Letters Read online

  [n.d.] [Tivoli]

  Dear Josie:

  I went through Pennsylvania on a fast train yesterday, and I thought of getting off to thank you for your letter. It was only fantasy, because I was going from Washington to New York, and wasn’t even on the right line. But I’m very grateful to you for that letter. I felt it through and through. We lose a lot of our humanity, struggling. The challenge is not to lose, rather to regain, to refine. What, if not that, are we for? When I see you or get a note from you I am aware how honorably you meet difficulties. I see in you a winner. If you think Seize the Day was good, I am satisfied that I’m doing all right. It’s hard for me to know, because so much of the time I’m deaf, dumb and blind, the slave of unknown masters.

  I’m glad you’re going to Greece to write. Greece, somehow, seems appropriate. But before you go let’s have a conversation. Why don’t we meet in town? Better yet, why don’t you come out and stay here with us for a while? What about Thanksgiving? [ . . . ]

  Thanks for your kindness.

  Josephine Herbst (1892-1969) was the author of Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939). She wrote from Germany for the New York Post in 1935 and went on to report from Spain and Latin America for various magazines.

  To John Berryman

  [Postmarked Tivoli, N.Y., 6 December 1956]

  Dear John:

  I feel you are acting in your own best interest. This may sound forbidding, like too much prudence, but there are prudences and prudences and growing older we learn to respect the higher branch of the family. My love to you both, carte blanche.

  Your Isaac poem came. Surprising how much of it I had remembered from the telephone—“half through, he crampt dead.” You do the right thing to keep the mark drawn high when one of us dies. It’s the only sort of answer we have got. Negative capability, isn’t that what Keats called it? I think and think about Isaac, and my recollections are endless—twenty-six years, of which I’ve forgotten very little. Isaac himself began to have doubts about thinking, and he passed them on to me. Now I feel more than ever what a strange activity thinking is. Anyway, since his going my life has been far less my own, and there are days when I care less. I have to recover my negative capability.

  Meanwhile, Anne Bradstreet has given comfort. When I read it in Princeton there were a lot of competing excitements. Later I saw it better, and now very clearly. [Edmund] Wilson is right and more than right. He usually is; a sound man. You seem just now to have poetry practically to yourself. Yes, [Robert] Lowell is very fine but he hasn’t built himself as much freedom as you have—this power to bring elements together which gives the greatest release. There’s plenty of talent; we’re all talented, but it’s this further strength we’re a little short of.

  The Bradstreet is wonderful. I take nothing from it if I say that your more recent poems are written in something more like my tongue. I think Bradstreet is a triumph in modern poetry, but there are formal properties in modern poetry and fiction, too, which are only there for us to overcome. All the formal properties have to be cracked and the simplicities released—like, “Torture me Father lest I be not thine.” So much has fallen away from our lives, we really think most barely when the truth is with us; “. . . he enjoyed despair/ did wrong . . .”; that is more like it. That’s a brother’s insight.

  I don’t do very much. Every once in a while I put Henderson on me like a plumber’s level. The bubble is usually in the wrong place, so I sigh and knock off for the day. But Sondra is a beautiful mother-to-be, and Greg gave me much pleasure last month, so my life is far from barren. Too many awful distractions, however, big gloomy houses, money, alimony problems, friends low in spirits, and ghosts, large numbers of highly individual ghosts.

  Anyhow, will we be seeing you and A[nne] soon? Give the ladies an opportunity, make common cause, give us all a big boost. What say? Come one, come all.

  Love,

  To John Berryman

  December 14, 1956 Tivoli

  Dear John:

  No, I’m not taking it too hard. It’s only that manipulations are so foolish. I hate to be manipulated and jockeyed, you know. It’s the pale shadow of diabolism. In this world of ghosts who administer funds and keep up a faint life still by the aid of gossip and politics, it’s the pallor of the devilment that gets me. [ . . . ] I never do realize it in time. I’ll be, till death, a dummy. And probably one in Hades, too. That seems to be the point of Orpheus. He simply couldn’t cope with hell. Our education is all wrong!

  Your name is not at all mud in N.Y. The whole idea of mud is an absurdity. In some quarters we are always necessarily mud, but not where thoughts are thought and feelings are felt. Everything will soon be forgotten. The rate of scandal, like every other thing, is stepped up. Three years ago I was involved in the big one. Now I’d have to remind people of it elaborately, give them a refresher, they’ve so thoroughly forgotten. Anyway these are questions of the conduct of life which we settled for ourselves some few years ago. In my eagerness to ensure your getting the grant I tipped myself over. I meant to do you good, but it seems to have come out harm. It’s as inevitable as shoelaces, since I don’t know the first thing about prudence. I have to admire it from a distance. You haven’t settled into other people’s affairs because you shun idleness. Now for God’s sake, let’s let all these things go slide down the flume. We have some twenty or thirty years of work lying before us.

  The Job is very, very good. Mpls. seems to be tuned in on it. When I was there I had the good fortune to find a rabbi at Hillel who was willing to put me through the Hebrew. I didn’t get far enough, and one of these days I will go forward. I don’t know a great deal about metrics but yours sound very right to me.

  As for the Freud lecture, I don’t believe I ought to try it. It would make me very nervous to prepare it and ball Henderson up. He’s thriving now, so why put his poor soul in hazard? Thanks anyway, greatly.

  I’m sorry you won’t be coming East. Come back with us in June, anyway.

  Love and best Xmas greetings,

  Berryman had embarked on a modern version of the Book of Job, never to be completed.

  To Alfred Kazin

  December 17, 1956 Tivoli

  Dear Alfred:

  Eight-months-pregnant Sasha lies on the couch holding Greg’s dog. (It sounds like Ch. 1 of a proletarian novel). I say, “Where’s Alfred’s letter?” And she says, jaunty, “In the folder where I put all the letters.” À la bonne heure! [54] I open the folder and ransack it. I find a box top that says, “Mail This to Ivory Snow and Get a Free Rand McNally Map of the US.” Thanks, I’ve already been there. What would you get, I wonder, if you mailed in the top of Pandora’s Box?

  Did I see your review [of Seize the Day] in the Times? Of course. It pleased me enormously. H’m, I thought, most people don’t even have friends, much less friends who approve of what they do. Bellow, you’re a very lucky (young) man. But as everybody knows, ingratitude begins with luck and so I didn’t send you a note, as I should have done. I count on you to realize that I am having a time of it with all these changes—house, child, book, money, relatives, trains and cars, New York, Hungary—and to forgive me.

  Suddenly it occurs to me that the last we were all together was at the time of Ann’s pregnancy, and now you have (by all reports) a beautiful daughter, and we haven’t even had a glass of tea. What do you say to our exchanging calendars so that we can look for each other in New York? Our house is splendid and manorial but has no beds, and unless you own sleeping bags we can’t ask you to come here.

  Now, for instance—Sasha and I plan to be in New York on Jan. 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th, possibly even the 8th. Do you think you’ll be in on any of those days? We’ll probably be staying with Covici on Morningside Drive. I’m in the city on Thursdays, usually. Don’t tell me you spend all your time in Amherst. I refuse to believe it.

  Love to you both (all three, all four of you),

  To Samuel Freifeld

&nb
sp; December 27, 1956 Tivoli

  Dear Sam’l:

  [ . . . ] I am working, not at my best, but working nevertheless at my métier [55]. Because I have to. Because, once, I chose it, and it’s just as well that I be faithful somewhere. We are comfortable here, and nothing is lacking except some money, and that not too sharply. I’m coming to Chicago to give a lecture on the 22nd. I shall arrive a day sooner, and if Sasha is well I shall stay over a day after. The lecture pays five hundred and I couldn’t conscientiously refuse.

  The business in hand, I don’t understand very well. But I’ve signed where it was indicated that I should, and have made a statement which ought to satisfy my brother or his lawyer. Last summer Sam told me he was not going to share in the remainder of our father’s money. He seems to have changed his mind, the privilege of women, businessmen, and brothers.

  I think our ancient experience in love affairs, going back to Oakley Blvd. and Irving St., probably taught us some valuable lessons and in particular prepared us for moments of disappointment. The more I think of what happened the more reason I have to be pleased that the thing [Freifeld’s marriage] ended before more harm was done. To you this is a cold comfort, but I have great confidence in our power to recover from everything. Except death, of course. But who’s talking about that! Maybe we’ll recover even from death, if it comes to a pinch. But in the meantime I’m confident of your earthly resurrection.

  I hope to find you in a state of calm and patience.

  With love,

  1957

  To Granville Hicks

  [n.d.] [Minneapolis]

  Dear Granville:

  [ . . . ] Your remarks on Brendan Gill tickled me. I’m sure he wasn’t mortified, he doesn’t mortify easily. But that New Yorker outfit is a strange one. First they give me a chance to beat up on A. West which, like a gent, I refuse. Then they give my next book to Gill knowing full well (Wm. Maxwell was present) that Gill and I have had a hassle. Strange people. But I tell you this, I have no desire to understand them.

  Spring has been weird enough here. For my money, the reasons are all atomic.

  We’ll be back in Tivoli by mid-June, and we hope you will visit us again.

  Best,

  Brendan Gill had panned Seize the Day in The New Yorker.

  To Ralph Ellison

  May 27, 1957 Minneapolis

  Dear Ralph—

  I won’t discuss with you in a letter any of the things suggested by your last. It isn’t a good idea. I’m writing now simply to say that the house in Tivoli is open to you for as long a time as you like or need.

  Sasha and I have been in Minneapolis since March. It was just what we needed. On the farm the year round we’d both go nuts. And NYC is out. Too rough, too choking. It wins by a decision over me. No knockout but I’ll never be the same.

  I’ll send the book you asked for when I get to New York in about two weeks. We’ll be passing through only. I find the Midwest agrees with me. Here I recognize things. And I’m near Chicago, which is not unimportant. I’ve been there several times this year, and next winter I’ll be teaching for ten weeks at Northwestern and hanging around the joints with Sasha’s bookie uncle.

  The new kid is beginning to sit up and take notice. He seems to have a sense of humor. Having survived the birth trauma he finds life a laughing matter.

  So should we all.

  I hope your book is going well.

  Good luck and love to you both from Sasha and me,

  To James Laughlin

  October 22, 1957 [Tivoli]

  Dear J,

  Thanks for the German article. I had already seen it but another copy is gratefully received. Not that I read German.

  About Delmore, I’m just as depressed as you are. He’s got it in his mind that I’m one of his ill-wishers, detractors, slanderers—who knows, and he phoned me in the middle of the night using techniques the GPU might have envied, threatening to sue me for slander and frightening my poor wife. With Katie [Carver’s] assistance I did try to look after him. I made an effort to get rid of the private detective he had hired at enormous cost, but the guy wouldn’t be shaken and in the end prevailed with Delmore. God knows he found plenty of purchase inside Delmore’s head. We raised a little dough to help him, not necessarily for psychiatric care, since I wasn’t absolutely sure that he needed it, but for his general care while he was being weaned from pills and gin. But he broke loose and I can be of no further use to him now. I imagine the detective, [Vincent] Stanzioni, is still sucking around him, and anybody who wants to do Delmore a good turn will push this guy into the Hudson. Evidently there is more to these sleuth characters than meets the public eye.

  With best wishes,

  James Laughlin (1914-1997), founder and director of New Directions, the leading house for modernist literature in America, had published Delmore Schwartz’s books, notable among them In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938) and The World Is a Wedding (1948). During his stay at the mental ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York, Schwartz had been paranoically convinced that his wife, Elizabeth, was adulterously involved with art critic Hilton Kramer, and hired a private detective, Vincent Stanzioni, to investigate. Catharine DeFrance Carver (1921-1997) would become Bellow’s editor at Viking after Covici’s death in 1964. Earlier at Reynal & Hitchcock, Harcourt Brace and Lippincott, she had edited Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Lionel Trilling, Leon Edel, Bernard Malamud, Leslie Fiedler and Richard Ellmann. In the later Sixties, disgusted by America’s involvement in Southeast Asia, she moved to London, where she would work for Chatto & Windus, Victor Gollancz and Oxford University Press.

  To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

  December 26, 1957 Tivoli, New York

  CONFIDENTIAL REPORT ON CANDIDATE FOR FELLOWSHIP

  Name of Candidate: Bernard Malamud

  I am an admirer of Mr. Malamud’s work, and I don’t lack for company. Mr. M. deserves the cheers the critics have given him (an exceptional case). His excellent qualities speak clearly for themselves. Among writers of Jewish descent he is distinguished by a fine and delicate sense of traditions. There is a coarse customary way of dealing with the Jew in the Anglo-Saxon world. [Israel] Zangwill started it, and Michael Gold almost ended it. I wish he had done it in for good. Alas, it hangs on. Mr. Malamud happily has no truck with it. I think his merits will be no less plain to the gentlemen of the committee than they are to me.

  To Philip Roth

  December 26, 1957 Tivoli, N.Y.

  Dear Philip Roth—

  Manuscripts around here shift and wander in huge piles, like the dunes. Yours turned up today, and I apologize to you for my disorder. It hurts me more.

  My reaction to your story was on the positive side of the scale, strongly. But mixed, too. I liked the straightness of it, the plainness about biology. That kind of thing suits me to the ground. I thought Moe was excellent; Pa, too. A company of Japanese committing hari-kari, though, I wasn’t sure about. A great idea, but palpably Idea. I have a thing about Ideas in stories. Camus’ The Plague was an IDEA. Good or bad? Not so hot, in my opinion. With you the Idea gains ground fast, easily. It conquers. What of Moe?

  Look, try Henry Volkening at 522 Fifth Ave. My agent. A very good one, too. Best of luck. And forgive my having the mss. so long. I should have read it at once. But I don’t live right.

  Yrs,

  The story Bellow was responding to was a draft of “Expect the Vandals,” published the following year in Esquire.

  1958

  To Ralph Ellison

  February 14, 1958 Evanston

  Dear Ralph—

  Drop me a line sometime to say how things are coming. It doesn’t have to be a full-scale letter. I’m incapable myself of writing one. It’s been years since I could.

  Chicago is—is something, I guess. No point in blaming the place. Some inward struggle no matter where you are. I suppose you experienced the same in Rome.

  Anyhow, Adam is
walking, and that’s nearly something. Life is just one long country fair for that kid. He’s medicinal to me. Sasha’s okay now; we all had pneumonia more or less, on arriving.

  On the 1st of April we’ll be back. Come up and help me put in garden vegetables. Bring manuscript.

  All the best,

  To John Berryman

  February 19, 1958 Evanston

  Dear John—

  For months now I have been lost in the remotest bush of Africa with Henderson. On Labor Day I started de nouveau and have written about five hundred pages since. Almost done now. The last fantasy is taking place in the neighborhood of Newfoundland. Crash fire—crash ice. I need to cool things off. Anyway, Eugene H. Henderson will give you a run for your money. And I believe he comes out sane, though he goes in mad. And that’s news.

  Adam is one year old today. Paul, too, soon. We should bring them together; and their decrepit parents as well. How is it that we haven’t bumped into each other in nearly a year?

  Love to Anne. Ton ami très distrait [56],

  You owe me copies of poems. Do you remember? I don’t see them in magazines. Do I rate a private subscription?

  To Pascal Covici

  [n.d.] [San Francisco]

  Dear Pat:

  Marshall [Best]’s information comes from a note sent to Tom [Guinzburg] who had some pleasant things to say about Henderson. I’ve finished the book (longhand) and this morning I am about to begin on the typewriter. There are three final chapters and although the written manuscript numbers more than five hundred pages I don’t feel that this should be such a long book. You’re right, I mustn’t trample and hurry; I’ve got to work it out at leisure, now that I’ve got all the facts down. Leisure, I said. Not to be confused with idleness. I’ve worked too hard moving it to allow idle winds to blow it all away. Except in two or three places, I anticipate no deep difficulty. But those two or three places (towards the end) do exist. (The King and the lion, mostly.) The ideas have to be absorbed into the comedy. I’ve got to take a short breather before I try this. Five hundred pages since Labor Day, and most of them the right pages. I’m bushed. Between Evanston and Henderson, I’ve worn myself out, but I recover quickly and I should be fit to start the final campaign after a couple of weeks of sleep in Tivoli. San Francisco is all right, I guess, although it makes you feel that after a journey of three thousand miles you might at least have gotten out of America.