Yours sincerely,
To Margaret Staats
November 28, 1966 [Chicago]
[ . . . ] My pleasure in life—to think about you. The white valentine. Face when making love. Hair when hands are raised to comb it. Teeth, lips, eyes, all music for my metronome.
I have enormous good luck!
Y.D.
In early December, Bellow and wife Susan formally separated.
1967
To Margaret Staats
January 11, 1967 [Chicago]
Your pinch-earmuffs were useful this freezing day. What is that Eliot line in “Journey of the Magi”? “A cold coming we had of it.” Well! It’s all cold and no coming. Like another poet’s fellow, Samson Agonistes, I’m grinding the Philistines’ corn. Don’t mind the complaining—these aren’t deep complaints and they seem to relieve me. I’m waiting for the current to light my poor bulb. [ . . . ]
Much love,
Y.D.
To Barley Alison
January 24, 1967 Chicago
Dear Barley:
My meeting with George [Weidenfeld] went off pleasantly and that is very odd because I was vexed with him and came prepared to say no. I shan’t say that he wooed and won me, because that’s a feminine and inapplicable phrase, but his proposal was too good to refuse. I say this objectively, with the objectivity of prudence, not of greed. He promised a first printing of forty thousand copies for my next book and a uniform edition of all the others. It was awkward because I do rather like [Tom] Maschler [editor in chief at Jonathan Cape]. Actually I could not give George a final answer without telling Maschler the terms of the offer, just as I could not quit George without a final meeting. But I have written Maschler—I tell you this privately; it is a privileged communication—to say that it would be insane of me to turn down George’s proposal. I am now waiting to hear from him.
George and I discussed you, of course. It was made quite clear that I would not have stayed with W[eidenfeld] and N[icolson] had you not been there. You may be sure that I betrayed no confidence. George knows nothing of our conversations. I told him that you should have had more influence in the business, and he told me how valuable you were to him. In this I think he was only partly smarmy, for he does value you highly (I am trying to imagine the cavern in which his values are stored). But he did not repeat what you had said in your letter about the three directors of the subsidiary company, and all of that. He said only that he planned to put you at the head of a separate organization. I earnestly hope that you will not let George snow you and that you will consult your family and your lawyers before you go into this.
So there it is. I shall probably be staying with W[eidenfeld] and N[icholson] and, better yet, with you. This last pleases me more than all the rest. I can assure you that the prospect of injuring you by going to Cape did not make me at all happy.
Yours affectionately,
Barley Alison was for many years Bellow’s British editor.
To Barley Alison
May 18, 1967 Chicago
Dear Barley,
Your letter is haunting me with Utopian visions. I want very much to come [to Almería, Spain, where Barley had a vacation residence], of course, but I don’t know yet whether I can manage it. During the summer I usually have numerous child problems. One of my sons is quite a young man and presents no problems, but the others are still much in need of Papa, and I am, with all my faults, a responsible papa. Still, I may be able to get away for a few weeks. Actually, I’d like nothing in the world better.
People who met you in New York said afterwards that they could easily understand why I have become your partisan and defender. You charmed everyone and I think you ought to have come to New York long ago. You remind me a bit of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, watching the lights of Christ-minster from his tiny hamlet while the years went by. You must come back often now.
You’re sure to have a marvelous summer in that place. If I should turn up, which is not very likely, I shall come alone and curl up in a corner.
Yours affectionately,
To Margaret Staats
June 7, 1967 Athens
When we landed in Rome Monday officials came on board to tell us the war [in the Middle East] had started and that our flight would stop in Athens. Somewhat stunned, I wasn’t totally disappointed. Feel a bit scared at the sound of bombs and guns blasting from the radio. But had to go forward and spent Mon. and Tues. fighting for a seat on the plane. I’m going tonight (Thurs. A.M.) and should be in Tel Aviv this hour tomorrow. Couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. At US Embassy just now I had my passport validated for the Middle East, signing various documents. It puts one in touch with reality. Otherwise one’s decades begin to feel empty like an old amusement park no longer patronized and oneself the caretaker remembering childhood, boyhood-youth as side shows (the fire-eater, the strong man, tunnel-of-love, etc.). This is much better. Though I do love you and my little children and a few other people—but this is all movie-talk! I’ll be back on sched. for our holiday. I’ll keep in close touch. Please don’t bug
Newsday
about me. And don’t
worry
so. After all, millions of lives are involved.
Love from Y. D.
On June 3, Bellow had flown from the US to report for
Newsday
on the crisis that would lead to the Six-Day War in the Middle East.
To Margaret Staats
June 10, 1967 Tel Aviv
This
bloody thing is simply not to be believed. I ask myself how it would look from News York, but then I can’t even say how it looks from here. From the slick Hilton to the battlefields to the Kremlin, etc.—or standing around in an elegant jacket watching armored columns shooting it out, or children being brought up from bomb shelters where parents have kept them for four days under shelling. I don’t find it easy to match the pieces. I’m safe and well, and get along perfectly on three hours of sleep. Or none. I found I could wait up all night for a plane, never go to bed at all for forty-eight hours, and feel no fatigue. Only, sometimes, depressed. Today I was up at 4:00 A.M. At 1:00 P.M. I remembered it was my birthday.
Now it’s 10:00 at night. I face a large bed which would look far better if it contained you. Write Y loving D here.
To Rosalyn Tureck
September 21, 1967 Chicago
Dear Rosalyn,
Wonderful of you to write. Yours was just the sort of letter I needed at a trying moment. As an admirer of your music, I don’t like to miss your concert. The odd fact is, however, that I have at last decided to visit Africa and have accepted an assignment from
Holiday
to go and hover over the sources of the Nile in a helicopter and to write impressions or effusions. I leave just before Thanksgiving and return after Christmas, which lets me out of a couple of trying holidays, but makes it impossible for me to hear you, alas. We shall keep in touch, I hope, and see a good deal of each other yet.
Best wishes,
A classmate of Bellow’s at Tuley, Rosalyn Tureck (1914-2003) was an internationally acclaimed interpreter of Bach on piano and harpsichord. (Glenn Gould would name her as his only influence.)
To Benjamin Nelson
October 13, 1967 Chicago
Dear Ben,
You are absolutely right about Brecht and [Eric] Bentley, but I tremble for you or for anyone who is sucked into these theatre quarrels. A most unstable and undesirable crowd; they have inherited all the charlatan traditions of theatre and lost contact with all the good things. Of course it can be argued that no playwright has
any
obligations to historical truth, though if he is writing for a modern, critical and intelligent audience (if such there be), he had better not offend too grossly.
How true to the facts was
Marat-Sade
? Only last night I read in
Encounter
a letter from Leo Labedz on the new [Rolf] Hochhuth play [
Soldiers, Necrology on Geneva
] having to do with Churchill’s crimes against the Poles in exile. Churchill is accused of murder, no less, and Hochhuth says he has years of study behind the charge. I doubt that very much and Labedz is furious. I suppose this puts Hochhuth’s play in the cold-war propaganda category, and I assume that it’s propaganda you oppose and not the disfigurement of facts by a creative person.
Could you send me a copy of the speech you gave in California? I want very much to read it.
Yours affectionately,
Benjamin N. Nelson (1911-77) taught history and sociology at the University of Minnesota, where he met Bellow, and later at the New School for Social Research. His books include
Freud and the Twentieth Century
(1957) and a posthumous collection of essays
, On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science, and Civilizations
(1981).
1968
To Edward Shils
January 20, 1968 Chicago
Dear Ed:
I spoke to your mother yesterday. She complains that she is feeling weak, but she sounded better to me. Her voice seemed stronger. I think it knocked her out to come back from [Dr.] Horner’s office on the train. She couldn’t get a cab, as I assume she wrote you. Anyway, I think I hear some improvement.
I came back from NY a few days ago with my Gaullist ribbon and medal. Your last letter was on the dining-room table and I re-read it for company. The situation in Chicago is odd and getting odder. It’s a peculiarly contactless life, when you’re not here. There are lots of people in these buildings. As if the pioneer emptiness were set upright, with indoor plumbing, books, food, but the spirit of the prairies still dominant. [ . . . ] No one other than David Grene asks me to dinner. If it weren’t for my divorce case I would have no social existence whatsoever [ . . . ] I simply get up in the morning and go to work, and I read at night. Like Abe Lincoln. When I go out there’s my city—sodden, mean and boring. [ . . . ] I tell myself that in any great city I could see as many people as I liked and wonder why I put up with such privation. It gets one. In that same light I saw N[athan] Leites with his bald musclebound skull hurrying through melting slush, moving with ballistic energy from 53rd to 55th, a bottle under his arm—moving with such force, and the muscles of shyness and analytic subtlety (probably pointless) gathered up on his shaven head. [ . . . ]
Anyway, there it is. I miss you very much. And I may turn up [in England] in mid-May.
Love,
To Meyer Schapiro
March 18, 1968 Oaxaca
Dear Meyer—
I thought you
were
in England. Now that I know you’re at home I shall certainly come to see you before you leave.
This is my second morning in Oaxaca. When you wake up in the tropics you understand the horror of your Northern fatigue. And the flowers tell you that you have been around much too long. Unfinished business is my excuse.
Of course I want to contribute to the Delmore fund. And I hope John Berryman will become, and remain, one of the judges. I haven’t seen him in two years, and he was in poor condition then, in full alcoholic bloat. I’m very fond of Berryman, and I admire him. I see why these self-destructive lives are led. But I can’t convince myself that it is a good tradition.
Did you receive tear-sheets of a longish story [“The Old System”] I published in January? I thought you might be interested in it.
The New Yorker
wanted deletions, so I gave it to
Playboy
in protest—lucrative protest. However, there are no poor but honest magazines. The quarterlies are about as corrupt as the slicks, and Hugh Hefner has pleasanter vices than Wm. Phillips.
My best wishes to you,
To Richard Stern
July 16, 1968 [East Hampton]
Cher
Richard—
The summer is hot in East Hampton, and all the artist roses are preening, even the ailing and the possibly dying are drinking their gin in the sun and talking welfare, reform or revolution, anarchy, guerilla warfare, action—building stately mansions on foundations of personal wretchedness.
The swimming is excellent.
I am getting in some good
travail
.
Since you mention weights and measures, I am about ten pounds too heavy and now eat yogurt at lunch.
Toujours poursuivi des femmes, pourtant tracassé. Des circonstances assez marrant. Elles sont
toutes
fachées—au nord, ouest, et ici même. Mais je continue tout de même de faire mes devoirs
[
78
].