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Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories
Five of Saul Bellow’s most moving, richly textured, and exquisitely plotted short stories make up this volume, each providing a history of personality and self-awakening. The title story, “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” follows a musicologist narrator who for years has scattered wounding witticisms “from the depths of my nature, that hoard of strange formulations.” As the story unfolds he tries to discover what led him into a “deep legal-financial hole,” while he awaits extradition from a refuge in British Columbia. “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” follows a divorced suburban woman and her lovers—would-be and actual—through a frantic day in their lives. Their needs and passions, as well as their comic conflicts, are matters of life and death. In “Zetland: By a Character Witness” and in “A Silver Dish,” Bellow returns, with his unequaled command of eloquent recollected detail, to a bygone Chicago, “Zetland” is a brilliant portrait of an artist as a young boy and a man, precocious and eccentric; “A Silver Dish” is a memorable story of a raffish, willful father and his affectionate son. “Cousins,” the final story in the volume, explores the mysteries of family feeling—mysteries that defy both logic and the worthiness of their objects, as Ijah Brodsky, successful in the larger world, is drawn into an encounter with criminal and naively idealistic forces. This collection represents a turning point in the bountiful career of Saul Bellow, a felicitous rendering of the human condition in all its absurd complexity.
290 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1984
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755 people want to read
About the author
Saul Bellow
252 books1,962 followersNovels of Saul Bellow, Canadian-American writer, include
Dangling Man
in 1944 and
Humboldt's Gift
in 1975 and often concern an alienated individual within an indifferent society; he won the Nobel Prize of 1976 for literature.
People widely regard one most important Saul Bellow of the 20th century. Known for his rich prose, intellectual depth, and incisive character studies, Bellow explored themes of identity and the complexities of modern life with a distinct voice that fused philosophical insight and streetwise humor. Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and Mister Sammler’s Planet , his major works, earned critical acclaim and a lasting legacy.
Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow at a young age moved with his family to Chicago, a city that shaped much worldview and a frequent backdrop in his fiction. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and later Northwestern, and his intellectual interests deeply informed him. Bellow briefly pursued graduate studies in anthropology, quickly turned, and first published.
Breakthrough of Saul Bellow came with The Adventures of Augie March , a sprawling, exuberance that in 1953 marked the national book award and a new direction in fiction. With energetic language and episodic structure, it introduced readers to a new kind of unapologetically intellectual yet deeply grounded hero in the realities of urban life. Over the following decades, Bellow produced a series of acclaimed that further cemented his reputation. In Herzog , considered his masterpiece in 1964, a psychological portrait of inner turmoil of a troubled academic unfolds through a series of unsent letters, while a semi-autobiographical reflection on art and fame gained the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1976, people awarded human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture of Saul Bellow. He only thrice gained the national book award for fiction and also received the medal of arts and the lifetime achievement of the library of Congress.
Beyond fiction, Saul Bellow, a passionate essayist, taught. He held academic positions at institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, Princeton, and Boston University, and people knew his sharp intellect and lively classroom presence. Despite his stature, Bellow cared about ordinary people and infused his work with humor, moral reflection, and a deep appreciation of contradictions of life.
People can see influence of Saul Bellow in the work of countless followers. His uniquely and universally resonant voice ably combined the comic, the profound, the intellectual, and the visceral. He continued into his later years to publish his final Ravelstein in 2000.
People continue to read work of Saul Bellow and to celebrate its wisdom, vitality, and fearless examination of humanity in a chaotic world.
People widely regard one most important Saul Bellow of the 20th century. Known for his rich prose, intellectual depth, and incisive character studies, Bellow explored themes of identity and the complexities of modern life with a distinct voice that fused philosophical insight and streetwise humor. Herzog , The Adventures of Augie March , and Mister Sammler’s Planet , his major works, earned critical acclaim and a lasting legacy.
Born in Lachine, Quebec, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Saul Bellow at a young age moved with his family to Chicago, a city that shaped much worldview and a frequent backdrop in his fiction. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and later Northwestern, and his intellectual interests deeply informed him. Bellow briefly pursued graduate studies in anthropology, quickly turned, and first published.
Breakthrough of Saul Bellow came with The Adventures of Augie March , a sprawling, exuberance that in 1953 marked the national book award and a new direction in fiction. With energetic language and episodic structure, it introduced readers to a new kind of unapologetically intellectual yet deeply grounded hero in the realities of urban life. Over the following decades, Bellow produced a series of acclaimed that further cemented his reputation. In Herzog , considered his masterpiece in 1964, a psychological portrait of inner turmoil of a troubled academic unfolds through a series of unsent letters, while a semi-autobiographical reflection on art and fame gained the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1976, people awarded human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture of Saul Bellow. He only thrice gained the national book award for fiction and also received the medal of arts and the lifetime achievement of the library of Congress.
Beyond fiction, Saul Bellow, a passionate essayist, taught. He held academic positions at institutions, such as the University of Minnesota, Princeton, and Boston University, and people knew his sharp intellect and lively classroom presence. Despite his stature, Bellow cared about ordinary people and infused his work with humor, moral reflection, and a deep appreciation of contradictions of life.
People can see influence of Saul Bellow in the work of countless followers. His uniquely and universally resonant voice ably combined the comic, the profound, the intellectual, and the visceral. He continued into his later years to publish his final Ravelstein in 2000.
People continue to read work of Saul Bellow and to celebrate its wisdom, vitality, and fearless examination of humanity in a chaotic world.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
October 7, 2020
It’s a brilliant collection and Saul Bellow manages to be matchlessly acidulous.
The title story, Him with His Foot in His Mouth is an epistolary tale of a man who despises hypocrisy and always tells truth while to tell the truth in the modern civilized society is mauvais ton.
And the hero of What Kind of Day Did You Have? is so highly intellectual that he sometimes doesn’t understand his own smart thoughts…
Outsmarting the others, one should avoid outsmarting one’s own self.
The title story, Him with His Foot in His Mouth is an epistolary tale of a man who despises hypocrisy and always tells truth while to tell the truth in the modern civilized society is mauvais ton.
I have from time to time remembered that I long ago made a bad joke at your expense and have felt uneasy about it, but it was spelled out to me recently that what I said to you was so wicked, so lousy, gross, insulting, unfeeling, and savage that you could never in a thousand years get over it. I wounded you for life, so I am given to understand, and I am the more greatly to blame because this attack was so gratuitous. We had met in passing only, we scarcely knew each other.
And the hero of What Kind of Day Did You Have? is so highly intellectual that he sometimes doesn’t understand his own smart thoughts…
He came on like the king of something – of the Jews perhaps. By and by, you became aware of a top-and-bottom contrast in Victor; he was not above as he was below. In the simplest terms, his shoes were used up and he wore his pants negligently, but when his second drink had warmed him and he took off the corduroy coat, he uncovered one of his typical shirts. It resembled one of Paul Klee’s canvases, those that were filled with tiny rectilinear forms – green, ruby, yellow, violet, washed out but still beautiful. His large trunk was one warm artwork. After all, he was a chieftain and pundit in the art world, a powerful man; even his oddities (naturally) had power. Kingly, artistic, democratic, he had been around forever. He was withering, though. But women were after him, even now.
Outsmarting the others, one should avoid outsmarting one’s own self.
October 16, 2020
I read perhaps only the title story and one other, so my reading and review are notably incomplete--if not irrelevant. I found the title story well within the achivement I grant Bellow, as the best fiction writer of his and my time, with Updike a close second (but only in a couple novels, like Rabbit at Rest).
On the whole, Bellow breaches the common recurrence of fine writers' being better at short stories than novels: Flannery O'Connor, maybe Joyce, maybe VS Naipaul, etc. Bellow doesn't seem to benefit by brevity.
Who was it said I have to write a novel if I fail at a short story...
BTW, Saul Bellow's best friend at U Minnesota in late 50's was my doctoral advisor Leonard Unger; legend had it they together at the Faculty Club lunch wrote a translation of the first four lines of TS Eliot's "Wasteland"... into Yiddish. Leonard wrote the first book on Eliot, and through Eliot, knew Donne and Shakespeare well. Leonard was also a wit, like my undergrad Amherst College English profs.
On the whole, Bellow breaches the common recurrence of fine writers' being better at short stories than novels: Flannery O'Connor, maybe Joyce, maybe VS Naipaul, etc. Bellow doesn't seem to benefit by brevity.
Who was it said I have to write a novel if I fail at a short story...
BTW, Saul Bellow's best friend at U Minnesota in late 50's was my doctoral advisor Leonard Unger; legend had it they together at the Faculty Club lunch wrote a translation of the first four lines of TS Eliot's "Wasteland"... into Yiddish. Leonard wrote the first book on Eliot, and through Eliot, knew Donne and Shakespeare well. Leonard was also a wit, like my undergrad Amherst College English profs.
December 22, 2016
نصفه رهاش کردم. واقعا نویسنده اسم به جایی برای کتابش انتخاب کرده. آدم مدام دلش میخواست به راوی بگه ببین، واقعا دیگه وقتشه ساکت شی :)))
January 24, 2016
The book was smarter than me, so I didn't enjoy it all too much.
November 27, 2013
Though I recognize that Bellow is a unique voice and found myself interested in his writing style and quirky way of describing people, places, and situations, I had to put this book away at page 172 because I simply couldn't stand it anymore.
First of all, I didn't like any of the characters and I wasn't sure that the author liked them either. Secondly, I am allergic to New Yorker-type stories that position the reader as a voyeur as he or she hears about the lives of people more accomplished/rich/famous/smart than oneself.
The second story, "What Kind of Day Did You Have?," a story that was highly recommended by several goodreads readers, is very much in this vein but I really had no interest in reading about the snide remarks or sudden mood swings of the protagonist and tired mightily of Bellow repeatedly reinforcing the idea that his fictional creation Victor Wulpy is a Great Man.
That the story revolves around the Wulpy character marks it as 60s issue for there was an epidemic at that time of such stories by Jewish writers such as Roth: always the virile all conquering man, always the attractive woman fawning over him, always this sex/power fantasy and all the women who play bit parts in it who are very much demeaned by the way they are treated by the Great Man. Always the sexual details that nobody has the stomach to want to read about anymore; perhaps at the time these details were considered bold and liberated; now they just seem pathetic.
Bellow has a reputation of being one of the better writers of the 20th century, and he is considered one of the best Jewish writers, but the stories in this book seem to have aged rapidly, judging from the one I read and the second one that I had to stop reading 73 pages into it.
First of all, I didn't like any of the characters and I wasn't sure that the author liked them either. Secondly, I am allergic to New Yorker-type stories that position the reader as a voyeur as he or she hears about the lives of people more accomplished/rich/famous/smart than oneself.
The second story, "What Kind of Day Did You Have?," a story that was highly recommended by several goodreads readers, is very much in this vein but I really had no interest in reading about the snide remarks or sudden mood swings of the protagonist and tired mightily of Bellow repeatedly reinforcing the idea that his fictional creation Victor Wulpy is a Great Man.
That the story revolves around the Wulpy character marks it as 60s issue for there was an epidemic at that time of such stories by Jewish writers such as Roth: always the virile all conquering man, always the attractive woman fawning over him, always this sex/power fantasy and all the women who play bit parts in it who are very much demeaned by the way they are treated by the Great Man. Always the sexual details that nobody has the stomach to want to read about anymore; perhaps at the time these details were considered bold and liberated; now they just seem pathetic.
Bellow has a reputation of being one of the better writers of the 20th century, and he is considered one of the best Jewish writers, but the stories in this book seem to have aged rapidly, judging from the one I read and the second one that I had to stop reading 73 pages into it.
August 5, 2018
"Le idee chiare diventano sempre più chiare quanto più la terra si spalanca sotto i tuoi piedi – l'illuminazione cresce parallelamente al tuo cammino fisiologico verso la morte." (Come è andata la vostra giornata?, p. 108)
"Rifuggo da tutto ciò che assomiglia a una “grandiosa iniziativa”. E poi non vivo isolato per mia scelta. Non riesco apparentemente a trovare i contemporanei di cui avrei bisogno." (Cugini, p. 263)
"Centinaia di libri, ma solo mezzo scaffale di quelli che contano. Non si estrae una maggior bontà da una maggior conoscenza." (ivi, p. 292)
"Rifuggo da tutto ciò che assomiglia a una “grandiosa iniziativa”. E poi non vivo isolato per mia scelta. Non riesco apparentemente a trovare i contemporanei di cui avrei bisogno." (Cugini, p. 263)
"Centinaia di libri, ma solo mezzo scaffale di quelli che contano. Non si estrae una maggior bontà da una maggior conoscenza." (ivi, p. 292)
June 22, 2017
جايى توى ٨٠ سالگى تون گوشه اى بشينيد و نگاهى به زندگى تون بندازين و متوجّه بشين جايى از زندگى تون فردى وجود داره كه بدون دليل آزارش دادين و براش نامه بنويسيد. خلاصه ى «وقتشه ساكت شى» در يك جمله همين ه و اين ه كه غم انگيزش مى كن ه. اين كه سال ها زندگى مى كنيم و با مشكلات و اتفاقات متفاوتى دست و پنجه نرم مى كنيم و تمام اين چند ده سال توى ١٦٠ صفحه خلاصه مى شه. :-<
اين كتاب نامه اى ست كه شخصيت اصلى داستان «آقاى شامونت» كه موسيقيدان ه به خاطر دريافت نامه اى از دوست ش «واليش» مبنى بر اين كه رفتار نادرست و متلك ش باعث آسيب «خانوم رز» شده به ايشون مى نويسه تا رفتارشُ توجيه كن ه و عذرخواهى كن ه.
شامونت توى اين نامه براى توجيه رفتارش دلايل مختلفى مى ياره و منشا متفاوتى ذكر مى كن ه مثل يك نوع بيمارى يا رفتارى شيطانى و ... اون از اين موضوع مى گه كه اين آزار ديگران به واسطه ى متلك هاش خيلى جاها براش گرون تموم شده و به خاطر ريشه يابى ش گريزى به كل زندگى ش مى زنه و از خانواده ش مى گى و در نهايت وضعيتى كه درون ش قرار داره.
نويسنده ى كتاب، «سال بلو» توى كتاب داره از مرگ اخلاقيات صحبت مى كن ه. برشى از جامعه ى فاصله گرفته از اخلاقياتُ توصيف مى كن ه و دردناك بودن شُ به رخ مى كشه.
كتاب خوندنى ه.
«خب، اين مسأله درست شبيه اين است كه مردى دريك روز زيبا از خانه بيرون برود، روزى آنچنان زيبا و دوست داشتنى كه او را ناخودآگاه به انجام كارى ترغيب كند، امّا براى انجام يك فعاليت مناسب يا هر كار ديگرى احساس مى كند همچون فردى پوچ و بى فايده است كه در ويلچر كنار ساحل نشسته است. آدم عليلى كه پرستارش به او مى گويد همين جا بنشينيد و امواج دريا را تماشا كنيد. مى خواهد كارى انجام بدهد اما ديگر نمى تواند. مى خواهم كارى كنم، امّا نمى توانم.»
March 24, 2024
سال بلو بسیار با سواد و رفتارشناسی دقیق است. داستان را جدا جلو میبرد، روایت ذهنیاش را جدا. هربار سر ذوق میآیم و با خودم میگویم باید حتما بیشتر از سال بلو بخوانم.
«گرچه ما دوستان خوبی برای هم بودیم، در آخر او قصد کرد تا نقش یک دشمن مهلک را برابر من بازی کند. تمام مدت که نقش یک همراه و دوست صمیمی و ارزشمند را برایم بازی میکرد، در اصل خیال داشت تا مرا همچون پرندهای در قفس فربه کند تا زمان مناسب برای خوردناش فرا رسد.»
«گرچه ما دوستان خوبی برای هم بودیم، در آخر او قصد کرد تا نقش یک دشمن مهلک را برابر من بازی کند. تمام مدت که نقش یک همراه و دوست صمیمی و ارزشمند را برایم بازی میکرد، در اصل خیال داشت تا مرا همچون پرندهای در قفس فربه کند تا زمان مناسب برای خوردناش فرا رسد.»
September 8, 2021
I’m going to stop, as the last three stories — one a fragment from 1974 — don’t interest me at this moment. But the first two are brilliant and quintessential “late” Bellow — “Him” and the Rosenberg story. They are just fabulous. Here is a curious piece from Joan Ullman, who is the real Katrina (Victor’s mistress/lover): https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/ar...
November 6, 2025
"Altogether an admirable person, and a complete American, as formal, as total in his fashion as a work of art. The model on which he formed himself has been wiped out. In the late thirties he and I went to the fights together, or the Club de Lisa for jazz."
Bellow, Saul. Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories (p. 278). Odyssey Editions. Kindle Edition.
Bellow, Saul. Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories (p. 278). Odyssey Editions. Kindle Edition.
January 2, 2025
After finishing Zachary Leader's two giant volumes of Bellow's life, I gave these stories from his later years, published 1986, a go. The title entry is about a man trying to make up, in epistolary form, for a callow, if casual, insult delivered to a harmless librarian of the type once relegated as a spinster, in the same era during which this putdown occurred, vaguely mid-twentieth century, a New York State genteel campus. It's fine, but no great revelations. More of anecdotes strung together by a smart guy.
In more than one sense. Same for "And How Was Your Day?" Very much based on events in Bellow's career. His doppelganger cajoles his divorced lover to fly from Chicago to see him at the VIP lounge at Buffalo airport. They deal with an earnest acquaintance from thirty years before who chats up the celebrity intellectual, before going back to their return leg the same day. Why, as the tale is told from her point of view, wisely, is never totally clear. This keeps you wondering. Their flight gets diverted to Detroit in bad weather, and they can't shake their unwanted "guest"... At least this kept my attention.
But while the again inevitably heavily autobiographical "Zetland" has its charms, it seems to be the start of an aborted longer piece. I can see why it's stillborn, for it stops as if the end of Act One of a play without another section, or a series which never got renewed for a second season. I guess Bellow wanted this beginning preserved, but with the characters just beginning to blossom, it's an odd pick.
The final pair didn't grab me. Neither "The Silver Dish" nor "Cousins" shook off their secondhand musty air of shaggy-dog yarns about the author's relatives which tangle into a skein of uninvolving encounters with the less rarified members of Bellow's extended clan. I wearied of the anecdotes, the listless dialogue, the recurring leitmotif of a highly educated, affluent, hyper articulate denizen of the circuit of world shakers and corridors of power squaring off with his kin who never escaped Chicago.
However not for the first time have I noticed a telltale trend. GR reviewers don't salivate with hype or drool with five-star average ratio when it comes to Bellow. Yet, we tend to reward him judiciously our points, hard-earned, for the effort he put into assembling formidable representatives of a now nearly vanished type, the immigrants and their children who came to America a century ago to teach each other in the world of ideas, business, and the professions what was needed to succeed against all odds.
Therefore, I still stay open to what I learn from Bellow and his peers. They took seriously the struggle not to fall into received opinion. They fought to fend off the groupthink which seduced their comrades then as now, in those who inherited their susceptible naivete, contemptible capitulation, and their libertine enthusiasms which accelerated the erosion of higher education, media integrity, sexual propriety, religious cohesion, ethical grounding, humanistic compassion, moral probity, and political circumspection. We see the results of the abandonment of standards, and although I hold Bellow in fact and fiction accountable for some prevarication and self-righteous posturing as he managed to profit handsomely and consistently as he assiduously could charm the fat-cats and think-tanks, and to court those in person whom he delighted in salvaging between the pages...still, he at his uneven best confronts you with both the hard truths of Western Civilization and the failures of its high ideals.
In more than one sense. Same for "And How Was Your Day?" Very much based on events in Bellow's career. His doppelganger cajoles his divorced lover to fly from Chicago to see him at the VIP lounge at Buffalo airport. They deal with an earnest acquaintance from thirty years before who chats up the celebrity intellectual, before going back to their return leg the same day. Why, as the tale is told from her point of view, wisely, is never totally clear. This keeps you wondering. Their flight gets diverted to Detroit in bad weather, and they can't shake their unwanted "guest"... At least this kept my attention.
But while the again inevitably heavily autobiographical "Zetland" has its charms, it seems to be the start of an aborted longer piece. I can see why it's stillborn, for it stops as if the end of Act One of a play without another section, or a series which never got renewed for a second season. I guess Bellow wanted this beginning preserved, but with the characters just beginning to blossom, it's an odd pick.
The final pair didn't grab me. Neither "The Silver Dish" nor "Cousins" shook off their secondhand musty air of shaggy-dog yarns about the author's relatives which tangle into a skein of uninvolving encounters with the less rarified members of Bellow's extended clan. I wearied of the anecdotes, the listless dialogue, the recurring leitmotif of a highly educated, affluent, hyper articulate denizen of the circuit of world shakers and corridors of power squaring off with his kin who never escaped Chicago.
However not for the first time have I noticed a telltale trend. GR reviewers don't salivate with hype or drool with five-star average ratio when it comes to Bellow. Yet, we tend to reward him judiciously our points, hard-earned, for the effort he put into assembling formidable representatives of a now nearly vanished type, the immigrants and their children who came to America a century ago to teach each other in the world of ideas, business, and the professions what was needed to succeed against all odds.
Therefore, I still stay open to what I learn from Bellow and his peers. They took seriously the struggle not to fall into received opinion. They fought to fend off the groupthink which seduced their comrades then as now, in those who inherited their susceptible naivete, contemptible capitulation, and their libertine enthusiasms which accelerated the erosion of higher education, media integrity, sexual propriety, religious cohesion, ethical grounding, humanistic compassion, moral probity, and political circumspection. We see the results of the abandonment of standards, and although I hold Bellow in fact and fiction accountable for some prevarication and self-righteous posturing as he managed to profit handsomely and consistently as he assiduously could charm the fat-cats and think-tanks, and to court those in person whom he delighted in salvaging between the pages...still, he at his uneven best confronts you with both the hard truths of Western Civilization and the failures of its high ideals.
December 22, 2023
خیلی کشدار و خستهکننده بود هرچند لحظاتی خندهدار هم داشت.
October 19, 2020
More than any other novelist since WWII, Saul Bellow was aware of the event that Jacques Derrida called "the rupture." And more than any other novelist, Bellow crafted rich and strange mimetic confrontations with the chaos of the external, visual world, with the internal chaos it manifests. In his collection Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories, Bellow again demonstrates his ability to penetrate the appearances of twentieth-century life and lay bare the essential forms.
In the title story he presents us with Dr. Shawmutt who has the dubious gift of saying the most offensive things. His "divine madness," however, is not accompanied by the desire to offend. Rather, it seems to be the result of a compulsion, a necessity, to strike through the masks, which is basically why he agrees with the counsel of "an old woman who reads Swedenborg and other occult authors" that "the soul is ruled by levity, pure." References to her appear especially at the beginning and the end of the story which is in the form of a long letter of apology to a Miss Rose whom Shawmutt had insulted thirty-five years earlier. The letter recounts "it all," how life has prepared him for "words of ultimate seriousness." He, like all human beings, has come up against the inevitable failure of life. Even his friends and brother have deceived him and shamelessly exploited him. He has been lessoned. Is experienced. No wonder that, after desperately fleeing to Canada to escape prosecution and further exploitation, he turns to the old woman, Mrs. Gracewell. Despite her unorthodox spirituality, there is an element of veracity to her convictions, which Shawmutt finds nowhere else and it prepares him (though the soul’s levity remains incorruptible) for his extradition back to the United States:
Forty years a widow and holding curious views, she is happy in my company.Few vistors want to hear about the Divine Spirit, but I am seriously prepared toponder the mysterious and intriguing descriptions she gives. The Divine Spirit,she tells me, has withdrawn in our time from the outer, visible world. You can seewhat it once wrought, you are surrounded by its created forms. But though natural processes continue, Divinity has absented itself. The wrought work is brightlydivine but Divinity is not now active within it. The world’s grandeur is fading.And this is our human setting, devoid of God, she says with great earnestness....I listen to this and have no mischievous impulses. I shall miss the old girl. After much monkey business, dear Miss Rose, I am ready to listen to words of ultimate seriousness. There isn’t much time left. The federal Marshall, any day now, will be setting out from Seattle.
If Shawmut proclaims "Better an ignis fatuus / Than no illume at all," he still posits, by the absence that is light-heartedly evoked throughout the letter, a world of spirit, which once merited, and may once again merit, the highest respect and fulfil the deepest and most sincere yearnings of humankind.
"A Silver Dish" probes further the dry surfaces and pervasive confusion. All the protagonist’s family and friends "had lived by the body, but the body was giving out." Everyone is suffering from some malady or another. As a young Jewish seminary student in South Chicago, he learns that, and his father helps him gain this lesson, he is "Not cut out for a spiritual life." Contrary to what might be expected, he and his coarse, scheming father remain more loyal to the old values than the pious Christians who merely want the boy Woody as a convert so that he might proselytise among the Jews and thereby prepare the world for the Second Coming. Surprised himself by the spirituality his scoundrel-father has had always up his sleeve, Woody fulfils his father’s wish and buries him among Jews.
Underneath Woody’s own coarseness and corporeality, from his earliest days as a coolie pulling a rickshaw for visitors to the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair, he had one idea...that the goal, the project, the purpose was (and he couldn’t explain why he thought so; all evidence was against it)--God’s idea was that this world should be a love world, that it should eventually recover and be entirely a world of love. He wouldn’t have said this to a soul, for he could see himself how stupid it was--personal and stupid. Nevertheless, there it was at the centre of his feelings.
Although he is accused of being his father’s son, a crook, a schemer at heart, although a deep tragic darkness taints him too, his "clumsy intuition" of good ultimately saturating life lifts Woody into the same realm that his father unexpectedly attains at death. A similar "clumsy intuition" undergirds the story "Cousins." Ijah Brodsky maintains family relations at a time when, as his ex-wife wryly reminds him, "the nuclear family is breaking up." Ijah himself indicates how deep his familial devotion is when he states, "I had remembered, observed, studied the cousins, and these studies seemed to fix my own essence and keep me as I had been." Whether with his gangster-cousin Tanky Metzger, Tanky’s sister Eunice,Cousin Motty, Scholem, or Mendy, Ijah, one of the family prodigies, learned in languages,sociology, linguistics, law and so on, perceives the devastating impact of historical, cultural confusion on his relatives. Yet deep below the chaos he also perceives and affirms
An original self exists, or, if you prefer, an original soul. It may be as Goethe suggested, that the soul is a theatre in which Nature can show itself, the only such theatre that it has. And this makes sense when you attempt to account for some kinds of passionate observation--the observation of cousins, for example.
Through his "personal observation" of his largely secularised and often criminal cousins, Ijah extends his selfless concern far beyond his own family. He comes to understand dimly the upheavals that have cut off others from the past and left them in a wasteland.
At one point Ijah concurs with Hegel that "the very bonds of the world" are dissolving and being swept away by the onward rush of events still too confused to penetrate clearly. But hedoes, as in the previously cited passage, affirm "A new emergence of Spirit." This "Spirit" is left vague and undefined by Ijah but may be connected with elemental forces he discovers through his reading in anthropology. This vagueness is not undetectable in the four other stories of this collection. It seems to be the sine qua non of their affirmation.Nevertheless, despite a certain ungrounded belief in re-emergence, the rupture is mimetically laid open and boldly probed. In our age of massive transformation, it would be unfair to expect more, to belittle the rare achievement of managing to be not a symptom but an exploration of the common malady. After recalling a session of the United Nations he had attended, presumably in his capacity as international financier, Ijah reaches the most striking and undeniable implication of there-emergence in the following passage:
Then it came to me how geography had been taught in the Chicago schools whenI was a kid. We were issued a series of booklets: "Our Little Japanese Cousins,""0ur Little Moroccan Cousins," "Our Little Russian Cousins," "Our Little Spanish Cousins." I read all these gentle descriptions about little Ivan and tiny Conchita,and my eager heart opened to them. Why, we were close, we were under it all (as Tanky was very intelligent "under it all"). We were not guineas, dagos, krauts; we were cousins. It was a splendid conception, and those of us who opened our excited hearts to the world union of cousins were happy, as I was, to give our candy pennies to a fund for the rebuilding of Tokyo after the earthquake of the twenties. After Pearl Harbour, we were obliged to bomb hell out of the place. It’s unlikely that Japanese children had been provided with books about their little American cousins.
Why, we were close, we were one under it all" stands as one of the most glorious utterances in all modern fiction--that out of the confrontation with horrifying chaos such an insight can merge proclaims the sovereign power of mimesis and bodes well for a world that approaches,though begrudgingly, its essential form. Ijah’s outlook is not a childish one. He would probably agree with the necessity of balancing emotion and intuition with the wisdom and sobriety enunciated by, among others, Brand Blanshard, who acknowledges, in his book Reason and Belief, the same irrefutable goal toward which all nations and peoples are impelled:
Nations must give up some part of their independence; they must believe in a reason that transcends prejudices and international boundaries; and they must be willing to hand over to a super-national government the control of the major weapons of destruction. That the 130 governments now in the United Nations,and particularly the half dozen most powerful ones, can be induced to take this line before the outbreak of Armageddon does not seem very probable. However that may be, there is only one way out of anarchy, whether individual or national.
Blanshard’s doubt notwithstanding, this collection testifies to the magnificent diversity of our country and of the world, and reminds us that the essential human spirit, under the forms of chaos, can be summoned, if we but have the will, and can heal and reunite the severed bonds of the quotidian world no matter how late the hour may be.
In the title story he presents us with Dr. Shawmutt who has the dubious gift of saying the most offensive things. His "divine madness," however, is not accompanied by the desire to offend. Rather, it seems to be the result of a compulsion, a necessity, to strike through the masks, which is basically why he agrees with the counsel of "an old woman who reads Swedenborg and other occult authors" that "the soul is ruled by levity, pure." References to her appear especially at the beginning and the end of the story which is in the form of a long letter of apology to a Miss Rose whom Shawmutt had insulted thirty-five years earlier. The letter recounts "it all," how life has prepared him for "words of ultimate seriousness." He, like all human beings, has come up against the inevitable failure of life. Even his friends and brother have deceived him and shamelessly exploited him. He has been lessoned. Is experienced. No wonder that, after desperately fleeing to Canada to escape prosecution and further exploitation, he turns to the old woman, Mrs. Gracewell. Despite her unorthodox spirituality, there is an element of veracity to her convictions, which Shawmutt finds nowhere else and it prepares him (though the soul’s levity remains incorruptible) for his extradition back to the United States:
Forty years a widow and holding curious views, she is happy in my company.Few vistors want to hear about the Divine Spirit, but I am seriously prepared toponder the mysterious and intriguing descriptions she gives. The Divine Spirit,she tells me, has withdrawn in our time from the outer, visible world. You can seewhat it once wrought, you are surrounded by its created forms. But though natural processes continue, Divinity has absented itself. The wrought work is brightlydivine but Divinity is not now active within it. The world’s grandeur is fading.And this is our human setting, devoid of God, she says with great earnestness....I listen to this and have no mischievous impulses. I shall miss the old girl. After much monkey business, dear Miss Rose, I am ready to listen to words of ultimate seriousness. There isn’t much time left. The federal Marshall, any day now, will be setting out from Seattle.
If Shawmut proclaims "Better an ignis fatuus / Than no illume at all," he still posits, by the absence that is light-heartedly evoked throughout the letter, a world of spirit, which once merited, and may once again merit, the highest respect and fulfil the deepest and most sincere yearnings of humankind.
"A Silver Dish" probes further the dry surfaces and pervasive confusion. All the protagonist’s family and friends "had lived by the body, but the body was giving out." Everyone is suffering from some malady or another. As a young Jewish seminary student in South Chicago, he learns that, and his father helps him gain this lesson, he is "Not cut out for a spiritual life." Contrary to what might be expected, he and his coarse, scheming father remain more loyal to the old values than the pious Christians who merely want the boy Woody as a convert so that he might proselytise among the Jews and thereby prepare the world for the Second Coming. Surprised himself by the spirituality his scoundrel-father has had always up his sleeve, Woody fulfils his father’s wish and buries him among Jews.
Underneath Woody’s own coarseness and corporeality, from his earliest days as a coolie pulling a rickshaw for visitors to the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair, he had one idea...that the goal, the project, the purpose was (and he couldn’t explain why he thought so; all evidence was against it)--God’s idea was that this world should be a love world, that it should eventually recover and be entirely a world of love. He wouldn’t have said this to a soul, for he could see himself how stupid it was--personal and stupid. Nevertheless, there it was at the centre of his feelings.
Although he is accused of being his father’s son, a crook, a schemer at heart, although a deep tragic darkness taints him too, his "clumsy intuition" of good ultimately saturating life lifts Woody into the same realm that his father unexpectedly attains at death. A similar "clumsy intuition" undergirds the story "Cousins." Ijah Brodsky maintains family relations at a time when, as his ex-wife wryly reminds him, "the nuclear family is breaking up." Ijah himself indicates how deep his familial devotion is when he states, "I had remembered, observed, studied the cousins, and these studies seemed to fix my own essence and keep me as I had been." Whether with his gangster-cousin Tanky Metzger, Tanky’s sister Eunice,Cousin Motty, Scholem, or Mendy, Ijah, one of the family prodigies, learned in languages,sociology, linguistics, law and so on, perceives the devastating impact of historical, cultural confusion on his relatives. Yet deep below the chaos he also perceives and affirms
An original self exists, or, if you prefer, an original soul. It may be as Goethe suggested, that the soul is a theatre in which Nature can show itself, the only such theatre that it has. And this makes sense when you attempt to account for some kinds of passionate observation--the observation of cousins, for example.
Through his "personal observation" of his largely secularised and often criminal cousins, Ijah extends his selfless concern far beyond his own family. He comes to understand dimly the upheavals that have cut off others from the past and left them in a wasteland.
At one point Ijah concurs with Hegel that "the very bonds of the world" are dissolving and being swept away by the onward rush of events still too confused to penetrate clearly. But hedoes, as in the previously cited passage, affirm "A new emergence of Spirit." This "Spirit" is left vague and undefined by Ijah but may be connected with elemental forces he discovers through his reading in anthropology. This vagueness is not undetectable in the four other stories of this collection. It seems to be the sine qua non of their affirmation.Nevertheless, despite a certain ungrounded belief in re-emergence, the rupture is mimetically laid open and boldly probed. In our age of massive transformation, it would be unfair to expect more, to belittle the rare achievement of managing to be not a symptom but an exploration of the common malady. After recalling a session of the United Nations he had attended, presumably in his capacity as international financier, Ijah reaches the most striking and undeniable implication of there-emergence in the following passage:
Then it came to me how geography had been taught in the Chicago schools whenI was a kid. We were issued a series of booklets: "Our Little Japanese Cousins,""0ur Little Moroccan Cousins," "Our Little Russian Cousins," "Our Little Spanish Cousins." I read all these gentle descriptions about little Ivan and tiny Conchita,and my eager heart opened to them. Why, we were close, we were under it all (as Tanky was very intelligent "under it all"). We were not guineas, dagos, krauts; we were cousins. It was a splendid conception, and those of us who opened our excited hearts to the world union of cousins were happy, as I was, to give our candy pennies to a fund for the rebuilding of Tokyo after the earthquake of the twenties. After Pearl Harbour, we were obliged to bomb hell out of the place. It’s unlikely that Japanese children had been provided with books about their little American cousins.
Why, we were close, we were one under it all" stands as one of the most glorious utterances in all modern fiction--that out of the confrontation with horrifying chaos such an insight can merge proclaims the sovereign power of mimesis and bodes well for a world that approaches,though begrudgingly, its essential form. Ijah’s outlook is not a childish one. He would probably agree with the necessity of balancing emotion and intuition with the wisdom and sobriety enunciated by, among others, Brand Blanshard, who acknowledges, in his book Reason and Belief, the same irrefutable goal toward which all nations and peoples are impelled:
Nations must give up some part of their independence; they must believe in a reason that transcends prejudices and international boundaries; and they must be willing to hand over to a super-national government the control of the major weapons of destruction. That the 130 governments now in the United Nations,and particularly the half dozen most powerful ones, can be induced to take this line before the outbreak of Armageddon does not seem very probable. However that may be, there is only one way out of anarchy, whether individual or national.
Blanshard’s doubt notwithstanding, this collection testifies to the magnificent diversity of our country and of the world, and reminds us that the essential human spirit, under the forms of chaos, can be summoned, if we but have the will, and can heal and reunite the severed bonds of the quotidian world no matter how late the hour may be.
October 19, 2012
I am a 45-year-old man and I don't have to continue reading something I lost interest in a long time ago. Note that the title of the book mentions stories, but doesn't say they're SHORT stories; that's good, because there are only 5 stories in a book of about 300 pages. And each story, as long as it is, feels like it goes on even further because of Bellow's tendency to get sidetracked, and get sidetracked from the sidetrack. I swear, the title of the first story should have been "But I Digress...".
I put the book aside halfway through the first story to read Life of Pi, which I had checked out of the library; I picked it up again after finishing that, got through the first story and halfway through the second, and am putting it aside again to read something else. I may eventually come back and finish it, but somehow I doubt it.
I put the book aside halfway through the first story to read Life of Pi, which I had checked out of the library; I picked it up again after finishing that, got through the first story and halfway through the second, and am putting it aside again to read something else. I may eventually come back and finish it, but somehow I doubt it.
June 6, 2012
This was another of my discoveries during our trip to Puerto Rico.My plan was to pick a book that was on our little hotel bookshelf- used second-hand books- mostly paperbacks. This one was falling apart. I picked it on our last day there. I liked it so much I asked the hotel if I could keep it... and they gladly said yes. I read several stories and they were all brilliant, original, strong and fascinating in detail. I have not read Bellow in a long time.... so this was a really wonderful re-discovery and I will always be sure to come back to his work. May-June 2012.
August 24, 2013
"And listen here, I am not digressing at all."
I have no idea who Saul Bellow is, but after reading this collection of five stories (novels and novellas, as the shortest is some twenty pages and the longest a hundred in length), I think I've read enough of him to last a lifetime. I liked the last three stories much more than the first two; perhaps they actually were better or I just got used to the digressing, flow-of-though, sidetracking style.
I have no idea who Saul Bellow is, but after reading this collection of five stories (novels and novellas, as the shortest is some twenty pages and the longest a hundred in length), I think I've read enough of him to last a lifetime. I liked the last three stories much more than the first two; perhaps they actually were better or I just got used to the digressing, flow-of-though, sidetracking style.
September 18, 2015
Some of the stories are really cool and interesting. Full of juicy situations and amazing characters whilst others are utterly boring. But on the whole "Him with his foot in his mouth" is a good reading.
March 6, 2013
مجموعه ای از داستان های کوتاه سال بلو در دوران دوم نویسندگی اش؛ "توسط یک شاهد 1974"، او و حرف های بیجایش 1982"، "روزت چگونه گذشت 1984" و "به وسیله ی لورنس مقدس 1995"
November 20, 2023
I enjoyed the first story here, in which a retired academic writes a long letter of apology to a woman he throughtlessly insulted many years before for the sake of scoring a wisecrack. However, I lost patience with the rest of the book - I should have taken note before buying it that one of the stories is over 100 pages long, surely a worrying sign in a book of short stories. I think Bellow's not really the writer for me - although he's clearly a talented writer with good style, many of his stories are set in the dreary world of academia and feature unbearably pompous characters, while he constantly goes off at tangents and includes far too many unnecessary details.
September 4, 2017
Fabulous! Saul Bellow is one of those rare writers who can take the mundane and through sheer strength of prose elevate it to the sublime. Here we are treated to all the usual highlights - profound, multifaceted characters rendered expertly, smart commentary on the human existence, and beautiful writing, climaxing in one of the greatest sentences I have ever read: "I am a great fish who can grant wishes and in whom there are colossal powers."
Nobel prizes in literature are not always given to the deserving. But with Bellow, the committee got it right.
Nobel prizes in literature are not always given to the deserving. But with Bellow, the committee got it right.
January 6, 2018
I liked the first story, but the second story was just downright irritating. It was about a woman who chose to be a doormat in exchange for hanging with a "celebrity". It went on and on, and when I realized I was only halfway through it and that it comprised the majority of the book, I said "the hell with it!" I am quite sure Saul Bellow hasn't a clue how to write about women or from a woman's standpoint. It was all one voice throughout (Victor's, even though it as the woman reminiscing; but maybe that was the point because he was the victor and she was the doormat).
June 19, 2025
First of all I think these stories and writing style is too intelligent for me. I wasn`t able to catch everything but still I finished and I know thats a good literature.
But after finishing I realised:
- it`s the same story over the short stories. It`s about reflecting the past, your inner nature between your family, relatives and roots. Is the sign of mature writing to put this all together like this.
- Bellow is good bringing you the weight of these belongings. The more you know the roots of your family, the harder it is to read the "book" of your nature.
But still I think - to get the issue of the meaning of this book you have to go through and read it all
But after finishing I realised:
- it`s the same story over the short stories. It`s about reflecting the past, your inner nature between your family, relatives and roots. Is the sign of mature writing to put this all together like this.
- Bellow is good bringing you the weight of these belongings. The more you know the roots of your family, the harder it is to read the "book" of your nature.
But still I think - to get the issue of the meaning of this book you have to go through and read it all
May 27, 2025
Hated it. Absolutely hated it. Cousins was the only story that didn't make me want to throw up. I guess other people don't feel the same way, since he received the highest honors a writer can receive.
But I will not read any more of his books because I prefer to read ones where at least one of characters has something good in her/him. Oh, yes, he can write; that's not the issue. It's who he chooses to write about.
But I will not read any more of his books because I prefer to read ones where at least one of characters has something good in her/him. Oh, yes, he can write; that's not the issue. It's who he chooses to write about.
August 12, 2023
Bellow’s biographer, Zach Leader, noted that Bellow would often have a rush of 100-pages (writing feverishly) and then look up, asking himself, ‘How do I make this into a novel?’
These short stories can be seen in this light—they are the first rush without the corollary plot formations.
‘A Silver Dish,’ included in this collection, is the best short story he ever wrote.
These short stories can be seen in this light—they are the first rush without the corollary plot formations.
‘A Silver Dish,’ included in this collection, is the best short story he ever wrote.
July 14, 2025
No, this book isn't for me. There's little action, and it's a lot of memorabilia about characters with peculiarities who, in turn, have relationships with other characters who have even more peculiarities. It's difficult to read because of the many subcultural terms and phenomena, the essence of which probably escapes me. This makes it less accessible than Bellow's other books.
December 26, 2022
در این نسخهی انتشارات روزگار نو فقط داستان “او و حرفهای بیجایش” منتشر شده بود. تصویری دقیق و طنزآمیز از جنگل تمدن بشری و قواعد جالب بازی و زندگی در آن! در جامعهای که بددهنی و متلکپرانی را کمتر از کلاهبرداری و چپاول تحمل میکند.
February 23, 2023
Mixed bag..I love good writing and Saul was one of the best. This book contains 5 stories, 4 of which are very good to great. I did however find “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” a dreadful read in just about all ways I can imagine. Four out of five equals 80%..a solid B-.
October 22, 2023
As with all short story collections, I like some stories better than others. It makes it hard to rate the book as a whole 5 stars… but some parts, such as “What kind of day did you have,” were beautiful.
December 31, 2017
Whinging premise. Whinging story.
July 22, 2018
Dazzling.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews