Letters

by Saul Bellow

  As for the rest of the scene, half my dogs are sleeping and lying. The Chicago half however is bowing and wowing in courtrooms and lawyers’ offices. It’s still a struggle unto the nothing. But Daniel’s sweetness only increases and his cleverness too. This cuts my losses by a great deal.

  I shan’t come to New York without calling you. I haven’t been there since September 1st. To which some of my cheerfulness must be ascribed.

  Love,

  To Hannah Arendt

  December 1, 1970 Chicago

  Dear Hannah,

  Many students have shown great interest in the Kant seminar and David [Grene] and I feel that you would find it worth your while to visit Chicago this winter. Under the circumstances we would not of course wish to press you. I don’t know how you feel about leaving New York now. I ran into Hans Morgenthau recently and he said that you don’t much enjoy going out. Chicago in winter can be grim but perhaps the students would compensate for the grimness.

  In any case we would be delighted to have you.

  Sincerely yours,

  Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher, Bellow’s much-admired colleague during the years at Bard, had died in October. Stiff collegial courtesies between Arendt and Bellow evidently continued, despite his attack on her Eichmann in Jerusalem in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. He was writing here in his capacity as chairman of the Committee on Social Thought.

  To Nicolas Nabokov

  December 19, 1970 Chicago

  Dear Mr. Nabokov,

  Of course I remember you well. The long years mean nothing—at least certain faculties are not affected by the calendar. The invitation is not merely attractive, it is positively fascinating. It so happens that I know little about the Aspen Institute. I know only the beautiful Mrs. Walter Paepcke whom I used to meet in Chicago’s last salon, now closed alas by the death of our aged hostess, Mrs. Epstein, whose walls were hung with paintings by Botticelli, Rembrandt and Goya. No, I’ve never visited Aspen. At the moment I have only sketchy summer plans and before I can be more definite I must learn what the mothers of my children have in mind for the holidays. I would like to come to the Institute, but what would I be asked to do? I am putting together a singular sort of book and it gives my life a certain oddity; not altogether agreeable, but what can one do? Let me say then that I’d like to come, I may very well be with you in Aspen next July; but I need to know what would be expected of me. With many thanks for your kind letter.

  Very sincerely,

  Nicolas Nabokov (1903-1978) was for many years resident composer at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. He is best remembered for his opera based on Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman), which premiered in 1973.

  1971

  To Norman Podhoretz

  March 11, 1971 Chicago

  Dear Norman,

  Thanks for your note [about “Culture Now: Some Animadversions, Some Laughs”]. It seems that I have a feeling for polemics—evidently I’ve been holding it down, sitting on it. I’ve never wanted to become an infighter. Probably this article ought to have appeared in Commentary but I wanted Rahv to have it for old times’ sake. The old Partisan was very generous to Isaac and me when we arrived green and sincere from Chicago. William [Phillips] had no sort of character at all but Philip [Rahv] had a solid Roman-Russian personality, dignified, weighty, and even (there were signs of it) affectionate.

  I don’t know if I will write anything else like this again, unless provoked. When I was in Paris, I was told that Mary McCarthy was screaming for my blood. Then, at nightfall, in London, who should turn up at a bus stop but Leslie Fiedler, his beard looking rather plucked about the chin. He was very friendly and proposed that we should have a friendly conversation next day. But I said No. And then Katie Carver also materialized and said I was in the wrong. I can never understand why revolutionaries try to hold on to liberal friendly relations with me.

  Yours with good wishes,

  To Margaret Staats

  April 30, 1971 Chicago

  Dear Maggie—

  Your birthday was not forgotten. On the 16th I was in New York and vainly twenty times dialed your number. Since then I’ve tried also from Chicago, but you seem no longer to live on 15th St. Wherever you reside now, you are remembered by me.

  My own condition isn’t too bad, but my sister’s husband [Charles Kauffman] has had a stroke again, and this time is partly paralyzed. He lies in the hospital, all the sweetness of his character showing in the new softness of his face. Forgiving everyone. Coming into the intensive-care room, I’m moved by Charlie. And my sister is still pretty, high-school Janey at the eyes—otherwise withered.

  So it goes.

  And, these weeks, I am on jury-duty and spend many days in a jury-box.

  Happy birthday and blessings,

  To the cast of the Circle in the Square production of The Last Analysis

  June 25, 1971 Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies

  To the entire cast:

  Bless you all, you’ve done the thing and done it marvelously! At the first preview, I knew that you could and would make the play go, that you saw life in the thing despite its many faults and that you would surely succeed with it. The blood of the art is still circulating. Not only is the play giving much pleasure to audiences but it is breaking down a stony professional prejudice against novelists in the theater. Six years ago this professionalism broke my back but I hobbled out again for another try [ . . . ] I can now set my crutch on fire and trade in my wheelchair for a motorcycle.

  A lady writing me about The Last Analysis says it has to do with “getting it all back from the butchers.” That is exactly what the play is about—and for me, personally, you have also redeemed it from the butchers.

  I am grateful to you all.

  The Last Analysis, negatively reviewed upon its Broadway premiere in 1964, enjoyed a better reception when Circle in the Square revived it off-Broadway seven years later under the direction of Theodore Mann and starring Joseph Wiseman.

  To Edward Shils

  June 26, 1971 Aspen

  My dear Edward—

  [ . . . ] Here in the mountains I feel a decided improvement in my state. But there’s so much room for improvement. I hope, just once, to do the thing which would justify my survival for so many decades. I seem not to be ready just yet, though my spirit is beginning to clear somewhat. Here at least I am not troubled by ladies. No dear creature offers me love or even a stable daily existence. I live alone, now that Adam has gone, in a large house with splendid views. Aspen is fashionable, like the summer place in which Prince Myshkin fell to pieces.

  I refused to go to New York for the revival of my revised farce. It seems to be having a succès fou. You don’t approve of it, I know, but it has a few Aristophanic moments.

  Bless you.

  Please keep in touch.

  Love,

  To John and Kate Berryman

  June 27, 1971 Aspen

  Dear Kate and John—

  This is to greet and bless Sarah Berryman on her arrival in this gorgeous wicked world which has puzzled and delighted my poor soul for fifty-six years. I expect the planet will go on a few billion years yet and she will thrive on it.

  Love to you all,

  1972

  To David Holbrook

  January 4, 1972 Chicago

  Dear Mr. Holbrook:

  [ . . . ] I have an idea that we are all far too susceptible to fashionable ideas and that our power to discriminate has been seriously damaged in this consciousness-explosion of ours. An old Yiddish proverb crops up in my thoughts more and more frequently. It goes like this: A fool throws a stone into the water; then sages knock themselves out trying to recover it. (Very free translation.) The sages evidently are no cleverer than the fool.

  There are by now enough fool-cast stones in the water to keep us silly sages going for quite a long time.

  I shall try to get a copy of your “Human Hope” book. Sorr
y I missed you in Chicago.

  Sincerely yours,

  David Holbrook is the author of many books including Human Hope and the Death Instinct (1971).

  To Robert Hivnor

  January 24, 1972 Chicago

  Dear Bob—

  I often wondered whether he would. I guessed that he wouldn’t. I seldom guess right.

  Not many of his sort left, and he was a dear friend.

  Thanks for the note. I’ll turn up in NY one of these days.

  On January 7, 1972, John Berryman had leaped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis.

  To Grace Wade

  March 7, 1972 Chicago

  Dear Mrs. Wade:

  In 1956 I spent many months at Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and there I knew several elderly women who lived at mountain sides and in lonely canyons. According to some odd intuitive method of my own I put together something. It was a year or two later that I wrote “The Yellow House,” moved by my memory of those old women and the Nevada desert. One of the old girls, now dead, was my landlady. From her I rented a shack built of old railroad ties. It was at the water’s edge and I dream sometimes of going back for a look. But I am told that the Lake has become a tourist attraction and I’m afraid of returning to cherished memories and finding only Disneyland.

  Thank you for writing.

  Sincerely yours,

  To Nadine Nimier

  March 29, 1972 Miami

  Dear Nadine,

  I’m not moribund. I’m simply as usual—not pulled-together sufficiently. To cure myself, I’ve come down to Florida with Adam and Daniel and voilà!—suddenly I am able to reply to your note. Evidently I come back to life when I voyage. Next month I’m off to Japan. I don’t know a word of le japonais—pas un seul mot. But I’m fairly good at pantomimes of all sorts. In July I’m going to Aspen, Colorado, and in August I’ll be in Europe. Perhaps we shall actually meet in France. I intend to stay until mid-September. I feel sometimes like a novel written by the ghost of Jules Verne and revised by Tutankhamen and Wm. Faulkner—about a Prince of Egypt reincarnated in the twentieth century, fond of southern whiskey and doomed to jet about the earth.

  Yours ever,

  To Samuel S. Goldberg

  [n. d.]

  When Mark Twain returned from a visit with Harriet Beecher Stowe and found he had called on her without a necktie, he posted the tie to her and wrote, “Sorry we couldn’t both be there at the same time.” Thus with this check. On Saturday, I’m off to Tokyo. There I expect to find some excellent second-hand book stores unraided and undespoiled by S. S. Goldberg. I may find something to your liking. Perhaps one of those sexual scrolls to cheer your lonely hours in the office and strengthen you in honorable dealings with Man and Government.

  The pickled trout at Max’s was better than ever. I left half a buck for the reddish pudgy woman and went back along Fifth Ave. hoping we might meet.

  Yours ever,

  I’ll settle for the [Lawrence] Binyan Dante, volumes I and II. I have the Paradiso.

  Among Bellow’s great friends, Samuel S. Goldberg was a Yiddish-speaking lawyer and bibliophile. The two of them could sometimes be spotted in New York’s used bookshops, particularly the Gotham and the Strand.

  To Frances Gendlin

  May [?], 1972 [Chicago]

  Dear Frances:

  There are many reasons why I didn’t write. For one thing, the jet lag was awful. It took more than ten days to recover. For another, I turned out to be a real or perhaps imaginary celebrity, and immediately began to do seminars, lectures, interviews, radio programs and Japanese semi-state dinners, sitting on the floor, using chopsticks and eating raw fish, or trying to eat it. I drank a good deal of sake to help myself sleep, but I kept waking at four A.M., utterly wretched most of the time. My system is sound enough, for a man of my age, but even it was not able to cope with the terrific time and space changes. After two weeks of this I was allowed to rest in Kyoto, where it was relatively tranquil. Kyoto I thoroughly enjoyed, staying in a Japanese inn, old-style, sleeping on the straw mat and lying on the floors half the day, admiring the little moss garden. Being on the floor was childhood again, and childhood is still the most pleasant part of life. A confession of adult failure. Well, I’d better own up. I haven’t done too hot, as the old Chicago phrase runs. For three weeks I didn’t hear from you at all, and I was quite put out about it. If you wrote a letter you didn’t send, I did, too. And then I was disheartened—appalled is a probably more accurate word—to find that I had crab-lice. I felt peculiarly shaky and stupid to make that discovery. I’d had nothing at all to do with women here, except to smile at them over the raw fish held in chopsticks. Going to the doctor was awful. Thinking about it all was awful. Cured now, I feel lousy still. Anti-self, anti-others, but above all the old fool. The world seems to expect that I will do all kinds of good things, and I spite it by doing all kinds of bad ones. They’re not terribly bad, either. Striking sins are out of reach. I try to break into the next sector, or find the next development, but nothing comes of this except unhappiness for myself and others. The unhappiness to myself I don’t much mind. The effect on others is a curse to me night and day. It’s true I haven’t taken a shot at [George] Wallace, but there isn’t much else I can take credit for. At the end of all this, I can say that I think of you a great deal and lovingly.

  I’m flying to San Francisco on the 26th. I suppose I’ll be there before the letter arrives and back in Chicago about the first of June.

  Love,

  On May 15, while campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, presidential candidate and Alabama governor George Wallace had been shot and seriously wounded by Arthur Bremer.

  To David Grene

  June 22, 1972 Chicago

  My dear David,

  I had thought to find some rest in Japan but it wasn’t like that at all—it never is. I found myself running up and down giving lectures and seminars to widely erudite Japanese scholars. Among them there seems to be one of everything under the sun, so that if you call out at Tokyo University for an expert on German armor of the thirteenth century he will appear in a few minutes ready to take sides. Tokyo is a fuming, hissing metropolis, and what God promised Abraham has come to pass in Tokyo, not in Jerusalem. They have what Henry James called “numerosity.” There are no small gatherings, only mobs—everywhere mobs of every description. It was desolating to see but often funny, too, and I felt myself something of a Gulliver there. The old temple cities, anyway, were very beautiful and I reached them in the right frame of mind: I was exhausted and cast myself down in the quiet of temple gardens. These were all beautifully arranged, each stone in place and every bamboo leaf quivering on cue. Then I rushed back to San Francisco and came down with some sort of fever. They were ten very unpleasant days. Then I had a court confrontation with Susan and then went East and collected degrees from Yale and Harvard—a double-header. Daniel and I were to have spent July in Aspen but my case continues and I am not at all sure that I’ll be able to get out of here. However, Adam and I will certainly turn up in Ireland toward the end of August. As yet, I don’t know precisely when. [ . . . ]

  Best wishes to everyone,

  Yours affectionately,

  To John Haffenden

  June 27, 1972 Chicago

  Dear Mr. Haffenden:

  Berryman’s last letters to me are still scattered about my flat. I haven’t had the heart to gather them into an envelope and put them away. Where would I put them? The relationship is still open, as it were. This may serve to explain why it has been difficult for me to answer your inquiry.

  Sincerely yours,

  Haffenden was beginning research for The Life of John Berryman, which would appear in 1982.

  To the Committee on Admissions of the Century Association

  September 29, 1972 Chicago

  [ . . . ] I understand that Mr. William Phillips has been nominated for membership in the Century Club. My purpose in this letter is to make clear my very strong
reasons for opposing this. I am convinced that Phillips has done great harm to American literature over the last ten or fifteen years. The Partisan Review of which he has been an editor from the first was once important and valuable. It continued the cultural line set by The Dial, Transition and the best of the little magazines. It published Malraux and T. S. Eliot, Silone and Koestler and George Orwell and Edmund Wilson and Robert Lowell and John Berryman [ . . . ]. But, the founding editors resigning for one reason or another, William remained in charge, and William lost no time in selling out. He betrayed and, intellectually and artistically, bankrupted the magazine. Over the last ten years PR has become trivial, fashionable, mean and harmful. Its trendiness is of the pernicious sort. It despises and, as much as it can, damages literature. The values held by early editors like Philip Rahv and Delmore Schwartz it has repudiated entirely. I think it has become the breeding place of a sort of fashionable extremism, of the hysterical, shallow and ignorant academic “counter-culture.” It trades on the reputation of the magazine, and readers who still associate the old names and standards with it are deceived into reading the harmful trash it now prints. In the early days William helped to build the old Partisan but he is also responsible for its decay. Standards have become rather soft, I know, but it’s nevertheless difficult for me to understand how anyone who has looked into recent numbers of PR could think of its editor as a member of the Century Club.

  Yours sincerely,

  The Century Association, an exclusive Manhattan club, grants members a period in which to support or oppose any candidate standing for membership. Once read by the admissions committee, “red letters” (as negative appraisals are called) are destroyed. Bellow had retained a carbon copy.