Saul Bellow and Frances Gendlin became friends while living on the same street in Chicago. Over lunch, Bellow would read what he had produced in the morning to Gendlin, who aspired to be a writer. Gendlin always claimed that it was these lunch sessions which taught her how to write. Bellow wrote the letter below while staying in Kyoto, the final destination of a rather unpleasant tour through Japan.
Undated May, 1972
Dear Frances,
There are many reasons why I didn’t write. For one thing, the jet lag was awful. It took more than ten days to recover. For another, I turned out to be a real or perhaps imaginary celebrity, and immediately began to do seminars, lectures, interviews, radio programs and Japanese semi-state dinners, sitting on the floor, using chopsticks and eating raw fish, or trying to eat it. I drank a good deal of sake to help myself sleep, but I kept waking at four A.M, utterly wretched most of the time. My system is sound enough, for a man of my age, but even it was not able to cope with the terrific time and space changes. After two weeks of this I was allowed to rest in Kyoto, where it was relatively tranquil. Kyoto I thoroughly enjoyed, staying in a Japanese inn, old-style, sleeping on the straw mat and lying on the floors half the day, admiring the little moss garden. Being on the floor was childhood again, and childhood is still the most pleasant part of life. A confession of adult failure. Well, I’d better own up. I haven’t done too hot, as the old Chicago phrase runs. For three weeks, I didn’t hear from you at all, and I was quite put out about it. If you wrote a letter you didn’t send, I did, too. And then I was disheartened–appalled is a probably more accurate word–to find that I had crab-lice. I felt peculiarly shaky and stupid to make that discovery. I’d had nothing to do at all with women here, except to smile at the them over the raw fish held in chopsticks. Going to the doctor was awful. Thinking about it at all was awful. Cured now, I feel lousy still. Anti-self, anti-others, but above all the old fool. The world seems to expect that I will do all kinds of good things, and I spite it by doing all kinds of bad ones. They’re not terribly bad, either. Striking sins are out of reach. I try to break into the next sector, or find the next development, but nothing comes of this except unhappiness for myself and others. The unhappiness to myself I don’t much mind. The effect on others is a curse to me night and day. It’s true I haven’t taken a shot at [George] Wallace,* but there isn’t much else I can take credit for. At the end of all of this, I can say that I think of you a great deal and lovingly.
I’m flying to San Francisco on the 26th, I suppose I’ll be there before the letter arrives and back in Chicago about the first of June.
Love,
Saul Bellow
Note: On May 15, while campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, presidential candidate and Alabama governor George Wallace had been shot and seriously wounded by Arthur Bremer.
From: Saul Bellow: Letters Viking Adult (November 4, 2010)
FURTHER READING
An interview with Frances Gendlin in which she discusses Bellow’s impact on her life.
An interview with Saul Bellow, published the year of this letter’s writing.