Letters

by Saul Bellow

  Sincerely yours,

  To Pascal Covici

  September 25, 1953 Barrytown

  Dear Pat—

  Thanks for the [Harvey] Swados review. I’m glad to see he feels as we do about things. A. West is a mamzer [46] of a different color. I thought it only reasonable that I should protest such a horrible misrepresentation of Augie and wrote to Mrs. White explaining that I was not a New Critic and Symbolist and that West had invented this lurid and foolish book that he was attacking in his own foolish and disorderly mind. [ . . . ]

  Love,

  The ad in the Times was beautiful.

  To Lionel Trilling

  October 11, 1953 Barrytown, N.Y.

  Dear Lionel,

  I’ve more than once wanted to write you a letter of thanks. I know that you have contributed more than a little to the success of my book. I’m in your debt also for mental support—for the intelligence of your reading. Though I’m not, perhaps, the most objective judge to be found, I thought your essay brilliant. The many criticisms of Augie I’ve seen since have made me appreciate yours all the more; I appreciate above all your sense of justice, for I know the book must have offended you in some ways.

  Reading Emerson’s “Transcendentalist” the other day while getting ready for class, I ran across a passage on the remoteness of the high-minded transcendentalist from worldly activities which made me think of one of our differences. It goes like this:

  “We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.”

  “Then,” says the world, “show me your own.”

  “We have none.”

  “What will you do, then?” cries the world.

  “We will wait.”

  “How long?”

  “Until the universe beckons and calls us to work.”

  “But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.”

  “Be it so; I can sit in a corner and perish (as you call it) but I will not move until I have the highest command . . . your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me. If I cannot work at least I need not lie . . .”

  So it runs. And this attitude (would you call it “inner-directedness”?) is what seeped into my comedy. It isn’t that Augie resists every function—that would make him a tramp; and while I would not hesitate to write about tramps if I were called to it, Augie is something different. I was constantly thinking of some of the best young men I have known. Some of the very finest and best intentioned, best endowed, found nothing better to do with themselves than Augie. The majority, whether as chasers, parasites, bigamists, forgers and worse lacked his fairly innocent singleness of purpose. They had reached the place where they fixedly doubted that Society had any use for their abilities. I think if you had been aware of their great negativism you might have taken another view of my “propaganda.” To love another, genuinely to love, is the inception of a function, I wished to say. I suppose I didn’t quite make [my point] convincingly. It may be that for this a kind of intelligence is required that I’m not able to exercise. I’m satisfied with the other kind—the intelligence of imagining. I would be satisfied, that is, but for the fact that you sometimes can’t imagine very far without crossing the border into the other kinds of intelligence.

  Not the least of my surprises, as reviews come in, is my surprise at the chaotic disagreement as to what constitutes normalcy. This is picturesque! Writers on the fiftieth floor of the Time building speak confidently with the vox populi, telling us what is normative in American life. The scene couldn’t be more bizarre. An anarchy of views upon normalcy. We might get some sociological principle out of this: When the daily life of a people is full of astonishments, miracles and wonders, the lives of individuals are duller (a natural reaction to the disorganizing hyperaesthesia resulting from overstimulation) and the greater the disorder and lack of agreement the larger the number of spokesmen for “normalcy.” [ . . . ]

  Your discussion of my treatment of the hero was full of brilliant perceptions (the eagle as anti-hero I had not thought of ) but I was myself more conscious of satirizing this disagreement over the normative.

  On the whole, however, I was fairly free of deliberate intentions. I could scarcely follow Mr. West’s review with its system of symbols. I had forgotten, since leaving Great Books Inc., what “simony” meant.

  Well, it’s all very interesting and what fascinates me most is the book’s sale. That I had never anticipated. The world’s a mysterious place.

  Yours faithfully,

  “A Triumph of the Comic View,” Trilling’s very favorable assessment of Augie, had appeared in The Griffin, the Readers’ Subscription newsletter.

  To Samuel Freifeld

  October 19, 1953 Barrytown

  Dear Sam,

  You did exactly right in your conversation with my father. I don’t know what anyone can do about my father except to change his character and that lies within the power of no one. Therefore, whatever you said, you said on your own account or in the name of justice, but practical effect I think there should be none. Myself, I have tried to hold no grudge and I had already answered his letter before yours arrived. I see no reason why I should not be faithful to whatever was, in the past, venerable in my father and I do my best to make allowances for the rest. I wouldn’t be uneasy about any of this if I were you. It’s just like my father to begin to be generous long after the rest of the world has begun. He’s impressed by my new fame and even more by the sales of the book and so now he feels uneasy and wants, too late, to go on record as a good parent. I try to make him feel that there is plenty of time.

  I can well imagine how you feel about Augie. I myself feel happier about this book than about anything I have ever done in the line of books because I have a sense of how much of it is just, and that you who know so much about the matter are also pleased with it is a great satisfaction to me. I feel that I have kept things from obscurity which should not sink and for that reason the book is as much intended for you as myself. The personal identification is altogether warranted. If you didn’t make it I’d feel that I had missed the mark. [ . . . ]

  As for Oscar’s book, I have written it up for the Saturday Review. I hope that will do some good.

  Love,

  To Alfred Kazin

  October 22, 1953 Barrytown

  Dear Alfred—

  [ . . . ] I don’t know what to make of the reviews either. What is there to say except that the reviewers have been Augie Marchean reviewers? They have led me to coin a phrase: “low seriousness.” Comedy is illegal—it isn’t even seen—it isn’t. In low seriousness no one laughs until the cue is given; one then asks gravely, “Now, why was it appropriate to laugh?” Enter hereupon Bergson, Freud, Dante and Charlie Chaplin, each bearing a basket of rocks. The rocks are piled on our breast in a huge cairn and so goes it.

  A. West is simply a bad novelist and re-wrote Augie unspeakably—a horror. Stendhal says bad taste leads to crimes. Who can doubt it? Mrs. White and Wm. Shawn are aghast. But whose baby after all is A. West?

  I feel I am at the point of growing wicked, so I stop, with much love,

  To Leslie Fiedler

  October 25, 1953 Barrytown, N.Y.

  Dear Leslie,

  It is a little weird to think that we have never exchanged a single letter. A fair share of the responsibility for this (if responsibility there be) is mine. I often wonder why I balk so at letter writing. I used to accuse myself of lacking energy, but it is too late for that now. I think it is because I talk to myself so much, a habit which has no virtue whatever to redeem it. Now that I’ve begun, I find that I can write quite easily to you. You may be one of my God-appointed correspondents.

  I’m very glad Augie pleased you. The writing of it gave me considerable pleasure; it was wonderful to feel I had the gift of amusement. Of course not everyone is amused. The book has many faults; and so has almost everyone. Though I was always of the opinion that people were hard to give pleasure to, it was nonetheless a sho
ck to see how many suffered from low seriousness—my new favorite description of the “earnestness” of deep readers. What makes people so sober? We’ve sunk a great depth if the funnyman also finds it necessary to be a prophet. I have my own share of low seriousness, of course, but I think of it as a curse. I am not a born prophet.

  The last third of the book was written under terrible difficulties. I suffered, and still do suffer, terrible pains after the separation. I found no alternative. I could not spend the rest of my life with [Anita]. Nor was it good for her to live with me. As for Gregory, I doubt that he will suffer as much from our divorce as I suffered from my parents’ “good” family life. I love Gregory and I know how to make him feel my love. He is injured, but not really seriously injured, and his position also has its advantages. At Princeton last year I nearly went down, and Anita’s troubles were as terrible to me as my own. We are both infinitely better than we were.

  I can imagine how hard it is to face Missoula after Rome. I was uneasy even in New York when I came back—and I had hated Paris for having defeated my aspirations, both the good and the bad. I said even New York. I don’t know. I’m sure Missoula has it over New York.

  My very best to Margaret and the kids.

  Yours,

  Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003), influential American critic, is best remembered for Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). His other books include the essay collections An End to Innocence (1955) and Waiting for the End (1964), as well as a collection of stories, The Last Jew in America (1966).

  To Katharine Sergeant Angell White

  October 27, 1953 Barrytown, N.Y.

  Dear Mrs. White:

  I am grateful to Mr. Shawn for having taken the trouble to read Augie March and I greatly appreciate your precedent-breaking offer [to allow a printed response in The New Yorker to Anthony West’s unfavorable review]. That Mr. Shawn agrees with me that I have been done an injustice satisfies me completely. I cannot see what would be gained by answering Mr. West, whether sweetly or hotly. The confusion is so vast, involved and peculiar that I don’t feel brave enough or capable enough to deal with it. There are some misunderstandings that simply weaken you when you contemplate their complexity. In some odd sense Mr. West’s review is not a piece of criticism but a piece of fiction; it is a very bad short story or something of that kind. For after all Mr. West invented what did not exist; he wrote what he thought to be my novel, and as he is a bad artist he produced a disfigured something. One cannot show the error of such a “something.” I don’t mean to try. What would be the good of it?

  It is very reassuring, however, to know that you feel the review falsified and misrepresented the book. That really is more than enough for me.

  Sincerely yours,

  To Edith Tarcov

  [n.d.] [Barrytown]

  Dear Edith—

  Thanksgiving Day! I have Gregory with me, and for the first time in months I can enjoy a leisurely afternoon. Never have I worked so hard at teaching. Small colleges demand infinitely more of you, and it is a thankless and poorly paid labor. On Fridays I generally have to go to New York to have my teeth—preserved. They are in that stage. And when I have finished running around the City and have returned from my visit to Forest Hills I reach Barrytown on Sunday in a state of exhaustion. And you know what Mondays are. Moreover, there are the difficulties. I know I have no right to complain to you, with your trouble, so much more real and visible than mine.

  Sometimes I think that man, for hundreds of centuries weakened by parasites—lice, fleas, tapeworms, fungi, etc.—has replaced them with parasitic anxieties which deplete him. Because he is used to feeling depleted and it does not seem to him right that he should be well.

  But this is very like me, to start out to thank you for your letter on my book and fall instead into dismal theories. I owe you my deepest gratitude. Yours was the sort of letter one expects from a friend. For whom is a book written, after all?

  I’m glad you observed, as no one else has, Augie’s bent for the illicit. I have often felt that the effort to lead a normal, respectable American life would make an outlaw of me. Stores and offices I have always found intolerable. Better knowledge of history might teach me the difference between impatience and freedom, but I do feel that the world asks an undue degree of control over us. At any rate, I am constitutionally unable to accept so much control and have passed this inability on to Augie. The devil’s disobedience is from pride, but Augie misses the love, harmony and safety that should compensate our obedience. People have accused me of asociality, and Trilling asserts Augie is “wrong” i.e. unprincipled. To me Augie is the embodiment of willingness to serve, who says “For God’s sake, make use of me, only do not use me to no purpose. Use me.”

  I can say it comically, not otherwise. Squeezed into “functions” in which all higher capacities die of disuse, we are considered unprincipled if we comment on the situation by so much as a laugh. Can Augie be anything but, in his mild way, an outlaw? Only, instead of being outside, as a Cain or Ishmael are outside, his desire is to be an Augie. Surely the greatest human desire—not the deepest but the widest—is to be used. If there were no will to be used the social process would be pleasureless, wholly pleasureless. Augie’s is the most reluctant non serviam [47] ever heard.

  Enough of Augie though. There is a lot to be complained of in the book.

  The news of Oscar’s operation has depressed me. I hope he will be seeing the last of hospitals. You must be very gloomy about it. It is a shame. Is there any other possible therapy? Forgive my foolish questions, but I feel this in my bones.

  The review in Saturday Review [of Oscar’s novel] had to be done as I did it because I was in the position of having asked for the book. I could not review it in the tone I would have taken had the book come unsolicited. They would not have accepted from me a review they considered obviously written for a friend. The political problem was a delicate one. I say this only because I have intimations of Oscar’s dissatisfaction with the piece I wrote. You have my assurance that I did my utmost.

  I won’t be coming to Chicago for a long time, so won’t you please write?

  Regards to everyone.

  Love,

  To Samuel Freifeld

  November 30, 1953 Barrytown

  Dear Sam—

  People will feel exposed, ridiculed, no matter how you deal with them. Any mention causes them shame. They can’t think that perhaps it was my aim to love not shame them. If you wanted to think about and find meaning in my existence I would thank you for it, not curse you.

  A few years ago when my brother thought he had cancer he cried out, “I pissed my life away!” And now look at him. That’s all forgotten. But I didn’t forget the great pain of hearing a man condemn himself. Forty-five years of life must contain some meaning.

  Of course, so long as our misery is secret our honor is whole.

  Well, I never dreamed that I could be an uncursed prophet, so I accept the curses. I agree that I am an outlaw. In outlaw bravado I have no interest. I only meant that I wish to obey better laws.

  Well, I haven’t much news to tell you. I am fairly happy. I do a lot of thinking. As yet, to no great purpose.

  Love to everyone,

  To Bernard Malamud

  [n.d.] [Barrytown]

  Dear Bernard:

  I don’t get many letters about Augie that I feel like answering. By pressure of numbers, society can make a specialist of you, if in no other way. Augie threatens to become my specialty as flying the Atlantic became the Lindberghs’—allow me one more immodest analogy: as jumping from the bridge became Steve Brodie’s.

  With this preface, let me say that I thought your letter one of the best, a terribly acute criticism. I’m not at all inclined to counter your criticisms. You’re a writer yourself, a real one; you know that self-defense is not what we ought to be thinking of. I made many mistakes; I must plead guilty to several of your charges. Yes, Augie is too passive, perhaps. Yes, the episodes do
not have enough variety; the pressure of language is too constant and uniform. That he is too august I think I might dispute. At least I felt his suffering sharply—maybe I didn’t get it across. He isn’t, to me, an Olympian. Only, he’s engaged in a War of Independence and the odds are vastly against him. It is devaluation of the person that he fights with. No doubt this war, like any war, produces exaggerations. Our passivity often is so deep that we do not recognize that the active spirit underneath has meanwhile organized an opposition, an opposition that wears the face of passivity. Some of the trouble is Augie’s; some of it the world’s. That is no excuse in literature, though it may be one in history. But I can’t claim that I was trying for perfection. There are times when I think how nice it would be to edit a new and better novel out of it. But I can’t allow myself to forget that I took a position in writing this book. I declared against what you call the constructivist approach. A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of mortality and decay. I backed away from Flaubert, in the direction of Walter Scott, Balzac and Dickens. Having brought off my effort as well as I could, I must now pay the price. You let the errors come. Let them remain in the book like our sins remaining in our lives. I hope some of them may be remitted. I’ll do what I can; the rest is in God’s hands.

  Two things about the book please me still: the comedy and the characters. Many people have missed what, to me, is the fun of the book. They suffer from culture-gravity. They say “picaresque” and don’t laugh. The baseball experts landing on your Natural with both feet are in the same league: sinners against imagination and the spirit of comedy.