Maybe for Millions, Maybe for Nobody: Jewish American Writing and the Undecidability of World Literature

1. On the Knees of My Soul, Between Heaven and Earth

After winning the Nobel Prize in 1976, Saul Bellow was inundated with congratulatory letters and telegrams from friends and family, from colleagues both academic and literary, and from a host of fans. Norman Mailer, with whom Bellow shared a sometimes amiable rivalry, sent this reluctant telegram: “After all Saul, why not cheers and congratulations?” Robert Penn Warren, a close friend, offered sardonic advice: “Dear Saul: For once the swedes didn’t make a mistake! Heartfelt congratulations, Ever yours, Red P.S. Invest wisely.” Beyond these personal messages, Bellow’s archives contain the large amount of fan mail he received, each offering congratulations as well as interpretations (sometimes quite personal) of Bellow’s works. The responses range widely, from amorous entreaties to eager college students’ ambitious literary meditations. Sister Liam O’Sullivan, a nun from the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles in the Bronx, New York, wrote on the very morning of the announcement of the Nobel Prize, 21 October 1976: “This is the Day which the Lord has made, with the co-operation of Saul Bellow. Let us be glad and rejoice that the Nobel Prize has come your way as well as to U.S.A.” Sister O’Sullivan then describes, in a style reminiscent of Bellow’s own prose, how she spent the morning waiting feverishly to learn the news and then how she dashed off quickly to the chapel to get “‘on the knees of my soul’—like Herzog—and offer strong prayers,” imploring the angels “to run—no—gallop—no—fly or whatever angels do to be there on the spot for the final decision in favor of Saul Bellow.” The sister tells of how she exulted upon hearing the good news, which she ascribed to Jesus’s intervention and to her own prayers. After mentioning the festive cake bought for the entire convent in honor of this special occasion, she concludes: “Marvelous how books can bring us humans together—linking even Heaven and Earth.”

This letter employs many conventions at once: first and foremost, it is a letter of congratulations; but it also offers a prayer to God combined with an homage to Bellow’s style, especially in Sister O’Sullivan’s mixing of high and low registers. Finally, and most surprisingly, she places Bellow’s achievement within a definition of world literature: “Marvelous how books can bring us humans together—linking even Heaven and Earth.” Sister O’Sullivan begins by confirming the earthly power of his fiction, how it “brings us humans together” in this world, a global community of readers. She then claims that Bellow’s writing also gives readers access to the next world. Bellow’s transcendent literary creations link “Heaven and Earth” by putting readers on this planet directly in touch with the universal. Echoing the universalist ambitions of the Nobel Prize yet imbuing it with a specifically Christian intonation, Sister O’Sullivan prescribes a kind of writing that may begin within a particular community but which aims for both global circulation and universal achievement, a popular, even dominant, definition of world literature that persists today.

Significantly, she does not mention Bellow’s Jewishness, including his Yiddish-inflected speech and his often-mentioned sentimental Russian Jewish genealogy. To be sure, the sensitive Jewish intellectual Herzog, one of Bellow’s best-known autobiographical characters (from his 1964 novel), does appear in the letter, but as a man of prayer, a model of human devotion to divine power. The Herzog of the novel is constantly writing letters in his head, resulting in a text of intense self-reflection that culminates in a sense of (proposed) clarity at the novel’s close. No monk by any stretch of the imagination—in the last pages he looks forward to a reunion with his lover—Herzog sometimes resembles a man of faith dedicated to epistolary modes of solitary prayer and confession. In an extraordinary interpretive gesture, Sister O’Sullivan feels that she must imitate Herzog as a writer of letters unsent...