Word: bellow
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...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...
Other nourishment, not so predigested, came from watching his father fail in a series of enterprises: a bakery, a chain of shops, even handling a contract to make sacks for the Canadian government in World War I. The family moved to Chicago near Division Street, where, Bellow says, "he did all right in coal until one of his uninsured trucks had a fatal accident. For years we all worked...