem and your get-together and dialogue [at the Jerusalem Book Fair] cannot find consummation at the same moment. I will add, privately, that I am told you will be entertaining Mr. [V. S.] Naipaul, who does not take a kindly view of me, although I once voted him an award, and have always spoken pleasantly of his books (the better ones). The Latin for all this I believe is verbum sapienti [96]. (I think that is the correct dative.) Bless you for your great kindness, and best wishes and regards from the Bellows.