Homage to Saul Bellow;
a Remembrance

or to Solomon Bellows, the name he was born with, in 1915

Bellow in 1953, picture by Richard Meek, used without permission of the New Yorker magazine

"A nervy guy," I thought, upon first meeting Saul Bellow--back before he was Somebody. But he was well on his way. And I thought him from NYC, not knowing anything about him--that he was from the North Side of Chicago. I should have spotted that accent (if any), being myself from the South Side of Chicago. "He sure thinks a lot of himself. Doesn't he seem to know his way around?"

I was an undergraduate writing student at the University of Washington, and Bellow was on a lecture tour. It was 1953. He was never far from the university world, most of his life. He had just published The Adventures of Augie March and we had not even heard of it. He read to us from the novel a fascinating account of trying to train an eagle. A toilet was involved, I remember, more than fifty years later. I think the huge bird used the back of the toilet as a perch, but I can't be sure, short of going back and rifling through the book and probably rereading most of it. And I don't want to do that. (Or do I? Perhaps.)

After the reading in the Walker-Ames Room of Parrington Hall, a bunch of us went down to Howard's Coffee Shop and had a cup with him. He tolerated us kindly, I recall, though he talked and looked over most of our heads. Then he was gone. A week or so later I saw his academic resume lying on the desk of a professor/friend. Saul was applying for a teaching job. Later I gathered that he had applied at many, if not all, of the places he gave readings at to promote his book. It was Princeton that made him the offer he accepted. But it was at the University of Chicago that he spent most of the time following. The English department there did not hire Jews, according to Biographer James Atlas. But its Committee on Social Thought assuredly did, and it taught classes, had faculty, and held full academic status.  To mock the Englishy English department, Bellow and friends like Harold Bloom used to speak Yiddish as they strode together down the hallways. I imagine it drove home the point of pompous exclusion pretty well.

Of course I read everything I could of Bellow over the years. At the time this consisted of The Dangling Man and The Victim, and Seize The Day. Augie, of course. And over the decades, each of the very good novels that came out almost yearly. Quite a few books and quite a few years.

When Bellow won the Novel Prize for Literature, a couple of decades later (1976), I was freelancing in Seattle, after having left the University staff, where I had worked for a decade. I asked the editor of The Argus--an old, respected weekly newspaper or journal--if they would be interested in a timely  article on Bellow. It was a little out of their line, but they agreed, as they had to my idea about one on Sontag.

In order to do a good job, I decided I needed to re-read Bellow. I started at the beginning. My, what a lot of production from a single man. I also re-read the short stories and his ventures into a form he was particularly skilled at, the novella.

It took me weeks to do all that reading. Well, I was out of work, literally speaking, and had the time. Then I began to write. Of necessity it was pretty short. I think it began, "A nervy guy," I thought, when I first saw/met Saul Bellow. But then my article got better, from an intellectual or critical viewpoint. I turned it into the editor, who accepted it (without reading it, of course), for the deadline was at hand. They paid me $50 for it. Of course that was Old Money. It came to about eight cents an hour for my  labor of love.

And now he is dead. "Prematurely?" Well, yes and no. He was 89 years old. From the looks of his brown teeth in a late, grinning photograph, he still had most of them and pretty good health. And he kept writing and publishing books into his late 80s. He fathered a daughter to his third wife at the age of 84. The Actual (a novella) came out in 1997 and Ravelstein in 2000. Same old Bellow, I thought.

There are many things to envy Bellow for, but it is better and more seemly simply to praise him and his mammoth accomplishments.  I'll leave the envy to Updike, Oates, Greene, Henry Miller, Nabokov, and many less deserving writers who did not get the greatly overrated but still important Nobel Prize for Literature. And I must say that the Nervy Guy wore his medallion well, getting it so early in his long career. I mean, it didn't seem to change him one bit, or to slow him down any.

I think we need a new word for such achievements.  "Bellowian." How's that?

 Robert Arnold, Editor

See Philip Roth's remembrance of this period in Bellow's life in April 25, 2005 issue of the New Yorker, p. 72

ILLNESS NOT JUST A METAPHOR

Susan Sontag dies at 71 from the cancer that chased her for years

Susan Sontag, 1833-2005. Picture by her companion and famed photographer, Annie Leibowitz

read a brief biography

I was a free-lance writer who had newly discovered photography, back in the mid-70s, when I first discovered Susan Sontag's book, On Photography, for which she had just received a Pulitzer Prize. I convinced the editor of Seattle's The Argus to let me do an article on her, for she had impressed me with this book, and her other writing, which I had followed in the lit journals of the day..

So I began to read her more fully, and soon acknowledged her as an intellectual who could reach ordinary readers who were willing to give  her enough time and thought. She wasn't difficult, though a bit preachy and morally superior. So I followed her career loosely over the following years.

Her response to a personal problem, such as cancer, was to write a book about it and her experiences, and to delve deeply into the moral psychology of what was involved. Illness As Metaphor followed the photography book by only a year. How prolific she was, I thought; and what was more, she seemed to be living in the same world as I, though that world seemed to be mostly centered in NYC and Paris. Mine was Seattle and Berkeley.

Never mind. Her world was highly recognizable. She wrote a couple of novels that were middling, and I read them and moved on to other writers. But each new book I managed to at least look into out of curiosity, and also into many of her articles published in literary and scholarly journals. So it was with great sadness that I learned that the cancer had come back and recently taken her life.

 I'd thought, along with the rest of the world, that she had licked it. But illness is no metaphor. It is a gruesome fact of life. None of us will live forever. (Though it may seem, on our bad days, that we will.)

Oh, the article. I got a $50 for it, back in 1975, and it only took me a month to write, for I had so much to read first. A good deal.

Her most recent book is Regarding the Pain of Others. (2003) One might consider it further reflections on photography, some 29 years later. The pain she finds is reflected in photographs of war and human suffering.

Each war has its particular atrocities (though they managed to greatly resemble each other) and each government carefully stages what it wants reflected to influence and sway its general public. But, Sontag finds, it wasn't until the war in View Nam that the small 35 mm. camera came into its own and captured what was truly going on. Previously all pictures were staged, originally because of the great length of time the shutter had to be left open and movement would ruin the picture.

During the Vietnamese War,  Larry Burrows proved master of the small camera--the Leica and the Nikon-- that told us, truly and up close, that war was an inexperienced hell.

And since then have we learned anything about the pain of other? Sontag says we have learned to ignore it in order to ourselves survive. And TV newscasts have done a lot to inure us to its horrors through nightly repetitions of scenes of manifest horror.

Much of what Sontag writes about seems almost self-evident. But it must be analyzed and approached through a moral perspective. It is her high seriousness and unflinching candor that we admirers will most miss in her absence.

EDITING SHOSTAKOVICH? WHO WOULD DARE? I MIGHT AND DID

MEMORABLE WORDS FROM A NOTABLE WRITER

And please note the ongoing references to photography, which is Sontag's métier, still and always.

"An ample reserve of stoicism is needed to get through the great newspaper of record each morning, given the likelihood of seeing photographs that could make you cry."

". . . the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic awareness, that terrible things happen."

( both quotes from page 13)

"nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite." (page 22)

". . . the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked." (page 41)

"We want the photographer to be a spy in the house of love and of death, and those being photographed to be unaware of the camera, 'off guard.'" (page 55)

DANCE, ANYONE?

Sir Anthony Powell, with his favorite cat, Trelawney

One thing leads to another. And another. A reading of volume 3 of Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Green evokes that whole vanished world of Balliol College, Oxford, in the early 1920s, and what a rich world it was, with George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Yorke (born Green), lingerers from Bloomsbury, Fleet Street, and the whole upper-class British establishment, in which titles proliferated.

Powell (pronounced Po-el) was at its center, both physically and literarily, unless Waugh was. All of the Balliol writers produced novels almost without number. But none of them quite so many and any better than Powell, best known for his Dance To The Music of Time. It comprised twelve volumes. They carry a complex cast of characters through about forty years of life and a major war.

And then it was time to write his memoirs. One volume would not be enough for a man like Powell; it took four, and later a publisher (he was once one himself) asked him to cut it down to one book, and he did. This is To Keep The Ball Rolling, the quote being from Joseph Conrad's short story, "Chance," in which there is a character  most appropriately named Powell.

Powell likes catchy titles that are drawn from his wide reading. The four condensed volumes are: Infants of the Spring (from Hamlet), Messengers of Day (Julius Caesar), Faces in My Time (King Lear), and The Strangers Are All Gone (Romeo and Juliet). Shakespeare all, of course, which probably portends nothing, nothing of significance. It is jape which only Powell fully appreciates, I suspect.

Nicholas Poussin, Dance To the Music of Time, c. 1637

I admire him greatly and have read not quite all his books, over a long period of time, but some of them twice. I look forward to the few that remain untouched by me . Rather than seem dated,  the novels and the memoirs seem surprisingly contemporary. Why, just the other day, I was listening to the Dave Matthews Band and reading about Powell's school days at Eton, in 1920, and thought, "Talk about your Casanova's Chinese Restaurant"?

(For the non-cognoscenti, I point out that the restaurant is the is Powell's novel in which the modern mix of cultures was quietly announced relative to London, producing an early recognition of the complex world in which we live and whose rich ironies repeat themselves daily, for anyone who cares to notice.)

Powell did. And this perception makes him more modern than many contemporary writers, that is, ones who are still alive, and not many are. Powell lived to his mid-nineties.

When Queen Elizabeth knighted him, he reports hearing her ask the man in line in front of him what he did. "I kill mosquitoes," the man replied.

"Oh, good," said her Majesty.

Such touches ring true and bring a quick and persisting smile. As do most of the things Anthony Powell chooses to write about.

Also of note, along these lines:

Jeremy Treglown's fine biography of Henry Green, Romancing, a participial commensurate with his subject's choice of titles, i.e. Loving, Nothing, etc.

Pretty good read. He writes well and knows his subject thoroughly. And of course it is about one of the Balliol writers, who are interesting, separately and together.

The book was recently remaindered through Dedalus, and my copy cost $2, plus postage.

 Treglown  has also written a biography of Roald Dahl and a book that traces literary criticism from Fielding to the Internet, with a concentration on Grub Street writers in London.

Norman Sherry concludes his thirty-year crusade to pin down the elusive life of writer Graham Greene.

Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. III, 1955-1991, Viking Press, 2004. 825 pp. $39.95

How well did he do?

Pretty well, considering that he was getting tired and pretty loose, there toward the end, and tended to identify so much with Greene that he often seemingly spoke for Greene, and sometimes not so accurately. But it is a brilliant job and he is the man Greene picked for the tough job. The total page count is 2,251.

It was a long, tough job, but somebody had to do it, and the fact that Sherry elected himself to do it is to our benefit. And if one has to enter deeply into a life not his own, Greene's is about as interesting a life as one might encounter. Most writers live desperately quiet lives at their pen or typewriter (or computer keyboard), but Greene managed to get his daily 600-word stint in in the morning, which left the rest of the day free to travel, chase married women (for twenty years or so, it was mainly Catherine Walston, pictured below in one of those moody glamour shots of the time. She looks pretty good still.

Greene was her principal lover, one might say. And she was his, though both of them fooled around to a high degree. There were three or four women, besides his wife (long abandoned) whom Greene had ongoing relations with, including Anita Bjork, and for the last twenty years of his life, and through old age, Yvonne Cloetta--a petite, immaculate  Frenchwoman much younger than him.

Green was a major literary figure of the twentieth century. His novels and stories are gripping and well constructed. He wastes little time getting his story underway. His Catholicism was a prevailing yet sometimes thing; he was a great doubter and often described himself as an agnostic. A wishful agnostic, one might add.

Greene's Catherine

Green published 60 books, including 28 novels and 8 plays that had been performed. Countless short stories, as well. He had a wonderful knack with a story and created a laundry list of tormented male characters. The Heart of the Matter and The Power and Glory are two of the most memorable. He worked hardest, though, on A Burnt-Out Case, and it remains perhaps his most difficult to write.

He traveled the world over, particularly the countries to the South, and posited  his novels and stories where he had been, and where he found poverty, illness, and religious conflict imbedded in complex personalities..

The Nobel Prize eluded him. There are stories about the politics of the award and how many of the Swedish trustees disliked him for an injustice that was largely imaginary. But universities the world over lately awarded him honorary doctors of letters degrees, including his own , Oxford, plus Edinburgh and  Cambridge.