Letters (48 page)
Authors: Saul Bellow
Annie has asked me to write another one-acter to go with “The Wen,” and if I can do it carelessly enough, showing my contempt for the medium as it now is in New York, I will scribble something for her.
Yours affectionately always,
To Alfred Kazin
January 28, 1965 Chicago
Dear Alfred—
I enjoyed seeing myself through your eyes in the
Atlantic
. Because I’m accustomed to run the portrait gallery myself, I was taken aback for a moment. Then I grew accustomed to the novelty and thoroughly enjoyed it. You may have been a little too generous. I remember being a very arbitrary, overly assertive type. Maybe there was no other way, in the democratic-immigrant’s-son situation, to obtain the required authority of tone. To me, now, the whole thing is a phenomenon; the
personal
element no longer counts for much. You were absolutely right about the Chicago side of things. For some reason neither Isaac nor I could think of ourselves as provincials in N.Y. Possibly the pride of R. M. Hutchins shielded us. For him the U. of C. didn’t have to compete with the Ivy League, it was obviously superior. It never entered our minds that we had lost anything in being deprived of Eastern advantages. So we were armored in provincial self-confidence, and came to conquer. Ridiculous boys! And even Isaac was a better realist than I. I think I was altogether
dans la lune
[
74
]. I had very few social needs, curiously. That saved me from Isaac’s gang of Hudson St. insiders.
Atlantic
. Because I’m accustomed to run the portrait gallery myself, I was taken aback for a moment. Then I grew accustomed to the novelty and thoroughly enjoyed it. You may have been a little too generous. I remember being a very arbitrary, overly assertive type. Maybe there was no other way, in the democratic-immigrant’s-son situation, to obtain the required authority of tone. To me, now, the whole thing is a phenomenon; the
personal
element no longer counts for much. You were absolutely right about the Chicago side of things. For some reason neither Isaac nor I could think of ourselves as provincials in N.Y. Possibly the pride of R. M. Hutchins shielded us. For him the U. of C. didn’t have to compete with the Ivy League, it was obviously superior. It never entered our minds that we had lost anything in being deprived of Eastern advantages. So we were armored in provincial self-confidence, and came to conquer. Ridiculous boys! And even Isaac was a better realist than I. I think I was altogether
dans la lune
[
74
]. I had very few social needs, curiously. That saved me from Isaac’s gang of Hudson St. insiders.
When will your book be published? I’m eager to read it. I remember that Isaac and I, in our high-court, closed-corporation, solemn Chicago Sanhedrin manner, agreed that
A Walker in the City
was wonderful—your best vein. And now I wait for your portrait of him.
A Walker in the City
was wonderful—your best vein. And now I wait for your portrait of him.
I wonder whether you’ve seen Jack Ludwig on
Herzog
, in the current
Holiday
. It’s a masterpiece in its own way—a great virtuoso performance on the high-wire of self-justification. Ingenious, shrewd, supersubtle, shamanistic, Rasputin-like. I’m really rather proud of the man. His cast-iron effrontery is admirable, somehow. If I ever commission a private Mt. Rush-more I’ll stipulate that his head be given plenty of space. Anyway, don’t miss this performance. [ . . . ]
Herzog
, in the current
Holiday
. It’s a masterpiece in its own way—a great virtuoso performance on the high-wire of self-justification. Ingenious, shrewd, supersubtle, shamanistic, Rasputin-like. I’m really rather proud of the man. His cast-iron effrontery is admirable, somehow. If I ever commission a private Mt. Rush-more I’ll stipulate that his head be given plenty of space. Anyway, don’t miss this performance. [ . . . ]
My affectionate best to Annie [Birstein] who defended me against those sophisticated brutes of the
New York Review of Books
.
New York Review of Books
.
Yours ever,
Kazin’s memoir-essay “My Friend Saul Bellow” had just appeared in
Atlantic Monthly.
The book he was readying for publication was
Starting Out in the Thirties.
Atlantic Monthly.
The book he was readying for publication was
Starting Out in the Thirties.
To Stanley Burnshaw
February 19, 1965 Chicago
Dear Stanley:
In my simplicity I thought the noise of
Herzog
would presently die down, but it seems only to get louder. I can’t pretend it’s entirely unpleasant. After all, I wanted
something
to happen, and if I find now that I can’t control the volume I can always stuff my ears with money. Ridiculously needless to say that I didn’t expect it. I sometimes think this prosperity may be the world’s way of telling the writer that if his imagination succeeded in one place it failed in another. It did well enough in a book, but now “this is how things really are.” After all my talk about “reality instructors” here are reality and instruction for you!
Herzog
would presently die down, but it seems only to get louder. I can’t pretend it’s entirely unpleasant. After all, I wanted
something
to happen, and if I find now that I can’t control the volume I can always stuff my ears with money. Ridiculously needless to say that I didn’t expect it. I sometimes think this prosperity may be the world’s way of telling the writer that if his imagination succeeded in one place it failed in another. It did well enough in a book, but now “this is how things really are.” After all my talk about “reality instructors” here are reality and instruction for you!
Sometimes I think of the world as impregnated by centuries of fiction and self-fertilized by science swelling out in new forms of consciousness. Anyway, it has gotten well beyond the literary imagination. Novelists (poets too) have so long taken it for granted that they knew how to describe and what to describe and that they were doing all right. What a pathetic error! What overconfidence! The world has beaten and exceeded us all by astronomical miles. One can’t hope to catch up. Writers, for instance, can never outdo the political history of the twentieth century in perversity, and it’s simply foolish of them to imitate its
Realpolitik
as the Becketts or Burroughses try to do.
Realpolitik
as the Becketts or Burroughses try to do.
In writing
Herzog
I realized how radical it was to be moderate, in our day and age, and, as you guessed, I found a musical form for it, suggested to me by hours of listening to records every day for three years. You are very shrewd to have seen it.
Herzog
I realized how radical it was to be moderate, in our day and age, and, as you guessed, I found a musical form for it, suggested to me by hours of listening to records every day for three years. You are very shrewd to have seen it.
The play was a great disappointment. But instead of making me wretched it only made me obstinate. I’ve reconstructed it (in my field hospital after the massacre) and Viking is printing the text. I’d root out my desire to write plays if I could; I found theater people to be miserable, untrustworthy creatures.
Susan and I expect to come back to the Vineyard this summer. We have written to real estate agents for a larger place, closer to the water, either Lambert’s Cove or South Beach. We expect to see you and Leda. We look forward to it.
Yours,
Stanley Burnshaw (1906-2005) was a poet and the author of a book on poetic creativity,
The Seamless Web
(1979), as well as a biography of Robert Frost.
The Seamless Web
(1979), as well as a biography of Robert Frost.
To Jean Stafford
February 24, 1965 Chicago
Dear Jean:
I liked all the stories, but the one about the old professor and the young know-it-all best. A sign of the times, I suppose. My times, I mean. These days I cross one shadow-line after another.
It’s far too long between meetings.
Yours,
Bellow had read
Bad Characters,
Stafford’s latest story collection
.
Bad Characters,
Stafford’s latest story collection
.
To Harvey Swados
June 14, 1965 Washington, D.C.
Dear Harvey:
These quarrels are hateful. I dislike the slap-in-the-face formula and the implied responsibility for death in Vietnam. Let me at the least make clear that the glamour of power means little to me. More, I don’t like what J[ohnson] is doing in Vietnam and S. Domingo, though you and I might not agree in our criticisms. But I don’t see that holding these positions requires me to treat Johnson like a Hitler. He’s not that. He may be a brute in some ways (by no means all) but he is the President, and I haven’t yet decided to go in for civil disobedience. Have you? You sound ready to stop paying taxes.
But—no quarrels. My attending a ceremony at the White House doesn’t make a fink or criminal of me. Intellectuals, and esp. former Marxists, will really have to decide in the end what they think a government is.
As ever,
To Toby Cole
September 20, 1965 Chicago
Dear Toby—
Yes, I like Shelley Winters. Wasn’t she the poor mother in
Lolita
? I liked her better than any of the others. But aren’t we low on the scale for the likes of her? (Suppose we admit it’s not too horrible for middle-aged men to copulate with small girls, do we then have to make a philosophy of it? I could write a better book from Lolita’s point of view.)
Lolita
? I liked her better than any of the others. But aren’t we low on the scale for the likes of her? (Suppose we admit it’s not too horrible for middle-aged men to copulate with small girls, do we then have to make a philosophy of it? I could write a better book from Lolita’s point of view.)
Yours equally,
To David Bazelon
October 6, 1965 Chicago
Dear David,
I’m all for getting together, and during the summer I began more than one letter inviting you to the Vineyard, but I wasn’t in good shape, and every time I picked up the calendar I got dizzy. I’m dying to know what your fifth career will be—I’m not in a position to tease you about marriages, for perfectly obvious reasons, but I am not opposed to multiples in either field. I think we were both meant to set records. I don’t know that survivors always find good company in one another, but it’s perfectly clear that we do know a great deal about the past and ought to put our heads together.
I bummed through Buffalo in 1934 with Herb Passin. I continued up into Canada, and he went to NYC where he borrowed fifteen bucks from Jim Farrell, which he never repaid. So Farrell said, anyway. He would ask me, “When is your pal going to pay up?” About twenty-five years ago I came to Buffalo again to give a speech and was trapped by a blizzard with nobody to talk to except Leslie Fiedler. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.
Let’s exchange schedules and try to get together.
All best,
To Edna O’Brien
December 31, 1965 [Chicago]
Dear Edna,
I’m back at my fine bowlegged table in Chicago—in my house—of correction, where I hope to become more nearly myself. There seems to be only one significant thing for me—for the likes of us—and it hasn’t a great deal to do with parties.
I took a great liking to you. I think you are a lovely woman.
It’s the last day of the year, and I keep saying to people that at least the date on our tombstones won’t be 1965. My sort of joke.
Yours affectionately,
1966
To Stanley Burnshaw
January 25, 1966 Chicago
Dear Stanley,
Maybe you recall a series of articles in
Horizon
just after the war called “Where Shall John Go?” Already twenty-five years ago the British felt they were no longer in the middle of things and they were quite right. Sometimes I feel we play medicine ball with the Center. The New Yorkers look towards London and Paris, London looks at New York, and Paris if I’m not mistaken has its eye on Peking. In America of course we are entirely hypnotized by New York with glimpses of Washington and Boston entering at the sides. You ask how I can stand Chicago as a steady diet. Well, it is of course gloomy and ugly, provincial and unsociable, and the worst is that it is unappalled by its own culturelessness—no happenings, no camps, no literary life, and all our celebrities go away and turn into Mike Nichols and Susan Sontag. In plain English, the pleasure Chicago gives is a remission from the pain of New York. As a center New York is a fraud and an abomination. Chicago is something of a frontier city in the sense of not having “caught up” but it is slowly importing, in degenerate form, things degenerate from their inception. Here people have a certain self-conscious naiveté. Often they don’t know what to say but they are not full of the knowledge so common in New York of what
not
to say. What I do miss in Chicago is the opportunity, never used in New York, to “go places.”
Horizon
just after the war called “Where Shall John Go?” Already twenty-five years ago the British felt they were no longer in the middle of things and they were quite right. Sometimes I feel we play medicine ball with the Center. The New Yorkers look towards London and Paris, London looks at New York, and Paris if I’m not mistaken has its eye on Peking. In America of course we are entirely hypnotized by New York with glimpses of Washington and Boston entering at the sides. You ask how I can stand Chicago as a steady diet. Well, it is of course gloomy and ugly, provincial and unsociable, and the worst is that it is unappalled by its own culturelessness—no happenings, no camps, no literary life, and all our celebrities go away and turn into Mike Nichols and Susan Sontag. In plain English, the pleasure Chicago gives is a remission from the pain of New York. As a center New York is a fraud and an abomination. Chicago is something of a frontier city in the sense of not having “caught up” but it is slowly importing, in degenerate form, things degenerate from their inception. Here people have a certain self-conscious naiveté. Often they don’t know what to say but they are not full of the knowledge so common in New York of what
not
to say. What I do miss in Chicago is the opportunity, never used in New York, to “go places.”
Susan wants to go to the Vineyard again but I am tempting her in this wilderness with visions of Europe. We may eventually find ourselves an acre somewhere near your pond and put up a Bucky Fuller dome, unless the zoning ordinances prevent it. Please give my best to Leda. I was distressed to hear she was ill again and I hope she’s better.
All best,
To Edward Shils
January 26, 1966 Chicago
My dear Edward:
The Air India crash gave us a shock. I knew that you were in Cambridge, but you often fly that route and I associate you with it, and I myself am often up in the Boeing 707. Now that Civil Aeronautics has pronounced the 727 dangerous I’ve stopped using it. Sometimes I feel what a vain numbers-game I’m playing or catch myself applying imaginary brakes in the air. No one has gone into the air traveler’s mind, so far as I know. It’s waiting for its Dostoyevsky. I have a very distinct impression that sinners derive expiation from jet flights and clear their adulterous consciences by the risk they take, deserving the fair because they are brave. (Not so very brave, but then the fair are not so often very fair.) Then, too, plane travel does something for people in despair. I’ve seen it happen. Wishers-for-death especially find it soothing. But this is not a good subject—I have tickets to New York Friday night. I’m going to visit Adam, and to look into other less agreeable things. Also, I want to put Mr. Pawlyk aside for a few days. At times I feel very strong and rich, but more often inept and poor with this new subject. I can make a sensible forecast. I’m sure it will be powerful but strange, perhaps too strange. To be really good, among the best, one must get hold of a kind of Tolstoyan normalcy which no one can challenge. I don’t believe I can expect that now. I think what I have is relatively good poise in the midst of abnormalities. [ . . . ]
The most agreeable thing about Chicago is that one doesn’t run into many writers, critical
razboiniks
[
75
] and gangsters of the pen. But then Chicago is also in a state of extraordinary winter nullity, and we haven’t seen many people. Winter nights are long. I have an electric blanket and read
War and Peace
. I’m convinced that Leo was a somatological moralist. Eyes, lips and noses, the color of the skin, the knuckles and the feet do not lie. The tone of Speransky’s laughter tells you his social ideas are unreliable. It’s not a bad system. I seem to have used it myself, most of the time. [ . . . ]
razboiniks
[
75
] and gangsters of the pen. But then Chicago is also in a state of extraordinary winter nullity, and we haven’t seen many people. Winter nights are long. I have an electric blanket and read
War and Peace
. I’m convinced that Leo was a somatological moralist. Eyes, lips and noses, the color of the skin, the knuckles and the feet do not lie. The tone of Speransky’s laughter tells you his social ideas are unreliable. It’s not a bad system. I seem to have used it myself, most of the time. [ . . . ]
You were marvelous in England. We shouldn’t have taken so much of your time, it made me guilty, but you gave it so willingly and freely and charmingly that I was extremely happy all day. It wasn’t just the visit to Cambridge, delightful in itself, it was the love that went into it that made it so extraordinary.
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