Letters

by Saul Bellow

To Jonathan Kleinbard

  July 1, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Jonathan,

  Sometimes citizen Bellow has to fight his guilt when he considers what a world this is, and how much he might have done in the public interest if he had put away this idle stuff he insists on calling “art.” His books have been a big mistake and it isn’t only honest, earnest lawyers, psychologists, engineers, economists, etc.—servants of reality—who believe this, but writers of a different outlook who fault me for ignoring the crisis under our noses and reproach me roughly. I might have been some good as a journalist. But it’s too late now to mend and all I can do is to do what I have taught myself. You say, “opening up the heart.” People seem to doubt if there is such an organ. The advanced view is that there ain’t no such thing, and it can find more evidence for this than we can for our convictions.

  But I’m going to stop here, leaving just enough space to say that the agreement of a man like you outweighs the criticism of thousands of “them.”

  We have other matters to discuss but they’ll have to wait.

  With thanks and affection to you and also to Joan,

  To Saul Steinberg

  July 10, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Saul:

  After the birthday shouting, the silence of Vermont came back. Real life is represented by the cat, who appeared just now to show us the bird he had killed, and to fill Janis’ mind with thoughts of vegetarianism.

  Your beautiful green diploma is hanging on the bedroom wall, and when I look at it in the morning I think of supernatural places it might get me into. If, that is, I should be in a position to take it with me. Meantime, I have ordered for you a book by one of our friends, Sarah Walden, whose business is restoration. She has, according to the jacket copy, “worked as a restorer on major collections in Europe, including the Louvre: . . . paintings ranging from those of Vermeer to those of Picasso.” We found it amusing and instructive. That’s what’s so nice about ignorance, you can always be instructed, and feel that you need never waste a moment’s time.

  It was noble of you to fly here, and I hope you found some entertainment in the occasion. Perhaps my Russian cousins made it worth your while.

  So much for Bellow’s Versailles. What we can offer you now is Bellow’s resort or Kur-Ort [110]. I promise excellent meals cooked by Janis and conversation only slightly less good.

  Love,

  To Zita Cogan

  July 18, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Zita:

  I thank you for your note and for your kind words and also for the color photograph of me in a tennis shirt. I stopped playing tennis some years ago but I have the shirt still, unraveling a little at the cuffs. It’s under a pile of junk on the shelf of my clothes closet here in Vermont. I can’t remember who took this photograph but one of these cold days when I pull the shirt on and stumble down to the kitchen to light a fire it will remind me of you.

  You’re kind to Mr. [James] Atlas. I am no more keen about a biography than I am about reserving a plot for myself at 26th and Harlem Avenue. I keep putting it off. I say this in order to make clear that I am not supporting Atlas, nor am I asking my friends to oblige him with recollections of my misconduct.

  The Chagall postcard was great. The bridegroom has found a beauty to play piggyback with. The glass of wine is a beautiful afterthought.

  Yours with love and kisses,

  To Albert Glotzer

  August 5, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Al:

  We too lived on Augusta Street—then unpaved—between Rockwell and Washtenaw, on the south side of the street. The address I believe was 2629, and we were on the second floor directly above the Polish landlord. I also wore high-top boots and remember the zero-teeth of Chicago eating at my toes. I was then nine years old. Our high-tops had a pen-knife, a bonus, in a sheath. I also remember the Nestor Johnson skates, manufactured on North Avenue near California. One pair of skates had to do for all three boys, two or three sizes too large for me. I did my best on the Humboldt Park lagoon.

  I didn’t get to Hammersmark’s bookshop until I was a high-school student. [Isadore] Bernick brought me there. The year must have been 1930. In 1936 Sam Hammersmark tried to recruit me for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. But I was an early member of the Spartacus Youth League. Sam and I had a good-natured relationship, by which I mean that we never discussed politics. I can recall borrowing Trotsky’s pamphlet on the German question from Freifeld. It knocked me for a loop. But my real interests were literary and I needed Hammersmark to supply me with books otherwise obtainable only in the Loop. Bernick, by the way, introduced me to proletarian art. Hammersmark hung it on his walls. Of a muscular, headless torso, mighty arms crossed, Bernick said that it was “symbolical of the proletariat without leadership.” On gloomy days such recollections cheer me up.

  I wonder what it is that so fascinates us about the old city. I suppose we had instinctively understood that it filled our need for poetry. Besides, maturity meant work, and work was something dark and blind to which we were sentenced when boyhood ended. It seems to me that we made excellent use of the liberty we enjoyed as schoolboys.

  I am in the middle of your Trotsky book. I read it with fascination. I used to think I knew quite a lot about Trotskyism, but what you write shows me to be an amateur. For instance, I had no idea at all that Trotsky was handicapped because he was not a proper old Bolshevik and that he was inhibited in his struggle with Stalin, Zinoviev, etc. because he lacked full credentials. I was stirred also by his unclear answers during the Mexico trials about the seizure of power and the character of the proletarian dictatorship.

  Herb Passin and I had an appointment with Trotsky in the summer of 1940, and came up from Taxco only to learn that he had been struck on the head and rushed to the hospital. We went there at once, introducing ourselves as newspapermen, and were led to a room where Trotsky lay dead with a bloody turban of bandages, and his face streaked with iridescent iodine. We turned up again later, after Al Goldman had arrived, and I remember that he was greatly put out by us for some inscrutable reason.

  Something remarkable about your book: I have observed that most people are incapable of altering their early beliefs. Most, I’ve noticed, think of their first education as a sort of investment made during their best, most vital years. Many of the Marxists I’ve known are unwilling to give up the labor they put into mastering difficult texts. They tend to hang on to the very end. A curious sort of rigidity. In most cases their knowledge became useless long long ago. It’s heartening to me to see how willing you are to reconsider your old faith. There are not many people with that kind of intellectual courage.

  Thanks for your kind words about my story, and tell Maggie [Marguerite Horst Glotzer, his wife] that I’m glad it pleased her. Janis is waiting for me to hand over your book, and sends you her best regards.

  Affectionately yours,

  Glotzer’s book was Trotsky: Memoir and Critique.

  To Frances Kiernan

  August 8, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Mrs. Kiernan:

  I knew Mary [McCarthy] quite well, never intimately. She and I never got along. You either had a good relationship with Mary or you had—well, whatever it was that we did have. For a decade or more she hated me, quite frankly. I could not return her feelings with the same intensity but I did what I could. I don’t observe the de mortuis rule; on the other hand, I see no point in lousing Mary up gratuitously, it doesn’t seem right. Then you haven’t asked me to louse her up so perhaps we can talk about her on the telephone, though I’d prefer a face-to-face meeting. It could be a brief one, no longer than a fire drill at the New Yorker. I did love Rachel [MacKenzie] and I do miss her even now.

  Yours, etc.

  Frances Kiernan, a former New Yorker fiction editor, was beginning work on her book Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy. She had reminded Bellow that it was during a fire drill at the New Yorker offices that Rachel MacKenzie introduced the two of them.
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  To George Sarant

  September 9, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear George:

  No I don’t think Isaac ever met [Wilhelm] Reich. Since I was then in therapy myself he would certainly have told me that he had gone up to Maine. He did in fact say to me that he had had fantasies about being sent for as soon as Reich had news that he, Isaac, was in treatment. In short he was confessing to visions of grandiose importance.

  Yes, I did know Paul Goodman. He was friendly with your father, not with me. Isaac believed that Goodman evaded the terrors of therapy by going over to [Gestalt Therapy co-founder] Fritz Perls—taking the easy way out.

  Isaac ended by believing that therapy had done him great harm. We had a long conversation a month or two before he died and he declared that he had been out of his mind for a decade and would now try to find some ground to re-establish his sanity. He was an extraordinarily gifted man. Village life, as he interpreted it, was his undoing. I don’t entirely blame the Village but his liberation degenerated into personal anarchy. I’m glad to win your good opinion. I hope the record, when all the results are in, won’t let us down.

  Love from someone who has known you forever,

  To Catherine Lindsay Choate

  September 17, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Catherine:

  Whenever I find a letter from you in my box I brighten up. Yes, I am well, and though I balk a little at admitting it, I am happy too. I can’t really explain why I am reluctant to say it—some silliness in character or a superstition, perhaps hereditary. I have no serious diseases and at seventy-five with foolish enthusiasm I pedal a bike up and down the Vermont hills. The neighbors take me for some kind of crazy prodigy. Certain lifelong peculiarities persist. I continue to work at them without believing that I will get anywhere. It’s an amusing game that I play. To give an innocent instance, I neglected my Latin sixty years ago and drive myself now to do right by Caesar’s Commentaries. This is a job I don’t do badly but I can’t really say that I can explain why I do it at all. However it’s the kind of absurdity that amuses me. It occurred to me not long ago that God had probably had an educational motive in putting Adam and Eve between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. It must have been some sort of educational test. When they flunked he designed a different kind of curriculum for them. It’s possible that I’ve had this idea all my life and that’s why I grind away at Caesar and all the ablatives and gerunds.

  I’m sorry to say that I have no engagement to speak in San Francisco. I’d love to see you though and I hope you are well.

  Yours affectionately,

  To John Auerbach

  September 17, 1990 W. Brattleboro

  Dear John:

  Mid-September and Janis and I are getting ready to return to Chicago. Vermont is now at its best. The black flies, deer flies and mosquitoes have perished and it becomes possible to sit on the lawn and read a book, so naturally we’d rather stay. We will miss the country and of course the city will be dreadful—not quite so bad as New York, nothing matches New York, but bad enough. Still we enjoy a certain amount of protection. We have an underground garage and we can go downtown for dinner safely enough although there are people who shun the Outer Drive after dark. Cars that break down and have to be abandoned are stripped by morning. Since you live within reach of Saddam you will see this quite rightly as much ado about nothing.

  I’m sorry to say that your Commentary subscription can’t be canceled. I don’t like the magazine; it has decided that I have a bad character and doesn’t review my books anymore. Still, it is one of the better journals and although the language of the contributors is something like the kapok that life jackets used to be stuffed with one can always find in it an article or two worth reading. [ . . . ]

  Much love,

  To Louis Lasco

  October 11, 1990 Chicago

  Dear Laibl:

  (No patronymics this time.)

  Rudy Lapp writes that you have come through a bypass and are better than ever, “a magnificent statue at a hundred seventy.” Statues remind me of Rome, and Rome of the Tuley classroom where you read a paper on Roman bath tubs. But archaeology, for us, is no longer a joke. At the Waldheim cemetery [in Forest Park, Illinois] which I recently had occasion to visit I saw the graves of classmates. The family plot is full and the streets are haunted—melancholy pavements where once we wasted life’s precious opportunities in horseplay. You never were sentimental (except in your unique manner), nor am I deliberately nostalgic. It’s my memory that’s the troublemaker. Or perhaps not even my memory but the persistence of certain mental arrangements. The past may be footage of a B-picture directed by me, personally.

  [ . . . ]

  I remember that at our rooming house (was it Lord Manor?) fifty years ago you shrugged indifferently when I told you that Harry Lichtenstein was dead. Neither of us will do that when notified of the other’s passing.

  Fraternal greetings from your old chum—relatively intact,

  To Philip Roth

  November 15, 1990 Chicago

  Dear Philip:

  Wish we were able to accept. Then I could tell you viva voce how much I like your Patrimony (which I’m now reading). It gives me just the emotional workout I’ve been needing, and literary pleasure besides.

  We have to see family in NYC. Could we drop in for a drink? We’ll call to see whether you have a free hour for us.

  All the best,

  To John Auerbach

  December 3, 1990 Chicago

  Dear John:

  To raise money for one of my fantasies—and it’s the non-literary fantasies which always trap me—I booked myself all over the country to give talks and readings. Experience should have warned me—but then I have a fantasy way of experiencing experience—how dangerously fatiguing this would be. Higher powers of understanding now show me that I wanted to be fatigued, that my secret plan was to tire out some of my worst tendencies and escape from them. I hoped that they would be too weak to pursue and overtake me. The results are not yet in. There was also an unforeseeable complication. In September Allan Bloom came down with the Guillain-Barré, a paralyzing disease. Since he has no wife, no children, no one to take care of him but his friends, Janis and I would run back to Chicago from San Antonio, Montreal, Miami, etc. as often as possible. For a while he was in mortal danger. He’s better now. His chances for recovery are good. He may be able to walk again.

  In the midst of this we heard of your stroke.

  Your brain and your circulatory system, anatomy and physiology, have tried everything possible to do you in. Since you’ve overcome everything they’ve heaped on you perhaps they’ll let you be, withdraw for a decade or two out of admiration for your powers of resistance. The fact that your right hand was spared gives me hope. It may even be that by some secret inner process you preserved your right hand from damage. Imagination can keep you alive and as long as you have tales to tell you may be able to hold death at bay. I’m convinced that unfinished business has kept me alive. Scribbling and survival go together, I think. [ . . . ]

  Go on writing your stories, and we will send waves of love by soul-radio.

  Love,

  To Martin Amis

  December 30, 1990 Schomberg, Ontario

  Dear Martin,

  Janis and I are in Ontario in the top storey of her parents’ farmhouse looking into falling snow, trees, fields, a pond, and staring directly into the empty face of a Trojan-helmet chimney emitting smoke from wood chopped by me. We’ve just come out of the bath and we sit beside a huge white tub-with-a-view, a whirlpool or perhaps even a Jacuzzi into which you pour bubble-bath cream which foams up and makes you into an Olympian, Old Massa Zeus looking down on white Chanel clouds.

  Too bad the people I care for are so widely distributed over the face of the earth. But then one tends to think about them all the more. Proximity isn’t everything. In this bedroom I have found a volume of Aldous Huxley’s letters written during the war years,
many of them from Hollywood to correspondents in London and other distant places. His views might have been less kooky if he hadn’t left England. But there are such things as inner distances and homegrown or domestic kookiness. I come up with odd ideas on my own Chicago turf and friends in England also send me their strange views. Years ago in Greenwich Village I used to say to a particular pal, “There’s only me and thee that’s sane and I sometimes have my doubts about thee.” The occasion for these thoughts is the mention of [Salman] Rushdie’s name at the breakfast table, his embrace or re-embrace of Islam. I suggested that he may have believed mistakenly that the civilization of the West had once and for all triumphed over exotic fundamentalism. After all, the Pope didn’t excommunicate Joyce for writing Ulysses and the Church is even older than Islam. In short, it isn’t safe yet to say that such and such a phenomenon has passed into history. Just as we were thinking that perestroika and glasnost had purified Russia once and for all we read a speech by the chief of the KGB accusing the US of sending radioactive wheat and poisoned foodstuffs to feed the hungry in the Soviet Union.

  The likes of us should quit politics and stick to dreams. It gave me pleasure to hear that I recently figured in a dream of yours, positively. I recently dreamt:

  Dream I: I identify Tolstoy as the driver of a beat-up white van on the expressway. I ask the old guy at the wheel of this crumbling van what he can do to keep his flapping door from banging against the finish of my car. When he leans over to the right I see that he is none other than Leo Tolstoy, beard and all. He invites me to follow him off the expressway to a tavern and he says, “I want you to have this jar of pickled herring.” He adds, “I knew your brother.” At the mention of my late brother I burst into tears.

  Dream II: A secret remedy for a deadly disease is inscribed in Chinese characters on my penis. For this reason my life is in danger. My son Greg is guarding me in a California hideout from the agents of a pharmaceutical company, etc.