The Naysayer to Nihilism

By Paul Gray

HIM WITH HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH AND OTHER STORIES by Saul Bellow; Harper & Row; 294 pages; $15.95

Anew book by Saul Bellow is an important event, and not only because he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. That award merely confirmed what thousands of readers had decided years earlier: Bellow's fiction offers a look at life that is not only essential but is unique among his contemporaries. Bellow has been the most rigorous naysayer to nihilism of his era. He has never tried to hide the gloomy truths about modern life or gloss over all the sound reasons (starting or ending with Auschwitz) for a thinking person to despair. His most memorable characters (Herzog, Mr. Sammler, Henderson the Rain King) can list in sometimes comic detail all the symptoms of the decline of the West. Almost alone in serious contemporary fiction, though, Bellow's heroes think that a cure may be worth a try.

The author's vision has accommodated itself most comfortably in his nine novels; big questions take up lots of space. But the smaller scale displayed by the five stories in this collection does not noticeably cramp Bellow's style. The old energies and preoccupations, the querulous people and the rollicking backdrops are all here, at full intensity. There are simply more stops and starts.

In the title story, a megalomaniac writes a letter to a retired librarian, apologizing for an insult that the victim almost certainly does not remember. Small wonder. Some 35 years have passed since the young college teacher, raffishly sporting a baseball hat, walked by the library and encountered Miss Rose. She: "Oh, Dr. Shawmut, in that cap you look like an archaeologist." He: "And you look like something I just dug up." Herschel Shawmut has been reminded of his offense by a former friend, who has mailed him a blistering attack on what he was and what he has become: Shawmut the poseur, the TV huckster of musicology for the masses, the rich author of a popular textbook. The accused can dismiss these charges as spiteful, but he cannot deny that he is, nearing 70, a fugitive from U.S. justice hiding out in British Columbia. That, Miss Rose, is what he would really like to explain: it is a complicated and terribly funny story.

Shawmut is a member of Herzog's class: the pensive man driven to distraction or worse by the messy betrayals of life. What Kind of Day Did You Have? presents a mirror image of this condition. Victor Wulpy, 70, is "a world-class intellectual" who is trying to keep life at arm's length. He has "arranged his ideas in well-nigh final order: none of the weakness, none of the drift that made supposedly educated people contemptible."

Illness has shaken some of his certainties, and so has his affair with Katrina Goliger, a plumpish matron in Evanston, Ill., who divorced her art-collecting husband for the sake of the celebrated visiting lecturer. Victor's attempt to "explain Katrina's sexual drawing power" thwarts him. He phones her from Buffalo, where he is giving a talk, and asks her to meet him there the next morning; then they can fly back to Chicago together in time for another lecture that night. He has, of course, not considered her two young daughters or her vindictive ex-husband, who is eager to gain custody by proving maternal neglect. Katrina knows this about her lover: "You didn't pester him with your nonsense." She flies to Buffalo and complications of weather, emotions and intellect.

These first two stories make up half the book. The remaining three are sketchier and less complex. Zetland: By a Character Witness describes the rites of passage that take a studious Jewish boy from the South Side of Chicago to the bohemia of Greenwich Village. The last two tales are set firmly in the Windy City, where Bellow has spent much of his life, and examine modes of good behavior. In A Silver Dish, the death of his aged father sets Woody Selbst, 60, on a mental tour of his past. He remembers a vision he had when young: "God's idea was that this world should be a love world, that it should eventually recover and be entirely a world of love." Woody seems unconscious of how hard, in caring for his contentious relatives, he has tried to realize his dream. In Cousins, Ijah Brodsky also copes with family demands, out of a sense of destiny rather than duty. He too thinks love can make sense of the world: "Human absorption in faces, deeds, bodies, drew me towards metaphysical grounds."

That can be said and underlined about Ijah's creator. Bellow's ideas seem to spring from inspiring characters and inspired observation. For every abstraction, there is a colorful, counterbalancing image: "The diamonds on her bosom lay like the Finger Lakes among their hills ... As a boy, Philip was very fat. We had to sleep together when we were children and it was like sharing the bed with a dugong." These moments make Bellow's fiction abundant as well as wise. Faithful readers will welcome this book as an addendum, a chance to watch the old master fiddling with themes and variations. The uninitiated may find this the best possible introduction to Bellow's tumultuous world.

Excerpt

"The traveling-celebrity bit was very tiring. You flew in and you were met at the airport by people you didn't know and who put you under a strain because they wanted to be memorable individually, catch your attention, ingratiate themselves, provoke, flatter--it all came to the same thing. Driving from the airport, you were locked in the car with them for nearly an hour. Then there were drinks--a cocktail hubbub. After four or five martinis you went in to dinner and were seated between two women, not always attractive. You had to remember their names, make conversation, give them equal time. You might as well be running for office, you had to shake so many hands. You ate your prime rib and drank wine, and before you had unfolded your speech on the lectern, you were already tuckered out. You shouldn't fight all this, said Victor; to fight it only tired you more."