Bellow letter reveals the novelist was no fan of Updike’s

Screen Shot 2013-03-18 at 6.50.31 PMIn his review of the newly published correspondence of Saul Bellow’s—Saul Bellow: Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor—Leo Robson of the New Statesman writes,

There is also a generous helping of contempt, the sine qua non of literary letters. To Cynthia Ozick, one of the few younger writers he admired, he wrote: “It gives me something less than pleasure to be listed with the Styrons, Vonneguts, Mailers.” He acquiesces in a friend’s description of John Updike as “an anti-Semitic pornographer” and doesn’t much like Updike’s chief outlet, the New Yorker. Or, for that matter, the journal he calls the New York Review of Each Other’s Books. Or the Jewish magazine Commentary: “the language of the contributors is something like the kapok that life jackets used to be stuffed with.”

Here is the complete review.

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