ten years before his death the other day, that great gossip (as the caustic john gardner described him) saul bellow was poisoned by eating a toxic fish in the caribbean.
the poisoning rendered him immobile for a time giving him fulminant pneumonia. after his recovery from a boston hospital, mr. bellow’'s nervous system was almost rendered kaput by the toxins that he could hardly write. there was a time even when he was hardly oriented as to time and place.
in hospital parlance, he would have been described during endorsements as a patient AOX2; awake, oriented only to his person, but not to time or place.
that would have been the greatest tragedy had he wallowed in that condition.
as paeans poured in from all over the world since the nobel laureate'’s death tuesday, the phrase master of universe invariably creeps into a good number of these encomiums. in a way, he really was.
from among the american, nay, make that english, writers of the 20th century, he was arguably alone in this unstinting coverage, this hyper orientation to almost every time, every place this writer wants to wade in, this generous inclusiveness of his work. he seamlessly rambled between society's high and low, the colloquial and the mandarin. all these without patronage or condescension.
but as to the full and balanced measure of his legacy, that would take some time to tell. and some really nasty arguings in the academe and what’'s left of the still contentious literary world.
in the meantime, let me, a reader, a third world reader, one who belongs to a culture that some of his critics claim he never particularly cared for, revisit some of my own private bellovian memories. this is my puny way, the only way i am capable perhaps, of honoring, of celebrating this most american of all novelists of the 20th century.
i remember this shame, this embarrassment after having one of my pieces, who i was hoping then to be printed in the op ed pages of the broadsheet i worked for in manila, slammed by an admired editor.
it was a spin off from my reportage the previous week of a fluvial procession tragedy somewhere in cavite. some good two dozens of devotees drowned after the fluvial float they crowded in sank.
in my attempts, admittedly stupid, at being pretentiously literary, i inserted a line somewhere saying more die of heartbreak (bellow’'s 1987 novel) than perhaps these tragedies that occur like clockwork in our safety averse society. this brought howls in the central desk. and for a week i chose to make myself scarce from the newsroom.
i remember, too, reading about this dog in bucharest yowling in the night, in the long night of the soviet domination of romania. this from bellow'’s 1982 novel, the dean'’s december.
i remember reading feverishly that book during the months leading to the heady edsa revolution. and i shudder as dean corde, the archetypal bellovian hero, imagines these howls, these barkings as a protest, as a plea.
"for god's sake, open the universe a little more!"