Saul Bellow, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of all time, lived and wrote several months of each year in the Brattleboro area for the last 20 plus years of his life. This episode captures the essence of the man and his work through his own words, writings and that of his official biographer, Professor Emeritus Zachary Leader of Roehampton University in London, as well as one of his good friends in Brattleboro, Larry Simons (these last two in exclusive interviews with the Brattleboro Words Trail). A bonus episode to follow features Bellow's longtime editor Beena Kamlani reading her delightful essay about her work with this unparalleled writer. Bellow won a trio of National Book Awards for fiction, a record still unsurpassed, for the Adventures of Augie March in 1954, Herzog in 1965, and Mr. Sandler's Planet in 1971. He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1976 novel Humboldt's Gift and, in 1976, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his full body of work. His life story fills two volumes. In this episode, his biographer (Leader) sums up his stature and relationship to Vermont and reads from Bellow's essay 'Vermont: A Good Place." Bellow's Brattleboro friend Larry Simons talks about their friendship, his work, his last years and how Bellow attended the inaugural Brattleboro Literary Festival in October of 2002 (which has grown to become a celebrated annual event). In spring of 2005, Saul Bellow died at his Boston home, but he loved Vermont so much that Brattleboro became his final resting place at the Shir He-Harim Jewish graveyard at Morningside Cemetery. Chiseled into his headstone are the spines of books and the single word epitaph: Writer.
This episode was researched, produced and narrated by Donna Blackney with production assistance from Sandy Rouse of the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Mixing and mastering was done by Alec Pombriant from masters done for Brattleboro Words Trail app for Guilford Sound. Our theme music is by Ty Gibbons. Executive Producer, LIssa Weinmann. Many thanks to Saul Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader, his long-time editor at Viking Penguin Press Beena Kamlani, his friend Larry Simons and the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society for their archival footage of Bellow and help.
For more info on Project, visit BrattleboroWords.org.
All audio clips of Saul Bellow from The Writing Life with Saul Bellow are reproduced by permission of HoCoPoLitSo, the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society, www.hocopolitso.org. To hear the entire interview, visit www.youtube.com/hocopolitso.
Excerpt(s) from HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow, copyright © 1958, 1959, 1974, renewed © 1986, 1987 by Saul Bellow. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpt(s) from HERZOG by Saul Bellow, copyright © 1961, 1963, 1964, renewed 1989, 1991, 1992 by Saul Bellow. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from RAVELSTEIN by Saul Bellow. Copyright © 2000 by Saul Bellow, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
References:
The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964 uby Zachary Leader. Published by Knopf 2015.
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965-2005 dby Zachary Leader. Published by Knopf 2018.
Saul Bellow: Letters, by Saul Bellow (Author), Benjamin Taylor (Editor) Penguin Books 2012
“Vermont: The Good Place” from There Is Simply Too Much To Think About, a collection of essays by Saul Bellow. Edited by Benjamin Taylor. Penguin Books 2016. Copyright 2015 Janis Bellow.
A Race Against Time by Beena Kamlani 2015 https://lithub.com/a-race-against-time-editing-saul-bellows-last-novel/
Episode Photo: Courtesy of the Nobel Prize
Music:
Part 1: ‘Now or Never’ by Michael Vignola (storyblocks.com)
Part 2: ‘Backed Vibes Clean’ by Kevin MacLeod (freemusicarchive.org)
‘Cool Jazz’ by Bobby Cole (storyblocks.com)
Part 3: ‘Just A Thought’ by Michael Vignola (storyblocks.com)
‘Empty Days’ by Alan Spiljak (freemusicarchive.org)
Part 4: ‘Just A Thought’ by Michael Vignola (storyblocks.com)
Saul Bellow Transcript / Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast 7/1/23
Host Lissa Weinmann:
Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail podcast.
Voice of Saul Bellow:
One of the things that I was always persuaded of as a writer was that you had to give some, uh, happiness to the people who were reading your books. It didn't have to be frivolous happiness. You might be writing about a murderer, but still some kind of delight. And I took it as an obligation. I think of myself as a working stiff. If I got up in the morning and, uh, say to myself, well, great writer. What's go, what's gonna, what are you gonna do today? I'd be paralyzed. So I duck the whole thing.
Narrator Donna Blackney:
That's the voice of novelist Saul Bellow speaking in 1986 at Howard Community College in Maryland. It's bellow at his most cheerful and generously insightful, best at a time when he was not yet overtaken by the multiple health issues that would deter him from public life. Later on, he'd recently met Janice Friedman, a graduate student who had become his fifth wife. He was living in Vermont for several months each year, finding a deep affinity with nature here, and respite from his heavy schedule of writing and teaching and traveling between Chicago, Boston, and internationally.
By the mid 1980s, Saul Bellow, the working stiff, had been writing acclaimed novels for four decades. He had won a trio of National Book Awards for fiction, a record still unsurpassed for the Adventures of Augie March in 1954, Herzog in 1965, and Mr. Sandler's Planet in 1971. He'd won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 1976 novel Humboldt's Gift. And also in 1976, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his full body of work. His life story fills two volumes. For the Brattleboro Words Trail, His biographer, Professor Emeritus Zachary Leader of Roehampton University in London, sums up his stature
Zachary Leader:
For most of his life. He was the most acclaimed novelist in America, if not in the world. In 1994, the London Sunday Times asked leading authors and critics in Britain to name “the greatest living writers in English”. And, Bellow came first in this poll. He was an active participant in public affairs. He spoke out on issues of foreign policy, race, education, religion, social policy, and the state of the culture. What made him great as a writer? I think, he had a number of great virtues as a writer. He had fantastic mimetic power, the power to see things perfectly, to catch what Keith's called the ‘fine isolated verisimilitude,’ the thing perfectly imitated. But he brought this attention to surface things and the ability to bring them alive on the page would provide access to deeper meanings.
Bellow archival: (03:29):
When you're reading something that stirs you, you begin to imitate it unconsciously. Just as when I was a kid and I, I had seen a Tarzan movie, I would go home swinging through the trees,
Leader (04:34):
He had great imaginative power too. He could imagine himself into situations which he was quite unlikely to have experienced. He's especially well known for creating a style that mixes the ivory tower with the street.
Bellow archival: (04:50):
I am going to read some pages from Henderson the Rain King. Now, I wrote this book, um, I think it was 1957 or 58: “What made me take this trip to Africa? There is no quick explanation. Things got worse and worse and worse, and pretty soon they were too complicated. When I think of my condition at the age of 55, when I bought the ticket, all is grief. The facts begin to crowd me, and I soon get a pressure in the chest. A disorderly rush begins. My parents, my wives, my girls, my children, my farm, my animals, my habits, my money, my music lessons, my drunkenness, my prejudices, my brutality, my teeth, my face, my soul. I have to cry. No, no, get back. You let me alone. But how can they let me alone? They belong to me. They're mine, and they pile into me from all sides. It turns into chaos. However, the world, which I thought so mighty an oppressor, has removed its wrath from me.
But if I'm to make sense to you people and explain why I went to Africa, I must face up to the facts. I might as well start with the money. I am rich. From my old man I inherited three million after taxes, but I thought myself a bum and had my reasons. The main reason being that I behaved like a bum. But privately, when things got very bad, I often looked to books to see whether I could find some helpful words. And one day I read “the forgiveness of sin is perpetual and righteousness first is not required.” This impressed me so deeply that I went around saying it to myself, but then I forgot which book it was. It was one of thousands left by my father, who had also written a number of them, and I searched through dozens of volumes. But all that turned up was money, for my father had used currency for bookmarks. Whatever he happened to have in his pockets, five tens or twenties, some of the discontinued bills of 30 years ago turned up, the big yellow backs, for old time's sake. I was glad to see them. And locking the library door to keep out the children, I spent the afternoon on a ladder shaking out books, and the money spun to the floor. But I never found that statement about forgiveness.
Narrator (07:52):
Bellow's acute observations of everyday humanity were drawn liberally from his own experiences, characters from his own life populate his stories, albeit under different names or circumstances. But as Bellow explains, his writing is fiction and not autobiography.
Bellow archival:(08:10):
Things that you write are in some degree autobiographical. But the first thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing in the world to write. It's hard because it's so very difficult to be absolutely factual about yourself. At my age, you have a mind like a trunk where you can always rummage and come up with something interesting. And you have all kinds of projects in the trunk or in the attic, or in the belfry, but you don't write them just because you have them. You can't just go from the idea to the page. You have to be stirred when you write. You may draw on facts from your own life, but if they're not in harmony with your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them. So you have to have a sound judgment and eliminate the ones that don't fit, because every, every book, every story has a sort of invisible musical signature at the front. (09:21): And when you've written the first few lines of the story, those govern all the rest that follows. There's no harmony between those openings, between the opening and what comes subsequently. And then you're just on the wrong track and people won't read you because you can't carry their interest. People sometimes put on their thinking caps when they're reading a book and they feel ‘this a serious book by a serious writer. I'm a serious reader and I must give this a serious reading’. And the result is that they generally miss the comedy and humor of the book by being so very serious. When I wrote Herzog, everybody raised a cry saying, ‘Bellow is the intellectual’s writer.’ On the contrary, I was poking fun at the intellectuals and I was showing how much a long university education culminating in a PhD could do to disorient you
Narrator (10:26):
Here's a quote from Herzog about dealing with what Bellow calls ‘the ordinary crises of life’. It's read by Larry Simons, one of bellow's local friends in Vermont.
Simons (reading excerpt from Herzog (10:38):
I fall upon the thorns of life. I bleed, and then I fall upon the thorns of life. I bleed. And what next? I get laid. I take a short holiday, but very soon after I fall upon those same thorns with gratification and pain or suffering and joy, who knows what the mixture is? What good, what lasting good is there in me? Is there nothing else between birth and death? But what I can get out of this perversity only a favorable balance of disorderly emotions, no freedom, only impulses. What about all the good I have in my heart? Does it mean anything? Is it simply a joke, a false hope that makes a man feel the illusion of worth and somebody goes on with his struggles? But this is no phony. I know it isn't. I swear it.
Simons (11:42):
We met Saul in the 1970s. He had bought a rug or two from us. He was very low key and just friendly. And at first it almost didn't occur to me who I was talking to, even though I had read his books. We really just talked about rugs. He had a real love for oriental rugs. Somewhere along the line, Saul and I probably started discussing a little bit of literature and philosophy, and I think it clicked with him that I was somebody he could talk to. I tried to stick mostly to asking him about his own books. One thing in particular was Herzog. I remember reading it as a maybe an 18 year old college freshman and being very impressed with the character. So when he told me that the whole book was a put-on, I felt kind of silly. I mean, of course, this was years later and I was no longer emulating the character Herzog, but at the time I read it, I probably thought I should.
Leader (12:35):
Saul Bellow was born in 1915 and died in 2005. He was born in Lachine, Quebec, the only member of his family not to be born in Russia, the only member of his family to be born in the Americas. He lived in Lachine, which is now part of Montreal, until he was eight. And then the family moved to Chicago in an immigrant neighborhood called Humboldt Park.
Bellow archival (13:04):
I was a child during the period of great American prosperity, the age of Harding and Coolidge. And then there was a great depression, which was terrible, but also very inspiring. You found out about life during the depression, and really there was no point in preparing for a profession because dentists and lawyers and engineers were on the soup line. So my father asked me what I wanted to do, and at first, I ducked him. I said that I would like to study anthropology, which he had never heard of. But that was just a front, because what I really wanted to do was write.
Leader (13:40):
He brought alive a world which had previously, and so he felt not had an adequate place in higher literary culture, the world of first generation American immigrants as they struggled to make it in the United States. He refused to call himself a Jewish American novelist. He didn't wanna be a hyphenate. He was an American novelist. He was finding a way to communicate what it was to be an American, because the experience of becoming an American was at the core of American identity. Though he was the great chronicler of American urban life, he was also a close and knowledgeable lover of nature and the countryside and this love of nature. And the countryside came very early on before the family moved to Chicago. And his memory of those summers were important to him and never, never left him.
Narrator (14:37):
Bellow had country homes in upstate New York and Aspen, Colorado before being introduced to Vermont by his fourth wife, the mathematician Alexandra Tulcea In 1983. They built a new home near Brattleboro, which quickly became Bellow's favorite place to be. He described it to Larry Simons as his real home, because this is where his books were from Chicago. He wrote to his friend, the poet Robert Penn Warren, who also lived part of each year in Vermont, that seeing Penn during his next visit would be no small part of the happiness of being in Vermont for bellow, Vermont meant happiness.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
This house became for him a kind of refuge from the frenetic activity of his life. First in Chicago, then in in Boston. He was writing all the time and teaching. He taught at BU as well as the University of Chicago. The novels he wrote from the eighties onwards, often, engendered, uh, controversy were involved with difficult, uh, subjects. And, um, it was a place of peace for him in Vermont. The house that he had built was cut off from the neighbors. Uh, he once had Jack Nicholson, who wanted to make a movie out of one of his novels, came in a giant limousine to visit him. He, all the neighbors were very excited about this visit, but he couldn't get the limousine down the little track to his house. He would invite friends up as well. He wasn't hermit like her without a social life. Uh, once a week, he and his wife Alexandra first, and then Janice would go to Brattleboro to collect provisions, and there he'd meet the philosopher Sidney Hook. He describes having meeting in Brattleboro, the art historian, Mayor Shapiro as well. He was friends with Robert Penn Warren, who lived in Vermont, and his wife Eleanor Clark, also a writer. The novelists, Philip Roth and Martin Amos and William Kennedy came and he'd invite members of his family up as well.
Simons (16:38):
We started having dinners together at our house, um, once at his house, several times in Boston. And we developed some friends in common who were kind of intellectually aligned with Saul, but very low key people. Vermont is obviously a very beautiful place, and it has attracted all sorts of artists and writers and musicians going back way back in time. And I think that people are very settled here. People are very comfortable being where they are with their present station in life. People are not out to impress you here. And I think that that is an important factor, especially for somebody like Saul, because he doesn't need to be impressed. He's grasping the real that he sees around him for his books. He's not trying to unmask phoniness. He's trying to show what people really are like. It's a different approach, I think, than a lot of writers have taken, or a lot of people have taken.
Leader (17:41):
The best way. I can give you a sense both of his feeling for the country in Vermont and for his time there, is to read a a bit from an essay he wrote in 1990 called ‘Vermont, A Good Place.’
Leader reading Bellow’s essay:
For the last 10 years, I've spent much of my time in Vermont. I have no near neighbors here where I live. The closest is a biologist from Yale who prefers Vermont to any college town and teaches science in a local high school. His wife designs and makes jewelry. Half a mile to the west is the house of the ingenious, extraordinarily inventive man who built my place. He and his wife, an obstetrical nurse, have become my friends. There are a few townspeople out this way. Most of us are newcomers or summer people. No township would be complete, I suppose, without its eccentric squatter. Our squatter collects old heaps, cars and trucks. His huts, plastic fluttering from their windows, are surrounded by ditched machinery of every sort. His livestock browses on weeds or eats broken rice cakes trucked in from factory somewhere near the Massachusetts line. Enormous long-legged pigs run into the road looking as if they were wearing high heels. They invaded the vegetable gardens of the people along the road and they root in them. Some say that the squatter comes from a respectable family and was well-educated. In the old days, he would've been called a remittance man or a gypsy, or a tinker. The property on which he squats adjoins a dam recently abandoned by the beavers. My wife and I arrive in the spring like Canada geese, sometime taking off again intermittently visible until the fall. The postman and the garbage collector have hard information about our comings and goings. Our roads, the whole township network were described by a visitor, a motherly old person from Idaho who came here to visit her son, “one green tunnel after another.” From the perspective of a driver shaded roads would look like that. On warm days, a walker is grateful for the shelter, although when the wind dies down, the black flies, deer flies, and no-see-ums will be waiting in the hollows. When it rains, you're kept almost dry by the packed leaves, and you hear the drops falling from level to level. You'll become familiar over the years with each of the beaches, yellow birches and maples, the basswood, the locusts, the rocks, the drainage ditches, the birds and the wildlife down to the red nus on the roads surface in the nearest town. Yes, people will be descending from their buses to buy baskets, maple syrup, aged cheddar and knickknacks. But 10 miles away through the woods, you hear no engines. When the birds awaken you, you open your eyes on the mast foliage of huge trees. Should the stone kitchen be damp, as it may be even in July, you bring wood in from the cellar and build a fire. After breakfast, you carry coffee out to the porch. The Jew takes up every particle of light. The hummingbirds chase away hummingbird trespasses from the fuschias and the Maltese Crosses. Grass snakes come out of their sheltering rocks to get some sun. The poplar leaves when you narrow your eyes are like a shower of small change. And when you walk down to the pond, you may feel what the psalmist felt about still waters and green pastures.
Leader speaking on his own again.(21:39):
This is what Vermont was to Saul Bellow are kind of paradisal refuge. It's also the place where he had his fifth wife most liked to live their respite from, uh, Boston. And it's also where their daughter grew up, Rosie born in 2000 with the fifth wife Janice who was 43 years younger than Bellow. Bellow was 84.
Narrator (22:06):
The Nobel website says, Saul Bellow was awarded his prize for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.
Bellow archival (22:18):
As for winning the Nobel Prize, at first it was very agreeable. You wear a claw hammer coat and a white tie. The king and the queen shake your hand. You dine in a palace and you feel a little bit like Cinderella. But then 20 people burst into your bedroom with cameras in the morning,
Narrator (23:26):
Saul Bellow found the peace and quiet he craved around Brattleboro, but he was by no means idle here. In a letter to novelist William Kennedy, he wrote, “Vermont is exquisite, and I am doing here what I am supposed to do.” His essay, ‘Vermont, the Good Place’, is one of many dozens written in the last two decades of his life, along with reams of personal correspondence as well as fiction. His stories continued to reflect and expand upon events and people in his own life, none more so than his final novel Ravelstein published in the year 2000. It focuses on two aging Jewish men reviewing their lives, their frailty, and the meaning of death. Ravelstein is a version of Saul's old friend Alan Bloom, who died of AIDS in 1997. They had first bonded at the University of Chicago. With age they had each expressed conservative ideas and were at times accused of elitism, anti feminism, intolerance, or racism.
Simons(24:33):
As far as becoming more conservative with age, I find an awful lot of my smartest friends have done that, and I don't feel that I have so
Bellow archival (25:37):
Sometimes I'm baffled, uh, when I hear people's impressions of what I've written and I say to myself ‘You always assumed you were part of the human species. How come you can get yourself so completely screwed up and misunderstood?’ But either you can panic and start making frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical eyes. Or you can just say 'the hell with you I know what I'm doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an attentive reading.’ You have to balance these things between the attentive reading and the self-doubt.
Simons (26:22)
Here's a quote I enjoy particularly from Ravelstein.
Simons quoting from Ravelstein:
He was here to give aid, to clarify and move and to make certain, if he could, that the greatness of humankind would not entirely evaporate and bourgeois wellbeing, et cetera. There was nothing of the average in Ravelstein's life. He did not accept dullness and boredom, nor was depression tolerated.
Narrator (26:49):
The other character in the story Chick is a version of Bellow and a vehicle for writing about his own health. Bellow suffered from ciguatera, a crippling neurological disease caused by a toxin in tropical fish that he ate during a trip to St. Martin in 1994. Its effects on nerves and brain function can be severe. Unlike his character Chick, Bellow never fully recovered from the poison.
Simons:
I knew Saul when he was ill with that, and it scared him. He knew that he was on the precipice at times of his own demise. I think because he, he talked about that afterwards. Saul was a guy who could often had a smile on his face when and personal conversation, but that was a solemn kind of a subject for him. The narrator clearly was Bellow, and he only is identified as Chick, but he's kind of that ever-looming presence that presents the story. And here's one of the quotes from him that I particularly liked:
“Death, how I imagined it. I said that pictures would stop. Evidently, I saw as pictures what Americans refer to as experience. I wasn't at the moment thinking of the pictures newly available, recently offered by technology, the kind of tour one now takes of one's digestive track or the heart. The heart, only a group of muscles after all, but how tenacious they are starting to beating in the womb and going in rhythm for as long as a century.
Narrator (28:25):
Through the lingering effects of the neurotoxin, and through other indications of Alzheimer's mental decline, Bellow kept working. Philip Roth and a group of academic colleagues supported be to continue lecturing until his memory lapses and anxieties became overwhelming, gradually slipping in and out of lucidity. He was sheltered from scrutiny by family and friends. Bella withdrew from public life to spend more time with Janice and their toddler daughter Rosie, his favorite activity.
Simons(28:58):
Somebody came to us and asked us if, my wife and I, knowing that we knew Saul, if he could be enticed to be part of the first Brattleboro Literary Festival. Saul agreed to appear. The literary festival had chosen whatever their largest venue was because they knew that he would pack in a crowd, but he didn't want any part of that. He said he would only do it if he could do it at our store Candle in the Night, because he was comfortable there. And we said, fine, we'd be happy to have that happen. And when we showed up that morning with Saul to get him in, it was packed like a New York subway car to the right, to the front door.
You couldn't even get in this building and we have big store, but it was, it never had that many people in it, ever. So we decided to bring him in the back way. We had a back door and an alley that came into our store and we tried getting him in the back and people wouldn't move. They were, they were really not willing to give up their positions even though they were in places where they weren't gonna see him. But they didn't know that. And I had to keep explaining to him that there was nothing to see if they didn't move because he was with us, at which point the seas parted and we were able to get him to the point at which we had set up a chair where he could greet people. And I think we all had the impression that people would kind of come strolling through and say hello. And, but it wasn't like that. It was so packed. There were so many people and his voice was very quiet at that point. He just wanted to lend his presence to help the literary festival, which was, uh, at that point a very generous gesture because he wasn't really
Up to it. But he did. And it, it got to the, where people started asking questions that Janice answered for him. I describe him as not having the energy to really speak publicly. He was struggling a little bit with the oncoming mental issues, but I, I don't know that we were really aware of it. I think we just felt that he was aging and that he was, he was a bit fragile both mentally and physically, and just didn't have that energy any longer. I understand how that condition comes on. I watched my father go through the same thing and with really bright people. There’s I think a moment at which they begin to understand it until they can't. He was a very private person despite his public persona. And I don't think that it's an easy thing for anybody to accept, especially somebody is bright and intellectually, aware as Saul Bellow was.
Narrator (31:59):
Bellow may have been mistaken as aloof or unreliable when in reality he was very unwell. As Martin Amos put it, “For a writer to lose touch with, his rationality is a curse. Just as Parkinson's would be for a surgeon.” in his final few years, Alzheimer's tightened its grip. Bellow's youngest of three sons Adam describes him becoming sweet and childlike near the end. And with his complicated extended family, rallying around some longstanding riffs were at least partly healed. Adam told Zachary Leader, I like to think he became more plant-like, more like a flower, which he was always fascinated by the life of plants and trees.
Simons (32:47):
I remember one conversation where he said to me, well, I guess it all comes down to Rousseau. And I couldn't wait to hear him explain what came down to Rousseau, but he never did. The conversation trailed off in some other direction. It might have even been that day in, when I visited him in Boston, when he was basically in a hospital bed in the house where he was living. I remember sitting by his bedside for hours. My wife and Janice were in the other room and, and they were very patient about the fact that I really wanted to just stay there and spend time with Saul. And a lot of the time he was asleep. He would kind of wake up and talk for a while and then fall back to sleep. But at one point he woke up and he said, um, how's your daughter doing? And I, he was referring to my younger daughter, Brittany, whom he had met at my house for dinner one time. And I said, oh, she's fine. She’s in college. She has a double major of Chinese and mechanical engineering, at which point he said “Good, she can put the screws to the Chinese.” and fell back to sleep immediately. I don't know that I ever really saw him again after that.
Narrator (34:01):
In spring of 2005, Saul Bellow died at his Boston home, but he loved Vermont so much that Brattleboro became his final resting place at the Shir He-Harim Jewish graveyard at Morningside Cemetery. Chiseled into his headstone are the spines of books and the single word epitaph: Writer.
Bellow archival (34:24):
The most difficult thing is the occasional panic doubt that you have that maybe you're not gonna be able to finish your project. And the most desirable is when you're either, uh, laughing or weeping yourself and, uh, scribbling at the same time. That's what one lives for in this trade.
Host Reads episode credits (35:12):
This episode was researched, produced and narrated by Donna Blackney with production assistance from Sandy Rouse of the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Mixing and mastering was done by Alec Pombriant and Guilford Sound. Our theme music is by Ty Gibbons. Executive Producer is me, LIssa Weinmann. Many thanks to Saul Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader, his long-time editor Beena Kamlani, his friend Larry Simons and the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society for their participation and help. Please find all credits for excerpts from Bellow’s work in our liner notes on the podcast page. You can find out more about the Brattleboro Words Trail, including how to get involved or produce your own story for the Trail, at BrattleboroWords.org. Thanks for listening!
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