Letters

by Saul Bellow

  I kiss you sweetly in the middle,

  Bellow, who liked standing on his head, enjoyed Herodotus’s tale of Hippocleides, who did so at Cleisthenes’s banquet, happily exposing his genitals.

  To Josephine Herbst

  [n.d.] [Rio Piedras]

  Dear Josie—

  It’s wicked to steal a writer’s typewriter. It should be punishable by death. I’ve lost two machines, and I’ve been angry enough to commit murder, both times. I hope it hasn’t held you up too badly. Susan tells me that your stay in NYC has not been as happy as it might have been. Certainly, if I’d been there, I wouldn’t have allowed it to go off-side. We’d have found a remedy for you—have made a helicopter pilot of you, or something to cheer the winter. The city, when your friends are writers, can be largely awful. One winter at a time, has always been my motto.

  P[uerto]R[ico] has been excellent for me. I’ve no [Alfred] Kazinian complaints to make of it. But my God! When one has been right one has been right. Where does that leave matters? Of course it’s barbarous, noisy, undisciplined, etc. And dirty, too, with a great many rats. But there are even more lizards than rats, and more flowers than lizards (I love both) and more perfumes than stinks. And the relation between beauty and garbage strikes me as being right.

  The book is going well, too.

  Love,

  And The Noble Savage has you at the top of the list this time—black and green, fresh and handsome, official and new, for spring.

  To Susan Glassman

  [n.d.] [Rio Piedras]

  Honey, I feel very off this morning, not feverish exactly, but tropical. I am hoping not to burst into hatred of this place between now and departure, but I do feel awfully close and shut in, maybe because I’ve begun to miss you. I chafe, and I’ve stopped being obliging. I refused to give a talk to the librarians on Saturday.

  What an eye-opener this book is to me now. I seem to have the cure which should only have arrived with the conclusion. It came prematurely.

  People have filled up daily conversation with clever and bitter comedy; at the same time, they’ve tried to behave responsibly. And now I’ve become too big a boy to play on with these secondary things, and Herzog shows it. The big, unwieldy, pathetic, and above all unnecessary responsibility which has grown larger than principle itself. Ay, ay! Well, I’m sure that, as so often, you find me clear as mud. But the conclusion is clear to me. The Self, as so conceived, is probably the funniest of all human conceptions. This was what I seem to have been after in Bummidge [hero of The Last Analysis], and certainly in Henderson (I want! I want!) So it’s farewell with laughter to that darling false self-image. What Herzog does with his memory is to create his darling image. Then he is horrified at, say, his father’s renegade desertion of St Dominique St . . . Well, enough of this. What you want to know is, Do I long to hold you in my arms? Yes, I do, greatly. And kiss you on the mouth and elsewhere.

  Love,

  To Susan Glassman

  [n.d.] [Rio Piedras]

  Dolly—Today I have aches (aix les pains, as J. Joyce said). I reached the dentist at last, and the cavity in that tooth was trifling. What caused the pain was tartar under the gums, which had to be scraped out, and my mouth is limping, now the Novocain has worn off. Life has begun to reach me in PR The day before yesterday, during rush hour on Ave. Ponce, the Studebaker broke down. Four hours later, it was fixed. I had to sit on the curb four hours, waiting for the mechanic. It was all in all rather enjoyable, for I hadn’t had so much compulsory peace in quite a while. I’m writing this in Keith’s office and he’s just come back, and I’ll rush to the P.O. so that you may have love’s message for the weekend.

  Sweetheart!

  To Susan Glassman

  April 24, 1961 [Rio Piedras]

  Dolly, how gladly I’d have crept into your bed last night. I missed you badly. And today, and daily, and especially nightly. I’ve slept in your bed since you left, but the fragrance has gone out of it by now. My heart is on 68th St. Love, you say? Love.

  I had frightful nightmares. I dreamed that Carlos [i.e., Jonas Schwartz] was suing. He’s such a hornet, how would he not? And then I woke and the prospect was even worse. It panicked me. And I’ve involved Esquire. Of course I don’t really think he’d do anything, it would make him look like a real idiot. He can’t afford it professionally. Still. You know. It’s dreadful not to be able to write about real matters; it turns all this into child’s play while industry and politics etc. do as they like, drive us into the shelters, make our lives foolish horrors and disfigure the whole world. Ay! Anyway, some of the facts have been fiddled with to place the scene in Chicago. And what is life without a few grave anxieties? Incomplete.

  This is the second long day of rain, and it’s like sharing a green raincoat with a steaming kettle. How I long for the 13th! [ . . . ]

  I feel like Chicken Little after the sky fell.

  Love, love, love,

  Jonas Schwartz, here referred to as “Carlos,” was recognizable in the early excerpt from Herzog scheduled to appear in Esquire.

  To Susan Glassman

  May 1, 1961 [Rio Piedras]

  Dolly: Just as you said, I got a raving letter from Pat, foaming with superlatives. One more soul I’ve made happy. What a terrific record. Only I haven’t heard from Esq. and it’s suspiciously like troubled silence. Oh well, maybe Jonas will sue and it’ll be the making of me. They can take my house, etc. and leave me free to say even more. [ . . . ]

  It won’t be long now before I shake this green dust from my feet. I wish to look into your blue gray eyes and groan and kiss your fingers and play the beast to your beauty.

  With love, love and kisses,

  To Susan Glassman

  [n.d.] [Rio Piedras]

  Dolly, I haven’t heard from you lately. I assume you’re busy with your father’s visit. And I myself? As you see, slowed up a little, but some of this stuff is new, and it’s understandable. The next forty or so pages will be mostly Juliana’s, and then we pass to Daisy, to Shura’s visit, to Mama and Papa and to the conclusion in the country. I had frightening misgivings about the stuff to appear in Esquire, and at the last minute I changed Carlos to a crippled war veteran, a hero of Omaha Beach. For the book itself I’ll have to consult long with Viking’s lawyers. Hate to lose Carlos comme il est [66].

  Getting off this island is to me identical in feeling with the finishing of this book—two prongs of the same force. You can see I’m not dawdling over it. I want to be free.

  Meantime Benitez [chairman of the University of Puerto Rico English Dept.] has asked me to take a permanent appointment here. I said no with thanks. It’s flattering. But then I have been good in that course; I can’t be modest without distortion, and facts are facts.

  [ . . . ] Last week I read Dr. [Albert] Ellis’s Sex Without Guilt. It all seems sensible enough, but something—something makes it feel like happiness in a chicken coop. There’s a junky sanity about it.

  Yes, I did hear from Greg. He wrote me a wonderful, friendly, familiar, explanatory and excited letter about his visit to Chicago, and his interview for admission, and all his friends. He spent two days with Adam and Sondra and sent me a very full report of everything. So we’re perfectly fine. No more crisis.

  If you see John McCormick tell him I’d particularly like him to write a response to [Seymour] Krim. “Notes from a Different Cat.” We must have a second piece or it’ll look as though we sponsor this lunatic. John’s going off, I know, but I want to press him very hard to do this. He’s the best of all possible answerers.

  I miss you, Dolly. I grow hollow at the feet with the sense of incompleteness. I may have to walk into Grand Union on my hands.

  Love,

  Albert Ellis was a Chicago “sexologist” whom Bellow had consulted in the spring of 1960. Seymour Krim, briefly Bellow’s colleague at Minneapolis, was an essayist associated with Kerouac, Ginsberg and others of the Beat movement. His essay “What’s This Cat’s Story?” had appeared in T
he Noble Savage.

  To Louis Gallo

  May 9, 1961 Rio Piedras

  Dear Lou:

  You’ll remember I made no claims whatever. I merely urged you to read Henderson because it would reveal more than any letters I might write. You speak of madnesses as though they were all of one color or taste. I came some time ago to think of despair and victimization as being at the service of the ruling class and the whole social edifice. It is the way in which imagination and intelligence eliminate themselves from the contest for power. Not that they are rivals for the same power. There is a difference. But—I have a taste for bluntness, just like yours—the only power they do exercise freely, without interference, is the power to despair. That is the monochromatic madness. Having myself felt it, known it, bathed in it, my native and temperamental impulse is to return to sanity in the form of laughter. This is not an affirmative policy. Nor do I expect anything but a disfigured success. But there are other powers from which we have abdicated—powers of gratification, of beauty and strength. When we agree they are gone forever some of us at least are shamefully lying. In my first two books I so agreed, shamefully. Then I realized I was merely doing another conventional thing. Conventionally lying. But I don’t want to write you the story of my life. I haven’t the time even if I had the inclination. I’m writing a book, and this is my last week on the Island. I’ll be back in Tivoli very soon, and perhaps we can meet in NYC one of these days. [ . . . ]

  To Keith Botsford

  June 7, 1961 Tivoli

  Dear Keith:

  [ . . . ] I went to Ann Arbor to give my lecture, and then to Chicago to see Adam. I saw Sondra, too, for a moment, and I might have seen Jack, I suppose, if I’d cared to look for him. Old Tschacbasov and Sondra are in litigation over Esther’s will, and Tschacbasov sent word that he would go to court to witness against Jack and his daughter if I wanted to bring suit for custody of the child. Such a suit doesn’t attract me. I want nothing to do with any of them. Through the kid, I’m already involved, but I mean to hold relations with the whole bunch to a sanitary minimum.

  I took Adam to the zoo and the aquarium, and picnicking, and shopping for toys. He wears the biggest pistol Marshall Field sells and the most ungunmanlike face in all of Chicago. I couldn’t get him off the subject of guns. He’s a fiercely singleminded kid. And like Greg he loves jokes. And like his Pa. [ . . . ]

  To Louis Gallo

  June 15, 1961 Tivoli, N. Y.

  Dear Lou—

  I’m back, and a great pleasure it is to be here, too. My mind wasn’t my own in Puerto Rico, in the direct rays of the sun. Back, back to the gothic kennel, my stone cellar and dirty rooms. I hope you’ve seen The Noble Savage #3. #4 will contain [your] “Oedipus Schmoedipus” and other good things. Editing has been more than I bargained for. I took it on with the usual good intentions, familiar underfoot en route to hell, and now it has become a full-time unpaid job, with all the troubles and injustices and errors for which executives get high salaries.

  Anyway—I’m interested in what you’ve been writing about the hatred of art among great writers. It’s certainly true of Tolstoy. All these men (Tolstoy, Rimbaud, etc.) had the moralist’s role to bear. They were Jonahs whose real calling was art. They had to prophesy instead, the higher vocation, and for this reason they were compelled to be severe towards their talents. I haven’t thought the matter through as closely as I might but it interests me enormously. If you’ve written about it I’d like to see what you’ve done.

  Now and then your writing hits the mark with a real clang. You’re erratic but you have a true aim. I’ve lived too long for this to be fooled.

  To Keith Botsford

  July 24, 1961 Tivoli

  Dear Keith,

  [ . . . ] The world, assailed by crisis, is not fighting over The Noble Savage at the bookstores. Nor does anyone swoon. Nor do our contributing editors with the exception of Swados and Herb Gold, infighters of old, notice that anything was said about them. I doubt that Ludwig will even look to see whether we have kept him on the masthead, and my annoyance and your point of honor will be equally vain and silly. Nevertheless we must do well, as the world falls sharply through space, and keep the band playing while the Titanic sinks in ice water. I am in a mood suitable for gay funerals. [ . . . ]

  In the present state of the world we could do worse. We might also attempt to spend less money, both of us. You, as a Tolstoyan, are even pledged to this. [ . . . ]

  To Ann and Alfred Kazin

  July 26, 1961 Tivoli

  Dear Ann and Alfred,

  I’m terribly pleased with your approval of poor Herzog. I’m here in Tivoli finishing up—or shall I say writing the book? That’s more like the truth. Men makht a leben kam mit tsores [67]. Now the tomatoes are coming in, I have no pressing economic problem, if the woodchucks will only lay off. It would be wonderful to run up to Wellfleet and visit with you for a day or two. Since that can’t be, why don’t you come to Tivoli for a long weekend in the fall? Fall and spring are Tivoli’s best seasons. Very beautiful. Great deal of room here, woods to walk in, fields, and it would give me very great pleasure. Let’s negotiate this when you return from the Cape.

  Thanks and love,

  To Arno Karlen

  August 17, 1961 Tivoli, N.Y.

  Dear Mr. Karlen:

  I’m sincerely sorry if I offended you at the [Wagner College] conference. That I should have failed you was inevitable, since no one ever gives up the belief that there is a “mana,” as the Polynesians call it, which must be transferable. I myself have often been indignant with older writers, and I know how you must have felt. But I believe you may have missed something Jewish that passed between us. Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, goes the old saying. Your talents were so obvious to me that I fixed at once upon the things that were less satisfactory. Among these were tendencies present in me, and superabundantly present, at your age. In scolding you, was I perhaps correcting myself a long generation ago? “Perhaps” is simply rhetoric. It was positively so, and when you say we are running on parallel tracks you confirm this. I noted at once in your writing the power to cut through superfluities, the hardness of attack that I favor. But the solipsism gets us all. Everyone is writing Ulysses all day long, within himself, and when we speak we speak sentences out of an inward context—only the tip of the iceberg appearing above the surface. So that you heard only the clause beginning with “but,” and not what preceded it.

  What I should have said to you about being a writer would have gone something like this: One has the choice now of coming before the world as a writer or actually being one. The Mailers and the Angries are dissatisfied with what you call the rapping on the cell wall, and they have decided to make a public appearance in the writer’s role. I don’t take you for a silly man. You are nothing like an Angry; still you were encountering difficulty in the role, and wanted to be acknowledged by the others. It seemed to me a trivial thing for you to be doing. You had it all over most of the people there anyway, and weren’t denied publication, and you might therefore have gone a little more softly with them, less gifted and less lucky as they were. An odd tightness or hardness came over you when they criticized you. I saw my own pale tense face twenty years ago, and I spoke and no doubt said the wrong thing. I owed you this explanation then but didn’t offer it because I was distracted, annoyed with the whole conference and angry with myself for having gotten into it. To deal with seventeen people within ten days was not easy. And the financial reward was negligible. In ten days of hacking I can easily earn twice as much, three times as much as Wagner paid me, so I was not there certainly for the money. I can’t believe that you’d really think there was more to say than, To be a writer one learns to live like one. This I said repeatedly and with variations. The craft one learns oneself. The main business is to find the most appropriate and most stimulating equilibrium. You are a person who writes; the most exacting criticism I could make wouldn’t have ten cents’ worth of value in the en
d because your critical principles will come from you. They will appear as you write and rewrite. For this reason I don’t feel at all guilty towards the seventeen at the conference. For tactless-ness, yes; for failures of instruction, no. I was there to make my own views clear; that’s all anyone can do in this enterprise. To the best of my ability I did make them clear. People who write have their own strong conception of how things should go. They tend to be despotic in life, as they often are towards their characters. There were therefore seventeen quite complete versions of how the thing was to go. And I provided the eighteenth.

  I frankly and willingly admit that to interrupt the writing of Herzog irritated me and possibly made me bearish. I am however always available to you for private conversation. Maybe we can clear some of this up.