Letters

  I may not be your most representative reader, but I am an admiring one. You may find my reactions odd. For one thing they are unexpectedly political (I myself didn’t expect them to be that). But you wrote with a certain openness, and the book is unsettling and I predict that it will invite an unusual diversity of interpretations. For it is an unsettling book. In that respect it has much in common with The Dean’s December. What this may bedeut is that as honorable writers we have nothing else in these times to record.

  I congratulate you and send you an affectionate embrace.

  To Philip Roth

  December 31, 1981 Chicago

  Dear Philip,

  Thanks for your generous note. Disappointing that I’m not going to be in Chicago in February. Alexandra and I are clearing out for the winter to British Columbia, which I look forward to as to a sanitarium. I’ve warned them in the English Department there that if they run me too hard I may have a breakdown. I’m not pretending, I’m ready for a padded cell. The Dean took it out of me; I wrote it in a kind of fit and I’m left with the peculiar residue that I don’t know how to get rid of. I can’t even describe it.

  I discovered some time ago that there was nothing to stop me from saying exactly what I thought. I expected flak, and unpleasant results are beginning to come in, but I’m getting support too, which I hadn’t looked for.

  Your capacity for looking things in the face is not inferior to mine. It’s presumptuous of me to go into a senior-citizen routine with you, but I’m being as straight with you as you are with me.

  I thank you again for your letter. We’ll have dinner some other time.

  Yours ever,

  1982

  To William Kennedy

  February 4, 1982 Victoria, B.C.

  Dear Bill:

  What a delay! But The Dean, eighteen months of high excitement, a long spree for a codger, wore me out. To get away from the ensuing noise of battle we made plans to retreat to British Columbia. We were smarter than we could know, because we got away from a disastrous winter, too. Here it rains and rains, but the green moss is delicious to see and there are snowdrops out already. The nervous system was not attuned to this sanctuary. For the first month I suffered acutely from what I called boredom: It was boredom but with a wash of deep fatigue, black-and-blue spread over the gray.

  By now I’ve read Ironweed (when I saw the heading Lemonweed, I preferred it; the novel has as much iron in it as it needs). It’s as good as Billy [Phelan], in my opinion. The key is lower, closer to death at every point. This must be the first human examination of skid row. I never saw another. Of an older American generation, Francis and Helen carried a more respectable, organized humanity with them when they began to sink. My guess is that today people sink from a more prosperous base but also a more disorderly one; they start out more chaotic, without Helen’s music or Francis’s conscience. Francis, a murderer, is also a traditional champion, the fated man, a type out of Icelandic or Irish epic. To kill is his destiny, and he kills American-style, with techniques learned in play, throwing a stone like a baseball and then swinging a bat in Hooverville. He considers himself a man of sin. No family refuge for him.

  All this you do beautifully. Here and there you go a bit too far. The Katrina idyll, for instance, is too idyllic. You ought to reconsider. Not that there were no beautiful pagan ladies, I knew a few myself, but I’m not entirely comfortable with K.

  Your Esquire article wasn’t badly edited, as editing goes. As much as the subject permitted it was slanted towards sensationalism. Your original piece was excellent. If now and then I shrank, it was myself that made me shrink. I do say things like “my fucking mouth.” All Americans do, but in print it looked out of character.

  Tell Cork [Smith] he can count on me, and remember me to Dana.

  Yrs, as ever,

  Kennedy’s article in Esquire was “If Saul Bellow Doesn’t Have a True Word to Say, He Keeps His Mouth Shut.” K. Corlies (Cork) Smith was Kennedy’s editor at Viking.

  To Alfred Kazin

  March 9, 1982 Victoria, B.C.

  Dear Alfred—

  It made me very unhappy to learn that you were ill. As a member of the class of’15, I have a special concern with your well being; and despite decades of differences and disagreements—misunderstandings—I am attached to you and am distressed when you are sick.

  We will discuss my failings (there is such a multitude of them) when you are better.

  Yours affectionately,

  To Leon Wieseltier

  March 12, 1982 Victoria, B.C.

  Dear Leon:

  I don’t think you expected a quick reply to your Arendt articles; the subject (not Hannah but Jewish history) is denser than the Amazon jungle, and even if I were the Paul Bunyan of the machete I could never hack my way through. It would take a long conversation (years, no doubt) to begin to sort out the main problems. Hannah was rash, but she wasn’t altogether stupid (unlike her friend Mary McC[arthy]). You do grant her that in your essay. The trouble is that her errors were far more extensive than her judgment. That can be said of us all, but she was monumentally vain, and a rigid akshente [93]. Much of her strength went into obstinacy, and she was the compleat intellectual—i.e. she went always and as rapidly as possible for the great synthesis and her human understanding, painfully limited, could not support the might of historical analysis, unacknowledged prejudices, frustrations of her German and European aspirations, etc. She could often think clearly, but to think simply was altogether beyond her, and her imaginative faculty was stunted.

  I once asked Alexander Donat, author of The Holocaust Kingdom, how it was that the Jews went down so quickly in Poland. He said something like this: “After three days in the ghetto, unable to wash and shave, without clean clothing, deprived of food, all utilities and municipal services cut off, your toilet habits humiliatingly disrupted, you are demoralized, confused, subject to panic. A life of austere discipline would have made it possible for me to keep my head, but how many civilized people lead such a life?” Such simple facts—had Hannah had the imagination to see them—would have lowered the intellectual fever that vitiates her theories. Her standards were those of a “noble” German intelligentsia trained in the classics and in European philosophy—what you call the “tradition of sweet thinking.” Hannah not only loved it, she actively disliked those who didn’t share it, and she couldn’t acknowledge this dislike—which happened to be dislike of those (so inconveniently) martyred by the Nazis. What got her gets us all: attachment to the high cultures of the “diaspora.” The Eros of these cultures is irresistible. At the same time assimilation is simply impossible—out of the question to reject one’s history. And insofar as the Israelis are secular, they are in it with the rest of us, fascinated and also eaten up by Greece, France, Russia, England. It is impossible for advanced minds not to be so affected. At the same time you are precisely where the Jew-hatred of those same cultures has situated you—in Tel Aviv. To complicate matters still more your survival depends upon a technology which . . . but you know more about this than I do. The more complex the problem of armament and the associated problems of diplomacy and of finances become, the more the assumption of a distinct Jewish destiny in Israel dwindles. It is possible to be a mini-superpower without ceasing to be an “excluded” people. (I wouldn’t call Israel a “pariah” among the nations.) It is also possible that this mini-superpower, which began as the national home of Zionists and of Jews fleeing destruction, presents itself to America’s leaders, some of them, as a convenient package to be traded for this, that or the other. What you call the pornographic strain in Western politics, mingling with supply-side economics, with the State Dep’t. Middle Eastern Contingent advising and participating, may not distinguish between diasporas and homelands.

  Anyway your Arendt pieces are wonderful, even though the concluding sentence . . . but what else can one conclude but “on course” and “in the dark”? We mustn’t surrender the demonic to the demagogic academics.
Intellectual sobriety itself may have to take the powers of darkness into account.

  All best,

  Wieseltier’s two-part essay on Arendt had appeared in back-to-back issues of The New Republic, where he concluded as follows: “There are not anti-Semites because there are Jews, and there are not Jews because there are anti-Semites. There are peoples, and a longing for paradise. The Jews are there for when the longing goes bad, when it ends in tumbrils or in boxcars. But now they have Israel, and America, and the night vision that has always sustained them, that has helped them to believe in the best even as they know the worst, and kept them steady, and on their course, in the dark.”

  To Robert Boyers

  March 12, 1982 Victoria, B.C.

  Dear Boyers:

  Well, yes, I suppose I will weather the storm, veteran that I am, although when it’s time to founder one simply founders. I was grateful for your letter, for supportive intelligence rather than “emotional” support. I quite clearly understood what I was getting into by writing the Dean. Characteristic of those young people at Northwestern to accuse me of distorting the facts—such facts as surround them and may be read daily in the papers, heard daily in the courts (where, however, they never go). The facts themselves shouldn’t much matter in a novel, but I went carefully into this particular case, talking to the lawyers and reading the materials in their files. I’m sure the Northwestern kiddies didn’t do that, they just told one another over and over that I had misrepresented the facts and out of this repeated telling they made a case and convicted me. Perhaps things have always been done like this but the crisis that surrounds us increases the will-to-lie and the gases given off by intellectual heads cause strange atmospheric distortions and bring down a special sort of acid rain.

  The Dean is strange, I don’t deny it, and I try to understand what it signifies to have written it and what the reactions of readers and reviewers signify. It’s charitable of you to speak of “uncharitable” reviews. [Hugh] Kenner was openly anti-Semitic. He won’t set off a wave of Jew-hatred but it’s curious that he should decide to come out openly in his Eliot-Pound anti-Semitic regalia. Perhaps he thinks it can be done now. What interests me much more than what he thinks is the effect of the Eliot-Pound phenomenon, the deadly madness at the heart of “tradition” and “culture” as represented by those two. One had to defend poor Pound against philistine, savage America—that was tantamount to protecting art itself. What Pound was actually saying didn’t so much matter. This was what the literary people defending him assume. A poet might be great despite his obsessions with Usura, Major Douglas, Mussolini, Jews. This was the line taken after the War by literary intellectuals. The inevitable corollary was that the poet’s convictions could be separated from his poetry. It was thus possible to segregate the glory from the shame. Then you took possession of the glory in the name of “culture” and kept the malignancies as pets. (In a democracy you can’t take away the right to harbor malignancies.) So we now have Mr. K[enner] with all the credit he has inherited from the Modernist Masters, their cultural glamour, crying “Sic ’em” to his Jew-biting dogs and turning them loose on me.

  Matters are no better on the left. I anticipated its accusations, too—for which I claim no great credit, it was very easy. I was old, I had gone dry and didactic, I was a neo-conservative, I had abandoned the novel, I was mentally too weak to handle ideas, I had capitulated, I was a fink. No one was willing to face the simple proposition or question: Is this the way we live now or isn’t it?

  Well, enough of that.

  I haven’t been able to decide about your invitation. For one thing I can’t remember what it was, exactly, and I didn’t bring your letter to Canada. For another, I wore out my treads (or threads), I was exhausted by the Dean. I expect to feel stronger presently. We’re returning to Chicago next week. Will you bear with me a little longer?

  Best wishes,

  Robert Boyers is the founding editor of Salmagundi and author of, among other works, Atrocity and Amnesia (1985). On a visit to Northwestern in the spring term of 1982, he had encountered students critical of the “ factual accuracy” of The Dean’s December. In the highly publicized court case on which Bellow partly based his novel, a black man and woman were charged with having murdered a white University of Chicago student by pushing him from the window of his third-story apartment. In the course of the trial, which generated support for the defendants among student radicals, an undergraduate was charged with threatening witnesses, one of whom had been shot at. Hugh Kenner’s disparaging review of Bellow’s novel, “From Lower Bellowvia,” had appeared in Harper’s.

  To Eileen Simpson

  April 10, 1982 Chicago

  Dear Eileen:

  Your splendid book reached me in Canada and I read it at once. I put off writing to you about it for all kinds of reasons. The Canadian mails are notorious. Letters had been lost. I wanted time to think. There was no hurry, really. The fact was that although I luxuriated in your reconstructed Forties the pleasure was also painful and heavy. Those were not at all the good old days out of which our reputations grew, they were bad times. What was worst about them for me I was reluctant to face, understandably. Then, and later, I declined to examine the phenomena. What were John [Berryman] and Delmore and Cal [Lowell] about, really? I admired their poems, I relished their company; but I was so deeply immersed in my own puzzles, programs, problems that I drove past in my dream-car . . . Something like that. Not without feeling, no; I certainly felt for them but I was a thousand times less attentive than I was capable of being. It came home to me sharply as I read your memoir. I suppose that if John and Delmore hadn’t been such entertainers, comic charmers, stylists, if they hadn’t had hundreds of intriguing tricks in presenting themselves . . . But really it does no good, this remorse for being so like them. Was I to be some singular moral genius, or super-psychologist? Moral geniuses were not in great supply. Your book, then, took me by surprise. I hadn’t known, I couldn’t have known, what you knew. Besides I hadn’t the patience, in my thirties and forties and fifties, to investigate. I can start now. I have started. A project to close out with.

  One trifling oddity: I too was interviewed by Whittaker Chambers [for a job at Time], introduced to him by [James] Agee. He quarreled with me in the same absurd way. With me the pretext was Wordsworth. I suspect that Agee was aware that he was sending hopeless cases to Chambers who baited and dismissed them. Did those two have an arrangement? Funny that John and I should never have discussed this. Agee was saintly, and Chambers prophetic and both did the work of Henry Luce . . . John and I missed that one. Perhaps he would have disagreed with me, as he did about [Edmund] Wilson and, in some degree, [Allen] Tate. But we needn’t go into that here. Sufficient to say (as my paper gives out) that you’ve written a book of permanent value, a fascinating book. I hope it will have the success it deserves and I send you my affectionate congratulations and thanks (for enlightening me).

  Yours ever,

  Eileen Simpson had just published Poets in Their Youth, a memoir about her marriage to Berryman including also portraits of R. P. Blackmur, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell.

  To Anthony Hecht

  May 20, 1982 Chicago

  Dear Tony:

  A few years back Red Warren said to me, “Still giving lectures? Bad idea.” I fell into a sulk when he said this but as my sixty-seventh birthday approaches (or I approach it in the sense that a fellow jumping from the top of the Empire State approaches the sixty-seventh floor) I better understand his opinion. Write a lecture, board a plane, see one old friend, yes, but also a very large platoon of non-friends, including followers of Lacan and de Man each of whom can be identified by a rictus of jeering rejection. Add to this an incomprehensible failure to agree on the simplest fundamentals not alone of literature but also of politics, sex, drink, nutrition; abrasive seminar rooms; dinners that will not end, etc. I used to wag through all this with puppy vitality, knocking down bricabrac wit
h my tail, but now . . . (why say it?). You and I and your wife will sit down in a nice carpeted and quiet bar and talk of old [Chanler] Chapman and Irma B[randeis].

  Yrs fondly,

  Irma Brandeis (1905-90) was a colleague of Bellow’s and Hecht’s at Bard, where she taught Romance languages. Author of The Ladder of Vision: A Study of Dante’s Comedy (1960), she had been in the 1930s the muse and lover of Eugenio Montale, greatest of twentieth-century Italian poets. A gratuitous insult to Brandeis by Bellow in the early 1950s would haunt him for decades until he expiated it in his long comic story “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” published in Atlantic Monthly in November 1982.

  To Margaret Shafer

  May 21, 1982 Chicago

  Dear Margaret—

  Your note did me much good. The Dean made many enemies. The powers of darkness were attracted. I seem to send impulses they readily pick up. Perhaps I should consider more earnestly what that signifies.

  When C[hanler] Chapman died the N.Y. Times tried to get me to certify that he was the original Henderson, and I declined to comment. But I’ve often thought, half guilty, half amused, that I’d suggested to Chanler how he might emerge from chaos, I’d solved his “identity-problem”; and that although I’d given him some formal assistance I hadn’t made him more kindly or pleasant. If anything, I’d suggested new forms of hysteria, cunning and aggression. After the book appeared he would come to Tivoli to visit me in his truck. But he was always incoherent—a non-angelic Billy Budd. The purpose of his incoherency was to startle, or frighten. What an oddity he was.