Letters Read Online Free Page B

doctrine—morality should be made of sterner stuff. But in my youth my head was turned by the study of erratic—or goofy—customs. In my early twenties I was a cultural relativist.”)
    1936 Publishes pieces in The Daily Northwestern , signing himself “Saul Bellow.”
     
    1937 Named associate editor of The Beacon , a monthly for which he writes. James T. Farrell, famed author of Studs Lonigan , befriends him. Bellow graduates from Northwestern with B.A. in anthropology. Awarded graduate fellowship in Department of Sociology and Anthropology at University of Wisconsin, Madison; Rosenfeld already a doctoral student there.
     
    1938 After two semesters, abandons graduate study and returns to Chicago. Works briefly for the WPA, writing biographies of Midwestern writers. Marries Anita Goshkin of Lafayette, Indiana, prominent in Northwestern radical circles, daughter of immigrant Jews from Crimea, “straightforward, big-bosomed, and very assertive,” as Herb Passin would recall her. Bellow takes job at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College on South Michigan Avenue, teaching courses in anthropology and English. Works of literature he assigns include novels by Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Dreiser and Lawrence.
     
    1939 Sets to work on Ruben Whitfield , first attempt at a novel. “I met on the street a professor who put a difficult question to me. He, Dr. L, was a European scholar, immensely learned. Growing bald, he had shaved his head; he knew the great world; he was severe, smiling primarily because he had occasion to smile, not because anything amused him. He read books while walking rapidly through traffic, taking notes in Latin shorthand, using a system of his own devising. In his round, gold-rimmed specs, with rising wrinkles of polite inquiry, he asked, ‘Ah? And how is the romancier ?’ The romancier was not so hot. The romancier ’s ill-educated senses made love to the world, but he was as powerfully attached to silliness and squalor as to grandeur. His unwelcome singularity made his heart ache. He was, so far as he knew, the only full-time romancier in Chicago (apart from Nelson Algren), and he felt the queerness (sometimes he thought it the amputation) of his condition. [ . . . ] I am bound to point out that the market man, the furniture mover, the steamfitter, the tool-and-diemaker, had easier lives. They were spared the labor of explaining themselves.”
     
    1940 Reads Stendhal. Also D. H. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico . Travels to Mexico City with Passin. (“We had an appointment with Trotsky and we came to the door of the house: an unusual amount of excitement. We asked for Trotsky and they said who are you, and we said we were newspapermen. They said Trotsky’s in the hospital. So we went to the hospital and we asked to see Trotsky and they opened the door and said, he’s in there, so we went in and there was Trotsky. He had just died. He had been assassinated that morning. He was covered in blood and bloody bandages and his white beard was full of blood.”)
     
    1941 Short story “Two Morning Monologues” accepted by Philip Rahv for publication in Partisan Review .
     
    1942 Ruben Whitfield evidently abandoned. Completed draft of another novel, The Very Dark Trees , accepted by William Roth of Colt Press; payment is one hundred fifty dollars. In New York, Bellow stays with Rosenfeld. (“On Seventy-sixth Street there sometimes were cockroaches springing from the toaster with the slices of bread. Smoky, the rakish little short-legged brown dog, was only partly housebroken and chewed books; the shades were always drawn (harmful sunlight!), the ashtrays spilled over.”) Engages literary agent Maxim Lieber and meets Alfred Kazin and Delmore Schwartz. Draft board defers Bellow twice owing to hernia. Forced to suspend operations at Colt Press. William Roth sends fifty-dollar consolation fee. Bellow burns manuscript of The Very Dark Trees . Reads and is influenced by Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids