Letters Read online

  In a letter that may have been lost en route, I asked you not to pass around “Mr. Green” anymore because I’ve re-read it and decided to re-write it. I have a fresh idea about it. When this overhauling will take place I can’t say, because my hands are full at the moment with the two books. One is almost done—the first draft—and another is in the first stages. I feel that the second, From the Life of Augie March, is the best thing I’ve ever written. The first is a book such as I might have done two, three or five years ago—a good book but nothing transcendent. Also a very grim book. This is why I’ve had the notion that it would be better to publish Augie first. I’m writing it very rapidly and can easily meet Viking’s deadline of June 1950 with enough material for a book. I have the feeling that it’ll turn out long enough for two volumes, but of this I’m not positive. Anyhow, I’ll send you the first chapter shortly. It may be publishable separately.

  Monroe has signaled me from his hilltop villa in Florence. I’ll say nothing to him about two books, as you advise. Perhaps I’ll return to Italy in August to visit him and other people. [ . . . ]

  I don’t hear much about literary life in America, except the Pound controversy. I haven’t seen a Times book section since December and can’t say I feel privation. Is Harvey [Breit] still on the job? Give him my kindest regards, please.

  [ . . . ]

  Best,

  Owing to Ezra Pound’s treasonable and anti-Semitic broadcasts from Rome during the Second World War, a number of writers, including Bellow, were furious when he received the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1949.

  To Henry Volkening

  July 27, 1949 [Paris]

  Dear Henry:

  The heat is slaughterous in Paris. People ask me whether it’s hotter in the States. Since it seems to give deep satisfaction, I always say yes. Generally I let them come out ahead and believe the beans are better, the beer hoppier, the soap more lathery und so weiter [34] in Europe. By the front page of the Tribune, I know what sort of summer’s day you’ve had and can always be sure, whatever the comparative temperatures, that yours was grittier and sootier. But it’s with no sort of pleasure.

  The mornings are cool enough, and I manage to do my stint before the worst of the day. How it reads, ask not, however, because I can’t see and won’t be able to until the fall.

  Mme. Wm. A. Bradley who acts for Vanguard has “sold”—the quotes are for effort—my two books to Gallimard (NRF), which also asks an option on the next three. How lovely and divine is confidence. It’s all right with me, since Gallimard is the best publisher in France. But is it all right with you, with Viking? I am going to see Mme. Bradley on Friday in her elegant house at 18 Quai de Béthune; I shall tell her what I think and ask her to stand by for word from you.

  We’re not going to Italy this summer, as planned. It’s awful of me to say so, I know, given what Italy is and what I am, but I haven’t got the time. Besides it’s too damned hot.

  All the best,

  To Monroe Engel

  October 24, 1949 Paris

  Dear Monroe:

  Except for a short vacation in Spain, in August, I’d been working faithfully and hard, and had reason to be cheerful when I saw Guinzburg, for I’d done a good deal. But then I read over carefully what I’d done and saw that the book I’d been rather confident of was not what I thought it was. I’d opened something new and, I think, infinitely better in the last part of it; the first was simply not of the same order and had to be raised or scrapped. I didn’t have it in me at this time to attempt this, so I’ve dived into something else I had started. On this, I’ve for some reason been able to work much faster than I’ve ever been able to work before. I do one fairly long chapter a week, and I expect to have the length of a book in first draft by Christmas. By the length of a book, I mean something like a hundred thousand words, not by any means the full length of what I plan. In any case, the first chapter is coming out in PR presently (November, they tell me), and if you’d like to see more I can send you carbons.

  How’s your own work going? I trust you’ve had better luck. I was in a state when I read over what I had written. All my cherished pride in being a steady performer took a belly-whop.

  Do you see Isaac and Alfred? Please give them my love.

  Best,

  To David Bazelon

  November 20, 1949 Paris

  Dear Dave:

  I know you’re a loyal friend of mine, none more, and that you speak up for me whenever the axe is unsheathed. Therefore you’ll understand what difficulties you put me in by writing as you did about Margaret [Bazelon’s woman friend, living in Paris], also a friend of mine, though by no means so near. But I do like her; she’s in some ways irresistible, as you know. You shouldn’t have spoken as you did about her even if you felt what you said to be true, and I’m not sure you did. Because such is not the way to speak of anyone, so despisingly; it’s the ruin of intercourse, that sort of bolshevism. One wry grin and you throw away the subject as Nedick’s do a squeezed orange. You were speaking of a person and a not inconsiderable one; moreover, someone who admired and loved you a good deal. For I’m sure Margaret wanted to marry you and gave you as much opportunity to ask her to as she could. Since you didn’t, all that you have to blame her for is wishing to get married. Now if you think marriage is an abject state for anyone, man or woman, and have something more digne [35] to propose than the black and hypocritical rags of matrimony, you can preach and publish your gospel in Hebron. But if you will agree to see anything at all normal in the human couple, it’ll be hard to make a wrathful case against Margaret, some thirty years old, tired of living alone or with other women and of mere sleeping around.

  Anyhow, I observed some protocol. I didn’t go to her wedding for reasons of loyalty, but I did go to dinner, accepting a fait accompli. Frankly, I couldn’t figure out, for the life of me, what conduct you would have laid on me and saw nothing treasonable in a plate of borscht, anyhow. Her husband is a reasonably good guy, sturdy, of apparently nice temper, Norwegian, of northern equableness.

  This may be as good a place as any to say that I approved very much of your article on women in Commentary.

  Now to speak of more freylikh [36] things: What have you been doing? Do you like your job, and does teaching agree with you? I trust you’ll have something good to say for it, since it looks as if I’m going to have to put myself under the pedagogue’s yoke again next year. I suppose I could stay in Europe for another year. But a third! Nay. I have to come back to the States, if for no other reason than I feel myself more and more an Amerikaner, and the place of such is more or less in Amerika. I badly miss American energy, even that of Minneapolis where hardly anybody at all is cultured. Here most everybody knows the year of Molière’s birth and what François I said to Henry VIII on the Field of Cloth of Gold, but it’s a weary satisfaction. Really weary. The working class round the Place de la Bastille has life, but it’s not greatly different from what you find in Gary and Whiting, take away the berets and substitute beer for wine and television for concertinas. The rest is increasingly like museum custodianship, it appears to me.

  You’ll be seeing Klonsky again, soon. He hath fled and no doubt will louse me around, for we ended in collision; but I could tell you some pretty stories too. Which I won’t, for reasons adumbrated in paragraph one.

  Let’s hear from you soon.

  Best,

  About the [D. H.] Lawrence Tales: They’re pretty expensive and I’m somewhat strapped, so will you enclose a ten-dollar bill in your next? I think that’ll do for two copies. If there’s a surplus I’ll buy you something else of his you can’t get in N.Y.

  To David Bazelon

  December 3, 1949 Paris

  Dear Dave:

  I’m answering you somewhat against my inclination, for your letter was horrible and wolfish, and ought not to be answered. But having set off your stuff you appear to feel, at the end, that everything can now be as before, which decidedly it ca
n’t.

  Of course I don’t know what went on between you and Margaret, but I don’t remember having taken any airs of expertise. I know your letter on her marriage made her wretched, while what you wrote to me about it was what I called it. When you say of a woman I know, or indeed any woman, that she has a stripe of white paint where her cunt ought to be, I think it is wrong; it is what I call bolshevik, not unjustifiably. Though I have often put up with your thinking me so, I am not stupid; when I say bolshevik I am thinking of a certain kind of destructiveness of which I have had some personal experience and of which I have also read a good deal in the polemical literature of Lenin, Trotsky and the Stalinists. I have a fairly well developed ear for tones and years’ experience of manners of a different kind for contrast.

  Now as for the wedding, it’s true that I needn’t have stayed away. But because, as you say, I didn’t know a great deal about your relations with Margaret I had to depend on her to a large extent to furnish clues to your feelings. I gathered from her attitude that you might feel it unfriendly of me to attend. But this is all trifling. The important thing is that after nearly ten years of friendship you should discharge such a load against me for a rebuke that wasn’t unjustified and in any event wasn’t harshly made.

  Did I say to you that you loyally defended me from literary attacks? You’re completely mistaken. I was thinking of what Alvin had often told me, that you spoke well of me when others spoke unkindly. In general. Now you tell me “it isn’t worth the effort” and you are speaking entirely of my writing. Had our friendship rested, childishly, on “literary loyalty” we’d have been through long before this. You must think me an idiot if you believe I haven’t known for years what attitude you took toward it. I shouldn’t say that you had ever covered me with laurels, and you’ve all too obviously spared me your opinion of what I’ve published since The Victim. Any writer naturally likes to have the things he does appreciated, but when have I ever twisted your arm for this? Now you “reveal” something that you think will crush me, as though you had spared me long enough, whereas in fact I had long ago come to terms with your estimate of my work, your reasons for it and the right and wrong of it, because I felt there were sympathies and attachments of greater importance than either the writing or your criticism. I don’t try for salvation through writing. From lack of foresight, I have no better profession. I’ll apply elsewhere for salvation, when I find the right place.

  No, you don’t belong to polite society, but you belong to a society all the same and have more of a membership in it than I have in any. It hasn’t inculcated very good things in you. There’s no need to describe these. I want no part of them, that’s all I want to say.

  Sincerely,

  To Oscar Tarcov

  December 5, 1949 Paris

  Dear Oscar:

  [ . . . ] I was overjoyed at your thick letter. In the first place, we hadn’t heard from anyone in weeks and were beginning to feel really in goles [37]. And in the second, with it there came plenty of others, but what others! Junk, madness, haughtiness, injury. Enough to provoke a man to abjure all intimacy and withdraw to a tent as far as possible from sea-level, whence life came, and live on snow and hawkshit. Presently I’ll tell you about this. But you can see that something sane and kind, in the nick of time, saved me from absolute despair.

  Speaking generally, I’m in an enviable position. On n’a pas lieu de se plaindre [38]. I’m in France, comfortable, comfortably employed, and want for nothing except some extremely necessary things which nearly everyone else lacks too. When I come back from seeing Spanish cities or speak with deportees and survivors, I know there’s nothing in my private existence that justifies complaint, or melancholy for myself, and that Hamlet is a luxury item in the life of mankind and adumbrates the difficulties we will all face after bread is plentiful. Save in America and this small fringe of Europe, it isn’t. After all, we’re incredibly wealthy, and if we look for a parallel to our problems I think we can find it, historically, in the annoyances of the surfeited rich. Or in Hamlets who have everything except what they really require of others and themselves. It’s a horrible thing to be Hamlet and not born a prince, Jean Genet says. I’d say, answering with the voice of the middle class, that the first is a misfortune which makes the second insignificant. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of all that sort of melancholy and boredom. France has given me a bellyful of it, France alone, not counting Chicago and New York. I’m out for sursum corda. Lift up the heart. Still, the bad tidings keep coming in and that makes it a kind of Quixotic job. There’s no other worth taking, however.

  I’ll tell you specifically what things are like. I get up, have breakfast, read the papers; Herschel goes off to school, Anita to her office, the maid puts up a lunch for me, I stick it in my briefcase and walk about a mile to my room, past the Russian embassy and curiosity shops. The weather is generally dark and gray, but the spirit only balks at it once in a while. In my room, 33 Rue Vaneau, I light the woodstove with ancient copies of Le Rire, pausing to look at some of the smutty cartoons of 1906. Then I fiddle around a bit and go to work. Late in the afternoon I come out again. This is the difficult part of the day, especially if it’s raining. I go home, shave, play with the kid awhile, go out along the Seine, read in a café, etc. Twice a week I play casino with an American painter at the Rouquet and drink cocoa. I have almost no friendly, that is, really intimate, intercourse with anyone except Anita. We see the Kaplans, Nick Chiaromonte and his wife and several other people. We have few French acquaintances because you have to make an enormous effort to justify yourself to the French and prove that you’re not a barbarian at best and pain in the ass at worst. So far as my observation goes, there are two kinds of people in France, the workers and the other French. The workers are infinitely superior and are, really, what we at home have always considered French, the others what we meant by bourgeois. You see then what it’s like. In many ways, it’s the best sort of life you can arrange, nowadays, given what things are, but it’s anything but warm. That’s why what I hear from you and others at home is so important—the source of first connection—and Anita and I take great pleasure in talking about you. In what goes on, you and Edith are not only your own “switzerland,” as you say, but ours, too. Well, then, when you write of Sam [Freifeld] it’s terribly disappointing. Isaac was even less charitable about him, describing his visit to New York. But then Isaac is probably not far from thinking the same things of me. I don’t know how you stand with him these days. Better, I hope. I’m entirely in the dog-house, I feel.

  In some ways it’s having chosen to become a writer that places me in this position. Anyhow it seems the more I write and publish, the more “public” things become, the less first contacts live. People draw off into coldness and enmity who’d have kinder feelings toward me if I were a photographer of dogs or a fish-expert. I hope with all my heart that your experience and Edith’s will be different.

  For instance, I got a hideous letter from Bazelon, full of rage; really one of those doggish, clawing things that want to go snarling straight into your inmost spirit and destroy you. I assure you I’m not exaggerating. He says, “I don’t speak up for you” (when my writing is criticized) “because it naturally isn’t worth the effort, first. Secondly, some people just don’t care for your writing for literary reasons of their own. And third, I didn’t understand that our friendship rested on literary loyalty.” The cause of this? One of Dave’s girl friends, to whom he was much attached, got married recently in Paris. I had gotten to know her well and consider her a friend of mine. Just before her wedding, Dave sent me a perfectly nauseating letter about her, attacking her sexually, etc. I answered that it was bolshevistic of him to express himself so about anyone. That since he had always been a loyal friend to me, he might understand my being loyal to her. That, however, I hadn’t gone to her wedding because he might not have liked it, etc. A perfectly inoffensive letter in which I said not a single thing about “literary loyalty”—as though by now it
weren’t perfectly clear what opinion his Hudson Street friends had of my writing. I shan’t say that I don’t care at all, but I don’t, effectively, care. I’ve never policed any of my friends on this score or twisted any arms. I’ve never quarreled with Sam or Isaac on this subject, their attitude has never essentially affected my feelings toward them. Ecco! My first contacts! Evidently Dave had been getting this ready for a long time and I had only to mention something so foolish as loyalty to have him gush it into my face.

  Where does this bring me? To coming back to the States. Ay, the happy day. Probably I could remain in Europe, if I wanted to work out a deal. But just now I want to come back. At least for a year. I don’t any longer have my job at Minnesota, but I’ve written to apply to other places.

  [William] Phillips of PR is here. Better acquaintance with him shows me what you’re up against with editors. As we used to say in Tuley, “His taste is in his mout.” They don’t believe there can be writing, he and his mob, and know from nothin’.

  Best love, and write soon,

  Write to 33 Vaneau. We have to move again.

  Nicola Chiaromonte (1904-1972) was a leading essayist and theater critic both in America at The New Republic and Partisan Review and in Italy at L’Espresso and La Stampa. With Ignazio Silone, he founded the magazine Tempo Presente.

  To Herbert and Mitzie McCloskey

  [n.d.] [Paris]

  Dearest Herb and Mitzie,

  After a year and a half in Paris, bien isolé, a very mysterious and above all friendless life, letters like yours are in the most literal sense from another world where I have friends from whom, inexplicably it sometimes seems, I have separated myself. But of course such separations are the characteristic ones, now, and sans le savoir [39] I get into the path—put myself there, I mean—of the characteristic. I can’t say why I left Mpls. any more than I could explain why, when it happened, I pulled out of Chicago. I submitted to an intuition, and later understood that I had (for me) done right. There are things you can’t comprehend by staying with them. But many of these moves are heavy. They are Jonah journeys.