Saul Bellow, The Art of Fiction No. 37: Interviewed by Gordon Lloyd Harper, The Paris Review, Winter 1966
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‘I Got a Scheme!’ – The Moment Saul Bellow Found his Voice
Zachary Leader
The Guardian, Apr. 17, 2020From the age of 49, when the publication of Herzog in 1964 made him rich as well as famous, Saul Bellow was the most acclaimed novelist in America, the winner of three National Book Awards, the Pulitzer prize, the Formentor prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal for fiction. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1976 and was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French. For Philip Roth, Bellow stands with William Faulkner as “the sturdy backbone of 20th-century American literature”, with a prose style “as rich and roiling as Melville’s”. James Wood has called him “the greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century”, a view he characterises as “relatively uncontroversial”. Ten years after his death, all of Bellow’s books are in print and his reputation remains undiminished.
In addition to Herzog, chief among his critical and commercial successes are The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975) and Ravelstein (2000), published when he was 85. When asked which of Bellow’s works to start with, however, I often say the Collected Stories (2001), which contains several of his novellas, including The Bellarosa Connection (1989), a brilliant meditation on the psychic impact of the Holocaust, in Europe, America and Israel. Bellow’s stories and novellas, he claimed, were written “at the top of my form”.
He was born 100 years ago, on 10 June 1915, in Lachine, Quebec, a quiet working-class town just south-west of Montreal. His parents and older siblings, two brothers and a sister, were Russian-Jewish immigrants from St Petersburg. When he was three, the family moved from Lachine to the heart of Montreal’s Jewish district, where the hero of Herzog also spent his early childhood. Moses Herzog recalls this district as “rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather”, but possessed of “a wider range of human feelings than he had ever been able to find”. In Canada, Bellow’s loving, tyrannical father failed at everything: as farmer, baker, dry-goods salesman, jobber, manufacturer, junk dealer, marriage broker, insurance broker and bootlegger. In 1923, pursued by agents of the Canadian Inland Revenue, he fled Montreal for Chicago, followed months later by the rest of the family, who were smuggled across the border by bootlegging associates. The Bellows were illegal residents in the United States, as they had been illegal residents in Russia, St Petersburg lying outside the Pale of Settlement, the area of tsarist Russia to which most Jews were restricted.
The immigrant neighbourhood where the Bellows settled was on Chicago’s north-west side. Here, Bellow went to local state schools and became an American, while remaining loyal to his Russian, Canadian and Jewish heritage: … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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What Saul Bellow Saw
Ruth R. Wisse
Mosaic, Oct. 7, 2019
In May 1949, a year after the establishment of the state of Israel, the American Jewish literary critic Leslie Fiedler published in Commentary an essay about the fundamental challenge facing American Jewish writers: that is, novelists, poets, and intellectuals like Fiedler himself.
Entitled “What Can We Do About Fagin?”—Fagin being the Jewish villain of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist—the essay shows that the modern Jew who adopts English as his language is joining a culture riddled with negative stereotypes of . . . himself. These demonic images figure in some of the best works of some of the best writers, and form an indelible part of the English literary tradition—not just in the earlier form of Dickens’ Fagin, or still earlier of Shakespeare’s Shylock, but in, to mention only two famous modern poets, Ezra Pound’s wartime broadcasts inveighing against “Jew slime” or such memorable lines by T.S. Eliot as “The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot” and the same venerated poet’s 1933 admonition that, in any well-ordered society, “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”
How should Jewish writers proceed on this inhospitable ground?
There was a paradox in the timing of Fiedler’s essay, since this was actually the postwar moment when Jews were themselves beginning to move into the forefront of Anglo-American culture. The “New York Intellectuals”—the first European-style intelligentsia on American soil, clustered around several magazines and publishing houses—were beginning to gain prominence as writers, thinkers, critics, and professors. Fiedler was thus not a petitioner requesting permission to enter American letters but someone already in place and intending to stay. Indeed, by the end of his essay, after laying out the problem, he proposes an answer:
[We] can begin to build rival myths of our meaning for the Western world, other images of the Jew to dispossess the ancient images of terror. Several, of varying dignity and depth, are already in existence: the happy Hebrew peasant of the new Israel; the alienated Jew as artist (Kafka’s protagonist Josef K.) or dilettante (Proust’s Charles Swann) or citizen (Joyce’s Leopold Bloom); the sensitive young victim of the recent crop of American war novels; the ambiguous figure of Saul Bellow’s novel [The Victim], both victim and oppressor. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Bellow Between Hebraism and Hellenism
Hillel Halkin
Mosaic, Oct. 16, 2019
Once, if asked to respond to Ruth Wisse’s fine and penetrating essay on Saul Bellow’s Jewishness, I would have made a point of re-reading each of the novels discussed by her. Having become stingier with my time, however, I decided to make do with re-reading just Ravelstein—and, even then, three surprises awaited me.
The first surprise was that, opening the 2001 paperback edition of Ravelstein that I took from its shelf, I found the inscription: “For Hillel and Marcia with best wishes, Saul Bellow.” Although I remembered the occasion (the only one) on which my wife and I met Bellow, which was at a dinner at Ruth Wisse’s home in Cambridge a year or two before his death, I had forgotten being given the book.
The second surprise, tucked as a bookmark into the novel’s first pages, was a card from a glatt-kosher catering company in New York informing me that the meal served on my El Al flight back to Israel had been prepared under the strictest rabbinical supervision. Glatt kosher? Me? I can’t imagine what I might have done to deserve it.
But the biggest surprise was the last one. Soon after beginning my re-reading of Ravelstein, I realized I had never read it in the first place. Beyond the page of the bookmark, not a single detail was familiar. I had, so it seems, started the novel on the airplane, fallen asleep, and dreamed that I’d read the whole thing.
And so I was now reading Ravelstein for the first time—and realizing, well before reaching the end of it, that it was not going to be one of my favorite Bellow novels. The problem wasn’t Bellow. His prose was as sharp and smart as always, if lacking the virtuoso passages of many of his earlier books. (This, I’ve noticed, is a common trait in great writers as they age. They lose all interest in showing off.) The problem was Ravelstein. I didn’t care for the man. And if you don’t care for, or at least care about, a novel’s main character, you can care only so much for the novel itself.
Ravelstein is an odd type: one of a kind. A stern moralist yet also a voluptuary, he is a man with a passionate commitment to the life of the mind and the Socratic pursuit of philosophy who also loves elegant custom-made suits, swanky Parisian restaurants, celebrity-class hotel suites, and exorbitantly priced sports cars.
Moreover, he can now afford all of these things, because he has become, late in life, a celebrity himself: a Jewish University of Chicago professor who has written a book about the intellectual degeneracy of late-20th-century America that, contrary to all expectations, has turned out to be an international best-seller and earned him a fortune. Once forced to scrounge and borrow to pay for his expensive tastes, he can now indulge them as much as he pleases. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Saul Bellow, The Art of Fiction No. 37
Interviewed by Gordon Lloyd Harper
The Paris Review, Winter 1966
The interview “took place” over a period of several weeks. Beginning with some exploratory discussions during May of 1965, it was shelved during the summer, and actually accomplished during September and October. Two recording sessions were held, totaling about an hour and a half, but this was only a small part of the effort Mr. Bellow gave to this interview. A series of meetings, for over five weeks, was devoted to the most careful revision of the original material.
Recognizing at the outset the effort he would make for such an interview, he had real reluctance about beginning it at all. Once his decision had been reached, however, he gave a remarkable amount of his time freely to the task—up to two hours a day, at least twice and often three times a week throughout the entire five-week period. It had become an opportunity, as he put it, to say some things which were important but which weren’t being said.
Certain types of questions were ruled out in early discussions. Mr. Bellow was not interested in responding to criticisms of his work that he found trivial or stupid. He quoted the Jewish proverb that a fool can throw a stone into the water that ten wise men cannot recover. Nor did he wish to discuss what he considered his personal writing habits, whether he used a pen or typewriter, how hard he pressed on the page. For the artist to give such loving attention to his own shoelaces was dangerous, even immoral. Finally, there were certain questions that led into too “wide spaces” for this interview, subjects for fuller treatment on other occasions.
The two tapes were made in Bellow’s University of Chicago office on the fifth floor of the Social Sciences Building. The office, though large, is fairly typical of those on the main quadrangles: much of it rather dark with one brightly lighted area, occupied by his desk, immediately before a set of three dormer windows; dark-green metal bookcases line the walls, casually used as storage for a miscellany of books, magazines, and correspondence. A set of The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (“it was given to me”) shares space with examination copies of new novels and with a few of Bellow’s own books, including recent French and Italian translations of Herzog. A table, a couple of typing stands, and various decrepit and mismatched chairs are scattered in apparently haphazard fashion throughout the room. A wall rack just inside the door holds his jaunty black felt hat and his walking cane. There is a general sense of disarray, with stacks of papers, books, and letters lying everywhere. When one comes to the door, Bellow is frequently at his typing stand, rapidly pounding out on a portable machine responses to some of the many letters he gets daily. Occasionally a secretary enters and proceeds to type away on some project at the far end of the room. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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FOR FURTHER REFERENCE:
Saul Bellow Interview: YouTube, Mar. 2, 2014
Saul Bellow’s Widow on His Life And Letters: ‘His Gift Was To Love And Be Loved’: Rachel Cooke, The Guardian, Oct. 10, 2010 — Letters. Sometimes, released from dusty shoeboxes and tall filing cabinets, they can explode in your face, like bombs.
Cynthia Ozick on the Letters of Saul Bellow: Cynthia Ozick, Literary Hub, July 6, 2016 — How easy it is, and plausible, to regard a collection of letters spanning youth and old age as an approximation of autobiography: the procession of denizens who inhabit a life, the bit players with their entrances and exits, the faithful chronology of incidents—all turn up reliably in either form, whether dated and posted or backward-looking.
That Somber City: In Search of Saul Bellow’s Montréal: Daniel Felsenthal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mar. 12, 2018 — I LEAVE THE APARTMENT soon after the snow begins to fall. The linoleum stairs are slick from days of muck, and in the little courtyard that separates the two wings of the housing complex, bikes are chained to the racks in defiance of winter, a blanket of white on their frames.
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This week’s French-language briefing is titled: Les innovations israéliennes pour combattre le coronavirus
