Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Pete Hamill says:
With all respect to Hamill, Rosemarie just informed me that Saul Bellow is dead, and then I read it in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. He was one of our best. Anyone unfortunate enough not to have read Bellow should start with “The Victim” and move on to “Dangling Man” and “Seize the Day,” all three are perfect little novels, almost short stories really, that have seldom been surpassed by any writer living or dead.
Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta, GA 04/06 at 04:53 AMThanks, Glen. I just read the obit in the Times and found myself thinking: Gee, I’ve never even read one of his books. I’m buried under a pile of books here...but I’ll try to get to “The Victim” soon.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from 04/06 at 05:07 AMOthers would no doubt recommend “Herzog” or “The Adventures of Augie March”, both of which are excellent, don’t get me wrong, but those early “novellas”, I guess is the correct stupid term, have always stuck with me. Much like Bernard Malamud, who I also adore, Bellows has this perfect naturalist prose style that has this reader laughing between tears. I’ve read all his books but the last one “Ravelstein” which is in the batch of books I need to get to. It is a big batch. “The Victim” is so good I keep going back for seconds and thirds. It is that kind of book.
Anyway, I’ve got to go now, go try to sell some books. I would be willing to bet anything we will sell some Bellow today. Death is a sure way for a writer to make the best seller list. Whatever it takes to get them to Bellows… but still it is a sad day for American literature.Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta, GA 04/06 at 05:44 AMThanks for the pointer glen. Will pick it up today. Have never read Bellows, but the name echoes in my mind. Anyway, I’ll do my bit to reraise this giant to posthumous bestsellerdom On nostalgia, I always find it odd that when listening to 1920’s music I experience nostalgia. Whats that all about? Nostalgic music from before my time. It’s not personal, but across the ages of filmic time. Finished Ham on Rye last night MZ. I’m very taken with buk. In awe of his style. Talk soon. regards dec
Posted by declan on from dublin 04/06 at 07:26 AMDeclan and Glen might be the only two folks I know who read faster than me. I cannot keep up with you...but I’ll try.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from 04/06 at 11:38 AMMickey,
Considering how much I read and how many books I have read, I am actually a very slow reader. I believe it is the quality not the quantity that matters when it comes to reading. For example, I just finished “Articles of War” by Nick Arvin. I started this 178 page book five days ago! Several of my friends would have gone through this in a couple of hours. In fact, in your original post you said it would take one sitting. I very seldom read this way.
“Articles of War” is, by the way, every bit as good as you suggested. I think I might have enjoyed it more than you did. At first I thought Nick Arvin appeared on the jacket to be much too young to have any business writing about WWII. I remember the almost useless advice I so often received in college: “write about what you know”, but he seems to have done his research, and he has a very good, clean prose style that fits his subject well.
Have you ever read Paul Fussell? He is one of my favorite writers. He does not write novels. His best two books are “Thank God For the Atom Bomb and Other Essays” and “The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations”, both collections of short articles on various topics. He has also written two excellent books on war that I think you would appreciate: “The Great War and Modern Memory” and “Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War.” Anything by Fussell is worth checking out. I think I have read all his books, but these titles would be right up your considerably large alley, I think.
Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta, GA 04/07 at 05:12 AMGlad you liked “Articles,” Glen. I just got my hands on Arvin’s first book: a collection of short stories called “In the Electric Eden.”
As for Fussell, I have read “Wartime” and I cited it often in my first book. You’ve got me curious about his essay collections.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from 04/07 at 05:48 AMThis does not have much to do with anything here, but I liked this so much I thought I would post it here. It is from Gore Vidal’s historical novel, “Burr”: “...the American reader cannot bear a surprise. He knows that this is the greatest country on earth, Washington the greatest man that ever lived, Burr the wickedest , and evidence to the contrary is not admissible. That means no inconvenient facts, no new information. If you really want the reader’s attention you must flatter him. Make his prejudices your own. Tell him things he already knows. He will love your soundness.”
Change “Washington” to “Reagan” or perhaps even “John Paul II”. Change “Burr” to “Ward Churchill” or “Bin Laden” and that sounds very relevant indeed.
Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta, GA 04/08 at 07:30 PMGoing back to Fussell this week I was reminded of the late great English novelist, Evelyn Waugh. Some on the left might have difficulty with Waugh because of his late life portrayal of the dreary old Tory. His puffing and posing and biting the heads-off of the beggar’s daughter has never bothered me. I always looked at it as simply another of his stories, perhaps not one of his best stories, but a story nevertheless, not a story he wrote, but a story he lived during his late fat flatulent years.
Anyhow, the reason I am bringing up Waugh is I wanted to recommend his delightful military trilogy, a wicked and humorous look at the utterly stupid world at war, a not the least bit glorious, death in the face of laughter, picture of men at war. The three novels are “Men At Arms”, “Officers and Gentlemen” and “The End of the Battle”. No one has ever written about war the way this grumpy Englishman wrote about war, “Hogan’s Heroes” meets P.G. Wodehouse meets Orwell on a sunny day. Actually that is a meaningless string of comparisons but it was fun anyway.
Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta, GA 04/08 at 08:10 PMI keep returning to Vidal’s “Burr”, which is as precise and honest a look into the sordid past of these United States as anything this side of Zinn’s “People’s History”.
Vidal poses as the famous man who shot Alexander Hamilton talking about our “great” 2nd president: “Jefferson was a ruthless man who wanted to create a new kind of world, dominated by independent farmers each living on his own rich land, supported by slaves. It is amazing how beguilingly he could present this contradictory vision. But then in all his words if not deeds, Jefferson was so beautifully human, so eminently vague, so entirely dishonest but not in any meretricious way. Rather it was a passionate form of self-delusion that rendered Jefferson as president and man (not to mention as writer of tangled sentences and lunatic metaphors) confusing even to his admirers. Proclaiming the unalienable rights of man for everyone (excepting slaves, Indians, women and those entirely without property), Jefferson tried to seize the Floridas by force, dreamed of a conquest of Cuba, and after his illegal purchase of Louisiana sent a military governor to rule New Orleans against the will of its inhabitants.”
You should hear “Burr” talking about someone he really hates like George Washington.
Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta, GA 04/10 at 05:35 AMThere is a piece posted this weeked on the Counterpunch site by the deliciously funny, always worth reading, late great American critic Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler’s masterpiece is “Love And Death in the American Novel” and anyone who loves literature would be doing themselves a disservice to pass up this classic. He wrote a number of other books, but I have only read two of them “What Was Literature?” and “No! in thunder”, and I loved them both.
Obviously Cockburn and St. James have a problem with Bellow’s politics. And I suppose I would have to agree, if I let such things stand in the way of great novels like “The Victim”, but I do not. Whatever rightist platitudes that Bellow has written or spoken do not stop me from loving his novels. More to the point I think it seems really dishonest to lump the postmortem praise the press is giving Bellow into the same bucket with the wall to wall mass media #### fest that’s still going on with this dull dead pope. It ain’t Bellow’s fault he happened to die the same week as John Paul II. And it seems Cockburn and St. John could have done better than digging up an old excerpt by Fiedler, if they really had anything of substance to say about Saul Bellow. Maybe there is more to come, but honestly I hope not because I am certain their post will influence readers who are Counterpunch admirers to not bother with Bellow. I imagine a couple of you who might have been considering checking into Bellow are already thinking better of it. Don’t get me wrong, I think Alexander Cockburn is perhaps the best political writer we have. It was the Counterpunch site that led me to this site, and the Counterpunch place is always the first site I check out every day if I don’t look at anything else. All of which is why this bothers me more than it probably should.
If I have the time maybe I will write a defense of Bellow piece and submit it to Counterpunch.
Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta, GA 04/10 at 06:28 AMI hope you write it, Glen.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from 04/10 at 07:25 AM
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