Letters (67 page)

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Authors: Saul Bellow

BOOK: Letters
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Ever yours,
 
To Hymen Slate
August 19, 1979 West Brattleboro
Dear Hymen:
Don’t knock your way of talking, I miss it out here in the green country. I need the green for my mental and bodily health, but it’s far from all-sufficient. Someday, when you’re inclined to listen, I’ll take pleasure in drawing a free-flowing sketch of what gives with me this decade—you ought to be told, and you’d certainly understand. I assume that you’d dispute some of my premises. I assume also, since you’re a man of a definite style, that you would listen selectively, with an eye to what seemed to you harmonious. Each of us has his own way of screening esthetically, and the older we grow the fussier we become about the facts we accept. I see that now. It’s a lucky man who has a generous style and can accept the wider range of other people’s facts. You have a generous style, and that’s what makes listening to your talk so agreeable. I’ve tried some of my facts on you with varying success. You don’t really like it when I talk about the cultural void. You insist that there are human characteristics that have nothing at all to do with the cultural void, and to an important extent you’re right. The human characteristics have a clear priority. Philistinism is not as important as all that. Still, I have had monstrous encounters with it. My position is peculiar, and there are times when I have a pressing need to tell you what it’s like. We are the survivors of a band of boys who were putting something of their own together in cultureless Chicago forty years ago. Now we drink tea together of a Sunday afternoon, and I feel the touch again. It would be merely sentimental if we weren’t
really
talking. As you yourself have often observed, we
talk
, the subjects are real. Even when you send an amusing note it has to do with matter and consciousness—a certain arrangement of matter resulting in consciousness. And then I say, yes, but does the arrangement arrange itself by the hit-or-miss method of what the fellows like to call “emergent evolution” or is it a supervised arrangement directed by some power or spirit which uses the physical brain as its instrument? You know which side I favor.
Maybe I’m saying this under the influence of today’s thick fog, which cries out for penetration and lucidity. [ . . . ]
Love to you both,
 
To Eleanor Clark
October 10, 1979 Chicago
Dear Eleanor,
Reading [your novel]
Gloria Mundi
made my return to Chicago considerably easier, lessened the culture shock. In the summer I am in Vermont, not of it (trees, skies, books, wife—an aesthetic sanctuary). Yours, the real Vermont, put things in perspective. There
are
connections between Wilmington and Chicago.
I admired your book. I took particular pleasure in the speed with which you got over the foothills to reach the necessary altitude, the place where things happen, the stripped-for-action, unencumbered plainness of the narrative. A complex subject presented without awkwardness, complication or rhetorical backing and filling. “Short views, for God’s sake!” That’s what Sydney Smith said. That’s what the art of describing our breakdown demands. I took great satisfaction in your Vermonters, satisfaction of a different sort in the parachuting clergyman and the brat-maniacs. I was happy with your sketch of the Old Man, too. He took such pride in his culture. You remember his Céline essay, I’m sure, and the statements about the future of culture under socialism. Then the common man will be a Goethe, a Beethoven. He had me fooled. Alas for poor him, and poor us.
Alexandra still talks about the evening we spent together. It made [Saul] Steinberg’s visit too. Next summer you come and dine with us.
Thanks for the book.
Yours ever,
 
“The Old Man” was Trotsky, on whose Mexico City staff Clark had served in the later 1930s.
 
 
To Owen Barfield
November 11, 1979 Chicago
Dear Owen:
With my “meaning to write” I am like a drunkard who says he will reform: going on the wagon, as drinkers here say, and the wagon is very different from the winged chariot. Your letter moved me by its warmth, kindness and candor. I have too much respect for what you have done, have made of yourself, to answer lightly and easily. Four or five years of reading Steiner have altered me considerably. Some kind of metamorphosis is going on, I think, and I am at a loss for words when I sit down to write to you. You will think it absurd that I should make a judge of you. It
is
absurd, and you must find it disagreeable as well, but the position carries no duties, you owe me nothing. I see you—it came through in your letter—as a man who has learned what to do with the consciousness-soul, has managed to regenerate severed connections and found passages that lead from thought to feeling. I won’t embarrass you by going on about this; you may think it bad form. I’ve observed in your books how you shun all such claims yourself, and that just as the Meggid calls himself the least of Michael’s servants you prefer to diminish yourself. The best of us have been destroyed in the wars of this century. Among the survivors there’s only the likes of ourselves to go on with. “I am myself indifferent honest, but . . .” Yes, it is like that. I am even more “indifferent honest,” myself, so it amused me to be described as a tank surrounded by pea-shooters.
I wanted to see you in Michigan, but it was impossible to go just then. I wouldn’t have had much time with you in any case. I have to satisfy myself by re-reading your books. I don’t think I shall be coming to England very soon. In Edinburgh two years ago an Anthroposophical lady, admonishing me, said, “Mr. Barfield will have to take you in hand in Kamaloca.” But perhaps I will have made some progress by that time and you won’t have to be so quite severe with me.
Yours most affectionately,
 
“Kamaloca” is the first stage of the afterlife, according to Anthroposophy.
1980
 
To Louis Lasco
January 3, 1980 Pasadena
Dear Luigi—
Peltz loves to tell of a visit to a Polish girl on Iowa St.—third floor. He blew the opportunity—pants down, two bucks gone. The girl was concerned. She said, “Oh, kid, you need practice—practice, practice practice!”
As an old Polish girl, of a sort, I too am a bit concerned. You’re a witty writer, but in the mss. you’ve lost your two bucks. Now, with a little practice you can get, and give, great satisfaction.
Ever yours, with love,
Soolabodoff
 
To Daniel Bellow
January 31, 1980 Pasadena
Dear Daniel,
Since I haven’t heard at all from you I take it that we won’t be seeing each other in California either because there is not time between terms or because you did not meet the little condition I set—no need to spell that out. But we often think of you and wonder what’s become of you. I mailed off your camp application signed and with a check so your summer is protected. I wish that I could see you more, I often miss you and I think somehow that you have arranged matters so in your own mind that the absence is mine from you and not yours from me. But the move East was after all by your choice. No reproach, I just think you should bear it in mind along with other facts, realities, truths. [ . . . ]
The other day I saw a set of Parkman in a bookshop. If I thought that you were interested in the early history of North America, the French-Indian wars, I’d send it to you. These are most exciting books. I’d read them myself if I had the time. I did read
The Oregon Trail
once and parts of the book on the Pontiac.
I’d be awfully glad to hear from you.
Love,
 
To Bobby Markels
January 31, 1980 Pasadena
Dear Bobby,
I am taking advantage of a crack typist to whirl back a reply. I enjoyed your poem, as I do all your productions. They are so relaxed that they do me good also in the way of détente. I met a lady who lives in your county and she tells me all the young people in Mendocino are in a lovely state of gentle ease. I asked her whether there was any sign of cultivated pot, but she said that she thought everyone there was naturally amiable, lovely and kind. I said this was certainly true of the one person I knew in Mendocino. I didn’t at all mind being listed by you. I thought if I could remember the shirt you ironed for me and still had it I would have it mounted and hung in the living room with a sentimental legend. [ . . . ]
You shouldn’t complain too much about being fifty. Fifty doesn’t seem much to me, my next birthday will be the sixty-fifth. The fifty years will have been worthwhile however if you have become wise enough to see through Nelson [Algren].
You mustn’t be too hard on your own egotism. The Bible says, “I am a worm, and no man.” When it comes to being hard on oneself the Bible is way ahead of us. Actually, atheists can never know how really insignificant they are. The same probably goes for agnostics. They only get a rain check.
Ever your affectionate friend,
 
Bobby Markels (born 1930) is the author of
How to Be a Human Bean
(1975) and other works. She lives in Mendocino, California.
 
 
To Albert Glotzer
January 31, 1980 Pasadena
Dear Al,
To keep you posted on [Ilya] Konstantinovski, he wrote to me from Paris where Gallimard is about to bring out his book. Would I read it, give him a blurb? As the much-esteemed maestro H. L. Mencken used to sign himself “with all the usual hypocrisies,” Konstantinovski gave me the usual hypocrisies. I don’t mind that, and I suppose by now the book is waiting for me in Chicago. Harper’s turned it down. The first reader said it was very good but the second opined that it was the rebellious outburst of a lifelong line-toer, that Konstantinovski, who had no intention ever of returning, was setting himself up in the West as one of the Major Russians of our time and was even recruiting a supporting cast of willing ladies. It seems that when he speaks to ladies he complains that they are unwilling to return his caresses and other acts of kindness. He’s not a very attractive man but it can’t be as hard as all that. There are ladies in every category, even his. I’ll send you a short report when I’ve read his book. [ . . . ]
Ever yours,
 
Ilya Konstantinovski’s book was
Le Seider de Varsovie.
It has never appeared in English.
 
 
To David Shahar
March 25, 1980 Pasadena
Dear David,
What shocking news! To be mugged in Jerusalem, in your own quiet neighborhood. The police were right, you were lucky to save your eye (I hope you are entirely recovered) from the neo-barbaric assault, as you call it. I take it from your letter that your attackers were not Arabs but North African [i.e., Sephardic] boys, since you speak of their wanting to hit an Ashkenazy. This is your introduction then to the tense watchfulness which has for years been the lot of New Yorkers, Chicagoans, even Londoners, I suppose. Not Muscovites. Theirs is a different system: Crime is a state monopoly. From now on you had better take your Jimmy [Shahar’s dog] with you when you go out for cigarettes. I hope he is fiercer than his namesake. Our own Jimmy [Carter] as you probably are aware is an affliction to us and to the rest of the world. I can’t say that he is actually the cause of our decline but he has become the foolish, impotent and repulsive symbol. But this is not a political message, rather a note of sympathy. [ . . . ] We send our love to both of you and to the children.
David Shahar (1926- 97), a fifth-generation Jerusalemite and much-honored Israeli writer, was best known for
The Palace of Shattered Vessels
(1969-94), his eight-volume series of historical novels.
 
 
To Ralph Ross
June 15, 1980 Chicago
Dear Ralph,
I’m not one of your prompt repliers: rather, a muller over of letters. No, I don’t need the Barfield book, I have other copies, also marked. I sometimes wonder what one can get out of Barfield if one hasn’t learned the “system.” Some of it is very curious, the different view of physics, for certain, the conviction that the law of the conservation of energy is all a mistake (this idea has too many poetic implications to be dismissed). My friends refuse to take any of this seriously. I forgive them as a friend should, and I perform other operations, in confirmation of my right to hold peculiar views. (Or is it a privilege, not a right?) Then I feel that I’m being faithful to Truth, through thick and thin. And it will do them good in the long,
long
run, perhaps after death. [ . . . ]
Alexandra adds her love to mine.
Yours,
 
To Walter Hasenclever

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