More Tributes to Bellow Come In

Slate recruits several literati to eulogize Saul Bellow. Clive James gets in one of the best lines: "One of the marks of a great writer is that he is always present when other writers talk shop. Bellow was always there, and always will be." (To which he then adds, "until the age of American cultural imperialism is over;" the snarky sidejab would hurt more if it weren't coming from the recent defender of Anne Heche's cultural stature.) James Atlas' contribution is more about himself than the deceased, but his jockeying for position is nearly matched by bad, bad Stanley Crouch, who starts off by informing us that "Saul Bellow and I corresponded and talked a good deal over the telephone after he had read a book of my essays" (a revelation that no doubt tears at Atlas's heartstrings, given that his piece is all about Bellow's eagerness to get off the phone). Hilton Als hits one of the first down notes, chastising Bellow for his disdainful ignorance of non-white, non-American authors and calling him "limited, in the end, by believing...that he and others like him were the center of a world that eventually passed them by."

In a separate Slate feature, Elisabeth Sifton has fond memories of editing Bellow's books, despite the difficulties it could entail. Carlin Romano (Philadelphia Inquirer) recounts the many prizes Bellow had received during his writing career, but makes the case that "Bellow bestowed more prestige on the prizes he received than they conferred on him." (He also notes, without naming Als specifically, that complaints of Als's nature were common throughout Bellow's life, and though he puts up some defense, it's of the generic "an author is not his characters" variety.) And Jeffrey Meyers (Wall Street Journal) contributes an odd little piece which veers from comparing Bellow to Nabakov to speculating about the weeks he spent living next door to Arthur Miller to the "notorious but hilarious challenge" that has Hilton Als so upset: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?" He adds that "no one has ever answered" the questions, which I suspect is not quite the case. As an example of Bellow's "characteristic wit," Meyers quotes the author's response to a query about cooperating with a proposed biography: "I feel about biography much as I do about buying a burial plot. It will come to that, of course, but I'm not quite ready for it." He conveniently leaves out the existence of the biography James Atlas wrote--a project in which Bellow was, as best as I can make out from the reviews archived online, taking part even as he was telling Meyers he wasn't interested, if not soon after.