Letters

by Saul Bellow

  The best one can do (the best I can do) is to write stories. I’ve written a novella—sexy but the setting (by and large) is a cemetery. I’ll send you a copy when it’s fit to be read.

  You mustn’t think I’ve forgotten you. I think about you both. But I very seldom send letters. And I can hardly bring myself to read the mail.

  I hope you are well, thriving, happy.

  Love,

  Janis adds her love, as well.

  The sexy novella would appear next spring as The Actual.

  To James Salter

  May 20, 1996 Brookline

  Dear Jim,

  I can’t match your chatty insouciance, nobody can. Real insouciance takes character. It’s one of the gifts that’s been withheld from me. If I were able to take matters lightly I should have come along on this junket. I’ve had two trips this spring, one to Toronto that knocked me out and another to Queens College that laid me low. A trans-Atlantic trip is something I can’t face. Perhaps if I had two or three months to recover in Paris I could do it, but a round trip is out of the question. Also I’m too unforgiving to write dégagé [125] anecdotes. To take an example of such skills from your own letter, I loved the Nabokov taxi-cab anecdote but the image of a rose on a hairy chest on which you finish it rubbed me the wrong way. Nabokov was like that—one of the great wrong-way rubbers of all times. Somewhere he said, and said very well, that Borges was a marvelous writer and then he went on to add that Borges’s pieces are like beautiful verandas and that after the eighteenth or twentieth porch one says, “Great but where are the houses?” This is Nabokov at his best. At his gruesome worst he pins feminine roses to simian bosoms.

  In the old days I used to stay in Gallimard’s attic on the Rue Bottin—little bedrooms such as the bedrooms I was used to in Chicago in the Depression: three bucks a week. I’d like nothing better than to follow you around Paris from one thrilling party to another. What a gift you have for filling your days with good company. When your letters come to be collected, you’ll be in a class with Samuel Pepys.

  All the best,

  To Julian Behrstock

  July 25, 1996 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Julian—

  I seem to have become a home-industry of ill news, surrounded by pharmaceuticals (médicaments). A text punctuated by pills. The heart turns out to be the problem—I had always suspected that it would end by getting its own back on me. The most sinister of the pills is Coumadin, an anti-coagulant that protects me from a stroke. Born normal enough, I am now a hemophiliac like the Tsarevitch and the other princes descended from Victoria and Albert. (So they tell me.)

  I thought of you (thought particularly; I often think of you) last month, remembering that we had marched nine years ago in the Northwestern procession [honoring the Class of 1937]. Our sixtieth anniversary comes up next year. It would be a good occasion for both of us, and memorable also for your wife and son.

  I’ve taken two or three domestic flights. Haven’t been abroad since the Caribbean holiday that nearly did me in. Janis is keen on going to Paris. We left a tidy sum there at CIC (the bank on Blvd. Raspail) and on three years of interest Janis says we could stay at the Crillon and give the Behrstocks dinner at a four-star joint. It’s a brilliant ploy. Janis is not one for small ideas. And I’m on her side. We could spend up a storm at the Crillon and march later with the Class of ’37.

  At this moment we are in Vermont, reading books, writing (on lucky days) and growing flowers.

  I don’t ask about your health because I don’t want to put you to the trouble of replying. But you know I’m pulling for you full strength.

  Your old friend,

  To Hymen Slate

  July 25, 1996 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Hymen—

  My son Gregory with his Italian organ-grinder mustachios visited you a few months ago, and said you weren’t well—reminding me that we’ve known each other, you and I, for more than sixty years, and that at this stage of life we experience both the present moment and antiquity. I write to say that I hope you’ve overcome your illness. Of course, the old expect their surviving friends to be ailing. I had a substantial foretaste of death recently (’94); it’s the usual thing for all octogenarians.

  Odd how past and present come together in the consciousness of aged men and women. My ninety-year-old sister in Miami Beach goes every day to the shopping mall to buy dresses; she exchanges or returns them, and her closets are full of skirts, blouses, shoes. She sees herself, with the help of her Frankenstein’s lab of cosmetics, appearing before the world as the smashing beauty she was sixty-five years back.

  As for me, you may ask why I write to you now, having dropped from sight about eleven years ago. As a mature observer, you may not see fit to ask at all, only shrug.

  But picture the following: In one week my elder brothers had died; I attended both funerals. I turned sixty-nine on June 10th, ’84. On that day Alexandra said she was divorcing me. She moved out of the apartment then and there. Not before she had applied circular stickers, big ones, green and white, to her possessions and mine. Even bathrobes and carpet slippers carried these gummed labels, a weird snowfall of large round green and white flakes.

  Rather than explain this or discuss it with you, since we had never reached an appropriate stage of intimacy, I simply dropped out. I disappeared. You will certainly understand that there are absurdities or paradoxes that are not and should not be communicable. I found an opening into a new life (the five hundredth one). I left Sheridan Rd. and our friendship, alas, was shelved.

  All my best wishes to you and to Evelyn.

  Your affectionate pal,

  To Martin Amis

  August 8, 1996 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Martin—

  A flying friend picked up The American Way, the in-house mag of American Airlines and I read your interview with a special pleasure, because your answers were so short:

  Q: What literary landmarks are important in the city?

  A: Karl Marx’s grave. A lot of people go and visit that in Highgate Cemetery.

  President Coolidge’s wife questioned him one Sunday morning when he returned from Church:

  Q: What was today’s sermon about?

  A: Sin.

  Q: What did the minister say about sin?

  A: He was against it.

  Funnily enough (my Irish friend David Grene says “funnily enough,” and I’ve picked up the habit) you were garrulous about ethnic foods. You wouldn’t dream of going into the West End for dinner. Neither would I. I’ve had good meals at Turkish restaurants. Odd that you should answer a food question so fully; I’ve seldom seen you eat a complete dinner, so I took a considerable interest in your opinions.

  These days I am eating less, sleeping less. The infirmities of age are coming fast upon me. It’s bad form to complain of ill-health. I didn’t use to do it—there was no problem; I had vital energy enough to waste on fooleries of every sort. But now I have no strength for the essentials. An hour at the writing table does me in. It troubles me now to write a letter about [your new novel] The Information. Page by page the writing gave me pleasure. Your books always do. The words bowl me over. But I find myself resisting your novel and in the end I back away from it.

  Very long ago, reading Céline, I recognized the importance of the discovery he had made. He seemed to be saying, in his Journey to the End of the Night, that there is always some residue of principle in his nihilists. Thus when Robinson’s girlfriend demands that he declare his love for her, he refuses. Outraged, hardly believing her ears, she says, “Tu ne bandes pas? ”—“Don’t you get a hard-on, like everybody else? That’s love, ain’t it?” But he cannot lie to her. This is his one principle, and she shoots him. He dies for his one belief.

  It seems to me that in the “advanced” countries, the Robinsons have become Célines—they think for themselves and they seem to be independently philosophical. This is part of your “bad news” and “terrible information.” Writers and characters a
like are on “thought trips,” squaring themselves one way or another with the prevailing nihilism. When the people one meets and/or writes about seek (and find) ideas it is more or less necessary for writers to cut their connections to the abstractions and to hang on to the phenomena, embrace them for dear life. We have no obligation to justify ourselves intellectually to the ruling philosophy, to be accepted as “authentic.”

  Of course the mental misery is very great. We don’t want to abandon the sufferers. But one does them little good by joining them in their thought-idolatry.

  So I come out on Janis’s side, more or less. She puts it that “we are invited to stare into the void. But instead of emptiness we find information.” My suggestion is that we come to agree—we are pleased to agree—with the leaders of thought, a.k.a. the nihilists. Céline’s Robinson still had one idea of his own. That was the limit of his independence. We are losing even that.

  A cheerless letter. But you did appoint me your spiritual father, and the foregoing is what this s.f. thinks you need.

  And of course he sends you his best love,

  To Hymen Slate

  September 9, 1996 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Hymen,

  For the life of me I can’t remember being unpleasant about your “character.” We’ve known each other for about sixty years (the very idea of such a figure breaks me up). And if anyone had asked me to compare my character to yours, yours would have won hands down. I must confess however that on North Sheridan Road in those years I was having a very bad time. And it may be that what my remark, if I made it, really meant was that one had to have a less than admirable character to be a fiction writer.

  Anyway at our age these close encounters with death should make us indulgent with each other. I am glad you explained the Anemia of Chronic Disease. I wouldn’t otherwise have known how serious it was. For myself, I am utterly fed up with sickness. This very day I have been waiting for a visiting technician to give me an intravenous antibiotic. Normally (that is to say, formerly) it wouldn’t have mattered so much. But after two years of much sickness and much recovery one does become impatient. I suppose the dead would say it is ungrateful of us to complain. But health is either complete or nothing at all. It’s not the absence of this fucking technician who has kept me indoors all day, it’s the tenacity of my symptoms, that finally drives me around the bend. I can’t get rid of them.

  So Abe Kaufman has died. Thirty years without a word from him—more like forty, come to think of it—and we still know no more about him than that he has departed. I frequently offered Kaufman friendship in as many ways as I could think of. But he was comically high and mighty with me. When I was at the Britannica under Mortimer Adler just before WWII Abe requested or demanded or commanded that I should get him on the payroll. I managed somehow to do just that. Abe then made an illuminating speech: “It is quite natural that you should have done this and it shows that you understand the difference between superior and inferior beings. You are aware that I stand higher in the hierarchy than you and that you therefore have an obligation to me.”

  It was easier to insult me than to say thanks. Anyway, he didn’t want to have to thank me for anything. When last heard from he had just gotten his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard. Well, let’s hope he will be happier in his next incarnation. It is diverting to think that we may be popping up again and again throughout eternity.

  Keeping in touch is a good idea. I have a feeling that your odds on recovery are better than you think.

  Affectionately,

  To James Wood

  September 9, 1996 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Mr. Wood,

  This is a pro tem note, to use congressional slang.

  I have meant to write a long and serious letter to thank you for various kindnesses and to express my admiration for any number of reviews in The New Republic. Janis and I are especially grateful for the collection of Polish poems in translation.

  I had, as a fanatical or enragé reader, studied over many decades gallery after gallery of old men in novels and plays and I thought I knew all about them. But to be one is full of surprises. Let me see: There is Oedipus at Colonus , there is the old sculptor of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, there is of course King Lear, and also Duncan in Macbeth and Polonius in Hamlet, and there are Jonathan Swift’s Struldbruggs—the repulsive and unkillable old, there is old Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace, there is Father Zossima in The Brothers K, there is Gerontion, and Yeats in his final years. But all of this business about crabbed age and youth tells you absolutely nothing about your own self. I shall leave the subject there. I can’t even begin to say what it’s really like.

  I see now what a procrastinator I have always been. I kept my projects in a warehouse (the good-intentions warehouse which I mention all too often) confident that there would be an endless future in which to take care of all business, but a few years ago I began to see at last that I had grown far too old to have so many obligations in the storage bins—on the calendar. When I read your T. S. Eliot piece I began to compose a reply and at odd moments I have mentally worked at it, but you will have forgotten about your essay long before I get my letter on paper. Words shouted into a fierce gale which is anyway blowing in the wrong direction.

  I thought I would send you a few lines to explain simply how matters stand. You may expect one of these months to receive a long and serious letter from me.

  With best wishes,

  To Herbert Mitgang

  September 21, 1996 W. Brattleboro, Vermont

  Dear Herb,

  I’m dictating a few remarks in answer to your letter of September 2nd.

  I’ve always liked Studs [Terkel]. We grew up in the same Chicago neighborhood, the Humboldt Park District. Originally German, this part of the city was by turns Scandinavian, Polish, Ukrainian, Jewish—it is now mainly Puerto Rican. Studs was ambitious to be an actor and could be identified by the copy of Variety always sticking out of his back pocket.

  Studs’s Chicago certainly was not mine. His Chicago was mythical. His myth was common. A convenient way to describe it is to refer you to Carl Sandburg. Sandburg had his gifts as a poet, but he was also a gifted advertising man. I don’t think it’s too much to say that the image of Chicago they held up to the world was stylized. It was The People, Yes! Populism was the source of their mythology. It was not necessary for them to wonder how to describe any phenomenon because they had ideological ready-mades, cutouts, stereotypes, etc. Poets and street-corner orators can make use of slogans, but slogans will not do for writers. I can readily identify the sources used by Studs Terkel because when I was very young I made use of them too. In the early years of the Depression we were all left-wingers. What I mean to say, as you will quickly recognize, is that as I grew older my left-wing sympathies waned. During the conservative administrations (Eisenhower, etc.)—during the Cold War too—Studs remained steadfast and he faithfully marked time until [in the Sixties] the junior middle-class masses were ready again to line up behind him.

  I have always classified you as a good guy and I hope you won’t use my candor against me and make me look like a gargoyle. I have learned by now that it is never safe to assume that a good guy is incapable of taking unfair advantage of the unwary and trusting schnook.

  Best wishes,

  In Memory of Yetta Barshevsky Shachtman

  (Printed in the program for Yetta Shachtman’s memorial service in New York City, September 22, 1996)

  Sixty-five years ago in the Humboldt Park District of Chicago, Yetta Barshevsky and I were students at the Tuley High School. Although we were born in the same year, she was just a bit ahead of me, graduating in 1932. Yetta was class orator. The title of her speech, a speech I remember very well, was “The Future Belongs to the Youth.” Well, of course it does. Actuarial statistics make it obvious that, like it or not, youth will inherit the future or, less pleasantly, that it will be thrust if not dumped on them. Al Glotzer tells me that it was Karl Liebknecht who invented this
clumsy slogan. Totalitarianism in the Thirties produced very nasty youth organizations—Hitlerjugend in Germany, Pioneers in Soviet Russia and also the Young Communist League. Mussolini had his Blackshirt boys. In England and in the USA we had nothing worse than Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement. The best that can be said for the Boy Scouts was that they didn’t do the future much harm.

  Yetta in her high school days was for a time a member of the YCL. She left the movement. Perhaps she was expelled. She was far too good, too gentle, too charming to be a hard-faced Third-Period Stalinist. Her mother, as I remember, was upset when Yetta dropped out of the movement. The mother was a spectacularly handsome dark-haired woman. I, you see, lived right around the corner, on Lemoyne Street. The Barshevskys were on Spaulding Ave. just north of Division Street I was a frequent visitor. I knew her brothers and also her father. I believe he was a carpenter. The back seat of his jalopy was filled with saws and sawdust. In those days one didn’t have a car and a truck. If you were a family man you preferred an old touring car to a truck—the front seat would not accommodate four kids and a wife. Barshevsky was fairly silent and clearly good-natured and affectionate with his children. I even came to know Yetta’s grandfather, whom I would often see at the synagogue when I came to say Kaddish for my mother. He was an extremely, primitively orthodox short bent man with a beard that seemed to have rushed out of him and muffled his face. He wore a bowler hat and elastic-sided boots. The old women, it seems, were wildly radical Communist sympathizers. The grandfathers were the pious ones.

  The immigrant parents at the graduation ceremonies were delighted with Yetta’s oration. On the platform, this slight, high-voiced young woman was fearless and formidable. Her manner was militant, urgent. From her you heard such words as “penury” and “mitigate.” I knew “mitigate” only from books. I had never heard it spoken. It took boldness to say it publicly and with natural confidence. And Yetta was a gentle creature with a fiery irrepressible message for the parents of the graduating class. “We will do right by you,” was what she was telling them. “We will give you mitigation.” There was a curious earnestness about Yetta.