Letters Read online

  I’m half way through the second draft. Warren has read it and seems to feel that it’ll sell. He liked it. I sent Henle a copy of the first draft. He disapproved of Mr. Schlossberg and thought the restaurant scene was a set-piece—wrongly. Otherwise he approved highly of it. Last week he sent me a copy of Calder [Willingham]’s novel, of which I’ve read about two hundred pages. Calder hits savagely beside the mark. He’s very nervous. Very capable in some ways, a fine ear, but on the whole more vehement than imaginative. I don’t know what makes so many of the Southern writers gratuitously violent. Faulkner has come closest to harnessing violence to tragedy, but the off-horse pulls harder with him, too.

  My feeling is that you should keep your hand in at fiction regardless. It may well be that you have a biographical talent. You should of course find the kind of writing in which your pliancy is greatest and your imagination freest. We all look for that. But it’s too early to give up fiction. How many novelists have shown their powers during their twenties?

  Let me hear.

  Love,

  Calder Willingham’s novel, soon to be published by Vanguard, was End as a Man.

  1947

  To Samuel Freifeld

  [Postmarked Madrid, date illegible; postcard of El Bufón Don Sebastián de Morra by Velázquez, Museo del Prado]

  Dear Sam—

  Thomas à Becket, your friend and mine, would be without note here where the people are the martyrs, every man his own, and the blood of saints and poets would be gratuitously shed—if offered at all. Besides which, the poets own Fiats and eat ten courses at dinner.

  To Edmund Wilson

  October 3, 1947 Minneapolis

  Dear Mr. Wilson:

  Two years ago you sponsored my application for a Guggenheim. I wonder if you would do so a second time. I have a new book coming in November, The Victim, and I rather think I’ll be luckier this year. I know this sort of thing is a great bother to you, but the powers will have it so.

  Sincerely yours,

  To Robert Penn Warren

  October 5, 1947 Minneapolis

  Dear Red—

  I’m sorry we missed seeing you and Cinina (Anita came to New York to meet me). Lambert Davis said he was expecting you daily. I would have liked nothing better than to hang around another week, but as it was I came back to Mpls. three days after the start of the quarter, arrived with a congestion of Spanish and Midwestern scenes in my head and my blood overcharged by a week of gluttony. Americans can remain fat in Spain; I, for some reason, lost about twenty pounds there and took steps to recover some of them in New York, but went too fast. No doubt there was an ideological reason for eating so much—we may not be strong in Phoenician ruins but we do have steamed clams. At all events, I’m living on milk and eggs, principally.

  Meanwhile I’ve unpacked my papers and am gradually coaxing myself back to work. I have a number of stories to do; after that, a novel. I’m applying for a Guggenheim, and I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d permit me to give you as a reference.

  [ . . . ] I expect you’ll put off sailing until All the King’s Men opens. You must be having a wonderful time with [Erwin] Piscator and his assistant.

  Anita asks to be remembered to you and Cinina.

  All the best,

  That spring, German émigré director Erwin Piscator was rehearsing Warren’s stage version of All the King’s Men at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School for Social Research in New York. By “assistant,” Bellow presumably refers to Piscator’s wife and collaborator, the dancer Maria Ley.

  To Henry Volkening

  [n.d.] [Minneapolis]

  Dear Henry:

  This is a copy of my reply to the enclosed and little enough to relieve my swollen feelings. I definitely do not want Henle to publish my next novel. You may say what you please about hard times in the publishing business. They’re not so hard but that a book like Eagle at My Eyes [by Norman Katkov] can’t go through three printings in its first month with no more (to say the least) to recommend it than my book. Henle gave me an advance of seven hundred fifty. I still owe him money. And doesn’t he seem pleased in his letter. Small wonder!

  Yours,

  Glad you like “Dora.” I don’t think the New Yorker will.

  To Robert Penn Warren

  [Postmarked Minneapolis, Minn., 17 November 1947]

  Dear Red:

  Thank you very much for being so agreeable about that Guggenheim business. I am terribly superstitious about formal letters. It’s harder for me to write the insurance company than to do a story; why, an analyst may someday be able to tell me. Anyhow, I appreciate it enormously.

  I do like the [Leonard] Ungers very much. So far we’ve met in company only—the social whirl this fall has been dazzling—but I think Leonard and I have sized each other up as people from the same layer of the upper air (or lower depths; whichever you like). And of course Sam Monk is wonderful as you probably well know. And the Hivnors: Bob got married last summer. We’re very lucky, in short. As far as the place itself is concerned, well, I understand what Augustine meant when he said “the devil hath established his cities in the north.” I’ve lived in Montreal and in Chicago. [ . . . ]

  My friend Isaac Rosenfeld, by the way, doesn’t call gossip gossip anymore; he calls it social history. I think that’s very good, don’t you?

  I wish I had a good excuse for going to New York during Christmas. I’d love to see All the King’s Men, but I have no such excuse and I’ll have to read about it in my two-day-old Times. [ . . . ]

  Best to Cinina,

  Yours,

  To Melvin Tumin

  [n.d.] [Minneapolis]

  Dear Mel—

  [ . . . ] Anita’s family is utterly wretched. Her mother, who last year lost her eldest son, is full of hurt and, at seventy-three, only her black eyes have animation, the rest of her is rigid. The sister-in-law (married to Anita’s brother Max) had her wave of talent about twenty-five years ago, at seventeen or so, and was sent to Italy and Germany to “complete her musical studies,” came home and flopped and now teaches piano to kids who come with hockey-sticks and baseball mitts. She is very cultural haut monde with me and because I would rather play with Herschel’s [Gregory’s] trains than enter her cultural haut monde, she is vengeful and digs at me, saying to Catherine, Anita’s eldest sister, “Please buy me The Axe of Wandsbek, a good novel, at your librarian’s discount. I want to send it to my brother Raoul.” This poor Raoul, formerly a violinist who played in a good chamber group, is now a lawyer in the alien-property-custodian’s office in Washington. And then Catherine, at fifty years, has colitis and bad temper and washes herself with fifty lotions a day. So much for Anita’s family. If I were to tell you of mine—Lordy! My father spoke for an hour at a dinner given for my brother, when he turned forty, on the significance of the name Moses. Shtel sikh for! [16]

  On Saturday Herschel became ill and I had to return to Minneapolis alone. He’s still sick—in protest, I’m sure, if we’re made alike, at the horrors of Chicago, Yemach ha shem. [17]

  Freifeld is in a really bad way, trapped, Melvin. His father died while he was in Germany and when he returned he had to keep the business in order to pay off debts and support his mother, who has turned into an incubus in revenge for thirty years of servitude to the paralyzed old man. Rochelle holds one arm, Mama the other and fortune pummels all three. Rochelle is still punishing Sam for his German infidelities, which he was foolish enough to confess. Because she was virtuous she won’t forgive him.

  You ought to write. Sam feels bypassed and abandoned. He’s in danger of losing his great gift of life in drought. I hate to see it happen to Sam who was so full and overfull.

  Well, enough woe. There are still beauty, fucking, little children and friendships in this world.

  Best love,

  To Henry Volkening

  [n.d.] [Minneapolis]

  Dear Mr. Volkening:

  Here are some extracts from the letter I was about to send [t
o Henle]:

  “I have had the disappointment in the last two weeks of receiving letters from friends and acquaintances in various parts of the country who had seen reviews of The Victim and tried to buy it only to be told by local booksellers that they had never heard of it. Knowing nothing of the mysteries of book distribution, I had always assumed, innocently, that the leading stores in every city automatically received a few copies. It rather shocked me to learn that the University of Chicago bookstore and Woolworth’s didn’t even know I had published a new book. As a Chicagoan and a Hyde Parker, I feel hurt by this. Until Red Warren’s review was printed, only a handful of people knew The Victim had appeared, and those who missed the Daily News of Dec. 3rd have had no further opportunity to learn of it. Since I have been tolerably well reviewed, I can’t understand why that should be.

  “I know you will accuse me again of putting off the philosopher’s robe and of being too impatient, and that you will repeat that before I have published five or six books I can’t expect to live by writing. But as I write slowly I will be forty or so before my fifth book is ready and I don’t think it is unreasonable of me to expect that the most should be made of what I do produce. When I see my chances for a year or two of uninterrupted work going down the drain I can’t help protesting the injustice of it. This year I have been ill and teaching leaves me no energy for writing. I had hoped that I would be able to ask for a year’s leave but I shall have nothing to live on if I do, and I see next year and the next and the one after that fribbled away at the university. My grievance is a legitimate one, I think. I don’t want to be a commercial writer or to be taken up with money. I have never discussed money matters with you in four years, not even when I signed contracts, except for the letter I wrote you last spring about the new book. You were annoyed with me; you said it was impossible to speak of plans five months in advance of publication. But now the book is out, it hasn’t been badly received and already it seems to be going the way of Dangling Man . . .”

  I don’t think it immoderate to ask why the book hasn’t been advertised in Chicago, at least. Henle has taken only three ads. One in PR before publication, one in the Sunday Times and one in the Saturday Review. I don’t ask him to make me a millionaire, Lord no! But he seems to be satisfied with very little as a small publisher, and I have to be content with even less. Dangling Man sold less than two thousand copies the first year and about a hundred a year since then. The advance sale of The Victim was twenty-two hundred; I shall be greatly surprised if it totals five thousand copies in all. If it were to bring me enough to live on for a year I wouldn’t think of trying to sell it to the movies for sure butchery. It will be no pleasure to me, I assure you, if the book is sold. I simply need the money to put Minneapolis behind me.

  What provoked me to write in this fashion was a note I received in which Henle said he expected the Progressive Book Club to have The Victim as its March choice. At seventy-five cents. It seems to me that this is tantamount to remaindering the book and getting shut of it. The Progressive Club has as members people who might normally be expected to buy a book like mine. If it does dispose of something like two thousand copies, I will receive something under two hundred bucks and half-saturate the market, or whatever they call it.

  I’ve been writing stories. I have quite a packet of them that I am working over, health and leisure permitting. Recently I sold a travel letter to Partisan Review at the new rates. [ . . . ]

  I’m making plans, together with Ed McGehee (already represented by you and Mr. Russell), to get together a travel anthology and to expand the article into a preface. I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d take this matter over for us. The anthology will be called Spanish Travelers or something like that and will be made up of accounts by 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century travelers in Spain, many great writers among them from Casanova to Roger Fry. Random House has already expressed interest in this, and if you like we can get up an outline.

  Please read this overwrought document charitably.

  Yours sincerely,

  PS I’m going to write Henle only that I’m resuming relations with you—a by-the-way note. I’m depending on your discretion in this matter, acting on your advice not to send the letter to Henle. It would be disastrous if he were to learn circuitously about my dissatisfaction.

  To David Bazelon

  December 1, 1947 Minneapolis

  Dear Dave:

  I’m still down in the neighborhood of a hundred sixty lbs. but apart from a certain understandable nervousness I’m not in bad condition, merely mindful of old age and death more than I should normally be. Which probably accounts for my inscription in the Charterhouse—“fly, Fleance . . . !” [18] And then, too, my battles (the two books) have tired me out. I feel I have one foot on the right path and another somewhere else: I don’t know where that is but perhaps it is a better place than what I have always considered the “right” one. Anyway, the feet aren’t together.

  Commentary’s foolishness is very annoying. I thought the Hammett piece was one of your best. I never saw the idea of the job treated in just that way. And Partisan’s conventionality is of course exasperating. If it’s pipsqueaks they’re guarding against someone ought to tip them off about the pipsqueaks they’ve been publishing. It’s just that they consider Partisan a very classy magazine and feel, like the managers of concert halls who have Beethoven’s name painted on the proscenium and would feel the dignity of the establishment lowered by Louie Armstrong’s at the other end, a connection between culture and incantation.

  About school: I think you must accept it as Raskolnikov did Siberia: indispensable punishment. Soon I fancy you’ll be able to arrange to write articles as term papers. There’s no reason, for instance, why the Hammett piece shouldn’t be a perfectly acceptable term paper. When you get the requirements out of the way, you’ll be much happier. Universities are full of fools, naturally, but so are all establishments. Brains and talent are the raison d’être for the university, however, and can’t be entirely repudiated. Not entirely. You can always invoke the raison d’être. Besides, when you’ve got Tennyson behind you you can’t be kept from Hardy, etc. But you know all this. [ . . . ]

  I spent Thanksgiving Day in Chicago with Oscar and Vic and Johnny, eating goose and thinking up schemes to make a million dollars. My father offered to make me a mine superintendant at ten thousand. The fact that I was a celebrity last week made no difference to him. A mine’s a mine, but Time is a mere striving with wind. I smiled at the offer but in the old heart of hearts I had to admit that he made sense. His instinct is sound. He doesn’t read my reviews, only looks at them. Again, high wisdom. The reviews are incredibly vulgar, so why read them?

  I’m glad [Elizabeth] Hardwick didn’t take the axe to me. She’s very formidable.

  Write me.

  Love,

  1948

  To James Henle

  [n.d.]

  Dear Jim:

  Surely you don’t mean that the total sales of the book come to two thousand! Why, you wrote last November that it had an advance sale of twenty three hundred. Is the two thousand you speak of in addition to the advance sale? That would be little enough for a novel that has been reviewed like mine. And if you mean that the total sale is two thousand I hardly know what to say after two years of wringing to pay bills and fighting for scraps of time in which to do my writing. Have I nothing to look forward to but two years of the same sort and a sale of barely two thousand for the next novel I write? And can it be worth your while to continue publishing books which sell only two thousand copies? I don’t understand this at all; I feel black and bitter about it, merely.

  Best,

  To David Bazelon

  January 5, 1948 Minneapolis

  Dear Dave:

  I agree with you entirely about The Victim that it is not so successful as it might have been and does not grow to the fullest size. Compared to what is published nowadays between boards, it is an accomplishment. Judged by my own standar
ds, however, it is promissory. It took hold of my mind and imagination very deeply but I know that somehow I failed to write it freely, with all the stops out from beginning to end. They were out in a few places. I could name them. And I must admit that in spite of the great amount of energy I brought to the book at certain times, I was at others, for some reason, content to fall back on lesser resources. For instance, it would not have been difficult to make Leventhal on the same scale as I did Allbee but I thought it would be seen that they were aspects of one another. As though it wouldn’t have been evident if I had allowed Leventhal a bit more room. But there is a certain diffidence about me, not very obvious socially, to my own mind, that prevents me from going all out, as you call it. I assemble the dynamite but I am not ready to touch off the fuse. Why? Because I am working toward something and have not yet arrived. I once mentioned to you, I think, that one of the things that made life difficult for me was that I wanted to write before I had sufficient maturity to write as “high” as I wished and so I had a very arduous and painful apprenticeship and still am undergoing it. This journeyman idea has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. It makes me a craftsman—and few writers now are that—but it gives me a refuge from the peril of final accomplishment. “Lord, pardon me, I’m still preparing, not fully a man as yet.” I’m like the young man in the Gospels, or have been till lately. “Give all thou hast and follow me,” says Christ. The young man goes away to think it over and so is lost. There’s a limit to thinking it over, even if grace isn’t immediate. But there must be something I’m afraid to give up. It isn’t through not wanting.

  I do think that [Greenwich] Village-sensibility has peculiar dangers. In the Village where so much desire is fixed on so few ends, and those constantly narrowing ends, there is a gain in intensity and a leak and loss in the respect of solidity. The Village is too unfriendly to the common, much too gnostic. Besides, the novelist labors in character, not in psychology, which is easier and swifter; the psychology of a man comes from many different sources, a theory that is shared; the vision of him as a character comes from the imagination of one man. The Villagers are poetic theorists in psychology and consider a vision of character naïve when it fails to satisfy their hunger for extremes. One could not write a novel in Village psychology because that is a group-product. I don’t think I make myself clear.