Dear John:
To raise money for one of my fantasies—and it’s the non-literary fantasies which always trap me—I booked myself all over the country to give talks and readings. Experience should have warned me—but then I have a fantasy way of experiencing experience—how dangerously fatiguing this would be. Higher powers of understanding now show me that I
wanted
to be fatigued, that my secret plan was to tire out some of my worst tendencies and escape from them. I hoped that they would be too weak to pursue and overtake me. The results are not yet in. There was also an unforeseeable complication. In September Allan Bloom came down with the Guillain-Barré, a paralyzing disease. Since he has no wife, no children, no one to take care of him but his friends, Janis and I would run back to Chicago from San Antonio, Montreal, Miami, etc. as often as possible. For a while he was in mortal danger. He’s better now. His chances for recovery are good. He may be able to walk again.
In the midst of this we heard of your stroke.
Your brain and your circulatory system, anatomy and physiology, have tried everything possible to do you in. Since you’ve overcome everything they’ve heaped on you perhaps they’ll let you be, withdraw for a decade or two out of admiration for your powers of resistance. The fact that your right hand was spared gives me hope. It may even be that by some secret inner process you preserved your right hand from damage. Imagination can keep you alive and as long as you have tales to tell you may be able to hold death at bay. I’m convinced that unfinished business has kept me alive. Scribbling and survival go together, I think. [ . . . ]
Go on writing your stories, and we will send waves of love by soul-radio.
Love,
To Martin Amis
December 30, 1990 Schomberg, Ontario
Dear Martin,
Janis and I are in Ontario in the top storey of her parents’ farmhouse looking into falling snow, trees, fields, a pond, and staring directly into the empty face of a Trojan-helmet chimney emitting smoke from wood chopped by me. We’ve just come out of the bath and we sit beside a huge white tub-with-a-view, a whirlpool or perhaps even a Jacuzzi into which you pour bubble-bath cream which foams up and makes you into an Olympian, Old Massa Zeus looking down on white Chanel clouds.
Too bad the people I care for are so widely distributed over the face of the earth. But then one tends to think about them all the more. Proximity isn’t everything. In this bedroom I have found a volume of Aldous Huxley’s letters written during the war years, many of them from Hollywood to correspondents in London and other distant places. His views might have been less kooky if he hadn’t left England. But there are such things as inner distances and homegrown or domestic kookiness. I come up with odd ideas on my own Chicago turf and friends in England also send me
their
strange views. Years ago in Greenwich Village I used to say to a particular pal, “There’s only me and thee that’s sane and I sometimes have my doubts about thee.” The occasion for these thoughts is the mention of [Salman] Rushdie’s name at the breakfast table, his embrace or re-embrace of Islam. I suggested that he may have believed mistakenly that the civilization of the West had once and for all triumphed over exotic fundamentalism. After all, the Pope didn’t excommunicate Joyce for writing
Ulysses
and the Church is even older than Islam. In short, it isn’t safe yet to say that such and such a phenomenon has passed into history. Just as we were thinking that
perestroika
and
glasnost
had purified Russia once and for all we read a speech by the chief of the KGB accusing the US of sending radioactive wheat and poisoned foodstuffs to feed the hungry in the Soviet Union.
The likes of us should quit politics and stick to dreams. It gave me pleasure to hear that I recently figured in a dream of yours, positively. I recently dreamt:
Dream I: I identify Tolstoy as the driver of a beat-up white van on the expressway. I ask the old guy at the wheel of this crumbling van what he can do to keep his flapping door from banging against the finish of my car. When he leans over to the right I see that he is none other than Leo Tolstoy, beard and all. He invites me to follow him off the expressway to a tavern and he says, “I want you to have this jar of pickled herring.” He adds, “I knew your brother.” At the mention of my late brother I burst into tears.
Dream II: A secret remedy for a deadly disease is inscribed in Chinese characters on my penis. For this reason my life is in danger. My son Greg is guarding me in a California hideout from the agents of a pharmaceutical company, etc.
Dream III: I find myself in a library filled with unknown masterpieces by Henry James, Joseph Conrad and others. Titles I have never seen mentioned anywhere. In shock and joy I open a volume by Conrad and read several pages, sentence after sentence after sentence in the old boy’s best style, more brilliant than ever. “Why in hell was I never told about this?” I ask. Certain parties have been holding out on us. I am indignant.
I depend on these dream-events to sort me out. Or perhaps to document my disorder more fully.
We may not be going to France after all. Our friend Bloom has for some months been down with the paralyzing Guillain-Barré syndrome and we can make no travel plans till we know whether the paralysis is temporary. Or not. He’s making progress but there won’t be any holidays until we’ve seen him through. Somebody at the BBC last year invited me to do a program in May and if the arrangements can be made perhaps we’ll fly over and catch you before you leave London.
Best wishes for the New Year to you and Antonia and the kids from Janis and me.
Love,
In an effort to be rid of the
fatwa
pronounced on him by Ayatollah Khomeini, Salman Rushdie had issued a tactical statement—later withdrawn—in which he claimed to have turned to Islam.
1991
To Louis Lasco
January 18, 1991 [Chicago]
Dear Louie:
The old ties it seems are still knotted. When you wrote that you needed more surgery it was hard to take. A good many of my old buddies have gone (also an ex-wife and some brothers). The emotional effects have been variable. I didn’t much mourn the Fish. But you turn out to be somebody I won’t emotionally relinquish. To get information I phoned Rudy Lapp, and he got in touch with Abe Held. Abe is an American incarnation of the old guys at Cratch-Mandel who used to be sent out to sit with the orthodox dying. You remember him? A left-winger from Humboldt Park. Dark-faced,
simpatico
, an unprominent chin, humane eyes. He reported that you had no listed number. He would stay on the case. However, he had no more information.
So your letter relieved me of immediate anxiety. You’ve been in my mind quite a lot. My wife took me to see
Cyrano
, which I watched with double vision—or at least a divided mind. Half the interest was in you. Sitting there in the old Fine Arts (S. Michigan Ave.) I fought the sentiments inspired by the death of the lover-warrior-poet. I lost. I had to walk out on my own tears and go down to the men’s room to pee.
Now the hard part of this note comes: If a loan would be useful (don’t get up on your high horse, remember that in 1929 we pooled our pennies to try to beat the slot machine in Simon’s drugstore on Division and Leavitt) I can spare the money.
[ . . . ] Your old friend hopes to hear from you soon.
To the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
January 23, 1991 Chicago
Nomination for the Gold Medal in Poetry:
In his younger years Karl Shapiro had a reputation for stormy dissent. He dared to attack T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He wrote that Eliot had made ours an age of criticism, and that criticism was the century’s substitute for poetry. He was, in short, a maverick dissenter. That America has a particular fondness for its mavericks is a famous fact. But so many mavericks are no more than cranks or posturers, display-figures and mere celebrities. Those philosopher-poets or statesmen who have principles to defend, truths which demand their allegiance, are the real heroes of dissent.
The poet shy and bold as a bullet,
Shapiro has written, characterizing himself in eight words. He is a quiet writer but also a warlike and deep one, a sort of American Jonah, obedient and disobedient at the same time. His controversial book was called
In Defense of Ignorance
but it was poetry not ignorance he was defending. He was a born poet and the irreverent polemic was his declaration of faith. Beyond controversy in his eighth decade, he continues to give us splendidly mature poems to study and admire.
To Stanley Crouch
January 25, 1991 Chicago
Dear Stanley Crouch,
How could I fail to appreciate your book [
Notes of a Hanging Judge
]—how often does one see intelligence, style and courage come together? Your subjects are monopolized by demagogy. The language(s) in which they are discussed prevent thinking, make it simply impossible. The race question (all the questions, the whole complex) is, after war, the single most terrible thing we have to face.
Therefore
very few are able to face it at all. Public discussion of the issues is virtually impossible. Do I say discussion? Real
descriptions
are also prohibited. Even if they weren’t prohibited (taboo) there might not be enough intellect and talent around to do the job.
The plain facts are yet to be stated, and it’s only men like you who have even begun to state them. So I hope (I pray!) that others will follow your example.
At your urging, I looked up [Meyer] Lansky in the library. Only one book, smart but sketchy, by a man named Hank Messick. I’ve begun to read it (the first half already read) and promise to think about it.
Many thanks, and best wishes,
To Ruth Wisse
February 12, 1991 Chicago
Dear Ruth,
Since we last dined (so pleasantly) I’ve been pursuing vain things (writing fiction) and I have (ungraciously and with unbecoming laziness) failed to answer important letters (like yours). I’ve thought now and then about your suggestion that I publish the talk I gave in Montreal but I can’t stop now to revise and edit. Besides, the lecture pleased you, and that’s the only sort of “publication” I care about. Where would I print it—in
Harper’s
or the
Atlantic
? In
Playboy
? Though you think so, I have no feud with
Commentary
. Norman [Podhoretz] and [Neal] Kozodoy have decided that I don’t exist. They review Gore Vidal and they ignore me. And they printed an idiotic story by Joe Epstein of which I am evidently the “protagonist”—a second-rate Jewish writer from Chicago. Gross, moronic, and clumsily written.
I could make those people very unhappy by describing them.
Ober es geyt mir nit in lebn
[
111
]. And besides, it wouldn’t really amuse me.
I think all the better of you for being so loyal to
Commentary
but I don’t believe you’ll ever bring it off—conciliation, I mean.
But I do read the magazine still and I did read your piece on anti-Semitism. I approved. I liked it. You’re right of course and I love you even when you publish in
Commentary
.
Yours affectionately,
To Karl Shapiro
February 23, 1991 Chicago
Dear Karl:
Apprehended while trying to do the right thing!
A conference call [to determine the recipient of the American Academy’s Gold Medal in Poetry] was arranged—staged—with [Donald] Hall and [Harold] Bloom, two highly experienced political infighters. I knew Hall once. Never met Bloom. He sounds like one of those new instruments, shaped like a sax and sounding like an oboe—I believe it’s called a basset-horn. A voice full of tremors, fluctuating between Oxford and the Bronx. These two conspirators of the East had met and agreed on a list. My additional nomination [of you] took them aback for a moment. One of them said, “Let him be listed but I shan’t vote for him.” The other said, “Neither will I.” Both parties then hung up on me. It’s been fifteen years since the Academy invited me to collaborate. They’re going to say that I still haven’t learned to follow the rules. But who knows—maybe Justice will be done. Let’s see what the ballots say. If I were as frivolous as I might be, and perhaps I should be, I could write a tale about the Typhoid Mary of Justice, a carrier of the germ whom the medical police are hunting on both coasts.
Sorry to hear of your phlebitis—I mean your excess of iron. But we need all the iron we can get, in these times. I have no current diseases, if you don’t count a small hemorrhage in the right eye. It gives me a damn sinister look, and won’t go away. For my time of life I’m in good condition. Janis tends me like a plant and now and then is rewarded with a flower.
Love to you and Sophie,
To Roger Kaplan