Saul Bellow

Found an awesome site today. From a piece ol' Saul wrote a couple years before his death:

"The question whether they had a right to this language and to this literature was a lively question. In their own eyes they sometimes felt that they didn’t have the right because they weren’t born to the manner, and American society—at least its elite Anglo-Saxon elements—told them that they didn’t come by it naturally and that it didn’t really belong to them. But the evidence of the streets was different, because a new life was forming in American society which belonged to nobody, and therefore there was no reason why an American writer should accept the words of Henry James in his book The American Scene, for instance, in which he was so distressed by the Jewish East Side of New York and by what was happening to the English language on the East Side."

I like that claim - English doesn't belong to anyone. In H. Roth's Call It Sleep this is evidenced by all the accents that accompany English and make it truly American, because it is being modified by immigrants. We never hear "proper English" and indeed it doesn't exist.