‘NYT’ comes up with the stalker-eulogy

We can credit The New York Times with inventing a new literary genre: the stalker-eulogy. A couple days after the April 5 death of novelist Saul Bellow, the paper’s editorial page offered an item (under the label “Appreciations,” complete with laurel wreath) in which editorial-board member Brent Staples memorialized Bellow and his work. It was a pleasant and lively piece, well-suited to the occasion. One wouldn’t guess while reading it that Staples had written years earlier of stalking Bellow around Chicago. So he did, though, in his 1994 memoir Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White, which was serialized in The New York Times Magazine. At the time of the stalking, Staples was a University of Chicago grad student, and Bellow was on the faculty. As he tracks his quarry, Staples reports in the memoir, he imagines lifting him bodily and pinning him against a wall. He didn’t, happily. More recently (when James Atlas’ biography of Bellow came out in 2000), Staples wrote in Slate about Bellow’s reaction to that section of the memoir: “He was especially angry about the time in the 1970s when I followed him down a darkened street, keeping a distance and letting him sweat. Never meant to harm him, just to give him a dose of those menacing black characters he produced in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, The Dean’s December, Humboldt’s Gift and so on.” Ah yes, what better preparation for writing an Appreciation when the famous man eventually dies? Having now stalked Staples through the archives, I almost feel eligible to Appreciate him if he kicks the bucket before I do.

—Posted by Mark Dolliver

April 11, 2005 | Permalink