FROM THE OBSERVER
Saul Bellow's widow on his life and letters: 'His gift was to love and be loved'
Letters. Sometimes, released from dusty shoeboxes and tall filing cabinets, they can explode in your face, like bombs. For Janis Bellow, however, the long-awaited publication of the letters of her husband, Saul, is "overwhelmingly joyful". Yes, there are some surprises within the collection's pages, things she found "a little bit daunting… and intermittently painful". But of one thing she can reassure me straight off, and that is that she has long since come to terms with the fact that, in a book that runs to 550 pages, she makes her first appearance only on page 411. Happily, she is not one of those terrifying literary widows you read about within the pages of the New Yorker, hoarding and proprietorial, always firing off furious letters to this inquisitive scholar and that nosy biographer: a wife desperate to bolster her role as muse and amanuensis. Apart from anything else, she is too busy juggling her teaching at Boston University with the care of her 10-year-old daughter, Rosie, to spend every spare moment warming her hands on the flame of her husband's renown. But it's also a simple matter of history, of facing facts. "Of course there were times when I thought: 'How could I not have known about this?'" she says, with the ghost of a smile. "But this [Saul's] is a very long life, and my part of the story is only a small one."
Although I should know better – my own father was married four times – I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to stereotyping the serial monogamist, and the kind of woman who might be attracted to him. On the way to meet Saul Bellow's fifth wife here at the house she shared with him in a coppery suburb of Boston, I looked again at an old newspaper photograph of the couple. It was taken in 1997: Saul was then 82, his wife 38. Saul is facing the camera, but his head is lowered slightly, and one hand rests lightly on his brow, as if he were tired, or thinking. Janis, meanwhile, is leaning against him – draped might be a better word – her head on his shoulder, her hand on his knee, her smile sly or victorious, I can't quite tell which. Outwardly, it seems a pretty simple state of affairs: the old guy, who needs always to be in possession of a wife; the younger, rapacious woman who wants the fast-track to a certain sort of lifestyle, to a world where she is always the youngest and the prettiest in a room full of people who admire her new husband so much they hardly dare speak in his presence.
But then Bellow opened her front door, and I saw immediately that this was all wrong. Small, steely and still, she is wearing a denim shirt, black jeans and no make-up; hard to believe this is the same person as the fox in the photograph. She is warm, but extremely serious: clever, clear, the kind of person who thinks about a question before she sets to answering it, and is sometimes, as a result, visibly amazed by her own responses. In a bowl in the middle of the kitchen table is a pile of cakes and pastries she bought at the bakery only moments ago. Once she starts talking, however, her own croissant remains in scattered pieces on her plate. The stories pour out – which is a surprise to us both. By rights, she should be guarded. She remembers all too well the squall that blew up when she and Saul first got together. But grief is at its most painful when the rest of the world has moved on; when the letters and phone calls stop, and you are deemed to be "over it". It is lovely to have an excuse to talk about Saul, and only Saul. Five years after his death, and 21 years after their marriage in a Vermont courthouse – he wore a bowtie, she wore a little dress he bought for her – she is plainly still in love with him. Any woman would notice this. You can see it on the curve of her cheekbones, which glow like incandescent lightbulbs.
When they began their relationship, Bellow had already chalked up four ex-wives: Anita Goshikin, Alexandra Tsachacbasov, Susan Glassman and Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. He was also in possession of three grown-up sons. Wasn't she wary? "You'd think that I ought to have been," she says. "But all that receded. I wasn't in any way wary. He wasn't really a bad boy. He was a serial marrier, but it had to do with a strange desire on his part to be intimate, to have love at the centre of his life. That was part of the daring I saw in him. He was audacious! What would it take to start over again [at that time in your life]? He was hungry in his soul. 'I'm going to have that,' he thought." So he was unbothered by the gossip? "Yes. But he was also keenly aware of how difficult it [our relationship] was [for other people]. He did not just bulldoze through. He did not want to hurt the people he loved. And though people were talking, we were so focused on each other… We liked all the same things. It wasn't: here's this old guy, and I'm this young person. There wasn't a single part of my being that wasn't able to open up to him."
Like Saul, who moved to Chicago from Montreal with his Russian immigrant parents at the age of nine, Janis Bellow was born in Canada. She came to America in 1979 when she enrolled as a PhD student at the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago University (it sounds Orwellian, but the committee is in fact a highly distinguished interdisciplinary graduate degree programme); Bellow was one of her professors. "I didn't go there to study with Saul Bellow, but the very first class I took, there he was. I was his student; he was on my doctoral committee. So when we got together, that all had to be rearranged. Nowadays, of course, that would be actionable or something." But all this was still long in the future: it was several years before they were to be a couple. "After a while, I went to work for him. His assistant was leaving, I needed work, and the job was offered to me. I remember thinking: 'Ugh, I don't type!' I spent that summer pecking away at a typewriter in preparation. That formal period was quite a long one. Several years. The romantic part happened later, and quite suddenly."
She was a young (just 21) and inordinately quiet student. She came from a small place, and most of her new peers had been to Yale or Harvard. As a newcomer and an outsider, when she entered Bellow's class – the Nobel laureate! – the main thought in her head was: which seat will best enable me to disappear? Unfortunately, she arrived before he did, and when he sat down, it was next to her. "I didn't look up," she says. "But I did notice the gentleman's hands." These were beautiful. "Judging by his hands, he was an extraordinary human being."
What else did she notice? "Well, I'd never heard anyone speak that way before. Here was somebody without lecture notes. He would just talk, and it was pouring out of him, a cascade. You felt in the presence of something extraordinary. I found something in those seminars. This was the literary life he was speaking to us about. They were not ordinary classroom discussions – Joyce, Proust, Conrad, Flaubert, Tolstoy: whatever he felt like teaching. I never missed a single one."
When she went to work as his assistant, however, she saw a different Bellow. "Outside the classroom, he was overwhelmed and… bothered. It was like trying to dig somebody out. He was funny and very formal, but I could see the weight of the world on him. He seemed oppressed." As his letters reveal, in his role as the elder statesman of American letters Saul was overwhelmed with requests; he travelled constantly, delivering lectures and speeches. He was also dutiful when it came to scribbling recommendations to awards committees on behalf of other writers. "He was frail and harassed," says Janis. "He was very correct and cordial, but not a particularly pleasant human being. That's why, when I hear people talk, when they say: 'I was so nervous when he came into the room; I needed a stiff drink before I spoke to him', I know what they mean because, at that time, I'd no idea how much joy and energy there was inside him. The man that I lived with and loved for all those years was like a 17-year-old boy. He was not a grump. He woke up happy."
In the winter of 1985, Bellow's fourth wife, Alexandra, a celebrated mathematician, asked him for a divorce, and the couple separated. The writer had to leave their home on the north side of Chicago, and set up camp at Hyde Park, close to the university. He also came down with terrible flu. "He got a little apartment, and we graduate students all helped him fix it up," says Janis. "This was a very depressed human being, and a sick one. I remember thinking: this man is in trouble. I didn't think it was very hopeful for a man of those years. I began to do things for him, like bring over food, but there wasn't in any way a connection [between us]. It was like I was taking care of an older family member or something." Then, one day, Bellow saw her leaving the library. "I must have looked weary or something. He said: 'You're having a hard day, aren't you?' At first, I thought that he was complaining that I was leaving the library too early. And then he asked me: 'Why don't you come to my house for dinner?'
"I didn't think anything of it, but when I appeared at the apartment, he was standing in the doorway wearing this apron [she leaps over to the stove, where this tattered relic still hangs] and holding this spatula. I didn't know he cooked; I thought we'd have pizza, and I'd do dictation. He was in a charming mood. I hadn't seen this side of him, and we had this wonderful evening. [It was clear that] he had ideas about this meeting that had never occurred to me. If someone had said: 'Did you ever consider him romantically?' I would have told them: 'No, no!' But… we were never apart again."
For the next few months, she and Bellow existed in a kind of bubble. "We were underground! This wasn't something anyone knew about. I had my own apartment, and I used to go there to pick up messages, but I never spent another night there. All my friends thought I was in the library. We explored Chicago. He showed me where he grew up. We went to the zoo a lot. It was very romantic. An immediate intimacy developed after that first physical intimacy. I was overly studious. I loved nature. But suddenly it felt like every single part of my life came together with his. It was a very beautiful time: [for him] a rebirth, and an unexpected one. He had a way of being that was total openness, or nothing: you give yourself madly, or why bother? He opened himself up. He had that capacity: to be loved, and to be in love." The great joy of reading his letters, she says, is that she has been taking him to bed with her again every night. "To hear something in his voice, something that you've never heard before…" Her voice, already low, drops a little more. "That is such a gift."
Bellow's letters take the reader through a long and replete – "capacious" is his wife's word for it – life. The earliest surviving letter was written at the age of 17, when he was on holiday with one of his two brothers. In it, Bellow breaks off with a childhood girlfriend, Yetta Barshevsky. It is thrilling. Already, you can see a future novelist at work. "It is dark now and the lonely wind is making the trees softly whisper and rustle. Somewhere in the night a bird cries out to the wind. My brother in the next room snores softly, insistently. The country sleeps… Over me the light swings up and back, up and back. It throws shadows on the paper, on my face. I am thinking, thinking, Yetta, drifting with night, with infinity, and all my thoughts are of you. But my thoughts of you are not altogether kind, they sting, they lash. Or shall we talk business?" Further down the page, however, he pulls back from this youthful intensity. Well, almost. "I hate melodrama," he writes. "The only thing that I hate more intensely than melodrama and spinach is myself."
Bellow was born Solomon Bellow in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, two years after his parents had arrived there from St Petersburg. When he was nine, the family moved to the Humboldt Park neighbourhood of Chicago, the city that would form the backdrop of his greatest novels. His father, Abram, was an onion importer, a deliverer of coal, and a sometime bootlegger. His mother, Liza, died when Saul was 17, but not before she had passed on to him her love of the Bible (he learned Hebrew at four), whose cadences inform every page of his prose, for all that he longed to escape the orthodoxy of his Jewish upbringing.
After university in Chicago, and a stint in the merchant navy during the war, during which he completed his first novel, Dangling Man, he embarked wholesale on his career as a novelist, funding it with university teaching and academic grants. His first serious critical success was The Adventures of Augie March (1953), but it was not until his 1964 novel, Herzog, became a bestseller that he earned any real money. Are his letters riddled with angst over this writerly struggle? His elder brothers, both businessmen, were by this time making serious cash, and regarded him, he once said, as "some schmuck with a pen". But, no. Unlike many writers, his dear friend John Cheever among them, Bellow was not one for self-doubt. He believed in his talent. In a pair of extraordinary letters to John Lehman in 1951, Bellow rails against the British publisher for not praising him enough. "If you can find nothing better to say upon reading Augie March than that you all 'think very highly' of me, I don't think I want you to publish it all," he writes. Later he adds: "Now, I know you haven't seen anything like my book among recent novels. I've been reviewing them; I know what they are. They're for the most part phony, or empty-headed, banal and bungling. I should have thought it would do something to you to see Augie." To adapt the song: I may be wrong, but I think I'm wonderful.
It was women ("They eat green salad and drink human blood," says Moses Herzog) who caused one angst, not writing. James Atlas, the author of a biography of Bellow – the novelist despised it, though he was interviewed by Atlas several times – has suggested that so long as he "still experienced himself as the son, abandoned and betrayed by the mother who died without his permission, he was unable to sustain relationships with women"; Mary Cheever, the wife of John Cheever, believed the two got on so well because "they were both women-haters".
Is this fair? From the letters, it is hard to judge. There are some pretty ugly missives to ex-wives, and more than a few notes to friends in which he rails against the unfairness of his various alimony agreements. He has nothing good to say about feminism, and I was upset by a series of letters to a girlfriend, Margaret Staats, who, while Bellow is travelling in Europe, discovers she might have cancer. When she finds out that this is not the case Bellow tells her to quit moaning. Doesn't she know that it has been just as bad for him, waiting for news? It's not as if he hasn't called her on the telephone! On the other hand, when he is in love, boy, is he in love. He bills and he coos, and he uses baby names, and he cannot wait to be with the object of his desire. He is suddenly a darling.
Most of the letters, though, are more literary life than private life – and they are the more fascinating. There are letters to William Faulkner and Edmund Wilson, to John Berryman and John Cheever, to Cynthia Ozick and Martin Amis. Bellow has a go at Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (the one is "rash", the other "stupid"); he tells Philip Roth – brave! – that his novel I Married a Communist is unsatisfactory ("I assume that you can no more bear Ira than the reader can. But you stand loyally by this cast-iron klutz – a big strong stupid man who attracts you for reasons invisible to me"); he flirts with Edna O'Brien ("I think you are a lovely woman"); and he disdains Christopher Hitchens, whom Bellow's young admirer, Martin Amis, had brought to dinner ("Hitchens appeals to Amis. This is a temptation I understand. But the sort of people you like to write about aren't always fit company, especially at the dinner table"). He also describes his feelings upon winning, in 1976, the Nobel prize for literature: "this mixture of glory and horror," he calls it, as if he were not incredibly pleased.
Best of all, though, are the critical and descriptive passages: of Chicago ("appalled by its own culturelessness"), of the places he visits on his travels, of the books he is reading (there is a wonderfully succinct and witty account of War and Peace). Capacious is certainly the word. And thank goodness. The digital world being what it is, this could well be one of the last collections of letters by a great writer we will ever get to read.
Janis Bellow did not work on the letters herself, and perhaps this was sensible. "I blush a little when I look back. I had a rather schoolmarmish attitude to Benjamin [Taylor, their editor]. It was because I felt protective. But it was his book, and while I might have been pulling in the direction of 'this will hurt someone's feelings', he was very convincing when it came to telling me something ought to stay." Does she hope it will change readers' perceptions of Saul? Zachary Leader's authorised biography of Bellow is not due for several years. On a personal level, yes. "I keep hoping that people who felt put out – who felt: 'Why didn't he have time for me?' – will realise how busy he was, how much was actually being delivered. That they will see that he has this generosity that somehow spreads out."
She has said that her own share in Saul's life was only a small one, but the irony is that she was also with him for longer than any other woman. Their relationship lasted for two decades, and by her account, they never had a cross word. "Yes. People used to joke: 'You're lucky – you didn't have some mean book written about you; you would if you'd come earlier.' [Saul, it is generally agreed, made nasty characters of his ex-wives] I'm not going to deny that. I'm much luckier. We met at the right time. If I'd been earlier in the line-up… I don't think I could have been with a man who was unfaithful to me. The pain of it."
After they were married, Saul seemed more free: he let go of some of his responsibilities to the outside world. There was a new lightness. In 1994, however, he ate a poisonous fish in the Caribbean, and fell into a coma that lasted five weeks. Janis did not leave his hospital for 10 days, and there followed months of rehabilitation. Had she ever imagined that she would end up as his nurse? "We joked about it. There was nothing he hid from himself. After we'd been married for two years, we asked ourselves: 'Are we going to be able to maintain this?' He wanted me to be free to go when it was over. He dreaded a loss of virility. We said to ourselves: 'We've already had more than most people have.'"
After his recovery, though he would now begin for the first time to define himself as an "old man", he was strong enough to work. He wrote a late, great novel, Ravelstein, based on the life and death of his friend, American academic Allan Bloom ("Bellow survives [and] so does fiction itself," wrote Malcolm Bradbury, possibly a little too dazzled by the miracle). He also, in the 11th year of his final marriage, became a father again – to the daughter he had always craved. "I wasn't the kind of person who was interested [in babies], only then it grabbed me with a ferocity. This was not for him, it was for me. But Rosie got the best of him. He was a writer, you see, not a husband, or a father; [looking back] you see a pattern of him not being able to put in time. When a child comes along, it displaces you, if you need to be at the centre, and obviously Saul did.
"He had huge needs. The writing life needed to be supported. He was aware of this; I'm not saying anything disrespectful. He failed his children; he left them, and it was a wound he carried around. He knew the cruelty of this. At the very end, though he was not a well father, he was in the house. He and Rosie would watch The Lion King together: in the final, unpleasant stages of his last illness, he was at the point where he didn't mind watching the same film over and over. I was somehow managing Rosie and Saul in the same way."
In the last weeks, she was determined to keep the house happy. She remembers, one afternoon, Rosie singing along with gusto to a Depression-era songbook, and dancing around the room. "Don't you think the child should be removed?" asked a visiting friend. "Leave Rosie alone," said Saul. "She's enacting my fantasies." He died at home, aged 89, Janis and Rosie by his side. Do they have a relationship with Saul's sons? Not really. Rosie has special needs, and Janis is focused very much on her. "We had cordial relations… but each of them belongs to a different mother. They're quite separate, even from one another."
It must seem as if her life has been lived the wrong way around. "Yes. I did have the feeling when he died: now my life is over, too. You start to think of yourself as posthumous." Does she dare to think of meeting someone else, or will no one match up? "I haven't had a chance even to wonder about that. In the beginning, I didn't want help. I needed to regroup with Rosie, just the two of us. So… people disappear. I kept thinking: 'I will get back in touch with these people, the people who wrote me all these letters.' I used to read them at the end of the day. It was so good to have them, but then that stops and it was my turn [to write back] and I didn't. I really cut myself off from everyone. If you are grieving, and you have a little child, well, life has to move. Crying was something you did in the shower. I begin to think of myself as a loner, a lone wolf. It's a strange way of being in the world. I'm solitary. I didn't start out that way." She keeps busy – perhaps too busy. But she does not involve herself in Bellow World: in symposia and lectures, in new editions and magazine profiles. "His whole world has disappeared, and that's the strangeness of it. I'm in a different universe now." The new universe is all about Rosie.
She takes me on a tour of the house. It is cosy, not grand, and that goes for Bellow's writing room, too (there is another home, for the summers, in Vermont). It is emphatically a family house, with the strange twist that there just happen to be photographs of a Nobel laureate on almost every shelf. He looks extremely happy in all of them: a picture of patriarchal contentment. You are reminded that, before his final illnesses, Bellow was proud of his fitness: he took care of himself; he was a man who liked to chop wood. And sure enough, when I ask Janis how she prefers to remember him – how she would describe him to an old girlfriend as if she had met him only yesterday – it is not his giant brain she thinks of first, nor his amazing facility with words, nor even the fact that, as she told me earlier, he had "read everything, six times". It is his physicality, the way he felt in her arms. "He had beautiful skin, healthy young skin, even at the end. He wasn't exactly tall, but he had this broad upper body, these giant arms." She slips into the present tense. "He's the kind of person you're so glad to be embracing at the end of the day. In bed. You want to be close to this human being. He's so full of excitement, and energy." She presses her hands to her chest, and closes her eyes.
Saul Bellow Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor, is published on 4 November by Penguin Classics
To John Cheever, 2 May 1979, Chicago
Dear John:
Do you realise we haven't seen each other's dear faces in nearly a year? I have seen you in the papers pulling down one award after another and that has given me great satisfaction. I am somewhat sorry for you because you have only the occasional satisfaction of remembering me. We ought to do something about this, especially as it has not been a happy year, and it would do me good to see you. […]
Atop the Hyde Park Bank building in Chicago 30 years ago there was a Russian nightclub called the Troika where they sang "Don't Forget Me," a sentimental lied which applies to us.
Love,
To Martin Amis, 30 December 1990, Schomberg, Ontario
Dear Martin,
Janis and I are in Ontario in the top storey of her parents' farmhouse looking into the falling snow, trees, fields, a pond, and staring directly into the empty face of a Trojan-helmet chimney emitting smoke from wood chopped by me. We've just come out of the bath and we sit beside a huge white tub-with-a-view, a whirlpool or perhaps even a Jacuzzi into which you pour bubble-bath cream which foams up and makes you into an Olympian, Old Massa Zeus looking down on white Chanel clouds.
Too bad the people I care for are so widely distributed over the face of the earth. But then one tends to think about them all the more. Proximity isn't everything. In this bedroom I have found a volume of Aldous Huxley's letters written during the war years, many of them from Hollywood to correspondents in London and other distant places. His views might have been less kooky if he hadn't left England. But there are such things as inner distances and homegrown or domestic kookiness. I come up with odd ideas on my own Chicago turf and friends in England also send me their strange views. Years ago in Greenwich Village I used to say to a particular pal, "There's only me and thee that's sane and I sometimes have my doubts about thee." The occasion for these thoughts is the mention of [Salman] Rushdie's name at the breakfast table, his embrace or re-embrace of Islam. I suggested that he may have believed mistakenly that the civilisation of the west had once and for all triumphed over exotic fundamentalism, After all, the Pope didn't excommunicate Joyce for writing Ulysses and the Church is even older than Islam. In short, it isn't safe yet to say that such and such a phenomenon has passed into history. Just as we were thinking that perestroika and glasnost had purified Russia once and for all we read a speech by the chief of the KGB accusing the US of sending radioactive wheat and poisoned foodstuffs to feed the hungry in the Soviet Union.
The likes of us should quit politics and stick to dreams. It gave me pleasure to hear that I recently figured in a dream of yours positively. I recently dreamt:
Dream I: I identify Tolstoy as the driver of a beat-up white van on the expressway. I ask the old guy at the wheel of this crumbling van what he can do to keep his flapping door from banging against the finish of my car. When he leans over to the right I see that he is none other than Leo Tolstoy, beard and all. He invites me to follow him off the expressway to a tavern and he says, "I want you to have this jar of pickled herring." He adds, "I knew your brother." At the mention of my late brother I burst into tears.
Dream II: A secret remedy for a deadly disease is inscribed in Chinese characters on my penis. For this reason my life is in danger. My son Greg is guarding me in a California hideout from the agents of a pharmaceutical company, etc.
Dream III: I find myself in a library filled with unknown masterpieces by Henry James, Joseph Conrad and others. Titles I have never seen mentioned anywhere. In shock and joy I open a volume by Conrad and read several pages, sentence after sentence after sentence in the old boy's best style, more brilliant than ever. "Why in the hell was I never told about this?" I ask. Certain parties have been holding out on us. I am indignant.
I depend on these dream-events to sort me out. Or perhaps to document my disorder more fully.We may not be going to France after all. Our friend Bloom has for some months been down with the paralyzing Guillain-Barre syndrome and we can make no travel plans till we know whether the paralysis is temporary. Or not. He's making progress but there won't be any holidays until we've seen him through. Somebody at the BBC last year invited me to do a program in May and if the arrangements can be made perhaps we'll fly over and catch you before you leave London. […]
Best wishes for the New Year to you and Antonia and the kids from Janis and me.
Love,
[In an effort to be rid of the fatwa pronounced on him by Ayatollah Khomeini, Salman Rushdie had issued a tactical statement – later withdrawn – in which he claimed to have turned to Islam.]
To Philip Roth, 1 January 1998, Brookline
Dear Philip,
Sorry to be so slow. Janis got to your manuscript first and all her enthusiasm, sympathies and forebodings were then communicated to me. A new Roth book is a big event in these parts. We are, to use the Chicago terms of the 20s, your rooters and boosters.
When she took off for Canada on Xmas day to see parents and sister, brother, kiddies, she left I Married a Communist with me for the holiday season. Reading your book consoled me in this empty house. It's a treat to read one of your manuscripts – I say this upfront – but this time the overall effect was not satisfactory. I was particularly aware of the absence of distance – I don't mean that the writer must put space between himself and the characters in his book. But there should be a certain detachment from the writer's own passions. I speak as one who in Herzog created the same sin. There I hoped that comic effects might protect me. Nevertheless I crossed the border too many times to raid the enemy camp. But then Herzog was a chump, a failed intellectual and at bottom a sentimentalist. In your case, the man who gives us Eve and Sylphid is an enragé, a fanatic-for-real.
But that's not the outstanding defect of IMAC. Your reader, out of respect for your powers, is more than willing to go along with you. He will not, as I was not, be able to go along with your Ira, probably the least attractive of all your characters. I assume that you can no more bear Ira than the reader can. But you stand loyally by this cast-iron klutz – a big strong stupid man who attracts you for reasons invisible to me.
Now there is real mystery about communists in the west, to limit myself to those. How were they able to accept Stalin – one of the most monstrous tyrants ever? You would have thought that the Stalin-Hitler division of Poland, the defeat of the French which opened the way to Hitler's invasion of Russia, would have led CP members to reconsider their loyalties. But no. When I landed in Paris in 1948 I found that the intellectual leaders (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc) remained loyal despite the Stalin sea of blood. Well, every country, every government has its sea, or lake, or pond. Still Stalin remained "the hope" – despite the clear parallel with Hitler.
But to keep it short – the reason: the reason lay in the hatred of one's own country. Among the French it was the old confrontation of "free spirits", or artists, with the ruling bourgeoisie. In America it was the fight against the McCarthys, the House Committees investigating subversion, etc that justified the left, the followers of Henry Wallace, etc. The main enemy was at home (Lenin's WWI slogan). If you opposed the CP you were a McCarthyite, no two ways about it.
Well, it was a deep and perverse stupidity. It didn't require a great mind to see what Stalinism was. But the militants and activists refused to reckon with the simple facts available to everybody.
Enough: you will say that all of that is acknowledged in IMAC. Yes, and no. You tell us that Ira is a brute, a murderer. But who else is there? Ira and Eve are at the core of your novel – and what does this pair amount to?
One of your persistent themes is the purgation one can obtain only through rage. The forces of aggression are liberating, etc. And I can see that as a legitimate point of view. OK if your characters are titans. But Eve is simply a pitiful woman and Sylphid is a pampered, wicked fat girl with a bison hump. These are not titans.
There aren't many people to whom I can be so open. We've always been candid with each other and I hope we will continue, both of us, to say what we think. You'll be sore at me, but I believe you won't cast me off for ever.
Ever yours,
Saul Bellow's widow on his life and letters: 'His gift was to love and be loved'
Letters. Sometimes, released from dusty shoeboxes and tall filing cabinets, they can explode in your face, like bombs. For Janis Bellow, however, the long-awaited publication of the letters of her husband, Saul, is "overwhelmingly joyful". Yes, there are some surprises within the collection's pages, things she found "a little bit daunting… and intermittently painful". But of one thing she can reassure me straight off, and that is that she has long since come to terms with the fact that, in a book that runs to 550 pages, she makes her first appearance only on page 411. Happily, she is not one of those terrifying literary widows you read about within the pages of the New Yorker, hoarding and proprietorial, always firing off furious letters to this inquisitive scholar and that nosy biographer: a wife desperate to bolster her role as muse and amanuensis. Apart from anything else, she is too busy juggling her teaching at Boston University with the care of her 10-year-old daughter, Rosie, to spend every spare moment warming her hands on the flame of her husband's renown. But it's also a simple matter of history, of facing facts. "Of course there were times when I thought: 'How could I not have known about this?'" she says, with the ghost of a smile. "But this [Saul's] is a very long life, and my part of the story is only a small one."
Although I should know better – my own father was married four times – I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to stereotyping the serial monogamist, and the kind of woman who might be attracted to him. On the way to meet Saul Bellow's fifth wife here at the house she shared with him in a coppery suburb of Boston, I looked again at an old newspaper photograph of the couple. It was taken in 1997: Saul was then 82, his wife 38. Saul is facing the camera, but his head is lowered slightly, and one hand rests lightly on his brow, as if he were tired, or thinking. Janis, meanwhile, is leaning against him – draped might be a better word – her head on his shoulder, her hand on his knee, her smile sly or victorious, I can't quite tell which. Outwardly, it seems a pretty simple state of affairs: the old guy, who needs always to be in possession of a wife; the younger, rapacious woman who wants the fast-track to a certain sort of lifestyle, to a world where she is always the youngest and the prettiest in a room full of people who admire her new husband so much they hardly dare speak in his presence.
But then Bellow opened her front door, and I saw immediately that this was all wrong. Small, steely and still, she is wearing a denim shirt, black jeans and no make-up; hard to believe this is the same person as the fox in the photograph. She is warm, but extremely serious: clever, clear, the kind of person who thinks about a question before she sets to answering it, and is sometimes, as a result, visibly amazed by her own responses. In a bowl in the middle of the kitchen table is a pile of cakes and pastries she bought at the bakery only moments ago. Once she starts talking, however, her own croissant remains in scattered pieces on her plate. The stories pour out – which is a surprise to us both. By rights, she should be guarded. She remembers all too well the squall that blew up when she and Saul first got together. But grief is at its most painful when the rest of the world has moved on; when the letters and phone calls stop, and you are deemed to be "over it". It is lovely to have an excuse to talk about Saul, and only Saul. Five years after his death, and 21 years after their marriage in a Vermont courthouse – he wore a bowtie, she wore a little dress he bought for her – she is plainly still in love with him. Any woman would notice this. You can see it on the curve of her cheekbones, which glow like incandescent lightbulbs.
When they began their relationship, Bellow had already chalked up four ex-wives: Anita Goshikin, Alexandra Tsachacbasov, Susan Glassman and Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. He was also in possession of three grown-up sons. Wasn't she wary? "You'd think that I ought to have been," she says. "But all that receded. I wasn't in any way wary. He wasn't really a bad boy. He was a serial marrier, but it had to do with a strange desire on his part to be intimate, to have love at the centre of his life. That was part of the daring I saw in him. He was audacious! What would it take to start over again [at that time in your life]? He was hungry in his soul. 'I'm going to have that,' he thought." So he was unbothered by the gossip? "Yes. But he was also keenly aware of how difficult it [our relationship] was [for other people]. He did not just bulldoze through. He did not want to hurt the people he loved. And though people were talking, we were so focused on each other… We liked all the same things. It wasn't: here's this old guy, and I'm this young person. There wasn't a single part of my being that wasn't able to open up to him."
Like Saul, who moved to Chicago from Montreal with his Russian immigrant parents at the age of nine, Janis Bellow was born in Canada. She came to America in 1979 when she enrolled as a PhD student at the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago University (it sounds Orwellian, but the committee is in fact a highly distinguished interdisciplinary graduate degree programme); Bellow was one of her professors. "I didn't go there to study with Saul Bellow, but the very first class I took, there he was. I was his student; he was on my doctoral committee. So when we got together, that all had to be rearranged. Nowadays, of course, that would be actionable or something." But all this was still long in the future: it was several years before they were to be a couple. "After a while, I went to work for him. His assistant was leaving, I needed work, and the job was offered to me. I remember thinking: 'Ugh, I don't type!' I spent that summer pecking away at a typewriter in preparation. That formal period was quite a long one. Several years. The romantic part happened later, and quite suddenly."
She was a young (just 21) and inordinately quiet student. She came from a small place, and most of her new peers had been to Yale or Harvard. As a newcomer and an outsider, when she entered Bellow's class – the Nobel laureate! – the main thought in her head was: which seat will best enable me to disappear? Unfortunately, she arrived before he did, and when he sat down, it was next to her. "I didn't look up," she says. "But I did notice the gentleman's hands." These were beautiful. "Judging by his hands, he was an extraordinary human being."
What else did she notice? "Well, I'd never heard anyone speak that way before. Here was somebody without lecture notes. He would just talk, and it was pouring out of him, a cascade. You felt in the presence of something extraordinary. I found something in those seminars. This was the literary life he was speaking to us about. They were not ordinary classroom discussions – Joyce, Proust, Conrad, Flaubert, Tolstoy: whatever he felt like teaching. I never missed a single one."
When she went to work as his assistant, however, she saw a different Bellow. "Outside the classroom, he was overwhelmed and… bothered. It was like trying to dig somebody out. He was funny and very formal, but I could see the weight of the world on him. He seemed oppressed." As his letters reveal, in his role as the elder statesman of American letters Saul was overwhelmed with requests; he travelled constantly, delivering lectures and speeches. He was also dutiful when it came to scribbling recommendations to awards committees on behalf of other writers. "He was frail and harassed," says Janis. "He was very correct and cordial, but not a particularly pleasant human being. That's why, when I hear people talk, when they say: 'I was so nervous when he came into the room; I needed a stiff drink before I spoke to him', I know what they mean because, at that time, I'd no idea how much joy and energy there was inside him. The man that I lived with and loved for all those years was like a 17-year-old boy. He was not a grump. He woke up happy."
In the winter of 1985, Bellow's fourth wife, Alexandra, a celebrated mathematician, asked him for a divorce, and the couple separated. The writer had to leave their home on the north side of Chicago, and set up camp at Hyde Park, close to the university. He also came down with terrible flu. "He got a little apartment, and we graduate students all helped him fix it up," says Janis. "This was a very depressed human being, and a sick one. I remember thinking: this man is in trouble. I didn't think it was very hopeful for a man of those years. I began to do things for him, like bring over food, but there wasn't in any way a connection [between us]. It was like I was taking care of an older family member or something." Then, one day, Bellow saw her leaving the library. "I must have looked weary or something. He said: 'You're having a hard day, aren't you?' At first, I thought that he was complaining that I was leaving the library too early. And then he asked me: 'Why don't you come to my house for dinner?'
"I didn't think anything of it, but when I appeared at the apartment, he was standing in the doorway wearing this apron [she leaps over to the stove, where this tattered relic still hangs] and holding this spatula. I didn't know he cooked; I thought we'd have pizza, and I'd do dictation. He was in a charming mood. I hadn't seen this side of him, and we had this wonderful evening. [It was clear that] he had ideas about this meeting that had never occurred to me. If someone had said: 'Did you ever consider him romantically?' I would have told them: 'No, no!' But… we were never apart again."
For the next few months, she and Bellow existed in a kind of bubble. "We were underground! This wasn't something anyone knew about. I had my own apartment, and I used to go there to pick up messages, but I never spent another night there. All my friends thought I was in the library. We explored Chicago. He showed me where he grew up. We went to the zoo a lot. It was very romantic. An immediate intimacy developed after that first physical intimacy. I was overly studious. I loved nature. But suddenly it felt like every single part of my life came together with his. It was a very beautiful time: [for him] a rebirth, and an unexpected one. He had a way of being that was total openness, or nothing: you give yourself madly, or why bother? He opened himself up. He had that capacity: to be loved, and to be in love." The great joy of reading his letters, she says, is that she has been taking him to bed with her again every night. "To hear something in his voice, something that you've never heard before…" Her voice, already low, drops a little more. "That is such a gift."
Bellow's letters take the reader through a long and replete – "capacious" is his wife's word for it – life. The earliest surviving letter was written at the age of 17, when he was on holiday with one of his two brothers. In it, Bellow breaks off with a childhood girlfriend, Yetta Barshevsky. It is thrilling. Already, you can see a future novelist at work. "It is dark now and the lonely wind is making the trees softly whisper and rustle. Somewhere in the night a bird cries out to the wind. My brother in the next room snores softly, insistently. The country sleeps… Over me the light swings up and back, up and back. It throws shadows on the paper, on my face. I am thinking, thinking, Yetta, drifting with night, with infinity, and all my thoughts are of you. But my thoughts of you are not altogether kind, they sting, they lash. Or shall we talk business?" Further down the page, however, he pulls back from this youthful intensity. Well, almost. "I hate melodrama," he writes. "The only thing that I hate more intensely than melodrama and spinach is myself."
Bellow was born Solomon Bellow in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, two years after his parents had arrived there from St Petersburg. When he was nine, the family moved to the Humboldt Park neighbourhood of Chicago, the city that would form the backdrop of his greatest novels. His father, Abram, was an onion importer, a deliverer of coal, and a sometime bootlegger. His mother, Liza, died when Saul was 17, but not before she had passed on to him her love of the Bible (he learned Hebrew at four), whose cadences inform every page of his prose, for all that he longed to escape the orthodoxy of his Jewish upbringing.
After university in Chicago, and a stint in the merchant navy during the war, during which he completed his first novel, Dangling Man, he embarked wholesale on his career as a novelist, funding it with university teaching and academic grants. His first serious critical success was The Adventures of Augie March (1953), but it was not until his 1964 novel, Herzog, became a bestseller that he earned any real money. Are his letters riddled with angst over this writerly struggle? His elder brothers, both businessmen, were by this time making serious cash, and regarded him, he once said, as "some schmuck with a pen". But, no. Unlike many writers, his dear friend John Cheever among them, Bellow was not one for self-doubt. He believed in his talent. In a pair of extraordinary letters to John Lehman in 1951, Bellow rails against the British publisher for not praising him enough. "If you can find nothing better to say upon reading Augie March than that you all 'think very highly' of me, I don't think I want you to publish it all," he writes. Later he adds: "Now, I know you haven't seen anything like my book among recent novels. I've been reviewing them; I know what they are. They're for the most part phony, or empty-headed, banal and bungling. I should have thought it would do something to you to see Augie." To adapt the song: I may be wrong, but I think I'm wonderful.
It was women ("They eat green salad and drink human blood," says Moses Herzog) who caused one angst, not writing. James Atlas, the author of a biography of Bellow – the novelist despised it, though he was interviewed by Atlas several times – has suggested that so long as he "still experienced himself as the son, abandoned and betrayed by the mother who died without his permission, he was unable to sustain relationships with women"; Mary Cheever, the wife of John Cheever, believed the two got on so well because "they were both women-haters".
Is this fair? From the letters, it is hard to judge. There are some pretty ugly missives to ex-wives, and more than a few notes to friends in which he rails against the unfairness of his various alimony agreements. He has nothing good to say about feminism, and I was upset by a series of letters to a girlfriend, Margaret Staats, who, while Bellow is travelling in Europe, discovers she might have cancer. When she finds out that this is not the case Bellow tells her to quit moaning. Doesn't she know that it has been just as bad for him, waiting for news? It's not as if he hasn't called her on the telephone! On the other hand, when he is in love, boy, is he in love. He bills and he coos, and he uses baby names, and he cannot wait to be with the object of his desire. He is suddenly a darling.
Most of the letters, though, are more literary life than private life – and they are the more fascinating. There are letters to William Faulkner and Edmund Wilson, to John Berryman and John Cheever, to Cynthia Ozick and Martin Amis. Bellow has a go at Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (the one is "rash", the other "stupid"); he tells Philip Roth – brave! – that his novel I Married a Communist is unsatisfactory ("I assume that you can no more bear Ira than the reader can. But you stand loyally by this cast-iron klutz – a big strong stupid man who attracts you for reasons invisible to me"); he flirts with Edna O'Brien ("I think you are a lovely woman"); and he disdains Christopher Hitchens, whom Bellow's young admirer, Martin Amis, had brought to dinner ("Hitchens appeals to Amis. This is a temptation I understand. But the sort of people you like to write about aren't always fit company, especially at the dinner table"). He also describes his feelings upon winning, in 1976, the Nobel prize for literature: "this mixture of glory and horror," he calls it, as if he were not incredibly pleased.
Best of all, though, are the critical and descriptive passages: of Chicago ("appalled by its own culturelessness"), of the places he visits on his travels, of the books he is reading (there is a wonderfully succinct and witty account of War and Peace). Capacious is certainly the word. And thank goodness. The digital world being what it is, this could well be one of the last collections of letters by a great writer we will ever get to read.
Janis Bellow did not work on the letters herself, and perhaps this was sensible. "I blush a little when I look back. I had a rather schoolmarmish attitude to Benjamin [Taylor, their editor]. It was because I felt protective. But it was his book, and while I might have been pulling in the direction of 'this will hurt someone's feelings', he was very convincing when it came to telling me something ought to stay." Does she hope it will change readers' perceptions of Saul? Zachary Leader's authorised biography of Bellow is not due for several years. On a personal level, yes. "I keep hoping that people who felt put out – who felt: 'Why didn't he have time for me?' – will realise how busy he was, how much was actually being delivered. That they will see that he has this generosity that somehow spreads out."
She has said that her own share in Saul's life was only a small one, but the irony is that she was also with him for longer than any other woman. Their relationship lasted for two decades, and by her account, they never had a cross word. "Yes. People used to joke: 'You're lucky – you didn't have some mean book written about you; you would if you'd come earlier.' [Saul, it is generally agreed, made nasty characters of his ex-wives] I'm not going to deny that. I'm much luckier. We met at the right time. If I'd been earlier in the line-up… I don't think I could have been with a man who was unfaithful to me. The pain of it."
After they were married, Saul seemed more free: he let go of some of his responsibilities to the outside world. There was a new lightness. In 1994, however, he ate a poisonous fish in the Caribbean, and fell into a coma that lasted five weeks. Janis did not leave his hospital for 10 days, and there followed months of rehabilitation. Had she ever imagined that she would end up as his nurse? "We joked about it. There was nothing he hid from himself. After we'd been married for two years, we asked ourselves: 'Are we going to be able to maintain this?' He wanted me to be free to go when it was over. He dreaded a loss of virility. We said to ourselves: 'We've already had more than most people have.'"
After his recovery, though he would now begin for the first time to define himself as an "old man", he was strong enough to work. He wrote a late, great novel, Ravelstein, based on the life and death of his friend, American academic Allan Bloom ("Bellow survives [and] so does fiction itself," wrote Malcolm Bradbury, possibly a little too dazzled by the miracle). He also, in the 11th year of his final marriage, became a father again – to the daughter he had always craved. "I wasn't the kind of person who was interested [in babies], only then it grabbed me with a ferocity. This was not for him, it was for me. But Rosie got the best of him. He was a writer, you see, not a husband, or a father; [looking back] you see a pattern of him not being able to put in time. When a child comes along, it displaces you, if you need to be at the centre, and obviously Saul did.
"He had huge needs. The writing life needed to be supported. He was aware of this; I'm not saying anything disrespectful. He failed his children; he left them, and it was a wound he carried around. He knew the cruelty of this. At the very end, though he was not a well father, he was in the house. He and Rosie would watch The Lion King together: in the final, unpleasant stages of his last illness, he was at the point where he didn't mind watching the same film over and over. I was somehow managing Rosie and Saul in the same way."
In the last weeks, she was determined to keep the house happy. She remembers, one afternoon, Rosie singing along with gusto to a Depression-era songbook, and dancing around the room. "Don't you think the child should be removed?" asked a visiting friend. "Leave Rosie alone," said Saul. "She's enacting my fantasies." He died at home, aged 89, Janis and Rosie by his side. Do they have a relationship with Saul's sons? Not really. Rosie has special needs, and Janis is focused very much on her. "We had cordial relations… but each of them belongs to a different mother. They're quite separate, even from one another."
It must seem as if her life has been lived the wrong way around. "Yes. I did have the feeling when he died: now my life is over, too. You start to think of yourself as posthumous." Does she dare to think of meeting someone else, or will no one match up? "I haven't had a chance even to wonder about that. In the beginning, I didn't want help. I needed to regroup with Rosie, just the two of us. So… people disappear. I kept thinking: 'I will get back in touch with these people, the people who wrote me all these letters.' I used to read them at the end of the day. It was so good to have them, but then that stops and it was my turn [to write back] and I didn't. I really cut myself off from everyone. If you are grieving, and you have a little child, well, life has to move. Crying was something you did in the shower. I begin to think of myself as a loner, a lone wolf. It's a strange way of being in the world. I'm solitary. I didn't start out that way." She keeps busy – perhaps too busy. But she does not involve herself in Bellow World: in symposia and lectures, in new editions and magazine profiles. "His whole world has disappeared, and that's the strangeness of it. I'm in a different universe now." The new universe is all about Rosie.
She takes me on a tour of the house. It is cosy, not grand, and that goes for Bellow's writing room, too (there is another home, for the summers, in Vermont). It is emphatically a family house, with the strange twist that there just happen to be photographs of a Nobel laureate on almost every shelf. He looks extremely happy in all of them: a picture of patriarchal contentment. You are reminded that, before his final illnesses, Bellow was proud of his fitness: he took care of himself; he was a man who liked to chop wood. And sure enough, when I ask Janis how she prefers to remember him – how she would describe him to an old girlfriend as if she had met him only yesterday – it is not his giant brain she thinks of first, nor his amazing facility with words, nor even the fact that, as she told me earlier, he had "read everything, six times". It is his physicality, the way he felt in her arms. "He had beautiful skin, healthy young skin, even at the end. He wasn't exactly tall, but he had this broad upper body, these giant arms." She slips into the present tense. "He's the kind of person you're so glad to be embracing at the end of the day. In bed. You want to be close to this human being. He's so full of excitement, and energy." She presses her hands to her chest, and closes her eyes.
Saul Bellow Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor, is published on 4 November by Penguin Classics
To John Cheever, 2 May 1979, Chicago
Dear John:
Do you realise we haven't seen each other's dear faces in nearly a year? I have seen you in the papers pulling down one award after another and that has given me great satisfaction. I am somewhat sorry for you because you have only the occasional satisfaction of remembering me. We ought to do something about this, especially as it has not been a happy year, and it would do me good to see you. […]
Atop the Hyde Park Bank building in Chicago 30 years ago there was a Russian nightclub called the Troika where they sang "Don't Forget Me," a sentimental lied which applies to us.
Love,
To Martin Amis, 30 December 1990, Schomberg, Ontario
Dear Martin,
Janis and I are in Ontario in the top storey of her parents' farmhouse looking into the falling snow, trees, fields, a pond, and staring directly into the empty face of a Trojan-helmet chimney emitting smoke from wood chopped by me. We've just come out of the bath and we sit beside a huge white tub-with-a-view, a whirlpool or perhaps even a Jacuzzi into which you pour bubble-bath cream which foams up and makes you into an Olympian, Old Massa Zeus looking down on white Chanel clouds.
Too bad the people I care for are so widely distributed over the face of the earth. But then one tends to think about them all the more. Proximity isn't everything. In this bedroom I have found a volume of Aldous Huxley's letters written during the war years, many of them from Hollywood to correspondents in London and other distant places. His views might have been less kooky if he hadn't left England. But there are such things as inner distances and homegrown or domestic kookiness. I come up with odd ideas on my own Chicago turf and friends in England also send me their strange views. Years ago in Greenwich Village I used to say to a particular pal, "There's only me and thee that's sane and I sometimes have my doubts about thee." The occasion for these thoughts is the mention of [Salman] Rushdie's name at the breakfast table, his embrace or re-embrace of Islam. I suggested that he may have believed mistakenly that the civilisation of the west had once and for all triumphed over exotic fundamentalism, After all, the Pope didn't excommunicate Joyce for writing Ulysses and the Church is even older than Islam. In short, it isn't safe yet to say that such and such a phenomenon has passed into history. Just as we were thinking that perestroika and glasnost had purified Russia once and for all we read a speech by the chief of the KGB accusing the US of sending radioactive wheat and poisoned foodstuffs to feed the hungry in the Soviet Union.
The likes of us should quit politics and stick to dreams. It gave me pleasure to hear that I recently figured in a dream of yours positively. I recently dreamt:
Dream I: I identify Tolstoy as the driver of a beat-up white van on the expressway. I ask the old guy at the wheel of this crumbling van what he can do to keep his flapping door from banging against the finish of my car. When he leans over to the right I see that he is none other than Leo Tolstoy, beard and all. He invites me to follow him off the expressway to a tavern and he says, "I want you to have this jar of pickled herring." He adds, "I knew your brother." At the mention of my late brother I burst into tears.
Dream II: A secret remedy for a deadly disease is inscribed in Chinese characters on my penis. For this reason my life is in danger. My son Greg is guarding me in a California hideout from the agents of a pharmaceutical company, etc.
Dream III: I find myself in a library filled with unknown masterpieces by Henry James, Joseph Conrad and others. Titles I have never seen mentioned anywhere. In shock and joy I open a volume by Conrad and read several pages, sentence after sentence after sentence in the old boy's best style, more brilliant than ever. "Why in the hell was I never told about this?" I ask. Certain parties have been holding out on us. I am indignant.
I depend on these dream-events to sort me out. Or perhaps to document my disorder more fully.We may not be going to France after all. Our friend Bloom has for some months been down with the paralyzing Guillain-Barre syndrome and we can make no travel plans till we know whether the paralysis is temporary. Or not. He's making progress but there won't be any holidays until we've seen him through. Somebody at the BBC last year invited me to do a program in May and if the arrangements can be made perhaps we'll fly over and catch you before you leave London. […]
Best wishes for the New Year to you and Antonia and the kids from Janis and me.
Love,
[In an effort to be rid of the fatwa pronounced on him by Ayatollah Khomeini, Salman Rushdie had issued a tactical statement – later withdrawn – in which he claimed to have turned to Islam.]
To Philip Roth, 1 January 1998, Brookline
Dear Philip,
Sorry to be so slow. Janis got to your manuscript first and all her enthusiasm, sympathies and forebodings were then communicated to me. A new Roth book is a big event in these parts. We are, to use the Chicago terms of the 20s, your rooters and boosters.
When she took off for Canada on Xmas day to see parents and sister, brother, kiddies, she left I Married a Communist with me for the holiday season. Reading your book consoled me in this empty house. It's a treat to read one of your manuscripts – I say this upfront – but this time the overall effect was not satisfactory. I was particularly aware of the absence of distance – I don't mean that the writer must put space between himself and the characters in his book. But there should be a certain detachment from the writer's own passions. I speak as one who in Herzog created the same sin. There I hoped that comic effects might protect me. Nevertheless I crossed the border too many times to raid the enemy camp. But then Herzog was a chump, a failed intellectual and at bottom a sentimentalist. In your case, the man who gives us Eve and Sylphid is an enragé, a fanatic-for-real.
But that's not the outstanding defect of IMAC. Your reader, out of respect for your powers, is more than willing to go along with you. He will not, as I was not, be able to go along with your Ira, probably the least attractive of all your characters. I assume that you can no more bear Ira than the reader can. But you stand loyally by this cast-iron klutz – a big strong stupid man who attracts you for reasons invisible to me.
Now there is real mystery about communists in the west, to limit myself to those. How were they able to accept Stalin – one of the most monstrous tyrants ever? You would have thought that the Stalin-Hitler division of Poland, the defeat of the French which opened the way to Hitler's invasion of Russia, would have led CP members to reconsider their loyalties. But no. When I landed in Paris in 1948 I found that the intellectual leaders (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc) remained loyal despite the Stalin sea of blood. Well, every country, every government has its sea, or lake, or pond. Still Stalin remained "the hope" – despite the clear parallel with Hitler.
But to keep it short – the reason: the reason lay in the hatred of one's own country. Among the French it was the old confrontation of "free spirits", or artists, with the ruling bourgeoisie. In America it was the fight against the McCarthys, the House Committees investigating subversion, etc that justified the left, the followers of Henry Wallace, etc. The main enemy was at home (Lenin's WWI slogan). If you opposed the CP you were a McCarthyite, no two ways about it.
Well, it was a deep and perverse stupidity. It didn't require a great mind to see what Stalinism was. But the militants and activists refused to reckon with the simple facts available to everybody.
Enough: you will say that all of that is acknowledged in IMAC. Yes, and no. You tell us that Ira is a brute, a murderer. But who else is there? Ira and Eve are at the core of your novel – and what does this pair amount to?
One of your persistent themes is the purgation one can obtain only through rage. The forces of aggression are liberating, etc. And I can see that as a legitimate point of view. OK if your characters are titans. But Eve is simply a pitiful woman and Sylphid is a pampered, wicked fat girl with a bison hump. These are not titans.
There aren't many people to whom I can be so open. We've always been candid with each other and I hope we will continue, both of us, to say what we think. You'll be sore at me, but I believe you won't cast me off for ever.
Ever yours,
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