Playboy Interview: Saul Bellow

If we judge our artists by the awards they receive, then Saul Bellow must be America's best living writer. He's won three National Book Awards (for "The Adventures of Augie March" in 1953, "Herzog" in 1964 and "Mr. Sammler's Planet" in 1970), the Pulitzer Prize ("Humboldt's Gift," 1975), the Gold Medal for the Novel (1977), the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1952), the Friends of Literature Fiction Award, the James L. Dow, the Prix International, the Fomentor Award (for "Herzog"), the Croix de Chevalier (1968) and the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature. He's received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant and, in 1983, he was made a commander of the French Legion of Honor.

While Bellow has said that writers seldom wish other writers well, writers have come around to acknowledge his preeminent position. Philip Roth calls him "the grand old man of American Jewish writers" as well as "the country's most accomplished working novelist." John Updike thinks he's "the best portraitist writing American fiction." Irving Howe dubbed him "the best living American novelist." Joyce Carol Oates considers him a genius and places him "off the scale of even Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon or Thomas Wolfe."

While Bellow could read Hebrew before he entered kindergarten (his mother hoped he would be a Talmudic scholar), his writing talent wasn't truly recognized until he was in his mid-20s, when "Partisan Review" first published some of his stories. His parents were Russian immigrants who moved in 1913 with their two sons and a daughter to Lachine, a suburb of Montreal. Their third son, Saul, was born there on June 10, 1915. At the age of eight he was diagnosed with a respiratory infection and had to be hospitalized for six months. Not long after his recovery the family moved to Chicago. His father, Abraham, worked in a bakery, sold wood scraps for fuel and did some bootlegging. Saul's mother, Liza, died when Saul was 17, before he entered the University of Chicago. After two years there he transferred to Northwestern University, where he majored in anthropology and sociology. In 1937 he married Anita Goshkin and got a job writing literary biographies for the federally funded WPA Writer's Project. During World War Two he was classified 2A because of a hernia and, after surgery, he joined the merchant marine. He sold a novel called "The Very Dark Trees," but when the publisher delayed it because of the war, Bellow decided it wasn't good enough and destroyed it. He then wrote "Dangling Man," about a young man waiting to be drafted, which earned him a $200 advance in 1944, the year his first son, Gregory, was born.

In 1947 Bellow wrote "The Victim," which "Time" described as a novel "about a solemn and touchy Jew accused by a fanatic Gentile of having ruined him" and said it "has troubling depths of meaning which make it unusual among new novels." But the book sold only 2257 copies, and it would be six years before Bellow's next novel appeared.

The Fifties were the dawn of a new golden age of the American novel. In the space of a few years came J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," J. P. Donleavy's "The Ginger Man," Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," William Gaddis' "The Recognitions" and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." Bellow contributed "The Adventures of Augie March" in 1953. It is the story of an optimistic, naive young man from Chicago who goes into the world seeking adventures and finds that "you do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever." With its bold gush of language, it remains a popular seller today. "Search no further," writer Martin Amis declared in "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1995. "The great American novel was a chimera; this mythical beast was a pig with wings. Miraculously, however, and uncovenantedly, Saul Bellow brought the animal home."

At the time it was published not all critics hailed it so enthusiastically. Norman Podhoretz considered the novel a failure; Anthony West wrote that Bellow's writing was wooden and dead. Norman Mailer called it "absurd, unconvincing, overcooked, overstuffed, unfelt, heaps of literary bull-bull." What seemed to upset critics was that Bellow had so radically departed from his first two finely drawn and more confined novels, which Bellow now calls his M.A. and Ph.D. "Augie March" broke new ground.

His next novel, "Seize the Day" (1956), about a day in the anxiety-ridden life of a man named Tommy Wilhelm, was called "one of the finest short novels in the language" by "The Guardian."

In 1956 Bellow married his second wife, Alexandra Tsachacbasov, and a year later his second son, Adam, was born. That marriage lasted only three years and ended around the time Bellow's picaresque novel "Henderson the Rain King" appeared in 1959. This comical one-man journey into the heart of a mythical Africa was compared to the "Odyssey" and "Don Quixote" by "Newsweek."

As had been the case with each of his novels, the raves were balanced by the pans. Elizabeth Hardwick condemned "Henderson" in the "Partisan Review," charging that Bellow was trying too hard to be "an important American novelist." Dwight Macdonald came to Bellow's defense and condemned the magazine for publishing Hardwick's misguided review. Bellow's response to such controversy? "Oh well, I just write stories."

He married his third wife, Susan Glassman, in 1961, and their son, Daniel, was born in 1962. Bellow continued writing. His next novel, "Herzog," about a sometimes suicidal intellectual who writes but never sends letters to world figures, hit number one on the "New York Times" best-seller list and remained there for 29 weeks. In 1970 came "Mr. Sammler's Planet," about another cynical intellectual, which prompted the "Sunday Times" of London to proclaim Bellow "the most important writer in English in the second half of the 20th century."

A 1965 "Book Week" poll of novelists and critics found Bellow to have written the "most distinguished fiction of the 1945-1965 period." That poll found Bellow to have written three of the six best novels of the postwar years.

By this time Bellow had accepted a position at the University of Chicago as a professor on the Committee on Social Thought and had begun writing "Humboldt's Gift," about a failed dead poet and a successful writer hounded by a gangster, a thinly veiled story about his relationship with the poet Delmore Schwartz. The London "Times" pronounced Bellow to be "one of the most gifted chroniclers of the Western world" and the Swedish Academy agreed, awarding Bellow the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. The academy felt his body of work represented an emancipation of American writing from the "hardboiled" style that had become routine in Thirties literature, and was deserving for its mix of "exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion."

Bellow's next book, "To Jerusalem and Back," was his first nonfictional work. Two novels ("The Dean's December" and "More Die of Heartbreak"), another book of stories ("Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories"), two novellas ("A Theft" and "The Bellarosa Connection"), a fiction collection ("Something to Remember Me By") and a book of essays ("It All Adds Up") were published in the last 14 years. His latest novella, "The Actual," about a man who has become "a first-class noticer" in his later years, has just been published.

Bellow married his fourth wife, Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, a mathematics professor, in 1975, and it was her mother's illness and their trip to visit her in Romania that Bellow dramatized in his 1982 novel "The Dean's December."

More than 20 years ago, a 1975 "Newsweek" profile noted, "He has not succumbed to any of the classic fates America seems to reserve for most of its major writers. He did not crack up, like Fitzgerald; he was not consumed by his own myth, like Hemingway; he did not suffer from long-delayed recognition, like Faulkner. Nor is Bellow a specimen of that other American phenomenon, the writer as showbiz personality or sudden superstar." Indeed, despite a fifth wife, Janis Freedman, and their moves to Boston and Vermont, Bellow remains sane and has a remarkably clear vision of himself and literature.

No saint by any means, Bellow can be cranky and cantankerous and admits to being aggressive. He bristles when critics label him a Jewish writer. "People who make labels should be in the gumming business," he has said.

On the eve of Bellow's 18th book, we sent Contributing Editor Lawrence Grobel (who has interviewed James Michener and Joyce Carol Oates) to Boston. His report:

"When I first tried to contact Bellow for an interview, I heard from his secretary, who told me he had suffered an illness, was convalescing and couldn't talk with me. 'He's also trying to complete a novel he's been working on for nearly ten years,' she said. 'Frankly, I don't think he'll ever finish it.'

"Six months later I tried again. This time he responded, saying he was inclined to talk. Half a year later I flew to Boston, where we met at his office on the sixth floor of Boston University's Department of Theology. His solid brown desk was old, the windows behind it somewhat grimy. There were no couches to sink into, no paintings on the walls, just two flimsily framed pieces of paper: one his National Book Award for 'Herzog,' the other the Harold Washington Literary Award. There were three black filing cabinets, one wall of books and four cardboard boxes on the worn purple carpet. It felt like the office of a cheap detective. We sat at a round table and spoke until dusk."

[Q] Playboy: How sick have you been, and how are you now?

[A] Bellow: I've been very sick. I went down to St. Martin in the Caribbean with my wife to finish a book about two years ago and ate some fish that was toxic. The toxin is very dangerous and often fatal. It attacks the nervous system. I wasn't aware of this at all at first. Then I began to feel rather odd. I couldn't work and passed out one night in the bathroom. My wife sent for an ambulance but I wouldn't get into it, so she got me back to Boston somehow and over to the Boston University hospital just in time, because they told me I would have died that night. They thought I was going to die anyhow. I was in intensive care for five weeks and they didn't diagnose this strange ciguatera until I was out of intensive care. They thought it was Legionnaires' disease or dengue. First I had heart failure and then double pneumonia. And in between I also had a gall bladder operation, which set me back. Any one of these things at my age could have been fatal, but I survived, though I've had a hard time pulling myself together again.

[Q] Playboy: After you recovered from this fish poisoning, were you able to write?

[A] Bellow: When I got out of the hospital I couldn't even sign my name. I couldn't manage my hand, I couldn't feed myself. They gave me a bowl of soup and a tablespoon and it was like beating a tomtom on the side of the dish. It's taken a little more than a year to recover.

[Q] Playboy: How has this affected the big novel you've been working on for the past decade, the one your former secretary believes you will never complete?

[A] Bellow: That's not accurate. Which is all I want to say about that for now.

[Q] Playboy: What kinds of demands does Boston University place on your time?

[A] Bellow: I have a special arrangement with Boston University. I teach literature one term, the spring term. I don't teach writing classes.

[Q] Playboy: Is it American, English or world literature?

[A] Bellow: It's whatever I like. I just finished teaching freshmen about ambitious young men in the 19th century. We read Balzac's Père Goriot, Stendhal's Red and the Black, Dickens' Great Expectations and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

[Q] Playboy: You mean you don't teach graduate students?

[A] Bellow: No, I like to teach the younger students because I think I should try to instill some feeling for literature.

[Q] Playboy: If you were entering college today, what would you study?

[A] Bellow: I would study history and literature. But it would be hard to find anybody teaching literature anymore because the profession has decided that we're better off without literature. The name of that trend is deconstructionism.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that the teaching of literature has been a disaster. Why?

[A] Bellow: People now teach literature to expose the authors, no matter how ancient, as racists, colonialists, imperialists, chauvinists, misogynists, exploiters, parasites, etc. Sure you can do this to Shakespeare--but why should you?

[Q] Playboy: Are you encouraged or discouraged by the students you see today, as compared with other generations?

[A] Bellow: If they've gone to reasonably decent schools they've been assigned good books. But those books are now in competition with the media and films. The challenge of a film is to reveal the inner lives of the people in it without really entering into their inner lives. The difference between a work of fiction and a movie is that the work of fiction is not just an account of actions, it's not just external, it's internal. And it's that internal life you're missing in movies.

[Q] Playboy: Plenty of people would say movies are the art form of our time.

[A] Bellow: That's like mixing up the sign over a hock shop with bowling balls. Just because the things are round and look as if they might roll doesn't mean they are what they seem to be, OK? Commercially there's no contest between the movies and the novel because people feel there's something pretentious about high art. The novel as high art has been demoted by the movie as high art, and the movie people are promoting this view.

[Q] Playboy: Do you go to many movies?

[A] Bellow: I go to movies quite a lot. I have a wife who's a great movie fan, and she drags me off to see them.

[Q] Playboy: Do the movies you see satisfy you or leave you empty?

[A] Bellow: I may be skeptical, but I can be captivated. These emotions are and should be childlike. I was highly suspicious of Schindler's List, but I was moved by it just the same. I couldn't deny that at the end I was carried away by some of the terrible things that had never been shown on film before, like the young woman presuming to offer advice, shot and killed right before your eyes. You can't help but be moved by that. Violently moved.

[Q] Playboy: What did you think of Robin Williams' portrayal of Tommy Wilhelm in the PBS film of your novel Seize the Day?

[A] Bellow: I didn't like it much. I thought that Robin had succumbed to the temptation to make Tommy Wilhelm a very schmaltzy, Jewish hysterical character.

[Q] Playboy: You once observed: "Give an actor a sentence with a subordinate clause and it kills him. He gets a hernia trying to heave it across the lights." Are there any actors you've seen who could make such a heave?

[A] Bellow: I like Jack Nicholson quite a lot, he's a very intelligent actor--that is to say, for an actor he's quite intelligent. He was interested in directing, not acting in, Henderson the Rain King. He had it under option for some years.

[Q] Playboy: Did you meet with him?

[A] Bellow: Yeah, I enjoyed meeting him. I was impressed by the fact that he didn't throw the roaches of his marijuana away but kept them in a little silver case.

[Q] Playboy: Must have been expensive dope.

[A] Bellow: Or they might have been auctioned as relics. Those guys are about as close to holy men as we get this removed from India.

[Q] Playboy: Did you share a joint with Nicholson?

[A] Bellow: No, he didn't offer me any.

[Q] Playboy: Actors obviously amuse you. Have you known any intimately?

[A] Bellow: The only actress I ever knew well was Marilyn Monroe, whom I knew quite well in the days when she was married to Arthur Miller. She was like somebody who had picked up a high-voltage wire and then couldn't get rid of it. You often felt that she was supercharged. There were moments of wistfulness when you could see how willingly she would have cut off the charge if she'd been able to do it, but she couldn't. I don't even think she was aware of the superexcited state she was in. She was very charming and too beautiful to be real. She had a kind of curious incandescence under the skin, which is rare.

[Q] Playboy: MGM expressed interest in you after Dangling Man was published--but it wasn't to option the book, was it?

[A] Bellow: No. It was a guy named Goldwyn, not from the famous Goldwyns, who came to Chicago and called me up. I went downtown hoping he wanted to buy the book. Instead he told me that he'd seen pictures of me and thought that I would do well as an actor.

[Q] Playboy: Did you give that suggestion any consideration?

[A] Bellow: I was outraged. [Laughs] I was wrong, I should have done it. In those days I was very proud of being a writer.

[Q] Playboy: And you weren't thinking of making your fortune on the big screen?

[A] Bellow: I was never interested in being rich. Not in the slightest.

[Q] Playboy: Years later you had your chance to appear, as yourself, in Woody Allen's Zelig. How'd he talk you into it?

[A] Bellow: That was a piece of foolishness. If I'd known what it was about I would never have done it. But Woody Allen made a great secret out of this. He wouldn't say what the film was about. All he said was that he was chatting up a certain number of intellectuals on an illdefined subject. I knew some others who were doing it, including Bruno Bettelheim, whom I call the Bettelheim of the Republic, so I thought it might be a gas. He sent me some pages of dialogue. The circumstances were very amusing. It was being filmed in an old apartment on Central Park West. I went there and walked around and ran into a solitary young man drifting from room to room. He told me that he had inherited the apartment from his parents but couldn't maintain it, so he rented it out to movie companies. I said, "What do you do?" He said, "I'm a novelist."

[Q] Playboy: Did this guy have any idea who you were?

[A] Bellow: I don't think so.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps that's a fitting image of the writer: One who wanders aimlessly among the rented empty rooms of an apartment he cannot afford to maintain.

[A] Bellow: Nowadays when a young man thinks of becoming a writer, first he thinks of his hairstyle and then what clothes he should wear and then what whiskey he's going to endorse.

[Q] Playboy: What did you think of when you first thought of becoming a writer?

[A] Bellow: It wasn't that I was going to be a glamorous person who would impress people. I had no idea what being a writer meant, really.

[Q] Playboy: Did you know in grade school that you wanted to be a writer?

[A] Bellow: Oh yes, I definitely knew.

[Q] Playboy: Did your parents try to discourage you?

[A] Bellow: My mother didn't interfere with me. Of course, she died when I was 17. She was concerned, as I later learned--she would talk to the neighbors and to her friends and to her dressmaker. But my parents came from St. Petersburg and were fairly sophisticated people. They were readers. In principle they wouldn't have had any objection to my being a writer. They just doubted that a child could be serious about this and whether he had the stuff for it. How were they supposed to know that?

[Q] Playboy: When did you become aware of the power of the written word?

[A] Bellow: When I found myself in the children's ward of a hospital when I was eight.

[Q] Playboy: Was that when you came down with tuberculosis?

[A] Bellow: It wasn't tuberculosis. It was something called empyema, an infection of the respiratory system that fills the lung cavity with fluid. I had to be tapped and I ran a fever every afternoon.

[Q] Playboy: How long did that last?

[A] Bellow: Nearly a year.

[Q] Playboy: It must have been quite a formative year in your life.

[A] Bellow: Oh, yes, it was indeed, because I was away from home for the first time. It was a few years after World War One, and it was a very restricted, old-fashioned place.

[Q] Playboy: Were there kids a lot sicker than you? Did you witness children dying?

[A] Bellow: Yeah, it was quite upsetting. You'd see activity during the night, the nurses were running, a light would go on, a screen would be set up along somebody's bed, and in the morning it was an empty bed. And you knew the kid had died.

[Q] Playboy: Did you think that you might die?

[A] Bellow: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: Did it make you more determined to live, or were you resigned to possibly not making it?

[A] Bellow: Resigned? No, I would hunker down in my bed and make myself as small as possible.

[Q] Playboy: So death couldn't find you?

[A] Bellow: Something like that. I met the world at the age of eight there in the hospital, and I had never known it on those terms before.

[Q] Playboy: And how did you spend your time there?

[A] Bellow: Reading, though reading matter was very limited. There were the funny papers, which were very important then, with characters that don't exist anymore, like Happy Hooligan, Slim Jim, Mutt and Jeff, Boob McNutt.

[Q] Playboy: That wasn't what introduced you to the power of the word, was it?

[A] Bellow: No. A lady brought me a copy of the New Testament. She was solemn, grim, middle-aged, dressed with many layers of clothing, long skirts, laced boots, a big hat. She was connected with some missionary society. First she tested me to see if I could read well enough. I learned to read the Old Testament when I was four--I was reading Genesis in Hebrew, which was a very powerful influence. The New Testament made a big hit with me. I was terribly moved by the Gospels. The rest was off-putting, but I read about the life and death of Jesus and realized he was a Jew. I began to feel a responsibility for the crucifixion. I loved Jesus. I realized I could not talk to my family when I got home about this. They would have been shocked and angry with me. So I kept it to myself. There were all kinds of things I had to keep to myself. And that was what I learned in the hospital.

[Q] Playboy: How did the Depression affect your family?

[A] Bellow: It was harder to make a living. During the Depression my father was in a business selling wood for fuel to Jewish bakers. In those days they used scrap wood in their ovens, which he used to get from northern Wisconsin. I used to go around with him quite a lot, so I knew most of the Jewish bakers of Chicago. We were never hungry, we just didn't have any money.

[Q] Playboy: Those who remember the Depression often consider it the most defining time of their lives.

[A] Bellow: It was defining in a curious way. Instead of breeding crime and antagonism it bred compassion and solidarity between people. They were much less harsh or severe than in times of prosperity. Sometimes I thought that the greatest blow of the Depression was not lack of money--it was damage to the pride of honest working people who felt the Depression was somehow a punishment.

[Q] Playboy: Did you feel something like that when your mother died when you were 17?

[A] Bellow: That was a terrible shock. It was a long, drawn-out cancer death. I could not even imagine my mother being dead. It was the greatest challenge to my imagination when she died because I couldn't imagine existence without her. We were really a very close family, my two brothers, my sister, my parents.

[Q] Playboy: How did her death affect your father?

[A] Bellow: He was devastated. He felt the sexual privation of her long illness and he didn't do anything while she was alive, I know, but she hadn't been dead very long before he began to see ladies in the neighborhood. He remarried within two years.

[Q] Playboy: Did you like your stepmother?

[A] Bellow: I liked her, but I liked her like a good joke. She was a funny lady. I couldn't take her seriously, though.

[Q] Playboy: You've said your father was violent, strong and authoritarian.

[A] Bellow: He was. He'd beat all of us.

[Q] Playboy: With a strap or with his hand?

[A] Bellow: Whatever came first.

[Q] Playboy: Have you experienced much violence in your life?

[A] Bellow: Quite a bit. I have seen a lot of it--enough to make me feel fright at being in a state of nature again, of having nothing but my naked self to depend upon.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever physically been a victim, other than from the hands of your father?

[A] Bellow: I was abused when I was a child by a stranger in an alley.

[Q] Playboy: Sexually?

[A] Bellow: Yeah.

[Q] Playboy: How old were you?

[A] Bellow: Seven, six.

[Q] Playboy: Did he make you cry?

[A] Bellow: He threatened me.

[Q] Playboy: How far did it go?

[A] Bellow: It went pretty far. I don't want to go into detail on that. [Pauses] I'm amused when I read about child abuse today because it is exaggerated and an unsavory falling back on one's legal status. It's also fashionable to hate your parents. It's a nasty little vice encouraged by society. It's a sign that people are unable to shed their childhood. It's a way of remaining childish, of explaining your own defects, that you were unjustly punished or abused as a child. I've never found it to be much more than a racket. I've been in courtrooms enough to know that there is such a thing as genuine child abuse, but when the middle class began to horn in on this, I said, uh-uh.

[Q] Playboy: Did you follow the Lyle and Erik Menendez trial?

[A] Bellow: Yes, I did. The first trial was disgraceful. The court shouldn't have accepted the testimony about how their parents did them sexual harm. That the jury would take their word for it stank to high heaven.

[Q] Playboy: Well, it was tried in California.

[A] Bellow: Yeah. California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need. You can quote me.

[Q] Playboy: What did you think of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial?

[A] Bellow: Trial by jury is in trouble everywhere, but in California the whole justice system is in deep trouble. It's no longer reliable. Everything is immediately transformed into a big TV show or spectacle. They are so narcotized by entertainment that they tend to transform everything from real life into entertainment terms. The whole thing's unreal.

[Q] Playboy: We take it then that you were shocked by the Simpson verdict?

[A] Bellow: Yes, I was shocked. I've never seen two murder victims so quickly forgotten. I could remember from my own childhood what an enormity a murder was. It was taken really very seriously. Now it's nothing to take a human life. It's like watching a comedy cartoon in which the hero falls in front of a steamroller and is rolled flat, then he's picked up and propped against a wall and in the next frame he's running again. So it had no reality.

[Q] Playboy: More than half a century ago, in 1940, you were in Mexico when one of your heroes, Leon Trotsky, was killed by an assassin. Was that murder made more real to you when you saw Trotsky in his coffin?

[A] Bellow: Not in his coffin, just on a table in the hospital.

[Q] Playboy: How did you manage that? Trotsky was an international figure--wasn't there security?

[A] Bellow: No. In those times, everybody went everywhere. I said I was an American journalist, so they let me in. Trotsky was wearing massive bloody bandages, his face and beard were smeared with blood.

[Q] Playboy: Trotsky became labeled and wound up in exile. Is being labeled a Jewish writer as annoying to you as labels are to Joyce Carol Oates, who complains that she's categorized as a woman's writer?

[A] Bellow: If you'll excuse me, anti-Semitism is not in the same class as what people might call misogyny or antifeminism. It's very different.

[Q] Playboy: Would you rather not be called a Jew?

[A] Bellow: I don't mind being called a Jew. I am a Jew.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you do think that you've been a disappointment to those Jews who, as you've noted, "expect Jewish writers to do good work for them and propagandize for them."

[A] Bellow: Do they really care very much about what writers say? They don't. At the moment the push-button reaction to me is that I'm a conservative. But that's just foolish labeling--they don't know whether I am a conservative or not, they've just heard that. Everything is rumor, all opinion is rumor. People simply react to rumor by repeating it as though it were true. There's nothing I can do about that.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider conservative to be a negative word?

[A] Bellow: In some quarters it is, in some it's a positive word. At Commentary magazine it's a positive word. But Commentary doesn't review my books, and if I'm a conservative, why are my books not reviewed at Commentary?

[Q] Playboy:Commentary did review Henderson the Rain King, and raised a point that might be said of many of your works: "What is so far chiefly missing in Bellow's writing is an account of what his heroes want to be free from." Is that a fair thing to expect from you?

[A] Bellow: There's an old Yiddish saying that translates: A fool throws a stone into a pond, ten sages go into the pond looking for it and can't find it. In other words, it takes almost nothing except a thoughtless tossing of a stone to motivate foolish people. Why should I answer that question? A dyspeptic book reviewier says something, and now I have to answer him at this moment? I don't have to answer him.

[Q] Playboy: Philip Roth said that, unlike Elie Wiesel or Isaac Bashevis Singer, you are a figure of more importance to other Jewish writers than you are to the Jewish cultural audience. Is he right?

[A] Bellow: When Herzog went on the best-seller list, Hannah Arendt said it was because of the Jewish public. She was quite sensitive to that sort of thing. She had an interest in keeping me in the kike class. Philip Roth has no such interest, he's just wrong.

[Q] Playboy: Seymour Krim wrote that he was "literally made, shaped, whetted and given a world with a purpose by the American realistic novel of the mid to late Thirties." Was it like that for you as well?

[A] Bellow: I think so. We all read Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Louis Bromfield and their English counterparts such as Archibald Cronin, Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells.

[Q] Playboy: Was there any novel that got to you emotionally?

[A] Bellow: I found Dreiser's An American Tragedy hard to read because it was so extremely painful, almost unbearable. One of those books I didn't finish reading until much later.

[Q] Playboy: What made it so painful?

[A] Bellow: Just the horror of having taken a pregnant woman out in a boat and murdering her.

[Q] Playboy: Your own first novel, The Very Dark Trees, dealt with a white man who turned black. What happened to that?

[A] Bellow: It was accepted by a publisher in San Francisco, Colt Press, which had published Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi, so I was impressed by that. I was only 26 or 27 and after I reread it I decided to destroy it.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Bellow: I was ashamed to be associated with it. I threw it down the incinerator drop in the building where I lived.

[Q] Playboy: How many manuscripts have you done that with over the years?

[A] Bellow: A few.

[Q] Playboy: In 1959 Norman Mailer wrote: "If I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx, Joyce and Freud, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler, Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way." Did you have similar ambitions?

[A] Bellow: He deserved to fail with a fantasy like that. He wasn't thinking about writing a marvelous book, he was thinking of placing himself in a tradition. I never had such notions. And I doubt that many of those people had such notions. Mailer is an extraordinary writer of vigorous prose, but he doesn't have the kind of mind that goes with the kind of writing he chose to do. He does have historical ideas about himself, but they are foolish ideas.

[Q] Playboy: What writers among your peers do you feel had the talent to pull off their ideas successfully?

[A] Bellow: Among my contemporaries I very much like John Cheever. I admired and loved Faulkner. I like Wright Morris and J.F. Powers a lot. They're all people with much more modest aims, which doesn't mean their novels are not good. They're first-rate.

[Q] Playboy: What about the novels of Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, William Gaddis, Gabriel García Márquez?

[A] Bellow: Nabokov was a very accomplished writer, but he was also a cold narcissist who invited the reader to join him. Kerouac belonged to a movement--the Beat spirit of the country--and was sort of a cult writer. I never had much to do with that. Gaddis is an excellent writer, I like him a lot. He's an original, a great user of the language. I liked García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, but all the others are just reruns of that. As you grow older you don't like to involve yourself in reckless reading of a great number of books; you want to limit yourself to the best that your generation has to offer.

[Q] Playboy: What was your impression of Samuel Beckett, whom you met in Paris?

[A] Bellow: He was a very great person. You had a feeling about him that he was humanly significant, physically even, when he strolled across the boulevard to meet you and sat down at a café table near the Pont Royal Hotel. It gave me marvelous comfort to see and talk with him, often about James Joyce. Beckett was so sane, so balanced, so quiet, so unpretentious.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever read Joyce's Finnegans Wake?

[A] Bellow: No. I'm waiting for the nursing home to read it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you measure yourself against other writers?

[A] Bellow: Well, one does, you know? Recently I reread Crime and Punishment and I said to myself, If only you could do this kind of thing, wouldn't it be great?

[Q] Playboy: We know your strengths as a writer, but what would you consider your weaknesses?

[A] Bellow: One of my weaknesses as a writer is that I was far too modest in my choice of subjects. If I were going to invest my talent more profitably I should have had more ambitious themes than I allowed myself to have.

[Q] Playboy: Can you be more specific? How could you have been more ambitious?

[A] Bellow: Well, Augie March was a very ambitious book, but it was ambitious in a different way. It was ambitious in language because I wanted to invent a more energized language that would allow me to move much more freely than I had hitherto been able to move. I wanted to be able to do American society in a way in which it had never been done before, and in part I succeeded in that book. But I failed because in the end I could not govern my discovery. I couldn't control it.

[Q] Playboy: Cynthia Ozick considered Augie the second American prose revolution, after Hemingway. Did you have a sense of that?

[A] Bellow: I wanted to do it for myself; I had no idea of establishing a benchmark. I'm beginning to see that my ambitions were rather strangely limited. Not that I was modest. I've never been modest. But I set myself bounds and I had to liberate myself from those bounds. Augie March starts out as a naive person and I don't let him get too sophisticated--that's a limitation in the book.

[Q] Playboy:Augie March also set off a storm of critical side-taking. There were those, among them Dwight Macdonald, who highly praised it, and others, such as Elizabeth Hardwick and Norman Podhoretz, who didn't like it at all. How do you deal with such mixed reviews?

[A] Bellow: You have to have a thick skin. I began to understand what I had done with Augie March that had upset so many people. I had unintentionally turned over a good many WASP applecarts. I had introduced a note into American fiction that was dangerous. It was undisciplined, it was awkward, it was jazzy and it reflected immigrant--and particularly Jewish--points of view that were unwelcome to the WASP establishment. It had never occurred to me before that I might be treading on the toes of the Brahmins or the heirs of the Brahmins with an interest in controlling their undisciplined and disciplined unfortunate Jews who had not been sent to Harvard. Augie March was too unbuttoned, too red-skinned even for the redskins.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that you succeeded in liberating the language and creating a truly original character with Augie?

[A] Bellow: Yes, I did. I felt that I had liberated the American novel from what was left of the English mandarin influence. And even from the Hemingway influence, because we did need liberation from that. Hemingway was a very marvelous and beautiful writer who was constricting. He produced novels with a highly polished surface. You didn't want to mar the surface of his beautifully constructed and polished stories or novels. But then it was too narrowing, because there were all kinds of experience which would never fit into that. Hemingway's personal attitudes intending to redefine American manhood were too constricting and too exclusive. But you could see what the social effects of Hemingway's books were.

[Q] Playboy: Are writers defining the American character as much today?

[A] Bellow: This has been taken over by journalism. Magazines such as Playboy and Esquire instruct young men in the way to be acceptably and successfully American: how to date, how to dress, how to buy a car, how to order a meal, how to prepare a salad dressing, how to take a holiday.

[Q] Playboy: Not long ago writers such as Tom Wolfe and other New Journalists were shouting that the novel had fallen and that journalists had wiped out the novel as literature's main event.

[A] Bellow: And here is Tom Wolfe making his fortune out of the novel some years later. Seems prophetically inconsistent.

[Q] Playboy: Wolfe addresses you personally in his opening to The New Journalism by saying it started the first new direction in American literature in half a century. "Bellow, Barth, Updike, Roth--the novelists are all out there right now ransacking the literary histories and sweating it out, wondering where they stand. Damn it all, Saul, the Huns have arrived."

[A] Bellow: Yes, and the Huns were taught to read English and then they bought Bonfire of the Vanities, which was a whole series of the most stunning billboards along the highway that I ever saw. Let me tell you something: I'm a Jew, and when Jews hear the language of the Holocaust, because that's what it is--the world will be Novelrein, just as Hitler wanted to make Germany Judenrein, OK?--I say to myself, it's all meshuga. I am used to hearing this eliminationist talk.

[Q] Playboy: Are you also used to hearing the kind of assessment a writer like Joyce Carol Oates has given of you, when she called you a genius in these pages and said you are "off the scale of even Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon or Thomas Wolfe"?

[A] Bellow: I don't think Truman Capote gets near the tail of the comet. Pynchon I like, but he is sort of an endless virtuoso. It's like listening to 20 hours of Paganini. One would be plenty. I loved Thomas Wolfe when I was young. I stayed up all night reading Look Homeward, Angel when I was 19, and I remember in the morning how devastated I was to have no more Thomas Wolfe to read.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to Oates' remark: Modesty aside, do you have that sense about yourself and your work?

[A] Bellow: I don't think in those terms. I tend to agree with her, but Lenin said, when describing what happened in Russia in 1917, "The power was lying in the street, I just picked it up." [Laughs] I do have the feeling that, yes, I did do something. Not that anybody cares much about such things nowadays. The country has changed so that what I do no longer signifies anything, as it did when I was young. There was such a thing as a literary life in this country and there were people who lived as writers. All that changed in my lifetime. Of course, this is such an enormous country that sometimes I think that if only one tenth of one percent of the population were reading seriously, it would still mean a quarter of a million readers.

[Q] Playboy: How relevant is the novelist today? Do we need novelists?

[A] Bellow: Do we need them? Yes. Do we know it? No. Although, as I say, you will still find a quarter of a million supporters somehow or other around the country. These are people who have preserved themselves secretly like members of a lodge who are not allowed to give away the secret of the handshake.

[Q] Playboy: If you had your own crystal ball, what might you see for the future of the novel?

[A] Bellow: It's a bad time for the novel. What's going to happen to the novel is what's going to happen culturally to this country. The number of readers is diminishing. Family life today is not creating more readers. Partly because of TV, partly because of schooling, partly because of books prepared for schoolchildren that pretend to be stories and that are so ill constructed and flat and corny that the kids have no regard for them. The experience of literature is missing from the lives of the younger generation of readers, and that's a bad deal. I don't think the classics are being read anymore. I know the Bible isn't being read much anymore, and the Bible is a great oceanic source for literature. When the Bible diminishes in stature, literature diminishes with it.

[Q] Playboy: Having married five times, what do you make of the institution of marriage, and what have you learned about it that you can pass on to your grandchildren?

[A] Bellow: You should have asked me this serious question at first, when I was full of piss and vinegar. I learned that the sexual revolution is a very bloody affair, like most revolutions.

[Q] Playboy: Divorces can be costly--to the soul and to the pocket. Are the divorce laws fair?

[A] Bellow: I had one big lawsuit relating to a divorce. Let me put it this way: I never yet saw a judge on the bench whom I would trust to condemn a man to death. That's one of my arguments against capital punishment. I don't think these people are often humanly qualified to decide these legal questions or to interpret the law.

[Q] Playboy: You have three sons from three of your marriages. Has it been difficult for them?

[A] Bellow: Undoubtedly.

[Q] Playboy: Any resentment in them, having you as their father?

[A] Bellow: Yeah, I guess so. However, let's get on with this.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been in therapy?

[A] Bellow: I was lucky that the writer in me survived all the therapy I had.

[Q] Playboy: And have you been through analysis?

[A] Bellow: At the insistence of one of my wives, I went to a psychoanalyst for a while. I enjoyed talking with him, but I was never analyzed.

[Q] Playboy: What about Reichian therapy? It's been said that your experiences with it freed you to write Augie March.

[A] Bellow: That's an incorrect theory, because I started writing Augie March in Paris two years before I ever heard of Wilhelm Reich.

[Q] Playboy: So you're saying that Reichian sexual therapy wasn't responsible for (continued on page 166)Saul Bellow(continued from page 68) changing your style of writing?

[A] Bellow: It would have been a disaster if it had. I protected my writing from the therapy, which I would call biological holistic therapy.

[Q] Playboy: Reich wrote a book about orgasms and his orgone box. Did you ever use the box?

[A] Bellow: I would sit in it from time to time. I don't know what effect it had on me. It would heat me up quite a lot. It was agreeable to be in the box, because it shut off all kinds of outside influences and gave you a meditative hour, which never does any harm. But I never went beyond Reichian therapy--that was enough.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you stop doing it?

[A] Bellow: Because it released violent feelings that I then couldn't govern. I'd lose my temper horrendously.

[Q] Playboy: You had never lost your temper like that before?

[A] Bellow: Not to the point of getting into fights.

[Q] Playboy: Physical fights? With strangers?

[A] Bellow: Yeah. I'd be insulted on the subway, I'd be ready to fight.

[Q] Playboy: Ever get your nose broken or eye blackened?

[A] Bellow: No, luckily I'd be dragged away. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: Were you a good fighter?

[A] Bellow: Not that good. I had exaggerated ideas about my powers. I think most men do.

[Q] Playboy: Joyce Carol Oates said that she couldn't think of many of her male colleagues who've written compellingly or convincingly about women. She cited you, Faulkner and Melville as great writers who never created any female characters of great depth. What writers have best captured the way a woman thinks and feels?

[A] Bellow: It's a question you should address to a lady, since evidently I'm down here not as a misogynist but as somebody who's missed the boat on the other sex. Is this for your lady readers--a sort of sop to throw them another victim? Somebody else to hate? It's one thing to write about women in a time when women are happy to read about themselves. It's another thing in an ideological age when women read you in order to see whether you measure up ideologically to their standards.

[Q] Playboy: John Gardner once called you a male chauvinist pig. Are you?

[A] Bellow: What should I say, that I'm not a pig? There's an old Irish gag from Chicago that goes: "Mike said you wasn't fit to live with pigs. But I stood up for you, I said you was." Why should I defend myself against charges by John Gardner or anybody else? They may well have been wrong. I never asked them to stand up to my charges.

Why do interviewers ask people questions that they wouldn't ask their neighbor for fear of being punched in the nose? Like, "Why are your bowel movements such a strange color?" Or, "Why do you piss through your ears?" I'm not responsible for what so-and-so said about me. I don't mind obliging you, I just don't like being put through the shredder.

[Q] Playboy: We have confidence in your ability to retort. What do you make of the AIDS epidemic?

[A] Bellow: If I believed in God I would say that this is God's way of restoring the seriousness to sexual connections. Because AIDS is a phenomenon that comes from promiscuity, which is wider among homosexuals than among heterosexuals.

[Q] Playboy: Some people think it's God's way of thinning the population, as wars did in the past.

[A] Bellow: If he wanted to thin the population, why did he start with homosexuals? They're the ones who are least likely to reproduce.

[Q] Playboy: You don't believe in God?

[A] Bellow: I don't really know what to think. I know what I thought about him when I was a child--I had an image of God that over the years turned out to be the image of my big brother. He parted his hair in the middle and he had a round, moony sort of face, and he wasn't really benevolent.

[Q] Playboy: Have you thought about an afterlife, immortality?

[A] Bellow: I think about those things all the time. There is nothing in death that science can tell you about with certainty. I find pretty good support in Plato because Socrates said it clearly in the Dialogues: Either there is a life after death or there is none. If there is none, then you go back to the state you were in before you were born, oblivion. So it's either oblivion or immortality.

[Q] Playboy: What's your intuition: oblivion or immortality?

[A] Bellow: My intuition is immortality. No argument can be made for it, but it's just as likely as oblivion.

[Q] Playboy: If you could come back as something else, what would that be?

[A] Bellow: I haven't the slightest idea. I think of life as a course of instruction and education and I think of the soul as a student coming back time after time. So life is just a graduate study program. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: In Mr. Sammler's Planet, Sammler categorizes people who threaten him into various animals. If you were to describe yourself as an animal, what would it be?

[A] Bellow: Some sort of monkey. I like the idea of being an arboreal animal, hanging by my tail, eating a banana. Reminds me of a limerick:

There was a young man from Dundee Who buggered an ape in a tree;

The results were most horrid,

All ass and no forehead,

Blue balls and a purple goatee.

[Q] Playboy: Do you remember your short poem about a Polish girl that Mark Harris mentioned in his book about you, Drumlin Woodchuck, but never quoted?

[A] Bellow: That's the one John Berryman fell in love with:

You can biff me, you can bang me,

But get it you'll never.

Think because I'm a Polish girl I fuck?

Kiss my ass, that's what you are.

[Q] Playboy: What has money meant to you?

[A] Bellow: I haven't got all that much money. I was married too many times to have much money.

[Q] Playboy: Capote once observed that what makes the rich different is that they eat tiny fresh vegetables and meats that are nearly unborn.

[A] Bellow: Truman hated me.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Bellow: I don't know enough about homosexual psychology to be able to explain it. When I first knew Truman Capote he was a charming little boy whom I met in Richard Wright's Paris apartment. He didn't have any ax to grind then, though he monopolized the conversation by talking about his society friends and his closeness to the House of Windsor and so on. But later on, he looked like a shrunken Sydney Greenstreet, and he was vicious about me.

[Q] Playboy: He didn't think you deserved the Nobel Prize.

[A] Bellow: Maybe I didn't deserve the Nobel Prize, but it's a cinch he didn't even deserve the Pulitzer. I can't see what Truman deserved at all, except a kick in the ass.

[Q] Playboy: He felt he created something new, the nonfiction novel, with In Cold Blood.

[A] Bellow: I wasn't bowled over. And his early books are just Southern faded fabrics, that's all.

[Q] Playboy: Some of the stories he published certainly created a stir.

[A] Bellow: There was one story in which he said Jews ought to be stuffed and put in museums. [Laughs] That's where it is: That's where the little fairies like that really belong, in Auschwitz on the general's staff, in the Auschwitz barracks with a swagger stick.

[Q] Playboy: Capote thought that Answered Prayers would kill any chance he had of winning any great literary prize. Did the Nobel Prize mean a great deal to you?

[A] Bellow: I didn't give a hoot about it one way or the other. I don't exist for that sort of thing, and I was very careful to see that it didn't affect my life too much.

[Q] Playboy: How can it not?

[A] Bellow: It's just a prize, like any other. Proust didn't get it, nor Tolstoy nor Joyce. So it isn't as though you were in the royal line and you went to Stockholm for the coronation.

[Q] Playboy: Is there a downside to having won the prize?

[A] Bellow: Yes, people feel that you are a public functionary, that you have to produce a certain amount of cultural shrubbery on God's little acre. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: So it didn't affect the way you write?

[A] Bellow: Not at all.

[Q] Playboy: Norman Mailer has been campaigning for the Nobel Prize for years. Do you think he should get it?

[A] Bellow: Well, I'd give it to him--if he had anything to trade. [Laughs]

[Q] Playboy: You're already on record for saying that writers seldom wish other writers well. Did winning the Nobel Prize widen the gulf between you and your peers?

[A] Bellow: I suppose that was Truman's problem. Maybe even Gore Vidal's problem. Gore never mentions me without treating my head like an ashtray, flicking his cigarette on it.

[Q] Playboy: Hold on. Vidal said in Palimpsest that, with the exception of you, his "celebrated contemporaries all seem to have stopped learning in their 20s."

[A] Bellow: Well, that's true. But I looked up some of the references in that book and they were not as kind as all that. He can't resist putting me down.

[Q] Playboy: Is Vidal a better nonfiction or fiction writer?

[A] Bellow: His novels lack originality. His essays are much more interesting. Gore Vidal is a good writer, he's just not as good as he thinks he is. I often thought of Gore as a patrician who got trapped among plebeians, and somehow he was condemned by his sexual preferences to live a level or two beneath the station to which he's entitled. He's always resented it a great deal: He doesn't see why homosexuals should not also be aristocrats. Well, he's right about that.

[Q] Playboy: Do you read any newer writers, such as David Foster Wallace, William Vollmann, T.C. Boyle?

[A] Bellow: I have read a little of Boyle. I rather like him. There's this terrific, meshuga young American writer named Denis Johnson, who wrote Resuscitation of a Hanged Man.

[Q] Playboy: How about Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates--are they Nobel-worthy?

[A] Bellow: I like Don DeLillo, he's often very amusing and penetrating. And I like Cormac McCarthy very much, grim as all get out--though I didn't like All the Pretty Horses so well because it was a little more conventional. Joyce Carol Oates offends people by being so prolific, which is the wrong reason to be offended. On the whole, I'm for her, she's a very good writer. I read James Dickey's Deliverance again recently and was knocked over by it. It's one of the finest books of that generation of writers.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever see the movie?

[A] Bellow: No, I avoid movies based on novels that I like a lot, because I don't like them to be damaged. I don't know how many times I've seen films of Anna Karenina, and they grow worse with every decade. The fact that Anna Karenina has survived all these movies and is still infinitely greater than any of them gives me hope.

[Q] Playboy: Back to the future Nobel laureates: What about John Updike or Philip Roth?

[A] Bellow: I could see Roth; he's a little buggy now and then, but a very gifted writer.

[Q] Playboy: And someone eight years your senior, James Michener?

[A] Bellow: I would rather see him get it than Toni Morrison, but I don't want to get into that. I'm not here to give prizes.

[Q] Playboy: Geoffrey Wolff has written about how many writers drink and how many are drunks and alcoholics, listing Fitzgerald, London, Crane, Thomas Wolfe, Hammett, Capote, Berryman, Lardner, Parker, O'Hara, Kerouac, Poe, Thurber, etc. He also pointed out that five American Nobel Prize winners had the problem: O'Neill, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis. How did you escape it?

[A] Bellow: When we were in Canada my old man was a bootlegger. He had a still and we used to go out there. I was just a little kid. He'd get inside and pour some of the booze into a dish and set it afire. If it didn't all burn out and there was fluid left in the bottom that wasn't fit to sell, he'd make me taste it. I don't know, I just got my intoxication out of reading poetry. I found Macbeth intoxicating.

[Q] Playboy: Whose ideas in this century have intoxicated you? You've said, "There are only a few big ideas. I can think of only a very small handful of people in the 20th century who were truly original." Who are they?

[A] Bellow: I think Kafka was truly original. Proust. Joyce. Probably Heidegger, though I don't care for him. Certain of our scientists, like Richard Feynman, who must have been a genuine original. Picasso was a real original. Matisse also. Hemingway. John Berryman. Eugene O'Neill.

[Q] Playboy: And what about Tennessee Williams?

[A] Bellow: No, I don't think so. He was cut from a cloth that, you see quite a lot of.

[Q] Playboy: Arthur Miller?

[A] Bellow: No.

[Q] Playboy: Sigmund Freud?

[A] Bellow: I'm quite puzzled by Freud. I don't really think all that much of him. First of all, his literary influence isn't clear to me; he is derivative, in a way. Second, Freud needed a theory of dreams, so he dreamed all the dreams himself. He went into business using himself as stock. He was a Jewish businessman. Whatever he needed, he made at home. He was a home industry. He was extremely ingenious, obviously a man of great gifts. But then he narrowed down everything to his own explanations, with the erotic as the root. It's not erotic in the great sense in which Plato and Socrates had an Eros. Freud's Eros is much narrower and it's biologically determined. It's instinctual with us to have the Oedipus complex. You have it whether you wish it or not; so, in a way, you're sentenced and Freud sentences you from the bench to manifest these deep, vital motives that are all sexual in character. You can't get away from that. I don't like to be boxed in like that. It's chutzpah on his part.

[Q] Playboy: Do any 20th century musicians or composers move you?

[A] Bellow: Dmitry Shostakovich. Igor Stravinsky sometimes.

[Q] Playboy: Not the Beatles, or Elvis or Barbra Streisand?

[A] Bellow: That's pop stuff. It's good, charming, but pop is pop.

[Q] Playboy: Can a pop master such as Andy Warhol ever reach the status of a Matisse?

[A] Bellow: Well, Warhol is no longer here to sign tin cans. I don't know--I haven't seen all the tin cans assembled yet.

[Q] Playboy: What did you think of Marlon Brando's comment that the Jews run Hollywood and that they never allow the image of the "kike" to reach the screen?

[A] Bellow: Well, I never thought he was a great thinker or a first-class philosophical character. I was a little surprised he could be so foolish. Most people are much better at concealing their anti-Semitism than Marlon Brando is. Anti-Semitism is extremely common. If you're still being shocked at the age of 80 by the random expressions of anti-Semitic views, there's something wrong with you. In a century where we experienced the Holocaust and two world wars, shock is a little more difficult to find. I don't expect much from a person like Brando. Why would I be shocked? Because he appeared in On the Waterfront? He had a script.

[Q] Playboy: Were you shocked about the Oklahoma City bombing and the incarceration of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols?

[A] Bellow: They're macho types, imaginary pioneers, militants, fighters in the cause of freedom. But, really, their minds have been poisoned by all kinds of ideological marijuana. There have always been these know-nothing movements in this country. I'm reading about the life of Lincoln now and he obviously had to deal with it then.

[Q] Playboy: You've written about all sorts of victims. Have you ever felt yourself to be one?

[A] Bellow: No, I don't feel myself to be a victim at all. I feel myself to be a winner, I always did. I was interested in victims as a subject.

[Q] Playboy: Are you glad to have lived at this time, or would you have preferred another time in history?

[A] Bellow: You have to take what you can get, not make demands. That's what's so striking about Mailer. He sprang from his mother's womb with two fists filled with demands and requirements for what life was going to be.

[Q] Playboy: What were the demands made of you back in 1970 when you were shouted off the stage at San Francisco State College?

[A] Bellow: There was one Mexican guy who had written a book, and he stood up and denounced me. He said, "What do you want to listen to this old man for? His balls are dried up, he can't come, he's absolutely of no interest." I didn't know what to say, except, "I didn't thrust myself upon you, I came here because I was invited to speak to you." They booed me.

[Q] Playboy: Your silence was their loss.

[A] Bellow: There's one thing I do know: When I'm tempted to say something and I don't say it, I feel all the better for it. I feel I've gotten stronger.

[Q] Playboy: J.D. Salinger must feel like Superman--he's kept quiet for three decades. Roth has called Salinger the writer of the age, because he didn't turn his back on the times. Do you have any insight into why he turned silent?

[A] Bellow: I don't know Salinger. I always liked his books; he's a very good writer. I don't know why he became so embittered as to turn into a hermit. I can understand it. I can even somewhat sympathize with it. It's better not to be doing what you and I are doing here. From my point of view.

[Q] Playboy: But from our point of view, however--

[A] Bellow: Right. I'm a public commodity. I'm listed on the Amex.

[Q] Playboy: Commodities are what sell. What did you think of Sotheby's auction of Jackie Onassis' estate?

[A] Bellow: That was a travesty.

[Q] Playboy: You mean you wouldn't pay $770,000 for Kennedy's golf clubs?

[A] Bellow: I'm afraid not. I was not impressed by Kennedy. He was a charming man, very intelligent, but he was no president. Besides, his father bought the office for him. And I don't see why, in a country as sensitive about plutocrats as this one, they should have cheered when he became president.

[Q] Playboy: Bill Clinton is a great admirer of JFK's.

[A] Bellow: I don't think Clinton is anything like a president of this country. He is a yuppie, a playboy. He's basically unserious. I don't even know why he wants to be there.

[Q] Playboy: Let's turn to literary politics. Is there a literary establishment today?

[A] Bellow: No. There are poor shreds of it at The New York Review of Each Other's Books.

[Q] Playboy: What did you think about Iran's fatwa on Salman Rushdie?

[A] Bellow: I thought it was horrendous, of course. But I also thought that Rushdie had so Westernized himself that he seems to have convinced himself, as so many writers do and have done since the Twenties--since the time of Ulysses--that anything can be said in a novel and be accepted. If Joyce could treat the Catholic Church slightingly, Rushdie thought, then he could do the same with Islam. He felt that he was going to do with Islam what Joyce had done with Catholicism. He was wrong. Which means he had lost touch with Islam and had become so thoroughly Westernized he didn't recognize that this was apt or likely to happen. Maybe it was inevitable.

[Q] Playboy: In 1995 Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed. Rushdie observed in his Playboy interview that "all over the world, writers are being thrown in jail. They mysteriously die in police custody. It is open season on writers and it must stop." Will it ever be dangerous to be a writer in the U.S.?

[A] Bellow: No. They may knock us to the ropes once in a while and give us a rabbit punch to the kidneys, but nobody takes us seriously enough to kill us.

I like Jack Nicholson quite a lot, he's a very intelligent actor--that is to say, for an actor he's quite intelligent.

Hannah Arendt had an interest in keeping me in the kike class. Philip Roth has no such interest, he's just wrong.