"A Silver Dish"

Saul Bellow’s story “A Silver Dish” contains so much fascinating wordplay, metaphor, and other stylistic devices that it is very difficult to pick only a few passages or methods. Some of the techniques I noticed the most were Bellow’s use of lists, and juxtaposition. He often uses the concise parataxis and asyndeton to reinforce Woody’s simple, strong, straightforward, and laconic demeanor, and in the same way that “such a straightforward-looking boy was perfect for a con”, such unqualified and direct language can of course also “con” the reader, or at least be more complex than its own structure. Robert Lanham’s example of “I came; I saw; I conquered” is often mirrored throughout the story, in phrases such as “Nothing severe.” “It was bad to cover up anything. He hated faking. Stone was honest. Metal was honest.” “He lived alone; as did his wife; as did his mistress: everybody in a separate establishment.” In the last sentence, the mistress and wife are introduced in the same breath and ranked on the same level. Everyone lived in separate places equally separate clauses.

In these next three passages, Woody’s “American materialism” affects the way the past is written about. Everything good is large and Christian, from Mrs. Skoglund herself, “grandly built”, to everything about her house with its “fifteen foot ceilings and high windows”. The opulent room they are led into is not just any room, but the front room, one of many, that even in the Depression requires and receives additional heating:

“They stood beat, itching, trickling in the front hall that was a hall, with a carved rural post staircase and a big stained-glass window at the top. Picturing Jesus with the Samaritan woman. There was a kind of Gentile closeness to the air. Perhaps when he was with Pop, Woody made more Jewish observations than he would otherwise. Although Pop’s most Jewish characteristic was that Yiddish was the only language he could read a paper in. Pop was with Polish Halina, and Mother was with Jesus Christ, and Woody ate uncooked bacon from the flitch. Still now and then he had a Jewish impression.”

“Mrs. Skoglund was the cleanest of women—her fingernails, her white neck, her ears—and Pop’s sexual hints to Woody all went wrong because she was so intensely clean, and made Woody think of a waterfall, large as she was, and grandly built. Her bust was big.”

“Mrs. Skoglund, Aase (Osie), led the visitors into the front room. This, the biggest room in the house, needed supplementary heating. Because of fifteen-foot ceilings and high windows, Hjordis had kept the parlor stove burning. …The stove was plugged into the flue of the marble fireplace, and there were parquet floors and Axminster carpets and cranberry-colored tufted Victorian upholstery, and a kind of Chinese étagère, inside a cabinet, lined with mirrors and containing silver pitchers, trophies won by Skoglund cows, fancy sugar tongs and cut-glass pitchers and goblets. There were Bibles and pictures of Jesus and the Holy Land and that faint Gentile odor, as if things had been rinsed in a weak vinegar solution.”

However, in his father’s care, they are not led into rooms; they have to fight their way not through a “front hall that was a hall,” but into a “cement corridor with low doors”. There is a feeling of suffocation when Woody remembers being “shut up” in the prison of a room with the “terrible little man”. Woody tries to be Gentile, but admits guiltily that “Still now and then he had a Jewish impression”. Yet, later in his life, the cement of the small Y becomes honest, and his Christian fervor and enthusiasm becomes associated with hypocrisy.

“And Pop, consistently a terrible little man…”

“They fought their way to the small Y building, shut up in wire grille and resembling a police station—about the same dimensions. It was locked, but they made a racket on the grille, and a small black man let them in and shuffled them upstairs to a cement corridor with low doors. It was like the small mammal house in Lincoln Park. He said there was nothing to eat, so they took off their wet pants, wrapped themselves tightly in the khaki army blankets, and passed out on their cots.”

In these cramped quarters, there is not room for the elaborate lists and descriptions, such as “silver pitchers, trophies won by Skoglund cows, fancy sugar tongs and cut-glass pitchers and goblets” as there was in Mrs. Skoglund’s home. There is barely enough room for a quick comparison to the mammal house. These sentences are shorter and made up of clauses of the necessary action, “It was locked, but they made a racket… He said there was nothing to eat, so they took off their wet pants, wrapped themselves tightly…and passed out”.

Lists occur frequently in this story. The first paragraph uses one to illustrate the lingering, drawn out, sickly old man it describes. Immediately following is the contrast of a heated, terse exclamation, representative of the still vital son.

“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!”

In the following passage, the list meanderingly follows the route of the trolley, mirroring its length. It goes past all the inauspicious locations, proving why it was nothing to brag about.

“And Western Avenue was the longest car line in the world, the boosters said, as if it was a thing to brag about. Twenty-three miles long, made by a draftsman with a T-square, lined with factories, storage buildings, machine shops, used-car lots, trolley barns, gas stations, funeral parlors, six-flats, utility buildings, and junk yards, on and on from the prairies on the south to Evanston on the north.”

Lacking the direction that a repetition of “The Western Avenue Line was…” would give it, this sentence chugs along and doesn’t quite know when to stop. It gets to a connective and junk yards and could stop anytime but has further to go, so it keeps going “on and on” till it recognizes its last stop as Evanston all the way north. Bellow’s sentences are given life through many different techniques, and in the ones I discussed, they wander through a rich house looking over its contents, stumble like a coughing old man, and drive forward through Chicago.