Saul Bellow_ Letters Part 51

I have always cla.s.sified you as a good guy and I hope you won't use my candor against me and make me look like a gargoyle. I have learned by now that it is never safe to a.s.sume that a good guy is incapable of taking unfair advantage of the unwary and trusting schnook schnook.

Best wishes, In Memory of Yetta Barshevsky Shachtman (Printed in the program for Yetta Shachtman's memorial service in New York City, September 22, 1996) Sixty-five years ago in the Humboldt Park District of Chicago, Yetta Barshevsky and I were students at the Tuley High School. Although we were born in the same year, she was just a bit ahead of me, graduating in 1932. Yetta was cla.s.s orator. The t.i.tle of her speech, a speech I remember very well, was "The Future Belongs to the Youth." Well, of course it does. Actuarial statistics make it obvious that, like it or not, youth will will inherit the future or, less pleasantly, that it will be thrust if not dumped on them. Al Glotzer tells me that it was Karl Liebknecht who invented this clumsy slogan. Totalitarianism in the Thirties produced very nasty youth organizations- inherit the future or, less pleasantly, that it will be thrust if not dumped on them. Al Glotzer tells me that it was Karl Liebknecht who invented this clumsy slogan. Totalitarianism in the Thirties produced very nasty youth organizations-Hitlerjugend in Germany, Pioneers in Soviet Russia and also the Young Communist League. Mussolini had his Blackshirt boys. In England and in the USA we had nothing worse than Baden-Powell's Boy Scout movement. The best that can be said for the Boy Scouts was that they didn't do the future much harm. in Germany, Pioneers in Soviet Russia and also the Young Communist League. Mussolini had his Blackshirt boys. In England and in the USA we had nothing worse than Baden-Powell's Boy Scout movement. The best that can be said for the Boy Scouts was that they didn't do the future much harm.

Yetta in her high school days was for a time a member of the YCL. She left the movement. Perhaps she was expelled. She was far too good, too gentle, too charming to be a hard-faced Third-Period Stalinist. Her mother, as I remember, was upset when Yetta dropped out of the movement. The mother was a spectacularly handsome dark-haired woman. I, you see, lived right around the corner, on Lemoyne Street. The Barshevskys were on Spaulding Ave. just north of Division Street I was a frequent visitor. I knew her brothers and also her father. I believe he was a carpenter. The back seat of his jalopy was filled with saws and sawdust. In those days one didn't have a car and a truck. If you were a family man you preferred an old touring car to a truck-the front seat would not accommodate four kids and a wife. Barshevsky was fairly silent and clearly good-natured and affectionate with his children. I even came to know Yetta's grandfather, whom I would often see at the synagogue when I came to say Kaddish for my mother. He was an extremely, primitively orthodox short bent man with a beard that seemed to have rushed out of him and m.u.f.fled his face. He wore a bowler hat and elastic-sided boots. The old women, it seems, were wildly radical Communist sympathizers. The grandfathers were the pious ones.

The immigrant parents at the graduation ceremonies were delighted with Yetta's oration. On the platform, this slight, high-voiced young woman was fearless and formidable. Her manner was militant, urgent. From her you heard such words as "penury" and "mitigate." I knew "mitigate" only from books. I had never heard it spoken. It took boldness to say it publicly and with natural confidence. And Yetta was a gentle creature with a fiery irrepressible message for the parents of the graduating cla.s.s. "We will do right by you," was what she was telling them. "We will give you mitigation." There was a curious earnestness about Yetta.

This, remember, was 1932. The Great Depression was upon us. Hitler and FDR had just spoken their first words on the world's stage.

Yetta introduced me, after a fashion, to world politics. We often crossed Humboldt Park together after school. I was even then "literary," while she was political. She gave me Trotsky's pamphlet on the German question. The view Trotsky developed was, as I remember, that Stalin's policies facilitated Hitler's rise to power. Stalin would not enter into a defensive alliance with the Social Democrats and other Left elements.

In good weather we sat on the steps of the Humboldt Park boathouse, under the huge arches; or in the Rose Garden, where the two bronze bison stood. She lectured me on Leninism, on collectivization, on democratic centralism, on the sins of Stalin and his inferiority to Trotsky. She was engaged, by now, to Nathan Goldstein, and Goldstein had turned from the CP to Trotskyism.

By 1933 Yetta and I had moved on to Crane Junior College, an inst.i.tution that soon went under for lack of cash-the usual thing, in those years.

Mayor [Anton] Cermak went down to Florida after Roosevelt had won the November election with the aim of getting money to pay the teachers. It was there that an a.s.sa.s.sin shooting at Roosevelt shot Cermak instead. Cermak was a martyr, therefore, who sacrificed his life for education. With his death the Irish Democrats took over, creating a machine that has ruled Chicago ever since.

I was, at best, a peripheral observer of the political drama. But Yetta loved novels too. She had me reading Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe Jean Christophe-all three volumes of it. Enormously stirring, this life of a Romantic t.i.tan. When I tried to read it again, decades later, it seemed to me nothing but twaddle.

I suppose I entered into Yetta's enthusiasms for Yetta's sake, for her importance to me was very great. She was one of those persons who draw you into their lives and also install themselves in yours. Even the small genetic accident that made one of her eyes seem oddly placed added warmth and sadness to her look. She always seemed to me to have a significant sort of Jewish beauty. One no more understands these things than the immigrant parents who heard the cla.s.s orator understood the word "mitigate." There is something radically mysterious in the specificity of another human being which everybody somehow responds to. Love is not a bad word for this response. Today's memorial testifies to Yetta's secret power, the power of being Yetta.

To Hymen Slate November 25, 1996 W. Brattleboro Dear Hymen, I am not going to molest you with my deep thoughts today. I want to say first of all that I greatly enjoyed your letter and have thought of various ways of answering. Since I came down a couple of years ago with a tremendous disease I have learned that people when they ask how you are don't really want a detailed reply. Naturally the sick man has given a great deal of thought to his condition and his disorder and is in a position to tell them something of deep and permanent value. But as you have probably had occasion to observe, their eyes glaze over just as you are getting to the best part. The n.o.blest thing a convalescent can do is to let them off the hook, that is, spare them the consequences of their question. In a way, it's like being old. It's best not to try to tell anybody what it's like.

Janis and I shuttle between Vermont and Brookline. This time of year Vermont turns gloomy and it's also somewhat dangerous. The hunters are out for free meat, a deer for Thanksgiving. We have bought crimson parkas, because the sportsmen get drunk in the woods and fire in all directions. The shooting will be over at the end of the month. Janis taught me how to go cross-country on skis but I doubt that my legs are strong enough these days to do it. I don't think I mentioned that my youngest son, Daniel, a newspaperman, has been working on the Brattleboro Reformer Brattleboro Reformer, our local paper. One of the attractions of Vermont was that he and his wife lived nearby. They have moved two hours away to the town of Rutland because he has a new job. He has become an editor of the Rutland Herald Rutland Herald, so we shall be seeing less of him. He has grown up to be literate, bookish, but by now he has seen much more of life than I had seen at his age. My oldest son, who came to visit you last spring, I think, is in California. His daughter, a good-looking young woman of twenty-four, is in New York as is my son Adam. Daniel is the one I see most often.

As for Boston, it's a snooty city that thinks very highly of its cultural opulence. So many art galleries and so much chamber music and so many literary societies and across the river there is Harvard prepared to answer all the questions one can think of. It doesn't have a monopoly on the best minds, but it does have, or claims to have, the biggest concentration of them. There are a few good friends in Brookline where we live, and also two or three at Harvard. We don't see any of them very often. I never was able to do all the things I wanted to do, cover all the bases, but one has to be much younger to have any real gift for relationships. Those we had when we were young remain the best. One of the things that bugged me, grieved me, about living in Hyde Park was to pa.s.s the houses where my late friends once lived, and even the windows from which I myself used to look out more than fifty years ago. The daily melancholy of pa.s.sing these places was among the things that drove me East. Here I have no melancholy past to bug me.

But we did have an agreeable group of pals and rivals, didn't we?

I teach only the spring term at Boston University, so I am free during eight months of the year. We don't do much traveling anymore because I tire so easily. I haven't been to New York in more than a year, but Janis and I are going to be in Chicago next April. This gives us four months to plan a reunion.

Much love from your reasonably intact friend,

1997.

To Julian Behrstock January 14, 1997 Brookline Dear Julian: 1997-what a date, hey? Long, long ago I used to play the arithmetic game and reckon (born in 1915) how old I would be when the century ended. Eighty-five in the year 2000. A completely unnatural and comical number. That's why my eighty-first year is so unlikely-a laughing matter; except that it's no joke. When I complain about my health it's really about the dwindling of my recuperative powers that I complain. In the past I bounced back after surgeries or pneumonias. Now I lose my footing when I put on my pants. The sense of balance is gone. I lost six pounds in intensive care. I put on about eighty while convalescing, and now I can't get rid of the increment. No matter how I fast I have to hold my breath to fasten the waistband.

Then there is the stamp of old age on the face, head, hands and ankles. These blue-cheese ankles-what a punishment for narcissists! And after a lifetime of dogged realism about oneself and such pride in keeping the record straight! Worst of all, in many ways, is the failure of memory. Yesterday I couldn't recall Muriel Spark. Today I can't pin down the name of a Cambridge prof whose books I liked-Bogan maybe. All the better to appreciate the joke about the old guy who says to the doctor, "There are three things I can't recall: names, faces-and the third I can't remember." This from the fella who knew what your brother Arthur used to call you, back in 1935! So shall I put up a fight to build up this collapsing structure?

All this, because I'm trying to explain why I may have sounded dejected when we spoke. The truth is that I was cheerfully surprised by the strength of your familiar voice. You sounded altogether yourself, and the letter that just arrived was written in a firm hand and perfectly legible.

It's not not Bogan-the name is Denis Bogan-the name is Denis Brogan Brogan, and the book was about nineteenth-century French politics. Brogan was entirely s.e.x-mad. He told me an unforgettable anecdote about one of his girlfriends. They were in a taxi and she said, "Dennis, I want to show you how I feel about you." And she raised her skirt and placed his hand upon her female organ-so gallantly streaming, as our national anthem has it. I tell you this pour t'egayer, cher vieux copain pour t'egayer, cher vieux copain [ [126]. I send you all the finest regards and wishes in the world.

Fight on, and write me soon,

To Philip Roth May 7, 1997 Brookline Dear Philip, Your letter forced me to think my story through again and I admit that I was or am confused about it. I had given some thought to the pain problem. As I followed the characters, they led me to examine their cynicism. They had to be "humorously" cynical and what they possibly hoped was to close out their witty but in the end fatiguing observations of one another. Probably they feel that they can wear their pain out, or attenuate it, or outlive it.

So I concluded that the pain had to be taken for granted.

Harry Trellman is willing-no, happy-to have Amy at last, for no better reason than that she is Amy. She is the ineradicable and irreplaceable actual. So, just as Bodo Heisinger is glad to take back a wife who once put out a contract on him, Harry proposes to Amy though he had heard the s.e.x cries she uttered under some stranger from New York. He has become aware that he has longed for her and spoken to her (unilaterally) almost daily for decades.

But he gave her no inducement to think of him him. Still he does see that he has come somehow to belong to Amy. Because she is his actual.

To all this there is a clue, so well hidden that it would have escaped not only Sherlock Holmes but even Sherlock's brother Mycroft, by far the smarter of the two. What is this indispensable hint? It's buried in the conversation between Amy and Mrs. Bodo. Amy tells Mrs. Bodo how Jay prepared his seduction routines. He impressed the ladies with his intellectual powers. He quoted great authors-without attribution, naturally. She repeats verbatim one pa.s.sage. He had taken it from a book, and she had found the book. The underlined pa.s.sage speaks of the spiritual character of the human face. Not a single thing in the universe is quite like it. The whole subject is wrapped up in a few sentences: "The face of a man is the most amazing thing in the life of the world. Another world shines through it." A worldly person like Harry, having small use for his worldliness, takes Amy's face for his actual actual. He needs it. He has to have it.

Now, I am not in a position to claim that I made this clear. I felt it. But as somebody coming back (briefly) from the dead I wasn't able to work it out acceptably (to you or me).

You do well to direct me, or connect me, to Eliade. Do you have a copy of [Norman] Manea's article? [ . . .]

We'll be in Vermont from the end of May.

Yours ever,

Roth had responded to Bellow's recently published The Actual. The Actual. Norman Manea's essay on the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, Bellow's former colleague in the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago, had detailed Eliade's pro-n.a.z.i activities in Romania during the Second World War. The essay appeared first in Norman Manea's essay on the historian of religions Mircea Eliade, Bellow's former colleague in the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago, had detailed Eliade's pro-n.a.z.i activities in Romania during the Second World War. The essay appeared first in The New Republic The New Republic and subsequently in Manea's and subsequently in Manea's On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (1993). (1993).

To Richard Stern [n.d.] W. Brattleboro Dear Richard- You did right to send the news of poor Zita [Cogan]'s death. I had heard about it from [Jonathan] Kleinbard, and from her son [Marc Cogan]. The woods grow thinner as the chenes qu'on abat chenes qu'on abat [ [127] fall faster. Zita and I, in our Humboldt Park days, lived on the same street. One of the feats of my youth was to shinny up the front of her house to fetch her from her second-storey room on Sunday mornings and summon her to a picnic. A truckful of high-school students cheered.

Now there's there's a wholesome reminiscence, for a change. a wholesome reminiscence, for a change.

You may be sure that you'd have been on my list of speakers at the Nat'l Portrait Gallery. I wasn't consulted about the arrangements. But it was handsome of you to fly in from Chicago. In your two-toned shirt you you looked handsome, too. You were beaming also, and your color was notably high. "Glowing," as young women's gym teachers liked to say. "Not sweating, but looked handsome, too. You were beaming also, and your color was notably high. "Glowing," as young women's gym teachers liked to say. "Not sweating, but glowing glowing."

Give Alane an affectionate greeting.

Ever yours,

Poet Alane Rollings is Richard Stern's wife.

In Memory of Zita Cogan (Read in Bellow's absence in Hyde Park, Illinois, May 16, 1997, at a memorial tribute organized by Mostly Music, the organization Zita Cogan founded) Many decades ago, on a June morning, we drove up to Zita's house in a truck. Her room was on the second floor and overlooked Humboldt Park. The picnickers honked and shouted. We were bound for the dunes. Her doorbell may have gone dead, or I a.s.sumed that it had, so I climbed up the face of the building just as John Barrymore or Douglas Fairbanks would have done, and banged on her bedroom door. I think that this made her very happy. What was said I can't remember. But it was a fine moment.

There was a Russian flavor about Zita. She wore Gypsy blouses and beads and bangles. We were all, in those days, partly Russian. Instead of underclothes we wore binding and scratchy swim-suits. Our pockets-and our heads as well-were nearly empty in those days of youth and vainglory.

This is one of my favorite recollections of Zita as a young woman. And now as our days on earth are almost used up I cherish this adolescent moment. Showing off? Of course I was. But when I burst in on her she was beautiful, and I was not so full of myself that I couldn't know it.

To Philip Roth June 17, 1997 W. Brattleboro Dear Philip, Just a note: You speak of [Norman] Manea's fantasy of Romania, "the myth he'd been making of it in exile." I haven't talked enough with him to have any notion of this myth and it would be very interesting to hear your account of it. I wonder why his notebook was lost on Lufthansa. You say he left it on the seat beside him when he disembarked? As you must know, I am no Freudian and I never have believed that a man's life is nothing but a front for the operations of his unconscious. Still, there must have been some sound reason for losing the diary of his visit to his native country.

I don't know Orwell's essay on Swift. I shall try to get a copy in the Brattleboro library or from BU. It's true that you hardly realize how deep Orwell goes because he is so clear about what he's doing.

Several years ago Janis and I were invited to a dinner for [Vaclav] Havel and found a message at our New York hotel to the effect that the dinner had been changed into a public celebration which would be held at the great cathedral (whatever they call it) at Riverside Drive and 120th Street. When we got there there were thousands of people inside the church and crowding to get in, and television crews and everyone was there, a blizzard of celebrities from Hollywood. Arthur Miller, I think, was present, and Paul Newman and a hundred others. Henry Kissinger had come to represent political seriousness, and I had been asked to introduce him. The Czechs didn't know what had hit them. They were sitting all in a row at the front of the cathedral-they were the occasion for this great display by the entertainment industry. Havel and I chatted for about three minutes and were separated as if we were tomato seeds in the digestive tract. Since then I have been several times invited to congresses for this or that in Prague, and I have yet to make my first visit there.

Yours,

To Werner Dannhauser September 1, 1997 W. Brattleboro Dear Werner, This is a good morning for pangs of conscience. The summer is stalled, the day is gray, oppressive, in check, windless-not even a small breeze. I feel that I'm below, in nature's insides, and that she seems to be having a digestive problem.

I haven't written to my correspondents because . . . because, because and because. I haven't added up the deaths of various friends during the last six months. [Francois] Furet you knew and perhaps you remember Zita Cogan who died a few weeks ago. The others were long-time buddies: a college cla.s.smate, in Paris [Julian Behrstock]. In New York, Yetta [Barshevsky] Shachtman, the widow of the US Trotskyite leader. She and I would walk back from school through Humboldt Park (Chicago) discussing Trotsky's latest pamphlet on the German question. We also read the "Communist Manifesto" and "State and Revolution." She was an earnest girl-the dear kind-Comrade Yetta. Her Pa was a carpenter, and his old Nash was filled with tools, shavings and sawdust. And now she has gone-human sawdust and shavings. There was also a clever, clumsy big man named [Hymen] Slate who believed (when we were young) that a sense of humor should be part of every argument about the existence of G.o.d. Laughing was proof that there was a G.o.d. But G.o.d in the end laid two kinds of cancer on him and took him away very quickly. When we were in our late sixties, in East Rogers Park, we met every Thursday to drink tea and consider the question of immortality. Neither of us had read Kant.

Next came the news that David Shahar had died. So many women in his life. When I met him with yet another one on some Jerusalem street he would lay a finger to his lips as he pa.s.sed. But [his wife] Shula was far too smart to be deceived-even if she had reason to want to be. I thought he must have a large turnover of ladies but evidently he was like a Mafia don. He had a band of Mafiosi girls each with her own turf-Paris, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, too, or Beersheba. His career would repay close study. I did like him, but my deeper sympathies went to Shula. That too would be worth studying-since so many people devote themselves to these studies studies. What an amazing amount of research is going on around us. But why should I identify with Shula? I suspect that she knew him far better than he could ever know himself. That his afternoons of love were a consolation for his literary failures. Why couldn't he have come to her for consolation?

A stupid question! I really know better than to ask.

I will mention one more death, that of a student from Chicago-very bright and handsome. His dissertation was published and widely reviewed. I argued with him about it. It was a little too fashionable for my taste. I sensed that he saw me as an old fuddy-duddy, but no . . . he ended years later by sharing my opinions. He did well for himself academically and got a tenured appointment in Southern California (Claremont?). He married a Dupont girl from Delaware but they were divorced after a year or two. He was charming, lively, and was strangely loyal to me-came every year to Vermont to talk matters over. He last visited in July and was unusually warm and close. A month later he died in a highway crash, and his tearful parents phoned to tell me what had happened-that they were notifying me because . . . because he had been so close to me and I had seen him through some bad times.

Together with all this I have the feeling that I am in it with him and the others aforementioned. Dying piecemeal. My legs ain't functioning as they ought. Day and night they ache. And I am this, that and the other in many respects, physically. It seems that my tear ducts have dried up, and the eyeb.a.l.l.s feel gummy. The details are not worth going into. It's possible that I may never recover from the damage done by cigua toxin. I observe, in writing to you, that you are the last person in the world to complain to, given your "medical history." But at bottom it may be an expression of solidarity. During the war we used to read of the bombing of German "marshalling yards"-the rail centers where freight trains are "made up," organized for their runs.

You must know that for many people you are an elder statesman, venerable, a fighter for the true faith, etc. And I may merely be saying that I am a foot-sore infantry campaigner myself. I'm well aware that you have no need for such declarations of affinity from another mutile de la guerre mutile de la guerre [ [128]. I want to feel close to you, just as my late student had sought me out annually.

I think he said that he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. I'm pretty sure that this was mentioned. I didn't take it up. I saw no way to do it. What good would it have done to discuss it?

This letter I think offers you a road map. It shows where I am at. It's not as bad as it sounds. I just need to get it out of my system today. I won't close with "have fun" but with Love,

Werner Dannhauser, professor emeritus of political science at Cornell University, is the author of Nietzsche's View of Socrates Nietzsche's View of Socrates (1976). Bellow's student was Brian Stonehill, who taught media studies at Pomona College and whose book was (1976). Bellow's student was Brian Stonehill, who taught media studies at Pomona College and whose book was The Self-Conscious Novel The Self-Conscious Novel (1988). (1988).

To James Wood October 14, 1997 W. Brattleboro Dear Mr. Wood- It occurred to me last night during an insomniac hour that you might not have received your copy of News from the Republic of Letters News from the Republic of Letters. I asked Chris Walsh about it today and he said that Botsford had "taken care of it." Now Botsford is a very gifted man but he isn't dependably efficient. He's had a bad year, in and out the hospital with a bad hip. He had been driving too fast on a remote highway in France. French doctors had bungled the surgery. It had to be done again in Boston. And then KB had gone back to the south of France, on a crutch. (He has a house on the Mediterranean coast.) He relies on graduate students to run his Boston "operations," and they do what can humanly be done to carry out his complicated orders.

He and I have done this sort of thing in the past. In the Fifties we brought out a journal called The n.o.ble Savage The n.o.ble Savage. The idea has always been to show how the needs of writers might be met. The n.o.ble Savage The n.o.ble Savage was a paperback published by Meridian Books-a company swallowed decades ago by Western Printers, which was devoured by the was a paperback published by Meridian Books-a company swallowed decades ago by Western Printers, which was devoured by the LA Times LA Times, etc.

Botsford and I have no publishing house behind us-no corporation, no philanthropical foundations, no patron. We pay for TROL TROL ourselves. We do it on the cheap-printing no more than fifteen hundred copies. We tried to get Barnes and n.o.ble to take it but B and N does not deal with magazines directly, only with official distributors. We thought we'd run it for a year in the hope of attracting five or six hundred subscribers. Six or seven hundred good men and true would make it possible for ourselves. We do it on the cheap-printing no more than fifteen hundred copies. We tried to get Barnes and n.o.ble to take it but B and N does not deal with magazines directly, only with official distributors. We thought we'd run it for a year in the hope of attracting five or six hundred subscribers. Six or seven hundred good men and true would make it possible for TROL TROL to survive. to survive.

Nothing like a boyish enterprise to give old guys the shocks they badly need or crave. I feel I owe you this explanation, since you were good enough to let us publish your Ibsen-Chekhov piece. We couldn't afford to pay you properly for it. So you are ent.i.tled to a description of what it is that we are doing. Your Chekhov is one of the ornaments of #2 #2. We have money enough for five or six numbers. Then, if we haven't the backing of the subscribers we hope to get, we will fold.

Ten years down the road your copy, or copies, of the paper may be worth a fortune. It'll be a collector's item and a rarity.

Yours with every good wish, To Albert Glotzer November 8, 1997 W. Brattleboro Dear Al: It seems that n.o.body gets a break. Whatever it is that deals out the disorders is no respecter of persons. If I had access to him I would say that A. Glotzer was due for a reprieve-a breather-because he has some important things to do, still.

I myself have had arrhythmia for a week straight and can't walk a block without panting. I went last week to visit my old sister in Cincinnati and came back short of breath. My cardiologist is on vacation. My sister is ninety-one years of age. She continues to play the piano although she is quite deaf and can't hear the mistakes she makes-chords with many notes omitted. But she's as proud of her performance as she ever was.

She described how, in Montreal in 1923, she was on her way to a lesson and felt her panties dropping-the rubber was used up. She had so many books in her arms that she couldn't prevent the panties from falling. She stepped out of them and left them on the pavement. I'd heard this dozens of times before. The anecdote has acquired mythic character. In 1923, I was eight years old; she was seventeen. You hadn't yet become a court-reporter, I don't think.

I shall be pulling for you in some remote part of my mind-the mental backwoods where prayers used to be said before we all became so "enlightened."

Your longtime affectionate Chicago chum,

To Herbert McCloskey December 16, 1997 Brookline Dear Herb, A note is just now all that I have signed for. I loved your letter of August. But then I misplaced it. And I was too tired to make a thorough search for it, but yesterday unexpectedly it turned up and I re-read it with sympathy and even a few tears. You write one h.e.l.l of a letter. I used to be a fair hand at this myself but what with sickness, old age, pharmaceutical la.s.situde and octogenarian lack of focus, I seem to have lost the knack. Janis, my wife, a G.o.dsend if there ever was one, tells me that I should not feel uneasy about the mail. I carry a swollen portfolio of letters from Vermont to Boston and back again to Vermont. But she says that there is no need for me to write letters, I have already written thousands of them, and that people who complain that I don't answer simply don't understand that a morning of writing exhausts me, and that my afternoons should be reserved for oblivion.

Still there is one thing that bothers me. I share your recollections of our trip to Banyuls. Can it be that I was then driving my own car? Or was it your car? I ask because at Banyuls I hitched a ride to Barcelona from a certain Senor Valls, a big-hearted businessman although he didn't say what his business was. [ . . . ] He took me to a cabaret in Barcelona with several exciting women. And I ate a fine dinner of seafood-to the horror of my ancestors, probably. All those nasty little creatures sc.r.a.ped up from the sea-mud. Next day I took a ferry to the off-sh.o.r.e islands where I chased after a lovely American woman. I'm sorry to say this resulted in a fiasco at the moment of embrace. I am tempted to believe that Anita sent me off under some hex. Anyway, I made my way back chastened. But what really bothers me is that I can't remember where I had left my car.

Anyway your letter was a wonderful letter and had a direct effect on my ice-bound heart. I used to see something of [-] in Chicago, but her gruff husband, a kind of technician-cyclops type, did not encourage our meetings. What a beautiful girl she was, and so appallingly young. And I remember that you entertained us hour after hour by explaining that when you were a kid you couldn't eat graham crackers unless they had been ripened under the pad of the porch swing.

If I had been writing this the effort by now would have worn me out. Luckily, I was able to dictate to my invaluable simpatico simpatico secretary, name of Chris Walsh, who not only takes letters but also drives me to my frequent hospital appointments. If one of these days I should fail to emerge from the hospital, you can get full details by applying to Chris at my University address. I used to have much confidence in my ability to ward off death. But death is as strong as ever, and I am a much weaker resister. secretary, name of Chris Walsh, who not only takes letters but also drives me to my frequent hospital appointments. If one of these days I should fail to emerge from the hospital, you can get full details by applying to Chris at my University address. I used to have much confidence in my ability to ward off death. But death is as strong as ever, and I am a much weaker resister.

Lots of love from your old chum,

1998.

To Philip Roth January 1, 1998 Brookline Dear Philip- Sorry to be so slow. Janis got to your ma.n.u.script first and all her enthusiasm, sympathies and forebodings were then communicated to me. A new Roth book is a big event in these parts. We are, to use the Chicago terms of the Twenties, your rooters and boosters.

When she took off for Canada on X-mas day to see parents and sister, brother, kiddies, she left I Married a Communist I Married a Communist with me for the Holiday Season. Reading your book consoled me in this empty house. It's a treat to read one of your ma.n.u.scripts-I say this up-front-but this time the overall effect was not satisfactory. I was particularly aware of the absence of distance-I don't mean that the writer with me for the Holiday Season. Reading your book consoled me in this empty house. It's a treat to read one of your ma.n.u.scripts-I say this up-front-but this time the overall effect was not satisfactory. I was particularly aware of the absence of distance-I don't mean that the writer must must put s.p.a.ce between himself and the characters in his book. But there should be a certain detachment from the writer's own pa.s.sions. I speak as one who in put s.p.a.ce between himself and the characters in his book. But there should be a certain detachment from the writer's own pa.s.sions. I speak as one who in Herzog Herzog created the same sin. There I hoped that comic effects might protect me. Nevertheless I crossed the border too many times to raid the enemy camp. But then Herzog was a chump, a failed intellectual and at bottom a sentimentalist. In your case, the man who gives us Eve and Sylphid is an created the same sin. There I hoped that comic effects might protect me. Nevertheless I crossed the border too many times to raid the enemy camp. But then Herzog was a chump, a failed intellectual and at bottom a sentimentalist. In your case, the man who gives us Eve and Sylphid is an enrage enrage, a fanatic-for-real.