In a review of Saul Bellows' letters, Kevin Stevens points to this key passage from an exchange with Lionel Trilling about the contemporary writer's duty:
Are most novels poor today? Undoubtedly. But that is like saying mutilation exists, a broken world exists. More mutilated and broken than before? That is perhaps the world’s own secret. Really, things are now what they always were, and to be disappointed in them is extremely shallow … Yes, there’s a great disease, an ancient disease now greatly magnified by our numbers. Man is sick of man; man declares man superfluous. ‘But,’ some say, ‘there is no society which gives us our value and creates importance for us.’ And this is to argue that a man’s heart is not itself the origin and seat of importance. But to assert that it is so and to prove and proclaim it with all one’s powers – that is the work and duty of a writer now.
Read Bellow's Paris Review interview here.
The Dish 