Free Letters by Saul Bellow Page A

didn’t do Kaufman any credit. It didn’t do you any good either. You had set him off against me on the basis of a very feeble sort of thing that you didn’t completely understand yourself. The whole thing was simply asinine. What it revealed clearly even to the stupidest of us that night was that you, Isaac, Kaufman regarded yourselves as a sort of aristocracy with a permanent patent for stepping on the fingers of others. But how readily you howled when your own fingers were under the sole.
    If you saw the present Kaufman-Rosenfeld arrangement you would know what I mean, maybe . . .
    Since that sort of thing stopped when you went away the air did clear. I don’t want to kid myself. We were not friends this last summer. You chose me out as a deadly enemy. You can’t deny that. Therefore why should I have attempted falsely to keep a relationship going. I saw viciousness more often than friendliness. Think what you were like then and see if you can honestly blame me. It’s too bad that you, a devotee of the truth, can’t stand it sometimes.
    I said the same thing in my first letter only not so elaborately. In the last five months or so there has been time for the harder feelings to fall away and be replaced by some of my former affection for you. I hate like all hell to have you estranged for the worst of all possible reasons: attempt at honest analysis. I hope you will accept my explanation. And I hope you reply because I don’t think it will be possible to write again otherwise. I suppose Isaac has already told you that I will probably go to Mexico this February.
    Regards to Ruthie and Sid,
    Yours,
     
    Abe Kaufman was another of Bellow’s high-school classmates.

1940
     
    To Oscar Tarcov
    [n.d.] [Chicago]
    Dear Oscar:
    Let’s drop writing in that line. That’s what you suggested in the first place; that we shouldn’t try to at this distance. And you were right, I think. There is another distance I might mention and that is the one between me and realization (and realization and action, too). A good deal of what you say about Anita I couldn’t dream of denying. I have had a great deal of trouble lately over her and several times in the last two months we have been on the verge of separating. We have had quarrels which really originate not out of trivial things but out of the fact that in numerous ways we are strongly disagreeable to each other. And for another thing the principal reasons for marriage have no existence any longer. But I have been breaking myself in two to reconcile because I don’t want another failure added to an already long list.
    Chuck that for the moment. From what I hear I will soon be able to talk to you and that will be much better.
    I have missed you—tremendously. Not as much as Isaac, perhaps; I have many more tasks and preoccupations. But still I share strongly his opinion that you should stay in New York. [ . . . ] If you can hold out, stay where you are at least for a while.
    It is likely that I will go to Mexico in spring. I have already given notice at Pestalozzi[-Froebel Teachers College]—[ . . . ] I think I can get you the job there. So that if no war breaks out I believe you can look forward to a very good job that will give you independence and leisure; an independence and leisure that I have used to my good advantage in the last year.
    I have almost finished Ruben Whitfield . I’ll be done with it by spring. I don’t think it’s as good a book as I can write. But then it’s really a subject for a much better-developed writer and a more fully developed individual. It wasn’t really my project. My views and interests changed so often in the course of the writing that every month I wanted to go back and do the whole thing over in a new way. I have re-written some parts as many as four times and the result shows great inconsistencies. What I am planning now is more personal and not so smart and tough and I am so eager to begin the new thing that I am hustling Ruben along.