…. Not an interview. A conversation.
Saul Bellow’s collected letters — a very big book — will appear later this month, and in anticipation of them, his widow, an English professor at Tufts, talks to the Guardian writer Rachel Cooke.
(UD, a University of Chicago grad, had a long talk with Bellow one afternoon in his high, turreted office. She will never forget it.)
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Excerpts:
He wasn’t really a bad boy. He was a serial marrier, but it had to do with a strange desire on his part to be intimate, to have love at the centre of his life. That was part of the daring I saw in him. He was audacious! What would it take to start over again [at that time in your life]? He was hungry in his soul.
… He was very correct and cordial, but not a particularly pleasant human being.
… An immediate intimacy developed after [our] first physical intimacy. I was overly studious. I loved nature. But suddenly it felt like every single part of my life came together with his. It was a very beautiful time: [for him] a rebirth, and an unexpected one. He had a way of being that was total openness, or nothing: you give yourself madly, or why bother? He opened himself up. He had that capacity: to be loved, and to be in love.
… People used to joke: ‘You’re lucky – you didn’t have some mean book written about you; you would if you’d come earlier.’ [Saul, it is generally agreed, made nasty characters of his ex-wives] I’m not going to deny that. I’m much luckier. We met at the right time. If I’d been earlier in the line-up… I don’t think I could have been with a man who was unfaithful to me. The pain of it.
[UD loves the way she refers to the line-up.]
… He was a writer, you see, not a husband, or a father; [looking back] you see a pattern of him not being able to put in time. When a child comes along, it displaces you, if you need to be at the centre, and obviously Saul did.
He had huge needs. The writing life needed to be supported. He was aware of this; I’m not saying anything disrespectful. He failed his children; he left them, and it was a wound he carried around. He knew the cruelty of this.
… [He was] the kind of person you’re so glad to be embracing at the end of the day. In bed. You want to be close to this human being. He [was] so full of excitement, and energy…
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A podcast with Janis Bellow.
October 10th, 2010 at 6:54PM
Ah, Saul Bellow, a marvel.
I remember when he got the Nobel Prize for literature in the seventies and I proudly posting the announcement on my bulletin board. Some Carleton undergrad wrote a snotty note about how much more wonderful John Berryman was, not realizing that Saul had taught at Minnesota and was friends with Berryman.
But I never could figure out what to make of Mr. Sammler’s Planet. (UD?) I remember reading it and being horrified. What sort of man could write such a thing?
And of course there is always the matter of taste. Although I liked to read Bellow’s stuff, other writers for whom I have great admiration did not. E.g., Nabokov who once referred to Bellow as a “miserable mediocrity.”
And of course he was still going strong in his fifth marriage, when he had a child with the last in the line-up when he was 84.