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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Unabated Bellow A Younger Saul Bellow Claimed Many Of The Greatest Literary Honors, But Even At 81, He Still Vigorously Pursues His Quest For Higher Truth

Mel Gussow New York Times

Saul Bellow is “a first-class noticer,” in common with Harry Trellman, the protagonist of his new novella, “The Actual.” The noticer, he said in a recent interview, “is the pussycat in the corner.”

Bellow a pussycat? More likely his readers think of this Nobel Prize winner as an aging but still raging literary lion.

The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle. Sitting in his office at Boston University, where he teaches, and later over lunch, he comes across as a man of natural reserve and charm. A conversation with Bellow roamed widely through his life and work, and was sprinkled with quotations from commentators as diverse as Henry James and Henny Youngman.

He began with James: “His advice to young writers was to try to be one of those persons on whom nothing is lost.” Then, applying that statement to himself, he said, “It becomes second nature.”

His approach is that of a newcomer on Earth: “I’ve never seen the world before. Now I was seeing it, and it’s a beautiful, marvelous gift. Enchanting reality! And when the end came, I was told by the cleverest people I knew that it would all vanish. I’m not absolutely convinced of that. If you asked me if I believed in life after death, I would say I was an agnostic. There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio, etc.”

At 81, he continues his quest, unabated through 10 novels and many novellas and stories. With his friend Keith Botsford as co-editor, he has just published the first issue of his third literary magazine, News From the Republic of Letters.

Bellow has won more awards than any of his contemporaries. Several years ago, The Sunday Times of London asked a selection of critics and authors to name the greatest living novelist in the English language. Bellow won handily.

He greets all honors with a grain of irony. “Every time you’re praised, there’s a boot waiting for you,” he said. “If you’ve been publishing books for 50 years or so, you’re inured to misunderstanding and even abuse.”

When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976, he “took it on an even keel,” he said. “There’s a secret humiliation connected with the prize, namely that some of the very great writers of the century didn’t get it: Proust, Tolstoy, who was still alive, or Strindberg and Joyce.” The award thrust him into the uncomfortable position of “a public servant in the world of culture.”

Years ago, when he was at the Breadloaf Writers Conference, he spent a great deal of time with Robert Frost, whom he regarded as “a very considerable poet, sometimes in spite of himself.”

“He was a prodigious talker about himself,” Bellow said. “I thought when I was his age, people would let me get away with murder, too. But I’m not allowed to get away with a thing.” With a smile, he vowed, “My turn will come.”

In contrast to some writers who wind down late in life, he has entered a new and rewarding phase: shorter, terser Bellow, sending out “a briefer signal.” His latest, “The Actual,” is 104 pages. Early novels like “The Adventures of Augie March” and “Henderson the Rain King” had tumultuous canvases.

In common with his other recent work, the new book in cameo captures themes and passions that have preoccupied the author: the often quixotic search for higher truths and a moral purpose in life. As always, he uses fictional instruments to probe the seemingly inexplicable malignancies of his society.

In the introduction to a collection of three novellas, published in 1991, he saluted his college composition teacher, Miss Ferguson, who advised her students to write short and “to stick to the necessary.” In his early work, he disregarded that lesson. Looking back at his longer novels, he would like to simplify some of them. If he had a chance to rewrite “Herzog,” he said, “I’d do it better.” But there are others like “Henderson” and “Humboldt’s Gift” that he can return to “with some pleasure.” Both have a strong comic element, something that “always gave me a surer touch.”

As with all things, he feels a sense of encroaching time, and as he talked, he apologized for sounding “very deathy.” He attributed that to a recent near-fatal experience. Two years ago, he became sick after eating toxic fish while on holiday with his wife on St. Martin. Later, in Boston, his illness was diagnosed as ciguatera, an attack on his nervous system. During Bellow’s recovery, the neurologist asked him to write something, and all he could do was draw a tiny, cramped circle.

Remembering that fearful moment, he said, “It was very weird, feeling that you didn’t have command of yourself. The doctor cured me of that fast enough, or my creditors did because I had unpaid bills and I couldn’t sign the checks.”

About two months later, he was well enough to write a story, “By the St. Lawrence,” which was a re-evocation of a traumatic episode from his childhood in Lachine, Quebec.

Other stories followed, including “The Actual,” which deals with the renewal of a high school romance late in life. In the interval, the woman has married and been divorced from the protagonist’s best friend. Explaining the provocation for the story, he said he was struck by “the tenacity of those early affections.” In this case, there was a uniqueness to the relationship.

“I’ve gotten to the stage now where I know the value of this uniqueness in other people,” he continued. “I don’t claim it for myself.” Asked if he had learned more about himself, he answered: “Yes. Not all of it pleasant. I have a joke about this. Socrates said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ My revision is ‘But the examined life makes you wish you were dead.”’

And given the alternative, he would, of course, rather be alive.

Before moving to Boston, he was a longtime resident of Chicago. There were periods, however, when he lived in New York City and Paris, where he wrote “Augie March.” After he had published two short novels, he found himself blocked and in a state of depression.

Walking the streets of Paris, he suddenly had a kind of epiphany. He remembered Chucky, a friend from his childhood. “He was a wild talker who was always announcing cheerfully that he had a super scheme. The memory of my affectionate friendship came back to me. I began to think, if he were around and writing a novel, how would he go at it?” Chucky became Augie March, and the book became Bellow’s breakthrough. As Cynthia Ozick wrote, it was a prose revolution that “turned over American fiction.”

Many years later, Chucky reappeared in the author’s life. By then a successful businessman, he had recognized himself in the book and was annoyed.

Didn’t Chucky realize he had achieved a certain immortality? Bellow laughed at the idea. “He had a different ‘i’ in mind. He thought of it as an intrusion.”

In such fashion, Bellow has repeatedly based characters on real people, Humboldt on the poet Delmore Schwartz, Henderson on Chandler Chapman, a son of the writer John Jay Chapman. “The Bellarosa Connection” centers on the flamboyant Broadway impresario Billy Rose.

Bellow happened to be in the lobby of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem when Rose arrived. His luggage had been lost and he was shouting about the irreparable loss of his custom-made clothes. Sometime later, a friend told Bellow about a man who had been rescued from the Holocaust by Rose’s underground organization. Light bulb! The convergence of two ideas: “The iceberg and the Titanic.”

Bellow is always on the alert for such tales: “I have my ear to the ground. As I like to say, if you have your ear to the ground, you either get a dirty ear or you hear the locomotive coming.” But if you don’t watch out, you might be run over. “Well, you don’t get too close to the tracks.”

When the narrator of the Rose story says that memory is life, he is speaking for the author. “Memory loss would be like a death,” he said, and added, “If I had no books to read or to write, I would go mad.”

For some time Bellow has worked on a long novel. “I put it aside,” he said. “I don’t know whether I’m going to finish it or not. At my time of life, if I don’t have a very strong impulse to write something, what am I writing it for?”

Then in response to those who would write his biography, he sounded for a moment like his old friend Chucky: “It’s an intrusion.” About his life as a subject for a book, he said, “It’s not the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It’s a lesser topic.” To those who “want to raise a monument to my bones,” he says, “I’m not bones yet.” He laughed. “It wasn’t my idea to be a horse, as my father used to say.”

The reference, he explained, was to an old Yiddish joke about a horse beaten by its driver. When asked why he was beating such a weak old horse, he said, “Well, being a horse was his idea.”’

For much of his life, Bellow has taught literature. He explained why, with all his success, he continues to pursue this part-time occupation: “You’re all alone when you’re a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that, but it’s much more interesting to talk about books.”

Bellow and his fifth wife, Janis Freedman, whom he describes as “a genius noticer,” divide their time between Boston and their home in Vermont. The novelist, the quintessential urbanite, has a studio in the woods.

“I had a black bear come up to the screen door. I was writing a story. He watched me. I watched him. He was thinking it over.” Then the bear went back into the woods and Bellow returned to his writing, immersing himself in the transformation of reality into a far greater fictional reality. Once again, he was trying “to fathom the mystery of people you think you know so well.”