It appears I have to run to catch the postman with this, so I’ll sign off. Write me a letter.
Love,
To David Peltz
July 2, 1975 Casa Alison, Carboneras, Almería, Spain Dear Dave:
The place is beautiful. I’m not, particularly. I arrived in an exhausted state and have been sleeping, swimming, eating, reading and little else. Let’s see if I can get myself flushed out. Life lays a heavy
material
weight on us in the States—things, cares, money. But I think that the reason why I feel it so much is that I let myself go, here, and let myself feel six decades of trying hard, and of fatigue. My character is like a taste in my mouth. I’ve tasted better tastes. But it’ll pass, and one of these days I’ll be able to see that the ocean is beautiful. And the mountains, and the plants, and the birds. Life isn’t kind to people who took it on themselves to do something about life. Uh-
unh
!
Adam is here with us—a marvelous young man, surprisingly good-natured for a son of mine. He smiles at his peevish pa and goes on reading science fiction and thrillers. The queen [Bellow’s new wife, Alexandra] is good-natured, too. She’s in her parlor eating mathematical bread and honey. Even I have an occasional good moment, and when I’ve slept myself out I may stop being such a bear.
I want to wish you a happy birthday and to ask whether you found time to stop at the Corbins and pick up the trifles I bought for you. I often think about you and wonder how it is to have lost a father at sixty. Sixty alone is hard enough. But I shan’t talk to you about death now. God knows there’s plenty of that in the book. Oddly enough, I don’t think much about
Humboldt
. It’s like the end of something. I’m like a fat Sonja Henie—no more fancy figures on the ice. Overweight. That’s the end of that. I’m hanging up my skates, retiring. If I ever try it again, it’ll be in my own back yard for God’s amusement.
Best to Doris, and love,
Bellow had married Romanian-born mathematician Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea the previous autumn.
To Owen Barfield
July 15, 1975 Carboneras, Almería, Spain
Dear Mr. Barfield—
That you should come down to London to answer the ignorant questions of a stranger greatly impressed me. I daresay I found the occasion far more interesting than you could. You were most patient with a beginner trying to learn his A-B-C’s. I continue to study your
Unancestral Voice
. It’s hard going—some forty years of thought and reading condensed—but I have a strong hunch that you are giving a true account of things. In these matters illumination counts for as much as the sort of “hard proofs” we have been brought up to demand, and lately I have become aware, not of illumination itself, but of a kind of illuminated fringe—a peripheral glimpse of a different state of things. This makes little sense to you perhaps.
Thank you for coming to talk to me.
Sincerely,
To Owen Barfield
July 24, 1975 Carboneras, Almería, Spain
Dear Mr. Barfield:
Your letter was very welcome. I’m glad you saw some merit in
Herzog.
At the Athenaeum [Barfield’s London club, where he and Bellow had lunched] I was a totally unknown quantity and felt that I had failed to show why I should be taken seriously. I continue to pore over
Unancestral Voice
and it is most important that you should be willing to discuss it with me. I can readily see why you would take little interest in contemporary fiction. Those who read it and write it are easily satisfied with what your Meggid calls lifeless memory-thoughts. For some time now I have been asking what kind of knowledge a writer has and in what way he deserves to be taken seriously. He has imagination where others have science, etc. But it wasn’t until I read your book on Romanticism that I began to understand something about the defeat of imaginative knowledge in modern times! I don’t want to labor the point which you yourself have brought to my attention; I only want to communicate something in my own experience that will explain the importance of your books to me. My experience was that the interest of much of life as represented in the books I read (and perhaps some that I wrote) had been exhausted. But how could existence itself become uninteresting. I concluded that the ideas and modes by which it was represented were exhausted, that individuality had been overwhelmed by power or “sociality,” by technology and politics. Images or representations
this
side of the mirror have indeed tired us out. All that science did was to make the phenomena technically (mathematically) inaccessible, leaving us with nothing but ignorance and despair. Yes, psychoanalysis directed us to go into the Unconscious. From the dark forest—a sort of preserve of things unknown—painters and poets like good dogs were to bring back truffles . . .
Tomorrow my Spanish holiday ends. My wife and I are returning via London and will be there for about ten days. I hope you will be kind enough to give me a few hours more of your time.
It was very good of you to send me the Steiner book. Will you have lunch with me (as my guest this time) in London? You speak of yourself as the servant of your readers, but this reader, though eager to talk with you, hesitates to impose himself.
Sincerely yrs,
To Philip Roth
August 8, 1975 [Chicago]
Dear Philip,
As your Czechoslovak-writers-aid program was to have run for only one year and, as Mrs. [Esther] Corbin tells me, that year is coming to a close, I should like to know whether you propose to continue. For my part, I’d be glad to go on sending fifty bucks a month.
The party last June was the one and only party in memory that felt to me like a real party. I didn’t know what I was saying or doing. It was bliss. I do remember trying to talk to you about The Jewish Writer but I was quite drunk and you were wasting your time. So let’s try again.
My wife is going to Jerusalem to give mathematical lectures. I shall be carrying her lecture notes. We will stop in New York en route (about the 8th of November). Shall we try to have a sober conversation or let well enough alone?
Yours sincerely,
To Margaret Staats
September 15, 1975 [Chicago]
On the death matter: With me or without, the preoccupation would have returned. After that night [ . . . ] I cried with relief but psychically the death (in the shadow-style of the psyche) took place. Many times (Yeats isn’t the first to tell us) we die, many times rise again. As for the terror, it drives us to think—it has its function. We don’t
go
without that.
I don’t know how I ever came to believe that a death-comedy had to be written. Perhaps it was
Measure for Measure
that put it into my head. Charlie [Citrine, narrator-protagonist of
Humboldt’s Gift
] himself is in and out of the grave continually. Of course I might have spared you but we were bound together in this comical-death complex, were appalled together and laughed together. We wore the same team cap for a few years. It didn’t occur to me that you would be affected so strongly.
But here I am, writing to you on Yom Kippur!
Early this morning Samuel S. Goldberg telephoned and asked whether I had read the review in
The New Yorker
by that “anti-Semitic pornographer.” And I remembered that you had mentioned Updike. If I hadn’t taken Daniel to see
Jaws
I suppose I might have been upset.
Jaws
gave me perspective. No one has ever accused me of writing bad English—I’m sure I slipped up here and there, in a book of more than five hundred pages that would be inevitable. This morning I’m actually frozen, covered with a thick ice of Jewish inhibitions. Shall I write my next book in Yiddish? But perhaps the grammatical lapses were all Charlie’s. Besides, did H. W. Fowler ever write an American novel?
Send me a comforting note. Forgive me for making D[emmie]’s plane crash.
Love,
In
Humboldt’s Gift,
Demmie Vonghel, a character unmistakably based on Maggie, dies in an airplane crash. In
The New Yorker
, John Updike had criticized
Humboldt
as overwrought and shapeless, comparing it unfavorably to
The Adventures of Augie March
.
To Mark Shechner
September 30, 1975 Chicago
Dear Mr. Shechner:
I liked your Rosenfeld lecture very much. I agreed with most of it. Perhaps I wouldn’t write to you about Isaac even if I were not running because I am still thinking about his life, his character, his thoughts and his death and am not yet ready to discuss him. But I will say this: He combined all the reticence and shyness of a small sickly Jewish boy from Chicago with heroic ideas about destiny. And after all, history would not have been history without these apparently timid and inconspicuous Jewish children.
May I keep your essay to refer to another time or do you want it returned? I am leaving Chicago for a few months but my secretary, Mrs. Esther Corbin, will return it if you need it.
Many thanks for letting me see it.
Sincerely yours,
Mark Shechner (born 1940) edited
Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader
(1988) and has written numerous books including
The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays
(1990).
To Ruth Miller
[n.d.] Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Jerusalem
Dear Ruth:
That was a welcome letter. I haven’t forgotten you, either. If I was your first teacher, you were my first pupil, and my heart hasn’t altogether turned to stone. I’ve often reproached myself for my impatience towards you. I mitigate nothing by telling you that I’m like my poor father, first testy then penitent. One must free one’s soul from these parental influences. Poor Papa’s soul was his, after all, and mine is mine, and it’s sheer laziness to borrow his behavior. We all do that, of course. He did it, too. Only he was too busy with life’s battles to remove
his
father’s thumbprints and cleanse the precious surfaces. We’ve been luckier. We have the leisure for it.
I read [Louis] Simpson’s piece in the
Times
before your letter came, and I didn’t quite know how to deal with it. It was cheap, mean, it did me dirt. I had thought Simpson was paying no more attention to me than I’ve paid to him over the years. One can’t look into everything, after all. I was indifferent to his poetry and it was only fair that he should pay no attention to what I wrote. I had no idea that he was in such a rage. But age does do some things for us (nothing comparable to what it takes away) and I have learned to endure such fits. I don’t ask myself why the
Times
prints such miserable stuff, why I must be called an ingrate, a mental tyrant, a thief, a philistine enemy of poetry, a narcissist incapable of feeling for others, a failed artist. Nor why this must be done in the Sunday
Magazine
for many millions of readers. Such things are not written about industrialists, or spies, or bankers, or trade-union leaders, or Idi Amin, or Palestinian terrorists, only about the author of a novel who wanted principally to be truthful and to give delight. It doesn’t stab me to the heart, however. I know what newspapers are—and what writers are, and know that they can occasionally try to destroy one another. I’ve never done it myself, but I’ve seen it done, often enough. [ . . . ] Louie’s hatred and my discomfort are minor matters, comparatively. He can’t
kill
me. He’s only doing dirt on my heart (by intention—he didn’t actually succeed). [ . . . ]
But I was upset to find you mentioned in his piece, and this is why I say that I didn’t quite know how to deal with it. I wondered why
you
should find it necessary to testify against me and say that I was an artist
manqué.
After many years in the trade, I’m well aware that the papers twist people’s words and that at times their views are reversed for them by reporters and editors. But you
were
angry with me, and Stony Brook
isn’t
exactly filled with my friends and admirers. Nor do I, from
my
side, think of Stony Brook as a great center of literary power in which a renaissance is about to begin, led by Kazin and Jack Ludwig and Louie. (Not that I’ve written reviews and articles about
them
.) So I didn’t expect you to say kind things about me. But I didn’t expect unkind things in print, and I was shocked by the opinion attributed to you that
Humboldt
was my confession of utter failure. Louie I could dismiss. A writer who doesn’t know quality when he sees it doesn’t have to be taken seriously. A reader who doesn’t see that the book is a very funny one can also be disregarded—one can only wonder why the deaf should attend concerts. But you I don’t dismiss. And I thought, “I’ve steered Ruth wrong. What has this girl from Albany Park gained by ending up in Stony Brook? It is
possible
that she should have become one of these killers?”