One morning in the spring of 1949, Saul Bellow was walking along a Parisian street to the Left Bank hotel room he was renting for a dollar a day as a study, when he experienced a revelation. Bellow had been staying in the city over the winter with his wife, Anita, and five-year-old son, Gregory, in order to make progress on his third novel, The Crab and the Butterfly. Paris was still at sea after occupation; the few writers and editors Bellow had encountered were unmoored, like him, by each newly published survivor’s report of concentration camps. The Crab and the Butterfly, only a chapter of which remains, reflected that dislocating anxiety.
It was, Bellow later recalled, a novel featuring “two men in a hospital room, one dying, the other trying to keep him from surrendering to death”, their dialogue developing the question of whether our “original nature is murderous”.
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I haven't been able to resist safety and I haven't been able to rest in it
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