Letters

by Saul Bellow

  [ . . . ]

  Anyway, it looks as though we’ll be coming to New York to live. I don’t know what rents are now, but I wouldn’t like to pay much more than sixty or seventy. Eighty, if I must. As for the size of the flat, that depends on the section we move into. In a neighborhood where I could find a room to write in, we wouldn’t need six rooms. Four to six, let’s say, then. The bigger the better. We have furniture and household stuff in Chicago, so they needn’t be furnished. [ . . . ]

  Thank you for your letter.

  Best,

  To Henry Volkening

  June 7, 1950 Rome

  Dear Henry:

  I thought, immodestly, that you would like Augie, and I’m delighted. Mountainous sales? I’d be satisfied with moderately hilly ones. But one never knows, for it’ll be a large book, and I have an idea that there’s something saleable about sheer bulk; people feel they’re not being cheated. As for your objections, I haven’t yet read what I’ve done, and I’ve worked at some speed, carelessly. It may be, when I read, that I’ll agree with you and with Monroe. Just now, I feel the booklearning is indispensable for its dimensions. It isn’t hard to explain. For that matter, it may not need any explanation; it represents a kind of Midwestern culture common enough, and left out by a harmful convention. Writers are altogether too tame about what they may assume; they need to take more license.

  If you think there are chapters that might interest magazine editors, show the mss. around. I do have a copy with me and the first, handwritten one is in Paris. We can’t lose all three. At worst, the written one would have to be typed off again. If anyone will take a chapter, I can polish it up; not printable as is. [ . . . ]

  On the 15th, we’re going to Positano, near Sorrento, and we’ll be there until the 20th of July. I’ve been asked to a conference of the most lofty anti-Stalinists, in Berlin at the end of June. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going. I’m not too keen about it, but five lotus-eating weeks I’m afraid would not agree with me.

  Yours,

  To the Tarcovs

  June 26, 1950

  Dear Tarcovs—

  Just now we’re in Positano, on the gulf of Salerno, in the midst of the mountains and hanging over the sea. The fishermen have no motors and plant their own lobster traps, the women make lace on bolsters, simply with pins and bobbins, and on holy days the Saints are taken for a walk by a procession. It would seem incredible for the gods never to see the sun, and they are shown it on Sunday.

  And we’re coming home in Sept. I expect things will be much altered. I read the papers with revulsion, when I get them. The only papers here are the Italian and catastrophe’s an old story to them—they prefer gossip.

  So we’ll be in Chicago for a week or two in Sept., and then to New York. I have evening work at NYU. Fear Isaac doesn’t like that. He sent me a sore, and rather nasty note about it, as though I had done something behind his back. What’s wrong with people at home, anyway, and what’s the snarling for? Isaac knows perfectly well that if my being at NYU would be doing him the least harm I’d turn down the job. I’ve told him so, and the truth of it doesn’t need any protestation. But he’d rather dislike me than converse about it and for my part I can’t continue to care many damns as the years accumulate on my head.

  That’s Bazelon and Isaac, one or two others, and leaves me and thee. Rather old-fashioned. Similarities in our families account for it maybe. Though you may not like the comparison just now, with Morrie’s sins [Bellow’s brother Maurice, who’d fathered a child out of wedlock and faced a paternity suit] tumbling from the closet. I knew something about them, of course, but wasn’t abreast of them all and hadn’t heard about the suit till you wrote me of it. I’d like to know more. It moves me to think of my father in this, and of the kids. It’ll do the rest of the family good if they’re not beyond remedies.

  This is turning out to be a sad letter, and that’s peculiar because I’ve been feeling the opposite of sad. Just went down to the harbor with Herschel, lecturing him on the geology of mountains. Sins of the father. I tried to tell you and Isaac about the Illinois limestone.

  It did us much good to get your letter with some evidence of happiness in it and word of the kids and of your writing. You seem more gallant about the last than I am. I’m beginning to think of bricklaying.

  Best love,

  Till July 20—Pensione Vittoria, Positano (Salerno), Italia.

  Spring Ode

  Thunder brings the end of winter,

  Rinsing the yellow snow from the gutter;

  Calico spots flare at the window;

  I lie in my bathrobe, eating butter.

  Grease on my cheeks—the fat of the season

  Now dead and sealed, now dead and waxy.

  Foxes yap on the tenement stairs;

  Hope arrives in a Checker taxi.

  His clever face is now surveying

  The hallway with its sooty tatters,

  The playing-card banners overhead,

  The cymbals, scales and other matters.

  My bathrobe sleeves are stiff with yolks,

  Speckled with crumbs of my winter’s eating;

  Bottles and eggshells on the floor

  Lie between us at our meeting.

  He falls into my arms, we kiss,

  We cry like reunited brothers.

  He tells me how he searched for me

  Among the others.

  My cheeks are fat, my eyes are wet,

  His hand rests sadly on my shoulder;

  We cannot help but see how much

  Each has grown older.

  —Bellow

  To Samuel Freifeld

  July 12, 1950 Positano

  Dear Sam’l:

  Probably was silly to talk about exile. I merely meant that, abroad, one wants to feel abroad from a place; for Europeans do have such home places, and if their friends do not support them, there are other things that do, so that one doesn’t have to look into one’s consciousness or memory for proof that existence isn’t accidental. Anyway, if I’m in exile so are you, from me. Exile in your own parlor, among appearances of substance.

  And then, you see, I’m a kind of connections-keeper. For instance, your papa and a few other relatives are very lively daily preoccupations of mine. Personages like them appear in Augie March. You don’t, and needn’t, look for yourself (the way I have of scrambling things); someone else is in your place. Most ways you’ll be pleased by this monument; it’s an honorable one; and you know your pa was too rich to be held by oblivion. And you’re free enough a man to be pleased rather than offended.

  Why we’re coming back? Well, one doesn’t form intimacies here, and I have a strong societal sense. The French are not the people to encourage intimacy. The Italians, yes; or apparently, but you come to a place with them beyond which you cannot go, possibly because they don’t, for themselves, go beyond it either. On the other hand, you may say: “Who wants your stinking intimacy anyhow?” and “Stand off, you and your intimacy”—with some justice. But then one is surrounded by signs of the great mutuality of this past, great relation, and wants to get off the egocycle and go home to see what can be done.

  Much love to you all [ . . . ]

  To Monroe Engel

  July 15, 1950 [Positano]

  Dear Monroe—

  Is Isaac’s nose out of joint about NYU? Mine is a little. He makes me feel that I’ve undermined him there. I can still drop out, if he’s affected. How can I know whether he is? I have no way of telling what’s at stake for him. For me there’s nothing. I simply don’t want to get in his way. Not from friendly feeling—there’s not much lost between us now; he’d like to become strangers, and I’m not so opposed to that as I formerly was—but because I’d prefer, if I have to struggle with someone for survival, that it be a person I never struggled with before.

  We’re about to leave Positano. Do you know it? Near Amalfi. Four thousand feet of mountain descending to the Gulf in a width of about eight hundred y
ards. We have the Siren Islands on one side and the Calabrian Mts. on the other. The islands now are owned by Léonide Massine and there are occasionally Russian women landing in Positano and demanding pen and paper at Giacomino’s coffee-house to write long somethings.

  By rising early to beat the heat I’ve written a long lot of Augie March; at four hundred pages it’s nothing like finished. It may be again as long. And then what: che cosa faremo? [43]

  I know [Herbert] Gold well, and like him; some of his things that I’ve read, the most recent, are very good; the very last thing he sent me was well-nigh perfect. One of a series, he says, I believe he’s going to call it The Economic Life. You ought to ask him for it.

  Good to hear about Jean Stafford, Mrs. Oliver Something. She sent me a wedding announcement. Heroic to marry so soon after a divorce. Mrs. Oliver Jensen! I just remembered. I’ll be grateful to you if you’ll congratulate her, thank her for me and tell her I haven’t forgotten that she gave me two bucks when she went to Germany. Is she writing anything now? She could be very good. I’m in favor of her.

  Quoi d’ailleurs? [44] I still arrive homeless. In Paris: 33 Rue de Vaneau will still do, after Aug. 1st.

  Best,

  To Henry Volkening

  [July 17, 1950]

  Dear Henry—

  This is Monday. We’re leaving Positano on Thursday, the 20th—for Rome, Siena, Florence, Turin, Grenoble and Paris. Paris on August 1st. On the 29th we’re supposed to sail. I add the provisional word because reading about Korea in this little town in a five-day-old newspaper, I don’t know but what we’ll be in an internment camp on the 29th [ . . . ]

  Our address in Paris will be 33 Rue Vaneau, again.

  I hope your summer is approximately as good as mine. It can’t be exactly as good because of the age of the papers when I see them, whereas you read the Times and all the truth that’s fit to print as soon as it’s discovered.

  I’ll be reading mine in a barrel, I think, by flashlight.

  All the best,

  On June 25 North Korean forces had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea, precipitating an international crisis that would lead to three years of war.

  To Henry Volkening

  August 21, 1950 [Paris]

  Dear Henry—

  This is the 21st août; on the 29th we sail, arriving in New York on Sept. 4, environ. Anita and the kid will go on to Chicago, and I’ll follow them a couple of days later to visit home briefly.

  Paris improves when viewed with les yeux passagers [45] of a tourist. Off and on, I’ve been writing, and I’ll have some four hundred pages of mss. to show Viking. I still think it would be a good idea to stop at some natural place in the narrative and publish a volume. I have an immense plan for the rest, and who knows whether there’ll be time for it all before we’re swamped.

  The Russians can have Europe now à l’oeil, for nothing—for the shouting. I don’t think they’ll let the opportunity escape—à bientôt.

  1951

  To Herbert McCloskey

  [n.d.] [Queens, New York]

  Dear Herb—

  I get news of you from Jenny who is a cheerful interpreter and whom I like to believe. You are going to California, building a house, finishing your book, and Mitz and the kids are well. You sound very lucky to me.

  The only thing simple in my life is Augie M. Everything else is wickedly complicated and perhaps the one accounts for the other. Even Augie goes slowly now, and speed was the reason for his success before. I am near the end of Book 1. Did I tell you that Viking is thinking of publishing it in two parts?

  I saw Sam Monk at the MLA convention. He said there’d be nothing for me at the U. for a while. Have you had a real falling out about Fiedler? You ought not. Sam is rightly down on Fiedler for some of the things he’s published.

  Sam, by the way, will be teaching at Columbia this summer.

  Not a word from Tumin. I saw him last in Paris. Where it was a convenience for him to have friends. Here he sees only [Ralph] Ross, and has not once phoned me. Perhaps he’s afraid of being asked for money. Shit! He has become a Princeton professor, hasn’t he, and has to be careful about impecunious writers. Since he’s a clandestine writer himself, maybe he believes I should pay for my brazenness. Besides, he’s always had the fear that I would write about him and write ruinously. Holy and almighty God—why do the intelligent men become radiologists and the blind study humanity!? [ . . . ] Incidentally, my monologue on Intelligence will come out presently in the Hudson Review.

  A few more financial hits like that from the Hudson, financed by the Morgan family (pays two cents a word) and I’ll have to go to work in a defense plant. This morning I read Truman’s manpower note. I can see myself in line at an office. Someone in front of me works at the Copacabana? Fine! Coats chicklets, colors Superman. Excellent, all exempt. Then come I:

  “What are you?”

  “A writer.”

  “For The Reader’s Digest, Red-Book, Noble Savage, Breezy Stories, Fleabite Gazette?”

  “For many a one of these.”

  “Then report in Pittsburgh Friday to the Hell’s Hinge Corp. Bring your own shackles.”

  Best love,

  To Herbert McCloskey

  January 30, 1951 Queens, New York

  Dear Herb,

  Thank you for trying, and for your offer. I know I have no better friends in the world than you and Mitzie, and I wouldn’t hesitate to ask for a loan if I needed the money and couldn’t get it from someone who could spare it more easily. But there’s my father who has a lot of it, and [Arthur] Lidov who’s become rich, too, and would willingly let me have a few hundred. Really, I don’t need it now, I have enough. By the middle of summer, if I don’t get a break, I will need some. But then I can always do something. I’ve gotten by for a long time. Nearly three years I’ve been able to give to writing and private griefs—to say nothing of considerable happiness. And conceivably I may still get by. I’ve applied for a Rockefeller grant and the signs are better than fair. [ . . . ]

  Winter diseases have begun to hit us. First there was a virus, and then the grippe. I had a bad case of the latter, aggravated by a penicillin reaction. I’m only one day out of bed—flat for nearly a week, and during the breather between semesters, too, when I had planned to do so much. And then I’ve been forbidden to smoke, too. Permanently; I can never again have a pipe or a cigar; not even a cigarette. So I’m sending you some of my pipes, dividing them between you and Paolo. [ . . . ]

  I suppose, damn it! that nearly everybody is some kind of writer and thus your writing has to be judged by these crypto-novelists wrapped as philosophers, sociologists, and even revolutionists. I’ll give you ten to one that Max Shachtman has written a novel on the Bridgman convention, or something like that [ . . . ]

  To John Lehmann

  [n.d.] [Queens]

  Damn, what a letter! It surpasses anything I’ve ever seen. Not a word about the quality of the novel. If you can find nothing better to say upon reading Augie March than that you all “think very highly” of me, I don’t think I want you to publish it at all. I’m not selling you a commodity. Your attitude infuriates me. Either you are entirely lacking in taste and judgment or you are being terribly prudent about the advance. Well, permit me to make it clear once and for all that it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference to me whether you publish the novel or not. You have read two-thirds of it, and I refuse absolutely to send you another page. Return the manuscript to Viking if you don’t want to take the book.

  Poet-publisher John Lehmann (1907-1987) brought out the extremely influential magazine New Writing (subsequently Penguin New Writing) as well as founding, in 1946, John Lehmann Limited, under which imprint Bellow, Thom Gunn, Laurie Lee, Elizabeth David and others were published.

  To John Lehmann

  July 19, 1951 [Queens]

  Dear John:

  I have your letter before me.

  In one place, it reads: “You say . . . that you
are still amenable to doing the great work in two parts . . .”; and in another: “You have indeed posed us a very tricky problem, but as you know we all think highly of you and very much hope that in the end the job won’t be beyond our means.”

  Now, I know you haven’t seen anything like my book among recent novels. I’ve been reviewing them; I know what they are. They’re for the most part phony, or empty-hearted, banal and bungling. I should have thought it would do something to you to see Augie. By your own admission you had almost finished reading the manuscript, and yet you had nothing to say about it. You were cool; businesslike, merely; you were terribly patronizing and you put me in a rage. In London you had made me feel—or tried to make me feel—that you had done me an immense favor in publishing my novels. I will not be made to feel that about Augie March. It damned well isn’t necessary.

  I have discussed this matter with Guinzburg, and he has left the decision to me. I think that, having blown my top, I have, for my part, cleared the air. If you still want to publish the book, I shall be glad to see it appear under your imprint. The manuscript is now six hundred pages long and at the present reckoning I have another two hundred to go. There is no break in the narrative, really. Any break would be arbitrary. Certainly the fifty pages you ask for would not bring the volume to a close; they begin a new action which continues for another two hundred pages.