Burlesquing Intellectuals

...Katrina herself has enough culture to know what it means to have published in the Dial, and too little to be anything other than her lover's humble acolyte...

...Sammler—have an exemplary stature that we associate with characters in the great 19th-century novels...

...And he can move, has moved, from high anthroposophical realms of speculation to realistic action and suffering...

...Shawmutt attributes them to "seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, fa-tum, divine madness...

...The collection is uneven, however...

...Reviewed by Oliver Conant Contributor, "New Republic," "American Book Review," No other writer has dramatized what used to be called the life of the mind with Saul Bellow's confidence and wit...

...Indeed, Bellow's looking back gives us something to look forward to...

...The dialogue similarly reproduces the variety and exactitude of colloquial speech amid Bellow's own inimitable idiolect...

...One of Bellow's skills has always been his ability to illustrate the charm of immigrants and their children adapting to American life...

...Nearly all of the stories in Him With His Foot in His Mouth are set in the past, or return to the past...

...To be sure, Bellow's feelings about intellectuals are complicated (he is one, after all), have many sources and are honorably come by...

...While acknowledging the "psychopathic" aspect of the poet's vision, Shawmutt says, "Ginsberg takes a stand for true tenderness and full candor," and praises his "purity of heart" and "hunger for goodness...

...More important, they reflect what must have been a highly alienating experience: trying to write serious, original fiction about real people that would make significant moral statements when liberal intellectuals—and, in the '30s and '40s, Stalinist intellectuals—subscribed to the orthodoxies that minority groups are wholly composed of innocent victims of oppression (not individuals with good and bad wills), or that environment alone determines moral choice...

...He is the elegant old intellectual Victor Wulpy, who "had been a bohemian long before bohemianism had been absorbed into everyday life...

...Here is Men-dy Eckstine, described with the humor and strength of Saul Bellow at his best: "Mendy Eckstine, once a free-lance journalist and advertising man, was now semiretired...

...But just when a debate impends, Wulpy pulls a face and stomps away, leaving Katrina to apologize...

...The latest in Bellow's long line of princes is in fact heartless...

...I much prefer the three other stories in the collection: "Zetland: By A Character Witness" (if Rameau's nephew were Jewish and had lived on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930s, hewould be Zetland), "ASil-ver Dish" and "Cousins...

...At the same time, the writer seems to be grinning appreciatively at Wulpy's scorn for corporate sponsors and intellectual hangers-on...

...They involve his Chicagoan's resentment of New York City and the East generally...

...the author's long-standing ambivalence toward intellectuals often turns nasty...

...He used to make this movement when he laid down his cigarette on the edge of the pool table of the University of Wisconsin Rathskeller and picked up his cue to study his next shot...

...In "Zetland: ByACharacter Witness," the protagonist, a young prodigy, exhibits cultural ambitions and a range of adolescent reading which, we are given to understand, have vanished...

...A Silver Dish" is a small classic about how complicity in wrongdoing can form bonds between father and son, a tale full of oedipal tension and love...

...The estimation is surprising, since Bellow has previously disapproved of Ginsberg's kind of wholesale rejection of society...

...A gangster's face resembles "an edema of deadly secrets...

...In the present volume, though, his annoyance expends itself in bumptiousness...

...One cannot help thinking that the more intelligently critical Sammler would have seen the good in Ginsberg without falling into Shawmutt's excesses...

...An evangelical home is "full of Bibles and pictures of Jesus and the Holy Land and that faint Gentile odor, as if things had been rinsed in a weak vinegar solution...

...They are largely flat, juvenile utterances of the put-down variety...

...Although her new love, the opposite of her husband, may cost her the custody of her children, she is willing to make the sacrifice...

...Mendy had a peculiar relish for being an American of his time...

...Some among the author's admirers will not doubt applaud the rancorous-ness and rather Odd provocativeness of these first two stories...

...At the little Division Street Savings Bank that became a fish store after the '29 crash, "a tank for live carp was made of the bank marble...

...The story has a Dickensian character gallery, the cousins of the title, and even the most Americanized of them has an extraordinary dimension...

...Again, Bellow's true attitude is difficult to discern...

...Most disappointing of all, his admirable figures, born of past noble battles, have been replaced by Shawmutt and Wulpy, characters out of some kind of burlesque...

...his fine, satiric insight into the deficiencies as well as his cherishing of the valuable in American life—all are here...

...he flails about, observing the operation of ressentiment, greed and arrogance among academics and intellectuals with a cruel unsparingness and (to my mind) a distressing lack of purpose...

...Curiously, too, in the course of his self-analysis Shawmutt turns gratefully to another possessor of an absolutely unbridled tongue, Allen Ginsberg...

...The rube shrewdie has a type he dearly loved—'Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick.' Mendy's densely curled hair was combed straight up, his cheeks were high, damaged by acne, healed to a patchy whiteness...

...Some are double-edged: "You can no longer be a philistine without high sophistication, matching the sophistication of what you hate...

...When his small rented plane appears about to crash to earth, he refuses to tell Katrina he loves her, regarding her need to hear him say this as a form of blackmail...

...Part of him appears to want to show up Wulpy as a pious fraud, a Marxisant poseur who jets around condemning capitalism in the name of art before audiences of wealthy executives...

...He loved hick jazz numbers like 'Sounds a Little Goofus to Me,' and in particular, Oh, the cows went dry and the hens wouldn't lay When he played on his ole cornet...

...Wulpy is supremely arrogant and, like Shawmutt, adept at the put-down:" 'To read Beidell's mind you'd need a proctoscope.' " The drum rolls for Wulpy are irritatingly insistent—he's "a monument," "a sovereign," "the thinker prince...

...As the prevalence of neoconservative politics and deconstructionist criticism suggests, the times hardly lack high-flown tendencies inimical to the creative enterprise...

...This seems extravagant, yet I could not say for sure that the author thinks so because the verbal violence closely parallels his own nose-thumbing impulse where the erudite are concerned...

...From Mendy as from Seckel [another cousin] I had learned songs...

...In one work after another, Bellow has demonstrated a high degree of imaginative generosity, of sympathy...

...Thus the stories are linguistically and in other ways meaty, even where one disagrees with their arguments—a far cry from the desiccated avant-gardism or the deliberate ordinariness and minimalism of too much of today's fiction...

...In the title piece and in a story called "What Kind of Day Did You Have...

...Herzog and Mr...

...Altogether an admirable person, and a complete American, as formal, as total in his fashion as a work of art...

...What Kind of Day Did You Have...

...Invariably protean, Bellow sounds a new note in this book that can be heard in the last sentence of the quoted passage—a note of persistent nostalgia, of regret for vanished folkways...

...The evidence of Wulpy's brain power is skimpy at best: It consists of his wisecracks, his lecture notes on the " lack of an idea in liberal democracy," and his contentious interchanges with Larry Wrangel, a young, nihilistic movie director who represents the new, massified artiness...

...Our foremost chronicler of 1930s immigrant Chicago further remains as acute as ever on the incongruities of period and place: The black coal-heaver wears a woman's fur coat against the cold, the " fur collar spikey with the wet and sprinkled with soot...

...With important exceptions, there also is much to be grateful for in this latest collection of stories...

...the ease, boldness, sprezzatura of his imagination...

...Books in Chicago were obtainable," remarks the narrator, and the pensiveness of the statement makes one almost believe that they no longer are...

...Cousins" is a kind of ethnographic reverie on "Jewish consanguinity," narrated by Ijah Brodsky, who is in many respects closer to Bellow than either Shawmutt or Wulpy...

...When this feeds the author's intelligent cultural pessimism it is extremely valuable...

...Sammler's Planet extend the argument, taking on fashionable irrational-ism and theorists of " alienation...

...Put another way, whatever the negative impact of the first two stories in the present volume, in Bellow's hands the past can be vivifying, as we know from meeting Mendy Eckstine...

...Such phrases as "neurotic, gutless, conniving intellectual types" are a little too frequent for my taste...

...is notable in Bellow's case for being written largely from the viewpoint of a woman, Katrina Goliger, a "suburban sex-pot" in the process of getting divorced from a dealer in ersatz art...

...Some of his creations—Asa Lev-enthal, Augie March, Moses Herzog, the redoubtable Mr...

...Bellow's quarrel with intellectuals has in the past inspired some of his best work, including his second and perhaps finest novel, The Victim...

...his pageant, or rather carnival of ideas...

...Sharp epigrams abound: "A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become...

...But the yeasty brew of Bellow's language...

...But these are not the author's targets...

...The model on which he formed himself has been wiped out...

...Eckstine had been my pool-hall, boxing, j azz-club cousin...

...He had a wonderful start of the head, to declare that he was about to set the record straight...

...It is not as powerful as Mosby's Memoires...

...Then there are the home truths: " It is an especially smart man who isn't marked forever by the sexual theories he hears from his father...

...Born in Muskingum, Ohio, where his father ran a gents' furnishings shop, he attended a Chicago high school and grew up a lively, slangy man who specialized in baseball players, vaudeville performers, trumpeters and boogie-woogie musicians, gamblers, con artists, city hall small-rackets types...

...Herschel Shawmutt is an elderly musicologist who in "Him With His Foot in His Mouth" tries to come to terms with his habit of making seemingly unmotivated, insulting remarks to intellectuals...

...it is much less so when the result is merely gloom and intensified ambivalence about intellectual success...