But it wasn’t a good thing to be cured of—the habit of correspondence, I mean. I’m aware that important ground was lost. One way or another it happened to most of the people I knew—a dying back into private consciousness and a kind of miserliness. You begin to work with proxies whom you’ve appointed yourself.
I suppose the letters in
Herzog
reflect this solipsistic condition: how and why intimacies die and the insanity of “going public” that results. With me, for a long time, it’s been fiction or nothing. So is it too late to mend? (A Victorian Christian question.)
Having read you, I’m certain that you’re free from this ailment or incapacity. You’re able to “say it all.” Nobody else is so full, fluent and open. In this department it’s you who are the
cher maître
.
To William Kennedy
May 6, 1992 [Chicago]
Dear Bill—
I’m glad you turned again to the family theme—you’re always at your best with the Phelans. I’m tempted to speculate that our family-less, out-of-the-void colleagues are anti-family on grounds of ideology (some from the Marxian, some from the Existentialist side). That’s okay for people who
really
come out of the void [ . . . ], but for the majority it’s an affectation—a put-on.
For the likes of us, with powerful early connections—well, we
can
say no to those connections. Whether it’s yes
or
no we have to live with them openly. Joyce, who was so cold to his Dublin family (perhaps to his Paris family as well), has Bloom pining for his dead little boy, his suicided father. Cruel and kinky-real, but not without curious feelings. If Joyce had been born in the fields, under a cabbage leaf (as Samuel Butler would have preferred to enter life) there w’d have been no
Ulysses
.
With this elaborate preface: I liked
Old Bones
a lot. I read it in one shot, and it did me a world of good.
Yours ever,
To John Auerbach
June 23, 1992 W. Brattleboro
Dear John:
[ . . . ] At six I watch the news. That doesn’t do much for me. I’m as listless as the rest of the country. Bush has nothing to give or say, and neither do I. Indignation gives me a bit of energy—riots in L.A., looting even in Chicago, idiocy on TV, cowardice in the newspapers, stupidity in government. The free-market economic theorists have done too well, they’ve taught the country that laissez-faire won the Cold War. Furthermore, I believe, people are terrified of the computers that have transformed the supporting structure. They’re terrified lest computer error wipe out their savings, their pensions, their insurance—the computerized bureaucracy frightens them to death. Make inquiries when anything goes wrong and you can’t get a human response—you get printouts or electronic voices. [Ross] Perot made his billions in government contracts, computerizing Medicare or Medicaid, and this weak-minded little man is believed to be a wizard. Nobody yet has said this publicly—you’re getting a special interpretation from me. Perot has proposed to put democracy on an electronic footing. Push a button to make your views known and we won’t need a Congress. If the President displeases the majority, an instant plebiscite will force him to step down. Therefore, we won’t need a constitution, nor a Supreme Court to interpret it. Only technicians.
All this may pass but no one can be certain that it will.
Meantime the trees grow, the birds sing, the flowers do their stuff, the green is greener than ever. And there’s Janis, without whom my blood wouldn’t circulate.
And I cling to my friends, as well.
With much love to you and Nola,
To Stanley Elkin
July 22, 1992 W. Brattleboro
Dear Stanley:
Some pen pal you got yourself.
I haven’t written to anyone in months, and I puzzle over this, whether it’s self-absorption or conceit or what. Not really self-absorption, because I don’t take myself as a subject for self-examination, never place myself on the psychological witness stand and am not so much modest as uninterested in studying my motives. I had a father-in-law years ago, a “great painter” in a sort of Stalinist Moulin-Rouge style. He described me to my then-wife as an “oral miser.” He didn’t take into account my seriousness about language. I don’t like babbling. Also I was fascinated by his four-square profundity about art, sex, the Collective Unconscious, his mixture of Marx and Jung, his guile, his swami airs—his commitment to his powers of penetration. The summit of unlikely resemblances: He was like a poet named St.-Jean Perse. Perse would stand on his toes, go rigid, widen his eyes and penetrate you. As in the Eliot line (I see from your last book that you are fond of Eliot) “When I am formulated, wriggling on a pin.” They pinned you. Only, I made a phenomenal escape every time.
No it isn’t self-absorption. I think continually about people. Because I didn’t answer your March letter, perhaps, I’ve thought about you every day for months and often read your essays [
Pieces of Soap
], agreeing or differing. No, it’s another problem, totally other: I haven’t got it together, as the children say. It hasn’t been together for quite a while now. Maybe there’s a profound reason—an enormous and total re-tooling. I’m an old man, after all. I have to rethink, restructure, revise. I’m not even faintly myself when I’m not writing, and won’t write as I formerly (in other lives) wrote. That isn’t good enough. It isn’t deep enough. Not sufficiently comprehensive. Doesn’t satisfy the emotional hunger, the ultimate craving. I never had what my old-time Village pals called “Writer’s Block.” If I’m ever blocked, it’s in conversation. Which is why the revolutionary painter father-in-law called me an oral miser. He was right, in a way. I clammed up because he was listenable-to rather than talkable-to.
Maybe the difficulty is due to the season. Strange things happen to the soul in summertime. Rudolf Steiner, whose books I’ve read by the score, wrote that in summer nature passes out, goes unconscious, lies in a deep sleep. You would think that it slept in winter, which is barren, all its faculties frozen. On the contrary, winter is a season of intense consciousness or wakefulness. It’s in the prolific summer that the earth is overtaken by sleep, yielding itself in a swoon to fertility. If the soul had its way it would lie dazed all the summer months.
Like you (in many ways) I agree that writing is writing. I have trouble with thank-you notes or letters of recommendation and so I prefer to think of the pages of fiction that I write as letters to the very best of non-correspondents. The people I love—the great majority of them unknown to me.
Old Tschacbasov wasn’t even listenable-to, he was a repulsive old phony and low self-dramatizer, a would-be Father Karamazov but without intelligence or wit. I materialized unwillingly in his studio because I was married to his daughter. She saw me as an “artist” too and held it against me. In the end she fired me because I was her father all over again, in an inferior version.
All best,
To Teddy Kollek
August 17, 1992 W. Brattleboro
My dear Teddy,
I often think of our visionary conversations at the Mishkenot about a sequel to my Jerusalem book. I sometimes feel that it would be too much for my poor old faculties and that my time-abused frame could never be equal to it. What I need is to hear the summoning Voice to which Samuel answered “
Hineni
”[
113
]. In your optimism you suggest that I should be lying awake nights—with a hearing aid perhaps. As Mayor of Jerusalem you may have advance notice of the prophetic moment.
Janis and I will be in Chicago in October and although we can’t do for you what the multi-million Pritzkers can, we always fall back on the resources of the poor, namely, love and respect. Send us your date of arrival and we will round up the
anshey ha’ ir
[
114
] and lay on a memorable evening or two.
A friend of mine, Margaret [Staats] Simmons, editor-in-chief of
Travel Holiday
magazine, will be visiting Jerusalem September 22nd-23rd and has expressed a wish to make an archeological tour. She will be staying at the King David.
Travel Holiday
, owned by
The Reader’s Digest Inc.
, has a large circulation and Mrs. Simmons is a person of good taste. A little ancient grandeur is all she needs to make her happy. She will write to your office by and by.
Ever yours affectionately,
To Rosanna Warren
October 21, 1992 Chicago
Dear Rosanna,
Pestering? If I were to give out licenses to pester, you’d be near the top of my list. I used to plead lack of time, and now I can add old age in my polite refusals. What’s more, I’ve been hammered flat by the recent death of an old friend [Allan Bloom]. But Bill [Arrowsmith] was an old friend too and it would be more a pleasure than a duty to read his translation of Montale. I promise, even, to get to it as quickly as possible.
In the old days we used to say about people like [John Kenneth] Galbraith that he was vaccinated with a gramophone needle. But we’ll all be in Vermont again next summer and if you come to visit us he’ll be sure not to be there.
To John Auerbach
November 12, 1992 Chicago
Dear John—
Getting used to a new and none-too-pleasant mode of life—vacancies to fill which are by nature unfillable. I pass Allan’s doorway and the great apartment house is like a monument, a pyramid with oneself under it all. I feel and I believe also that I look like someone else these days—perhaps an older member of my own family, but certainly not me, S. Bellow. An uncle or perhaps an aunt. Also I feel a powerful impulse to race away, to escape the constraints which go with being so-and-so, a person for whom (physically) I have no use.
These puzzling differences from what I am accustomed to consider myself must come from mourning, and they may or may not pass. (How can
I
tell?)
I sometimes think that if I were in S’dot Yam we could give each other comfort. If only I could get there by subway! I’d dearly love to walk along the sea with you and watch the water coming in.
I hope this note doesn’t depress you. I turn to you when I’m sad, as we will turn to the people we love.
In an effort to “get out from under” I’ve made myself impossibly busy. I have dozens of jobs to do and drive myself to get them done. A foolish and characteristic measure which only makes things worse. Janis thinks a few days in Vermont catching up on sleep will do us some good, so we’ll go off next week. Chicago now has its first taste of winter—you will remember from your pre-Israel days how the seasons trek one up and down.
Our best love to Nola.
Your friend,
To John Silber
December 27, 1992 Chicago
Dear John,
You’ll be wondering what became of me. Let me say first, however, how splendid your offer is, and how generous—how pleased I am by it and how grateful.
I can now go on to tell you that it has made my whole life flash before me like the experience of the drowning. We have had to consider, my wife Janis and I, just how life should be lived—i.e. what to make of the future. On the whole, a cheerful thing to do, although there are lurid flashes of an apocalyptic nature on the horizon, and the horizon is furthermore uncomfortably close. Problems of moving and resettlement arise. And then as I grow older I think of reducing the time spent in teaching.
Since Boston and BU have a great many attractions, would it be possible to teach half-time? I could make the public appearances—I don’t mind those too much—and it would be agreeable to live in Brookline or the Back Bay. Would it be possible to find a teaching position for Janis? She has just gotten her Ph.D. while studying in the Committee on Social Thought. She taught college courses in political theory and also in literature, and she would be ideally suited for your undergraduate Humanities program.
I’m tremendously grateful for your super invitation, and I hope you will forgive all this elderly fussing about “what to do with my life.”
Endless thanks and all the best,
Silber was at the time president of Boston University.
1993
To Jonathan Kleinbard
April 25, 1993 Paris
Dear Jonathan,
[ . . . ] I can’t cope with life in Chicago. A month in Paris has brought back to me the life I knew in the past—free movement, peaceable crowds in parks. I don’t expect Boston to be different from Chicago, but there is Vermont close by. I don’t feel like breathing my last in the Maginot Line (5825 [Dorchester], Apt 11E).
I shall miss you and Joan and your friendship. Janis will feel being away from Joan as a serious privation.
But it was understood tacitly that we’d have to get out of Chicago. Allan said to me, “You’re planning the moves you’ll make when I die.” That was a bad moment for me, but he was right of course, and I was silent. But after a time I said, “Yes, but I’ll be catching up with you soon enough.” He agreed with that, and we went back to discussing the Bulls’ chances against the Knicks.