tutorial, study guide, web links, and further reading

A Silver Dish (1984) is one of five pieces in the collection Him with his Foot in his Mouth. The story was first published in The New Yorker for 25 September, 1978. The four other stories in the collection are Cousins, What Kind of Day Did You Have?, Him with his Foot in his Mouth, and Zetland: By A Character Witness.

A Silver Dish – commentary

This story is essentially one of ethnic and religious allegiance. Woody Selbst, like many of Saul Bellows’ other protagonists, is the son of Jewish immigrants to America. His father Morris is a non-believing Jew, and his mother is a Christian convert who has brought up her son Woodrow in an environment of evangelical proselytising.

Woody appears to be religiously neutral—he respects his mother and is very sceptical about his father, who is a gambler, a womaniser, and a completely improvident parent. His father even cheats Woody out of his hard-earned part time savings in order to desert the family, and believes he is offering Woody a useful lesson in life—to trust nobody.

Pushing this dubious behaviour even further, his father pressures Woody into asking for financial support from his philanthropic sponsor the pious Mrs Skoglund. Despite his father’s tales of needing to repay for someone else’s misdeeds, Woody knows full well that his father is probably going to use the money to settle his own gambling debts—yet he assists him in this fraudulent enterprise.

The story reaches its emotional climax when his father steals a silver dish from Mrs Skoglund while they are in her house asking for financial assistance. Woody is shocked by his father’s outrageous anti-social behaviour, and the two of them become locked in an Oedipal fight on the floor.

His father claims to have replaced the silver dish before they leave the house, but Woody is quite right – his father lies to him, steals the silver dish and pawns it. As a result of this theft Woody is expelled from the seminary where he is a student as Mrs Skoglund’s protégé.

Nevertheless, when his father is later dying, Woody visits the hospital and climbs into the bed where his father is in his death throes—to hold him and prevent him pulling out the needles that are helping to keep him alive. It is his father to whom he gives his final allegiance – not his mother and the Christian fundamentalism she represents.

Father and son

Throughout the story Woody appears to be in conflict with his father. The improvident Morris deserts his family when Woody is young, and he sets up an irregular relationship with Halina, a Polish woman. He virtually steals from his own son, lies to him, and drags him into the hugely embarrassing episode of the stolen dish. At each stage he rationalises his bad behaviour as valuable (negative) lessons in life for his son.

And yet Woody’s life turns out to be a close parallel to that of his father. Following the theft of the bowl, Woody lies to the people at the mission: ‘He denied that he or Pop had touched Mrs Skoglund’s property. The missing object – he didn’t even know what it was – had probably been misplaced, and they would be very sorry on the day it turned up’. And as an adult in the narrative present of the story, Woody also has an ex-wife and a mistress, just like his father. He is also a risk-taker – smuggling hashish back through customs after his African holiday.

Religion

In religious terms the story is one of Woody’s choice between Christianity and Judaism. Christianity is the institutional religion of the country in which he lives – America. Judaism is the religion of his family’s cultural heritage as recent immigrants. This split is also echoed in his own family. His mother is a Christian convert, whilst his father is a non-believing Jew.

Woody has even been educated and converted to Christianity as a child – and bears witness in the services he attends. But it is significant that he is paid, bribed to do so. ‘He was often sent by Aunt Rebecca to get up and tell a churchful of Scandinavians that he, a Jewish lad, accepted Jesus Christ. For this she paid him fifty cents.’ Even more significant is that the goal of the mission is to convert Jews – as it has done in his own case.

In the narrative present of the story Woody is drinking coffee on a Sunday morning in his apartment above his office, surrounded by the clamour of church bells: ‘the Ukrainian, Roman Catholic, Greek, Russian, African Methodist churches’. These are all branches of Christian belief, and it is against this summons to church attendance and Christian belief that he makes his final decision:

It wouldn’t conclude as Mrs Skoglund, bribing him to round up Jews and hasten the Second Coming, imagined it, but in another way. This was his clumsy intuition.

Moreover, his choice is made explicitly between the two religious options represented by his parents. Despite his mother’s virtues, and despite his father’s shortcomings, it is his father’s influence to which Woody gives his allegiance:

He was like a horseman from Central Asia, a bandit from China. It was Mother, from Liverpool, who had the refinement, the English manners. It was the preaching Reverend Doctor in his black suit. You have refinements, and all they do is oppress you? The hell with that.

A Silver Dish – resources

A Silver Dish – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Silver Dish – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Saul Bellow bibliography

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

A Silver Dish – plot synopsis

Woodrow (Woody) Selbst is a sixty year old Chicago building tile contractor with an ex-wife and a mistress. He has recently buried his father Morris. As a boy Woody was educated partly as a Christian, and his mother is an evangelical proselyte.

Surrounded by the sound of church bells on a Sunday morning, Woody confronts his grief in recollections of his youth during the Depression. His father deserted the family, and even cheated Woody out of his part-time savings to fund the escape.

Woody recalls a winter snowstorm when his father insists on visiting the devout Mrs Skoglund, Woody’s patroness, to scrounge some money from her. Woody is reluctant and sceptical when Morris gives Mrs Skoglund a hard luck story about his business, claiming that he is trustworthy. Mrs Skoglund leaves them whilst she seeks guidance in prayer.

Whilst she is absent Morris steals a silver dish from her display cabinet. Woody is mortified with embarrassment and tries to retrieve the dish. The two of them scuffle and fall to the floor. Mrs Skoglund returns and gives them a cheque. Morris tells Woody he has replaced the dish.

A few days later it is revealed that he was lying, and Woody is expelled from the seminary in disgrace. His father has pawned the dish, and many years later confesses that he spent the money betting on horses. He also claims that he did his son a favour in separating him from Christian zealots.

As an adult Woody looks after his mother and his invalid sisters. His final recollection is his father’s death in hospital, when he climbs into Morris’s bed and holds him whilst he is dying.

A Silver Dish – characters

© Roy Johnson 2017

More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
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tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

A Theft (1987) is one of three stories in the collection Something to Remember Me By. It was originally intended for magazine publication, but was rejected as being too long. Saul Bellow took the unusual step of publishing it as a single volume – directly as a paperback book. The two other stories in the collection are Something to Remember Me By and The Bellarosa Connection.

A Theft – commentary

The main theme

The story (or novella) is largely a character study of Clara Velde – her deep emotional conflicts, erratic behaviour, and her problematic relationships with the people close to her. But the most important feature, which unites all these elements, is the complexity of her feelings for ex-lover Ithiel (Teddy) Regler.

Teddy is an intelligent and impressive figure in his own right, but so far as Clara is concerned he is all men; he is the man; but he has remained beyond her reach, unobtainable. This might explain why she has had so many failed marriages. But she has one tangible link that expresses the bond she feels between them. He has given her an expensive emerald ring that she treasures and provides the story with its central symbol.

When she first loses the ring she feels that her world has come apart. She has three children, a successful career, and a loyal but ineffectual husband, Wilder. But after twenty years she still regards Teddy as her soul mate. The ring is a powerful emblem of what he means to her and the love they once shared (which curiously enough, is not really dramatised, even in her retrospective musings).

The ring is recovered, but then disappears again when it is stolen by the boyfriend of her au pair, a petty crook from Haiti. Clara more-or-less fires the au pair Gina, but then immediately feels guilty about how rashly she has acted. Once again she feels that a cornerstone of her identity has been removed, and she flies to Washington where Teddy gives her the support that she needs.

Gina the au pair recovers the ring from her boyfriend and returns it via Clara’s daughter Lucy, who completes the transaction without question or fuss. Clara is not only relieved, but feels she has learned a valuable lesson about herself from the much younger woman.

‘I do seem to have an idea of who it is that’s in the middle of me. There may not be more than one in a million, more’s the pity, that do have. And my own child possibly one of those.

It is a moment of catharsis that draws the very loose ends of the story together. But for all the moral and existential anxiety that arises from these twin episodes, it is worth noting that the only theft which remains outstanding at the conclusion to the story is Clara’s. When the ring first goes missing, she claims on her insurance policy – sixteen thousand dollars – but does not return the money when the ring turns up again in her bedroom. This particular theft is left unexamined.

Weaknesses

The early part of the story concerns Clara’s incontinent confessions about her private life and loves to her assistant Laura Wong. These confidences are largely about her continued enthusiasm for former lover Teddy Regler. But Ms Wong hardly features at all in the latter part of the story – so she is introduced for no meaningful purpose.

The same is true of the early scenes describing Clara’s meetings with Giangiacomo and Spontini in Italy. The fictional character Giangiacomo is a thinly disguised portrait of the Italian radical Giangiacomo Feltrinelli – best known as the publisher of Boris Pasternack’s Doctor Zhivago. The character is introduced, but then blows himself up whilst trying to dynamite power lines. [This was one interpretation of Feltrinelli’s controversial death in 1972.] There seems very little connection between this slightly larger-than-life character and the main theme of the story.

In the case of Spontini, his significance is reduced to a single incident. When he is driving Clara in his car she threatens to ward off his wandering hands with the red hot element of a dashboard cigarette lighter. She goes on later to make him the third of her four husbands – but he too never emerges again in the story with any significance, and it is difficult to understand why he is named and included.

Saul Bellow is rightly celebrated as a writer who can bring fictional characters alive by carefully observed physical details, idiosyncratic speech patterns, and a Dickensian sense of comic exaggeration. These approaches to fictional entertainment work well in the expansive scope of novels—which Henry James called ‘large loose baggy monsters’. But these vivid but inconsequential characters can unbalance the more restrained and delicate requirements of the short story and the novella.

Bellow gives the impression in A Theft of writing that is lower his usual standard. For instance, there is a glaring technical flaw part way through the narrative. The story is told almost exclusively from Clara’s point of view. Even passages that switch briefly into third person omniscient narrative mode have Clara as a point of focus. But following an argument between Clara and Teddy, the narrative suddenly switches from her point of view to his when he leaves her and checks into a hotel:

He went to the bed and sat on the edge but did not lie down. It was not in the cards for him to sleep that night. The phone rang—it was a mean sound, a thin rattle—and Etta said: “Clara has swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She called me and I sent the ambulance.”

The only justification for this sudden change of perspective is that it allows the shock of her attempted suicide to be seen from his point of view. After this the story switches back again to Clara to give a brief history of her first three marriages.

A Theft – resources

A Theft – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

A Theft – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

A Saul Bellow bibliography

Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

A Theft – plot summary

Clara Velde is a successful fashion advisor with three children living on Park Avenue in New York City. She has been married four times, but is mostly enthusiastic about her former lover Ithiel (Teddy) Regler. She hires a young Viennese girl Gina Wegman as an au pair, and she confides personal concerns to Laura Wong, her design assistant.

She recalls meeting revolutionary Giangiacomo in Italy, and is pursued by Spontini (who later becomes one of her husbands). When Teddy takes a secretary to South America on a business trip, she moves Frenchman Jean-Claude into his apartment. Clara and Teddy are reconciled, but when he does the same again on another foreign trip, Clara tries to commit suicide. She survives, and goes on to a career of serial matrimony.

She marries four times, and Teddy marries three. She loses the expensive ring he once bought her, claims on the insurance, then finds it but does not repay the insurance money.

When Teddy’s third wife leaves him, Clara goes to Washington to offer comfort. On returning to New York she finds the au pair Gina has had a party with her Haitian lover and lots of friends. Clara is suspicious, and when she discovers that her emerald ring is missing she assumes the boyfriend has stolen it. She orders Gina to return it next day – or leave. She feels devastated again by the loss, but then guilty about her peremptory dismissal of Gina.

Clara visits her psychiatrist, then meets Teddy, who recommends a private investigator. Some time later the ring suddenly reappears on her bedside table. Clara thinks Gina has replaced it, and wishes to thank and reward her. She meets Gina who explains that she returned the ring by giving it to Lucy, her daughter.

A Theft – principal characters

© Roy Johnson 2017

More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
More on short stories
Twentieth century literature