Letters

I wasn't sure I would read the recent edition of Saul Bellow's Letters edited by Benjamin Taylor, but I saw it at the local library the last time I was there and decided to check it out. (That's what I like most about public libraries: you can read the books you don't want to buy.) Letters fall into the larger category of biography, autobiography, memoirs, and personal essays and journals that I've been exploring these last few years, especially those written about and by writers. And with letters there is often the added interest of observing the letter writer's self presentation, as well as the growth and changes in personality over time.

Bellow was a great writer of letters, both in the sense of the quality of his writing, and the extent of his correspondence. This edition covers a period from 1932, when Bellow was seventeen, to 2005, the year of his death. Readers can watch the letter writer grow from a modest but ambitious youth to a very successful and celebrated author. Much of Bellow's correspondence collected in this volume concerns his career, both as author and teacher. Despite his own frequent disclaimers, Bellow devoted a considerable amount of his life to teaching, and although he tended to cast himself as anti-academic, he nevertheless depended a good deal on academic employment, especially early in his career as a novelist. The more personal letters offer glimpses of Bellow as friend, husband, father, lover, and mentor.

One of the most interesting aspects of Bellow's letters is the insight they give to his personality. He obviously took care to write each letter in a voice and style best suited to the recipient. He could be deferential when requesting letters of reference from James Farrell or Edmund Wilson or Robert Penn Warren, but even there the tone differs depending on the closeness of those relationships. And it is amusing to watch him gauge the proper levels of respectful distance and informality or intimacy. With John Berryman he is always careful to offer encouragement and flattery, with Ralph Ellison he is intimate and slyly understanding, but with his old friends, especially those he grew up with in Chicago, he is often direct and cajoling, sometimes critical and scolding. Bellow had a tremendous capacity for friendship, but he must have been quite a handful for friends to contend with. Like all writers, he also had a very large and yet fragile ego, and no one felt this more than his own family and his various editors and agents.

I enjoy reading letters because they are like snapshots: they give a very accurate representation of a particular and quite specific moment frozen in time. They record a moment of intimacy, of anger or affection, that once existed, but may well have been ephemeral, and may have passed as quickly as it was recorded. Bellow seems to have known this, and it is clear he wrote very carefully, even when his emotions were most aroused, perhaps especially so then, which makes these letters so engaging. And yet I can't say that after reading his letters I find myself feeling any closer to the man. As a writer, even of letters, Bellow was always an artist in control of his own rhetoric. He lets his readers see mainly what he wants us to see of himself. He is certainly charming, but also manipulative, and a master of control, even when he seems to be most revealing of himself. His letters were small installments in his own story, and he was, of course and quite naturally, the hero of that story, with everyone else cast in a supporting role. He could be sympathetic, but also could withhold his sympathy.

Nevertheless, letters are a wonderful genre of self-writing, and it is too bad we will have so few examples in the future, for with the advent of electronic communication, email, instant messaging, and so-called social media, the art of letter writing will likely soon be lost. As I was going through my own papers in preparation for our coming move and relocation, I looked over my files of correspondence, dating from graduate school in the mid 1970s through the years I spent as an academic and the early years at the National Endowment, and ending in a trickle of letters to a few correspondents who were not yet online in the late 1990s, with even one or two in the new century. That I suspect is fairly typical. It's true I've kept files of my earliest email correspondence, which I still have archived somewhere. And I continue to archive my email in a haphazard fashion. But with a few exceptions email correspondence is not the same, and I seriously doubt that electronic records will long endure. They are easily saved, yet just as easily erased and lost. Just as well, perhaps, but it will be a different sort of world without the genre of letters.