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
, that is, scan the latest
sottises
, observe with brutal contempt the newest wrinkle in anguish, and then feed Simone’s articles on sex 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 Hellman, in whom I produce symptoms of
shyness
. And Phil Rahv who keeps alive the traditions of Karl Marx. I’m very fond of Philip—he’s
mishpokhe—
and he gives us a kind of private Chatauqua course in
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 butterfly 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
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
: “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
. [ . . . ] 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 Nobel.) 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 classroom, 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 seashore. I won’t be surprised to see them at the crap 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
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
: “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
. 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
, 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
to have been met? Since the late Forties I have been brooding about it and sometimes I imagine that I
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.”
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
, 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 embarrassment.
“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 manuscripts, 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
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 Hôtel Pont Royal, 7 rue de Montalembert, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. 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.