(1915–2005)
Canadian-born U.S. writer
Saul Bellow
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
Herzog (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 237.
Send me a little note, old pal. Remember you occupy one of the top compartments of my heart.
Letter to Samuel Freifeld, dated November 5, 1955, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 142.
Words shouted into a fierce gale which is anyway blowing in the wrong direction.
Letter to James Wood, dated September 9, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 525–26.
You know what a thorough sufferer I can be. I not only hit bottom, I walk for miles and miles on it.
letter to Pascal Covici, dated November 10, 1959, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 184.
I believe I learned with her to love a woman, and I can’t see where or how my heartsickness will end.
Letter to Keith Botsford, dated November 5, 1959, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 183.
I used to have much confidence in my ability to ward off death. But death is as strong as ever, and I am a much weaker resister.
Letter to Herbert McCloskey, dated December 16, 1997, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 538–39.
Then there is the stamp of old age on the face, head, hands and ankles. These blue-cheese ankles—what a punishment for narcissists!
Letter to Julian Behrstock, dated January 14, 1997, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 530–31.
I turned sixty-nine on June 10th, ’84. On that day Alexandra said she was divorcing me. She moved out of the apartment then and there. Not before she had applied circular stickers, big ones, green and white, to her possessions and mine. Even bathrobes and carpet slippers carried these gummed labels, a weird snowfall of large round green and white flakes.
Letter to Hymen Slate, dated July 25, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 521–22.
I am like you in my boyish rejection of elderliness. Antiquity—why not come right out with it? You pack a snowball on a winter day and imagine taking a belly flop on your sled as we all used to do back in the beautiful Twenties—I was ten years old in 1925. All that remains is the freshness of the impulse.
Letter to Albert Glotzer, dated April 19, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 518.
As ever (whatever that is),
The closing of the letter to John Hunt, dated September 13, 1995, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 509.
Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces—down to the last glassy splinter.
Letter to Martin Amis, dated March 13, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 516–17.
When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around, and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.
Written in a letter to Philip Roth, letting him know his stories are the “real thing,” dated December 12, 1969, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 290.