Entry 5:

Brent and Tony,

Does Bellow's "noticing," his penchant for exhaustive thumbnail sketches of people's and places' quiddities and oddities, ever strike you as willed and preening, even a kind of aggression? A way of saying not, "look at that," but "watch me write"? Perhaps there is love, as Tony says, in Bellow's exhaustive catalogs of (for example) scalps and skin and slippers but "self-forgetting"? Not for a moment! Chekhov, Maupassant, Stendhal, Flaubert--you never hear the note of self-congratulation in them that sounds through Bellow's strenuous exaltations. I thought Seize the Day was wonderful in the way it captured the fear and desperation of Tommy Wilhelm, the terrible need of this middle-aged failure for the approval of his cold and self-absorbed father, but beginning with Augie March, and especially Herzog and Henderson, I never feel, "There it is: the real thing, life." I feel, "There it is: literary ambition, and there he is, a brilliant man with a huge vocabulary, working like a stevedore."

Katha