How Saul Bellow Reckoned with Money and Fame / Zachary Leader. In: Lit Hub Daily November 15, 2018

The launch party for Saul Bellow’s Herzog was held on September 22, 1964, two days after Julian Moynihan pronounced the novel “a masterpiece” on the front page of The New York Times Book Review and Philip Rahv called Bellow “the finest stylist at present writing fiction in America” in a review in the New York Herald Tribune Book Week. Alfred Kazin was among the guests at the launch, and while waiting for his wife to arrive he amused himself by picking out “the customers for Saul’s party from the regulars at 21 was so easy!” The regulars were better looking, stamped with the difference of their background deeply depressing. In they came, “Arabel Porter all the old loves, would-be loves, friends and misses—even Vassiliki [Rosenfeld]. All so stale, isn’t bloody familiar?” Only Bellow impressed:

Saul, our plebeian princeling and imaginative king, standing there, gray, compact, friendly and aloof, receiving his old friends whom he had invited to 21 . . . Saul alone of all the old gang has achieved first-class status. . . . Saul alone has made it, with the furious resistance of personal imagination to the staleness of the round. There’s more yet for me, he cries in his heart, more, much more! Nothing is stale, he cries, if only you look at it hard enough, see in it aspects of human fate in general. Put your story on the universal stage of time, and the old Chicago friends will seem as interesting as kings in the old history books.

Two days earlier, when the first reviews of Herzog appeared, Kazin had pondered Bellow’s public persona. The face he presented to the world, Kazin decided, resembled Charlie Chaplin’s “in that first photograph of the tramp—the face absolutely open to life, open, humble, almost childlike, in its concentrated wistfulness and naïve expectancy. Above all a face submissive to the fates.” This face, Kazin imagined, was worn by Herzog, and “Saul himself now wears [it] in company. He sits in the waiting room, prepared to be ushered into anything. What will you do with me? he asks, recognizing a stronger power than himself.” Kazin admired Bellow’s air of containment, expectancy, passivity, but also found it irritating. “Saul now wears an aspect mild and submissive,” he writes in a journal entry of September the book was published. “He puts his ear willing to anything to say to him. He is available to you, he is interested in you, he is most polite. But the minute he has registered what turns it into food for thought—and you find yourself sacrificing your thought for the pleasure of having him develop it. Later, in a journal entry of August 1, 1965, Kazin complains of “Saul’s usual trick of having others make the effort, his immobility in company. . . . Saul is in an interesting state of self-consciousness, of course, because of his present fame and fortune. Having worked so long to make it, he now is suffering even more than usual because he has. He intimated, making almost a physical point of it as usual, that he sought anonymity. . . . He was, as usual, making mental lassos of everyone to himself. And I was tired of adjusting to him.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/how-saul-bellow-reckoned-with-money-and-fame/