With love and best wishes,
(It would be a mistake not to forgive me.)
To Anne Doubillon Walter
July 16, 1983 West Brattleboro, Vermont
Dear Anny,
You are probably used to my long silences. They aren’t a sign of absent-mindedness really or of old-fashioned procrastination (“the thief of time”). I am simply incapable of “keeping up.” I have never understood how to manage my time and now I have less strength to invest in attempted management. The days flutter past and this would be entertaining if I could compare them to butterflies, but there’s nothing at all picturesque or cheerful about this condition. Rather it makes me heavy-hearted. Not a leaden state, just something permanently regrettable. Thus I hold your letter of March 3rd, which I intended to answer immediately because it contained a request. I wanted to tell you that a book about me
vu par
yourself would please me greatly, and of course you have my permission without restriction.
I thought of looking for you in Paris last September, but Flammarion and Co. left me no time for myself. I had nothing but the use of my eyes for looking past my interlocutors at the Seine. In my “spare” time I was presented to Monsieur Mitterand at the Élysée. He is a pleasant man, but I had some rather sharp exchanges with Mssrs. [Régis] Debray and [Jack] Lang [minister of culture under Mitterand]. I have a friend in Chicago who says that a minister of culture is a fatal clinical symptom. It tells you “culture is more abundant here.” And if the French insist on using such American techniques for getting into the papers and onto the television screen, I don’t see how they can then have the
toupet
[
98
] to criticize the Americans. All they can say against the Americans is that they have made more progress in corruption. With a little help M. Lang will outstrip us.
For heaven’s sake, Anny, don’t worry about returning the loan. You will give me a good dinner one of these days, or send me some French books.
Dear old friend,
Régis Debray, famed veteran of the Che Guevara-led insurrection in Bolivia—sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment there but released after an international appeal led by Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux and others—had been appointed special adviser to Mitterand.
1984
To Philip Roth
January 7, 1984 Chicago
Dear Philip:
I thought to do some good by giving an interview to
People
, which was exceedingly foolish of me. I asked Aaron [Asher] to tell you that the Good Intentions Paving Company had fucked up again. The young interviewer turned my opinions inside out, cut out the praises and made it all sound like disavowal, denunciation and excommunication. Well, we’re both used to this kind of thing, and beyond shock. In agreeing to take the call and make a statement I was simply muddle-headed. But if I had been interviewed by an angel for the
Seraphim and Cherubim Weekly
I’d have said, as I actually did say to the crooked little slut, that you were one of our very best and most interesting writers. I would have added that I was greatly stimulated and entertained by your last novel, and that of course after three decades I understood perfectly well what you were saying about the writer’s trade—how could I
not
understand, or miss suffering the same pains. Still our diagrams are different, and the briefest description of the differences would be that you seem to have accepted the Freudian explanation: A writer is motivated by his desire for fame, money and sexual opportunities. Whereas I have never taken this trinity of motives seriously. But this is an explanatory note and I don’t intend to make a rabbinic occasion of it. Please accept my regrets and apologies, also my best wishes. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about the journalists; we can only hope that they will die off as the deerflies do towards the end of August.
To Leon Botstein
January 18, 1984 Chicago
Dear Leon,
I fiddled all summer like one of the three grasshoppers in the song, but since I returned to Chicago I have been too busy paying rent. (You will recall that the fiddling grasshoppers never paid rent.) My fingertips have lost their calluses. Alexandra’s greatly relieved that I have been too furiously busy to fiddle. A shack in the woods is being built for me where I will be able to play the Devil’s Trill Sonata to the foxes and the bears.
We’ve rather given up on visits, they’re too great a strain. My social talents, never great, have dried up. I am unable to meet groups, and although I don’t dislike gossip, my custom is to file it away for future use. Alexandra feels as I do, and besides she needs graduate students in Ergodic Theory, and without Ergodic Theory she is apt to grow gloomy. So we decline your kind offer, albeit with profuse thanks. [ . . . ]
Yours quite cheerfully,
To James Salter
January 25, 1984 Chicago
Dear Jim,
That was an illuminating number of
Esquire
. Everybody was more or less as destiny had sketched him out, and people did what they are renowned for doing, e.g., Truman Capote stepping on Katharine Hepburn’s feet. If he had bitten her he might have done some serious damage, but of all the harms he is capable of doing, this was certainly the least.
I thought you were perceptive about Eisenhower although you were interested in the military Eisenhower most of all, not in the President. How
weird
those people are in the White House showcase. Now there’s a subject one of us should turn his mind to.
I didn’t come to the party because I had two or three kinds of Asian flu at the same time. I’m sure I would have liked the party, although I am rarely happy to be the center of attention. Much better to be hidden in a corner looking at everything through a jeweler’s glass.
How is Karyl [Roosevelt], and did she get the job I recommended her for? The lady who telephoned from Long Island wanted to make sure that she would be discreet. A confidential secretary? A governess? A stand-in for the wife herself? Southampton has surely seen that kind of thing before. It seemed just the kind of luxury cruise Karyl would adore, on a yacht called the
F. Scott Fitzgerald
(updated, of course).
I think you should stand pat with Mike Strang and John Wix, and if Wix is not a good fellow to be involved with let’s not involve ourselves. I am firmly convinced that we will all be able to retire to the Riviera when our Colorado land is sold. (Having read Robin Maugham’s memoir of his uncle’s last years, I am not attracted by the Riviera. I shouldn’t like to die so far from a kosher butcher shop.)
Yours affectionately,
A special issue of
Esquire
, “Fifty Who Made a Difference,” had included Salter’s essay on Eisenhower. In the mid-1970s Bellow, Salter and Walter Pozen had purchased eighty-one acres near Carbondale, Colorado, which they would sell at a loss twenty years later.
To Karl Shapiro
February 7, 1984 Chicago
Dear Karl,
It
was
great, wasn’t it? And you’re absolutely right, we’ve always met heretofore in company (the Freifelds or others), and I was so delighted to have you and your friend all to myself at Les Nomades that I talked my head off. If I say that there is a particular sympathy between you and me I hope that doesn’t put you off. I know what it is to go into recoil when affection rises. I should acknowledge also that I was (what the kids call) hyper that night, because I had been banging away day and night for five weeks at a troublesome story. I didn’t know it but I was shortly to go down in flames. I am one of those nuts who will go to the zenith just prior to a collapse. But I am perfectly well now and have even sent you a copy of the story that caused the crash. You will see that it runs in the Valentine’s Day issue and that I appear with Larry Flynt and other fun personalities.
I hope that you aren’t neglecting your memoirs, the reading of which made me even more hyper. Give my best to your delightful lady friend.
Yours ever,
Neglected today, Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) was among the most highly regarded American poets of the Forties and Fifties. His major works include
V-Letter and Other Poems
, which won the Pulizer Prize in 1945. In 1969 he shared the Bollingen Prize with John Berryman. Shapiro’s “delightful lady friend,” whom he would shortly marry, was the translator Sophie Wilkins. Her English version, with Eithne Wilkins and Ernest Kaiser, of Robert Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities
is among the great feats of modern translation. Bellow’s long story “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” had just appeared in
Vanity Fair.
To Midge Decter
February 7, 1984 Chicago
Dear Midge:
Inquiries and complaints—mainly complaints—having been made about my participation in or sponsorship of your Special Issue of
Confrontations
(“Winners”), I read the offending number, which I had missed, and although the prize books you attacked seemed squalid enough, your own reviews were in such bad taste that it depressed me to be associated with them. I have for some time been struggling with the growing realization that a problem exists: About Nicaragua we can agree well enough but as soon as you begin to speak of culture you give me the willies. I was on the point of dropping from the Committee when Joseph Epstein last year read a paper in your symposium ascribing to me views I do not hold and pushing me in a direction I wouldn’t dream of taking. It was uncomfortable to be misunderstood and misused in a meeting of which I was one of the sponsors and even more uncomfortable to see his speech reprinted in
Commentary
. But where there are politics there are bedfellows, and where there are bedfellows there are likely to be fleas, so I scratched my bites in silence. Your Special Issue, however, is different. I can’t allow the editors of
Confrontations
to speak in my name, or with my tacit consent as board-member, about writers and literature. When there are enemies to be made I prefer to make them myself, on my own grounds and in my own language.
Le mauvais goût mène aux crimes
[
99
], said Stendhal, who was right of course but who didn’t realize how many criminals history was about to turn loose.
I am resigning from the board and request that you remove my name from your announcements. Sorry.
Yours sincerely,
The Committee for the Free World’s magazine was in fact
Contentions
, not
Confrontations
, though Bellow may have deliberately gotten the name wrong. The essay “Winners” in their Special Issue had mocked a number of the recent recipients of various American book prizes.
To Mario Vargas Llosa
February 20, 1984 Chicago, Ill.
Dear Mr. Vargas Llosa:
I write to invite you to join us in a meeting I am organizing under the auspices of the Olin Center [of the University of Chicago], to be held in Vermont from August 20th to August 25th, 1984. The participants, in addition to yourself, are to be Alexander Sinyavsky, Leszek Kołakowski, Heinrich Böll, V. S. Naipaul, A. K. Ramanujan, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Federico Fellini, Werner Dannhauser, Allan Bloom and myself.
My intention is to bring together a small group of serious writers to discuss our peculiar situation in the world today and to share with one another whatever wisdom and inspiration on the subject we may have. The politics of our century tend to crush imagination—to present us with spectacles and conditions which appear to make art irrelevant. At the same time, in a variety of ways, it is clear that our fragile enterprise remains one of the best hopes of humanity—if we can keep it alive. It is not that I hope to change very much by such a
rencontre
as I propose. But we might hearten one another and have a rare opportunity to reflect together.
The meeting is not intended to beget yet another protest against censorship or a complaint about the unartistic character of “bourgeois” life. Nor is it to be an exercise in flattery of art and the artist. Rather, it is intended to be the broadest kind of consideration of the writer’s physical and spiritual dependence on political life and of his responsibility to it—as well as his superiority to it—and of the claims of his art over against it. Lack of clarity about the perennial tension between art and politics may have something to do with the excessive hopes and the overly exposed position of writers in contemporary regimes. The nineteenth century’s great expectations for culture made possible the culture ministries of fascist and communist governments of the twentieth century.
I propose a five-day program with one three-hour session per day, tentatively treating the following themes:
Day 1: A philosophic discussion of the problematic relation of art to politics and morals, beginning from Rousseau’s
Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles
with its attack on Enlightenment views of the arts and its resuscitation of Plato’s criticism of poetry. This would, in addition to its intrinsic merit, serve to take us out of the narrow confines of our time. The paper would be presented by Allan Bloom and commented upon by Leszek Kołakowski.