One of the pleasures of writing these Letters from the Archive is uncovering hidden gems—great stories that, for whatever reason, have drifted out of the spotlight. Saul Bellow’s “A Silver Dish” isn’t one of those stories. It’s a classic. That said, it’s so good that, today, I was thrilled to read it again, for what must be the fifth time. (The New Yorker published it in 1978; Bellow later collected it in a book called “Him with His Foot in His Mouth.”)
“A Silver Dish” is like a mini-novel. It starts in the present, when its protagonist, Woody Selbst, is a successful businessman. But then it flashes back to the Great Depression, when Woody was a young seminary student. In the contrast, you see fifty years of implied history. Back in the thirties, a misadventure with his “vital and picturesque” father, Morris, ended Woody’s time at the seminary and set him on a different path. In the present, Morris is dying, and Woody, in mourning, is thinking about how their lives are woven together. I don’t want to give away anything about the episode at the heart of the story—the episode that forces Woody to leave the seminary—but you can get a sense of their shared character from this paragraph, early in the story:
Woody, a businessman in South Chicago, was not an ignorant person.… [He] had read up on many subjects, subscribed to Science and other magazines that gave real information, and had taken night courses at De Paul and Northwestern in ecology, criminology, existentialism. Also he had travelled extensively in Japan, Mexico, and Africa, and there was an African experience that was especially relevant to mourning. It was this: On a launch near the Murchison Falls in Uganda, he had seen a buffalo calf seized by a crocodile from the bank of the White Nile. There were giraffes along the tropical river, and hippopotamuses, and baboons, and flamingos and other brilliant birds crossing the bright air in the heat of the morning, when the calf, stepping into the river to drink, was grabbed by the hoof and dragged down. The parent buffaloes couldn’t figure it out. Under the water the calf still threshed, fought, churned the mud. Woody, the robust traveller, took this in as he sailed by, and to him it looked as if the parent cattle were asking each other dumbly what had happened. He chose to assume that there was pain in this, he read brute grief into it. On the White Nile, Woody had the impression that he had gone back to the pre-Adamite past, and he brought reflections on this impression home to South Chicago. He brought also a bundle of hashish from Kampala. In this he took a chance with the customs inspectors, banking perhaps on his broad build, frank face, high color. He didn’t look like a wrongdoer, a bad guy; he looked like a good guy. But he liked taking chances. Risk was a wonderful stimulus. He threw down his trenchcoat on the customs counter. If the inspectors searched the pockets, he was prepared to say that the coat wasn’t his. But he got away with it, and the Thanksgiving turkey was stuffed with hashish. This was much enjoyed. That was practically the last feast at which Pop, who also relished risk or defiance, was present. The hashish Woody had tried to raise in his back yard from the Africa seeds didn’t take. But behind his warehouse, where the Lincoln Continental was parked, he kept a patch of marijuana. There was no harm at all in Woody but he didn’t like being entirely within the law. It was simply a question of self-respect.
Who but Saul Bellow could combine, in a single, globe- and decade-spanning paragraph, criminology, crocodiles, marijuana, a Thanksgiving turkey, and a Lincoln Continental? And all while exploring the big subjects: death, families, fate. “A Silver Dish” is available to everyone in our online archive.
Photograph by Alberto Roveri/Mondadori Portfolio/Getty.
