Letters (82 page)

Authors: Saul Bellow

BOOK: Letters

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One of my mistakes, from the first, was to try to draw a line between mad and sane and I can see now, having observed you for so long, that you would accept no such line in your relations with people and that you floated in and out between the lines and over them as your feelings directed. My line-drawing dementia must have made me very perverse. But you seemed to go where your feelings led you, and you put them first even when you were dealing with lunatics. I must have taken my family for normal people. Now that most of them are dead and the survivors very old, the evidence is that they were anything but normal. When my old sister went back to Montreal for a visit, she made a search for a coffee shop she had known sixty-five years ago. It hadn’t occurred to her that it wouldn’t be there, just as she remembered it. She spent two or three days looking, and of course no one could recall any such place. She had put everything on hold and she was still the pretty and charming girl who used to be taken for treats to this nice place on Sherbrooke. So what
had
happened? Her parents had died, her husband was destroyed, her son committed suicide. But in some respects nothing at all had happened. So when I think of people I have known forever and loved, either more or less or dearly, I see masses of habit possessing the original person and replacing him in the end.

And of course we are creatures of a day, but we don’t absolutely believe it.

I’ve taken some time off from Chicago to spend a few months in Boston, not far from my place in Vermont. I’ve rather liked Boston; Chicago has been taken over by racial politics—blacks and whites in a contest for control. I find it very disagreeable. On the 15th the Boston holiday ends and we go back.

The botanical garden was nice, wasn’t it?

Your friend, as ever,

Catherine Lindsay Choate met Bellow in the early 1950s. They would remain in contact for the rest of his life.

PART SIX

1990-2005

A
nd again out of the flaming of the sun would come to him a secret certainty that the goal set for this earth was that it should be filled with good, saturated with it. After everything preposterous, after dog had eaten dog, after the crocodile death had pulled everyone into his mud.

—“A Silver Dish”

1990

To John Auerbach

February 5, 1990 Chicago

My dear John,

[ . . . ] For a man approaching the seventy-fifth year of his age I am not doing badly. Janis is a dear woman and she has even overcome some of my more monstrous defects of character.

As more news of deaths arrives (the latest was that of Edith Tarcov, a dear woman whom I think you knew) the less I feel the victory of my survival. There is a strange scratchiness in the viscera when I think matters over.

I will be asking Smadar next week to bear good tidings—your surgery safely behind you.

Much love from your friend,

To John Auerbach

April 5, 1990 Chicago

Dear John:

Your letters sound more cheerful. Think there must be something to the old
Dum spiro spero
[
¹⁰⁹]. In the worst of times, it comes over you that you are, despite all that sickness and age can do, still inhaling and exhaling.

This is a note to cover a new story, and these stories seem to be the letters we write to each other.

I hope Nola is recovering quickly. Janis and I were sorry to hear of her accident.

Love to you both,

To Martin Amis

June 3, 1990 W. Brattleboro

Dear Martin,

By now you will have heard or read (I can’t imagine that Hitchens would have missed an opportunity to convey such news) that on our last day in London Janis and I were received at No. 10 Downing Street and were treated to tea and tittle-tattle by the Prime Minister. Now honestly, can you imagine that a pair of US hicks from Chicago would refuse an invitation to see for themselves the seats of the mighty? Like the nursery rhyme pussycats who went to London and frightened a mouse or two under the queen’s chair, we have little else to report. It was George Walden [former minister for education in Mrs. Thatcher’s government] who arranged this meeting, the same Walden who endeared himself to us by his indignation at your being passed over for the Booker Prize.

Put yourself in our place: Ronald Reagan or George Bush hearing that you are in Washington asks you to tea and you, ever faithful to high principles, return a withering refusal.

American friends have asked me for my impressions: “Well, you’re cruising on an interstate highway and a few hundred feet ahead you see a perfectly ordinary automobile like any other GM, Chrysler or Japanese product, and then suddenly it turns on its dangerous blue police lights and you realize that what you took for a perfectly ordinary vehicle is packed with power. It’s that unearthly blue flash that makes the difference.”

Leaving Heathrow, I opened a London newspaper and there I saw myself exposed to sophisticated ridicule. The writer, with a blue flash of his own, revealed to all the world, and to me, that Clara in
A Theft
was none other than Margaret Thatcher, concealed in the ranks as the prime minister of New York fashions. I now have this to suggest to the pre-Socratic who said you could never twice put your foot in the same river: You are doomed to put your foot in again and again and again.

But ideology is not likely to come between us. We loved seeing you and Antonia. She served us a dinner that made all the other dinners in Europe look sick. Also, Jacob [Amis] immediately recognized that I was a friend which did much to restore my confidence in myself, none too firm these days.

Yours as ever,

And love from Janis.

To Roger Shattuck

June 5, 1990 W. Brattleboro

Dear Roger:

Your letter was entirely reasonable and sensible, and I admit that I was wrong to be so touchy about a trifle. My only defense is that you gave me a hard time at Rosanna [Warren]’s dinner party, beginning with my public address and going on to my rank as a writer—whatever that may mean. I am well used to being put in my place, and I don’t really mind when I can feel that I am in the hands of a dependable place-putter.

But these provocations were minor. I don’t mind friendly teasing at all. I am however touchy about the language of some of my books, and when I am criticized in a matter of usage I can be a bit crazy. It was unforgivable to burst into your office with a list of references. If we knew each other better I’m sure I’d come to accept the teasing, even to enjoy it, and you might make friendly allowance for an occasional eruption. Of course I knew that you had written a favorable review of
Humboldt,
and you will perhaps remember that I have spoken admiringly of
The Banquet Years
, and of your Proust book. We have no
casus belli.

The daring of a major move at my time of life sets my teeth on edge but nothing is impossible to unrealistically (perversely?) youthful types like me.

Many thanks for your civilized letter.

Yours,

To Philip Roth

June 24, 1990 W. Brattleboro

Dear Philip:

In you I had a witness of my own kind and a point of balance. Without your support the angry waves would have dashed me on the stern and rock-bound Jewish coast. I am very fond of Cousin Volya who was something of a hero in the Old Country, serving in the Russian cavalry from Leningrad to Berlin. It’s easy to mistake him for somebody else. When he explained the difference between Latvia and Lithuania to [Saul] Steinberg, Steinberg said it was a piece of dialogue out of a Marx Brothers’ movie. There was however a regiment with machine guns. But I see Steinberg’s point of view. With peace, the Marx Brothers return.

Anyway, you were a great comfort to me—representing what it was essential to represent. And I thought you must be enjoying the singing. The
mixture
of a thousand ingredients.

In principle, I’m against such parties but when a surprise turns off the principle I seem to enjoy them quite a lot.

Yours ever,

Your note made Janis happy.

Roth and Claire Bloom had been present in Vermont—along with Bellow’s cousin Volya from Riga, Saul Steinberg, Eleanor Clark, Rosanna Warren, Maggie Staats Simmons, John Auerbach from Israel, Albert Glotzer, Bette Howland, Jonathan Kleinbard, sons Adam and Daniel Bellow and many others—for a surprise seventy-fifth birthday celebration.

To Julian Behrstock

June 26, 1990 W. Brattleboro

Dear Julian:

It never occurred to me to think of myself as the Ancient of Days but there’s no getting away from it. What is it that prevents me from realizing that I have grown so old—persistent adolescence? Obstinacy? A refusal to acknowledge what I plainly see in the mirror?

Yesterday I was gardening in front of the house, made a misstep, fell four feet to the ground, landed flat on my back, picked myself up at once and went about my business until Janis ordered me to go upstairs and lie down. No broken bones, no bruises visible, only a stiffness across the hips in the night. My sister Jane, nine years my senior, fell downstairs at the El station on her way to the Loop and kept her appointment nevertheless. She broke no bones either.

I was touched by your birthday message. Janis turns out to be an incredibly gifted organizer. You would have enjoyed the occasion. It was attended by seventy people, two of them greenhorn cousins of my own age just out of the Soviet Union. And children, of course, and grandchildren and old pals, the durable kind like yourself.

Last week I accepted a grant from a foundation, whose intent is not altogether clear. I think they want me to go to Paris in the winter of ’91 to teach a course at the Sorbonne. The offer was made and accepted on the telephone, so I’m not altogether clear about the specifics. What is certain is that Janis and I will fly over at the beginning of February and stay until the end of May. Sometimes apartments are exchanged through the university. It’s highly unlikely that you might know someone who will be leaving for the Congo in February and returning in May. The perennial adolescent in me insists on believing that anything is possible. My mature purpose is to tell you the news and to say how glad I am at the prospect of seeing you early next year.

Love,

To Jonathan Kleinbard

July 1, 1990 W. Brattleboro

Dear Jonathan,

Sometimes citizen Bellow has to fight his guilt when he considers what a world this is, and how much he might have done in the public interest if he had put away this idle stuff he insists on calling “art.” His books have been a big mistake and it isn’t only honest, earnest lawyers, psychologists, engineers, economists, etc.—servants of reality—who believe this, but writers of a different outlook who fault me for ignoring the crisis under our noses and reproach me roughly. I might have been some good as a journalist. But it’s too late now to mend and all I can do is to do what I have taught myself. You say, “opening up the heart.” People seem to doubt if there
is
such an organ. The advanced view is that there ain’t no such thing, and it can find more evidence for this than we can for
our
convictions.

But I’m going to stop here, leaving just enough space to say that the agreement of a man like you outweighs the criticism of thousands of “them.”

We have other matters to discuss but they’ll have to wait.

With thanks and affection to you and also to Joan,

To Saul Steinberg

July 10, 1990 W. Brattleboro

Dear Saul: