Saul Bellow: Letters (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Saul Bellow: Letters
The best Bellow letters are not here, but in Herzog. There, constituting one of the richer and more memorable aspects of that novel, they show Bellow at his most comic, absurd, endearing, and yet most exasperating. Written to a vast gallery of correspondents, few indeed ever likely to write Moses Herzog back (his dead mother, the credit department at Marshall Field, Martin Heidigger, Adlai Stevenson, Dwight Eisenhower, Erwin Schrödinger, psychiatrists who treated him, lovers who mistreated him, and even himself), these letters direct us inward [End Page 378] to the marrow of Bellow's wordy genius. Vibrant, at times lyrical, at all times streetwise, urgent, and needy, they remind us of the full span of his distinctive American idiom.
That amplitude is not here. Rather, we read through much shop talk, applications for fellowships, praise for fellow writers (John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Wright Morris, Eleanor Clark, Robert Penn Warren, Philip Roth), crushing denunciations of former wives, billets-doux to new lovers, and, near the end of his long and productive life, a cascade of sour indictments lodged against the young, the "hip," and the new. The letters leave us with the understanding that it was better to have been his friend than any of his former wives, better to have been his loyal reader than his reviewer, better always a fellow conservative than a leftist.
Nor was he a man, pace his resilient hero Augie March, to brush aside an old injury. Those who once wronged him (among them, the editor William Phillips, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Midge Decter, and Joseph Epstein) were, despite the years, resented still. Suspected anti-Semites (Graham Greene, Hugh Kenner, Edward Said) were forever to be kept in the deepest pits of hell. He could not be freed of his animosities any more than he could let go of his friends. Indeed, the loyalty of old friendship burns in this book and is its saving grace. Perhaps its loveliest moment flashes before us when we read of his reply to Cheever's request that Bellow read his newest novel, Falconer: "Will I read your book? Would I accept a free trip to Xanadu with Helen of Troy as my valet?" That, in his letters, is Bellow at his best.
William M. Chace is president emeritus of Emory University and professor of English emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics; and 100 Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor, and University President, and What I Learned along the Way.
