Knocking Away the Pigeons

By R.Z. Sheppard

Saul Bellow's It All Adds Up (Viking; 327 pages; $24.95) adds up to a stimulating kvetch, a nonfiction Herzog. Like that novel's title character, Bellow shows himself in this collection of essays and criticism to be a great complainer and world worrier. He is, as the Herzog jacket copy described the book's hero 30 years ago, someone who "cannot keep from asking what he calls the 'piercing questions.' "

Now nearing his 80th birthday, Bellow remains America's most distinguished living writer, thickly bronzed by literary honors that include a Nobel Prize. But public monuments attract pigeons, in Bellow's case the flock of critics and political correctionists who dismiss his traditional humanism, learning and individuality as elitist or worse. Liberals and leftists have long attacked him as an insensitive conservative. Feminist discontent about the women in his fiction has been duly registered. More recently, Brent Staples, an editorial writer for the New York Times, objected in a memoir to the portrayal of a black man in Mr. Sammler's Planet, and in March, critic Alfred Kazin wrote in the New Yorker that "my heart sank when I heard that Bellow once asked, 'Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?' "

Bellow responded that a journalist had misunderstood that particular "piercing question" and noted that neither the Bulgarians nor the Americans have a Proust. Then he made the ornery outburst: "My critics, many of whom could not locate Papua New Guinea on the map, want to convict me of contempt for multiculturalism and defamation of the Third World. I am an elderly white male -- a Jew to boot. Ideal for their purposes."

These are touchy times. Bellow prefers the frank give-and-take of old Chicago, where he grew up multicultural long before the word was coined. As he writes in a 1990 piece, "The absence of an idea of defamation was very liberating."

Bellow recalls the good old days with the pugnacious pride of a self-made man. The tone can get overbearing, and there are blind spots, but one would have to be afflicted with multiple sensory deficits to miss his point. Urban America is in physical decline. Cities as seats of education and social stability have decayed. Relations among ethnic and racial groups may have been raw in the poor immigrant neighborhoods of Bellow's youth, but fractious communities still shared a common identity as Americans. No longer. "The slums, as a friend of mine once observed, were ruined," he writes with bitter humor.

What happened? The pieces selected for this collection -- on Mozart, F.D.R., J.F.K., the media blizzard that can confuse rather than inform, the political and intellectual ideologues who reduce philosophy and art to pseudoscientific theory -- were written over the past three decades and are too separated by time and subject to provide a coherent analysis. For that the reader should turn to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, Bellow's late friend and colleague at the University of Chicago. Yet even if It All Adds Up is more an agglomeration of rants than a systematic critique, it is inspiring to watch someone as august and honored as Bellow join the fray with such bareknuckle prose and such a passion for independence.