Letters (91 page)
Authors: Saul Bellow
I’ve become forgetful, too. Nothing like your father’s nominal aphasia. I find I can’t remember the names of people I don’t care for—in some ways a pleasant disability. I further discover that I would remember people’s names because it relieved me from any need to think about them. Their names were enough. Like telling heads.
I can guess how your father must have felt at his typewriter, with a book to finish. My solution is to turn to shorter, finishable things. I have managed to do a few of those. Like learning to walk again—but what if what one wants, really, is to
run
?
run
?
I am sure you have thought these things in watching your father’s torments.
Last Saturday I attended a memorial service for Eleanor Clark, the widow of R. P. Warren. I found myself saying to her daughter Rosanna that losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces—down to the last glassy splinter.
Of course you
are
your father, and he is you. I have often felt this about my own father, whom I half expect to see when I die. But I believe I do know how your father must have felt, sitting at his typewriter with an unfinished novel. Just as I understand your saying that you are your dad. With a fair degree of accuracy I can see this in my own father. He and I never
seemed
to be in rapport: Our basic assumptions were
very
different. But that now looks superficial. I treat my sons much as he treated me: out of breath with impatience, and then a long inhalation of affection.
are
your father, and he is you. I have often felt this about my own father, whom I half expect to see when I die. But I believe I do know how your father must have felt, sitting at his typewriter with an unfinished novel. Just as I understand your saying that you are your dad. With a fair degree of accuracy I can see this in my own father. He and I never
seemed
to be in rapport: Our basic assumptions were
very
different. But that now looks superficial. I treat my sons much as he treated me: out of breath with impatience, and then a long inhalation of affection.
I willingly take up the slack as a sort of adoptive father. I do have paternal feelings towards you. It’s not only language that unites us, or “style.” We share more remote but also more important premises.
And I’m not actually at the last gasp. I expect to be around for a while (not a prediction but an expectation). Whilst this machine is to him, Hamlet said.
Yours, with love,
Martin Amis’s father, Kingsley Amis, renowned author of
Lucky Jim
(1954) and many other works, had died in October of the previous year after a long decline, subsequently chronicled by Martin in his memoir
Experience
(2000).
Lucky Jim
(1954) and many other works, had died in October of the previous year after a long decline, subsequently chronicled by Martin in his memoir
Experience
(2000).
To Reinhold Neven du Mont
April 12, 1996 Brookline
Dear Reinhold:
Harriet Wasserman and I have not been able to continue as agent and client. My new agent, as you may have heard, is Andrew Wylie. Harriet has cast me into outer darkness and no longer communicates with me though there is unfinished business to do.
In any case I write to inform you that Mr. Wylie will be representing me and that he has full authority to speak for me. You and I have always had excellent relations and there will be no change in our amicable customs.
I hope that you are well and happy. I have almost recovered from several illnesses and am writing again. I have just finished a novella—something entirely new, I hope.
Yours as ever,
Neven du Mont was an editor at Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Bellow’s German publisher.
To Albert Glotzer
April 19, 1996 Brookline
Dear Al,
I spoke with Yetta [Barshevsky Shachtman] and she told me that it was your habit to attend the Boston Marathon and wait at the finish line for your son the runner. I too encourage the oddities of my three sons and my sole grandson, Andrew, who grew up in California where oddities are never in short supply. So I was hoping to see you last Monday, but Yetta said that you were making a quick round trip and would not stay overnight. On last Tuesday I was expected at Queens College—booked for a reading—but the Nervous Nellies of the Queens English Department called on Monday to warn me of bad weather ahead. They urged me to get on the next shuttle. So I was actually in New York City on Monday night. I did my thing on Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon I was back in Boston. This was my first solo journey and I regretted leaving Janis behind. I am like you in my boyish rejection of elderliness. Antiquity—why not come right out with it? You pack a snowball on a winter day and imagine taking a belly flop on your sled as we all used to do back in the beautiful Twenties—I was ten years old in 1925. All that remains is the freshness of the impulse.
Last Sunday, here in Boston, I spoke at Harvard before Richard Pipes’s society [the Shop Club]; its members are Polish intellectuals and Jewish intellectuals (from Poland). The membership was singular, to say the least. Nobody has more intellectual style than these east Europeans. I thought this was a very odd lodge. My subject was anti-Semitism (otherwise known as Jew-hatred) in literature. I concentrated almost entirely on Dostoyevsky and on L.-F. Céline. Afterwards we attended a party at the Pipeses’. Among the guests were many who knew more about my subject than I did, and I wish I could remember their names. The only name that does come back to me is that of the brother of the late James Merrill, a boyish old man, ruddy and blue-eyed, with white curls, who looked as if he might have just left his fielder’s mitt on the hall table. For all his billions he was so fresh and engaging that my heart went out to him. He turned out to be an amateur scholar deeply interested in Polish history and literature. But I was monopolized by a mathematician I had known in a former incarnation and by a Polish Céline expert who spoke to me in French about Céline’s sick-joke pamphlets recommending the Final Solution.
A house in the country was a great idea, but completely utopian. I love solitude, but I prize it most when plenty of company is available. At this very moment, the roads are swimming in mud in Vermont. How to deal with mud time? Perhaps I might start a new fashion with mud skis. I seem to be one of those natural revolutionists who comes up regularly with million-dollar ideas. [ . . . ]
I invite you to come and stay with Janis and me when you attend next year’s Marathon. This will give both of us something to live for.
Yours,
To John Auerbach and Nola Chilton
May 3, 1996 Brookline
Dear John and Nola—
If I don’t write to you, I scarcely write at all. My correspondents have given up on me. Not to write means to be fundamentally out of order, and I suppose that that can be said of me. I am not “drunk” but I am “disorderly”—old before my preparations to be old are completed. I keep thinking what I
shall
be doing
when
—and
when
overcomes me while I’m still considering what to do about it.
shall
be doing
when
—and
when
overcomes me while I’m still considering what to do about it.
A month in intensive care, unconscious, was what did it. At last I was convinced.
It’s necessary for me to be in Boston [on account of] its doctors. I have a five-foot shelf of pills. Janis makes sure I take them on schedule, and visit the cardiologist, the neurologist, the dermatologist, the G.U. man, the ophthalmologist, etc. A friendly physician has explained to me that four weeks in intensive care take six months to recover from. I must not expect to be normal again before the end of 1996.
But I have much to be grateful for. Without Janis I’d have joined my ancestors by now. I do think of
them
quite a lot. I’m edging near. But I can’t conceive of any sort of life, in any dimension, without her. And, after all, seeing my parents, brothers, friends is by no means a certainty. There’s a large cloud of ambiguous promises over all our intimations—a dark atmosphere of hints. This side of death there’s nothing definite, about the afterlife, to be found.
them
quite a lot. I’m edging near. But I can’t conceive of any sort of life, in any dimension, without her. And, after all, seeing my parents, brothers, friends is by no means a certainty. There’s a large cloud of ambiguous promises over all our intimations—a dark atmosphere of hints. This side of death there’s nothing definite, about the afterlife, to be found.
The best one can do (the best
I
can do) is to write stories. I’ve written a novella—sexy but the setting (by and large) is a cemetery. I’ll send you a copy when it’s fit to be read.
I
can do) is to write stories. I’ve written a novella—sexy but the setting (by and large) is a cemetery. I’ll send you a copy when it’s fit to be read.
You mustn’t think I’ve forgotten you. I think about you both. But I very seldom send letters. And I can hardly bring myself to read the mail.
I hope you are well, thriving, happy.
Love,
Janis adds
her
love, as well.
her
love, as well.
The sexy novella would appear next spring as
The Actual.
The Actual.
To James Salter
May 20, 1996 Brookline
Dear Jim,
I can’t match your chatty insouciance, nobody can. Real insouciance takes character. It’s one of the gifts that’s been withheld from me. If I were able to take matters lightly I should have come along on this junket. I’ve had two trips this spring, one to Toronto that knocked me out and another to Queens College that laid me low. A trans-Atlantic trip is something I can’t face. Perhaps if I had two or three months to recover in Paris I could do it, but a round trip is out of the question. Also I’m too unforgiving to write
dégagé
[
125
] anecdotes. To take an example of such skills from your own letter, I loved the Nabokov taxi-cab anecdote but the image of a rose on a hairy chest on which you finish it rubbed me the wrong way. Nabokov was like that—one of the great wrong-way rubbers of all times. Somewhere he said, and said very well, that Borges was a marvelous writer and then he went on to add that Borges’s pieces are like beautiful verandas and that after the eighteenth or twentieth porch one says, “Great but where are the houses?” This is Nabokov at his best. At his gruesome worst he pins feminine roses to simian bosoms.
dégagé
[
125
] anecdotes. To take an example of such skills from your own letter, I loved the Nabokov taxi-cab anecdote but the image of a rose on a hairy chest on which you finish it rubbed me the wrong way. Nabokov was like that—one of the great wrong-way rubbers of all times. Somewhere he said, and said very well, that Borges was a marvelous writer and then he went on to add that Borges’s pieces are like beautiful verandas and that after the eighteenth or twentieth porch one says, “Great but where are the houses?” This is Nabokov at his best. At his gruesome worst he pins feminine roses to simian bosoms.
In the old days I used to stay in Gallimard’s attic on the Rue Bottin—little bedrooms such as the bedrooms I was used to in Chicago in the Depression: three bucks a week. I’d like nothing better than to follow you around Paris from one thrilling party to another. What a gift you have for filling your days with good company. When your letters come to be collected, you’ll be in a class with Samuel Pepys.
All the best,
To Julian Behrstock
July 25, 1996 W. Brattleboro
Dear Julian—
I seem to have become a home-industry of ill news, surrounded by pharmaceuticals (
médicaments
). A text punctuated by pills. The heart turns out to be the problem—I had always suspected that it would end by getting its own back on me. The most sinister of the pills is Coumadin, an anti-coagulant that protects me from a stroke. Born normal enough, I am now a hemophiliac like the Tsarevitch and the other princes descended from Victoria and Albert. (So they tell me.)
médicaments
). A text punctuated by pills. The heart turns out to be the problem—I had always suspected that it would end by getting its own back on me. The most sinister of the pills is Coumadin, an anti-coagulant that protects me from a stroke. Born normal enough, I am now a hemophiliac like the Tsarevitch and the other princes descended from Victoria and Albert. (So they tell me.)
I thought of you (thought
particularly
; I often think of you) last month, remembering that we had marched nine years ago in the Northwestern procession [honoring the Class of 1937]. Our sixtieth anniversary comes up next year. It would be a good occasion for both of us, and memorable also for your wife and son.
particularly
; I often think of you) last month, remembering that we had marched nine years ago in the Northwestern procession [honoring the Class of 1937]. Our sixtieth anniversary comes up next year. It would be a good occasion for both of us, and memorable also for your wife and son.
I’ve taken two or three domestic flights. Haven’t been abroad since the Caribbean holiday that nearly did me in. Janis is keen on going to Paris. We left a tidy sum there at CIC (the bank on Blvd. Raspail) and on three years of interest Janis says we could stay at the Crillon and give the Behrstocks dinner at a four-star joint. It’s a brilliant ploy. Janis is not one for small ideas. And I’m on her side. We could spend up a storm at the Crillon
and
march later with the Class of ’37.
and
march later with the Class of ’37.
At this moment we are in Vermont, reading books, writing (on lucky days) and growing flowers.
I don’t ask about your health because I don’t want to put you to the trouble of replying. But you know I’m pulling for you full strength.
Your old friend,
To Hymen Slate
July 25, 1996 W. Brattleboro
Dear Hymen—
My son Gregory with his Italian organ-grinder mustachios visited you a few months ago, and said you weren’t well—reminding me that we’ve known each other, you and I, for more than sixty years, and that at this stage of life we experience both the present moment and antiquity. I write to say that I hope you’ve overcome your illness. Of course, the old expect their surviving friends to be ailing. I had a substantial foretaste of death recently (’94); it’s the usual thing for all octogenarians.
Odd how past and present come together in the consciousness of aged men and women. My ninety-year-old sister in Miami Beach goes
every day
to the shopping mall to buy dresses; she exchanges or returns them, and her closets are full of skirts, blouses, shoes. She sees herself, with the help of her Frankenstein’s lab of cosmetics, appearing before the world as the smashing beauty she was sixty-five years back.
every day
to the shopping mall to buy dresses; she exchanges or returns them, and her closets are full of skirts, blouses, shoes. She sees herself, with the help of her Frankenstein’s lab of cosmetics, appearing before the world as the smashing beauty she was sixty-five years back.
As for me, you may ask why I write to you now, having dropped from sight about eleven years ago. As a mature observer, you may not see fit to ask at all, only shrug.
But picture the following: In one week my elder brothers had died; I attended both funerals. I turned sixty-nine on June 10th, ’84. On that day Alexandra said she was divorcing me. She moved out of the apartment then and there. Not before she had applied circular stickers, big ones, green and white, to her possessions and mine. Even bathrobes and carpet slippers carried these gummed labels, a weird snowfall of large round green and white flakes.
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