Many decades ago, on a June morning, we drove up to Zita’s house in a truck. Her room was on the second floor and overlooked Humboldt Park. The picnickers honked and shouted. We were bound for the dunes. Her doorbell may have gone dead, or I assumed that it had, so I climbed up the face of the building just as John Barrymore or Douglas Fairbanks would have done, and banged on her bedroom door. I think that this made her very happy. What was said I can’t remember. But it was a fine moment.
There was a Russian flavor about Zita. She wore Gypsy blouses and beads and bangles. We were all, in those days, partly Russian. Instead of underclothes we wore binding and scratchy swim-suits. Our pockets—and our heads as well—were nearly empty in those days of youth and vainglory.
This is one of my favorite recollections of Zita as a young woman. And now as our days on earth are almost used up I cherish this adolescent moment. Showing off? Of course I was. But when I burst in on her she was beautiful, and I was not so full of myself that I couldn’t know it.
To Philip Roth
June 17, 1997 W. Brattleboro
Dear Philip,
Just a note: You speak of [Norman] Manea’s fantasy of Romania, “the myth he’d been making of it in exile.” I haven’t talked enough with him to have any notion of this myth and it would be very interesting to hear your account of it. I wonder why his notebook was lost on Lufthansa. You say he left it on the seat beside him when he disembarked? As you must know, I am no Freudian and I never have believed that a man’s life is nothing but a front for the operations of his unconscious. Still, there must have been some sound reason for losing the diary of his visit to his native country.
I don’t know Orwell’s essay on Swift. I shall try to get a copy in the Brattleboro library or from BU. It’s true that you hardly realize how deep Orwell goes because he is so clear about what he’s doing.
Several years ago Janis and I were invited to a dinner for [Václav] Havel and found a message at our New York hotel to the effect that the dinner had been changed into a public celebration which would be held at the great cathedral (whatever they call it) at Riverside Drive and 120th Street. When we got there there were thousands of people inside the church and crowding to get in, and television crews and everyone was there, a blizzard of celebrities from Hollywood. Arthur Miller, I think, was present, and Paul Newman and a hundred others. Henry Kissinger had come to represent political seriousness, and I had been asked to introduce him. The Czechs didn’t know what had hit them. They were sitting all in a row at the front of the cathedral—they were the occasion for this great display by the entertainment industry. Havel and I chatted for about three minutes and were separated as if we were tomato seeds in the digestive tract. Since then I have been several times invited to congresses for this or that in Prague, and I have yet to make my first visit there.
Yours,
To Werner Dannhauser
September 1, 1997 W. Brattleboro
Dear Werner,
This is a good morning for pangs of conscience. The summer is stalled, the day is gray, oppressive, in check, windless—not even a small breeze. I feel that I’m below, in nature’s insides, and that she seems to be having a digestive problem.
I haven’t written to my correspondents because . . . because, because and because. I haven’t added up the deaths of various friends during the last six months. [François] Furet you knew and perhaps you remember Zita Cogan who died a few weeks ago. The others were long-time buddies: a college classmate, in Paris [Julian Behrstock]. In New York, Yetta [Barshevsky] Shachtman, the widow of the US Trotskyite leader. She and I would walk back from school through Humboldt Park (Chicago) discussing Trotsky’s latest pamphlet on the German question. We also read the “Communist Manifesto” and “State and Revolution.” She was an earnest girl—the dear kind—Comrade Yetta. Her Pa was a carpenter, and his old Nash was filled with tools, shavings and sawdust. And now she has gone—human sawdust and shavings. There was also a clever, clumsy big man named [Hymen] Slate who believed (when we were young) that a sense of humor should be part of every argument about the existence of God. Laughing was proof that there was a God. But God in the end laid two kinds of cancer on him and took him away very quickly. When we were in our late sixties, in East Rogers Park, we met every Thursday to drink tea and consider the question of immortality. Neither of us had read Kant.
Next came the news that David Shahar had died. So many women in his life. When I met him with yet another one on some Jerusalem street he would lay a finger to his lips as he passed. But [his wife] Shula was far too smart to be deceived—even if she had reason to want to be. I thought he must have a large turnover of ladies but evidently he was like a Mafia don. He had a band of Mafiosi girls each with her own turf—Paris, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, too, or Beersheba. His career would repay close study. I did like him, but my deeper sympathies went to Shula. That too would be worth studying—since so many people devote themselves to these
studies
. What an amazing amount of research is going on around us. But why should I identify with Shula? I suspect that she knew him far better than he could ever know himself. That his afternoons of love were a consolation for his literary failures. Why couldn’t he have come to her for consolation?
A stupid question! I really know better than to ask.
I will mention one more death, that of a student from Chicago—very bright and handsome. His dissertation was published and widely reviewed. I argued with him about it. It was a little too fashionable for my taste. I sensed that he saw me as an old fuddy-duddy, but no . . . he ended years later by sharing my opinions. He did well for himself academically and got a tenured appointment in Southern California (Claremont?). He married a Dupont girl from Delaware but they were divorced after a year or two. He was charming, lively, and was strangely loyal to me—came every year to Vermont to talk matters over. He last visited in July and was unusually warm and close. A month later he died in a highway crash, and his tearful parents phoned to tell me what had happened—that they were notifying me because . . . because he had been so close to me and I had seen him through some bad times.
Together with all this I have the feeling that I am in it with him and the others aforementioned. Dying piecemeal. My legs ain’t functioning as they ought. Day and night they ache. And I am this, that and the other in many respects, physically. It seems that my tear ducts have dried up, and the eyeballs feel gummy. The details are not worth going into. It’s possible that I may never recover from the damage done by cigua toxin. I observe, in writing to you, that you are the last person in the world to complain to, given your “medical history.” But at bottom it may be an expression of solidarity. During the war we used to read of the bombing of German “marshalling yards”—the rail centers where freight trains are “made up,” organized for their runs.
You must know that for many people you are an elder statesman, venerable, a fighter for the true faith, etc. And I may merely be saying that I am a foot-sore infantry campaigner myself. I’m well aware that you have no need for such declarations of affinity from another
mutilé de la guerre
[
128
]. I want to feel close to you, just as my late student had sought me out annually.
I think he said that he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. I’m pretty sure that this was mentioned. I didn’t take it up. I saw no way to do it. What good would it have done to discuss it?
This letter I think offers you a road map. It shows where I am at. It’s not as bad as it sounds. I just need to get it out of my system today. I won’t close with “have fun” but with
Love,
Werner Dannhauser, professor emeritus of political science at Cornell University, is the author of
Nietzsche’s View of Socrates
(1976). Bellow’s student was Brian Stonehill, who taught media studies at Pomona College and whose book was
The Self-Conscious Novel
(1988).
To James Wood
October 14, 1997 W. Brattleboro
Dear Mr. Wood—
It occurred to me last night during an insomniac hour that you might not have received your copy of
News from the Republic of Letters
. I asked Chris Walsh about it today and he said that Botsford had “taken care of it.” Now Botsford is a very gifted man but he isn’t dependably efficient. He’s had a bad year, in and out the hospital with a bad hip. He had been driving too fast on a remote highway in France. French doctors had bungled the surgery. It had to be done again in Boston. And then KB had gone back to the south of France, on a crutch. (He has a house on the Mediterranean coast.) He relies on graduate students to run his Boston “operations,” and they do what can humanly be done to carry out his complicated orders.
He and I have done this sort of thing in the past. In the Fifties we brought out a journal called
The Noble Savage
. The idea has always been to show how the needs of writers might be met.
The Noble Savage
was a paperback published by Meridian Books—a company swallowed decades ago by Western Printers, which was devoured by the
LA Times
, etc.
Botsford and I have no publishing house behind us—no corporation, no philanthropical foundations, no patron. We pay for
TROL
ourselves. We do it on the cheap—printing no more than fifteen hundred copies. We tried to get Barnes and Noble to take it but B and N does not deal with magazines directly, only with official distributors. We thought we’d run it for a year in the hope of attracting five or six hundred subscribers. Six or seven hundred good men and true would make it possible for
TROL
to survive.
Nothing like a boyish enterprise to give old guys the shocks they badly need or crave. I feel I owe you this explanation, since you were good enough to let us publish your Ibsen-Chekhov piece. We couldn’t afford to pay you properly for it. So you are entitled to a description of what it is that we are doing. Your Chekhov is one of the ornaments of
#2
. We have money enough for five or six numbers. Then, if we haven’t the backing of the subscribers we hope to get, we will fold.
Ten years down the road your copy, or copies, of the paper may be worth a fortune. It’ll be a collector’s item and a rarity.
Yours with every good wish,
To Albert Glotzer
November 8, 1997 W. Brattleboro
Dear Al:
It seems that nobody gets a break. Whatever it is that deals out the disorders is no respecter of persons. If I had access to him I would say that A. Glotzer was due for a reprieve—a breather—because he has some important things to do, still.
I myself have had arrhythmia for a week straight and can’t walk a block without panting. I went last week to visit my old sister in Cincinnati and came back short of breath. My cardiologist is on vacation. My sister is ninety-one years of age. She continues to play the piano although she is quite deaf and can’t hear the mistakes she makes—chords with many notes omitted. But she’s as proud of her performance as she ever was.
She described how, in Montreal in 1923, she was on her way to a lesson and felt her panties dropping—the rubber was used up. She had so many books in her arms that she couldn’t prevent the panties from falling. She stepped out of them and left them on the pavement. I’d heard this dozens of times before. The anecdote has acquired mythic character. In 1923, I was eight years old; she was seventeen. You hadn’t yet become a court-reporter, I don’t think.
I shall be pulling for you in some remote part of my mind—the mental backwoods where prayers used to be said before we all became so “enlightened.”
Your longtime affectionate Chicago chum,
To Herbert McCloskey
December 16, 1997 Brookline
Dear Herb,
A note is just now all that I have signed for. I loved your letter of August. But then I misplaced it. And I was too tired to make a thorough search for it, but yesterday unexpectedly it turned up and I re-read it with sympathy and even a few tears. You write one hell of a letter. I used to be a fair hand at this myself but what with sickness, old age, pharmaceutical lassitude and octogenarian lack of focus, I seem to have lost the knack. Janis, my wife, a godsend if there ever was one, tells me that I should not feel uneasy about the mail. I carry a swollen portfolio of letters from Vermont to Boston and back again to Vermont. But she says that there is no need for me to write letters, I have already written thousands of them, and that people who complain that I don’t answer simply don’t understand that a morning of writing exhausts me, and that my afternoons should be reserved for oblivion.
Still there is one thing that bothers me. I share your recollections of our trip to Banyuls. Can it be that I was then driving my own car? Or was it your car? I ask because at Banyuls I hitched a ride to Barcelona from a certain Señor Valls, a big-hearted businessman although he didn’t say what his business was. [ . . . ] He took me to a cabaret in Barcelona with several exciting women. And I ate a fine dinner of seafood—to the horror of my ancestors, probably. All those nasty little creatures scraped up from the sea-mud. Next day I took a ferry to the off-shore islands where I chased after a lovely American woman. I’m sorry to say this resulted in a fiasco at the moment of embrace. I am tempted to believe that Anita sent me off under some hex. Anyway, I made my way back chastened. But what really bothers me is that I can’t remember where I had left my car.