Alas, that letter is not in this book.
I didn’t ask to write about Saul Bellow: Letters so I could mention that I once received a letter from the late Nobel Prize–winning novelist. At least not only so I could mention it. (And, yes, I recognize that “mention” here is a euphemism for “brag” or “gloat.”) Long before I had the opportunity to interview him in 1982, I felt a deep connection with Bellow, a fellow Chicagoan, a professor at the university where I received my post-graduate degree, the author who I (and so many others) considered America’s greatest contemporary novelist.
In his introduction to this generous selection of more than 700 letters spanning Bellow’s literary life, editor Benjamin Taylor writes that the volume constitutes “an exhaustive self-portrait which is, as well, the portrait of an age.” The first part in particular is crucial, for Bellow often had a prickly relationship with critics whom he felt misread him and a resistance toward biographers, whom he believed had a reductive attitude toward the relationship between the author’s fiction and his life and often seemed more interested in his serial marriages than the seriousness of his (often very funny) art. It’s illuminating to read his self-deprecatory assessments of Humboldt’s Gift (“an amusing and probably unsatisfactory novel,” he wrote to Joyce Carol Oates), Mr. Sammler’s Planet (“isn’t even a novel. It’s a dramatic essay of some sort, wrung from me by the Crazy Sixties.”) and the popular breakthrough of Herzog: “I can’t pretend it’s entirely unpleasant,” he writes of the clamorous response. “After all, I wanted something to happen, and if I find I can’t control the volume I can always stuff my ears with money.” These aren’t dashed-off notes, but letters that required considerable care and meant much to the author, as he expresses affection and support for other writers (Ellison, Roth, Malamud, Cheever, Amis et al.), takes critics and journalists to task with well-formed arguments and offers critical commentary on the culture that provides the context for his work (a culture that no longer values the art of writing letters). “There used to be something like a literary life in this country…Nothing remains but gossip and touchiness and anger,” he laments. Of his own work: “I prefer to think of the pages of fiction that I write as letters to the very best of non-correspondents. The people I love—the great majority of them unknown to me.” The letters are most revealing of Bellow’s own character—his playful humor, his commitment to take his own work and that of others very seriously but not himself. Here’s how he ends the letter he wrote to me: “I got a kick out of the photograph too. I told my secretary that it made me look just like Dwight D. Eisenhower. As she comes from Canada she only laughs at me.”
Alas, that letter is not in this book.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02221-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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