To Owen Barfield
August 13, 1976 Chicago
Dear Mr. Barfield—
By now you will perhaps have written me off as someone who straggled in and then faded out in pursuit of other enthusiasms. The fact is that I continue as well as I can with Steiner and that I am still trying to train myself. I haven’t been able to do this steadily. Last autumn I decided—took it as a duty—to write a short book about Israel. I’d never seriously studied Zionism (i.e. the terrible question of the fate of the Jews) but having come to Jerusalem with my wife I “discovered” it; I began to assume a degree of responsibility for it. A solution is beyond anyone’s powers, but I wanted at least to state the problem of Israel clearly to the civilized public. For six months I soaked myself in the literature of the subject and spent my nights in reading and my days taking interviews and writing them down. The results have just appeared in
The New Yorker
(July 12 and 19). They aren’t satisfactory but they seem to have had a certain effect. I worked very hard at them. I worked myself into such a state of fatigue that I was unable to pull myself together physically, much less write thoughtful letters. The morning meditations, which I continued faithfully, helped somewhat, although there were days in which I could only ramble through them in a promissory way. Later, I would do them properly.
I didn’t mind your dismissing
Humboldt
. I expected that. It is a comical and very American examination of the cares and trials of “civilized” people in a civilized country. These cares are by now plainly ludicrous and one can’t be truly serious about them. The ultimate absurdity is that it is the spiritual matters, which alone deserve our seriousness, that are held to be absurd. Perhaps it was wrong of me to put this longing for spiritual fruit in a comic setting. I knew that you could never approve and would think it idiotic and perhaps even perverse. But I followed my hunch as a writer, trusting that this eccentric construction would somehow stand steady.
I shall send you the little Jerusalem book when it is published in October.
With best wishes,
To Louis Lasco
August 25, 1976 [Chicago]
Highly esteemed Katastrof Efimovitch—my dear school friend:
I thank you for your congratulations. I am afraid I have too many irons in too many fires; letters go unanswered. Like yourself I should be thinking of retirement. I used to flinch from this as a bourgeois idea. Whenever I emerged through the door of a jet plane into California sunshine my first thought was: “Retirement!” And then: “But I am too young!” (Meaning, in fact, that I had not yet satisfied my adolescent ambitions.) But now I think more kindly of people who move gracefully and tranquilly give up, surrender themselves to a quiet and gentle elderliness. Maybe this [long adolescence] is the only maturity I am destined to know.
I don’t see Glotzer in Chicago—nor Freifeld, nor Peltz, nor S. J. Harris; none of the Division St. children. Some of them are annoyed with me. I can’t say that this causes me much regret. I’m fond of them but nearly fifty years of the same bluffing have worn out my powers of politeness. I seem to have been an extraordinarily polite young person. I sometimes miss Peltz, a good man to have a hearty dinner with. He has some sort of grievance against me. I suppose it will last a decade or so, and we will be reconciled just before the
articulo mortis
[
84
].
I enjoy hearing from you. “Rosh Hashanah is at our throats again” made my day. Give your dear old mother my warmest regards. I begin to believe that her brother actually was reincarnated in me.
Your affectionate friend,
Bedouin Trofimovitch
To Teddy Kollek
September 9, 1976 Chicago
Dear Teddy,
Yours was the first of the Israeli reactions [to
To Jerusalem and Back
] and I was understandably apprehensive. The form I adopted obliged me to write quite explicitly about people—and one never knows. There are art historians who explain that two hundred years ago people accepted unfavorable portraits of themselves; warts, harelips, paunches, wrinkles and all. See what Goya did to the Spanish Bourbons. They didn’t seem to mind, but our far less noble contemporaries wish to appear without a flaw. One of the paradoxes of democracy.
Your letter pleased me very much and I have received many kind notices from Israel and from America. So I’m encouraged to return to Jerusalem. If you should know of an available apartment, we would be most grateful to have it.
With best wishes for the New Year,
As ever,
To Margaret Shafer
October 15, 1976 [Chicago]
Dear Margaret:
Your note delighted me. There are days, in Chicago, when I think enviously of life in Annandale-on-Hudson, and of intelligent ladies who read and write under the beautiful trees. (Or beautiful ladies and intelligent-looking trees.) I wish I hadn’t been so very stupid in Dutchess County—I missed so many things. But then the County was rather dumb about me. I wasn’t received in the “best” places. It was funny, at times. Ellison and I would drink martinis together, and then he’d go off in his Chrysler to dinner, leaving me to grill my solitary steak. He and the nobs loved one another. I was amused. Almost no damage to my self-esteem (not easily dented).
My best to you and Fritz,
Canadian-born Margaret Shafer, wife of Fritz Shafer, professor of religion at Bard, taught piano privately and organized music festivals in Annandale-on-Hudson. She and Bellow had been friends from his arrival there in 1953.
To Toby Cole
October 18, 1976 Chicago
Dear Toby,
I am absolutely sure that you are right, and it comforts me to be so well protected by a lady for whom I have so much affection. I think though that everything should be done to protect that ninny [Leon] Kirchner. If he had as many feet as a centipede I know that he would manage somehow to get them all into his mouth. But he has worked long and hard, and I should like to see him produce his opera without interference. Let United Artists do what it will about his expired rights.
We
should not remind those United Artists of their contractual powers. I don’t like being on the side of Goliath, Behemoth and Leviathan. The proper course for us is to say nothing and to hope for Leon’s sake that the mighty corporation will hear, see and feel nothing. [ . . . ]
Yours as ever,
Leon Kirchner (1919-2009) was composing
Lily
, an opera based on
Henderson the Rain King
. It would have its premiere at New York City Opera in May 1977.
To John Cheever
November 10, 1976 Chicago
Dear John,
Will I read your book? Would I accept a free trip to Xanadu with Helen of Troy as my valet? I am longing to read the galleys. Since I have to go to New York this weekend, and also to Princeton to see my son Adam playing Antonio, the heavy in
The Tempest
, I shall get Harriet Wasserman at Russell and Volkening to obtain a set of galleys for me from Knopf. I would like to see you too, but I don’t know when I will be free from this mixture of glory and horror. But I will write to you pronto about the book, which I’m sure to read with the greatest pleasure.
Yours,
“This mixture of glory and horror” refers to the decision of the Swedish Academy, on October 21, to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bellow.
To John Cheever
November 23, 1976 Chicago
Dear John:
Well, I expected the best and that’s exactly what I got in
Falconer
. It’s splendid. For two days it was my cyclone cellar; I hid out in it. It wasn’t without surprises. You generally take a lighter view of the ruins. This is much the toughest book you ever wrote—warlike, nothing softened. But the more decay you got into, the purer the book became.
Falconer
is elegant. You remember what Orwell said about Henry Miller, that Henry had put the spoken language back into literature and gotten rid of the language of protocol. True enough, up to a point, but Henry poured his peculiar cafeteria fruit salad—his “philosophy” and his “poetry”—over everything. You arrange to have the best and the worst live together in high style. But I know you don’t go for this literary stuff, and I’m knocking it off now. What I felt all through was an enraged determination to state the basic facts. You stated them, all right, and gave your pal the most intense satisfaction. For which he thanks you from a full heart.
You should sell hundreds of thousands of copies, unless the country is farther gone in depravity than I think. It delighted me that in the
Paris Review
interview you mentioned the pleasant and intelligent people who read the books and write thoughtful letters about them and who have no visible connection with advertising, journalism or the academic world. I love those people. They sustain me, too, as you observed. Your interviewer might have followed up on this important statement.
Ever yours,
Don’t you generally go off after you’ve finished a novel? What you want now is a delicious holiday.
To Teddy Kollek
November 29, 1976 Chicago
Dear Teddy,
I want to get this off to you before I leave for Stockholm—I haven’t even prepared the formal lecture. Under this inconceivable barrage I find it hard to concentrate. I did however take great pleasure in the review of the Jerusalem book that you wrote for
The New Republic
—it was clear, it was just, it was intelligent and elegant; I doubt that any other mayor could have written it.
Now as to the requests: People of America have begun to speak of the protection of national resources. I have decided that I am such a national, and even international, resource and am issuing an appeal for protection. Here and now I have a choice to make between becoming a Jewish dervish (the whirling and howling kind) or remaining a writer. Your situation is different, you have a political vocation and you have to deal with all of these outfits. As for Mr. Bernstein, the UJA has contacted me. His letter said that he did not want to use an extract from my Jerusalem book and he urged me to write something “fresh and original” (a wonderful choice of words). The fact is that the Jerusalem book is coming out in France, Italy, England, Germany, etc. and even in Japan, and I feel that it is important that I should maintain a stance of disinterestedness and that it would not be a useful thing for anyone if I were to identify myself with all good Jewish causes indiscriminately. I dread becoming an adjunct, a rubber stamp. I need say no more to you. Less than a word is all you need because you are wiser than most.
Yours with every good wish,
1977
To Adam Bellow
January 31, 1977 [Chicago]
Dear Adam -
I’ve never been so cold. The weather, making me listless, proves that I have some lizard ancestors, connections with the Mesozoic. You probably suspected it all along. It is five P.M., the temperature is zero, the wind is blowing at twenty m. p. h. And I am about to pour myself a strong drink and rejoin the mammalian order.
Your affectionate Father
To Owen Barfield
February 5, 1977 Chicago
Dear Barfield:
On the contrary, I should have written to you long ago. Nor did I expect you to acknowledge the
Jerusalem
book, which I sent in lieu of a letter, thinking that it would explain why I was so poor a correspondent. I find it most difficult to pull myself together. It is all too bewildering. Steiner makes matters sometimes easier, sometimes much harder. This is not because of the new perspective he gives me; in some ways I am drawn to him because he confirms that a perspective, the rudiments of which I always had, contained the truth. But to reassemble the whole world after a different design isn’t easy for a man of sixty. I keep my doubts and questions behind a turnstile and admit them one at a time, but the queue is long and sometimes life is disorderly. Besides I can’t put into what I write the faint outlines I am only beginning to see. That would muddle everything, and it would be dishonest, too, in a novice. Writing as a comic novelist, I am capable of anything, mixing desperation and humor just as I like (in my own mind, defining Herbert’s “wearie” in “The Pulley” as weary with one’s own absurdities). But I was serious in the
Jerusalem
book. It produced a great deal of discussion (to answer your question about its reception) and, in Israel, predictably, many polemics. I don’t at all mind being attacked. It rather pleases me, even when the attackers are wicked or idiotic or ideologically muscle-bound. I’d sooner know how things are. Such is my present state of mind, anyway. Perhaps it indicates that I protected myself too well in the past.