“I assemble the dynamite but I am not ready to touch off the fuse.”

That’s a quote from Saul Bellow.  Bellow, a novelist, short story writer, and nonfiction author, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the National Medal of Arts, and the National Book Award three times (having been nominated for it six times).  I think, then, that what he thought about his own writing might interest any modern-day writer.

According to a 1948 letter by Bellow, published recently in The New Yorker (available online only to subscribers), writing “freely” was his goal. About his second novel, The Victim, he wrote:

“Compared to what is published nowadays between boards, it is an accomplishment.  Judged by my own standards, however, it is promissory.  It took hold of my mind and imagination very deeply but I know that somehow I failed to write it freely, with all the stops out from beginning to end. … I assemble the dynamite but I am not ready to touch off the fuse.”

And, in fact, this is what was written at the time in a review:

The Victim, then, is concerned with one of the great themes of European literature. Knowing this, one feels the disparity between the largeness of its theme and the modest, narrow, bare, abrupt American genre of writing in which it is realized. But this is perhaps unfair to the author. He is not after all seeking to emulate European examples; he is writing an American novel, and the American accent is inevitably a modest one.

I haven’t read much of Bellow’s work.  But I suspect that the flaws noted by that reviewer, which he attributed to Bellow writing with an American accent (odd idea), were more due to Bellow’s inability to let all the stops out with that book, or to touch off the dynamite’s fuse, as he himself asserted.

More about how one does that in later posts….

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    Last reviewed: 5 May 2010