Does it all add up? Not really. For this collection [It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future], as Bellow himself implies, is just too scattered and heterogeneous. Its thirty-one essays (all previously published in periodicals such as Life, Holiday, and Esquire or given as lectures) span his entire career. The earliest, “Spanish Letter,” dates from 1948, four years after his first novel, Dangling Man. The last ones, “Writers, Intellectuals, and Politics” and an homage to William Arrowsmith, appeared in 1993. Closely linked with Bellow's fiction, they reveal the richness and the variety, and occasionally the contradictions and the discursiveness, of the outstanding novelist of his brilliant generation.

The introduction, “Mozart: An Overture,” presents motifs that will constantly resurface. Bellow feels a deep empathy with the composer, for “with beings such as Mozart, we are forced to speculate about transcendence.” And “transcendence,” especially the “transcendence of art,” will be a preoccupation throughout the essays, which are organized in six sections: 1) “Riding Off in All Directions,” which includes “In the Days of Roosevelt” (1983), a recollection of the New Deal; 2) “Writers, Intellectuals, and Politics,” with a revealing “Interview with Myself” (1976) and Bellow's Nobel Prize lecture from 1976; 3) “The Distracted Public,” with the Jefferson lectures (1977) and “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About” (1992); 4) “Thoughts in Transition,” with “Israel, the Six-Day War” (1967) and “New York, World Famous Impossibility” (1970); 5) “A Few Farewells,” to friends who have died, including Berryman, Cheever, Rosenfeld, and Allan Bloom; 6) “Impressions and Notices,” with “Half a Life” (1990) and “A Second Half Life” (1991).

We can understand that Bellow, nearing eighty, his literary productivity slowing down, could feel “bitter dissatisfaction” in rereading some of these pieces (issued, perhaps, on the urging of his publishers?). Nevertheless, both he and his public have reason to be more than satisfied with many of them, especially those containing lively autobiographical allusions. His memories of Chicago, “my city,” are particularly appealing. In a sense, Chicago is the hero of Augie March, the novel in which Bellow most fully achieved his ideal of “the marriage of the colloquial and the elegant.” Later, however, in “Chicago, the City That Was” (1983), he laments that it is no longer the “recklessly spontaneous” city of his salad days. He hopes it may survive, and he cannot imagine “what America would be without great cities.” For despite occasional praise of the rural charms of Vermont and Tuscany, he is essentially “a city kid,” a Jewish city kid. Although certainly not simply “a Jewish novelist,” he remains deeply aware of his ethnic heritage.

Bellow has reservations about New York, as we read in “A World Famous Impossibility” (1970). He had arrived in Manhattan at the end of the 1930s and was soon frequenting “the Partisan Review crowd,” of whose views he was often sharply critical. They had made their reputations “on the ground between literature and politics, with diminishing attention to literature.” He criticized this position even more vehemently during his “Paris years” (1948-50) when he became acquainted with “the dandruff of Existentialism,” a doctrine he charged was engendered by “the decomposition of the bourgeois carcass.” His contacts in Greenwich Village, on the Rive Gauche, and in the university gave him a disdain for “putty-headed academics and intellectuals.” He accused the universities of “disabling, confusing, and alienating students” and regrets that so many contemporary writers have become professors and have withdrawn from the real world.

Bellow is pessimistic about modern society: “The decline and fall of everything is our daily dread.” The media are partly to blame, since “they distract the public with a plethora of information.” The essential role of the artist is to combat such “distraction,” to awaken a concern, “the heart of my seemingly endless sermonizing” with “the human essences forgotten in a distracted world.” He pleads romantically for “the transcendence of art” as “an attempt to find in the universe what is fundamental and enduring” and to lead us “to sacred states of the soul.” “The soul? What's that?” ironically quip “the putty-headed.”