Word: charlatan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These claims struck me as extravagant. I realized that L. Ron Hubbard must be either an extraordinary scientist or a flaming charlatan. Let me say now that I lean toward the latter view; but nevertheless, the L. Ron Hubbard trip is both a fantastic personal story and a sobering barometer of our society's fragmentation. For a person must have a desperate sense of alienation and powerlessness to subordinate himself to such an ultra chauvinist, pyramidal organization, such an elitist hierarchy with Hubbard at the summit...
...chances of success by inadvertence. A novelist whose writing takes even the slightest notice of his society is obliged to make some sense of the times. That is his franchise, and fool luck will not help. He must be a seer or, at a minimum, the rarest sort of charlatan...
There is nothing of the charlatan in Saul Bellow, and perhaps it is time to admit that he is a seer. The author of The Adventures of Angle March, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog observes his age with no excessive charity. Chaos? Yes. Senselessness? Yes. Disintegration and despair? Be the author's guest. The dour view itself is not remarkable. Well-wrought chaos and subtly evoked senselessness have never been in such abundant literary supply. A reader thinks, with varying respect, of Mailer, Heller, Vonnegut, Cheever, Barth...