Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
Johnston, George Sim
upon him. We need to realize the influence that Wilder undoubtedly exerted on writers as different as Goyen, Updike, Vidal, and perhaps Barth. The most serious objection to Wilder--that he...
...It seems quite possible that what happened to Waugh will happen to Wilder...
...And none of his irritable clowns, including Henderson, has been so successful...
...If you lifted all of the digressions since Herzog and pasted them in a book, you would have a chrestomathy of superb journalism...
...After all, nearly everyone he knew, if we are to believe him, did him an injury...
...In his every recollection there is a badly concealed dagger...
...cape from Oxford by way of writing leaders for Lord Beaverbrook's Sunday Express," only to be sacked by Beaverbrook who considered Cohn a dull writer...
...He explains to her that she is the only person he has ever insulted for no reason and relates in manic detail the notable instances when he has insulted people for a very good reason...
...Bellow has been an eloquent dissenter from the Wasteland mentality which he once called " t h e Established Church in modern literature...
...Indeed, his worst enemy--and his enemies are legion if we can believe his own account--could hardly have portrayed him in a more damning fashion...
...the narrative intelligence can jump wherever it pleases...
...Bellow has a slangy way with high-brOw thought which is charming ( " . . . n i h i l i s m , too, has its nono's...
...It is addressed to a spinster librarian whom the writer, a retired music professor who is on the lam in Canada for legal-financial reasons, recalls having insulted years ago...
...Whether we will place Wilder on that higher plateau of American letters where the Melvilles and the Faulkners reside (as I think we eventually will) can remain for a while a matter of reasonable disagreement...
...Sometimes they appear in job lots on a single page...
...With the exception of The Victim, which he later referred to as "small and correct," an exercise in restraint before he let it rip in The Adventures o f Augie March, Bellow's full-length novels could all be chopped up into smaller pieces without losing anything essential...
...the diamonds on an heiress's bosom "lay like the Finger Lakes among their hills...
...The humanistic music has ceased, and now there is a different barbarous music welling u p , " says one of the characters...
...Back in 1949, Bellow wrote a story for the Partisan Review called "A Sermon by Doctor Pep," which could serve as a subtitle to much of his work...
...which is supposed to be about Harold Rosenberg (or is it Clement Greenberg...
...So why did Bellow become the Eric Sevareid of American novelists...
...His colleagues, soon or late, turned against him, blocked him from awards that he thought he deserved-for example, the Regius Chair at Oxford--or failed to appreciate his efforts as historian, teacher, journalist, and finally TV panelist to enlighten the masses, the only ones, Taylor insists, who really matter...
...There have been novelists obsessed with intellectual categories--Stendhal and Mann, for example--who nonetheless have managed to keep the namedropping to a minimum and get on with the story...
...ties that he wanted to write Bellow's biography...
...All these characteristics make the short story or novella, and not the novel, Bellow's natural form...
...He then gleefully recalls how his tutor, someone named Stanley Cohn, sought esWilliam H. Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor o f English at the University o f South Carolina...
...I don't think his fiction would suffer much if he had excised every one...
...When he is not bragging about his superior intelligence, or all the great books he has written, or his unparalleled insight into modern history, he is asking us to believe that all who disagreed with him and stood between him and some prize that was rightfully his were not only wrong but somehow motivated by evil intentions...
...Harris, a novelist and putative friend, decided in the late sixGeorge SimJohnston is a writer living Reviewed by John Podhoretz in the in New York...
...the publication of these additional materials would suddenly bring about a change in reputation...
...A somber note runs through this new collection of stories, however...
...Humboldt's Gift was several cuts above its two neighbors...
...Brittling Sees It Through has such a plague of unsolicited opinion ravaged the work of a first-rate novelist...
...We would recognize the basic tension between the darker colors of Calvinist redemptionism and the light of classical progress, which must have been sometimes agonizing to him as he came back to it in book after book...
...A PERSONAL HISTORY A.J.P...
...It is also the only fiction Bellow has written since Seize the Day in which not a single world-class intellectual or school of philosophy is mentioned...
...Zetland: By a Character Witness" tells of a mute inglorious Augie...
...Cousins," which is a kind of companion piece to "The Old System," deals with municipal corruption in Chicago, about which Bellow did write an op-ed piece...
...Sammler's Planet and The Dean's December gave the impression that their author had written a hundred or so jeremiads for the New York Times op-ed page and decided instead to slice them up and serve with fictional filler...
...One has the impression that this most cerebral of novelists finally felt it necessary to strike back at what he called the "brutal profs and bad-tempered ivy league sodomites" who feed on "stale ideological French chocolates...
...His one separately published novella, Seize the Day, would be perfect i f it did not end with Tommy Wilhelm gushing at a stranger's funeral (a piece of sentimentalism which for some reason pleased the critics...
...Whether this late pessimism is justified or not, it does not have the designer label affixed to the angst of most of our "serious" novelists...
...Not that I mind Bellow's ideas or the way he puts them...
...But until then anybody who wants to find a touchstone of sanity and objectivity, beyond the little everyday political happenings, or who wants to gain a good clear focus on what America is all about, could do a lot worse than reading Thornton Wilder...
...and although the narrator, Charles Citrine, does manage to get in his two bits at every opportunity, he is not, like Sammler and Dean Corde, looking down from a crow's nest halfway to heaven...
...In the manner of Boswell, he began to hang all over Bellow like a bad suit...
...The answer may lie in Chekhov's remark that a writer should engage in politics to the extent that he needs to protect himself from politics--meaning, in Bellow's case, intellectual politics...
...Like the journalistic asides, most of these name-tag references are entertaining and provocative...
...And I , " Taylor smugly concludes, "so despised by clever Stanley, have been a principal contributor to the Sunday Express for the last twenty years...
...To that rule he most certainly should have made an exception of himself...
...The other stories, with the exception of "The Silver Dish," which is a moving contribution to that peculiar American literary sub-genre dealing with Lost Fathers, cover a number of areas which have engaged Bellow's imagination in the past...
...For example, as a boy he earned and should have received a scholarship to Balliol College, but because his family had money the award was given to someone else...
...Reading the wonderful collection of new stories in Him with His Foot in His Mouth, one is thankful that Bellow chose not to bury the odd assortment of intellectuals, Chicago mobsters, and night school existentialist tile contractors who appear in them in another long, amorphous novel...
...Bellow, in fact, has produced some wonderful nonfiction pieces over the years, and they should be collected, if only because now you have to ferret them out in books whose ominous titles, such as The Writer's Dilemma, make you want to read them in a plain brown wrapper...
...Bellow once said that Gide's work is full of excellent monologuists who want to advance to dialogue, which is exactly his own case...
...Taylor tells us in the preface to this work that he thinks every historian should write an autobiography...
...Bellow complained, for example, that "what-can-be-done with literature is for many intellectuals, certainly the most influential of them, infinitely more i m p o r t a n t than books . . . . We have passed from contemplative reading to movement, to action, to p o l i t i c s . . , intellectuals are curiously busy with social questions . . . . " He goes on to say that one of the nice things about Hamlet is that Polonious is stabbed...
...It is not an observation Augie March or Moses Herzog would have made...
...But note how Taylor remembers the (probably imagined) slight: " . . . n o n e of the boys who got scholarships to Balliol when I got none has been heard of since...
...Harris is a Pavlovian leftist, and at every opportunity he tried to recruit his man into the Cause, antiwar division...
...We do not read novels for the same reasons that we read essays...
...Not until his third marriage, when he was 70, would he consent to sleeping double...
...Wells wrote Mr...
...Like most such "lovers of the people," Taylor seems never to have gotten along very well with Tom, Dick, and Harry...
...The professor paints each victim with a few deft comic strokes: A conniving lawyer has eyes "like the eyes you glimpse in the heated purple corners of the smallmammal house that reproduces the gloom of nocturnal tropics" (Bellow has as little use for lawyers as Dickens...
...Among the pleasures of reading Bellow is the impression that one is dealing with a mature and powerful mind which makes its own markets on the intellectual exchange...
...Some of those pieces, the ones written about fifteen years ago, have a curious ring now...
...Not since H.G...
...This story is the sort of intellectual slapstick that Bellow does better than anyone...
...When Bellow does get on with the story, he shows a canny sense of his strengths and weaknesses...
...Where were we standing when it happened...
...A perceptive study of the assimilation of Old World immigrants into America, it covers more ground in forty pages than most novels...
...If you wonder why Bellow should feel pressure from such quarters, read Mark Harris's Saul Bellow: Drummlin Woodchuck...
...Incidentally, he laments in his preface that his second wife did not wish to be either named or referred to in the book, a request that thus prevented him from atoning " f o r some of my graver acts of selfishness and lack of considera38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984...
...His memoir is, in a word, a disaster...
...Even when Fate seems to have dealt him a poor hand, it always turns out that he wins the final trick...
...In some ways, I suppose, Taylor deserves our pity as well as our contempt...
...Taylor not very convincingly places the blame for the failure of those unions on the fact that he refused to sleep in a double bed, having as a child become accustomed to bedding down in a single...
...his narrators are often alone in a room (or lying in a hammock in an overgrown garden) recalling the past...
...Each is more entertaining and instructive for being on his own fictional patch...
...Reading this wretched book, more a panegyric to his greatness than anything else, I found it hard to believe that so vain, petty, absurd, vulgar and often downright stupid a man could ever have written anything of merit...
...January 1981 American Spectator.--Ed...
...He is not a dramatic writer, which he made abundantly clear in his full-length play The Last Analysis, and steers clear of the sort of immediate scene setting one finds, say, in James and Waugh...
...the characters at least seemed to exist for reasons other than sounding off...
...Here, as with Herzog, we have a slightly cracked academic writing a letter which may or may not be put in the mail...
...Well, I suppose I would keep one of Herzog's phantom memos: "Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I should like to know what you mean by -the expression 'the fall of the quotidian.' When did this fall occur...
...So far as the fiction goes, the long short story "The Old System," which appeared in Mosby's Memoirs and HIM WITH HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH AND OTHER STORIES Saul Bellow/Harper & Row/S15.95 George Sim Johnston S ! Pince his last collection of stories appeared in 1968, Saul Bellow, like his most famous creation, Moses Herzog, has felt the need to explain, to have it out, to put into perspective...
...My favorite among the five, perhaps because it is the funniest, is the title story...
...Four children were born of the first marriage, and two of the second-though little is said about any of the progeny...
...one surmises from its truncated ending that it started as a sketch for a novel...
...The most serious objection to Wilder--that he is too tame, too effortless somehow, too blandly pedestrian would, I am sure, be quite soon dispelled by such publications...
...Bellow is one of the best intellectual break dancers around...
...Taylor/Atheneum/$14.95 William H. Nolte As if in extenuation of the crime he committed in writing A Personal History, A.J.P...
...Moreover, his first two marriages, each somehow lasting twenty years or more, were unhappy to an extreme...
...after fifty pages the reader does not understand why Bellow did not put a contract out on him...
...One imagines that this crass and vulgar book represents only one of the kinds of ideological noise to which Bellow has been subjected since the late sixties, and his later novels can perhaps be understood as an exercise in contracoustics...
...But all this intellection seldom fuses with the fiction proper...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 37 Other Stories, is, for my money, his best work since Herzog...
...But, alas, as Gertrude Stein advised Hemingway, remarks are not literature...
...He does not understand why Bellow kept trying to avoid him...
...You can't go for more than a dozen pages in his later work without running into Hegel or Freud or Sartre or Merleau-Ponty or Andr~ Breton...
...This filter of sensibility allows him to avoid the problem, as Mailer once put it, of getting his characters out of a room...
...Fans of the New York Intellectual soaps, who can't get enough of what Rahv really said to Howe at the Trillings' New Year's Eve party, will get an extra fillip from "What Kind of Day Did You Have...
...As a result he got a scholarship to the lesser renowned Oriel College...
...Bellow has a weakness for the virtuosic manipulation of brand-name intellectuals...
...Not one...
...I am ready to go even farther and to suggest that the best American answer to the Brideshead Revisited TV series would be an equally well-cast and textfaithful series of The Eighth Day...
...His method is the flashback, the monologue, the character sketch...
Vol. 17 • November 1984 • No. 11
