The name of the game is Give All.

Saul Bellow, before yesterday known as our greatest living novelist, is dead. In commemoration, I'd like to quote from an extraordinary letter he wrote to his friend Dave Peltz, who complained when Bellow used one of his anecdotes in Humboldt's Gift.

“It wasn't you who was the subject. People have written about me. Their me is not me. It couldn't matter less. What matters is that good things be writtten. Dear God how we need them! . . . I promised not to write Your Life. But this was all I could promise. We've known each other forty five years and told each other thousands and thousands of anecdotes. And now, on two bars suggested by one of your anecdotes, I blew a riff . . . What harm is there in that? Your facts are unharmed by my version . . . These aren't questions of property, are they?. . .

Now David, the nice old man who wants his collection of memory-toys to play with in old age is not you! You harm yourself with such fantasies. For the name of the game is not Social Security. What an error! Social Security is an entirely different game. The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing. Touch them with your imagination and I will kiss your hands . . . What you fear as the risk of friendship, namely, that I may take from the wonderful hoard is really the risk of friendship because I have the power to lift a tuft of wool from a bush and make something of it . . . So I know how to transform common matter. And when I give that transformation has that no value for you? . . . As for me I long for others to do it. I thirst for it. So should you”