When you were down, busted, blasted, burnt out, dying, you saw the best of Clara.
So it was odd that she also should have become an executive,
highly paid and influential.
She could make fashionable talk,
she dressed with originality,
she knew at lot at first hand about decadence,
but at any moment she could set aside the “czarina” and become the hayseed,
the dupe of travelling salesmen or grifters who wanted to lure her up to the hayloft.
In her you might see suddenly a girl from a remote town,
from the vestigial America of one-room schoolhouses,
constables,
covered-dish suppers,
one of the communities bypassed by technology and urban development.
Her father, remember, was still a vestryman,
and her mother sent checks to TV fundamentalists.
In a sophisticated boardroom Clara could be as plain as cornmeal mush,
and in such a mood, when she opened her mouth,
you couldn’t guess whether she would speak or blow bubble gum.
Yet anybody who had it in mind to get around her was letting himself in for lots of bad news.
– Saul Bellow –
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Amy Hill’s cover painting for A Theft. An untitled copy of A Theft – bearing her own (the above) illustration, is tossed from a window above Park Avenue. A closer view reveals that this illustration appears – ad infinitum? – inside each iteration within the painting.
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Portrait of Saul Bellow by Thomas Victor.