Letters

by Saul Bellow

  I don’t think you ought to take Lionel Abel’s comments seriously. I came across them in The Intellectual Follies and they struck me as characteristically and amusingly cockeyed and foolish. Abel didn’t drink hard and I doubt he ever took dope; he was on some mind-altering substance of his own (probably he secreted it), and he heard and saw his own inventions and nothing else. To say that the Fourth International was my marriage broker is very funny. I wouldn’t have had the wit—at that time—to say it. Lionel must have heard it from someone else, forgot the source and conveniently attributed it to me.

  I understand that a book of which I am the subject is about to appear, and I’m thinking of taking sanctuary in a remote part of Madagascar until it has been reviewed, discussed and forgotten.

  Best wishes,

  “Golden Boy,” Atlas’s article on Isaac Rosenfeld, had appeared in The New York Review of Books. The book about Bellow was Ruth Miller’s Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, though it would not appear for another two years.

  In Memory of Robert Penn Warren

  (Delivered at the Stratton Church, Stratton,

  Vermont, October 8, 1989)

  All the King’s Men had just been published when I arrived in Minneapolis in 1946. Red seldom mentioned his novel, nor spoke of its success or his fame. Having written it, he put it behind him—he didn’t care to cut a figure. He never spoke of the work he was doing. I had to read his introduction to the Modern Library Edition of All the King’s Men to learn that he was then finishing his essay on The Ancient Mariner.

  In Minneapolis, when I was a very junior member of the English Department, I was one of a group of instructors invited by Joseph Warren Beach to meet Sinclair Lewis. When we were ushered into the room Lewis pushed back his chair, stood up, raised his long arms and said, “For God’s sake, don’t tell me your names.”

  I give you this as an illuminating contrast. Red wanted to know the names. He took a special interest in your gifts if you had any. He wanted to know what you were writing. He offered to read your manuscript. With me he was especially generous. But he preferred not to be thanked and the lessons he taught me about reserve and silence I couldn’t have gotten from anyone else. I never knew a man more free from common prejudices. I hope he didn’t find me a hopelessly clumsy pupil.

  Two years ago I got one of his rare rebukes. We met every summer in Vermont and in September we said goodbye and I said, “See you next year.” It vexed him, and he set me straight. “Don’t lie like that,” he said. He was right of course to reject my awkward, embarrassed and false words.

  But I did see him the next year.

  And when we met again some weeks before his death he smiled at me and said, “You didn’t expect to see me still alive, did you?”

  I said no I hadn’t, but that I was glad of course to talk to him again.

  The house was filled with small children; it evidently gave him great pleasure to follow them with his eyes.

  With him I was especially attentive, because he was a great-souled man. That was very clear to me. A moment ago I said that I hoped he didn’t find me a clumsy pupil. Red certainly didn’t want disciples, and I am too old now to be formed by anyone. But one doesn’t meet many men of Red’s stature. They are so phenomenally rare that you find yourself observing them closely, with gratitude and (being in a church emboldens me to use a term not often used nowadays) with reverence.

  To John Auerbach

  October 23, 1989 Boston

  My dear John,

  A case of bad timing: When I took this Boston job I assumed you would still be in Newton. If you had been, Janis and I would have spent more time here, but as it is, we shuttle between BU and Vermont. I preach against restlessness but can’t do without it, like the rest of my countrymen. This back-and-forth long weekly drive doesn’t leave much time for writing, and lack of time comes in the nick of time for I haven’t got anything to work on. I wrote one hundred pages of a funny narrative during the summer, but it was like a skyscraper in the desert. I had overlooked the water problem.

  Anyway, Janis and I have been flying everywhere—to New York, to Cincinnati, to Chicago—and we have tickets also for Washington and Tulsa, Oklahoma. My typewriter and Janis’ computers are idle. But I suppose it will do us no harm to think things over. We are generally working too hard to think at all.

  Boston is not so bad. If we could have the trees cut down we could see the Charles from our window; if the trees were down, however, it wouldn’t be worth looking at. We are fifteen minutes from the Brookline bakeries and delicatessens, but must avoid stuffing ourselves. In short, every advantage has a long train of attendant problems. Only, thank God, I am not one of Janis’ problems, nor is she one of mine. Perhaps this shows that only an odd marriage can be a happy one. Janis speaks of us as an old married couple. I suppose this breaks down as: I am old, we are married. Aside from these facts, social and statistical, we love each other.

  I fret with you over the failure of your books to arrive, but I am planning to send you the core of a new library if they don’t turn up. Remember you are a dear friend to both of us, and your letters about walking on the shore, swimming in the sea and living among old friends again give us great nakhes [108].

  With best love from both of us,

  Love and greetings to Nola.

  Bellow and Janis Freedman had wed on August 25 in the town hall of Wilmington, Vermont.

  To Wright Morris

  November 15, 1989 Boston

  Dear Wright:

  The classic question: What is to be done? The answer is even more classic: A lot of choice we got.

  There was no frailty in what you read to me. Only the beholder (listener) was frail, and he drew strength from it.

  Years ago I discovered that the reception of a manuscript by an editor or that of a book by the reviewers and the public gave me an index to the cultural condition of the country, one pitiful disaster after another. A psychologist would call this viewing a profile. A reader of entrails (and that’s what this calls for) would cry, “Take this goddam chicken out of my sight!” Your agent’s phrase about the high expectations of readers is about as terrible a mess of entrails as I’ve held my nose at this calendar year.

  Don’t forget that you are Wright Morris and that the books you’ve given your countrymen are beyond price.

  And you need to know that in the last year and a half I have been rejected by the Atlantic, Esquire and others.

  Since you ask how I am, let me inform you that last summer I married a beautiful young woman. Some would take this as evidence that I am ready for the funny farm but I think much too highly of my wife to take such an opinion seriously.

  Yours ever,

  To Catherine Lindsay Choate

  December 6, 1989 Boston

  Dear Catherine:

  It was wise of Lakewood College to give you a course to teach. I could be very happy sitting in your class, quasi-invisible, listening to you. You yourself said that you remember I am still in this world, if silent and unseen. Well, I would be silent in your classroom, looking on. It would give me pleasure. To this day, I take pleasure in you, and you’re wrong to suggest that your letters are tedious. There is nothing boring about you, there never was.

  One of my mistakes, from the first, was to try to draw a line between mad and sane and I can see now, having observed you for so long, that you would accept no such line in your relations with people and that you floated in and out between the lines and over them as your feelings directed. My line-drawing dementia must have made me very perverse. But you seemed to go where your feelings led you, and you put them first even when you were dealing with lunatics. I must have taken my family for normal people. Now that most of them are dead and the survivors very old, the evidence is that they were anything but normal. When my old sister went back to Montreal for a visit, she made a search for a coffee shop she had known sixty-five years ago. It hadn’t occurred to her that it wouldn’t be there, just as she rem
embered it. She spent two or three days looking, and of course no one could recall any such place. She had put everything on hold and she was still the pretty and charming girl who used to be taken for treats to this nice place on Sherbrooke. So what had happened? Her parents had died, her husband was destroyed, her son committed suicide. But in some respects nothing at all had happened. So when I think of people I have known forever and loved, either more or less or dearly, I see masses of habit possessing the original person and replacing him in the end.

  And of course we are creatures of a day, but we don’t absolutely believe it.

  I’ve taken some time off from Chicago to spend a few months in Boston, not far from my place in Vermont. I’ve rather liked Boston; Chicago has been taken over by racial politics—blacks and whites in a contest for control. I find it very disagreeable. On the 15th the Boston holiday ends and we go back.

  The botanical garden was nice, wasn’t it?

  Your friend, as ever,

  Catherine Lindsay Choate met Bellow in the early 1950s. They would remain in contact for the rest of his life.

  PART SIX

  1990-2005

  And again out of the flaming of the sun would come to him a secret certainty that the goal set for this earth was that it should be filled with good, saturated with it. After everything preposterous, after dog had eaten dog, after the crocodile death had pulled everyone into his mud.

  —“A Silver Dish”

  1990

  To John Auerbach

  February 5, 1990 Chicago

  My dear John,

  [ . . . ] For a man approaching the seventy-fifth year of his age I am not doing badly. Janis is a dear woman and she has even overcome some of my more monstrous defects of character.

  As more news of deaths arrives (the latest was that of Edith Tarcov, a dear woman whom I think you knew) the less I feel the victory of my survival. There is a strange scratchiness in the viscera when I think matters over.

  I will be asking Smadar next week to bear good tidings—your surgery safely behind you.

  Much love from your friend,

  To John Auerbach

  April 5, 1990 Chicago

  Dear John:

  Your letters sound more cheerful. Think there must be something to the old Dum spiro spero [109]. In the worst of times, it comes over you that you are, despite all that sickness and age can do, still inhaling and exhaling.

  This is a note to cover a new story, and these stories seem to be the letters we write to each other.

  I hope Nola is recovering quickly. Janis and I were sorry to hear of her accident.

  Love to you both,

  To Martin Amis

  June 3, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Martin,

  By now you will have heard or read (I can’t imagine that Hitchens would have missed an opportunity to convey such news) that on our last day in London Janis and I were received at No. 10 Downing Street and were treated to tea and tittle-tattle by the Prime Minister. Now honestly, can you imagine that a pair of US hicks from Chicago would refuse an invitation to see for themselves the seats of the mighty? Like the nursery rhyme pussycats who went to London and frightened a mouse or two under the queen’s chair, we have little else to report. It was George Walden [former minister for education in Mrs. Thatcher’s government] who arranged this meeting, the same Walden who endeared himself to us by his indignation at your being passed over for the Booker Prize.

  Put yourself in our place: Ronald Reagan or George Bush hearing that you are in Washington asks you to tea and you, ever faithful to high principles, return a withering refusal.

  American friends have asked me for my impressions: “Well, you’re cruising on an interstate highway and a few hundred feet ahead you see a perfectly ordinary automobile like any other GM, Chrysler or Japanese product, and then suddenly it turns on its dangerous blue police lights and you realize that what you took for a perfectly ordinary vehicle is packed with power. It’s that unearthly blue flash that makes the difference.”

  Leaving Heathrow, I opened a London newspaper and there I saw myself exposed to sophisticated ridicule. The writer, with a blue flash of his own, revealed to all the world, and to me, that Clara in A Theft was none other than Margaret Thatcher, concealed in the ranks as the prime minister of New York fashions. I now have this to suggest to the pre-Socratic who said you could never twice put your foot in the same river: You are doomed to put your foot in again and again and again.

  But ideology is not likely to come between us. We loved seeing you and Antonia. She served us a dinner that made all the other dinners in Europe look sick. Also, Jacob [Amis] immediately recognized that I was a friend which did much to restore my confidence in myself, none too firm these days.

  Yours as ever,

  And love from Janis.

  To Roger Shattuck

  June 5, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Roger:

  Your letter was entirely reasonable and sensible, and I admit that I was wrong to be so touchy about a trifle. My only defense is that you gave me a hard time at Rosanna [Warren]’s dinner party, beginning with my public address and going on to my rank as a writer—whatever that may mean. I am well used to being put in my place, and I don’t really mind when I can feel that I am in the hands of a dependable place-putter.

  But these provocations were minor. I don’t mind friendly teasing at all. I am however touchy about the language of some of my books, and when I am criticized in a matter of usage I can be a bit crazy. It was unforgivable to burst into your office with a list of references. If we knew each other better I’m sure I’d come to accept the teasing, even to enjoy it, and you might make friendly allowance for an occasional eruption. Of course I knew that you had written a favorable review of Humboldt, and you will perhaps remember that I have spoken admiringly of The Banquet Years, and of your Proust book. We have no casus belli.

  The daring of a major move at my time of life sets my teeth on edge but nothing is impossible to unrealistically (perversely?) youthful types like me.

  Many thanks for your civilized letter.

  Yours,

  To Philip Roth

  June 24, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Philip:

  In you I had a witness of my own kind and a point of balance. Without your support the angry waves would have dashed me on the stern and rock-bound Jewish coast. I am very fond of Cousin Volya who was something of a hero in the Old Country, serving in the Russian cavalry from Leningrad to Berlin. It’s easy to mistake him for somebody else. When he explained the difference between Latvia and Lithuania to [Saul] Steinberg, Steinberg said it was a piece of dialogue out of a Marx Brothers’ movie. There was however a regiment with machine guns. But I see Steinberg’s point of view. With peace, the Marx Brothers return.

  Anyway, you were a great comfort to me—representing what it was essential to represent. And I thought you must be enjoying the singing. The mixture of a thousand ingredients.

  In principle, I’m against such parties but when a surprise turns off the principle I seem to enjoy them quite a lot.

  Yours ever,

  Your note made Janis happy.

  Roth and Claire Bloom had been present in Vermont—along with Bellow’s cousin Volya from Riga, Saul Steinberg, Eleanor Clark, Rosanna Warren, Maggie Staats Simmons, John Auerbach from Israel, Albert Glotzer, Bette Howland, Jonathan Kleinbard, sons Adam and Daniel Bellow and many others—for a surprise seventy-fifth birthday celebration.

  To Julian Behrstock

  June 26, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Julian:

  It never occurred to me to think of myself as the Ancient of Days but there’s no getting away from it. What is it that prevents me from realizing that I have grown so old—persistent adolescence? Obstinacy? A refusal to acknowledge what I plainly see in the mirror?

  Yesterday I was gardening in front of the house, made a misstep, fell four feet to the ground, landed flat on my back, picked myself up at once and
went about my business until Janis ordered me to go upstairs and lie down. No broken bones, no bruises visible, only a stiffness across the hips in the night. My sister Jane, nine years my senior, fell downstairs at the El station on her way to the Loop and kept her appointment nevertheless. She broke no bones either.

  I was touched by your birthday message. Janis turns out to be an incredibly gifted organizer. You would have enjoyed the occasion. It was attended by seventy people, two of them greenhorn cousins of my own age just out of the Soviet Union. And children, of course, and grandchildren and old pals, the durable kind like yourself.

  Last week I accepted a grant from a foundation, whose intent is not altogether clear. I think they want me to go to Paris in the winter of ’91 to teach a course at the Sorbonne. The offer was made and accepted on the telephone, so I’m not altogether clear about the specifics. What is certain is that Janis and I will fly over at the beginning of February and stay until the end of May. Sometimes apartments are exchanged through the university. It’s highly unlikely that you might know someone who will be leaving for the Congo in February and returning in May. The perennial adolescent in me insists on believing that anything is possible. My mature purpose is to tell you the news and to say how glad I am at the prospect of seeing you early next year.

  Love,