Letters (80 page)
Authors: Saul Bellow
I don’t quite understand what you meant by “moving to the States”—that, from my standpoint, would be the best thing in the world if it were feasible. I go on hearing from Tony, who telephones me for news of your progress and I tell him what I can, which is not much these days, since I hesitate to phone Smadar who will have other things on her mind now. But we are going to be in Philadelphia on the first of May and perhaps by then the baby will have been born. Janis and I are making our Vermont move early this year, at the beginning of May. As peaceful a summer of work as one can arrange in these terrible days of trouble. On the question of Israel I have kept my distance from most factions although I did sign a letter at Teddy Kollek’s urging, with co-signers Isaiah Berlin and Isaac Stern. My memory may be suppressing “Boynstein” the conductor. [ . . . ]
I dictate this note to Janis and it contains love from us both,
To Cynthia Ozick
May 18, 1988 W. Brattleboro
Dear Cynthia,
When I looked around you were gone, and I was greatly disappointed. Our contacts make me think of a billiard game—one light touch and then we’re again at opposite ends of the table. Has Providence decided that touches are better than extended contacts? Anyway, I was sad, but during dinner my spirits rose somewhat on your account because you didn’t have to listen to the speeches. These got worse and worse with the rank and wealth of the speakers and by the time we got to the most eminent I was in some pain. He [Walter J. Annenberg] made Sartre’s void feel like Times Square. Among the other speakers I make an exception for [Chaim] Potok, who gave a very good talk, and gave it in his own words. The others all spoke the synthetic tongue of the media, something far worse than Orwellian double-speak. Double-speak and double-think were, after all, political, whereas with Mr. Annenberg there was no visible reason, it was an
acte gratuit
in the Gide meaning of the term—mental or linguistic murders.
acte gratuit
in the Gide meaning of the term—mental or linguistic murders.
I think that I agreed with a nod when you spoke of the Academy Ceremony, but I have no intention of turning up this year. New York is a ten-hour round trip from Vermont and I can’t face that. Not for the privilege of sitting next to John Updike.
It always does me good to see you, and I think it’s time we meet face to face for a conversation. Perhaps you and your husband would like to take in a Marlboro concert. If so, we could give you dinner and a night’s lodging.
This does not count as an answer to your beautiful letter. I used to be a free and easy correspondent. God knows I never suffered from writer’s block, but as I grow older “the mail problem” has become serious. One could write a funny story on this subject, and I may do just that.
(I think the medals they gave us could be used to crack walnuts. Or to subdue
nudniks
. Only nowadays it would be an abuse of some kind.)
nudniks
. Only nowadays it would be an abuse of some kind.)
Now the hardest part of this letter—an appropriate close: I generally say “best wishes.” In your case they really are
the
best,
the
best,
In Philadelphia, Bellow and Ozick had been among the speakers at the centenary celebration of the Jewish Publication Society of America.
To Harold Brodkey
December 5, 1988 Chicago
Dear H.B.:
Late last summer I told Ann Malamud that I was going to write to you about your stories, which I was reading with pleasure. Now at the beginning of December I am ready to put down some of my impressions—not too long a time, for me. I guess I am slowing down—the gap between intention and performance is getting longer. To go immediately to the point: I see that we agree about human beings as they are represented in fiction, in modern literature. The models irritate or bore us, they are utterly used up; thin but usable for a century, they are coming apart now, a mass of floating threads. Speaking for myself (perhaps for you too) I find that what passes for human in most fiction is not merely inadequate but enraging as well, and in your stories I see a persistent following-up of intuitions that come too often to be passed over. Have I got it right? Take “Hofstedt” (p. 97): “The narrative will be colored like a map, according to the geography of my spirit . . . my lunges at and occasional capture of intelligence, that armored and fatal lizard.” (Your note calls me an intelligent writer, but I do understand that intelligence belongs under the lining. Any sane tailor knows that.)
The things I like best have a kind of excited, even passionate vitality breaking out like a profuse nosebleed, a flow of blood, a hemorrhage, as in “Verona: A Young Woman Speaks”—the showpiece child of vain ambitious parents going clean out of herself. It takes the Swiss Alps with their snow to cool her. Or does the snow only make the kid more ecstatic? Each moment is more beautiful than the one before, but she does fall asleep. “This was happiness then.”
In the longer stories this is less immediate but then the purpose of all the extended meanders is exploration, leading to the discovery (or surprise and capture) of intuitions. About love. About being.
That’s how I interpret “Almost Classical” in your title.
With thanks and best wishes,
Brodkey’s book was
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.
1989
To Michael Alison
June 12, 1989 W. Brattleboro
Dear Michael,
Since Barley’s death I have been rethinking everything I knew about her. One never does that for the living, somehow; you and Susan-Mary must be going through this too and even more painfully. Barley was physically fragile but she was also proportionately durable in spirit. She had drawn her own line through existence and followed it with extraordinary determination and persistence. What she had ruled out and could not allow herself to wish for was not allowed to interfere or to weaken her purpose. But her generosity was such that she wanted others to have what she had been obliged to relinquish.
I couldn’t always understand her reasoning but I know from her bearing that she was receiving signals inaudible to me—probably unintelligible to me, as well. She was a dear and devoted friend and one of the most generous persons I ever knew.
I am not much good at condolences, but I was her affectionate and admiring friend and shall continue to think of her and to feel for her as I have thought and felt for some forty years.
Yours ever,
To Cynthia Ozick
June 15, 1989 W. Brattleboro
Dear Cynthia,
No need for you to make a case, you are entirely in the right about
Tikkun
and the Columbia/PLO/Israeli left. I’d attend your Writers’ and Artists’ Fair if I were entirely free, and although you will not be terribly interested in the crowded and presidential character of my schedule I can’t resist reeling off a sequence of dates representing a) gainful occasions, b) collegial and personal obligations and c) vanity and other mortal frailties. As you know, I shan’t be in Chicago next autumn. I agreed without proper forethought to teach at Boston University. I wish I hadn’t boxed myself in. I have to be in New York November 9th, back in Boston to teach a class November 10th. I fly to Washington November 30th to honor Malamud’s memory. Boston, again, the very next day. Then Tulsa, Oklahoma December 9th. Each of these occasions requires a round trip, your December 3rd conference included. Let me say nevertheless that I am going to try to come. That is, I will come if I can prepare a suitable statement. Being airborne is sometimes illuminating. Flying can stir me up. [ ... ]
Tikkun
and the Columbia/PLO/Israeli left. I’d attend your Writers’ and Artists’ Fair if I were entirely free, and although you will not be terribly interested in the crowded and presidential character of my schedule I can’t resist reeling off a sequence of dates representing a) gainful occasions, b) collegial and personal obligations and c) vanity and other mortal frailties. As you know, I shan’t be in Chicago next autumn. I agreed without proper forethought to teach at Boston University. I wish I hadn’t boxed myself in. I have to be in New York November 9th, back in Boston to teach a class November 10th. I fly to Washington November 30th to honor Malamud’s memory. Boston, again, the very next day. Then Tulsa, Oklahoma December 9th. Each of these occasions requires a round trip, your December 3rd conference included. Let me say nevertheless that I am going to try to come. That is, I will come if I can prepare a suitable statement. Being airborne is sometimes illuminating. Flying can stir me up. [ ... ]
As for the PEN, my contempt for it is such that I now throw its membership bills into the fireplace. Besides, it gives me something less than pleasure to be listed with the Styrons, Vonneguts, Mailers, to say nothing of the academic specialists, public relations people and promoters whose names fill the membership list. And when you say that I ought to be left in peace to write more sentences I can make the same wish for you. The media experts etc. have it all over us in the field of politics and I am often tempted to take the Nabokov Literature-Only line. Perhaps it was easier for him. The situation of a Russian in exile (a Christian, after all) can’t approach that of a Jew with its special complications and singular horrors. The woman who wrote that splendid essay on Primo Levi in your last collection can’t possibly stand apart on Literature-Only grounds and keep her self-respect. The only non-fiction book I ever published, and it’s not likely to have a successor, was the Jerusalem one. I felt it had to be done, but then it was something I could do on my own terms without conferences, luncheons, speeches and appeals to the press to publicize my position. I can’t believe that either alternative (Politics, No Politics) answers the one truly significant question. Because we are Jews we are
scandalized,
and being scandalized sets us apart—i.e. we have to be isolated by “everybody.”
scandalized,
and being scandalized sets us apart—i.e. we have to be isolated by “everybody.”
I’d like to say since I’ve mentioned your terrific collection of essays that I thought you were too nice to George Steiner who is, of all pains in the ass, the most unbearable because of his high polish and his snobbery. He is not a good existentialist—Nietzschean-Heideggerian—because the Nietzscheans and Heideggerians made no claims for the Europe that is (or was in the Nineteenth Century) and based all their hopes on a Europe that hadn’t yet appeared. They assumed that the old civilization was gone forever and they would not have cared for all this strutting of people dressed in what tatters they could find of the glorious old fabric. The Last Man in
Zarathustra
is not mentioned as an American. I kept thinking of Steiner’s opportunistic Old Europe game while I was recently reading Denis Donoghue’s piece on [Paul] de Man in
The New York Review of Each Other’s Books
. Since the linguistics business interests you, perhaps you too read his back-and-forth article (“Nazism was bad of course and it was wicked of de Man to hate Jews, but let us mitigate our judgment by thinking of the unhappy psychological constitution of the man, etc.”). De Man, like his master Heidegger (to whom he was never very faithful), believed that there was nothing further to be said or done for this civilization of ours and that whatever hastened its disintegration was historically justified. [ . . . ] In doing so, de Man won the admiration of hundreds of intellectuals to whom the decline of the West is just another game.
Zarathustra
is not mentioned as an American. I kept thinking of Steiner’s opportunistic Old Europe game while I was recently reading Denis Donoghue’s piece on [Paul] de Man in
The New York Review of Each Other’s Books
. Since the linguistics business interests you, perhaps you too read his back-and-forth article (“Nazism was bad of course and it was wicked of de Man to hate Jews, but let us mitigate our judgment by thinking of the unhappy psychological constitution of the man, etc.”). De Man, like his master Heidegger (to whom he was never very faithful), believed that there was nothing further to be said or done for this civilization of ours and that whatever hastened its disintegration was historically justified. [ . . . ] In doing so, de Man won the admiration of hundreds of intellectuals to whom the decline of the West is just another game.
I never do write you a short letter, do I? Miss M. Kakutani of the
New York Times
said a few weeks ago that I am a garrulous writer. Maybe she meant fluent. Of course no man can know at what point he may have turned into a Polonius.
New York Times
said a few weeks ago that I am a garrulous writer. Maybe she meant fluent. Of course no man can know at what point he may have turned into a Polonius.
Yours ever,
To Sophie Wilkins
August 15, 1989 W. Brattleboro
Dear Sophie:
It isn’t hard nowadays to count one’s blessings, they’re well under the number of toes and fingers. It’s the scope of those blessings I do enjoy that I’m most gratefully aware of. In this day and age, bringing out a small book or two and hearing from you and from Karl about the one and the other makes me singularly lucky. I’m hardly conscious of anything resembling a “literary life,” but as a writer I’m still well above the poverty line. How “my readers” keep their purity and sanity is a profound mystery, given what they have to absorb in the way of literary journalism and the general
Schlumperei
[
106
] of “educated” opinion. To a large sector of that opinion, the heavily ideologized one, I am something of an ogre-reactionary. Besides I am one of the old-guy heavies who have to be kept in their place. No question but that Karl too has to put up with this being kept in place. No exceptions are made.
Schlumperei
[
106
] of “educated” opinion. To a large sector of that opinion, the heavily ideologized one, I am something of an ogre-reactionary. Besides I am one of the old-guy heavies who have to be kept in their place. No question but that Karl too has to put up with this being kept in place. No exceptions are made.
Members of our own dwindling generation who will see the picture as only those can who have lived as we have—graduates of the same street-academies, veterans of the same wars, released from the same errors and prejudices, breathers of the vanishing atmospheres of the Thirties, Forties, Fifties—are our best judges. When I read, or rather study, one of your letters I remember the conversation of old friends, the tone of those better days and the style of thinking and comment of Greenwich Village gatherings. Friends now dead also come back to enlighten and comfort me and to remind me that we—the living remnant—are alone now, or all but. The survivors for the most part are silenter and silenter, reluctant, some of them, to say a single word. Of those still here a few have become dim, or too cranky to wish to make themselves intelligible. So you seem to me extraordinarily magnanimous. I send you a mere booklet and you answer with a personal letter, a really valuable communication in the old style. I sometimes think I write books in lieu of letters and that real letters have more kindness in them, addressed as they are to one friend. In pleasing you and Karl I have my reward. When you tell me I am more or less on track.
Yours as ever,
To Cynthia Ozick
August 29, 1989 W. Brattleboro
Dear Cynthia:
I can write a small book more easily than a letter—why is that? This is not so much a question as a mystery, and an idiotic mystery at that. When I am writing fiction I am
geared up
or fully mobilized (see how I call on mechanical or military figures of speech). I seem to have some difficulty about being myself, unless it’s the fiction-writer that’s the real thing. But it’s not (thank God!) an identity problem. The real source of both letters and stories can be located. Somewhere Kierkegaard has written about the human power to relate everything to everything else. For Jews, it’s the
neshama
[
107
]. Still I find letter-writing difficult, a fault which is not trivial, an unpleasant fault. But then what you said about
The Bellarosa Connection
gave me more pleasure than I could handle, and your letter was in every respect so rich and generous that it turned me into a reader, an admiring reader.
geared up
or fully mobilized (see how I call on mechanical or military figures of speech). I seem to have some difficulty about being myself, unless it’s the fiction-writer that’s the real thing. But it’s not (thank God!) an identity problem. The real source of both letters and stories can be located. Somewhere Kierkegaard has written about the human power to relate everything to everything else. For Jews, it’s the
neshama
[
107
]. Still I find letter-writing difficult, a fault which is not trivial, an unpleasant fault. But then what you said about
The Bellarosa Connection
gave me more pleasure than I could handle, and your letter was in every respect so rich and generous that it turned me into a reader, an admiring reader.
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