by Saul Bellow
I have just read your excellent mixture of thrills and exotic facts about our great enemy the USSR and about the émigrés of the eastern seaboard and I found it vigorous, fresh, sassy, and stirring. It’s not for me, a common reader, to say how sound your scientific facts are. I am comfortable and safe with them and don’t care whether they are accurate or whether the NYPD will fault you for your portrait of Solly the Detective—these are mere questions of expertise. I was interested in your millenarian or apocalyptic dialogues because they were probably perfectly characteristic and it didn’t at all concern me to examine them as historical theses. I didn’t care, and neither will other uncaptious readers, to apply a stern test to your account of the present state of civilization. You are located somewhere between James Bond and Heidegger, and the Bond elements, thank God, prevail. [ . . . ]
Some of the teachings of Master [Andrei] Sinyavsky, against realism and so forth, have been commendably absorbed. It’s a lively book and gave me a most enjoyable evening.
All best,
To Margaret Mills
February 21, 1985 Chicago
Dear Ms. Mills,
I must ask you to excuse me from this chore. Singer and I are not the best of friends and while I do not grudge him this award, or any other, my dissimulation apparatus is not strong enough to satisfy your request.
Sincerely yours,
Margaret Mills had requested that Bellow write a short citation endorsing The Penitent by Isaac Bashevis Singer for the Howells Medal of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
To Robert Hivnor
October 15, 1985 Chicago
Dear Bob,
Months later I come across your note about Mary Manheim and the letter from Katie Carver. I never knew Mary at all well. I did know her psychoanalyst and visited him on the Cape at a time when she (Mary) was being analyzed in his tool-shed. Houseguests were under strict orders to keep out of sight lest we frighten her. Professional ethics did not, however, prevent him from passing on gossip oddments. To this day I’ve never told a soul what Mary was up to, and even now I don’t name the analyst, although he has probably gone to his reward, and might even now be talking his head off in God’s tool-shed.
Wish he had been Katie Carver’s analyst—a much juicier patient. I’m sorry for them both, poor girls. It’s been ten years now since Katie excommunicated me. She used to keep a lightweight typewriter for me in London when she worked for Oxford Press on Dover Street, but I offended her after John Berryman’s death by speaking of him while she and I were having a beer, and she said, “How dare you speak of John in a place like this?” As John’s death was hastened by alcoholism I didn’t see that there was anything improper in reminiscing in the presence of so many bottles. But Katie said in a trembling voice, “Take your typewriter away and never come to see me again.” This guarantees that she will not be among my deathbed visitors, and is as close to an insurance policy as I can hope to get.
I can’t sign this because my secretary is taking it from [my] dictation [onto a Dictaphone] and I am going to Dublin day after tomorrow.
Janis will verify that I closed with affection and good wishes.
To Teddy Kollek
December 6, 1985 Chicago
Dear Teddy,
It was a real and earnest flu, involving the head and the gastric regions and exorbitant thermometer readings. [ . . . ]
The World Jewish Congress has invited me to Jerusalem, and I shall be showing myself publicly at a ceremony about which you undoubtedly know all there is to know. I expect to see you on about the 26th of January under, I hope, mild skies. Would you let me give you lunch at the Hyatt Hotel, with perhaps a little tour to see the latest improvements you have made? We can discuss future plans then.
Yours most affectionately,
1986
To the Norwegian Nobel Committee
January 8, 1986 Chicago
I am entering Mayor Teddy Kollek of Jerusalem as a candidate for the next Nobel Peace Prize, confident that he will be seriously considered. The reasons for my confidence in this nomination are self-evident. Mayor Kollek is a very special sort of politician. In Jerusalem he is recognized by all parties, elsewhere in the Middle East waging a furious war, as the embodiment of impartial good will. Arabs in the Old City, Muslims everywhere, are aware that their holy places are respected and protected; Jews, both religious and secular, Christians of all denominations—Catholics, Protestants, Greeks, Armenians, Copts—share the city without conflict. No one is deprived of justice in Jerusalem. Offenses are impartially punished. Old feuds, factional outbursts of violence, are kept under conscientious control. Not another capital in the Middle East can compare with Jerusalem in this respect. Kollek is recognized by traditional enemies as a man who is firm and fair, morally imaginative and humane, whose administration has set an example, has made it possible for antagonists to live together in a peaceful and beautiful city. For contrast, one has only to look at Cairo and its rioters, at turbulent and tragic Beirut bombed and burned by Muslim and Christian armies. Kollek is a statesman who believes that Middle Eastern differences can ultimately be reconciled and has indeed given the region, and the world as well, a practical demonstration that such a belief is not Utopian.
To Edward Burlingame
February 4, 1986 Chicago
Dear Ed,
It’s good of you to offer to fly to Chicago. I don’t think such a trip would make much difference. Several times I came to discuss Him with His Foot in His Mouth with you, and each time I was made to feel that I was entreating Harper & Row to do right by me. It seems that all my suggestions and requests were referred to your marketing people, who simply rejected them. Not once did you do what I asked. I couldn’t help feeling that I had placed myself in a humiliating position and I could only conclude that in your view I had written my books for nobody but your marketing experts.
To put the matter at its simplest, I don’t care to submit myself to such treatment again.
Yours without rancor,
Following the departure of Harvey Ginsberg in 1980, Burlingame had become Bellow’s editor at Harper & Row.
To Karl Shapiro
February 18, 1986 Chicago
Dear Karl,
Mailer mostly wanted a huge media event—that’s what he calls living—and I’m sure that we dosed him up for months to come. It boggled my mind to see how greedy the radicals were for excitement “radical-style.” I’m speaking of big-time subversives like Ginsberg, Nadine Gordimer, Grace Paley, Doctorow and other representatives of affluent revolution. There was an organization in Montreal when I was a small kid called The Consumer’s League, headed by Mrs. Saunders, a cabinet-maker’s wife. And when she went out in her corsets to picket the kosher butcher shop she might have been Grace Paley’s mother. The comparison will allow you to imagine the political level of PEN. [Günter] Grass listened to nothing that was said by others, and the very idea of reading an American book was inadmissible. I told him privately that if he had skimmed The Dean’s December he wouldn’t have talked such balls about the South Bronx, but even the suggestion that he read one of my books made his mouth drop. I never cared for misanthropy, but I’m being coerced into it.
In your kindness you say, “Be well.” But it’s not exactly in my power to take your advice and good wishes. After eleven years of marriage and at the age of seventy I find myself evicted on the basis of grievances largely imaginary. But any American has the special gift of making a fresh start in life, so I am girding myself to meet yet one more challenge.
The scene of this unusual effort is Apt. 11E, 5825 S. Dorchester, Chicago, Illinois, 60637, telephone (312) 684-0758. A new group of lawyers is gnawing at my foundations. This brings to mind T. S. Eliot and one of the most hateful poems of this century (“Burbank”). Why send mysterious disturbing communications? Better to state the facts simply.
Yours (both of you) most affectionately,
Bellow refers here to an acrimonious meeting of PEN International
in New York at which, attacked by Günter Grass, he had counterattacked by saying, “No intelligent writer is devoid of political feelings. On the other hand, one must not get megalomaniacal notions of the powers of writers.” The president of the PEN American Center and host of the event was Norman Mailer. In his anti-Semitic poem “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” T. S. Eliot wrote: “The rats are underneath the piles, / The jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs,” etc.
To Barley Alison
February 27, 1986 Chicago
Dear Barley,
As you may have read in the papers, I shall be coming over to give a talk at PEN [in London]. I am not altogether on fire with eagerness to travel, but in view of the lamentable changes in my life, it may be constructive to go abroad. It won’t cure heartache but it will probably divert me.
My last dinner at The Hungry Horse was so abominable that I shall presume on an old friendship to suggest a small dinner at Harley Gardens. If you are up to it, it would be wonderfully agreeable to see Martin Amis and his wife, and one or two other old friends—perhaps Mel Lasky. I’m very fond of him, and haven’t seen him in a dog’s age. After the guests have gone, you and I can have a chat about Alexandra. Like one of the more forbidding tales in Herodotus, that will be—the one in which the severed head of the defeated prince is plunged into a tub of blood by the barbarian who has killed him. A little will go a long way. I don’t want to go back to the Capitol Hotel to be rigid with hateful insomnia all night.
Please don’t plan any office parties for me. I am in no mood to face your personnel—all those pretty girls whose reward is to gaze upon celebrities.
I shall be bringing a considerable chunk of manuscript. I view this as a consoling piece of information.
With love from your devoted old friend,
To Philip Roth
February 27, 1986 Chicago
Dear Philip,
This bulletin will inform you that I am arriving on March 20th, and putting up at the Capitol Hotel on Basil Street. I think Harriet Wasserman has accepted a dinner invitation from Heath and Co. (my agent in London, Mark Hamilton) for the 21st. I give my PEN spiel on the 22nd, and I should by rights be free for dinner on that evening. Or the next, or the next. I need this trip like a hole in the head, but among the many holes already disfiguring it, one more will never be noticed. Please call me to set a date, I don’t think I have your number anywhere—I’ll try to get it from my son Adam.
I think I said in my earlier note that I was traveling alone.
All best,
To Rachel E. G. Schultz
March 16, 1986 Chicago
Dear Rache,
My punctilious papa, your great-grandfather B., always paid his bills before taking a trip. A version of the clean-underwear thing for ladies. Shock nobody in the Emergency Room. [ . . . ]
It was a lovely thing to do for your dad’s birthday . . . pleasures that make it possible to go on in what is possibly not the best of worlds.
Love to you both,
Rachel E. G. Schultz, M. D. (born 1960), is a granddaughter of Saul Bellow’s brother Samuel.
To Philip Roth
April 27, 1986 Chicago
Dear Philip:
Was much moved by your piece on Malamud in the Times. It showed me the man’s life as I couldn’t otherwise have seen it. You saw him at first as an insurance agent. I privately thought of him as a CPA. But I have a secret weakness for the hidden dimensions of agents and CPAs. I never could bring myself to judge by appearances. No faith in the categories (the social categories, I mean). Well, he did make something of the crumbs and gritty bits of impoverished Jewish lives. Then he suffered from not being able to do more. Maybe he couldn’t have, but he looked forward to a fine old age in which the impossible became possible. Death took care of that wonderful aspiration. We can all count on it for that.
I want to thank you again for looking after me in London. As you realized, I was in the dumps. The Royal Athletic Club was just the place for me. The Shostakovich quartets did me a world of good. There’s almost enough art to cover the deadly griefs with. Not quite, though. There are always gaps.
And also dinner with Edna [O’Brien], the Joan of Arc of Irish sex, armies of horny men behind her. That was lovely. Dick [Stern] says that Claire [Bloom] gives wonderful imitations of her. I hope to see those one day.
Yours ever,
Bernard Malamud had died on March 18.
To John Auerbach
April 28, 1986 Chicago
Dear John,
Not writing many letters because of the hysterical nature of my circumstances. Your letters to me, however, have great value, and I read them with loving attention and store the contents in a locked compartment of my head. So then: I have cancelled my trip to Paris, depending on the stability of your new plans. Since you’re going to be in Massachusetts, there will be a room waiting for you in Vermont when you are ready to travel. I am now fairly well settled in new quarters, facing life anew for the thousandth time. Arrangements for the divorce have been agreed to by both parties. Alexandra has arranged compensation for the terrible injuries she received from me at the rate of a thousand dollars per fantasy trauma. Apparently, she suffered one hundred twenty permanently damaging abuses. So, I shall have to earn more money and that need will be an interesting test of my faculties. I think I still have all my marbles. So now we’ll see about that. [Anthony] Kerrigan came to spend two days here with his new white beard. It makes him look like the Gloucester fisherman from the cod-liver-oil bottle, the smell of which made me hold my nose when my mother poured the oil down my throat. He seems well enough, although flat-broke—one of those flat-broke bohemian millionaire types. Until I published Herzog, I was one of those myself, rich enough for anything at all. He lives on Social Security checks and on his GI pension, and apparently supports his son, Elie, as well. They seem to sleep in dresser drawers and eat canned chile con carne. Being on the wagon, Tony has no whiskey bills. Also, he plans to visit Cuba soon, and his fantasy is that Castro will kill him there and solve all his (Tony’s) financial worries by making a rich martyr of him. He’s as charming as ever and very much like an old, old streetcar transfer, punched full of holes by the conductor but there’s always room for one more punch. He earned five hundred bucks here, which will probably buy his ticket to Cuba. More might be done for Tony, but I don’t know just what more would be. I do my best to find a few bucks for him here and there.
I am dictating this letter to Janis, one of my aims being to entertain all of us.
It will make me very happy to see you again.
Much love to you both,
Anthony Kerrigan (1919-1991) was noted for his translations of Borges, Neruda, Ortega y Gasset, Cela and others. In 1973 he won a National Book Award for his translation of Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations.
To Sigmund Koch
May 1, 1986 Chicago
Dear Professor Koch,
I have a letter from Stephen Toulmin informing me that you were close to Delmore Schwartz at NYU before you became a professional psychologist. A substantial recommendation. Stephen tells me that I would find you congenial, and that I wouldn’t be squandering scarce time by talking to you. It’s the interviewer himself that matters. Too often he heckles or badgers the poor mousy painter or poet, who then becomes obsessed with crazy plans to escape.
I spend my summers in Vermont, and if I succeed in finishing the small book I’m writing by September, I think I might be able to come to Boston for a day or two. But there is not the slightest chance that I will lay aside an incomplete manuscript to go and chat about aesthetics. The second or third week of September may be possible.
Sincerely yours,
To Barley Alison
July 18, 1986 West Brattleboro
Dear Barley,
Your idea about “Occasional Pieces” looks good on paper, sounds good when read aloud, but I wouldn’t dream of molesting Martin Amis who has much more i
mportant things to do; it would be a dreadful imposition to ask him to fuss with my old papers. I can see that you don’t believe for a single moment that I shall have a book ready to publish by the end of summer. I can always count on you to wave aside my solemnest assurances. Plus ça change, etc.
Your last letter is too thick to be used as a bookmark and not thick enough to be wedged under my rickety kitchen table. I am unable to use the advice it contains, and I can’t come to greater harm by keeping my own counsel.
Really, Alexandra has done one of her most exquisite snowjobs on you. You are one of a regiment of friends whom she has entirely convinced that I wanted to divorce her. It all makes excellent sense: Two brothers die, I turn seventy, and then I put myself out on the street. Do you know this anecdote about the Duke of Wellington? He is approached by a gentleman who asks, “Sir, are you Mr. Jones?” Wellington answers, “Sir, if you can believe that, you can believe anything.”
Now a brief and simple statement about Alexandra’s mathematics: You can have your research assistants at Secker [and Warburg] check this out for you at Cambridge or Oxford. The power of even the ablest mathematicians begins to decline in the third decade. Alexandra is now in her fifties. She may enjoy trotting around to congresses where she is sure of a warm welcome because she is pretty and, thanks to me, well-heeled also. She can stand the young prodigies to lunch, but she has little to contribute to the proceedings. She told me with heavy emphasis not many months ago that for a long time she had not been able to obtain significant results in her researches, and that it was ALL MY FAULT.
There is much much more to be said, but I shan’t say it.
Much love from your surviving friend,
To John Auerbach
July 29, 1986 West Brattleboro