Dear Edith—
Thanksgiving Day! I have Gregory with me, and for the first time in months I can enjoy a leisurely afternoon. Never have I worked so hard at teaching. Small colleges demand infinitely more of you, and it is a thankless and poorly paid labor. On Fridays I generally have to go to New York to have my teeth—preserved. They are in that stage. And when I have finished running around the City and have returned from my visit to Forest Hills I reach Barrytown on Sunday in a state of exhaustion. And you know what Mondays are. Moreover, there are the
difficulties
. I know I have no right to complain to you, with your trouble, so much more real and visible than mine.
Sometimes I think that man, for hundreds of centuries weakened by parasites—lice, fleas, tapeworms, fungi, etc.—has replaced them with parasitic anxieties which deplete him. Because he is used to feeling depleted and it does not seem to him right that he should be well.
But this is very like me, to start out to thank you for your letter on my book and fall instead into dismal theories. I owe you my deepest gratitude. Yours was the sort of letter one expects from a friend. For whom is a book written, after all?
I’m glad you observed, as no one else has, Augie’s bent for the illicit. I have often felt that the effort to lead a normal, respectable American life would make an outlaw of me. Stores and offices I have always found intolerable. Better knowledge of history might teach me the difference between impatience and freedom, but I do feel that the world asks an undue degree of control over us. At any rate, I am constitutionally unable to accept so much control and have passed this inability on to Augie. The devil’s disobedience is from pride, but Augie misses the love, harmony and safety that should compensate our obedience. People have accused me of asociality, and Trilling asserts Augie is “wrong” i.e. unprincipled. To me Augie is the embodiment of willingness to serve, who says “For God’s sake, make use of me, only do not use me to no purpose. Use me.”
I can say it comically, not otherwise. Squeezed into “functions” in which all higher capacities die of disuse, we are considered unprincipled if we comment on the situation by so much as a laugh. Can Augie be anything but, in his mild way, an outlaw? Only, instead of being outside, as a Cain or Ishmael are outside, his desire is to be an Augie. Surely the greatest human desire—not the deepest but the widest—is to be used. If there were no will to be used the social process would be pleasureless, wholly pleasureless. Augie’s is the most reluctant
non serviam
[
47
] ever heard.
Enough of
Augie
though. There is a lot to be complained of in the book.
The news of Oscar’s operation has depressed me. I hope he will be seeing the last of hospitals. You must be very gloomy about it. It is a shame. Is there any other possible therapy? Forgive my foolish questions, but I feel this in my bones.
The review in
Saturday Review
[of Oscar’s novel]
had
to be done as I did it because I was in the position of having asked for the book. I could not review it in the tone I would have taken had the book come unsolicited. They would not have accepted from me a review they considered obviously written for a friend. The political problem was a delicate one. I say this only because I have intimations of Oscar’s dissatisfaction with the piece I wrote. You have my assurance that I did my utmost.
I won’t be coming to Chicago for a long time, so won’t you please write?
Regards to everyone.
Love,
To Samuel Freifeld
November 30, 1953 Barrytown
Dear Sam—
People
will
feel exposed, ridiculed, no matter how you deal with them.
Any
mention causes them shame. They can’t think that perhaps it was my aim to love not shame them. If you wanted to think about and find meaning in
my
existence I would thank you for it, not curse you.
A few years ago when my brother thought he had cancer he cried out, “I pissed my life away!” And
now
look at him. That’s all forgotten. But I didn’t forget the great pain of hearing a man condemn himself. Forty-five years of life must contain some meaning.
Of course, so long as our misery is secret our honor is whole.
Well, I never dreamed that I could be an uncursed prophet, so I accept the curses. I agree that I am an outlaw. In outlaw bravado I have no interest. I only meant that I wish to obey better laws.
Well, I haven’t much news to tell you. I am fairly happy. I do a lot of thinking. As yet, to no great purpose.
Love to everyone,
To Bernard Malamud
[n.d.] [Barrytown]
Dear Bernard:
I don’t get many letters about
Augie
that I feel like answering. By pressure of numbers, society can make a specialist of you, if in no other way.
Augie
threatens to become my specialty as flying the Atlantic became the Lindberghs’—allow me one more immodest analogy: as jumping from the bridge became Steve Brodie’s.
With this preface, let me say that I thought your letter one of the best, a terribly acute criticism. I’m not at all inclined to counter your criticisms. You’re a writer yourself, a real one; you know that self-defense is not what we ought to be thinking of. I made many mistakes; I must plead guilty to several of your charges. Yes, Augie is too passive, perhaps. Yes, the episodes do not have enough variety; the pressure of language is too constant and uniform. That he is too august I think I might dispute. At least I felt his suffering sharply—maybe I didn’t get it across. He isn’t, to me, an Olympian. Only, he’s engaged in a War of Independence and the odds are vastly against him. It is devaluation of the person that he fights with. No doubt this war, like any war, produces exaggerations. Our passivity often is so deep that we do not recognize that the active spirit underneath has meanwhile organized an opposition, an opposition that wears the face of passivity. Some of the trouble is Augie’s; some of it the world’s. That is no excuse in literature, though it may be one in history. But I can’t claim that I was trying for perfection. There are times when I think how nice it would be to edit a new and better novel out of it. But I can’t allow myself to forget that I took a position in writing this book. I declared against what you call the constructivist approach. A novel, like a letter, should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of mortality and decay. I backed away from Flaubert, in the direction of Walter Scott, Balzac and Dickens. Having brought off my effort as well as I could, I must now pay the price. You let the errors come. Let them remain in the book like our sins remaining in our lives. I hope some of them may be remitted. I’ll do what I can; the rest is in God’s hands.
Two things about the book please me still: the comedy and the characters. Many people have missed what, to me, is the fun of the book. They suffer from culture-gravity. They say “picaresque” and don’t laugh. The baseball experts landing on your
Natural
with both feet are in the same league: sinners against imagination and the spirit of comedy.
I’m very grateful to you for writing. Yours,
New York bookmaker Steve Brodie claimed to have survived a daredevil leap from the Brooklyn Bridge on July 23, 1886. (Whether he actually did so or not is unknown.) To “pull a Brodie” or “do a Steve Brodie” entered the American language as terms for doing something spectacular and dangerous.
1954
To Alfred Kazin
January 7, 1954 Barrytown
Dear Alfred:
I wouldn’t have taken the Bard job last June if I hadn’t been very hard up. Not that the school is so bad—it has much to recommend it, the students are bright and those that are earnest are terribly earnest in every sense of the term. If you want to teach, Bard is the place for you. But it you want to write also,
méfie-toi
! [
48
] The lit. faculty is good. Heinrich Blücher is
good
, some of the arts people are good, too. The large majority are mediocre and cantankerous types who couldn’t make it at Bryn Mawr, Antioch, Bennington, Black Mtn., etc.
Myself, I have no clear plans. I am trying to recover a state of mind lost unawares about a year ago.
I’ll tell A. Wanning that you’re perhaps interested in Bard. Maybe you could arrange to work with Heinrich. That would make Bard worth your while. [ . . . ]
Love to you both,
The name of the new Bard
zaddik
[
49
] is James H. Case, Jr.
Heinrich Blücher, husband of Hannah Arendt and like her a refugee from Nazi Germany, taught for many years at Bard.
To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
February 1, 1954 Barrytown, N.Y.
CONFIDENTIAL REPORT ON CANDIDATE FOR FELLOWSHIP
Name of Candidate: James Baldwin
Mr. Baldwin’s outline is more eloquent than anything I could write in support of his application. I do not see how it can fail to impress the Committee, with its wisdom and its talent. For the most part, the Whites have hitherto dealt with individual Negroes as representatives of their race—as social types. Mr. Baldwin makes a special bid to be considered as an individual—to have all men considered so. He approaches the matter as an artist and social historian; first as an artist, however. Social scientists and professional historians have unjustly been given preference to artists in this field of writing.
Baldwin’s successful proposal to the foundation was for work on an essay collection that would appear in 1955, the epoch-making
Notes of a Native Son.
To Robert Penn Warren
March 27, 1954 Barrytown, N.Y.
Dear Red:
That’s awful, about the leg! I hope it was only a Tennysonian and poetic fracture that will give you an opportunity to dream, and not one of those rough Hemingway-type broken legs. You sound cheerful about it, but then you have an enviable way of referring to your troubles. I wish I had it. As the youngest child I learned to make the most of mine.
I expected you to get the poetry award; you should have gotten it. But I’m sure this is not an injustice that excites you, and though it would have made me feel better to have you on the platform I can only congratulate you on your missing the whole thing. It was an
auto-da-fé
, with poor [Bruce] Catton, an awfully nice guy, catching hell, and me in my button-down
sanbenito
[
50
] boiling in the face.
Now everything is nice and quiet once again; I’m writing and I’m in very good spirits.
You could write an ode on that cast and turn the whole thing to profit. Always for bearing off fortune under the very nose of calamity.
Very best wishes,
Bellow had received the National Book Award for
Augie March.
Bruce Catton had won in the nonfiction category for
A Stillness at Appomattox
. Warren’s
Brother to Dragons
had been a finalist in poetry, but lost to Conrad Aiken’s
Collected Poems
.
To Oscar Tarcov
[n.d.] [Barrytown]
Dear Oscar:
I’m very glad the operation went off well and that you have your health again. Now for heaven’s sake, let hospitals alone.
Your letter gave me a stir. Yours isn’t a happy condition, though it’s better than the former one. I wonder what adjustment can be made in our friendship. I was never willing to give it up. You must know that. I realized you were down on your luck and had no margin for patience with me. But I was suffering too, and all I could do was withdraw from your harsh judgments. Had either of us been a little happier we would have done better by the other. But our miseries were anti-symbiotic, or something like that. I was in the strange condition of being envied while I lay at the bottom of hell. This being the case, I had no alternative but to close my mind.
It does no good to rake these things over now. I am as eager to bury them as you probably are.
My ideas about the future are vague. Bard College is pretty shaky right now, and anyway I think I may try to make a living at writing. It will have to be a sizable income, and it puts me in a strange position to be, in the ridiculous term people have imported, an
avant-garde
writer with a slick writer’s requirements. For one year it may be possible, and after that—who knows?
Merry Pesach, and love to everyone,
To John Berryman
[n.d.] [Barrytown]
Dear John—
Forgive silence. These days letters come hard for me. I attach much consequence to my inability to write them. It means my heart is lazy, and I am very tired. Also, it may mean that I am loath to say what I think, and that is miserable.