Letters Read online

  Of course we are continually aware, while working, that we are under attack, and so perhaps it is wiser not to pretend that we are a species without enemies. I am familiar with Lionel Trilling’s attitude, of course. It is one of the historical blessings of Jewish birth that one is used to flourish in the face of hostile opinion. I hinted at this last year when Francis Brown of the Times Book Review asked me to write a piece. The attitude I took then was that the modern world is full of people who declare that other people are obsolete. Stalin and the Kulaks, Hitler and the Jews and Slavs and gypsies, and Trilling and T. S. Eliot and several others have decided that novels are done for historically. So that one Hegelian posse or another is always riding hard on the heels of practically everyone. Possibly college professors are excepted.

  Anyway, Francis Brown would not print [my essay]. He said it was not “vintage Bellow.” The quote is direct.

  Afterwards I thought it over and decided that there is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book. If that doesn’t convince ’em, and it may not for the spirit of denial is very strong, one has at least labored to some purpose in having reached less arbitrary and opinionated souls who have not yet learned of the lamentable obsolescence of fiction. Arguments will be met by further arguments, and victory will always fall to the critics.

  But I have no objection to framing my views on the writing of fiction and on the situation of the writer. I do have strong views and there is no use in trying to conceal them. I am entirely willing, even eager, to air them in your anthology. But I greatly fear the enemy will say, “These vanishing Americans deny that they are vanishing.” Or, “These lizards presume to call themselves still dinosaurs.” Of course, lizards are far less extinct than many men I know (like Trilling). But you see it is a little awkward to insist, and possibly this is what Wright has in mind.

  Have you thought of Thornton Wilder as possible contributor?

  I should very much like to know what you think of my points. Soon my wife and I are returning; we expect to be in New York by mid-June. Perhaps we can have a conversation about this. Henry knows my whereabouts, usually, and he can arrange a meeting.

  With very best wishes,

  Granville Hicks (1901-82) was a literary critic, teacher, and editor who published, among other books, Figures of Transition: A Study of British Literature at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1939) and, in an early Communist phase, John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary (1936). He had proposed that Bellow write an essay on the current state of fiction for an anthology, The Living Novel: A Symposium, scheduled for 1957. Bellow’s contribution was “Distractions of a Fiction Writer.”

  To Pascal Covici

  March 16, 1956 Reno

  Dear Pat:

  You got me into this [San Francisco] Examiner bother. The Hearst Press, no less! I know you’re an old cynic to whom these things are as the clouds that pass. I myself am beginning to feel like that. Disgusting! Here Nixons, there Eisenhowers, Kefauvers. Bah! Harding was at least funny. But there were people to make fun of him. Now everybody is respectful and fish-headed and utterly, piously stupid. And I’m supposed to go to SF for this piously created cultural occasion. I am a promising writer who wrote a shocking but powerful book and I learned about writing from the New Testament. Me! [ . . . ] I am sure I said that having been brought up to regard the Old Testament as truth, the New Testament looked to me to be fiction. It still does. So now this irony has been turned about for the readers of the Examiner so that I sound no brainier than a stove pipe. But pious, pious, pious. Mmm! I pray, I love Jesus and Eisenhower and kiss everyone’s backside with patriotic and worshipful humility. Note: They aren’t even paying me a fee for it. All of this ass-kissing is philanthropic; I do it for culture, for Ike and for you, and for Hearst and beautiful San Francisco, and for book sales.

  This little trip will cause a short delay in the delivery of those stories. I have written another new, long one. Now in Henry’s hands. It looks like a piece of my Joshua novel, the bootlegger’s son’s memoirs, and it represents my first real effort to create a heroine. I seem to have done it. I’ve at least convinced myself. I’m hoping the New Yorker will buy it. For since the Holiday fiasco (it turns out that I wasn’t pious enough about Carl Sandburg and Marshall Field or somebody) I’m rather short of money. Though, like a well-heeled writer I’m donating my services to the San Francisco Examiner together with Ilka Chase and Irving Stone—note well those names, dearest Covici!—yes, just like a penniless Polish baron who has nothing but his moustache and his pride.

  Africa [i.e., Henderson the Rain King] is about half completed. Shall I send you five or six chapters for safekeeping? I have the carbons. It may be a good idea. But I must ask you not to show the stuff to anyone.

  I must be in one of those hornet’s moods of mine. I always manifest them to people I love. Others would bat me down. But, you see, I have to monkey with my old stories; I have to speak in San Francisco. And I have to wait here until my settlement is completed. None of these things do I want to do. Hence the temper. Please forgive me.

  One serious remark: I have a feeling that the African thing is going to be very good.

  Best to Dorothy and the children.

  Love,

  To Ralph Ellison

  April 2, 1956 Reno

  Dear Ralph:

  How goes your—I am on the point of saying exile, but it’s I who am exiled, while you’re in the middle of everything. Was there so much to be apprehensive about? A good long look back to this side is probably what you’ve needed for some time. God knows it doesn’t bear too much looking at when it’s right on top of you. One close look a month is about enough for me, when I buy Life and see that Faulkner is threatening a second Civil War, and if one of the best has become such a damned fool, imagine what the worst are like. I began to miss the great world after a few months here in the desert, and then some real or pretended GI sold me a subscription to News-week and conned me out of nine bucks. The thing has never come, and perhaps I’ve made a double gain. In three weeks of desert any city boy can become hayseed green.

  I hope it’s been a good year for you and Fanny; for Sondra and me it’s been a remarkable one. You wouldn’t have known me, Ralph, with my casting outfit and a new reel pulling in rainbow trout. Sitting a horse, too. But this doesn’t mean any Hemingway conversion. I like fish, but after you’ve pitted your brain against theirs for an afternoon, the interest begins to give out. I’m fonder of horses. But you can’t kid yourself. The jets go over the sky with a clap of air after them, and there goes your primitive moment.

  My interest in literature is beginning to revive. I hate it less now than I did last year. God knows how my back ever came to be under this cross. To do something once in a while is a thrill, if you don’t have the money-spectre waiting on the throne for you to perform and grovel like a damn clown. It hasn’t become easier; it’s that I care less. The small legacy helped. I don’t like to hand my father’s money over to Anita, since they hated each other, but I tell myself that it does something for Greg. I can’t specifically say what that is. It ensures a bourgeois upbringing. Poverty would be better, but it isn’t to be found anyhow.

  We’ll be back in the East this summer to spend August with the kid, and we’ll probably stay there. We’re very nearly broke, and I’m trying to arrange some part-time teaching. A book of stories is coming out this fall, but that won’t bring in very much. Besides, all stories seem to me yesteryear’s ghosts. All that scaffolding, and then you’re lucky to mount one little Christmas star. There’s comfort in the fact that one of the stories is a small novel—almost. It’s the one I wrote at Bard last summer, and there’s a good deal of excitement in it.

  Let me have some good news of yourself and your labors and your six months of Rome.

  Love to you both,

  In February, Life had published Faulkner’s “A Letter to the North” in which, responding to those
“who would compel immediate and unconditional integration,” he had warned, “Go slow now. Stop for a time, a moment.”

  To Samuel S. Goldberg

  [n.d.] [Reno]

  Cher Samuel:

  I have a brief pause in my occupations, having recently completed and sent off my long story or novelette, Seize the Day, to Viking. It’ll appear with several other pieces in the fall, and let’s hope it will bring some revenue. The hope is rather flimsy. Stories, even mine, can’t expect much of a sale. The Guggenheim is coming to an end, and I had a disappointing bust-up with Holiday. The editors told me first to write the Illinois piece in my own way and then were appalled by my long discussion of boredom in the Midwest. They wanted me to cheer things up a little, like a true native son. But I couldn’t do that. Like Lincoln, I was a lousy immigrant.

  Without my Pa’s small legacy, in other words, I could never make do. But I’ve had a valuable illumination about money, thanks to Seize the Day. I’ve learned the true value of a dollar. It’s about two cents, on my scale. We need money on account of our vices. But after all, vice isn’t everything. There are also cheaper vices, and I am remodeling Walden mentally for modern habitation. I’ll explain this to you in person some time in June when we return.

  I’ve never seen Sondra so well. You wouldn’t know her. I can’t congratulate myself often enough. Do you still wander round the bookstores? If you should see a copy of R. F. Burton’s A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome, please capture it for me and send it out. I’m in the midst of a long novella about an explorer and need it for some of the details. God will bless you for sending it air-express. I will pay all charges. It’s more important to me than the next election.

  Love,

  To John Berryman

  May 16, 1956 [Reno]

  Dear Mr. Berrimon:

  Vous m’excuserez, j’espère, quelques fautes menues. Je n’ai pas le don suprême de la politesse.

  I ’ave souvent theenk of your conference sur I-do-and-do-not-wish-to-be-cast-upon-your-shore. It is a titre sublime. Et sérieusement, vous avez peint ze human situation more better than J.-P. Sartre avec une seule strook. I do and do not wish. Voici la question! Elle est toute là, là, là!

  My own mind has amended it as follows. I do and do not wish to acknowledge that I have been wrestling at close quarters with a grizzly bear. I have been buying and selling, earning and spending, peeling potatoes, drinking seltzer, and this brown pelt before my dizzy eyes belongs to . . . to . . . an acquaintance. Mais n’en parlons plus. A further step might be taken. Father, forgive them, they know and do not know what they do.

  Focus is all.

  I begin again:

  Dear John:

  My focus has improved remarkably. I now get an image and a half instead of two.

  I am always delighted to hear from you, whether the news is good or not. How much—how infinitely better when I sense a tranquil spirit, as I now do. New York is not good for us. No, nor Princeton neither. John, you give me great satisfaction. I think of the three of us—you and I and [Tom] Riggs composing that damn Xmas poem and I feel, some four years later, at least two of us are making it.

  Your letter gives me the first good opinion I’ve had of [T. S.] Eliot in some time. I’m delighted! Let us exchange copies. I have a sort of zany book coming in November. It isn’t exactly worthy of us, perhaps. C’est pour gagner la vie. But in addition I have accomplished something vraiment pas mal. Sans blague, Berrimon. I think you will be pleased. We shall have a private reading when we reach Minneapolis early in June.

  Can you really put us up for a day or two? You will make us divinely happy.

  We leave here on the 1st of June. Possibly earlier. We drive to Boulder, Colo. first for one day. And then to Mpls. We shall wire or write from the road to give the exact time of our arrival.

  Much love, from the intense inane which surrounds me today,

  To Ralph Ellison

  [n.d.] [Saratoga Springs, N.Y.]

  Dear Ralph:

  I’ve never enjoyed writing letters. Vasiliki says that Isaac, whose journals she took after his death, had some uncomplimentary things to say about the way I answered letters. I deserve them. There is some wickedness hidden here and I ought to root it up, even if it should mean going to an analyst. It’s part of some disagreeable reticence in me—laziness; worse; something very nasty.

  Anyway, there’s a lot to tell. I don’t know where to start—Sondra is going to have a baby in February: that’s the best of the news. Then, in rapidly descending order, we’ve bought ourselves a wreck of a house in Tivoli [New York]. I wanted to be near Greg for some of the time at least, and I had a little money that my father willed me, which I was spending anyway, and to keep it all from trickling away we put it into a large building. We can’t even live in the place yet, because there’s no water, and I’m writing to you now from Yaddo where I’ve taken refuge. At a hundred seventy-five feet the drillers did strike some veins but I don’t know yet whether they give enough water. A couple of beguiling fairies sold us the place and lied about the water, the roof—not sure I’ll have enough money to keep things going. Plaster, paint, carpentry, taxes, fuel. But I’m not supposed to worry about these problems here. I came to work on my book. It isn’t the bootlegger but something entirely different. Which will greatly surprise you. My hero is just now hunting lions in East Africa with a native king, an inspired king who is opening my hero’s eyes. These are great eyes, and they were thickly shut, and I’m making the most of it all. I try to read books of African travel but I become very impatient with them. I find the travelers didn’t know how to write about Africa. And since I was once an anthropology student I find it easier to invent my own tribes, customs and all. There are two tribes. One is wicked, the other is good, more or less Essene, Children of Light. My traveler respects the children of light, but he learns much more from the children of darkness. That’s hardly a surprise, and I can’t find it in my heart to be satisfied with anything so obvious. This is why I have taken to hunting lions. Something may come of the lions. If I can’t touch the heart of the great mystery (this time) I may as well spin a yarn.

  You will see, anyway, that I haven’t been idle. I’ve covered the country, East and West. If only I could be a little more idle, and think of the things I’ve seen. But I permit myself little rest; I fuss. All the old, tiresome sins. You know me, Al.

  It was thoughtful of you to write about the Fulbright. I suppose you’re well into your book now, and that Fanny has entirely recovered. These suppositions are hopes. We miss you here. I could use some of those long conversations we used to have. Even a meditative hour on Riverside Drive. It isn’t the Tiber, but it’s not worthless.

  New York is as ever. Gregory is five foot two and physically a man at the age of twelve. One of these days he’s going to stop thinking about the Dodgers. He’s a great success. I’m very proud of him.

  Love to you both,

  Fanny and Ralph Ellison were in Rome for the year.

  To Gertrude Buckman

  August 2, 1956 Tivoli, N.Y.

  Dear Gertrude:

  This is more like it. You see, I need your good opinion, yours and that of people like you. It isn’t that my detractors won’t let me live, etc. One must appreciate detractors, too. It’s merely that when you’ve tried to make a little more reality, or tried to reclaim a little of infinite unreality, you like to hear from your brothers and sisters that it hasn’t been one more illusion.

  Besides, I had been thrown millions of light years by Isaac Rosenfeld’s death. He died while writing something and it’s something of a comfort to feel that writing something perhaps matters. Perhaps it does.

  My best thanks,

  Gertrude Buckman was Delmore Schwartz’s former wife. Schwartz would serve as the model for Von Humboldt Fleischer, Bellow’s figure of early brilliance and subsequent crackup in Humboldt’s Gift. Isaac Rosenfeld had died at his desk on July 14, 1956, at the age of thirty-eight.

  To
Ruth Miller

  August 23, 1956 Tivoli, N.Y.

  Dear Ruth:

  Sondra was too unwell to travel to Poughkeepsie. I myself have been none too hot, either, since Isaac’s death. I’ve had to sit at home and pull myself together. The house has been a great headache. It interfered so with all the vital processes that at last I had to turn the matter over to Sondra—no business woman, let it be said. You’re lucky to be married to a painter. They understand plastering, wiring, etc. My attitude towards these things has always been that I should know enough about them to write of them confidently. Anyway, I phoned today to Vassar and learned that school had ended on the 19th. I was disappointed. I thought it would continue till Labor Day. I guess I don’t listen when you tell me things.

  As this is being written I imagine you’re in the air between La Guardia and Chicago, either going or returning. If the house were in better repair I’d ask you up for Labor Day. But now the well has given out. We may have to drill a new one (another thousand down the hole, literally). Oh well, Pa didn’t really think I could hold on to his legacy.

  So, we’ll meet in NY when the New School season on me opens. The sharpshooters are oiling their guns. My days and nights are immersed in literature, but when it comes to holding class I am progressively less articulate and I make a fool of myself.

  I’m going on with Henderson the Rain King. We shall make a three-way trade, soon: Irv’s movie, your novel and mine exchanging hands.

  Don’t be angry with us; we wanted to come. But Sondra was in bed, and Vasiliki Rosenfeld who was here was in no condition to be left alone.

  Love,

  To Josephine Herbst [n.d.] [Tivoli]