Life of Saul Bellow
Mar. 5th, 2019 11:32 pmCommentary magazine arrived today, and contains a review of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, the second volume of a biography of that writer. I am not a great fan of Saul Bellow (I read one of his less famous novels once, and was not enormously impressed), but I did meet the elderly gentleman and the last of his long series of wives once, when they came to my parents’ house in the Boston suburbs for dinner.
It’s odd how one can meet some famous people over the course of a lifetime, sometimes helped by having parents with connections: shake hands with a politician who had been and would again be governor of Texas, know a fellow student in college who would become a well-known author (David Foster Wallace), shake hands with several Congressmen, hear Hans Bethe lecture on supernovas, have dinner with a Nobel laureate in Literature associated with the same university as one’s father, meet authors of different sorts of literature at sf cons, exchange words with Ilya Prigogine and John Archibald Wheeler, have dinner with Roger Penrose . . .
It’s odd how one can meet some famous people over the course of a lifetime, sometimes helped by having parents with connections: shake hands with a politician who had been and would again be governor of Texas, know a fellow student in college who would become a well-known author (David Foster Wallace), shake hands with several Congressmen, hear Hans Bethe lecture on supernovas, have dinner with a Nobel laureate in Literature associated with the same university as one’s father, meet authors of different sorts of literature at sf cons, exchange words with Ilya Prigogine and John Archibald Wheeler, have dinner with Roger Penrose . . .