Saul Bellow (1915-)

American author, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Bellow is among the major representatives of the
Jewish-American writers. His works have widely influenced American literature after World War II. Among
Bellow's most famous characters are Augie March, Moses E. Herzog, Arthur Sammler, and Charlie Citrine - a
superb gallery of self-doubting, funny, charming, disillusioned, neurotic, and intelligent observes of the modern
American way of life.
"There are times when I need to ride in the subway at rush hour or sit in a crowded movie house—
that's what I mean by a humanity bath. As cattle must have salt to lick, I sometimes crave physical
contact." (from Ravelstein, 2000)
Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec. His parents had emigrated from Russia to Canada in 1913. Bellow was
raised until the age of nine in an impoverished, polyglot section of Montreal, full of Russians, Poles, Ukrainians,
Greeks, and Italians. After his father was beaten - he was a a bootlegger - the family moved in 1924 to Chicago.
Although Bellow is not considered an autobiographical writer, his Canadian birth is handed over in his first novel,
THE DANGLING MAN (1944), and his Jewish heritage and his several divorces are shared by many of his
characters. The death of Bellow's mother, when he was 17, was a deep emotional shock for him. In 1933 Bellow
entered the University of Chicago, but transferred to Northwestern University, where he studied anthropology and
sociology and graduated in 1937. As a friendly advice, the English-department chairman told Bellow to forget his
plans to study the language: "No Jew could really grasp the tradition of English literature."

During the Christmas vacation Bellow fell in love, married, and abandoned his postgraduate studies at Wisconsin
University to become a writer. However, it took years before Bellow published his first book. He taught at
Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers' College, Chicago, from 1938 to 1942, and worked then for the editorial department of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1943 to 1944. In 1944-45 he served in the US Merchant Marine. After the war
Bellow returned to teaching, holding various posts at the Universities of Minnesota, New York, Princeton and
Puerto Rico.

While serving with the Merchant Marine, Bellow wrote The Dangling Man, which depicted the intellectual and
spiritual vacillations of a young man waiting to be drafted. The novel was loosely based on Dostoevsky's Notes from
the Underground (1864). It was followed by THE VICTIM (1947), a paranoid story of a doppelganger, set against
the realistic background of New York City. However, Chicago became the town that is connected to Bellow's books.
"The people of Chicago are very proud of their wickedness. This is good old vulgar politics, despite the
pretensions." (Bellow in The New York Times, July 6, 1980) In THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH (1953)
Bellow let himself loose and abandoned some of the formal restrictions he had followed in his earlier books. He
started to write the book in Paris, and continued it in other places, but "not a single word of the book was composed
in Chicago," he later told.
The rich picaresque novel recounts the seemingly unconnected experiences of its hero in his quest for self-
understanding. Augie March, the protagonist, is born into an immigrant Jewish family in Chicago before
the Depression. His mother is poor and nearly blind. George, his younger brother, is retarded, and his elder
brother, Simon, wants to become rich as soon as possible. Each of them is 'drafted untimely into hardships'.
Augie proceeds through a variety of dubious jobs and adventures. His employers include the real estate
dealer named Einhorn and Mrs. Renling, owner of a smart men’s store, and other colorful, energetic
characters, obsessed with sex, making money or both. Augie loves women and observes each portion of the
female anatomy closely. On his mystical quest to discover 'the lesson and theory of power,' Augie finds
everywhere lies, and asks why he always have to fall among theoreticians. The novel is a hymn to city life,
it avoids sentimentality, and ends in Augie's healthy laugh.
At the beginning of his career, Bellow was influenced by Trotskyism and the Partisan Review group of intellectuals.
He rejected Ernest Hemingway's 'tough guy' model of American fiction, and became engaged with a wide range of
cultural fields and tradition - Nietzsche, Oedipal conflicts, popular culture, Russian-Jewish heritage. From the first
published stories Bellow's has examined the relation of author-character-narrator. Books narrated in the first person
often have been mistaken for representing Bellow's own thoughts. "No writer can take it for granted that the views
of his characters will not be attributed to him personally," he has said. "It is generally assumed, moreover, that all
the events and ideas of a novel are based on the life experiences and the opinions of the novelist himself." (Bellow in
The New York Times, March 10, 1994)

In the play THE LAST ANALYSIS (1965) Bellow attacked naive Freudianism, THE DEAN'S DECEMBER,
MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK, and A THEFT deepened his engagement with the writings of Jung, SEIZE THE
DAY used motifs from social anthropology. With The Adventures of Augie March Bellow changed his style, and
made his homage to Mark Twain. HERZOG (1964), Bellow's major novel from the 1960s, centers on a middle-aged
Jewish intellectual, Moses E. Herzog, whose life had some to a standstill. He is on the brink of suicide, he writes
long letters to Nietzsche, Heidegger, ex-wife Madeleine, Adlai Stevenson, and God. As Augie March, Moses
Herzog is introspective and troubled, but he finally also finds that he has much reasons to content with his life. After
pouring all Herzog's thoughts into letters Bellow notes in the last words of the book: “At this time he had no
messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.”
"Bellow, too, is convinced that to have a conscience is, after a certain age, to live permanently in an
epistemological hell. The reason his and Dostoevsky’s heroes are incapable of ever arriving at any
closure is that they love their own suffering above everything else. They refuse to exchange their
inner torment for the peace of mind that comes with bourgeois propriety or some kind of religious
belief. In fact, they see their suffering as perhaps the last outpost of the heroic in our day and age."
(Charles Simic in New York Review of Books, May 31, 2001)
From 1960 to 1962 Bellow was co-editor of the literary magazine The Noble Savage, and in 1962 he was appointed
professor on the Committee of Social Thought at University of Chicago. In 1975 Bellow visited Israel and recorded
his impressions in his first substantial non-fiction book, TO JERUSALEM AND BACK (1975). Bellow's
disenchantment with the liberal establishment reflected in his novel MR SAMLERS PLANET (1970), where Arthur
Samler, an elderly Polish Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, views with his only intact eye the world of black
pickpockets, student revolutionaries and the ill-mannered younger generation. HUMBOLDT'S GIFT (1975), which
won the Pulitzer Prize, was narrated in the first person. The protagonist, Charlie Citrine, is a writer, rich and
successful. But in his heart he knows that he is a failure - he under the thumb of a small-time Chicago gangster,
ruined by a divorce and finally abandoned by his mistress. He admires his dead friend, Von Humboldt Fleischer,
modeled on the poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966). Humboldt, a talent wasted, represents for him all that is
important in culture. Citrine continues the series of Bellow's losers, from Herzog to Sammler, but as his other
novels, it is not gloomy, but founds comic sides even from its protagonist's tragedy.
"Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America least this is often the case.
Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain it." (from Ravelstein)
Bellow has also published short stories and plays. His conservative tone of the 1970s and early 1980s changed with
the short story collection HIM WITH HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH (1984) into a more relaxed mode of his earlier
works. THE BELLAROSA CONNECTION (1989) was based on an anecdote Bellow overheard at a dinner party.
Bellow has three sons from his first four marriages. In 1989 he married Janis Freedman. They have one daughter,
born in 1999. Bellow has not lost his ability to arise controversy, as his 13th novel RAVELSTEIN (2000) proves. It
draws a portrait of Abe Ravelstein, an university professor and a closeted homosexual who ultimately dies of AIDS-
related illness. Ravelstein's character is based on Allan Bloom, Bellow's colleague at the University of Chicago and
the author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), who died in 1992. The cause was officially announced as
liver failure. Ravelstein's sexual inclinations were only a small detail in Bellow's book but critics found it most
intersting. "This is a problem that writers of fiction always have to face in this country. People are literal
minded, and they say, 'Is it true? If it is true, is it factually accurate? If it isn't factually accurate, why isn't it
factually accurate?' Then you tie yourself into knots, because writing a novel in some ways resembles writing
a biography, but it really isn't. It is full of invention." (Bellow in Time, May 8, 2000) Bellow's attitude to black
have also arisen debate. In an interview (The New Yorker, March 7, 1988) he asked "Who is the Tolstoy of the
Zulus?" - this time behind the comment was not a fictional character but the writer himself, who wanted to point out
that "Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo."
For further reading: Saul Bellow by R. Deitweiler (1967); Saul Bellow's Enigmatic Laughter by S.B.
Cohen (1974); Saul Bellow, ed. by E.H. Rovit (1975); Saul Bellow by M. Harris (1980); Quest for the
Human by E.L. Rodrigues (1981); Saul Bellow by M. Beadbury (1982); Saul Bellow's Moral Vision by
L.H. Goldman (1983); Saul Bellow by D. Fuchs (1984); Saul Bellow, ed. by H. Bloom (1986); On Bellow's
Planet by J. Wilson (1986); Sort of Columbus by J.A. Braham (1984); Saul Bellow by R.F. Kiernan (1989);
 Saul Bellow against the Grain by E. Pifer (1990); Saul Bellow and the Decline of Humanism by M.K.
Glenday (1990); Saul Bellow by R. Miller (1991); Saul Bellow by Peter Hyland (1992); The Critical
Response to Saul Bellow, ed. by Gerhard Bach (1995); Handsome Is: Adventures With Saul Bellow by
Harriet Wasserman (1997); New Essays on Seize the Day, ed. by Michael P.Kramer (1998); Saul Bellow: A
Biography by James Atlas (2000) - See also: Chaim Potok, rabbi and author, and Isaac Bashevis Singer,
who wrote most of his works in Yiddish. - NOTE: According to some sources (The Encyclopedia
Americana, 1971; Lexikon der Weltliteratur, 1988, Encyclopedia of World Literature, 1999), Saul Bellow
was born on July 10, 1915, not on June 10.

Selected works:
 DANGLING MAN, 1944
 THE VICTIM, 1947 - Uhri
 THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH, 1953 - Augie Marchin kiemurat - National Book Award
 THE WRECKERS, 1954
 SEIZE THE DAY, 1956 - Tartu tilaisuuteen - television adaptation in 1987
 HENDERSON THE RAIN KING, 1959 - Sadekuningas
 DESSINS, BY JESSE REICHEK, 1960 (with C. Zervos)
 RECENT AMERICAN FICTION: A LECTURE, 1963
 ed.: CHICAGO IN FICTION, 1963 onwards
 ed.: GREAT JEWISH SHORT STORIES, 1953
 THE WRECKER, 1964 (tv play)
 HERZOG, 1964 - suom. - National Book Award
 THE LAST ANALYSIS, 1965 (play)
 OUT FROM UNDER, 1966
 LIKE YOU'RE NOBODY, 1966
 A WEN, 1966 (published in Traverse Plays, ed. by J. Haynes)
 OTANGE SOUFFLÉ, 1966 (published in Traverse Plays)
 MOSBY'S MEMOIRS, AND OTHER STORIES, 1968
 MR. SAMLER'S PLANET, 1970 - Samlerin planeetta - National Book Award
 TECHNOLOGY AND THE FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE, 1973
 HUMBOLDT'S GIFT, 1975 - Humboldtin lahja - Pulitzer Prize
 TO JERUSALEM AND BACK, 1976
 THE ACTUAL, 1977 - Ainoa oikea
 NOBEL LECTURE, 1979
 DEAN'S DECEMBER, 1982 - Dekaanin joulukuu
 HIM WITH HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH AND OTHER STORIES, 1984 - Löyhäsuinen mies ja muita
kertomuksia
 MODERNITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS, 1987
 MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK, 1987 - Yhä useamman sydän pettää
 A THEFT, 1989 - Varkaus
 THE BELLAROSA CONNECTION, 1989 - suom. Bellarosa
 SOMETHING TO REMEMBER ME BY, 1992
 ALL ADDS UP, 1994
 THE ACTUAL, 1997
 RAVELSTEIN, 2000
 COLLECTED STORIES, 2001
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1976
Presentation Speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the Swedish Academy

Translation from the Swedish text

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

When Saul Bellow published his first book, the time had come for a change of climate and generation in American
narrative art. The so-called hard-boiled style, with its virile air and choppy prose, had now slackened into an
everyday routine, which was pounded out automatically; its rigid paucity of words left not only much unsaid but
also most of it unfelt, unexperienced. Bellow's first work, Dangling Man (1944), was one of the signs portending
that something else was at hand.

In Bellow's case emancipation from the previous ideal style took place in two stages. In the first he reached back to
the kind of perception that had found its already classic guides in Maupassant, Henry James and Flaubert perhaps
most of all. The masters he followed expressed themselves as restrainedly as those he turned his back on. But the
emphasis was elsewhere. What gave a story its interest was not the dramatic, sometimes violent action but the light
it shed over the protagonist's inner self. With that outlook the novel's heroes and heroines could be regarded, seen
through and exposed, but not glorified. The anti-hero of the present was already on the way, and Bellow became one
of those who took care of him.

Dangling Man, the man without a foothold, was thus a significant watchword to Bellow's writing and has to no
small extent remained so. He pursued the line in his next novel, The Victim (1947) and, years later, with mature
mastery in Seize the Day (1956). With its exemplary command of subject and form the last-mentioned novel has
received the accolade as one of the classic works of our time.

But with the third story in this stylistically coherent suite, it is as if Bellow had turned back in order at last to
complete something which he himself had already passed. With his second stage, the decisive step, he had already
left this school behind him, whose disciplined form and enclosed structure gave no play to the resources of
exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and discerning compassion which he also knew he possessed and
whose scope he must try out. The result was something quite new, Bellow's own mixture of rich picaresque novel
and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession,
interspersed with philosophic conversation with the reader-that too very entertaining-all developed by a
commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act
or prevent us from acting and that can be called the dilemma of our age.

First in the new phase came The Adventures of Augie March (1953). The very wording of the title points straight to
the picaresque, and the connexion is perhaps most strongly in evidence in this novel. But here Bellow had found his
style, and the tone recurs in the following series of novels that form the bulk of his work: Henderson the Rain King
(1959), Herzog (1964), Mr Samler's Planet (1970) and Humboldt's Gift (1975). The structure is apparently loose-
jointed but for this very reason gives the author ample opportunity for descriptions of different societies; they have a
rare vigour and stringency and a swarm of colourful, clearly defined characters against a background of carefully
observed and depicted settings, whether it is the magnificent facades of Manhattan in front of the backyards of the
slums and semi-slums, Chicago's impenetrable jungle of resourceful businessmen intimately intertwined with
obliging criminal gangs, or the more literal jungle, in the depths of Africa, where the novel, Henderson the Rain
King, the writer's most imaginative expedition, takes place. In a nutshell they are all stories on the move and, like the
first book, are about a man with no foothold, but (and it is important to add this) a man who keeps on trying to find a
foothold during his wanderings in our tottering world.

Even a few minutes' sketch of Bellow's many-sided writings should indicate where that foothold lies. It cannot be
pointed out, as none of his protagonists reaches it. But during their escapades they are all on the run, not from
something but towards something, a goal somewhere which will give them what they lack - firm ground under their
feet. "I want, I want, I want!" Henderson exclaims, and sets off for an unknown continent. What his demands are he
does not know; what he demands is to find out, and his own desire is the unknown continent. "A worthwhile fate,"
Augie March calls his goal. And Herzog, the restless seeker after truth, for his part tries out one phrasing after the
other of what he means by "a worthwhile fate". At one point he says confidently that "the realm of facts and that of
value are not eternally separated". The words are uttered in passing but are worth dwelling on, and if we think of
them as coming from Bellow himself they are essential. Giving value a place side by side with palpable facts is, as
regards literature, a definite departure from realism. As a philosophy it is a protest against the determinism that must
make man unaccountable for his actions as well as inert or hostile to life, since it prevents him from feeling,
choosing and acting himself. The awareness of a value, on the other hand, gives man freedom, thereby
responsibility, thereby a desire for action and a faith in the future. That is why Bellow, never one to look through
rose-coloured spectacles, is at heart an optimist. It is the light of that conviction which makes the facets of his
writing sparkle. His "anti-heroes" are victims of constant disappointment, born to defeat without end, and Bellow (it
cannot be over-emphasized) loves and is able to transform the fate they find worthwhile into superb comedies. But
they triumph nonetheless, they are heroes nonetheless, since they never give up the realm of values in which man
becomes human. And, as Augie March says, anyone can become alive to this fact at any moment, however
unfortunate he may be, "if he will be quiet and wait it out".

The realm of facts and that of value - the very combination of words is reminiscent of a work by the philosopher
Wolfgang Köhler, professor first at Göttingen, then in Berlin, finally at Princeton, to which he fled from the Nazis.
Köhler's book is called The Place of Value in a World of Facts and lent its name to an international Nobel
symposium in Stockholm some years ago, at which a lecture was given by E. H. Gombrich, disciple and younger
friend of Köhler. He told of the latter's last night in Berlin, before the flight could be carried out. Köhler spent the
slow hours with like-minded friends, and while they waited, wondering if a patrol would clamp up the stairs at the
last moment and pound on the door with rifle butts, they played chamber music. "Such is," Gombrich remarked, "the
place of value in a world of facts".

The threatened position of value between obtrusive realities has not escaped Bellow; that is what he is always
writing about. But he does not think that either mankind's conduct or the explosive development of the sciences
betoken a world catastrophe. He is an optimist-in-spite-of-all, and thus also an opposition leader of human kindness.
Truth must out, of course. But it is not always hostile. Facing the truth is not necessarily the same as braving death.
"There may be truths on the side of life," he has said. "There may be some truths which are, after all, our friends in
the universe."

In an interview once Bellow described something of what happens when he writes. Most of us, he supposed, have a
primitive prompter or commentator within, who from earliest years has been telling us what the real world is. He
himself has such a commentator in him; he has to prepare the ground for him and take notice of what he says. One is
put in mind of another man who went out into the highways and byways with his questions, taking notice of his
inner voice : Socrates and his daemon. This introspective listening demands seclusion. As Bellow himself puts it,
"Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes
prayer, too, and the eye of the storm." This was what prevailed when Köhler played chamber music on his last night
in Berlin while, aware of imminent disaster, "being quiet and waiting it out". It is there that the value and dignity of
life and mankind have their sole haven, ever storm-lashed, and it is from that stillness that Saul Bellow's work, borne
on the whirlwind of disquiet, derives its inspiration and strength.

Dear Mr Bellow, it is my task and my great pleasure to convey to you the warm congratulations of the Swedish
Academy and to ask you to receive from the hands of His Majesty the King the Nobel Prize for Literature of the
year 1976

Saul Bellow – Nobel Lecture

I was a very contrary undergraduate more than 40 years ago. It was my habit to register for a course and then to do
most of my reading in another field of study. So that when I should have been grinding away at "Money and
Banking" I was reading the novels of Joseph Conrad. I have never had reason to regret this. Perhaps Conrad
appealed to me because he was like an American - he was an uprooted Pole sailing exotic seas, speaking French and
writing English with extraordinary power and beauty. Nothing could be more natural to me, the child of immigrants
who grew up in one of Chicago's immigrant neighborhoods of course! - a Slav who was a British sea captain and
knew his way around Marseilles and wrote an Oriental sort of English. But Conrad's real life had little oddity in it.
His themes were straightforward - fidelity, command, the traditions of the sea, hierarchy, the fragile rules sailors
follow when they are struck by a typhoon. He believed in the strength of these fragile-seeming rules, and in his art.
His views on art were simply stated in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus. There he said that art was an
attempt to render the highest justice to the visible universe: that it tried to find in that universe, in matter as well as
in the facts of life, what was fundamental, enduring, essential. The writer's method of attaining the essential was
different from that of the thinker or the scientist. These, said Conrad, knew the world by systematic examination. To
begin with the artist had only himself; he descended within himself and in the lonely regions to which he descended,
he found "the terms of his appeal". He appealed, said Conrad, "to that part of our being which is a gift, not an
acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder... our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship
with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of
innumerable hearts... which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

This fervent statement was written some 80 years ago and we may want to take it with a few grains of contemporary
salt. I belong to a generation of readers that knew the long list of noble or noble-sounding words, words like
"invincible conviction" or "humanity" rejected by writers like Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway spoke for the
soldiers who fought in the First World War under the inspiration of Woodrow Wilson and other rotund statesmen
whose big words had to be measured against the frozen corpses of young men paving the trenches. Hemingway's
youthful readers were convinced that the horrors of the 20th Century had sickened and killed humanistic beliefs with
their deadly radiations. I told myself, therefore, that Conrad's rhetoric must be resisted. But I never thought him
mistaken. He spoke directly to me. The feeling individual appeared weak - he felt nothing but his own weakness.
But if he accepted his weakness and his separateness and descended into himself intensifying his loneliness, he
discovered his solidarity with other isolated creatures.

I feel no need now to sprinkle Conrad's sentences with skeptical salt. But there are writers for whom the Conradian
novel - all novels of that sort - are gone forever. Finished. There is, for instance, M. Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the
leaders of French literature, a spokesman for "thingism" - choseisme. He writes that in great contemporary works,
Sartre's Nausea, Camus' The Stranger, or Kafka's The Castle, there are no characters; you find in such books not
individuals but - well, entities. "The novel of characters," he says, "belongs entirely in the past. It describes a period:
that which marked the apogee of the individual." This is not necessarily an improvement; that Robbe-Grillet admits.
But it is the truth. Individuals have been wiped out. "The present period is rather one of administrative numbers. The
world's destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise and fall of certain men of certain families." He goes
on to say that in the days of Balzac's bourgeoisie it was important to have a name and a character; character was a
weapon in the struggle for survival and success. In that time, "It was something to have a face in a universe where
personality represented both the means and the end of all exploration." But our world, he concludes, is more modest.
It has renounced the omnipotence of the person. But it is more ambitious as well, "since it looks beyond. The
exclusive cult of the 'human' has given way to a larger consciousness, one that is less anthropocentric." However, he
comforts us, a new course and the promise of new discoveries lie before us.

On an occasion like this I have no appetite for polemics. We all know what it is to be tired of "characters". Human
types have become false and boring. D.H. Lawrence put it early in this century that we human beings, our instincts
damaged by Puritanism, no longer care for, were physically repulsive to one another. "The sympathetic heart is
broken," he said. He went further, "We stink in each other's nostrils." Besides, in Europe the power of the classics
has for centuries been so great that every country has its "identifiable personalities" derived from Molière, Ramne,
Dickens or Balzac. An awful phenomenon. Perhaps this is connected with the wonderful French saying. "Sil y a un
caractère, il est mauvais." It leads one to think that the unoriginal human race tends to borrow what it needs from
convenient sources, much as new cities have often been made out of the rubble of old ones. Then, too, the
psychoanalytic conception of character is that it is an ugly rigid formation - something we must resign ourselves to,
not a thing we can embrace with joy. Totalitarian ideologies, too, have attacked bourgeois individualism, sometimes
identifying character with property. There is a hint of this in M. Robbe-Grillet's argument. Dislike of personality,
bad masks, false being have had political results.

But I am interested here in the question of the artist's priorities. Is it necessary, or good, that he should begin with
historical analysis, with ideas or systems? Proust speaks in Time Regained of a growing preference among young
and intelligent readers for works of an elevated analytical, moral or sociological tendency. He says that they prefer
to Bergotte (the novelist in Remembrance of Things Past) writers who seem to them more profound. "But," says
Proust, "from the moment that works of art are judged by reasoning, nothing is stable or certain, one can prove
anything one likes."

The message of Robbe-Grillet is not new. It tells us that we must purge ourselves of bourgeois anthropocentricism
and do the classy things that our advanced culture requires. Character? "Fifty years of disease, the death notice
signed many times over by the serious essayists," says Robbe-Grillet, "yet nothing has managed to knock it off the
pedestal on which the 19th century had placed it. It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same phony
majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism."

The title of Robbe-Grillet's essay is On Several Obsolete Notions. I myself am tired of obsolete notions and of
mummies of all kinds but I never tire of reading the master novelists. And what is one to do about the characters in
their books? Is it necessary to discontinue the investigation of character? Can anything so vivid in them now be
utterly dead? Can it be that human beings are at a dead end? Is individuality really so dependent on historical and
cultural conditions? Can we accept the account of those conditions we are so "authoritatively" given? I suggest that
it is not in the intrinsic interest of human beings but in these ideas and accounts that the problem lies. The staleness,
the inadequacy of these repels us. To find the source of trouble we must look into our own heads.

The fact that the death notice of character "has been signed by the most serious essayists" means only that another
group of mummies, the most respectable leaders of the intellectual community, has laid down the law. It amuses me
that these serious essayists should be allowed to sign the death notices of literary forms. Should art follow culture?
Something has gone wrong.

There is no reason why a novelist should not drop "character" if the strategy stimulates him. But it is nonsense to do
it on the theoretical ground that the period which marked the apogee of the individual, and so on, has ended. We
must not make bosses of our intellectuals. And we do them no good by letting them run the arts. Should they, when
they read novels, find nothing in them but the endorsement of their own opinions? Are we here on earth to play such
games?

Characters, Elizabeth Bowen once said, are not created by writers. They pre-exist and they have to be found. If we
do not find them, if we fail to represent them, the fault is ours. It must be admitted, however, that finding them is not
easy. The condition of human beings has perhaps never been more difficult to define. Those who tell us that we are
in an early stage of universal history must be right. We are being lavishly poured together and seem to be
experiencing the anguish of new states of consciousness. In America many millions of people have in the last forty
years received a "higher education" - in many cases a dubious blessing. In the upheavals of the Sixties we felt for the
first time the effects of up-to-date teachings, concepts, sensitivities, the pervasiveness of psychological, pedagogical,
political ideas.

Every year we see scores of books and articles which tell the Americans what a state they are in - which make
intelligent or simpleminded or extravagant or lurid or demented statements. All reflect the crises we are in while
telling us what we must do about them; these analysts are produced by the very disorder and confusion they
prescribe for. It is as a writer that I am considering their extreme moral sensitivity, their desire for perfection, their
intolerance of the defects of society, the touching, the comical boundlessness of their demands, their anxiety, their
irritability, their sensitivity, their tendermindedness, their goodness, their convulsiveness, the recklessness with
which they experiment with drugs and touch-therapies and bombs. The ex-Jesuit Malachi Martin in his book on the
Church compares the modern American to Michelangelo's sculpture, The Captive. He sees "an unfinished struggle to
emerge whole" from a block of matter. The American "captive" is beset in his struggle by "interpretations,
admonitions, forewarnings and descriptions of himself by the self-appointed prophets, priests, judges and
prefabricators of his travail," says Martin.

Let me take a little time to look more closely at this travail. In private life, disorder or near-panic. In families - for
husbands, wives, parents, children - confusion; in civic behavior, in personal loyalities, in sexual practices (I will not
recite the whole list; we are tired of hearing it) - further confusion. And with this private disorder goes public
bewilderment. In the papers we read what used to amuse us in science fiction - The New Tork Times speaks of death
rays and of Russian and American satellites at war in space. In the November Encounter so sober and responsible an
economist as my colleague, Milton Friedman, declares that Great Britain by its public spending will soon go the way
of poor countries like Chile. He is appalled by his own forecast. What - the source of that noble tradition of freedom
and democratic rights that began with Magna Carta ending in dictatorship? "It is almost impossible for anyone
brought up in that tradition to utter the word that Britain is in danger of losing freedom and democracy; and yet it is
a fact!"

It is with these facts that knock us to the ground that we try to live. If I were debating with Professor Friedman I
might ask him to take into account the resistance of institutions, the cultural differences between Great Britain and
Chile, differences in national character and traditions, but my purpose is not to get into debates I can't win but to
direct your attention to the terrible predictions we have to live with, the background of disorder, the visions of ruin.

You would think that one such article would be enough for a single number of a magazine but on another page of
Encounter Professor Hugh Seton-Watson discusses George Kennan's recent survey of American degeneracy and its
dire meaning for the world. Describing America's failure, Kennan speaks of crime, urban decay, drug-addiction,
pornography, frivolity, deteriorated educational standards and concludes that our immense power counts for nothing.
We cannot lead the world and, undermined by sinfulness, we may not be able to defend ourselves. Professor Seton-
Watson writes, "Nothing can defend a society if its upper 100,000 men and women, both the decision-makers and
those who help to mould the thinking of the decision-makers, are resolved to capitulate."

So much for the capitalist superpower. Now what about its ideological adversaries? I turn the pages of Encounter to
a short study by Mr. George Watson, Lecturer in English at Cambridge, on the racialism of the Left. He tells us that
Hyndman, the founder of the Social Democratic Federation, called the South African war the Jews' war; that the
Webbs at times expressed racialist views (as did Ruskin, Carlyle and T. H. Huxley before them); he relates that
Engels denounced the smaller Slav peoples of Eastern Europe as counter-revolutionary ethnic trash; and Mr. Watson
in conclusion cites a public statement by Ulrike Meinhof of the West German "Red Army Faction" made at a
judicial hearing in 1972 approving of "revolutionary extermination". For her, German anti-semitism of the Hitler
period was essentially anticapitalist. "Auschwitz," she is quoted as saying, "meant that six million Jews were killed
and thrown on the waste heap of Europe for what they were: money Jews (Geldjuden)."

I mention these racialists of the Left to show that for us there is no simple choice between the children of light and
the children of darkness. Good and evil are not symmetrically distributed along political lines. But I have made my
point; we stand open to all anxieties. The decline and fall of everything is our daily dread, we are agitated in private
life and tormented by public questions.

And art and literature - what of them? Well, there is a violent uproar but we are not absolutely dominated by it. We
are still able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher activities have not succumbed to fury or
to nonsense. Not yet. Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a
modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that
he is devoutly waiting for us. When complications increase, the desire for essentials increases too. The unending
cycle of crises that began with the First World War has formed a kind of person, one who has lived through terrible,
strange things, and in whom there is an observable shrinkage of prejudices, a casting off of disappointing ideologies,
an ability to live with many kinds of madness, an immense desire for certain durable human goods - truth, for
instance, or freedom, or wisdom. I don't think I am exaggerating; there is plenty of evidence for this. Disintegration?
Well, yes. Much is disintegrating but we are experiencing also an odd kind of refining process. And this has been
going on for a long time. Looking into Proust's Time Regained I find that he was clearly aware of it. His novel,
describing French society during the Great War, tests the strength of his art. Without art, he insists, shirking no
personal or collective horrors, we do not know ourselves or anyone else. Only art penetrates what pride, passion,
intelligence and habit erect on all sides - the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine
one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which, without art, we can't receive. Proust
calls these hints our "true impressions." The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art, be hidden
from us and we will be left with nothing but a "terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life." Tolstoy
put the matter in much the same way. A book like his Ivan Ilyitch also describes these same "practical ends" which
conceal both life and death from us. In his final sufferings Ivan Ilyitch becomes an individual, a "character", by
tearing down the concealments, by seeing through the "practical ends."

Proust was still able to keep a balance between art and destruction, insisting that art was a necessity of life, a great
independent reality, a magical power. But for a long time art has not been connected, as it was in the past, with the
main enterprise. The historian Edgar Wind tells us in Art and Anarchy that Hegel long ago observed that art no
longer engaged the central energies of man. These energies were now engaged by science - a "relentless spirit of
rational inquiry." Art had moved to the margins. There it formed "a wide and splendidly varied horizon." In an age
of science people still painted and wrote poetry but, said Hegel, however splendid the gods looked in modern works
of art and whatever dignity and perfection we might find "in the images of God the Father and the Virgin Mary" it
was of no use: we no longer bent our knees. It is a long time since the knees were bent in piety. Ingenuity, daring
exploration, freshness of invention replaced the art of "direct relevance." The most significant achievement of this
pure art, in Hegel's view, was that, freed from its former responsibilities, it was no longer "serious." Instead it raised
the soul through the "serenity of form above any painful involvement in the limitations of reality." I don't know who
would make such a claim today for an art that raises the soul above painful involvements with reality. Nor am I sure
that at this moment, it is the spirit of rational inquiry in pure science that engages the central energies of man. The
center seems (temporarily perhaps) to be filled up with the crises I have been describing.

There were European writers in the 19th Century who would not give up the connection of literature with the main
human enterprise. The very suggestion would have shocked Tolstoy and Dostoevski. But in the West a separation
between great artists and the general public took place. They developed a marked contempt for the average reader
and the bourgeois mass. The best of them saw clearly enough what sort of civilization Europe had produced,
brilliant but unstable, vulnerable, fated to be overtaken by catastrophe, the historian Erich Auerbach tells us. Some
of these writers, he says, produced "strange and vaguely terrifying works, or shocked the public by paradoxical and
extreme opinions. Many of them took no trouble to facilitate the understanding of what they wrote - whether out of
contempt for the public, the cult of their own inspiration, or a certain tragic weakness which prevented them from
being at once simple and true."

In the 20th Century, theirs is still the main influence, for despite a show of radicalism and innovation our
contemporaries are really very conservative. They follow their l9th-Century leaders and hold to the old standard,
interpreting history and society much as they were interpreted in the last century. What would writers do today if it
would occur to them that literature might once again engage those "central energies", if they were to recognize that
an immense desire had arisen for a return from the periphery, for what was simple and true?

Of course we can't come back to the center simply because we want to; but the fact that we are wanted might matter
to us and the force of the crisis is so great that it may summon us back to such a center. But prescriptions are futile.
One can't tell writers what to do. The imagination must find its own path. But one can fervently wish that they - that
we - would come back from the periphery. We do not, we writers, represent mankind adequately. What account do
Americans give of themselves, what accounts of them are given by psychologists, sociologists, historians,
journalists, and writers? In a kind of contractual daylight they see themselves in the ways with which we are so
desperately familiar. These images of contractual daylight, so boring to Robbe-Grillet and to me, originate in the
contemporary world view: We put into our books the consumer, civil servant, football fan, lover, television viewer.
And in the contractual daylight version their life is a kind of death. There is another life coming from an insistent
sense of what we are which denies these daylight formulations and the false life - the death in life - they make for us.
For it is false, and we know it, and our secret and incoherent resistance to it cannot stop, for that resistance arises
from persistent intuitions. Perhaps humankind cannot bear too much reality, but neither can it bear too much
unreality, too much abuse of the truth.

We do not think well of ourselves; we do not think amply about what we are. Our collective achievements have so
greatly "exceeded" us that we "justify" ourselves by pointing to them. It is the jet plane in which we commonplace
human beings have crossed the Atlantic in four hours that embodies such value as we can claim. Then we hear that
this is closing time in the gardens of the West, that the end of our capitalist civilization is at hand. Some years ago
Cyril Connolly wrote that we were about to undergo "a complete mutation, not merely to be defined as the collapse
of the capitalist system, but such a sea-change in the nature of reality as could not have been envisaged by Karl
Marx or Sigmund Freud." This means that we are not yet sufficiently shrunken; we must prepare to be smaller still. I
am not sure whether this should be called intellectual analysis or analysis by an intellectual. The disasters are
disasters. It would be worse than stupid to call them victories as some statesmen have tried to do. But I am drawing
attention to the fact that there is in the intellectual community a sizeable inventory of attitudes that have become
respectable - notions about society, human nature, class, politics, sex, about mind, about the physical universe, the
evolution of life. Few writers, even among the best, have taken the trouble to re-examine these attitudes or
orthodoxies. Such attitudes only glow more powerfully in Joyce or D.H. Lawrence than in the books of lesser men;
they are everywhere and no one challenges them seriously. Since the Twenties, how many novelists have taken a
second look at D.H. Lawrence, or argued a different view of sexual potency or the effects of industrial civilization
on the instincts? Literature has for nearly a century used the same stock of ideas, myths, strategies. "The most
serious essayists of the last fifty years," says Robbe-Grillet. Yes, indeed. Essay after essay, book after book, confirm
the most serious thoughts - Baudelairian, Nietzschean, Marxian, Psychoanalytic, etcetera, etcetera - of these most
serious essayists. What Robbe-Grillet says about character can be said also about these ideas, maintaining all the
usual things about mass society, dehumanization and the rest. How weary we are of them. How poorly they
represent us. The pictures they offer no more resemble us than we resemble the reconstructed reptiles and other
monsters in a museum of paleontology. We are much more limber, versatile, better articulated, there is much more
to us, we all feel it.

What is at the center now? At the moment, neither art nor science but mankind determining, in confusion and
obscurity, whether it will endure or go under. The whole species - everybody - has gotten into the act. At such a time
it is essential to lighten ourselves, to dump encumbrances, including the encumbrances of education and all
organized platitudes, to make judgments of our own, to perform acts of our own. Conrad was right to appeal to that
part of our being which is a gift. We must hunt for that under the wreckage of many systems. The failure of those
systems may bring a blessed and necessary release from formulations, from an over-defined and misleading
consciousness. With increasing frequency I dismiss as merely respectable opinions I have long held - or thought I
held - and try to discern what I have really lived by, and what others live by. As for Hegel's art freed from
"seriousness" and glowing on the margins, raising the soul above painful involvement in the limitations of reality
through the serenity of form, that can exist nowhere now, during this struggle for survival. However, it is not as
though the people who engaged in this struggle had only a rudimentary humanity, without culture, and knew nothing
of art. Our very vices, our mutilations, show how rich we are in thought and culture. How much we know. How
much we even feel. The struggle that convulses us makes us want to simplify, to reconsider, to eliminate the tragic
weakness which prevented writers - and readers - from being at once simple and true.

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them and
endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology,
philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an
immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what
we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. At the center humankind struggles with collective
powers for its freedom, the individual struggles with dehumanization for the possession of his soul. If writers do not
come again into the center it will not be because the center is pre-empted. It is not. They are free to enter. If they so
wish.

The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain of it is shown to us in glimpses, in what
Proust and Tolstoy thought of as "true impressions". This essence reveals, and then conceals itself. When it goes
away it leaves us again in doubt. But we never seem to lose our connection with the depths from which these
glimpses come. The sense of our real powers, powers we seem to derive from the universe itself, also comes and
goes. We are reluctant to talk about this because there is nothing we can prove, because our language is inadequate
and because few people are willing to risk talking about it. They would have to say, "There is a spirit" and that is
taboo. So almost everyone keeps quiet about it, although almost everyone is aware of it.

The value of literature lies in these intermittent "true impressions". A novel moves back and forth between the world
of objects, of actions, of appearances, and that other world from which these "true impressions" come and which
moves us to believe that the good we hang onto so tenaciously - in the face of evil, so obstinately - is no illusion.

No one who has spent years in the writing of novels can be unaware of this. The novel can't be compared to the epic,
or to the monuments of poetic drama. But it is the best we can do just now. It is a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel
in which the spirit takes shelter. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones
that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that
the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something,
fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony and even justice. What Conrad said was true, art attempts to find
in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.
Saul Bellow – Banquet Speech
Saul Bellow's speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1976
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

There are not many things on which the world agrees but everyone I think acknowledges the importance of a Nobel
Prize. I myself take most seriously the Nobel Committee's recognition of the highest excellence in several fields and
I accept the honor of this award with profound gratitude.

I have no very distinct sense of personal achievement. I loved books and I wrote some. For some reason they were
taken seriously. I am glad of that, of course. No one can bear to be ignored. I would, however, have been satisfied
with a smaller measure of attention and praise. For when I am praised on all sides I worry a bit. I remember the
scriptural warning, "Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you." Universal agreement seems to open the
door to dismissal. We know how often our contemporaries are mistaken. They are not invariably wrong, but it is not
at all a bad idea to remember that they can't confer immortality on you. Immortality - a chilling thought. I feel that I
have scarcely begun to master my trade.

But I need not worry too much that all men will speak well of me. The civilized community agrees that there is no
higher distinction than the Nobel Prize but it agrees on little else, so I need not fear that the doom of universal
approval is hanging over me. When I publish a book I am often soundly walloped by reviewers - a disagreeable but
necessary corrective to selfinflation.

When the Committee's choice was announced and the press rushed at me (a terrifying phenomenon!) and asked how
I felt about winning the Nobel Prize in literature, I said that the child in me (for despite appearances there is a child
within) was delighted, the adult skeptical. Tonight is the child's night entirely. On Sunday I will have some earnest
things to say from the pulpit. Sunday is the best day for dark reflections but the child's claim to this Friday night will
not be disputed.

From Les Prix Nobel, 1976

This interview took place at the University of Victoria, Canada - 1982.

Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec in 1915. He attended Protestant schools in Montreal until at the age of
nine he moved with his family to Chicago. He studied at the University of Chicago and received his bachelor's
degree from Northwestern University with honors in sociology and anthropology. He has taught at New York
University, Princeton, the University of Minnesota and the University of Chicago.

Bellow's first novel, Dangling Man (Avon) appeared in 1944. He received a National Book Award for three of his
subsequent novels. The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog and Mr. Sammler's Planet (all Avon). Humboldt's Gift
(Avon), published in 1975, was awarded the Pulitzer prize. In 1965 he became the first American to win the
International Literary Prize, awarded to him for Herzog. In 1968 he was awarded the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et
Lettres, the highest literary honor France accords to a non-citizen.

I first met Bellow in the early 60s at the University of Chicago, about the time of the publication of Herzog. Nearly
20 years later, on a visit to Victoria and compelled by a reading of Bellow's latest book, The Dean's December, I
sought him out once again, this time in his modest office in the University of Victoria's Clearihue, Building. Our
conversation focused on the new novel.

The Dean's December, Bellow's first fiction since winning the Nobel prize, counterposes two societies, that of
Bucharest, Rumania and Chicago, Illinois. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Albert Corde, the dean of students at
an unnamed Chicago college, both cities exhibit the symptoms of societal breakdown. Corde has traveled to a
barren, bureaucratic Bucharest with his wife Minna to offer support and comfort at a time when her mother is dying.
There he muses on his own life in Chicago, describing in some painfully eloquent passages Chicago's street life.

Bellow and I spoke for an hour, until interrupted by the light knock of a student at the door. As I rose to leave, I was
struck by the resemblance of Bellow to his creation, Albert Corde. Bellow too had the face of a man who seeks to
trace or find "the human motion of character"; a man who, it seemed to me, had written a novel which, for all its
bleakness, was an affirmation of humanist values.

Sward: I like your phrase, "Truth should have some style." Yet The Dean's December has
been criticized as a novel of ideas. Do you think the reception this book has had suggests
readers are reluctant to accept novels of ideas or novels that have been labeled by reviewers
as vehicles primarily for the author's ideas?

Bellow: Readers don't like to be disturbed. They don't like either their habits or their
expectations to be frustrated. But I think anyone who reads this as a book of ideas misses
something; misses the emotion with which those ideas are presented and the passion behind
them. This is for me a very intense book. It's not just a treatise. The opinions themselves
would be meaningless if they were not passionately expressed or dramatized. And I would be
the first to to be leery of abstractions in a novel if they were nothing but abstractions. Writing
of this sort is writing which is meant to be passed through the soul, not just absorbed idly,
superficially. If you see it in that perspective, I don't think you can take The Dean's
December as a book of abstruse half-truths. That's a lazy view of the book. It's nothing of the
sort. It's attached to all sorts of human disasters. The reviewers are missing or evading the
point.

Sward: Some readers of earlier books of yours feel that there is a bleaker view of life
dominating later books like The Dean's December. The question arises, to what extent does
this reflect your own world view?

Bellow: A writer is a sort of medium. He doesn't decide in advance exactly what he is going
to do. Only a commercial writer sits down with a set purpose to write a book that reflects
attitudes that the public desires. If you know in advance what you are going to write, then
you are a commercial writer. Or if you know in advance what you are going to paint, you are
a commercial painter, a poster man. I am not a poster man. And when I begin to write I don't
know what is going to happen. In my own writing I'm a historian, a chronicler in a sense.

I know there are lots of people who think that's a mantle that I have no right to wear. I don't
know how they decide who has the right. Many of them, when they read Mr. Sammier's
Planet, decided I was a reactionary old stinker. Well, it is not for me to tell them what to
think. But I'm free to say that this is merely ideological classification and reflects an
unwillingness to read as closely as is necessary. People are in a hurry to pigeon-hole you
because they don't have the time to deal with you as an individual. They are much too busy.

One needs one's routines in order to survive the attacks of chaos and panic that beset
everybody. So I don't actually blame people trying to find a rubric if it is going to help them.
But if it just strengthens prejudice, then it is a threat to culture and art.
Sward: I haven't seen a single review of The Dean's December that picks up on the book's
humor or wit.

Bellow (agreeing): Corde doesn't yield willingly to some deeply depressing circumstances.
Corde is obviously a man of wit, and wit is one of the assets he's protecting. Wit itself is one
of the rights of the civilized mind.

This is an odd moment in human history and much of modern thought is dead thought,
repulsively and oppressively dead. The need now is for thinking that is so passionate it
becomes vivid. I don't blame people for not wanting to be bothered and if they'd rather have
antics or copulation in the novel, well, the world's so abundantly supplied with these things I
can't see why they'd object if I come up with something different. They're welcome to their
cakes. and if they're willing to eat flat cakes and drink stale ale, there's plenty around. But
why should these people be affronted by a new kind of book? Why this outrage in many
quarters? Why this outpouring of wrath? Why?

Should I tell you something personal! It took guts to write The Dean's December. I knew in
writing the book that I was challenging a great many taboos.

Flaubert said long ago that the new idea is always loathed. Now there are two possibilities.
Either I haven't come up with anything new or I have indeed come up with something new.
There's a 50-50 chance I have come up with something new.

Sward: In the February 1982 issue of Esquire, you stated that reporters and media people
generally are far more interested in satisfying a demand for excitement than in experiencing
and conveying human emotions and character. What does the media do and how do you
distinguish between the work of a novelist and the work of a journalist? I might add that for
me the central theme of The Dean's December is what a human being really is.

Bellow: You're quite right. And what it is possible for a human being to be in a time like this.
I don't think the media deals with questions of this sort. I think the media gives you the news
of the day, not news of being. That is what a good novel. story or narrative poem should
bring, news of being. The media gives you information or perhaps mis-information. We
suffer from a glut of this kind of dramatized. selectively dramatized pieces of fact, hand-
picked items of news. In this age of mass communication people are given the impression
that they know what is going on. Well, the genuine word in the expression "mass
communication" is mass. The second term, communication. is mis-leading. And we don't
know what is really going on. What we get from the mass media are the shadows of what is
happening. Even the highly qualified experts, students of these questions, don't necessarily or
inevitably know what is going on. So what we are exposed to is an immense system of
distraction leading to a sense of frustrated intensity and helplessness in the face of all these
overwhelming events which artificially fill us. The news media are certainly not a source of
clarity. They do not focus our attention on the true questions.

Sward: On the other hand, there are critics who would maintain that the novel is a dead form.
How would you answer them?

Bellow: Well, all forms are dead until someone revives them. This is true of everything. This
is true of religion, which if has no individual character is just there as the corpse of
something that used to be. It must be brought back to life by exemplary persons who are able
to take possession of it and renew it with their own energies and with their own spirits. Then
it comes to life again. We are actually succumbing to an intellectual fashion when we talk
about dead this or dead that. It's true that many things die. We ourselves die every instant and
are re-born. This happens continuously to us from the moment of birth. We die when we go
to sleep and we are born again when we awake in the morning. If by death critics mean death
beyond any possibility of resurrection, I don't know. I don't think they really seriously
address the question of the death of a form.

Sward: Perhaps it's a question of relevancy?

Bellow: Well, they can easily dismiss the novel as irrelevant. Depending on how distracted
they are and what their need for big daily doses of intensity is. This is a problem that writers
have faced for a very long time now. As early as 1830 De Tocqueville was very clear about
this. It is the demand in a democracy for ever greater stimulants. This means that the quiet
arts have no hope for success in these overdosed times. We are made so hyper by one crisis
after another that it is very difficult to obtain the attention of anybody for any purpose. There
is a big fight going on, a war of attention being waged in the consciousness of every human
being. Everybody wants attention. Television wants it in order to sell commodities.
Politicians want it in order to get votes. Partisans of this, that or the other special interest
group want it for their own purposes. Lobbyists want it. Ideologists want it. Everybody wants
it. So the human consciousness at present is a sort of battlefield. And you know what Tolstoy
tells us about battles in War and Peace. Nobody really knows what is going on during a
battle.

In the midst of this figurative battle someone buttonholes you and says, "You're going to
listen to me now." This is really the test of an artist's power, to compel the embattled and the
distracted to listen. Nor is it simply a matter of getting ordinary attention. Attention of a
certain quality is what you want. It's a matter of detaining the person and saying, "I am
talking up to you, not down." Maybe that sort of attention is no longer there. But it seems to
be there, because when I publish a book. I get lots of letters from people who have really read
it and who tell me how it has stirred them. These readers are much more dependable than the
book, reviewers.
Sward: You suggested in a recent interview that one cannot write a novel about how power
works unless one deals also with the corruption of justice in politics and in the people at the
top. What form might this take?

Bellow: I don't really know. I don't think American writers have really concerned themselves
with these questions in the last two or three generations. I can think of very few American
writers who have actually tried to deal with these themes, so there are very few examples of
it. Mine is not a popular approach. What has been popular are the intensest kinds of
subjectivity, eroticism, if not outright pornography, and violence. And a kind of comedy
which I myself have practiced. I have no prescription now for now for how it's to be done.
But I think at times it behooves writers as people to think for themselves --for a change. We
have been running in packs.

Sward: You were born in Quebec. If your family hadn't moved you to Chicago when you
were nine, your childhood background would have been roughly similar to that of Mordecai
Richler. You might, in other words, have written about Montreal instead of Chicago. Would
you care to speculate?

Bellow: What's the point in speculating on what didn't happen? I might have died, in which
case none of this would have happened. I damn near died in the Royal Victoria Hospital,
Ward H, in December 1923, where I was down with pneumonia and peritonitis at the same
time, either of these capable of killing me. I must have been strong as a horse. Because I
survived all that and came out of it. I was then eight years old, and made it. So, then, how do
I know whether I would have been like Mordecai Richler? I really take exception to being
lumped together with A.M. Klein and Mordecai Richler as if we were a troika of Jewish
writers. I consider myself a Jew and an American who writes books.

Sward: During your time in Victoria have you been made aware of Canadian sensitivity to or
lack of awareness of literature outside the borders of this country? High school and university
English courses now preserve a large chunk of their curriculum for Canadian authors. No
doubt that is as it should be. But it also means many students leave university with a minimal
knowledge of world literature. Is this an obstacle to the development of writing in this
country?

Bellow: No, I don't think so. I think it is commendable that Canadians should concern
themselves with their own culture and their own literature. I think they ought to recognize the
disadvantages under which they labor. They have to disconnect themselves from a most
influential super power, influential in every department of life, and the disseminator of things
both good and bad, which Canadians very properly think they have the right to choose among
and to make judgements about. They should fight for their independence. The question is,
what is it that they are going to fight for? What is the strength of their own culture and their
own power to resist those influences? The trouble is that most of the mass culture is from the
United States and the other advanced and powerful countries.

The main influence in Canada when I was a boy was English. Montreal was a very British
city and the French had segregated themselves out of it parochially, in their schools, their
churches and their communities, so there were not friendly relations between the two
cultures. I attended a Protestant school in Montreal until I was nine years old where we read
British books and sang God Save the King and recited the Lord's Prayer and all the rest of it.
And even in the U.S. when I was a boy, it took me some time to become aware of the
uniquely American cultural presence. It became more definite as I grew older. In the United
States the British also enjoyed a monopoly over certain branches of culture. So we in
America couldn't ignore the English and French influence, and you in Canada can't ignore the
American influences.

Sward: You won the Nobel prize in literature in 1976. Has winning the prize changed your
life or work habits or attitude toward writing in any particular way? Also, has the nature of
the Nobel prize itself changed in recent years?

Bellow: I am not a student of the prize. I never knew much about it. I accepted it as I
accepted other prizes I have been awarded. People exaggerate the PR power of Nobel awards
and give them too much importance. It's not the presidency of the United States or the Soviet
Union, as some would appear to assume. Nobel prize winners are expected to be for all good
things and against all evil. Secondly, although Christianity is not thriving in this secular
society, we have carried over its martyrology to our cultural life and then fastened in the
course of' things on whoever appears on the horizon as a good candidate for martyrdom.

In addition, there's the cliche that if you get the prize, you've shot your wad, which I resist as
I've resisted so many other cliches. When T.S. Eliot got the Nobel prize I believe he
complained it meant the end of his useful life as a poet. But then it was pointed out to me that
Yeats did much of his best work after the award.

I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel, in this as in other areas. In the Freudian sense, I've
been gathered to the fathers and the fathers have to be brought down. And in another sense,
I'm subjected to the barrage the aged must endure in all generations: that is, "Down with the
Gerontocracy!" I'm just me.