Saul Bellow’s letters

My review of Saul Bellow: Letters is out at the Christian Science Monitor. I have read and reread Bellow for many years, written about him, and once saw him in person, so it was a treat to have this unexpected opportunity to review a new Bellow volume five years after his death.

I particularly enjoyed the flashes of humor in these letters.

Bellow writes to Alfred Kazin that on hearing that Kazin would not be coming to the University of Minnesota, “the lady instructors and female assistants set up a cry like Milton’s Syrian damsels over the limbs of Osiris.” Even, or especially, in the face of illness and death, this humor of high and low is a refuge. “I have death on my mind, today,” he writes in July 1968. “S.S. Goldberg is ill, John Steinbeck is in the Southampton Hospital, Jean Stafford has just been released from same. So we, here, are feeling the wing. But in this weather it is more cooling than anything else. The Angel of Death, floating over the house, brings air-conditioning.”