So—who was the sports figure that said, “It ain’t over till it’s over”? He was dead right.
We’ll continue to love you both from Boston, Vermont, etc., as well as from the life-to-come.
We’ll be back on May 17th, to pack, etc. and we’ll have more to say then.
Yours ever,
To Philip Roth
July 20, 1993 W. Brattleboro
Dear Philip,
Curious how futile good intentions feel in a case like this. The whole of one’s personal morality is on the line—a tug-of-war in which I am outweighed a million to one by the imponderables. If you were to ask I’d come down to see you, though I’ve never seen myself as a bearer of remedies. I can’t think of a single cure I ever worked. My idea of a
mitzvah
was to tell you a joke, which was like offering to install a Ferris wheel in your basement. Certainly not a useful idea.
This may seem to be a greeting from the horizon but I’m really not all that far. I feel anything but distant.
Affectionately,
Roth had suffered a serious illness, followed by the dissolution of his marriage to Claire Bloom.
To Roger Kaplan
July 20, 1993 W. Brattleboro
Dear Roger,
Don’t think we’ve forgotten you—it isn’t forgetfulness, it’s the hurlyburly of relocation. There was a thirty-year accumulation of Chicago junk to transport, to say nothing of our cat Moose, without whom no stable domestic life is possible.
I don’t know how useful I can be to you, you’ve done such a job (just as I did at your time of life) of supercomplication. I tried to get this complex operation down in the first pages of
Henderson the Rain King
with a catalogue of burdens, duties and handicaps.
It gave me some feeling of being helpful or useful through our mere presence in Paris. I can’t say that I have any grasp whatever of your psychological problems. Psychology (let’s be thankful for some things) is not my trade. Nor do I size you up as the sort of person who will tell his shrinker everything. You’d be sure to keep a few capstones or even cornerstones in your pocket. (It slows one up to carry so much rock, but it’s the safest strategy.)
Besides, I don’t want your foundation stones, only your affection. Reciprocity guaranteed.
Yours ever,
To Nathan Tarcov
August 18, 1993 W. Brattleboro
Dear Nathan,
Your invitation is very kind and I thank you for it. I find it a bit difficult just now, before I have had time to set up a routine for myself at BU, to make plans for this academic year. I’d be more than happy to come in ’94-’95. I name these years with a certain hesitancy. At my time of life one becomes somewhat circumspect in the matter of future dates, but the natural thing is to go ahead and make them since I’ve never had the experience of being prevented by certain powerful forces—often mentioned but not as yet seen (by me)—from keeping an appointment.
It boils down to this: I’d love to come but I am not at this moment able to set a time. I shall be thinking about an appropriate book suitable for discussion at a high-powered seminar.
I was distressed by the Sunday
Times
review of Allan’s book. It was not only criminal from an intellectual standpoint but also showed how low the
Times
has sunk. If I were not personally involved I should have written to Max Frankel to ask him how he could allow such stuff to be printed and why it was that he was willing to identify his point of view with that of the
Nation
. This Katha [Pollitt] is the sort of hit-person bred nowadays in the lower depths of New York.
Yours affectionately,
Nathan Tarcov, son of Oscar and Edith, has been for many years a professor of political philosophy in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His books include
Locke’s Education for Liberty
. Katha Pollitt, a staff writer at
The Nation
, had negatively reviewed Allan Bloom’s posthumously published
Love and Friendship
in
The New York Times Book Review
.
To John Auerbach
October 18, 1993 W. Brattleboro
Dear John,
We’re getting a serious taste of the dying year in Vermont. The leaf-season was brilliant. Now comes cold rain, fog and the trees are dripping. No different from the Polish winters you used to know.
I think of you often, but I seem incapable of writing letters, and the incapacity is symptomatic. I seem to sacrifice everything in order to write a few pages (more often than not, bad ones that have to be thrown away). Loose all over the place—bills and business letters, other peoples’ manuscripts accumulating on windowsills and in paper cartons. Everything is on hold. I’m unable to face the fact that I’m not going to catch up. [ . . . ]
“Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,
Dreaming on both.”
(
Measure for Measure
)
The only remedy is to come to terms with the biological facts, which I seem to resist bitterly. I do as I learned to do as a sick child (1923, in Montreal) and read books, magazines, papers, clippings, catalogues (L.L. Bean) and even recipes or directions for use on the backs of boxes. I hide in print. All I need to do is acknowledge that I am no longer thirty, nor forty, fifty, sixty, seventy. Old Cousin Louie [Dworkin] used to say when I came to see him—“I’m in the slemonium!”
I suppose I’m trying to find a way of my own—in this as in everything else.
Now tell me—is the
TLS
coming? We took a subscription two months ago.
Greet Nola for me.
Love,
“Slemonium” was evidently Cousin Louie’s private word for the stage of life beyond seventy.
1994
To Margaret Staats
January 4, 1994 Boston
Dear Maggie—
We’re in Boston now after much hugger-mugger, and trying to live with the aches caused by much property and attendant responsibilities. Just now everything has been shut down by winter storms. I sit facing the Charles, which has been iced over and snowed upon, and it isn’t going anywhere either. We’ll have to wait for the January thaw—I know it’s supposed to arrive—guaranteed by Yankee lore and tradition. And
then
we’ll go out and gather impressions of Boston. I have a fair understanding of the Green Line—the other subway colors, not yet.
Janis has found a cake plate for Signora Cinelli-Colombini (you remember
her
) and will send it to Montalcino. You with your bottomless memory are sure to be familiar with the name. Signora C.C. entertained us while I wrote the “Winter in Tuscany” article. You said that we should send a suitable present, and at last we’ve made a selection.
This morning I was playing whirling dervish—literally. It’s one of the Tibetan lamas’ exercises for squaring oneself with the
chakras
(vital centers of the spiritual-romantic self). I got dizzy (my first effort) and fell down. A real fall that shook the house. No damages to report.
Yr. indestructible old chum,
“Winter in Tuscany” had been commissioned for
Travel Holiday
and had appeared there in November 1992.
To Martin Amis
July 24, 1994 W. Brattleboro
Dear Martin,
I can generally diagnose my friends’ disorders by reading [their stories and novels]. I know from experience that a real comedian is at his best when he’s most wretched. I don’t like Freud at all but he was on target when he wrote that happiness is the remission of suffering, something he may have swiped from Schopenhauer. You will have guessed that this note is inspired by [Amis’s story] “Author, Author” in
Granta
. It’s the sort of comic x-ray that sinks the diagnostician’s spirits and fills the connoisseur’s heart with pure pleasure. I hear an echo here of Brutus after the assassination: We loved Caesar for his greatness but killed him because he was ambitious.
But of course writing well is also a sign of cure and recovery.
Janis who was also knocked flat—“decked” with happiness—sends love.
Yours as ever,
To Julian Behrstock
September 15, 1994 W. Brattleboro
Dear Julian—
As you will have guessed, I am disturbed to hear that you’ve been ill and had major surgery. When you have bad news your generous impulse is to reassure everyone. That, I’ve learned, is one of your deepest traits. You could hardly have gone through a course of chemotherapy without deep-fatigue—but the Midi and some rest and musing bring back your
joie de vivre
, and your mood is upbeat.
The other problems—arrhythmia and a runaway heartbeat—one can live with. I’ve done that for years with large daily doses of quinine. I have other nuisance-ailments associated with age—the medical term is presbyopia. No reason to describe those. “
Edad con sus disgracias
”[
115
] is the title of one of Goya’s etchings. Even reasonable people are taught by life, willy-nilly, to pray, and these days I include you in my stolen prayer sessions. (I like to call them meditations.)
We have hardly budged from Vermont this summer. I watched the summer through the windows while scribbling away at a novel I perhaps should never have started. Life has by now prepared me to write an essay called “How Not to Write a Novel.” Lots of critics would say it sh’d be “
Why
Not to Write One.” The whole world has accepted biological (“historical”) standards. A heart flourishes, then inevitably perishes, and a higher type of the same comes into its own. The new type has a bigger mouth and stronger jaws. You shall hear from me again and soon.
Love,
To Eugene C. Kennedy
November 10, 1994 Grand Case, Saint-Martin
Dear Gene—
The treatment is working. I put it like that because I begin to see how necessary it was for Janis to get me here—I was willing to talk about it, but of my own accord I’d never have gotten here. I just lack the character to do what’s necessary. And today I see a parallel between me and the problem drinkers whose doctors send them away to be dried out. Too much festination [
116
], as Dr. Oliver Sacks would put it. I recommend his book
Awakenings
, and the Parkinsonian case-histories in it. Sarah probably has read it. His account of festination and catatonia went straight to that waiting throbbing target, my heart. The blue of the Caribbean I see from this open door is my form of El Dopa.
Festination!
I had a bad case of it. I suspect that Dr. Sacks believes it’s endemic. Civilized people all have it in some form or other. What I do for it is to soak in the ocean twice daily. We have no phone in our small flat (open to the breezes) and no newspapers are available. NO mail is being forwarded. My one daily lapse or cop-out—cheating on the cure—is literary. I work each morning on my
Marbles
book. I may actually get that monkey off my back before X-mas.
A daily greeting in my Village days was “off the couch by X-mas!” It was said of Jim Agee that he
had
to work at
Time
to pay for his analysis. He said it himself—Henry Luce and Sigmund Freud were in cahoots. More than half of the Lucites (or Luciferites) were then in treatment.
Anyway my spirits having risen during these days of submersion in an El Dopa Caribbean, I love you with a fresh impulse. You’re a darling man. I wish I could say it in the right brogue.
We return to festinating Boston Nov. 30th. Let’s hope we will be able then to live by the good old slogan
Festina Lente
[
117
].
So, in the same vein—
Excelsior!
Much love to both of you,
Former priest and dissident Roman Catholic Eugene C. Kennedy is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Loyola University, Chicago, and the author of many books including
The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality
(2001) and
My Brother Joseph
(1998), a memoir of his friendship with Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. Shortly after writing this letter, Bellow fell dangerously ill with ciguatera poisoning. For a month he was unconscious and in intensive care at Boston University Hospital. At the turn of the year he went home to the apartment on Bay State Road, where he slowly recovered.
1995