ellauri052.html on line 970: The rap against Bellow is that he maligned four of his five wives, especially in his fiction. This is true, and Leader is savvy enough not to take Bellow’s word about them. Wife No. 1, Anita, is shown as the underappreciated mainstay she obviously was. As for wife No. 2, Sondra Tschacbasov Bellow (Bellow called her Sasha), the model for the evil Madeleine, Leader has a scoop: an unpublished memoir shared with him after Bellow’s death. By her own account, Sasha was a vulnerable child-woman lacking basic life skills. From childhood and into her teens, she says, she was the victim of incest committed by her father. When Bellow took up with her, he was 37 and she was 21, a Bennington graduate and a secretary at the Partisan Review. His friends treated her with a sniggering sexism unfortunately unremarkable in the 1950s. At a party Bellow took her to, the critic R. W. B. Lewis, her former professor, drunkenly demanded to
ellauri184.html on line 78: Mailer wrote his fourth novel, An American Dream, as a serial in Esquire magazine over eight months (January to August 1964), publishing the first chapter two months after he wrote it. In March 1965, Dial Press published a revised version. The novel generally received mixed reviews, but was a best seller. Joan Didion praised it in a review in National Review (April 20, 1965) and John W. Aldridge did the same in Life (March 19, 1965), while Elizabeth Hardwick panned it in Partisan Review (spring 1965).
ellauri222.html on line 99: Bellow published his first short story in 1941. It came out in Partisan Review—marking the start of a relationship that was key to establishing Bellow’s reputation as the intellectuals’ chosen novelist. Bellow visited New York frequently, and lived there at various points, but he was never comfortable in the city. “I congratulated myself with being able to deal with New York,” he told Philip Roth near the end of his life, “but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.”
ellauri222.html on line 101: Still, in New York and at Princeton, where he spent a year teaching creative writing, Bellow made friends with many of the critics who dominated literary life in the nineteen-fifties. They found him bright, congenial, and sufficiently bookish, and especially admired what they took to be his poise and real-world savvy. Irving Howe thought Bellow “very strong-willed and shrewd in the arts of self-conservation.” “Even his egocentricity added to his charms,” said William Phillips, the co-editor, with Philip Rahv, of Partisan Review. “Stunning—the ultimate beautiful young Jewish intellectual incarnate,” Alfred Kazin’s wife, Ann Birstein, remembered. Bellow maintained the allure by cultivating just the right amount of aloofness. “I was the cat who walked by himself,” as he put it.
ellauri222.html on line 105: So even “Dangling Man,” an awkwardly written book about which Bellow later said, “I can’t read a page of it without feeling embarrassed,” was received as a sign that the novel might after all be up to its historic task. “Here, for the first time I think, the experience of a new generation has been seized,” Delmore Schwartz wrote, in Partisan Review. In The New Yorker, Edmund Wilson called “Dangling Man” a “testimony on the psychology of a whole generation.” When Bellow’s second novel, “The Victim,” came out, in 1947, Martin Greenberg, in Commentary, explained that Bellow had succeeded in making Jewishness “a quality that informs all of modern life . . . the quality of modernity itself.” In Partisan Review, Elizabeth Hardwick suggested that Bellow might become “the redeeming novelist of the period.”
ellauri222.html on line 131: In Commentary, Podhoretz complained that the novel lacked development and that its exuberance was forced. He called it a failure. Podhoretz was one of Trilling’s protégés, and Bellow always believed that Trilling was behind the review, although Podhoretz denied it. But Atlas says that the art critic Clement Greenberg, then an editor at Commentary, having recently come over from Partisan Review, claimed that the editors had put Podhoretz up to it. It was felt in New York circles, Greenberg said, that Bellow had gone a little too far.
ellauri222.html on line 133: Most reviews were enthusiastic, though. “Augie March” was not a best-seller, but it sold well and won a major award. The year it came out, Bellow took a job at Bard College. He and Anita were separated, and he had a new girlfriend, Sondra Tschacbasov, called Sasha. She was sixteen years younger and strikingly attractive. They met at Partisan Review, where she worked as a secretary.
ellauri222.html on line 135: At Bard, Bellow became close friends with a literature professor named Jack Ludwig. As Leader describes him, Ludwig was an oversized personality, a big man, extravagant, a shameless purveyor of bad Yiddish, and an operator. Ludwig idolized Bellow; people who knew them said that Ludwig wanted to be Bellow. He flattered Bellow, went for long walks with him, started up a literary journal with him, and generally insinuated himself into Bellow’s life. Bellow accepted the proffer of adulatory attentiveness. The couples (Ludwig was married) socialized together. This was the period when Bellow wrote “Seize the Day,” which Partisan Review published in a single issue, in 1956, after The New Yorker turned it down, and “Henderson the Rain King,” published in 1959, a novel whose hero was based on a neighbor of the Bellows in upstate New York.
ellauri222.html on line 151: “Herzog” was nevertheless received the way all Bellow’s novels had been received: as a report on the modern condition. Many of the critics who reviewed it—Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Richard Ellmann, Richard Poirier—knew Bellow personally and knew all about the divorce. (Poirier was an old friend of Ludwig’s; the review he published, in Partisan Review, was a hatchet job.) None of these reviewers mentioned the autobiographical basis of the book, and several of them warned against reading it autobiographically, without ever explaining why anyone might want to. The world had no way of knowing that the story was not completely made up.
ellauri222.html on line 165: Structure was always Bellow’s weak point. One of his first editors at Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald, worried about what he called a “centerless facility.” Podhoretz was not wrong about the problem of shapelessness in “Augie March.” The novel’s antic style is like a mechanical bull. For a few hundred pages, Bellow is having the time of his life, letting his invention take him where it will. By the end, he is just hanging on, waiting for the music to stop. It takes the story five hundred and thirty-six pages to get there.
ellauri257.html on line 428: Gombrowiczin partisaani Simian on itäpolakki Ukrainasta. Tää on tämmöstä markiisi de Sade tyyppistä synnintunnosta hikeentymistä. Vizaa paljaalle pyllylle, se tuntuu kivalta. Partisanismi ei sovi vanhoille ja läskeille. Wizi Witold on pervo pedofiili. Että vaan toinen jalka paljaana! Fredrik on Muumipapan nuoruuden ystävä. Hän on ex-regissööri, siitä noi paljaat jalat. Witold, miten voit? Hauska tavata. Hizi mikä apinoiden planeetta. Läskien setämiesten urheilumezästystä nuoret notmiinä. Vaclawin on nähtävä tämä. Ei tässä juonta ole, mennään kiihotus edellä. Polta nämä kirjeet. Bara vidare! Utför allt nogrannt! Apinoiden planeetalle on hyvä mennä yhdessä ettei olla hulluja.
ellauri341.html on line 169: Bei der Partisanenbekämpfung im Gebiet der Pripjetsümpfe wurde streng nach Befehl gehandelt, welcher lautete: „Jeder Partisan ist zu erschießen. Juden sind grundsätzlich als Partisanen zu betrachten.“
xxx/ellauri125.html on line 485: With Walton's support, he began Call It Sleep in about 1930, completed the novel in the spring of 1934, and it was published in December 1934, to mostly good reviews. Yet the New York Herald Tribune's book critic Lewis Gannett foresaw that the book would not prove popular with its bleak depiction of New York's Lower East Side, but wrote readers would "remember it and talk about it and watch excitedly" for Roth's next book. Call It Sleep sold slowly and poorly, and after it was out-of-print, critics writing in magazines such as Commentary and Partisan Review kept praising it, and asking for it to be reprinted. After being republished in hardback in 1960 and paperback in 1964, with more than 1,000,000 copies sold, and many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the novel was hailed as an overlooked Depression-era masterpiece and classic novel of immigration. Today, it is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Jewish American literature. With Walton's support, he began Call It Sleep in about 1930, completed the novel in the spring of 1934, and it was published in December 1934, to mostly good reviews. Yet the New York Herald Tribune's book critic Lewis Gannett foresaw that the book would not prove popular with its bleak depiction of New York's Lower East Side, but wrote readers would "remember it and talk about it and watch excitedly" for Roth's next book. Call It Sleep sold slowly and poorly, and after it was out-of-print, critics writing in magazines such as Commentary and Partisan Review kept praising it, and asking for it to be reprinted.[ After being republished in hardback in 1960 and paperback in 1964, with more than 1,000,000 copies sold, and many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the novel was hailed as an overlooked Depression-era masterpiece and classic novel of immigration. Today, it is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Jewish American literature. After Muriel's death in 1990, Roth moved into a ramshackle former funeral parlor and occupied himself with revising the final volumes of his monumental work, Mercy of a Rude Stream. It has been alleged that the incestuous relationships between the protagonist, a sister, and a cousin in Mercy of a Rude Stream are based on Roth's life. Roth's own sister denied that such events occurred. Roth attributed his massive writer's block to personal problems such as depression, and to political conflicts, including his disillusion with Communism. At other times he cited his early break with Judaism and his obsessive sexual preoccupations as probable causes. Roth died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States in 1995. The character E. I. Lonoff in Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels (The Ghost Writer and Exit Ghost in this case), is a composite of Roth, Bernard Malamud and fictional elements.
xxx/ellauri127.html on line 120: In his lifetime, Nabokov received many contrary and often puzzled reviews. The Hollywood producer Robert Evans famously flew to Switzerland in 1968 to read an advance copy of the novel “Ada” in one day. “It was torture,” he recalled. Dwight Macdonald hated “Pale Fire” on behalf of Partisan Review, calling it “unreadable . . . too clever by half . . . Philistine . . . false” — and he hadn’t even finished his first paragraph!
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