check it out:
this collection of letters spans Bellow's lifetime from age 17 to 89. imagine jumping into that life. that mind. those words. those sentences that are the framework of the life of a literary icon.
i'm a little swoony.
from the article, here's a taste:
To Ralph Ross
March 22, 1977 Chicago
Dear Ralph:
Years ago (God, what a long time it seems, and how far way Minneapolis is!) you told me something valuable, and it was so unexpected that I couldn't react intelligently on the spot but carried the remark off and worked on it for a couple of decades. You said that Isaac [Rosenfeld] was the most unworldly person you had ever known, with one exception: Compared with me, Isaac was the complete sophisticate. I felt the truth of this immediately — being what I was, I couldn't expect to understand. And I always made a special point of seeming to be intensely practical and competent because I had no grasp of real life. Isaac was what our French friends call "faux naif," and I saw that all along and understood that he wouldn't have needed such an act if he hadn't been so clever. He was trying to act his way out of (relative) worldliness. I was working in the opposite direction. Was I so innocent? Self-absorbed, rather. Only it was no ordinary form of self-absorption because I could understand what I was determined to understand. And if I hadn't sensed so many frightful things I wouldn't have been so intensely unworldly. Evidently I was determined not to understand whatever was deeply threatening—allowed myself to know what conformed to my objectives, and no more. A tall order, to bury so many powers of observation. That sounds immodest; I mean only to be objective. But all the orders have been tall. If you had followed up on your shrewd remark you might have saved me some time, but I assumer you thought that if I couldn't work out the hint I couldn't be expected to bear a full examination either. I had to go through the whole Sondra-Jack Ludwig business, for instance. I gave them, and others, terrific entertainment. Sondra sent me to the English Department to threaten to resign if the didn't re-appoint Ludwig, whom they had good reason to loathe. It was a barrel of fun. I'm not so keen on this sort of Goldoni comedy as I once was (small wonder), but I can see the humor of it. It gives me great satisfaction to look back in detachment and to think of the wit the gods gave us when they had to reduce our scope. But why didn't they reduce our ambitions correspondingly? Why were we fired up with glorious dreams of achievement leading to such appalling waste? No one could make a true success except a few private persons with limited aims. Some of us, trying hard, were wonderfully unstinting of themselves. I think of John [Berryman], so generous in self-destruction. Or Isaac, who put on every stitch of virtue he had, and got on his horse and jumped into the big hole in the Forum. No one who set out to make the big scene in a big way could in the nature of the case, get very far.
***
To John Cheever
December 9, 1981 Chicago
Dear John:
Since we spoke on the phone I've been thinking incessantly about you. Many things might be said, but I won't say them, you can probably do without them. What I would like to tell you is this: We didn't spend much time together but there is a significant attachment between us. I suppose it's in part because we practiced the same self-taught trade. Let me try to say it better — we put our souls to the same kind of schooling, and it's this esoteric training which we had the gall, under the hostile stare of exoteric America to persist in, that brings us together. Yes, there are other, deeper sympathies but I'm too clumsy to get at them. Just now I can offer only what's available. Neither of us had much use for the superficial "given" of social origins. In your origins there were certain advantages; you were too decent to exploit them. Mine, I suppose, were only to be "overcome" and I hadn't the slightest desire to molest myself that way. I was, however, in a position to observe the advantages of the advantaged (the moronic pride of Wasps, Southern traditionalists, etc.). There wasn't a trace of it in you, You were engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself. When I read your collected stories I was moved to see the transformation taking place on the printed page. There's nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul. I loved you for this, I loved you anyway, but for this especially.
***
Here's the Link to the full NPR Article.
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