the most pleasant part of life

"Kyoto I thoroughly enjoyed, staying in a Japanese inn, old-style, sleeping on a straw mat and lying on the floors half the day, admiring the little moss garden. Being on the floor was childhood again, and childhood is still the most pleasant part of life. A confession of adult failure."

~~ from Saul Bellow to Frances Gendlin, May 1972

Bellow's Rosenfeld

"I liked your [Isaac] Rosenfeld lecture very much. I agreed with most of it. Perhaps I would not write to you about Isaac even if I were not running because I am still thinking about his life, his character, his thoughts and his death and am not yet ready to discuss him. But I will say this: He combined all the reticence and shyness of a small sickly Jewish boy from Chicago with heroic ideas about destiny. And after all, history would not have been history without these apparently timid and inconspicuous Jewish children."

~~ Saul Bellow to Mark Schechner, September 30, 1975

Bellow's Cheever

"Will I read your book? Will I accept a free trip to Xanadu with Helen of Troy as my valet? I am longing to read the galleys. Since I have to go to New York this weekend, and also to Princeton to see my son Adam playing Antonio, the heavy in The Tempest, I shall get Harriet Wasserman of Russell and Volkening to obtain a set of galleys for me from Knopf. I would like to see you too, but I don't know when I will be free from this mixture of glory and horror. But I will write to you pronto about the book, which I am sure to read with the greatest pleasure."

~~ from Saul Bellow to John Cheever, November 10, 1976

Mr. Sammler's Planet

"It's true that I didn't like your review of Sammler. I didn't dislike it more than other pieces of yours, but I disliked it. It appeared more than a year after publication of the book and I had heard that an earlier and more friendly review had been rejected by the editors, but knowing what gossip is, I did not take this to be fact. It was the conclusion of your piece—"God lives!"—that offended me. You meant evidently that I was a megalomaniac. But this didn't seem to me to be literary criticism."

~~ Saul Bellow to Alfred Kazin, March 20, 1974

the power of the truth

"The word 'hero,' long in disrepute, has been redeemed by [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn. He has had the courage, the power of mind and the strength of spirit to speak the truth to the entire world. He is a man of perfect intellectual honor and, in his moral strength, he is peculiarly Russian. To the best Russian writers of this hellish century it has been perfectly clear that only the power of the truth is equal to the power of the state."

~~ Saul Bellow to The New York Times, January 7, 1974

highly individual ghosts

"I don't do very much. Every once in a while I put Henderson [the Rain King] on me like a plumber's level. The bubble is usually in the wrong place, so I sigh and knock off for the day. But Sondra is a beautiful mother-to-be, and Greg gave me much pleasure last month, so my life is far from barren. Too many awful distractions, however, big gloomy houses, money, alimony problems, friends low in spirits, and ghosts, large numbers of highly individual ghosts."

~~ Saul Bellow to John Berryman, December 6, 1956

a little more?

"But I wonder whether I could get into Minnesota for the summer sessions with a creative writing course. For one term, two years ago, they paid me something like eight hundred. Do you think, now that I'm older, they'd give me a little more?"

~~ Saul Bellow to Herbert McCloskey, 1951

Eighty if I must.

"Anyway, it looks as though we'll be coming to New York to live. I don't know what rents are now, but I wouldn't like to pay much more than sixty or seventy. Eighty if I must. As for the size of the flat, that depend on the section we move into. In a neighborhood where I could find a room to write in, we wouldn't need six rooms. Four to six, let's say then. The bigger the better."

~~ Saul Bellow to Monroe Engel, April 30, 1950

Them as has, gets.

"We have a little money and I have applied for a Guggenheim, but I have been so often rejected by Guggenheim I have no right to look for anything but still another no. Isaac [Rosenfeld]'s is really the first case I know of a needy writer and a deserving one getting the prize. Ordinarily it goes to people who have enough of a reputation to have acquired money by means of it. Them as has, gets. The executors of a vast estate could never find it in their hearts to be disloyal to that grand principle."

~~ Saul Bellow to Melvin Tumin, 1948

hanging on a ledge

"Editorially I can't push the magazine to the left because Harris is a shrewd opportunistic bastard who won't permit it. However, if we load the magazine with Bolshevik writers of national reputation, we can have Harris hanging on a ledge before long."

~~ from Saul Bellow to James T. Farrell, 1937

Whom or who, again?

"Number two: the 'who' or 'whom' business. This is very slightly trickier. 'John, whom I know to be an honourable man' is right; 'John, whom I know is an honourable man' is wrong. Here's what you do: you mentally recast the subclauses as main clauses — 'I know him to be an honourable man', 'I know he is an honourable man' — and your ear will guide you: 'him' demands 'whom', and 'he' demands 'who' . . . In conversational prose be wary of whom. In the closing pages of Herzog, Bellow writes, 'Whom was I kidding?' This is grammatically correct; it also leaves the sentence up on one stilt. 'Whom the fuck d'you think you're looking at?' Or even worse, 'At whom the fuck d'you think you're looking?' Never worry about ending a sentence with a preposition. 'That rule', Churchill famously said, 'is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.'"

~~ from Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis

through application

"'It's strange. No one behaves worse or talks more balls than Norman [Mailer], but he's widely liked . . . The question remains. Why don't Jews drink?'

"'Well, it's the same with Jewish achievement in general,' said Saul [Bellow] (as his drink arrived). And that achievement is disproportionate. [Albert] Einstein put it pretty well. The great error is to think it's somehow innate. That way anti-Semitism lies. It isn't innate. It's to do with how you're raised. All good Jewish children know that the way to impress their elders is through application. Not sports, not physical strength or physical beauty, and not the arts. Through learning and studying.'"

~~ from Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis

Bellow's auto-fiction

"In Saul's case, auto-fiction gave rise to weeklong bouts of sleepless anxiety about lawsuits (he made last-minute proof changes, he asked people to sign waivers) — plus family troubles (with father and eldest brother), broken or suspended friendships, the deepening rancour of ex-wives and ex-lovers, and above all the indecipherable disquiet of children. It is morally treacherous ground, and Bellow himself thought the question 'diabolically complex'. Diabolically complex, and — I would've thought — fatally self-shackling. Fiction is freedom? Well, the life-writer seems to be crying out for boundaries and impediments and restraints. Crying out for them — nevertheless inviting them in."

~~ from Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis

the Pruf is in the Yiddish

I've read previously about the Bellow-Rosenfeld J. Alfred.

several solitaries of the highest genius

"'That's just it. There never was such a literary world,' I said. 'In the nineteenth century there were several solitaries of the highest genius—a Melville or a Poe had no literary life. It was the customhouse and the barroom for them. In Russia, Lenin and Stalin destroyed the literary world. Russia's situation now resembles ours—poets, in spite of everything against them, emerge from nowhere. Where did Whitman come from, and where did he get what he had? It was W. Whitman, an irrepressible individual, that had it and that did it.'"

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

life, Charlie, not literature

"Twenty years ago in the hands of the law, he had wrestled with the cops. They had forced him into a straight jacket. He had had diarrhea in the police wagon as they rushed him to Bellevue. They were trying to cope, to do something with a poet. What did the New York police know about poets! They knew drunks and muggers, they knew rapists, they knew women in labor and hopheads, but they were at sea with poets. Then he had called me from a phone booth in the hospital. And I had answered from the hot grimy flaking dressing room a the Belasco. And he had yelled, 'This is life, Charlie, not literature!' . . . [W]hen Humboldt cried, 'Life!' . . . [h]e only meant realistic, naturalistic life. As if art hid the truth and only the sufferings of the mad revealed it."

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

steak and vodka

"Tolsto[y] thought that people got into trouble because they ate steak and drank vodka and coffee and smoked cigars. Overcharged with calories and stimulants and doing no useful labor they fell into carnality and sins. At this point I always remembered that Hitler had been a vegetarian, so it wasn't necessarily the meat that was to blame."

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

ex-friends

"He had no old friends, only ex-friends. He could become terrible, going into reverse without warning. When this happened, it was like being caught in a tunnel by the Express. You could only cling to the walls, or lie between the rails, praying."

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

poetry and proles

"It's been a whole day of atonement."

"You've seen enough of the whatchamacallems? I learned some new words at the poker game from you."

"Which words?"

"Proles," he said, "Lumps. Lumpenproletariat. You gave us a little talk about Karl Marx."

"My lord, I did carry on, didn't I. Completely unbuttoned. What got into me?"

"You wanted to mix with riffraff and the criminal element. You went slumming, Charlie, and you had a great time playing cards with us dumbheads and social rejects."

"I see. I was insulting."

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

The Partisan Crowd

Poet Ben Mazer posted a curious sales item in his Delmore Schwartz social-media group. It's a complete run of The Partisan Review from December 1937 to December 1959, and many of the issues are in excellent condition. "The Partisan crowd" also received good mention in Joseph Epstein's recent writing in Commentary Magazine. The essay concerns his early days among the New York Intellectuals when, as a subscriber, he'd avidly read Commentary, The Partisan Review, and Encounter.