Saul Bellow_ Letters Part 1

Saul Bellow_ Letters.

by Saul Bellow.

INTRODUCTION.

"This Caring or Believing or Love Alone Matters"

When urged to write his autobiography, Saul Bellow used to say there was nothing to tell except that he'd been unbearably busy ever since getting circ.u.mcised. Busy with the making of novels, stories and the occasional essay; with romance, marriage, fatherhood, divorce, friendship, enmity, grief; with the large-scale events of history and small-scale events of literary life; with the prodigious reading habit and dedication to teaching that saw him into his later eighties. Busy, not least, corresponding. The great authors are not all so good at letters; indeed, you could make a considerable list of figures of the first rank who were perfunctory correspondents. It would seem to be a separate gift, as mysterious as the artistic one. Looking over the best letter writers in our language of the last century-Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Katherine Anne Porter, Evelyn Waugh, Samuel Beckett, John Cheever, William Maxwell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Flannery O'Connor, James Merrill-one finds every sort of personality and no common denominator. Some kept diaries, others did not. Some were prolific, others produced relatively little. The most one can say is that each led a rich additional life in his or her correspondence, rich enough to have become a part of literature itself.

Four generations-the one before him, his own, and the two following-are addressed in Bellow's tremendous outflow, an exhaustive self-portrait that is, as well, the portrait of an age. His correspondents are a vast company including wives, sons, friends from childhood, fellow writers, current and former lovers, current and former students, admiring and disadmiring readers, acolytes asking him to read what they'd written (he nearly always did, it seems), religious crackpots, autograph hounds (hundreds), obsessive adulators, graphomaniacs and seriously insane people.

It will come as no surprise to readers of Bellow's novels and stories that he can in his letters be instantly dramatic as well as very funny. Here are a few instances from the Alfred Kazin file. First, Paris, January of 1950: "And of this I am sure: that he [Stendhal] would do as I do with his copy of Les Temps Modernes Les Temps Modernes, that is, scan the latest sottises sottises, observe with brutal contempt the newest wrinkle in anguish, and then feed Simone's articles on s.e.x to the cat to cure her of her heat and give the remainder to little G[regory] to cut dollies from; he can't read yet and lives happily in nature." And from Martha's Vineyard, summer 1964: "We've seen a bit of Island Society. Styron is our leader, here in little Fitzgeraldville. Then there is Lillian h.e.l.lman, in whom I produce symptoms of shyness shyness. And Phil Rahv who keeps alive the traditions of Karl Marx. I'm very fond of Philip-he's mishpokhe- mishpokhe-and he gives us a kind of private Chatauqua course in Hochpolitik Hochpolitik from which I get great pleasure. Why can't we forgive each other before we become harmless?" And from West Brattleboro, Vermont, summer 1983: "That I've become an unforthcoming correspondent is perfectly true; I take no pleasure in these silences of mine; rather, I'm trying to discover the reasons why I so seldom reply. It may be that I'm always out with a b.u.t.terfly net trying to capture my mature and perfected form, which is just about to settle (once and for all) on a flower. It never does settle, it hasn't yet found its flower. That from which I get great pleasure. Why can't we forgive each other before we become harmless?" And from West Brattleboro, Vermont, summer 1983: "That I've become an unforthcoming correspondent is perfectly true; I take no pleasure in these silences of mine; rather, I'm trying to discover the reasons why I so seldom reply. It may be that I'm always out with a b.u.t.terfly net trying to capture my mature and perfected form, which is just about to settle (once and for all) on a flower. It never does settle, it hasn't yet found its flower. That may may be the full explanation." be the full explanation."

Despite the comradely tenor of these excerpts, relations with Kazin were far from easy. Reading the file through, one encounters Bellow as often outraged as affectionate. Yet in the aftermath of renewed hostilities between them, he dispatched this in the summer of 1982: Dear Alfred,A happy birthday to you, and admiration and love and long life-everything. Never mind this and that, this and that don't matter much in the summing up.Love from your junior by five days,

With others of his generation, relations were less volatile. John Cheever he loved, delighting in their differences of style and heritage. On both sides the letters are courtly, of the great-man-to-great-man kind, yet abundantly tender. Here is Bellow's reply to Cheever, who had asked him to read page proofs of Falconer Falconer: "Will I read your book? Would I accept a free trip to Xanadu with Helen of Troy as my valet? [ . . . ] I have to go to New York this weekend, and also to Princeton to see my son Adam playing Antonio, the heavy in The Tempest The Tempest. [ . . . ] I would like to see you too, but don't know when I will be free from this mixture of glory and horror." (He had just won the n.o.bel.) Or his riposte, two years later, to Cheever's solicitation of names of writers to be honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters: "I perish of greed and envy at the sight of all these awards which didn't exist when we were young and mooching around New York." To Cheever's specific request for names of critics to honor, Bellow responds: "There are no critics I could nominate for anything but crucifixion." And this, finally, written in December 1981, after he learned how gravely ill Cheever was: "Since we spoke on the phone I've been thinking incessantly about you. Many things might be said, but I won't say them, you can probably do without them. What I would like to tell you is this: We didn't spend much time together but there is a significant attachment between us. I suppose it's in part because we practiced the same self-taught trade. Let me try to say it better-we put our souls to the same kind of schooling, and it's this esoteric training which we had the gall, under the hostile stare of exoteric America to persist in, that brings us together. Yes, there are other, deeper sympathies but I'm too clumsy to get at them. Just now I can offer only what's available. [ . . . ] When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There's nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul. I loved you for this. I loved you anyway, but for this especially."

Writing to Ralph Ellison, with whom he shared digs and the early struggle for recognition, he is larky, freewheeling. Here he writes from the University of Puerto Rico, where he was spending the spring term of 1961: "I keep going [ . . . ] and drift with the stray dogs and the lizards and wonder how many ways a banana leaf can split. The dog population is Asiatic-wandering tribes of mongrels. They turn up in all the fashionable places, and in the modern university buildings, the cafeterias-there're always a few hounds sleeping in a cool cla.s.sroom, and at night they howl and fight. But with one another, not with the rats, another huge population, reddish brown and fearless. You see them in vacant lots downtown, and at the exclusive tennis club at the seash.o.r.e. I won't be surprised to see them at the c.r.a.p table, watching the game. Then there is the mongoose clan. They eliminated the snakes, but now no one knows what to do about their raids on the chickens. So much for the zoology of this place. The island is beautiful. The towns stink. The crowds are aimless, cheerful, curious and gaudy. Drivers read at the wheel, they eat and they screw while driving."

Letters to John Berryman sound a different note. Fragility of life and arduousness of art are the preoccupations. In October 1963, with unforeseeable national tragedy waiting in the wings, Bellow's mood is already dark: "I can't say that all is well with us. My lifelong friend Oscar Tarcov was carried off by a heart attack on Wednesday. I feel I'd rather die myself than endure these deaths, one after another, of all my dearest friends. It wears out your heart. Eventually survival feels degrading. As long as death is our ultimate reality, it is is degrading. Only waiting until Cyclops finds us." Their friendship was rooted in literary fellow feeling; such pleasure as there is comes from mutual awe. Bellow writes in the spring of 1966: "You have extended my lease on life with these poems. Nothing more stable than inspired dizziness. The poet's answer to the speed of light and the Brownian motion of matter. We have no holy cities, maybe, but we do have Dream Songs." degrading. Only waiting until Cyclops finds us." Their friendship was rooted in literary fellow feeling; such pleasure as there is comes from mutual awe. Bellow writes in the spring of 1966: "You have extended my lease on life with these poems. Nothing more stable than inspired dizziness. The poet's answer to the speed of light and the Brownian motion of matter. We have no holy cities, maybe, but we do have Dream Songs."

In letters to the next generation-to Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Stanley Elkin among others-one encounters a man reluctantly accepting the role of senior eminence, though scarcely at home with it. What's most striking is how differently he responds to each of the three. To Roth in December 1969, thanking him for a letter about Mr. Sammler's Planet Mr. Sammler's Planet: "Your note did me a lot of good, though I haven't known what or how to answer. Of course the so-called fabricators will be grinding their knives. They have none of that ingenuous, possibly childish love of literature you and I have. [ . . . ] There aren't many people in the trade for whom I have any use. But I knew when I hit Chicago (was it twelve years ago?) and read your stories that you were the real thing. When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around, and I've never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil."

And in the autumn of 1974, responding to Roth's essay "Imagining Jews": "I was highly entertained by your piece in the New York Review New York Review. I didn't quite agree-that's too much to expect-but I shall slowly think over what you said. My anaconda method. I go into a long digestive stupor. Of course I am not a Freudian. For one fierce moment I was a Reichian. At this moment I have no handle of any sort. I can neither be picked up nor put down." Finally this, twelve years later: "I want to thank you again for looking after me in London. As you realized, I was in the dumps. [ . . . ] The Shostakovich quartets did me a world of good. There's almost enough art to cover the deadly griefs with. Not quite though. There always are gaps."

Writing to Ozick, Bellow's theme is history, as here in the summer of 1987: "I was too busy becoming a novelist to take note of what was happening in the Forties. I was involved with 'literature' and given over to preoccupations with art, with language, with my struggle on the American scene, with claims for the recognition of my talent or, like my pals of the Partisan Review Partisan Review, with modernism, Marxism, New Criticism, with Eliot, Yeats, Proust, etc.-with anything except the terrible events in Poland. Growing slowly aware of this unspeakable evasion I didn't even know how to begin to admit it into my inner life. Not a particle of this can be denied. And can I really say-can anyone say-what was to be done, how this 'thing' ought ought to have been met? Since the late Forties I have been brooding about it and sometimes I imagine that I to have been met? Since the late Forties I have been brooding about it and sometimes I imagine that I can can see something. But what such broodings amount to is probably insignificant. [ . . . ] I can't even begin to say what responsibility any of us may bear in such a matter, in a crime so vast that it brings all Being into Judgment." see something. But what such broodings amount to is probably insignificant. [ . . . ] I can't even begin to say what responsibility any of us may bear in such a matter, in a crime so vast that it brings all Being into Judgment."

With Stanley Elkin, he is more intimately reminiscent, more deeply revealing. This from spring 1992: "When I was young I used to correspond actively with Isaac Rosenfeld and other friends. He died in 1956, and several more went in the same decade, and somehow I lost the habit of writing long personal letters-a sad fact I only now begin to understand. It wasn't that I ran out of friendships altogether. But habits changed. No more romantic outpourings. We were so Russian Russian, as adolescents, and perhaps we were practicing to be writers. Isaac himself made me conscious of this. When he moved to New York I wrote almost weekly from Chicago. Then, years later, he told me one day, 'I hope you don't mind. But when we moved from the West Side' (to the Village, naturally) 'I threw away all your letters.' And he made it clear that he meant to shock me, implying that I would feel this to be a great loss to literary history. I felt nothing of the sort. I was rid of a future embarra.s.sment.

"But it wasn't a good thing to be cured of-the habit of correspondence, I mean. I'm aware that important ground was lost. One way or another it happened to most of the people I knew-a dying back into private consciousness and a kind of miserliness."

But the formidable letters written in maturity and old age belie Bellow's reiterated claim to have lost the art. The disappearance of those young letters to Rosenfeld is a misfortune for which there are hundreds of compensations, early and late. "It is extraordinarily moving to find the inmost track of a man's life and to decipher the signs he has left us," Bellow wrote. Herein are seven hundred and eight letters charting his inmost track and granting the nearest view we shall have of him.

"He had pledged himself to a great destiny," his old friend and enemy Kazin wrote. "He was going to take on more than the rest of us were." Bellow's career, among the longest in American literary history, does indeed seem outsize-in ambition, learning, vision, bravura, fulfillment. In freedom. The letters collected here bear witness to all he was, but the autobiographical narrative they sketch is overwhelmingly an artist's story. His struggle to write the next page of fiction is, for better or worse, what matters most on any given day. A journey through the Bellow archive reveals how much was taken on, and how much accomplished. The hundred and forty linear feet at Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, include ma.n.u.scripts, notebooks, address books, appointment books, incoming mail, carbons and (later) photocopies of outgoing mail, photographs, newspaper and magazine clippings, personal objects and so on. Some items: A hectoring letter from his aged immigrant father, dated September 23, 1953, the month in which Bellow's early masterpiece The Adventures of Augie March The Adventures of Augie March was published: "Wright me. A Ledder. Still I am The Head of all of U. Signed, Pa." A letter from John F. Kennedy dated September 8, 1961: "I am hopeful that this collaboration between government and the arts will continue and prosper. Mrs. Kennedy and I would be particularly interested in any suggestions..." etc. A legal instrument certifying that one Saul Bellow, being duly sworn on oath, deposes and says that his naturalization as a U.S. citizen was effective on August 3, 1943, at Chicago, Illinois, as attested by Certificate of Naturalization No. 5689081. (He had arrived from Quebec with his family on July 4, 1924. In other words, the leading American novelist of his generation, who dramatized like no one else American low-street cunning and highbrow foolery, who sought to itemize every particular of the American urban clamor, was not officially American till he was close to thirty years old.) was published: "Wright me. A Ledder. Still I am The Head of all of U. Signed, Pa." A letter from John F. Kennedy dated September 8, 1961: "I am hopeful that this collaboration between government and the arts will continue and prosper. Mrs. Kennedy and I would be particularly interested in any suggestions..." etc. A legal instrument certifying that one Saul Bellow, being duly sworn on oath, deposes and says that his naturalization as a U.S. citizen was effective on August 3, 1943, at Chicago, Illinois, as attested by Certificate of Naturalization No. 5689081. (He had arrived from Quebec with his family on July 4, 1924. In other words, the leading American novelist of his generation, who dramatized like no one else American low-street cunning and highbrow foolery, who sought to itemize every particular of the American urban clamor, was not officially American till he was close to thirty years old.) Also, from the early 1980s, an old-fashioned calling card on which is written, in a spidery hand, "Shall call at your hotel tomorrow Friday at 5:00 P.M. in the hope of seeing you. Sincerely, Sam Beckett." They did indeed meet the following afternoon in the bar of the Hotel Pont Royal, 7 rue de Montalembert, Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The living embodiment of modernism was eager to meet the great quarreler with modernism. In the event, little was said. Their encounter resembled Proust's famous meeting with Joyce. After the halting exchange of civilities, Proust had asked Joyce's opinion of truffles, and Joyce allowed as he liked them and so on, miserably. A number of versions of the meeting were later reported, most of which sound embroidered. Whatever was said, one thing is clear: Those mighty opposites had no wish to meet again.

Nor did Bellow and Beckett. Had he read Dangling Man Dangling Man, Bellow's first published novel, Beckett would have come upon this quick bit of dialogue- "If you could see, what do you think you would see?"

"I'm not sure. Perhaps that we were the feeble-minded children of angels."

-and might have wondered if he, Beckett, had written the lines, for they could as well have been spoken by Vladimir to Estragon in Waiting for G.o.dot Waiting for G.o.dot or by Nag to Nell in or by Nag to Nell in Endgame. Endgame. But Beckett, that good and generous man, was likely responding to everything in Bellow ant.i.thetical to himself: an unfazed humanistic faith and, beyond that, a faith in things beyond the grave. The last ditch, the final straw, the end of the line, the But Beckett, that good and generous man, was likely responding to everything in Bellow ant.i.thetical to himself: an unfazed humanistic faith and, beyond that, a faith in things beyond the grave. The last ditch, the final straw, the end of the line, the fin de partie fin de partie-all these ways of thinking, all these metaphors for nullity, were anathema to Bellow's fundamentally buoyant, bright-hearted imagination.

A photo from his bar-mitzvah year shows a handsome, compact boy in knickerbockers, kneesocks and spectators, smiling mildly into the camera. The day is sunny, the season leafy. In one hand he holds an open book. Harder to see, tucked under an arm, is a second book. No time to waste, what with all there was to read: Tocqueville, Stendhal, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Marx, Flaubert, Durkheim, Tolstoy, Weber, Conrad, Frazer, Dreiser, Malinowski, Boas, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence. This "superior life," as he calls it in Humboldt's Gift Humboldt's Gift, this insatiable book-hunger, was from childhood the necessary complement to "bread-and-b.u.t.ter, meat-and-potatoes, dollars-and-cents, cash-and-carry Chicago." Alongside the Division Street world of peddlers, tailors, greengrocers, fishmongers, butchers, ganzer machers, ganzer machers, touts and touts and shnorrers shnorrers was this lavish invitation to otherness, this superabundant hospitality of books. "I had a heart full of something. I studied my favorite authors. I rode the bobbling el cars reading Shakespeare or the Russians or Conrad or Freud or Marx or Nietzsche, unsystematic, longing to be pa.s.sionately stirred." was this lavish invitation to otherness, this superabundant hospitality of books. "I had a heart full of something. I studied my favorite authors. I rode the bobbling el cars reading Shakespeare or the Russians or Conrad or Freud or Marx or Nietzsche, unsystematic, longing to be pa.s.sionately stirred."

Bellow's bookishness has inclined critics to sum him up as a novelist of ideas. True, his protagonists are intellectuals-but intellectuals who discover how feeble their learning is once real life has barged in. He shows the comic inefficacy of ideas when brought to the test of experience. Scratch these intellectuals and you find flesh-and-blood, struggling, bewildered human beings. In Herzog Herzog, for example, Bellow dramatizes the sad hilarity of a scholar no more able to finish his magnum opus, The Roots of Romanticism, The Roots of Romanticism, than Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot's than Mr. Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch Middlemarch could finish his could finish his Key to All Mythologies Key to All Mythologies . But when Moses Herzog undergoes the additional humiliation of being cuckolded by his best friend, the block lifts. He finds he can write-not, however, about Romanticism. What he manically scribbles is letters. Not the stamped-and-mailed kind collected here. No, it's unsent letters that save Herzog, epistolary furor trans.m.u.ting the failed Romantic scholar-by one of Bellow's beautiful reversals-into the article itself, a genuine Romantic. Let others dabble in nihilism as they please; for Herzog life remains what it had been for Keats-the vale of soul-making. The thing he'd attempted to tackle at second hand Herzog now knows . But when Moses Herzog undergoes the additional humiliation of being cuckolded by his best friend, the block lifts. He finds he can write-not, however, about Romanticism. What he manically scribbles is letters. Not the stamped-and-mailed kind collected here. No, it's unsent letters that save Herzog, epistolary furor trans.m.u.ting the failed Romantic scholar-by one of Bellow's beautiful reversals-into the article itself, a genuine Romantic. Let others dabble in nihilism as they please; for Herzog life remains what it had been for Keats-the vale of soul-making. The thing he'd attempted to tackle at second hand Herzog now knows originally originally, without mediation, as a birthright. His humiliation becomes the groundwork for revelations of the Sublime. Letters are dispatched to an ever more sacred company. Here, for example, is Herzog writing to his childhood friend Shapiro: "But we mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals. The canned sauerkraut of Spengler's 'Prussian Socialism,' the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about Inauthenticity and Forlorn-ness. I can't accept this foolish dreariness. We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice-too deep, too great, Shapiro." And to Morgenfruh, a social scientist fondly remembered from graduate-school days: "Dear Dr. Morgenfruh, Latest evidence from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa gives grounds to suppose that man did not descend from a peaceful arboreal ape, but from a carnivorous, terrestrial type, a beast that hunted in packs and crushed the skulls of prey with a club or femoral bone. It sounds bad, Morgenfruh, for the optimists, for the lenient hopeful view of human nature." And here to G.o.d, in whom Herzog (like his maker) involuntarily believes when he feels life beating against its boundaries: "How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense. I have not been too good at it. But I have desired to do your unknowable will, taking it, and you, without symbols. Everything of intensest significance, especially if divested of me." Finally, and most movingly, to his long-dead mother: "The life you gave me has been curious, and perhaps the death I must inherit will turn out to be even more profoundly curious. I have sometimes wished it would hurry up, longed for it to come soon. But I am still on the same side of eternity as ever. It's just as well, for I still have certain things to do. And without noise, I hope. Some of my oldest aims seem to have slid away."

You love Moses Herzog for blindness, for haplessness, for thrashing around. At length, you love the feeble-minded child of angels for having come into his own. All that letter writing has delivered him to silence. At the book's climax, while a hermit thrush sings his evening song, Herzog's self and soul chat amiably, inwardly: "But what do you want, Herzog?" "But that's just it-not a solitary thing. I am pretty well satisfied to be, to be just as it is willed, and for as long as I may remain in occupancy." He fills his hat with flowers: rambler roses, day lilies, peonies. "At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word." Resentment, rage, hatred, jealousy, self-pity-all are transfigured into natural piety. And such piety, in Bellow's mimetic art, has the last word, however bad the news from Olduvai Gorge.

Novels and stories draw their strength from the humility of the emotions, not from the grandeur of big ideas. Their abiding power is a belief-always difficult to sustain-in the existence of others. "This caring," says Bellow, "or believing or love alone matters." Let one instance, taken from Humboldt Humboldt, stand here for hundreds. The scene is the old Russian Bath on Division Street: "Mickey who keeps the food concession fries slabs of meat and potato pancakes, and, with enormous knives, he hacks up cabbages for coleslaw and he quarters grapefruits (to be eaten by hand). The stout old men mounting in their bed sheets from the blasting heat have a strong appet.i.te. Below, Fra.n.u.sh the attendant makes steam by sloshing water on the white-hot boulders. These lie in a pile like Roman ballistic ammunition. To keep his brains from baking Fra.n.u.sh wears a wet felt hat with the brim torn off. Otherwise he is naked. He crawls up like a red salamander with a stick to tip the latch of the furnace, which is too hot to touch, and then on all fours, with t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es swinging on a long sinew and the clean a.n.u.s staring out, he backs away groping for the bucket. He pitches in the water and the boulders flash and sizzle. There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail."

Fra.n.u.sh appears and vanishes, yet he is immortal, a datum nothing can unmake.

From the Fifties, the population of what Bellow called "my Dead" steadily grows, of course. Inevitable in the collected letters of a long life: more and more loved ones nowhere certainly but in the safekeeping of memory. After seventy-five, you look in vain for survivors from the older generation; after eighty-five, only remnants of your own remain. Like Rob Rexler in "By the Saint Lawrence," his last story, written at the age of eighty, Bellow no longer sees death as the ugly intruder. The metaphor has changed. Now death is the universal magnetic field, irresistible, gathering us in. Yet now, as never before, the ecstatic sense of being alive-and the hallucinatory vividness of those who are gone-bear down on Rexler with blessings. He recalls his earliest encounter with death: In Lachine, at the level crossing of the Grand Trunk, a man has been killed by an oncoming train. Standing up on the running board of Cousin Albert's Model T for a better look, Robby sees organs in the roadbed. Aunt Rozzy, when Albert and Robby come home to tell her, lowers her voice and mutters something devout. Remembered in old age, the long-ago day is suddenly possessed as much more than a memory. Everything that happened then seems also to be happening now. Elderly Rob Rexler becomes becomes young Robby stroking Cousin Albert's close rows of wavy hair, as Albert fiercely pushes the hand away. "These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life-his being-and love was what produced them." young Robby stroking Cousin Albert's close rows of wavy hair, as Albert fiercely pushes the hand away. "These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life-his being-and love was what produced them."

A sentence of fiction like that is art of the highest order. Bellow's letters are the other side of the tapestry, hitherto unseen: tangled, knotty, loose threads hanging, reverse of the radiant design. He called his novels and stories "letters-in-general of an occult personality." The letters-in-particular here collected reveal the combats, the delights, the longings-the will, the heroic self-tasking-that gave birth to such lasting things.

-Benjamin Taylor

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 antic.i.p.ated it. I had only time enough to s.n.a.t.c.h 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ident.i.ty is untraced.

1937.

To James T. Farrell [n. d.] [Chicago]

Dear Mr. Farrell: It may surprise you that the a.s.sociate editor of the Beacon 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. 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 s.p.a.ce for the American Youth Congress or United Christian Youth meetings, s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sa.s.sinating 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 a.s.sociate editor of The Beacon, 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. 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 d.a.m.ning me. Of course he d.a.m.ned all the things I stood for, which was the equivalent of d.a.m.ning 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 naive idea of education. 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 h.e.l.l 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 naive 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.

You ought to meet [Alexander] Goldenweiser. Even Isaac is completely won by the man. A perfect cosmopolite, a perfect intellect. He knows as much Pica.s.so as he does Tshimshiam religion, he knows Mozart as well as Bastian, and Thomism as well as Polynesia. You ought to see the books that line his shelves. Next to [Alfred L.] Kroeber stands Sidney Hook, and Lenin, and of course many of Trotsky's pamphlets. He can open up in a seminar and discuss for an hour the anthropological thinking of Elisee Reclus, the anarchist geographer, the great friend of Kropotkin. He is a piano virtuoso, an esthetician, a Bolshevik, a deeply cultured man.

I am taking a seminar with the great Kimball Young, in advanced social psychology, a cla.s.s with friend [Eliseo] Vivas, about whom Isaac will be delighted to write you. A course in the cla.s.sical economists, and one in European prehistory.

I guess you have a good half-hour's reading in the above. Leave you to digest it.

Alexander Alexandrovich Goldenweiser (1880-1940), a Ukrainian-born social scientist and disciple of Franz Boas, was greatly esteemed for his groundbreaking research in totemism as well as for his charismatic teaching style. He was in residence at University of Wisconsin, Madison, for the academic year 1937-38.

To Oscar Tarcov [Postmarked Madison, Wisconsin, 13 October 1937]

Dear Oscar: How shall I help you? What can I do? Whatever I could I would do with all my heart. If I were lying next to you in h.e.l.l I would help you with all my power. But h.e.l.l is for our ancestors. For us, nothing so simple. I can give you no advice because I am so different from you for one thing, and because, for another, my own problems are by no means settled.

I am a strange dog, Oscar. Strange things occur in me that I cannot account for. Just now I am deeply in love, and I think I shall continue in love, because it is my salvation. You, on the other side, could not find salvation in love. You see how different we are? Even our capacities for love are different.

You'll have to settle your problems by yourself. You'll have to wrestle with your own devil because, though I am at present sitting on mine, he is kicking and undefeated.

However, I think you are on the right track. Stick to anthropology; I wish I could accept it wholly. It will bring you closer to truth perhaps, make you happier, perhaps. If you discover a province in it to make yours, you are sure at least to be freer. If any discipline can do it, it is anthropology. You will see what I mean if you read the Autobiography of a Papago Woman, Memoirs of the A.A.A. Autobiography of a Papago Woman, Memoirs of the A.A.A., a monograph published by the American Anthropological a.s.sociation. You can doubtless find it in the periodical room. It was published only last year. When you read it you will see how many universes there are. That there are other lives, the color of clay, narrow as cave walls but still broad as rock and free and fierce as wolves.

Read it and write back.

Yours,