Letters Read online

  I’m very grateful to you for writing. Yours,

  New York bookmaker Steve Brodie claimed to have survived a daredevil leap from the Brooklyn Bridge on July 23, 1886. (Whether he actually did so or not is unknown.) To “pull a Brodie” or “do a Steve Brodie” entered the American language as terms for doing something spectacular and dangerous.

  1954

  To Alfred Kazin

  January 7, 1954 Barrytown

  Dear Alfred:

  I wouldn’t have taken the Bard job last June if I hadn’t been very hard up. Not that the school is so bad—it has much to recommend it, the students are bright and those that are earnest are terribly earnest in every sense of the term. If you want to teach, Bard is the place for you. But it you want to write also, méfie-toi! [48] The lit. faculty is good. Heinrich Blücher is good, some of the arts people are good, too. The large majority are mediocre and cantankerous types who couldn’t make it at Bryn Mawr, Antioch, Bennington, Black Mtn., etc.

  Myself, I have no clear plans. I am trying to recover a state of mind lost unawares about a year ago.

  I’ll tell A. Wanning that you’re perhaps interested in Bard. Maybe you could arrange to work with Heinrich. That would make Bard worth your while. [ . . . ]

  Love to you both,

  The name of the new Bard zaddik [49] is James H. Case, Jr.

  Heinrich Blücher, husband of Hannah Arendt and like her a refugee from Nazi Germany, taught for many years at Bard.

  To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

  February 1, 1954 Barrytown, N.Y.

  CONFIDENTIAL REPORT ON CANDIDATE FOR FELLOWSHIP

  Name of Candidate: James Baldwin

  Mr. Baldwin’s outline is more eloquent than anything I could write in support of his application. I do not see how it can fail to impress the Committee, with its wisdom and its talent. For the most part, the Whites have hitherto dealt with individual Negroes as representatives of their race—as social types. Mr. Baldwin makes a special bid to be considered as an individual—to have all men considered so. He approaches the matter as an artist and social historian; first as an artist, however. Social scientists and professional historians have unjustly been given preference to artists in this field of writing.

  Baldwin’s successful proposal to the foundation was for work on an essay collection that would appear in 1955, the epoch-making Notes of a Native Son.

  To Robert Penn Warren

  March 27, 1954 Barrytown, N.Y.

  Dear Red:

  That’s awful, about the leg! I hope it was only a Tennysonian and poetic fracture that will give you an opportunity to dream, and not one of those rough Hemingway-type broken legs. You sound cheerful about it, but then you have an enviable way of referring to your troubles. I wish I had it. As the youngest child I learned to make the most of mine.

  I expected you to get the poetry award; you should have gotten it. But I’m sure this is not an injustice that excites you, and though it would have made me feel better to have you on the platform I can only congratulate you on your missing the whole thing. It was an auto-da-fé, with poor [Bruce] Catton, an awfully nice guy, catching hell, and me in my button-down sanbenito [50] boiling in the face.

  Now everything is nice and quiet once again; I’m writing and I’m in very good spirits.

  You could write an ode on that cast and turn the whole thing to profit. Always for bearing off fortune under the very nose of calamity.

  Very best wishes,

  Bellow had received the National Book Award for Augie March. Bruce Catton had won in the nonfiction category for A Stillness at Appomattox. Warren’s Brother to Dragons had been a finalist in poetry, but lost to Conrad Aiken’s Collected Poems.

  To Oscar Tarcov

  [n.d.] [Barrytown]

  Dear Oscar:

  I’m very glad the operation went off well and that you have your health again. Now for heaven’s sake, let hospitals alone.

  Your letter gave me a stir. Yours isn’t a happy condition, though it’s better than the former one. I wonder what adjustment can be made in our friendship. I was never willing to give it up. You must know that. I realized you were down on your luck and had no margin for patience with me. But I was suffering too, and all I could do was withdraw from your harsh judgments. Had either of us been a little happier we would have done better by the other. But our miseries were anti-symbiotic, or something like that. I was in the strange condition of being envied while I lay at the bottom of hell. This being the case, I had no alternative but to close my mind.

  It does no good to rake these things over now. I am as eager to bury them as you probably are.

  My ideas about the future are vague. Bard College is pretty shaky right now, and anyway I think I may try to make a living at writing. It will have to be a sizable income, and it puts me in a strange position to be, in the ridiculous term people have imported, an avant-garde writer with a slick writer’s requirements. For one year it may be possible, and after that—who knows?

  Merry Pesach, and love to everyone,

  To John Berryman

  [n.d.] [Barrytown]

  Dear John—

  Forgive silence. These days letters come hard for me. I attach much consequence to my inability to write them. It means my heart is lazy, and I am very tired. Also, it may mean that I am loath to say what I think, and that is miserable.

  There was no rush about the money. I am being stripped anyway [by divorce], and the value of money is exaggerated. With twice as much I am half as well off, but thank you anyway for sending it. Courtesy of poets. I never repay what I borrow from businessmen.

  Your bad health is a nuisance. You should really decide to improve it, John. God knows, I’m a prey to too many weaknesses myself not to understand how it is. But there is a difference between being prey and agreeing to be prey. I do not agree. My defects will kill me, but they’ll have to fight me first, and they will lose a few battles before they win the war.

  Things are not good, but they are better with me. Slowly, I’m beginning to get my strength back, though Anita B. has not let up in her campaign to get me crucified. It’s a good many miles to Golgotha yet.

  Sasha [Sondra Tschacbasov] is infinitely more happy than she’s been in her life, I think. A poor book by Arnold Bennett I read this A.M.—Lillian—had one good thing in it. A young girl requires making. A man makes her into a woman. Whither then? I hope she’ll become my wife, but it is a great thing to have waked someone into life, and Sasha is a very considerable human being. [ . . . ]

  We must have a conversation about health and disease. Meantime, old man, for the love of Mike stop knocking yourself out.

  All the best,

  To Samuel Freifeld

  [Postmarked New York, N.Y., 25 April 1954]

  Dear Pal—

  Got record. Very enjoyable—I thank you. Separate thank-occasions are hardly the thing between blood-brothers. I have more gratitude in me than separate thank-grains can ever measure.

  So you met my strange delightful buddy Delmore [Schwartz]. And Elizabeth? I hope you hit it off. I am very fond of them. Has Berryman come around? I took the liberty of giving him your address, too. [Peter] Viereck I don’t much care for. Are you still so “conservative”? I called it a phase and let it go at that. Strange you should argue with me as though I were a Nation liberal. Me?!!! So I refused to compound error by thinking you a McCarthy. Was I right?

  About Eliot—I forgive you because you haven’t seen The Confidential Clerk. Wait! I don’t know what I’m protesting too much about. Do you mean that he’s a mighty Niagara and I a mere squirt? Possibly. But someone has to stand up for Jews and democrats, and when better champions are lacking, squirts must do what they can.

  Thank (again!) you for your kindness. Just know I still have about enough dough to get by for a while. I considered calling on you for a loan when I found a house to buy. I need a place of my own very, very badly. I am nearly ready to sit and be Columbus’s chronicle, not one
of his crew. It would do Gregory good, too; he loves to be with me, and it makes him happy to come to me in a settled place.

  Anita keeps me fairly strapped. She always took far more than she gave. I don’t reproach her with anything; her nature is its own reproach. I am genuinely sorry for her but I can feel more compassion as an ex-husband. [ . . . ]

  Best love,

  To Theodore Weiss

  [n.d.] [Barrytown]

  Dear Ted:

  I see you’ve made out something about my character by reading Augie. It’s true. Since I had to be there, I ended by rejoicing in Bard. It was quite something. We must have a full-dress discussion of it when you come back. I’d have made some compromise and stayed if I were a tougher character. But you’ve got to have stability somewhere to survive this pays de merveilles [51], cloud-cuckoo, monkey-on-the-back, avant-garde booby cosmos, and I’m afraid I just don’t have it—grit, gumption, spunk, stick-to-itiveness, values founded on rock. With all my heart I enjoyed the sight of a skinny pallid little boy arriving in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac and a lot of other things, more numerous than the daffodils. I took walks and fiddled with fiddling [Emil] Hauser and had excellent conversations. But I couldn’t survive meetings and in the end stopped attending. And if I had to choose between trichinosis and talking an hour with F[elix] Hirsch I’d—you know! Where’s that raw pork? And [James H.] Case—an Ivy League shlimazl [52]! I say little of the rest of the administration, and of the trustees I have only to speak the name. They are wonderful! Giants of deformity. They could stand with Sobakevitch or any other giant in Dead Souls.

  I’m going to miss Jack Ludwig and Ted Hoffman and Heinrich [Blücher] and Andy and you. You and I are, I think, the slowly but durably acquainted type and I have a pleasant expectation of knowing you better. I’ll be around in the spring. Europe, alas, is not in my plans. My son can’t do without my help this year. It is also somewhat the other way around. But he’s starting at another school; I’m beginning another book, and barring the unbarrable unforeseen you’ll find me here in the spring when you arrive.

  Isn’t it amazing how little truth about English weather there is in English poetry? I wonder why that is. They knew no better, perhaps.

  Sondra and I send all three of you (I assume Roz is still with you) our very best.

  Theodore Weiss (1917-2003), poet and longtime editor of the Quartely Review of Literature, was at Oxford for the year.

  To John Berryman

  December 7, 1954 [New York City]

  How are you, John?

  We begin to look for you now, as Xmas comes on, you melancholy Santa Claus. Last night in solemn conversation, when near looped, your name came up. Spoken by me, in fact. It was something nice, and so tonight I make wig-wags through the dark of night towards Minnesota. Minneapolis is beautiful, I agree, and I was happy there, after a fashion. Part of those sixteen years before the fortieth year. Which is the very next. I don’t fear it very much however. I’m growing so lazy, John, it appalls me. I don’t even worry. My anxieties are like old dogs. They no longer run after rabbits. They only dream and whine, asleep.

  Am writing a handsome new book, which is so far highly satisfactory. It’s called Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son, or The Song of the Oedipus Complex. I do not worry about that either. Do you know, though, as I creep near the deepest secrets of my life, I drop off like a lotus-eater. I am being extremely lazy.

  It’s probably all to the good that you left Iowa, since they didn’t appreciate you. I’d be happy to know you were friendly with Herbert McCloskey and his wife [in Minneapolis]. They are my very good friends, and I have written them about you. [ . . . ]

  Write well, and remember me to everyone.

  Love,

  And Sondra’s love.

  1955

  To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

  March 27, 1955 333 Riverside Drive, New York

  Dear Mr. Moe:

  In response to your inquiry I am able to say that my estimated income from writing for the year beginning in September, 1955 is about three thousand dollars. As you will perhaps recall, I have two dependents. There may be other money coming but I can’t be sure of it.

  My plans for work during the coming year (September ’55 to September ’56) will take me to Rome for at least half of that time and I estimate my own traveling expenses at about five hundred; living expenses for myself and my family during the entire period of the Fellowship would run to about three thousand. About three thousand more would cover the clerical and other smaller expenses. I am therefore asking the Guggenheim Foundation to consider my request for a Fellowship grant of approximately thirty-eight hundred dollars. This should enable me to finish my novel now in progress.

  Sincerely yours,

  To Sherry Mangan

  June 3, 1955 [New York City]

  Dear Mangan—

  Thank you very much. My spirit, at least, was sober and I remember and stand by what I said. I couldn’t agree more about Manhattan and its miseries, and I will get out of here soon. But before I (or we) come to Spain, a short stay in Nevada is required of me, divorce laws being of a near-Spanish backwardness. So we should be arriving in Europe in February of ’56. A Guggenheim makes matters easier for me this year.

  What are your plans? Will you be staying long in Málaga? I’d hate to put you to the trouble of describing it if you were not going to be there. In 1947 I spent a week there and saw it a little.

  Yours with best wishes,

  John Joseph Sherry Mangan (1904-61) was an editor, poet, novelist and leading journalist at Time, Life, and Fortune in the 1940s. A dedicated Trotskyist long after the cause had faded, Mangan would find himself more and more isolated, dying alone and impoverished in Rome.

  To Malcolm Cowley

  June 5, 1955 Barrytown

  Dear Malcolm—

  Thank you for your most generous Guggenheim letter. The news of the award came at about the same time as my father’s death and I have been in a confused and incompetent state these last six weeks. I’m only now beginning to come out of it a bit. I’m sure your letter had great weight with the committee and I’m very grateful.

  Sincerely,

  To Leslie Fiedler

  June 14, 1955 333 Riverside Drive, New York

  Dear Leslie—

  Since my father’s death last month I’ve been slow at everything. Not that I was ever prompt in anything, but life is particularly difficult in all departments just now. If I knew where I was going to be at Xmas I would be glad to help you bring up engines against the New Orthodoxy, as you name it. But as I have a Guggenheim and can travel, how do I know where the old spirit in my feet is going to lead me? Not to Paris, that I can tell you. But neither is it likely to take me to Chicago. Many thanks just the same.

  I’m grateful for the kind mention you gave me in the N[ew] R[epublic] piece, although I don’t consider myself part of the Partisan group. Not those dying beasts. (They posed as Phoenixes but were Dodos.) I always knew it. I have ever been unideological. I have sophisticated skin and naïve bones.

  As for the sales of Augie, Viking denies Pop. Library figure, but who says it’s bad to be a Jew in America? Is it better in Israel?

  Shalom, and greetings to Margaret et al.,

  Perhaps you’d like to try Wright Morris? His address is 501 Beechtree Lane, Wayne, Pa.

  To Alfred Kazin

  June 29, 1955 Barrytown

  Dear Alfred:

  Last night Sondra dreamed that Anne had given birth to a daughter (hurray) and that her friend Anita Maximillian had given birth to another, and that you were the father of both, and everyone was supremely pleased—as why shouldn’t everybody be? I congratulate everybody. This dream indicates that in Sondra’s eyes you have become the Father personified. For you this is honor, and for me it is hope. We are both well. Sondra has lost her job, to great delight. First she was affronted, and then it made her, as it should have done, happy. [ . . . ]

  My own spir
its, as may show forth, are not at all low. I’m not doing the sort of thing I want to do. Not yet. But God lets me practice my trade for several hours of the day, so what have I to complain of? And I read a good many books and wait for matters to straighten themselves out, and I am confident that they will. The other day, enjoyed [Jacob] Bronowski’s book on Blake; it did me good to read a Marxian again. I’m told he’s an engineer and member of the Coal Board.

  Well, molti saluti, and don’t be too nervous. I’m sure Anne can do this thing quite easily.

  All the best,

  Thanks for the wine!

  To Ruth Miller

  July 27, 1955 Barrytown

  Dear Ruth:

  “May I say something?” Somewhere in Italian comedy there’s a man who prefaces everything with this; I forget the place, but it is very funny. Well, then, this is what I want to say. Your essay has many peculiarities, all of them first-rate. My mind follows yours, and Ralph [Ellison]’s, too, through the hoops, up the ropes, into the trapezes, down in the net and all around the three rings. This was exhilarating and good, every minute of it. There’s nothing that brightens the mind more than this sort of exercise. You are a good woman, you have every talent you need, talent to burn, and you are wise, too, and I take great pride and happiness in being your old friend. But may I say something?

  It is this: Your explication [of Invisible Man] is too dense, too detailed. It needs some divorce from the text. Perhaps it is too much like laboratory analysis, but I don’t hope to capture the difficulty in simile. Let me ask you, Do you think that all portions of the book have equal merit? I speak of literary merit. And do you think all the parts are equally necessary to the structure of the book? You see, you have left out the literary side of the matter almost entirely and that, to my mind, is a mistake. I myself distinguish between the parts of the novel that were written and those that were constructed as part of the argument; they are not alike in quality. The first third of the book is beautiful, whereas the Brotherhood portion is ordinary. The sweet-potato seller, the eviction, the riot can’t be compared with the mechanical symbols, the hospital, the seduction. The former are in full cry after the Meaning and your interest is in Opinion rather than in Creation.