Letters Read Free

and late. “It is extraordinarily moving to find the inmost track of a man’s life and to decipher the signs he has left us,” Bellow wrote. Herein are seven hundred and eight letters charting his inmost track and granting the nearest view we shall have of him.
     
    “He had pledged himself to a great destiny,” his old friend and enemy Kazin wrote. “He was going to take on more than the rest of us were.” Bellow’s career, among the longest in American literary history, does indeed seem outsize—in ambition, learning, vision, bravura, fulfillment. In freedom. The letters collected here bear witness to all he was, but the autobiographical narrative they sketch is overwhelmingly an artist’s story. His struggle to write the next page of fiction is, for better or worse, what matters most on any given day. A journey through the Bellow archive reveals how much was taken on, and how much accomplished. The hundred and forty linear feet at Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, include manuscripts, notebooks, address books, appointment books, incoming mail, carbons and (later) photocopies of outgoing mail, photographs, newspaper and magazine clippings, personal objects and so on. Some items: A hectoring letter from his aged immigrant father, dated September 23, 1953, the month in which Bellow’s early masterpiece The Adventures of Augie March was published: “Wright me. A Ledder. Still I am The Head of all of U. Signed, Pa.” A letter from John F. Kennedy dated September 8, 1961: “I am hopeful that this collaboration between government and the arts will continue and prosper. Mrs. Kennedy and I would be particularly interested in any suggestions...” etc. A legal instrument certifying that one Saul Bellow, being duly sworn on oath, deposes and says that his naturalization as a U.S. citizen was effective on August 3, 1943, at Chicago, Illinois, as attested by Certificate of Naturalization No. 5689081. (He had arrived from Quebec with his family on July 4, 1924. In other words, the leading American novelist of his generation, who dramatized like no one else American low-street cunning and highbrow foolery, who sought to itemize every particular of the American urban clamor, was not officially American till he was close to thirty years old.)
    Also, from the early 1980s, an old-fashioned calling card on which is written, in a spidery hand, “Shall call at your hotel tomorrow Friday at 5:00 P.M. in the hope of seeing you. Sincerely, Sam Beckett.” They did indeed meet the following afternoon in the bar of the Hôtel Pont Royal, 7 rue de Montalembert, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The living embodiment of modernism was eager to meet the great quarreler with modernism. In the event, little was said. Their encounter resembled Proust’s famous meeting with Joyce. After the halting exchange of civilities, Proust had asked Joyce’s opinion of truffles, and Joyce allowed as he liked them and so on, miserably. A number of versions of the meeting were later reported, most of which sound embroidered. Whatever was said, one thing is clear: Those mighty opposites had no wish to meet again.
    Nor did Bellow and Beckett. Had he read Dangling Man , Bellow’s first published novel, Beckett would have come upon this quick bit of dialogue—
    “If you could see, what do you think you would see?”
    “I’m not sure. Perhaps that we were the feeble-minded children of angels.”
     
    —and might have wondered if he, Beckett, had written the lines, for they could as well have been spoken by Vladimir to Estragon in Waiting for Godot or by Nag to Nell in Endgame. But Beckett, that good and generous man, was likely responding to everything in Bellow antithetical to himself: an unfazed humanistic faith and, beyond that, a faith in things beyond the grave. The last ditch, the final straw, the end of the line, the fin de partie —all these ways of thinking, all these metaphors for nullity, were anathema to Bellow’s fundamentally buoyant,