4S0
particular genre of which Poirier,
with justification, disapproves. The
difficulty with that genre, as the
work of Malamud, Roth, and
others testifies, is that a cluster of
customs, language, shared assump–
tions and views no longer exists in
this country, if it ever did; there–
fore the "Jewish" novelist must be
busy about re-creating, and often
making sentimental, a segment of
experience which has then
to
be
trampled upon and denied. Bellow
does not do this. Rather, his novels
have a dimension that is social in
the broadest sense, compnsmg
politics, manners, morals and mores,
together with a language all his
own. One may not care for that
language, but it is his alone, as
the many attempts to imitate it so
painfully prove.
At its best, Bellow's language is
CORRESPONDENCE
the source of his strength, and
the
point of his vulnerability on
the
few occasions when it fails him. It
is worth remembering that when
he began to write, there was
Hemingway, there was a tired
and
sterile Naturalism, or there was
an
equally sterile kind of Europeanized
experimentation in the manner of
Dos Passos, Thomas and Virginia
Wolfe-Woolf. Bellow reached for
and found a language that was
neither excessively literary nor one
more variety of Naturalism. He
was able to combine the intellectual
with the colloquial, not always with
success, to be -sure, as no one had
done before him. This is a literary
accomplishment, one which
is
abundantly present in
Herzog,
with
variations and refinements upon the
earlier work. In my view (and in
the view of many readers' who liked
Broadway and Eighty,eighth Street
TR 4-9189
