Letters (77 page)
Authors: Saul Bellow
I am dictating this letter to Janis, one of my aims being to entertain all of us.
It will make me very happy to see you again.
Much love to you both,
Anthony Kerrigan (1919-1991) was noted for his translations of Borges, Neruda, Ortega y Gasset, Cela and others. In 1973 he won a National Book Award for his translation of Unamuno’s
Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations.
Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations.
To Sigmund Koch
May 1, 1986 Chicago
Dear Professor Koch,
I have a letter from Stephen Toulmin informing me that you were close to Delmore Schwartz at NYU before you became a professional psychologist. A substantial recommendation. Stephen tells me that I would find you congenial, and that I wouldn’t be squandering scarce time by talking to you. It’s the interviewer himself that matters. Too often he heckles or badgers the poor mousy painter or poet, who then becomes obsessed with crazy plans to escape.
I spend my summers in Vermont, and if I succeed in finishing the small book I’m writing by September, I think I might be able to come to Boston for a day or two. But there is not the slightest chance that I will lay aside an incomplete manuscript to go and chat about aesthetics. The second or third week of September may be possible.
Sincerely yours,
To Barley Alison
July 18, 1986 West Brattleboro
Dear Barley,
Your idea about “Occasional Pieces” looks good on paper, sounds good when read aloud, but I wouldn’t dream of molesting Martin Amis who has much more important things to do; it would be a dreadful imposition to ask him to fuss with my old papers. I can see that you don’t believe for a single moment that I shall have a book ready to publish by the end of summer. I can always count on you to wave aside my solemnest assurances.
Plus ça change,
etc.
Plus ça change,
etc.
Your last letter is too thick to be used as a bookmark and not thick enough to be wedged under my rickety kitchen table. I am unable to use the advice it contains, and I can’t come to greater harm by keeping my own counsel.
Really, Alexandra has done one of her most exquisite snowjobs on you. You are one of a regiment of friends whom she has entirely convinced that
I
wanted to divorce
her
. It all makes excellent sense: Two brothers die, I turn seventy, and then I put myself out on the street. Do you know this anecdote about the Duke of Wellington? He is approached by a gentleman who asks, “Sir, are you Mr. Jones?” Wellington answers, “Sir, if you can believe that, you can believe anything.”
I
wanted to divorce
her
. It all makes excellent sense: Two brothers die, I turn seventy, and then I put myself out on the street. Do you know this anecdote about the Duke of Wellington? He is approached by a gentleman who asks, “Sir, are you Mr. Jones?” Wellington answers, “Sir, if you can believe that, you can believe anything.”
Now a brief and simple statement about Alexandra’s mathematics: You can have your research assistants at Secker [and Warburg] check this out for you at Cambridge or Oxford. The power of even the ablest mathematicians begins to decline in the third decade. Alexandra is now in her fifties. She may enjoy trotting around to congresses where she is sure of a warm welcome because she is pretty and, thanks to me, well-heeled also. She can stand the young prodigies to lunch, but she has little to contribute to the proceedings. She told me with heavy emphasis not many months ago that for a long time she had not been able to obtain significant results in her researches, and that it was ALL MY FAULT.
There is much much more to be said, but I shan’t say it.
Much love from your surviving friend,
To John Auerbach
July 29, 1986 West Brattleboro
Dear John,
One of the peculiarities of rural Vermont is that we have no modern touch telephone here, and all efforts to ring you in S’dot Yam last Sunday failed. Probably these rural operators didn’t know that there is a country called Israel. I think this note will arrive before your departure on August 11th. I don’t know whether Tony [Kerrigan] has mentioned that we saw something of each other last spring in Chicago, and that he was planning to be parachuted into Cuba, his birthplace. Havana for him, Lachine for me, Warsaw for you, N.Y. for Nola—I say nothing of Bucharest—we make quite a cosmopolitan little family, like the people on your kibbutz. (I re-read two of your stories last week, one of them, “The Witch,” a marvelous thing; we must try again to place it.) Finally (I am dictating rapidly), I came across a letter from Ken Moore requesting your address, and I saw no harm in giving it to him, although he and Tony are not on good terms. So he will write to S’dot Yam and you will be in Newton, Mass.
Lots of luck, and love to you both,
To Leon Botstein
September 24, 1986 Chicago
Dear Leon,
Your fiddle is safe in a cupboard in West Brattleboro, Vermont. Had your letter been sent a week earlier I would have brought the instrument to Chicago. Since my house is not far from Marlboro College, it might be brought there if your friend is in a position to come by and claim it. I know of no way to ship it, but the man who takes care of the place when I’m gone might be able to bring it to Bennington or to Greenfield, Mass. or Brattleboro. I was glad to have a violin to play with, but I couldn’t really do it justice, so I shut it in the case with reluctance and haven’t gone near it for a year or so.
I had intended sending you a note about William Hunt whom I highly and strongly recommend as a poet and teacher, and also as a person. I used to see him often in Chicago, and I still see him as frequently as I can because he is such an illuminating conversationalist that for days after talking to him I feel elated. He tells me that he has asked you for employment. You’ve probably made your appointments [at Bard] for the coming year, but if you do have a vacancy you couldn’t fill it with a better man.
All best,
To Bobby Markels
November 4, 1986 Chicago
Dear Bobby,
Everything seems to be looking up for you. I thought it could, I thought it would, so I am pleased for your sake. Now that you’ve got your rose-colored glasses back on your nose I can tell you that I lost two brothers last year, all the brothers I had, and that my wife decided to divorce me and that I am now seventy-one years of age, and have some afflictions that go with high seniority. Putting together all these events, or disasters, you may better understand why it miffed me to receive from you so many self-engrossed communications. It’s not altogether bad to be self-engrossed, but it is difficult to receive heaps of requests for encouragement, promotion and what-not-else. Not that I grudge you such things, but to sit down with pieces of paper before a typewriter and pound out letters on request or demand is not always appealing to injured or troubled parties. I found out when the Nobel Prize came my way that I was henceforth to be considered an elder statesman, and a functionary doing good to younger people whose bolt had not yet been shot. If you ever visit my office you will see loads of books to be read, loads of letters to be answered, loads of angels who have no space to fly in and multitudes of inflamed
nudniks
[
103
] whose mothers told them they were angels, and whose English profs told them that I was a do-gooder: “Send him manuscripts, send him 2,481,526 letters of mounting hysteria demanding replies and ending in vituperations and threats.” Well, to hell with all that. I continue to open letters from people I know or like or love, but it does cross my mind from time to time that although they may like or love me still, they haven’t said so in ten or fifteen years and either their feelings have dried out or their manners have gone to hell. If you hadn’t sent me two nice letters in recent months I wouldn’t even be explaining myself. This is a
quid pro quo
. You stopped shaking my tree and you got one peach
gratis
.
nudniks
[
103
] whose mothers told them they were angels, and whose English profs told them that I was a do-gooder: “Send him manuscripts, send him 2,481,526 letters of mounting hysteria demanding replies and ending in vituperations and threats.” Well, to hell with all that. I continue to open letters from people I know or like or love, but it does cross my mind from time to time that although they may like or love me still, they haven’t said so in ten or fifteen years and either their feelings have dried out or their manners have gone to hell. If you hadn’t sent me two nice letters in recent months I wouldn’t even be explaining myself. This is a
quid pro quo
. You stopped shaking my tree and you got one peach
gratis
.
Yours affectionately,
In Memory of Bernard Malamud
(Delivered in Bellow’s absence by Howard Nemerov at the annual luncheon of the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, December 5, 1986)
Some thirty-five years ago I gave a talk in Oregon, and Bernard and Ann Malamud came down from Corvallis, where he was teaching, to hear me. I don’t remember what I said—from time to time one has to talk—but I do remember our meeting. I was struck by his expressive eyes. I didn’t of course know what it was that they were expressing. I couldn’t know that until, in the course of years, I had read his novels and stories.
Inland Oregon seemed an odd place for a man from New York, and I can recall thinking that it did Corvallis great credit to have imported such an exotic. He was not an exotic to me. We were cats of the same breed. The sons of Eastern European immigrant Jews, we had gone early into the streets of our respective cities, were Americanized by schools, newspapers, subways, streetcars, sandlots. Melting Pot children, we had assumed the American program to be the real thing: no barriers to the freest and fullest American choices. Of course we understood that it was no simple civics-course matter. We knew too much about the slums, we had assimilated too much dark history in our mothers’ kitchens to be radiant optimists. Our prospects were sufficiently bright if we set out to become shopkeepers, druggists, accountants, lawyers. Even doctors, if we were able to vault over the quota system. There were, to be sure, higher ambitions. There were Jewish philosophers like Morris R. Cohen, scholars like [Harry] Wolfson at Harvard. At a more heady level there were [Bernard] Berenson types who entered the cosmopolitan art world and associated as equals, or near-equals, with Brahmins and English aristocrats. But if you had no social ambitions of this kind, and no special desire to be rich, to shuffle off emigrant vulgarity and live in an Italian villa, if you set out instead to find a small place for yourself as a writer, you were looking for trouble in uncharted waters, you were asking for it. Of course it was admiration, it was love that drew us to the dazzling company of the great masters, all of them belonging to the Protestant Majority—some of them explicitly anti-Semitic. You had only to think of Henry Adams, or to remember certain pages in Henry James’s
The American Scene,
the anguish of his recoil from East Side Jews. But one could not submit to control by such prejudices. My own view was that in religion the Christians had lived with us, had lived in the Bible of the Jews, but when the Jews wished to live Western history with them they were refused. As if that history were not, by now, also ours. Have the Jews no place in (for instance) the German past?
The American Scene,
the anguish of his recoil from East Side Jews. But one could not submit to control by such prejudices. My own view was that in religion the Christians had lived with us, had lived in the Bible of the Jews, but when the Jews wished to live Western history with them they were refused. As if that history were not, by now, also ours. Have the Jews no place in (for instance) the German past?
Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us. Malamud in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York. He was a myth-maker, a fabulist, a writer of exquisite parables. The English novelist Anthony Burgess said of him that he “never forgets that he is an American Jew, and he is at his best when posing the situation of a Jew in urban American society.” “A remarkably consistent writer,” he goes on, “who has never produced a mediocre novel . . . he is devoid of either conventional piety or sentimentality . . . always profoundly convincing.” Let me add on my own behalf that the accent of a hard-won and individual emotional truth is always heard in Malamud’s words. He is a rich original of the first rank.
1987
To the Swedish Academy
March 6, 1987 Chicago
Dear Sirs,
I wish to place a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature. My candidate is Robert Penn Warren, America’s eldest and most distinguished poet. Mr. Warren had a poetic rebirth in the sixth and seventh decades of his life and has produced some of his most powerful work in old age. He is now in his early eighties and has never been more fertile. In mid-life he was prodigiously successful (author of
All the King’s Men
and other works of fiction). He is also widely known as a critic and scholar. He has written significant studies of Coleridge, Theodore Dreiser and many others. During the Sixties he wrote extensively about the civil-rights struggle. It is not necessary to make an elaborate case for his eligibility and I trust that the Academy will give serious consideration to this nomination.
All the King’s Men
and other works of fiction). He is also widely known as a critic and scholar. He has written significant studies of Coleridge, Theodore Dreiser and many others. During the Sixties he wrote extensively about the civil-rights struggle. It is not necessary to make an elaborate case for his eligibility and I trust that the Academy will give serious consideration to this nomination.
Sincerely,
To Rachel E. G. Schultz
June 2, 1987 [W. Brattleboro]
Dear Rachel,
When I attended your mother’s wedding thirty years ago I knew it was going to be a good thing, with excellent results, and I was dead right. You yourself are one of the best of those results and I send you loving congratulations on your graduation from medical school. It warms my cynical old heart to see that mortal choices sometimes achieve beautiful results. I wish I could come to Cincinnati but I am, to put it succinctly, too beat to travel. Once you finish your residency I will accept anesthetics from nobody but you.
Signed, your Great Uncle.
To Cynthia Ozick
July 19, 1987 West Brattleboro
Dear Cynthia,
At the Academy [of Arts and Letters] I was happy to see you, but then a wave of embarrassment struck me when I was reminded of my neglect and bad manners. You didn’t mean to embarrass me when you reminded me that I owed you a letter (there had been a gap of two years). The embarrassment came from within, a check to my giddiness. It excited me to have so many wonderful contacts under the Academy’s big top. Too many fast currents, too much turbulence, together with a terrible scratching at the heart—a sense that the pleasures of the day were hopeless, too boundless and wild to be enjoyed. There was such a crowd of dear people to see but I had unsettled accounts with all of them.
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