Letters
Page 41
Yours apologetically,
Trilling’s essay in Commentary was an excerpt from his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, published in book form as Sincerity and Authenticity. Bellow’s essay in Harper’s was “Machines and Storybooks,” to which Trilling would respond angrily, ending all contact between them.
To David Peltz
July 14, 1974 [Carboneras, Almería, Spain]
Dear David,
I’m sorry you feel hurt. I’m baffled as well. Three years ago Bette [Howland] told you that I was writing about you. You were angry and forbade it. It wasn’t you who were the subject. People have written about me. Their me is not me. It couldn’t matter less. What matters is that good things be written. Dear God, how we need them! [ . . . ] I promised not to write Your Life. But this was all I could promise. We’ve known each other forty-five years and told each other thousands and thousands of anecdotes. And now, on two bars suggested by one of your anecdotes, I blew a riff. Riffs are irrepressible. Furthermore, no one should repress them. I created two characters and added the toilets and the Playboy Club and the fence and the skyscraper. What harm is there in that? Your facts are unharmed by my version. Writers, artists, friends, are not the Chicago Title and Trust Company or the Material Supply Corp. These aren’t questions of property, are they? It might even make you happy that in this world writers still exist. And I should think it would touch you that I was moved to put a hand on your shoulder and wanted to remember you as I took off for the moon. For what you think is so major is really quite minor, a small feel taken by your goofy friend to reassure him as he got going. Your facts, three or four of them, got me off the ground. You can’t grudge me that and still be Dave Peltz.
Now, David the nice old man who wants his collection of memory-toys to play with in old age is not you! You harm yourself with such fantasies. For the name of the game is not Social Security. What an error! Social Security is an entirely different game. The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing. Touch them with your imagination and I will kiss your hands. What, trunk-loads and hoards of raw material? What you fear as the risk of friendship, namely that I may take from the wonderful hoard, is really the risk of friendship because I have the power to lift a tuft of wool from a bush and make something of it. I learned, I paid my tuition most painfully. So I know how to transform common matter. And when I give that transformation, has that no value for you? How many people in Gary, Chicago, the USA, can you look to for that, David? As for me, I long for others to do it. I thirst for it. So should you.
I’ll be back from Spain in about ten days. When we talk I will make a particular effort to understand your feelings. When you think about me, remember that we’ve known each other since about 1929 and make an effort for my sake to understand the inevitability of your appearing among the words I write. And if you think that your friend Bellow, who loves you, is on the whole a good thing, not a bad one, let be. Let be, let be, for God’s sake. Let me give what I can, as I can.
Love,
Peltz had been angered by the appearance, in January, of an excerpt from Humboldt’s Gift in Playboy that made use of an episode from his life.
To James Laughlin
August 13, 1974
Dear J.L.—
Monroe Engel is reminded of Delmore, perhaps, but [in Humboldt’s Gift] I am writing of a composite part, inevitably. Sometimes I feel there wasn’t a whole man in the lot, and I include myself as a fragment. Life, ourselves assisting, broke everyone up.
I should write something about Delmore for the collection you want to publish. I’d like to, but I can’t promise anything until I’ve pried this albatross off my neck.
Yes, I did love Delmore. I believe that you did, too. How comically he loused us all up. It was a privilege to be worked over by him.
When I’ve read my last galley I’ll be free to make promises—and I would like to say a few words about Delmore. I see that you continue to be generous toward him. And I do think he was an important writer.
Anyway, there it is.
All best wishes,
To Louis Lasco
October 1, 1974 [Chicago]
Dear Luigi—
I have noted your new address, and the fact Uncle Benjy had a pet shop. Poor Benjy. If you or I had a pet shop it would be funny. Why is it so sad that Benjy should sell puppies and birds? No gift for life, poor soul.
You ought to subscribe to the Daily News. Do you more good than Las Vegas.
Affectionately, Yakima Canuti
To Philip Roth
October 14, 1974 Chicago
Dear Philip—
Of course, I’m pleased, delighted, honored. Lord! Can this bello maestro be me? What a nice thing.
It was obvious to me in 1956 when I came to Chicago and read your stories that you were very good. Over the years, I’ve muttered words to this effect when your name came up in conversation but (characteristically) I never said it to you.
I was highly entertained by your piece in the New York Review [of Books]. I didn’t quite agree—that’s too much to expect—but I shall slowly think over what you said. My anaconda method. I go into a long digestive stupor. Of course I am not a Freudian. For one fierce interval I was a Reichian. At the moment I have no handle of any sort. I can neither be picked up nor put down.
All best wishes,
Roth had written asking permission to dedicate his essay collection Reading Myself and Others to Bellow. His essay in The New York Review of Books was “Imagining Jews.”
1975
To Meyer Schapiro
January 21, 1975 Chicago
Dear Meyer—
As I read your book, I kept thinking how much better you do your work than I do mine, and how superior your subject is—Moses with his arms held up, and Aaron and Joshua and Rembrandt’s Jacob blessing the songs of Joseph. I, by contrast, have such odd people to deal with. Though I don’t doubt that I am greatly to blame. Probably there’s far more in them than I can see or bring out. Still I do think that I was quite faithful to Von Humboldt Fleisher. I was pleased by your letter, heartened, moved by it. I know that if I satisfy your standards I’ve done what ought to have been done.
Now I’m wondering what you’ll think of the book as a whole. Just now I’m preparing it for the printer and I’m having severe emotional ups and downs as I read it. Lawrence said he cast off his sickness in writing and I understand that thoroughly. On the other hand, looking at what you’ve set down you see nothing, at times, except the sickness.
The letters I’ve had from readers of the Esquire excerpts haven’t all been pleasant. Dead-poet cults are quick to form and the cultists are peculiarly psychopathic and offensive. One of them accuses me of doing with Humboldt what Wallace Markfield did with Isaac Rosenfeld in an awful book called To an Early Grave—I’d be driven up the wall if I were still agile enough to climb walls.
I hope to see you when I’m in New York next.
Yours most affectionately,
“Burdens of a Lone Survivor,” an excerpt from Humboldt’s Gift, had appeared in the December issue of Esquire.
To Barnett Singer
January 27, 1975 Chicago
Dear Mr. Singer,
If I don’t answer all your notes it’s only because I’m always in the position of someone without a pilot’s license trying to land a Boeing 747. But I will say this of Gore Vidal: He’s a specialist in safe scandal. Whenever he steps onto the Senate floor he’s already got the necessary votes in his inside pocket. Yes, I am rather fond of him. But I look for no surprises when he rises to speak.
As for me, I’m still there trying.
Sincerely yours,
To Melvin Tumin
[n.d.] [Chicago]
Dear Mel—
Now I’m delinquent. It seems I have too many things going all at once and all keeping me in that essential state of turmoil which, Pascal says, p
revents people (saves them!) from thinking about salvation. I bump along among unfinished works, promises unkept, things undone, lawsuits without end and the rest of the weak comic furniture of Life, that grand enterprise. Einstein could have used the time to find out more about light. But I must say in my own behalf that I manage to get some pleasing pages written.
I was amused by your conversation with Harold [Rosenberg], the King of the N.Y. intellectuals (old style). He is a grand old man. Sometimes he oddly resembles his late friend Paul Goodman (not one of my favorites). Their views on poetry are similar. It used to annoy Harold when I said that Paul wrote like one of A.S. Neill’s Summerhill kids (“creative-writing” for sexually free kiddie cats). Here the paper ends, but not my affection for you.
Love to Sylvia,
To Mark Smith
April 15, 1975 Chicago
Dear Mark,
In great haste—I’m correcting proofs—I want to say that I admired The Death of the Detective and that I sent a sub-recommendation to the Guggenheim. I observe that people like Tillie Olsen and Lionel Trilling got fellowships but that your name was not on the list. At least I didn’t see you on it and I was disturbed on your behalf and vexed with that obese Gordon Ray whom I sometimes see at the Century Club lowering his four-hundred-pound fanny into a greatly-to-be-pitied chair. His role in the perfect Republic would have been that of third understudy to Laird Cregar (do you remember that fat actor?) in a vile Victorian thriller called The Lodger. What can one do? Of course you have got to lose your innocence. It took me six decades to do it.
With indignation towards them and best wishes to you,
Mark Smith (born 1935) is the author also of Smoke Street (1984) and other novels.
To Joyce Carol Oates
April 15, 1975 Chicago
Dear Miss Oates,
When I answered your letter of December 20th I said that I would be glad to do the interview-by-mail as soon as I sent off Humboldt’s Gift, an amusing and probably unsatisfactory novel. Well, it went to the printer a few weeks ago and while I was waiting for the galleys I began to deal with your stimulating questions. Before I could make much progress the galleys began to arrive in batches so I have to put off the project again. When I was younger I used to think that my good intentions were somehow communicated to people by a secret telepathic wig-wag system. It was therefore disappointing to see at last that unless I spelt things out I couldn’t hope to get credit for goodwill. I expect to be through with proofs in about two weeks and you should be receiving pages from me in about a month’s time.
I’m not sure that you will want a photograph of me in your new journal. It seems that after I have finished a novel, I always want to write an essay to go with it, hitting everyone on the head. I did that when Henderson the Rain King appeared, and a very bad idea it was too—guaranteed misinterpretation of my novel. You shouldn’t give readers two misinterpretable texts at the same time. And if you do publish my picture I will join the ten most wanted.
Yours most earnestly and sincerely,
Bellow’s self-interview would appear that autumn in the inaugural issue of Ontario Review.
To Anthony Godwin
[n.d.] [Chicago]
Dear Mr. Godwin:
Is cosseted the word? Two days of your proposed program would put me in the hospital, on tranquillizers for a month. When your invitation was conveyed to me by Catharine Carver I thought the visit was to be made British-style, with dignified reticence. But I see you have an American promotional scheme; or go, rather, beyond the wildest promotional fantasies of Madison Ave. I never do the promotion bit here. As Katie can tell you, I shun TV appearances and avoid the speaker’s platform. I was willing enough to give a lecture or two, hold one press meeting, tape one BBC program and attend a party. But your lunch parties, trips to Sussex and Edinburgh and “serious” television programs are out of the question. The very thought of them paralyzes me. With half your schedule I could be elected to Congress, and never leave my district. What we need is a compromise. On my terms. I will come for several days and make several appearances, the number to be strictly limited. I don’t want my time utilized to the fullest extent. What a terrifying thought!
I am of course delighted to have you publish my books and I appreciate greatly your desire to launch them with flame and thunder. More than once, however, I’ve seen writers ride bicycles on the high-wire, eat fire, gash themselves open to call attention to their books. They end up with little more than a scorched nose, a broken bone.
Sincerely,
Anthony Godwin was editorial director at Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
To Owen Barfield
June 3, 1975 Chicago
Dear Mr. Barfield:
I’ve read several of your books—Saving the Appearances, the collection of essays on Romanticism, a long dialogue the name of which I can’t remember just now and, quite recently, Unancestral Voice, a fascinating book. I am not philosopher enough to argue questions of rationality or irrationality, but there are things that seem to me self-evident, so markedly self-evident and felt that the problem of proving or disproving their reality becomes academic. Like you I am tired of all the talk about what matters and avoidance of what really matters.
I’d be very grateful for the opportunity to talk to you about the Meggid and about Gabriel and Michael and their antagonists. I’m afraid I don’t understand the account you give of the powers of darkness. I am, I assure you, very much in earnest.
Sincerely yours,
P.S. I got your address from Mr. Charles Monteith of Faber.
Owen Barfield (1898-1997), barrister, man of letters, disciple of Rudolf Steiner and expounder of Anthroposophy, Steiner’s teaching, published many books including Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928) and What Coleridge Thought (1971).
To Harriet Wasserman
July 1, 1975 Casa Alison, Carboneras, Almería, Spain
Dear Harriet:
You’ll think it odd that I never wrote to thank you for the magnificent party and the dinner, and it is odd, but I’ve been oddly tired. This is Sixties Fatigue, and I’m not talking about the last decade. It’s only now, after a week in Carboneras, that I’m able to face a piece of paper. Well, it was a significant party that you gave me, with champagne, Chinese food, big surprises and Roman splendor. I was touched. It’s seldom that anyone takes so much trouble over me—say, once in sixty years. I’m not used to it (to say the least!). It gave me joy. It also troubled me somewhat because I thought, “So something like this can be done by some for others?” I had heard about that. And now it becomes a glorious memory. I feel like the small girl in Little Dorrit who couldn’t forget the hospital—the “orspital,” I mean.
It appears I have to run to catch the postman with this, so I’ll sign off. Write me a letter.
Love,
To David Peltz
July 2, 1975 Casa Alison, Carboneras, Almería, Spain Dear Dave:
The place is beautiful. I’m not, particularly. I arrived in an exhausted state and have been sleeping, swimming, eating, reading and little else. Let’s see if I can get myself flushed out. Life lays a heavy material weight on us in the States—things, cares, money. But I think that the reason why I feel it so much is that I let myself go, here, and let myself feel six decades of trying hard, and of fatigue. My character is like a taste in my mouth. I’ve tasted better tastes. But it’ll pass, and one of these days I’ll be able to see that the ocean is beautiful. And the mountains, and the plants, and the birds. Life isn’t kind to people who took it on themselves to do something about life. Uh-unh!
Adam is here with us—a marvelous young man, surprisingly good-natured for a son of mine. He smiles at his peevish pa and goes on reading science fiction and thrillers. The queen [Bellow’s new wife, Alexandra] is good-natured, too. She’s in her parlor eating mathematical bread and honey. Even I have an occasional good moment, and when I’ve slept myself out I may stop being such a bear.
I want to wish you a ha
ppy birthday and to ask whether you found time to stop at the Corbins and pick up the trifles I bought for you. I often think about you and wonder how it is to have lost a father at sixty. Sixty alone is hard enough. But I shan’t talk to you about death now. God knows there’s plenty of that in the book. Oddly enough, I don’t think much about Humboldt . It’s like the end of something. I’m like a fat Sonja Henie—no more fancy figures on the ice. Overweight. That’s the end of that. I’m hanging up my skates, retiring. If I ever try it again, it’ll be in my own back yard for God’s amusement.
Best to Doris, and love,
Bellow had married Romanian-born mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea the previous autumn.
To Owen Barfield
July 15, 1975 Carboneras, Almería, Spain
Dear Mr. Barfield—
That you should come down to London to answer the ignorant questions of a stranger greatly impressed me. I daresay I found the occasion far more interesting than you could. You were most patient with a beginner trying to learn his A-B-C’s. I continue to study your Unancestral Voice. It’s hard going—some forty years of thought and reading condensed—but I have a strong hunch that you are giving a true account of things. In these matters illumination counts for as much as the sort of “hard proofs” we have been brought up to demand, and lately I have become aware, not of illumination itself, but of a kind of illuminated fringe—a peripheral glimpse of a different state of things. This makes little sense to you perhaps.