ellauri052.html on line 978: The most important person in Bellow’s life—Maury, his oldest brother. As Leader shows, Maury was both the driving force in Bellow’s Americanization and a major presence in his work. Parents and wives came and went, but Maury remained: Simon in Augie March, Shura in Herzog, Julius in Humboldt’s Gift. As peremptory and violent as their father but more competent, Maury epitomized the cult of power and material success that both fascinated and repelled Bellow. “I recognized in him the day-to-day genius of the U.S.A.,” Bellow said in an interview with Philip Roth. In the same conversation, Roth observed that Maury’s reckless, angry spirit was “the household deity of Augie March.” By the time Maury finished law school, he had already started collecting graft for a corrupt Illinois state representative, skimming off the top for himself and his mother. A charismatic ladies’ man with an illegitimate son, Maury was “very proud of his extraordinary group of connections, his cynicism, his insiderhood,” Bellow told Roth. Maury was disdainful of his brother’s nonremunerative choice of profession, which he considered luftmenschlich—frivolous, impractical.
ellauri082.html on line 76: He was a ladies’ man.
xxx/ellauri122.html on line 796: In their early 20s the pair vacationed together on Lake Garda on the Austrian-Italian border; they paid their respects at Goethe’s house in Weimar; stayed together at the Hotel Belvedere au Lac in Lugano, Switzerland; and even visited brothels together in Prague, Milan, Leipzig, and Paris. Brod, a self-confessed ladies’ man with an insatiable appetite for adventurous sexual conquests, often berated Kafka for not having a similarly urgent drive of eros. “You avoid women and try to live without them,” Brod once told his friend.
xxx/ellauri125.html on line 313: This is the work of a man unconcerned with offending women or racial historians, the voice of a soul in pure id mode, thinking with his groin and worrying little about the ladies’ vote. Is it the last gasp of a man who’s just become a father for the first time? An early midlife crisis? An attempt at alienating the marketplace so he can live as an artist rather than a paparazzi target?
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