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.”
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