. . . one has to have a less than admirable character to be a fiction writer.
—Saul Bellow

The most penetrating literary criticism I know of the novelist Saul Bellow was made in my presence by my dear friend Edward Shils one afternoon in his apartment in Hyde Park. Edward had been reading, in manuscript, a portion of James Atlas’s biography of Bellow. He put down Atlas’s pages, and, with his fondess for extended metaphors, said to me: “You know, Joseph, Mr. Atlas will only grasp the true nature of Saul Bellow when he understands that our friend Saul, had he been allowed to sit for two hours in the lap of the Queen of England, would, when told by the Queen that she must now attend to her official duties, though she much enjoyed their visit, freshly emerge from the Queen’s lap with two observations: first, that the Queen had no understanding whatsoever of the condition of the modern artist, and, second, that she was an anti-Semite.”

Edward and Saul went back a ways. In 1962, two years before the publication of Herzog, Edward arranged for Saul to be made a member of the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. That same year Saul wrote to his friend John Berryman, “I love Edward Shils.” Edward had contributed much to the composition of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, chiefly to the cosmopolite character of Arthur Sammler, or so people who