A Companion to the American Short Story

by Alfred Bendixen

  lectual who, early in his life, has made a grand fatum in the form of a cruel witticism

  that he believes to have all but mortally wounded a shy young librarian. Given his

  egocentrism, he is certain the event has been all but terminal for her. Now Shawmut ’ s

  moral failings, backwardness, and inner emotions are revealed, as are his intellectual

  pride and selfi shness. His irresponsible comic outbursts proceed from his “ hysterical

  syndrome ” (20). Instead of apologizing to Miss Rose, he writes a personal meditation

  in which he exercises his masterful rhetorical skills so as to manipulate the unwitting

  woman into sympathizing with his guilt.

  “ What Kind of a Day Did You Have? ” (1984) reveals the true inner workings of

  a grotesque love between Katrina and Wulpy, two tragicomical lovers experiencing

  a meltdown on a terribly gray winter ’ s day while airborne. It is another of Bellow ’ s

  stories of Eros versus Thanatos that foregrounds the failures of heterosexual love in

  the twentieth century. As such, it is related to More Die of Heartbreak , the novel in

  which this consistent theme culminates. Some have argued that the open form of this

  story makes it another novella. The high degree of cerebration and complex feeling

  has rendered it problematic for some critics, who ask for more dramatization of

  abstract feelings.

  “ Zetland: By a Character Witness ” (1974) is a story told narratologically by a

  witness whose account spans the gray area between evidence and personal impression.

  In it Bellow privileges the humanly constructed testimonial over the hard facts of the

  matter. Zetland is the character through whom Bellow explores the incongruities and

  complexities of the inevitable gap between fact and fi ction, guilt and innocence. It is

  another of his philosophical explorations into the relationship between the nature of

  reality and language.

  “ A Silver Dish, ” which fi rst appeared in the New Yorker in 1978, is an elegantly

  rendered story about a classic father – son relationship that reveals more Bellovian

  theater of the soul. Its genesis lies in fragments belonging to the Seize the Day era,

  and its steady development over time reveals the high degree of artistry with which

  it is rendered. This time, readers experience a conventional plot. The story is based

  on the moral impasse between father and son having to do with the father ’ s theft of

  a silver dish. Father – son confl icts unite all of Bellow ’ s fi ctions and no doubt have their

  roots in his problematic childhood relationship with the none - too - honest Abraham

  Bellow, who was originally run out of St. Petersburg because of an onion smuggling

  operation. At the center of the story, Woody is engaged in a youthful pursuit of the

  sacred, while his father, the tricky, cunning Morris (Pop), is engaged in stealing the

  silver dish. As such, Morris is another of Bellow ’ s reality instructors who, as he dies

  in the ensuing struggle, teaches his son about the inevitable co - inherence of the sacred

  and the profane. Woody passes the rite - of - passage by coming to appreciate the gift

  of a reprehensible father. Morris is a boon just being himself. One of Bellow fi nest

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  Gloria L. Cronin

  literary expressions of humor and love, it is considered by many to be the most clas-

  sical story in the collection.

  In “ Cousins ” (1984), Ijah Brodsky, another talking intellectual, reveals that he is

  estranged from his wife and both of his brothers. He sketches for his captured listeners

  a whole range of some thirty strange cousins from all paths in life, all dredged up in

  remarkable detail from his prodigious memory. Sentimental and cynical by turns, Ijah

  compels his audience to feel empathy for him thanks to the sheer range of his intel-

  ligence and his brilliantly articulated feelings. Part of the comic agenda in this story

  is accomplished through the device of mental letters. Ijah ’ s self - imposed task is to

  retrieve the essential metaphysical world from under the debris of modern ideas. His

  repeated references to Hegel suggest that the nature of his quarrel is with the impos-

  sibility of higher synthesis. It is another attempt by Bellow to expand the conventions

  of the short story to include more cerebration and feeling. “ Cousins ” is Bellow at his

  most nostalgic and tender as he works in character sketches and allegory to describe

  Ijah Brodsky ’ s ontological rediscovery of the metaphysical worlds of good and evil.

  In this collection, Bellow unremittingly searches for new forms of artistic expression

  unconstrained by the plot - driven and portraiture - driven content of the conventional

  short story form, and he mostly succeeds.

  The Late Years: 1989 – 2005

  In 1989, Bellow made publishing history by publishing two novellas in paperback

  – A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection – that were soon to be followed by two more

  novellas printed in hardback – The Actual (1997) and Ravelstein (2000) . In this fi nal

  phase of his career, Bellow seems to have settled fi rmly on the novella as his form of

  choice, putting it back on the literary map.

  A Theft (1989) , which features Bellow ’ s only real female protagonist, is a Bellovian

  comic opera on the high jinks of the failed heterosexual pair. Clara Velde, raised on

  old - time, countrifi ed, Midwestern religious and racial values, has been plunged into

  the multiracial, urban world of contemporary marriage and business. Four times

  divorced and still involved with her true love, Ithiel Regler, she now knows he will

  never marry her. This novella deals with some very old Bellow themes, including the

  Hawthornian theft of the human heart, the lure of the intellect, the classic evasions

  of the intellectual male lover, and the racial chaos of “ Gogmagogsville ” (12). It is also

  about boredom and power politics, as well as the supposed impossibility of higher

  synthesis, the human comedy of sexual desire, the failure of psychiatry, the chaotic

  proliferation of ethnic others, the increasing absence of civilized spaces, and the

  diminished status of the individual. Bellow ’ s demythologization of romantic love in

  “ Gogmagogsville ” once again hinges on the ironic portrayal of a male protagonist

  torn between the desire for ultimate union with a female and the simultaneous pursuit

  of the intellect. Bellow has commented that Clara is his favorite female protagonist

  because she is so eternally romantically ready. Critics are not so sure that this overrides

  Saul

  Bellow

  339

  her other defi cits. Clara Velde has defrauded an insurance company, cheated on four

  husbands, impulsively thrown out her bewildered German au pair girl, made numer-

  ous racist remarks, and even become so suspicious of her dear friend, Mrs. Wong, that

  she thinks the woman might be trying to lure her lover with her oriental wiles.

  The Bellarosa Connection (1989) is Bellow ’ s most overt treatment of the response of

  American Jews to the Holocaust. It features an unnamed narrator, an elderly memory

  freak, who is trying desperately to recapture a lost opportunity for relationship with

  the grossly overweight yet spiritually authentic Sorella Fonstein. The novella is domi-

  nated by his remembrance of Sorell
a ’ s attempts to force the notorious Billy Rose to

  acknowledge her Holocaust survivor husband, Harry, since it was Billy who funded

  her spouse

  ’

  s dramatic rescue. Billy, who never really cared about the Holocaust

  anyway, will have none of this. Even Sorella ’ s attempt to blackmail him produces no

  response. The unnamed narrator is now overcome with guilt for his neglect of this

  remarkable couple and desires to atone for the moral aloofness. When he is informed

  that they have both died several months earlier, he laments that he has lived his entire

  life more through memory than through actual relationships. Centering on the

  emotional betrayal that the survivors of the Holocaust experienced at the hands of

  American Jews, this novella is Bellow ’ s personal mea culpa.

  “ Something to Remember Me By ” (1990) in Something to Remember Me By: Three

  Tales (1991) is another comic novella set in vintage Bellow territory – the Chicago

  of the 1930s on a cold, sooty day of shame and humiliation. Louie, the protagonist,

  an old Chicagoan of Jewish descent, is getting ready to die. He writes this story for

  his grown son. It tells the hilarious story of him as a 17 - year - old adolescent who,

  during his mother ’ s fi nal days on earth, engages his fi rst prostitute. She steals his

  money and clothes, including the sheepskin coat his mother had given him, leaving

  him only his shoes as she disappears out the window to join her accomplice. It is a

  freezing winter ’ s day, and the only clothes he can fi nd in the room are a woman ’ s

  boudoir jacket and a soiled dress. It is a typical Bellow reality check. Dressed in only

  these scanty female clothes he makes it to a local speakeasy only to fi nd his friend

  absent. Desperate, chilled to the bone, and the butt of many jokes for his woman ’ s

  clothing, the boy is approached by a wily drunk who lures him back to his apartment

  by promising him some clothes. Once there, the Jewish boy is forced, in a fi tting and

  hilarious retribution, to cook a pork dinner for the drunk and his three children.

  When the boy fi nally gets home, his father deals him a blow for which he is profoundly

  grateful, since it signals that his mother is still alive. The story contains vintage comic

  realism and probably grew from a stock of material Bellow had written much earlier.

  Peter Hyland has suggested that since Bellow dedicated this story to his children and

  grandchildren, it is probably a “ farewell legacy, a Prosperan apologetics ” (347).

  “ By the St. Lawrence ” appeared fi rst in the July 1995 issue of Esquire , and now

  prefaces the Collected Stories , indicating its thematic importance to the canon. Written

  in the third person, it features Rob Rexler, an author born to parents from Kiev and

  raised in Lachine and Montreal. He is an historian who has written about nihilism,

  Stalinism, decadence, Marxism, and National Socialism. Now he must lecture at

  340

  Gloria L. Cronin

  McGill University on Brecht and his Marxism, something of which he is now heartily

  tired. Rexler is obviously a thinly disguised persona for the now aged Bellow. On the

  way to the campus, he has the driver take him to his birthplace in Lachine. What

  follows is a detailed, nostalgic account of the scene by the St. Lawrence he remembered

  from childhood, his mother ’ s love for him, the summer he got polio, adolescence,

  cousins and relatives, old family quarrels, “ characters, ” Albert ’ s afternoon visit to the

  “ ladies ” while the young boy waited in the car, and the man killed on the tracks later

  the same day. It is the account of all the Bellovian themes of contemporaneity, youth,

  loss of innocence, the lost Jewish extended family of immigrant origins, family feuds,

  and Dickensian neighborhood characters. Most of all, it is the fi ction in which the

  aging Bellow recalls his own immigrant childhood and counts all that has been kept

  and lost.

  The Actual (1997) , another novella, tells the familiar Bellow story of an old ado-

  lescent love now reclaimed in late middle age. The worldly and clever Harry Trellman,

  an intellectual social observer and ambassador of the arts, is invited to “ notice ” the

  contemporary scene on behalf of the wealthy, aging Sigmund Adletsky. Harry will

  be his informer, “ noticer, ” and brains trust. Meantime, the sensitive Adletsky soon

  discerns the nature of Harry ’ s great sadness – an unrequited adolescent love, Amy

  Wustrin. As he fi nally brings the two aging lovers back together again, the plot turns

  on one of Bellow

  ’

  s favorite Platonic themes: the existence of one

  ’

  s soul mate or

  “ actual. ” Critics have suggested that this work belongs to his 1970s period and that

  Bellow is now simply clearing his desk.

  Ravelstein (2000 ), Bellow ’ s fi nal novella, is a beautifully rendered memorial to the

  late Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago. Here Bellow plays Boswell to Bloom ’ s

  Johnson as he captures the era and ethos of their moment together at the University

  of Chicago as two intellectuals of Russian Jewish descent. The portrait of Chick/

  Bellow is as carefully delineated as is the portrait of Ravelstein/Bloom. At the age

  of 64, and for several years thereafter, Bellow found in Allan Bloom the adoring

  and approving older father fi gure and Jewish soul mate he had never had. More

  than anyone, Bloom helped Bellow reclaim his identity as a child of Russian immi-

  grant Jews.

  Ravelstein is full of jokes, one - liners, and Catskill comedian gags which capture the

  distinctly fi rst - generation Jewish American voice, wit, neuroses, manners, affectations,

  cultural collisions, and intellectual passions. It records an accomplished, boon com-

  panionship always sought and usually lost by previous Bellow protagonists. Here

  Bellow ’ s debt of friendship to Allan Bloom is elegantly and even uproariously memo-

  rialized. Tender, risqu é , intellectually stimulating, full of brilliant conversation, even

  wicked at times, this account of a famous literary friendship encompasses everything

  from the sublime to the vaudevillian. Bloom/Ravelstein, a declared Platonist, believes

  that the highest purpose of male friendship is the formation of an elite community

  of potential truth seekers who are also searching for a relationship with their “ actuals ”

  or true halves. Ravelstein gets his erotic teachings from Aristophanes and Socrates

  and his moral vision from the Bible. As he is dying of Aids at the end of the novella,

  Saul

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  341

  it is the injunctions of Moses, the near annihilation of Jews in the twentieth century,

  and the importance of Jewish learning that preoccupy him. He tells Chick that half

  of the Jews have been killed and that the two of them belong to the other half. It is

  an injunction for Chick to assume responsibility for the fact that he is a Jew still

  living, one who must keep on talking into the increasing silence.

  Ravelstein is perhaps Bellow ’ s fi nest novella. It has been called a biographical essay,

  a eulogy, a memoir, a threnody, a roman à clef , the chronicle of a friendship, a valedic-

  tion, a Kaddish, a biography, and an autoethnography. It is also Bellow ’ s
career end

  game, his fi nal word on all the major anti - modernist themes, including death. It

  contains Bellow ’ s attempt to make amends for his own sins of omission as an American

  Jew and Jewish American writer. The book is heavily threaded through with accounts

  of Nazi atrocities and with Ravelstein ’ s repeated chastisements of Chick for becoming

  friendly with Grielescu, a Balkan Nazi sympathizer and Romanian fascist Iron

  -

  Guardist whom Ravelstein accuses of representing “ sadists who hung living Jews on

  meat hooks ” (16). In it, Bellow also reclaims himself as a Jew. Bellow ’ s “ outing ” of

  his homosexual friend in this book remains problematic for some readers. The con-

  troversy somewhat surprised Bellow, who said he thought all of Bloom ’ s friends knew

  about his sexual preferences. However, that Bellow loved Allan Bloom is never in

  doubt. Finally, after almost losing his own life, and after struggling for over six years

  to fulfi ll his promise to write Bloom ’ s life, Chick/Bellow completes the task. Ravelstein

  is a remarkably accomplished “ short view ” and a fi tting summation of all the old

  themes.

  The Collected Stories (2001) contains a “ Preface ” by Janis Bellow, its compiler, and

  an “ Introduction ” by James Wood, who calls Bellow the great “ portraitist of human

  form ” (xiii) and praises him for his “ greatly abundant, greatly precise, greatly various,

  rich, and strenuous ” prose (xiii). Bellow, he argues, does not write as a depth psycholo-

  gist, but as a metaphysician of “ embodied souls ” and in the manner of Proust, Dickens,

  and Tolstoy, who also conceive of their characters as essences (xv). It is these characters

  who embody Bellow ’ s struggle with the great secular - religious questions of the age.

  Conclusion

  Bellow ’ s short fi ction has received increasing critical attention in the last ten years.

  The sheer condensation and focus on the inner lives of his intellectual characters have

  made them diffi cult and challenging reading due to the high degree of complexity.

  Bellow ’ s works are introspective stories that often take place in the complex minds

  of intellectuals. Some of his short fi ction feels like brilliant fragments, while other

  works look like shards of a discarded novel. All of them are distinguished by a high