Letters (8 page)
Authors: Saul Bellow
Of course we have not yet lost the CP. For the liberals swarm around us, and as inevitably as fruit flies gather on lush bananas, so do [Earl] Browder’s minions flock to liberals. If Harris thinks it profitable there may be reconciliation. Harris thinks nothing of assassinating a scruple or knifing a principle if thereby he can profit.
I would like very much to hear from you.
Sincerely,
Bellow was working as associate editor of
The Beacon,
a monthly founded by his childhood friend Sydney J. Harris that advertised itself as “Chicago’s Liberal Magazine,” an editorial stance uncongenial to Bellow’s youthful Bolshevist sympathies. In this letter he attempts to make common cause with the Trotskyist Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Earl Browder had become chairman of the American Communist Party in 1932. During his term as general secretary, he supported the Popular Front, a Stalin-sanctioned policy of friendly outreach to liberals and support for New Deal policies. Running as Communist candidate for President in the 1936 election, Browder won 80,195 votes. Albert Glotzer (1908-99), a founder of the Trotskyist movement in America, had been the first Westerner to visit Trotsky in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, in the Sea of Marmara; there Glotzer was briefly his secretary and bodyguard. In 1937 he served in Mexico City as stenographer for the John Dewey-led commission that exposed the fraudulence of Stalin’s charges against Trotsky. Glotzer would be a lifelong friend of Bellow’s.
The Beacon,
a monthly founded by his childhood friend Sydney J. Harris that advertised itself as “Chicago’s Liberal Magazine,” an editorial stance uncongenial to Bellow’s youthful Bolshevist sympathies. In this letter he attempts to make common cause with the Trotskyist Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Earl Browder had become chairman of the American Communist Party in 1932. During his term as general secretary, he supported the Popular Front, a Stalin-sanctioned policy of friendly outreach to liberals and support for New Deal policies. Running as Communist candidate for President in the 1936 election, Browder won 80,195 votes. Albert Glotzer (1908-99), a founder of the Trotskyist movement in America, had been the first Westerner to visit Trotsky in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, in the Sea of Marmara; there Glotzer was briefly his secretary and bodyguard. In 1937 he served in Mexico City as stenographer for the John Dewey-led commission that exposed the fraudulence of Stalin’s charges against Trotsky. Glotzer would be a lifelong friend of Bellow’s.
To Oscar Tarcov
September 29, 1937 Madison
Dear Oscar:
I’ve had a real letter fest this evening, four letters. I’m not a little worn out with transmitting news, or rather manufacturing it, for there has been no real temporal or spatial news of importance, with the exception of the renaissance of Isaac [Rosenfeld]. Isaac is beginning to spring a little gristle in his marrow. Who knows, he may develop bone if he continues. He’s a serious scholar now, and if he doesn’t break down into his characteristic monodic delivery he’ll be a gent of substance when the year is out. He reads earnestly and constantly. He is suddenly grave, and for the past week he has given no sign of surrealism.
It is all too easy to be righteously critical. It is impossible to condone my jumping at you that Saturday. By doing so I laid myself open to as much blame as was owing you, and shared your weakness evenly with you. Besides, without knowing, without being sure of what moved you to act as you did, I really answered the promptings of my own secret and unconscious life.
But you were goddamned trying. And although I shouldn’t have been so impatient, the squabble had a long genesis. I think you had it coming. Your elaborate, desperate rakishness and airiness was more than I could take. It went back beyond New York, beyond your mother, beyond Pearl too; it went back to an obscure but nevertheless bitter self-understanding, and the pressure of that half-understanding and the crush of a welter of the other things I have mentioned, you fought off with that wild pose. In all this I am not altogether correct, but I am not altogether wrong either. There is more than a germ of truth, or my life has been unique.
I suppose Isaac has told you of my illness. I’m still weaker than a rabbit’s belly. Now I lay me down.
Yours,
Oscar Tarcov (1915-63) had been, along with Isaac Rosenfeld, Bellow’s closest childhood friend; the three grew up within a few blocks of one another in the Humboldt Park district of Chicago. In the spring of 1937 Bellow graduated from Northwestern with a B.A. in anthropology, and was awarded a graduate fellowship in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Rosenfeld was already a doctoral student.
To Oscar Tarcov
October 2, 1937 Madison
Dear Oscar:
First about my family: Of course there was an awful blowout before I left. My father, spongy soul, cannot give freely. His business conscience pursues him into private life, and he plagues those he loves with the scruples he has learned in that world I so detest. He started giving me a Polonius, berating all my friends, warning me, adjuring me, doing everything short of damning me. Of course he damned all the things I stood for, which was the equivalent of damning me also. The night before he had made perfectly hideous for me. Art Behrstock had been over, and no sooner did the old man discover Art had been in Russia than he withered him with arguments and insults. When he started on me, on the instant of my leaving, I blew up and told him precisely the place he occupied in my category of character, what I thought of his advice, and that I intended to live as I saw fit. I told him all this as you may expect without faltering, and I didn’t do it in subdued terms. I told the old man that if he didn’t want to give me his measly allowance in Madison I would just as lief stay in Chicago and get a job and a wife and live independent of the family forevermore. The coalbins resounded with my shouts and imprecations, till the old man as a defense-measure decided that he was needed somewhere and swam off into the gloom. The next I hear of this is that the old man is heartbroken because I have not written to him. Did he expect a manifesto of love after such a clash? That is why the old woman [Bellow’s stepmother] called you up; to discover if I had made any disclosures to you.
I had a letter from Sam (my brother) this morning, in which he urged me to write, and I think I shall now. But what have I to say to him? He sees me as quite a different creature than I really am. To him I am a perverse child growing into manhood with no prospects or bourgeois ambitions, utterly unequipped to meet his world. (He is wrong, am not unequipped but unwilling.) My father and probably all fathers like him have an extremely naïve idea of education. They think it is something formal, apart from actual living, and that it should give one an air of highbrow eminence coupled with material substance (money). They do not expect it to have an effect on the moral life, on the intellectual life, and I doubt whether they have ever heard of an esthetic life. They are good folk, when they are not neurotic, and what after all can we expect? Such conflicts must come if we are to honestly follow out the concepts we learn or teach ourselves. What nexus have I with the old man? What shall I say to him? In his way he is a curio. For instance: He boasts of having read the complete works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky. I believe him. But how has he been able to look open-eyed at these men and act as he has shown himself capable of acting? [ . . . ]
So much for the family.
So you’re going into anthropology; sweet Jesus! It’s a hell of a lot better than the English department. And if you are not going to train yourself in a money-making technique you could choose no better field. It is the liveliest, by far, of all the social sciences. Since it is your intention to go to school, I think it is the best discipline, the one that will aid you most. Of course, you will have to learn to keep your balance, but that should be easier in anthropology than in English. As for satisfying the finance corporation that is putting you through—
Rien n’est plus simple
[
1
]. For the good student there are scholarships and fellowships galore. You have no notion how naïve socially many writers are. The tendency of our time, anyhow, is to rate the moral excellence over the esthetic. I don’t think any of us are pure estheticians. Closest is Isaac, who also falls short. There will be a little awkwardness in anthropology—prehistory and physical anthropology and parts of descriptive anthropology. But after all, these are the least important parts of anthropology. I regard them as necessary implements, the tools of social philosophy. With a little effort and application you can brush them out of the way. Moreover, if you are good at rationalizing, you can find certain charms in even the tools.
Rien n’est plus simple
[
1
]. For the good student there are scholarships and fellowships galore. You have no notion how naïve socially many writers are. The tendency of our time, anyhow, is to rate the moral excellence over the esthetic. I don’t think any of us are pure estheticians. Closest is Isaac, who also falls short. There will be a little awkwardness in anthropology—prehistory and physical anthropology and parts of descriptive anthropology. But after all, these are the least important parts of anthropology. I regard them as necessary implements, the tools of social philosophy. With a little effort and application you can brush them out of the way. Moreover, if you are good at rationalizing, you can find certain charms in even the tools.
You ought to meet [Alexander] Goldenweiser. Even Isaac is completely won by the man. A perfect cosmopolite, a perfect intellect. He knows as much Picasso as he does Tshimshiam religion, he knows Mozart as well as Bastian, and Thomism as well as Polynesia. You ought to see the books that line his shelves. Next to [Alfred L.] Kroeber stands Sidney Hook, and Lenin, and of course many of Trotsky’s pamphlets. He can open up in a seminar and discuss for an hour the anthropological thinking of Elisée Reclus, the anarchist geographer, the great friend of Kropotkin. He is a piano virtuoso, an esthetician, a Bolshevik, a deeply cultured man.
I am taking a seminar with the great Kimball Young, in advanced social psychology, a class with friend [Eliseo] Vivas, about whom Isaac will be delighted to write you. A course in the classical economists, and one in European prehistory.
I guess you have a good half-hour’s reading in the above. Leave you to digest it.
Alexander Alexandrovich Goldenweiser (1880-1940), a Ukrainian-born social scientist and disciple of Franz Boas, was greatly esteemed for his groundbreaking research in totemism as well as for his charismatic teaching style. He was in residence at University of Wisconsin, Madison, for the academic year 1937-38.
To Oscar Tarcov
[Postmarked Madison, Wisconsin, 13 October 1937]
Dear Oscar:
How shall I help you? What can I do? Whatever I could I would do with all my heart. If I were lying next to you in hell I would help you with all my power. But hell is for our ancestors. For us, nothing so simple. I can give you no advice because I am so different from you for one thing, and because, for another, my own problems are by no means settled.
I am a strange dog, Oscar. Strange things occur in me that I cannot account for. Just now I am deeply in love, and I think I shall continue in love, because it is my salvation. You, on the other side, could not find salvation in love. You see how different we are? Even our capacities for love are different.
You’ll have to settle your problems by yourself. You’ll have to wrestle with your own devil because, though I am at present sitting on mine, he is kicking and undefeated.
However, I think you are on the right track. Stick to anthropology; I wish I could accept it wholly. It will bring you closer to truth perhaps, make you happier, perhaps. If you discover a province in it to make yours, you are sure at least to be freer. If any discipline can do it, it is anthropology. You will see what I mean if you read the
Autobiography of a Papago Woman, Memoirs of the A.A.A.
, a monograph published by the American Anthropological Association. You can doubtless find it in the periodical room. It was published only last year. When you read it you will see how many universes there are. That there are other lives, the color of clay, narrow as cave walls but still broad as rock and free and fierce as wolves.
Autobiography of a Papago Woman, Memoirs of the A.A.A.
, a monograph published by the American Anthropological Association. You can doubtless find it in the periodical room. It was published only last year. When you read it you will see how many universes there are. That there are other lives, the color of clay, narrow as cave walls but still broad as rock and free and fierce as wolves.
Read it and write back.
Yours,
To Oscar Tarcov
[Postmarked Madison, Wisconsin, 7 December 1937]
Dear Oscar:
I’m tearing this off in cruel haste; it’s a shame to treat you this way. But this is the period preceding the period of paper-writing. I have several on my hands, more than I should perhaps have undertaken. The result is, of course, that I bear more than my normal load of fretting. I know I waste more time fuming and bustling than I spend in work. But I can’t break the habit.
Ever since he began his paper on the Absolute as conceived by Josiah Royce, Isaac has been intolerable. If they hand out laurels for sheer evasive-ness and careful and reserved ambiguities in the Philosophy Department, Isaac should get the juiciest they have on hand. If the paper is well received by [Max C.] Otto, Isaac will stay. If not he will return. In process of writing his paper he has suddenly discovered, however, that he gets along swimmingly without Chicago when he has something to do. One can predict even less for Isaac than for me.
I didn’t get around to pumping you about your feeling towards anthropology. If you want to volunteer some information I shall be glad to get it, because if it is necessary for me to unconvince you of something it is best for me to begin preparing now.
Yours,
After two semesters, Bellow abandoned graduate study, returned to Chicago, and married Anita Goshkin of Lafayette, Indiana, a daughter of immigrant Jews from the Crimea who was prominent in Northwestern radical circles—“straightforward, big-bosomed, and very assertive,” as Bellow’s high-school friend Herb Passin remembered her.
1939
To Oscar Tarcov
October [?], 1939 [Chicago]
Dear Oscar:
You are perfectly right. We should have had a talking-out before you went away. But to be perfectly frank too, I didn’t care, at the time that you left, to talk to you. I was neither angry nor disgusted, but “disaffected,” alienated to the point of indifference. I needed nothing from you and it was of small consequence to see you and talk to you. Whether you stayed or left was all one to me. In fact I felt the air was a little clearer after you had gone. Now I am being as open as I can, telling you how I felt and what I felt. I think you could make about the same confession. There are many reasons on both sides.
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