Taylor - Saul Bellow

Table of Contents

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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Janis Bellow, 2010 Introduction copyright Benjamin Taylor, 2010 All rights reserved

A small portion of the Introduction and a number of the letters first appeared in The New Yorker.

Photograph credits

INSERT ONE:

Pages 1 (all), (bottom), (bottom): Courtesy of Janis Bellow; (top), (bottom), (top): Courtesy of Nathan Tarcov; (bottom), (top left and right, middle): Courtesy of Sylvia Tumin; (top): Photograph by Polly Forbes-Johnson Storey; (top right): Fred W. McDarra h/ Getty Images; (bottom): Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; (top): AP Photo; (middle): Courtesy of Kentucky Library and Museum, Western Kentucky University; (bottom): Photograph by Evalyn Shapiro, used by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated; (bottom): 2010 Nancy Crampton INSERT TWO:

Pages 1 (top): Joan M. Elkin; (bottom), (top): 2010 Nancy Crampton; (bottom), (top), (bottom): Courtesy of Janis Bellow; (top): AP Photo / Greg Marinovich; (middle): Estate of Evelyn Hofer; (bottom): Courtesy of Smadar Auerbach-Barber; (top): Paul Buckowski/Times Union (Albany); (bottom): The University of Chicago; (top), (top): Nancy Lehrer; (bottom): Cella Manea, by permission of Cella Manea and The Wylie Agency; (top): Boston University Photography; (bottom): Marco Fedele di Catrano; (bottom): Rachael Madore

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INTRODUCTION

This Caring or Believing or Love Alone Matters

W hen urged to write his autobiography, Saul Bellow used to say there was nothing to tell except that hed been unbearably busy ever since getting circumcised. Busy with the making of novels, stories and the occasional essay; with romance, marriage, fatherhood, divorce, friendship, enmity, grief; with the large-scale events of history and small-scale events of literary life; with the prodigious reading habit and dedication to teaching that saw him into his later eighties. Busy, not least, corresponding. The great authors are not all so good at letters; indeed, you could make a considerable list of figures of the first rank who were perfunctory correspondents. It would seem to be a separate gift, as mysterious as the artistic one. Looking over the best letter writers in our language of the last centuryVirginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Katherine Anne Porter, Evelyn Waugh, Samuel Beckett, John Cheever, William Maxwell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Flannery OConnor, James Merrillone finds every sort of personality and no common denominator. Some kept diaries, others did not. Some were prolific, others produced relatively little. The most one can say is that each led a rich additional life in his or her correspondence, rich enough to have become a part of literature itself.

Four generationsthe one before him, his own, and the two followingare addressed in Bellows tremendous outflow, an exhaustive self-portrait that is, as well, the portrait of an age. His correspondents are a vast company including wives, sons, friends from childhood, fellow writers, current and former lovers, current and former students, admiring and disadmiring readers, acolytes asking him to read what theyd written (he nearly always did, it seems), religious crackpots, autograph hounds (hundreds), obsessive adulators, graphomaniacs and seriously insane people.

It will come as no surprise to readers of Bellows novels and stories that he can in his letters be instantly dramatic as well as very funny. Here are a few instances from the Alfred Kazin file. First, Paris, January of 1950: And of this I am sure: that he [Stendhal] would do as I do with his copy of Les Temps Modernes , that is, scan the latest sottises , observe with brutal contempt the newest wrinkle in anguish, and then feed Simones articles on sex to the cat to cure her of her heat and give the remainder to little G[regory] to cut dollies from; he cant read yet and lives happily in nature. And from Marthas Vineyard, summer 1964: Weve seen a bit of Island Society. Styron is our leader, here in little Fitzgeraldville. Then there is Lillian Hellman, in whom I produce symptoms of shyness . And Phil Rahv who keeps alive the traditions of Karl Marx. Im very fond of Philiphes mishpokhe and he gives us a kind of private Chatauqua course in Hochpolitik from which I get great pleasure. Why cant we forgive each other before we become harmless? And from West Brattleboro, Vermont, summer 1983: That Ive become an unforthcoming correspondent is perfectly true; I take no pleasure in these silences of mine; rather, Im trying to discover the reasons why I so seldom reply. It may be that Im always out with a butterfly net trying to capture my mature and perfected form, which is just about to settle (once and for all) on a flower. It never does settle, it hasnt yet found its flower. That may be the full explanation.

Despite the comradely tenor of these excerpts, relations with Kazin were far from easy. Reading the file through, one encounters Bellow as often outraged as affectionate. Yet in the aftermath of renewed hostilities between them, he dispatched this in the summer of 1982: