Bellow’s Bible

James Wood (TLS August 5) explores the Englishness of Saul Bellow, and particularly his indebtedness to the rhythms and sounds of the Authorized Version. Some of his suggestions are quite a stretch (“By the factory walls the grimy weeds grew” is quite distantly related to Psalm 137:1 – Wood says it “gently borrows from” the Psalm; though if the Psalm is being refracted through Eliot’s “By the waters of Leman . . . ” it becomes more plausible). Overall, though, Wood’s pointis illuminating, especially when he suggests that the repetitions of Bellow’s prose are drawing on the poetic parallelism of Hebrew poetry: “Father Herzog sat peeling the fruit with his Russian pearl-handled knife. He peeled and twirled and cut with European efficiency.”