All the best,
The story in
Harper’s Bazaar
was “By the Rock Wall,” which Bellow apparently lost and had rewritten.
To Monroe Engel
April 30, 1950 Paris
Dear Monroe:
I’m very pleased, very happy, about your response. While I didn’t exactly take the Guggenheim rejection as literary criticism—how can such an organization
criticize
—I couldn’t help, nevertheless, feeling uneasy . . . on the side where my judgments sometimes fail me, the helpless side. But then there’s the stronger side, and there I knew that the course I’d been following for a long time was at last producing results, that I’d put my hand strongly to a good thing and was making it resound. Or, putting it another way, I believe I’m beginning to make some real excavations. I’m delighted that you agree.
Ad n
[
auseam
], I’ve notified you that you were going to see the raw mass. You hear that far too often, I’m sure. And I must say that although I have some kind of instinctive sense of what the finished thing will be, I’ve never had such a mass to knead and shape either, and I don’t know how I’ll fare with it. The abundance gives me confidence, however, and wherever that and the life, the feeling of the book, are connected there’ll be no pruning. But I haven’t read over what I’ve done, consecutively. When I do, I may very well share your objections. My own figure for the shape of the book is that of a widening spiral that begins in the parish, ghetto, slum and spreads into the greater world, and there Augie comes to the fore because of the multiplication of people around him and the greater difficulty of experience. In childhood one naturally lives as an observer. And it may be that Augie doesn’t sufficiently come forward at first; but in my eyes, the general plan of the book—its length—justified this. I have a further part in mind for almost all the characters so far introduced, even the ones like Kreines and Five Properties. And Sylvester will be a considerable Machiavellian too.
Another two hundred pages, and the design will be almost entirely visible; and there will be
still
more—the second part will be again as long, with sections on the war and the life of a black-marketeer in Europe and a final, tragic one on the life of the greatest Machiavellian of them all, Augie’s brother Simon. Sometimes I’m not sure that Augie will bear so much traffic, and again think that he
must
bear it, be sent through the bitterest of contemporary experience if my purpose is to have its real test. In any case, publishing a first volume would give me a breather in which to mature the sequel. But we can discuss this, as you propose, in September, when I’ll have a good deal more to show.
[ . . . ]
Anyway, it looks as though we’ll be coming to New York to live. I don’t know what rents are now, but I wouldn’t like to pay much more than sixty or seventy. Eighty, if I must. As for the size of the flat, that depends on the section we move into. In a neighborhood where I could find a room to write in, we wouldn’t need six rooms. Four to six, let’s say, then. The bigger the better. We have furniture and household stuff in Chicago, so they needn’t be furnished. [ . . . ]
Thank you for your letter.
Best,
To Henry Volkening
June 7, 1950 Rome
Dear Henry:
I thought, immodestly, that you would like
Augie
, and I’m delighted. Mountainous sales? I’d be satisfied with moderately hilly ones. But one never knows, for it’ll be a large book, and I have an idea that there’s something saleable about sheer bulk; people feel they’re not being cheated. As for your objections, I haven’t yet read what I’ve done, and I’ve worked at some speed, carelessly. It may be, when I read, that I’ll agree with you and with Monroe. Just now, I feel the booklearning is indispensable for its dimensions. It isn’t hard to explain. For that matter, it may not need any explanation; it represents a kind of Midwestern culture common enough, and left out by a harmful convention. Writers are altogether too tame about what they may assume; they need to take more license.
If you think there are chapters that might interest magazine editors, show the mss. around. I do have a copy with me and the first, handwritten one is in Paris. We can’t lose all three. At worst, the written one would have to be typed off again. If anyone will take a chapter, I can polish it up; not printable as is. [ . . . ]
On the 15th, we’re going to Positano, near Sorrento, and we’ll be there until the 20th of July. I’ve been asked to a conference of the most lofty anti-Stalinists, in Berlin at the end of June. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going. I’m not too keen about it, but five lotus-eating weeks I’m afraid would not agree with me.
Yours,
To the Tarcovs
June 26, 1950
Dear Tarcovs—
Just now we’re in Positano, on the gulf of Salerno, in the midst of the mountains and hanging over the sea. The fishermen have no motors and plant their own lobster traps, the women make lace on bolsters, simply with pins and bobbins, and on holy days the Saints are taken for a walk by a procession. It would seem incredible for the gods never to see the sun, and they are shown it on Sunday.
And we’re coming home in Sept. I expect things will be much altered. I read the papers with revulsion, when I get them. The only papers here are the Italian and catastrophe’s an old story to them—they prefer gossip.
So we’ll be in Chicago for a week or two in Sept., and then to New York. I have evening work at NYU. Fear Isaac doesn’t like that. He sent me a sore, and rather nasty note about it, as though I had done something behind his back. What’s wrong with people at home, anyway, and what’s the snarling for? Isaac knows perfectly well that if my being at NYU would be doing him the least harm I’d turn down the job. I’ve told him so, and the truth of it doesn’t need any protestation. But he’d rather dislike me than converse about it and for my part I can’t continue to care many damns as the years accumulate on my head.
That’s Bazelon and Isaac, one or two others, and leaves me and thee. Rather old-fashioned. Similarities in our families account for it maybe. Though you may not like the comparison just now, with Morrie’s sins [Bellow’s brother Maurice, who’d fathered a child out of wedlock and faced a paternity suit] tumbling from the closet. I knew something about them, of course, but wasn’t abreast of them all and hadn’t heard about the suit till you wrote me of it. I’d like to know more. It moves me to think of my father in this, and of the kids. It’ll do the rest of the family good if they’re not beyond remedies.
This is turning out to be a sad letter, and that’s peculiar because I’ve been feeling the opposite of sad. Just went down to the harbor with Herschel, lecturing him on the geology of mountains. Sins of the father. I
tried
to tell you and Isaac about the Illinois limestone.
It did us much good to get your letter with some evidence of happiness in it and word of the kids and of your writing. You seem more gallant about the last than I am. I’m beginning to think of bricklaying.
Best love,
Till July 20—Pensione Vittoria, Positano (Salerno), Italia.
Spring Ode
Thunder brings the end of winter,
Rinsing the yellow snow from the gutter;
Calico spots flare at the window;
I lie in my bathrobe, eating butter.
Grease on my cheeks—the fat of the season
Now dead and sealed, now dead and waxy.
Foxes yap on the tenement stairs;
Hope arrives in a Checker taxi.
His clever face is now surveying
The hallway with its sooty tatters,
The playing-card banners overhead,
The cymbals, scales and other matters.
My bathrobe sleeves are stiff with yolks,
Speckled with crumbs of my winter’s eating;
Bottles and eggshells on the floor
Lie between us at our meeting.
He falls into my arms, we kiss,
We cry like reunited brothers.
He tells me how he searched for me
Among the others.
My cheeks are fat, my eyes are wet,
His hand rests sadly on my shoulder;
We cannot help but see how much
Each has grown older.
—Bellow
To Samuel Freifeld
July 12, 1950 Positano
Dear Sam’l:
Probably was silly to talk about exile. I merely meant that, abroad, one wants to feel abroad
from
a place; for Europeans do have such home places, and if their friends do not support them, there are other things that do, so that one doesn’t have to look into one’s consciousness or memory for proof that existence isn’t accidental. Anyway, if I’m in exile so are you, from me. Exile in your own parlor, among appearances of substance.
And then, you see, I’m a kind of connections-keeper. For instance, your papa and a few other relatives are very lively daily preoccupations of mine. Personages
like
them appear in
Augie March
. You don’t, and needn’t, look for yourself (the way I have of scrambling things); someone else is in your place. Most ways you’ll be pleased by this monument; it’s an honorable one; and you know your pa was too rich to be held by oblivion. And you’re free enough a man to be pleased rather than offended.
Why we’re coming back? Well, one doesn’t form intimacies here, and I have a strong societal sense. The French are not the people to encourage intimacy. The Italians, yes; or apparently, but you come to a place with them beyond which you cannot go, possibly because they don’t, for themselves, go beyond it either. On the other hand, you may say: “Who wants your stinking intimacy anyhow?” and “Stand off, you and your intimacy”—with some justice. But then one is surrounded by signs of the great mutuality of this past, great
relation
, and wants to get off the egocycle and go home to see what can be done.
Much love to you all [ . . . ]
To Monroe Engel
July 15, 1950 [Positano]
Dear Monroe—
Is Isaac’s nose out of joint about NYU? Mine is a little. He makes me feel that I’ve undermined him there. I can still drop out, if he’s affected. How can I know whether he is? I have no way of telling what’s at stake for him. For me there’s nothing. I simply don’t want to get in his way. Not from friendly feeling—there’s not much lost between us now; he’d like to become strangers, and I’m not so opposed to that as I formerly was—but because I’d prefer, if I have to struggle with someone for survival, that it be a person I never struggled with before.
We’re about to leave Positano. Do you know it? Near Amalfi. Four thousand feet of mountain descending to the Gulf in a width of about eight hundred yards. We have the Siren Islands on one side and the Calabrian Mts. on the other. The islands now are owned by Léonide Massine and there are occasionally Russian women landing in Positano and demanding pen and paper at Giacomino’s coffee-house to write long somethings.
By rising early to beat the heat I’ve written a long lot of
Augie March
; at four hundred pages it’s nothing like finished. It may be again as long. And then what:
che cosa faremo?
[
43
]
I know [Herbert] Gold well, and like him; some of his things that I’ve read, the most recent, are very good; the very last thing he sent me was well-nigh perfect. One of a series, he says, I believe he’s going to call it
The Economic Life.
You ought to ask him for it.
Good to hear about Jean Stafford, Mrs. Oliver Something. She sent me a wedding announcement. Heroic to marry so soon after a divorce. Mrs. Oliver
Jensen
! I just remembered. I’ll be grateful to you if you’ll congratulate her, thank her for me and tell her I haven’t forgotten that she gave me two bucks when she went to Germany. Is she writing anything now? She could be very good. I’m in favor of her.
Quoi d’ailleurs?
[
44
] I still arrive homeless. In Paris: 33 Rue de Vaneau will still do, after Aug. 1st.
Best,
To Henry Volkening
[July 17, 1950]
Dear Henry—
This is Monday. We’re leaving Positano on Thursday, the 20th—for Rome, Siena, Florence, Turin, Grenoble and Paris. Paris on August 1st. On the 29th we’re supposed to sail. I add the provisional word because reading about Korea in this little town in a five-day-old newspaper, I don’t know but what we’ll be in an internment camp on the 29th [ . . . ]
Our address in Paris will be 33 Rue Vaneau, again.
I hope your summer is approximately as good as mine. It can’t be exactly as good because of the age of the papers when I see them, whereas you read the
Times
and all the truth that’s fit to print as soon as it’s discovered.
I’ll be reading mine in a barrel, I think, by flashlight.
All the best,
On June 25 North Korean forces had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel into South Korea, precipitating an international crisis that would lead to three years of war.