No Vacation in Jerusalem
Even writers communicate by e-mail these days – this means anthologies of their letters will probably not contain thoughts for posterity. Occasionally, a comment may surface that may give some posthumous clues. But compendia covering a whole span of a life can scarcely be expected anymore. This is why the recently published collection of letters by Saul Bellows (1915-2005) may very well be the last anthology of its kind. The great author was a prolific letter-writer throughout his life. The present collection was published by Benjamin Taylor and comprises two fifths of Bellow's letters. Not only do they seem like episodes of a spontaneous autobiography; they also draw a picture of the American literary scene from the era of the Great Depression all the way to the early 21st century. For example, the reader can find a letter that Bellow wrote to leftist author James Thomas Farrell in 1937 in which the 22-year-old outlines his political convictions to the attention of the established novelist. Sixty years later, Bellow goes back to that time when he addressed Philip Roth regarding the latter's novel "I Married a Communist."
The compendium closes with a letter from 2004 in which the elderly Nobel Prize winner for Literature remembers the special linguistic circumstances surrounding his beginnings. Bellow was born in 1915 in Lachine, a suburb of the Canadian urban center of Montreal, the fourth child of Abraham and Liza Belo. His parents had immigrated from St. Petersburg only two years earlier. He was barely four years old, when he was navigating five different languages: "Russian and Yiddish at home, Hebrew for my studies of the Old Testament and French and English in the street." In this letter, Bellow remembers language as creating especially deep differences between the generations: "My parents needed any perceivable assistance. They would constantly ask: 'What did he say?' and I would have to translate for them in broken English. It was not a great help. The older folks did not understand English, nor French." Language became a source of power for the child, a path to independence and an instrument to make a name for himself in the New World.
Career
When he was nine years old, the family moved to Chicago. The city offered Bellow an abundance of material for honing his gift of observation. Upon reaching his thirties, he was able to artfully capture the barely understandable conflicts between Stalinist and Trotskyite fractions within the lively leftist urban scene. Bellow pretended to be a Bolshevik, even travelling to Mexico to see Leon Trotsky. But Trotsky had been murdered a short time before the arrival of the young author. Soon, literature came to play a greater part in Bellow's life – and in his correspondence – than politics. Like himself, all of his friends were also from Russian immigrants and idolized the great poets of the homeland. After the break with his father, Bellow writes: "He boasted that he had read the complete works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky. I believe it. But how could he look at these men with open eyes and have the capacity to act in such a way as he did?"
In 1941, Bellow published his first story in The Partisan Review. From now on, he was focused completely on his career as a writer. His letters from the following decade are a reflection of his self-confidence during these formative years in which he published his first two novels and built a network of contacts in order to have sufficient time and money to be able to pursue writing. Bellow pressures his publisher to support his work with more vigor. Several times, he applied for a Guggenheim scholarship asking established authors such as Robert Penn Warren and Edmund Wilson for letters of recommendation. After two rejections, he was finally awarded the Guggenheim prize in 1948 and opted to take the usual route of these scholarship winners. He traveled abroad.
Although he met American and European intellectuals, such as Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Lionel Abel, Georges Bataille and Nicola Chiaramonte, during his two-year sojourn in Paris, his letters to the United States bear witness to his resistance of succumbing to the temptations of the European culture and literary scene. It seems ultimately that living abroad reinforced his self-image as an American. It was in Paris where he started the great American novel that was to become his big break. "The Adventures of Augie March" begins with the words: "I am an American. Born in Chicago…." The work was published in 1953 and earned Bellow the National Book Award.
Success and personal advancement
This is how Bellow became a member of the literary establishment. Now he was in a position to recommend up-and-coming talent like Bernard Malamud and James Baldwin for Guggenheim scholarships. The letters from this time in Bellow's life document his friendships with poet John Berryman, critic Alfred Kazin and novelist Ralph Ellison. Bellow subsequently produced a series of award-winning novels, established himself as a public person achieving international celebrity status after winning his Nobel Prize in 1976. At the same time, his private life was becoming increasingly more complicated. In 1974, he married his fourth wife, Romanian-born Mathematics professor Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. But we was also still struggling with the demands by his previous wives, the mothers of his three sons. The marriage with Tulcea lasted ten years. In 1989, Bellows finally married Janis Freedman with whom the then 80-year-old fathered a daughter. Over the course of these years, he writes letters describing invitations to teach in Chicago and Boston, public presentations in the United States and abroad, as well as his never-ending work on novels, short stories and essays.
Seen over seven decades, certain topics keep resurfacing in Bellow's letters. For example, he repeatedly addressed the question of his identity as an American Jew. Although his work is populated with Jewish protagonists, in his letters, Bellow discussed his Jewish roots only when asked. William Faulkner, in his capacity as chairman of a committee for the promotion of American values abroad, asked Bellow in 1956 to facilitate the release of Ezra Pound from a psychiatric institution to which the poet had been committed in 1945. Bellow responded in harsh tones: "You want me to join you in honoring a man who called for the destruction of my co-religionists? … Is he to be released because he was a poet? Perhaps better poets than him have been wiped out. Do we want to be silent about them? … The whole world has conspired to ignore what happened, the gigantic wars, the colossal hatred, the unimaginable murders, the destruction of the image of man itself."
Bellow declared he was not a Zionist. But Israel called him. In June 1967, he traveled on behalf of the publication Newsday to Tel Aviv to describe tensions in the Near East on location. His flight was held up in Rome because the Six Day War had broken out. But Bellow did not hesitate to press on and admitted: "I could not have lived with myself had I discontinued the trip." Ten years later, he returned to Israel to write the short book To Jerusalem and Back in which he intended to "provide a clear outline of the problem of Israel for the civilized public."
Jewish identity
His own attitude toward Judaism seems to have taken on clear contours only very late in life. In 1987, for example, he stated to Cynthia Ozick that his generation of American-Jewish writers carried a personal guilt for not having dealt with the holocaust thoroughly enough. He excuses his own failure by saying that in the 1940s he had been too busy to become a novelist – his career and his life as a literary person had been so taxing that he had locked out "the horrible events in Poland." But in the same letter he insists that he has been "brooding" about these events ever since trying to figure out what an appropriate response to these monstrous acts should have looked like, or if there had been a chance at all to influence them.
Bellow gave a final statement on his faith in 1991 in letter to the Jewish author Stephen Mitchell. Mitchell had written a new translation and an introduction to the essential teachings of Christ. Bellow let him know he as well was privy to the attractions of evangelism; gravely ill, when he was eight years old, he had been taken to the children's ward at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. During his stay, a well-meaning missionary had given him a copy of the New Testament. Bellow admits that in this moment of vulnerability and loneliness Jesus had moved him "immeasurably by his deeds and by his words." But he does not let Mitchell off the hook that easily. He goes on in a tone that reminds of the previously quoted letter to Faulker that a Jew cannot afford to forget the past: "Jesus, yes, but what about two thousand years of Jewish history? How do you want to deal with the Jew as the cardinal enemy of Christendom? … People like you must honestly address this question."
It does not matter if he talks about personal matters, literature or politics – the vitality, optimism and his nonchalantly flowing prose make Bellow's letters a rare pleasure for any reader. He utilizes any conceivable opportunity to allow the metaphors to flow freely from his pen. For example, during his visit in Israel in 1976, a friend suggested that he combine his stay with a vacation. Bellow answered: "Vacationing in Jerusalem would be like consummating a marriage in a public wash salon." The reader may very well need to catch his breath after exploring the extraordinarily varied landscape of Bellow's letters. But the present collection invites to repeat visits – indeed, time travel through the most exciting moments in American cultural history.
Monica Strauss is a long-term valued contributor to aufbau. She is a publicist and author. She lives in Manhattan.