Anyway your letter was a wonderful letter and had a direct effect on my ice-bound heart. I used to see something of [—] in Chicago, but her gruff husband, a kind of technician-cyclops type, did not encourage our meetings. What a beautiful girl she was, and so appallingly young. And I remember that you entertained us hour after hour by explaining that when you were a kid you couldn’t eat graham crackers unless they had been ripened under the pad of the porch swing.
If I had been writing this the effort by now would have worn me out. Luckily, I was able to dictate to my invaluable
simpatico
secretary, name of Chris Walsh, who not only takes letters but also drives me to my frequent hospital appointments. If one of these days I should fail to emerge from the hospital, you can get full details by applying to Chris at my University address. I used to have much confidence in my ability to ward off death. But death is as strong as ever, and I am a much weaker resister.
Lots of love from your old chum,
1998
To Philip Roth
January 1, 1998 Brookline
Dear Philip—
Sorry to be so slow. Janis got to your manuscript first and all her enthusiasm, sympathies and forebodings were then communicated to me. A new Roth book is a big event in these parts. We are, to use the Chicago terms of the Twenties, your rooters and boosters.
When she took off for Canada on X-mas day to see parents and sister, brother, kiddies, she left
I Married a Communist
with me for the Holiday Season. Reading your book consoled me in this empty house. It’s a treat to read one of your manuscripts—I say this up-front—but this time the overall effect was not satisfactory. I was particularly aware of the absence of distance—I don’t mean that the writer
must
put space between himself and the characters in his book. But there should be a certain detachment from the writer’s own passions. I speak as one who in
Herzog
created the same sin. There I hoped that comic effects might protect me. Nevertheless I crossed the border too many times to raid the enemy camp. But then Herzog was a chump, a failed intellectual and at bottom a sentimentalist. In your case, the man who gives us Eve and Sylphid is an
enragé
, a fanatic-for-real.
That’s not the outstanding defect of
IMAC
. Your reader, out of respect for your powers, is more than willing to go along with you. He will not, as I was not, be able to go along with your Ira, probably the least attractive of all your characters. I assume that you can no more bear Ira than the reader can. But you stand loyally by this cast-iron klutz—a big strong stupid man who attracts you for reasons invisible to me.
Now there is a real mystery about Communists in the West, to limit myself to those. How were they able to accept Stalin—one of the most monstrous tyrants ever? You would have thought that the Stalin-Hitler division of Poland, the defeat of the French which opened the way to Hitler’s invasion of Russia, would have led CP members to reconsider their loyalties. But no. When I landed in Paris in 1948 I found that the intellectual leaders (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc.) remained loyal despite the Stalin sea of blood. Well, every country, every government has
its
sea, or lake, or pond. Still Stalin remained “
the
hope”—despite the clear parallel with Hitler.
But to keep it short—the reason: The reason lay in the hatred of one’s own country. Among the French it was the old confrontation of “free spirits,” or artists, with the ruling bourgeoisie. In America it was the fight against the McCarthys, the House Committees investigating subversion, etc. that justified the Left, the followers of Henry Wallace, etc. The main enemy was at home (Lenin’s WWI slogan). If you opposed the CP you were a McCarthyite, no two ways about it.
Well, it was a deep and perverse stupidity. It didn’t require a great mind to see what Stalinism was. But the militants and activists refused to reckon with the simple facts available to everybody.
Enough: You will say that all of that is acknowledged in
IMAC
. Yes, and no. You tell us that Ira is a brute, a murderer. But who else is there? Ira and Eve are at the core of your novel—and what does this pair amount to?
One of your persistent themes is the purgation one can obtain only through rage. The forces of aggression are liberating, etc. And I can see that as a legitimate point of view. Okay if your characters are titans. But Eve is simply a pitiful woman and Sylphid is a pampered, wicked fat girl with a bison hump. These are not titans.
There aren’t many people to whom I can be so open. We’ve always been candid with each other and I hope we will continue, both of us, to say what we think. You’ll be sore at me, but I believe that you won’t cast me off forever.
Ever yours,
To John Auerbach and Nola Chilton
February 23, 1998 Brookline
Dear John and Nola,
[ . . . ] Many years ago Bobby Kennedy several times said to me that he was concerned with small dictators who might (easily) produce a nuclear device. One of the things I have always suspected was that aberrant types would somehow find means to realize their mad megalomaniacal dreams. The tendency is, in hundreds of millions of instances, to translate imagination into actualities. You think of blowing up a federal building with a bomb made of cheap components including a sack of fertilizer, and you load your ingredients into a parked truck and it goes off and kills men, women and children. So there’s no limit to the possibilities for cranks [ . . . ] Meantime our president is beset by sex problems. It’s a tribute to FDR and even to Jack Kennedy that their sex problems didn’t prevent them from governing the country, but I’m not altogether sure that Clinton can carry Monica while conducting foreign affairs. All I can definitely say about this historic episode is that it shows us what a powerful aphrodisiac great politics can be.
Meanwhile most of my contemporaries have gone to the next world, and it’s no more than reasonable that I should be preoccupied with the next world, and it is natural also that at my age one should think more often about friends still living.
I hope Chris Walsh has sent you copies of
The Republic of Letters
. We have just published
#3
.
Much love to both of you,
To Teddy Kollek
April 14, 1998 Brookline
Dear Teddy,
I felt when Isaiah Berlin died that I should send you a note, but then I was too dreary to do it. Instead I recalled the weeks when I was at the Mishkenot and Isaiah and his wife were at the King David just up the street.
Later on I dined with Isaiah several times in Oxford and we reminisced pleasantly about those days in Jerusalem, the Jerusalem you had totally transformed.
I often feel these days that death is a derelict or what Americans nowadays call a street person who has moved into the house with me and whom I can find no way to get rid of. The only solution is to make him a member of the family.
Enough of these gloomy reflections and fantasies. I am trying to express solidarity and exchange sympathies with an old friend who is, I hope, well and happy.
With affection,
To Albert Glotzer
June 3, 1998 W. Brattleboro
Dear Al—
I used to be an eager letter writer, but it fills me with self-disgust now to face the growing pile of unanswered mail. Age is probably to blame—since age is there, I make use of it. Life becomes silenter and silenter. I notice that most of the mental work of the old (the work of this old man, at least) is done in silence. I find myself often talking to the dead (for instance). Others have confessed to me that they do it too. Even rationalist atheists and materialists will admit, if they’re old enough, that they expect to meet their mothers in the afterlife.
I marvel at your refusal to give in. I too am a scrapper. Giving in to sickness is inconceivable. It’s very strange that after thirty years of heart trouble (fibrillations) I am free from symptoms. I’m rid of the pills. On the other hand, walking has become painful. My arthritic joints find it hard to stand up from a seated position. But I
makh zikh nit visndik
, in Yiddish. The translation is: “Ignore it!” We are forced to do our business, day by day, between narrowing limits and reduced perspectives. Again, it’s
makh zikh nit visndik
. [ . . . ]
Much love to you, and to Maggie,
To Sophie Wilkins
June 17, 1998 W. Brattleboro
Dear Sophie,
[ . . . ] The delicious chocolates you sent are in the cupboard. Janis makes a point of eating chocolates only on birthdays—excuse me, family birthdays—and anniversaries. I am on my honor never to eat precious candies without permission, but of course I do eat them. I steal them. I am extremely fond of truffles. Of course I shouldn’t eat them. I am not desperately sick but neither am I in the best of health. Atrial fibrillation is my chief complaint. Mostly I ignore such troubles. I do bitch from time to time, but at heart I still assume that nothing has changed much since childhood. Maybe this is what psychiatrists mean when they say that a patient is “in denial.”
I am very happy to hear that Karl is improving. He has very justifiably taken a long holiday from injustice and idiocy. Maybe he will feel well enough by and by to take up the sword once more. As for Thomas Bernhard, he is a very strange bird indeed. I read him with respect and even admiration but he doesn’t reach my warmer feelings. What he does reach is my own bottomless hatred of the Nazis, especially the Austrian ones. He would have you think that virtually all Austrians were and remain Nazis. I see no reason to disagree. When I read Karl’s lovely poem about Auden’s grave I wondered why Auden should have wished to pass his last years [at Kirchstetten] in the society of such creeps. I seem to recall that he even addressed affectionate lines to some of them. But then Austria was always a monument to bourgeois comforts, and in his declining years Auden too loved pottering in the kitchen and sleeping in bourgeois feather beds.
Janis also sends her love,
To Philip Roth
September 15, 1998 W. Brattleboro
Dear Philip—
So sorry about the delay.
Now that I am in real earnest an old guy, requiring orderliness, I am in circumstances always of disorder—of chaos.
Ever your pal,
To Evelyn Nef
August 8, 1998 Brookline
Dear Evvy,
I would much sooner have paid you a visit but as Janis has told you the doctors ordered me to come and have a pacemaker installed. I have had my problems with doctors during this long life of mine. My medical history goes back to 1923 when my appendix was removed in Montreal and I damned near died of peritonitis. After that I was quite sick in Chicago and after that very sick in Boston. And now I am eighty-three years old and still stepping into the batter’s box to try for one more hit. So my pacemaker and I will be happy to come and pay a visit and we shall all sit down together in your grand new house. Janis and I—and Walter [Pozen]—are looking forward with anticipated happiness to seeing you again.
Yours with love,
Author, linguist, psychotherapist and philanthropist Evelyn Stefansson Nef (1913-2009) was the widow of John U. Nef, Bellow’s longtime colleague in the Committee on Social Thought. Previously, she had been the lover of Buckminster Fuller, the wife of puppeteer Bil Baird, and the wife of explorer Vihjalmur Stefansson.
To Richard Stern
November 15, 1998 Brookline
Dear Richard,
Your notes always give me great comfort.
Am I all right? No, just partly right. My memory, of which I was West-Point proud, keeps disappointing me. Last week I couldn’t remember Katharine Hepburn’s name and the name of her lover—Somebody Tracy eluded me for several days. And I actually have to go back to reference works, to my great shame. Well, perhaps God is trying to tell me that though I could remember everything, I didn’t really understand anything. The pacemaker, however, keeps my heart regular, and I can drink all the wine I like at dinner and thumb my nose at caffeine.
I wouldn’t throw in the towel—yet. A little anecdote to illustrate; I dug it up last month in writing a note to Jack Miles (you’ll see this for yourself in the next number of
TROL
): An old man lives in the forest alone and gathers winter fuel and finds himself one day unable to lift his burden of sticks. He raises his eyes to heaven and says, “O God, send me Death,” and when Death comes Death says, “Did you send for me, sir?” The old man replies, “Yes, lend me a hand with these sticks. Just put them on my shoulder and I’ll do the rest.”
You may want that towel one day to wipe your inspired brow.
Say hello to Alane.