Henry, look! Would you marry your daughter off to her first suitor? This book, old man, is a child of mine.
Let’s have not simply a figure but some notion of the Deutsch intentions.
Heavens!
You
should know
this
!!!
Yrs. from the midst of night,
To Katharine Sergeant Angell White
September 25, 1953 Barrytown, N.Y.
Dear Mrs. White:
I wish to point out to you, an editor of the
New Yorker
, that Mr. [Anthony] West’s review of
Augie March
is disgraceful. Mr. West is at liberty to dislike my book; that is a prerogative no sane author would deny a critic. But Mr. West, without any warrant whatever, has made me out to be a disciple of the New Criticism and has constructed, and attacked, a mad symbolical novel that bears no resemblance to the one he was given. In writing the book I was aware of no symbolic aims. Out of his own turbulence, thoughtlessness and pedantry Mr. West has attributed to me things as remote from me as the moon. “Simon” and “simony,” eagles and “virility,” “sex” and “culture”—really, it is simply too much! I feel I must write to you for the sake of my mental health. Let us hope that it is only my mental health that is endangered and not that of your readers as well.
Sincerely yours,
To Pascal Covici
September 25, 1953 Barrytown
Dear Pat—
Thanks for the [Harvey] Swados review. I’m glad to see he feels as we do about things. A. West is a
mamzer
[
46
] of a different color. I thought it only reasonable that I should protest such a horrible misrepresentation of
Augie
and wrote to Mrs. White explaining that I was not a New Critic and Symbolist and that West had invented this lurid and foolish book that he was attacking in his own foolish and disorderly mind. [ . . . ]
Love,
The ad in the
Times
was beautiful.
To Lionel Trilling
October 11, 1953 Barrytown, N.Y.
Dear Lionel,
I’ve more than once wanted to write you a letter of thanks. I know that you have contributed more than a little to the success of my book. I’m in your debt also for mental support—for the intelligence of your reading. Though I’m not, perhaps, the most objective judge to be found, I thought your essay brilliant. The many criticisms of
Augie
I’ve seen since have made me appreciate yours all the more; I appreciate above all your sense of justice, for I know the book must have offended you in some ways.
Reading Emerson’s “Transcendentalist” the other day while getting ready for class, I ran across a passage on the remoteness of the high-minded transcendentalist from worldly activities which made me think of one of our differences. It goes like this:
“We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.”
“Then,” says the world, “show me your own.”
“We have none.”
“What will you do, then?” cries the world.
“We will wait.”
“How long?”
“Until the universe beckons and calls us to work.”
“But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.”
“Be it so; I can sit in a corner and
perish
(as you call it) but I will not move until I have the highest command . . . your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me. If I cannot work at least I need not lie . . .”
So it runs. And this attitude (would you call it “inner-directedness”?) is what seeped into my comedy. It isn’t that
Augie
resists every function—that would make him a tramp; and while I would not hesitate to write about tramps if I were called to it,
Augie
is something different. I was constantly thinking of some of the best young men I have known. Some of the very finest and best intentioned, best endowed, found nothing better to do with themselves than Augie. The majority, whether as chasers, parasites, bigamists, forgers and worse lacked his fairly innocent singleness of purpose. They had reached the place where they fixedly doubted that Society had any use for their abilities. I think if you had been aware of their great negativism you might have taken another view of my “propaganda.” To love another, genuinely to love, is the inception of a function, I wished to say. I suppose I didn’t quite make [my point] convincingly. It may be that for this a kind of intelligence is required that I’m not able to exercise. I’m satisfied with the other kind—the intelligence of imagining. I would be satisfied, that is, but for the fact that you sometimes can’t imagine very far without crossing the border into the other kinds of intelligence.
Not the least of my surprises, as reviews come in, is my surprise at the chaotic disagreement as to what constitutes normalcy. This is picturesque! Writers on the fiftieth floor of the Time building speak confidently with the
vox populi
, telling us what is normative in American life. The scene couldn’t be more bizarre. An anarchy of views upon normalcy. We might get some sociological principle out of this: When the daily life of a people is full of astonishments, miracles and wonders, the lives of individuals are duller (a natural reaction to the disorganizing hyperaesthesia resulting from overstimulation) and the greater the disorder and lack of agreement the larger the number of spokesmen for “normalcy.” [ . . . ]
Your discussion of my treatment of the hero was full of brilliant perceptions (the eagle as anti-hero I had not thought of ) but I was myself more conscious of satirizing this disagreement over the normative.
On the whole, however, I was fairly free of deliberate intentions. I could scarcely follow Mr. West’s review with its system of symbols. I had forgotten, since leaving Great Books Inc., what “simony” meant.
Well, it’s all very interesting and what fascinates me most is the book’s sale.
That
I had never anticipated. The world’s a mysterious place.
Yours faithfully,
“A Triumph of the Comic View,” Trilling’s very favorable assessment of
Augie,
had appeared in
The Griffin
, the Readers’ Subscription newsletter.
To Samuel Freifeld
October 19, 1953 Barrytown
Dear Sam,
You did exactly right in your conversation with my father. I don’t know what anyone can do about my father except to change his character and that lies within the power of no one. Therefore, whatever you said, you said on your own account or in the name of justice, but practical effect I think there should be none. Myself, I have tried to hold no grudge and I had already answered his letter before yours arrived. I see no reason why I should not be faithful to whatever was, in the past, venerable in my father and I do my best to make allowances for the rest. I wouldn’t be uneasy about any of this if I were you. It’s just like my father to begin to be generous long after the rest of the world has begun. He’s impressed by my new fame and even more by the sales of the book and so now he feels uneasy and wants, too late, to go on record as a good parent. I try to make him feel that there is plenty of time.
I can well imagine how you feel about
Augie
. I myself feel happier about this book than about anything I have ever done in the line of books because I have a sense of how much of it is just, and that you who know so much about the matter are also pleased with it is a great satisfaction to me. I feel that I have kept things from obscurity which should not sink and for that reason the book is as much intended for you as myself. The personal identification is altogether warranted. If you didn’t make it I’d feel that I had missed the mark. [ . . . ]
As for Oscar’s book, I have written it up for the
Saturday Review.
I hope that will do some good.
Love,
To Alfred Kazin
October 22, 1953 Barrytown
Dear Alfred—
[ . . . ] I don’t know what to make of the reviews either. What is there to say except that the reviewers have been Augie Marchean reviewers? They have led me to coin a phrase: “low seriousness.” Comedy is illegal—it isn’t even seen—it
isn’t
. In low seriousness no one laughs until the cue is given; one then asks gravely, “Now, why was it appropriate to laugh?” Enter hereupon Bergson, Freud, Dante and Charlie Chaplin, each bearing a basket of rocks. The rocks are piled on our breast in a huge cairn and so goes it.
A. West is simply a bad novelist and re-wrote
Augie
unspeakably—a horror. Stendhal says bad taste leads to crimes. Who can doubt it? Mrs. White and Wm. Shawn are aghast. But whose baby after all is A. West?
I feel I am at the point of growing wicked, so I stop, with much love,
To Leslie Fiedler
October 25, 1953 Barrytown, N.Y.
Dear Leslie,
It is a little weird to think that we have never exchanged a single letter. A fair share of the responsibility for this (if responsibility there be) is mine. I often wonder why I balk so at letter writing. I used to accuse myself of lacking energy, but it is too late for that now. I think it is because I talk to myself so much, a habit which has no virtue whatever to redeem it. Now that I’ve begun, I find that I can write quite easily to you. You may be one of my God-appointed correspondents.
I’m very glad
Augie
pleased you. The writing of it gave me considerable pleasure; it was wonderful to feel I had the gift of amusement. Of course not everyone is amused. The book has many faults; and so has almost everyone. Though I was always of the opinion that people were hard to give pleasure to, it was nonetheless a shock to see how many suffered from low seriousness—my new favorite description of the “earnestness” of deep readers. What makes people so sober? We’ve sunk a great depth if the funnyman also finds it necessary to be a prophet. I have my own share of low seriousness, of course, but I think of it as a curse. I am not a born prophet.
The last third of the book was written under terrible difficulties. I suffered, and still do suffer, terrible pains after the separation. I found no alternative. I could not spend the rest of my life with [Anita]. Nor was it good for her to live with me. As for Gregory, I doubt that he will suffer as much from our divorce as I suffered from my parents’ “good” family life. I love Gregory and I know how to make him feel my love. He is injured, but not really seriously injured, and his position also has its advantages. At Princeton last year I nearly went down, and Anita’s troubles were as terrible to me as my own. We are both infinitely better than we were.
I can imagine how hard it is to face Missoula after Rome. I was uneasy even in New York when I came back—and I had
hated
Paris for having defeated my aspirations, both the good and the bad. I said
even
New York. I don’t know. I’m sure Missoula has it over New York.
My very best to Margaret and the kids.
Yours,
Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003), influential American critic, is best remembered for
Love and Death in the American Novel
(1960). His other books include the essay collections
An End to Innocence
(1955) and
Waiting for the End
(1964), as well as a collection of stories,
The Last Jew in America
(1966).
To Katharine Sergeant Angell White
October 27, 1953 Barrytown, N.Y.
Dear Mrs. White:
I am grateful to Mr. Shawn for having taken the trouble to read
Augie March
and I greatly appreciate your precedent-breaking offer [to allow a printed response in
The New Yorker
to Anthony West’s unfavorable review]. That Mr. Shawn agrees with me that I have been done an injustice satisfies me completely. I cannot see what would be gained by answering Mr. West, whether sweetly or hotly. The confusion is so vast, involved and peculiar that I don’t feel brave enough or capable enough to deal with it. There are some misunderstandings that simply weaken you when you contemplate their complexity. In some odd sense Mr. West’s review is not a piece of criticism but a piece of fiction; it is a very bad short story or something of that kind. For after all Mr. West invented what did not exist; he wrote what he thought to be my novel, and as he is a bad artist he produced a disfigured something. One cannot show the error of such a “something.” I don’t mean to try. What would be the good of it?
It is very reassuring, however, to know that you feel the review falsified and misrepresented the book. That really is more than enough for me.
Sincerely yours,
To Edith Tarcov
[n.d.] [Barrytown]