Letters

by Saul Bellow

  I am being called on the house phone. I have just time to address this and send both of you our love.

  One of Bellow’s most significant correspondents, John Auerbach (1922-2002) was a Warsaw Jew who had survived the war on false papers, working as a stoker on German ships. Arrested while trying to flee to Sweden, he was imprisoned in Stutthof concentration camp. From the summer of 1945 Auerbach worked with Mossad Aliyah B in the transport of Jewish refugees to Palestine. Arrested by British police, he served three years’ detention on Cyprus. At the founding of the State of Israel, Auerbach settled in Caesarea at Kibbutz S’dot Yam where he skippered a fishing fleet. Following the death of his son in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Auerbach retired from the sea and began to write. Twelve books appeared in Israel during his lifetime.

  1981

  To William Kennedy

  January 7, 1981 Chicago

  Dear Bill,

  There is only one reason why I haven’t been replying: I spend my mornings cantering and galloping on the typewriter, the afternoons in revision and my nights in what Shakespeare called the restless ecstasy. We would say threshing about. I got off a corking reference for the Guggenheim. I thought of sending you a copy but it’s strictly against the regulations and I didn’t feel like Xeroxing forbidden papers. I’m still willing to do an interview. All I need is Time. It keeps getting scanter and scanter. I’m sorry your wife’s shop has burned—what a way for me to find out that she had a shop.

  I didn’t take Mark Harris to heart at all. I haven’t read his book and I rather enjoy the pummeling he’s getting in the press. For once I am a contrast gainer and even getting some sympathy. I don’t want that either. I turn my back on it all and wish that I had a back like one of Rodin’s burghers of Calais—a big bronze back.

  New Year’s greetings and all best,

  Mark Harris had just published Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck.

  To Allan Bloom

  [n.d.] [Brasenose College, Oxford]

  What is there to say? Without you, it’s only approximately perfect. Fatigue, passing off in waves, reveals a lump of wicked passions that had been ignored by the work-forces—bypassed. Your observations would be invaluable.

  Love,

  To Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  May 19, 1981 Brasenose College, Oxford

  Dear Senator:

  Ed Burlingame of Harper & Row tells me that he has asked you to help my wife’s aunt, Ana Paonescu, an old woman very dear to her, to get out of Romania. The aunt is seventy-five and has a bad heart. She has already wound up her affairs, arranged to give up her rooms, distributed the last of the glassware and coffee spoons, and the authorities have her marking time (time is what she hasn’t got a lot of). The reason (alleged) is that she hasn’t gone through all the formalities (bureaucratic) of giving up a small piece of property in the country. She has tried to give it up, has done everything possible to hand it over, but title hasn’t actually been transferred, so she gets no passport. Why this is happening I don’t know, but her daughter is waiting for her in LA, her niece (my wife) in Chicago. There isn’t too much time left altogether.

  I make this appeal to you, and not to Sen. Percy, because Sen. Percy isn’t always attentive to such requests.

  But—with malice towards none (Sen. P.) and with gratitude for your generous offer to help, I am yours, as ever,

  To Allan Bloom

  May 26, 1981 [Brasenose College, Oxford]

  Dear Allan—

  Well, it was after all a good thing to come here to this stronghold of ruling reptiles. Some of them you can’t help liking, and there are sweet smaller lizards and not a few lovable amphibians. You aren’t snubbed here as you would have been in the days of Oxford’s arrogance. Times are badder and facts are humbler. But it rains sans cesse. Of course I had to rewrite everything, and in Sept. I may do it all da capo. I am tired and miss Alexandra, and miss talking to you. I have some new ideas, more liberating than the old ones. Maybe I should write them in a notebook—yes, I will. I have just the notebook.

  Mitterand had wished to invite me to his coronation, and it put me in an awkward position. Barley Alison said that I must attend. She drove me up the wall, but I came down from the moulding at last and said no. I had to finish Lecture Two. [ . . . ]

  In London I found a little book about smoking which I will send to you. In Oxford I read a book by [Paul] Morand, Open All Night, which I recommend.

  Much love,

  To Allan Bloom

  June 6, 1981 [Carboneras, Almería, Spain]

  Dear Allan:

  Having someone in Chicago to whom to talk really, I go on the road, for reasons perhaps presently to be understood. I feel I’ve been inspecting Europe for the last time, taking the concluding view of London and Rome, places now unnecessary. In Rome the victory has gone to Henry Ford. History is bunk, and you can’t even see it because of the automobiles. Nobody ever imagined that the Gadarene swine would rush around in circles, unable to find the precipice—living it up, meantime, but God how they long for it.

  My cultivated old friends are wrecked. The incessant reading of modern books wore them out. Sometimes you watch them trying to put all the puzzle pieces together while Kafka and Proust hover behind them making suggestions. [ . . . ]

  I did well enough in Oxford, although I was very tired, and I met some decent people there. It was intimidating to have Iris Murdoch and [John] Bayley, her husband, in the audience, also Isaiah Berlin and more of the same, but I got through it all. Still I have bad dreams about lecturing and teaching—had one last night. You and I were about to do a class on Antony & Cleo, and a graduate student was selling me his (valuable) paper on the play. His price was eight hundred bucks. I had counted out five hundred when it occurred to me that he was just a student, so I stopped putting down dollars and said, “This is unheard of.” He was the type that has absolute knowledge of the dollar-value of a product. I have no such knowledge and therefore I give in. So in the end I missed the class altogether, and that was unpleasant. If I were more interested in dreams I’d try to figure it out. However, dream interpretation has given way to an interest probably equally hopeless in clairvoyance. Why be a mere doctor when you can be a seer instead?

  Maybe the graduate student stood for the young dons who practiced their snob-judo on me at High Table, and whom I quickly kicked in the pants.

  I met lots of dear people in my travels, none clever enough for what we’ve got to face in Rome. I had one very bad shock. Introduced to an old slovenly woman with bad teeth, I said I was pleased-to-meetcha and so on. She seemed to know me well, reminded me that in 1948 when I was a mere ragazzo and before I had written famous books I had often visited her—once in Anacapri. I soldiered it all out with the weapons of social charm. She must have thought me cold and aloof. When she had gone off, bending on her cane, I asked Paolo Milano who she was. Was! It was Elsa Morante, whom I had always liked so much. That?! And I remembered how sturdy and handsome she had been, and that in 1948 we would meet every night at the Antico Greco for an aperitif, and tears began to run from my eyes. My friend Milano gave me vast credit for sentiment—gold stars for progress in the cure of my hard heart. Gold stars I didn’t feel that I deserved, but it was too much trouble to explain this to poor Milano, who had lived too long by best-accredited modern books to understand without efforts too great to ask a sick old man to make. Besides, I was crying also for him—the dos courbé [91], the shuffle, the weak legs, the pacemaker in his chest, the prostate surgery, the faded eyes. He now has a majordomo running his flat with the carefully chosen antiques and the heirlooms. This peasant from the north is small, broad, healthy and gentle, womanly. Cooks the pasta, arranges the gladioli, etc. Paolo sleeps in a double bed, left-hand side—the right side is loaded with new books. The wife’s side of the bed.

  And no—the rest has been, for me, airports, ripoffs (the Roman word for hustlers is gli abusivi), anxiety over language, the vertigo of the streets, the lack of desire which defeats
my lifelong attraction to shop windows—why deck out the old bod? Etc.

  Now I’m in Carboneras on the Mediterranean, the refrains of Barley Alison more persistent than the sea and infinitely less mysterious and beautiful. It was really foolish of me to make this trip of final inspection.

  I miss you enormously. My eyes come to life when I pick up a can of insecticide named BLOOM: BLOOM RAPIDE elimine les insects tels que les moustiques, etc. BLOOM RAPIDE se distingue par ses effets rapides et par son parfum agréable. A message of love,

  To Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  July 14, 1981 West Halifax, Vermont

  Dear Senator—

  The old girl has arrived, safe and sound, thanks to your intervention. I should have sent this news sooner, but I was sitting at conference tables in Germany, saving the humanities, and tied in knots. I write you from Vermont (on my wife’s stationery). I hope you will allow us to thank you in person, on our next Washington visit. I think Aunt Anna would still be in Romania if you hadn’t interceded with the Ambassador.

  Yours most gratefully,

  To Allan Bloom

  August 15, 1981 West Halifax

  Dear Allan:

  [ . . . ] Alexandra is very much afraid, terrified, by the harm my book [The Dean’s December] may do—friends of the family in Romania persecuted; the most persistent nightmare is that Sanda [Loga] will be refused visas to visit her old parents. It also keeps me up nights. Nothing by halves. I doubt that anything so dire will happen, but she astutely points out (and how astute do you need to be for this?) that these people are crazy—wicked fantasists, to put it in my own way.

  Hence the plan to make a public noise on publication—be interviewed on CBS and other disagreeable if not hateful places. But that may make matters worse. If I am asked to talk about the regime, I will declare myself an enemy, and it will become nasty if indeed they think me one. Maybe I should be quiet and only talk to people like Moynihan or Scoop Jackson (the former was helpful in getting the old aunt out) about strategies to be adopted if visas are refused. How could I face Sanda if I increase fame and fortune while she . . .

  I can use some wise advice. In this world there seems no way to do right except in obscurity and modesty. Doing wrong will cause severe suffering in every way; inwardly; and will Alexandra forgive me?

  Romanian-born physicist Sanda Loga was then and remains a close friend of Alexandra’s.

  To Hymen Slate

  August 21, 1981 West Halifax

  Dear Hymen:

  We traveled and we traveled—in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland and England. Why I moved about so much I can’t easily explain. Alexandra saw mathematicians in Madrid, Paris and in Germany, but I had no such excuse. I was going. Since I was revisiting all these places I had the feeling sometimes that I was giving them the final inspection—never would see them again. I told an old friend in Rome that I’d never return. One can’t even see the city for the cars, the Colosseum is fenced up because the tourists have been taking pieces of it as souvenirs, the Romans all look as though they had just gotten up after an adulterous siesta, first-class hotels stink of bad plumbing, everybody is on the make, the exhibitionists don’t even zip up between exposures, they walk around on fashionable streets with their genitals in their hands. And that healthy Pole, the Pope, is now an invalid. No more Holy City for me.

  I carried my manuscript from country to country, hoping to finish the corrections. In Madrid I was able to do quite a lot in cafés, surrounded by agreeable Spaniards, but I didn’t send the book to the printer till last week. Now I get a two-week break while waiting for galley proofs. Not time enough. This is no youthful fatigue. I used to bounce back. Now I drag myself outside mornings to sit under the trees. Late summer, fortunately, is very beautiful. There’s only the telephone to fear—news of a new lawsuit by Susan. The wicked never let up. The lawyers learn no kindness. My own are as bad as hers, and the moronic inferno is as hot as ever.

  No comfortable conversations with friends of my own age. I need some of your melancholy fun. October looks good to me.

  Love,

  To John Cheever

  December 9, 1981 Chicago

  Dear John:

  Since we spoke on the phone I’ve been thinking incessantly about you. Many things might be said, but I won’t say them, you can probably do without them. What I would like to tell you is this: We didn’t spend much time together but there is a significant attachment between us. I suppose it’s in part because we practiced the same self-taught trade. Let me try to say it better—we put our souls to the same kind of schooling, and it’s this esoteric training which we had the gall, under the hostile stare of exoteric America to persist in, that brings us together. Yes, there are other, deeper sympathies but I’m too clumsy to get at them. Just now I can offer only what’s available. Neither of us had much use for the superficial “given” of social origins. In your origins there were certain advantages; you were too decent to exploit them. Mine, I suppose, were only to be “overcome” and I hadn’t the slightest desire to molest myself that way. I was, however, in a position to observe the advantages of the advantaged (the moronic pride of Wasps, Southern traditionalists, etc.). There wasn’t a trace of it in you. You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There’s nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul. I loved you for this. I loved you anyway, but for this especially.

  Up and down on these rough American seas we’ve navigated for so many decades; we’ve had our bad trips, too—unavoidable absurdities, dirty weather, but that doesn’t count, really. I’ve been trying to say what does count.

  My son Adam, who has been visiting us in Chicago, when I told him that I was writing you wanted me to say that he was charmed by your short book [Oh What a Paradise It Seems]. I was, too.

  If it isn’t possible for you to come to Chicago, I will fly to New York whenever it’s convenient for you.

  Love,

  To Bernard Malamud

  December 22, 1981 Chicago

  Dear Bern:

  Now I see—this book [God’s Grace] was as much a departure for you as the Dean was for me. You told me this one would be different, so I was somewhat prepared but not as prepared as all that. Even the best of readers are like generals in that they are always fighting the last war. Not to keep you in suspense, God’s Grace excited me and in the end it moved me. Why or how I’m not able to tell you. Maybe the best approach to this mystery is to say what I was thinking as I read you.

  First, as to performance: You’re always happy when you read a man who has learned his trade, perfected it. He can be trusted. You hand yourself over to him, and that’s the first stage of your happiness.

  Then you try to identify the species. What sort of book is it? The edge of doom, and over: the destruction of the planet, flood, apocalypse, the voice of God. Cohn is Noah, Cohn is Job, he is even Robinson Crusoe. The world’s end can’t put an end to Jewish wit. Your God is no humorist, however, and the novel is genuinely apocalyptic. Moreover, it is a novel, not the unfolding of an eschatology. It’s about our own preparation for the last things, the end. Our minds and feelings, decade by decade, have been forced towards it. It’s not a matter of a theme that finds “objective correlatives.” We have experienced the correlatives first. These prepared us thoroughly for the worst; we’ve seen it coming and agreed that we deserved or would deserve it. With approving vengefulness we have endorsed it. This we have done while breathing the air of nihilism and while applying the methods of “science” (the business of this science being to tell us the past, present and future of reality), but also while trying to hang on to decencies of liberalism. All this is in your book. I was intrigued, at times appalled, sometimes irritated, but by the end I found myself moved greatly. Things were as they should be at the end. My doubts passed into the background. There was nothing to doubt in such
an emotion, or after-emotion.

  It may surprise you to learn how Jewish, Jewish-American, Eastern seaboard and “liberal” I found God’s Grace to be: Cohn teaching the chimps, the lower primate branch destined perhaps to take its turn at the summit; Cohn deciding to make his human contribution to this development. God rejects this; the laws of animal nature can’t be waived in a day, thousands of millennia are needed. Yes, and also Shakespearean grace descending temporarily on Mary M.

  After the final disaster Cohn starts over again (like a good Jew, one must keep trying), teaches speech, gives lectures, cultivates minds and morals. I identified myself often with the apes. I too was fascinated (long ago) by the Darwin-Wallace orthodoxy, but later it seemed to me that this materialist orthodoxy could not satisfy deeper questions about the nature of human consciousness. All this gave Cohn’s lectures a certain pathos. So did the Ethical Culture spirit of the community he wanted to create. All was to be well. You do treat this with the irony it deserves and see clearly the defeatism implicit in this form of “goodness,” but you appear to suggest that no alternative could ever occur to Cohn. The political sense of this is plain to you. Cohn’s sentimental will-to-goodness is fatal. It can’t anticipate evils, has no force, is unable to defend itself, and is just as unacceptable to God as human wickedness; indeed Cohn must, like the rest of humankind, die. Or should I rather have said “like the West which Cohn so completely represents”? Anyway, Cohn’s Isaac sacrifice profoundly moved me. I couldn’t say why, or was alles bedeutet [92].