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Sophie Wilkins, Saul Bellow,
Dylan Thomas: Letters
introduction
by Keith Botsford
Home
> Nos.
14/15 > Lives
It
must have happened to many people, to know Sophie
before meeting her. Because one knew what she
did by way of selfless translation Saul Bellow
had talked about her long before we got in touch:
with love and a note of sorrow at her troubles
in her later days. He said, “You must get something
out of her, quelle vie!”
I think of her as the
greatest Responder I have ever known. She read
with passion and always seemed to know what
one was trying to do. In this way she was utterly
unselfish. She wrote to me about The Republic
of Letters when it was at its beginning
(she sent a check for $500 which Saul and I
stolidly refused to accept), and about my books
when they were in their early stages. Always
in terms of dazzlement that people were still
producing (she kindly said) what she thought
‘real’ literature was about: rich fodder for
the omnivore. I have treasured her letters,
beaten out on an old machine and edited and
xxx’d out and glossed with additional knowledge.
It became necessary
one day that I meet her, for I could not imagine
such a perfect responder. I knew much of her
history by then, and had been encouraging her
to put it down on paper. If I had a mental picture
at all, it had to do with age and fatigue and
piles of paper and manuscripts.
We made a date, I traveled
uptown, rang her bell. This sassy, dolled-up,
sparkling woman?! We talked in a rush, catching
up on sixty-plus years of whom we had known
and what we had read. Having envisaged frailty,
I wondered where, uptown, we might find a decent
place to lunch. Ha! She whisked me off in a
taxi to midtown to a place she liked and knew.
Grandes dames don’t allow even gentlemen
to pay. She’d always paid for the life she had
but it was worth it to her, to know and to love.
And she said to her grandson, “Everything is
learning, even dying.”
This is an excerpt.
To read the rest, please continue your travels
in the Republic by purchasing
Nos. 14/15, Fall/Winter 2004.
Keith
Botsford is editor of TRoL.
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