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Gilbert, Peter. "A Summing Up." Jewish Quarterly (Winter 1994/5): 64.
Describes the contents of IAAU and suggests that its central theme is perhaps its defense of the vital and enduring importance of literature in our lives, reminiscences of various kinds, and wonderful descriptions of people and places which could easily have come from one of his own
novels. Concludes that this is an important book to be imbibed slowly, that the pleasure of reading it could easily be spread over several weeks.
Alter, Robert. "Seize the Bliss: It All Adds Up by Saul Bellow." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. New Republic 2 May 1994: 37–39.
Comments that this miscellany which spans forty-five years lacks sustained argumentation and systematic thinking and remains the work of a novelist, not an essayist. Sees Bellow standing in a long line of modern intellects who do not trust intellectuals, but who, like the old Russian intelligentsia, believe they are in possession of a blue print of history and can redirect society. Sees the collection as an autobiographical collage which is fairly engaging. Details the various types of inclusions and provides a lengthy and detailed discussion of Bellow's beliefs and attitudes concerning intellectuals, the novel as a way of thinking, ideology, radicalism, liberalism, modern culture, academic apparatus, and the spiritual necessity of art. Concludes that these sundry pieces make a deeply affecting case for aesthetic bliss as a necessary nutriment in a time of pandemic distraction for an author who has not used art as an alibi for escape from political engagement.
Battersby, Eileen "The Sage from Chicago." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Irish Times 23 Aug. 1994: 10.
Calls IAAU a collection of sharp travel pieces, selected nonfiction, memoirs, observations, and tributes to dead friends. Says it reads like an evening spent with the man himself, a shrewd, witty, observant, concerned individual wary of "putty-headed academics and
intellectuals." Concludes with epigrammatic selections illustrative of Bellow's wit and descriptive powers.
Bawer, Bruce. "Chicago's Jeremiah Rails at Our Babylon." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Wall Street ]ournal 1 Apr. 1994: A7.
Refers to black New York Times columnist Brent Staples's memoir Parallel Time that accuses Bellow of racism. Agrees with others that Staples is too simplistic in confusing the author with his characters, but also agrees that for Bellow the charge is not completely invalid. Describes the pieces in this Bellow collection as a "a truly eloquent critique of contemporary American society," but tainted with a tendency to think of America's past as all good and her present as all bad. Certainly there is much to fault in America's decline in morals and manners, but Bellow's denunciation of "the age of the information Superhighway," implies that bigotry can never "be eliminated, only papered over."
Becker, Stephen. "Saul Bellow: 'The Most Intensely Criticized Writer We Have.'" From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Chicago Sun-Times 3 Apr. 1994, see. Show: 10.
Rambles through IAAU, sampling various topics from the first section and suggesting that Bellow does not hit full stride in the second section. Samples classic Bellow positions on various topics and concludes that if Bellow is alive and writing, then intelligence, dignity, and civility are not doomed. Concludes that even the cover is engaging and cocky.
Brown, John L. "World Literature in Review: Essays." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future. World Literature Today 69.1 (1995): 148–49.
Argues that IAAU does not add up because the collection is just too scattered and heterogeneous. However, its thirty-one essays span his entire career and suggest richness, variety, contradictions, and brilliance.
Caldwell, Gail. "Saul Bellow Speaks Up." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Boston Globe 17 Apr. 1994: A14.
Responds to Saul Bellow's voice as agonizingly awake, to his literary persona as that of pastoral crank and bruised romanti. Calls his politics and letters both elegant and curmudgeonly. Sees emerging from the collection a portrait of a self-made man who has read most of the great twentieth-century thinkers and writers. Concludes with a lengthy reminiscence from the book.
Conrad, Peter. "Longing to Go Home." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Observer 11 Sept. 1994: 23.
Links Bellow with D. H. Lawrence, who taught us once upon a time that the novel would save the world. Notes that for Bellow the literary career is a spiritual vocation, or a rabbinical calling. Recounts many of the opinions expressed—the disappointed idealist, the state of modern culture, the failure of the literary culture and the modern metropolis and concludes that the many other effusions of cultural piety collected here are grateful platitudes dispensed while Bellow wonders when he will be allowed to go home.
Cross, Richard K. "Clearing the Mind of Cant." Modern Age 37.3 (1995): 251–54.
Claims that as greatly as the pieces differ from one another in form, matter, and audience, the book does not impress one as a gathering of fugitives. The voice and tone
carry Bellow's verbal signature, which is resonant with the "tinkling particulars of street knowledge" (251). Reprises Bellow's views on art, culture, political correctness, and ideology. Concludes that Bellow probes the radical mystery of life and does so with honesty, vigor, and intelligence.
Greenstein, Michael. "Secular Sermons and American Accents: The Nonfiction of Bellow, Ozick, and Roth." Shofar 20.1 (2001): 4–20.
"At the beginning of the twentieth century, Emma Lazarus's words affixed to the Statue of Liberty heralded an affinity between American and Jewish values and identities. At the same time, however, Henry James' negative comments about the Yiddish language of these immigrants at Ellis Island on the Lower East Side of New York undermined the acceptance of Jews into the American mainstream. In their own essays, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth admire James but challenge his antisemitic sentiments by adopting a range of rhetorical strategies that combine elitism and egalitarianism to reaffirm the overlapping of American and Jewish identities. Their moral seriousness in conjunction with their ironic attitudes simultaneously questions rabbinic authority; their non-fictional jeremiads synthesize and reinvent a Jewish–American covenant.
Harris,
Mark. "Solid Bellow." From
the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction
Collection. Chicago
Tribune 10 Apr.
1994, sec. 14:1, 12.
Notes how
IAAU reflects Bellow's powers of observation,
and features striking travelogues, portraits,
sketches, observations, opinions, cultural analyses,
historical recollections, and autobiographical
anecdotes. Calls these vivid and vibrant documents
which tell us what America lacked from the perspective
of neither a short-term idealist, nor pragmatist,
but of a visionary.
Jones, J. D. F. "Flashes of Sunlight from America's Finest Novelist." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Financial Times 10 Sept. 1994: XX.
Finds the early pieces fairly random and chatty up until the remarkable Jefferson Lectures of 1977. Summarizes Bellow's basic positions on art, society, human life, America, and the contemporary culture, and then concludes that sadly there is nothing in his volume to convey to the stranger, or to the skeptical colleague, the magnificence of Bellow the novelist's portrait gallery of characters.
Kowal, Michael. "Saul Bellow: Pieces of His Mind." Congress Monthly Sept./Oct. 1994: 17–19.
Considers IAAU to be about the state of cultural conditions in the United States, but does not see Bellow as a Matthew Arnold because he cherishes the Philistine as much as he deplores him. Notes Bellow's heavy intellectual baggage and strong sense of the era. Observes his moral strenuousness is tempered with strong effusions of commonsense. Describes the individual pieces as alternately heart-stopping, colloquial, reminiscent, perspicacious, beautiful, observant, absorbing, frank, erudite, and intelligent. Notes that despite the fact that Bellow's democratic American convictions often clash with his aristocratic European instincts, Bellow is a true original and an American classic.
Kramer, Hilton. "Saul Bellow, Our Contemporary." Commentary June 1994: 37–41. Rpt in The Twilight of the Intellectuals; Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold. Hilton Kramer. Chicago: Dee, 1999. 167–80.
Describes how he and his generation eagerly received each one of Bellow's first few novels up to the publication of Herzog, a penultimate novel which he and his
generation of Jewish intellectuals saw as defining their world. Then describes their perception of the courageous, sagacious, and prophetic qualities of MSP, which they saw as descriptive of the moral collapse of New York and of the emancipated Jewish middle-class fundamental to the Jewish intellectuals of his and Bellow's generation. Explains how he then drops out of the Bellow fan club with the publication of HG and registers his distrust of Bellow's fable of Delmore Schwartz's life. Describes HG as an extended exercise in self-exoneration, and complains that Bellow's subsequent books seemed bent settling old scores and trying out metaphysical roles. From this autobiographical and historical persepctive he locates his assessment of IAAU, which he describes as containing things both "Herzogian" at their best and bogged down in the "moronic inferno" at their worst. Notes that from the Jefferson lectures through all of these pieces there is something unacknowledged–something offstage that sparks his indignation without ever being openly confronted or identified, something about the true sources of his anger. Writes of Bellow's early welcome by the Partisan Review and his later withering condescension toward them. Wonders about Bellow's scorn for the fallacies of Marxism and his suspicious silence on the subject at the time. Criticizes him for not being able to write the moral history of the Russian immigrants of his day, though recently it seems Bellow cannot stop talking about it in his 1990–1991 interviews–only one of the losses we are reminded of in IAAU. Criticizes also Bellow's fixation on degraded popular culture, the media's culpability, and its distractions, because he seems to trivialize this malevolent phenomenon by reducing it to merely a major distraction for writers and intellectuals who are thereby deprived of an audience. Describes Bellow as ultimately inhabiting an invisible political place between the disabuses of a liberalism he clings to and the neo-conservatism he both embraces and spurns–a space of intellectual refuge for a dwindling remnant of homeless liberals who identify their survival with a refusal of affiliation.
Provides a detailed account of the attacks on Bellow as a racist and university intellectual, and criticizes Bellow's rather feeble responses. He accuses Bellow of remaining our contemporary in his copping-out on such explosive topics as multiculturalism and political correctness.
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Who Is Saul Bellow? And Who Isn't Saul Bellow." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. New York Times 11 Apr. 1994: 15C.
Describes IAAU as a nonfiction collection full of ambiguities and contradictions, but nevertheless pedestrian in Sympathizes with Bellow who at seventy-eight is surrounded by intellectual picadors intent on lowering the old bull's head and making him bleed. Expresses disappointment that even in the old Montreal neighborhood Bellow is not well remembered. Sees IAAU as a compelling grab bag of nonfiction pieces by a novelist who is also a wise, grumpy, and mournful man who is stubbornly, touchingly under the mistaken belief that he is still addressing a literate audience.
Pinsker, Sanford. "What a Life at the Writing Desk Comes to." From the Distant Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Midstream Dec. 1994: 40–42.
Prescott, Peter S. "Mr. Bellow's Planetoid." From the Distant Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. New York Times Book Review 10 Apr. 1994: 9.
Rampton, David. "Don't Judge This Book by It's Title; Saul Bellow's Sharp-Eyed Nostalgia Makes for Riveting Reading." From the Distant Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Ottawa Citizen 22 May 1994: B3.
Richler, Mordecai. "King Saul." From the Distant Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. National Review 1 Aug. 1994: 58–60.
Prescott, Peter S. "Mr. Bellow's Planetoid." From the Distant Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. New York Times Book Review 10 Apr. 1994: 9.
Rampton, David. "Don't Judge This Book by It's Title; Saul Bellow's Sharp-Eyed Nostalgia Makes for Riveting Reading." From the Distant Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Ottawa Citizen 22 May 1994: B3.
Richler, Mordecai. "King Saul." From the Distant Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. National Review 1 Aug. 1994: 58–60.
Romano, Carlin. "His Mouth, His Foot." From the Distant Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Nation 8/15 Aug. 1994: 168–71.
Admires Bellow's wonderful sentences and after reviewing the major ideas in the essays calls the collection a fifty-year sampler, not a reliquary, but a gathering of some of the more readable essays. Notes the absence of some of the more pungent interviews from the 1970s, and considers the collection evidence that Bellow is an artist, not an intellectual, a professional polemicist, or a philosopher. Admires the crisp, detailed travel pieces and the many essences of American literary culture. Expresses interest in the ambiguities and mysteries of meaning the essays contain and at the same time criticizes Bellow's attention to the same old male greats and the lack of imagination he vaunts so regularly. Believes that what others call his realism or elitism limits his outreach to America's rainbow, its future. Suspects Bellow's ego is so fastened to time and to his people that he finds it impossible to accept that others will live different lives and criss-cross his experience in different narratives. Concludes that in IAAU we sense that Bellow is arranging the score the way he wants it to sound–without the bullhorns of the past, and without the rebukes of the present.
Rothman, Claire. "Fascinating Look into Mind of Saul Bellow." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Gazette [Montreal] 23 Apr. 1994: J1.
Calls IAAU a fascinating journey through the mind of one of America's most distinguished postwar writers who hearkens back to a golden age in America when people flocked to theaters and read poetry. Considers Bellow's literary theories dated and his wanderlust thoroughly modern. Expresses disappointment at the absence of comments on the novels, and concludes that although the volume offers a clear picture of Bellow's theories and values from over
the last forty years, it leaves to the reader the difficult task of relating these to his fiction.
Rubin, Merle. "Assorted Nonfiction from Novelist Bellow." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future.' A Nonfiction Collection. Christian Science Monitor 28 Apr. 1994: 14.
Describes Bellow's prose style as lively and distinctly personal. Then argues that some of Bellow's pronouncements betray a sort of dismissive irritability toward the claims of feminists, homosexuals, and multiculturalists, when the question is to what extent this defense of Western values is merely a reaction against or failing to grasp the importance of the genuinely valuable contributions of previously silenced voices as he worries about defending the values of this generation and preserving the greatest works of art and literature for the sustenance of future generations.
Shechner, Mark. "Saul Bellow's Rewarding Reading." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Buffalo News 8 May 1994, Book Reviews: 8.
Suggests, after reviewing the content of the essays, that while some writers cheer themselves with Vodka and tonic, Bellow prefers contempt and rage—shaken and stirred, and almost on the rocks. Finds his style to be a superlative high-low prose in which epigrams are spat out with zeal and in which the author appears like a one man dictionary of quotations, contradictions, grandiose touches, and misanthropic exhilaration. Bellow comands our attention because of the great rebellious vigor of his style and at the same time fixes us with his glittering prose: disdainful, rancorous, challenging, funny, and uneasy.
Sheppard, R. Z. "Knocking Away the Pigeons." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Time 9 May 1994: 80.
Shone, Tom. "But the Chaos of the Modern Age is Always Breaking in." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Spectator 17 Sept. 1994: 35.
Solotaroff, Robert. "The Personal Essay and Saul Bellow's It All Adds Up." Studies in American Jewish Literature 18 (1999): 35–40.
Solotaroff, Robert. "The Personal Essay and Saul Bellow's It All Adds Up." Studies in American Jewish Literature 18 (1999): 35–40.
Discusses in detail the strengths Bellow brought with him when he sat down to write non-fiction: the flypaper memory, cadences, diction, pitch and variation in dialogue, the ability to set down vivid images, the zany rightness of figurative language, and the ability to mix low presence and high culture. Argues that Bellow's non-fiction prose utilizes an intimate style, autobiographical content, and urbane conversational style. By these standards all but one of the three essays in IAAU qualify as personal essays. Details the major essays and concludes that the most endearing moments in these essays are the most personal moments which offer up feelings leading to the conclusion that the reader is always umbilically connected with an unusually perceptive and deep-feeling man who is himself continually connected with what is inside of him and what is outside of him.
Symons, Julian. "Against the Bitch Goddess." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Times Literary Supplement 23 Sept. 1994: 25.
Tanenhaus, Sam. "Real Powers." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. New Criterion Apr. 1994: 65–68.
Winder, Robert. "Rage and Contempt to Life the Spirits." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection.. Independent 16 Sept. 1994: 18.
Wolfe, Peter. "Saul Bellow's Rich Resonance." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. St. Louis Post-Dispatch Everyday Magazine 19 June 1994: 5C.
Describes the range, richness, and sensibility of IAAU as well as the list of topics Bellow addresses. Notes that a Whitmanesque inclusiveness galvanizes Bellow's new book which channels into a self-portrait reflecting Bellow's humanity and infusing his belief that both the ordinary and the everyday merit our best energies.
Wolkoff, Robert L. "Bellow's Command of Words, Ideas Makes Essays 'delicious.'" Metro West Jewish News 49.19 (1995): 42–45.
Commends Bellow for inventing a new kind of American sentence and for being an Everyman who describes what we have all seen and felt. Concludes that one would be hard pressed to find better evidence of the image of the immigrant love affair with America than this book.
Yardley, Jonathan. "Asides of an Artist." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Washington Post Book Week 27 Mar. 1994: 3.
Distinctive
and full of pronounced and prickly views—some
gloomy, some cranky, and all full of a fierce
insistent energy and commanding presence, this
collection of essays will do nicely in lieu
of a new novel. Quotes extensively from the
major pieces on Bellow's philosophy of the relationship
between art and civilization, as well as from
Bellow's humorous and deflating description
of Jack Nicholson's visit to his Vermont home.
Yardley, Jonathan. "Saul Bellow Adding It up; Novelist's First Collection of Nonficiton Explores the Role of Art in American Society." From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. Houston Post 3 Apr. 1994: C4.
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