Letters Read online

  Yours affectionately,

  To Toby Cole

  December 3, 1963 Chicago

  Dear Toby—

  What a time . . . I’m confused, myself.

  (To begin again.) I’ve had a conversation or two with Lyn [Austin]. She’s just stalling me pleasantly until Joe has time to think about this play. So, I’m still of the same mind ab’t Lincoln Center, and I’ve rather expected to hear from you. Arthur Miller was much interested. Of course you may feel bound by “agent’s ethics” not to go into it with Miller or [Harold] Clurman but there’s not much to be said against my investigating the matter. I’ve taken a very considerable runaround from Zero first (on Joe’s say-so) and then from Joe himself, and I’m a bit fed up.

  Love,

  “What a time” here means “What times we live in.” President Kennedy had been assassinated eleven days earlier.

  1964

  To Richard Stern

  July 21, 1964 Martha’s Vineyard

  Dear Dick,

  After dinner, the Spaniards say, Don’t budge! Ni un sobrescrito leer. Not even to read a superscription. At the Vineyard, we’re in an Irish kind of mist, everything is green. As I recall, the Pacific puts you to sleep, like a blessing. The Atlantic braces. So I go once a day and souse myself, and study eternity. Nice that the organism still can feel keen pleasure.

  I thought California would give you the answers you needed. You took your stitch there in time. But be a little careful with California’s speciality—the grotesque. Just before I left Chicago, I read the introduction Wright Morris has written for Windy MacPherson’s Son (in that Chicago novel series at the Press) and he had a lot to say about [Sherwood] Anderson and the grotesque. But he didn’t say enough, or rather, loving the grotesque himself, he didn’t have it right. I don’t either, and I’ve been pursuing the subject. Maybe it’s a taste for Gothic detail (minus cathedrals). But I think it’s an important part of the American literary method to EXPOSE the SEEMING. So at bottom it may be Calvinism. “So-and-so seems to be one thing but I shall show you what he is.” The exposed may be Tom in Gatsby or marriage in Albee. Or just American “normalcy.” Anyway, American novels (this week) are dramas of EXPOSURE! and the grotesque is just one of the methods. It also means the writers accept the challenge to compete with experience by being as grotesque and . . . don’t mind my lectures; they’re just a sign of affection.

  Eager to see you, and the book. When do you come East?

  Yours ever,

  To Alfred Kazin

  July 22, 1964 Martha’s Vineyard

  Dear Alfred—

  Your friends the [Justin] Kaplans received us in splendor with whiskey, wine and lobster, two desserts and beautiful views of the Atlantic. I thought they were splendid. She looks like one of Goya’s blue-eyed ladies in the Prado (where I put in several kulturny weeks in 1947). After dinner we sat eagerly about the TV to listen to Goldwater’s acceptance speech, which gave me unpleasant sensations of a blood-pressure sort, toothaches, liberal leyden [*]. Then we went home to our sandy beds. Deceptive gains now make life worthwhile—for instance, I have weaned myself from the pills I was taking during the final months of Herzog, and this improvement in my nights will set me up metaphysically for at least a year; life is after all simple, decides a complicated mind.

  We’ve seen a bit of Island Society. Styron is our leader, here in little Fitzgeraldville. Then there is Lillian Hellman, in whom I produce symptoms of shyness. And Phil Rahv who keeps alive the traditions of Karl Marx. I’m * Yiddish: pains very fond of Philip—he’s mishpokhe [71]—and he gives us a kind of private Chatauqua course in Hochpolitik [72] from which I get great pleasure. Why can’t we forgive each other before we become harmless?

  Much love to you both,

  To Alfred Kazin

  [n.d.] [Chicago]

  Dear Yevgeny Pavlovitch:

  You know me, Yevgeny, and my Russian lack of organization. I am a poor lost woof from the kennel of Fate looking for a dog to belong to. So, do I have that letter from the man? Of course not. And what difference does it make? I will give the same speech anyhow, no matter what they call it. A good speech, but the one for that day, and how do I know in advance what to call it? Pick me a title, like Oliver Twist’s name, und fertig [73].

  How is the beautiful Ann Borisovna? Is her pale beauty as always? I am certain.

  I am so bold as to send you my new remark: “Now there are no more frontiers, only borderline cases.” This paragraph has nothing to do with the preceding. I yield to no man in my admiration.

  You missed a very lively party. For a dull play, no doubt.

  Ach, be well. Love and kisses from your crotchety friend,

  The Last Analysis had opened on Broadway on October 1, starring Sam Levene in the role of Bummidge.

  To Dorothy Covici

  November 5, 1964 Chicago

  Dear Dorothy,

  [ . . . ] Dr. Glassman (Frank, I mean) is recovering from a cerebral aneurysm. He had surgery last week—I won’t go into detail—but he’s going to be all right, the doctors say. I flew back last night, and Susie and Daniel will come home on Sunday.

  I have a note on my desk from Keith Botsford, very grieved at the news of Pat’s death. He wants to be remembered to you.

  Much love,

  A baby boy, Daniel, had been born to the Bellows in March. Pascal Covici had died of a heart attack on October 14.

  To Leonard Unger

  December 4, 1964 Chicago

  Dear Leonard—

  I’ve been thinking of you since September, when I got your letter. Evidently there is something in me that insists upon “making something” of suffering. The living, I suppose, can only extend life insofar as they are the living. The state is uneven at best, and this last year has not been at all good—some of my dearest friends have died, and I feel not so much spared as stripped. You’ve been on my mind. I keep thinking of your sister, and your old parents, and asking myself what I might do to express solidarity and friendship at a time when I feel the lines slipping out of my fingers. At last I decided simply to be “heard from.” I can’t make anything of suffering just now.

  Say hello to my friends,

  1965

  To Adam Bellow

  [n.d.] [Chicago]

  Dear Adam-

  Here are some stamps. Countries sometimes disappear and leave nothing behind but some postage stamps. But Papas and Adams go on and on.

  Papa

  To Toby Cole

  January 23, 1965 Chicago

  Dear Toby,

  I haven’t heard from you in a dog’s age, so I assume there’s nothing stirring to hear. The Stevenses phone me every few days to tell me how marvelously they attend to my interests, to which I reply uh-huh. It seems that a lady named Nancy Walker has been reading my dramatic works, and wants to direct “The Wen” on Bleecker Street, in a loft. And that is probably where it belongs. I told Annie, however, that she’d have to find excellent actors. The hams I have seen would turn it into an obscenity. It’s borderline anyhow. From the Guthrie I got some satisfaction, but have nothing substantial to tell you as yet. Peter Zeisler was here. I like him very much, and he took the play with him and has written me very cheerfully about it. Still I don’t know what his intentions are. Nor have I heard anything from the other side of the water. By now I am powerfully convinced that all stories about the British sense of humor are true as far as they go, but that they don’t go far enough. British reviews of Herzog are solemn to the point of stupidity. I suppose we shall be hearing soon from the French, and from the Wops, my only spiritual brethren. Do drop me a line one of these days. I begin to think that the theater and I will never hit it off, and in all likelihood I shan’t be bothering much more with it.

  Annie has asked me to write another one-acter to go with “The Wen,” and if I can do it carelessly enough, showing my contempt for the medium as it now is in New York, I will scribble something for her.

  Yours affectionately always,<
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  To Alfred Kazin

  January 28, 1965 Chicago

  Dear Alfred—

  I enjoyed seeing myself through your eyes in the Atlantic. Because I’m accustomed to run the portrait gallery myself, I was taken aback for a moment. Then I grew accustomed to the novelty and thoroughly enjoyed it. You may have been a little too generous. I remember being a very arbitrary, overly assertive type. Maybe there was no other way, in the democratic-immigrant’s-son situation, to obtain the required authority of tone. To me, now, the whole thing is a phenomenon; the personal element no longer counts for much. You were absolutely right about the Chicago side of things. For some reason neither Isaac nor I could think of ourselves as provincials in N.Y. Possibly the pride of R. M. Hutchins shielded us. For him the U. of C. didn’t have to compete with the Ivy League, it was obviously superior. It never entered our minds that we had lost anything in being deprived of Eastern advantages. So we were armored in provincial self-confidence, and came to conquer. Ridiculous boys! And even Isaac was a better realist than I. I think I was altogether dans la lune [74]. I had very few social needs, curiously. That saved me from Isaac’s gang of Hudson St. insiders.

  When will your book be published? I’m eager to read it. I remember that Isaac and I, in our high-court, closed-corporation, solemn Chicago Sanhedrin manner, agreed that A Walker in the City was wonderful—your best vein. And now I wait for your portrait of him.

  I wonder whether you’ve seen Jack Ludwig on Herzog, in the current Holiday. It’s a masterpiece in its own way—a great virtuoso performance on the high-wire of self-justification. Ingenious, shrewd, supersubtle, shamanistic, Rasputin-like. I’m really rather proud of the man. His cast-iron effrontery is admirable, somehow. If I ever commission a private Mt. Rush-more I’ll stipulate that his head be given plenty of space. Anyway, don’t miss this performance. [ . . . ]

  My affectionate best to Annie [Birstein] who defended me against those sophisticated brutes of the New York Review of Books.

  Yours ever,

  Kazin’s memoir-essay “My Friend Saul Bellow” had just appeared in Atlantic Monthly. The book he was readying for publication was Starting Out in the Thirties.

  To Stanley Burnshaw

  February 19, 1965 Chicago

  Dear Stanley:

  In my simplicity I thought the noise of Herzog would presently die down, but it seems only to get louder. I can’t pretend it’s entirely unpleasant. After all, I wanted something to happen, and if I find now that I can’t control the volume I can always stuff my ears with money. Ridiculously needless to say that I didn’t expect it. I sometimes think this prosperity may be the world’s way of telling the writer that if his imagination succeeded in one place it failed in another. It did well enough in a book, but now “this is how things really are.” After all my talk about “reality instructors” here are reality and instruction for you!

  Sometimes I think of the world as impregnated by centuries of fiction and self-fertilized by science swelling out in new forms of consciousness. Anyway, it has gotten well beyond the literary imagination. Novelists (poets too) have so long taken it for granted that they knew how to describe and what to describe and that they were doing all right. What a pathetic error! What overconfidence! The world has beaten and exceeded us all by astronomical miles. One can’t hope to catch up. Writers, for instance, can never outdo the political history of the twentieth century in perversity, and it’s simply foolish of them to imitate its Realpolitik as the Becketts or Burroughses try to do.

  In writing Herzog I realized how radical it was to be moderate, in our day and age, and, as you guessed, I found a musical form for it, suggested to me by hours of listening to records every day for three years. You are very shrewd to have seen it.

  The play was a great disappointment. But instead of making me wretched it only made me obstinate. I’ve reconstructed it (in my field hospital after the massacre) and Viking is printing the text. I’d root out my desire to write plays if I could; I found theater people to be miserable, untrustworthy creatures.

  Susan and I expect to come back to the Vineyard this summer. We have written to real estate agents for a larger place, closer to the water, either Lambert’s Cove or South Beach. We expect to see you and Leda. We look forward to it.

  Yours,

  Stanley Burnshaw (1906-2005) was a poet and the author of a book on poetic creativity, The Seamless Web (1979), as well as a biography of Robert Frost.

  To Jean Stafford

  February 24, 1965 Chicago

  Dear Jean:

  I liked all the stories, but the one about the old professor and the young know-it-all best. A sign of the times, I suppose. My times, I mean. These days I cross one shadow-line after another.

  It’s far too long between meetings.

  Yours,

  Bellow had read Bad Characters, Stafford’s latest story collection.

  To Harvey Swados

  June 14, 1965 Washington, D.C.

  Dear Harvey:

  These quarrels are hateful. I dislike the slap-in-the-face formula and the implied responsibility for death in Vietnam. Let me at the least make clear that the glamour of power means little to me. More, I don’t like what J[ohnson] is doing in Vietnam and S. Domingo, though you and I might not agree in our criticisms. But I don’t see that holding these positions requires me to treat Johnson like a Hitler. He’s not that. He may be a brute in some ways (by no means all) but he is the President, and I haven’t yet decided to go in for civil disobedience. Have you? You sound ready to stop paying taxes.

  But—no quarrels. My attending a ceremony at the White House doesn’t make a fink or criminal of me. Intellectuals, and esp. former Marxists, will really have to decide in the end what they think a government is.

  As ever,

  To Toby Cole

  September 20, 1965 Chicago

  Dear Toby—

  Yes, I like Shelley Winters. Wasn’t she the poor mother in Lolita? I liked her better than any of the others. But aren’t we low on the scale for the likes of her? (Suppose we admit it’s not too horrible for middle-aged men to copulate with small girls, do we then have to make a philosophy of it? I could write a better book from Lolita’s point of view.)

  Yours equally,

  To David Bazelon

  October 6, 1965 Chicago

  Dear David,

  I’m all for getting together, and during the summer I began more than one letter inviting you to the Vineyard, but I wasn’t in good shape, and every time I picked up the calendar I got dizzy. I’m dying to know what your fifth career will be—I’m not in a position to tease you about marriages, for perfectly obvious reasons, but I am not opposed to multiples in either field. I think we were both meant to set records. I don’t know that survivors always find good company in one another, but it’s perfectly clear that we do know a great deal about the past and ought to put our heads together.

  I bummed through Buffalo in 1934 with Herb Passin. I continued up into Canada, and he went to NYC where he borrowed fifteen bucks from Jim Farrell, which he never repaid. So Farrell said, anyway. He would ask me, “When is your pal going to pay up?” About twenty-five years ago I came to Buffalo again to give a speech and was trapped by a blizzard with nobody to talk to except Leslie Fiedler. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

  Let’s exchange schedules and try to get together.

  All best,

  To Edna O’Brien

  December 31, 1965 [Chicago]

  Dear Edna,

  I’m back at my fine bowlegged table in Chicago—in my house—of correction, where I hope to become more nearly myself. There seems to be only one significant thing for me—for the likes of us—and it hasn’t a great deal to do with parties.

  I took a great liking to you. I think you are a lovely woman.

  It’s the last day of the year, and I keep saying to people that at least the date on our tombstones won’t be 1965. My sort of joke.

  Yours affectionately,
/>   1966

  To Stanley Burnshaw

  January 25, 1966 Chicago

  Dear Stanley,

  Maybe you recall a series of articles in Horizon just after the war called “Where Shall John Go?” Already twenty-five years ago the British felt they were no longer in the middle of things and they were quite right. Sometimes I feel we play medicine ball with the Center. The New Yorkers look towards London and Paris, London looks at New York, and Paris if I’m not mistaken has its eye on Peking. In America of course we are entirely hypnotized by New York with glimpses of Washington and Boston entering at the sides. You ask how I can stand Chicago as a steady diet. Well, it is of course gloomy and ugly, provincial and unsociable, and the worst is that it is unappalled by its own culturelessness—no happenings, no camps, no literary life, and all our celebrities go away and turn into Mike Nichols and Susan Sontag. In plain English, the pleasure Chicago gives is a remission from the pain of New York. As a center New York is a fraud and an abomination. Chicago is something of a frontier city in the sense of not having “caught up” but it is slowly importing, in degenerate form, things degenerate from their inception. Here people have a certain self-conscious naiveté. Often they don’t know what to say but they are not full of the knowledge so common in New York of what not to say. What I do miss in Chicago is the opportunity, never used in New York, to “go places.”