Letters

by Saul Bellow

  Dear John,

  One of the peculiarities of rural Vermont is that we have no modern touch telephone here, and all efforts to ring you in S’dot Yam last Sunday failed. Probably these rural operators didn’t know that there is a country called Israel. I think this note will arrive before your departure on August 11th. I don’t know whether Tony [Kerrigan] has mentioned that we saw something of each other last spring in Chicago, and that he was planning to be parachuted into Cuba, his birthplace. Havana for him, Lachine for me, Warsaw for you, N.Y. for Nola—I say nothing of Bucharest—we make quite a cosmopolitan little family, like the people on your kibbutz. (I re-read two of your stories last week, one of them, “The Witch,” a marvelous thing; we must try again to place it.) Finally (I am dictating rapidly), I came across a letter from Ken Moore requesting your address, and I saw no harm in giving it to him, although he and Tony are not on good terms. So he will write to S’dot Yam and you will be in Newton, Mass.

  Lots of luck, and love to you both,

  To Leon Botstein

  September 24, 1986 Chicago

  Dear Leon,

  Your fiddle is safe in a cupboard in West Brattleboro, Vermont. Had your letter been sent a week earlier I would have brought the instrument to Chicago. Since my house is not far from Marlboro College, it might be brought there if your friend is in a position to come by and claim it. I know of no way to ship it, but the man who takes care of the place when I’m gone might be able to bring it to Bennington or to Greenfield, Mass. or Brattleboro. I was glad to have a violin to play with, but I couldn’t really do it justice, so I shut it in the case with reluctance and haven’t gone near it for a year or so.

  I had intended sending you a note about William Hunt whom I highly and strongly recommend as a poet and teacher, and also as a person. I used to see him often in Chicago, and I still see him as frequently as I can because he is such an illuminating conversationalist that for days after talking to him I feel elated. He tells me that he has asked you for employment. You’ve probably made your appointments [at Bard] for the coming year, but if you do have a vacancy you couldn’t fill it with a better man.

  All best,

  To Bobby Markels

  November 4, 1986 Chicago

  Dear Bobby,

  Everything seems to be looking up for you. I thought it could, I thought it would, so I am pleased for your sake. Now that you’ve got your rose-colored glasses back on your nose I can tell you that I lost two brothers last year, all the brothers I had, and that my wife decided to divorce me and that I am now seventy-one years of age, and have some afflictions that go with high seniority. Putting together all these events, or disasters, you may better understand why it miffed me to receive from you so many self-engrossed communications. It’s not altogether bad to be self-engrossed, but it is difficult to receive heaps of requests for encouragement, promotion and what-not-else. Not that I grudge you such things, but to sit down with pieces of paper before a typewriter and pound out letters on request or demand is not always appealing to injured or troubled parties. I found out when the Nobel Prize came my way that I was henceforth to be considered an elder statesman, and a functionary doing good to younger people whose bolt had not yet been shot. If you ever visit my office you will see loads of books to be read, loads of letters to be answered, loads of angels who have no space to fly in and multitudes of inflamed nudniks [103] whose mothers told them they were angels, and whose English profs told them that I was a do-gooder: “Send him manuscripts, send him 2,481,526 letters of mounting hysteria demanding replies and ending in vituperations and threats.” Well, to hell with all that. I continue to open letters from people I know or like or love, but it does cross my mind from time to time that although they may like or love me still, they haven’t said so in ten or fifteen years and either their feelings have dried out or their manners have gone to hell. If you hadn’t sent me two nice letters in recent months I wouldn’t even be explaining myself. This is a quid pro quo. You stopped shaking my tree and you got one peach gratis.

  Yours affectionately,

  In Memory of Bernard Malamud

  (Delivered in Bellow’s absence by Howard Nemerov at the annual luncheon of the American Academy and

  Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, December 5, 1986)

  Some thirty-five years ago I gave a talk in Oregon, and Bernard and Ann Malamud came down from Corvallis, where he was teaching, to hear me. I don’t remember what I said—from time to time one has to talk—but I do remember our meeting. I was struck by his expressive eyes. I didn’t of course know what it was that they were expressing. I couldn’t know that until, in the course of years, I had read his novels and stories.

  Inland Oregon seemed an odd place for a man from New York, and I can recall thinking that it did Corvallis great credit to have imported such an exotic. He was not an exotic to me. We were cats of the same breed. The sons of Eastern European immigrant Jews, we had gone early into the streets of our respective cities, were Americanized by schools, newspapers, subways, streetcars, sandlots. Melting Pot children, we had assumed the American program to be the real thing: no barriers to the freest and fullest American choices. Of course we understood that it was no simple civics-course matter. We knew too much about the slums, we had assimilated too much dark history in our mothers’ kitchens to be radiant optimists. Our prospects were sufficiently bright if we set out to become shopkeepers, druggists, accountants, lawyers. Even doctors, if we were able to vault over the quota system. There were, to be sure, higher ambitions. There were Jewish philosophers like Morris R. Cohen, scholars like [Harry] Wolfson at Harvard. At a more heady level there were [Bernard] Berenson types who entered the cosmopolitan art world and associated as equals, or near-equals, with Brahmins and English aristocrats. But if you had no social ambitions of this kind, and no special desire to be rich, to shuffle off emigrant vulgarity and live in an Italian villa, if you set out instead to find a small place for yourself as a writer, you were looking for trouble in uncharted waters, you were asking for it. Of course it was admiration, it was love that drew us to the dazzling company of the great masters, all of them belonging to the Protestant Majority—some of them explicitly anti-Semitic. You had only to think of Henry Adams, or to remember certain pages in Henry James’s The American Scene, the anguish of his recoil from East Side Jews. But one could not submit to control by such prejudices. My own view was that in religion the Christians had lived with us, had lived in the Bible of the Jews, but when the Jews wished to live Western history with them they were refused. As if that history were not, by now, also ours. Have the Jews no place in (for instance) the German past?

  Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us. Malamud in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York. He was a myth-maker, a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables. The English novelist Anthony Burgess said of him that he “never forgets that he is an American Jew, and he is at his best when posing the situation of a Jew in urban American society.” “A remarkably consistent writer,” he goes on, “who has never produced a mediocre novel . . . he is devoid of either conventional piety or sentimentality . . . always profoundly convincing.” Let me add on my own behalf that the accent of a hard-won and individual emotional truth is always heard in Malamud’s words. He is a rich original of the first rank.

  1987

  To the Swedish Academy

  March 6, 1987 Chicago

  Dear Sirs,

  I wish to place a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature. My candidate is Robert Penn Warren, America’s eldest and most distinguished poet. Mr. Warren had a poetic rebirth in the sixth and seventh decades of his life and has produced some of his most powerful work in old age. He is now in his early eighties and has never been more fertile. In mid-life he was prodigiously successful (author of All the King’s Men and other works of fic
tion). He is also widely known as a critic and scholar. He has written significant studies of Coleridge, Theodore Dreiser and many others. During the Sixties he wrote extensively about the civil-rights struggle. It is not necessary to make an elaborate case for his eligibility and I trust that the Academy will give serious consideration to this nomination.

  Sincerely,

  To Rachel E. G. Schultz

  June 2, 1987 [W. Brattleboro]

  Dear Rachel,

  When I attended your mother’s wedding thirty years ago I knew it was going to be a good thing, with excellent results, and I was dead right. You yourself are one of the best of those results and I send you loving congratulations on your graduation from medical school. It warms my cynical old heart to see that mortal choices sometimes achieve beautiful results. I wish I could come to Cincinnati but I am, to put it succinctly, too beat to travel. Once you finish your residency I will accept anesthetics from nobody but you.

  Signed, your Great Uncle.

  To Cynthia Ozick

  July 19, 1987 West Brattleboro

  Dear Cynthia,

  At the Academy [of Arts and Letters] I was happy to see you, but then a wave of embarrassment struck me when I was reminded of my neglect and bad manners. You didn’t mean to embarrass me when you reminded me that I owed you a letter (there had been a gap of two years). The embarrassment came from within, a check to my giddiness. It excited me to have so many wonderful contacts under the Academy’s big top. Too many fast currents, too much turbulence, together with a terrible scratching at the heart—a sense that the pleasures of the day were hopeless, too boundless and wild to be enjoyed. There was such a crowd of dear people to see but I had unsettled accounts with all of them.

  I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life communications, are too much for me. I used to rattle them off easily enough; why is the challenge of writing to friends and acquaintances too much for me now? Because I have become such a solitary, and not in the Aristotelian sense: not a beast, not a god. Rather, a loner troubled by longings, incapable of finding a suitable language and despairing at the impossibility of composing messages in a playable key—as if I no longer understood the codes used by the estimable people who wanted to hear from me and would have so much to reply if only the impediments were taken away. By now I have only the cranky idiom of my books—the letters-in-general of an occult personality, a desperately odd somebody who has, as a last resort, invented a technique of self-representation.

  You are the sort of person—and writer—to whom I can say such things, my kind of writer (without sclerosis in the matter of letters). I stop short of saying that you are humanly my sort. I have no grounds for that, I know you through your books, which I always read because they are written by the real thing. There aren’t too many real things around. (A fact so well known that I would be tedious to elaborate on it.) You might have been one of the dazzling virtuosi, like [William] Gaddis. I might have done well in that line myself if I hadn’t for one reason or another set my heart on being one of the real things. Life might have been easier in the literary concert-hall circuit. But Paganini wasn’t Jewish.

  You probably see what I am clumsily getting at. I’ve been wending my way toward your Messiah [of Stockholm], and I speak as an admirer, not a critic. About Bruno Schulz I feel very much as you do, and although we have never discussed the Jewish question (or any other), and we would be bound to disagree (as Jewish discussants invariably do), it is certain that we would, at any rate, find each other Jewish enough. But I was puzzled by your Messiah . I puzzled myself over it. I liked the Hans Christian Andersen charm of your poor earnest young man in a Scandinavian capital, who is quixotic, deluded, fanatical, who lives on a borrowed Jewishness, leads a hydroponic existence and tries so touchingly to design his own selfhood. But when he is challenged by reality, we see the worst of him—nine times nine devils (to go to the other Testament for a moment) rush into him, and in his last state, because he is not the one and only authentic Schulz-interpreter, he becomes a mere literary pro, that is, a non-entity. I read your book on the plane to Israel, and in Haifa gave my copy to A. B. Yehoshua. He wanted it, and I urged him to read it. So in writing you, I haven’t got a text to refer to, and must trust my memory or the memory of my impressions. When I read it I was highly pleased. When I thought back on it I felt you might have depended too much on your executive powers, your virtuosity (I’ve often passed the same judgment on myself) and that you wanted more from your subject than it actually yielded. [ . . . ]

  It’s perfectly true that “Jewish Writers in America” (a repulsive category!) missed what should have been for them the central event of their time, the destruction of European Jewry. I can’t say how our responsibility can be assessed. We (I speak of Jews now and not merely of writers) should have reckoned more fully, more deeply with it. Nobody in America seriously took this on and only a few Jews elsewhere (like Primo Levi) were able to comprehend it all. The Jews as a people reacted justly to it. So we have Israel, but in the matter of higher comprehension—well, the mental life of the century having been disfigured by the same forces of deformity that produced the Final Solution, there were no minds fit to comprehend. And intellectuals [ . . . ] are trained to expect and demand from art what intellect is unable to do. (Following the foolish conventions of high-mindedness.) All parties then are passing the buck and every honest conscience feels the disgrace of it.

  I was too busy becoming a novelist to take note of what was happening in the Forties. I was involved with “literature” and given over to preoccupations with art, with language, with my struggle on the American scene, with claims for recognition of my talent or, like my pals of the Partisan Review, with modernism, Marxism, New Criticism, with Eliot, Yeats, Proust, etc.—with anything except the terrible events in Poland. Growing slowly aware of this unspeakable evasion I didn’t even know how to begin to admit it into my inner life. Not a particle of this can be denied. And can I really say—can anyone say—what was to be done, how this “thing” ought to have been met? Since the late Forties I have been brooding about it and sometimes I imagine I can see something. But what such brooding may amount to is probably insignificant. I can’t even begin to say what responsibility any of us may bear in such a matter, in a crime so vast that it brings all Being into Judgment. [ . . . ] “Metaphysical aid,” as somebody says in Macbeth (God forgive the mind for borrowing from such a source in this connection), would be more like it than “responsibility”; intercession from the spiritual world, assuming that there is anybody here capable of being moved by powers nobody nowadays takes seriously. Everybody is so “enlightened.” By ridding myself of a certain amount of enlightenment I can at least have thoughts of this nature. I entertain them at night while rational censorship is sleeping. Revelation is, after all, at the heart of Jewish understanding, and revelation is something you can’t send away for. You can’t be ordered to procure it. [ . . . ]

  Some paragraphs back I said that you didn’t seem to be getting what you really wanted from your Messiah novel. I can’t think that I would offend you by speaking as I speak to myself. I have often rushed into the writing of a book and after thirty or forty pages, just after taking off, I felt that I had made a crazy jump, that I had yielded to a mad convulsion, and that from this convulsion of madness, absolutely uncalled-for and self-generated, I might never recover. At the start the fast take-off seemed such a wonderful and thrilling exploit. I believed in it still. But could I bring it off, would I land safely or fall into the ocean? I experienced the same anxiety in the middle of your novel (the Mediterranean below). You would be fully justified in calling this a projection and turning it against me. Anyway, I did have the sensation of turbulence, a dangerous air-storm. I felt you were brilliant and brave at the controls. [ . . . ]

  With bes
t wishes,

  To Karl Shapiro

  July 31, 1987 West Brattleboro

  Dear Karl,

  Every time I publish a novel it turns out that a test has been administered—no, two tests; in one I am graded by reviewers, while the other is mine, unintentionally given to my fellow Americans. Half of these are totally illiterate, thirty percent more are functionally illiterate, and the rest, while intellectually capable are tremendously unwilling to go along. Democrat that I am, I write for everybody but as you well know not everybody gives a damn. Grateful for what I can get, I absolve one and all. We weren’t brought up, you and I, to feel superior. The idea of giving the entire USA a Rorschach test in the arts is horrifying. Still, the fatal facts (for example, that our souls are gasping for oxygen) can’t be covered up. Sometimes I see in the entire species a single animal as represented in the paintings of the Northwest Coast Indians. All the parts of the creature—eyes, teeth, belly, tail—have been separated and are arranged in the foreground so that teeth or ears or claws are hypertrophied whereas other important parts are diminutive. Well, everything is there, but the parts for whose development I pray are atrophied. One day they will be restored and judgment will occupy its rightful place.

  Meantime my hopes are in people—like you and Sophie—who, like me, have devoted their lives to novels, poems, music, painting, religion and philosophy. To most Americans we are respected freaks entitled, like everybody else, to live. They don’t have to eliminate curbstones for us, as for the blind. Like spastics whose brains outpace computers, or like those clairvoyants to whom the cops turn to find missing bodies when all police methods are exhausted, we have our place. On TV recently I saw a science prodigy with a strange disease, lecturing an audience of astrophysicists through an interpreter trained to understand him. He used a language only two could speak, and long formulas were written on the blackboard. This has got to mean something to you.