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The author has nothing against the computer but resists using one. "Philip Roth pushes me more than anybody else. He says I'd find that I had a lot more free time." Bellow still works the old way, writing in longhand, typing that version, making corrections and then typing everything again. At the moment, he says, "I haven't got a subject. Writers who don't write are really very difficult creatures. I may not have to write anymore, you know," he adds with a smile. "I'm going to be 85."
Bellow has somehow sailed past the rocks on which so many American writers have foundered: burnout, alcoholism, depression, suicide. The only sign of inner turbulence in his life is the fact of his having been married five times. He jokes, "If at first you don't succeed, try again," and then offers a more serious account: "The times were so disorderly, and everything was up in the air. As part of that, you tried to anchor yourself. You're looking for an anchor, and a very attractive woman is to be preferred, if available. But they're not always so capable of being married, having a husband who is just another wandering soul in the night." He pays Freedman the ultimate Bellow compliment: "I can never say anything to her that she doesn't understand. And not only understand, but often she's been there in anticipation before."
Bellow is pleased by all the awards and recognition his work has received, but is not overly impressed with himself: "People used to kid me when I was a boy, and they would say, 'Ah, yes, you're going to have a Nobel Prize one day. You'll also be covered like a tree with bark.'" He refuses to romanticize his work: "I'm not a tortured writer. I had my days in my youth when I was a tortured writer. I decided that if torture is part of the job, I was going to quit."
What kept him going, in part, was something he read in his youth by the early 20th century Russian author Vasily Rozanov: "What he remains in my mind for is a piece in which he said, 'I opened my eyes and here was the world. Here was this great human and divine enterprise.' And it was as though I had just opened my eyes on what human existence was, really. It was my turn." Bellow takes that turn again, childlike wonder and all, in Ravelstein, when Chick says, "In the interval of light between the darkness in which you awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality, which was in a state of highly advanced development. I had waited for millennia to see this."
--Reported by Andrea Sachs/Boston