little worn out with transmitting news, or rather manufacturing it, for there has been no real temporal or spatial news of importance, with the exception of the renaissance of Isaac [Rosenfeld]. Isaac is beginning to spring a little gristle in his marrow. Who knows, he may develop bone if he continues. He’s a serious scholar now, and if he doesn’t break down into his characteristic monodic delivery he’ll be a gent of substance when the year is out. He reads earnestly and constantly. He is suddenly grave, and for the past week he has given no sign of surrealism.
It is all too easy to be righteously critical. It is impossible to condone my jumping at you that Saturday. By doing so I laid myself open to as much blame as was owing you, and shared your weakness evenly with you. Besides, without knowing, without being sure of what moved you to act as you did, I really answered the promptings of my own secret and unconscious life.
But you were goddamned trying. And although I shouldn’t have been so impatient, the squabble had a long genesis. I think you had it coming. Your elaborate, desperate rakishness and airiness was more than I could take. It went back beyond New York, beyond your mother, beyond Pearl too; it went back to an obscure but nevertheless bitter self-understanding, and the pressure of that half-understanding and the crush of a welter of the other things I have mentioned, you fought off with that wild pose. In all this I am not altogether correct, but I am not altogether wrong either. There is more than a germ of truth, or my life has been unique.
I suppose Isaac has told you of my illness. I’m still weaker than a rabbit’s belly. Now I lay me down.
Yours,
Oscar Tarcov (1915-63) had been, along with Isaac Rosenfeld, Bellow’s closest childhood friend; the three grew up within a few blocks of one another in the Humboldt Park district of Chicago. In the spring of 1937 Bellow graduated from Northwestern with a B.A. in anthropology, and was awarded a graduate fellowship in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Rosenfeld was already a doctoral student.
To Oscar Tarcov
October 2, 1937 Madison
Dear Oscar:
First about my family: Of course there was an awful blowout before I left. My father, spongy soul, cannot give freely. His business conscience pursues him into private life, and he plagues those he loves with the scruples he has learned in that world I so detest. He started giving me a Polonius, berating all my friends, warning me, adjuring me, doing everything short of damning me. Of course he damned all the things I stood for, which was the equivalent of damning me also. The night before he had made perfectly hideous for me. Art Behrstock had been over, and no sooner did the old man discover Art had been in Russia than he withered him with arguments and insults. When he started on me, on the instant of my leaving, I blew up and told him precisely the place he occupied in my category of character, what I thought of his advice, and that I intended to live as I saw fit. I told him all this as you may expect without faltering, and I didn’t do it in subdued terms. I told the old man that if he didn’t want to give me his measly allowance in Madison I would just as lief stay in Chicago and get a job and a wife and live independent of the family forevermore. The coalbins resounded with my shouts and imprecations, till the old man as a defense-measure decided that he was needed somewhere and swam off into the gloom. The next I hear of this is that the old man is heartbroken because I have not written to him. Did he expect a manifesto of love after such a clash? That is why the old woman [Bellow’s stepmother] called you up; to discover if I had made any disclosures to you.
I had a letter from Sam (my brother) this morning, in which he urged me to write, and I think I shall now. But what have I to say to him? He sees me as quite a different
It is all too easy to be righteously critical. It is impossible to condone my jumping at you that Saturday. By doing so I laid myself open to as much blame as was owing you, and shared your weakness evenly with you. Besides, without knowing, without being sure of what moved you to act as you did, I really answered the promptings of my own secret and unconscious life.
But you were goddamned trying. And although I shouldn’t have been so impatient, the squabble had a long genesis. I think you had it coming. Your elaborate, desperate rakishness and airiness was more than I could take. It went back beyond New York, beyond your mother, beyond Pearl too; it went back to an obscure but nevertheless bitter self-understanding, and the pressure of that half-understanding and the crush of a welter of the other things I have mentioned, you fought off with that wild pose. In all this I am not altogether correct, but I am not altogether wrong either. There is more than a germ of truth, or my life has been unique.
I suppose Isaac has told you of my illness. I’m still weaker than a rabbit’s belly. Now I lay me down.
Yours,
Oscar Tarcov (1915-63) had been, along with Isaac Rosenfeld, Bellow’s closest childhood friend; the three grew up within a few blocks of one another in the Humboldt Park district of Chicago. In the spring of 1937 Bellow graduated from Northwestern with a B.A. in anthropology, and was awarded a graduate fellowship in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Rosenfeld was already a doctoral student.
To Oscar Tarcov
October 2, 1937 Madison
Dear Oscar:
First about my family: Of course there was an awful blowout before I left. My father, spongy soul, cannot give freely. His business conscience pursues him into private life, and he plagues those he loves with the scruples he has learned in that world I so detest. He started giving me a Polonius, berating all my friends, warning me, adjuring me, doing everything short of damning me. Of course he damned all the things I stood for, which was the equivalent of damning me also. The night before he had made perfectly hideous for me. Art Behrstock had been over, and no sooner did the old man discover Art had been in Russia than he withered him with arguments and insults. When he started on me, on the instant of my leaving, I blew up and told him precisely the place he occupied in my category of character, what I thought of his advice, and that I intended to live as I saw fit. I told him all this as you may expect without faltering, and I didn’t do it in subdued terms. I told the old man that if he didn’t want to give me his measly allowance in Madison I would just as lief stay in Chicago and get a job and a wife and live independent of the family forevermore. The coalbins resounded with my shouts and imprecations, till the old man as a defense-measure decided that he was needed somewhere and swam off into the gloom. The next I hear of this is that the old man is heartbroken because I have not written to him. Did he expect a manifesto of love after such a clash? That is why the old woman [Bellow’s stepmother] called you up; to discover if I had made any disclosures to you.
I had a letter from Sam (my brother) this morning, in which he urged me to write, and I think I shall now. But what have I to say to him? He sees me as quite a different
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