Letters (81 page)

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Authors: Saul Bellow

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And now, as a preface to business, I have something to relate to you: My young friend Martin Amis, whom I love and admire, came to see me last week. He was brought here from Cape Cod by a chum whom I had never met, not even heard of. They stayed overnight. When we sat down to dinner the friend identified himself as a journalist and a regular contributor to the
Nation.
I last looked into the
Nation
when Gore Vidal wrote his piece about the disloyalty of Jews to the USA and their blood-preference for Israel. During the long years of our acquaintance, a dune of salt has grown up to season the preposterous things Gore says. He has a score to settle with the USA. Anywhere else, he might have been both a homosexual
and
a patrician. Here he had to mix with rough trade and also with Negroes and Jews; democracy has made it impossible to be a gentleman invert and wit. Also the very source of his grief has made him famous and rich. But never mind Gore, we can skip him. Let’s go on to our dinner guest, Martin’s companion. His name is Christopher Hitchens. During dinner he mentioned that he was a great friend of Edward Said. Leon Wieseltier and Noam Chomsky were also great buddies of his. At the mention of Said’s name, Janis grumbled. I doubt that this was unexpected, for Hitchens almost certainly thinks of me as a terrible reactionary—the Jewish Right. Brought up to respect and to reject politeness at the same time, the guest wrestled briefly and silently with the
louche
journalist and finally [the latter] spoke up. He said that Said was a great friend and that he must apologize for differing with Janis but loyalty to a friend demanded that he set the record straight. Everybody remained polite. For Amis’ sake I didn’t want a scene. Fortunately (or not) I had within reach several excerpts from Said’s
Critical Inquiry
piece, which I offered in evidence. Jews were (more or less) Nazis. But of course, said Hitchens, it was well known that [Yitzhak] Shamir had approached Hitler during the war to make deals. I objected that Shamir was Shamir, he wasn’t the Jews. Besides I didn’t trust the evidence. The argument seesawed. Amis took the Said selections to read for himself. He could find nothing to say at the moment but next morning he tried to bring the matter up, and to avoid further embarrassment I said it had all been much ado about nothing.
Hitchens appeals to Amis. This is a temptation I understand. But the sort of people you like to write about aren’t always fit company, especially at the dinner table.
Well, these Hitchenses are just Fourth-Estate playboys thriving on agitation, and Jews are so easy to agitate. Sometimes (if only I knew enough to do it right!) I think I’d like to write about the fate of the Jews in the decline of the West—or the long crisis of the West, if decline doesn’t suit you. The movement to assimilate coincided with the arrival of nihilism. This nihilism reached its climax with Hitler. The Jewish answer to the Holocaust was the creation of a state. After the camps came politics and these politics are nihilistic. Your Hitchenses, the political press in its silliest disheveled left-wing form, are (if nihilism has a hierarchy) the gnomes. Gnomes don’t have to know anything, they are imperious, they appear when your fairy-tale heroine is in big trouble, offer a deal and come to collect her baby later. If you can bear to get to know them you learn about these
Nation
-type gnomes that they drink, drug, lie, cheat, chase, seduce, gossip, libel, borrow money, never pay child support, etc. They’re the bohemians who made Marx foam with rage in
The Eighteenth Brumaire
. Well, that’s nihilism for you, one of its very minor branches, anyway. Yet to vast numbers of people they are very attractive somehow. That’s because those vast numbers are the rank and file of nihilism, and they want to hear from Hitchens and Said, etc., and consume falsehoods as they do fast-food. And it’s so easy to make trouble for the Jews. Nothing easier. The networks love it, the big papers let it be made, there’s a receptive university population for which Arafat is Good and Israel is Bad, even genocidal.
Now what does one do about all this?
To be more particular, what am I to do about it on Dec. 3rd? I haven’t the slightest idea, and there’s nothing more depressing than to picture myself spluttering at the podium, making a fool of myself and making your meeting look foolish, too. Nothing would please our own Jewish nihilists more.
What you need, and you’ve probably thought of this yourself, is a sensible talk by Jeane Kirkpatrick on the PLO.
Ever your admiring and affectionate friend,
 
Cordial relations would subsequently develop between Hitchens and the Bellows. Edward W. Said’s piece in
Critical Inquiry
was “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors.”
To James Atlas
September 20, 1989 Boston
Dear James:
Re-reading your Rosenfeld article this morning, I find it mostly accurate—although I become uncomfortably aware at times that a man I thought I knew well escaped my understanding in the end. At every turn of the spiral everything looks different. But it was a fair, even generous article and I was touched by it. Delmore would sometimes warn me against Isaac, whom he described as monstrously jealous. Perhaps he wanted the place in my affections held by Isaac. One thing they had in common was a belief in the truth of psychological analysis. And by the end of the Fifties I had had it with “psychology,” and when I say that Isaac escaped my understanding it’s not a psychological understanding that I have in mind. I never gave psychoanalysis so much as a two-year lease. I enjoyed it as a game then being played, and now I see it as trivial pursuit. What saddens me is that we didn’t know what we were doing. The cry from the cross, “Father, forgive them,” is more true than Freud’s complete works.
I don’t think you ought to take Lionel Abel’s comments seriously. I came across them in
The Intellectual Follies
and they struck me as characteristically and amusingly cockeyed and foolish. Abel didn’t drink hard and I doubt he ever took dope; he was on some mind-altering substance of his own (probably he secreted it), and he heard and saw his own inventions and nothing else. To say that the Fourth International was my marriage broker is very funny. I wouldn’t have had the wit—at that time—to say it. Lionel must have heard it from someone else, forgot the source and conveniently attributed it to me.
I understand that a book of which I am the subject is about to appear, and I’m thinking of taking sanctuary in a remote part of Madagascar until it has been reviewed, discussed and forgotten.
Best wishes,
 
“Golden Boy,” Atlas’s article on Isaac Rosenfeld, had appeared in
The New York Review of Books.
The book about Bellow was Ruth Miller’s
Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination,
though it would not appear for another two years.
In Memory of Robert Penn Warren
(Delivered at the Stratton Church, Stratton,
Vermont, October 8, 1989)
All the King’s Men
had just been published when I arrived in Minneapolis in 1946. Red seldom mentioned his novel, nor spoke of its success or his fame. Having written it, he put it behind him—he didn’t care to cut a figure. He never spoke of the work he was doing. I had to read his introduction to the Modern Library Edition of
All the King’s Men
to learn that he was then finishing his essay on
The Ancient Mariner
.
In Minneapolis, when I was a very junior member of the English Department, I was one of a group of instructors invited by Joseph Warren Beach to meet Sinclair Lewis. When we were ushered into the room Lewis pushed back his chair, stood up, raised his long arms and said, “For God’s sake, don’t tell me your names.”
I give you this as an illuminating contrast. Red wanted to know the names. He took a special interest in your gifts if you had any. He wanted to know what you were writing. He offered to read your manuscript. With me he was especially generous. But he preferred not to be thanked and the lessons he taught me about reserve and silence I couldn’t have gotten from anyone else. I never knew a man more free from common prejudices. I hope he didn’t find me a hopelessly clumsy pupil.
Two years ago I got one of his rare rebukes. We met every summer in Vermont and in September we said goodbye and I said, “See you next year.” It vexed him, and he set me straight. “Don’t lie like that,” he said. He was right of course to reject my awkward, embarrassed and false words.
But I did see him the next year.
And when we met again some weeks before his death he smiled at me and said, “You didn’t expect to see me still alive, did you?”
I said no I hadn’t, but that I was glad of course to talk to him again.
The house was filled with small children; it evidently gave him great pleasure to follow them with his eyes.
With him I was especially attentive, because he was a great-souled man. That was very clear to me. A moment ago I said that I hoped he didn’t find me a clumsy pupil. Red certainly didn’t want disciples, and I am too old now to be formed by anyone. But one doesn’t meet many men of Red’s stature. They are so phenomenally rare that you find yourself observing them closely, with gratitude and (being in a church emboldens me to use a term not often used nowadays) with reverence.
To John Auerbach
October 23, 1989 Boston
My dear John,
A case of bad timing: When I took this Boston job I assumed you would still be in Newton. If you had been, Janis and I would have spent more time here, but as it is, we shuttle between BU and Vermont. I preach against restlessness but can’t do without it, like the rest of my countrymen. This back-and-forth long weekly drive doesn’t leave much time for writing, and lack of time comes in the nick of time for I haven’t got anything to work on. I wrote one hundred pages of a funny narrative during the summer, but it was like a skyscraper in the desert. I had overlooked the water problem.
Anyway, Janis and I have been flying everywhere—to New York, to Cincinnati, to Chicago—and we have tickets also for Washington and Tulsa, Oklahoma. My typewriter and Janis’ computers are idle. But I suppose it will do us no harm to think things over. We are generally working too hard to think at all.
Boston is not so bad. If we could have the trees cut down we could see the Charles from our window; if the trees were down, however, it wouldn’t be worth looking at. We are fifteen minutes from the Brookline bakeries and delicatessens, but must avoid stuffing ourselves. In short, every advantage has a long train of attendant problems. Only, thank God, I am not one of Janis’ problems, nor is she one of mine. Perhaps this shows that only an odd marriage can be a happy one. Janis speaks of us as an old married couple. I suppose this breaks down as: I am old, we are married. Aside from these facts, social and statistical, we love each other.
I fret with you over the failure of your books to arrive, but I am planning to send you the core of a new library if they don’t turn up. Remember you are a dear friend to both of us, and your letters about walking on the shore, swimming in the sea and living among old friends again give us great
nakhes
[
108
].
With best love from both of us,
 
Love and greetings to Nola.
 
Bellow and Janis Freedman had wed on August 25 in the town hall of Wilmington, Vermont.
To Wright Morris
November 15, 1989 Boston
Dear Wright:
The classic question: What is to be done? The answer is even more classic: A lot of choice we got.
There was no frailty in what you read to me. Only the beholder (listener) was frail, and he drew strength from it.
Years ago I discovered that the reception of a manuscript by an editor or that of a book by the reviewers and the public gave me an index to the cultural condition of the country, one pitiful disaster after another. A psychologist would call this viewing a profile. A reader of entrails (and that’s what this calls for) would cry, “Take this goddam chicken out of my sight!” Your agent’s phrase about the high expectations of readers is about as terrible a mess of entrails as I’ve held my nose at this calendar year.
Don’t forget that you are Wright Morris and that the books you’ve given your countrymen are beyond price.
And you need to know that in the last year and a half I have been rejected by the
Atlantic
,
Esquire
and others.
Since you ask how I am, let me inform you that last summer I married a beautiful young woman. Some would take this as evidence that I am ready for the funny farm but I think much too highly of my wife to take such an opinion seriously.
Yours ever,
 
To Catherine Lindsay Choate
December 6, 1989 Boston
Dear Catherine:
It was wise of Lakewood College to give you a course to teach. I could be very happy sitting in your class, quasi-invisible, listening to you. You yourself said that you remember I am still in this world, if silent and unseen. Well, I would be silent in your classroom, looking on. It would give me pleasure. To this day, I take pleasure in you, and you’re wrong to suggest that your letters are tedious. There is nothing boring about you, there never was.

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