Letters

by Saul Bellow

  But there is nothing to complain about. I am lucky to find a few readers who actually approve. To have even a minyan [104] is ecstasy. (Do I catch myself saying, after so many decades of devotion to Anglo-American literature, that the Happy Few resemble the Jews!)

  What I intended when I sat down to write was to thank you and Sophie for your assurance that I was indeed on track, doing what I thought I was doing and even directing my attention to things that had escaped me in my frenzy. And then enclosing the poem, which I re-read several times a week, was magnificently symbolic, an act of certification from another initiate; going me one (or more) better. This is a poem Catullus might have written if he had reached your age—“Goodbye to all that.” Liberation ladies may be incensed when they read you, but the poem contains history, and history, as Lincoln assured us, we can’t escape.

  My friend Janis and I will be leaving Vermont toward the end of September, but we can and will entertain you almost as splendidly in Chicago.

  Yours ever,

  The enclosed poem was, in all likelihood, Shapiro’s “Adult Bookstore.”

  To John Auerbach

  August 5, 1987 W. Brattleboro Dear John,

  You haven’t heard from me because of my mad obstinacy. I have insisted on reaching you by telephone and after some fifty attempts Janis and I were once or twice rewarded with a ring. There was, however, no answer at your end. So I am writing to say that we’re well, thriving, recovering from heavy and fatiguing burdens—convalescing. I begin to have hopes of recovery and one of these days you will hear that I have gone back to my desk. [ . . . ]

  To tell the truth I have felt somewhat waterlogged and half-sunken in the green heat of New England (an unusually stifling summer), and while I have a lively desire to do things I have very little power to act, so I am both agitated and torpid. I have to tell you that I was, however, moved to write a fairly severe letter to Tony [Kerrigan]. He sent a communication to Commentary to explain how it was that Borges had been passed over by the Swedish Academy and why it was that so many lesser writers had gotten the prize. I did not feel that Yeats, Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Camus, Churchill, etc. were so very far beneath Borges and I was taken by surprise that Kerrigan should say publicly what I have always thought him to think privately. I went after him for that and if he ever does reply to my letter he will probably take refuge in the usual eccentricities. He may or may not mention this to you, and I think it best to speak about it now. I don’t really care whether I stand high or low in Tony’s hierarchy but I think that my friends or friendly acquaintances should not surprise me in print with their negative opinions. Only yesterday I recommended Tony to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a translator’s grant saying that there was no better interpreter of Borges in English. I mention this to assure you that I am not persecuting him.

  Borges declared long ago that contemporary writers ought not to do novels and as Tony is faithful to the master I have a rabbinical problem with him. Every man to his own orthodoxy. Even if I say so myself, More Die of Heartbreak is a better read than the Borges story on Raimondo Llull, submitted by Tony with his application for the National Endowment for the Humanities, with its mystical diagrams from the Middle Ages. But I know that a falling out between two of your friends makes you uncomfortable, so I want to tell you simply that I wasn’t falling out but only acting from self-respect, drawing the line with Tony. Nor do I intend to quarrel with [A.B.] Yehoshua, for whom I have a genuine liking (with only minimal reservations). I intend to write him a conciliatory epistle this very day.

  The flowers around the house come and go and only Janis holds her ground, flower-like but not subject to blossoming and decay like the vegetable kingdom.

  Affectionate greetings to Nola.

  With much love,

  To Wright Morris

  August 10, 1987 West Brattleboro

  Dear Wright,

  I hope you will send me a copy of The Origin of Sadness which you say is a meditation on our shared losses. We have had a long friendship and an unusual one, if you bear in mind a certain oddity in our two shapes, a permanent incongruity. I mention it because this time we got out of hailing distance entirely. More Die of Heartbreak is a funny book, or was meant to be. Your radar for laughter must have been pointed the wrong way. Your welcome and charming letter compliments me on restoring the word “soul” to common usage and then you say that I confuse “ego-crack” (a Californian category) with heartbreak. Now it seems to me that people who will not use the word soul and are by now unaware that any such thing exists will surely experience a kind of inner suffocation. I have taken the liberty to describe this as heartbreak. Killing sorrow would be an acceptable alternative as in our old friend Chaucer: “Sorrow at hearte killeth full many a manne.” With this double invocation of poetic license I send you a comradely embrace.

  Nowadays overlooked, Wright Morris (1910-98) was the greatly admired author of The World in the Attic (1949), Man and Boy (1951), The Works of Love (1952), The Field of Vision (1956), Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960) and Plains Song (1980). He twice won the National Book Award for Fiction. A native of Nebraska, where most of his novels are set, Morris lived for many years in Mill Valley, California.

  To Ann Malamud

  August 30, 1987 West Brattleboro

  Dear Ann:

  Your note about More [Die of Heartbreak] was particularly pleasing because I have come, over the years, to value your opinion. It takes longer to see the wife of another writer clearly, that’s the odd truth. It isn’t easy to get a direct view of her, especially if you see her not oftener than twice a year. But you bowled me over when you identified Dick Rovere in The Dean’s December . That was either clairvoyance or genius. I began to listen attentively. True readers are about as small in number as the Apostles. The road is rocky and getting rockier all the time, and all but a few have been bounced off the wagon. (You were lucky to have read only one review—the full picture is appalling.) I think I might have done more to make the meaning of the title clearer: People are now supposed to be dying of external causes. Their own souls are of no account, a cause of nothing. So human nature, gone underground to a greater depth than ever before, way below Plato’s cave, thinks only about biochemistry and lives in total ignorance of itself. To me this naturally seemed a truly comic theme.

  I like what you say about the old Jews. Still, I wonder sometimes whether America hasn’t been too much for them.

  Yours most affectionately,

  To Martin Amis

  October 20, 1987 Chicago

  Dear Martin,

  I make plans and then have to cancel them, so the pain schedule is fairly steady but the anxiety schedule is always full to overflowing. My own health is none too good and I have a sister who is older and far sicker, in need of care. She is just out of the hospital and has to be looked after until late November when she goes to Florida. It would have made me miserable to have run off to London and its pleasures with only a nurse to look in on her twice weekly.

  I’m glad to hear that you are finishing a novel. I desperately need something new to read. Returning from Vermont I found my office stacked with recent books, and when I sized them up I asked what might be in them that I couldn’t do without—was there in those heaps a single page containing what is absolutely essential to expansion or survival? Long and bitter experience has jammed the answer into both ears, as definite as doom. Not an ounce of survival in any of these.

  I already mentioned to two London interviewers that in the younger generation on either side of the Atlantic you stand out like the evening star. So they will think that you and I are in cahoots, ganging up on everybody else, conspiring to take the candy away from the other babies. But I am much too old for candy and oddly enough (for a writer of fiction) I have for some years now been saying exactly what I think (whenever I know what that is). The conspiratorial imagination is terrible lively hereabouts. Word has gone out that my friend Allan Bloom is nothing but one of my fictional creati
ons and that I have put him over on the USA, successful book and all. So one does lay oneself open to accusations by being friendly and generous to me, and you were generous, when you agreed to do a BBC number. That at least I shall be sparing you by nursing sister Jane in Chicago. [ . . . ] I’m sorry that we shan’t be eating a jolly dinner together. It’s still possible that Janis and I might fly over in December, but if that doesn’t work out we shall both entertain you handsomely in Vermont next summer.

  Yours as ever,

  1988

  To Todd Grimson

  January 27, 1988 Chicago

  Dear Mr. Grimson:

  This mill grinds slowly, but it does grind. Thank you for your letter of last August. I put it aside with a sense that you are nice not to ask me to do anything. I was then and am now somewhere on that wall to which people refer when they say—“driven up the wall.”

  I had not heard about George [Sarant]’s heart attack [though by now] old friends of his father’s have told me about it. He and I have not been faithful correspondents, so will you tell him for me how very sorry I am? If he is as you say a Reichian or neo-Reichian he will have no use for such sentiments but I am an old friend of the family and remember him as a small boy and I must therefore be allowed to have the feelings of an old friend of the family.

  It is hard to keep up with new books especially when you feel continually that time is running out and that one cannot afford to pick up a new novel enthusiastically. Three or four new books arrive daily, to say nothing of letters, magazines, booklets, brochures, appeals, cables and unsolicited manuscripts. I do try, however, to look into all the books. I read a few pages and if I am (the rare case) fascinated I sit down and read the whole thing through. When Oscar Wilde said he could resist anything except temptation he may have meant that he was seldom tempted. Substitute fascination for temptation and my own case is covered. [ . . . ]

  Sincerely yours,

  To John Auerbach

  March 1, 1988 W. Brattleboro

  Dear John,

  Janis and I have come to Vermont for ten days and we are now sitting in the kitchen in winter sunshine. Smadar [Auerbach’s daughter] and her husband have been very kind, informing us about your surgery which by all reports has been difficult and dangerous, and in our own way we have been going through the whole thing with you from afar—for all the good that may do. The only good we can do is to tell you from a distance of thousands of miles how dear you are to us and how much we want to see you.

  I remember that Freud somewhere said that happiness begins when the pain stops, so that our gratifications may be described as one escape after another. If Janis and I are happy here it is as refugees from Chicago. In Vermont we can walk up and down the roads without fear of being overtaken by some drug addict, sex maniac or gunman. We not only walk, we also cross-country ski. Janis has taught me at my advanced age how to keep from falling down. And how once down to rise from my behind to my feet. I get some boyish enjoyment from this. I suppose that age is one of those conditions from which occasional remissions bring some pleasure. Maybe that’s what second childhood really means. I have also brought some manuscripts out here, my most dependable opiate, as well as books by the dozen. I haven’t yet learned that I can’t expect to read them all, but I cling to them as pious Christians do their beads or clergymen their missals. But I do go out of doors and rinse my brains in God’s icy air without knowing whether the tears in my eyes come from the cold wind or gratitude to my Creator. The children come: Daniel was here last weekend and Adam and his wife and baby will be here soon. No mail arrives from Chicago, it will all be waiting for us next Monday, stacks of letters and bills. I can’t understand how so many insurance companies can have found their way into the list of my dependents.

  Tony Kerrigan is spending the winter in Brooklyn with friends or nafkes [105] or both. We are on good terms and exchange letters now and then. I sometimes have the feeling that Tony is always suggesting changes to me, hopeful corrections of my character. If it’s not too late to learn. I joke with you a bit out of helplessness. All that a friend can do is love you and these small jokes which are love’s trimmings. We will try to telephone when you have returned to the kibbutz.

  Meanwhile, Janis and I send our love to you and Nola.

  Ever your friend,

  To Rachel E. G. Schultz

  March 11, 1988 Chicago

  Dear Rachel,

  Bad of me not to have answered your thoughtful and beautiful letter. You will understand though, with a slight allowance for poetic license, that like you I am often up in the night with the sick, both sick characters (fictional) and my own ailing neurasthenic self. There are enough sufferers to keep us all busy day and night.

  I was touched by what you said about my brother [Sam]—your grandfather—and interested in your observation about his awkwardness and discomfort with women, even with his own granddaughters. Your mother and I have often, since his death, talked about him and I think that my brother, in spite of his considerable charm, was never at ease even with members of his immediate family. In the world he made a great success, but his intimacies were all crippled. I am convinced that he was forever apologizing for his inadequacies. As an adolescent he had a very normal interest in girls, but he also felt menaced by them and took refuge in marital safety. You and your contemporaries would find it hard to grasp the degree of sexual terror that afflicted people of an older generation. It seems to me that my brother’s terror took the form eventually of retreat. He shrank into himself and in effect turned himself over to his wife, who offered him a fortress of orthodoxy, in which she could persecute him to her heart’s content. About business he was able to think comprehensively and clearly but he had little insight into the people who surrounded him and took him over. His is a case of a man so dominated by self-doubt and fear that he never learned to make any significant human judgments other than business judgments. I saw this, I knew the history of these weaknesses as intimately as only a sibling can, I pitied him for it, and I loved him without any expectation of a return. He forgave me even my numerous and preposterous marriages, by which he must in some way have felt threatened. But I didn’t ask him for anything and I knew that he would never understand what I was up to. I learned to love both my brothers and my sister to the extent that they were lovable and even a bit beyond, and it made not the slightest difference to me that I couldn’t even begin to talk to them. I had to forgo all communication except what long-standing family love going back to childhood made possible. But that was a great deal. Some four thousand years of Jewish history went into it—I don’t mean Talmudic history or anything of that sort. I mean the history of Jewish feeling.

  That you should have seen this moves me. A delightful development which I never anticipated: The things that couldn’t be said to members of my generation can be said to nieces and great nieces and, here and there, to my own children.

  Lots of love,

  Your doting G.U.

  To Philip Roth

  March 15, 1988 Chicago

  Dear Philip,

  Now that I have decided not to attend Abba Eban’s Brussels Conference (my sidekick would have been another friend of Israel, Mr. P. Klutznick of Water Tower Place), I can look forward to seeing you instead and perhaps hearing Claire reading from Virginia Woolf. If you like I will entertain you with an account of my residence at the old Woolf House in Rodmell, about fifteen years ago. I was there for some six weeks. I think the French word would have been sequestré. Nothing to compare with the horrors of the Demjanjuk trial. You must tell me about those. As for the little talk, I would like nothing better.

  I read of your recent award [National Book Award for The Counterlife] with delight. There’s so little in the newspapers these days to be pleased about. (I write this on March 15th, Primary Day in Chicago. I don’t look forward to the results in the Tribune tomorrow morning.)

  Yours ever,

  Roth had attended the trial of John Demjanjuk, a Detroit autow
orker extradited to Jerusalem to stand trial for crimes against humanity. Alleged to be the infamous “Ivan the Terrible” who tortured and murdered tens of thousands at Treblinka and Sobibor, he was in 1988 convicted and sentenced to death. (Ten years later Israel’s Supreme Court reversed the verdict. Demjanjuk has subsequently been extradited to stand trial again on the same and additional charges in Germany, where his case continues.)

  To John Auerbach

  April 15, 1988 Chicago

  Dear John,

  Dizzy times for me—nobody but nobody gets a break, a reprieve. I can understand why Romantic poets loved rural life. The peasants timed themselves by the sun and had leisure to smell the flowers. In Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony Ludwig started with the fresh fields and then there was a tempest and when the tempest passed you heard the melody of a dear little cuckoo, a capitalist bird sitting in a nest it had not built. So after storms Romantics expected peace, but you and I know better than that and expect no relief after our daily storms. However, I continue to write. I hope you are writing too. I was happy to get a note in your own hand, so I expect you are still able to write stories. As much as possible I ignore health problems and the handicaps that come with age and consider them so many impediments to storytelling—I have just finished a long story called “A Theft.” You will have a copy as soon as I can clean it up and impose on Janis to type it.

  I don’t quite understand what you meant by “moving to the States”—that, from my standpoint, would be the best thing in the world if it were feasible. I go on hearing from Tony, who telephones me for news of your progress and I tell him what I can, which is not much these days, since I hesitate to phone Smadar who will have other things on her mind now. But we are going to be in Philadelphia on the first of May and perhaps by then the baby will have been born. Janis and I are making our Vermont move early this year, at the beginning of May. As peaceful a summer of work as one can arrange in these terrible days of trouble. On the question of Israel I have kept my distance from most factions although I did sign a letter at Teddy Kollek’s urging, with co-signers Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Stern. My memory may be suppressing “Boynstein” the conductor. [ . . . ]