"I had to be what movie people call the continuity girl; he expected me to read the text closely so that he could have someone to talk to as he worked on finishing it, to opine, query, schmooze, then query again," writes Elisabeth Sifton in Slate about working with Saul Bellow at Viking, which sounds like a great time even for those who didn't care for him personally. One editor who felt that way thrust a heavily bellowed proof at Sifton and gave up: "Look at this.... Just read that," he repeated. "Read it! He took a perfect sentence, the bastard, and he made it even better." I wonder what Miss Gould (who, by all accounts, did that more than once) thought of him? Sifton continues:

In the same way, he revised the shorter text of To Jerusalem and Back, his first nonfiction book and the occasion of his first publication in The New Yorker. Saul was still smarting about the magazine's treatment of his books over the decades; they'd never taken any of his stories, either. He'd recite by heart passages from reviews whose faint praise suggested, he thought, anti-Semitic condescension: "They think it's remarkable that I write as I do seeing as how it isn't my native language. That's the implication. Their idea of a Jewish writer is Isaac Singer—shtetls, exotic Polish ambience, magic, curious folkways. Believe me, I know whereof I speak. They never wanted stuff of mine." He was being paranoid, I told him, but privately I thought he was right.

William Shawn's having accepted this big piece on Bellow's trip to Jerusalem was a big deal, therefore, and it pleased him. But he was on guard, especially whilst his text was submitted to The New Yorker's elaborate editorial and fact-checking procedures, and I remember the glee with which he trumped them. For example, he had written that his first publisher-editor at Viking—the much-loved, revered Romanian Jewish Pascal Covici—had started out life in America as a grapefruit salesman in Florida. The fact-checkers asked three different people to verify this implausible statement; all three said that the only living person who would know that detail was Saul Bellow. We talked about verifiability, about the meaning of factual truth, about trusting the writer, about seeing trees and not understanding forests, especially when the landscape was Israeli.

Sifton also awards Bellow a posthumous presidential fitness patch to add to his many other laurels. "We know that stamina and persistence are essential ingredients of great art, don't we? Saul was in fighting trim. That gorgeous prose, with its sinewy elegant hilarity and syncopated rhythmic intensity—you don't think it was composed by a slob with poor muscle tone, do you?" I'm sure the Observer could do a devastating chart to see if this ratio holds true. Poets, beware the calipers!

In Chiasmus in the New Yorker, part of Mardy Grothe's fabulous project (which I've written about) devoted to the topsy-turvy rhetorical device, there's an apt example from James Atlas' "The Uses of Misery" (1998). It's a fitting tribute now: "Bellow's life trajectory is cyclical; out of misery, triumph; out of triumph, misery—an exhausting but exalted dialectic." Not a bad description of editing, either.

Editing Saul Bellow [Slate]
A Silver Dish [Bellow, New Yorker archive: "What do you do about death—in this case, the death of an old father?"]
Rereading Saul Bellow [Philip Roth, New Yorker archive: "The transformation of the novelist who published 'Dangling Man' in 1944 and 'The Victim' in 1947 into the novelist who published 'The Adventures of Augie March' in '53 is revolutionary."]