Letters

by Saul Bellow

  You ought to meet [Alexander] Goldenweiser. Even Isaac is completely won by the man. A perfect cosmopolite, a perfect intellect. He knows as much Picasso as he does Tshimshiam religion, he knows Mozart as well as Bastian, and Thomism as well as Polynesia. You ought to see the books that line his shelves. Next to [Alfred L.] Kroeber stands Sidney Hook, and Lenin, and of course many of Trotsky’s pamphlets. He can open up in a seminar and discuss for an hour the anthropological thinking of Elisée Reclus, the anarchist geographer, the great friend of Kropotkin. He is a piano virtuoso, an esthetician, a Bolshevik, a deeply cultured man.

  I am taking a seminar with the great Kimball Young, in advanced social psychology, a class with friend [Eliseo] Vivas, about whom Isaac will be delighted to write you. A course in the classical economists, and one in European prehistory.

  I guess you have a good half-hour’s reading in the above. Leave you to digest it.

  Alexander Alexandrovich Goldenweiser (1880-1940), a Ukrainian-born social scientist and disciple of Franz Boas, was greatly esteemed for his groundbreaking research in totemism as well as for his charismatic teaching style. He was in residence at University of Wisconsin, Madison, for the academic year 1937-38.

  To Oscar Tarcov

  [Postmarked Madison, Wisconsin, 13 October 1937]

  Dear Oscar:

  How shall I help you? What can I do? Whatever I could I would do with all my heart. If I were lying next to you in hell I would help you with all my power. But hell is for our ancestors. For us, nothing so simple. I can give you no advice because I am so different from you for one thing, and because, for another, my own problems are by no means settled.

  I am a strange dog, Oscar. Strange things occur in me that I cannot account for. Just now I am deeply in love, and I think I shall continue in love, because it is my salvation. You, on the other side, could not find salvation in love. You see how different we are? Even our capacities for love are different.

  You’ll have to settle your problems by yourself. You’ll have to wrestle with your own devil because, though I am at present sitting on mine, he is kicking and undefeated.

  However, I think you are on the right track. Stick to anthropology; I wish I could accept it wholly. It will bring you closer to truth perhaps, make you happier, perhaps. If you discover a province in it to make yours, you are sure at least to be freer. If any discipline can do it, it is anthropology. You will see what I mean if you read the Autobiography of a Papago Woman, Memoirs of the A.A.A., a monograph published by the American Anthropological Association. You can doubtless find it in the periodical room. It was published only last year. When you read it you will see how many universes there are. That there are other lives, the color of clay, narrow as cave walls but still broad as rock and free and fierce as wolves.

  Read it and write back.

  Yours,

  To Oscar Tarcov

  [Postmarked Madison, Wisconsin, 7 December 1937]

  Dear Oscar:

  I’m tearing this off in cruel haste; it’s a shame to treat you this way. But this is the period preceding the period of paper-writing. I have several on my hands, more than I should perhaps have undertaken. The result is, of course, that I bear more than my normal load of fretting. I know I waste more time fuming and bustling than I spend in work. But I can’t break the habit.

  Ever since he began his paper on the Absolute as conceived by Josiah Royce, Isaac has been intolerable. If they hand out laurels for sheer evasive-ness and careful and reserved ambiguities in the Philosophy Department, Isaac should get the juiciest they have on hand. If the paper is well received by [Max C.] Otto, Isaac will stay. If not he will return. In process of writing his paper he has suddenly discovered, however, that he gets along swimmingly without Chicago when he has something to do. One can predict even less for Isaac than for me.

  I didn’t get around to pumping you about your feeling towards anthropology. If you want to volunteer some information I shall be glad to get it, because if it is necessary for me to unconvince you of something it is best for me to begin preparing now.

  Yours,

  After two semesters, Bellow abandoned graduate study, returned to Chicago, and married Anita Goshkin of Lafayette, Indiana, a daughter of immigrant Jews from the Crimea who was prominent in Northwestern radical circles—“straightforward, big-bosomed, and very assertive,” as Bellow’s high-school friend Herb Passin remembered her.

  1939

  To Oscar Tarcov

  October [?], 1939 [Chicago]

  Dear Oscar:

  You are perfectly right. We should have had a talking-out before you went away. But to be perfectly frank too, I didn’t care, at the time that you left, to talk to you. I was neither angry nor disgusted, but “disaffected,” alienated to the point of indifference. I needed nothing from you and it was of small consequence to see you and talk to you. Whether you stayed or left was all one to me. In fact I felt the air was a little clearer after you had gone. Now I am being as open as I can, telling you how I felt and what I felt. I think you could make about the same confession. There are many reasons on both sides.

  I haven’t the same attitude now, so you can put at least one salutary gain to your departure.

  I’m glad you won’t have to come back to Chicago the way Isaac did, sour and sick but prepared to resume his twenty-second straight year on the same set. He’s trying to get on the Yiddish Courier.

  I know you’ll be tickled to hear that Passin is joining the F.O.R. (Fellowship of Reconciliation), a Christian Pacifist outfit, and has renounced Marxism in toto. I knew that he could play the “Christianized” role temporarily under the influence of Cora and his father-in-law, the terrible Doctor. But to see him undertake it in lieu of a political career surprises and disgusts. Somehow I think it could be all overlooked if it were done for political reasons. The real reasons turn his whole action cold and greasy.

  He got hold of Isaac and he too now touts some of Passin’s views without, I think, realizing how completely they were formed by wishes first and deliberation last.

  Ask him in your next letter. Anita sends her regards—

  To Oscar Tarcov

  [Postmarked Chicago, Ill., 5 December 1939]

  Dear Oscar:

  I hear you became offended by the mention of “cleared air” in the last and only letter I sent you. Perhaps I was, as they say around here, semantically maladroit. I think I can explain what I meant. I am anxious there should be no misunderstanding about such an innocuous phrase; it appears to me that it has swollen out of all proportion into an insult.

  You have no idea (or maybe you have now) what a condition our circle was in. Marriage kept me aside, apart, or more accurately involved me in a different way, so that I think I really saw what was coming off. You and Isaac and a few others were gummed into a very disagreeable relationship. By definition—social placing—the group was a friendly one. But there was very little friendship in it actually and more jealousy, covert rage, detestation and in fact a need to use one’s friends as one should use one’s enemies. For instance, there were evenings when there could be no doubt about the fact that you detested me. That was evident from the way in which you needled me.

  In the next scene of this tender little drama there occurred a polarization. I was shot into the [Sam] Freifeld camp; you and Isaac drew together into a new nucleus. And when that happened your interdependence intensified. What one did supplemented the others’ acts. So also with what one thought, one hoped, desired, wrote, admired, etc. To me that seemed ridiculously, childishly feeble. Two such creative (for that is what you hoped to be and even set yourselves up to be) individuals should not cleave together so closely. Well, so far as I could see you were stuck together in helplessness. Together you fulminated against the others, against yourselves, and if I looked ridiculous to you at some moments during that time, have a good goggle at yourself. You were stagnating and in no picturesque or admirable way.

  The attachment you two evolved for [Abe] Ka
ufman had a different reason than the one you found. I did not object to Kaufman at all but to the reason. It was very simple. He acted strong while you were weak. He was bold and adventurous and careless and you were really very timid. A lot of disagreeable buffoonery came off. It put you in no better odor than anyone else. I saw pathology not passionate friendship and of course immediately I became a boor. I hate the kind of worship you two worked up for an individual who was remarkable, yes, but as full of error as anybody else. In that deification you looked preposterous to me: taken in, self-deceived, hectically involved and reliant and, Jesus, the whole thing looked idiotic to me. It showed your helplessness up so baldly. It was pitiful.

  I made mistakes, of course. But with this qualification, I made mistakes, too. But I saw yours as easily as you saw mine and I could have told them to you on the spot, at any time. That night at Isaac’s when I would not produce humbug humility, I wasn’t prepared for it whereas you, you had staged the whole thing and therefore could turn your cheek in the best Dostoyevsky style. The whole thing was nasty. It didn’t do Kaufman any credit. It didn’t do you any good either. You had set him off against me on the basis of a very feeble sort of thing that you didn’t completely understand yourself. The whole thing was simply asinine. What it revealed clearly even to the stupidest of us that night was that you, Isaac, Kaufman regarded yourselves as a sort of aristocracy with a permanent patent for stepping on the fingers of others. But how readily you howled when your own fingers were under the sole.

  If you saw the present Kaufman-Rosenfeld arrangement you would know what I mean, maybe . . .

  Since that sort of thing stopped when you went away the air did clear. I don’t want to kid myself. We were not friends this last summer. You chose me out as a deadly enemy. You can’t deny that. Therefore why should I have attempted falsely to keep a relationship going. I saw viciousness more often than friendliness. Think what you were like then and see if you can honestly blame me. It’s too bad that you, a devotee of the truth, can’t stand it sometimes.

  I said the same thing in my first letter only not so elaborately. In the last five months or so there has been time for the harder feelings to fall away and be replaced by some of my former affection for you. I hate like all hell to have you estranged for the worst of all possible reasons: attempt at honest analysis. I hope you will accept my explanation. And I hope you reply because I don’t think it will be possible to write again otherwise. I suppose Isaac has already told you that I will probably go to Mexico this February.

  Regards to Ruthie and Sid,

  Yours,

  Abe Kaufman was another of Bellow’s high-school classmates.

  1940

  To Oscar Tarcov

  [n.d.] [Chicago]

  Dear Oscar:

  Let’s drop writing in that line. That’s what you suggested in the first place; that we shouldn’t try to at this distance. And you were right, I think. There is another distance I might mention and that is the one between me and realization (and realization and action, too). A good deal of what you say about Anita I couldn’t dream of denying. I have had a great deal of trouble lately over her and several times in the last two months we have been on the verge of separating. We have had quarrels which really originate not out of trivial things but out of the fact that in numerous ways we are strongly disagreeable to each other. And for another thing the principal reasons for marriage have no existence any longer. But I have been breaking myself in two to reconcile because I don’t want another failure added to an already long list.

  Chuck that for the moment. From what I hear I will soon be able to talk to you and that will be much better.

  I have missed you—tremendously. Not as much as Isaac, perhaps; I have many more tasks and preoccupations. But still I share strongly his opinion that you should stay in New York. [ . . . ] If you can hold out, stay where you are at least for a while.

  It is likely that I will go to Mexico in spring. I have already given notice at Pestalozzi[-Froebel Teachers College]—[ . . . ] I think I can get you the job there. So that if no war breaks out I believe you can look forward to a very good job that will give you independence and leisure; an independence and leisure that I have used to my good advantage in the last year.

  I have almost finished Ruben Whitfield. I’ll be done with it by spring. I don’t think it’s as good a book as I can write. But then it’s really a subject for a much better-developed writer and a more fully developed individual. It wasn’t really my project. My views and interests changed so often in the course of the writing that every month I wanted to go back and do the whole thing over in a new way. I have re-written some parts as many as four times and the result shows great inconsistencies. What I am planning now is more personal and not so smart and tough and I am so eager to begin the new thing that I am hustling Ruben along. It has become painful and sometimes even obnoxious and frequently the whole shmeer seems so transparent and fatuous that I want to abandon it. But I am going to finish it.

  This idea of “finish it” is present not only in Ruben and in my marriage but also in the movement. I was alienated before the factional fight but now the whole affair has become nauseous—the Old Man’s attempt to knife [James] Burnham and cast him out of the movement, the excruciating hysteria of the old timers [ . . . ], the stupidity of the polemics—all this has made me resolve that if the minority capitulates and yields Burnham a few more, I am finished.

  I have begun to read in order to re-evaluate the principles of bolshevism, or better, to learn them for the first time—[Franz] Borkenau, [Arthur] Rosenberg, Rosa Luxemburg’s attitudes to Leninism. It’s a goddam crime that at the time that the war is on us the only revolutionary party in the country falls to pieces. We’ll be crushed too, I think.

  Isaac has quit already. How do you feel about it?

  I don’t intend to drop out immediately. I’m waiting (and plenty of others are also) to see what happens at the convention. I may hold on. I don’t want to leave just when it is becoming dangerous. For that very reason.

  Give my regards to Ruthie and Sid,

  Yours,

  No trace remains of Ruben Whitfield, Bellow’s tentative first novel. The political party Bellow and Tarcov still belonged to, and which Rosenfeld had left, was the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist affiliation opposing the Stalinist orthodoxy of the American Communist Party. By the autumn of 1939, however, the SWP had itself broken into two factions, a majority headed by James P. Cannon and blessed by Trotsky (“the Old Man”) from his Mexican exile, and a minority led by Max Shachtman and James Burnham, who, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the Soviet invasions of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland, declared the USSR an imperialist aggressor and enemy to the socialist movement. At the SWP’s third national convention, in April 1940—to which Bellow is referring here—the Cannon faction would prevail, and Burnham and Shachtman left the party along with forty percent of its membership, including Bellow and Tarcov.

  To Oscar Tarcov

  [Postmarked Chicago, Ill., 9 December 1940]

  Dear Oscar:

  You remember, don’t you, that I didn’t know what my draft-number was? Well I got my papers yesterday and you need feel “singled out” no longer. My local order no. is 282 and with every possible deferment I can’t hope to stay out of a uniform longer than a year. My citizenship is in the hands of the Immigration Department and the man handling my case there gives me his assurance that I will have my first papers by the middle of January at the latest. And since first papers and no more are required I don’t see how I can possibly get out. At best I can only make class two.

  I’m very glad I didn’t know what my number was. It gave me ease of mind, a certain Damoclean peace. Not that I’m terribly disturbed now. It harasses and upsets my friends much more than it does me. I don’t even have to try to comfort myself. Nothing has been changed.

  Isaac feels he is being discriminated against. He doesn’t want to stay home alone. He even speaks n
ow of volunteering and claims it isn’t proper to remain behind when everything he values is in training camp.

  Of course it’s no joke but, frankly, I was surprised that I personally had been getting away with it so long. With every individual in the Western World and a great part of the Eastern either in arms or beneath them it seems incredible that we should go free long. It’s a sort of luck which isn’t designed for me. It’s designed for the Herb Passins of the world, not for me. You remember how you felt about getting and holding a job? Well, I feel the same way about getting out from under. It just isn’t for me—for us, I should say.

  That we got away, free so long, is merely accidental. It’s rather a heavy-footed irony that I who hate so much and fear so much anything of a “kill” or “crush” connection should be drawn into army service so quickly.

  See you Christmas,

  1941

  To Oscar Tarcov

  February 8, 1941 [Chicago]

  Dear Oscar:

  I expected you to call me when you were in. I thought perhaps you had tried to get me while I was out of town from Wednesday night to Friday. That’s probably the way it was.

  I’m completely legalized now [as a Canadian residing in the U. S.] and there is no danger for me as long as aliens are not touched, and even then it is safe to suppose that Canadian aliens will have relative immunity when they start filling the camps (for I believe there will be camps). So far indications are that since I am a non-citizen I am not draftable and, while I don’t feel exactly comfortable and secure, it is reasonably permissible for me to make some plans for next year.