Letters Read online

  I’m never, as you know, without some kind of kopdreyenish [22]. And recently the chief dreynish has been publishing. We were hard hit by the failure of The Victim. For it was, financially, a failure. Vanguard sold less than twenty-five hundred copies. It was hard not to blame Henle for that. The flop he made of it has been the scandal of publishers’ row for months. [ . . . ]

  Just at present I’m working on a novelette called The Crab and the Butterfly which maybe Partisan will publish. Rahv has an idea that something should be done for the novella and has written to say that he plans to run one a year—in imitation of Horizon, let it be added. The crab is human tenacious-ness to life, the butterfly is the gift of existence which the crab stalks. The crab cannot leap or chase but stands with open claws while the creature flaps over him. This is, for a while, I hope, the last of the “heavies.” I should like to write a purely comic book next in a spirit of le gai savoir, Nietzsche’s gaya scienza, ringing comedy, not the centerless irony of the New Yorker which takes the name nowadays. I’m much attracted by a subject to which you would have no objections, I’m sure—I wouldn’t write or publish any such thing—: the high fun of the weeks after you returned from Guatemala. The comic side of it, of which I’m sure you’re aware, appeals to me tremendously. Naturally, I wouldn’t undertake it without a nil obstat from you though what I have in mind is not a copy of the original. Someone altogether different drawn from a very few elements that are yours and totally transformed.

  Write me,

  Love,

  To Henry Volkening

  [n.d.] [Minneapolis]

  Dear Henry:

  Henle has released me. Not without anger and reproach, but he has let me off. I’m tingling with distress over the whole thing and I’m also relieved; the relief definitely outweighs the other. Clearly there was no pleasant way to do it, though I tried very hard to be moderate. [ . . . ]

  The word’s been going around New York for weeks now that I was going to break away; I’m sure he must have heard it and expected me to ask to be let off.

  I hope you don’t come in for any reproaches. None of this was your doing though Henle will almost certainly feel that the recent renewal of our connection has something to do with the break. I apologize in advance for any bad feeling between you that I may cause.

  But now the way’s open and we can begin to consider proposals. Or do you think I ought not to negotiate a contract with anyone until I have a book ready?

  Best,

  To Alfred Kazin

  May 2, 1948 Minneapolis

  Dear Alfred:

  There’s universal lamentation because you’re not coming. Sam Monk, who is the Department’s new head, was deeply disappointed and the lady instructors and female assistants set up a cry like Milton’s Syrian damsels over the limbs of Osiris. It’s perfectly decorous to report this to a man on the threshold of fatherhood, isn’t it? And the McCloskeys ask me to say that your decision saddens them. But on the whole I think you’re wise to stick to your book; there aren’t many members of the English Department who wouldn’t gladly change places with you.

  I went to hear Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas yesterday and sat next to Herr Doktor Allen, the philologist, who did his best to ruin the concert for me utterly. First, were you coming? He regretted that you weren’t (even he!) and recalled a trip he and MacDowell had arranged for visiting professors to the north of the state when you were here. Then, “The man who reviews Mr. [Allen] Seager’s new book in the Saturday Review of Literature says he is the best of the professor-novelists—better than Warren. What do you think of that?” I hoped Mr. Seager wouldn’t get a swelled head and fall from first position. Next we started on the writing of books and the shafts began to zip past. All I could think of was, “See what a rent the envious Casca made!” How they hate all writers who don’t appear in the PMLA or the Post! And there was the chorus singing, “Great Minds Against Themselves Conspire.” Yes, by becoming professors, not satisfied to remain mere writers.

  So I think you’ve chosen wisely.

  Needless to say, your liking The Victim made me very happy—grateful, to qualify further. I think of the conversation between Cummings and interlocutor, in this connection, on the preface to The Enormous Room:

  “Mr. Cummings, don’t you want to be read more widely?”

  “Widely? Not deeply?”

  Of course the proud novelist assumes that there is a depth. There’s a great deal of truth in your remark that the book is harshly conceived. If I thought this harshness were a result of character or temperament I should be extremely disquieted. I understand it, however, as the result of an incomplete assimilation of suffering and cruelty and an underdevelopment of the elements that make for harmony. I sense them but I don’t see them as plainly as the others and haven’t mastered them as elements of fiction. I could simply invoke them, state them flatly, but I’d feel false if I did. I think the bonds of naturalism were too strong for me in The Victim. I didn’t want to go beyond probabilities for the two men. I drove myself to be faithful to them, not sufficiently aware that The Victim was in a substantial sense a fantasy, too. I ought to have given Leventhal greater gifts. I’m trying to understand why I showered so many on Allbee instead. It’s a perverse kind of favoritism toward outsiders and strictness with the beloved children—which originates, I think, with my father.

  It’s very gratifying for me to be able to discuss this with you. We don’t get enough of this kind of discussion, you and I.

  We haven’t decided where to go next year. Anita is all for Europe. I’m not convinced, though my mind isn’t shut to it. Did you enjoy Italy, and can you make any recommendations? I asked Paolo [Milano] for some a few months ago, but he hasn’t answered.

  Love to both of you and best regards to Pearl,

  [ . . . ] Henle and I have as of last week broken off. He bungled both books awfully.

  In Act III of Dido and Aeneas the chorus sings: “Great minds against themselves conspire, / and shun the cure they most desire.” Paolo Milano (1905-1988), editor of The Portable Dante (1947) and later chief literary critic for L’Espresso, would be among Bellow’s close friends for forty years.

  To David Bazelon

  May 27, 1948 Minneapolis

  Dear Dave—

  [ . . . ] The trouble with anthropology is that it doesn’t consider people at full depth. Anti-poetic, therefore basically unfaithful. Mere botanizing.

  Spring is fabulously beautiful here in the wilderness.

  Love,

  To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

  June 4, 1948 Minneapolis

  Dear Mr. Moe:

  The house we had been promised in New York is not forthcoming and, as we have received an invitation from friends in Paris to join them and have been assured of living quarters by them, I should like to know if the Guggenheim Foundation would have any objection to our going abroad in October.

  Sincerely yours,

  To Henry Volkening

  June 10, 1948 Minneapolis

  Dear Henry:

  I have a short vacation between terms, and I’m typing out one of the stories I told you about. I’ll send you a copy—rough—so that you can gather some idea of what it is I have in the trunk. This is fairly representative. I have a feeling that you’ll see it as little-mag material, but maybe I’m wrong.

  I’ve met Jim Powers twice and I like him tremendously. His wife is so abnormally quiet that there’s little you can say about her save that she is quiet. We hope to know her better.

  Alvin Schwartz, a friend of mine whose book The Blowtop was published and murdered by Dial, has sent me eighty pages of a new novel which I think better than the first and very, very good. I’ve advised him to get in touch with you and you’ll probably hear from him soon.

  Thanks for the tear-sheets from PW. [Monroe] Engel [at Viking Press] sent me a copy of the Graham Greene [The Heart of the Matter]. I think it’s his best though I have plenty of reservations about it. Why don’t
religious writers benefit by faith? They’re so timid and tangential about it. In their place I’d want to roar like a lion. That’s the lion of Judah, I suppose. Whereas Mr. Greene takes his Christian lamb to school with him and lets the teacher—i.e., the strength of the secular—put it out. I’d like to see a little more extravagance.

  Best,

  To Henry Volkening

  September 27, 1948 Paris

  Dear Henry:

  I seem to be unable to accustom myself to ships. A very light sea made me sick the second day out and it wasn’t till we were nearly on the other side before the feeling left me that my sweetbreads had changed places with my brain. But everything has been very peaceful save for the robberies we’ve been subjected to. Prices are doubled as soon as one opens one’s mouth, though one were to have two heads and a beret on each.

  Next Monday we get into the apartment we’ve rented from an old English gentleman who used to race automobiles and who still writes articles for the racing magazines in London and carries on an international correspondence with Greek and Portuguese fans. He’s crazy about the new typewriter I had to bring for a bribe and he’s taking it to Cannes to write a book, leaving me to struggle with mine in his, I hope, not too cold study. [ . . . ]

  Best,

  To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

  October 20, 1948 Paris

  Dear Mr. Moe:

  We are for the time being settled at 24 Rue Marbeuf, Paris VIII, in a flat belonging to a man who may come back from Nice in a month’s time or stay there till April. The coal strike will induce him to remain, I think. Should he come back sooner than we expect we may move on to Italy where life is reputedly simpler.

  With best wishes,

  To Samuel and Rochelle Freifeld

  [Postmark illegible; postcard of Le Jardin et Palais du Luxembourg, Paris]

  Dear Sam and Rochelle,

  We’re here and all and not Frenchified. I at least—Jamesian American—more stubbornly barbarian than ever. How are you and when are you going to write your stout friend?

  To Monroe Engel

  October 25, 1948 Paris

  Dear Monroe:

  I’m sorry we had all that mix-up before sailing, but I’m sure you’ve experienced the harassment of traveling en famille, no one more reliable than yourself to take care of tickets, trunks, bags, boxes and sacks, etcetera. A few friends came to the hotel to see us over the last humps and we somehow got the trunks shut and ready.

  We’ve been in Paris nearly a month, rather well settled in an apartment and I’ve already been at work for two weeks and now, if it weren’t for an occasional fusillade of French under the window or at the back of the house, I’d be able to imagine, without the least trouble, that I was in Minneapolis. Except that Minneapolis houses are much better heated. I don’t get out very often now and when I think of it resent this voluntary encapsulation and damn writing as an occupation.

  I have a strong suspicion that we won’t be able to remain in France long. The country hasn’t begun to feel the effect of the recent strikes. But three million tons of coal were lost and everyone expects cuts in electric power and gas. In some parts of the city the electric coupures have already started and Paris pitch black is no place for us.

  Through Paolo Milano I am in correspondence with people in Rome and we are thinking of heading there. I may go there alone to find a place within a week or two.

  I’d be glad to hear that everything is going well with you. Will you send me a note so that I’ll know the lines of communication are up? I enjoyed the Auden reader very much though I was rather horrified at the pieces on Sophocles and Euripides. Everyone to his own form of daring—or outrage.

  Best,

  Viking had just published The Portable Greek Reader, edited and introduced by W. H. Auden.

  To Oscar and Edith Tarcov

  [Postmarked Paris, 1 December 1948; postcard of the Champs-Élysées]

  Dear Oscar and Edith:

  You know what it is for me to write a letter unless directly inspired from Sinai. But I must confess that I am wanted by Sinai for disobedience and various other infractions. I have put off writing till I got my bearings. Now that I have them, I’m going to Italy to lose them. Full explanations soon.

  Love,

  To Henry Volkening

  December 17, 1948 Paris

  Dear Henry:

  Don’t be too concerned about “Dr. Pep”; it’s a production of impulse and may well be unclear to everyone. It appears to be a sermon on diet; it is really one on our failing connection to reality. Things are increasingly done out of sight in an increasingly false milieu and we are encouraged to forget our debt to the rest of the creation, to labor and suffering. This is done in order that we may be able to perform the complicated tasks of a civilization. The whole emphasis of our civilization, viewed on the ideological side, has been on love and gentleness. Now what is the relation between this and the blood shed out of sight? Why, you have revolutionaries who are going to shed blood once and for all, for the gentlest of reasons (Robespierre). You can’t have an omelet without breaking eggs, they say. That is, the secret underlying their gentleness is their ferocity. A humanized and cultivated environment, like an apparently gentle man, often similarly overlays ferocity. The pruning that makes Fontainebleau harmonious gives an idea to the revolutionary. Dr. Pep goes on to say that the true gentleness is to be found in the man whose sacrifice is personal. And that’s the main line of reasoning. As for the manner of writing, I do not find it hard to justify. It gives me great pleasure to jump over the difficulties of required form—required, that is, by the readers trained by editors to look for a sort of strict little dance in fiction. Consequently there is a sort of richness in writing which is supposed to be not for us: the honey in the lion’s mouth. It’s not so much considered daring to go into the lion’s mouth as it is thought bad form. One doesn’t go into anybody’s mouth.

  I am surprised that you don’t mention the story called “Looking for Mr. Green” which I mailed to you some time before “Dr. Pep.” I was rather expecting you to blow your top over it—as A[lvin] Schwartz would say—and am beginning to think how to reproach the postal bureaucracy for its loss. It may still arrive. Luckily there are copies. I have one and one was sent to my friend Paolo Milano. I don’t believe the copy will be fit to send round—you may not think the contents fit, either. In that case, please have the mss. re-typed at my expense. This kind of delay makes me see purple. And on going through my things I learned that I had lost the mss. of a story, “The Rock Wall,” that I had counted on getting off to you next. I suspect it may have gone with a lot of stuff I burned before leaving Minneapolis.

  So is it. Anyhow, I’m working, and eventually something ought to come in that will reward your patience.

  We’re going to Nice to spend Christmas and in January I’m going on to Italy for a month. Next April we’ll move there together but at present I want to get off and think through a novel, or novels, for there are several in my mind. I came across a hundred pages of one I began three years ago. Still eminently printable but not the step forward I should like to make.

  If the mss. of “Mr. Green” hasn’t arrived, please phone Milano.

  Best wishes and Merry Xmas,

  To J. F. Powers

  December 18, 1948 Paris

  Dear Jim:

  Congratulations on the baby. It’s an excellent thing to have daughters, once one has accepted fatherhood in principle, and to be spared the Oedipal struggle. Sons don’t light your cigar and bring your slippers. As for the pious beggars at Notre Dame, I don’t know if they’d be willing to intercede for you in a thing like this. For that matter, I haven’t even seen pious beggars near the church. All that neighborhood is full of peddlers of twenty-French-poses and you can’t get into the cathedral without being solicited by half a dozen sinners under the feet of the apostles. It’s interesting psychologically and I suppose there’s a providential purpose around, too, as
usual.

  We haven’t had any snow, but Paris has been terribly gray and somber and I’d give a great deal to see sunshine. Theoretically, I oughtn’t to mind the weather; I should be working. But there’s some kind of doom, apparently, about the Guggenheim. Rosenfeld and Lionel Trilling and several others in New York told me that I’d better not try to buck it. I’ve written two stories here, but not a word of the novel so far. I haven’t even been able to think of it and I’m planning to go to Italy for a change of luck.

  I’ve seen excellent reviews of Prince of Darkness in the Statesman and the Spectator and several good ads for it. [John] Lehmann is doing very well for you. I’ll look out for Italian notices when I go to Rome and send them to you. Swedish is the only language my book has been translated into. I haven’t seen a copy of the translation and I have an idea I’d be shocked by the look of it. I’m hoping to meet Carlo Levi through a friend, Nick Chiaromonte. It must have been I who recommended Christ Stopped at Eboli; I was urging everyone to read it in my missionary zeal. Probably trying to earn my professorial pay by disseminating good books. [ . . . ]