Letters

by Saul Bellow

  I wanted to see you in Michigan, but it was impossible to go just then. I wouldn’t have had much time with you in any case. I have to satisfy myself by re-reading your books. I don’t think I shall be coming to England very soon. In Edinburgh two years ago an Anthroposophical lady, admonishing me, said, “Mr. Barfield will have to take you in hand in Kamaloca.” But perhaps I will have made some progress by that time and you won’t have to be so quite severe with me.

  Yours most affectionately,

  “Kamaloca” is the first stage of the afterlife, according to Anthroposophy.

  1980

  To Louis Lasco

  January 3, 1980 Pasadena

  Dear Luigi—

  Peltz loves to tell of a visit to a Polish girl on Iowa St.—third floor. He blew the opportunity—pants down, two bucks gone. The girl was concerned. She said, “Oh, kid, you need practice—practice, practice practice!”

  As an old Polish girl, of a sort, I too am a bit concerned. You’re a witty writer, but in the mss. you’ve lost your two bucks. Now, with a little practice you can get, and give, great satisfaction.

  Ever yours, with love,

  Soolabodoff

  To Daniel Bellow

  January 31, 1980 Pasadena

  Dear Daniel,

  Since I haven’t heard at all from you I take it that we won’t be seeing each other in California either because there is not time between terms or because you did not meet the little condition I set—no need to spell that out. But we often think of you and wonder what’s become of you. I mailed off your camp application signed and with a check so your summer is protected. I wish that I could see you more, I often miss you and I think somehow that you have arranged matters so in your own mind that the absence is mine from you and not yours from me. But the move East was after all by your choice. No reproach, I just think you should bear it in mind along with other facts, realities, truths. [ . . . ]

  The other day I saw a set of Parkman in a bookshop. If I thought that you were interested in the early history of North America, the French-Indian wars, I’d send it to you. These are most exciting books. I’d read them myself if I had the time. I did read The Oregon Trail once and parts of the book on the Pontiac.

  I’d be awfully glad to hear from you.

  Love,

  To Bobby Markels

  January 31, 1980 Pasadena

  Dear Bobby,

  I am taking advantage of a crack typist to whirl back a reply. I enjoyed your poem, as I do all your productions. They are so relaxed that they do me good also in the way of détente. I met a lady who lives in your county and she tells me all the young people in Mendocino are in a lovely state of gentle ease. I asked her whether there was any sign of cultivated pot, but she said that she thought everyone there was naturally amiable, lovely and kind. I said this was certainly true of the one person I knew in Mendocino. I didn’t at all mind being listed by you. I thought if I could remember the shirt you ironed for me and still had it I would have it mounted and hung in the living room with a sentimental legend. [ . . . ]

  You shouldn’t complain too much about being fifty. Fifty doesn’t seem much to me, my next birthday will be the sixty-fifth. The fifty years will have been worthwhile however if you have become wise enough to see through Nelson [Algren].

  You mustn’t be too hard on your own egotism. The Bible says, “I am a worm, and no man.” When it comes to being hard on oneself the Bible is way ahead of us. Actually, atheists can never know how really insignificant they are. The same probably goes for agnostics. They only get a rain check.

  Ever your affectionate friend,

  Bobby Markels (born 1930) is the author of How to Be a Human Bean (1975) and other works. She lives in Mendocino, California.

  To Albert Glotzer

  January 31, 1980 Pasadena

  Dear Al,

  To keep you posted on [Ilya] Konstantinovski, he wrote to me from Paris where Gallimard is about to bring out his book. Would I read it, give him a blurb? As the much-esteemed maestro H. L. Mencken used to sign himself “with all the usual hypocrisies,” Konstantinovski gave me the usual hypocrisies. I don’t mind that, and I suppose by now the book is waiting for me in Chicago. Harper’s turned it down. The first reader said it was very good but the second opined that it was the rebellious outburst of a lifelong line-toer, that Konstantinovski, who had no intention ever of returning, was setting himself up in the West as one of the Major Russians of our time and was even recruiting a supporting cast of willing ladies. It seems that when he speaks to ladies he complains that they are unwilling to return his caresses and other acts of kindness. He’s not a very attractive man but it can’t be as hard as all that. There are ladies in every category, even his. I’ll send you a short report when I’ve read his book. [ . . . ]

  Ever yours,

  Ilya Konstantinovski’s book was Le Seider de Varsovie. It has never appeared in English.

  To David Shahar

  March 25, 1980 Pasadena

  Dear David,

  What shocking news! To be mugged in Jerusalem, in your own quiet neighborhood. The police were right, you were lucky to save your eye (I hope you are entirely recovered) from the neo-barbaric assault, as you call it. I take it from your letter that your attackers were not Arabs but North African [i.e., Sephardic] boys, since you speak of their wanting to hit an Ashkenazy. This is your introduction then to the tense watchfulness which has for years been the lot of New Yorkers, Chicagoans, even Londoners, I suppose. Not Muscovites. Theirs is a different system: Crime is a state monopoly. From now on you had better take your Jimmy [Shahar’s dog] with you when you go out for cigarettes. I hope he is fiercer than his namesake. Our own Jimmy [Carter] as you probably are aware is an affliction to us and to the rest of the world. I can’t say that he is actually the cause of our decline but he has become the foolish, impotent and repulsive symbol. But this is not a political message, rather a note of sympathy. [ . . . ] We send our love to both of you and to the children.

  David Shahar (1926- 97), a fifth-generation Jerusalemite and much-honored Israeli writer, was best known for The Palace of Shattered Vessels (1969-94), his eight-volume series of historical novels.

  To Ralph Ross

  June 15, 1980 Chicago

  Dear Ralph,

  I’m not one of your prompt repliers: rather, a muller over of letters. No, I don’t need the Barfield book, I have other copies, also marked. I sometimes wonder what one can get out of Barfield if one hasn’t learned the “system.” Some of it is very curious, the different view of physics, for certain, the conviction that the law of the conservation of energy is all a mistake (this idea has too many poetic implications to be dismissed). My friends refuse to take any of this seriously. I forgive them as a friend should, and I perform other operations, in confirmation of my right to hold peculiar views. (Or is it a privilege, not a right?) Then I feel that I’m being faithful to Truth, through thick and thin. And it will do them good in the long, long run, perhaps after death. [ . . . ]

  Alexandra adds her love to mine.

  Yours,

  To Walter Hasenclever

  June 12, 1980 Chicago

  Dear Walter,

  Your letter arrives as I am poised for departure, about to launch myself from my wire, too heavy to be a bird, too sinful to be any sort of angel (but somehow I continue to view myself as a flier). Will you come for dinner or for a longer visit? I can tempt you with an unpublished manuscript. Please call us when you arrive. I shan’t ask you to bring George Bush when you come—I have nothing really against Mr. Bush, his standing with me improves now that I learn he was one of your pupils, but if he is running on the Reagan ticket as Vice-President he will be too busy to dine with us. The country does need a President but where is it to find one? Maybe the office should be abolished for the next four years.

  Yours ever,

  To Dean Borok

  June 17, 1980 West Halifax, Vermont

  Dear Mr. Borok—

  I
at length answer. I always meant to, but my wife and I were in Pasadena until mid-April and then came back only to prepare to leave again. These are (unnecessarily) busy days, and life grows more complex with the years. I had expected it to be simpler.

  I took the liberty of showing your letter to my brother Sam, seeing no reason why you should mind. He was moved by it—he, too. (We both found it curious that you should be in Montreal, where we started out; I was born in Lachine.) Neither of us could form a picture of the life you’ve led. But that’s hardly strange when you think that we have no clear picture of our eldest brother’s life, either. He sees none of us—brothers, sister, or his two children by his first marriage, nor their children—neither does he telephone or write. He had no need of us. He has no past, no history. His adopted children do not seem to care for him. His present wife? An enigma. He probably has some money—he’s thought about little else all his life. But he’s old now—seventy-three. And ill; he’s had a coronary bypass. I tell you all this to warn you about the genes you seem so proud of. If you’ve inherited them (it’s possible you have) many of them will have to be subdued or lived down. I myself have had some hard going with them.

  If you can find the right way to do it, perhaps you should write the story of your life. To get rid of it, as it were. In writing it successfully, you will forgive everyone in the process. Yes, all those who sinned against you will be forgiven. (That’s what I would call a successful effort to get one’s life down on paper.)

  Thank you for writing.

  I wish you happiness,

  Borok, out-of-wedlock son of Maurice Bellows, wrote to Bellow after he read The Adventures of Augie March, having realized that a version of his own birth is narrated in the novel.

  To Hymen Slate

  July 22, 1980 West Halifax

  Dear Hymen—

  I’d be a better correspondent if I weren’t writing all the time. You have to be a graphomaniac to spend hours on a manuscript and then turn, for relaxation, to letters. A critic, years ago in Paris, said I had bureaucratic tendencies. He offended me then. Now I’m inclined to see it his way. I learned to organize my daily life for a single purpose. There was one other drive, the sexual one, but even that presently gave way. My erotic life was seriously affected, too, in that I diverted myself with a kind of executive indiscriminateness—without a proper interest in women.

  (Why is it that as soon as I sit down to write to you I find that I am busily examining my character. In another existence you must have been my confessor.) Vermont is exquisite, and I am doing here what I am supposed to do (or what I intended to do) but I miss our Sunday gabfests. I am glad to discover this. Sometimes I suspect I have too few dependencies. [ . . . ]

  I hope your health is good. I have a small case of arrhythmia or tachycardia. Not serious.

  Love,

  To William Kennedy

  August 22, 1980 West Halifax

  Dear Bill—

  I’m not what you’d think of as a drifter but I do drift in a real (i.e. barely conscious) sense—a sort of desert rat with a Smith Corona instead of a prospector’s mule. Not even the Committee on Social Thought fully remembers me. Just as well.

  Your letter, which delighted me, finally reached Vermont where I’ve been dug in writing (what else?) a small book—something of a cherry bomb or small grenade, I like to think.

  I’ve seen some of your writing. I liked one of your books a lot (I can’t recall the title; sclerosis probably gaining on me). I didn’t see Billy Phelan, but I was stirred by your Upstate outlaws and molls. Did I recommend you for a grant after reading that (which probably you didn’t get)? I suspect occasionally that a favorable letter from me is the kiss of death.

  And yes, I understand about poor Tom Guinzburg, a poor D.P. with loads of money.

  I’d love to see you again and have a talk. We had good talks at Rio Piedras but we were bush-league prophets (or futurologists, not to overload the great word “Prophet”). [ . . . ]

  Very glad to have heard from you.

  Yours ever,

  To George Sarant

  [Postmarked Chicago, Ill., 11 September 1980]

  Dear George—

  Let’s not make too much of this. Quite simply, what happened was that Wm. Phillips, always a devious rat, called me (most solicitous and considerate!) to say he was about to publish Isaac’s journals. He had said wounding things about me—did I mind? Of course it was weird—a voice from the grave. And of course I said the journals should be printed, uncensored. Canny old William was worried about libel suits. I promised that I would not go to law. Let the dead man have his say.

  For me this was a turn of events charged with emotion. I was glad to have so much high feeling over Isaac—a bonus, as I saw it. I was very curious. And of course I’m now too old for “hurt feelings.” No, it was, Let’s hear Isaac’s dear voice again. I expected no horrid revelations. I knew quite well what he thought and felt about me—pro and con. I was aware also that his peculiar adaptation of W[ilhelm] Reich was bringing up material from the psychic drainage system—that Isaac felt he owed it to truth to bring it to the surface and let it spin and be purified, etc.

  Again W. Phillips called—this time to say that fear of libel had made him decide not to publish. He wanted me to know (“act of friendship” etc.—the usual bullshit or, in his case, rat-shit). [ . . . ]

  Isaac’s journals made sad reading. He was in bad shape, wasn’t he? I think he would have recovered. But enough of that. What I didn’t like was that you had put the journals into the hands of [———], a nasty opportunist, mean-spirited, a brewer of low-grade troubles and a shtunk. As he had taken a cut or two at me in print, to bring me down to size, I did not think well of your handing Isaac’s notes over to him. I didn’t expect you to consult me, but I had no reason to think you had inadvertently given him more ammunition.

  But you tell me it was done innocently, and I choose to believe you. I don’t want to exaggerate, make swellings and breed stupid disagreements.

  Perhaps you’ll pay me a visit, one of these days (years).

  Remember me to your sister.

  Yours ever,

  George Sarant (1947-94), a Reichian psychoanalyst, was the son of Isaac Rosenfeld and Vasiliki Sarantakis Rosenfeld; in early manhood he had taken an anglicized version of his mother’s family name.

  To John Auerbach and Nola Chilton

  October 17, 1980 Chicago

  Dear John:

  A mild gray October morning: We fly to Washington (I’m lecturing to a Brandeis meeting) and instead of making my last will and testament I write to you. We’ll post the letter at O’Hare. I miss you greatly. I can’t get used to the changed distances, and still move to the telephone to call you in Newton, but in Newton there’s only [Milton] Hindus at the other end [whose house John and Nola had rented]. I seldom have occasion to call Hindus. No matter how I squeeze the material he’ll never in the real world resemble you.

  I was pleased when they put you in charge of the foreign contingent [at Kibbutz S’dot Yam] and very unhappy to hear that you would wash the dishes instead. I have put myself in your place as a mental substitute—I don’t mind the dishes, but there’s a whole kibbutz to wash for. That is highly undesirable, and I think you ought to resist it, but I know that you won’t. I hope the chaverim [90] are not being spiteful. But Nola can be depended upon to protect you from excesses. She must be unhappy about your assignment.

  But enough of these bad things. I now collect amusing subjects for you in and around Chicago. Here’s one of them: A man from the Illinois Arts Council pursued me with messages for several weeks. He wanted to give me a medal for my services to the arts. (One of my services to them was to keep away from him.) I never called. The messages were left with Alexandra at Northwestern—she didn’t really pay much attention to them. Then fuller messages and complaints were left. I was to go to Danville, Ill. to be decorated by the Governor himself.

  That was different. The Governor when he
was the crusading US Attorney had prosecuted my brother [Sam] and sent him to jail for ninety days. For this reason alone the occasion began to seem worthwhile, enjoyable, splendid. I would whisper something outrageous to the Governor as he pinned on the medal. On other occasions he had steered clear of me. Once we were in the same box at the Lyric Opera, guests of the company, and he disappeared after the first act, before the lights were on, avoiding embarrassment. But none of this was clear until the very last moment. By now the man from the Council was angry. He told the secretaries at Northwestern that this was the most distinguished award I had ever received. Higher than Pulitzers, greater than Nobels. But Danville is a town two hours away on undistinguished roads. I didn’t want to stay overnight. Arrangements should have been made earlier. Alexandra refused to let me take the small plane from Meigs Field. All the usual noise and anxiety. In the end, I had to call the gentleman from the Council and say I couldn’t come. Apologies were made—and perhaps even accepted. Someone else would accept the award for me, which turned out to be a book of poems by Illinois poets. I think most of them were in real estate and public relations. In next day’s paper the event was reported and the names of the other winners were announced. Among them was Susan [Glassman Bellow]’s longtime lover, a sculptor named Hunt. He would have been the top slice of this ironical sandwich. He’d have had more fun at my expense that I could ever have gotten out of the Governor.