Outtakes from a book review
Some books can be neatly summed up in 750 or 1,000 words, but for others there is far too much to say.
My review of Saul Bellow’s letters went through several drafts, and looking back at the first draft I noticed some things that seemed worth saying, even though they didn’t make the final cut. Bellow’s crankiness toward his fellow writers, for instance, is notable, but it didn’t seem appropriate to dwell on this point in print, considering the warmth and generosity that mark so many of his letters.
This generous collection of letters is probably one of the last of its kind. Ours is not a letter-writing age, and although there may be writers whose e-mails will be worth collecting, the medium favors haste and immediacy. Bellow’s was one of the longest literary careers in American history. The letters presented here span almost three quarters of a century, from 1932, when Bellow was seventeen years old, to 2005, when he died at the age of eighty-nine.
Bellow’s letters were angry, affectionate, acid, and funny. They went out to friends (rarely to family) and as his career gained momentum to his literary contemporaries. Of these, Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and Philip Roth were particular friends.
Each correspondence, as Benjamin Taylor explains in his introduction, had its particular flavor. “Writing to Ralph Ellison, with whom he shared digs and the early struggle for recognition, he is larky, freewheeling.” But in letters to the troubled poet John Berryman, “Fragility of life and arduousness of art are the preoccupations.” When Berryman jumped to his death from a bridge in Minneapolis, Bellow’s note to a friend was laconic: “I often wondered whether he would. I guessed that he wouldn’t. I seldom guess right. Not many of his sort left, and he was a dear friend.” The important things had already been said.
Other writers he had more problems with. “I like him,” he wrote of Norman Mailer, “but he’s such an ideologist.” V.S. Naipaul, he notes, “does not take a kindly view of me, although I once voted him an award, and have always spoken pleasantly of his books (the better ones).” “Singer and I are not the best of friends,” he writes, declining a request to nominate his fellow Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. In another letter he disposes of several writers in one sentence: “I’m speaking of big-time subversives like Ginsberg, Nadine Gordimer, Grace Paley, Doctorow and other representatives of affluent revolution.” And later, “it gives me something less than pleasure to be listed with the Styrons, Vonneguts, Mailers….” Nabokov not only rubbed him the wrong way, he was “one of the great wrong-way rubbers of all time.” He would not take a trip for the privilege of sitting next to John Updike, he writes, declining another honor. As for Mary McCarthy, “she and I never got along.” He objects to the “stridency of writers like Baldwin and their tone of personal injury.” ...
The disadvantage of long life is that you must suffer the deaths of many friends. As the years go by, the letters are punctuated by fewer recommendations for grants and professorships and by more letters of condolence. Yetta, the recipient of the book’s very first letter, is the subject of another letter, sixty-five years later, at the time of her death. He remembers her fiery political speeches and her love of romantic novels. “Even the small genetic accident that made one of her eyes seem oddly placed added warmth and sadness to her look. She always seemed to me to have a significant sort of Jewish beauty.”
