Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 8:22 AM by Gene

• Literary titan Saul Bellow dies [home-page hed]

TRANSLATION: Anyone here know who he was?

I would offer up an opinion but all I know is he was a writer who was said to be a reasonably good one, and I'll leave it at that.

P. S. Who but Terry Teachout could have written this?

I just got an urgent e-mail from an editor informing me that Saul Bellow died earlier today and asking if I wanted to write an appreciation. I said no, not merely because I'M TAKING WEDNESDAY OFF!! but because Bellow never really interested me, not as a writer and not as a man. I didn’t find him at all sympathetic, yet he didn’t irritate me enough to cause the accretion of a strong negative opinion. He simply wasn’t on my screen (except when he took a shot at me in the New York Times, but that's another story).

Might it have been a generational thing? Among the New York intellectuals, Bellow was a fixed star, a literary giant about whom you had to have an opinion, be it good or bad. I don’t think that’s true today, and I wonder how well his work will be remembered ten years from now, or even five. My guess—and it’s nothing more than that—is that he’ll be seen as a period piece. That doesn’t exactly add up to an appreciation, does it?

Five years ago, by the way, I would have said yes to that editor, run straight to the nearest bookstore, come back with a tall stack of paperbacks, and stayed up all night knocking out a thousand words of well-honed prose. I may be a workaholic, but at least I’m no longer a degenerate one.