Letters Read online

  But I’m writing a novelette which may surprise you. It’s called “Who Breathes Overhead.” From Schiller’s “Diver”—“Who breathes overhead in the rose-tinted air may be glad.” It’s about the amor fati, the vein of enjoyment that runs through our deepest suffering, and it centers about a man who is rotting to death in a hospital room. His stink offends the other patients. The hero of the story defends him because nothing is, for him, more valuable than life or more sacred than the struggle to remain alive. Here I know what I’m doing. The apprenticeship is in its last days. [ . . . ]

  I had hoped that you would show up in Chicago, a deserving scholar taking a Christmas rest, like myself.

  Love,

  To Henry Volkening

  February 18, 1948 Minneapolis

  Dear Henry:

  That was a nice letter of Mrs. [Katharine] White’s. She’s right not to ask for revisions, though I feel she would ask for them if she were genuinely after the story, because I wouldn’t, I couldn’t start nipping, creasing or deleting to suit the policy of a magazine. The policy of a magazine ought to be to publish good stories, and the blitheness that seeks to ward off boredom above everything else runs inevitably into thin squeaking—as the New Yorker does. Have you seen E. Wilson’s remarks on it in Commentary? They went right to the button. But does this mean he has broken off with the magazine?

  Henle answered me at great length and he said that in the long run I couldn’t miss (but how long is long?) and that Farrell and every other serious writer in America had the same bad row to weed. I answered him, more mildly than the first time, that Farrell’s books started to come out during the Depression and that these are fat years. What is fundamentally wrong, it seems to me, is that Henle has too small an organization to push a book to the retailers. Arthur Bergholz explained the whole thing very sensibly from the seller’s standpoint. A good many firms have been fishing after me with hints of gold and spinners of silver. Of course I hear that Leviathan Viking swallowed Lionel Trilling up whole and stilled the prophet’s voice pretty damn effectively. Still, the come-ons are attractive. I can understand your reluctance to try to break Vanguard’s option. But I can tell you that when my next novel is ready it’ll take a lot of hauling to harness me to Vanguard’s wagon again. However, I’ll think of measures to take when the time is ripe.

  Meanwhile, it may be a sound idea to get up an outline of that Spanish Travelers book I mentioned before. My piece in Partisan (have you seen it?) might do as an introduction. I could easily lengthen it. McGehee and I have gone a little into the literature and believe we could get up a fascinating anthology. These big houses need grist, don’t they? For their standing mills. Publishing may be slack now but it would be worth it to any house to invest a couple of thousand dollars and have a book ready when the wave returns. Could you perhaps sound out old Mr. [Pascal] Covici? We need money in the worst way. [ . . . ]

  As ever (as you see),

  To Melvin Tumin

  [n.d.] [Minneapolis]

  Dear Moish:

  A little destiny is a treacherous thing. Once again I am doing things that I only half understand because something commands me to do them. I went in and asked Zozo [Joseph Warren Beach, chairman of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota] for a year’s leave, terming it so—though it’s perfectly clear to us both that I won’t be returning. And after all I am a family man now; I have more gray hairs than black. This may not appear to be an excess in view of the fact that I have just published a book which has been well received. But that book, now past its sales prime, has sold in the neighborhood of twenty-two hundred copies.

  Anyway, I had sworn not to stay. We have a little money and I have applied for a Guggenheim, but I have been so often rejected by Guggenheim I have no right to look for anything but still another no. Isaac’s is really the first case I know of a needy writer and a deserving one getting the prize. Ordinarily it goes to people who have enough of a reputation to have acquired money by means of it. Them as has, gets. The executors of a vast estate could never find it in their hearts to be disloyal to that grand principle.

  Of course I am aware that I have much to be grateful for. More than ever aware since coming back from Europe. At least I write on my own terms, and on my own terms have two thousand readers. The price is pretty high, but I (we) am (are) still in a position to pay it. [Whereas] in Spain the terms are dictated by Francisco [Franco] and the Church.

  Freyt mir zeyr [19] that [R. P.] Blackmur thinks well of me. I hope he hasn’t seen the piece on novelists and critics that I had in The New Leader some time back. I had it in mind to exempt him personally, for I really learned a great deal from The Double Agent and The Expense of Greatness, but as you had put an iron for me in his fire I couldn’t very well do it.

  I hear hopeful things about your book from sociologists who have wind of it. Phil Selznick wanted to use it in California, I know.

  Speaking of social science, who should turn up on the faculty here but Joe Greenberg, as unbevelled as ever. Hersky was here for Convocation, arms laden with African, Haitian and jazz records and his old spiel. Neither of us looked the other up. But I said to the disciple, “Is this the Science of Anthropology?” Stoutly he answered yes, whereupon I beat up on him without mercy.

  We hear nothing from Passin. Cora, who has gone out to be with him, occasionally writes. Do you correspond with him? Do you think he has given us up as part of the degenerate West?

  I hope to hear from you very soon. Don’t wait until you have “news.”

  Love,

  To David Bazelon

  March 8, 1948 Minneapolis

  Dear Dave:

  [ . . . ] I haven’t read Don Juan since my course in the Romantics, circa 1936. There you have the advantage of taking six years or so to mature before beginning to study. Principally I recall “hail Muse, etc.” and Juan and Haidee. It’s shameful. The poem is one of the things I mean to read again. One never recovers from the attacks of pedantry made in weak and impressionable times. And my list of books to re-read is getting incredibly long. There isn’t time enough in this life even to get enough sleep, says Old Man Karamazov, so how can you have time enough to repent and be saved? [ . . . ] Among the things I’ve judged of utmost importance to get back to are music and Hebrew before it is too late to recover them. On Tuesdays I translate one chapter of Job and on Wednesday nights play duets with a political scientist named Sandstrom. I still manage to keep my morning free for writing and the result is that I’m not less than a month or so behind in my duties at the university, may its name be erased (there’s the Hebrew). In all crises there I call on temperament to get me by. All the same, I haven’t got the time I need for writing and don’t get nearly enough of it done. Since October I’ve done nothing but a novelette of about thirty thousand words—a dazzlingly white elephant, too short for a book and too long for a magazine. That’s the only new thing. I did take out one of my stories, shine it up and sent it to Russell and Volkening who sold it to Harper’s Bazaar. Which is a hopeful sign; I have a drawerful of stories in the first draft. They’d better be marketable, for I’ve asked for a year’s leave of absence—three years of teaching straight is more than flesh and blood can endure—and while I’ve applied for a Guggenheim I don’t feel I’m really, in Guggenheim’s eyes, the Guggenheim type.

  Anyway, I’m not teaching next year. Our plans aren’t definite. We wanted to go to Europe, but the putsch in Czechoslovakia makes war seem too close and the next long night (the final?) about to start. We thought of going to New Mexico but they test atom bombs there. Let me not breathe neutrons. Or the West Indies. Have you any ideas? Will furnish our own light. [ . . . ]

  I regret that your friend [Philip] Rieff’s magazine went on the rocks. Now I have a long review of Bernanos’s Joy to dispose of. I can’t send it out as a review at this late date, so I must run it into an article or let it moulder.

  Please go on feeling epistolary.

  Love,

 
In February, Czech Communists backed by the Soviet Union had seized political and military power in Czechoslovakia, sending shock waves throughout Western Europe, Great Britain and the United States.

  To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

  March 26, 1948 Minneapolis

  Dear Mr. [Henry Allen] Moe:

  During the past year I earned about four thousand dollars, five hundred of which came from writing. My wife and I used almost all of this money—we have a child of four—although I imagine we could have managed on thirty-five hundred.

  I knew of course when I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship that the stipend was twenty-five hundred and I was, and am still, ready to accept that amount in order to be free from academic duties to write. I have no certain resources for the coming year. I believe that from the sale of things I have already written I could earn five hundred and perhaps a little more.

  If I receive the Fellowship, I would prefer it begin in October, 1948. I contemplate leaving Minneapolis and doing my work in New York State.

  Sincerely yours,

  The Guggenheim Foundation customarily asks successful candidates to submit a budget for the coming year prior to awarding the fellowship. Henry Allen Moe was executive director of the foundation.

  To Melvin Tumin

  April 21, 1948 Minneapolis

  Dear Moishe:

  Yes, I turned out after all to be a Guggenheim type. Who would have thought, as the Macbeths said, the old man had so much blood in him? Somehow, under deep layers, the old irremovable feeling lurks that I am a born slightee and that no one can really take very seriously the marks I set on paper. In Chicago last week my father looked, when I told him of the award, as he had looked at the gold star in my third-grade copybook. Yes, very fine, but there is still life with its markets, alleyways and bedrooms where such as you are conceived between a glass of schnapps and a dish of cucumbers and cream. So where is grandeur? Not in Guggenheims, he is perfectly right. Nevertheless, there is grandeur. Little does he really know. When I say slightee, I do not mean slighted in the gift of life, which is never negligible; I merely mean slighted in the award of badges and distinctions. And even that is no longer true. Lucky the Guggenheim came along when it did. I was about to accept an offer at Bard College, Annandale on Hudson (with two hyphens). If I do what Isaac has done with the Fellowship, namely, rest, I may have to go there the year after. I can very well understand why Isaac has done that; I’m tempted to do likewise. One works so hard to become eligible that one really needs an opportunity to cancel the grind. Besides, it is a very desirable thing to go fallow and wait for a second growth. It’s a kind of return to the natural self before the tilling of discipline and the nervousness of the first tries which bring about a disfigurement of the original bent or a cast in the pure eye of the original endowment—don’t mind my abuse of metaphors. It’s a harassing life, in short, for writers as for professors of sociology; they have a way of slighting the real end. I must say, here, that sociologists are the greater offenders. I listen to them around here with every effort to be fair and understanding but I can’t make out their Man. Surely that’s not homo sapiens, mon semblable! The creature the theologians write about is far closer to me.

  I got a like complaint about Kappy from [Herbert] McCloskey and from Isaac. Isaac and I are, of course, in a slightly different category: Chicagoans and writers. Whereas you’re from Newark and knew the Ur-Kaplan. That’s very important, for Kappy has made himself after his own image, has chosen to be the Parisian Kaplan and has put behind him the part of his history that doesn’t fit the image. This self-incubation is a fascinating thing. Having re-explored the boundaries of freedom under God’s law (Faust) the next move logically tempts man to free himself from the definition other men give him. That’s the Nietzschean “Grand Style.” A man’s birth and all the primitive facts about him are accidental and not free. Why should he be the Kaplan his mother bore and Newark stamped when he has the power to be the Kaplan of his choice? You have felt that, I have, Passin has. Only some of us have had the sense to realize that the man we bring forth has no richness compared with the man who really exists, thickened, fed and fattened by all the facts about him, all of his history. Besides, the image can never be reyn [20] and it is especially impure when money and power are part of its outfit. Kappy is an official. In justice to him, however, it must be said that it would be hard to resist exploiting such great gifts, it would be hard for anyone. It’s the best, the strongest, the most talented whose lives miscarry in this way. I deeply hope, for Kappy, that he recovers before the damage to his power to feel goes any further. I thought when I heard him last summer discoursing on concentration-camps that only tragedies of that magnitude had the power to touch him, the catastrophe in gross. So many of the lovers of humanity in bulk have no feeling for persons. They only obey a compulsory healthy-mindedness for mankind in general, for sufferers in numbers. [ . . . ]

  I got a rather disagreeable letter from Kurt [Wolff] about The Victim. I didn’t mind his criticisms of specific things but I disliked extremely his telling me “you aren’t there yet” and all his didactics, his tacking me down with neat clips. He meant less well than he thought he did. You yourself have always objected to the opinion I give of myself. But even if it were not just it would still be necessary, as you would understand if you were subjected to as much scaling down and leveling by dozens of means, from historical comparison to personal attack. The Victim has its share of faults but so do many other universally and deservedly admired books. This equalitarianism of men who do not care for themselves and therefore cannot allow others to give great value to human personality is extremely dangerous to writers who are after all devoted to a belief in the importance of human actions. The Gods, the saints, the heroes, these are human pictures of human qualities; the citizen, the man in the street, the man of the mass have become their antithesis. I am against the triumph of this antithesis and Kurt in his letter put himself on the side of the enemy, the envious Casca. The Victim where it is successful is a powerful book. I take my own due for it. There aren’t many recent books that come close to it and I can’t take seriously any opinion that doesn’t begin by acknowledging that. There you have it. I’m not modest. Whether I’m truly aware of my shortcomings will be apparent in my next books. It will be apparent for I’m very thoroughly aware of a large number.

  Genug [21].

  We haven’t decided where to go next year. Have you any ideas? I’m waiting to hear from you. I feel a very great warmth toward you, Moishe, and I don’t want it to lapse again. You and Isaac are the only friends to whom I write at such length.

  Love,

  Political scientist Herbert McCloskey and his wife, Mitzie, had become close friends of Bellow’s at the University of Minnesota.

  To Henry Volkening

  [n.d.] [Minneapolis]

  Dear Henry:

  [ . . . ] I’m teaching, not too conscientiously, three courses and though I have assistants (two of them) to grade papers I cannot rule from afar. My presence is indispensable. I took a day off last week to go to Chicago and hear [Arthur] Koestler and I’m paying for it now in heavier toil.

  I haven’t written to Henle yet. I’ve just received his congratulations on the Guggenheim, so how can I? But I got a jog today from some friends in Philadelphia who couldn’t obtain The Victim. They wrote to friends in Passaic, and they couldn’t get it. The results in Rochester were no better. Finally they wrote New York. But that’s discouraging. I haven’t even been banned in Philadelphia. It seems I have a D rating among booksellers. God stiffen them!

  I didn’t know [J. F.] Powers was on your list. I’d like to meet him. Why don’t you suggest to him that he call me next time he’s in Minneapolis?

  And maybe you know of a good place for me to go next year. Anywhere, within reason, in the western hemisphere.

  I’ll send the novelette (it’ll be ready soon) to [Philip] Rahv and tell him that I do business through you. [ . . . ]
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  Best,

  To Henry Volkening

  April [?], 1948 Minneapolis

  Dear Henry:

  Last time I wrote to Henle I said that I thought I had a right to devote all my time to writing. He replied that I had indeed. No more. Other publishers have offered me the opportunity. One wanted to give me enough money for a year. I know you favor my staying with Vanguard. At least you don’t want to be the instrument of divorce. But I can’t see why I should stay. I think I’d be better off with another house.

  Do you think Henle would release me if I asked him to?

  As ever,

  To Melvin Tumin

  [n.d.] [Minneapolis]

  Anita is fast winning her campaign to go to Europe. I have been opposing her. I don’t like to hazard a year of writing, and France or Italy may be too exciting and disturbing. I came back last fall exhausted and sick and for two or three months was good for nothing. Instead of going to Europe I have been proposing that we settle in the East, settle for good in the country outside New York. I’m sure I can have the Bard job in ’49 and I’ve thought of buying a house in that part of the state. I’m weary of milling around, living in a different house each year, getting accustomed to strange beds, new rooms, curious furniture and the peculiarities and grievances of landladies. Formerly Anita agreed with me. In fact I didn’t get her out of Chicago initially without a great deal of veytig. But she’s got the migratory habit now, apparently. She promises to settle down when we return from abroad. And she’s winning, as I’ve said. If everything were to go well in Europe . . . well, there are attractions. I continue to hesitate because Anita did so badly in Mexico with the language; she was terrified and clung with all her weight to me; I couldn’t tolerate that. The results, though I haven’t said so before—perhaps didn’t really understand—were disastrous. Nearly fatal. But she promises to behave differently in France. Kappy and Celia are very actively agitating and I am, this week, for the first time really tempted. When we leave Minneapolis in July we’ll be homeless again. Rich DPs, that’s what it comes to. So it seems we won’t be living in the same vicinity, you and I, for another year at least.