Letters Read online

  1996 Bellows leave Bay State Road apartment and relocate to house in Brookline. Death of Eleanor Clark in February. In preparation for seminar called “Young Men on the Make: Ambitious Young Men in the Novel,” Bellow re-reads Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. (“[T]he Russians have an immediate charismatic appeal—excuse the Max Weberism. Their conventions allow them to express freely their feelings about nature and human beings. We have inherited a more restricted and imprisoning attitude toward the emotions. We have to work around puritanical and stoical restraints. We lack the Russian openness. Our path is narrower.”) Other readings for course include Père Goriot, The Red and the Black, Great Expectations , Sister Carrie and The Great Gatsby. Gives University Professors lecture at Boston University. Readings at Harvard and Queens College. Begins work on Ravelstein, novel based on life and death of Allan Bloom. After twenty-five years, severs professional ties with Harriet Wasserman and engages Andrew Wylie as literary agent. Meyer Schapiro dies in March. In December, Bellow’s former wife Susan dies of aneurysm, aged sixty-three.

  1997 Novella The Actual published in April. In July, François Furet suddenly dies. Bellow in Washington, D.C., for unveiling of his portrait at National Portrait Gallery. As always, Bellows spend most of spring, summer and fall in Vermont. Owen Barfield dies in December, aged ninety-nine.

  1998 In New York, Bellow participates in tribute to Ralph Ellison at 92nd Street Y. Lectures at Northeastern University, Boston College and Landmark College. Interviewed by Martin Amis for BBC television documentary. In Boston, attends dinner parties and outings with friends new and old, including Ruth and Len Wisse, Stephanie Nelson, Keith and Nathalie Botsford, Rosanna Warren, Judith and Christopher Ricks and Monroe and Brenda Engel. Death in April of Wright Morris. In June, Alfred Kazin dies. In Vermont, dinners and parties with Walter Pozen, Herb and Libby Hillman, Arthur and Lynda Copeland and Frank Maltese; Philip Roth, Norman and Cella Manea, Joan and Jonathan Kleinbard, Sonya and Harvey Freedman, Wendy Freedman, Robert Freedman, and Martin and Isabel Amis make frequent visits.

  1999 Death in May of Saul Steinberg. In June, J. F. Powers dies. Bellow sits for long reflective interview with Romanian novelist Norman Manea, later published in Salmagundi. Continues work on Ravelstein. Alice Adams dies. In September, Bellow lectures at Montreal. A very pregnant Janis travels with him to Lachine to visit The Saul Bellow Library. Bellow sits for series of interviews with Philip Roth. On December 23 in Boston, Janis gives birth to Naomi Rose Bellow. (“I’m sure no child living will have a better mother than my new child is going to have.”)

  2000 Ravelstein published. Publication party at Lotos Club in New York. Karl Shapiro dies. At Harvard, Bellow reads from Ravelstein. Receives New England Library Award. Summer visitors to Vermont include Philip Roth, Maneas, Kleinbards and Amises. In October, Bellow, Janis and Rosie visit the Kleinbards in St. Louis.

  2001 Collected Stories published, with preface by Janis Freedman Bellow and introduction by James Wood.

  2002 Though ill, Bellow continues at Boston University, inviting James Wood to co-teach seminar. Death of John Auerbach.

  2003 Library of America begins publishing collected works of Saul Bellow in five uniform volumes. Janis asks Roger Kaplan, Martin Amis, Keith Botsford, James Wood and others to co-teach weekly seminar with Bellow. Rosalyn Tureck dies. Death of sister Jane Bellow Kauffman at ninety-seven.

  2004 Bellow receives honorary doctorate from Boston University. Prolonged illness. David Grene dies in September. Bellow, Janis and Rosie still wintering in Brookline, summering in Vermont.

  2005 Saul Bellow dies at home in Brookline on April 5 and—after traditional Jewish rites—is interred in Brattleboro Cemetery, Brattleboro, Vermont.

  PART ONE

  1932-1949

  On winter afternoons when the soil was frozen to a depth of five feet and the Chicago cold seemed to have the headhunter’s power of shrinking your face, you felt in the salt-whitened streets and amid the spattered car bodies the characteristic mixture of tedium and excitement, of narrowness of life together with a strong intimation of scope, a simultaneous expansion and constriction in the soul, a clumsy sense of inadequacy, poverty of means, desperate limitation, and, at the same time, a craving for more, which demanded that “impractical” measures be taken. There was literally nothing to be done about this. Expansion toward what? What form would a higher development take? All you could say was that you accepted this condition as a gambler would accept absurd odds, as a patient accepted his rare disease. In a city of four million people, no more than a dozen had caught it. The only remedy for it was to read and write stories and novels.

  —“The Jefferson Lectures”

  1932

  To Yetta Barshevsky

  May 28, 1932 South Harvey, Michigan

  RESOLUTION [scrawled on back of envelope]

  My dear Yetta:

  I know this letter will be unexpected, less unexpected of course than my impromptu departure, but nonetheless unexpected. Even I had not anticipated it. I had only time enough to snatch my bathing suit and several sheets of paper. The day’s events have left my mind in turmoil, but I take this opportunity to write to you, Yetta, to tell you that which has for weeks been gathering, fermenting in my breast, that which has been seething and boiling in me, and finding no expression in spontaneity. It is something, Yetta, that more through uncertainty and cowardice than anything else I have not been able to broach to you. True, I am a self-confessed coward. Cowards we are all intrinsically, but the justification of cowardice lies in the confession.

  It is dark now and the lonely wind is making the trees softly whisper and rustle. Somewhere in the night a bird cries out to the wind. My brother in the next room snores softly, insistently. The country sleeps. The waves surge angrily at the house, they cannot reach it, they snarl and pull back. Over me the light swings up and back, up and back. It throws shadows on the paper, on my face. I am thinking, thinking, Yetta, drifting with night, with infinity, and all my thoughts are of you. But my thoughts of you are not altogether kind, they sting, they lash. Or shall we talk business?

  You will think, perhaps, “Phrase-monger.” For yours is a Young Communist League mind. Or: “What can have gotten into solid, bovine Bellow?”

  But all the time you will have a presentiment, and all the time you will pray. (For you are devout, Yetta.)

  “Why does he write, why does not the fool wait until he comes back so I can intimidate him?”

  I hate melodrama. The only thing that I hate more intensely than melodrama and spinach is myself. You think perhaps that I am insane? I am. But I have my pen; I am in my element and I defy you. (Here there is a lengthy pause, a gusty sigh, and the indomitable Bellow rolls on in all his fullness and strength.)

  As of late there has been a noticeable rift between us. It seems that the incorrigible [Nathan] Goldstein is uneasy. It seems that in the presence of others you are too lavish in your affection toward him. The situation indeed is critical. (By the way, Yetta, make it a point to show this to Goldstein.) Mind you, I make no sacrifice, no secret of giving you up. I abhor sacrifice and martyrdom—they are hypocrisy within hypocrisy—an expression of barbaric dogma and fanaticism—their motive, their masked motive, is a disgusting one—it is merely the hiding of the egoism of individualism.

  So it is through mutual consent that we part. You to listen to Goldstein’s Marxian harangues with a half-feigned interest; I to loll on the bosoms of voluptuous time and space and stifle desire and hope. The Oriental, you know, is a fatalist. It is perhaps atavism that prompts me to say, “What is to be will be.” And so I am content. I have no regrets. For some time I will shroud myself in an injured reserve. Maybe I will find solace in the philosophic calm of the ascetic. Man ever seeks to justify his acts. To be a recluse is a justification of the wrongness of a right. In several weeks with a cynical droop to the lip and a weary eye on a sordid world, I the young idealist will lay his woes and his heart at Pearl’s feet. If she spurns them I
will go home and write heart-rending poetry and play the violin. If not, I will lapse into a lethargic contentment that will last only as long as the love lasts. For love stupefies.

  So I sever relations with you.

  We may still be casual friends. But some day when I am in my dotage and you are many chinned and obese we may be reconciled. In the Interim be happy—if my notorious skepticism allows me, I too will endeavor to find contentment with Pearl.

  So Yetta,

  It is Good-bye—

  You are at liberty to do as you like with this letter.

  Evidently on holiday with one of his brothers, Bellow has just turned seventeen when he writes this, his earliest surviving letter. Nathan Goldstein would shortly marry Yetta. Following their divorce in the 1940s, Yetta would marry Max Shachtman. Pearl’s identity is untraced.

  1937

  To James T. Farrell

  [n. d.] [Chicago]

  Dear Mr. Farrell:

  It may surprise you that the associate editor of the Beacon should be politically of a mind with you, but that is the case. I have asked Al Glotzer several times to write to you for me. I’m tired of asking him; I am quite sure he hasn’t written. And perhaps it would be a shame if he dissipated his Machiavellian genius in trivial correspondence.

  If you will tell me why you have taken up with the magazine, and what you have gathered of [Sydney] Harris from his letters, and what your opinion is of the role of the magazine, and whether you think it can be useful, I for my part will undertake a long narrative of the whole venture and try to explain my position on it. I will try to give you an inkling of it now: Editorially I can’t push the magazine to the left because Harris is a shrewd, opportunistic bastard who won’t permit it. However, if we load the magazine with Bolshevik writers of national reputation, we can have Harris hanging on a ledge before long.

  Already the Stalinites have excommunicated him and pronounced the magazine anathema. Jack Martin, local educational director of the C.P., wrote Harris a letter calling him a fascist record, agent of the Gestapo and a few other unoriginal things. It is peculiar how the Stalinites have lost central discipline by spreading themselves through liberal groups. They are scattered so widely that Martin’s dicta have not yet come to the ears of the ranks, and every day little fresh-faced YCL boy scouts come to ask space for the American Youth Congress or United Christian Youth meetings, space which Harris freely, even prodigally, gives.

  Of course we have not yet lost the CP. For the liberals swarm around us, and as inevitably as fruit flies gather on lush bananas, so do [Earl] Browder’s minions flock to liberals. If Harris thinks it profitable there may be reconciliation. Harris thinks nothing of assassinating a scruple or knifing a principle if thereby he can profit.

  I would like very much to hear from you.

  Sincerely,

  Bellow was working as associate editor of The Beacon, a monthly founded by his childhood friend Sydney J. Harris that advertised itself as “Chicago’s Liberal Magazine,” an editorial stance uncongenial to Bellow’s youthful Bolshevist sympathies. In this letter he attempts to make common cause with the Trotskyist Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Earl Browder had become chairman of the American Communist Party in 1932. During his term as general secretary, he supported the Popular Front, a Stalin-sanctioned policy of friendly outreach to liberals and support for New Deal policies. Running as Communist candidate for President in the 1936 election, Browder won 80,195 votes. Albert Glotzer (1908-99), a founder of the Trotskyist movement in America, had been the first Westerner to visit Trotsky in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, in the Sea of Marmara; there Glotzer was briefly his secretary and bodyguard. In 1937 he served in Mexico City as stenographer for the John Dewey-led commission that exposed the fraudulence of Stalin’s charges against Trotsky. Glotzer would be a lifelong friend of Bellow’s.

  To Oscar Tarcov

  September 29, 1937 Madison

  Dear Oscar:

  I’ve had a real letter fest this evening, four letters. I’m not a little worn out with transmitting news, or rather manufacturing it, for there has been no real temporal or spatial news of importance, with the exception of the renaissance of Isaac [Rosenfeld]. Isaac is beginning to spring a little gristle in his marrow. Who knows, he may develop bone if he continues. He’s a serious scholar now, and if he doesn’t break down into his characteristic monodic delivery he’ll be a gent of substance when the year is out. He reads earnestly and constantly. He is suddenly grave, and for the past week he has given no sign of surrealism.

  It is all too easy to be righteously critical. It is impossible to condone my jumping at you that Saturday. By doing so I laid myself open to as much blame as was owing you, and shared your weakness evenly with you. Besides, without knowing, without being sure of what moved you to act as you did, I really answered the promptings of my own secret and unconscious life.

  But you were goddamned trying. And although I shouldn’t have been so impatient, the squabble had a long genesis. I think you had it coming. Your elaborate, desperate rakishness and airiness was more than I could take. It went back beyond New York, beyond your mother, beyond Pearl too; it went back to an obscure but nevertheless bitter self-understanding, and the pressure of that half-understanding and the crush of a welter of the other things I have mentioned, you fought off with that wild pose. In all this I am not altogether correct, but I am not altogether wrong either. There is more than a germ of truth, or my life has been unique.

  I suppose Isaac has told you of my illness. I’m still weaker than a rabbit’s belly. Now I lay me down.

  Yours,

  Oscar Tarcov (1915-63) had been, along with Isaac Rosenfeld, Bellow’s closest childhood friend; the three grew up within a few blocks of one another in the Humboldt Park district of Chicago. In the spring of 1937 Bellow graduated from Northwestern with a B.A. in anthropology, and was awarded a graduate fellowship in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Rosenfeld was already a doctoral student.

  To Oscar Tarcov

  October 2, 1937 Madison

  Dear Oscar:

  First about my family: Of course there was an awful blowout before I left. My father, spongy soul, cannot give freely. His business conscience pursues him into private life, and he plagues those he loves with the scruples he has learned in that world I so detest. He started giving me a Polonius, berating all my friends, warning me, adjuring me, doing everything short of damning me. Of course he damned all the things I stood for, which was the equivalent of damning me also. The night before he had made perfectly hideous for me. Art Behrstock had been over, and no sooner did the old man discover Art had been in Russia than he withered him with arguments and insults. When he started on me, on the instant of my leaving, I blew up and told him precisely the place he occupied in my category of character, what I thought of his advice, and that I intended to live as I saw fit. I told him all this as you may expect without faltering, and I didn’t do it in subdued terms. I told the old man that if he didn’t want to give me his measly allowance in Madison I would just as lief stay in Chicago and get a job and a wife and live independent of the family forevermore. The coalbins resounded with my shouts and imprecations, till the old man as a defense-measure decided that he was needed somewhere and swam off into the gloom. The next I hear of this is that the old man is heartbroken because I have not written to him. Did he expect a manifesto of love after such a clash? That is why the old woman [Bellow’s stepmother] called you up; to discover if I had made any disclosures to you.

  I had a letter from Sam (my brother) this morning, in which he urged me to write, and I think I shall now. But what have I to say to him? He sees me as quite a different creature than I really am. To him I am a perverse child growing into manhood with no prospects or bourgeois ambitions, utterly unequipped to meet his world. (He is wrong, am not unequipped but unwilling.) My father and probably all fathers like him have an extremely naïve idea of e
ducation. They think it is something formal, apart from actual living, and that it should give one an air of highbrow eminence coupled with material substance (money). They do not expect it to have an effect on the moral life, on the intellectual life, and I doubt whether they have ever heard of an esthetic life. They are good folk, when they are not neurotic, and what after all can we expect? Such conflicts must come if we are to honestly follow out the concepts we learn or teach ourselves. What nexus have I with the old man? What shall I say to him? In his way he is a curio. For instance: He boasts of having read the complete works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky. I believe him. But how has he been able to look open-eyed at these men and act as he has shown himself capable of acting? [ . . . ]

  So much for the family.

  So you’re going into anthropology; sweet Jesus! It’s a hell of a lot better than the English department. And if you are not going to train yourself in a money-making technique you could choose no better field. It is the liveliest, by far, of all the social sciences. Since it is your intention to go to school, I think it is the best discipline, the one that will aid you most. Of course, you will have to learn to keep your balance, but that should be easier in anthropology than in English. As for satisfying the finance corporation that is putting you through—Rien n’est plus simple [1]. For the good student there are scholarships and fellowships galore. You have no notion how naïve socially many writers are. The tendency of our time, anyhow, is to rate the moral excellence over the esthetic. I don’t think any of us are pure estheticians. Closest is Isaac, who also falls short. There will be a little awkwardness in anthropology—prehistory and physical anthropology and parts of descriptive anthropology. But after all, these are the least important parts of anthropology. I regard them as necessary implements, the tools of social philosophy. With a little effort and application you can brush them out of the way. Moreover, if you are good at rationalizing, you can find certain charms in even the tools.