Saul Bellow_ Letters Part 45

Catherine Lindsay Choate met Bellow in the early 1950s. They would remain in contact for the rest of his life.

PART SIX.

1990-2005.

And again out of the flaming of the sun would come to him a secret certainty that the goal set for this earth was that it should be filled with good, saturated with it. After everything preposterous, after dog had eaten dog, after the crocodile death had pulled everyone into his mud.

-"A Silver Dish"

1990.

To John Auerbach February 5, 1990 Chicago My dear John, [ . . . ] For a man approaching the seventy-fifth year of his age I am not doing badly. Janis is a dear woman and she has even overcome some of my more monstrous defects of character.

As more news of deaths arrives (the latest was that of Edith Tarcov, a dear woman whom I think you knew) the less I feel the victory of my survival. There is a strange scratchiness in the viscera when I think matters over.

I will be asking Smadar next week to bear good tidings-your surgery safely behind you.

Much love from your friend,

To John Auerbach April 5, 1990 Chicago Dear John: Your letters sound more cheerful. Think there must be something to the old Dum spiro spero Dum spiro spero [ [109]. In the worst of times, it comes over you that you are, despite all that sickness and age can do, still inhaling and exhaling.

This is a note to cover a new story, and these stories seem to be the letters we write to each other.

I hope Nola is recovering quickly. Janis and I were sorry to hear of her accident.

Love to you both,

To Martin Amis June 3, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear Martin, By now you will have heard or read (I can't imagine that Hitchens would have missed an opportunity to convey such news) that on our last day in London Janis and I were received at No. 10 Downing Street and were treated to tea and t.i.ttle-tattle by the Prime Minister. Now honestly, can you imagine that a pair of US hicks from Chicago would refuse an invitation to see for themselves the seats of the mighty? Like the nursery rhyme p.u.s.s.ycats who went to London and frightened a mouse or two under the queen's chair, we have little else to report. It was George Walden [former minister for education in Mrs. Thatcher's government] who arranged this meeting, the same Walden who endeared himself to us by his indignation at your being pa.s.sed over for the Booker Prize.

Put yourself in our place: Ronald Reagan or George Bush hearing that you are in Was.h.i.+ngton asks you to tea and you, ever faithful to high principles, return a withering refusal.

American friends have asked me for my impressions: "Well, you're cruising on an interstate highway and a few hundred feet ahead you see a perfectly ordinary automobile like any other GM, Chrysler or j.a.panese product, and then suddenly it turns on its dangerous blue police lights and you realize that what you took for a perfectly ordinary vehicle is packed with power. It's that unearthly blue flash that makes the difference."

Leaving Heathrow, I opened a London newspaper and there I saw myself exposed to sophisticated ridicule. The writer, with a blue flash of his own, revealed to all the world, and to me, that Clara in A Theft A Theft was none other than Margaret Thatcher, concealed in the ranks as the prime minister of New York fas.h.i.+ons. I now have this to suggest to the pre-Socratic who said you could never twice put your foot in the same river: You are doomed to put your foot in again and again and again. was none other than Margaret Thatcher, concealed in the ranks as the prime minister of New York fas.h.i.+ons. I now have this to suggest to the pre-Socratic who said you could never twice put your foot in the same river: You are doomed to put your foot in again and again and again.

But ideology is not likely to come between us. We loved seeing you and Antonia. She served us a dinner that made all the other dinners in Europe look sick. Also, Jacob [Amis] immediately recognized that I was a friend which did much to restore my confidence in myself, none too firm these days.

Yours as ever,

And love from Janis.

To Roger Shattuck June 5, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear Roger: Your letter was entirely reasonable and sensible, and I admit that I was wrong to be so touchy about a trifle. My only defense is that you gave me a hard time at Rosanna [Warren]'s dinner party, beginning with my public address and going on to my rank as a writer-whatever that may mean. I am well used to being put in my place, and I don't really mind when I can feel that I am in the hands of a dependable place-putter.

But these provocations were minor. I don't mind friendly teasing at all. I am however touchy about the language of some of my books, and when I am criticized in a matter of usage I can be a bit crazy. It was unforgivable to burst into your office with a list of references. If we knew each other better I'm sure I'd come to accept the teasing, even to enjoy it, and you might make friendly allowance for an occasional eruption. Of course I knew that you had written a favorable review of Humboldt, Humboldt, and you will perhaps remember that I have spoken admiringly of and you will perhaps remember that I have spoken admiringly of The Banquet Years The Banquet Years, and of your Proust book. We have no casus belli. casus belli.

The daring of a major move at my time of life sets my teeth on edge but nothing is impossible to unrealistically (perversely?) youthful types like me.

Many thanks for your civilized letter.

Yours, To Philip Roth June 24, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear Philip: In you I had a witness of my own kind and a point of balance. Without your support the angry waves would have dashed me on the stern and rock-bound Jewish coast. I am very fond of Cousin Volya who was something of a hero in the Old Country, serving in the Russian cavalry from Leningrad to Berlin. It's easy to mistake him for somebody else. When he explained the difference between Latvia and Lithuania to [Saul] Steinberg, Steinberg said it was a piece of dialogue out of a Marx Brothers' movie. There was however a regiment with machine guns. But I see Steinberg's point of view. With peace, the Marx Brothers return.

Anyway, you were a great comfort to me-representing what it was essential to represent. And I thought you must be enjoying the singing. The mixture mixture of a thousand ingredients. of a thousand ingredients.

In principle, I'm against such parties but when a surprise turns off the principle I seem to enjoy them quite a lot.

Yours ever, Your note made Janis happy.

Roth and Claire Bloom had been present in Vermont-along with Bellow's cousin Volya from Riga, Saul Steinberg, Eleanor Clark, Rosanna Warren, Maggie Staats Simmons, John Auerbach from Israel, Albert Glotzer, Bette Howland, Jonathan Kleinbard, sons Adam and Daniel Bellow and many others-for a surprise seventy-fifth birthday celebration.

To Julian Behrstock June 26, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear Julian: It never occurred to me to think of myself as the Ancient of Days but there's no getting away from it. What is it that prevents me from realizing that I have grown so old-persistent adolescence? Obstinacy? A refusal to acknowledge what I plainly see in the mirror?

Yesterday I was gardening in front of the house, made a misstep, fell four feet to the ground, landed flat on my back, picked myself up at once and went about my business until Janis ordered me to go upstairs and lie down. No broken bones, no bruises visible, only a stiffness across the hips in the night. My sister Jane, nine years my senior, fell downstairs at the El station on her way to the Loop and kept her appointment nevertheless. She broke no bones either.

I was touched by your birthday message. Janis turns out to be an incredibly gifted organizer. You would have enjoyed the occasion. It was attended by seventy people, two of them greenhorn cousins of my own age just out of the Soviet Union. And children, of course, and grandchildren and old pals, the durable kind like yourself.

Last week I accepted a grant from a foundation, whose intent is not altogether clear. I think they want me to go to Paris in the winter of '91 to teach a course at the Sorbonne. The offer was made and accepted on the telephone, so I'm not altogether clear about the specifics. What is certain is that Janis and I will fly over at the beginning of February and stay until the end of May. Sometimes apartments are exchanged through the university. It's highly unlikely that you might know someone who will be leaving for the Congo in February and returning in May. The perennial adolescent in me insists on believing that anything is possible. My mature purpose is to tell you the news and to say how glad I am at the prospect of seeing you early next year.

Love, To Jonathan Kleinbard July 1, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear Jonathan, Sometimes citizen Bellow has to fight his guilt when he considers what a world this is, and how much he might have done in the public interest if he had put away this idle stuff he insists on calling "art." His books have been a big mistake and it isn't only honest, earnest lawyers, psychologists, engineers, economists, etc.-servants of reality-who believe this, but writers of a different outlook who fault me for ignoring the crisis under our noses and reproach me roughly. I might have been some good as a journalist. But it's too late now to mend and all I can do is to do what I have taught myself. You say, "opening up the heart." People seem to doubt if there is is such an organ. The advanced view is that there ain't no such thing, and it can find more evidence for this than we can for such an organ. The advanced view is that there ain't no such thing, and it can find more evidence for this than we can for our our convictions. convictions.

But I'm going to stop here, leaving just enough s.p.a.ce to say that the agreement of a man like you outweighs the criticism of thousands of "them."

We have other matters to discuss but they'll have to wait.

With thanks and affection to you and also to Joan,

To Saul Steinberg July 10, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear Saul: After the birthday shouting, the silence of Vermont came back. Real life is represented by the cat, who appeared just now to show us the bird he had killed, and to fill Janis' mind with thoughts of vegetarianism.

Your beautiful green diploma is hanging on the bedroom wall, and when I look at it in the morning I think of supernatural places it might get me into. If, that is, I should be in a position to take it with me. Meantime, I have ordered for you a book by one of our friends, Sarah Walden, whose business is restoration. She has, according to the jacket copy, "worked as a restorer on major collections in Europe, including the Louvre: . . . paintings ranging from those of Vermeer to those of Pica.s.so." We found it amusing and instructive. That's what's so nice about ignorance, you can always be instructed, and feel that you need never waste a moment's time.

It was n.o.ble of you to fly here, and I hope you found some entertainment in the occasion. Perhaps my Russian cousins made it worth your while.

So much for Bellow's Versailles. What we can offer you now is Bellow's resort or Kur-Ort Kur-Ort [ [110]. I promise excellent meals cooked by Janis and conversation only slightly less good.

Love,

To Zita Cogan July 18, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear Zita: I thank you for your note and for your kind words and also for the color photograph of me in a tennis s.h.i.+rt. I stopped playing tennis some years ago but I have the s.h.i.+rt still, unraveling a little at the cuffs. It's under a pile of junk on the shelf of my clothes closet here in Vermont. I can't remember who took this photograph but one of these cold days when I pull the s.h.i.+rt on and stumble down to the kitchen to light a fire it will remind me of you.

You're kind to Mr. [James] Atlas. I am no more keen about a biography than I am about reserving a plot for myself at 26th and Harlem Avenue. I keep putting it off. I say this in order to make clear that I am not supporting Atlas, nor am I asking my friends to oblige him with recollections of my misconduct.

The Chagall postcard was great. The bridegroom has found a beauty to play piggyback with. The gla.s.s of wine is a beautiful afterthought.

Yours with love and kisses,

To Albert Glotzer August 5, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear Al: We too lived on Augusta Street-then unpaved-between Rockwell and Washtenaw, on the south side of the street. The address I believe was 2629, and we were on the second floor directly above the Polish landlord. I also wore high-top boots and remember the zero-teeth of Chicago eating at my toes. I was then nine years old. Our high-tops had a pen-knife, a bonus, in a sheath. I also remember the Nestor Johnson skates, manufactured on North Avenue near California. One pair of skates had to do for all three boys, two or three sizes too large for me. I did my best on the Humboldt Park lagoon.

I didn't get to Hammersmark's bookshop until I was a high-school student. [Isadore] Bernick brought me there. The year must have been 1930. In 1936 Sam Hammersmark tried to recruit me for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. But I was an early member of the Spartacus Youth League. Sam and I had a good-natured relations.h.i.+p, by which I mean that we never discussed politics. I can recall borrowing Trotsky's pamphlet on the German question from Freifeld. It knocked me for a loop. But my real interests were literary and I needed Hammersmark to supply me with books otherwise obtainable only in the Loop. Bernick, by the way, introduced me to proletarian art. Hammersmark hung it on his walls. Of a muscular, headless torso, mighty arms crossed, Bernick said that it was "symbolical of the proletariat without leaders.h.i.+p." On gloomy days such recollections cheer me up.

I wonder what it is that so fascinates us about the old city. I suppose we had instinctively understood that it filled our need for poetry. Besides, maturity meant work, and work was something dark and blind to which we were sentenced when boyhood ended. It seems to me that we made excellent use of the liberty we enjoyed as schoolboys.

I am in the middle of your Trotsky book. I read it with fascination. I used to think I knew quite a lot about Trotskyism, but what you write shows me to be an amateur. For instance, I had no idea at all that Trotsky was handicapped because he was not a proper old Bolshevik and that he was inhibited in his struggle with Stalin, Zinoviev, etc. because he lacked full credentials. I was stirred also by his unclear answers during the Mexico trials about the seizure of power and the character of the proletarian dictators.h.i.+p.

Herb Pa.s.sin and I had an appointment with Trotsky in the summer of 1940, and came up from Taxco only to learn that he had been struck on the head and rushed to the hospital. We went there at once, introducing ourselves as newspapermen, and were led to a room where Trotsky lay dead with a b.l.o.o.d.y turban of bandages, and his face streaked with iridescent iodine. We turned up again later, after Al Goldman had arrived, and I remember that he was greatly put out by us for some inscrutable reason.

Something remarkable about your book: I have observed that most people are incapable of altering their early beliefs. Most, I've noticed, think of their first education as a sort of investment made during their best, most vital years. Many of the Marxists I've known are unwilling to give up the labor they put into mastering difficult texts. They tend to hang on to the very end. A curious sort of rigidity. In most cases their knowledge became useless long long ago. It's heartening to me to see how willing you are to reconsider your old faith. There are not many people with that kind of intellectual courage.

Thanks for your kind words about my story, and tell Maggie [Marguerite Horst Glotzer, his wife] that I'm glad it pleased her. Janis is waiting for me to hand over your book, and sends you her best regards.

Affectionately yours,

Glotzer's book was Trotsky: Memoir and Critique. Trotsky: Memoir and Critique.

To Frances Kiernan August 8, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear Mrs. Kiernan: I knew Mary [McCarthy] quite well, never intimately. She and I never got along. You either had a good relations.h.i.+p with Mary or you had-well, whatever it was that we did have. For a decade or more she hated me, quite frankly. I could not return her feelings with the same intensity but I did what I could. I don't observe the de mortuis de mortuis rule; on the other hand, I see no point in lousing Mary up gratuitously, it doesn't seem right. Then you haven't asked me to louse her up so perhaps we can talk about her on the telephone, though I'd prefer a face-to-face meeting. It could be a brief one, no longer than a fire drill at the rule; on the other hand, I see no point in lousing Mary up gratuitously, it doesn't seem right. Then you haven't asked me to louse her up so perhaps we can talk about her on the telephone, though I'd prefer a face-to-face meeting. It could be a brief one, no longer than a fire drill at the New Yorker New Yorker. I did love Rachel [MacKenzie] and I do miss her even now.

Yours, etc.

Frances Kiernan, a former New Yorker New Yorker fiction editor, was beginning work on her book fiction editor, was beginning work on her book Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy. She had reminded Bellow that it was during a fire drill at the New Yorker New Yorker offices that Rachel MacKenzie introduced the two of them. offices that Rachel MacKenzie introduced the two of them.

To George Sarant September 9, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear George: No I don't think Isaac ever met [Wilhelm] Reich. Since I was then in therapy myself he would certainly have told me that he had gone up to Maine. He did in fact say to me that he had had fantasies about being sent for as soon as Reich had news that he, Isaac, was in treatment. In short he was confessing to visions of grandiose importance.

Yes, I did know Paul Goodman. He was friendly with your father, not with me. Isaac believed that Goodman evaded the terrors of therapy by going over to [Gestalt Therapy co-founder] Fritz Perls-taking the easy way out.

Isaac ended by believing that therapy had done him great harm. We had a long conversation a month or two before he died and he declared that he had been out of his mind for a decade and would now try to find some ground to re-establish his sanity. He was an extraordinarily gifted man. Village life, as he interpreted it, was his undoing. I don't entirely blame the Village but his liberation degenerated into personal anarchy. I'm glad to win your good opinion. I hope the record, when all the results are in, won't let us down.

Love from someone who has known you forever,

To Catherine Lindsay Choate September 17, 1990 W. Brattleboro Dear Catherine: Whenever I find a letter from you in my box I brighten up. Yes, I am well, and though I balk a little at admitting it, I am happy too. I can't really explain why I am reluctant to say it-some silliness in character or a superst.i.tion, perhaps hereditary. I have no serious diseases and at seventy-five with foolish enthusiasm I pedal a bike up and down the Vermont hills. The neighbors take me for some kind of crazy prodigy. Certain lifelong peculiarities persist. I continue to work at them without believing that I will get anywhere. It's an amusing game that I play. To give an innocent instance, I neglected my Latin sixty years ago and drive myself now to do right by Caesar's Commentaries Commentaries. This is a job I don't do badly but I can't really say that I can explain why I do it at all. However it's the kind of absurdity that amuses me. It occurred to me not long ago that G.o.d had probably had an educational motive in putting Adam and Eve between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. It must have been some sort of educational test. When they flunked he designed a different kind of curriculum for them. It's possible that I've had this idea all my life and that's why I grind away at Caesar and all the ablatives and gerunds.

I'm sorry to say that I have no engagement to speak in San Francisco. I'd love to see you though and I hope you are well.