To Henry Volkening
August 21, 1950 [Paris]
Dear Henry—
This is the 21st
août
; on the 29th we sail, arriving in New York on Sept. 4,
environ
. Anita and the kid will go on to Chicago, and I’ll follow them a couple of days later to visit home briefly.
Paris improves when viewed with
les yeux passagers
[
45
] of a tourist. Off and on, I’ve been writing, and I’ll have some four hundred pages of mss. to show Viking. I still think it would be a good idea to stop at some natural place in the narrative and publish a volume. I have an immense plan for the rest, and who knows whether there’ll be time for it all before we’re swamped.
The Russians can have Europe now
à l’oeil
, for nothing—for the shouting. I don’t think they’ll let the opportunity escape—
à bientôt
.
1951
To Herbert McCloskey
[n.d.] [Queens, New York]
Dear Herb—
I get news of you from Jenny who is a cheerful interpreter and whom I like to believe. You are going to California, building a house, finishing your book, and Mitz and the kids are well. You sound very lucky to me.
The only thing simple in my life is
Augie M.
Everything else is wickedly complicated and perhaps the one accounts for the other. Even
Augie
goes slowly now, and speed was the reason for his success before. I am near the end of Book 1. Did I tell you that Viking is thinking of publishing it in two parts?
I saw Sam Monk at the MLA convention. He said there’d be nothing for me at the U. for a while. Have you had a real falling out about Fiedler? You ought not. Sam is rightly down on Fiedler for some of the things he’s published.
Sam, by the way, will be teaching at Columbia this summer.
Not a word from Tumin. I saw him last in Paris. Where it was a convenience for him to have friends. Here he sees only [Ralph] Ross, and has not once phoned me. Perhaps he’s afraid of being asked for money. Shit! He
has
become a Princeton professor, hasn’t he, and has to be careful about impecunious writers. Since he’s a clandestine writer himself, maybe he believes I should pay for my brazenness. Besides, he’s always had the fear that I would write about him and write ruinously. Holy and almighty God—why do the intelligent men become radiologists and the blind study humanity!? [ . . . ] Incidentally, my monologue on Intelligence will come out presently in the
Hudson Review
.
A few more financial hits like that from the
Hudson
, financed by the Morgan family (pays two cents a word) and I’ll have to go to work in a defense plant. This morning I read Truman’s manpower note. I can see myself in line at an office. Someone in front of me works at the Copacabana? Fine! Coats chicklets, colors Superman. Excellent, all exempt. Then come I:
“What are you?”
“A writer.”
“For
The Reader’s Digest, Red-Book, Noble Savage, Breezy Stories, Fleabite Gazette
?”
“For many a one of these.”
“Then report in Pittsburgh Friday to the Hell’s Hinge Corp. Bring your own shackles.”
Best love,
To Herbert McCloskey
January 30, 1951 Queens, New York
Dear Herb,
Thank you for trying, and for your offer. I know I have no better friends in the world than you and Mitzie, and I wouldn’t hesitate to ask for a loan if I needed the money and couldn’t get it from someone who could spare it more easily. But there’s my father who has a lot of it, and [Arthur] Lidov who’s become rich, too, and would willingly let me have a few hundred. Really, I don’t need it now, I have enough. By the middle of summer, if I don’t get a break, I will need some. But then I can always do something. I’ve gotten by for a long time. Nearly three years I’ve been able to give to writing and private griefs—to say nothing of considerable happiness. And conceivably I may still get by. I’ve applied for a Rockefeller grant and the signs are better than fair. [ . . . ]
Winter diseases have begun to hit us. First there was a virus, and then the grippe. I had a bad case of the latter, aggravated by a penicillin reaction. I’m only one day out of bed—flat for nearly a week, and during the breather between semesters, too, when I had planned to do so much. And then I’ve been forbidden to smoke, too. Permanently; I can never again have a pipe or a cigar; not even a cigarette. So I’m sending you some of my pipes, dividing them between you and Paolo. [ . . . ]
I suppose, damn it! that nearly everybody is some kind of writer and thus your writing has to be judged by these crypto-novelists wrapped as philosophers, sociologists, and even revolutionists. I’ll give you ten to one that Max Shachtman has written a novel on the Bridgman convention, or something like that [ . . . ]
To John Lehmann
[n.d.] [Queens]
Damn, what a letter! It surpasses anything I’ve ever seen. Not a word about the quality of the novel. If you can find nothing better to say upon reading
Augie March
than that you all “think very highly” of me, I don’t think I want you to publish it at all. I’m not selling you a commodity. Your attitude infuriates me. Either you are entirely lacking in taste and judgment or you are being terribly prudent about the advance. Well, permit me to make it clear once and for all that it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference to me whether you publish the novel or not. You have read two-thirds of it, and I refuse absolutely to send you another page. Return the manuscript to Viking if you don’t want to take the book.
Poet-publisher John Lehmann (1907-1987) brought out the extremely influential magazine
New Writing
(subsequently
Penguin New Writing
) as well as founding, in 1946, John Lehmann Limited, under which imprint Bellow, Thom Gunn, Laurie Lee, Elizabeth David and others were published.
To John Lehmann
July 19, 1951 [Queens]
Dear John:
I have your letter before me.
In one place, it reads: “You say . . . that you are still amenable to doing the great work in two parts . . .”; and in another: “You have indeed posed us a very tricky problem, but as you know we all think highly of you and very much hope that in the end the job won’t be beyond our means.”
Now, I know you haven’t seen anything like my book among recent novels. I’ve been reviewing them; I know what they are. They’re for the most part phony, or empty-hearted, banal and bungling. I should have thought it would do something to you to see
Augie
. By your own admission you had almost finished reading the manuscript, and yet you had nothing to say about it. You were cool; businesslike, merely; you were terribly patronizing and you put me in a rage. In London you had made me feel—or tried to make me feel—that you had done me an immense favor in publishing my novels. I will
not
be made to feel that about
Augie March.
It damned well isn’t necessary.
I have discussed this matter with Guinzburg, and he has left the decision to me. I think that, having blown my top, I have, for my part, cleared the air. If you still want to publish the book, I shall be glad to see it appear under your imprint. The manuscript is now six hundred pages long and at the present reckoning I have another two hundred to go. There is no break in the narrative, really. Any break would be arbitrary. Certainly the fifty pages you ask for would not bring the volume to a close; they begin a new action which continues for another two hundred pages.
I know this presents you with some difficult problems, but I don’t want to hear about the difficulties exclusively. As to your being treated as a salesman, I think you’re under a misapprehension. It wouldn’t have made any difference to me what a salesman thought of my book.
Yours,
To Herbert McCloskey
[n.d.] [Queens]
Dear Herb:
For many reasons, your letter made me happy. I keep it with various necessary talismans on my desk and read it often. I
knew
I could reach you and Mitzie, because of your generosity toward me. I shall have such readers.
I know how steeped in impatience people are and how little capable of giving attention. You ought to have seen the letter I received from Tumin after he had read
Augie
. Perhaps you heard something about his feelings in Princeton. Too much sociological and literary analysis, I suppose, crippled him as they do many others in reading. I was amazed. But it is really too much to expect people to come out of their feelings. Though I intended it as one of the revolutionary effects of the book that they should be forced, torn away from them and the sickness of the habitual diagnosed—not cured, that is not the work of literature. Freifeld reacted somewhat as Mel did. I should have thought people would desire a world to be brought to life of which we have felt the mass and trouble mostly—going elsewhere for superber being or beauty (to the Old World) and therefore putting ourselves in a false position, for our feeling hearts of course stay with our own experience. But some people do not seem to wish it.
I go on, though. I work with great speed as I think must be apparent. But the book is extremely long. On some days it lays a great strain on me. I think that a long book ought not to be so dense; it will be tiring. But I have a great deal for Augie to face and can’t let up. The mss. is already about four hundred pages and I believe that’s only half the work. Viking wants me to publish half of it and I’ve been tempted. For one thing the war [in Korea] may capsize everything. But if that’d been a real factor I would probably never have undertaken to write such a book. Anyhow, I will have a good deal to show you, Herb, when you come East, as I hope you will do.
I have reason to be grateful for my job at NYU. It leaves my days free. If after taxes I got a little more than two thousand, I’d have no complaint. I expect to earn about a thousand more by writing.
PR
and
Commentary
have helped, so far. But I wonder whether I could get into Minnesota for the summer sessions with a creative writing course. For one term, two years ago, they paid me something like eight hundred. Do you think, now that I’m older, they’d give me a little more? [ . . . ] Queens is a terribly expensive place. Little G. has a half-scholarship at school, but still the tuition is what it used to be at Chicago in 1933. I’m fairly sure I could go to Ohio for the summer, but I’d far rather spend it with you. If you will be there, that is. What do you plan to do? Will you be reading proofs of your Russian book by that time? [ . . . ]
Red Warren’s settled in Manhattan for the year; we see him and Isaac and Paolo and the Partisaners. Isaac’s even more strapped than I am and he’s looking for work outside New York too. Maybe Ross will give him a job if he goes to Minn.
[ . . . ] I’ve asked
Commentary
to send you a copy of my story [“Looking for Mr. Green”].
Best love to you all,
1952
To Elizabeth Ames
[n.d.]
Dear Miss Ames—
On various occasions I have recommended writers to you. This time I am writing on my own behalf. I should very much like to come to Yaddo for a couple of weeks this summer and would be infinitely obliged to you if you could give me a quiet room in which to finish a novel I’ve been working on for quite a long time. It’s nearly done now.
I’d like to come on June 15th and stay for two weeks. Perhaps my application comes too late. I hope not.
As sponsors I can offer Mssrs. Granville Hicks, Alfred Kazin and Paolo Milano.
Sincerely yours,
Elizabeth Ames (1885—1977) was from 1926 until 1971 director of Yaddo, the famed artists’ colony at Saratoga Springs, New York.
To Herbert McCloskey
March 20, 1952 [New York City]
Dear Herb:
[ . . . ] Perhaps we could meet in Chicago too. I won’t, of course, be spending all my time with my father. How can I? After ten minutes, there’s alas nothing more to say. After which I have to stand by, for he gets angry if I desert this silence. But I start to crumble under it and have to save myself.
In fewer words, I’ll be in Chicago on the 4th (Friday). I have to leave on the evening thereof in order to make Seattle by Sunday night (I have to check all the schedules). So if you leave Minneapolis on the 3rd, Chicago will make a pleasant stopover for you, and then I’ll see you also in Minneapolis on April 30th.
Love to Mitzie and the kids,
I don’t know how serious 17 Minetta St. is; I’m in the process of finding out. But have to find out. In November when I moved here I considered myself divorced. Now I simply consider myself calm. I suggest you revisit Anita and Greg while you’re in the East, if you can find time.