In one of the most infamous one-liners of the 1980s culture wars, Saul Bellow told James Atlas, who was working on a New York Times Magazine profile of Allan Bloom, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.”
Later, Bellow denied ever having made that remark as quoted. He claimed, in writing, that an unnamed journalist had misunderstood him.
If I were a journalist whose career depended on a reputation for accuracy and care in quoting sources, I would have defended myself from Bellow’s backtracking. I’m not shy, and neither was James Atlas. But James Atlas was largely sympathetic to Bellow’s and Bloom’s views on the so-called Western Canon. Indeed, Atlas had written his own book about the canon wars, Battle of the Books, not too long after his 1988 profile of Bloom. Having burned no bridges with Bellow over the accuracy of his own reporting, James Atlas ended up writing Bellow’s semi-authorized biography, which carefully made no mention of the infamous remark.
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