Misquotations
Francis King
Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories Saul Bellow (Alison Press/Secker & Warburg £8.95) Q ince, of the five stories here collected, L3 two — the title-story and another enti- tled 'What Kind of a Day Have You Had? — might each have been published as a nouvelle on its own account, this volume might be described as excellent value. But it is only excellent value in the sense that a lot bought at a knock-down price at an auction-sale is excellent value: there are things in it that one cherishes and things that one could well do without.
The superb title-story is certainly a thing that one cherishes. Its narrator, an elderly musicologist with the Dickensian name of Shawmut, left by the death of his crooked brother in 'a deep legal-financial hole', is writing, after the passing of thirty-five years, to a former librarian, Miss Rose, whom (so a friend has now informed him) he 'traumatised for life' with a single heedless remark. Miss Rose, encountering him by chance on the campus where both of them were working, chirruped to him: 'Oh, Dr Shawmut, in that cap you look like an archaeologist', to receive the reply: 'And you look like something I just dug up.' Do such remarks really traumatise people for life? Shawmut, lonely, poverty- stricken and persecuted, is convinced, as he remembers other similar remarks that he has made, that they do. He is also convinced that, when one comes seemingly unbidden to his lips, he must be the victim of some kind of 'seizure, rapture, demonic possession, Fatum, divine madness, or even solar storm'.
Because of his inability to keep his foot out of his mouth, Shawmut — as Mr Bellow mordantly shows — limps through life, constantly overtaken by people less gifted, honest or well-intentioned than himself, and finally trips up so disastrously that he has to flee to Canada, where, quailing and ailing, he awaits his inevitable extradition back to the United States, to face charges of which he is as innocent as he is of any malice when he produces his devastating home truths.
In 'What Kind of a Day Have You Had?', the author painstakingly dissects the diseased tissue of a love-affair between a moribund, world-famous savant, too high- minded and clear-sighted to be wholly human, and the physically and intellectual- ly sloppy woman, divorced mother of two girls, whom he has taken as his mistress. Characteristically, he pressed on this mis- tress a copy of Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, making her think bitterly: 'You have a love affair and then you ask
your ladylove to read a book to discredit love, and it's the most extreme book you can select. That's some valentine.'
`A Silver Dish', in which a 60-year-old South Chicago Jewish businessman rumin- ates, on the death of his rogue of a father, on their relationship, is almost as fine as these two stories. 'Cousins', in contrast, is discursive and slow, as it takes up again the theme of relationships, regulated more by duty and obligation than by affection or tenderness, within a Jewish family.
Certain preoccupations persist from story to story. One of these is 'major surgery' (as Mr Bellow calls it), especially for cancer of the breast. (`Michael Morris said that if titties were not fondled and kissed, they got cancer in protest', runs a passage in 'A Silver Dish'). Another is the view that the 'very bonds of the world' are loosening and that the 'unheard music' by which people previously ordered their lives has become a cacophony ('a cosmic orches- tra . . . has suddenly cancelled its perform- ance'). The result is that beneath the intellectual and stylistic ebullience one has a constant sense of world-weariness and pessimism. In even the less successful of these stories Mr Bellow is like the kind of dinner-guest, a witty polymath, who inun- dates his fellow-guests with a Niagara of anecdotes, critical observations, puns, epi- grams and jokes. One story immediately leads him on to another, which may well be totally, ,irrelevant. Having told that story, he is then put in mind of some remark by Dostoievsky or Kipling or Kant, which in turn leads him to . . . Like such a dinner- guest, he appears to be unable to check his facts. Thus Churchill (the name keeps cropping up) did not say of Tom Driberg 'He is the man who brought pederasty into disrepute' (that is what Adlai Stevenson might have said) but, far more robust and exact, 'He is the sort of man who gives buggery a bad name.' Again, it was not Churchill, as Mr Bellow seems to believe, but Noel Coward who identified the little black man seated next to the monumental Queen of Tonga in the Coronation proces- sion as her lunch. Yet again, Matthew Arnold did not write 'Others abide our judgment, thou art free' but 'Others abide our question. Thou art free.'
It is with wonderful dexterity that this most intelligent and erudite of novelists fishes out of his seething memory such diverse names as those of Bucky Fuller, Parker Tyler, Kenneth Burke, Francoise de la Renta, Willie Hoppe and Baziotes. But the lay reader may well be confused; and the reader of the future may well demand copious notes.
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