REVIEW / BOOK
SAUL BELLOW, SEIZING THE DAY, REVISITS THE HUMAN CARNIVAL
HIM WITH HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH, AND OTHER STORIES, BY SAUL BELLOW.
HARPER & ROW. 294 PP. $15.95.

Author: By Margaret Manning Globe Staff

Date: Sunday, May 27, 1984
Page: ?????
Section: BOOKS

"Him With His Foot in His Mouth" is a collection of recent stories, and the title one is a long, discursive apologia by an aging musicologist, one Herschel Shawmut, to an aging librarian, "Miss Rose," for some imagined offense he may have committed 35 years earlier. It turns into an overview of his life - like almost all lives, not worth a ragged Kleenex - and particularly his relationship with a fellow scholar, Eddie Walish, the person who now says he, Shawmut, ruined Miss Rose's life by an offhand wisecrack.

Walish, plus Shawmut's current problems which have to do with fraud and delusion and the reason he is living in retreat in British Columbia, are the guts of the story.

He tells Miss Rose that his now-dead wife was slender and small, a "Lucas Cranach woman," not modern. She does sound dreadful, as Shawmut (he says his name comes from a chain of Massachusetts banks) goes on and on and on. He got into trouble because he and his terrible and clearly dishonest brother (Shawmut is clearly vivacious but not overly fastidious) swindled relatives, among others. A mess. A vortex, Miss Rose. A whirlwind. How can one explain, excuse? One can't. One is sorry, whatever one did. That is the story of Shawmut, though he is not anxious to admit he did anything.

The next, and most ambitious, story is "What Kind of Day Did You Have?"

Katrina Goliger, a divorced suburban matron with two children, is "passably pretty. . . awkward. . . wildly restless." She has a gentleman friend, Victor Wulpy, who is a well known intellectual (a Harold Rosenberg type), not to mention a 75-year-old bohemian. He is her entree to a world she had never known and she treasures that. Her father was a political fixer in Chicago, a man of no discernible wit who thought intelligent women should be avoided. Victor Wulpy disagrees. He loves (despite poor health) noise, chatter, drink (five martinis before dinner) and being lionized. He is fond of Katrina (though not of his wife) and he talks to her nonstop. She is not expected to do anything but listen, but she sees this as having been admitted to the master class. He lives for ideas. He is happy with himself and so are we, especially when he says of an acquaintance: "nothing but a fish bladder in his head," or when Bellow says of him that he paid no more attention to death than to a litter of puppies pulling at the cuffs of his pants. He radiates.

Victor is in Buffalo during some blighted winter lecturing. He is paid less than Henry Kissinger is, but not much. Katrina is in her house in Evanston sitting out her divorce and her husband's threatened suit for custody of their two children. Victor summons her to the Buffalo airport. He is on his way to another lecture in Chicago. She goes. She can't keep away from him - even if it might mean losing her children, who are pretty boring anyway, as Bellow describes them. Victor is important, and not just to her. People pursue him, mostly people who haven't top quality minds. Of course, there aren't many top quality minds around.

Here is Victor/Bellow on charm, of which both have plenty, if they feel like it:

"Even harsh people have their own harsh charm. Some are all charm, like Franklin D. Roosevelt. Some repudiate charm, like Stalin. When all-charm and no-charm met at Yalta, no-charm won hands down."

Victor and Katrina survive a virtually upside-down flight back to Chicago during which he refuses to tell her he loves her, even under these hairy conditions. And what kind of day did you have?

An elephant figures in this story in a charming way.

There are three other, and I suppose lesser, or at least shorter, stories in "Him With His Foot in His Mouth." I like them all.

"Zetland: By a Character Witness" is a very short one about a Chicago boy who goes exuberantly with his new wife to New York where they live with cockroaches and thereby become real bohemians.

"A Silver Dish" is about dying and trying to live, about misbehaving (stealing, gambling, chasing women), about a coarse-grained life. But whose life is made of silk?

"Cousins." A gangster named Tanky, the narrator's cousin, is going to jail unless said narrator can Do Something. Tanky is clearly a no-goodnik, though he doesn't kill people, he just scares them. Others, men he may know, do kill.

Family, God save the mark! Too much of it. Too many years of it. Too many quarrels, misunderstandings. Too much idiocy. But there it all is, is some of what Bellow is saying, and why would we want to change it, especially when we can't? And especially because in Bellow's world the characters may stew, but they also bubble.

Bellow didn't win the Nobel for being adorable or ponderous. His is a powerful mind, perhaps the most powerful mind among all those exceedingly
brainy American writers who do so much to instruct and entertain us. In addition, he is a virtuoso of dialogue that has roots in Yiddish cadence and of language that is pure Anglo-Saxon - New England woods in autumn: "pollen, woodsmoke, decayed and mealy leaves, spider webs, perhaps the wing powder of dead moths."

He can create sensations of immediacy and breathlessness. He wants to get away from courtly prose, to capture the moment, to seize the day, if you will, although in that book the hero is so weak he can seize nothing. Bellow has come a long way away from easy despair and angst. In "Herzog," he wrote of the cliche quality of the Wasteland point of view and he has continued with that theme, among others. These stories are vital, and while God may be absent, human consciousness, if ripe enough, is all.

MANNIN;05/15,14:28 LDRISC;05/27,13 B07655179