"I GOT A SCHEME!".(Excerpt)

On a summer afternoon in 1998, while I was visiting Saul Bellow and his wife, Janis, in their rural Vermont home, I proposed to Saul that he and I do an extensive written interview about his life's work. We had been talking for hours on the deck at the rear of the house, along with other friends who'd driven to Vermont to see the Bellows--the Romanian writer Norman Manea and his wife, Cella, who is an art restorer, and the writer and teacher Ross Miller. The four of us tried to get up to Vermont for three or four days every summer because Saul demonstrably enjoyed our visits, and we had a good time together staying at a nearby inn. The conversation was sharp and excited, lots of lucid talk directed mostly at Saul--whose curiosity was all-embracing and for whom listening was a serious matter--and much hilarity about the wonders of human mischief, particularly as we evoked them around the dinner table at the Bellows' favorite local restaurant, where Saul would throw back his head and laugh like a man blissfully delighted with everything. The older Saul got--and in '98 he was eighty-three and growing frail--the more our annual pilgrimage resembled an act of religious devotion.

Once I was home, I phoned Saul to suggest how we might proceed with the interview, if he was still interested in my idea. I would reread the books (some, like "The Adventures of Augie March" and "Herzog," for the third or fourth time), then send him my thoughts on each, structured as questions, for him to respond to at length however he liked. As it turned out, we never got much beyond a beginning, despite Saul's willingness and my prodding. Every few months, in response to a letter or a phone call from me, some pages would arrive in the mail or through the fax machine, but then months would pass without a word from him, and, despite a weeklong visit I made to his Boston home one December, when he and I sat together for several hours every day talking about the books in the hope of stimulating his memory and his interest, the project petered out, and, reluctantly, I let him be. In time, I enlarged my "thoughts" into an essay on his work, and filed away the pages that Saul had sent sporadically in the course of the two and a half years that I'd tried to keep the interview alive.

Only recently have I taken the pages out to reread. They appear here as he wrote them, without any editorial correction or alteration--his sentences like his memories left to stand as they are--and with bracketed material added by me only for the sake of clarity. They focus on the early books "Augie March," "Seize the Day," and "Henderson the Rain King," published between 1953 and 1959. We got no further than that. Most of the pieces are about "Augie" or are recollections--of Saul's Chicago childhood or of Paris in 1948, where the book was begun--motivated by his thinking about "Augie"; sometimes it appears that he has forgotten having already answered my questions about "Augie," and zestfully, with great precision, begins to develop a new line of thought that repeats details and incorporates motifs from a previous response. The pages about "Seize the Day" arrived in May of 2000 and those on "Henderson the Rain King" several months later, and that was the end of it.

It's too bad that I couldn't get him to go on to "Herzog," "Mr. Sammler's Planet," "Humboldt's Gift," and "The Dean's December," as I planned to do, but he just wasn't interested enough in contemplating his own achievement anymore. Also, he was writing "Ravelstein" at the time, and the energy and concentration weren't there for this sort of retrospective pursuit. It's too bad, because what he wrote about the fifties books constitutes a singularly Bellowesque mix of mind and memory, the opening of an aged writer's autobiography, unplanned, extemporized, and yet comparable in its vividness and evocative charm to Hemingway's farewell to the world, the posthumously published memoir "A Moveable Feast."

--Philip Roth

I certainly was transformed [by writing "Augie March"] and I'll probably be the last to understand how this happened, but I am very willing to look for the cause. I had written two very correct books ["Dangling Man" and "The Victim"] and I shall try to explain what I mean by correct: I seem to have felt that I, as the child of Russian Jews, must establish my authority, my credentials, my fitness to write books in English. Somewhere in my Jewish and immigrant blood there were conspicuous traces of a doubt as to whether I had the right to practice the writer's trade. Perhaps I felt that I was a pretender or an outlaw successor. After all, it wasn't Fielding, it wasn't Herman Melville who forbade me to write, it was our own Wasp establishment, represented mainly by Harvard-trained professors. I must say that these guys infuriated more than they intimidated me.

Well, I got a Guggenheim, thanks to Jim Farrell [James T. Farrell, the author of "Studs Lonigan"] and Edmund Wilson, and with wife and child I crossed the Atlantic on a ship named De Grasse carrying about a hundred Southern college girls practicing their French on stewards and deckhands with no intention of getting rid of their Southern drawl. The voyage lasted nearly two weeks. The men slept in the hold while the women and children had tiny cabins.