Letter from Saul Bellow to Philip Roth: 'I don't live right'
JA
October 19
Across our desks today at the Meanjin office came a copy of this very entertaining missive from Saul Bellow to Philip Roth, published earlier this year in the New Yorker. As far as rejection letters go, we think it’s pretty good. It was written in 1957, when Roth was but a young, relatively unknown aspiring author – his first publication, Goodbye, Columbus, was still three two years away, and his third novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, which launched him into the literary stratosphere, another fourteen years in the making. Bellow, on the other hand, was by then an established name of the trade, and (evidently) not without a sense of humour.
Dear Philip Roth:
Manuscripts around here shift and wander in huge piles, like the dunes. Yours turned up today, and I apologize to you for my disorder. It hurts me more. … My reaction to your story (“Expect the Vandals”) was on the positive side of the scale, strongly. … A great idea, but palpably Idea. I have a thing about Ideas in stories. Camus’s “The Plague” was an IDEA. Good or bad? Not so hot, in my opinion. With you the Idea gains ground fast, easily. It conquers. What of Moe?
Look, try Henry Volkening at 522 Fifth Ave. My agent. A very good one, too. Best of luck. And forgive my having the mss. so long. I should have read it at once. But I don’t live right.
Yrs,
Saul Bellow
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Comments
19 Oct 10 at 9:22
You could forgive any rejection accompanied by a letter like that.
...19 Oct 10 at 11:33
That’s sweet, what a charming letter.
It’s always refreshing to be reminded that other writers and editors beat themselves up because they don’t do this work ‘right’. Especially these cats, whoa.
...19 Oct 10 at 12:12
Bellow wrote one of my favourite blurbs, which was for Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus… “Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently. He is skilled, witty, energetic and performs like a virtuoso.”
In 1957 Roth was twenty-three. Goodbye Columbus was published two years later. You forget to mention that Roth won the National Book Award with Columbus, when he was twenty-five. Portnoy’s Comlpaint took him to bestseller lists in 1969. Herzog was Bellow’s breakthrough and took sold millions in 1964. Bellow was nearly twenty years Roth’s senior and more of a father figure. I didn’t read the letter so much as a rejection when it appeared in the New Yorker, but more as a sort of continuation of that relationship. It wasn’t a letter from an editor to just any submitted manuscript. Roth had stayed with Bellow when he studied in Chicago and was making those first attempts.
...19 Oct 10 at 12:31
Yes good point (and thanks for adding a bit more history to my brief intro). What I like about this is that despite being a ‘no thanks’, its got such style and wit to it, which makes it encouraging and, as you say, a continuation of a relationship in a way. I’d never read any of Bellow’s missives before – but now will keep in eye out.
...19 Oct 10 at 12:36
His selected letters – from which this one was extracted for The New Yorker – comes out next month. If it isn’t glaringly obvious, I’m a bit of a Bellow nut, so I’m looking forward to it’s release immensely. Most of his novels are from the p.o.v. of his barely disguised alter-egos, so it will be interesting to see if the Letters can say anything different about his life, or say it in a different way.
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