Letters (29 page)

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Authors: Saul Bellow

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There was no rush about the money. I am being stripped anyway [by divorce], and the value of money is exaggerated. With twice as much I am half as well off, but thank you anyway for sending it. Courtesy of poets. I never repay what I borrow from businessmen.
Your bad health is a nuisance. You should really decide to improve it, John. God knows, I’m a prey to too many weaknesses myself not to understand how it is. But there is a difference between being prey and
agreeing
to be prey. I do
not
agree. My defects will kill me, but they’ll have to fight me first, and they will lose a few battles before they win the war.
Things are not good, but they are better with me. Slowly, I’m beginning to get my strength back, though Anita B. has not let up in her campaign to get me crucified. It’s a good many miles to Golgotha yet.
Sasha [Sondra Tschacbasov] is infinitely more happy than she’s been in her life, I think. A poor book by Arnold Bennett I read this A.M.—
Lillian
—had one good thing in it. A young girl requires making. A man makes her into a woman. Whither then? I hope she’ll become my wife, but it is a great thing to have waked someone into life, and Sasha is a very considerable human being. [ . . . ]
We must have a conversation about health and disease. Meantime, old man, for the love of Mike stop knocking yourself out.
All the best,
 
To Samuel Freifeld
[Postmarked New York, N.Y., 25 April 1954]
Dear Pal—
Got record. Very enjoyable—I thank you. Separate thank-occasions are hardly the thing between blood-brothers. I have more gratitude in me than separate thank-grains can ever measure.
So you met my strange delightful buddy Delmore [Schwartz]. And Elizabeth? I hope you hit it off. I am very fond of them. Has Berryman come around? I took the liberty of giving him your address, too. [Peter] Viereck I don’t much care for. Are you still so “conservative”? I called it a phase and let it go at that. Strange you should argue with me as though I were a
Nation
liberal. Me?!!! So I refused to compound error by thinking you a McCarthy. Was I right?
About Eliot—I forgive you because you haven’t seen
The Confidential Clerk
. Wait! I don’t know what I’m protesting too much about. Do you mean that he’s a mighty Niagara and I a mere squirt? Possibly. But someone has to stand up for Jews and democrats, and when better champions are lacking, squirts must do what they can.
Thank (again!) you for your kindness. Just know I still have about enough dough to get by for a while. I considered calling on you for a loan when I found a house to buy. I need a place of my own very, very badly. I am nearly ready to
sit
and be Columbus’s chronicle, not one of his crew. It would do Gregory good, too; he loves to be with me, and it makes him happy to come to me in a settled place.
Anita keeps me fairly strapped. She always took far more than she gave. I don’t reproach her with anything; her nature is its own reproach. I am genuinely sorry for her but I can feel more compassion as an ex-husband. [ . . . ]
Best love,
 
To Theodore Weiss
[n.d.] [Barrytown]
Dear Ted:
I see you’ve made out something about my character by reading
Augie
. It’s true. Since I had to be there, I ended by rejoicing in Bard. It was quite something. We must have a full-dress discussion of it when you come back. I’d have made some compromise and stayed if I were a tougher character. But you’ve got to have stability
somewhere
to survive this
pays de merveilles
[
51
], cloud-cuckoo, monkey-on-the-back,
avant-garde
booby cosmos, and I’m afraid I just don’t have it—grit, gumption, spunk, stick-to-itiveness, values founded on rock. With all my heart I enjoyed the sight of a skinny pallid little boy arriving in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac and a lot of other things, more numerous than the daffodils. I took walks and fiddled with fiddling [Emil] Hauser and had excellent conversations. But I couldn’t survive meetings and in the end stopped attending. And if I had to choose between trichinosis and talking an hour with F[elix] Hirsch I’d—you know! Where’s that raw pork? And [James H.] Case—an Ivy League
shlimazl
[
52
]! I say little of the rest of the administration, and of the trustees I have only to speak the name. They are wonderful! Giants of deformity. They could stand with Sobakevitch or any other giant in
Dead Souls
.
I’m going to miss Jack Ludwig and Ted Hoffman and Heinrich [Blücher] and Andy and you. You and I are, I think, the slowly but durably acquainted type and I have a pleasant expectation of knowing you better. I’ll be around in the spring. Europe, alas, is not in my plans. My son can’t do without my help this year. It is also somewhat the other way around. But he’s starting at another school; I’m beginning another book, and barring the unbarrable unforeseen you’ll find me here in the spring when you arrive.
Isn’t it amazing how little truth about English weather there is in English poetry? I wonder why that is. They knew no better, perhaps.
Sondra and I send all three of you (I assume Roz is still with you) our very best.
 
Theodore Weiss (1917-2003), poet and longtime editor of the
Quartely Review of Literature,
was at Oxford for the year.
 
 
To John Berryman
December 7, 1954 [New York City]
How are you, John?
We begin to look for you now, as Xmas comes on, you melancholy Santa Claus. Last night in solemn conversation, when near looped, your name came up. Spoken by me, in fact. It was something nice, and so tonight I make wig-wags through the dark of night towards Minnesota. Minneapolis
is
beautiful, I agree, and I was happy there, after a fashion. Part of those sixteen years before the fortieth year. Which is the very next. I don’t fear it very much however. I’m growing so lazy, John, it appalls me. I don’t even worry. My anxieties are like old dogs. They no longer run after rabbits. They only dream and whine, asleep.
Am writing a handsome new book, which is so far highly satisfactory. It’s called
Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son, or The Song of the Oedipus Complex
. I do not worry about that either. Do you know, though, as I creep near the deepest secrets of my life, I drop off like a lotus-eater. I am being extremely lazy.
It’s probably all to the good that you left Iowa, since they didn’t appreciate you. I’d be happy to know you were friendly with Herbert McCloskey and his wife [in Minneapolis]. They are my very good friends, and I have written them about you. [ . . . ]
Write well, and remember me to everyone.
Love,
 
And Sondra’s love.
1955
 
To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
March 27, 1955 333 Riverside Drive, New York
Dear Mr. Moe:
In response to your inquiry I am able to say that my estimated income from writing for the year beginning in September, 1955 is about three thousand dollars. As you will perhaps recall, I have two dependents. There may be other money coming but I can’t be sure of it.
My plans for work during the coming year (September ’55 to September ’56) will take me to Rome for at least half of that time and I estimate my own traveling expenses at about five hundred; living expenses for myself and my family during the entire period of the Fellowship would run to about three thousand. About three thousand more would cover the clerical and other smaller expenses. I am therefore asking the Guggenheim Foundation to consider my request for a Fellowship grant of approximately thirty-eight hundred dollars. This should enable me to finish my novel now in progress.
Sincerely yours,
 
To Sherry Mangan
June 3, 1955 [New York City]
Dear Mangan—
Thank you very much. My spirit, at least, was sober and I remember and stand by what I said. I couldn’t agree more about Manhattan and its miseries, and I will get out of here soon. But before I (or we) come to Spain, a short stay in Nevada is required of me, divorce laws being of a near-Spanish backwardness. So we should be arriving in Europe in February of ’56. A Guggenheim makes matters easier for me this year.
What are your plans? Will you be staying long in Málaga? I’d hate to put you to the trouble of describing it if you were not going to be there. In 1947 I spent a week there and saw it a little.
Yours with best wishes,
 
John Joseph Sherry Mangan (1904-61) was an editor, poet, novelist and leading journalist at
Time, Life,
and
Fortune
in the 1940s. A dedicated Trotskyist long after the cause had faded, Mangan would find himself more and more isolated, dying alone and impoverished in Rome.
 
 
To Malcolm Cowley
June 5, 1955 Barrytown
Dear Malcolm—
Thank you for your most generous Guggenheim letter. The news of the award came at about the same time as my father’s death and I have been in a confused and incompetent state these last six weeks. I’m only now beginning to come out of it a bit. I’m sure your letter had great weight with the committee and I’m very grateful.
Sincerely,
 
To Leslie Fiedler
June 14, 1955 333 Riverside Drive, New York
Dear Leslie—
Since my father’s death last month I’ve been slow at everything. Not that I was ever prompt in anything, but life is particularly difficult in all departments just now. If I knew where I was going to be at Xmas I would be glad to help you bring up engines against the New Orthodoxy, as you name it. But as I have a Guggenheim and can travel, how do I know where the old spirit in my feet is going to lead me?
Not
to Paris, that I can tell you. But neither is it likely to take me to Chicago. Many thanks just the same.
I’m grateful for the kind mention you gave me in the
N
[
ew
]
R
[
epublic
] piece, although I don’t consider myself part of the
Partisan
group. Not those dying beasts. (They posed as Phoenixes but were Dodos.) I always knew it. I have ever been unideological. I have sophisticated skin and naïve bones.
As for the sales of
Augie
, Viking denies
Pop. Library
figure, but who says it’s bad to be a Jew in America? Is it better in Israel?
Shalom,
and greetings to Margaret et al.,
 
Perhaps you’d like to try Wright Morris? His address is 501 Beechtree Lane, Wayne, Pa.
 
To Alfred Kazin
June 29, 1955 Barrytown
Dear Alfred:
Last night Sondra dreamed that Anne had given birth to a daughter (hurray) and that her friend Anita Maximillian had given birth to another, and that you were the father of both, and everyone was supremely pleased—as why shouldn’t everybody be? I congratulate everybody. This dream indicates that in Sondra’s eyes you have become the Father personified. For you this is honor, and for me it is hope. We are both well. Sondra has lost her job, to great delight. First she was affronted, and then it made her, as it should have done, happy. [ . . . ]
My own spirits, as may show forth, are not at all low. I’m not doing the sort of thing I want to do. Not yet. But God lets me practice my trade for several hours of the day, so what have I to complain of? And I read a good many books and wait for matters to straighten themselves out, and I am confident that they will. The other day, enjoyed [Jacob] Bronowski’s book on Blake; it did me good to read a Marxian again. I’m told he’s an engineer and member of the Coal Board.
Well,
molti saluti
, and don’t be too nervous. I’m sure Anne can do this thing quite easily.
All the best,
 
Thanks for the wine!
 
To Ruth Miller
July 27, 1955 Barrytown
Dear Ruth:
“May I say something?” Somewhere in Italian comedy there’s a man who prefaces everything with this; I forget the place, but it is very funny. Well, then, this is what I want to say. Your essay has many peculiarities, all of them first-rate. My mind follows yours, and Ralph [Ellison]’s, too, through the hoops, up the ropes, into the trapezes, down in the net and all around the three rings. This was exhilarating and good, every minute of it. There’s nothing that brightens the mind more than this sort of exercise. You are a good woman, you have every talent you need, talent to burn, and you are wise, too, and I take great pride and happiness in being your old friend. But may I say something?

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