The American literary scene is agog with the discovery, revealed in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, of the missing last paragraph of Saul Bellow’s final novel, The Three Corbies. According to Beena Kamlani, Bellow’s last editor, “As far as Viking is concerned, now that we have the missing last paragraph, we’re ready to go with The Three Corbies. It’s just a matter of tweaking some proper nouns.”
But Bellow fans should not yet start camping out in front of bookstores (if they can find any within a day’s drive) awaiting their first editions. Although the lost last paragraph has come to light at last, there still seem to be numerous murky complications within the Bellow estate which could delay publication, perhaps for many years to come.
       Those who have read the manuscript describe it as a tale of sibling rivalry – cordial on the surface, but seething with Freudian passions underneath – among the sons of a Nobel prize-winning philosopher, Helius Claymore. Following Claymore’s death, the brothers – Horace, Quincy and Jack – discover that their memories of Claymore are very different – so much so, that each – in his own way – undergoes an existential crisis that questions the basis of his entire life.  Harold Bloom called The Three Corbies “a postlude to King Lear.”
       The Three Corbies’ dénouement is a set piece describing an event at the 92nd Street Y, following the publication of a somewhat unflattering memoir of his father by the eldest son, Horace. All three brothers join in a discussion panel and almost come to blows as it becomes clear how wide the gaps are between their divergent views of Helius Claymore. Horace, who has become a psychoanalyst, sees Claymore as having been a cold egoist. Quincy, now an editor of right-wing non-fiction, says his father was “a political butterfly,” whose seemingly strong opinions only echoed those of his wife and his circle of friends at any particular time. The youngest son, Jack – a potter in the Berkshires – remembers Claymore as nothing more or less than a wise and loving paterfamilias. To the distress of some of the audience at the 92nd Street Y, and to the delight of others, unable to defend Claymore’s reputation against the onslaughts of his older brothers, Jack finally breaks down in tears.
       Here is a facsimile of the missing last paragraph of The Three Corbies, as it appeared in The New York Review of Books of March 10, 2016.

       Why, oh why, do I Goo-Goo? Sure, it’s an easy way to find information, but every time I Goo-Goo I expose myself to the possibility of having a cherished illusion shattered.
 
       It was Junior Walker’s Shotgun, as covered by The Burning Bush one night at Spinelli’s in New Paltz, that loosened up a pedal clumsiness that had afflicted me from the time I was a fat eleven year old, and I found myself boogying.
       I may have been loose as a goose and stoned, but not stoned out of my mind. I never am stoned – or drunk or worried – out of my mind. It is as if, whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m feeling, in a brain cell cubicle, somewhere between my right temple and my medulla, there is a dry, sober clerk, a wordclerk, scribbling and scrabbling (pun intended) away. He’s always there, and he was there then. You listen to the words, I messaged him, I’m not going to: “I say: Shotgun!”
       Words in conversation, words that I speak or words that are spoken to me, words I deliberately read in a newspaper or a book or on the screen, words I listen to (rather than simply hear), are my responsibility, not the wordclerk’s.  The job of the wordclerk is to take note of extraneous words, gratuitous words, words around me, words in the environment. He spells them out, phoneticizes them (as best he can), interprets them, re-interprets them, then files them away with other words in a Borgesian (in the sense of limitless) library of ideas.
       Advertisements (visual and audio), cell phone half-conversations overheard on the train, the blather on NPR (known as “human interest” stories) that fills the time between bursts of real news, these are the kinds of words I pass on to the wordclerk.
       (The wordclerk usually enjoys his job, except for that time in Amsterdam, where the words drove him crazy. The problem was not that they were in a foreign language. The wordclerk loves dealing with French, Italian, Spanish, German; even if he cannot dope out a word’s meaning, he takes pride in sounding the word out (virtually, silently, in his little cubicle), turning the Castilian “s’s” into hissed “th’s”, lilting along in Italian as if he were singing a Mozart aria, pursing his virtual lips through the prissy French “eu”, clanging through a long German word like ringing the bell on a firetruck moving at a stately 100 kph down the autobahn. But to the wordclerk Dutch seems like English with spelling mistakes. Supermarkt. Apotheek. Haring broodjes. Bibliotheek. Geopend behalve op maandag. In Amsterdam, he threw up his virtual hands in not so virtual frustration.)
       Song lyrics are an interesting case. Generally, the first time I hear a song, after only three or four words the lyrics go straight to the wordclerk, while I attend to the music. Sometimes the words of a song are intriguing enough or are enough of a narrative so that I listen to them right through. The next time I hear the song, or the third or fourth time, once I know what’s coming – been there, heard that – I don’t bother with the lyrics any longer and shoot them over to the wordclerk. Billy Joel’s Piano Man is a case in point: a nice, melancholy tale worth hearing – but not again and again and again. Then there are some songs which, no matter how often I hear them, I never pass along to the wordclerk, any more than I would pass along to him a poem by Donne or Dickinson or Yeats or Millay, no matter how often I’ve read it – Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, for example.
       Unlike poems on a page, which I can stop reading once I’ve become bored, song lyrics keep going as long as the music does. This makes for an occasional back-and-forth between myself and the wordclerk. For example, I love the words to Paint it Black, but I’ve listened to them often enough so that as soon as I hear Brian Jones’ twanging sitar intro, I alert the wordclerk: pay attention, because I won’t be. Then, in a moment, the wordclerk reminds me that I – that is, my conscious self – would not want to miss the line, “I see the girls walk by, dressed in their summer clothes.” Its imagist sentimentality, smacking of Prévert and Antonioni and Bonnard, is like a delicious flavor that one can never get tired of. It has never flagged in the pleasure it gives me.
 
       It is the wordclerk who is responsible for mondegreens, fortuitous misunderstandings of heard words. Sylvia Wright coined the term in an essay, "The Death of Lady Mondegreen", published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954. In it, Wright describes how, as a young girl, she misheard the first stanza of "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray" as
 
        Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
        Oh, where hae ye been?
        They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
        And Lady Mondegreen.
 
The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green".
       "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them,” says Wright, in whose youthful imagination the murdered Earl and Lady bleed to death hand-in-hand, “is that they are better than the original."
       With the coming of rock-and-roll, in which, for the most part, song lyrics became a framework for the music, instead of vice-versa, mondegreens flourished. (Not that anyone knew that was what they were called.) Now that our generation has gone into reminiscence mode, lists of mondegreens have become a genre of space filler, which websites and bloggers turn to when they can’t think of anything else to write about.
       Not all misheard song lyrics reach the level of mondegreenality, which stipulates that the mistaken line must be better than the original. Some examples which do, are:
 
Let's move before they raise the fucking rent instead of Let's move before they raise the parking rate. (Bad Company: All Right Now)
       
Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran instead of Ba ba ba ba ba barann. (Beach Boys: Barbara Ann)
 
A girl with colitis goes by instead of A girl with kaleidoscope eyes. (The Beatles: Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds)    
 
       Perhaps the most common rock mondegreen, which has given me great pleasure over the years is:
 
There's a bathroom on the right instead of There’s a bad moon on the rise. (Credence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising)
 
       I’d always known, of course, that those couldn’t be the real words, but they rang so true: a noisy bar, a raucous band, and a singer thoughtfully integrating into the music vital information about the location of the facilities for those in the crowd with beer-brimming bladders. It was a funny idea, which both I and the wordclerk preferred to the meaningless and forgettable, “There’s a bad moon on the rise.” It was a real cool mondegreen.
       I recently discovered that I had been living with another mondegreen, one just as elaborate as Sylvia White’s (who conjured up not only Lady Mondegreen, in her best dress, with a low neck trimmed in Irish lace and with an arrow through her throat, lying in a dappled clearing beside a yellow-bearded and kilted Earl Amurray, an arrow through his heart, but also the Queen, who had a crush on the Earl, and the Earl’s wife, who resembled a harridan classmate of White’s and had only married the Earl so she could become Lady Amurray).
 
       So (as tedious story tellers like to say), back in 1968, when the Age of Aquarius finally hit me below the knees, as The Burning Bush honked and twanged and popped to Shotgun, I sent the lyrics right on to the wordclerk, who reported on them thusly:
       Like most R&B songs, Shotgun is about fraught, passionate love, specifically about the turmoil of a shotgun wedding, with the would-be groom skedaddling and the wood-be bride going after him with a shotgun. Here (according to the wordclerk) are the lyrics:
 
          I said: Shotgun!
          Sugar boy run now.
          To the church, baby,
          To the church, now.
 
Put on your red dress
And then you go downtown now
I said buy yourself a shotgun now
We're gonna break it down baby now
We're gonna load it up baby now
And then you shoot him if he runs now.
 
          Shotgun!
          Sugar boy run now,
          To the church, baby.
          To the church now. 
 
Put on your high heel shoes
I said we're goin' down to make him play the blues.
He’s gonna dig potatoes.
He’s gonna pick tomatoes
 
          I said: Shotgun!
          Sugar boy run now,
          To the church, baby.
          To the church now. 
 
I said it's cryin’ time.
I said it's cryin’ time.
I said it's cryin’ time.
 
       And so it was and so it ever would have been if, for some trivial reason, I had not Goo-Goo’d Shotgun and, thanks to a link headed “Do the lyrics of Shotgun by Jr. Walker promote gun violence” and a zillion links to the lyrics themselves, I came to realize that the wordclerk had constructed for my delectation a mondegreen as grand, sturdy and compelling as Sylvia White’s.
       I mean, after all, compared to the wordclerk’s Shotgun, what is this?
 
I said, shotgun
Shoot 'em 'fore he runs, now
Do the jerk, baby
Do the jerk, now
 
Put on yo' red dress
And then you go downtown, now
I said, buy yourself a shotgun, now
We gonna break it down, baby, now
We gonna load it up, baby, now
A-then you shoot him 'fore he run, now
 
Shotgun
Shoot 'em 'fore he run, now
Do the jerk, baby
Do the jerk, now
Yeah!
 
Put on yo' high-heel shoes
I said, we goin' down here
An listen to 'em play the blues
We gonna dig potatoes
We gonna pick tomatoes
 
I said, shotgun
Shoot 'em 'fore he run, now
Do the jerk, baby
Do the jerk, now
Yeah!
 
I said it's, Twine time
I said it's, Twine time
I said it's, Twine time
 
       The Shotgun, The Jerk, and The Twine were dances; digging potatoes and picking tomatoes were dance moves. Shotgun, along with Roadrunner, may be a Jr. Walker masterpiece, but its lyrics are nothing more than a dance fad compendium – just a few levels up from The Twist and the Hokey-Pokey. Thanks to the wordclerk’s sophistication, his encyclopedic grasp of the culture and its folkways and his reliance on classical forms, Shotgun became, for me, the soundtrack to a Southern gothic vignette:
       There she is, a feisty, curvaceous little woman, all dolled up for her wedding, red dress, red shoes, lipstick to match, angry as all get out, urged on by a quartet of brothers and cousins, sashaying down the Main Street (ghettoized) of Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning and into a gun store. The bemused gun dealer, perhaps a bit intimidated by the brothers and cousins rhythmically milling behind her, sells her a shotgun, which she pays for with a wad of bills from a red purse that matches her dress and shoes. With the brothers and cousins overseeing, she breaks open the gun and loads it right then and there, marching back out onto Main Street and up a hill in the direction of the white clapboard church where she last saw the man who’d knocked her up  – just a kid, really – as he streaked off down a side street. And there he is, she’s found him, lurking in the doorway of a tavern (since it’s Sunday, even though the gun store’s open, the bars aren’t – this is the Baptist South, after all), in a fawn colored zoot suit that he’d borrowed from an uncle. “To the church. Now!” she yells, waving the shotgun at him, her purse dangling from her arm. “To the church. Now!” echo the brothers and cousins. Up the hill proceeds the procession, the woman and her brothers and cousins taunting the hapless husband-to-be with visions of the domestic life that awaits him. Finally, as the cringing groom and the furious bride, poking him in the small of his back with the shotgun muzzle, disappear into the church, the brothers and cousins linger outside. They’ve upheld the family’s honor, their work is done, and now, revealing that they are more than just a cohort of relatives, but play the role of a Greek chorus, they take a moment to express their sympathy for the man in the case, who’s just a kid, really. “It’s cryin’ time,” they sing, “It’s cryin’ time.”  
       I don’t care what the real words to Shotgun mean – I am not going to abandon my Shotgun. As Sylvia Wright says, “I won’t give in to it. Leaving [Earl Amurray] to die all alone, without even anyone to hold his hand – I won’t have it.”

       I suppose it’s the same everywhere else, but maybe not. In this neck of the woods, book clubs are strictly female. I have friends in three or four local book clubs; they’re all women and all the members of the clubs are women.
       When someone drops out, the club invites someone else to join. How come I’ve never been asked? I’ve occasionally been consulted about whether certain female acquaintances might be interested in joining a club with a vacancy. If only I had the chutzpah of Dick Chaney (who, when asked by the Bushes to choose a vice-presidential candidate to run with the clan’s lovable ne’er-do-well and make sure he didn’t screw things up, chose himself).
       Gauging by the book club discussion questions that have begun to appear as appendices to best-sellers, publishers assume that the readers in book clubs are female.
       Is Vronsky a worthy and appropriate lover for the passionate Anna? In what ways does he potentially fall short in this role?
       The discussion questions for a men-only book club would be much more elevated:
       Would Vronsky be just as attractive to women if he wore regular clothes instead of a uniform with shiny black riding boots? Can you imagine Anna in shiny black riding boots?
       Believe it or not, I was a book club pioneer – before book clubs had been appropriated by the Oprahgeist and began to be treated by publishers’ marketing departments as a combination trunk show and kaffeeklatsch. Back in 1994, Anna Livia and I, ensconced or marooned (depending on one’s point of view) in the middle of eighty acres which, themselves, were in the middle of nowhere, yearning to discuss with our friends something other than the weather or which of the nearby supermarkets (nearby meant within twenty-five miles) had the best produce section (granted, these are important topics, but still...), we formed a once-a-month reading group.
       The initial membership was three couples – ourselves, a pair of countrified progressive educators and a theater couple, an actor and a costume designer, recently transplanted from New York – and a single woman who was a shrink.
        To avoid contentious deliberations, we decided that, going in a round robin, each member would get to choose the book for the next meeting. The choices for the first five months were: Gilgamesh, the Nibelungenlied, The Age of Innocence, King Lear and Harold Nicolson’s Some People.
       Meanwhile, the shrink had invited a friend along to a meeting, a social worker from across the river. With the woman sitting right there, we were asked if the friend could join the group. It was one of those cases where “Would you mind?” becomes a rhetorical question.
       We did mind. We put up with an Edith Wharton characterized as a traitor to feminism, then a Lear who was a victim of ageism, but when we were scolded for wasting our time on Nicolson’s memoir because it was nothing but an encomium to the British upper-class, (evidently, “We were not amused”) the book club dissolved in despair.
       That little history might go some way towards excusing current book clubs, with their strict limits on new members and their wariness about inviting anyone (such as a man) who might rock the boat.