BELLOW ON THE BRINK

FOR Nobel-prize winning novelist Saul Bellow death has become a constant presence in the midst of a still-active life. It is the consequence of eating a poisonous fish during a Caribbean holiday in 1995. The toxins attacked his central nervous system. After a month in intensive care, his body was wasted, his hands useless.

"Death's a challenge" he said during an interview in Boston late in April. "I've got to summon the guts to face it. I'm not in a flap, I'm curious. It's also a temptation. While in intensive care, I considered letting myself go, but my wife Janis fought for me and I didn't want to let her down."

The interview was partly peripetatic; after listening to a talk by the poet Richard Wilbur on the perils of translation, we strolled a mile down Boston's Commonwealth Avenue towards Bellow's office. He seemed to walk confidently but complained of occasional stumbling.

"I was still in my prime, not much diminished, even though 79, but the illness dumped me into old age."

Bellow is white-haired with a balding pate, fine lines etch his cheeks, but when he comes up with a telling phrase or a witticism a glinting smile cancels the years.

In the interview request I sent from Roine, I had mentioned a mutual acquaintance, the Italian literary critic Paolo Milano. It was just as well I had not exaggerated my closeness to the critic, because Bellow recalled that Milano's posthumously published memoir fails to mention Bellow's presence on trips they took to places such as Salzburg. His comment - "I guess he didn't think I was classy enough as an intellectual" - hinted at a touchiness about Europeans attitudes towards this son of immigrants from St Petersburg who arrived in Montreal in 1913, even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976 for "the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work" and is the only novelist to have received three US National Book Awards.

Bellow's new novella, The Actual, his 18th book, has just appeared in the US. So also has a new literary magazine News from the Republic of Letters which he co-edits with Keith Botsford, who played the same role in the production of two previous magazines, The Noble Savages and ANON; the first issue contains an excerpt from a new work by Bellow, View from Intensive Care.

In a recent interview Bellow proved typically outspoken: Norman Mailer has foolish notions about his standing in literature; Truman Capote gets nowhere near "the tail of the comet" that Bellow represents. And California is like an artificial limb that the rest of the country does not need.

I had been warned that Bellow was sometimes cranky, but instead he was cordial. His office is on the sixth floor of Boston University's Arts and Science building, which houses the University Professors' Program, the Departments of Classical Studies and Philosophy of Religion, and a School of Theology. "We're overrun by theologians" said Bellow, as he ushered me through a door with a nameplate, "Professor Bellow", into his nondescript office (a large desk, a round table, some books, including his own, filing cabinets, an old carpet) and requested his assistant to bring us cranberry juice. We sat at the table.

Were there parallels between his recent near-death experience and that at the age of eight, when he had both pneumonia and peritonitis? Did he again feel that he should make the most of a second chance?

"Again I was near death and again with recovery I have the feeling that there are things to complete. But this time I fear my body might not sustain me. Once the central nervous system is damaged it recovers only slowly if at all especially at my age. I'm afraid I'll fall over when I pull on my pants in the morning and I feel wobbly walking."

Given these problems, what are your ambitions now? Bellow's round, soulful eyes were fixed in a brown study before he responded. "Let me give myself a running start on that one. As a novelist, I've never quite done what I wanted to do. It was only in recent years that I freed myself from certain duties and felt I could at last bring off what I've aimed at. But I ate that fish, and illness makes you uncertain, preoccupied with your health.

"What do I still aim at? Without wanting to appear puffed-up, I'd say that I want to render my vision, which is unique because everybody is unique. I feel a responsibility to it. At times it's come through in what I've written, but only at times.

WITH so much still left to do, why does he teach?

"It brings me in contact with young people and this saves a writer from imprisonment in his own subjectivity. Teaching also solves the problem of what to do in the afternoon. Usually I get up at seven, drink a cup of coffee, and write - I haven't reached the bottom of the sack yet. But then there's the afternoon. I teach whatever I like for a couple of hours on Wednesdays for one semester. I'm just completing a course on ambitious young people in 19th and early 20th century literature".

As one who has written so much about people elbowing their way to the top in Chicago and elsewhere, what do you see as the difference between contemporaries and ambitious young people in 19th century literature?

"Today many young people are on the make, rather than ambitious in the same way as the protagonists of writers such as Stendahl, Balzac, Dickens and Dreiser, because they want simply to get ahead. The figures which interest me, however, have a depth of feeling, passion.

"The undergraduates in my seminar have a polite interest in these characters but when I was their age many people were passionate about literature. During the Depression there was radio, yes, but no television, no money, no jobs. It seemed useless to train for the professions. So everyone read, even if they had to go to libraries because they couldn't afford books. They went there also because libraries were the only places they could keep warm, but when the libraries closed they stood on sidewalks discussing what they'd read. It was wonderful and made me think writing was the best thing to do.

"I assumed this widespread passion for literature would go on forever, but it's all withered away. The bohemian life that accompanied it broke up. Later the GI Bill of Rights gave ex-servicemen steady paychecks if they went to university. Greenwich Village was depopulated and an independent life as a writer became less feasible. Still later, writers became university teachers, which in some cases crippled creativity.

"There's a residual interest in literature and even a tenth of one per cent of the US population is still a considerable audience, but - compared to when I began - literature is marginal, which makes writers feel marginal.

"I've always wanted a connection with a larger community. Liberal society gives security, abundance, privacy, but also encourages people to lead completely private lives. More and more I see it as a fool's paradise. One of the scenes I most admire in Dostoevsky is the one in Crime and Punishment after Raskolnikov has killed the old lady and Sonia points out that he has cut himself off from society, from humanity. Many of Dostoevsky's attitudes I don't share, but this scene brilliantly brings out the need for connection with society. Once I was politically engaged, which gave this connected feeling. Later I was tempted to become an Israeli. But finally I felt somewhat like Allen Ginsburg who, when Gershon Scholem suggested he become an Israeli, said: `All my life I've been running away from the Bronx'"

He began The Adventure of Augie March in Paris but, because I live in Rome, I am interested to know how much of it was written there, recreating sombre Chicago while sitting in the elegant Casina Valadier in the Borghese Gardens?

"There's no better way of doing it. I wrote about 200 pages in Rome. But Augie got away from me. It was not easy to ride that particular bronco. I'd mastered the style by the time I go to Henderson (Heriderson the Rain King) and Humboldt (Humboldt's Gift).

Was The Actual written entirely after his illness?

"Yes. For once, I was trying to prove a point: that I could still do it." He flashes a son-of-the-bootlegger smile.

He has proved his point. Will he complete the novel he had worked on for years before his illness?

"I've moved away from it or perhaps it's moved away from me. I'm on to something else."

ARE the characters in this new novel still faced with questions such as whether it is any use consulting Spinoza about adultery after they find their wives have cuckolded them? Is Bellow still using intellectual vaudeville creating overly cerebral characters being slapped in the face by reality?

"Slaps in the face are unavoidable be cause modern life forces us to live in our heads to an unprecedented extent. Modern life's comically difficult. It's as if we inhabit a gymnasium where we're obliged to give a performance for which we're incompetent.

"It brings to mind Dr Johnson's comparison of women preachers to dogs walking on their hind legs - it's not surprising that they do it badly, said Johnson, but that they do it at all.

"Mankind has always fought hunger and that still continues in some places. But now we're faced with a new problem, how to handle the abundance available to whole populations. We're flooded with goods. A super abundance of everything pushed along by new forms of credit. We're on a huge spree. It's intoxicating, as if we've arrived in the Promised Land.

"To use a Yiddish expression, the Maoist revolution is sucked-out eggs". He flashes another raffish smile.

"The real revolution is the electronic one. For instance, we take for granted immediate telephonic contact with people on the other side of the globe, but how's it done? Most of us have only hazy ideas about the electronic devices we constantly use.

"Could Robinson Crusoe ever have imagined that there'd be a time when men would take off in a machine that would lift them miles high within minutes? Who's the pilot, who's in charge of all this?

"Modern man is a primitive among these marvels who, I think, senses that they are magical. I'd like to capture the strangeness of all this.

It seems he is applying the anthropology he studied to his fellow citizens and discovering cargo cults worthy of Papua.

"If they're cargo cults, they're ones that work. The planet's a school, life's an extended know-thyself course. When you speak to God in your heart, however, you ask if you're simply put among all this to make mistakes, to be a fool. I've made so many mistakes about myself and others. To put it briefly: Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but sometimes the examined life makes you wish you were dead." Another smile, but this time it does not reach his eyes.