Letters

by Saul Bellow

  I know this presents you with some difficult problems, but I don’t want to hear about the difficulties exclusively. As to your being treated as a salesman, I think you’re under a misapprehension. It wouldn’t have made any difference to me what a salesman thought of my book.

  Yours,

  To Herbert McCloskey

  [n.d.] [Queens]

  Dear Herb:

  For many reasons, your letter made me happy. I keep it with various necessary talismans on my desk and read it often. I knew I could reach you and Mitzie, because of your generosity toward me. I shall have such readers.

  I know how steeped in impatience people are and how little capable of giving attention. You ought to have seen the letter I received from Tumin after he had read Augie. Perhaps you heard something about his feelings in Princeton. Too much sociological and literary analysis, I suppose, crippled him as they do many others in reading. I was amazed. But it is really too much to expect people to come out of their feelings. Though I intended it as one of the revolutionary effects of the book that they should be forced, torn away from them and the sickness of the habitual diagnosed—not cured, that is not the work of literature. Freifeld reacted somewhat as Mel did. I should have thought people would desire a world to be brought to life of which we have felt the mass and trouble mostly—going elsewhere for superber being or beauty (to the Old World) and therefore putting ourselves in a false position, for our feeling hearts of course stay with our own experience. But some people do not seem to wish it.

  I go on, though. I work with great speed as I think must be apparent. But the book is extremely long. On some days it lays a great strain on me. I think that a long book ought not to be so dense; it will be tiring. But I have a great deal for Augie to face and can’t let up. The mss. is already about four hundred pages and I believe that’s only half the work. Viking wants me to publish half of it and I’ve been tempted. For one thing the war [in Korea] may capsize everything. But if that’d been a real factor I would probably never have undertaken to write such a book. Anyhow, I will have a good deal to show you, Herb, when you come East, as I hope you will do.

  I have reason to be grateful for my job at NYU. It leaves my days free. If after taxes I got a little more than two thousand, I’d have no complaint. I expect to earn about a thousand more by writing. PR and Commentary have helped, so far. But I wonder whether I could get into Minnesota for the summer sessions with a creative writing course. For one term, two years ago, they paid me something like eight hundred. Do you think, now that I’m older, they’d give me a little more? [ . . . ] Queens is a terribly expensive place. Little G. has a half-scholarship at school, but still the tuition is what it used to be at Chicago in 1933. I’m fairly sure I could go to Ohio for the summer, but I’d far rather spend it with you. If you will be there, that is. What do you plan to do? Will you be reading proofs of your Russian book by that time? [ . . . ]

  Red Warren’s settled in Manhattan for the year; we see him and Isaac and Paolo and the Partisaners. Isaac’s even more strapped than I am and he’s looking for work outside New York too. Maybe Ross will give him a job if he goes to Minn.

  [ . . . ] I’ve asked Commentary to send you a copy of my story [“Looking for Mr. Green”].

  Best love to you all,

  1952

  To Elizabeth Ames

  [n.d.]

  Dear Miss Ames—

  On various occasions I have recommended writers to you. This time I am writing on my own behalf. I should very much like to come to Yaddo for a couple of weeks this summer and would be infinitely obliged to you if you could give me a quiet room in which to finish a novel I’ve been working on for quite a long time. It’s nearly done now.

  I’d like to come on June 15th and stay for two weeks. Perhaps my application comes too late. I hope not.

  As sponsors I can offer Mssrs. Granville Hicks, Alfred Kazin and Paolo Milano.

  Sincerely yours,

  Elizabeth Ames (1885—1977) was from 1926 until 1971 director of Yaddo, the famed artists’ colony at Saratoga Springs, New York.

  To Herbert McCloskey

  March 20, 1952 [New York City]

  Dear Herb:

  [ . . . ] Perhaps we could meet in Chicago too. I won’t, of course, be spending all my time with my father. How can I? After ten minutes, there’s alas nothing more to say. After which I have to stand by, for he gets angry if I desert this silence. But I start to crumble under it and have to save myself.

  In fewer words, I’ll be in Chicago on the 4th (Friday). I have to leave on the evening thereof in order to make Seattle by Sunday night (I have to check all the schedules). So if you leave Minneapolis on the 3rd, Chicago will make a pleasant stopover for you, and then I’ll see you also in Minneapolis on April 30th.

  Love to Mitzie and the kids,

  I don’t know how serious 17 Minetta St. is; I’m in the process of finding out. But have to find out. In November when I moved here I considered myself divorced. Now I simply consider myself calm. I suggest you revisit Anita and Greg while you’re in the East, if you can find time.

  To Lionel Trilling

  June 23, 1952 Saratoga Springs, N. Y.

  Dear Lionel:

  [ . . . ] I rarely read the Times. It’s enough for me to know that it exists, and every day, and especially on Sunday, appears. But on your recommendation, I read Diana’s piece. And then [John] Aldridge’s sequel. You’d need no Swami powers, I’m sure, to divine the fact that I disagree most violently. Are most novels poor today? Undoubtedly. But that is like saying mutilation exists, a broken world exists. More mutilated and broken than before? That’s perhaps the world’s own secret. Really, things are now what they always were, and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow. We may not be strong enough to live in the present. But to be disappointed in it! To identify oneself with a better past! No, no!

  I spoke of boredom in my Ellison piece [“Man Underground” in Commentary ]. Yes, there’s a great disease, an ancient disease now greatly magnified by our numbers. Man is sick of man; man declares man superfluous, and says in his heart that he himself is superfluous. “But,” some say, “there is no society which gives us our value and creates importance for us.” And this is to argue that a man’s heart is not itself the origin and seat of importance. But to assert that it is so and to prove and proclaim it with all one’s powers—that is the work and duty of a writer now; it ought to be the work and duty of critics, too.

  As though Sunday weren’t rugged enough without the Times and the Aldridges.

  Best wishes,

  To Elizabeth Ames

  July 28, 1952 [New York City]

  Dear Miss Ames—

  Once more I want to thank you for Yaddo’s hospitality and for your kindness.

  I badly needed those two weeks in order to turn myself round and find the proper direction.

  The city’s hot. Though there’re hotter places (they tell me) this one’s hot enough for my taste.

  Gratefully yours,

  To Bernard Malamud

  July 28, 1952 New York

  Dear Bernard Malamud,

  I read The Natural with great pleasure. Every page of it shows the mind and the touch of a real writer. The signs are unmistakable, and it’s always a thrill to discover them.

  Your story “The Loan” made a deep impression on me, too. It has a Hardyesque turn that I particularly approve of.

  All best wishes for your success.

  To Herbert and Mitzie McCloskey

  [Postmarked Princeton, N.J., 10 September 1952]

  How are you, all of you? All the Bellows live and flourish. Ask Isaac. Me, this week I turn the cap shut on Augie in his pickling mason jar and am ready to play peek-a-boo again with the universe.

  State of the soul much better. Very sorry two days were all.

  Love,

  To Robert Penn Warren

  [Postmarked Princeton, N.J., 27 October 1952]

  Dear Red:

  It would be
nice to see you sometime. I’m a lot more free now, having all but finished Augie. It won’t be published for a while. I’ve missed the spring list. But it is done.

  So if you do any weekend socializing in New York, may I call you somewhere?

  I look for announcements of your long poem. Have you finished it? When’s it coming out?

  Augie was very difficult for me in the last half. I suppose I succumbed to the dreadful thing I warn everyone against—seriousness. I had to throw away about two hundred pages at the end and re-write them. My slogan was, “Easily or not at all,” but I forgot it. Too much of a temptation to speak the last word. Either it’s already inscribed on our brows or it isn’t. I speak of my own brow, natch, and of Augie’s.

  Hope you had a wonderful summer,

  Warren’s long poem was Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices, which would be published the following year.

  To Henry Volkening

  November 10, 1952 Princeton

  Dear Henry:

  I mailed the mss. to Mrs. White [at The New Yorker] by special delivery last Thursday, so if she’s in New York she received it on Friday and you should be hearing from her any day.

  I’m up to Ch. XXI in the revision of Augie. There are, in all, X XVI. Thus the Liberation comes this month. And then there’s one section that I’ll do over especially for you, and Viking won’t get any of that. I suppose I could get a better deal if I told Pat [Covici] of my situation, but then I’d have to discuss it with him. Than which nothing could suit me less.

  The Vanguard check came, thank you very much. You know what makes everything happen? Love, Henry. You ought to know that by now. Only Love is married to Hate, isn’t it! You know, a new mythology ought to go good. Ambivalence is their little daughter who lives on the shores of the Superego, etc.

  Vale,

  Following Monroe Engel’s departure from Viking, Pascal Avram Covici (1885-1964), who had edited John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, became Bellow’s editor.

  To Samuel Freifeld

  December 28, 1952 Princeton

  Dear Sam:

  Thanks for answering. I ordered those records on Dec. 1st, and they should have arrived long ago. I’ve sent a tracer after them, and they should be coming in one of these days. The reason I bought them is that I want to observe your birthday. You shouldn’t reproach me, since it means something when one is suffering suddenly to remember that since childhood a certain love has existed without changing. The love I have for you is something literal brotherhood never gave me.

  I have written to Oscar; it’s terrible luck. Is he better? Is he still in the hospital?

  I’ve just gotten out of the hospital myself. I had virus pneumonitis, or some such damned thing. My strength is very low. The book took it out of me, and what this book didn’t take Anita did.

  The situation is bad. Her rigid unlovingness has driven me out—that and nothing else. I’ve done my best to stay and often I’ve felt that either going or staying threatened me with death. So I tried to choose the braver and at least less ignominious death.

  Happy New Near, and my love to Rochelle and my love to Judy and Susie. God bless you all,

  To David Goldknopf

  [n.d.] [Princeton]

  Dear David:

  I got a letter off to Elizabeth Ames in a hurry, and I hope she will send you an invitation. Frankly, I have a selfish interest in the success of your application. I may be—most probably will be—in Yaddo myself in July and I’d like to be sure of at least one person there. Miss Ames herself is a good and charming woman but she has creeps innumerable on her list. Perhaps it’s not her fault solely but the situation in the “arts.” Anyhow there are usually more phonies than deerflies on the estate, getting into your hair.

  I would like to see you sometime soon. I get into New York on weekends, and I spend those mostly with my son. We often go to the zoo, or to the Museum of Natural History. If you have wild animals or stuffed Indians at your house he’d be delighted to come and I’d be glad to bring him.

  Best wishes,

  1953

  To Robert Penn Warren

  January 7, 1953 Princeton

  Dear Red—

  I wish you both long life and all the happiness in the world.

  It’d be nice to see you, one of these days. I suppose you’ll be going to Europe soon. Perhaps we can have one drink before you leave.

  Albert [Erskine] tells me your poem’s done. I hope to read it soon. Augie’s finished, thank God.

  Best wishes,

  Warren had just married the writer Eleanor Clark. Albert Erskine was his editor at Random House.

  To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

  January 20, 1953 Princeton, N.J.

  CONFIDENTIAL REPORT ON CANDIDATE FOR FELLOWSHIP

  Name of Candidate: Bernard Malamud

  Mr. Bernard Malamud is, to my mind, one of the very few writers of the first order to appear since the debut of J. F. Powers. I am perfectly sure that he will become a major novelist. He has every prerequisite: the personal, definite style, the emotional resources, the understanding of character, the dramatic sense and the intelligence. He understands what the tasks of an imaginative writer of today are. Not to be appalled by these tasks is in and of itself a piece of heroism. Imagination has been steadily losing prestige in American life, it seems to me, for a long time. I am speaking of the poetic imagination. Inferior kinds of imagination have prospered, but the poetic has less credit than ever before. Perhaps that is because there is less room than ever for the personal, spacious, unanxious and free, for the unprepared, unorganized and spontaneous elements from which poetic imagination springs. It is upon writers like Mr. Malamud that the future of literature in America depends, writers who have not sought to protect themselves by joining schools or by identification with prevailing tastes and tendencies. The greatest threat to writing today is the threat of conformism. Art is the speech of an artist, of an individual, and it testifies to the power of individuals to speak and to the power of other individuals to listen and understand.

  Literal-minded critics of Mr. Malamud’s novel, The Natural, complained that it was not about true-to-life baseball players and failed entirely to see that it was a parable of the man of great endowments, or myth of the champion. I have immense faith in Mr. Malamud’s power to make himself understood. I should be very happy to hear that he had become a Guggenheim fellow.

  To Oscar Tarcov

  March 9, 1953 Princeton

  Dear Oscar:

  I had heard about your good news and was very happy for you. If I hadn’t been so utterly flattened out I’d have written at once to tell you so. But I’m sure you knew how I’d feel about an event like this and I know also that you understand how at times one needs every ounce of strength to get over the daily obstacles and can only have daily perspectives. Now I am better; I can admit I was very desperate, that I was very nearly dead. Things have improved greatly. I can now sleep, eat and function normally, and I seem to be making it.

  I was planning to come to Chicago during spring vacation, at the beginning of April, but my old man isn’t going to be there then so I’ll probably arrive in June, toward the end of the month, with Gregory. This may be my last visit to Chicago for some time to come, because people will be taking the axe to me when Augie is published. Publication date is set for after Labor Day. If I had the dough I’d go to Europe and stay out of the way altogether. But I haven’t. I may be teaching at Bennington College, therefore, when Sept. comes.

  Gregory is not so disturbed as you might imagine. He knows how strong his parents’ love for him is. He does not feel abandoned by me, in fact we have never been closer. I have never loved him more.

  I’ll most certainly want to write a piece about your book when it comes out. It’s great news, Oscar. It made me very glad.

  My best love to you all,

  Tarcov’s first novel, Bravo My Monster, had been scheduled for publication in th
e autumn by Regnery.

  To James H. Case, Jr.

  June 6, 1953

  Dear President Case:

  I shall be happy to accept appointment as Assistant Professor of English at Bard College for the year 1953-1954 at an annual salary of four thousand five hundred dollars.

  I plan to come up to Bard sometime next week to make housing arrangements and to arrange the details of my schedule with the Registrar.

  Sincerely,

  To Henry Volkening

  August 25, 1953

  Dear Henry—

  What know I about such matters? Doesn’t Diarmuid [Russell] know more than I could if I studied? When Augie is published, there will be a big bang and even the British will hear it. I don’t think we ought to act in dread of the workhouse. Were [André] Deutsch a British Vanguard I’d say no. But if the Deutsches will publish a sizeable first printing, will produce a neat book and will advertise, why, I won’t object.

  Henry, look! Would you marry your daughter off to her first suitor? This book, old man, is a child of mine.

  Let’s have not simply a figure but some notion of the Deutsch intentions.

  Heavens! You should know this!!!

  Yrs. from the midst of night,

  To Katharine Sergeant Angell White

  September 25, 1953 Barrytown, N.Y.

  Dear Mrs. White:

  I wish to point out to you, an editor of the New Yorker, that Mr. [Anthony] West’s review of Augie March is disgraceful. Mr. West is at liberty to dislike my book; that is a prerogative no sane author would deny a critic. But Mr. West, without any warrant whatever, has made me out to be a disciple of the New Criticism and has constructed, and attacked, a mad symbolical novel that bears no resemblance to the one he was given. In writing the book I was aware of no symbolic aims. Out of his own turbulence, thoughtlessness and pedantry Mr. West has attributed to me things as remote from me as the moon. “Simon” and “simony,” eagles and “virility,” “sex” and “culture”—really, it is simply too much! I feel I must write to you for the sake of my mental health. Let us hope that it is only my mental health that is endangered and not that of your readers as well.