Letters (90 page)
Authors: Saul Bellow
Much love,
Amis had contributed an introduction to the new Everyman edition of
The Adventures of Augie March.
The Adventures of Augie March.
1996
To Albert Glotzer
January 9, 1996 Brookline
Dear Al,
I thought of you while chatting with Richard Pipes, the Russian historian. He’s getting ready to publish a collection of recently released Lenin documents from the early years—1917 to 1923. I wish you had been here when he described some of them. One is an order to find and hang a hundred Kulaks. Just hang them, his instructions were, and leave them hanging as long as possible. A few years ago we in America were calling this consciousness-raising. On the other hand, one still meets people from Harvard with a hear-no-evil fixation on the essential benevolence of the Soviet Union from first to last. But of course now we’re talking about character formations of the middle class, not about politics.
I haven’t read
Crime and Punishment
in many years—I have it scheduled for the coming winter—but I have a distinct recollection of Raskolnikov’s double murder. He waits until the old usurer’s sister is out of the way, but just as he hits the money lender on the head with his axe, the door opens and he sees the shocked face of the simpleton sister who has returned. He has no choice but to kill her, too. It is the second killing that plagues his conscience. I can’t remember that he ever regrets the first murder. But the innocent sister who unexpectedly comes home is a True Believer and also an intimate friend of the prostitute Sonya whom Raskolnikov eventually marries. Tell Maggie for me that I hope I haven’t upset her. I will be reading the book in March and if I’m wrong about the second victim I shall send a dozen American Beauty roses to apologize.
Crime and Punishment
in many years—I have it scheduled for the coming winter—but I have a distinct recollection of Raskolnikov’s double murder. He waits until the old usurer’s sister is out of the way, but just as he hits the money lender on the head with his axe, the door opens and he sees the shocked face of the simpleton sister who has returned. He has no choice but to kill her, too. It is the second killing that plagues his conscience. I can’t remember that he ever regrets the first murder. But the innocent sister who unexpectedly comes home is a True Believer and also an intimate friend of the prostitute Sonya whom Raskolnikov eventually marries. Tell Maggie for me that I hope I haven’t upset her. I will be reading the book in March and if I’m wrong about the second victim I shall send a dozen American Beauty roses to apologize.
My health improves daily. I say this only to friends. Illness gives me a whole range of marvelous excuses for refusing the thousands of requests that come in the mail.
On Thursday Janis and I are flying down to Coral Gables to attend the wedding of my youngest son, Daniel. Youngest? He’ll be thirty-two in March. Nobody is young anymore, except the grandchildren, and even they look a little wrinkled from time to time—my own projection, of course. I must have an ailing cornea. [ . . . ]
Best wishes,
To Julian Behrstock
January 19, 1996 Brookline
Dear Julian,
Just as I was about to emerge from the woods and to feel approximately normal, the doctors caught up with me and back to the hospital I went for gall-bladder surgery. This imposed a second convalescence on the first, which wasn’t quite over. I found myself in the same hospital corridor, only two doorways away from the room I occupied last January. I wouldn’t dream of complaining to a non-complainer like you. I’m just chronicling, not bitching. The surgery is about three weeks behind me now. My belly, which must have resembled Picasso’s stamp collection, has recovered from the surgical bruises. The only prominent scar goes through my navel. Out of some sheer primitive magical conviction, I felt the navel to be inviolable. I seemed to have believed that it would never be mutilated. Probably some Oedipal residue. Anyway, I am delighted to hear that you are well enough to travel
en famille.
en famille.
I have in today’s mail a letter from the Ministry of Culture in Paris inviting me to a “Salon du livre” late in March. The national center of this book fair, if you can believe it, is 53 rue de Verneuil. Surely you haven’t forgotten the rue de Verneuil.
But this is a pipe dream. I couldn’t possibly fly to Paris for three days and bring back a jet lag lasting for weeks.
Janis and I have moved away from Bay State Road and the showpiece apartment belonging to the University is used for visiting firemen. [ . . . ]
I hope there will be no more medical news at either end. The foregoing explains why you have not been hearing from me.
Yours affectionately,
To Sophie Wilkins
January 19, 1996 Brookline
Dear Sophie,
I seem to be down to notes, even though I long to reply to your delicious letter with a letter equally long.
It took me nearly a year to recover from heart failure, double pneumonia, and a toxic attack on the nervous system, and then, just as I thought I could put it all behind me, the doctors decided that they must remove my gall bladder, and the surgery put me down again for a period of weeks and I am only just beginning to recover. So although I have all sorts of things to tell you, I find that I can’t write stories or novels in the morning and long letters in the afternoon. Nor when I look at the shelves in the library can I understand demon correspondents like Voltaire or Alexander Pope. I am too old and bothered to read their books, much less their letters. In my youth I had time for everything. I read scads of books, earned my letter on the track team, chased girls and spoke from a soapbox. I can only think about Voltaire that he must have had an extraordinarily long adolescence. But then Goethe told Eckermann somewhere that whenever he began to write in real earnest the years dropped away and he was once again sixteen and seventeen.
Anyway, I have pulled out of the second nosedive. My youngest son, Daniel, was married last Sunday in Coral Gables, Fla., and Janis and I flew down on Thursday from this gateway to the Arctic to the snowless beauty of the south. We had to wait four hours at Logan for our plane. I had sworn in advance to put up with no long airport ordeal, and I actually had a letter from the doctor certifying that I was too weak to expose myself to fatigue. But I did it all the same. I didn’t want the kid accusing me of disappearing on
all
important occasions. So I did it all, including a second trip to the altar with my ex-wife, Daniel’s mother. There wouldn’t have been a Stoic in all of Rome who wouldn’t have congratulated me on my philosophic poise.
all
important occasions. So I did it all, including a second trip to the altar with my ex-wife, Daniel’s mother. There wouldn’t have been a Stoic in all of Rome who wouldn’t have congratulated me on my philosophic poise.
Let me add my name to the list of Freud’s detractors. If he had been purely a scientist he wouldn’t have had nearly so many readers. It was lovers of literature (and not the best kind of those) who made his reputation. His patients were the text and his diagnoses were lit. crit. The gift the great nineteenth-century
nudniks
[
123
] gave us was the gift of metaphor. Marx with the metaphor of class struggle and Freud with the metaphor of the Oedipus complex. Once you had read Marx it took a private revolution to overthrow the powerful metaphor of class warfare—for an entire decade I couldn’t see history in any other light. Freud also subjugated us with powerful metaphors and after a time we couldn’t approach relationships in any but a Freudian medical light. Thank God I liberated myself before it was too late.
nudniks
[
123
] gave us was the gift of metaphor. Marx with the metaphor of class struggle and Freud with the metaphor of the Oedipus complex. Once you had read Marx it took a private revolution to overthrow the powerful metaphor of class warfare—for an entire decade I couldn’t see history in any other light. Freud also subjugated us with powerful metaphors and after a time we couldn’t approach relationships in any but a Freudian medical light. Thank God I liberated myself before it was too late.
Anyway, the purpose of the letter is to tell you how much we love you and miss you both. Janis and I will be in New York on April 16th. The reason for the visit is a bought-and-paid-for reading at Queens College. Perhaps we will be able to see you then. The trouble is that we must be back in Boston to meet our classes at BU. If the Queens authorities will allow me to fiddle with the dates, we may be able to add a weekend, and thus have time for the really important things.
Yours ever,
In Memory of Eleanor Clark
(Delivered at the First and Second Unitarian
Universalist Church, Boston, March 9, 1996)
I met Eleanor Clark in Manhattan in the late Forties. It was Paolo Milano who introduced us. She was then living on the Upper East Side, and he said, “I’m going to call on her—come along.” I had read Eleanor in
Partisan Review
. Perhaps she had read me, too. What I recall is that she was a breezy young woman with a fine figure, attractive, a lively conversationalist, a great asker of difficult questions. I think Paolo had been acquainted with her in Rome. I know that in the late Thirties she had been one of Trotsky’s staff in Mexico City. I always meant to ask her if she was in the villa when it was attacked—blasted—by an armed band led by Siqueiros the painter. But I never got around to it, somehow.
Partisan Review
. Perhaps she had read me, too. What I recall is that she was a breezy young woman with a fine figure, attractive, a lively conversationalist, a great asker of difficult questions. I think Paolo had been acquainted with her in Rome. I know that in the late Thirties she had been one of Trotsky’s staff in Mexico City. I always meant to ask her if she was in the villa when it was attacked—blasted—by an armed band led by Siqueiros the painter. But I never got around to it, somehow.
PR
was in its early years strongly flavored by Trotskyist politics. The magazine was in the Thirties what
The Dial
had been in the Twenties, its great days, the days of Marianne Moore—an international journal of literature and the arts. In
Partisan Review
a decade later the arts were mixed with left-wing politics. College students in the Midwest had their eyes opened to the great world by
Partisan Review
. There they could read Malraux, Silone, Gide, Orwell, Auden together with that older generation of American poets and critics—Allen Tate, R. P. Warren, John Crowe Ransom, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Meyer Schapiro. And suddenly a generation of younger Americans began to appear in this otherwise unattainable company un-dreamed of in Madison, Wisconsin, or Urbana, Illinois. It was in
PR
that we first read our own gifted contemporaries—Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Clement Greenberg, Jean Stafford, Harold Rosenberg, James Agee. Eleanor Clark was one of those gifted and, in my view, privileged people—the
avant-garde
, the bohemians—initiates of a sort into all that represented the finest, the deepest, the boldest and the subtlest.
was in its early years strongly flavored by Trotskyist politics. The magazine was in the Thirties what
The Dial
had been in the Twenties, its great days, the days of Marianne Moore—an international journal of literature and the arts. In
Partisan Review
a decade later the arts were mixed with left-wing politics. College students in the Midwest had their eyes opened to the great world by
Partisan Review
. There they could read Malraux, Silone, Gide, Orwell, Auden together with that older generation of American poets and critics—Allen Tate, R. P. Warren, John Crowe Ransom, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Meyer Schapiro. And suddenly a generation of younger Americans began to appear in this otherwise unattainable company un-dreamed of in Madison, Wisconsin, or Urbana, Illinois. It was in
PR
that we first read our own gifted contemporaries—Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Clement Greenberg, Jean Stafford, Harold Rosenberg, James Agee. Eleanor Clark was one of those gifted and, in my view, privileged people—the
avant-garde
, the bohemians—initiates of a sort into all that represented the finest, the deepest, the boldest and the subtlest.
There was something like a literary, painterly and intellectual life in New York in those years. Very brief. It didn’t quite make it into the Sixties. Already in the Fifties writers were drifting into teaching positions in the universities. So that when I went to Minnesota in 1946 I became acquainted with Robert Penn Warren. He had not then met Eleanor Clark. I’ve never been much good at chronologies. In such matters I go, as most of us do, by emotional clocks and affective calendars. The object of these recollections is to turn some lateral or indirect light on Eleanor’s life. I can recall driving in winter from Rhinebeck, N.Y., with Fred Dupee and his wife to the Warren house in Connecticut to attend a party they were giving and that Fred, who was driving, had us all swigging whiskey from the bottle Jazz-Age style. The party lasted most of the night, but Eleanor and Red were, unlike most of their guests, unmistakably family people.
Over the years I met the Warrens in a variety of circumstances. I recall that the three of us went together in a car when Eleanor won a National Book Award for
The Oysters of Locmariaquer
. I took the fiction prize in that year, and Red said to the two of us, “Enough of this. You’ve got your medals. Now get out while the getting’s good.”
The Oysters of Locmariaquer
. I took the fiction prize in that year, and Red said to the two of us, “Enough of this. You’ve got your medals. Now get out while the getting’s good.”
During the last twenty summers we met often in Vermont. Eleanor’s eyes were all but gone but she entertained her visitors in style. We sat on the outer deck of the house, drinking. On a conversational roll she barely noticed the chill of the air at sunset or the stinging of the mosquitoes. Like the matriarch she had become she cooked the dinner and, at the head of the table, ladled out the stew and filled the plates of her guests. She often growled at me for my shell-back social views and pounced on my mistakes of grammar or usage. But that was because she loved disputes, sharp answers and social militancy. She was a handsome, brave, big-hearted woman. If you hadn’t seen her sweeping aside her handicaps and frailties, coming on like the able-bodied beauty she had been decades ago, you had missed a superb demonstration of gallantry or heroic courage.
To Richard Stern
March 12, 1996 Brookline
Dear Richard—
You are unchallengeably the most generous writer I’ve ever known. Your firefly friends can be certain when their tails light up with a new color that your innocent heart will respond with joy.
When I got out of the hospital (crawled out) last winter I ran a test or two—naturally—to see whether there was a charge still in the batteries. And of course repetitions—deploying the old troops—wouldn’t do.
And . . . I’ve got at least four or five readers. God has not abandoned me. Why the Lord of hosts has let the ranks become so thin, who can say?
Continuons!
[
124
]
Continuons!
[
124
]
Much love from your well and grateful friend,
To Martin Amis
March 13, 1996 Brookline
My dear Martin:
I see that I’ve become a really bad correspondent. It’s not that I don’t think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the “warehouse of good intentions”:
“Can’t do it now.”
“Then put it on
hold
.”
hold
.”
This is one’s strategy for coping with old age, and with death—because one
can’t
die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
can’t
die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
I entered the hospital in ’94, a man biologically in his forties. Coming out in ’95, I was the Ancient Mariner, and the Mariner didn’t write novels. He had only one story and delivered it orally. But [I told myself] you
are
a writer still, and perhaps you’d better come to terms with the Ancient.
are
a writer still, and perhaps you’d better come to terms with the Ancient.
I may be about to resolve all these difficulties, but for two years they have totally absorbed me.
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