In 1994, Brent Staples, an editorial writer at the New York Times,wrote an account of Saul Bellow that was first published in The New York Times Magazine and then later as part of his memoir, Parallel Time. Raised in impoverished circumstances in Chester, Pennsylvania, Staples, who is black, described discovering Bellow upon his arrival in Hyde Park to attend the University of Chicago. Simultaneously in thrall to Bellow’s fiction and stung by Bellow’s fictional characterizations of black people, Staples “wants to lift [Bellow] bodily and pin him against a wall. Perhaps I’d corner him on the stairs and take up questions about ‘pork-chops’ and ‘crazy buffaloes’ and barbarous black pickpockets. I wanted to trophy his fear.” At the same time, “I wanted something from him … I wanted to steal the essence of him, to absorb it right into my bones.”
Staples’s Times Magazine article, as riveting and memorable as something by Bellow himself, caused an uproar, outraging Bellow’s friends and supporters and gratifying his detractors. The latter group increased exponentially one month later, when another disappointed Bellow-lover, Alfred Kazin, published his own autobiographical essay in The New Yorker. Kazin quoted a comment Bellow made to an interviewer in 1988. Addressing attempts to make undergraduate reading lists of literature more inclusive, Bellow had quipped sarcastically, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be happy to read them.” When he heard that Bellow had said that, Kazin wrote, “my heart sank.” Though barely a peep of protest occurred when Bellow’s remark first appeared in print, Kazin’s reiteration of it, so soon after Staples’s magazine essay, provoked a frenzy of denunciation.
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