Letters

by Saul Bellow

  A letter is a hostage to fortune, as likely to pass into oblivion as posterity. Along with those to Isaac Rosenfeld, one regrets the vanished communications to Sydney J. Harris, Herbert Passin, Harold Kaplan, Delmore Schwartz, Paolo Milano and Rosette Lamont. Still, a great hoard does survive. My gratitude to all the individuals who have preserved vulnerable paper is beyond telling. To Sylvia Tumin, widow of Melvin Tumin, I owe a particular debt; she was the first of so many to share letters and photos with me. Professor Nathan Tarcov furnished all of the many communications to Oscar and Edith Tarcov, his father and mother. (I am additionally grateful to Professor Tarcov for inviting me to address the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought about my researches.) Katherine Powers provided Bellow’s letters to her father, J. F. Powers. I want to thank Eugene Kennedy for his cooperation and friendliness. Monroe Engel gave patiently of his time. Dr. Oliver Sacks recalled swimming in the Bellows’ pond in Vermont and kindly made a search of his files. Robert W. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, ran a public call for letters. I am indebted to Cynthia Ozick for her deeply considered reflections on Bellow in several essays over the years. William Hunt provided letters and spoke with me absorbingly and at length. James Salter searched old trunks and was unfailingly helpful. I am much obliged to Professor Daniel Bell for a long and illuminating conversation. I would like to thank Mme. Julian Behrstock and Christie’s auction house in New York, where I was allowed to photograph the letters from Bellow to her husband on consignment there. Rosanna Warren helped with several important details pertaining to her parents. Susan Cheever kindly answered queries, as did A. B. Yehoshua and Ian McEwan. Leon Wieseltier clarified backgrounds to several letters and offered pungent English equivalents for Yiddish turns of phrase. Linda Asher and Elisabeth Sifton helped to clarify Bellow’s sequence of editors at Viking. David Rieff suggested the solution to an arcane matter pertaining to his father. Maria Campbell reported on Erich Linder. Amanda Vaill told me who Lyn Austin was. Joyce Carol Oates provided context for the letter to her. My dear friend Frances Kiernan decoded an otherwise unintelligible sentence. Professor Henry Hardy, Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and executor of the Estate of Sir Isaiah Berlin, was kindly in touch, as were Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, Edith Kurzweil, Nicholas Christopher, Debra Romanick Baldwin, Judith Dunford, Ben Sidran, Eugene Goodheart and Leslie Epstein. Robert Boyers, editor of Salmagundi, clarified the context of a letter to him. So did Professor Mark Shechner of the State University of New York, Buffalo. Through the generosity of Zachary Leader, who is at work on a biography of Bellow, I was able to include letters to David Peltz and to Herbert and Mitzi McCloskey. I have greatly benefited from frequent exchanges of information with Zach and count him an indispensable friend. Dean Borok journeyed to a storage locker in Brooklyn to retrieve a particularly remarkable letter. Owen Barfield, grandson of the Owen Barfield addressed in these pages, kindly gave access to his grandfather’s papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. From Kibbutz S’dot Yam, near Caesarea, Nola Chilton dispatched photocopies of the letters to herself and her late husband John Auerbach. Stephen Mitchell furnished the unforgettable document in which Bellow describes his childhood discovery of Jesus, and Professor Martin E. Marty kindly answered my queries about the original, now housed at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Louis Gallo came from Trenton to New York to deliver precious pages and drink a glass of iced coffee. Frances Gendlin was kindly in touch. Daphne Merkin shared her memories of visiting Bellow in Vermont. Joshua Howes, a descendant of Bellow’s childhood friend Louis Sidran, clarified the Sidran family tree. Norman Manea reminisced about Margaret Shafer. Barbara Probst Solomon described her long telephonic friendship with Bellow. Dominique Nabokov recalled summers with him at the Aspen Institute. Shirley Hazzard vividly described his visit to Capri in 1984 to receive the Premio Malaparte. And Eleanor Fox Simmons reported on a lost cache of billets doux that would, she said, have been the ornament of this book.

  I want to thank Gregory, Adam and Daniel Bellow for their swift and friendly response to many queries. Daniel generously gave access to letters to his mother, and Adam puzzled with me over a crux in one of them. Lesha Bellows Greengus and Dr. Rachel Schultz, Bellow’s niece and great niece, have been tremendously helpful from the start. Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea Bellow suggested necessary emendations to the chronology for 1973 to 1985. Valiantly generous in her willingness to allow very personal matters into print, Maggie Staats Simmons also solved a chronological mystery and led me to the letters to Samuel S. Goldberg. And Nancy Crampton shared the many photographs of Bellow she took over the years; examples of her marvelous work appear on the hardcover jacket of this book as well as in the inserts.

  I thank the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Pennsylvania for furnishing letters to James T. Farrell. For those to John Berryman, I wish to thank the Manuscripts Division of the Elmer L. Anderson Library of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Harvard’s Houghton Library gave access to those to James Laughlin. It is a particular pleasure to thank Timothy Young of Yale’s Beinecke Library for his hospitality each time I’ve worked in that most beautiful of research facilities; Bellow’s letters to Edmund Wilson, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Penn Warren, Eleanor Clark, Josephine Herbst and Saul Steinberg are housed there. Professor Iain Topliss of La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, who has embarked on a biography of Steinberg, gave crucial advice. The Berg Collection of The New York Public Library made available letters to Alfred Kazin, John Cheever and Louis Lasco. At the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, Dr. Alice Burney bore with my extensive calls on their holdings; Bellow’s letters to Ralph Ellison, Hannah Arendt, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Philip Roth are there. The Rare Book and Manuscript Division of the University of Delaware houses those to David Bazelon and Mark Harris, which they kindly supplied. William Kennedy directed me to the Special Collections of the State University of New York at Albany for access to the many letters to him. I thank the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center of Boston University for access to the papers of William Phillips, Philip Rahv, Leslie Fiedler, Roger Shattuck, Richard Lourie and Rosalyn Tureck. From The Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas came a particularly rich harvest—letters to Henry Volkening, Pascal and Dorothy Covici, Bernard Malamud, Stanley Burnshaw, Alice Adams, James Salter, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Keith Botsford. Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library provided friendly access to the archives of James Henle, Lionel Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, Benjamin Nelson, Richard V. Chase, John Leggett and Herbert Gold. Bellow’s congratulatory note to the Circle in the Square cast of The Last Analysis I transcribed at Lincoln Center’s New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, along with his letter to Zero Mostel. The letter to Theodore Weiss came courtesy of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton University’s Firestone Library. Letters to Jean Stafford are preserved in Special Collections of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Those to Anthony Hecht and Edna O’Brien are at Emory University’s Special Collections, and those to Toby Cole at Special Collections of the University of California, Davis. Viking Penguin patiently searched their archives and found many remarkable documents including the communications to Monroe Engel, Marshall Best and Elisabeth Sifton. To the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library of Duke University go my thanks for opening Harriet Wasserman’s archive. I am much obliged to the Rare Book and Manuscripts Collection of the University of Virginia for access to Bellow’s vehement letter to William Faulkner. Letters to Stanley Elkin (a great friend to me in younger days and someone with whom I often spoke about Bellow’s books) are housed in the Special Collections of The John M. Olin Library, Washington University, St. Louis. From The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation come those to Henry Allen Moe and Gordon Ray as well as reference letters in behalf of James Baldwin, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud and Louise Glück; it is a pleasure to record here
my gratitude to Edward Hirsch, president of the Foundation, and Andre Bernard, vice president and secretary, for their hospitality. Thanks to the good offices of Rob Cowley, I was able to research Bellow’s correspondence with Malcolm Cowley, his father, at Chicago’s Newberry Library. The Special Collections and Archives of The W. E. B. Dubois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, provided Bellow’s letters to Harvey Swados. And at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kathy Kienholtz granted access to the Academy’s extensive Bellow file.

  All other letters—whether in carbon or photocopy—have come from the Special Collections Research Center of Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, where David Pavelich in particular made my labors orderly and swift. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the radiant and phenomenal Esther Corbin, now in her hundredth year; as Bellow’s secretary from 1971 to 1976, Mrs. Corbin made and filed hundreds of carbon copies of outgoing mail. I want to thank Michael Z. Yu, executor of the Estate of Allan Bloom, for granting access to Bloom’s papers there; Richard Stern, whose archive is also at the Regenstein, and who has been so generous to this project from its inception; and Joseph Epstein, executor of the Estate of Edward Shils. James Atlas, a portion of whose papers are likewise at the Reg, generously gave me access to photocopies of Bellow’s letters to Nathan Gould, Frances Gendlin, Willie Greenberg, William Roth, Jonas Schwartz, Leonard Unger, Ralph Ross, Robert Hivnor, Albert Glotzer, William Maxwell, Gertrude Buckman, Ann Birstein, Ladislas Farago, Barnett Singer, Ben Sidran—and Evelyn, the otherwise unidentified girl with one blue and one brown eye. Mr. Atlas’s archive at Regenstein will always be a vital basis for Bellow research.

  James Wood’s chronology in The Library of America’s multi-volume edition of Bellow’s works served as the foundation for my own. I also made extensive use of Gabriel Josipovici’s bibliography—authoritative for 1941 to 1974—in The Portable Saul Bellow. And I greatly profited from Norman Manea’s inspiring interviews with Bellow for The Jerusalem Literary Project, afterward excerpted in Salmagundi; passages from these interviews appear in the chronology. Jacqueline Weld graciously responded to requests for translations of Bellow’s unsavory Spanish. Professor Ruth Wisse of Harvard University patiently coped with my endless queries about Yiddish and Hebrew. Catherine Healey answered questions about Bellow’s meaty, energetic French; and Anka Mulstein and Louis Begley kindly went to their Grand Robert in search of a phrase (nonexistent, it turned out) Bellow thought he had heard while hitchhiking from Banyulssur-Mer to Barcelona in the summer of 1947.

  My dear friend Stephen Motika traveled with me to Chicago to help with the early stages of research. Brett Hool, Lindsay Alexander and, especially, Patrick “Memphis” Callihan transcribed endlessly and accurately. Patrick has additionally given yeoman service in securing photographic permissions. My freelance editor, Kristin Camp Sperber, was unfailing in precision and insight. Janet Biehl, my copyeditor, saved me from many a blunder. All those at Viking Penguin who have labored long have my thanks: Carolyn Carlson, Beena Kamlani, Amanda Brower, Shannon Twomey and Francesca Belanger. At The New Yorker, where an excerpt from this book appeared, I got to know the surpassing professionalism of David Remnick and Katherine Stirling.

  Without the ferocious advocacy of Andrew Wylie and Jeffrey Posternak, agents to the Estate of Saul Bellow, this book could not have come to be. I am also grateful to their colleague Alexandra Levenberg, who cheerfully and expertly addressed issue after issue. Walter Pozen, Saul Bellow’s lawyer, has been an essential guide and occasional Dutch uncle. Good, wise, sharp-eyed Joel Conarroe read every blessed word of the proofs. To Philip Roth, a godfather to these pages, I owe incalculable debts.

  I’d like also to thank Saul Bellow’s young daughter Rosie (cat lover, violinist, deep thinker) for her friendship, and for telling me off on one occasion, when I deserved it. To Rosie’s mother, the gifted and indefatigable Janis Freedman Bellow, who photocopied all letters leaving Bellow’s desk during the last twenty-three years of his life, I am boundlessly grateful: for her scholarly foresight, for the trust she has reposed in me, and for her warmth and wit in fair and foul weather. Were it within my purview to dedicate this book I would do so to J. F. B.

  Finally, I want to thank Saul Bellow for the privilege of spending each afternoon of the last three years with him.

  INDEX

  Page numbers in bold indicate correspondence with individuals.

  Abel, Lionel

  absurdity

  The Actual (Bellow)

  Adams, Alice

  Adams, J. Donald

  adolescence

  The Adventures of Augie March (Bellow)

  completion and revisions

  Dean Borok and

  discussions about Augie March

  enthusiasm for writing

  episodic nature

  excerpt

  publication of chapters

  reviews

  “The Adventures of Saul Bellow” essay

  age and aging

  coping with

  death and

  fatigue and

  forgetfulness

  old friends and

  old men in novels and plays

  thoughts on

  Agnon, S. Y.

  agnosticism

  Air India plane crash

  alchemy of writing

  alimony

  Alison, Barley

  Alison, Michael

  All Marbles Still Accounted For (unfinished novel)

  All The King’s Men (Warren)

  American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters

  American Communist Party

  American writing and writers

  Augie March and

  Bernard Malamud and

  discussion of Invisible Man

  distinct identity of

  Ellison on purpose of fiction

  exposing the seeming

  Ames, Elizabeth

  Amis, Martin

  Anderson, Sherwood

  Anne Bradstreet

  (Berryman)

  Anon (journal)

  Anthony, Joseph

  anthropology

  anthroposophy

  anti-Semitism

  Christopher Hitchens and

  Ezra Pound and

  Hannah Arendt and

  Harvard Shop Club speech

  Jerusalem Book Fair and

  Jewish writers finding their place and

  reviews of The Dean and

  Ruth Wisse’s article on

  Apple, Max

  Arendt, Hannah

  Army service

  art

  artistic principles

  emergence vs. imposition of positions in

  foundation of

  non-definitive answers of

  power of individual speech and

  “prepared” attitudes and

  value of

  writers as prophets

  Asher, Aaron

  atheism

  Atlantic Monthly

  Atlas, James

  Auden, W. H.

  Auerbach, John

  aging and illnesses

  Bellow’s services to the arts award

  Bellow’s seventy-fifth birthday

  Boston University

  discussion of Borges

  divorce from Alexandra

  each other’s writing

  health, writing, and Israel

  Kibbutz S’dot Yam

  politics

  stroke suffered by

  visits to Vermont

  Austin, Lyn

  avant-garde writing

  Baldwin, James

  Bard College

  Barfield, Owen

  Barfield’s judgment of Bellow’s novels

  Bellow’s study of Barfield’s writings

  death of

  discussions of Israel

  discussions of Steiner

  discussions of writing

  meetings with

  Barshevsky, Yetta

  Bar
zun, Jacques

  Bazelon, David

  anthropology

  Bellow’s advice about writing fiction to

  Bellow’s plans to meet with