April 26, 2010 Issue

At first I didn’t think the selection of Saul Bellow’s letters published in this week’s New Yorker would be all that interesting. It wasn’t until after I read Martin Schneider’s post at Emdashes (“Some Quick Hits on a Recent Issue,” April 23, 2010) that I gave them even a second thought. Schneider said, “The letter Saul Bellow wrote to Philip Roth on January 7, 1984 (not available online), is pretty fantastic, even if his appellation for the poor journo who crossed him, ‘crooked little slut,’ is a bit unfortunate.” I decided to check out this letter for myself, and ended up reading the whole damned collection. I enjoyed them, and I learned a few things too. For example, the way Bellow employs both a semi-colon and a question mark in the same sentence (“Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter?”). For the most part, Bellow’s letters are written in short, choppy sentences. There’s little evidence of what Joan Acocella memorably described as “the grand, cascading sentences” of The Adventures of Augie March (see Acocella’s “Finding Augie March,” The New Yorker, October 6, 2003, later reprinted in her great Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints). Yet, the letters contain perceptions that stayed with me after I finished reading them. That observation about the death of a parent, for example: “I found myself saying to her daughter Rosanna that losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces – down to that last glassy splinter.” When I read that, I instantly thought of my own parents, both turning eighty this year. And I remembered that Bellow had opened his wonderful short story “A Silver Dish" (The New Yorker, September 25, 1978) with a question about the death of a father: “What do you do about death – in this case, the death of an old father?” Now, I want to reread that story. In fact, the selection of letters in this week’s issue has whetted my appetite for more Bellow. After all, he is, as James Wood says, “probably the greatest writer of American prose of the twentieth century – where greatest means most abundant, various, precise, rich, lyrical” (see Wood’s “Saul Bellow’s Comic Style” in his collection The Irresponsible Self).