The April 26 New Yorker includes a selection of Saul Bellow's letters, including a 1948 missive in which the youthful writer reflects on his timidity: "But there is a certain diffidence about me, not very obvious socially, to my own mind, that prevents me from going all out, as you call it. I assemble the dynamite but I am not yet ready to touch off the fuse."
He wrote this five years before The Adventures of Augie March and 16 years before Herzog. Once he got the fuse lit, the explosions just kept coming.
1 comment:
No poetry challenge this week so none of us will be responding to Bellow's metaphor. There'll be no gentle caress of fuses, no going off at half cock, no fizzle, splutter or firing. Give the man a Nobel, is my advice. But stand well back.
D.
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