Saul Bellow was a
great man of letters in both senses of the word. Over a long lifetime—he died
in 2005 at the age of ninety—he dispatched thousands of epistolary missives
(lamenting all the while that he was a terrible correspondent), and he was a
master of the genre. Not unlike Moses Herzog, the fevered letter-writer of his
eponymous—and to my mind, best—novel, "he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to
the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last
to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead"; but
Bellow drew the line at the famous dead—no letters to Nietzsche or the French
theologian Teilhard de Chardin, both one-way correspondents of Herzog—and he
wrote no letters to "his own obscure dead," though they were often in
his thoughts. As he got older, he looked backward more than forward: to his
classmates at Tuley High School in Chicago; to his parents; and to the odd
assortment of teachers and merchants and relatives who richly populated his
childhood in the Jewish-immigrant neighborhood of Humboldt Park where he grew
up—characters like Uncle Benjy, who had a pet shop: "Why is it so sad that
Benjy should sell puppies and birds?" he asked one of his old classmates.
I must declare at the outset
that two of the letters in this plump and totally engaging volume (both genial
in tone) are addressed to me; and also that scattered throughout are a few
references (alas, not flattering) to the biography of Bellow over
which I labored for more than a decade. But I suppose—it's a stretch—these
references could be seen in a positive light. As Charlie Citrine says of the
abusive poet Von Humboldt Fleisher in Humboldt's
Gift:
"To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like
being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken
by Soutine."
Bellow complained endlessly
about what a chore it was to keep up with his correspondence, especially after
he became famous. "These days letters come hard for me…." "I've
never enjoyed writing letters…." Perhaps not; but he did answer most of
his mail, and it gives off a heat of exuberance, energy, wit, and a pure joy in
writing for its own sake. There's also plenty of pain, as in this letter to
Edward Shils, his colleague at the University of Chicago, where he describes
the titanic alimony struggle with his third wife, Susan Glassman, that nearly
landed him in jail:
I had
always thought myself quite sturdy and resistant to knocks, but it often seems
that I am not quite so strong as I had believed. I wake in the night, and do
not feel very strong. I sometimes find myself praying. Not for favors of any
sort, not even for help, but simply for clarification. I am not especially
apprehensive about dying. What does distress me is the thought that I may have
made a mess where others (never myself) see praiseworthy achievements.
It is a temptation—and perhaps a
cliché—to lament the end of the epistolary art. In an age of email and
technological gadgetry that has shortened our attention span to minutes if not
seconds, the time required to sit down and write a letter, even a dashed-off note
(what Henry James called "the mere twaddle of graciousness") is
simply no longer there. On my shelf are six volumes of Virginia Woolf's letters
amounting to well over two thousand pages, and four volumes of James's letters,
the last of which numbers 838 pages, as if its editor, the diligent biographer
and keeper-of-the-Jamesian flame Leon Edel, was determined to cram in (like the
increasingly cramped words on a holiday post card) as many as he could before
running out of space. What these volumes hold are not just letters: they are
gems of prose by masters of the English language. Bellow is the last in the
line of literary correspondents. There's no point in being elegiac: new ways of
recording experience and, for the biographer, pulling back the curtain to find
out what really happened (or what the subject thinks happened) are fast
evolving. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube have superseded the typed or handwritten
letter, just as those means of communication rendered obsolete the quill. In
the future, biographers will amass their evidence out of different materials.
But the day in which nearly six hundred pages of letters—a fraction of those
Bellow wrote—can be assembled and published in a book is over. There will be no
more collections of letters like this.
In his book Literary Biography, Edel wrote: "The letters
are a part of the novelist's work, of his literary self, a part of his capacity
for playing out personal relations as a great game of life." They have
leitmotifs, thematic repetitions. For Bellow, one of those themes—a major
one—was resentment. He was, as even he admitted, "a born slightee,"
convinced that he was besieged by "gangsters of the pen,"
"detractors," "enemies." Waiting for Henderson the Rain King to come
out, he wrote the novelist Josephine Herbst: "The sharpshooters are oiling
their guns."
But he was generous, too, praising other writers and
expressing unself-conscious affection for the people in his life—especially his
past life. "The love I have for you is something literal brotherhood never
gave me," he writes his Tuley friend Sam Freifeld (who he derides in other
letters; but such is human nature). And funny! Stuck in Chicago on a frigid
winter day, he writes a girlfriend: "What is that Eliot line in 'Journey
of the Magi'? 'A cold coming, we had of it.' Well! It's all cold, and no
coming." Mired in domestic troubles, he crabs to a literary acolyte:
"I've been on the road to make money to pay taxes and also legal fees, as
well as accountants and wives, and children's tuitions and medical expenses.
The patriarchal list should go on to include menservants and maidservants and
camels and cattle. I'd be lucky to get into the end of the procession, among
the asses." When not lamenting his general cluelessness ("I always
made a special point of seeming to be intensely practical and competent because
I had no grasp of real life"), he slipped in wise axioms: "We all
carry the same load of unwashed plates from life's banquet."
The most surprising discoveries
are the love letters to Maggie Staats, the great love of his life. They met
when she was twenty-four and he was fifty-one—a gap that in our prudish era
might be considered age-inappropriate. But these letters, some of which I
hadn't seen before, reveal a side of Bellow that's hard to discern from the
pitiless depiction of women in his fiction, his numerous marriages, and his
"womanizing." There is a tenderness in their baffled tone, a sense of
deep confusion about the intensity of his feelings. Signed "Y D"
[your darling], they show him at his most vulnerable. "It's dreadful how I
miss you," he writes: "All the oldest, worst longings are stirred
up—some seem very old, wild, peculiar, something like wrinkled furies along the
line of marsh." Bellow wasn't always swaggering from one bed to another;
sometimes he was just scared.
The editor of this volume,
Benjamin Taylor, has done a good job. His selection is judicious, and
assembling a literary life's worth of letters in even a book of this size could
not have been an easy task. There are some editorial oddities. Given the vast
trove from which to select, why does Taylor interlard them with speeches,
testimonies, eulogies, Nobel Prize nominations (of Philip Roth and Robert Penn
Warren)? These belong in a biography. There are also some flat-out errors. I
don't suppose it makes any difference now, but Rust Hills, the fiction editor
of Esquire, who died two years ago,
narrowly averted having to read that he died in 1983. And the paucity of
footnotes is frustrating. Taylor identifies some people referenced in the
letters, and not others. Who, for instance, are "Vic and Johnny,"
with whom Bellow eats goose in Chicago on Thanksgiving of 1947? And who's
"Dr. Nuehl," referred to in passing? Four psychiatrists I know about.
Is this a fifth? Also, it's news to me that Bellow was "taken in custody
by the State Police" in Maryland. What was that all about? "Herzog is
like Old Man River, he don't say nothing," Bellow frets to Richard Stern
when he's stuck in the novel. Neither does Taylor. He doesn't have to apologize
for Bellow's foibles and misadventures, but at least he could explain.
In a letter to Mel Tumin, one of
his Chicago "band of boys" (an echo of Shakespeare's "band of
brothers" in Henry V?), Bellow
wrote: "Only some of us have had the sense to realize that the man we
bring forth has no richness compared with the man who really exists, thickened,
fed and fattened by all the facts
about him, all of his history." We can never know all the facts, of
course, but these letters bring us closer than ever to the man.
James Atlas, the biographer of
Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, is president of the independent publishing
company Atlas & Co.
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