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