I recently watched an old documentary on the life of
Saul Bellow (American Masters, PBS Passport). Along with his literary
achievements he had five wives, and no telling how many girl friends on the
side, nor how many girlfriends on the side eventually became wives. The last
one did; she was 43 years his junior and a student of his at the University of
Chicago. She now teaches in Boston
Interestingly, many of our twentieth century Nobel
laureates in literature did not lead exemplary lives. Booze and women were
constant themes for Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Hemingway, and Bellow.
Faulkner had his issues with the bottle as well. John Steinbeck had two wives,
but not at the same time. Hemingway, while on safari in 1935, got drunk and
screwed one of the native women in his entourage. Today we would characterize his
behavior as rape. But he wrote about it in his nonfiction Green Hills of
Africa as just another day in the bush.
In his fifties he fell in love with a 19-year-old in
Italy and wrote a wretched novel about it and death, Across the River and
into the Trees. In fairness, taking a more analytical approach, academics
liked the book. Nevertheless, you should read Hemingway’s A Movable Feast,
about life in Paris in the nineteen-twenties among the ‘lost generation’ of
American writers. (That term was originated by Gertrude Stein if memory serves
me.) Supposedly “Feast” is non-fiction. Supposedly. I guess too often human
weakness is a price for creative gifts. At the risk of sounding like only horny
drunk men qualify for the Nobel, I should also say that Pearl Buck and Toni
Morrison had their evenings in Stockholm, as did the poet Louise Gluck in 2020.
Enough.
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