First, as to performance: You’re always happy when you read a man who has learned his trade, perfected it. He can be trusted. You hand yourself over to him, and that’s the first stage of your happiness.
Then you try to identify the species. What sort of book is it? The edge of doom, and over: the destruction of the planet, flood, apocalypse, the voice of God. Cohn is Noah, Cohn is Job, he is even Robinson Crusoe. The world’s end can’t put an end to Jewish wit. Your God is no humorist, however, and the novel is genuinely apocalyptic. Moreover, it
is
a novel, not the unfolding of an eschatology. It’s about our own preparation for the last things, the end. Our minds and feelings, decade by decade, have been forced towards it. It’s not a matter of a theme that finds “objective correlatives.” We have experienced the correlatives first. These prepared us thoroughly for the worst; we’ve seen it coming and agreed that we deserved or would deserve it. With approving vengefulness we have endorsed it. This we have done while breathing the air of nihilism and while applying the methods of “science” (the business of this science being to tell us the past, present and future of reality), but also while trying to hang on to decencies of liberalism. All this is in your book. I was intrigued, at times appalled, sometimes irritated, but by the end I found myself moved greatly. Things were as they should be at the end. My doubts passed into the background. There was nothing to doubt in such an emotion, or after-emotion.
It may surprise you to learn how Jewish, Jewish-American, Eastern seaboard and “liberal” I found
God’s Grace
to be: Cohn teaching the chimps, the lower primate branch destined perhaps to take its turn at the summit; Cohn deciding to make his human contribution to this development. God rejects this; the laws of animal nature can’t be waived in a day, thousands of millennia are needed. Yes, and also Shakespearean grace descending temporarily on Mary M.
After the final disaster Cohn starts over again (like a good Jew, one must keep trying), teaches speech, gives lectures, cultivates minds and morals. I identified myself often with the apes. I too was fascinated (long ago) by the Darwin-Wallace orthodoxy, but later it seemed to me that this materialist orthodoxy could not satisfy deeper questions about the nature of human consciousness. All this gave Cohn’s lectures a certain pathos. So did the Ethical Culture spirit of the community he wanted to create. All was to be well. You do treat this with the irony it deserves and see clearly the defeatism implicit in this form of “goodness,” but you appear to suggest that no alternative could ever occur to Cohn. The political sense of this is plain to you. Cohn’s sentimental will-to-goodness is fatal. It can’t anticipate evils, has no force, is unable to defend itself, and is just as unacceptable to God as human wickedness; indeed Cohn must, like the rest of humankind, die. Or should I rather have said “like the West which Cohn so completely represents”? Anyway, Cohn’s Isaac sacrifice profoundly moved me. I couldn’t say why, or
was alles bedeutet
[
92
].
I may not be your most representative reader, but I am an admiring one. You may find my reactions odd. For one thing they are unexpectedly political (I myself didn’t expect them to be that). But you wrote with a certain openness, and the book is unsettling and I predict that it will invite an unusual diversity of interpretations. For it
is
an unsettling book. In that respect it has much in common with
The Dean’s December
. What this may
bedeut
is that as honorable writers we have nothing else in these times to record.
I congratulate you and send you an affectionate embrace.
To Philip Roth
December 31, 1981 Chicago
Dear Philip,
Thanks for your generous note. Disappointing that I’m not going to be in Chicago in February. Alexandra and I are clearing out for the winter to British Columbia, which I look forward to as to a sanitarium. I’ve warned them in the English Department there that if they run me too hard I may have a breakdown. I’m not pretending, I’m ready for a padded cell.
The Dean
took it out of me; I wrote it in a kind of fit and I’m left with the peculiar residue that I don’t know how to get rid of. I can’t even describe it.
I discovered some time ago that there was nothing to stop me from saying exactly what I thought. I expected flak, and unpleasant results are beginning to come in, but I’m getting support too, which I hadn’t looked for.
Your capacity for looking things in the face is not inferior to mine. It’s presumptuous of me to go into a senior-citizen routine with you, but I’m being as straight with you as you are with me.
I thank you again for your letter. We’ll have dinner some other time.
Yours ever,
1982
To William Kennedy
February 4, 1982 Victoria, B.C.
Dear Bill:
What a delay! But
The Dean
, eighteen months of high excitement, a long spree for a codger, wore me out. To get away from the ensuing noise of battle we made plans to retreat to British Columbia. We were smarter than we could know, because we got away from a disastrous winter, too. Here it rains and rains, but the green moss is delicious to see and there are snowdrops out already. The nervous system was not attuned to this sanctuary. For the first month I suffered acutely from what I called boredom: It
was
boredom but with a wash of deep fatigue, black-and-blue spread over the gray.
By now I’ve read
Ironweed
(when I saw the heading
Lemonweed
, I preferred it; the novel has as much iron in it as it needs). It’s as good as
Billy
[
Phelan
], in my opinion. The key is lower, closer to death at every point. This must be the first human examination of skid row. I never saw another. Of an older American generation, Francis and Helen carried a more respectable, organized humanity with them when they began to sink. My guess is that today people sink from a more prosperous base but also a more disorderly one; they start out more chaotic, without Helen’s music or Francis’s conscience. Francis, a murderer, is also a traditional champion, the fated man, a type out of Icelandic or Irish epic. To kill is his destiny, and he kills American-style, with techniques learned in play, throwing a stone like a baseball and then swinging a bat in Hooverville. He considers himself a man of sin. No family refuge for him.
All this you do beautifully. Here and there you go a bit too far. The Katrina idyll, for instance, is too idyllic. You ought to reconsider. Not that there were no beautiful pagan ladies, I knew a few myself, but I’m not entirely comfortable with K.
Your
Esquire
article wasn’t badly edited, as editing goes. As much as the subject permitted it was slanted towards sensationalism. Your original piece was excellent. If now and then I shrank, it was myself that made me shrink. I
do
say things like “my fucking mouth.” All Americans do, but in print it looked out of character.
Tell Cork [Smith] he can count on me, and remember me to Dana.
Yrs, as ever,
Kennedy’s article in
Esquire
was “If Saul Bellow Doesn’t Have a True Word to Say, He Keeps His Mouth Shut.” K. Corlies (Cork) Smith was Kennedy’s editor at Viking.
To Alfred Kazin
March 9, 1982 Victoria, B.C.
Dear Alfred—
It made me very unhappy to learn that you were ill. As a member of the class of’15, I have a special concern with your well being; and despite decades of differences and disagreements—misunderstandings—I am attached to you and am distressed when you are sick.
We will discuss my failings (there is such a multitude of them) when you are better.
Yours affectionately,
To Leon Wieseltier
March 12, 1982 Victoria, B.C.
Dear Leon:
I don’t think you expected a quick reply to your Arendt articles; the subject (not Hannah but Jewish history) is denser than the Amazon jungle, and even if I were the Paul Bunyan of the machete I could never hack my way through. It would take a long conversation (years, no doubt) to begin to sort out the main problems. Hannah was rash, but she wasn’t altogether stupid (unlike her friend Mary McC[arthy]). You do grant her that in your essay. The trouble is that her errors were far more extensive than her judgment. That can be said of us all, but she was monumentally vain, and a rigid
akshente
[
93
]. Much of her strength went into obstinacy, and she was the compleat intellectual—i.e. she went always and as rapidly as possible for the great synthesis and her human understanding, painfully limited, could not support the might of historical analysis, unacknowledged prejudices, frustrations of her German and European aspirations, etc. She could often think clearly, but to think simply was altogether beyond her, and her imaginative faculty was stunted.
I once asked Alexander Donat, author of
The Holocaust Kingdom
, how it was that the Jews went down so quickly in Poland. He said something like this: “After three days in the ghetto, unable to wash and shave, without clean clothing, deprived of food, all utilities and municipal services cut off, your toilet habits humiliatingly disrupted, you are demoralized, confused, subject to panic. A life of austere discipline would have made it possible for me to keep my head, but how many civilized people lead such a life?” Such simple facts—had Hannah had the imagination to see them—would have lowered the intellectual fever that vitiates her theories. Her standards were those of a “noble” German intelligentsia trained in the classics and in European philosophy—what you call the “tradition of sweet thinking.” Hannah not only loved it, she actively disliked those who didn’t share it, and she couldn’t acknowledge this dislike—which happened to be dislike of those (so inconveniently) martyred by the Nazis. What got her gets us all: attachment to the high cultures of the “diaspora.” The Eros of these cultures is irresistible. At the same time assimilation is simply impossible—out of the question to reject one’s history. And insofar as the Israelis are secular, they are in it with the rest of us, fascinated and also eaten up by Greece, France, Russia, England. It is impossible for advanced minds not to be so affected. At the same time you are precisely where the Jew-hatred of those same cultures has situated you—in Tel Aviv. To complicate matters still more your survival depends upon a technology which . . . but you know more about this than I do. The more complex the problem of armament and the associated problems of diplomacy and of finances become, the more the assumption of a distinct Jewish destiny in Israel dwindles. It is possible to be a mini-superpower without ceasing to be an “excluded” people. (I wouldn’t call Israel a “pariah” among the nations.) It is also possible that this mini-superpower, which began as the national home of Zionists and of Jews fleeing destruction, presents itself to America’s leaders, some of them, as a convenient package to be traded for this, that or the other. What you call the pornographic strain in Western politics, mingling with supply-side economics, with the State Dep’t. Middle Eastern Contingent advising and participating, may not distinguish between diasporas and homelands.
Anyway your Arendt pieces are wonderful, even though the concluding sentence . . . but what else can one conclude but “on course” and “in the dark”? We mustn’t surrender the demonic to the demagogic academics. Intellectual sobriety itself may have to take the powers of darkness into account.
All best,
Wieseltier’s two-part essay on Arendt had appeared in back-to-back issues of
The New Republic
, where he concluded as follows: “There are not anti-Semites because there are Jews, and there are not Jews because there are anti-Semites. There are peoples, and a longing for paradise. The Jews are there for when the longing goes bad, when it ends in tumbrils or in boxcars. But now they have Israel, and America, and the night vision that has always sustained them, that has helped them to believe in the best even as they know the worst, and kept them steady, and on their course, in the dark.”
To Robert Boyers
March 12, 1982 Victoria, B.C.
Dear Boyers:
Well, yes, I suppose I will weather the storm, veteran that I am, although when it’s time to founder one simply founders. I was grateful for your letter, for supportive intelligence rather than “emotional” support. I quite clearly understood what I was getting into by writing the
Dean
. Characteristic of those young people at Northwestern to accuse me of distorting the facts—such facts as surround them and may be read daily in the papers, heard daily in the courts (where, however, they never go). The facts themselves shouldn’t much matter in a novel, but I went carefully into this particular case, talking to the lawyers and reading the materials in their files. I’m sure the Northwestern kiddies didn’t do that, they just told one another over and over that I had misrepresented the facts and out of this repeated telling they made a case and convicted me. Perhaps things have always been done like this but the crisis that surrounds us increases the will-to-lie and the gases given off by intellectual heads cause strange atmospheric distortions and bring down a special sort of acid rain.