Letters

by Saul Bellow

  This, remember, was 1932. The Great Depression was upon us. Hitler and FDR had just spoken their first words on the world’s stage.

  Yetta introduced me, after a fashion, to world politics. We often crossed Humboldt Park together after school. I was even then “literary,” while she was political. She gave me Trotsky’s pamphlet on the German question. The view Trotsky developed was, as I remember, that Stalin’s policies facilitated Hitler’s rise to power. Stalin would not enter into a defensive alliance with the Social Democrats and other Left elements.

  In good weather we sat on the steps of the Humboldt Park boathouse, under the huge arches; or in the Rose Garden, where the two bronze bison stood. She lectured me on Leninism, on collectivization, on democratic centralism, on the sins of Stalin and his inferiority to Trotsky. She was engaged, by now, to Nathan Goldstein, and Goldstein had turned from the CP to Trotskyism.

  By 1933 Yetta and I had moved on to Crane Junior College, an institution that soon went under for lack of cash—the usual thing, in those years.

  Mayor [Anton] Cermak went down to Florida after Roosevelt had won the November election with the aim of getting money to pay the teachers. It was there that an assassin shooting at Roosevelt shot Cermak instead. Cermak was a martyr, therefore, who sacrificed his life for education. With his death the Irish Democrats took over, creating a machine that has ruled Chicago ever since.

  I was, at best, a peripheral observer of the political drama. But Yetta loved novels too. She had me reading Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe—all three volumes of it. Enormously stirring, this life of a Romantic Titan. When I tried to read it again, decades later, it seemed to me nothing but twaddle.

  I suppose I entered into Yetta’s enthusiasms for Yetta’s sake, for her importance to me was very great. She was one of those persons who draw you into their lives and also install themselves in yours. Even the small genetic accident that made one of her eyes seem oddly placed added warmth and sadness to her look. She always seemed to me to have a significant sort of Jewish beauty. One no more understands these things than the immigrant parents who heard the class orator understood the word “mitigate.” There is something radically mysterious in the specificity of another human being which everybody somehow responds to. Love is not a bad word for this response. Today’s memorial testifies to Yetta’s secret power, the power of being Yetta.

  To Hymen Slate

  November 25, 1996 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Hymen,

  I am not going to molest you with my deep thoughts today. I want to say first of all that I greatly enjoyed your letter and have thought of various ways of answering. Since I came down a couple of years ago with a tremendous disease I have learned that people when they ask how you are don’t really want a detailed reply. Naturally the sick man has given a great deal of thought to his condition and his disorder and is in a position to tell them something of deep and permanent value. But as you have probably had occasion to observe, their eyes glaze over just as you are getting to the best part. The noblest thing a convalescent can do is to let them off the hook, that is, spare them the consequences of their question. In a way, it’s like being old. It’s best not to try to tell anybody what it’s like.

  Janis and I shuttle between Vermont and Brookline. This time of year Vermont turns gloomy and it’s also somewhat dangerous. The hunters are out for free meat, a deer for Thanksgiving. We have bought crimson parkas, because the sportsmen get drunk in the woods and fire in all directions. The shooting will be over at the end of the month. Janis taught me how to go cross-country on skis but I doubt that my legs are strong enough these days to do it. I don’t think I mentioned that my youngest son, Daniel, a newspaperman, has been working on the Brattleboro Reformer, our local paper. One of the attractions of Vermont was that he and his wife lived nearby. They have moved two hours away to the town of Rutland because he has a new job. He has become an editor of the Rutland Herald, so we shall be seeing less of him. He has grown up to be literate, bookish, but by now he has seen much more of life than I had seen at his age. My oldest son, who came to visit you last spring, I think, is in California. His daughter, a good-looking young woman of twenty-four, is in New York as is my son Adam. Daniel is the one I see most often.

  As for Boston, it’s a snooty city that thinks very highly of its cultural opulence. So many art galleries and so much chamber music and so many literary societies and across the river there is Harvard prepared to answer all the questions one can think of. It doesn’t have a monopoly on the best minds, but it does have, or claims to have, the biggest concentration of them. There are a few good friends in Brookline where we live, and also two or three at Harvard. We don’t see any of them very often. I never was able to do all the things I wanted to do, cover all the bases, but one has to be much younger to have any real gift for relationships. Those we had when we were young remain the best. One of the things that bugged me, grieved me, about living in Hyde Park was to pass the houses where my late friends once lived, and even the windows from which I myself used to look out more than fifty years ago. The daily melancholy of passing these places was among the things that drove me East. Here I have no melancholy past to bug me.

  But we did have an agreeable group of pals and rivals, didn’t we?

  I teach only the spring term at Boston University, so I am free during eight months of the year. We don’t do much traveling anymore because I tire so easily. I haven’t been to New York in more than a year, but Janis and I are going to be in Chicago next April. This gives us four months to plan a reunion.

  Much love from your reasonably intact friend,

  1997

  To Julian Behrstock

  January 14, 1997 Brookline

  Dear Julian:

  1997—what a date, hey? Long, long ago I used to play the arithmetic game and reckon (born in 1915) how old I would be when the century ended. Eighty-five in the year 2000. A completely unnatural and comical number. That’s why my eighty-first year is so unlikely—a laughing matter; except that it’s no joke. When I complain about my health it’s really about the dwindling of my recuperative powers that I complain. In the past I bounced back after surgeries or pneumonias. Now I lose my footing when I put on my pants. The sense of balance is gone. I lost six pounds in intensive care. I put on about eighty while convalescing, and now I can’t get rid of the increment. No matter how I fast I have to hold my breath to fasten the waistband.

  Then there is the stamp of old age on the face, head, hands and ankles. These blue-cheese ankles—what a punishment for narcissists! And after a lifetime of dogged realism about oneself and such pride in keeping the record straight! Worst of all, in many ways, is the failure of memory. Yesterday I couldn’t recall Muriel Spark. Today I can’t pin down the name of a Cambridge prof whose books I liked—Bogan maybe. All the better to appreciate the joke about the old guy who says to the doctor, “There are three things I can’t recall: names, faces—and the third I can’t remember.” This from the fella who knew what your brother Arthur used to call you, back in 1935! So shall I put up a fight to build up this collapsing structure?

  All this, because I’m trying to explain why I may have sounded dejected when we spoke. The truth is that I was cheerfully surprised by the strength of your familiar voice. You sounded altogether yourself, and the letter that just arrived was written in a firm hand and perfectly legible.

  It’s not Bogan—the name is Denis Brogan, and the book was about nineteenth-century French politics. Brogan was entirely sex-mad. He told me an unforgettable anecdote about one of his girlfriends. They were in a taxi and she said, “Dennis, I want to show you how I feel about you.” And she raised her skirt and placed his hand upon her female organ—so gallantly streaming, as our national anthem has it. I tell you this pour t’égayer, cher vieux copain [126]. I send you all the finest regards and wishes in the world.

  Fight on, and write me soon,

  To Philip Roth

  May 7, 1997 Brookline


  Dear Philip,

  Your letter forced me to think my story through again and I admit that I was or am confused about it. I had given some thought to the pain problem. As I followed the characters, they led me to examine their cynicism. They had to be “humorously” cynical and what they possibly hoped was to close out their witty but in the end fatiguing observations of one another. Probably they feel that they can wear their pain out, or attenuate it, or outlive it.

  So I concluded that the pain had to be taken for granted.

  Harry Trellman is willing—no, happy—to have Amy at last, for no better reason than that she is Amy. She is the ineradicable and irreplaceable actual. So, just as Bodo Heisinger is glad to take back a wife who once put out a contract on him, Harry proposes to Amy though he had heard the sex cries she uttered under some stranger from New York. He has become aware that he has longed for her and spoken to her (unilaterally) almost daily for decades.

  But he gave her no inducement to think of him. Still he does see that he has come somehow to belong to Amy. Because she is his actual.

  To all this there is a clue, so well hidden that it would have escaped not only Sherlock Holmes but even Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, by far the smarter of the two. What is this indispensable hint? It’s buried in the conversation between Amy and Mrs. Bodo. Amy tells Mrs. Bodo how Jay prepared his seduction routines. He impressed the ladies with his intellectual powers. He quoted great authors—without attribution, naturally. She repeats verbatim one passage. He had taken it from a book, and she had found the book. The underlined passage speaks of the spiritual character of the human face. Not a single thing in the universe is quite like it. The whole subject is wrapped up in a few sentences: “The face of a man is the most amazing thing in the life of the world. Another world shines through it.” A worldly person like Harry, having small use for his worldliness, takes Amy’s face for his actual. He needs it. He has to have it.

  Now, I am not in a position to claim that I made this clear. I felt it. But as somebody coming back (briefly) from the dead I wasn’t able to work it out acceptably (to you or me).

  You do well to direct me, or connect me, to Eliade. Do you have a copy of [Norman] Manea’s article? [ . . .]

  We’ll be in Vermont from the end of May.

  Yours ever,

  Roth had responded to Bellow’s recently published The Actual. Norman Manea’s essay on the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, Bellow’s former colleague in the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago, had detailed Eliade’s pro-Nazi activities in Romania during the Second World War. The essay appeared first in The New Republic and subsequently in Manea’s On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (1993).

  To Richard Stern

  [n.d.] W. Brattleboro

  Dear Richard—

  You did right to send the news of poor Zita [Cogan]’s death. I had heard about it from [Jonathan] Kleinbard, and from her son [Marc Cogan]. The woods grow thinner as the chênes qu’on abat [127] fall faster. Zita and I, in our Humboldt Park days, lived on the same street. One of the feats of my youth was to shinny up the front of her house to fetch her from her second-storey room on Sunday mornings and summon her to a picnic. A truckful of high-school students cheered.

  Now there’s a wholesome reminiscence, for a change.

  You may be sure that you’d have been on my list of speakers at the Nat’l Portrait Gallery. I wasn’t consulted about the arrangements. But it was handsome of you to fly in from Chicago. In your two-toned shirt you looked handsome, too. You were beaming also, and your color was notably high. “Glowing,” as young women’s gym teachers liked to say. “Not sweating, but glowing.”

  Give Alane an affectionate greeting.

  Ever yours,

  Poet Alane Rollings is Richard Stern’s wife.

  In Memory of Zita Cogan

  (Read in Bellow’s absence in Hyde Park, Illinois, May 16, 1997, at a memorial tribute organized by Mostly Music, the organization Zita Cogan founded)

  Many decades ago, on a June morning, we drove up to Zita’s house in a truck. Her room was on the second floor and overlooked Humboldt Park. The picnickers honked and shouted. We were bound for the dunes. Her doorbell may have gone dead, or I assumed that it had, so I climbed up the face of the building just as John Barrymore or Douglas Fairbanks would have done, and banged on her bedroom door. I think that this made her very happy. What was said I can’t remember. But it was a fine moment.

  There was a Russian flavor about Zita. She wore Gypsy blouses and beads and bangles. We were all, in those days, partly Russian. Instead of underclothes we wore binding and scratchy swim-suits. Our pockets—and our heads as well—were nearly empty in those days of youth and vainglory.

  This is one of my favorite recollections of Zita as a young woman. And now as our days on earth are almost used up I cherish this adolescent moment. Showing off? Of course I was. But when I burst in on her she was beautiful, and I was not so full of myself that I couldn’t know it.

  To Philip Roth

  June 17, 1997 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Philip,

  Just a note: You speak of [Norman] Manea’s fantasy of Romania, “the myth he’d been making of it in exile.” I haven’t talked enough with him to have any notion of this myth and it would be very interesting to hear your account of it. I wonder why his notebook was lost on Lufthansa. You say he left it on the seat beside him when he disembarked? As you must know, I am no Freudian and I never have believed that a man’s life is nothing but a front for the operations of his unconscious. Still, there must have been some sound reason for losing the diary of his visit to his native country.

  I don’t know Orwell’s essay on Swift. I shall try to get a copy in the Brattleboro library or from BU. It’s true that you hardly realize how deep Orwell goes because he is so clear about what he’s doing.

  Several years ago Janis and I were invited to a dinner for [Václav] Havel and found a message at our New York hotel to the effect that the dinner had been changed into a public celebration which would be held at the great cathedral (whatever they call it) at Riverside Drive and 120th Street. When we got there there were thousands of people inside the church and crowding to get in, and television crews and everyone was there, a blizzard of celebrities from Hollywood. Arthur Miller, I think, was present, and Paul Newman and a hundred others. Henry Kissinger had come to represent political seriousness, and I had been asked to introduce him. The Czechs didn’t know what had hit them. They were sitting all in a row at the front of the cathedral—they were the occasion for this great display by the entertainment industry. Havel and I chatted for about three minutes and were separated as if we were tomato seeds in the digestive tract. Since then I have been several times invited to congresses for this or that in Prague, and I have yet to make my first visit there.

  Yours,

  To Werner Dannhauser

  September 1, 1997 W. Brattleboro

  Dear Werner,

  This is a good morning for pangs of conscience. The summer is stalled, the day is gray, oppressive, in check, windless—not even a small breeze. I feel that I’m below, in nature’s insides, and that she seems to be having a digestive problem.

  I haven’t written to my correspondents because . . . because, because and because. I haven’t added up the deaths of various friends during the last six months. [François] Furet you knew and perhaps you remember Zita Cogan who died a few weeks ago. The others were long-time buddies: a college classmate, in Paris [Julian Behrstock]. In New York, Yetta [Barshevsky] Shachtman, the widow of the US Trotskyite leader. She and I would walk back from school through Humboldt Park (Chicago) discussing Trotsky’s latest pamphlet on the German question. We also read the “Communist Manifesto” and “State and Revolution.” She was an earnest girl—the dear kind—Comrade Yetta. Her Pa was a carpenter, and his old Nash was filled with tools, shavings and sawdust. And now she has gone—human sawdust and shavings. There was also a clever, clumsy big man named [Hymen] Slate who believed (
when we were young) that a sense of humor should be part of every argument about the existence of God. Laughing was proof that there was a God. But God in the end laid two kinds of cancer on him and took him away very quickly. When we were in our late sixties, in East Rogers Park, we met every Thursday to drink tea and consider the question of immortality. Neither of us had read Kant.

  Next came the news that David Shahar had died. So many women in his life. When I met him with yet another one on some Jerusalem street he would lay a finger to his lips as he passed. But [his wife] Shula was far too smart to be deceived—even if she had reason to want to be. I thought he must have a large turnover of ladies but evidently he was like a Mafia don. He had a band of Mafiosi girls each with her own turf—Paris, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, too, or Beersheba. His career would repay close study. I did like him, but my deeper sympathies went to Shula. That too would be worth studying—since so many people devote themselves to these studies. What an amazing amount of research is going on around us. But why should I identify with Shula? I suspect that she knew him far better than he could ever know himself. That his afternoons of love were a consolation for his literary failures. Why couldn’t he have come to her for consolation?

  A stupid question! I really know better than to ask.

  I will mention one more death, that of a student from Chicago—very bright and handsome. His dissertation was published and widely reviewed. I argued with him about it. It was a little too fashionable for my taste. I sensed that he saw me as an old fuddy-duddy, but no . . . he ended years later by sharing my opinions. He did well for himself academically and got a tenured appointment in Southern California (Claremont?). He married a Dupont girl from Delaware but they were divorced after a year or two. He was charming, lively, and was strangely loyal to me—came every year to Vermont to talk matters over. He last visited in July and was unusually warm and close. A month later he died in a highway crash, and his tearful parents phoned to tell me what had happened—that they were notifying me because . . . because he had been so close to me and I had seen him through some bad times.