Alex Kudera's Blog, page 17

Mr. Sammler's Planet

"It's true that I didn't like your review of Sammler. I didn't dislike it more than other pieces of yours, but I disliked it. It appeared more than a year after publication of the book and I had heard that an earlier and more friendly review had been rejected by the editors, but knowing what gossip is, I did not take this to be fact. It was the conclusion of your piece—"God lives!"—that offended me. You meant evidently that I was a megalomaniac. But this didn't seem to me to be literary criticism."

~~ Saul Bellow to Alfred Kazin, March 20, 1974

"Funny as hell"

In fact, dear reader, hell is no laughing matter, and we may need to protect the masses by censoring your words.

unbeaten paths

Similar to Mahrukh Aamir's "It is the Despair of One's Life, Being One's Character," Daniel Green's Issue Nine focuses in detail on Sheila Heti and her Alphabetical Diaries. In addition, Daniel Green's Issue Six has an extensive treatment of several of publisher Corona\Samizdat's experimental novels.

friends and repetitions

Ah, yes, our friends and their repetitions, and how friendly it is of them to listen to us repeat ourselves. 

the power of the truth

"The word 'hero,' long in disrepute, has been redeemed by [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn. He has had the courage, the power of mind and the strength of spirit to speak the truth to the entire world. He is a man of perfect intellectual honor and, in his moral strength, he is peculiarly Russian. To the best Russian writers of this hellish century it has been perfectly clear that only the power of the truth is equal to the power of the state."

~~ Saul Bellow to The New York Times, January 7, 1974

new Nadelman review

Consider Philadelphia in the 1980s in a new review of Eugene Nadelman by Michael Weingrad.

great days for literature

The novel is in the mail.

highly individual ghosts

"I don't do very much. Every once in a while I put Henderson [the Rain King] on me like a plumber's level. The bubble is usually in the wrong place, so I sigh and knock off for the day. But Sondra is a beautiful mother-to-be, and Greg gave me much pleasure last month, so my life is far from barren. Too many awful distractions, however, big gloomy houses, money, alimony problems, friends low in spirits, and ghosts, large numbers of highly individual ghosts."

~~ Saul Bellow to John Berryman, December 6, 1956

a little more?

"But I wonder whether I could get into Minnesota for the summer sessions with a creative writing course. For one term, two years ago, they paid me something like eight hundred. Do you think, now that I'm older, they'd give me a little more?"

Saul Bellow to Herbert McCloskey, 1951

Eighty if I must.

"Anyway, it looks as though we'll be coming to New York to live. I don't know what rents are now, but I wouldn't like to pay much more than sixty or seventy. Eighty if I must. As for the size of the flat, that depend on the section we move into. In a neighborhood where I could find a room to write in, we wouldn't need six rooms. Four to six, let's say then. The bigger the better."

~~ Saul Bellow to Monroe Engel, April 30, 1950