Letters

by Saul Bellow

  I dictate this note to Janis and it contains love from us both,

  To Cynthia Ozick

  May 18, 1988 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Cynthia,

  When I looked around you were gone, and I was greatly disappointed. Our contacts make me think of a billiard game—one light touch and then we’re again at opposite ends of the table. Has Providence decided that touches are better than extended contacts? Anyway, I was sad, but during dinner my spirits rose somewhat on your account because you didn’t have to listen to the speeches. These got worse and worse with the rank and wealth of the speakers and by the time we got to the most eminent I was in some pain. He [Walter J. Annenberg] made Sartre’s void feel like Times Square. Among the other speakers I make an exception for [Chaim] Potok, who gave a very good talk, and gave it in his own words. The others all spoke the synthetic tongue of the media, something far worse than Orwellian double-speak. Double-speak and double-think were, after all, political, whereas with Mr. Annenberg there was no visible reason, it was an acte gratuit in the Gide meaning of the term—mental or linguistic murders.

  I think that I agreed with a nod when you spoke of the Academy Ceremony, but I have no intention of turning up this year. New York is a ten-hour round trip from Vermont and I can’t face that. Not for the privilege of sitting next to John Updike.

  It always does me good to see you, and I think it’s time we meet face to face for a conversation. Perhaps you and your husband would like to take in a Marlboro concert. If so, we could give you dinner and a night’s lodging.

  This does not count as an answer to your beautiful letter. I used to be a free and easy correspondent. God knows I never suffered from writer’s block, but as I grow older “the mail problem” has become serious. One could write a funny story on this subject, and I may do just that.

  (I think the medals they gave us could be used to crack walnuts. Or to subdue nudniks. Only nowadays it would be an abuse of some kind.)

  Now the hardest part of this letter—an appropriate close: I generally say “best wishes.” In your case they really are the best,

  In Philadelphia, Bellow and Ozick had been among the speakers at the centenary celebration of the Jewish Publication Society of America.

  To Harold Brodkey

  December 5, 1988 Chicago

  Dear H.B.:

  Late last summer I told Ann Malamud that I was going to write to you about your stories, which I was reading with pleasure. Now at the beginning of December I am ready to put down some of my impressions—not too long a time, for me. I guess I am slowing down—the gap between intention and performance is getting longer. To go immediately to the point: I see that we agree about human beings as they are represented in fiction, in modern literature. The models irritate or bore us, they are utterly used up; thin but usable for a century, they are coming apart now, a mass of floating threads. Speaking for myself (perhaps for you too) I find that what passes for human in most fiction is not merely inadequate but enraging as well, and in your stories I see a persistent following-up of intuitions that come too often to be passed over. Have I got it right? Take “Hofstedt” (p. 97): “The narrative will be colored like a map, according to the geography of my spirit . . . my lunges at and occasional capture of intelligence, that armored and fatal lizard.” (Your note calls me an intelligent writer, but I do understand that intelligence belongs under the lining. Any sane tailor knows that.)

  The things I like best have a kind of excited, even passionate vitality breaking out like a profuse nosebleed, a flow of blood, a hemorrhage, as in “Verona: A Young Woman Speaks”—the showpiece child of vain ambitious parents going clean out of herself. It takes the Swiss Alps with their snow to cool her. Or does the snow only make the kid more ecstatic? Each moment is more beautiful than the one before, but she does fall asleep. “This was happiness then.”

  In the longer stories this is less immediate but then the purpose of all the extended meanders is exploration, leading to the discovery (or surprise and capture) of intuitions. About love. About being.

  That’s how I interpret “Almost Classical” in your title.

  With thanks and best wishes,

  Brodkey’s book was Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.

  1989

  To Michael Alison

  June 12, 1989 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Michael,

  Since Barley’s death I have been rethinking everything I knew about her. One never does that for the living, somehow; you and Susan-Mary must be going through this too and even more painfully. Barley was physically fragile but she was also proportionately durable in spirit. She had drawn her own line through existence and followed it with extraordinary determination and persistence. What she had ruled out and could not allow herself to wish for was not allowed to interfere or to weaken her purpose. But her generosity was such that she wanted others to have what she had been obliged to relinquish.

  I couldn’t always understand her reasoning but I know from her bearing that she was receiving signals inaudible to me—probably unintelligible to me, as well. She was a dear and devoted friend and one of the most generous persons I ever knew.

  I am not much good at condolences, but I was her affectionate and admiring friend and shall continue to think of her and to feel for her as I have thought and felt for some forty years.

  Yours ever,

  To Cynthia Ozick

  June 15, 1989 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Cynthia,

  No need for you to make a case, you are entirely in the right about Tikkun and the Columbia/PLO/Israeli left. I’d attend your Writers’ and Artists’ Fair if I were entirely free, and although you will not be terribly interested in the crowded and presidential character of my schedule I can’t resist reeling off a sequence of dates representing a) gainful occasions, b) collegial and personal obligations and c) vanity and other mortal frailties. As you know, I shan’t be in Chicago next autumn. I agreed without proper forethought to teach at Boston University. I wish I hadn’t boxed myself in. I have to be in New York November 9th, back in Boston to teach a class November 10th. I fly to Washington November 30th to honor Malamud’s memory. Boston, again, the very next day. Then Tulsa, Oklahoma December 9th. Each of these occasions requires a round trip, your December 3rd conference included. Let me say nevertheless that I am going to try to come. That is, I will come if I can prepare a suitable statement. Being airborne is sometimes illuminating. Flying can stir me up. [ ... ]

  As for the PEN, my contempt for it is such that I now throw its membership bills into the fireplace. Besides, it gives me something less than pleasure to be listed with the Styrons, Vonneguts, Mailers, to say nothing of the academic specialists, public relations people and promoters whose names fill the membership list. And when you say that I ought to be left in peace to write more sentences I can make the same wish for you. The media experts etc. have it all over us in the field of politics and I am often tempted to take the Nabokov Literature-Only line. Perhaps it was easier for him. The situation of a Russian in exile (a Christian, after all) can’t approach that of a Jew with its special complications and singular horrors. The woman who wrote that splendid essay on Primo Levi in your last collection can’t possibly stand apart on Literature-Only grounds and keep her self-respect. The only non-fiction book I ever published, and it’s not likely to have a successor, was the Jerusalem one. I felt it had to be done, but then it was something I could do on my own terms without conferences, luncheons, speeches and appeals to the press to publicize my position. I can’t believe that either alternative (Politics, No Politics) answers the one truly significant question. Because we are Jews we are scandalized, and being scandalized sets us apart—i.e. we have to be isolated by “everybody.”

  I’d like to say since I’ve mentioned your terrific collection of essays that I thought you were too nice to George Steiner who is, of all pains in the ass, the most unbearable because of his high polish and his snobbery. He is not a good existentialist—Nietzschean-
Heideggerian—because the Nietzscheans and Heideggerians made no claims for the Europe that is (or was in the Nineteenth Century) and based all their hopes on a Europe that hadn’t yet appeared. They assumed that the old civilization was gone forever and they would not have cared for all this strutting of people dressed in what tatters they could find of the glorious old fabric. The Last Man in Zarathustra is not mentioned as an American. I kept thinking of Steiner’s opportunistic Old Europe game while I was recently reading Denis Donoghue’s piece on [Paul] de Man in The New York Review of Each Other’s Books. Since the linguistics business interests you, perhaps you too read his back-and-forth article (“Nazism was bad of course and it was wicked of de Man to hate Jews, but let us mitigate our judgment by thinking of the unhappy psychological constitution of the man, etc.”). De Man, like his master Heidegger (to whom he was never very faithful), believed that there was nothing further to be said or done for this civilization of ours and that whatever hastened its disintegration was historically justified. [ . . . ] In doing so, de Man won the admiration of hundreds of intellectuals to whom the decline of the West is just another game.

  I never do write you a short letter, do I? Miss M. Kakutani of the New York Times said a few weeks ago that I am a garrulous writer. Maybe she meant fluent. Of course no man can know at what point he may have turned into a Polonius.

  Yours ever,

  To Sophie Wilkins

  August 15, 1989 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Sophie:

  It isn’t hard nowadays to count one’s blessings, they’re well under the number of toes and fingers. It’s the scope of those blessings I do enjoy that I’m most gratefully aware of. In this day and age, bringing out a small book or two and hearing from you and from Karl about the one and the other makes me singularly lucky. I’m hardly conscious of anything resembling a “literary life,” but as a writer I’m still well above the poverty line. How “my readers” keep their purity and sanity is a profound mystery, given what they have to absorb in the way of literary journalism and the general Schlumperei [106] of “educated” opinion. To a large sector of that opinion, the heavily ideologized one, I am something of an ogre-reactionary. Besides I am one of the old-guy heavies who have to be kept in their place. No question but that Karl too has to put up with this being kept in place. No exceptions are made.

  Members of our own dwindling generation who will see the picture as only those can who have lived as we have—graduates of the same street-academies, veterans of the same wars, released from the same errors and prejudices, breathers of the vanishing atmospheres of the Thirties, Forties, Fifties—are our best judges. When I read, or rather study, one of your letters I remember the conversation of old friends, the tone of those better days and the style of thinking and comment of Greenwich Village gatherings. Friends now dead also come back to enlighten and comfort me and to remind me that we—the living remnant—are alone now, or all but. The survivors for the most part are silenter and silenter, reluctant, some of them, to say a single word. Of those still here a few have become dim, or too cranky to wish to make themselves intelligible. So you seem to me extraordinarily magnanimous. I send you a mere booklet and you answer with a personal letter, a really valuable communication in the old style. I sometimes think I write books in lieu of letters and that real letters have more kindness in them, addressed as they are to one friend. In pleasing you and Karl I have my reward. When you tell me I am more or less on track.

  Yours as ever,

  To Cynthia Ozick

  August 29, 1989 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Cynthia:

  I can write a small book more easily than a letter—why is that? This is not so much a question as a mystery, and an idiotic mystery at that. When I am writing fiction I am geared up or fully mobilized (see how I call on mechanical or military figures of speech). I seem to have some difficulty about being myself, unless it’s the fiction-writer that’s the real thing. But it’s not (thank God!) an identity problem. The real source of both letters and stories can be located. Somewhere Kierkegaard has written about the human power to relate everything to everything else. For Jews, it’s the neshama [107]. Still I find letter-writing difficult, a fault which is not trivial, an unpleasant fault. But then what you said about The Bellarosa Connection gave me more pleasure than I could handle, and your letter was in every respect so rich and generous that it turned me into a reader, an admiring reader.

  And now, as a preface to business, I have something to relate to you: My young friend Martin Amis, whom I love and admire, came to see me last week. He was brought here from Cape Cod by a chum whom I had never met, not even heard of. They stayed overnight. When we sat down to dinner the friend identified himself as a journalist and a regular contributor to the Nation. I last looked into the Nation when Gore Vidal wrote his piece about the disloyalty of Jews to the USA and their blood-preference for Israel. During the long years of our acquaintance, a dune of salt has grown up to season the preposterous things Gore says. He has a score to settle with the USA. Anywhere else, he might have been both a homosexual and a patrician. Here he had to mix with rough trade and also with Negroes and Jews; democracy has made it impossible to be a gentleman invert and wit. Also the very source of his grief has made him famous and rich. But never mind Gore, we can skip him. Let’s go on to our dinner guest, Martin’s companion. His name is Christopher Hitchens. During dinner he mentioned that he was a great friend of Edward Said. Leon Wieseltier and Noam Chomsky were also great buddies of his. At the mention of Said’s name, Janis grumbled. I doubt that this was unexpected, for Hitchens almost certainly thinks of me as a terrible reactionary—the Jewish Right. Brought up to respect and to reject politeness at the same time, the guest wrestled briefly and silently with the louche journalist and finally [the latter] spoke up. He said that Said was a great friend and that he must apologize for differing with Janis but loyalty to a friend demanded that he set the record straight. Everybody remained polite. For Amis’ sake I didn’t want a scene. Fortunately (or not) I had within reach several excerpts from Said’s Critical Inquiry piece, which I offered in evidence. Jews were (more or less) Nazis. But of course, said Hitchens, it was well known that [Yitzhak] Shamir had approached Hitler during the war to make deals. I objected that Shamir was Shamir, he wasn’t the Jews. Besides I didn’t trust the evidence. The argument seesawed. Amis took the Said selections to read for himself. He could find nothing to say at the moment but next morning he tried to bring the matter up, and to avoid further embarrassment I said it had all been much ado about nothing.

  Hitchens appeals to Amis. This is a temptation I understand. But the sort of people you like to write about aren’t always fit company, especially at the dinner table.

  Well, these Hitchenses are just Fourth-Estate playboys thriving on agitation, and Jews are so easy to agitate. Sometimes (if only I knew enough to do it right!) I think I’d like to write about the fate of the Jews in the decline of the West—or the long crisis of the West, if decline doesn’t suit you. The movement to assimilate coincided with the arrival of nihilism. This nihilism reached its climax with Hitler. The Jewish answer to the Holocaust was the creation of a state. After the camps came politics and these politics are nihilistic. Your Hitchenses, the political press in its silliest disheveled left-wing form, are (if nihilism has a hierarchy) the gnomes. Gnomes don’t have to know anything, they are imperious, they appear when your fairy-tale heroine is in big trouble, offer a deal and come to collect her baby later. If you can bear to get to know them you learn about these Nation-type gnomes that they drink, drug, lie, cheat, chase, seduce, gossip, libel, borrow money, never pay child support, etc. They’re the bohemians who made Marx foam with rage in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Well, that’s nihilism for you, one of its very minor branches, anyway. Yet to vast numbers of people they are very attractive somehow. That’s because those vast numbers are the rank and file of nihilism, and they want to hear from Hitchens and Said, etc., and consume falsehoods as they do fast-food. And
it’s so easy to make trouble for the Jews. Nothing easier. The networks love it, the big papers let it be made, there’s a receptive university population for which Arafat is Good and Israel is Bad, even genocidal.

  Now what does one do about all this?

  To be more particular, what am I to do about it on Dec. 3rd? I haven’t the slightest idea, and there’s nothing more depressing than to picture myself spluttering at the podium, making a fool of myself and making your meeting look foolish, too. Nothing would please our own Jewish nihilists more.

  What you need, and you’ve probably thought of this yourself, is a sensible talk by Jeane Kirkpatrick on the PLO.

  Ever your admiring and affectionate friend,

  Cordial relations would subsequently develop between Hitchens and the Bellows. Edward W. Said’s piece in Critical Inquiry was “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors.”

  To James Atlas

  September 20, 1989 Boston

  Dear James:

  Re-reading your Rosenfeld article this morning, I find it mostly accurate—although I become uncomfortably aware at times that a man I thought I knew well escaped my understanding in the end. At every turn of the spiral everything looks different. But it was a fair, even generous article and I was touched by it. Delmore would sometimes warn me against Isaac, whom he described as monstrously jealous. Perhaps he wanted the place in my affections held by Isaac. One thing they had in common was a belief in the truth of psychological analysis. And by the end of the Fifties I had had it with “psychology,” and when I say that Isaac escaped my understanding it’s not a psychological understanding that I have in mind. I never gave psychoanalysis so much as a two-year lease. I enjoyed it as a game then being played, and now I see it as trivial pursuit. What saddens me is that we didn’t know what we were doing. The cry from the cross, “Father, forgive them,” is more true than Freud’s complete works.