The Actual

Saul Bellow

THE ACTUAL

Contents

The Actual

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) is the only novelist to receive three National book awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr Sammler’s Planet. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt’s Gift. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to him in 1976 ‘for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.’ In 1990, Mr Bellow was presented with the National Book Award Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. He has also received the National Medal of Arts. His books include Dangling Man (1944), The Victim (l947), The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mosby’s Memoirs (1969), Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970), Humboldt’s Gift (1975), To Jerusalem and Back (1976), The Dean’s December (1982), Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), More Die of Heartbreak (1987), A Theft (1989), The Bellarosa Connection (1989), Something to Remember Me By (1991), It All Adds Up (1994), The Actual (1997), Ravelstein (2000) and Collected Stories (2001).

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

The Actual

‘Like all super-fiction, Bellow’s novella is elliptical while seeming utterly direct … he has a gift for concentrating life into a quick, nervy sentence … Genius, to be swallowed whole’

David Hughes, Mail on Sunday

‘This is a slender volume … but, in what amounts to a literary miracle, Bellow manages to hint at the histories of about half-a-dozen characters, and leave an impression of lives lived slowly. Does Bellow get older, or just better?’

Time Out

‘Bellow is still too good, too sharply observed for most writers to even dream of matching … His prose is still tough and muscular, as streetwise as it is lyric’

Irish Times

‘Stands as a mature distillation of Bellow’s work to date: a twinkling … gem that recapitulates in miniature the issues and ideas that have animated his fiction of the last 50 years … Elegiac … touching’

International Herald Tribune

‘No American writer is capable of waxing so cantankerous, and yet his voice has the meticulous range and certainty of a cathedral choir … The wit is exquisitely mannered; the intelligence both fearless and elegant’

Boston Globe

‘The Actual miniaturizes Bellow’s deepest concerns … we are the witnesses of a life devoted to the careful prolongation of the novel form. We should be grateful’

Guardian

It’s easy enough to see what people think they’re doing. Nor is what they really are up to hard for common sense to make out. The usual repertories of stratagems, deceits, personality rackets, ringing the changes on criminal cunning, are hardly worth examining. Years have gone by since I last found interest in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and its once fresh story-behind-the-story. That a slip of the tongue will lead you back to the mischievous id needs no more proving. I grant that Freud was one of the most ingenious men who ever lived, but I have no more use for his system than I have for Paley’s watch – a metaphor for the universe, wound up in the beginning, then ticking away for billions of years. As long as a single thing is there to suppose, somebody (in this case an eighteenth-century English clergyman) will be sure to suppose it.