(...) How had Bellow managed to exert such an effect on writers
almost half his age, from another tradition and another continent? Putting this
question to the speakers later on, I received two particularly memorable
responses. Ian McEwan related his impression that Bellow, alone among American
writers of his generation, had seemed to assimilate the whole European
classical inheritance. And Martin Amis vividly remembered something Bellow had
once said to him, which is that if you are born in the ghetto, the very
conditions compel you to look skyward, and thus to hunger for the universal."
(...)
"Perhaps the best illustration of nobility that Bellow offers
is Augie March’s brief glimpse of Trotsky in Mexico, from which he receives a
strong impression of “deepwater greatness” and an ability to steer by the
brightest stars. Bellow himself had arrived in Mexico in 1940, just too late to
see Trotsky, who had been murdered by a hireling assassin the morning they were
meant to meet. Like Henderson, Trotsky was a man upon whom life had “decided to
use strong measures.” The founder of the Red Army was also the author of
Literature and Revolution and a coauthor of Manifesto for an Independent
Revolutionary Art. In his own person he united the Jew, the cosmopolitan, the
man of ideas, and the man of action. And the speed with which Bellow learned
from the experience of Trotsky’s murder is a theme in several of his fictions."
“Ghetto nothing!” Ravelstein said. “Ghetto Jews had highly
developed feelings, civilized nerves—thousands of years of training. They had
communities and laws. ‘Ghetto’ is an ignorant newspaper term. It’s not a ghetto
that they come from, it’s a noisy, pointless, nihilistic turmoil.”
(...)
do ensaio:"Saul Bellow: the great Assimilator", 2007..
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