Letters Page 24
Best regards to everyone—the born, the reborn, the newborn.
Schreck dich nicht [57].
Love,
To John Berryman
July 24, 1958 [Tivoli]
Dear John,
Many thanks, dear pal, for your handsome note. When it’s you who tells me something I rely utterly on it, and what you tell me does me infinite amounts of good. Fun comes hard—like, alas, its parents, pleasure and happiness, whom we have to pursue. I know whom to chase, but sometimes it makes me very grim. And I do love old Henderson, but not steadfastly, as he deserves. At least the book is finished, or almost. I suspect that in the middle I was maybe too business-like and earnest. But I’m trying to give earnestness the sack. I think I’m going to be able to do it. Laying down the law too much. A bad trait, ever since Moses started it.
The Don [Quixote] is as handsome as any book I’ve ever seen. It’s going to make me take up my Spanish again; meanwhile I gloat over the plates and read the scholarly notes.
When may we see you and Anne and Paul? Tivoli stands open.
Yours, no bunk,
To Leslie Fielder
[n.d.] [Tivoli]
Dear Leslie—
I didn’t intend to sound mean. Of course, friendship (manqué?) or old acquaintance; it never ripened into friendship.
In some ways, I understand and sympathize with your position. Only I think positions emerge in a work of art, and you seem to think they’re imposed. It makes small difference what the artist says he thinks, and a “prepared” attitude is an invitation to disaster. Perhaps you’ll think this more “misology” (hard word). I only complain that intelligence has become so naked. Ideology is of no use to us in refurnishing the empty house.
Anyway, to be a “misologist,” if I am indeed one, is almost as subversive as possible. Only humanists are more subversive—the most subversive of all—and I am a humanist. Henderson is not Reichian confusion, but comedy. I shun doctrine. I am willing if I must to be a destroyer, but not on a doctrinaire basis.
Where is Goshen, Vt.? Far from Tivoli, N.Y.? [ . . . ]
Best to Margaret.
Yours,
To Pascal Covici
October 2, 1958 Minneapolis
Dear Pat—
[ . . . ] I haven’t written my Columbia speech, and I don’t know what to say, I’m so bewildered, but I’ll arrive by plane on the 9th or 10th to say it, and I’ll probably seem self-assured and confident on the platform. God has given me that gift in exchange for what he has taken away in content.
Dr. Neuhl, after a month of conversations, believes I’m normal after all. It makes me sorry for the rest of you guys. So this is life? What I’ve got? And normal life, too? How sad for everybody! But it has been considerate of me, I declare, to defend human ideals by separating myself from the happy many. I must be a sporting type.
Sondra is well. She reads med[ieval] history sixteen hours a day and has little time for anything else. A kind sort of woman looks after Adam from 9:00 to 3:30 daily. It costs a little, but then I don’t know how to enjoy money, anyway. Haven’t a clue, and never have had. What do you do with it? If Henderson earns a lot, maybe Harold G[uinzburg] will agree to give me a course of private lessons.
Can you read my hand?
Give my love to Dorothy, and make sure she’s the right Dorothy, and ask if she will be my guest at Granada’s on Sat. of next weekend. You come, too. I’m inviting my mother-in-law as well.
Your dear friend,
But I haven’t been able to write anything. I’m still swimming towards the life-raft.
To Ralph Ellison
[n.d.] [Minneapolis]
Dear Ralph:
What’s the news? The proofs [of Henderson the Rain King] are in and I’m trying to make a rest cure of this University teaching. The administration fights back. I’m being worked comparatively hard but I try to sleep through most of it, and victory seems to be on my side. Meanwhile Sasha reads vast volumes of Byzantine history. I swear she’s going to end up in Coptic church history. Boring subjects delight her. I take a deep interest in them (fast asleep). But we do manage to have a good time often. The political rallies have been pretty hot, and tonight’s election night and I’m off for D7C HQ with a clutch of beer bottles to whoop it up for my candidates. [Adlai] Stevenson was here last week, as funny as Mort Sahl.
Luckily there’s nothing here like Madison Sq. Garden or the Coliseum and you get a chance to kid with the politicians.
Adam has most of his teeth now, and a considerable vocabulary—some of it unfortunate. He’s caught us unprepared by the speed of his learning-power before we could remember to stop saying shit. However, a little honest shit does no harm.
Anything I say next will be compromised by the above.
Any leaks?
And can we save that pine tree? It’s getting serious.
Tanti saluti. What do they say?—Auguri!
Love,
1959
To Josephine Herbst
January 31, 1959 Minneapolis
Dear Josie:
You know what hard luck is and therefore I shan’t be impressing you with the following—I offer it only in explanation of my failure to answer your letter.
Sondra and I had a blowup last June and she took the kid and went to the city. I had to hold together the house and my impossible book and take care of my older son who came to spend the summer with me. We had one of those struggles, Sondra and I, that you’ve probably seen before. No account of them can be given without full details and that is a hopeless job. She was working in an art gallery while I was re-writing Henderson by dictating the text, revising as I went, to a typist. Eight, ten, twelve and fourteen hours a day for six weeks. By mid-August I was near suicide.
A nephew of mine, my sister’s son, had this even more seriously in mind. Toward the end of the month, in his Army barracks in San Francisco, being in great trouble and seeing no way out, he killed himself.
I drove to Chicago for the funeral.
Then I came on to Minneapolis. Sondra and I patched things up. Which means just about as much as it says. Patches, for two or three months, were all we had to bless ourselves with. More recently we’ve done better. It turned out that Sondra has a nervous disorder, in itself not too serious. It doesn’t affect her health but it does account for our marital disorders to a considerable extent. Anyway, life has brightened, if it doesn’t glitter downright. But then there isn’t enough glitter in half a lifetime to dunk your toast in. The baby is handsome and quick, and Sondra has enrolled in graduate school where she’s doing extremely well.
I don’t tell you this to have it weigh on your heart (“Man’s trouble!”) but only because it will seem loutish of me not to have answered. Josie, I couldn’t do it. I’ve had enough in the last year to justify a decade of paralyzed silence but I claim no special privilege that way. I’m fond of you, more than a little, and I want to hear from you. Can you spare me a few lines?
How is your book? May I see some of it? I’ll send you a copy of Henderson very soon. [ . . . ]
Affectionately,
Bellow’s nephew Lawrence Kauffman had hanged himself in his barracks at the Presidio while awaiting military trial on a charge of theft.
To Pascal Covici
[n.d.] [Minneapolis]
Dear Pat:
The liquor was hidden, the light left burning. Was everything in good order when you returned? I’d be desolated if it wasn’t. I hope you and Dorothy had a tall old time in the South. After you left the weather [in New York] became deadly cold.
What’s there to report? Lillian H[ellman] and I had a good talk as a result of which I’ve made fine progress with the Tragedy of Bummidge the self-analyst. Next week I plunge into Act II. I go and go—write and write. Oh: Meridian Press is wildly eager to publish a magazine, on very good terms to editors and contributors.
Also the Ford Foundation has been heard from. Today I received forms to fill with details of my financial
history. It seems I don’t earn enough annually to ship a goat to Guatemala from next door in Honduras.
Any news about Henderson? If it isn’t very very good, please spare me.
Were the pictures frightful? I’m sure they must have been.
The Hebrew dictionary and the records arrived. Many thanks.
Remember me with love to Dorothy.
Yr. devoted friend,
No check for Jan.?
To Elizabeth Ames
February 5, 1959 Minneapolis
Dear Elizabeth:
I hope you’ve had a good year.
Mine has been very mixed. Luckily, as I slowly discover, my character is a tough one. Here I’d gone around thinking that I was the flower of fragility. What a misconception! Well, we’d better be sturdy. They’re getting the machines ready to carry us body and bones to the moon. Just imagine Yaddo on Mars and Venus. It’s a very sobering idea.
I am asking Viking Press to send you a copy of Henderson the Rain King. It might have originated in the Mars Yaddo and not at Saratoga Springs where it actually had its birth. You may find it a poor return for your hospitality. And then again you may like it. I hope so.
Love,
To Josephine Herbst
February 18, 1959 Minneapolis
Dearest Josie:
In haste: You bet there’s a magazine. It’s coming out in September. Meridian Press is publishing it and I’m one of the editors, primus inter pares. I’m anxious to read some of your things, particularly the memoirs. I have a feeling they must be extraordinarily hot. Do you have a copy to spare me? I’d be very grateful. The editors of this thing are very eager to stay away from the typical literary magazine. To some extent it will of course be literary, but we want to avoid overemphasis on literature. There’ll be no criticism in it, or very little. It should be topical, too, and writers ought to be encouraged to do reportage, familiar essays, social comment and all of that. To get away from the notion that literature is about itself. Such bunk.
I’ll write in more detail soon. I don’t generally. But I feel drawn to you. Why? Perhaps you understand this better than I. I’ve come to love you. There’s something about you that brings out that feeling in me, very strongly. [ . . . ]
To Pascal Covici
February 19, 1959 Minneapolis
Dear Pat:
We seem to be making a splash [with Henderson], and I know that doesn’t displease you. I haven’t read any reviews except the ones you send, and those after Sondra has looked them over. She feels that I shouldn’t have to lick any more wounds than I received last summer, and I suppose she’s right. Anyway, I think there’s every reason to be satisfied with what I have seen. The rest can’t count for much; besides, I can’t allow myself to brood over any of it, good or bad. I’ve seen more than one writer stop his work to concern himself for a year or two or three with the fate of a particular book, then to discover that he had lost the thread. I’m writing the second act of a farce, and that’s what I shall try to think about.
Before the Ford [Foundation] fortune came through, I had accepted invitations to give a couple of talks, one at Illinois and another at Chicago in April. After April 24th I aim to take a short holiday. At the beginning of June, we’re coming East en famille. I realize that you’re wondering what the grant amounts to. Well, it’s eight thousand a year for two years, and that’s nothing to complain about. The Foundation assumes that with this base, I can earn what more I need and suffer no undue anxiety. That’s true. But I’ll need to do the play, now, and I can’t see what objection there is to the magazine. It excites me. Isn’t that as good as money? And since I won’t be teaching it’ll be highly beneficial because I need some other kind of interest even when I’m writing.
Naturally, we’ll be in Minneapolis for part of next year so that the psychiatry and the neurology can go on. They tell me I’m making great speed, and Sondra too is much better. All’s well in the sack, unusually well, and we’ve begun to feel much affection for each other. So it’d be ridiculous to depart for long from this base. I’ll be in and out, next year.
I think the Times piece stirred up quite a lot of hornets. That’s fine. They’ve been quietly chewing paper for a long time, undisturbed.
Love to Dorothy.
Yours as always,
Bellow had just published “Deep Readers of the World, Beware!” in The New York Times Book Review.
To Ralph Ellison
[n.d.] [Minneapolis]
Dear Ralph:
I’ve been tightly wound up for a few months. It would have done me some good to take the advice I gave you so freely a few years ago and remain above the battle. The fighting about poor Henderson has been fierce and wild, and to make matters worse I’m not quite sure where I myself stand. For I’m not in possession of my head and don’t know what parts of the book originate in gaiety and which in desperation. It’s easy enough to see through the prejudices of critics and to assess their vindictiveness against the new and the unexpected but it’s not as though the book occurred as a pure act of the imagination. The worry and the struggle and confusion of mind and feeling of the last two years have muddied it. I know what answer I’d like to give but what bothers me is the strong will to give it and I’m not sure but that the attitude is stronger than all the other elements in Henderson together. From this you’ll conclude that your friend is badly mixed-up; we must be besotted ere we can become wise, Montaigne says. Yes, but how long, O Lord! And then too the mixture of success and failure is bewildering; it keeps you from being properly besotted, although the moving down that took place last summer should satisfy the most exacting moralist. I’m inclined to set the whole of Henderson down to dizziness and begin to think of a new start. [ . . . ]
I’d like to have something from you in the first issue, part of the novel, if the seacook isn’t ready. Maybe you could spare a few pages of the boy preacher. That would be fine. It would give you the advantage also of seeing a little of it in hard print. For me, anyway, that’s always valuable; you may feel otherwise.
I hope the house hasn’t been troubling you. [ . . . ] I gathered that the oil bills bothered you. I don’t really mind paying them. The expense of the house is altogether pretty small. I get a few hundred dollars a year from my father’s estate which just about covers the fuel costs and makes me feel that my old man still gives me shelter. I guess everyone figures these arrangements out according to his own fetishistic devices. A few details: If [Jack] Sarda [the handyman] hasn’t cleaned the leaves out of the gutters, he ought to. Also, he and I arranged to have the front stairs and the shutters painted (it should have been done before winter), so would you remind him of that, and also of the aluminum door we discussed for the kitchen? Why do I always connect “artistic temperament” like his with poor performance? I’m beginning to think also of the garden. The strawberry plants must need a little cultivating, and the garden ought to be disked up as soon as the ground dries. The guy at Ed Smith’s Service Station (Elmer) always does that for me. The peat and the fertilizer ought to be spread around first, though if you’re busy it’s no great deal, I enjoy doing that sort of thing, and can look after it in June when we come up.
For the magazine, which we call The Noble Savage, we have a few excellent pieces. One by John Berryman on India, one by a young fellow named [Edward] Hoagland (he wrote a book called Cat Man) which is very fine, a short thing by Wright Morris, etc. You’re listed as a contributing editor. If you have no objection to that would you mind sending to me, or to Aaron Asher at Meridian Books, a little statement giving your consent?
Saw Malamud in Chicago. Unquestionably the right choice for the award.
All the best from the queen of the Middle Ages. From me too.
Bernard Malamud’s novel The Assistant had just received the National Book Award for Fiction.
To Pascal Covici
April 6, 1959 Minneapolis
Dear Dr. Covici:
I’m referring the enclosed letter to you in
the faint hope of getting you to heed my will for once. Will you kindly instruct the lady to send not one of those dead-goose pictures which make me look like the Fred Allen of Nicaragua but the laughing photograph which you said you liked but never used? That’s a long question because it’s so rhetorical. I expect the same old photo to go to Chicago. My prediction is thus on record and the rest is up to you.
The trip to Puerto Rico has had to be called off for psychiatric reasons. Illness in the family. Someone near to me. Myself. No, summer’s coming, and we’ll be off from Mpls, and next winter we’ll probably be in Europe or Asia, so it doesn’t make sense to have a holiday now. Anyway, I must get through the play although I haven’t much energy to bring to it at this moment. I’m doing my weak best with life on every front. If only the barbarians won’t push. Since I speak in Chicago on the 24th and at Pittsburgh on the 29th of this month, I plan to come to NYC directly after the Chicago talk. I’ll try to leave the same night so that I can spend Sat., Sun. and Mon. in New York, flying to Pittsburgh on Tuesday and proceeding to Purdue on Thursday, earning seven hundred en route. It’ll be very restful to watch the best-seller list no longer. Three weeks. Not much. Still, last letter to me was somewhat puzzling for you said it wouldn’t sell a hundred fifty thousand copies. Of course not. But forty? Thirty? Even thirty would be very good. It would pay the mortgage at Tivoli. Best place in the world for suffering. I’ll keep it for old age or insanity.