Letters (36 page)

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Authors: Saul Bellow

BOOK: Letters
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Would it appeal to you to cover the [Floyd] Patterson [-Ingemar Johansson] fight and/or other Garden events? I understand that Cuss Amato, P.’s manager, is a psychologist, so I was told at least. He was described to me as having taught Patterson (fascinating idea) the necessity to feel fear in the ring. I assume P. is naturally free from it.
You’d have a ball. Meridian would buy you tickets and pay for your fare and dinners. Other contributors will be Ellison, Wright Morris, John Berryman, myself, D. H. Lawrence (over his dead body) and other friends of yours. Possibly Arthur Miller. What do you say? I want to see stories, too, of course, but I’m particularly keen about getting writers into the world again. Literature has for too long been their whole life. I hope the book is going well.
All best,
 
Harvey Swados (1920-72) was a fiction writer best known for
Out Went the Candle
(1955) and
Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn
(1960). His September 1959
Esquire
essay “Why Resign from the Human Race?” is said to have inspired the founding of the Peace Corps
.
Swados’s review of
Henderson the Rain King
had appeared in
The New Leader.
 
 
To Fanny Ellison
April 14, 1959 Minneapolis
Dear Fanny,
You’re very kind about
Henderson
. Here and there it’s as close to frenzy as a man can get while continuing (somehow) to laugh, and it contains elements I hope I’ve seen the last of. One of these days I’m going to enter the little inner room where my best humanity has been locked up for a long time. Not just yet.
We’re all much better than we were. I think it did us nearly as much good to get away from Tivoli as you say it’s done Ralph to be there.
I wish you, in all ways, the best of everything.
Your friend,
 
To Alice Adams
[n.d.] [Minneapolis]
Dear Alice:
Your story is much better, if no less grim. (
I
should talk.) The spirit in which you wrote makes it very hard to discuss. It’s so obviously a last cry of the heart that I don’t like to make any technical points. And nevertheless, the story is very “technical,” too; both in the good sense and the not-so-good. You are much more of an American than I. There are signs of it all over the place. You do a job of work on the edge of panic. Of your work itself, the writing, I haven’t a bad word to say. And I really can’t say anything against the story either. Of its kind it is wonderful. There’s nothing left to discuss except the kind; which brings us back to the beginning of the paragraph. I don’t want to drive tractors into the center of your soul. I think I may be very stupid about this matter, and I must ask you in advance to forgive me.
It’s the smallness of the compass that bothers me. The story is cut off from life at one stroke. There’s something too breathless about it, and there isn’t enough space or air for the emotions. They can’t expand and therefore grow painful. Does that make sense? Or let me put it in the old-fashioned and possibly—to you—pompous esthetic terms of unity and diversity. The story lacks diversity, and its very virtues make it intolerable by holding you tightly. Besides, you don’t have to write like all the sisterhood since Virginia Woolf. You ought to give up some of the conventions of feminine sensibility.
This may not sound kind, but I assure you all the unkindness is in the sound. For a long time I allowed myself to be pushed into these small spaces, too. I am only urging you to utter the magic syllable “Whoosh” in the face of psychological oppression. The nineteenth century drove writers into attics. The twentieth shuts them in nutshells. The only remedy is to declare yourself king, or queen, of infinite space. There is a word for that too, megalomania, but you have taught me (that’s an excellent touch, the fervor with which the girl takes unto herself the various mental diseases) not to worry about that.
I think Sasha and I will blow the West pretty soon. I have to get back East. Not that I look forward to any of it—always excepting my son. Because of a deadline I had to decline Berkeley’s invitation to lecture. So we shan’t be getting back to San Francisco, alas. How I wish we could.
It was very good of you to try to fix me up with a job. Money is awfully tight these days. Anita is a devil at finance. I, on the other hand, am a damn fool at it. I realize—too late—that I might have had a thousand more out of my Guggenheim if my timidity hadn’t prevented. But what’sa use’a talk?
Sure I knew Bill Brown in Paris. I recall that he was fine, jolly and nutty. Whenever he grows serious he wears a look of intensest anguish—right? That’s the same guy.
I don’t know about [Norman] Mailer. I like him, but he’s such an ideologist. I do everything the hard way.
Love,
Alice Adams (1926-99) was an American fiction writer best known for her short stories, collected in
After You’ve Gone
(1989) and
The Last Lovely City
(1999), and for her novel
Superior Women
(1984).
 
 
To Ralph Ellison
[n.d.] [Minneapolis}
Dear Ralph,
I counted on the two little old dolls to plant the garden, but I suppose spring cleaning was too much for them, those moth-flakes. So I’m going to ask you to go to the Farmer’s Coop in Red Hook and buy sweet corn, cucumber and squash seed and plant a few rows, please, reading from left to right tomatoes, about six or eight hills of cucumbers, five or six rows of corn (six should be an even number) and about five hills of squash where the tomatoes used to sit. The rail in the middle of the garden is the worst, as you’ll see. There I put in beans last summer to enrich the ground. You can do all this in a few hours and oblige me greatly. It’ll keep us all in produce this summer, and give Sasha and me a good reason to go out in the sun.
The mower will never do, I suppose. They’re cheaper now, and I may go to Montgomery Ward [ . . . ] and get one with a guarantee. Money? Somehow it turns up when it’s needed, and I’ve learned to stop thinking about it in excess.
Lettuce, carrots, etc. are raided by rabbits and woodchucks, and to plant them in the open is no use.
If Sarda has pooped out we’d better begin to get bids from others for regular yearly care. We’ll close out old randy Jack fairly but inexorably unless he wakes from that long sleep.
I’ll be along soon to attack the hares. Hope the garden isn’t too demanding. Put in whatever you like, but I’d feel crazy to live in the country without corn and tomatoes. It’s bad enough not to have a cow.
Love,
 
To Bernard Malamud
May 10, 1959 Minneapolis
Dear Bern,
I shy away from all writers’ organizations. The PEN is about my limit, and I have doubts about that. No doubt the [Authors] League is fine, but the publisher and the agent aren’t the enemy. The enemy (and I’m not horribly hostile towards them, either) is a hundred sixty million people who read nothing. What’s the League going to do about them, about Orville Prescott, about TV and Hollywood? It may increase my income by six hundred per annum. I don’t care about increasing my income by six hundred per annum. It isn’t worth joining an organization for. [ . . . ]
Best,
 
To Richard V. Chase
May 27, 1959 [Tivoli]
Dear Mr. Chase:
I find myself in the strange position of one who provokes comment on his behavior and then tries to avoid hearing it. Ordinarily I can’t read what people have to say about my writing. But I read your essay with particular satisfaction and agreed with many of your points. Freedom for what? This is the philosophical or religious question I seem to have failed to satisfy. It’s a strange thing to be a “cognitive” writer without the will or the capacity to continue to a definite conclusion. I sometimes think the comedy in my books is a satire on this inconclusiveness.
Of course, mere writers of fiction have never been burdened with such responsibilities before, and I doubt that much good art can result from this striving for useful or intellectually acceptable opinion.
Anyway, you’ve done a good thing for me and I’m very grateful.
Sincerely yours,
 
Richard V. Chase (1914-62), Columbia University professor of English, was best known for
The American Novel and Its Tradition
(1957). His essay «The Adventures of Saul Bellow” had just appeared in
Commentary.
 
 
To William Phillips
July 13, 1959 Tivoli, N. Y.
Dear William—
Every few months in
PR
your rats gnaw at my toes. It would be unnatural if I did not notice.
Yrs,
To John Berryman
August 12, 1959 Tivoli
Dear John:
Splendid! Gorgeous! This is the way to reply to the disintegrating fates. I’ve sent poems and Taj to Meridian, and you shall be rewarded (not in just measure); we are trying to spread our funds to pay all our honorable contributors. Perhaps we ought to publish more Dream Songs—say a dozen. Five will stun—ten would awe. That’s as you see fit. I merely ask you to revolve it in your mind.
About the editing: I thought you might like it. As you’re a contrib. ed. you won’t want to see unworthy poetry in the magazine. There is some good taste on the masthead, but not your authority. At least we can do the screening and obtain your opinion. Wouldn’t think of laying a burden on your frail back (frail as whips!).
You will be pleased with most of
Savage
.
Paul and Adam had a great life in the sunshine, both boys naked, tottering after dachshunds and butterflies.
Stay intacto and thrive for the sake of your devoted,
 
To Josephine Herbst
August 15, 1959 Tivoli
Dear Josie:
Wonderful to get a letter from you. It always brings back my balance, if that should happen to be out, and it often is. You’ve got more stuff in you than ten ingénues.
Well, I too have stuff, and I get worn out by the dreary people it’s somehow become my business to see for whom Despair is shoptalk, like Rinse for the housewife. Damn them all! At a party a few weeks ago, worn out by all the talk, I allowed myself to say something to the man next to me about the human instinct for truthfulness, and he laughed in my face. So I reminded him of Pilate, and then his feelings were hurt. His
feelings
! Phooey!
I never imagined that
Henderson
could be ultimately successful. My state when I wrote it was too bad, going round and round like a centrifuge. Some of it is all right—the language, mostly, and the physical imagination, but I’m aware that it gets mixed up between comedy and earnestness, which is another way of saying that I’ve got literature mixed up with lots of other matters. That’s bad. Out of our greatest needs we’ve made a big chunk, or ball, and we push, push. Sisyphus was no such damn fool. He was a sinner, but at least he wasn’t the author of his own rock. Though psychoanalysis would probably knit its brows and say, But of course he was. What amazes me most about
H
[
enderson
] is its reception. It beats me that I should be accused of cunningly willing the whole thing into being. Do these people who are called (but why?) Critics suppose that anyone would
want
to feel as I did? It utterly beats me. I can’t imagine what the hell they’re up to.
They
are the mystery. Because if they’re in outer darkness how did they happen to bring their typewriters with them?
Basta!
You seem in good spirits. I’m aware that you have your troubles, but it must be something of a dignity for the troubles to have you. Because, Josie, you are
something
. I love you dearly. I’m waiting to see what you have for us. There may be a little money in it for you, which I’m certain the business people will let you have in advance (before publication). Authority on the
Savage
is shared by three of us, but I holler most. Anyway, I shall be looking in Box 185 every morning for your manuscript.
With love,
 
To Josephine Herbst
September 5, 1959 Minneapolis
Dear Josie:
I read your piece immediately and wouldn’t put it down for any inducement. It’s the sort of thing that gives the world a new spin. I see the ants running on the bark with different eyes as I read and know I’ve fallen in with the real thing. Your piece goes along at first in a plain, truthful fashion and suddenly, without effort or engineering, becomes beautiful.
Here and there I’ve marked some passages which pleased me less—and they’re very few. Perhaps the piece should start with a more dry attack. It takes a little too long. That’s probably a result of excision from the book. But everything is supported by feeling, and never in excess, and you’re beautifully clear about Hemingway and Dos Passos, and even lesser characters like [Rafael] Alberti. As for the self that comes through, it’s the one I fell in love with in Yaddo’s plutocratic dining room,
coup de foudre
[
58
].

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