"A Silver Dish" by Saul Bellow

 

“A Silver Dish” comes from the 1984 collection Him with his foot in his mouth and other stories, but first appeared in The New Yorker in 1978. It is a character study of two men, Woody Selbst, sixty, a self-made man, and his father, Morris – or Pop – a man of truly outrageous behaviour. The story begins with a breathtaking first paragraph:

“What do you do about death – in this case the death of an old father? If you’re a modern person, sixty years of age, and a man who’s been around, like Woody Selbst, what do you do? Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background. How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odors, the moldiness or gassiness, of old men. I mean! As Woody put it, be realistic. Think what times these are. The papers daily give it to you – the Lufthansa pilot in Aden is described by the hostages on his knees, begging the Palestinian terrorists not to execute him, but they shoot him through the head. Later they themselves are killed. And still others shoot others, or shoot themselves. That’s what you read in the press, see on the tube, mention at dinner. We know now what goes daily through the whole of the human community, like a global death-peristalsis.

This is classic Saul Bellow. The shocking directness of the first sentence immediately draws the reader into the story. As it continues, it seems to ask uncomfortable questions: after all, no-one cares to admit to ambivalence about the death of a parent. Then, before the story has a chance to become too introverted, it sweeps out to an extraordinary degree by encompassing global terrorism and the violence of death. In the second paragraph it sweeps even further, with a remarkable description from Woody’s youth of a buffalo calf being dragged from a riverbank into the churning river while the parent buffaloes look around as though “asking each other dumbly what had happened.” It is clear what territory we are in here: this story is about bloodlines, about family, about connectedness.

Friedrich suggests that “the beauty of this short story lies in its fortunate balance between an amazing vitality and freshness of life, and a complex artistic representation.” She then points to her own research at the University of Chicago which suggests the genesis of “A Silver Dish” is a series of character sketches from real life with no semblance of plot or narrative technique. She explains how Bellow grafted and re-grafted characters into different plot ideas, discarding material and gradually distilling it until the characters and their actions felt drawn from real life. Thus, Friedrich concludes, it is “the inquiry into character, not ideas or general concepts of plot, that give the creative process the decisive first impulse.” Given that an enduring criticism of Bellow, particularly in his later novels, is that his characters  have, in Pinsker’s words, “too much of the non-fictional essay pressing on their chests”, and that “the balance between texture and talkiness was tilting, unhappily towards the latter,” this conscious re- and re-working by Bellow of the text of “A Silver Dish” can be seen as significant. And what is undeniable is that it is successful.

The story takes the form of a tryptich covering three time frames – the past, when the silver dish of the title is stolen by Pop, “last Tuesday”, when Pop dies in Woody’s arms and “now”, the Sunday morning when Woody is reviewing his past. It is a complicated structure but perfectly comprehensible. Partly, this is due to what Schultz identifies as:

shifts in narrative technique. While the central section dramatizes the theft of the dish by means of scenic narration, sections one and three alternate between showing and telling, with emphasis on reflection and summary.

The first section gives us an introduction to Woody and to the fact that Pop is dying. As Schultz points out:

“it establishes a narrative voice, a local and temporal setting, and a set of moral coordinates that guide the reader through the barrage of memory bits flooding the protagonist’s mind. Even when the reader may feel whirled around by a multitude of data and impressions, such a strategy prepares the “quiet zone” from which moral authority emerges.”

In this section Woody is reflecting, after Pop’s death, on how his life has turned out. We learn a great deal of Woody’s character – an individualist, someone who fights the system for no reason other than he feels he ought to. He is clearly mourning his father and turns to memories as a way of managing the grief.

The long centrepiece of the story relates one particular memory, the theft of the silver dish by his father which results in Woody being suspended from the seminary and which, therefore, transforms his life. The final section returns us to Pop’s deathbed and the harrowing scene where Woody gets into bed with his father to try to stop him from pulling out the intravenous needles. That the reader should care as much as Woody about this ogre of a man is testament to Bellow’s skill as a writer.

In Woody and Pop, Bellow has created two timeless characters. Pop is, in many ways, a ghastly man, a “metaphysical gargoyle”, as Taylor describes him, someone who walked out on his family when Woody was fourteen, saying airily: “It’s okay. I put you all on welfare.” In the next breath he asks his son to give him money to buy gasoline:

Understanding that Pop couldn’t get away without his help, Woody turned over to him all he had earned at the Sunset Ridge Country Club in Winnetka. Pop felt that the valuable life lesson he was transmitting was worth far more than these dollars, and whenever he was conning his boy a sort of high-priest expression came down over his bent nose, his ruddy face.

Years later, the now worldly-wise Woody smiles as he remembers Pop’s attitude of “that’ll teach you to trust your father.” He recalls that: “Pop was physical; Pop was digestive, circulatory, sexual.” Pop loves to be outrageous: for example, referring to Aunt Rebecca’s removed breast, he tells his son: “if titties were not fondled and kissed, they got cancer in protest.”  Pop is a self-made man who arrived in Chicago from Liverpool as a boy:

He became an American, and America never knew it. He voted without papers, he drove without a license, he paid no taxes, he cut every corner.”

Apparently without scruple, Pop forces his son to take him to the home of his sponsor at the seminary, Mrs Skoglund. There, he intends to ask for $50. While the religious Mrs Skoglund goes to another room to pray for guidance as to whether or not to lend the money, Pop steals a silver dish from a locked cabinet which he unpicks with a penknife. Woody reacts in horror and the two have a wrestling match in which Pop punches Woody in the face three or four times and knees him in the mouth. Later, he promises to put the dish back but “of course,” he keeps it and pawns it. When the theft is discovered, Woody is suspended from the seminary and Aunt Rebecca turns him out of his home. Even now, Pop acts badly. “So what, kid?” he says. He even justifies stealing the dish:

“I didn’t hurt myself, and at the same time did you a favor.”

“It was for me?”

“It was too strange of a life. That life wasn’t you, Woody. All those women…”

Why did Pop do it? After all, he was not a foolish man and must have known he had little chance of success. Partly, it was simply a challenge:

Morris knew that Mother and Aunt Rebecca had told Mrs Skoglund how wicked he was. They had painted him for her in poster colours – purple for vice, black for his soul, red for Hell flames: a gambler, smoker, drinker, deserter, screwer of women, and atheist. So Pop was determined to reach her. It was risky for everybody.

Reprehensible that may be, but it is only part of the story. “That theft was part of Pop’s war with Mother… Mother represented the forces of religion and hypochondria.” Pop hates the way his ex-wife – a convert to Christianity – and her brother-in-law, Doctor Kovner, preach fundamentalism. “Unless I take a hand,” he tells his son, “you won’t even understand what life is. Because they don’t know – those silly Christers.” Pop himself isn’t religious, not even especially moral, and yet, as Glaysher notes:

Contrary to what might be expected, [Woody] and his coarse, scheming father remain more loyal to the old values than the pious Christians who merely want the boy Woody as a convert so that he might proselytize among the Jews.

Pop genuinely believes he is helping his son. He sees himself, in Schulz’s words, as a “reality instructor.” Through the theft, Pop believes he has won the war with Mother:

Pop had carried him back to his side of the line, blood of his blood, the same thick body walls, the same coarse grain. Not cut out for a spiritual life. Simply not up to it.

Pop was no worse than Woody, and Woody was no better than Pop.”

Unsurprisingly, his upbringing has an impact on Woody’s character. Early in the story, we are shown that he is unconventional. He smuggles hashish out of Kampala because “he liked taking chances. Risk was a wonderful stimulus.” Woody is a highly complex character, an amalgam of the incorrigibility of his father and the piety that his mother represents, if not attains. He is “leading a double life, sacred and profane.” He is far from perfect: as a child he steals food from the mission house for no reason other than he likes to be reckless. When, speaking in church, he finds that his heart is not in what he is preaching, he turns to techniques his father would have appreciated:

sincere behavior got him through. He had to rely for delivery on his face, his voice – on behavior.

And yet, despite this, Woody is a decent man. Where Pop abandoned his family, Woody goes to elaborate lengths to help his:

Since his wife, after fifteen years of separation, had not learned to take care of herself, Woody did her shopping on Fridays, filled her freezer. He had to take her this week to buy shoes. Also, Friday night he always spent with Helen – Helen was his wife de facto. Saturday he did his big weekly shopping. Saturday night he devoted to Mom and his sisters.

Hyland describes “A Silver Dish” as “the story of a man whose life is blighted by his need to be loved by a father who is incapable of giving love.” This is poor interpretation and slack reading of the text, which specifically says:

Did he [Pop] love anyone (he was so busy?) Yes, he loved Halina. He loved his son.

Second-billing, perhaps, but Woody knew his father loved him, in his own way. Hyland goes on to describe Pop as “cynically selfish,” which again is too literal to capture the depth of the man. Certainly, Pop was cynical but, even so, traces of decency can be found:

If Woody had a weakness, it was to be unselfish. This worked to Pop’s advantage, but he criticized Woody for it, nevertheless.

Hyland then suggests of Woody that “for his own emotional and spiritual equilibrium he needs to redeem a man who cannot be redeemed.” Yet again, this is too narrow a view of Pop. Indeed, it could be argued that the whole story is an elaborate redemption of this complex, infuriating man. There is an infectiousness about his elaborate refusal to be ordinary which makes him quite appealing. The reader can only admire Woody for the way he has assimilated his father’s devilry and spirit. Ozick gets the tone right when she describes “A Silver Dish” as the “companionable trials of Woody Selbst and his rogue father.” Schulz goes even further:

Almost from the outset, parallels and affinities with Pop [and Woody] abound to the point where one can argue that “A Silver Dish,” far from dramatizing a conflict between father and son, actually presents a story of male bonding.”

As with much of Bellow’s work, “A Silver Dish” draws its strength from the way Bellow uses character to make a point about society in general. By focusing on the individual, he can bring the general more clearly into focus. So it is with “A Silver Dish”. Schulz describes Woody as combining “elements of American modernity with a larger, more spiritual realm.” Clayton explains that “the story moves towards an integration of the two conflicting worlds of the physical and metaphysical,” This is made possible by the creation of two vibrant, living, colourful personalities, by establishing what Schulz describes as “the opposition of idealist son and realist father,” and by leaving them to find their own ways to their respective states of grace.

That moment is surely reached in the beautiful conclusion to the story, when – in a counterpoint to the earlier wrestling scene – Woody has climbed into bed beside his father and holds him as he dies:

After a time, Pop’s resistance ended. He subsided and subsided. He rested against his son, his small body curled there…Pop, whom Woody thought he had stilled, only had found a better way to get around him. Loss of heat was the way he did it. His heat was leaving him. As can happen with small animals while you hold them in your hand, Woody presently felt him cooling. Then, as Woody did his best to restrain him, and thought he was succeeding, Pop divided himself. And when he was separated from his warmth, he slipped into death. And there was his elderly, large, muscular son, still holding and pressing him when there was nothing anymore to press. You could never pin down that self-willed man. When he was ready to make his move, he made it – always on his own terms. And always, always, something up his sleeve. That was how he was.

This ending, elegaic, spiritual, above all human, could, one imagines, even have brought a tear to the eye of that old rogue, Pop.  Well, almost, and that is the genius of “A Silver Dish”.

The use of description to establish character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Here is a fine piece of descriptive writing from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.

I realised I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland: the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cacturs liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head.

As an example of how to integrate descriptive writing into narrative, this cannot be beaten. The narrator is Chief Bromden, an inmate in an asylum who is doubly cloistered by the perception in his head that the world is under the control of ‘The Combine’, which controls thoughts and actions in secrecy. Not long before this passage, there is a harrowing scene in which the Chief describes the impenetrable fog which he thinks The Combine brings down on the world in order to go about its business. This, then, is a man wholly confined. And yet, of course, he is a countryman, used to freedom and open spaces. It is a tragic situation he has found himself in.

And so, in this passage, we get the first inkling of the Chief looking outward once more. He notices for the first time the rural location of the hospital and gives a vivid description of it. This seamlessly leads him into a reminiscence of a happy experience from his childhood. The shift is beautifully handled – a moment of relaxation in the present, releasing repressed memories of the past. In this way, description of landscape is being used specifically to build character and character development. It is beautifully handled.

The passage continues, and it is worth quoting at length because it is superbly done:

Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window – cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off – the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young boy drunk – that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales.

He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one.

I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon – a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the centre of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more.

I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound. The dog could still hear them a long time after me. He was still standing with his paw up; he hadn’t moved or barked when they flew over. When he couldn’t hear them any more either, he commenced to lope off in the direction they had gone, towards the highway, loping steady and solemn like he had an appointment. I held my breath and I could hear the flap of his big paws on the grass as he loped: then I could hear a car speed up out of a turn. The headlights loomed over the rise and peered ahead down the highway. I watched the dog and the car making for the same spot of pavement.

The dog was almost to the rail fence at the edge of the grounds when I felt somebody slip up behind me. Two people. I didn’t turn, but I knew it was the black boy named Geever and the nurse with the birthmark and the crucifix. I heard a whir of fear start up in my head. The black boy took my arm and pulled me round. ‘I’ll get ‘im,’ he says.

‘It’s chilly at the window there, Mr Bromden,’ the nurse tells me. ‘Don’t you think we’d better climb back into our nice toasty bed?’

‘He cain’t hear,’ the black boy tells her. ‘I’ll take him. He’s always untying his sheet and roaming ‘round.’

There is an astonishing poignancy to this. We have this man, physically trapped in an asylum and mentally enclosed by his own irrational fears, and it is counterpointed by, firstly, the flighty dog, then the skein of geese and finally by a car – all of them free, going about their own business unhindered. Meanwhile, the Chief describes all of this in exquisite detail – ‘blue shine of the lawn’, the ‘black, weaving necklace’ of geese, the steady and solemn lope of the dog. Be clear, whatever the Chief’s current situation, here is a man at ease with nature.

And then the reality, perhaps portended by the arrival of that car – humanity, modern progress – and the Chief becomes aware of a presence behind him. The ‘whir of fear’ starts up in his head. His reverie is over, his moment of freedom finished. The black boy and the nurse deal with him gently enough, but consider the nurse’s words, her patronising use of the first person plural, the childish description of a ‘toasty bed’. This to a man who could conjure such magical descriptions, who demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to nature, but the nurse blithely assumes that there is nothing happening in his brain, that he is some sort of zombie wandering the ward aimlessly and staring vacantly into space. And the scene concludes chillingly, with that reminder of the Chief’s situation, the sheet that has to be tied around him nightly to confine him to his bed. It is clear that the Chief may have found a solitary, fleeting moment of escape, but it was a chimera. He is unable to comprehend our world. But we, to our shame, are equally unable to comprehend his. A more poignant description of mental illness it would be hard to find.