Patent leather sandals and the great enterprise …

… Saul Bellow: Letters. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Bellow's spiritual or metaphysical vocabulary was intimately related to a bodily one. In 1966, he reread War and Peace and saw a kindred spirit: "I'm convinced that Leo was a somatological moralist. Eyes, lips and noses, the colour of the skin, the knuckles and the feet do not lie . . . It's not a bad system. I seem to have used it myself, most of the time." He was right to spot the connection; much of his own art lay in finding the mind's construction in the face. ("Your looking things in the face is not inferior to mine," he told Roth in 1981, the metaphor slipping its moorings.) Through the corporeal, Bellow believed, he could reach something, even somewhere, else. The belief persisted until the end. Chick, the narrator of his last novel, Ravelstein(2000), reflects: "I have always been inclined to give a special diagnostic importance to the upper lip. If there is a despotic tendency it will reveal itself there." The swift-nibbed describer is at one with the novelist of ideas.