Short Fiction

Criticism

• "Summations." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 186–99.
  
  
• "The Thoughts of Sergeant George Flavin." Penguin New Writing 38 (1949): 47–51.
  
  
• Alter, Robert. "Kafka's Father, Agnon's Mother, Bellow's Cousins." Commentary Feb. 1986: 46–52.
  
  
• Alter, Robert. "Mr. Bellow's Planet." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. New Republic I l June 1984: 33–37.
  

  Notes that these stories read more like brilliant fragments than well-made wholes. Each story is like a small vignette that captures the essential issues of the novels. Discusses Bellow's work in general terms, commending him for his "mantic" vision, which extends to the short stories in this collection.

• Glenday, Michael K. "Some Versions of the Real: The Novellas of Saul Bellow." The Modern American Novella. Ed. Robert A. Lee. New York: St. Martin's; London: Visions, 1989. 162–77.
  

  Examines Bellow's novellas in an attempt to understand the intensity and concentration of the form and the pervasive theme of American denial of "real" reality in them. Traces this theme of typical American escapism in national and personal life through the novellas because, he argues, they have a sharp cutting edge which enables Bellow to cut to the "enduring recognitions." Concludes that the novellas suggest that American life will be one of increasing artificiality and increasing inhumanity.

• Goldenberg, Judi. "Bellow's Work Has Few Peers." Rev. of Collected Stories. Richmond Times-Dispatch 16 Dec. 2001: E4.
  

  "Nobel laureate, three-time National Book Award Winner, octogenarian, new father, and grand old man of American letters, Saul Bellow has devoted the last years of his extraordinary literary career to short works of fiction such as the brief, but potent, novellas, BC and AT. Viking now celebrates Bellow's success in the genre with a volume of selected short stories and novellas—from early works to the most current—introduced by his respected biographer, with a Preface by his wife Janis" (1).

• Halio, Jay. "Saul Bellow's Fiction of Contemplation and 'What Kind of Day Did You Have?'" Saul Bellow Journal (1993 Winter–1994 Fall) 11–12.2–1: 124–32. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000: 257–64.
  

  Bellow is principally concerned with the nature of reality and our apprehension of it. Brings insights from DD concerning issues of perception, and likens this story to the longer piece. Explores the principal characters and story line, highlights intellectual shallowness as the principal theme, and the distortions of the consciousness as the secondary preoccupation of the story. The story reveals Bellow's disdain of simple narratives. His measured style and confrontation of the real issues of contemporary human experience elevate his fiction to a higher order. To lie to oneself, as Bellow demonstrates, leads to intellectual decay, and moral and spiritual death as well.

• Harris, Hope. "From Saul Bellow, Three Tales That Get to the Point." Rev. of Something to Remember Me By. Houston Chronicle 26 Jan. 1992: Zest: 25.
  

  Compares the directness and purpose in this collection with the circuitous and ideological patterns of previous work. Describes the plot of BC primarily and concludes that Bellow is a superb short story writer for whom the structure of the short story form prevents the kind of pedantic wanderings the novel form permits him.

• Pellegrin, J. Y. "'Leaving the Yellow House': oú établir su maison." Profils-Americains [France.] 9 (1997): 147–54, 220–21.
  

  In French.

• Phillips, K. J. "Sacrificing to Baal: Bellow." Dying Gods in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1990. 93–96.
  

  Suggests that in "A Sermon by Dr. Pep," Bellow is slipping us a sober essay underneath the humorous character sketch of a fanatic, who apparently worries only about this audience's "digestions." Pep, in the manner of the self-help prophet extolling a yogurt diet, warns us not to think too much about death, because it inhibits the digestion and sends us to an early grave. Suggests also that Bellow wants to inhibit our bustling complacency by forcing us to look at violence in nature and in society—by forcing us to admit a moment when we might be prepared to haul a victim to the bloody altar ourselves. Provides a detailed explication of the story drawing on ancient myths of sacrificial dying gods, like Osirus and Moloch, as well as historical parallels like Robespierre, in an effort to plead in 1949 that the unwilling taking of human life might sometimes be necessary in wars against Hitlers in which young Isaacs from the ranks of both Allies and Axis go down to Baal.

• Shear, Walter. "'Leaving the Yellow House': Hattie's Will." Saul Bellow Journal 7.1 (1988): 51–56.
  

  Reviews the feminist critical complaints about the character of Hattie in "Leaving the Yellow House," and the feminist espousals of her. Agrees with the arguments that Hattie lacks mental and physical energy and is a wretched failure responsible for her own miserable final days. Sees her problems as typical of other Bellow characters, namely Tommy Wilhelm, who was created during the same period. Suggests that Bellow has indicated his love for Tommy but not for Hattie.

• Stevick, Philip. "The Rhetoric of Bellow's Short Fiction." Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Ed. Stanley Trachtenberg. Critical Essays on American Literature. Boston: Hall, 1979. 73–82.
  

  Argues that Bellow's short fiction carries power and integrity. Claims that like other writers of the period he deals in the "ludic, the fabulous, and the linguistic." Provides a historical overview of the various stories and collections. Comments that the implications of such rhetorical fiction as these stories are: 1) special verbal effects and grammar, 2) the invention of a grammar of resistance, 3) certain kinds of valuations of the human community. What follows is a detailed account of the kind of grammar being spoken of with specific reference to individual stories. A major article.

• Sutherland, John. "Miss Ferguson's Twitching Ferule." Rev. of Something to Remember Me By. Times Literary Supplement 6 Nov. 1992: 20.
  

  Comments on Bellow's "Preface" and his explanation for writing short books after a career of writing fat ones. Briefly describes the three stories in the book and concludes that "for humour, profundity, and . . . uncharacteristic brevity it will rank high in Bellow's achievement when the final reckoning comes."

• Taylor, Christopher. "Literature Great and Small." Rev. of Collected Stories. Sunday Telegraph 16 Dec. 2001: 15.
  

  Observes that Bellow's two great themes—the Jewish experience in twentieth century America, and the fate of the individual in an age which Bellow feels doesn't put proper value on individualism—suffuse the entire volume. Bellow is sometimes accused of over-intellectualizing, but the ironies of his stories usually arise from a collision between theoretical speculation and the specificity of lived experience. Most of all the focus is on character and the idea of character itself, which always figures as something irreducible and persisting. Points out that you can't be a resident of the republic of letters for nearly 40 years without eathering some bad press, and Bellow has seen plenty in his day. His critics haven't entirely lacked for ammunition—his contradictory attitudes to women, for example, or the notorious scene in MSP, where the black pickpocket menaces the protagonist with his 'large tan-and-purple uncircimsized thing.' But despite the crabbed conservatism and querulous irritable sermonizing of some of his later writing, Bellow still seems the likeliest of his contemporaries to endure.

• Weinstein, Ann. "A Toast to Life, L'Chayim: Saul Bellow's 'A Father-to-Be.'" Saul Bellow Journal 2.1 (1982): 32–35.
  

  Discusses the story as a veritable seedbed of ideas, characters and themes used by Bellow later in the novels. In particular shows the relationship between Rogin and the later Herzog.

• "Memoirs of the Bootlegger's Son." Granta 41 (1992): 9–35.
  
  
• "Something to Remember Me By." Writing Our Way Home: Contemporary Stories by American Jewish Writers. Ed. Ted Solotaroff and Nessa Rapoport. New York: Schocken, 1992. 14–45; Rpt. in The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
  
  
• 1208. Kindilien, Glenn A. "The Meaning of the Name 'Green' in Saul Bellow's 'Looking for Mr. Green.'" Studies in Short Fiction 15.1 (1978): 104–07.
  

  Makes a creative and detailed attempt to explore the implications of the name "Green" and relates this to thematic issues in the story.

• 1209. Knight, Karl F. "Bellow's 'Cousins': The Suspense of Playing It to the End." Saul Bellow Journal 5.2 (1986): 32–35. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria L. Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 253–56.
  

  The principal theme in Saul Bellow's "Cousins" is the effort to hold things together against the forces of dissolution. Ijah Brodsky, the protagonist, has an apocalpytic sense of the struggle, but avoids despair by working for continuity within his family, by being a responsive and responsible cousin. But the story suggests that responsibility to the larger society may at times take precedence over loyalty to a particular cousin; indeed, the term "cousins" comes to mean the universal human family.

• Chavkin, Allan and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. “Saul Bellow’s ‘An Exalted Madness’ and ‘Zetland: By a Character Witness.’” Saul Bellow Journal. 21.1–2 (2005–06): 97–105. 

  
  

  Examines two versions of an unpublished short story, both entitled “An Exalted Madness,” which together are useful in understanding “Zetland: By a Character Witness.” Both stories focus on the same subject and employ similar phrasing. In this succession of accounts lies Bellow’s thinking from 1956 to the 1970s about Zetland, or Elias Zetland (alias Isaac Rosenfeld), was excised from the 6,000 problematic draft pages of HG in the Bellow manuscript collection. Details the similarities and differences between the manuscripts. Concludes that Bellow and the narrator love Zetland but are also embarrassed by him, believing that he can never be a literary artist of Melvillean caliber. 

• Chavkin, Allan and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. “Skepticism and the Depth of Life in Saul Bellow’s ‘The Old System.’” Saul Bellow Journal 19.1 (2003): 23–29.

  
  

  Argues that this story has received very little critical attention, which is surprising since this story is not only one of Bellow’s finest works but anticipates the sensibility of the later fiction from MSPto R. Details the family drama and emotional clamor that arises from the cousins’ feud, the themes of regret, death love, family rivalries and terrible passions. Discusses prior critical approaches to the story. Suggests that the story implies a new system, largely the product of modernism with its emphasis on skepticism, its existentialist assumptions, and its rejection of traditional beliefs, such as the importance of family feeling and bourgeoisie morality. Claims the clash between the town systems centers on emotionalism versus hard-boiled tough-mindedness. Concludes that “The Old System” reveals that cold detachment and extreme skepticism of modernism are unsatisfactory responses to the incredible variety and profound mystery of the human condition. States it is primarily his faith in the imagination to attain hints of immortality that distinguishes Bellow from the modernists.

• Friedrich, Marianne M. “‘Something to Remember Me By’: From Early Fragments to Finished Story.” Saul Bellow Journal 19.1 (2003): 45–51.

  
  

  Recalls Bellow indicating to her that this story was important to him. Points out the biographical correspondences between protagonist Laurie and Bellow-the seventeen-year-old who also lost his mother to cancer. Studies the 1993 deposits of manuscripts at the Regenstein Library Special Collections and observes how hard Bellow worked over this text to finally get it right. Finds seven major fragments and several smaller ones. Notes that Bellow requested his lawyer hand a copy of this memoir to each of his heirs. Notes the impact of Schopenhauer on this story and its representations of death. Concludes that Bellow’s ultimate motive in this story is to purge his consciousness of it. 

• Amidon, Stephen. "Seize the Day." Rev. of Collected Stories. New Statesman 10 Dec. 2001: 14.
  

  Comments that collection here means recollection. Commends Bellow for his vibrant and unforgettable characters who are in fact collectors of stories on the lookout for memories, gathering them in.

• Anderson, David D. "The Chicago Short Fiction of Sherwood Anderson and Saul Bellow." Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature Newsletter 17.1 (1987): 13–24.
  

  A comparative essay which discusses what it was that drew young men like Sherwood Anderson and Saul Bellow to take up the profession of letters in Chicago. Useful historically.

• Austin, Michael. "Saul Bellow and the Absent Woman Syndrome: Traces of India in 'Leaving the Yellow House.'" Saul Bellow Journal 11.2–12.1 (1993–94): 146–55. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 69–77.
  

  Reviews Bellow's designation as misogynist by an increasing number os scholars, and argues that in "Leaving the Yellow House," Bellow attempts to portray a strong female character. Reviews the scholarly debates over the story and suggests that India exerts a tremendous influence the way we should read to story because she successfully accomplished what Hattie seems unable to do—decide to whom to leave the yellow house. She defines through opposition those traits that make Hattie indecisive. Describes India as a long dead specter benefactor, the "trace" of the binary, the unseen opposition against which Hattie is held. India, unlike Hattie, is rich, cultured, traveled, owner, provider, and master. Occupying these traditionally "male" roles within the gender equation, India is the other half of the binary to Hattie's poverty and powerlessness and passivity. Also hinted at is India's abusiveness and manipulation of Hattie's economic dependency. Though almost obscured from the text by her absence, India allows us to reconstruct the binaries that explain Hattie: masculine-feminine, foreign-domestic, master-servant, and absent-present.

• Bach, Gerhard and Gloria L. Cronin. "Introduction." Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. xi–xxxii.
  

  Details the aptness of short fiction for a late twentieth century audience, the prestigious history of the short story and novella in the twentieth century Anglo–American tradition, and commends Bellow's mastery in rejuvenating it. Reviews the critical response to Bellow's short fiction, traces Bellow's early, middle, and tale late periods as a short fiction writer, with a review of the critical literature as each collection or novella appeared. Concludes that Bellow's short fiction can be read individually or as companion pieces to the master works. They too reflect his recurring themes and now provide us with a very sizeable collection of short fiction that is elegant in its brevity and measured intensity. With their finely crafted dialogue, sharp with, precise portraits, character portraiture, and fine insights they resemble the best of Hawthorne and James. It is a legacy of elegance that spans Bellow's entire career.

• Bellow, Janis. Preface. Saul Bellow: Collected Stories. New York: Viking, 2001. v–xii.
  

  Writes the preface for Naomi Rose, Janis and Saul's new daughter, who will read it perhaps in two decades hence. Offers a miniature portrait of Bellow at work, the birth of several of the books, plus biographical and autobiographical disclosures of their life together. Describes Bellow's writing routines, places of work, visits from friends, struggles with new fictions, background information on several of the books, Contains many direct quotes from Below about various works in progress.

• Berger, Alan. "The Logic of the Heart: Biblical Identity and American Culture in Saul Bellow's 'The Old System.'" Saul Bellow Journal 11.2–12.1 (1993–94): 133–45. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 93–102.
  

  Argues that despite his protests, Bellow is a kind of prophet of antiquity, "an over-interrogated witness" for a Hebrew-Humanism which advocates moral responsibility while simulatneously viewing history through a covenantal lens. Describes the effects of this in several works in which outspoken expressions of covenant Judaism and the contract with God is mocked for the purposes of human community. Describes "The Old System" as simultaneously a canny history of Jewish assimilation; an insider's description of Ostjuder; an empathetic portrayal of biblical and Hasidic components of Jewish identities; and a series of identity conflicts with American mores, Englightenment and scientific worldviews, and a post-traditional world. These themes remain vital in the old system as they do in contemporary Jewish–American culture. Concludes that the emotional, moral, and religious yearnings which comprise the old system remain as a historical chapter and a future goal.

• Blustein, Bryna Lee Datz. "Reflecting the Stereotype: Malamud's 'Yiddishe' Mama, Bellow's Aggressive Woman, Roth's Jewish American Princess."Beyond the Stereotype: A Study of Representative Short Stories of Selected Contemporary Jewish American Female Writers. St. Louis: Saint Louis U, 1986. 8–36
  

  Uses Philip Stevick's notion that the center of Bellow's fiction is rhetoric to shed light on "Two Moving Monologues," "Him With His Foot in His Mouth," and "The Old System." Argues that each of these stories hinges on voice and is about the way a man talks to himself. But in HWHFHM, Bellow fails to affirm women's voices, and in fact offers women who are cruel, static, hard-hearted, senile, and generally intolerable. By far the most despicable is Tina in "The Old System." It appears that for Malamud and Bellow, the Jewish woman, as she becomes more advanced in the American experience, also becomes more materialistic, aggressive, and shrill.

• Boers, Robert. "Captains of Intellect." Salmagundi 106–07 (1995): 100–08.
  

  Describes Bellow as an "intellectual captain" and his characters as thought-besotted, academic specialists who, like Bellow, find it hard to break out of their repertoires of ideas and their thoughtfulness in order to face the world alone. Notes that the stories in HWHFHM display with relentless intellectual vividness the penalties and compensations of the intellectual vocation. Details the particular characters in these stories, pointing out that only Victor Wulpy may be called an intellectual captain. Not even Shawmut achieves this. Instead he engages us primarily through representing something inaccessible to revision in human character–a "fatum." Thus "fatum" characterizes many of the other characters in this selection of stories with perhaps the exception of "Cousins," in which story Ijah, a man of affections who reads books and is conversant with big ideas, feels it a disgrace to be identified as an intellectual. Stories like this and "Him with His Foot in His Mouth" generate unease about their own abundant brilliance and manifest guilt about the relation between wit and malice, spontaneity and insult. But they also manifest guilt about the mysterious subordination of all human faculties to The Fatum. Concludes that Bellow has helped us to feel a dignity in those mad for transcendence, to feel that contemporary ideas are just as likely to be cruel, and that venomous antipathy might well liberate intelligence in a way milder emotions cannot. Concludes that Bellow's influence has been steady, but not programmatic or coherent.

• Boyd, Robert. "Collection Is Wonderful Evidence of Bellow's Mastery." Rev. of Collected Stories. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 16 Dec. 2001: F10.
  

  Criticizes the eight-page Introduction by the critic James Wood, pleading the case for Saul Bellow as a major writer. The point is well taken, but hardly news, and the argument is made much more eloquently by the stories that follow. Describes how BC and AT, both included in this volume, were first published as Penguin paperbacks—too short for hard covers and too long for the magazines. The former—Bellow's most intense fictional examination of the Holocaust—is an intricate exploration of the uses of memory and of the complex forces that shape human destiny. 'A Theft' which is, incidentally, all the proof needed to demolish the charges that Bellow is misogynistic, presents a female character, Clara Velde, who is in every way an equal of Bellow's male characters Henderson, Herzog, and Augie March.

• Camps-Robertson, R. "L' écriture métonymique de la Perte dans 'A Silver Dish' de Saul Bellow."
  

  Argues that the mimetic representation of the world in "A Silver Dish" is steeped in a dualistic conception of human experience. Characters go in pairs, revealing a conflict between man and woman. Woody is confronted with the world lying out of his reach as he registers his ultimate solitude after his father's death. Dualism can even be traced down in the linguistic use of connectors such as "also." In this context, Bellow imagines a poetic response to loss which both acknowledges duality at the heart of experience and points to the possibility for man to express some degree of freedom in his destiny. The text provides numerous instances of the use of metonymy, not as discrete rhetorical figures of speech, but rather as a principle to guide the reader out of the vicious circle of dualism. The stolen silver dish turns into a valueless token while the body of the father fades into a mere impression in his son's body. The tolling of the bells of the surrounding churches is suspended and, in the still vibrating silence, Woody suddenly surrenders to the memory of the past. The scene of the theft plays a crucial role in the narrative structure and acts as catharsis on the narrator, enabling him to come to terms with the scene of his father's death. Woody is then left alone, and his father's enigmatic lifelong fight against "the forces of religion and hypochondria" has brought no valid answer to the metaphysical questions that haunt Woody. Yet his father's legacy is precisely the memory of an act claiming individual freedom. However ironic the interpretation of this memory is, it bears witness to the only form of recognition of the individual's freedom through remembering.

• Cartwright, Justin. "Just Something He Dug Up." Rev. of Collected Stories. Independent 25 Nov. 2001: 15.
  

  We should count our blessings. As James Wood says, Bellow is probably the pre-eminent American novelist of our times. Even Updike, who might be considered a rival for that title, suggests something similar. And if Bellow strains a little for the easy effects of his' (middle Bellow) is described as "come down in the knees, like a car jack." In HWHFHM, a professor is described as having "eyebrows like caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge." But some later works are not as good: in AT Clara Velde's "weighty head, resting on a long neck," is introduced in too peremptory a fashion to mean much; also we have to take on trust her life-long love for the charming and masterful Ithiel Regler, as no evidence of his charm is produced.

• Chavkin, Allan, and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. "Shawment's Hostile Joking and Stereotyping in 'Him with His Foot in His Mouth.'" Saul Bellow Journal 11.2–12.1 (1993–94): 22–29.
  

  Considers the enigmatic Shawmut the key to unlocking "Him with His Foot in His Mouth" along with the particular narrative viewpoint–a rough draft of a letter of apology–which at times resembles a private journal or a mental meditation. Sees the narrator as a manipulator of rhetoric and a manipulator of innocent Miss Rose, whose letter is more designed to con her into sympathizing with him as victim than it is intended as a sincere apology. Condemns his vision as stereotypical, distorted, prejudiced, disparaging, and hostile to women. Concludes that through Shawment, Bellow reveals that stereotyping is invariable dehumanizing. Bellow uses Shawmut to function as both social critic and object of criticism, a man filled with self-disgust over evasions of the deepest impulses of his soul and his neglect of his Jewish heritage in order to assimilate with a mainstream society that is hostile to the outsider.

• Clark, Alex. "What the Memory Man Forgot." Rev. of Collected Stories. Guardian 8 Dec. 2001. 10.
  

  Another answer is that Bellow is also confused by the competing demands of grandeur and glibness. In these pieces, high seriousness jostles with jokey colloquialism; minor characters are lovingly embodied with the full majesty of their creator's inventive powers before being ushered offstage; baffling theoretical positions are poured into the surge and swell of everyday life. Bellow's success in reflecting the complex agonies and ungovernable variety of human nature and history is also, occasionally, his failure to move. Bellow resolves some of these tensions through a kind of comic anarchy. In "The Old System," another narrator besieged by the past recalls a family feud between a brother and sister. Isaac, Tina feels, has become rich at his family's expense; by way of revenge, she charges him admission to her death-bed. Is this punitive excess comic or tragic? Either way, it's theatrical, 'a situation of opera, which at the same time was a situation of parody.' "The Old System"—infused with its memories of Aunt Billy Rose, with her "large bust, wide hips, and old-fashioned th"—contains a passionate repudiation of this world of feeling and theatricality that maps itself onto death, that claims that operatic finish: "But once humankind had grasped its own idea, that it was human and human through such passions, it began to exploit, to play, to disturb for the sake of exciting disturbance . . . Oh, these Jews - these Jews! Their feelings, their hearts!"

• Clayton, John. "A Rich Reworking." Saul Bellow Journal 6.2 (1987): 19–25.
  

  Argues that though "all the stories [in HWHFIHM] are filled with baroque exuberance" stories such as "Cousins," "Him with His Foot in His Mouth," and "What Kind of a Day Did You Have?"—"for all their narrative energy and charming, digressive playfulness, don't come together as stories" (19). Discusses each of the stories in turn and finds the piling up of facts tedious, the monologues insufficiently dramatized, and many of them more like novel fragments than short stories. Concludes, however, that "A Silver Dish" does successfully answer the collection's opening question about death and does effectively dramatize the terms of the conflicts in the story.

• Cohen, Sarah Blacher. "Adaptations in and of Saul Bellow's 'The Old System.'" Saul Bellow Journal 11.2–12.1 (1993–94): 108–23.
  

  Describes the actual historical occurrence in Albany, New York, of a Jewish immigrant purchasing an Albany country club in order to transform it into a shopping mall. Shows how after considerable authorial liberty by Bellow this event becomes the basis for "The Old System." Details Bellow's adaptation of this set of events for his own literary purposes and likens him to Theodore Dreiser, who also regarded himself as a historian of the era and who also wanted to immortalize his milieu. Admires Bellow's representations of Albany and Schenectady from the 1910s to 1950s for their authenticity of setting and palpable reality. Further describes the structural and thematic arrangements of Bellow's story, and then describes her own further adaptations of it for the purposes of effective theater in her own play.

• Conant, Oliver. "Burlesquing Intellectuals." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. New Leader 11 June 1984: 16–17.
  

  Argues that this collection is not as powerful or as even as the previous collection, but goes on to praise it for its ease, boldness, language and carnival of ideas. Deals primarily with how Bellow treats intellectuals in the collection.

• Cowley, Jason. "Collected Stories." Rev. of Collected Stories. Times 12 Dec. 2001, Final ed., sec. Times 2: 13.
  

  "It is the shorter, more controlled [Saul Bellow] I have always admired, the Bellow of the early, edgy existential novels of perplexed wonder that were such an influence on the young Malcolm Bradbury, the Bellow of the novella Seize the Day and of later elegiac works such as DD, which are infused by a kind of autumnal music. "Memory is life," Bellow writes in The Bellarosa Connection, which recreates the strange life of Harry Fonstein from wartime danger in Nazi-occupied Poland to his years of affluent happiness in American and to, in baffled old age, his death in a road crash on the Jersey Turnpike. We never encounter Harry directly: he exists entirely in the memory of an old friend, a wealthy Jewish–American from whom he has long since drifted apart but who has never forgotten Harry and the memories he lived with of 'the destruction of his family in Poland. "Saul Bellow's entire writing life has been spent nurturing his own particular way of seeing. His great gift is his eye. No contemporary writer sees more clearly than Bellow, sees us for what we are in all our complicated human struggle and vulnerability. These stories—tender, discursive, wise, all-seeing—offer the best of him. Something to remember him by indeed." (The Times abstract)

• Cryer, Dan. "In Short, Bellow Still Towers: New Collection of His Stories Compares Well with His Novels." Rev. of Collected Stories. Newsday 5 Nov. 2001: B9.
  

  "Not so, cautioned dissenters like the late Alfred Kazin. His Bright Book of Life argued for the superiority of the short, tightly focused early novels TV and SD. Now the critic James Wood steps forward to champion an even shorter form, the story. In his introduction to 'Collected Stories,' Wood proclaims [Saul Bellow], alongside Faulkner, as 'the greatest modern American writer of prose.' This greatness, he asserts, is 'present in Bellow's stories as fully as in his novels. Nor does intelligence translate into street smarts. It's the relatives of Bellow's well-read narrators who make business deals, have contacts in the mob, pile up the dough. Success is more often professional and academic for the assimilated generation. The exceptions are marked by an operatic willingness to sacrifice everything for ideas. See 'Zetland: By a Character Witness' for a downward spiral from high-powered adolescent prodigy to free-floating Greenwich Village eccentricity. Within extended families, the author summons up a cartload of colorful characters, doting mothers and stern fathers. 'Cousins' is Bellow at his most tender. Out of love for a dear aunt and uncle, Ijah Brodsky risks his good name on behalf of a gangster relative. In 'The Old System,' by contrast, lonely scientist Samuel Braun is so fed up with chronic strife among siblings that he yearns to extinguish feeling itself: He 'tried to grasp what emotions were. What good were they?'" (Newsday abstract)

• Demarest, David P. Jr. Title? Not sure if this is right section.
  

  Traces how Bellow places man in a rather Popean middle state and aims at an ironic knowledge similar to Pope's in both accepting and affirming life's contradictions. Searches for and describes these themes of continuity in "Looking for Mr. Green," and "A Father-to-Be." Argues that these forms lay down the terms of Bellow's dialectic, while Rogin in the latter story prefigures the protagonists of the novels in the inconsistencies of his own attitude. Sees both stories as revealing life's discontinuities and the inconsistency of human moods, which both undercut narrow expectations that life can be ordered rationally, or logically. Each protagonist ends up suspending critical judgment and gratefully accepts it without questioning that things are as they are. Finally in H, both protagonists are further developed and brought to full awareness.

• Demarest, David P., Jr. "The Theme of Discontinuity in Saul Bellow's Fiction: 'Looking for Mr. Green' and 'A Father-to-Be." Studies in Short Fiction 6.2 (1969): 175–86. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria L. Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 31–42.
  

  Sees these stories as excellent introductions to Bellow's views generally. Suggests that the polar issues are seeking for intellectual order or taking life as it is. Provides an excellent comparative and formalistic treatment of the two stories.

• Dietrich, Richard F. "The Biological Draft Dodger in Bellow's 'A Father-to-Be.'" Studies in the Humanities 9.1 (1981): 45–51. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria L. Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 59–68.
  

  An exhaustive exegesis of the story showing how irrational a human a scientist like Rogin can be in face of inner psychological issues. Shows the central concern of the story to be Rogin's relationship with his fiancee, Joan. The psychological nexus is Rogin's refusal of fatherhood after marriage. What and who Rogin is, and why he must avoid the future in the form of children, becomes the burden of the story. Hence, we see the supposedly rational scientist behaving like anything but a rational being as he attempts to cope with sex, love and mature adult responses to his impending marriage. He evades clear thinking, and philosophizes and rationalizes as he tries to reconcile his infantilism and oedipal urges. He ends in total regression.

• Donoghue, Denis. "Bellow in Short." Rev. of Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories. Art International 13 (1969): 59–60, 64.
  

  Provides a general discussion of the stories in light of the novels. Neither detailed nor stystematic.

• Friedrich, Marianne M. "Two Women Protagonists from Bellow's Short Stories: Character Conception and Its Artistic Realization." Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth-Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 73–85. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 79–92.
  

  Focuses on the character conception and themes interrelated narrative forms in the two women protagonists, Dora and Hattie. Argues that both stories explore a major philosophical construct—Freud's theory of the individual in "Dora," and Proustian and Bergsonian concepts of time in "Leaving the Yellow House." Details both concepts and illuminates the progression from the traditional short story in "Dora," to a distinctive, personal concept of the short story in "Yellow House." Shows how Freud's case study of Dora influenced the theme, structure, and narrative of Bellow's story and challenges it. Shows how Bellow deviates from Proust's and Bergeson's theories of motion and narration of self through the artistic representation of interior time as he establishes inner voices as an integral part of a dual structure within the narrative progression.

• Friedrich, Marianne. "'Cousins': The Problem of Narrative Representation." Saul Bellow Journal 11.2–12.1 (1993–94): 80–107.
  

  Suggests that Ijah Brodsky in "Cousins" is the prototype of Bellow's talking intellectuals because of his isolation from his two brothers, his divorce, his affection for collateral cousins, and his high degree of cerebration. Comments on how Bellow pushes the range of mimetic possibilities within this short narrative form to its extreme limits as he tackles cerebration and complexity of character through character sketch and allegory. Illustrates how Ijah's concept of "suspense" is strongly informed by Hegel and permeates the story's structure, as does Kant's philosophy of religion–the antithetical philosophical background against which Ijah's mystical, mythic revelations and insights unfold. Shows also how his immersion in the dual nature of the mythic Mother leads to his ontological rediscovery of a metaphysical world of good and evil, and his spiritual rebirth into a full acceptance of humankind.

• Friedrich, Marianne. "Bellow's Renaissance Courtier: Woody Selbst in 'A Silver Dish.'" Saul Bellow Journal 9.1 (1990): 21–35.
  

  Describes the aesthetic beauty of "A Silver Dish" as lying in the spontaneity, vitality, and complex layered artistic presentation of the story. Also locates the story's genesis in earlier unpublished fragments and character sketches taken from real life. Concludes that the story is uncanny, multifaceted, and transparent, based on its Renaissance tension between an intensely imagined personal, individual, framed in the world and its projection—by way of detail—against another reality that transcends the limitations of time and place.

• Furman, Andrew. "Saul Bellow's 'Him with His Foot in His Mouth': Why Bellow (and Other Writers) Matter." Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 239.52.
  

  Outlines Bellow's unwavering views of the writer's moral role in society to edify, instruct, reveal and even prophesy. This story bespeaks of the writer's indefatigable persistence in engaging the individual's quest for a higher spirituality. Bellow creates a protagonist sensitive to the state of his soul. Notes the profound antagonisms in Shawmut's backwardness and un-Americaness in contrast to the hipness of his accuser, Eddie Walish. Traces Shawmut's moral choice, failures, and inner musings about the contemporary House of Pride, and the failure of modern life to provide the emotional religious vision. Ultimately the spiritual convictions of Shawmut's neighbor speak to him more profoundly than Ginsberg's eroticism or highbrow intellectualism.

• Galloway, David D. "Saul Bellow: 'The Gonzaga Manuscripts.'" Die Amerikanishe Short Story der Gegenwart: lnterpretationen. Ed. Peter Freese. Berlin: Schmidt, 1976. 168–74.
  

  Views this short story as a forerunner to HRK. Describes the parallels between the two works.

• Geismar, Maxwell. "The American Short Story Today." Studies on the Left 4.2 (1964): 21–27.
  
  
• Gordon, Andrew. "Shame and Saul Bellow's 'Something to Remember Me By.'" Saul Bellow Journal13.1 (1995): 52–63.
  

  Implicit in many of Bellow's social comedies seems to be the masochistic notion that a dose of humiliation may be good for the soul. Characteristically in Bellow's novels and short stories, the lofty heroes are made to run the full gauntlet of embarrassment, mockery, ridicule, humiliation, mortification, and disgrace. In "Something to Remember Me By," this process of shame at the ridiculous adolescent sexual initiation rite of passage with the prostitute tells us something about the psychology of shame and about the Bellow hero's journey. In recent Bellow studies shame has been dealt with as narcissistic disorder, diminished self-image, guilt, and anxiety. However, his problems are really oedipal. Bellow's story demonstrates that, for all its sting, shame may have its origins in neurosis, Oedipal conflict, and ambivalence about his own sexual identity. Nevertheless, confessing his shame can perform penitential, reparative, and pedagogical functions and can lead finally to love. In telling the story to his son, Louie proves that despite the odds he will be a better father than his father was, relating to his son through good kind words rather than through angry blows. He hopes his son will be a good Jewish son and a good man.

• Gray, Paul. "Actions Speak Only as Loud as Words." New York Times Book Review 9 Dec. 2001: 15.
  

  Wonders what niche Bellow's new collection of short fiction is intended to fit into. All thirteen stories have appeared earlier and in paperback with the exception of the printing of "Something to Remember Me By," and an interesting Preface by Janis Bellow, as well as an appreciative introduction by critic James Wood, who needs this, the author asks. Provides a few critical insights on each of the works and generally applauds Bellow's sudden blazes of clarity, acheievement of a fiction of sensibility, demotic voice, comic gifts, and fondness for slang.

• Gray, Paul. "The Naysayer to Nihilism." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Time 14 May 1984: 84.
  

  Provides a content summary of the stories in the collection. No critical opinion offered except in conclusion. "Faithful readers will welcome this book as an addendum, a chance to watch the old master fiddling with themes and variations."

• Halio, Jay L. "Contemplation, Fiction, and the Writer's Sensibility." Southern Review 19.1 (1983): 203–18. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow's Fiction of Contemplation and 'What Kind of Day Did You Have.'" Saul Bellow Journal 11.2–12.1 (1993–94): 124–32. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 257–64.
  

  Argues that Bellow is not a conventional storyteller in the O. Henry or Singer sense, since he is more interested in the nature of reality and our apprehension of it than he is in issues of plot and story. Describes Bellow's ventures into this theme in several other fictions, short and long, and shows how this plays out in "What Kind of Day Did You Have." Notes that the stories collected in HWHFM show disdain of simple narratives, and argues that his difficult, measured style, and above all his confrontation with the real issues of contemporary human experience, elevate his fiction to the highest order. As the reader falls into a contemplative mode of this story he or she is warned that though realities may be hard to bear, avoiding them leads to intellectual decay, as well as to moral and spiritual death.

• Helman, Scott W. "Bellow Stories Collect Stuff of Life." Rev. of Collected Stories. Boston Globe 6 Dec. 2001, third ed.: C6.
  

  "As [Saul Bellow] makes clear in the story 'Cousins,' most of his characters—whether it will help them or help destroy them—discover that family relationships, however unhealthy, are defined and rendered indispensable by their being bound by blood. When Cousin Ijah agrees to write a federal judge on behalf of Cousin Tanky, a convicted criminal, he explains, 'I did it because I had been present at Cousin Tanky's circumcision and heard his cry.' In that story and others, Bellow succeeds in depicting not only the ties that bind, but those that strangle, unravel, and reel you back after years of fraying. The excuses we make for kin Bellow points out with a laugh, the errands we run, the paradoxes we become" (Boston Globe Abstract).

• Holinger, Richard. "Him with His World Intact." Saul Bellow Journal S.1 (1989): 24–34.
  

  Argues that all but one of the stories in HWHFHM share the author's familiar bonding of male protagonists who intellectually foray through a number of crises in the face of the perceived dissolution of the city, the world, and the mind. Develops this thesis with regard to each of the stories.

• Hyland, Peter. "Making It all Add Up: Bellow's Memoirs and 'Mosby's Memoirs.'" Saul Bellow Journal 15.1 (1997): 15–23.
  

  Asks what Bellow finally has to tell us at the close of the milliennum's end by examining "Something to Remember Me By" (1991) and IAAU (1994). Suggests that in both autobiographical fictions he offers us history, both political and cultural, and an individual life with that history. Furthermore, they both make a gesture toward closure in a way his fictions have always resisted. Argues that this seeming inconsistency is really about the consistent theme of the later fiction—memory. Examines MM as well as "Something to Remember Me By" with regard to the theme of memory. Concludes that given Bellow's statements that he is still trying to revise his perspectives and earlier errors, he is still busy.

• Hyland, Peter. "Short Stories." Saul Bellow. Modern Novelists. New York: St. Martin's, 1992; Macmilan Modern Novelists. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. 119–27. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 21–29.
  

  Provides critical commentary on each of the short stories contained in MM and HWHFHM. Concludes that Bellow is returned in his late years to the short story, but that all the central issues of the larger works are to be found both in the early and late short fiction.

• Ikeda, Choko. "An Ending with Progression." Saul Bellow Journal 16.1 (1999): 57–46.
  

  Argues that the use of the progressive verb form in the titles of "Looking for Mr. Green," and "Leaving the Yellow House," suggests that its continuative conception is inevitable and appropriate for their singular and meaningful endings, in contrast to Samuel Beckett's use of progressive forms in his Waiting for Godot (1952). Applies this to Bellow's unique and suspended endings to his stories.

• Ikeda, Choko. "Narrative Devices in Saul Bellow's 'A Silver Dish.'" Kyushu American Literature 29 (1988): 31–39.
  

  Analyzes the characteristics of Bellow's narrative devices in "A Silver Dish" and then contrasts them with the stream-of-consciousness technique, which similarly deals with introspection. Deals also with the structure of the story.

• Johnson, Gregory. "Jewish Assimilation and Codes of Manners in Saul Bellow's 'The Old System.'" Studies in American ]ewish. Literature 9.1 (1990): 48–60.
  

  Concentrates on the system of Jewish manners called "the old system" in the short story of that name. Argues that in this story Bellow acts as social historian whose task it is to assess and interpret the aftermath of assimilation within America's prevailing Capitalist, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant CASP culture. Suggest it ranks as Bellow's most unified and concentrated treatment of the national and behavioral problems dramatized by Jewish assimilation. Disagrees with Cuddihy's The Ordeal of Civility (1974), which notes that Bellow's career is marked by a failure of nerve typical of those Jewish intellectuals who have denied in some way their cultural roots in the assimilation of Protestant values. Shows how, on the contrary, Bellow's views old world manners as highly civilized, not savage or crude. Asserts that Bellow views these manners not as primitive, but as different from Protestant codes of civility. Provides an extensive analysis of the story as well as MSP, and suggests that Mr. Sammler could do worse than choose "the old system."

• Kakutani, Michiko. "Books of the Times: Saul Bellow's Collection of Most Unusual Suspects." Rev. of Collected Stories. New York Times 30 Oct. 2001, sec., The Arts: E6. Rpt. as "Remembrance of Things Past." San Diego Union-Tribune 11 Nov. 2001, sec. Books: 8.
  

  The narrator is known as 'the memory man,' the founder of the Mnemosyne Institute which trains executives and politicians in the fine art of remembering. Details the plot and describes his own memories of a European emigre named Harry Fonstein and Harry's torturous relationship with the impresario Billy Rose, whom Harry wants to thank for having saved him from the Nazis during World War II.This is a method of storytelling that Mr. Bellow has employed throughout his career with varying degrees of success, from earlier novels like HG and H through his last novel, R. But while these portraits become armatures for Mr. Bellow's ideas—for lofty philosophical speculation, for mordant political and social gripes—the people themselves remain wonderfully visceral creations, flesh-and-blood human beings, indelibly rendered through his exuberant language and gifts as a "genius noticer."

• Kehl, D. G. "The Distaff and the Staff: Stereotypes and Archetypes of the Older Woman in Representative Modern Literature." International Journal of Aging and Human Development 26.1 (1988): 1–12.
  

  Using references to 25 representative poems and 9 works of fiction by 35 modern authors (American, British, French, Australian), Kehl sets out to demonstrate that the elderly woman often survives with dignity, even nobility, in a society often insensitive to her plight. Argues that Hattie of "Leaving the Yellow House," by leaving the house to herself, explodes the stereotype of the older woman's inability to exercise her volition.

• Kemp, Peter. "Expansive Tastes." Rev. of Something to Remember Me By. Sunday Times 8 Nov. 1992: sec. 6: 11.
  

  Calls these three tales concise, veteran pieces which pulsate with energies generated by memory. Calls Sorella Fonstein a formidably sophisticated heroine, and the title story a robust and tender memoir. Notes that within this trio of stories, large issues are aired and wide perspectives opened up from the Jewish experience to the razzle dazzle of Broadway, and the pogroms of Galicia and Auschwitz. These narratives compress wealths of suggestion in compact narratives crisp with detail.

• Knight, Karl F. "Bellow's Shawmut: Rationalizations and Redemption." Studies in Short Fiction 24.4 (1987): 375–80.
  

  Discusses Bellow's short story "Him with His Foot in His Mouth" as a "muddled, touchingly human document, an apologia . . . which must be read with some skepticism, since Shawmut's need to rationalize makes him at times an unreliable narrator .... He uses his physical condition, his victimization, and his penitence to put forward a clever case for understanding and forgiveness" (375). Yet, "Bellow reminds us that this is a constructed rhetorical appeal when Shawmut says, 'I will say it all and then revise, send Miss Rose only the suitable parts'" (375).

• Knight, Karl F. "Bellow's Victor Wulpy: The Failure of Intellect." Saul Bellow Journal 6.2 (1987): 26–35.
  

  Argues that though Wulpy brings color, excitement, and the ratified air of artistic and intellectual elitism into Katrina's drab suburban life, the relationship is troubled, largely because of Wulpy's arrogance and detachment. Like some of Hawthorne's characters, Wulpy is a failure in his personal relationships because of his over-intellectualism.

• Knight, Karl F. "Sexual Irony in Bellow's 'What Kind of Day Did You Have?'" Notes on Contemporary Literature Mar. 1987: 10–12.
  

  Discusses the sexual irony in "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" by arguing that Katrina's sexual adventuring occurs because she was prepared for it by her conventional middle-class father, Billy Weigal. Her present lover, Victor Wulpy, seems on the surface to represent a rejection of the father-figure. But in a further irony, Weigal and Wulpy share so many basic attitudes toward women that in taking Wulpy Katrina is seeking the father-figure.

• Koning, Christina. "Consent unto Death." Rev. of Something to Remember Me By. Times 12 Nov. 1992: 37.
  

  Discusses MSP and H as offering a panoramic view of contemporary society, in what Wyndham Lewis described as "the moronic inferno," by their chronicling of its horrors and inanities. Argues that in recent years Bellow has abandoned the big canvas of these earlier works for a more compressed form. Now, instead of a multiplicity of stories, we get a single exemplary story. Sees these three tales as offering a distillation of themes which have occupied Bellow throughout his entire career. In each, a single incident brings about the revolution of an entire history: the "turntable" on which a protagonist has been going around suddenly becomes a "vortex" into which he finds himself drawn. Illustrates this movement in "Something to Remember Me By," AT, and BC. Concludes that recent Bellow work indicates he has relinquished his role of historian of the "moronic inferno" to younger writers.

• Kremer, S. Lillian. "Something to Remember Me By: Four Fictions of Memory." Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria L. Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 329–47.
  

  "Something to Remember Me By," like Bellow's other short fiction is a lyrical narrative rooted in recollection of the past, often evoking healing notalgia tempered by an indictment of a century and a contemporary American that have fallen short of their early promise. Explroes the significance of memory in characters ready to confront the personal, social, or historic posts that have shped their lives. Reviews MM, BC, "The Old System," and "Something to Remember Me By." This latter story poses the transcendental question of which world it is we really belong to—this one or another world from which this one takes its orders.

• Lanters, Jose "Fiction." Rev. of Something to Remember Me By. World Literature Today 66.4 (1992): 721–22.
  

  Describes the contents of the three stories and notes that Bellow is again in the business of fathoming human experience, how memory functions, and how we process it. Commends Bellow for his ability to evoke eroticism, and for capturing the very particular quality of one's life while revealing that such particularity is true for every life. Calls "Something to Remember Me By" a welcome addition to Bellow's already rich contribution to American fiction.

• Lelchuk, Alan. "Recent Adventures of Saul Bellow: Reflections on 'What Kind of Day Did You Have?'" Saul Bellow: A Mosaic. Twentieth-Century American Jewish Writers 3. New York: Lang, 1992. 59-71. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 265-77.
  

  Discusses Victor Wulpy's reflections on the relative power and merits of charm and style in terms of Bellow's meaning in the story. Uses long passages from the story to illustrate Bellow's poetry in prose and numerous aesthetic comments and successes. Describes the qualities of Bellow's prose as prose, his use of imagery, formal experimentations, and stylistic accomplishment of character. Concludes that especially for American writers like himself, having a great writer like Bellow in our time lends a special fragrance to the air of literature and adds both importance and legitimacy to that most civilized task of reading and writing so frequently overlooked in the distracting wilderness of America. Concludes that like Matisse, Bellow flourishes, creating fresh and imaginative ways of constructing reality, expanding our vision, and stunning us with the configurations of his most original art.

• Lelchuk, Alan. "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria L. Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000.
  

  Considers Bellow's style in light of his remarks about the difference between charm and style. Demonstrates how crucial the paragraph is in reading Bellow, and unpacks a sample paragraph to reveal its rich economy of culture and biography, its poetry, its dazzling description, and striking idiom. Takes a further paragraph and comments on its controlled, dense, heavily textured prose reminiscent of Proust, sense of childhood, creative energy and Wordsworthian chords. Unpacks the characters and general thematic movements of the story. Concludes that like the late Matisse, Bellow flourishes, creating fresh and imaginative ways of looking at the world. At the end of his day, Pulpy rides out his crisis with steadfast courage and poise, taking full responsibility for bringing Katrina along. Death does not daunt him and to the end he remains a man of style.

• Lemon, Lee T. "A Browningesque Protrait." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Prairie Schooner 58.4 (1984): 110.
  

  Concentrates on a brief discussion of character in each of the stories. Lemon is generally appreciative and unsurprised by the collection.

• Levin, David. "Innocents Abroad: From Mark Twain and Henry James to Bellow, Malamud, and Baldwin." Recherches Anglaises et Americaines 18 (1985): 163–82. Rpt. in Forms of Uncertainty: Essays in Historical Criticism. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992.
  

  In this article about Twain, James, Malamud, Baldwin, and Bellow, Levin explores continuities and differences in contemporary writers and the tradition of American literature with regard to innocence, simplicity, and naivètè. Reviews much early American, and other, writing on the subject and the moves to "innocents" as they appear in the writings of the above-mentioned authors. Deals in detail with "Mosby's Memoirs," and H. Concludes that in their concentration on a so-called ethnic American's anxious relationship to the genealogical side of his cultural past and to Western civilization, Bellow, Malamud, and Baldwin are only three of the best contemporary American writers who play elegant and moving variations on an old American theme. In their work innocence means not simple purity, but naivètè verging on blindness and vulnerability being corrupted by the provincial's desire to be accepted by the dominant culture.

• Lippit, Noriko M. "A Perennial Survivor: Saul Bellow's Heroine in the Desert." Studies in Short Fiction 12.3 (1975): 281–83.
  
  
• Loake, Jonathan. Rev. of Him With His Foot in His Mouth. Books and Bookmen Aug. 1984: 34.
  
  
• Lough, James. "Ridin' with Saul Bellow's Love of Characters Apparent Throughout Collection of Stories." Rev. of Collected Stories. Denver Post 25 Nov. 2001, Rockies ed.: EE1.
  

  Comments that the book's preface, written by Janis, is a helpful introduction to his biography and personal life. The introduction by critic James Wood gives Bellow's newer readers some useful angles from which to appreciate his stories. Objects that nowhere does the collection indicate the stories' dates. The casual reader cannot know which ones Bellow wrote earlier in his career, and which later. As a result, we cannot trace how their artistry and themes developed over time. But the stories themselves are Bellow's gifts to the world. Through them, we join in the financial, amorous, intellectual and spiritual quests of his vivid characters, only to realize that the quest does not matter as much as the glowing, vibrant individual who has undertaken it.

• Marovitz, Sanford E. "That Certain 'Something': Dora, Dr. Braun, and Others." Saul Bellow Journal 12.2 (1994): 3–12.
  

  Describes the progression of Bellow's character Dora from a self-sufficient fairly unconnected I-It relationship with the universe to a more engaged I-Thou relationship. In this transformed way she enters other's lives and draws them into her own, thus entering into divine communion. Her "gift" is her new divine agent fulfilling a complicitous role in her new enlightenment and in her gift of life. Spiritual investment in human relationship is equally significant in "Mosby's Memoirs," "Looking for Mr. Green," "A Father-to-Be," "The Old System," and in DD. Dora is a kindred fiction to all of these, for the "something" that she perceives through her experience with Mr. Regler corresponds precisely with the "divine gift" on which Dr. Braun meditates after tracing his family's crises, and shortly before he peers through "the dark kitchen window" into a night sky filled with stars.

• Marovitz, Sanford. "Back to the Beginning: A Late Look at Bellow's Early Short Stories." Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 3–17.
  

  Notes how Bellow labels his earliest stories character sketches, and argues that there is a remarkable thematic and methodological consistency over the full span of his career. Takes all the short fiction from "Two Morning Monologues" and a total of eight pieces, and provides commentary on each in chronological order, pointing out all the continuities. Concludes that by the end of 1951, he has established his promise as an author.

• Massie, Allan. "Book Reviews: The Problem with Great Writers." Rev. of Collected Stories. Scotsman 8 Dec. 2001: 7.
  

  Comments that there is still a great deal to enjoy in everything he writes; for his generation to enjoy anyway, since so many of his concerns have been that generation's. But, as works of art, few of these stories are satisfactory. They read mostly like chunks of novels that just, stopped. They are shapeless, baggy little monsters. The great masters of the short story, Chekhov, Kipling, Hemingway, are all takers-out. Bellow is a stuffer-in. Give any one of these stories to Kipling and he would have cut it by at least half and made it stronger. He would have pruned it of the adjectives. Actually the adjectives and the lengthy physical descriptions of characters, in which his admirers revel, are disguises, hiding the reality that Bellow has a deficient sense of how other people behave. This is why he resorts so often to exaggeration, shouting loudly to draw attention to the way he writes rather than to what he is writing.

• McQuade, Molly. Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Chicago 33.2 (1984): 108.
  

  Commends the book for its skill, tenderness and authority. Calls the stories "rhythmically personal talk," and admires their concrete detail and successful texture and characterization. Provides semi-detailed exegesis of the title story.

• Mizener, Arthur. "Saul Bellow: 'Looking for Mr. Green.'" Handbook for Analyses, Questions, and a Discussion of Technique for Use with Modern Short Stories: The Uses of the Imagination. Arthur Mizener. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1979. 50–53.
  

  Provides a useful social and character analysis of the story, plus a series of study questions.

• Nakajima, Kenji. "A Study of Saul Bellow's 'A Sermon by Dr. Pep.'" Kyushu American Literature 17 (1976): 12–19. Cited in MLA Bibliography, 1976.
  
  
• Nakajima, Kenji. "A Study of Saul Bellow's 'Looking for Mr. Green.'" Kyushu American Literature 18 (1977): 5–18.
  

  Provides a fairly detailed formalistic exegesis of the story under the headings: Idea in the Structure, Initiation Theme, Green: The Namer of the Unnameable, and Looking for Mr.Green.

• Newman, Judie. "Saul Bellow and Social Anthropology." Saul Bellow at Seventy-five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Studies & Texts in English 9. Tübingen: Narr, 1991. 137–49.
  

  Sketches Bellow's background and continuing interest in anthropology, including his decision to study anthropology in terms which suggest a conscious identification with universalism and a demystification in the cause of freedom. Argues that the notion of cultural change and creative adaptation has special relevance for him as a Jew, because perhaps of his immigrant status suggestive of lack of social stability. Sees the common thread in Bellow's works as a concern with and the influence of, and resistance to, environment and with the degree to which human adaptation in customs and culture is desirable, or even possible. Discusses Bellow's research topic, the study of taboos among Eskimos, as following in the footsteps of Franz Boas and his theories of geographic determinism and fear of societies not being able to break the shackles of tradition. Notes how this type of anthropologist who believes in breaking with tradition is exactly the kind of anthropologist Ijah Brodsky rejects. Traces the parallels in Ijah Brodsky's reading and Siberian ethnography studied by Boas and Bellow. Provides a detailed treatment of the story, tracing its metaphysical theme of the break with traditional ideas. Shows how Bellow pursues the theme of fraternal "cousinhood" in both its mode of organization and its ultimate discoveries. Shows how Ijah uses the Chukchee as examples of divisive transcendence as opposed to the binding power of human love, and espouses the notion that human beings can collaborate in pursuit of a better future.

• Newman, Judie. "Saul Bellow and Trotsky: 'The Mexican General." Saul Bellow Newsletter 1.1 (1981): 26–31.
  

  Aruges that this story, like all the novels, is formally located in the contingency of historical process. Bellow is actively engaged in analysis of the dynamics of history. In this story one of the questions raised is whether man makes history or history makes man. The indirection of this story forces the reader to question his principal focus. The final question the story forces the reader to ask is whether all the characters, important or not so important, really are of any significance to history. Is history the record of public acts of great men, or is it made by men in the grip of secret desires, swayed by forces beyond their control? Newman also discusses nature as a counterforce to history.

• Newman, Judie. "Zapotec Man and the Torajan Granny: 'Mosby's Memoirs' and the Sacrifice of the Heart." Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 113–26.
  

  Describes "Mosby's Memoirs" as an imaginative remapping of the border between life and death. Notes that the geography of death is not universal. When Willis Mosby sets out to memorialize himself, his intention is to defeat death rather than to acknowledge it. His fantasy of self-impersonation, doubling, and death all occur in Mitta, the town of souls, center of the world of the dead. Not coincidentally Mosby's memories center on Europe in the aftermath of WWII and upon Lustgarten who is characterized as "Zapotech." The images of mass death characterize both places. It is Bellow's own cosmic mourning ritual as he confronts the deaths of millions. Mitta is a convenient substitue locale for Bellow's imaginative response combining humor and guilt and expiation. Asks in conclusion if Bellow is exploring issues posed by the Holocaust by asking if comedy is a denial of death or an enlargement of the field of slaughter. Arguably Bellow's dark comedy provides a necessary counter-irritant in an extended ritual of mourning, insisting upon the vital role of the imagination in maintaining the social relation to the dead.

• O'Connell, Shaun. "Bellow: Logic's Limits." Rev. of Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories. Massachusetts Review 10.1 (1969): 182–87.
  

  Provides a brief critical overview of the stories published in MM. Praises the stories for their taut style, their emphasis on intellectual life, and their awareness.

• Ozik, Cynthia. "Farcical Combat in a Busy World." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. New York Times Book Review 20 May 1984: 3. Rpt. in Saul Bellow. Ed. Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 235–41; as "What Drives Bellow." Metaphor & Memory. Cynthia Ozick. New York: Knopf, 1989. 49–57; Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria L. Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 207–14.
  

  Calls the volume HWFIM "a concordance, a reprise, a summary, all the old themes and obsessions hauled up by a single tough rope". Praises the work as a "cumulative art concentrated, so to speak, in a vial." Sees the stories as the long-awaited personal decoding process for Bellow. Comments on each story and places Bellow in his twentieth-century American and international context.

• Peden, William. "'Oh, These Jews–These Jews! Their Feelings, Their Hearts!'" The American Short Story: Continuity and Change, 1940–1975. William Peden. 2nd rev. enl. ed. Boston: Houghton, 1975. 121–23, passim.
  

  Details the plot and characters in each of the six stories in MM. Calls "The Old System" the best—a novel in miniature. Offers snippets of Bellow's most colorful lines in the book, and generally applauds the collection.

• Phipps, Sam. "Book Reviews." Rev. of Collected Stories. Scotland on Sunday 16 Dec. 2001, 13.
  

  Argues that contrary to his own stated rules on brevity, Bellow has always loved the sound of his own literary voice far too much, and with a Nobel Prize in hand, why should he reign himself in now? These stories are labyrinthine, patchy, maddening, and a few are purely brilliant.

• Pinsker, Sanford. "A New Look as the Old System." Saul Bellow Journal 11–12.2–1 (1993 Winter–1994 Fall): 54–65. Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 103–12
  

  Aruges that "The Old System" has been largely ignored by Bellow critics and that it is important because it is a dress rehearsal for MSP. Compares and contrasts Dr. Braun and Mr. Sammler. Suggests that ultimately Bellow's narrative technique distances us from Braun and the story becomes notable for its supressions as well as for its inclusions. The story is a long, dark evening of the soul, and it descends from the Puritan spiritual diaries. Ultimately, the scientist Braun does not understand the excess of Jewish feelings. Compares the story to Roth's Zuckerman from The Ghost Writer. Concludes that Bellow's story is more expansive and humane.

• Pinsker, Sanford. Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Studies in Short Fiction 21.4 (1984): 404–05.
  

  A brief review commenting on the emphasis in the collection on style, voice, and memory. Condemns earlier fiction for its preachiness and sighs with relief that the short stories are not as bad in this respect. Identifies HWHFHM as a collection of short stories that helps decode the earlier fiction. Asserts that the voice of the stories is finally "demonized by the right questions."

• Prescott, Peter S. "Him at His Most Impressive." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Newsweek 14 May 1984: 76. Rpt. as "The Briefer Bellow." Never in Doubt: Critical Essays on American Books, 1972–1985. Peter S. Prescott. New York: Arbor, 1986. 119–21.
  

  Laments that Bellow has written so few short stories. Sees the form as a natural curb on his "didacticism." Calls the stories as "well-crafted and thickly textured." Provides a brief introduction to each.

• Rasche, Bend. "Die fugur des intellekstuellen: gefangen in den fallstricken der amerikanischen middle—Saul Bellow, 'Him With His Foot in His Mouth (1985).'" Anglistik and Engleschunterricht 44 (1991): 27–44.
  
  
• Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Koheleth in Chicago: Quest for the Real in 'Looking for Mr. Green.'" Studies in Short Fiction 11.4 (1974): 387–93.
  

  Sees the story as a bildungsroman that uses the quest pattern. Identifies it as a species of Drieserian metaphysical parable and commends it as one of the great short stories of our time.

• Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "A Rough-Hewn Heroine of Our Time: Saul Bellow's 'Leaving the Yellow House.'" Saul Bellow Newsletter l.l (1981): ll–17.
  

  Suggests that previous critics have failed to properly explain Bellow's short stories when they fail to see them in terms of the analogous themes and characters in the novels. Gives a highly sophisticated critique of this short story, and particularly of the character of Hatti Waggoner. Draws parallels between Hattie and Joseph, Charlie and Herzog. Interprets the story as pointing up the failure of human love, isolation, and the failure of the American dream of the Edenic West. Also discusses the themes of inertia, identity, and death contained in the story, all in terms of the novels.

• Rooke, Constance. "Saul Bellow's 'Leaving the Yellow House': The Trouble with Women." Studies in Short Fiction 14.2 (1977): 184–87.
  

  Discusses Hattie in detail, comparing her predicament and personality to those of Bellow's male protagonists. However, suggests that Bellow fails to distinguish her as he should and give her both intellectual dimension or his full sympathy. She fails to wake from her living sleep and achieve salvation through confronting death, as do the male protagonists. Concludes that although Bellow's notorious sexism is less apparent in this story than in most other works, there are textual evidences of authorial sexism.

• Roudane, Matthew C. "Discordant Timbre: Saul Bellow's 'Him with His Foot in His Mouth.'" Saul Bellow Journal 4.1 (1985): 52–61.
  

  Examines the manner in which Shawmut's present recollections of his past irresponsible and comic outbursts shape not only his life, but Bellow's structural and thematic concerns within the short story. Concludes that what emerges is an extension of Bellow's philosophical conviction that the individual can take an affirmative essentially romantic stance towards both an internal world that, for Shawmut at least, is complicated by his "hysterical syndrome" which causes him "to put his foot in his mouth."

• Safer, Elaine. Degrees of Comic Irony in A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection. Melus 21.4 (1996 Winter): 157–72. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 297–313.
  

  In AT and BC, Bellow juxtaposes high-sounding romantic ideas an relativistic or pragmatic behavior. Its comedy derives from Bellow's sense of the disintegrating outline of the worthy and humane self. Of note here is Bellow's ongoing comic treatment of "me" and "my." Relates Bellow's humor to Rabelais and Sterne on the one hand, and such Jewish writers as Shalom Aleichem on the other–all writers who fuse the sacred, the secular, the mythological and the mundane. Then there is the comic irony vested in the narrative voice. In AT, the third person narrator is particularly obtuse, while the narrator is BC makes judgements on other characters without being aware of his own -self-contradictions and it takes him a long time to arrive at an awareness of his own emptiness and lifelong mistakes. Neither does the obtuse narrator of AT penetrate the ironies of her own situation. Comic irony develops out of the contrast between romantic expectations and by ideas, with the actualities of their lives. Concludes that both novellas present a comic vision that arises from the juxtaposition of character, high-sounding or romantic assertions, and their relativistic behavior.

• Satlof, Marilyn IL "Bellow's Modern Lamed Vovniks." Saul Bellow Journal 8.2 (1989): 39–46.
  

  Claims that, in HWHFHM, Bellow creates his version of the Lamed Vovnik, the thirty-sixer who will save the world not primarily through his kind heart and good deeds, but through his sharp mind and even sharper wit. Hence piquing the world into morality. Concludes that Bellow's Lamed Vovnik's are neither Hasidic artisans humbly plying their trade, nor heart-rendered shtetl dwellers. Suggests that Bellow has moved the wellsprings of his Lamed Vovniks from the heart to the brain, and while maintaining the focus on the soul, he has placed his thirty-sixers within this continuum of immortality.

• Scheer-Schaezler, Brigitte. "A la recherche du text perdu: 'The Gonzaga Manuscripts." Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 43–58.
  

  Comments that although this fifties and sixties material in "The Gonzaga Manuscripts" might be dated, it is interesting to see how Americans and Europeans viewed in clichés and stereotypes and seemed endlessly strange to one another. Fiction of the period abounds in cold war terrors and in the figure of the naive American tourist in postwar Europe, as does "The Gonzaga Manuscripts" and MM. Provides comparative commentary on these and other fiction of the period, including much Henry James work that Bellow possibly drew on. Traces Bellow's resistance to pessimistic historicism, but suggests that oft-cited affirmations in these works, must take second place to his having been such a sharply discerning and minutely observant analysts and witness to our century—one of its keenest readers, a listener to its twice-told tales.

• Schulz, Dieter. "Self and Transcendence in 'A Silver Dish.'" Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 227–38.
  

  Central to this story is the encounter of father and son which recalls many other male/male relationships from DM to BC. Woody's father is a reality instructor who teaches his son lessons about the lusty encounter with life's physical pleasures, as well as with sharp practice, petty thievery, and fraud. Details the opposition of idealist son and realist father over the stolen silver dish. Points out the similarities of this Oedipal pattern in Woody's failed attempt to wrestle the dish away from his father, with other similar encounters in Bellow's fiction. Woody represents resistance to the dynamics of modern American life. Technically the story represents an astonishing feat of the fusion of technique and theme. In its space of mourning and meditation, the story enables the protagonist to transcend the limitations of the ego-oriented and self-imprisoned in a civilization dedicated to the accumulation of wealth. In embracing the otherness of his father, an otherness with typically eludes him, Woody succeeds in appreciating the gift of a father who was a boon always by being himself.

• Shank, Jenny. "Less Bellow Would Have Been More." Rev. of Collected Stories. Rocky Mountain News 9 Nov. 2001: 27D.
  

  Complains that Collected Stories is not a good choice for someone approaching Bellow for the first time. This is a compendium for hard-core Bellow fans only, and though not uniformly enjoyable, it proves the wisdom Bellow displayed in sticking largely to novels (with only two volumes of short stories out of his 18 previously published books) rather than trying to be a master of both forms.

• Shapiro, Susan. Rev. of Something to Remember Me By. Washington Times 17 Nov. 1991: B8.
  
  
• Siegel, Ben. "Love's Labors Lost: Saul Bellow's A Theft." Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 281–296.
  

  Argues that at seventy-eight Bellow appears determined not to leave unused, in the time left to him, any leftover or salvageable plot line or story fragment. In fact, he seems to be reworking many of his familiar characters and ideas for additional possibilities. In AT, Bellow once again presents worldly intellectuals more successful in their public than in their private lives. And in this respect the book seems essentially a reworking of certain aspects of earlier stories like "The Old System," "A Silver Dish," and "What Kind of Day Did You Have," with its typical high-strung women and high-powered men of previous stories that Clara and Ithiel obviously resemble. Also discusses Clara as the typical Bellow woman executive, with special problems in the business world and the masculine roles she must adopt. Present also are innocents, victims, and analysts of earlier fiction, as well as the thieves and deceivers. Suggests that, like his earlier fiction, this story avoids pat solutions and instead offers the reader the opportunity to imagine for themselves how Clara, Teddy Regler, and others will deal with ongoing confusion and unfulfilled lives. Concludes that like everyone else, each character will have to cope with that most insidious "thief" of all--his or her own human frailties.

• Simon, Jeff. "Writing Short Makes Time for Fast Thinkers." Rev. of Collected Stories. Buffalo News, final ed.: F7.
  

  A sarcastic denunciation of Janis Bellow's Preface and James Wood's Introduction. Argues that Nabokov should have won the 1976 Nobel Prize instead of Bellow, and that Bellow's "hypertrophied" protagonists are probably just like the Swedish academics who awarded Bellow the prize.

• Skinner, David. "Saul Bellow's Stories of Character and Cognition." Rev. of Collected Stories. Washington Times 9 Dec. 2001: B8.
  

  Argues that there is something grubby even about Mr. Bellow's most elegant characters, an inner Herzog furious at life for making us the low beings we are. In the well packed pages of 'Collected Stories,' which bills itself as the first major collection of Mr. Bellow's short fiction, there is wide display of such I-and-the-world antagonism. It is the natural effect of the Bellow passion for character. Make character preeminent and the other engines of storytelling become auxiliary. This is not really a complaint: Mr. Bellow elevates character, in all senses of the word, well beyond commonly recognized boundaries. No writer quite loves a psychological tic, physical deformity, or an internal compulsion as fully as Mr. Bellow does. So much that his work is concisely described as portraiture.

• Snyder, Phillip A. "Artist-by-Artist (De)construction: Mediated Testimony in Bellow's 'Zetland: By a Character Witness.'" Saul Bellow Journal 11.2–12.1 (1993–94): 66–79. Rpt. in Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. Eds. Gerhard Bach and Gloria Cronin. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 2000. 215–26.
  

  Argues that Zetland functions narratologically as a character witness testimony, which occupy's "the space between evidence and impression, privileging testimonial over the empirical and filling any evidentiary absence with their narrative presence." "Zetland" re-presents well the complexities and incongruities of this kind of discourse, existing as it does in the gap between binaries such as fact/fiction or guilt/innocence. In Bakhtinian terms apomnemoneumatay or recollections and as the unnamed narrator of his boyhood memories of Chicago and New York of Max Zetland, his boyhood friend, especially his impressions of Zetland's education, philosophy, and family relationships. Covers such topics as the nature of its dramatic monologue, whether or not Zetland is on trial, the mechanics of meditation concerning the absent/present, Zetland, Zetland's testimonial performances, codes of De-Construction, and trials of memory. Concludes that "Zetland" functions as an artist-by-artist de-construction, mediated by eyewitness testimony and codifies by the bildungs-Künstleroman tradition which never encounters closure.

• Solotaroff, Theodore M. "Saul Bellow: Lines of Resistance." Rev. of Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories. The Red Hot Vacuum and Other Pieces of Writing of the Sixties. Theodore Solotaroff. New York: Atheneum, 1970. 298–305.
  
  
• Walsh, Thomas. "Heroism in Bellow's 'The Mexican General.'" Saul Bellow Journal 1.2 (1982): 31–33.
  

  Shows how in this story Bellow "laments history's sordidness, but shows that the General's ignorance and opportunism that seem to undermine the old man's greatness ultimately serve to sharpen it."

• Weinstein, Ann. "Ijah, 'Our Cousins' Keeper': Bellow's Paradigm of Man." Saul Bellow Journal 7.2 (1988): 58–70.
  

  Calls Ijah in "Cousins" not a saint, but rather a do-gooder who fights pessimism, despair, and melancholia. Sees Ijah Brodsky as sharing his creator's increased cynicism and preoccupation with duty, destiny, and death, but also sharing his belief in human nature and the existence of the soul.

• Weinstein, Mark A. "Saul Bellow." Popular World Fiction 1900–Present. Ed. Walton Beacham and Suzanne Niemeyer. Washington: Beacham, 1987. 1: 101–11.
  

  Reference work treatment of Bellow's publishing history, critical reception, honors, popularity, characters, techniques, and literary precedents. Discusses the themes, social concerns, characters, techniques, and literary precedent respectively in AAM, H, HG.

• Wood, James. "Introduction." Saul Bellow: Collected Stories. New York: Viking, 201. xiii–xx.
  

  Calls Bellow a writer whose immense stylistic powers rank him alongside Faulkner as two of the greatest modern American prose writers. Describes the august raciness and pure daring of his sentences, commends him as a great portraitist of the human form alongside Dickens. Describes the function of the exuberant sketches, the metaphysical impact, the values of the visual, his approach to history, his sense of the humanity. Divides the stories into: 1) lone, loose-edged stories which read as if they began life as novels, 2) and short, almost classical tales which often recount the vents of a single day. Describes Bellow's "impressions" compounded of details which bespeak of a master realist. Talks of the influence of Chicago, stifling family, the religious vision, the intellectual quest, coiled ironies, philosophical content, and his bookishness. Concludes "that all of these beautiful stories throw out at us, in burning centrifuge, the secular religious questions: What are our days of awe? And how shall we know them."

Reviews

• Amis, Martin. Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Observer 24 June 1984: 20. Rpt. with additions as part of "The Moronic Inferno." The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America. Martin Amis. London: Cape, 1986. 8–11.
  

  Calls the appearance of HWHFHM the beginning of the period of "Late Bellow." Notes the familiar oppositions: a rich, generously comic and fanatically detailed record of the human experience and habitat, set against a wayward seaminess, or moodiness, an intoxicated receptivity to ideas—Bellow's own poetry of meditation. And secondly, a countervailing ferocity in his apprehension of the peculiar disorders and distortions of the modern era. Notes Bellow's attention to formative American ideas such as the development of wealth, and his congenital good fortune in knowing the tenderness of human ties of blood and race. Discusses Bellow's investment in sociology, revelation, heterodox transcendentalism, contemporary formations, and elegiac visions in these stories.

• Gilbert, Harriett. Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. New Statesman 29 June 1984: 26.
  
  
• Goodheart, Eugene. "Parables of the Artist." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Partisan Review 52.2 (1985): 149–53. Rpt. in Pieces of Resistance. Eugene Goodheart. Cambridge: New York: Cambridge UP, 1987. 167–70; "Parable of the Artist." Rev. of Him with His Foot m His Mouth and Other Stones. Partisan Review 52.2 ( 1985 ): 149–53. Rpt. as "Saul Bellow's Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories." Pieces of Resistance. Eugene Goodheart. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987. 167–70.
  
  
• Gray, Paul. "Actions Speak Only as Loud as Words." The New York Times Book Review Dec. 9, 2001: p. 15.
  

  Wonders what niche Bellow's new collection of short fiction is intended to fit into. Notes that all thirteen stories have appeared earlier and in paperback with the exception of the printing of "Something to Remember Me By," and an interesting Preface by Janis Bellow, as well as an appreciative introduction by critic James Wood. Complains that none of this is necessary. Provides a few critical insights on each of the works and generally applauds Bellow's sudden blazes of clarity, acheievement of a fiction of sensibility, demotic voice, comic gifts, and fondness for slang.

• Adams, Robert 1VL "Winter's Tale." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. New York Review of Books 19 July 1984: 28–29.
  
  
• Amidon, Stephen. "Seize the Day." Rev. of Collected Stories. New Statesman 10 Dec. 2001: 14.
  
  
• Bloom, Alice. "Recent Fiction II." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Hudson Review 37.4 (1984–85): 621–30.
  
  
• Boyd, Robert. "Collection Is Wonderful Evidence of Bellow's Mastery." Rev. of Collected Stories. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 16 Dec. 2001: F10.
  

  Criticizes the eight-page Introduction by the critic James Wood, pleading the case for Saul Bellow as a major writer. The point is well taken, but hardly news, and the argument is made much more eloquently by the stories that follow. Describes how BC and AT, both included in this volume, were first published as Penguin paperbacks—too short for hard covers and too long for the magazines. The former—Bellow's most intense fictional examination of the Holocaust—is an intricate exploration of the uses of memory and of the complex forces that shape human destiny. 'A Theft' which is, incidentally, all the proof needed to demolish the charges that Bellow is misogynistic, presents a female character, Clara Velde, who is in every way an equal of Bellow's male characters Henderson, Herzog, and Augie March.

• Cartwright, Justin. "Just Something He Dug Up." Rev. of of Collected Stories. Independent. 25 Nov. 2001: 15.
  

  We should count our blessings. As James Wood says, Bellow is probably the pre-eminent American novelist of our times. Even Updike, who might be considered a rival for that title, suggests something similar. And if Bellow strains a little for the easy effects of his middle Bellow is described as "come down in the knees, like a car jack." In HWHFHM, a professor is described as having "eyebrows like caterpillars from the Tree of Knowledge." But some later works are not as good: in AT Clara Velde's "weighty head, resting on a long neck," is introduced in too peremptory a fashion to mean much; also we have to take on trust her life-long love for the charming and masterful Ithiel Regler, as no evidence of his charm is produced.

• Clark, Alex. "What Memory Man Forgot." Rev. of Collected Stories. Guardian 8 Dec. 2001. 10.
  

  Another answer is that Bellow is also confused by the competing demands of grandeur and glibness. In these pieces, high seriousness jostles with jokey colloquialism; minor characters are lovingly embodied with the full majesty of their creator's inventive powers before being ushered offstage; baffling theoretical positions are poured into the surge and swell of everyday life. Bellow's success in reflecting the complex agonies and ungovernable variety of human nature and history is also, occasionally, his failure to move. Bellow resolves some of these tensions through a kind of comic anarchy. In "The Old System," another narrator besieged by the past recalls a family feud between a brother and sister. Isaac, Tina feels, has become rich at his family's expense; by way of revenge, she charges him admission to her death-bed. Is this punitive excess comic or tragic? Either way, it's theatrical, 'a situation of opera, which at the same time was a situation of parody.' "The Old System"—infused with its memories of Aunt Billy Rose, with her "large bust, wide hips, and old-fashioned th"—contains a passionate repudiation of this world of feeling and theatricality that maps itself onto death, that claims that operatic finish: "But once humankind had grasped its own idea, that it was human and human through such passions, it began to exploit, to play, to disturb for the sake of exciting disturbance . . . Oh, these Jews - these Jews! Their feelings, their hearts!"

• Enright, D. J. "Exuberance-Hoarding." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Times Literary Supplement 22 June 1984: 688.
  
  
• Halperin, Irving. "Therefore Choose Life." Rev. of "Mosby's Memoirs." Jewish Affairs Mar. 1976: 65, 67, 69
  
  
• Kakutani, Michiko. "Books of the Times: Saul Bellow's Collection of Most Unusual Suspects." New York Times 30 Oct. 2001, sec., The Arts: E6.
  

  The narrator is known as 'the memory man,' the founder of the Mnemosyne Institute which trains executives and politicians in the fine art of remembering. Details the plot and describes his own memories of a European emigre named Harry Fonstein and Harry's torturous relationship with the impresario Billy Rose, whom Harry wants to thank for having saved him from the Nazis during World War II.

• Klausler, Alfred P. Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Christian Century 12–19 Sept. 1984: 848.
  
  
• LaSalle, Peter. "Sumer is icumen in, Llude sing cuccu!" Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. America 14 July 1984: 16–17.
  
  
• Loake, Jonathan. Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth. Books and Bookmen Aug. 1984: 34.
  
  
• Mano, D. Keith. "In Suspense." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. National Review 10 Aug. 1984: 48.
  
  
• Mudrick, Marvin. Rev. of Mosby's Memoirs & Other Stories. Hudson Review 21.4 (1968–69): 751–63.
  
  
• Peden, William. "Recent Fiction: Some of the Best." Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. Western Humanities Review 39.3 (1985): 267–74.
  
  
• Rev. of Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories. New York Times 27 Oct. 1985: 50.
  
  
• Richardson, Jack. "Chasing Reality." Rev. of Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories. New York Review of Books 13 Mar. 1969: 12–14.
  
  
• Samuels, Charles Thomas. "Action and Idea in Saul Bellow." Rev. of Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories. Atlantic Nov. 1968: 126–28, 130.
  
  
• Tanner, Tony. "Tony Tanner Writes about the American Novelist, Saul Bellow." Rev. of Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories. Listener 23 Jan. 1969:113–14.