Saul Bellow, author of Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, and The Adventures of Augie March,
among others, died 14 years ago today. Bellow is still the only writer
to have been awarded the National Book Award for Fiction three times—he
also nabbed a Pulitzer, a National Medal of Arts, and of course, the
Nobel Prize. The Swedish Academy praised his work for its “mixture of
rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of
entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession
interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a
commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer
and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting,
and that can be called the dilemma of our age.” Which is only to say
that he was a pretty good writer, to put it mildly. He may have been a
somewhat abrasive, as a person, but you could do worse than taking craft
tips from him. And so, in our grand tradition of mining interviews for
writing advice from literary greats, here is a selection of Bellow’s
best.
Report your true impressions.
The essence of our real condition, the
complexity, the confusion, the pain of it, is shown to us in glimpses,
in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as “true impressions.” . . . The
value of literature lies in these intermittent “true impressions.” . . .
No one who has spent years in the writing of novels can be unaware of
this. The novel can’t be compared to the epic or to the monuments of
poetic drama. But it is the best we can do just now. It is a sort of
latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter. A novel
is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false
ones that make up most of what we call life.
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