Stephen Lyle on Saul Bellow, Artur Sammler, and the Cyclops

Dear Mr. Bellow:

I loved your essay, which really helped me understand your father more. A thought provoking, beautifully written piece.

In the context of Tiresias et al., hard not to think also of the Homeric Cyclops — reportedly an uncivilized, man-eating bunch — when entertaining the various mythic figures of vision. Sammler’s single, traumatized eye denies him (at least for a while) the multiplicitous moral vision of the author. The one-sided blindness of every youthful, radical partisan is shared by the old reactionary, its counterpart. Your father, possessed of two eyes, was certainly self-aware enough to see this, and critiques that relegate him entirely to Sammler’s planet seem to belong on a childish one of their own. His prophecies regarding the weaknesses of liberal democracies are indeed looking alarmingly prescient. Let us hope that the perturbations of the coming years will cause our traditional liberal project to look deeper into itself, and find harder, but more durable truths upon which to rest, quills and all.