LETTERS
By Saul Bellow
Edited by Benjamin Taylor. Illustrated. 571 pages.
Viking. US$35.
Saul Bellow’s letters are concerned with daily life, literature and the state of the modern world.
By Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, Published: November 8, 2010
Herzog, the title character of Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel, is famously a writer of letters he never sends, letters to friends, rivals, relatives and strangers; letters that satisfy his craving “to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.” The letters are, by turns, cranky, coruscating, clever and cerebral: the outpourings of a man overflowing with ideas and grievances, and reeling from the complications of his life and the stubborn mystifications of the world around him.
The real-life letters of Herzog’s creator turn out to be just as arresting, seizing the reader by the lapels and refusing to let go. Although Bellow (1915-2005) repeatedly apologizes in this collection for being a lousy correspondent — suffering from some sort of “disagreeable reticence” — he is a gifted and emotionally voluble letter writer, convinced that sharing his experiences and thoughts with friends provides an escape hatch from the “miserliness” of “private consciousness.”
Some of his letters are yesterday’s equivalents of e-mail, catching his recipients up on the daily stuff of life, annoyances large and small, “toil, tears, sweat and business-wriggling.” Others are philosophical meditations on literature, politics, literary politics and the state of the modern world, musings that remind us of Bellow’s love of the Old Testament, Shakespeare and the great 19th-century Russian novels, and his belief that fiction ought to address the great moral questions of human existence and “account for the mysterious circumstance of being,” as he once observed in The New York Times. Taken together, the letters form a sort of discursive autobiography and intellectual cri de coeur.
They amplify Bellow’s argument that all American books, including his own, “pant” after meaning. They underscore his simultaneous craving for intellectual conversation and his impatience with the literary establishment and what he called “fashionable extremism” — “the hysterical, shallow and ignorant academic ‘counterculture.’ ” And they point up the highly personal sources of much of his fiction: “You damn near killed me,” he writes his ex-wife Sondra in one especially vituperative letter. “I’ve put that behind me, but I haven’t forgotten the smallest detail. Nothing, I assure you. I made something [in ‘Herzog’] of the abuses I suffered at your hands.”
Full piece at NYT.
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