Letters (11 page)
Authors: Saul Bellow
Now for you, divine and goat-eared boy, as Kappy calls you, I give you advice as an elder statesman in love and in the knowledge that you must have winced when I poked fun at Passin and his inamorata. You know I have been led to take rather a light attitude towards your affairs by the very way in which you conducted them. And I am not the only one. I have not met your Shirley yet. If the Army doesn’t rush me I will, though. I don’t know what to expect in advance. I have hunches. But I do know that at a distance of several thousand miles she is apt to be magnificently appetizing, whereas if you slept with her on Irving Park Road tomorrow you might not give a damn for her on Saturday. I’ll stretch it to two bangs, three as an extra concession to your constancy; but no more. I haven’t forgotten the Russian and one or two other items of your love life. So before you make any move to import her across leagues of desert, snow, mountain, etc. be sure you know what you’re up to. You must admit that your record gives me no choice but to say this to you. Certainly you cannot have failed to think of it yourself. You have. But in the unreality of bananas, dysentery, bad whiskey, waddly
muchachas
, hills, lizards and the rest of the bizarre, over-colored, hellish, romantic
cauchemar
[
3
], you may not be capable of sensible resolutions. If I were you I wouldn’t undertake any commitments at such a distance. I am afraid, however, that you are marked for fatality by your testicles as surely as the cat by its curiosity. Far be it from me to stand in the way of Destiny. I’ll visit Her some time next week. [ . . . ]
muchachas
, hills, lizards and the rest of the bizarre, over-colored, hellish, romantic
cauchemar
[
3
], you may not be capable of sensible resolutions. If I were you I wouldn’t undertake any commitments at such a distance. I am afraid, however, that you are marked for fatality by your testicles as surely as the cat by its curiosity. Far be it from me to stand in the way of Destiny. I’ll visit Her some time next week. [ . . . ]
The East was a good thing for me. I went around receiving my accolades. It was such a relief to come out of the Chicago basin where two or three friends had me subsist on their estimates and to find in the larger world of New York that I was regarded as an up-and-comer. Bertram D. Wolfe said my story was one of the finest he had ever seen an American writer do on Mexico. Clement Greenberg said . . . I don’t want to quote all these testimonials myself, it would seem like so much self-gilding. I will simply name the names: Mary McCarthy, Nigel Dennis, Alfred Kazin,
ad regurgitam
. And don’t think your letter, which Anita forwarded, was not important to me.
ad regurgitam
. And don’t think your letter, which Anita forwarded, was not important to me.
I have worn myself out batting it around with you this morning. I will close now with all my love. My next will be a theoretical letter treating of some of the points you have raised and which I am too tired to try my intellectual muscles on just now.
Hasta luego
,
,
You’re lucky the censor is not somebody from the Hays Office. My, what swearing. Let’s hope it isn’t a lady-censor.
Melvin Marvin Tumin (1919-94), later a professor of sociology at Princeton well known for his work on race relations, was at this time doing doctoral field research in Guatemala.
To Melvin Tumin
[n.d.] [Chicago]
Dearest Moish:
It’s very unfair of me, I know, not to have written so long. You must think that someone who is constantly with a typewriter must be reminded daily of the letters he owes. That is true. I am reminded of them, but sometimes I simply cannot write them. Should I begin in detail to tell you how things have until lately been with me you would quickly understand why. But since I would be engaged night and day for two months in so doing and you are quick at inference, we’ll jump over that. I was greatly affected by your last letter and if I had answered it at once, as I originally planned to do, our correspondence would be one letter ahead. But only one. In the last six weeks I have sent Isaac a single letter and Kappy a single apologetic note, and that has been the total extent of my epistling. So you need not feel neglected. You have not been neglected, really. I mention you so often that Anita with her psychoanalytic smile says, “Ah? Your boyfriend again.” The joke has become one of her staples. She knows how desperately I miss you and says it wistfully because no woman likes to feel she is not her husband’s or lover’s all-in-all. Women as a rule cannot make adequate qualitative distinctions when it comes to love.
I have watched the mailbox anxiously for your story. (You see the mailbox has not lost its potency; it is still the little cold tin womb in which the world makes me a little present from time to time of another installment of my life.)
Anita showed me her letter [from you] last week. I see she has told you about my new book. I quite deserve the eulogy. It is good, as far as it has come. And it has been important to me in that it has partially revived me. I had been
fartroymt
[
4
] in the worst, most narcotic sense until I began it. Suddenly, out of base
merde
, I began to manufacture gold. Thank God for such alchemical powers in the greatest feat of human engineering. It is not very much nowadays to make gardens out of literal shit but to transmute spiritual shit, that is something!
fartroymt
[
4
] in the worst, most narcotic sense until I began it. Suddenly, out of base
merde
, I began to manufacture gold. Thank God for such alchemical powers in the greatest feat of human engineering. It is not very much nowadays to make gardens out of literal shit but to transmute spiritual shit, that is something!
Only with my present short perspective, I shall never be able to finish what I started. No one is untouched, nowadays. Each of us in his way is a casualty of the war. If I were to begin to tell you what has happened to me . . . Everything from being disappointed in my job-quest with machine-like regularity to being reduced to a charity case. My father has had to give me money, to my shame. You know how full of ugly, bastardly pride I am. It really has embittered me. I have felt myself wholly abandoned. I have had no one to talk to. Isaac and Kappy are doing fairly well in New York. Sam, poor bureaucrat, has been engulfed, his human qualities swallowed. He has not time for them except on weekends and even then resents having his rest disturbed. Tarcov? No. Only with Abe Kaufman have I been able to maintain some halfway decent human intercourse and that has been nearly all in the realm of ideas, and mainly esthetic ideas. In all other ways our outlook is too different for the most essential kind of communication. And I have been spectator to my own victimization, have watched the terrific beating and endured it bodily too. Until three weeks ago when I began to write I wanted the Army to take me. The sooner the better.
And now perhaps you will be better able to judge why I did not write. I did not intend to tell you this, but the instant the typewriter began to jiggle a little more rapidly it started coming out. I cannot prevent it. I am so full of it that everything I touch is by a reverse Midas process turned somber. I have taken the first round of pummeling in my maturity and it has been dreadful. There have been more sideshows in the arcade of contumely than I can remember. Family. Even former students. Even Passin. Even
Hersky
[Melville J. Herskovits, Bellow’s former teacher at Northwestern] has aimed his little boot at me. Last week he called me up at two thirty in the afternoon. It seems I had used him as a reference in connection with the national roster of scientific and specialized personnel. He had phoned to tell me how much trouble it was to fill out the forms. He was a busy man, a busy man! In some detail he insulted me on each of the following: 1. The fact that I am unemployed and at home at 2:30 P.M. 2. My lack of qualification as an applicant for any consideration from the national roster. 3. The fate of my novel. (He had anticipated what would happen, he gave me to understand.) And last,
in algemein
[
5
], my wasted life. Perhaps that will help enliven for you the whole idea of the transmutation of shit. If I can turn from that to writing within the space of half a day (that’s all it took me to recover) it is I and not Squibbs who have found the Priceless Ingredient.
Hersky
[Melville J. Herskovits, Bellow’s former teacher at Northwestern] has aimed his little boot at me. Last week he called me up at two thirty in the afternoon. It seems I had used him as a reference in connection with the national roster of scientific and specialized personnel. He had phoned to tell me how much trouble it was to fill out the forms. He was a busy man, a busy man! In some detail he insulted me on each of the following: 1. The fact that I am unemployed and at home at 2:30 P.M. 2. My lack of qualification as an applicant for any consideration from the national roster. 3. The fate of my novel. (He had anticipated what would happen, he gave me to understand.) And last,
in algemein
[
5
], my wasted life. Perhaps that will help enliven for you the whole idea of the transmutation of shit. If I can turn from that to writing within the space of half a day (that’s all it took me to recover) it is I and not Squibbs who have found the Priceless Ingredient.
Hijo de la chinga madre!
[
6
] Do you see what I mean? At four o’clock I can tell myself I am immune. At four fifteen I am lost again. Man’s happiness is largely a product of the stability of his prospects. Mine are pfffft!
[
6
] Do you see what I mean? At four o’clock I can tell myself I am immune. At four fifteen I am lost again. Man’s happiness is largely a product of the stability of his prospects. Mine are pfffft!
The organization which has sent you so many hundreds of miles away to study aborigines might more profitably have engaged you at home. Goosing-relationships between the wives of siblings have fewer mysteries than the operation of a single draft board. In two months my status has changed three times and so far as I can tell will change again within the next two weeks or so. Was it any wonder that I
longed
to be called? Is it strange to prefer no future to an uncertain one?
Juges en toi-même
[
7
]
.
longed
to be called? Is it strange to prefer no future to an uncertain one?
Juges en toi-même
[
7
]
.
A further and more reasonable word about “no future.” I find the prospect of enjoying the benefits of a peace without having contributed to the peace (of whatever sort; I am hoping for the best) intensely disagreeable. I realize that as an artist I have the principled right to claim exemption. It would be just, but in all conscience I could not plead for it. Besides it would be foolish, don’t you think so? Like filing an appeal to be released from an epidemic on the grounds that someone should live to record it. No. You may remember the advice of the old German in
Lord Jim:
“In the destructive element immerse.” It is for the world to pull the artist from the destructive element and not for him to ask it to. Cervantes lost an arm fighting the Moors, Calderon, I think it was, wrote one of his plays sitting in the hull of one of the ships of the Armada. And Socrates. If I pull out of this with a whole skin I will write a book called “Socrates was a Hoplite.”
Lord Jim:
“In the destructive element immerse.” It is for the world to pull the artist from the destructive element and not for him to ask it to. Cervantes lost an arm fighting the Moors, Calderon, I think it was, wrote one of his plays sitting in the hull of one of the ships of the Armada. And Socrates. If I pull out of this with a whole skin I will write a book called “Socrates was a Hoplite.”
Voilà,
dear Mel, the picture.
dear Mel, the picture.
We are moving, shortly. Anita has a new job out in Dunning and we shall have to go to the North Side. I will send the new address as soon as I know what it is.
Please write.
Love,
To Melvin Tumin
[n.d.] [Chicago]
Dearest Moissay:
[ . . . ] Somehow I have not clicked with editors. About two months ago I wrote a story called “Juif!” which carried in it all the sting and tragedy I could impart. It is immeasurably above “The Dead James.” Never have I had such letters of apology from editors refusing to take it. By their own standards it is as well-tailored as any of the sweet little nostalgic pieces they print, but it is liable to awaken too much feeling. So out it goes. [ . . . ]
Permit me to give you a second example. You remember “The Car”? Last summer Whit Burnett [editor of
Story
] was interested in it. “Tell Bellow to bring the last few pages up to par,” he said to my agent, “and we’ll probably be able to use it.” I was in terrible need at the time, so I doctored it up and sent it in. Three months later it was returned to me. No explanation, no comment, only a brief note. “Sorry this failed to get my final OK, W.B.” When I picked up the current issue of
Story
it was full of a coarse-grained piece of shit by WB himself, a fictional version of the life of Robert Burns with lumps of half-digested haggis in it.
Je m’en fous de tous les WB et les autres enfants chiennes. Que tu pierde sus miembros en un dia de sangre, W.B.
[
8
]
Story
] was interested in it. “Tell Bellow to bring the last few pages up to par,” he said to my agent, “and we’ll probably be able to use it.” I was in terrible need at the time, so I doctored it up and sent it in. Three months later it was returned to me. No explanation, no comment, only a brief note. “Sorry this failed to get my final OK, W.B.” When I picked up the current issue of
Story
it was full of a coarse-grained piece of shit by WB himself, a fictional version of the life of Robert Burns with lumps of half-digested haggis in it.
Je m’en fous de tous les WB et les autres enfants chiennes. Que tu pierde sus miembros en un dia de sangre, W.B.
[
8
]
There is nothing new with me. I am a recluse, I am a bear. I bite people’s heads off when they cross me. I have known one hundred sixty-nine brands of humiliation.
Two weeks ago I stopped work on my novel—it was not direct enough—and have since solaced myself with a book called
The Notebook of a Dangling Man
. It has taken possession of me. I have written twenty-thousand words already and have not come one third of the whole way. It is the complete wartime swansong of a “righteous man” who strove with all his heart not to be an undergroundling but who now sees himself forced to the pavement and begins to realize that he may have to be a telluric creature after all because the age
requires
it. I don’t know myself what the QED will be because I have not finished the demonstration. It will have to be the end-product of its own logic. I think it will end with questions not answers. But then, the work of the artist cannot be expected to comprehend that of the scientist and the philosopher as well. It sets up the hypotheses and tests them in various ways, and it gives answers, but these are not definitive. However, they need not be definitive; they sing about the human situation. It is a kind of truth these answers give, the truth of sorrow and of celebration, the truth that we are stamped with immortality and the truth that we live meanly.
The Notebook of a Dangling Man
. It has taken possession of me. I have written twenty-thousand words already and have not come one third of the whole way. It is the complete wartime swansong of a “righteous man” who strove with all his heart not to be an undergroundling but who now sees himself forced to the pavement and begins to realize that he may have to be a telluric creature after all because the age
requires
it. I don’t know myself what the QED will be because I have not finished the demonstration. It will have to be the end-product of its own logic. I think it will end with questions not answers. But then, the work of the artist cannot be expected to comprehend that of the scientist and the philosopher as well. It sets up the hypotheses and tests them in various ways, and it gives answers, but these are not definitive. However, they need not be definitive; they sing about the human situation. It is a kind of truth these answers give, the truth of sorrow and of celebration, the truth that we are stamped with immortality and the truth that we live meanly.
I shall be finished in a month, for certain and perhaps sooner.
Now for some news. Kappy is leaving the country on a mission. I don’t know whither; North Africa is the most likely spot for him. They don’t speak French on Guadalcanal.
Edith [Tarcov] has had a little girl Miriam Jean; Rochelle [Freifeld] ought to yield any day now.
Voici tout le but humain.
[
9
]
Voici tout le but humain.
[
9
]
Don’t pull my leg about fighting off your adorers like Gauguin in the movies. [ . . . ] You ought to be starting home soon, no? Pack up your papers and come. Leave something in Guatemala for the next anthropologist. Don’t hog it all. However, I don’t think you ought to leave the country without meeting three officials of higher rank than the ones Herb boasts of knowing in Mexico. If possible, meet the President. I want to be present when you tell him, “Señor X and I discussed the Indian problem. I handed him an eighty-five-page memorandum in Spanish and six of the principal varieties of Chibchan on the teaching of Kant in the Sixth Form. He rewarded me with the Order of El Caiman Gordo, third-degree, and said that after the war he would authorize a grant for me to go all through the country teaching the natives contraception and that I would naturally travel overland in his Buick which is decorated fore and aft with the Seal of State. And, Herb, you won’t believe this,
er ret mich a shidukh mit sein tochter
[
10
]. She carries a dowry of eighty thousand milreis or pesos or whatever the coin of the realm is, and a biannual world cruise. I was made a chief of the Prtchiwai tribe for successfully dosing the elder of the shamans with castor oil on the first occasion of his tasting salami. I was initiated”—here bend to show the clan cicatrices—“and when I left was accompanied fifty miles by singing, weeping villagers. When I reached the coast I sent each of them an alarm clock and five Coca-Cola bottle-caps in token of
Bruderschaft
[
11
].”
er ret mich a shidukh mit sein tochter
[
10
]. She carries a dowry of eighty thousand milreis or pesos or whatever the coin of the realm is, and a biannual world cruise. I was made a chief of the Prtchiwai tribe for successfully dosing the elder of the shamans with castor oil on the first occasion of his tasting salami. I was initiated”—here bend to show the clan cicatrices—“and when I left was accompanied fifty miles by singing, weeping villagers. When I reached the coast I sent each of them an alarm clock and five Coca-Cola bottle-caps in token of
Bruderschaft
[
11
].”
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