After reading all the articles, book reviews, movie reviews, and essays in There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Non-Fiction I never got the sense that Bellow was enjoying himself writing this stuff. Even the Nobel Prize lecture is dull. There’s just too much “going through the motions” in much of this work. I found out that Bellow’s favorite American writer is Theodore Dreiser. And Bellow once roomed with Ralph Ellison.
Arranged chronologically, the pieces in this collection show the range of interests Bellow is willing to write about. He has mixed feelings about Philip Roth but doesn’t have much to say about other contemporary writers. The only time Bellow shows some emotion is when Gunter Grass attacks him for not being more political. GRADE: B
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
THE FIFTIES AND BEFORE
Spanish Letter
Illinois Journey
The University as Villian
The Sharp Edge of Life
Laughter in the Ghetto:On Sholom Aleichem
Dreiser and the Triumph of Art
Hemingway and the Image of Man
Man Underground: On Ralph Ellison
The 1,001 Afternoons of Ben Hecht
The Swamp of Prosperity: On Philip Roth
The Writer and the Audience
Distractions of a Fiction Writer
Deep Readers of the World, Beware!
A Talk with the Yellow Kid
THE SIXTIES
The Sealed Treasure
On Jewish Storytelling
Up From the Pushcart: On Abraham Cahan
Where Do We Go From Here? The Future of Fiction
At the Movies
On Shakespeare’s Sonnets
The Writer As a Moralist
Beatrice Webb’s America
Recent Fiction: A Tour of Inspection
Barefoot Boy: On Yevgeny Yevtushenko
My Man Bummidge
The Thinking Man’s Waste Land
Cloister Culture
Israel: The Six-Day War
Skepticism and the Depth of Life
THE SEVENTIES
On America: Remarks at the U.S. Cultural Center in Tel Aviv
New York: World-Famous Impossibility
Machines and Storybooks: Literature in the Age of Technology
A World Too Much With Us
An Interview with Myself
The Nobel Lecture
Americans Who Are Also Jews: Upon Receiving the Democratic Legacy Award of the Anti-Defamation League
The Day They Signed the Treaty
THE EIGHTIES
In the Days of Mr Roosevelt
Reflections on Alexis de Tocqueville: A Seminar at the University of Chicago
My Paris
Foreword to The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset
The Civilized Barbarian Reader
A Jewish Writer in America: A Lecture
Chicago: The City That Was, the City That Is
THE NINETIES AND AFTER
There Is Simply Too Much to Think About
Writers, Intellectual, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence
Papuans and Zulus
Alone in Mixed Company
Ralph Ellison in Tivoli
Literature: The Next Chapter
Wit Irony Fun Games
Vermont: The Good Place
Winter in Tuscany
Before I Go Away: A Words and Images Interview with Norman Manea
“I Got a Scheme!”: With Philip Roth
Coda: Why Not?
Acknowledgments and Editors Note
Index
Another writer whose star dipped almost as soon as he was cold in the grave. I’ve said it before, but I believe the immediate future will not be kind to mid-century male writers who in their personal lives or in their writing ignored, mistreated, trivialized, or objectified women–and I believe Bellow will be seated in the corner with Norman Mailer, et. al.
/Dismounting soap box now.
Deb, I completely agree with your analysis. Even Bellow’s Nobel Prize hasn’t stop his slide into obscurity. Bellow’s works aren’t taught at SUNY at Buffalo’s English Department. Not a good sign for the future.
Like is favorite writer, Dreiser, he could be a self-righteous scold.
Patti, Bellow is completely unknown to my students. They’ve never heard of him, never read his novels, and wouldn’t be receptive to Bellow’s themes for all the reasons Deb has listed. All this makes Bellow’s legacy a troubled one.
Forgive me, but the fact that Saul Bellow is completely unknown to your students doesn’t say as much about Bellow as it says about them — whether an author is well known to millenials or post-millenials isn’t exactly a standard to go by. And in response to all of the comments about his purported misogyny, have we suddenly forgotten that F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of America’s most famous and enduring authors, was rampantly racist? Have we forgotten Hemingway’s “homophobia”? For most people, it’s simple: either the writing is good, or it isn’t. In Bellow’s case, I consider his writing excellent. From my point of view – that of a seventeen year old girl who has loved his work since fourteen – he was unapologetically honest and transparent, and so refreshing in an age of “political correctness” and insularity.
Miriam, excellent comment! However, my point about my students not knowing who Saul Bellow was that many of them DON’T READ. Somehow, we’ve become a visual society so Netflix and HULU and AMAZON Prime move my students more than literature.
I’ll pass.
The one person on Deb’s list who I think will survive is Philip Roth. Even Updike has faded away.
But what do I know?
Jeff, I even think Philip Roth is iffy. My students are reading Tolkien and George R. R. Martin and FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. Literature is the last thing they want to read.
To be fair to your students, I’d rather listen to an audio recording of Fran Drescher huffing helium while reading 50 SHADES OF GRAY than to try to make it through HENDERSON THE RAIN KING again.
Deb, for some scholars the fact that HENDERSON THE RAIN KING loses out to Harry Potter is a tragedy.
George, Saul Bellow is one of three authors I have meant to read for a long time. The other two are William Styron and Philip Roth. I liked SISTER CARRIE” by Theodore Dreiser.
Prashant, I read SISTER CARRIE as a kid and loved it. AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY is also one of Dresser’s class novels. Styron’s books are very dark (he suffered from depression). Philip Roth can be quite comedic.
Read several Bellow works long ago: Henderson the Rain King, Seize the Day, Adventures of Augie March, Herzog. I think that’s all. I didn’t really enjoy any of them.
Bill, I liked HERZOG and Mr. Sammler’s Planet.
I think HERZOG was the best. But they all fade into a giant gray cloud, at least in my head.
Patti, you’re right about a certain sameness in all Bellow’s novels.
The more ponderous novels aren’t up to some of the short fiction up to “Seize the Day”…which I dug more than Bill did. (At his funniest, Bellow can remind me of Avram Davidson…and I note that Bellow and Botsford, in going through Bellow’s nonfiction, barely overlap at all with this book in what they selected for EDITORS.
Bellow doesn’t hate women as much as Hemingway does, but he can display an unfortunate dull resentment. HERZOG, inspired by the affair between Bellow’s wife and the third co-founder of THE NOBLE SAVAGE magazine, sorta kinda can be forgiven, perhaps, given those circumstances.
I first read Roth when I was ten…a good age for the fantasticated absurdity of OUR GANG…
There is subtle emotion when Bellow meets a Mormon Missionary and gentleman in Illinois Journey.
Scott, you’re right. Bellow was capable of subtle emotion…and writing about it effectively.