"Some People Come Back Like Hecuba"

"The episodes in Mr. Sammler." said Saul Bellow "are meant to be typical of the madness in New York City middle-class life. But," he adds with characteristic low-key irony, "I may be a little behind."

The comment, like the book itself, underlines the fact that in some ways this century has made Bellow a profoundly conservative man. "That was one of the things I was trying to say in Herzog, too," Bellow admitted to TIME Correspondent Martha Duffy. "Today you can simply be distracted to death. Tearing the self apart has become a social duty."

To help keep himself in one piece, Bellow, who used to live in New York, six years ago took up calmer residence in a five-room apartment on Chicago's South Side. It is a bachelor's flat--no curtains, orderly bookshelves and unobtrusive modern furniture. Three marriages have left Bellow with three sons, age 25, twelve and five, and three divorces. Herzog, which camped on the best-seller lists for a winter, brought him financial security, though --he cannot help remarking--it was praised for a lot of the wrong reasons: "topical, Jewish and political reasons." He no longer needs to make money from teaching, but Bellow continues to follow a pattern familiar to less successful American novelists. He has taught writing and literature at Minnesota, Princeton, New York University and Bard. "One year there seemed like ten," he says. "No one knows the demands a progressive school makes on a teacher." Now he is at the University of Chicago, giving courses in Joyce and Melviile and serving, along with Hannah Arendt and Edward Shils, the university's prestigious Committee on Social Thought. "They keep me around as a pet," he explains. -

Though Bellow has always been "book-crazy, fiercely concentrated on being a writer," he has come to academic life and to eminence the long way round. He was born in Lachine, Quebec, an industrial suburb of Montreal, in 1915. just two years after his Russian parents emigrated from St. Petersburg. (He still speaks fluent French.) "It was a polyglot village of Sicilians, Ukrainians, Scots, Croats and Indians," Bellow remembers. "I had an Iroquois nurse who chewed meat before feeding it to me. I'm sure it did me good."

Other nourishment, not so predigested, came from watching his father fail in a series of enterprises: a bakery, a chain of shops, even handling a contract to make sacks for the Canadian government in World War I. The family moved to Chicago near Division Street, where, Bellow says, "he did all right in coal until one of his uninsured trucks had a fatal accident. For years we all worked to pay it off."

On Division Street, Bellow says. "you could find anything: Yiddish, vegetarianism, Marxism, anarchism, tea, soap boxes. On Friday night you could hear speeches on everything from national tax plans to breathing right." In high school Bellow and his friends started something called the Russian Literary Society that met in a local hot-dog stand. "We wrote poetry, essays, plays. All my friends were readers and it was competitive. Someone was ahead of you on Nietzsche, you were up on him on something else." From this intellectual ferment he graduated to a series of Midwest colleges, finally getting a degree in anthropology from Northwestern in 1937 and a job with a WPA writer's project. He has been writing ever since. -

When he is working, Bellow customarily sits at his typewriter from early morning until afternoon, "when my brain goes dead." He revises often. Sammler, for instance, went through four revisions while it was in galleys at the publisher. "I rewrite," he says, "because after a certain proficiency you can repeat yourself. It's like hearing your own voice with all the bad jokes and neurotic complaints. I write faster, though, the older I get--I figure I have less time." He was busy on two other novels when the prototype of Mr. Sammler, seen in Paris years ago, suddenly took up residence in his mind. "He was an old half-Russian, half-Italian who spent the war hiding in France," Bellow says. "He had Mr. Sammler's appearance, his blindness, his walk. Some people come back like Hecuba. They are nothing to me. I am nothing to them. But they are the most important people in my life."

Surveying the future at 54, Bellow admits to a certain nostalgia for what he calls "the New York that might have been: a city of great culture." But he adds, "There is no literary life I want to live. I don't want to join the jet set like Vidal or Capote. If Mailer wants to be the Joe Louis of literature, fine. I don't want to be a public figure or go on TV. I'm not trying to free the middle class from sexual repression." He pauses. Then adds wryly, very aware that what he is about to say is both calmly true and a wild understatement: "I'm just an old-fashioned writer."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.