by Saul Bellow
I tell you these things—for openers—because I found that I could tell you things. It made me happy to see you. It will take you some time to learn that I’ve a reputation for reticence. A Village painter who did psychiatry as a sideline once called me an “oral miser.” He was right, I’m afraid. I couldn’t talk to him. There’s no one in Chicago to make me freely conversational. Joe Epstein I like and respect but I don’t open my heart to him because he doesn’t have the impulse—your impulse—to open up. Besides he’s more fair-minded than we are, or more circumspect when he discusses our bogus contemporaries. You and I have in common a vivid impatience with jerks which makes us wave our arms and cry out. You won me with your first outburst.
So I galloped at once through the articles you sent and was disappointed only when there was no more to read. They were, as I expected (no, I got more than I expected), comprehensively intelligent, learned, lively, without nonsense, delightful. Some of your views I don’t share. I knew [Nicola] Chiaromonte well, liked him, occasionally agreed with him, considered him to be one of the better European intellectuals of the Fifties and Sixties. But Nick was, in many ways, a standard product, often deficient in taste, snobbish. You came closest to the truth in examining his agreement with Hannah Arendt, that superior Krautess, on the differences between Platonic and Marxian intellectuals. The reason Nick and Hannah failed to notice the congealment of intellectuals into their own “stratum” (your word) was that they were terribly proud of their own super-eligibility for the highest of all strata. Their American friends could never hope to join them there. We were very nice but not kulturny enough to be taken seriously. But I shan’t go on about Nick, who was certainly a considerable person. I don’t always respect the rule of de mortuis [86] but in his case I shall. Even in Hannah’s case, though she tempts me more strongly. I used to say unforgivably wicked things about her, and that wickedness should yield to Death. Still it is hard to stop the genius of abuse. If belles lettres still existed it would be pleasant to write something about that. I’m sure it’s already been done. Probably by Lucian, or someone else I haven’t read. But mostly I was in enthusiastic agreement with your views and sent up more than one cheer.
What a pity we had so little time to talk. We have a good deal to tell each other.
All best,
At Bellow’s request, Wieseltier had sent a selection of his essays including a review of Chiaromonte’s The Worm of Consciousness and Other Essays, from The New York Review of Books.
To Sam Wanamaker
March 3, 1978 Chicago
Dear Sam,
I take your proposition [about a film of Henderson the Rain King] seriously, and Marlon Brando in the role has a certain charm for me—the charm of the unlikely but feasible. There are any number of reasons why I could not write a screenplay—one is that I am writing a book; no, two books. I don’t know what Harriet Wasserman has done about Public Television; we’ve been out of touch, but I am sending your letter to her and she will be able to give you (I hope) the information you want.
All best to you,
To Leon Wieseltier
March 9, 1978 Chicago
Dear Leon:
We’re taking off for London on one of those diabolical machines that persuade you your journey is necessary. Well, maybe it is. But from my window over Lake Michigan, which is frozen two miles out, bands of spring water begin to show, green, blue and white. The air is the same. You feel it all squeezing and opening like the folds of an accordion. You are the accordion, the transparencies are inside. Even if the music is somewhat silly, I don’t want to leave. Also, against my will, I have to write a review for the Times of Kollek’s Memoirs. That puts me into the field of diplomacy. First I gather my real opinions together, then I run them through the adapter and hope for a balanced compromise. I like Teddy’s kind of character; he is rude, bumptious, but the book is interesting in its way and more candid than most of its kind. The “personal” books of politicians are vexing. How many exceptions are there? De Gaulle, Clemenceau. But if it takes big wars to beget these Clemenceaus we can do without them.
I’m sure your piece [“Auschwitz and Peace,” in The New York Times] was extremely hard to write. It’s a good one, and it will turn discussion in the right direction. You know what to expect from hot controversy over Jewish questions—bangs and blows on the noggin. But it was most important to call attention to the effects of Auschwitz on Israeli leaders, and you were more than tactful in putting it—“saving realism,” “accommodation is not surrender,” the Jews “never hungered for conquest.” I don’t see what there is for intelligent people to object to. And one of the encouraging things about the Jews is that they can always come up, as if under warranty, with a number of good heads. The others, too, of course, are always there, and you can count on them to call you a trendy dove. A dayge [87]!
You touch some rather deep questions—is anything worth writing that doesn’t graze these at least? I wonder what this stiffness [ . . . ] really signifies. Sometimes I think of it as an impossible degree of wakefulness or bolt-uprightness. Supposing the Europeans, and especially the Germans, to have made their wars and their death-camps in a state of possession, nearly a dream state, the effect on the victims and sufferers was one of super wakefulness. Their portion was—reality. At the very least. In this wakefulness they built their society, their army, fought their wars. Perhaps they see the goyim still ruled by these fatal phantasmagorias of theirs. Is America awake? No kidding! Or France, blundering towards its next elections? And aren’t these Jews still spiritually in Europe, together with their dead millions of the war? It’s tempting to think whether this reckless game (I wonder whether Begin isn’t acting from fated motives) may not have its source in some need for critically heightened consciousness.
I’ve concluded, however, that when people say such things they are often talking about themselves. So I pause to check myself out.
Are you coming to Chicago soon? Give me some notice and I may be able to organize a public lecture at the university. We have little money, but there are a few dollars in the Committee’s lecture fund.
All best,
To James Salter
March 29, 1978 Chicago
Dear Jim,
You won’t know anything about Jeffrey Harding unless you come here and look at the County Jail. I don’t know what sort of movie one could make about it but the jail itself is worth seeing, if Jeff can get you in (and out) safely.
At the moment it seems a more tranquil spot than Asolo [where Salter was vacationing]. What do you want to go to Italy for, and tempt kidnappers and terrorists? I’m having this out with my son Adam who wants to live in Florence next year and study Dante and Petrarch under the auspices of Smith College. I sent him clippings from the papers, which make no impression on him. I had him talk to my agent [Erich] Linder, who sends his own son to a Swiss university. And I don’t know whether you noticed a recent dispatch from Rome about the rage of the Mafia against those kidnappers of Aldo Moro. They denounce the terrorists for ruining the rackets in Italy and threaten to have their people inside the prisons execute the terrorists there if Moro is not set free by March 30th.
Seems to me that you and Adam are being pretty old-fashioned about Italy. I know you want to drink wine and breathe the delicious mountain air, but how much breathing do you think they’ll let you do? I suggest you come and look at the County Jail. We can go to Gene and Georgetti’s and eat our steak in nice quiet local Mafia surroundings.
Ciao to you,
Jeffrey Harding, who was making a movie about prison life in Chicago, had been referred to Salter by Bellow.
To John Cheever
May 18, 1978 Chicago
Dear John:
I write to you as a member to the Chairman of the Awards Committee [of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters]. I perish of greed and envy at the sight of all these awards which didn’t exist when we were young and mooching around New York. I have no one to recom
mend for the [American] Academy in Rome—just as well, I wouldn’t want any of my friends shot in the legs—but I would like to recommend David Pryce-Jones who wrote the book on the Mitford girls for the E. M. Forster Award. I’d like also to put up a young author named Max Apple who has written a very good book called The Oranging of America and also Bette Howland, author of Blue in Chicago.
There are no critics I could nominate for anything but crucifixion.
Yours with very sincere affection (this because you signed yourself very sincerely yours),
Love, too,
To Leon Wieseltier
May 19, 1978 Chicago
Dear Leon:
In Chicago when spring comes and the great sun stirs all this great mess and nature begins to produce all its spring phenomena, it’s not so much the budding trees and the blooming flowers that come into their own as the machines and the tarnish and the old building materials, and atmospheric lead and carbon are transposed. You get the spring look for lead and sulphuric derivatives. Yesterday we had gorgeous weather, with of course an Ozone Watch and over-heated automobiles with their hoods up blocking express-ways. I sat in a stalled car and kept calm by thinking about Rudolf Steiner, and I was perfectly sure that I was taking in deadly carcinogens and would get lung cancer. Today spring is low and gray. No harm in this, I suppose. What you feel is that the world has no elasticity. It’s probably un-Jewish of me to yield to external conditions in this way. In Lodz, once, I asked Dr. Marek Edelman, who’d been an adolescent fighting in the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto and was now a “cardiolog,” whether the ugliness of his urban surroundings didn’t bother him, and he looked at me with outright contempt. What difference can the outside of things make? It’s a kind of idolatry or graven-image susceptibility. You can catch an esthetic clap, whoring after these Ruskins, and serve you damn right. Have you heard of Edelman? A remarkable fellow, author of a stirring account of the Ghetto and the Umschlagplatz [deportation point from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka].
I’ve been on the road to make money to pay taxes and also legal fees, as well as accountants and wives, and children’s tuitions and medical expenses. The patriarchal list should go on to include menservants and maidservants and camels and cattle. I’d be lucky to get into the end of the procession, among the asses. When I came back I had to finish writing a short essay on Goethe’s Italian Journey—a wonderful book—for a German magazine, and so I had no time to go through the letters I’d gotten about our letter [of public protest to the Begin government], but now I’ve seen most of them, ranging from bouquets to notices of excommunication. You put your name to a document and you get a free bathysphere ride through the oceans of Jewish opinion and emotion. One lady blowfish informed me that the Israelis and the American Jews had problems enough without my acting as any kind of spokesman for them. She could find nothing in my biography or writings that showed any capacity for rational political thinking. Or any other sort. Some of the Israeli papers, I hear from my friend John Auerbach, called me a Russian agent and a Carter stooge. There’s nothing I long for less than politics, and I’d be glad to leave political rationality to the Begins and the Weizmanns, if I thought they had it, but Begin was awful on his last trip here, mismanaged everything, demanded the test of strength in the Congress everyone’s been dreading and which everything possible should have been done to avoid. He overstates everything, is all emphasis, is pertinacious, hollering—a real Jabotinskyite, and he’s going to bring us to a dangerous pitch of fanaticism. It isn’t so much that he’s wrong on all the issues, he’s not; but he doesn’t know how to lead the discussion. He’s a convulsive sort of man. And imagine the Jews outdone by a Carter. What can explain that but disorder and hysteria in the Jewish ranks. Is there no one in Israel to tell Begin what public relations in the US are all about?
But then there’s no one in the US, seemingly, who can tell the Administration what the Saudis, etc. are about. A Bernard Lewis might do it, if anyone would let him get near enough to Jimmy, and if Jimmy were not himself a problem child. And all we private persons can do is think about these matters. They give us thought materials. Nor will anyone pay attention to our wisdom, if we should achieve it, what with the Moros and the Cambodias—the crisis-maddened consciousness of intelligent people is what I mean, I suppose. It’s because I have a letter from Jean-Paul Sartre asking me to contribute an article to a Big Discussion of the Jewish Question in Les Temps Modernes next autumn that this comes up.
Yours ever,
Wieseltier had organized an open letter to protest the Begin government’s slowness in answering the peace initiatives of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat. Signed by prominent American Jews including Bellow, Irving Howe, Jacob Neusner, Seymour Martin Lipset and Lucy Davidowicz, the letter received front-page coverage in The New York Times.
To Ladislas Farago
May 24, 1978 Chicago
Dear Mr. Farago:
I can return your compliments. I read your Patton book with admiration, so it pains me to contradict you. The letter [to The New York Times] I signed was probably too vague because it was too cautiously written but it did not support Carter’s Middle East policy and it was only mildly critical of Begin. I can’t understand why it should be sinful of American Jews to take positions which are taken also in Israel and expressed in the Knesset. The signers of our letter did not presume to tell the Israelis what they should do. No one expects Israel to commit suicide for the sake of “peace.” Why does it undermine Begin to enter a caveat against the dangers of annexation and the dangers of a large Arab population within a Greater Israel? But the last thing I want is to get into political controversies. In the Israeli press I have been called a sellout, a fink, a Carter-stooge and a Moscow agent. I don’t think any of these tags does me justice—do you? Well, the right tag is hard to find.
Sincerely yours,
Ladislas Farago (1906-1980) was the author of many World War II histories including Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (1964) and Aftermath: The Search for Martin Bormann (1974).
To Edward Shils
September 3, 1978 Chicago
My dear Edward:
Vicissitudes, yes, or perhaps the increasing contrariness of elderly friends—but it is a friendship and we both know it, and it sustains me in times of trouble. I can bear my difficulties pretty well; I am certainly equal to them mentally. I am not quite in control of them emotionally. I am and for a long time have been ready to do without the money. If the brutal order holds in the Appeals Court, I shall have to borrow to pay my persecutors, and I have no reason to be confident in the judgment of the Court of Appeals. My experience with courts and lawyers leaves no room for optimism. I’ve been up to the chin in sewage for nearly ten years now. It’s time I did whatever I must do to extricate myself.
The whole thing is monstrous—simply monstrous. It has taught me a great deal, though. I don’t say this menacingly, or with excessive bitterness. I plan no vengeance. I mean only to say that it has expanded my understanding of human beings very considerably.
However, I did not become a writer in order to make money, nor shall I stop being one because everything is confiscated. I am not quite certain how to go forward. The more I publish, the more vulnerable I am to predators. Perhaps some sort of American samizdat is the answer. (My one joke, this sad day.)
I had always thought myself quite sturdy and resistant to knocks, but it often seems that I am not quite so strong as I had believed. I wake in the night, and do not feel very strong. I sometimes find myself praying. Not for favors of any sort, not even for help, but simply for clarification. I am not especially apprehensive about dying. What does distress me is the thought that I may have made a mess where others (never myself ) see praiseworthy achievements.
I knew that you would write to me. I told Alexandra before your letter came that I would soon hear from you. Because I do, after all, know what is what (in my own quite limited fashion). And I thank you from a full heart.
And you will forg
ive my silliness, as you always have.
Affectionately,
An Illinois Court of Appeals would uphold the lower-court ruling that had ordered Bellow to pay Susan half a million dollars in settlement of their long-standing property dispute.
To Owen Barfield
September 19, 1978 Chicago
Dear Owen:
I think I better stop waiting for a tranquil moment. There is no tranquil moment.
What I wished to tell you at some length I will tell you briefly. We read Saving the Appearances and Worlds Apart in a seminar last April and May. It’s too soon to say how well I succeeded as your interpreter. The participants were Wayne Booth of the English Department, Professor Wick, a philosopher who specializes in Kant, and a young mathematician named Zable, one of my wife’s colleagues who had seen a copy of Saving the Appearances on my table and was keen to discuss it with me. There were also two graduate students, one of them interested in Anthroposophy. Booth and the Kantian found the book “interesting but tough,” as Huck Finn said of Pilgrim’s Progress . Booth was extremely sympathetic, keenly interested, Wick was laconic and pulled at his pipe and told us that we didn’t really know Kant; we would be hopelessly muddled until we had put in a year or two at the Critiques of This or That. But even he found you an attractive writer. I thought I would get this brief interim report to you while my recollection of the seminar is still fresh. For the rest, the usual difficulties—no, worse than usual. I am being deprived by the courts of all my possessions. This morning I suddenly remembered a touching photograph, taken after his assassination, of Gandhi’s possessions: sandals, rice bowl, eyeglasses and dhoti. Can anyone with more property than that resist the powers of darkness? I make light of it, but the threat is serious. Today I was asked for an inventory of my personal belongings, and I wonder whether the court would hesitate to put them on auction. One never knows. I manage nevertheless to concentrate daily on the distinctions between the essential and inessential.