Dec/Jan 2011
The Victim
Saul Bellow thought everyone would do him dirt.
by Vivian Gornick
Saul Bellow died in 2005 at the age of eighty-nine, and now we have, under the editorship of Benjamin Taylor (working closely with Bellow's widow), a collection of 708 letters out of the thousands that he wrote.
The letters are to publishers and editors; boyhood friends; wives, lovers, children; the crowd of writers Bellow knew, both famous and obscure. Many of these letters are rich in gossip, declarations of love and ambition, praise, criticism, and commiseration; the most touching among them are to the writers for whom he had tender feeling (John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever) and those who appealed to him for help (William Kennedy, Wright Morris). Filled as they are with the encouragement of high regard, these letters are yet among the book's briefest and even least interesting, with hardly a word in them, over all the years, of what Bellow was reading, or working on, or even fulminating against, as his famous disaffection for the world as it is grew.
What is startling, however, is the difference between the over-the-top voice that dominates the novels and the uniformly moderate one here in evidence. That novel-writing voice—always the same, always glowing with the force of dazzling, inventive complaint rushing out of the mouth of this manic Jew who had swallowed a library—who ever doubted it was Bellow's own? Of course, it was and it wasn't; yet the corrective to literary fantasy is a bit unnerving. Even during periods of his life when we know that Bellow was beside himself with shame and rage (around the time, for instance, that the openly autobiographical Herzog [1964] was being written), the sentence structure of the letters remains straightforward, the vocabulary simple, the tone calm. One cannot help but speculate on how these seven hundred were chosen. Are there, perhaps, hundreds more somewhere that strike a wilder note of emotional distress, moral ferocity, intellectual contempt? Or is it, rather, that all the talented agitation went into the books, while life on the ground got the dull edge?
Yet a current or two of passion runs strongly through the seventy years of Bellow's life that the collection covers. For this reader, two letters, both written in 1949, one to a boyhood friend, another to a university colleague, epitomize the concerns that cut deepest. The first: "It seems the more I write and publish, the more . . . [p]eople draw off into coldness and enmity who'd have kinder feelings toward me if I were a photographer of dogs or a fish-expert." The second: "I am very hostile . . . to 'literary culture' . . . [and] the other vanities of 'culture' that have no meeting with chaos. . . . The idea of a university, as Ortega says, is in classicism; the true life of poetry, as he also tells us, is in shipwreck."
The first letter betrays a lifelong preoccupation with the jealousies of others who Bellow always thought were bound to do him dirt; the second an equally lifelong reiteration of the inner chaos he believed necessary to the making of literary art. The connection between the two is, I believe, significant. In 1975, he wrote wearily to art critic Meyer Schapiro, "Lawrence said he cast off his sickness in writing and I understand that thoroughly. On the other hand, looking at what you've set down you see nothing, at times, except the sickness."
Read the full review at bookforum.
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