Saul Bellow by Taylor Benjamin & Bellow Saul

Author:Taylor, Benjamin & Bellow, Saul [Bellow, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: VIKING ADULT
Published: 2010-11-03T18:30:00+00:00

Benjamin N. Nelson (1911-77) taught history and sociology at the University of Minnesota, where he met Bellow, and later at the New School for Social Research. His books include Freud and the Twentieth Century (1957) and a posthumous collection of essays, On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science, and Civilizations (1981).

1968

To Edward Shils

January 20, 1968 Chicago

Dear Ed:

I spoke to your mother yesterday. She complains that she is feeling weak, but she sounded better to me. Her voice seemed stronger. I think it knocked her out to come back from [Dr.] Horner’s office on the train. She couldn’t get a cab, as I assume she wrote you. Anyway, I think I hear some improvement.

I came back from NY a few days ago with my Gaullist ribbon and medal. Your last letter was on the dining-room table and I re-read it for company. The situation in Chicago is odd and getting odder. It’s a peculiarly contactless life, when you’re not here. There are lots of people in these buildings. As if the pioneer emptiness were set upright, with indoor plumbing, books, food, but the spirit of the prairies still dominant. [ . . . ] No one other than David Grene asks me to dinner. If it weren’t for my divorce case I would have no social existence whatsoever [ . . . ] I simply get up in the morning and go to work, and I read at night. Like Abe Lincoln. When I go out there’s my city—sodden, mean and boring. [ . . . ] I tell myself that in any great city I could see as many people as I liked and wonder why I put up with such privation. It gets one. In that same light I saw N[athan] Leites with his bald musclebound skull hurrying through melting slush, moving with ballistic energy from 53rd to 55th, a bottle under his arm—moving with such force, and the muscles of shyness and analytic subtlety (probably pointless) gathered up on his shaven head. [ . . . ]

Anyway, there it is. I miss you very much. And I may turn up [in England] in mid-May.

Love,

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