sever relations with you.
We may still be casual friends. But some day when I am in my dotage and you are many chinned and obese we may be reconciled. In the Interim be happy—if my notorious skepticism allows me, I too will endeavor to find contentment with Pearl.
So Yetta,
It is Good-bye—
You are at liberty to do as you like with this letter.
Evidently on holiday with one of his brothers, Bellow has just turned seventeen when he writes this, his earliest surviving letter. Nathan Goldstein would shortly marry Yetta. Following their divorce in the 1940s, Yetta would marry Max Shachtman. Pearl’s identity is untraced.
1937
To James T. Farrell
[n. d.] [Chicago]
Dear Mr. Farrell:
It may surprise you that the associate editor of the Beacon should be politically of a mind with you, but that is the case. I have asked Al Glotzer several times to write to you for me. I’m tired of asking him; I am quite sure he hasn’t written. And perhaps it would be a shame if he dissipated his Machiavellian genius in trivial correspondence.
If you will tell me why you have taken up with the magazine, and what you have gathered of [Sydney] Harris from his letters, and what your opinion is of the role of the magazine, and whether you think it can be useful, I for my part will undertake a long narrative of the whole venture and try to explain my position on it. I will try to give you an inkling of it now: Editorially I can’t push the magazine to the left because Harris is a shrewd, opportunistic bastard who won’t permit it. However, if we load the magazine with Bolshevik writers of national reputation, we can have Harris hanging on a ledge before long.
Already the Stalinites have excommunicated him and pronounced the magazine anathema. Jack Martin, local educational director of the C.P., wrote Harris a letter calling him a fascist record, agent of the Gestapo and a few other unoriginal things. It is peculiar how the Stalinites have lost central discipline by spreading themselves through liberal groups. They are scattered so widely that Martin’s dicta have not yet come to the ears of the ranks, and every day little fresh-faced YCL boy scouts come to ask space for the American Youth Congress or United Christian Youth meetings, space which Harris freely, even prodigally, gives.
Of course we have not yet lost the CP. For the liberals swarm around us, and as inevitably as fruit flies gather on lush bananas, so do [Earl] Browder’s minions flock to liberals. If Harris thinks it profitable there may be reconciliation. Harris thinks nothing of assassinating a scruple or knifing a principle if thereby he can profit.
I would like very much to hear from you.
Sincerely,
Bellow was working as associate editor of The Beacon, a monthly founded by his childhood friend Sydney J. Harris that advertised itself as “Chicago’s Liberal Magazine,” an editorial stance uncongenial to Bellow’s youthful Bolshevist sympathies. In this letter he attempts to make common cause with the Trotskyist Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Earl Browder had become chairman of the American Communist Party in 1932. During his term as general secretary, he supported the Popular Front, a Stalin-sanctioned policy of friendly outreach to liberals and support for New Deal policies. Running as Communist candidate for President in the 1936 election, Browder won 80,195 votes. Albert Glotzer (1908-99), a founder of the Trotskyist movement in America, had been the first Westerner to visit Trotsky in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, in the Sea of Marmara; there Glotzer was briefly his secretary and bodyguard. In 1937 he served in Mexico City as stenographer for the John Dewey-led commission that exposed the fraudulence of Stalin’s charges against Trotsky. Glotzer would be a lifelong friend of Bellow’s.
To Oscar Tarcov
September 29, 1937 Madison
Dear Oscar:
I’ve had a real letter fest this evening, four letters. I’m not a
We may still be casual friends. But some day when I am in my dotage and you are many chinned and obese we may be reconciled. In the Interim be happy—if my notorious skepticism allows me, I too will endeavor to find contentment with Pearl.
So Yetta,
It is Good-bye—
You are at liberty to do as you like with this letter.
Evidently on holiday with one of his brothers, Bellow has just turned seventeen when he writes this, his earliest surviving letter. Nathan Goldstein would shortly marry Yetta. Following their divorce in the 1940s, Yetta would marry Max Shachtman. Pearl’s identity is untraced.
1937
To James T. Farrell
[n. d.] [Chicago]
Dear Mr. Farrell:
It may surprise you that the associate editor of the Beacon should be politically of a mind with you, but that is the case. I have asked Al Glotzer several times to write to you for me. I’m tired of asking him; I am quite sure he hasn’t written. And perhaps it would be a shame if he dissipated his Machiavellian genius in trivial correspondence.
If you will tell me why you have taken up with the magazine, and what you have gathered of [Sydney] Harris from his letters, and what your opinion is of the role of the magazine, and whether you think it can be useful, I for my part will undertake a long narrative of the whole venture and try to explain my position on it. I will try to give you an inkling of it now: Editorially I can’t push the magazine to the left because Harris is a shrewd, opportunistic bastard who won’t permit it. However, if we load the magazine with Bolshevik writers of national reputation, we can have Harris hanging on a ledge before long.
Already the Stalinites have excommunicated him and pronounced the magazine anathema. Jack Martin, local educational director of the C.P., wrote Harris a letter calling him a fascist record, agent of the Gestapo and a few other unoriginal things. It is peculiar how the Stalinites have lost central discipline by spreading themselves through liberal groups. They are scattered so widely that Martin’s dicta have not yet come to the ears of the ranks, and every day little fresh-faced YCL boy scouts come to ask space for the American Youth Congress or United Christian Youth meetings, space which Harris freely, even prodigally, gives.
Of course we have not yet lost the CP. For the liberals swarm around us, and as inevitably as fruit flies gather on lush bananas, so do [Earl] Browder’s minions flock to liberals. If Harris thinks it profitable there may be reconciliation. Harris thinks nothing of assassinating a scruple or knifing a principle if thereby he can profit.
I would like very much to hear from you.
Sincerely,
Bellow was working as associate editor of The Beacon, a monthly founded by his childhood friend Sydney J. Harris that advertised itself as “Chicago’s Liberal Magazine,” an editorial stance uncongenial to Bellow’s youthful Bolshevist sympathies. In this letter he attempts to make common cause with the Trotskyist Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Earl Browder had become chairman of the American Communist Party in 1932. During his term as general secretary, he supported the Popular Front, a Stalin-sanctioned policy of friendly outreach to liberals and support for New Deal policies. Running as Communist candidate for President in the 1936 election, Browder won 80,195 votes. Albert Glotzer (1908-99), a founder of the Trotskyist movement in America, had been the first Westerner to visit Trotsky in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo, in the Sea of Marmara; there Glotzer was briefly his secretary and bodyguard. In 1937 he served in Mexico City as stenographer for the John Dewey-led commission that exposed the fraudulence of Stalin’s charges against Trotsky. Glotzer would be a lifelong friend of Bellow’s.
To Oscar Tarcov
September 29, 1937 Madison
Dear Oscar:
I’ve had a real letter fest this evening, four letters. I’m not a
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