Word: bellow
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Impersonating a Lion. The sensational fizz of the novel made its large flaws seem unimportant. But the big novel loosened Bellow's collar. His next important outburst was Henderson the Rain King (1959). He could not work twice the trick of making literary shapelessness a virtue. And he managed an enormous feat in leading the new novel -wilder and funnier than Augie March -toward resolution. It was one thing to leave young Augie, grinning and scratching his head at the end of the novel. But Henderson, the Yankee millionaire who charges off to Africa in a frenzy of exasperation...
...episodes in Mr. Sammler." said Saul Bellow "are meant to be typical of the madness in New York City middle-class life. But," he adds with characteristic low-key irony, "I may be a little behind...
...comment, like the book itself, underlines the fact that in some ways this century has made Bellow a profoundly conservative man. "That was one of the things I was trying to say in Herzog, too," Bellow admitted to TIME Correspondent Martha Duffy. "Today you can simply be distracted to death. Tearing the self apart has become a social duty...
...help keep himself in one piece, Bellow, who used to live in New York, six years ago took up calmer residence in a five-room apartment on Chicago's South Side. It is a bachelor's flat-no curtains, orderly bookshelves and unobtrusive modern furniture. Three marriages have left Bellow with three sons, age 25, twelve and five, and three divorces. Herzog, which camped on the best-seller lists for a winter, brought him financial security, though -he cannot help remarking-it was praised for a lot of the wrong reasons: "topical, Jewish and political reasons...
...Though Bellow has always been "book-crazy, fiercely concentrated on being a writer," he has come to academic life and to eminence the long way round. He was born in Lachine, Quebec, an industrial suburb of Montreal, in 1915. just two years after his Russian parents emigrated from St. Petersburg. (He still speaks fluent French.) "It was a polyglot village of Sicilians, Ukrainians, Scots, Croats and Indians," Bellow remembers. "I had an Iroquois nurse who chewed meat before feeding it to me. I'm sure it did me good...