American Nobel-prize winning author Saul Bellow talks to former Canadian Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, in a conversation recorded in 1988.
EPISODE SUMMARY
Listening to this 1988 conversation between Nobel-prize winning American writer, Saul Bellow, and former Canadian Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, we possess the advantage of hindsight. In the midst of a US presidential election, Bellow bemoans the vapid discourse between candidates George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis—their language constrained by groupthink and moral rigidity and the fact that neither one says anything worth listening to. One almost wants to say aloud: "Bellow, stop! Be careful what you wish for!" After the election we've just had—36 years later—it seems almost quaint to think that US presidential candidates are plagued with the problem of not saying enough. Clarkson delicately puts pressure on Bellow to claim a tribe: not only in terms of his Jewishness, but is he really a misogynist, and what's the deal with the accusations of racism against him? Bellow's defense that these questions feel "McCarthyite" in their demand for loyalty is both incisive and ironically blind to its own implications. Though he stands as one of America's most significant literary voices of the 20th century, Bellow emerges here as a figure suspended between eras, embodying both timeless insight and the beautiful limitations of his age.
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The audio recording of Saul Bellow in conversation with Adrienne Clarkson was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in 1988. It's used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Click here to check out Season One of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to all 26 episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Nikki Giovanni, Grace Paley and many more.
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SHOW NOTES
Works by Saul Bellow
More Die of Heartbreak (print edition) (ebook)
Dangling Man (print edition) (ebook)
Humboldt's Gift (print edition) (audiobook)
Herzog (print edition)
There is Simply too much to Think About: Collected Essays (print edition) (ebook) (audiobook)
Saul Bellow: Letters (print edition) (ebook)
Works about Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow: I was a Jew and an American and a Writer by Gerald Soring (print edition)
Saul Bellow's Heart: a Son's Memoir by Greg Bellow (print edition)
Other Related Books or Materials
The Adventures of Saul Bellow: a video featuring Martin Amis on Bellow's life and career
Seize the Day: a 1986 film adaptation of a 1965 Saul Bellow work
"Saul Bellow is now a stamp" (this link opens an article from Lithub from Feb 2024)
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
Saul Bellow: Wires not Roots
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
RANDY: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, produced by the Toronto Public Library and in association with the Toronto Festival of Authors. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, Saul Bellow let’s us know what’s on his mind, and why, he worries, too many people don’t have nearly enough on their minds.
Saul Bellow teaser: We really can't explain very much because we were only born relatively a little while ago, imperfectly equipped. It's not as though we were birds or grasshoppers who are fully mature in a matter of hours or days. But we have to learn very painfully, and we don't learn enough. But it's all a very mysterious thing. I mean, people who feel that they can tell you, in so many words, what it's all about are totally mistaken. So, you get hints from yourself and from the lives you know of what may really be happening. Your business is to explore those... Is to pursue those hints.
RANDY: I didn’t mean for this to happen, but I found an unexpectedly good way to listen to this 1988 interview of Canadian-born great American novelist Saul Bellow, conducted by Adrienne Clarkson in Toronto about a year after he’d published the novel More Die of Heartbreak. The good way I found was this: I was moving from one office to another at the university, and trying to re-shelve dozens and dozens of books, which were mixed up with old pictures, art, Father’s Day gifts, beautiful and also tacky religious goods, news clippings clipped for reasons I can’t remember, a Japanese coffee grinder, that kind of thing. I should add here that these materials were all mixed up because they had been packed up, hastily, at the start of the pandemic and after some time in a temporary location, were now being moved more permanently. The academic in me wanted everything neatly divided and arranged by personal and professional, and in turn the professional arranged by specialization. The Saul Bellow reader in me reveled in the humanness of the mixture, of the life of the mind and ordinary life, while at the same time seeking insight and order in that mixture. That’s the great challenge, as Clarkson notes in this interview, that every Bellow protagonist confronts: an intensely-felt sense that things aren’t as they are meant to be, within one’s life and about the world, and a relentless desire to do something about it. Not to do something about it in a revolutionary political sense, but rather, to do something about it by naming it, thinking about it, trying to explain it to others, all of which involves taking a chance to see if someone else will hear you out and understand. All of that is what Bellow himself does in this interview, whether the subject is his memories of his father and growing up in Quebec, or family life as an idea and as a reality, the career pressures of winning the Nobel Prize, U.S. politics, city life, or the dangerous relationship between the value and cost of higher education. Clarkson pushes Bellow on some of his formulations and likewise his public standing, on topics including the role of religion in life, the representation of women and Black people in his fiction, his being criticized and also conscripted by various sides in the late 1980s versions of the Culture Wars, and in particular about his concern with the dulling conformity of group-think being created by politics and higher education alike. Given his stature at that point, more than a decade after winning the Nobel Prize and a regular subject of profiles and interviews and commentary, as he laments in telling us about the challenges of reading about himself in The New York Times, Bellow could have offered canned answers. Instead, he thinks out loud, sometimes with urbane humour and charm, as with his analogy about being Jewish and being a fish in water, and sometimes in ways that don’t resonate with the mores of our current moment or, for that matter, if you listen to some of the audience murmuring, didn’t resonate with his own. And I think he was more than fine with that, with being both fully immersed in the stuff of life around him, and, as a storyteller working his trade, capable of stepping away to tell us what he was noticing. That’s to say, what he was noticing for us, through and throughout his many books, and what he very much wanted us to be noticing for ourselves and each other if we could take the chance to hear him out, to understand.
******
Adrienne Clarkson: At this year's Literary Festival. Saul Bellow, as most of you know, was born in Lachine, Quebec. Was born in Lachine, Quebec. Moved with his family to Chicago when he was nine years old, is the winner of every major award in the United States, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. As the Nobel laureate in literature, he joined a pantheon of other American writers of this century who have been awarded the Nobel Prize at pretty well 15-year intervals, starting with Sinclair Lewis, then Hemingway, then Steinbeck and William Faulkner. In thinking of the Nobel Prize, Mr. Bellow, it seems that when you regard the way in which the American tradition has been looked at in this way, it's been basically because there's a kind of humanistic tradition that the Nobel Prize seems to warrant in American letters. Do you... Did you feel that as well? Certainly in your Nobel address, you talked about that, and you talked about the failing, perhaps, of modern writers to address the real situation of man.
Saul Bellow: Well, I didn't... I was just doing my best to provide a speech.
[laughter]
SB: And I wasn't really concerned with humanism great... As such. In fact, it's a word that puts me off a little bit.
AC: Why?
SB: Well, because it's become a sort of shibboleth in modern life. And somebody wrote me a letter recently saying, "How about... " oh, it was Newsday newspaper on Long Island. Let's hear it for rational humanism or something like that. Would I write a piece? No, I wouldn't write a piece. But I was very nervous when I wrote that, the Nobel Prize speech, because I came to Stockholm without having... Without preparation. I didn't have it. So I... They put you up at the Grand Hotel, which is a marvelous place, very classy place with unspeakably gorgeous bathrooms, and I locked myself...
[laughter]
SB: I locked myself in the bathroom to write this speech, nights, and I was very nervous about it.
AC: The bathroom being a place for you to get inspiration?
SB: No, no, the speech.
AC: [laughter] If you don't like the word humanist, you also don't seem to like the word moralist. I've seen yourself... You refer to yourself, or somebody referred to you as meliorist, which in a way talks about relativism in values, but...
SB: How do you spell meliorist?
[laughter]
AC: M-E-L-I-O-R-I-S-T.
SB: Not M-E-A-L...
AC: No, not M-E-A-L.
[laughter]
AC: So is it moralist... Is it a problem to talk in those classic... Those terms about humanism or moralism or the relationships of man to the world?
SB: I think those are academic terms or PR terms. They make writers very uncomfortable. Meliorist means that I think that everything is gonna be better, and I'm not sure that anything is... I'm not even sure we're gonna survive, so I can't call myself a meliorist.
[laughter]
AC: You're not sure it's gonna survive?
SB: Unless... Well, nobody's sure of that.
AC: But you're not pessimistic, are you?
SB: Well, I dislike both terms. I don't like to be called a pessimist, I don't like to be called an optimist.
[laughter]
AC: Well, let's go back to the beginning because we are in a Canadian audience, and I wanted to talk about that. You were born in Canada. Do you have... Some of your heroes mention Montreal, mention Canada, that's mentioned in the very first novel, Dangling Man, and it's mentioned in Herzog, there's a Montreal feeling to it. And apart from the fact that probably you talked funny and the other kids noticed that, are there other memories of Canada, of Montreal?
SB: Everybody talked funny in my neighborhood.
[laughter]
SB: This was St. Dominique Street, between Napoleon and Roy. That's the Montreal part of it. And there wasn't anybody who talked anything straight in any language. So if I had any peculiarities of expression, they certainly weren't noticed by anyone. Well, I guess I have a lot of Canadian feeling because I remember Lachine very... Extremely well. My father had lots of family there, and then we moved to Montreal in 1918. My God, it's practically neolithic times.
[laughter]
SB: And we lived there, and I did what all little kids in the ghetto do... Did. It was very mixed, by the way, in those days, that is, it was partly French, and there was smattering of everything there. Lots of... As in Lachine... Lachine... I got a thrill yesterday riding by this new dome because I saw that the Dominion Bridge Company was building it and it's a Lachine company, and I felt rather thrilled by that. I have very clear, very clear recollections of Lachine and Montreal.
AC: Did you... When you were growing up, was it a religious background that you had? Did you...
SB: Yes. My family were Orthodox Jews. My parents had come from St. Petersburg in 1913. I was born in Lachine in 1915. My father was usually on the lam. He was a Jew living in St. Petersburg without proper papers, and he had to get out. And then we lived in Montreal, and my father had tried everything to keep us, keep the family, to support the family. Finally did a little bootlegging, and he didn't do so well as some other bootleggers from Montreal.
[laughter]
AC: Who shall remain nameless.
[laughter]
SB: Well, I'll leave that to you.
[laughter]
AC: What did your mother want you to be when you grew up?
SB: Well, a rabbi first, and failing that, a violinist.
[laughter]
AC: Did you take lessons?
SB: Oh, yes. I studied the fiddle.
AC: Do you still play?
SB: Well, until some years ago I played in a sort of amateur way with tolerant people.
[laughter]
AC: And about being a rabbi, did that ever attract you? Did you ever think you might do that, go to Yeshiva?
SB: I couldn't imagine myself with a full beard. That was one of my troubles.
[laughter]
SB: And also I didn't feel morally fitted for that calling.
AC: What do you mean morally fitted?
SB: Well, I mean, I would've had to learn more virtues than I could possibly learn.
[laughter]
AC: Well, rabbi is a teacher, not a priest.
SB: Oh, I think among the Jews, he's supposed to be an exemplar, if you'll excuse the fancy word.
[laughter]
SB: I know that this doesn't hold in the south of the United States, but it's certainly held.
[laughter]
AC: Well, in the event, you didn't event, start to become a rabbi. You went and became, as an undergraduate, a social scientist. Anthropology, sociology was what first appealed to you. Why, why then?
SB: Well, I figured I was a savage living among savages, and I might as well get the hang of the things scientifically.
[laughter]
AC: Thought you could codify it, did you?
SB: Well, just, I was very curious about it, yes. But then I changed my mind about anthropology too.
AC: Why?
SB: Well, because I kept writing stories instead of papers for my courses.
AC: Couldn't stick to the facts?
SB: No.
[laughter]
AC: But ever since you started to write, you've created a body of work which has done all the things that novels really should do, that engage people, that create memorable characters, that relate characters to the outside world, that where the outside world is very real and the characters have a creative imagination about them that sees the mind, obviously. So you're one of the few writers writing in the world today that uses ideas and also becomes a best-selling author, also becomes a Nobel Prize winner, and all of those things kind of go together. I mean, it's an interesting thing because, for instance, a book like Herzog in which Herzog in his semi-madness writes to people like Nietzsche, it's not... The basis out of which all of that grows, those ideas and so on, are all things that you are educated in that presumably you have taught in the committee on social thought, but it's not usually the material of modern novels anymore.
SB: Well, modern American novels started as... Were mainly, for most of the century, populist novels. That is, they were the novels that assumed that the writer was a common man and the readers were common men, and that they shared a wonderful democratic ideal. That was even true for many of the best writers of the century. But then there was really no way for populism to keep up with what was actually happening.
AC: Why not?
SB: Well, you couldn't grasp what was happening unless you abdicated altogether the... You stop making an effort to grasp what was happening in modern life, because with a limited set of ideas, you just couldn't talk about these things. It's alright to play poker, but if you're sitting there playing poker while all of these... While society is transformed, that this technologically transformed at such a stunning rate, you're hardly with it. I mean, you are then part of the third world.
AC: If the technology is being transformed at that stunning rate as you say, but you have been trying always to find, as a focus and a centre, some character who is able to be the center of those that spoke of the wheels as it goes about. And always that character, whether it's Citrine in Humboldt's Gift, or Herzog or Mr. Sammler or Joseph in The Dangling Man, that person is always feeling themself at the still point of that turning world.
SB: But when I say populist, I don't mean... When I say non-populist, I don't mean that you dissociate yourself from everybody. On the contrary, you feel that you wouldn't do whatever it is that you do if it weren't a matter of getting closer. You just assume the psychic unity of all mankind and you assume that another self is like your own self, and therefore it's a matter only of penetrating the selves. It's not a matter of being a virtuoso or a matter of being an intellectual. I don't really care much about intellectuals as a class.
AC: I'm relieved to hear that.
[laughter]
SB: Well, I'm sure everybody is.
[laughter]
AC: What you're talking about is that the writer himself is human. I mean, it's like I'm human, nothing human is alien to me. That therefore you yourself by writing are also connecting and connecting with other people's concerns and things that they may not... That are inchoate to them.
SB: Well, that's the general idea. Because there are... I think that there are more unknowns than anybody has ever got... We've just begun to scratch the surface of these unknowns. And by an unknown, I mean something not accounted for by any branch of thought or scientific thought for that matter. What I mean is that we all have hunches about what other human beings are.
AC: Intuitions.
SB: All right. If you prefer that.
AC: And then, and how do you... And you put them into action if you're a writer, is that it?
SB: Well, no. You see things though that you can't explain.
AC: Like?
SB: Well, as a matter of fact, we really can't explain very much because we were only born relatively a little while ago, imperfectly equipped. It's not as though we were birds or grasshoppers who are fully mature in a matter of hours or days. But we have to learn very painfully, and we don't learn enough. But it's all a very mysterious thing. I mean, people who feel that they can tell you, in so many words, what it's all about are totally mistaken. So, you get hints from yourself and from the lives you know of what may really be happening. Your business is to explore those... Is to pursue those hints.
AC: And then create something from them that is a fully realized... Well, it ends up being a book, a novel, a story about something.
SB: Yes. Because... That's because I do it in accordance with the demands of my trade, which is to write novels or stories.
AC: Do you see it as a trade to which you served an apprenticeship, for instance?
SB: Oh, you certainly serve an apprenticeship. I'm just borrowing from Yeats who said, "Irish poets, learn your trade."
[laughter]
AC: The two themes that come out always in a Saul Bellow novel are religion and family, one way or the other. What has being a Jew meant to Saul Bellow as a writer?
SB: It's like asking a fish what water has meant to him. I don't know.
[laughter]
AC: Try, explore it.
SB: Well, try before all these people?
AC: Yeah.
[laughter]
AC: There are two of us here. [laughter] I'm here to help. [laughter] It seemed...
SB: Well, I don't really know. I mean, I really do feel... And I've written about it, and I write better about it than I speak. So I think I can give you the references.
[laughter]
AC: Oh, come on. Come on. If you've written about it, you can do it. [laughter] Is that a reference when the Jewish American writer... It's interesting that there should be such a thing as a Jewish American writer, there's also Jewish Canadian writers…
SB: Well, I'm a little leery of the whole Jewish writer thing. First of all, it became a thing. It was not of our invention. I mean, people like Malamud and myself and others didn't think this up. It appeared in two ways. First, as an academic category, and secondly as a journalistic category. It was not a matter of surprise to us because we knew all along what was happening, that we were Americans who were Jewish, or Jews who were Americans, the order in which you put it may or may not be important, uhh… who felt liberated by this life in America to do what they could with their gifts, their talents in this department. And it certainly wasn't a concerted effort on anybody's part. It was an afterthought. First, you play the piece and then they tell you it was a sonata. It's not up to you to give this description.
AC: But it has been described, and I'm just interested in what it... When you say how can a fish describe water, you have really said it. I mean, you have said that is all of it. That is the atmosphere, that's the air you breathe, and that's what it's about.
SB: Yes, I would... I agree with what I said before.
[laughter]
AC: And family. I mean, those are the other things. There's always relationships, deep relationships, relationships that don't work, failed ones, ones that cause a great deal of irritability, pain, some joy, et cetera, in the Bellow type, in the novels.
SB: Well, the family, if it is a family is one's first school of love. It is the place where you learn what the fundamental attachments are. And it is the place in which your emotions appear and begin to be formed. And it would've been impossible for me to turn my back on this and to opt instead for a world in which these things didn't exist. I was for some time in my early development a Marxist. Well, you know what that means. You had no use for the family. It had been denounced by Marx and Engels as a bourgeois institution. In the communist paradise there wouldn't be any such thing as a family. But... and as at present constituted, it was a form of social oppression which connected with capitalist exploitation and class suffering and all the rest of that.
SB: So I should have done the... I should have made the Freeman's choice according to... According even to myself as an ideologist in those days. You can't... You don't choose your relatives, therefore, your association with them is not a free association. You go into the world and you find your own likes and you develop free friendships with them. And that's much better than having a family connection. Now, it's true that for many years it became impossible for me to communicate freely with members of my own family. They didn't know what I was doing. I understood better what they were doing because what they were doing was what so many others were doing. I didn't demand this kind of understanding from them. I thought I would've been horrified at the idea that, A, that I should make the effort to explain myself to them, and B, that they should make the effort to understand what I was trying to explain. My attachments to them were inviolable and unbreakable forever. And we kept it that way. And if it was necessary for me to use the language of my youth or childhood in talking to them, well, I would do it that way. But I never stopped feeling for them, and I didn't think one had to have high-level conversations with you... With them in order to love them.
AC: Do you speak to your family in Yiddish?
SB: With those surviving, who still know Yiddish, yes. I can speak to them in Yiddish.
AC: I know that in your book, To Jerusalem, you were able to have a conversation with an Ortho Hasidic person who was riding in the plane with you. And I assumed that that had been in Yiddish. And then...
SB: Oh, yes. He wouldn't have spoken Hebrew to me. That's the holy tongue. You don't do that. You can pray in Hebrew on an airplane, but you don't have conversations.
[laughter]
SB: We spoke Yiddish.
AC: Did you...
SB: We can swap a few expressions in Yiddish if you knew any.
AC: If I knew any, but I'm sorry, I don't.
SB: [laughter] All right.
AC: It's not my other language. [laughter]
[foreign language]
AC: But the family is only, as you say, the root. It's the first place where we learn about attachment, about love, and it's also not something that we choose. It's something that happens to us. That's how we're born and we are in it. But later, we come to other kinds of relationships. And those, of course, are the ones we describe. And they're often very troubled. They... None of them seem to... They're not always work out the way one wants to. They're not young girls' dreams and so on. And that's what you have worked at. And recently in... Especially in one of the stories, "What Kind of A Day You've Had," you've certainly portrayed women in a very interesting way.
AC: Katrina's a very interesting female character in "What Kind of a Day You Have," because she's divorced. She's got two little children. She's also in the thrall of a passionate relationship with an egotistical intellectual monster. And she's a very, very sympathetic character. Are you interested in what's happening to women today? I mean, apart from personally, I mean, just on a general scale of things as human interest.
[laughter]
SB: Well, of course, I mean, you know, the reason I'm hesitating a little bit is I don't know which way to take you up on this.
AC: Oh, any way.
SB: Of course, I'm interested in women, they're... 'cause they're one half or more of the human species. How would I not be? [chuckle] On the other hand, I feel this is sort of a McCarthyite question because I have to declare my loyalty here.
[laughter]
AC: No. No. I'm giving you the opportunity. I'm giving you the opportunity because your heroes are men. And why shouldn't they be? You're a man, you're writing about men, and that's fine. But I'm saying that these... There are these very interesting female characters, of whom Katrina is one.
SB: Well, I'm delighted. Thank you. I'm delighted to... I think she is a very interesting woman. Yes.
AC: Yeah.
SB: But in what way do you want me to discuss her further?
[laughter]
AC: Have you followed the women's movement?
SB: Well, I have to follow it, because it's there. I mean, you know, I am a sort of stuck with the chronicle of the times, and I have to follow all these things. Of course, I do. I read about it. I listen, I encounter people who are critical of me. I'm denounced as a misogynist from time to time.
[laughter]
SB: I didn't get to look the way I am now by being a misogynist. That's clear.
[laughter]
SB: All right. Now, I've acquitted myself of the charge of misogyny. Now, that's of course...
AC: [laughter] Have you? [laughter]
SB: Well, I mean, on the level on which you ask the question.
AC: [laughter] That's only one of the questions, but of course, there are many others that you address. And that's the other thing in the novels that the relationship to the exterior world is one in which the central character often finds a kind of madness out there, or a violence or there... Any number of scenes that you can classify. And I'm not gonna do doctoral thesis work here on the stage with it, but that's the relationship. There's always the central character, and then something happens and you know, it happens in an elevator, to Mr. Sammler, or it happens to the Mercedes that gets all banged up. If there's a number of things, there's always that outside world coming in with this sudden involuntary violence and a kind of ripping open of that, the person's selfhood by something happening outside. Does that come from living in Chicago?
[laughter]
SB: Well, certainly Chicago helps, but I've also lived in New York. I've lived in peaceful places like Minneapolis, in Nevada desert, south of Spain, and so on.
AC: But you came back to Chicago, and it's always...
SB: Oh, yes. Since people ask me whether I have roots there. I say no, but I have a lot of old wires...
[laughter]
SB: Which... [laughter] is what... Well, they'll do you more good in Chicago than roots. Roots have to grow up under the sidewalks for nourishment.
AC: And the wires wire you up?
SB: Well, the wires are... They're old wires, of course, but they're serviceable, knob-and-tube, kind of thing.
AC: [laughter]
SB: Well, why do these things happen? Well, they happen to... You know, if they happen to people who entertain the utopian project of a better life than is led at the public level. That's part of the trouble.
AC: At the life led at the public level?
SB: Oh, well. We're seeing that now in the United States. In the...
AC: In the current presidential race.
SB: In the current presidential race. For one, yes. That's sort of epitome of what goes on. Because they don't address any of the issues, thought that would be fatal. They can't speak of them.
AC: What are the real issues?
SB: The war issue, the race issue, the urban decay issue, the drug issue, the education issue, the unsoundness of personal life issue, etcetera.
AC: Why can't...
SB: Religious issue.
AC: Why can't they address that? What is the problem? Why can't they?
SB: Well, it doesn't seem to be a public language for those matters anymore. What you do is speak in canned phrases and canned phrases cannot deal with this sort of thing. You say, I'm reaching out. You say, I'm in the mainstream. You say I am... I perceive something, you say all these... All these meaningless words, in which it's very easy to frame Dick and Jane's sentences, but it's not easy to... Even then, it's hard to find a predicate.
[laughter]
AC: But if that goes on, does that mean a disintegration, if the public level cannot meet the private needs and the private need cannot bridge that gap, what happens to a society? What happens to people?
SB: Well, when there's such a discrepancy between the inner life and the outer forms of it, then you're in a state of barbarism. And this is true of personalities, too. Therefore, when I say you're the Utopian project, I meant that, I meant that... That to be a free and intelligent man and to keep the balance to be the same within as you are in your external life. If you don't, to some extent, bring this off, then you are some kind of barbarian. And many of my protagonists are people who don't like the idea of being barbarians.
AC: And who have religious faith or believe in God, even if they can't admit it, as Herzog says at one point and who have a feeling that there is... Well, religious faith representing kind of order or a kind of feeling that there is something beyond the material.
SB: Well, I've been called a very old-fashioned writer because of this, but because people do... And I've read about... It's... One of my trials is to pick up a magazine or newspaper quite innocently and then find that I'm reading something about myself, and it makes me very unhappy. First of all, it's sort of misleading, and I paid good money to buy The New York Times, and all of a sudden, I find that whom... I like the lady and the story about her son who is being analyzed, she says, cost him $100 an hour and all he talks about is me.
[laughter]
SB: That's a boast.
[laughter]
SB: But yeah, I see these things, people say... Well, and I've watched this in other writers as they grow older. They... I watched it, particularly Robert Frost whom I used to know. He's only safe when he's sufficiently petrified to be considered a monument but I'm still in the transitional period before petrifaction, so I'm not actually a monument yet. Therefore, I've... I run across all kinds of things about myself in public...
AC: Forum.
SB: [0:30:05.1] well at least … the print media. I've even heard myself denounced on the radio while washing the dishes, once it happened.
[laughter]
AC: Denounced for what? Do you remember?
SB: Yes. I was denounced for the way I portrayed the Black robber in Mr. Sammler's Planet.
AC: Because it was racist.
SB: They said I was being a racist. I didn't feel that at all. I mean, I started quite early as an anthropologist. Being a racist would've come hard to me. And secondly, I did write Henderson the Rain King for which I never get credit from these people, because... The ones who call me racist... Because evidently, they only read those books in which they think they can catch me at racism.
[laughter]
AC: You were saying that you're considered old-fashioned because of that religious background to most of the heroes, their religious preoccupations but why should that be old-fashioned? Is that because of the discrepancy between the interior life and the public life now?
SB: Well, it's a preoccupation that's not shared by many writers. I mean most writers in the 20th century have just taken it for granted that we live in a nihilistic condition. So that if you wonder about that, then you're tagged and off base immediately. Now, you know... That's rather silly because I've been reading Nietzsche since I was a kid. I knew all about Nietzsche... Nihilism before I was out of high school. So I mean, I knew a great deal about it. And of course, it's something you have to... It's a subject you have to close with, in no uncertain terms. But what I object to is the attitude that it's all over, that of course, we are now in such and such a period. You know, there was a classic... Neoclassic period and there was a romantic period, there was a late romantic period, and there was a symbolist period, and then there was a modernist period, and then there was a postmodernist period. Now, were in the post-postmodernist period. My God, if you feel like a steamer truck with all these labels plastered all over the place, you know, what good is it to talk that way or to try to place yourself that way?
SB: After all, we weren't born with that kind of label on our rumps. So I do as I see fit, and then of course, I am either with it or not with it. And that can't be any serious writers' concern. He cannot, he doesn't have to square himself with Marx and Freud and the existentialists and the structuralists and the deconstructionists and all the rest, doesn't have to square himself with anybody. One of the great mistakes in my life was feeling that I had to keep up, but it's like being on one of these revolving running machines in which you have to run faster and faster, and then you're simply winded, [chuckle] in the end. What good... What did it all amount to? I'm now on... I've given myself a furlough from all of these considerations.
AC: What kind of furlough?
SB: Well, I don't have to make a bow in any direction anymore. I mean, I don't have to say... I don't have to identify myself at all.
AC: There's no reason why you should. I mean, at this stage in your career, preeminent American novelist, Nobel Prize winner, you don't have to prove anything to anybody, and you don't... Certainly, you... And you must feel it.
SB: Oh, you're wrong about the Nobel Prize winner. Being a Nobel Prize winner means that you have to prove you're not finished.
[laughter]
AC: Well, that's what all the other American ones said. You didn't say that. You have not said that. But they all said that.
SB: Who said?
AC: Hemingway and all the other American Nobel Prize winners of this century, Hemingway said, wouldn't even go to accept his Nobel Prize because he said a writer should write and not speak. He sent his speech and Steinbeck said, I feel I should be dead, or a priest or something, and all of that is that worry, that superstition, which all you writers seem to share about prizes, about talk.
SB: Well, I wasn't gonna share it. I knew, of course.
[laughter]
SB: You left out... I mean, there's no reason why accepting a prize should cripple you for the rest of your life.
AC: It hasn't crippled you. You wrote "The Dean's December."
SB: I know, but I was being watched for...
[laughter]
AC: You are being watched, but at least, you know it.
[laughter]
SB: Well, I mean, this is a transposition. I'm not... I'm not surprised that Hemingway behaved that way because he transposed from the sports world into the literary world. And you can't apply the standards of boxing, you know, because what are you gonna do when you can't punch anymore? No, the stereotype was that the prize is the kiss of death, and once you've had it, you're finished and so on. And this hangs over you like a damp burlap cover for a while, and then you say, "Oh, the hell with it," as I did. I know that... I knew Steinbeck pretty well. Steinbeck really was...
AC: Spooked by it.
SB: Spooked by it. Yes, he was.
AC: And couldn't...
[overlapping conversation]
SB: Well, he had trouble with it, he had trouble with it. Too bad because he was a splendid man.
AC: The prizes, all of that is really, that's the separate life of the public life of the writer. What we've really been trying to talk about is, what are the concerns of the writer in the modern age and that gap between the interior life and the... and spiritual concerns and what our public ones is really very, very disturbing, I think, for people wanting to live their lives nowadays in 1988. Books have always been for people who love literature and love reading, somehow a kind of guide, a kind of string through the maze, if one can put it that way. And now the maze seems to be overgrowing so fast and lashing you in the face... That the string is, it's very hard to be guided through by that string.
SB: Well, I spoke before about the psychic unity of the writer and the reader. Psychic unity of all human beings and the psychic unity of persons of ourselves and so on. But writers are really not so different from others in this respect. People are spooked by all kinds of things. They twist themselves into a deformity trying to assert that they are holding the right positions, that they are for the all the good things and against all the bad things. And they're educated with an eye to learning what the good things are and associating themselves with the good things, permanently dissociating themselves from the bad things. This usually results in a paralysis of thought because once you have bought and paid for a university education, which is... Which has outfitted you with the full set of principles, you are not going to abandon those under any circumstances. As for thinking, God forbid, you never do that again. You don't need to. You are already prepared. You're fully equipped by your... by higher education with everything that you're going to need. And furthermore, you paid for it.
[laughter]
SB: It would surprise you, how often I hear, as I did not very long ago at Dartmouth when I gave a talk, the girls arose from the audience and said, "We're not paying $20,000 a year in tuition to hear what you've just told us." Well, I said, "Really, to understand what I'm saying, you'd have to pay a lot more."
[laughter]
AC: Well, you hit on that...
SB: If I didn't say it, I should have.
[laughter]
AC: Well, you have now.
[laughter]
SB: All right.
AC: You've hit on something that is really very key and central, which is that, now, instead of eternal truths, and I speak out of my kind of education and my set of beliefs, I guess, instead of things like beauty, truth, goodness, wisdom, and so on, what we are taught about relative values to things like success or to things like making it or to things like money or to things like a job. And that's what... That's where we at... We are at now.
[overlapping conversation]
SB: I suppose so.
AC: And so I'm not surprised.
SB: I was speaking of it in a simpler manner what people... What people will declare themselves, on every point. I am not a racist. I am not a sexist. I am not a chauvinist of any kind. I am compassionate. I am caring... Two more words [chuckle] from the vocabulary that ought to be proscribed and so on. And that... people do function that way. In fact, it's... I often think that they will, they... that they refuse to say things... That they refuse to think things that are really not properly sayable according to the... to their standard, to their educational standard. And it's very hard... I think it's much harder now to get people to think for themselves than it used to be.
AC: Because we all conform, because people conform because of their educations and like jargon?
SB: Here's a public of 230 odd million people in the United States, quite willing to choose between two candidates, four candidates, if you like, who don't say anything.
[laughter]
SB: Really, not... Humanly, not anything. So they use cue words and the public is content to accept this and somehow, at least it seems to be for the time being. Of course, the voter turnout will not be large.
AC: Mm-hmm.
SB: So maybe I ought to befriend the non-voters of America and go to see them privately, have [chuckle] some conversations with them and tell 'em they hold the promise of the future.
[laughter]
AC: Will you vote?
SB: Well, I like to vote. I enjoy it, but I don't think I will this time. No.
AC: Don't you feel that's, here's some jargon, an abdication of your responsibilities as a citizen?
SB: Well, if there were more than two kinds of dog food in the pet food aisle, I might be willing to make a choice.
[laughter]
[applause]
AC: You see, we are all understanding something else 'cause we have an election campaign, too.
SB: Oh yeah, I've heard of it.
AC: Yeah, so there's a subconscious river going on here between all... Among all of us. Thank you very much. That's been a very...
SB: Oh, you're welcome.
****
RANDY: Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, to Jewish emigres from Russia. The family moved to Chicago in 1924 where, after growing up in a polyglot poor immigrant milieu, Bellow enrolled at Northwestern University, with future plans to be an anthropologist. Instead, he published his first novel in 1944 and came to national attention in 1953 with the Adventures of Augie March. There followed a series of major novels, including Herzog, Henderson the Rain King, Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Humboldt’s Gift, which was published the year before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Bellow continued publishing novels for the rest of his life while teaching at the University of Chicago and Boston University, and for decades was a major national and international figure as a novelist. His final book, Ravelstein, appeared in 2000, five years before he died, leaving behind four children and six grandchildren from five marriages.
The audio recording of Saul Bellow in conversation with Adrienne Clarkson was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in October 1988. It's used with the permission of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Find out more about all of TIFA’s Canadian and international author events, both virtual, in-person and on-demand, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives is produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, graphic design by Amy Haakmat and research support from Gregory Ellis.
For more about Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. You can also listen to all 26 episodes of season one as well with interviews and readings by Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Kramer, Lee Maracle and much, much more. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives.