Write soon,
Love,
To William Roth
February 23, 1942 Chicago
Dear Mr. Roth:
I am sending the uncorrected mss. at Rahv’s insistence. The whole novel is about two hundred pages long, i.e. between sixty and seventy thousand words.
Only the first chapter has been rewritten—the rest is first-draft.
If you will be kind enough to attend to
The Very Dark Trees
speedily (for better or for worse) I will be infinitely grateful, because the Army is hot on my heels and I should like to have the fate of the book decided before I leave.
Yours very truly,
Bellow had submitted
The Very Dark Trees,
his next novel after
Ruben Whitfield,
to William Roth, editor in chief of the Colt Press.
To William Roth
April 2, 1942 Chicago
Dear Mr. Roth:
The Army has just notified me that I will be inducted on June 15th.
With this hanging over me I would like to clear up all my business, and especially
The Very Dark Trees,
as quickly as possible. Please let me know how I stand at your earliest opportunity.
Very truly yours,
P.S. Are you interested in novelettes? I have several which I am very eager to publish.
To William Roth
April 3, 1942 Chicago
Dear Mr. Roth:
Your letter bowled me over; I am neither too shy nor too hardened to admit it freely, and I wish I could frame a very special kind of “thank you.” The occasion certainly calls for it.
I do not mind waiting until November, and your terms are entirely satisfactory. Just now, it happens, I have no pressing need for an advance. I have money enough and time enough to complete and polish the novel. You see, I am teaching part-time in a local normal school. The draft board has deferred me to permit me to finish the term there.
The other copy of the novel was farmed out and is still wandering around somewhere in the desolate sticks of the industry. I have been trying to call it in for some time. If I get it within the next few days I shall notify you and there will be no need for you to send your copy. But if it does not come in I shall have to ask you to send me it for I have none with me. Thank you again. I shall be waiting for some further word from you and a contract.
Appreciatively yours,
Bellow’s letter of April 2 had evidently crossed in the mail with Roth’s acceptance.
To William Roth
June 24, 1942 Chicago
Dear Mr. Roth:
After rushing like the devil to get through in time I was turned back temporarily at the induction station on a technicality. I’ll be free now till mid-July. Since I didn’t expect to be here this summer I gave up my teaching job and I will have an incomeless month unless you can see your way clear to advancing me something.
It would be a bad time to go over the mss. for errors. My friends and I read it in a hell of a hurry the night before I was to have been snatched.
I don’t know where I’ll be when the proofs come. I’ve arranged to have a friend here read them for me. But that will be only in the last extremity (i.e. in case I should happen to be in China or Australia).
Sincerely,
To William Roth
[Postmarked Chicago, Ill., 29 July 1942]
Dear Roth:
I owe myself a kick for inconsiderateness. I should have thought to ask you what your plans were and whether you had some sort of war immunity. Instead I took it for granted that you were deifically remote from any such concerns. This coordinator business has a promising sound and I hope you prosper at it.
Your faith in me is bracing. You haven’t seen the novelette and you have only my word that it is good. It will be as good as I can make it, so much I can promise. I’ll send it on in a few weeks and hope with fervor that you won’t be disappointed in it.
Now as to the book, I have no hopes for quick results and no particular anxiety, just the usual, rather remote, niggling uneasiness. I have not sent the carbon-copy out and I have no intention of doing so until you get some replies from the East. Then if the results are disappointing I shall simply send both copies to Macdonald and go off to the Army and let the law of probabilities take care of the rest.
Yours, etc.
To William Roth
[n.d.] [Chicago]
Dear Roth:
I was terribly hard hit by the bad news, as you might expect. I had thought that the book at least was something I need no longer worry about. Your own situation, as I gather it, makes me feel equally bad. I hope you can salvage more than you imply you can. There is no need to send more money. I would return the fifty if I did not need it so badly, myself having gotten myself in debt.
About the disposition of the manuscript: Do you think you can find another publisher for it? I hate to bother you with difficulties you might be spared. If you haven’t the heart to trouble with it just send it back collect. I’ll do what I can to dispose of it. It does seem to me that you ought to do something to hold your gains together for the post-war period, encyst yourself, somehow, until the trouble is over. I’m sure most of the people you’ve been dealing with would want to go along. Perhaps you can continue. It should be something to hope for, at any rate.
But to sum up in the matter of the manuscript: If you don’t think you can find someone to take it I should like you to send it back so that I can offer it to a few more publishers before the war snuffs out all my chances.
Condolences and all my best wishes,
Upon being drafted himself, William Roth had suspended operations at Colt Press.
To William Roth
[n.d.] [Chicago]
Dear Roth:
I haven’t tried anyone yet. Rahv wrote in Macdonald’s name that he would undertake to peddle the novel for me. What’s your opinion? Is that a good idea? I don’t want to put you to a lot of trouble; you’ve been much fairer to me already than you need have been. But if you want to continue handling this for me I shall not expect you to exert yourself for nothing, and if a miracle should come to pass I insist you get an agent’s percentage—(it is so figmentary that I hesitate to speak of it). Please be guided by your own interests in this and not by any feelings of obligation.
One of my friends suggests that I get three or four more copies typed and send them around. If you think that’s a good idea and want to handle this for me I will raise the necessary money and send it on. There would be no sense in having it done here.
Don’t bother with [James] Laughlin [at New Directions]. He read the first six or seven chapters and after an equal number of months decided that he didn’t want the book. I don’t like the way he does things. He’s spoiled; if it occurs to him to clear up a bit of business he may do it, haphazardly, or he may let it hang until he gets around to it, forgetting meanwhile that there are others involved to whom the time means much more.
I should like to explain that I feel I am miles and centuries away from
The Very Dark Trees
—whole developmental heights. Oh, I still feel it deserves publication, in fact since I will never have time to finish any of the long things I have started I am determined it
must
be published, for it is to give me the right (in the postwar period, if we have one) to continue as a writer. But in a sense it is business, not literature. I am taking you at your word and am working over a novelette which is, well, fifty times better than the novel. (I should amend that to “ten times” for the sake of objectivity.) I hope you will be able to persuade your partner to go on publishing, even if it is only small things that you bring out.
By all means let’s understand each other clearly on this agent business, and that as soon as possible.
Luck,
Try a last stab at your partner.
To William Roth
[n.d.] [Chicago]
Dear Roth:
Evil days. My old gray head no longer goes up with pride when someone says, “My boy, you are promising.” But then, too, I am inured to some extent. I have so often been kicked in the shins I have ceased to think that there is any personal malignancy in it. It’s just the general lot, that’s all. I need no one to tell me your shins are in bad shape also.
It’s too bad we shan’t meet until and unless we last out the war. The disposition of a book is not as important as that. There will be more books, if God sees fit to let me come through, and undoubtedly you will publish them if you are similarly protected. But meantime I would like to verify my idea of you.
Stay away from Dutch Harbor [in the Aleutians]. If you are inclined, and, if your location is no military secret, write. I don’t know what will happen to me. What information I have is all indefinite. But we may both want correspondents in the Army, or in remote places.
Don’t worry about the mss., you’ve done far more than your share already. I’ll have a friend in New York pick it up and peddle it around as well as he can—perhaps turn it over to Macdonald.
I don’t know, and I can’t continue to care intensely and still function. I have to take this attitude, you see.
All best luck in Alaska and God be with you. Try to write, but unless you really are impelled to, don’t.
1943
To Dwight Macdonald
[n.d.] [Chicago]
Dear Dwight:
If you wrote stories, you would find that editors sowed criticisms with a liberal hand and very carelessly. My reply, if I were to bother to make one, would in most cases be simply “Bah!” But I find yours very just in the case of “The Car,” and I am only too delighted to be able to offer an editor a posy, for once. The “centreless facility which destroys the form by excess elaboration” is not quite right, but it is sufficiently close. The greatest difficulty, after one has conceived a story, is to keep the conception always in clear focus. It is not because I write too easily that I sometimes fail. I would be more successful, perhaps, if I did write with more careless dash. But what I find heartbreakingly difficult in these times is fathoming the reader’s imagination. If he and I were both of a piece, it would not be so hard. But as it is I am ringed around with uncertainties and I often fail to pull myself together properly, banishing distraction and anxiety. And so I find myself perpetually asking, “How far shall I take this character? Have I made such and such a point clear? Will the actions of X be understood? Shall I destroy a subtlety by hammering it?” Etc.
Besides, being the local draft-board freak is not an unmixed boon. I do not know from day to day what to expect and, as a 1A, cannot go back to teaching. It’s impossible to make the best use of one’s capacities at such a time, and it is nearly as crippling to know that one’s talents are being kept hobbled. And there you are.
I [ . . . ] am now nearing the end of
Notes of a Dangling Man
, a short, semi-autobiographical novel which rather pleases me. I am going to have to peddle this one on my own, too. Max Lieber, my agent, is a patriot, and the
Notes
is not exactly a sweet little bundle of V’s.
Max expects me to become a moneymaker, someday. At present, however, he thinks me still a little wild and when I send him a mss. he doesn’t try very hard to market it.
Last December I sent him a story called “Juif!” that I think you would like. If you phone him I am sure he will not object to sending it to you, although I suspect that he is a bit of a Stalinist.
If you want to run it I will send a corrected copy from Chicago. There are a few slips and rough spots that I overlooked in the draft Lieber has.
Yrs,
Less than a “patriot” and more than “a bit of a Stalinist,” Maxim Lieber (1897- 1993) was in fact a covert agent of the Soviet Union. In 1951, realizing he would either have to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee against Alger Hiss, with whom he had spied in the 1930s, or else refuse to cooperate and go to prison, Lieber fled with his wife, Minna, to Cuernavaca, Mexico. Thereafter they made their way to Warsaw, where housing, along with a teaching post for Minna, were provided by the Polish government.
1944
To David Bazelon
January 25, 1944 [Chicago]