There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction by Saul Bellow

Author:Saul Bellow [Bellow, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Essays, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Writing
ISBN: 9780670016693
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2015-03-30T23:00:00+00:00

An Interview with Myself

How do you, a novelist from Chicago, fit yourself into American life? Is there a literary world to which you belong?

When I entered the Restaurant Voltaire in Paris with the novelist Louis Guilloux some years ago, the waiter addressed him as “Maître.” I didn’t know whether to envy him or to laugh up my sleeve. No one had ever treated me so reverentially. I knew how important literature was to the French. And as a student I had sat (in Chicago) reading of salons and cénacles, of evenings at Magny’s with Flaubert and Turgenev and Sainte-Beuve—reading and sighing. What glorious times! But Guilloux himself, a Breton and a former left-winger, seemed to flinch when he was called “Maître.” It may be that, even in Paris, literary culture is now publicly respected only by smarmy headwaiters. Here I am not altogether on firm ground. What is certain is that nothing like this happens here. In America we have no Maîtres except in dining rooms, no literary world, no literary public. Many of us read, many love literature, but the traditions and institutions of literary culture are lacking. I do not say that this is bad, I only state it as a fact that ours is not a society that interests itself in such things. Any modern country that has not inherited these habits of deference simply does not have them.

American writers are not neglected; they mingle occasionally with the great; they may even be asked to the White House, but no one there will talk literature to them. Mr. Nixon disliked writers and refused flatly to have them in, but Mr. Ford is as polite to them as he is to actors, musicians, television newscasters and politicians. At large receptions the East Room fills with celebrities who become ecstatic at the sight of other celebrities. Secretary Kissinger and Danny Kaye fall into each other’s arms. Cary Grant is surrounded by senators’ wives who find him wonderfully preserved, as handsome in the flesh as on film. They can hardly bear the excitement of personal contact with greatness. People speak of their diets, of their travels, of the vitamins they take and the problems of aging. Questions of language or style, the structure of novels, trends in painting—these are not discussed.

The writer finds Mr. Ford’s party a wonderful pop occasion. Senator Fulbright seems almost to recognize his name and says, “You write essays, don’t you? I think I can remember one of them.” But the senator, as everyone knows, was once a Rhodes scholar. He would remember an essay.

It is actually pleasant on such an evening for a writer to pass half disembodied and unmolested by small talk from room to room, looking and listening. He knows that active public men can’t combine the duties of government with literature, art and philosophy. Theirs is a world of high-tension wires, not of primroses on the river’s brim. Ten years ago Mayor Daley in a little City Hall ceremony gave me a five-hundred-dollar check on behalf of the Midland Authors’ Society for my novel Herzog.

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