“Something to Remember Me By” by Saul Bellow
Recommended by Mary Gaitskill
Issue No. 31
WHEN THERE IS TOO MUCH GOING ON, more than you can bear, you may choose to assume that nothing in particular is happening, that your life is going round and round like a turntable. Then one day you are aware that what you took to be a turntable, smooth, flat, and even, was in fact a whirlpool, a vortex. My first knowledge of the hidden work of uneventful days goes back to February 1933. The exact date won’t matter much to you. I like to think, however, that you, my only child, will want to hear about this hidden work as it relates to me. When you were a small boy you were keen on family history. You will quickly understand that I couldn’t tell a child what I am about to tell you now. You don’t talk about deaths and vortices to a kid, not nowadays. In my time my parents didn’t hesitate to speak of death and the dying. What they seldom mentioned was sex. We’ve got it the other way around.
Read the rest of the story at electricliterature.com.
About the Author
A fiction writer, essayist, playwright, lecturer, and memoirist, Saul Bellow was born in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, and was raised in Chicago. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1937 and did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin before serving in the Marines during World War II. Later, during the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, Bellow served as a war correspondent for Newsday. Throughout his long and productive career, he contributed fiction to several magazines and quarterlies, including The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Playboy, and Esquire, as well as criticism to The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New Leader, and others.
Universally recognized as one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, Bellow has won more honors than almost any other American writer. Among these, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Humboldt’s Gift and the B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Award for “excellence in Jewish literature.” He was the first American to win the International Literary Prize, and remains the only novelist in history to have received three National Book awards, for The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet. In 1976, Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” Saul Bellow died in 2005 at age 89.
About the Guest Editor
Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica, as well as the story collections Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Last year she was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library where she was researching a novel.
“Something to Remember Me By” by Saul Bellow, currently collected in COLLECTED STORIES by Saul Bellow. Copyright © 2001 by Saul Bellow, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
