Letters

by Saul Bellow

  My health improves daily. I say this only to friends. Illness gives me a whole range of marvelous excuses for refusing the thousands of requests that come in the mail.

  On Thursday Janis and I are flying down to Coral Gables to attend the wedding of my youngest son, Daniel. Youngest? He’ll be thirty-two in March. Nobody is young anymore, except the grandchildren, and even they look a little wrinkled from time to time—my own projection, of course. I must have an ailing cornea. [ . . . ]

  Best wishes,

  To Julian Behrstock

  January 19, 1996 Brookline

  Dear Julian,

  Just as I was about to emerge from the woods and to feel approximately normal, the doctors caught up with me and back to the hospital I went for gall-bladder surgery. This imposed a second convalescence on the first, which wasn’t quite over. I found myself in the same hospital corridor, only two doorways away from the room I occupied last January. I wouldn’t dream of complaining to a non-complainer like you. I’m just chronicling, not bitching. The surgery is about three weeks behind me now. My belly, which must have resembled Picasso’s stamp collection, has recovered from the surgical bruises. The only prominent scar goes through my navel. Out of some sheer primitive magical conviction, I felt the navel to be inviolable. I seemed to have believed that it would never be mutilated. Probably some Oedipal residue. Anyway, I am delighted to hear that you are well enough to travel en famille.

  I have in today’s mail a letter from the Ministry of Culture in Paris inviting me to a “Salon du livre” late in March. The national center of this book fair, if you can believe it, is 53 rue de Verneuil. Surely you haven’t forgotten the rue de Verneuil.

  But this is a pipe dream. I couldn’t possibly fly to Paris for three days and bring back a jet lag lasting for weeks.

  Janis and I have moved away from Bay State Road and the showpiece apartment belonging to the University is used for visiting firemen. [ . . . ]

  I hope there will be no more medical news at either end. The foregoing explains why you have not been hearing from me.

  Yours affectionately,

  To Sophie Wilkins

  January 19, 1996 Brookline

  Dear Sophie,

  I seem to be down to notes, even though I long to reply to your delicious letter with a letter equally long.

  It took me nearly a year to recover from heart failure, double pneumonia, and a toxic attack on the nervous system, and then, just as I thought I could put it all behind me, the doctors decided that they must remove my gall bladder, and the surgery put me down again for a period of weeks and I am only just beginning to recover. So although I have all sorts of things to tell you, I find that I can’t write stories or novels in the morning and long letters in the afternoon. Nor when I look at the shelves in the library can I understand demon correspondents like Voltaire or Alexander Pope. I am too old and bothered to read their books, much less their letters. In my youth I had time for everything. I read scads of books, earned my letter on the track team, chased girls and spoke from a soapbox. I can only think about Voltaire that he must have had an extraordinarily long adolescence. But then Goethe told Eckermann somewhere that whenever he began to write in real earnest the years dropped away and he was once again sixteen and seventeen.

  Anyway, I have pulled out of the second nosedive. My youngest son, Daniel, was married last Sunday in Coral Gables, Fla., and Janis and I flew down on Thursday from this gateway to the Arctic to the snowless beauty of the south. We had to wait four hours at Logan for our plane. I had sworn in advance to put up with no long airport ordeal, and I actually had a letter from the doctor certifying that I was too weak to expose myself to fatigue. But I did it all the same. I didn’t want the kid accusing me of disappearing on all important occasions. So I did it all, including a second trip to the altar with my ex-wife, Daniel’s mother. There wouldn’t have been a Stoic in all of Rome who wouldn’t have congratulated me on my philosophic poise.

  Let me add my name to the list of Freud’s detractors. If he had been purely a scientist he wouldn’t have had nearly so many readers. It was lovers of literature (and not the best kind of those) who made his reputation. His patients were the text and his diagnoses were lit. crit. The gift the great nineteenth-century nudniks [123] gave us was the gift of metaphor. Marx with the metaphor of class struggle and Freud with the metaphor of the Oedipus complex. Once you had read Marx it took a private revolution to overthrow the powerful metaphor of class warfare—for an entire decade I couldn’t see history in any other light. Freud also subjugated us with powerful metaphors and after a time we couldn’t approach relationships in any but a Freudian medical light. Thank God I liberated myself before it was too late.

  Anyway, the purpose of the letter is to tell you how much we love you and miss you both. Janis and I will be in New York on April 16th. The reason for the visit is a bought-and-paid-for reading at Queens College. Perhaps we will be able to see you then. The trouble is that we must be back in Boston to meet our classes at BU. If the Queens authorities will allow me to fiddle with the dates, we may be able to add a weekend, and thus have time for the really important things.

  Yours ever,

  In Memory of Eleanor Clark

  (Delivered at the First and Second Unitarian

  Universalist Church, Boston, March 9, 1996)

  I met Eleanor Clark in Manhattan in the late Forties. It was Paolo Milano who introduced us. She was then living on the Upper East Side, and he said, “I’m going to call on her—come along.” I had read Eleanor in Partisan Review. Perhaps she had read me, too. What I recall is that she was a breezy young woman with a fine figure, attractive, a lively conversationalist, a great asker of difficult questions. I think Paolo had been acquainted with her in Rome. I know that in the late Thirties she had been one of Trotsky’s staff in Mexico City. I always meant to ask her if she was in the villa when it was attacked—blasted—by an armed band led by Siqueiros the painter. But I never got around to it, somehow.

  PR was in its early years strongly flavored by Trotskyist politics. The magazine was in the Thirties what The Dial had been in the Twenties, its great days, the days of Marianne Moore—an international journal of literature and the arts. In Partisan Review a decade later the arts were mixed with left-wing politics. College students in the Midwest had their eyes opened to the great world by Partisan Review. There they could read Malraux, Silone, Gide, Orwell, Auden together with that older generation of American poets and critics—Allen Tate, R. P. Warren, John Crowe Ransom, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Meyer Schapiro. And suddenly a generation of younger Americans began to appear in this otherwise unattainable company un-dreamed of in Madison, Wisconsin, or Urbana, Illinois. It was in PR that we first read our own gifted contemporaries—Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Clement Greenberg, Jean Stafford, Harold Rosenberg, James Agee. Eleanor Clark was one of those gifted and, in my view, privileged people—the avant-garde, the bohemians—initiates of a sort into all that represented the finest, the deepest, the boldest and the subtlest.

  There was something like a literary, painterly and intellectual life in New York in those years. Very brief. It didn’t quite make it into the Sixties. Already in the Fifties writers were drifting into teaching positions in the universities. So that when I went to Minnesota in 1946 I became acquainted with Robert Penn Warren. He had not then met Eleanor Clark. I’ve never been much good at chronologies. In such matters I go, as most of us do, by emotional clocks and affective calendars. The object of these recollections is to turn some lateral or indirect light on Eleanor’s life. I can recall driving in winter from Rhinebeck, N.Y., with Fred Dupee and his wife to the Warren house in Connecticut to attend a party they were giving and that Fred, who was driving, had us all swigging whiskey from the bottle Jazz-Age style. The party lasted most of the night, but Eleanor and Red were, unlike most of their guests, unmistakably family people.

  Over the years I met the Warrens in a variety of circumstances. I rec
all that the three of us went together in a car when Eleanor won a National Book Award for The Oysters of Locmariaquer. I took the fiction prize in that year, and Red said to the two of us, “Enough of this. You’ve got your medals. Now get out while the getting’s good.”

  During the last twenty summers we met often in Vermont. Eleanor’s eyes were all but gone but she entertained her visitors in style. We sat on the outer deck of the house, drinking. On a conversational roll she barely noticed the chill of the air at sunset or the stinging of the mosquitoes. Like the matriarch she had become she cooked the dinner and, at the head of the table, ladled out the stew and filled the plates of her guests. She often growled at me for my shell-back social views and pounced on my mistakes of grammar or usage. But that was because she loved disputes, sharp answers and social militancy. She was a handsome, brave, big-hearted woman. If you hadn’t seen her sweeping aside her handicaps and frailties, coming on like the able-bodied beauty she had been decades ago, you had missed a superb demonstration of gallantry or heroic courage.

  To Richard Stern

  March 12, 1996 Brookline

  Dear Richard—

  You are unchallengeably the most generous writer I’ve ever known. Your firefly friends can be certain when their tails light up with a new color that your innocent heart will respond with joy.

  When I got out of the hospital (crawled out) last winter I ran a test or two—naturally—to see whether there was a charge still in the batteries. And of course repetitions—deploying the old troops—wouldn’t do.

  And . . . I’ve got at least four or five readers. God has not abandoned me. Why the Lord of hosts has let the ranks become so thin, who can say? Continuons! [124]

  Much love from your well and grateful friend,

  To Martin Amis

  March 13, 1996 Brookline

  My dear Martin:

  I see that I’ve become a really bad correspondent. It’s not that I don’t think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the “warehouse of good intentions”:

  “Can’t do it now.”

  “Then put it on hold.”

  This is one’s strategy for coping with old age, and with death—because one can’t die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

  I entered the hospital in ’94, a man biologically in his forties. Coming out in ’95, I was the Ancient Mariner, and the Mariner didn’t write novels. He had only one story and delivered it orally. But [I told myself] you are a writer still, and perhaps you’d better come to terms with the Ancient.

  I may be about to resolve all these difficulties, but for two years they have totally absorbed me.

  I’ve become forgetful, too. Nothing like your father’s nominal aphasia. I find I can’t remember the names of people I don’t care for—in some ways a pleasant disability. I further discover that I would remember people’s names because it relieved me from any need to think about them. Their names were enough. Like telling heads.

  I can guess how your father must have felt at his typewriter, with a book to finish. My solution is to turn to shorter, finishable things. I have managed to do a few of those. Like learning to walk again—but what if what one wants, really, is to run?

  I am sure you have thought these things in watching your father’s torments.

  Last Saturday I attended a memorial service for Eleanor Clark, the widow of R. P. Warren. I found myself saying to her daughter Rosanna that losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces—down to the last glassy splinter.

  Of course you are your father, and he is you. I have often felt this about my own father, whom I half expect to see when I die. But I believe I do know how your father must have felt, sitting at his typewriter with an unfinished novel. Just as I understand your saying that you are your dad. With a fair degree of accuracy I can see this in my own father. He and I never seemed to be in rapport: Our basic assumptions were very different. But that now looks superficial. I treat my sons much as he treated me: out of breath with impatience, and then a long inhalation of affection.

  I willingly take up the slack as a sort of adoptive father. I do have paternal feelings towards you. It’s not only language that unites us, or “style.” We share more remote but also more important premises.

  And I’m not actually at the last gasp. I expect to be around for a while (not a prediction but an expectation). Whilst this machine is to him, Hamlet said.

  Yours, with love,

  Martin Amis’s father, Kingsley Amis, renowned author of Lucky Jim (1954) and many other works, had died in October of the previous year after a long decline, subsequently chronicled by Martin in his memoir Experience (2000).

  To Reinhold Neven du Mont

  April 12, 1996 Brookline

  Dear Reinhold:

  Harriet Wasserman and I have not been able to continue as agent and client. My new agent, as you may have heard, is Andrew Wylie. Harriet has cast me into outer darkness and no longer communicates with me though there is unfinished business to do.

  In any case I write to inform you that Mr. Wylie will be representing me and that he has full authority to speak for me. You and I have always had excellent relations and there will be no change in our amicable customs.

  I hope that you are well and happy. I have almost recovered from several illnesses and am writing again. I have just finished a novella—something entirely new, I hope.

  Yours as ever,

  Neven du Mont was an editor at Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Bellow’s German publisher.

  To Albert Glotzer

  April 19, 1996 Brookline

  Dear Al,

  I spoke with Yetta [Barshevsky Shachtman] and she told me that it was your habit to attend the Boston Marathon and wait at the finish line for your son the runner. I too encourage the oddities of my three sons and my sole grandson, Andrew, who grew up in California where oddities are never in short supply. So I was hoping to see you last Monday, but Yetta said that you were making a quick round trip and would not stay overnight. On last Tuesday I was expected at Queens College—booked for a reading—but the Nervous Nellies of the Queens English Department called on Monday to warn me of bad weather ahead. They urged me to get on the next shuttle. So I was actually in New York City on Monday night. I did my thing on Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon I was back in Boston. This was my first solo journey and I regretted leaving Janis behind. I am like you in my boyish rejection of elderliness. Antiquity—why not come right out with it? You pack a snowball on a winter day and imagine taking a belly flop on your sled as we all used to do back in the beautiful Twenties—I was ten years old in 1925. All that remains is the freshness of the impulse.

  Last Sunday, here in Boston, I spoke at Harvard before Richard Pipes’s society [the Shop Club]; its members are Polish intellectuals and Jewish intellectuals (from Poland). The membership was singular, to say the least. Nobody has more intellectual style than these east Europeans. I thought this was a very odd lodge. My subject was anti-Semitism (otherwise known as Jew-hatred) in literature. I concentrated almost entirely on Dostoyevsky and on L.-F. Céline. Afterwards we attended a party at the Pipeses’. Among the guests were many who knew more about my subject than I did, and I wish I could remember their names. The only name that does come back to me is that of the brother of the late James Merrill, a boyish old man, ruddy and blue-eyed, with white curls, who looked as if he might have just left his fielder’s mitt on the hall table. For all his billions he was so fresh and engaging that my heart went out to him. He turned out to be an amateur scholar deeply interested in Polish history and literature. But I was monopolized by a mathematician I had known in a former incarnation and by a Polish Céline expert who spoke to me in French about Céline’s sick-joke pamphlets recommending the Fi
nal Solution.

  A house in the country was a great idea, but completely utopian. I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available. At this very moment, the roads are swimming in mud in Vermont. How to deal with mud time? Perhaps I might start a new fashion with mud skis. I seem to be one of those natural revolutionists who comes up regularly with million-dollar ideas. [ . . . ]

  I invite you to come and stay with Janis and me when you attend next year’s Marathon. This will give both of us something to live for.

  Yours,

  To John Auerbach and Nola Chilton

  May 3, 1996 Brookline

  Dear John and Nola—

  If I don’t write to you, I scarcely write at all. My correspondents have given up on me. Not to write means to be fundamentally out of order, and I suppose that that can be said of me. I am not “drunk” but I am “disorderly”—old before my preparations to be old are completed. I keep thinking what I shall be doing when—and when overcomes me while I’m still considering what to do about it.

  A month in intensive care, unconscious, was what did it. At last I was convinced.

  It’s necessary for me to be in Boston [on account of] its doctors. I have a five-foot shelf of pills. Janis makes sure I take them on schedule, and visit the cardiologist, the neurologist, the dermatologist, the G.U. man, the ophthalmologist, etc. A friendly physician has explained to me that four weeks in intensive care take six months to recover from. I must not expect to be normal again before the end of 1996.

  But I have much to be grateful for. Without Janis I’d have joined my ancestors by now. I do think of them quite a lot. I’m edging near. But I can’t conceive of any sort of life, in any dimension, without her. And, after all, seeing my parents, brothers, friends is by no means a certainty. There’s a large cloud of ambiguous promises over all our intimations—a dark atmosphere of hints. This side of death there’s nothing definite, about the afterlife, to be found.