Book Review

Saul Bellow. It All Adds Up from the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future: A Nonfiction Collection. New York: Viking, 1994. Pp. 327. $23.95 (cloth).

Leon Forrest. Relocations of the Spirit: Essays by Leon Forrest. Wakefield, R.I.: Asphodel Press, 1994. Pp. 397. $24.95 (cloth).

Bernice E. Gallagher. Illinois Women Novelists in the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography. Urbana and Chicago:

E. Duane and Rachel Kamm Elbert. History from the Heart: Quilt Paths Across Illinois. Nashville, Tenn.: Rutledge Hill Press, 1993. Pp. 242 with 150 color and 60 black-and-white illustrations, notes, glossary, bibliography and index. $34.95 (cloth).

Versions of Illinois' past—fresh and fascinating—beckon from the volumes reviewed here as enticingly as visions of sugar plums dancing in the children's dreams in "Twas the Night Before Christmas." If you awaken to find your stocking stuffed with these books, prepare for a delicious voyage of discovery, via the eclectic ruminations of two celebrated Chicago novelists and the collective contributions of recently reclaimed Illinois women artists.

As one of the nation's premier men of letters, Saul Bellow has had many occasions over the past 40 years to reflect on matters timely and timeless in lectures, interviews, articles and essays. Surprisingly, given his 1976 Nobel Prize, this nonfiction has never been collected for publication until now. Not surprisingly, the result is worth the wait.

Courtesy of the Early American Museum, Mahomet Quilt Paths Across Illinois made by the Illini County Stitchers of Champaign County in 1990 recalls in its design the paths Illinois' families took to participate in the Illinois Quilt Research Project. The quilt, named to commemorate the project, was used as a fundraiser.

Ten of the 30 pieces that comprise It All Adds Up recall Bellow's long residence in Chicago and recapture some of its famous, infamous and forgotten figures. He remembers hearing Mayor Richard J. Daley's game reply to a reporter's needling question about whether he'd read the novelist's recently published Herzog ("I've looked into it," Daley retorted). He recalls meeting the retired con artist Yellow Kid Weil, who attributed his success in crime to his skill at entering the lives of his dupes. And he reprises the performance art of Facts-and- Figures Taylor, "who entertained shouting crowds in Washington Park by reciting the statistics he had memorized in the public library."

Bellow evokes scenes as easily as characters, of course. Chicago's institutions and neighborhoods predominate, as he recollects how, when one approached the stockyards, the "frightful stench seemed to infect the sun itself, so that it was reeking as well as shining," or how, walking home on the Midway one summer evening during the Depression, he heard FDR's fireside chat from start to finish as cab drivers pulled over to listen to the president on the radio. But Bellow's eye for detail proves just as keen on the road. While driving the length of the state from Galena to Cairo on a summer odyssey for Holiday, he felt enclosed "in the deaf, hot solitude of trembling air," adrift on a green and golden ocean created by a race of "corn worshippers."

Bellow also serves up lively observations about writers as varied as Dostoevsky and Nabokov, Joyce and Hemingway, Anderson and Dreiser. Interviews, including a notable conversation with himself, allow him to discuss his own work too. Readers of his novels will find insights into The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog and Henderson the Rain King. If you have been challenged by the

evolution of Bellow's fiction, you will be stimulated by the developing perspectives represented in this selection of his nonfiction. Whether intended as such. It All Adds Up could serve as a fitting coda to a distinguished career.

The year 1994 also saw the appearance of Relocations of the Spirit, a welcome gathering of 27 essays, articles and reviews written over the past two decades by Leon Forrest, chair of African American Studies at Northwestern University and author of four novels. The opening section, subtitled "At Home in the Windy City," is a moving reminiscence about his roots — familial, geographic and aesthetic. Here Forrest introduces the thread he weaves throughout the book as a master theme: The African-American experience has been one of reinvention and transformation in a "quest for wholeness," and this is reflected in his own artistic aspirations and accomplishments as well.

Forrest discusses blues and jazz, boxing and basketball, sermons and spirituals, poetry and protest

In reviewing the sources and stages of this individual and collective quest, Forrest discusses its expression in the blues and jazz, boxing and basketball, sermons and spirituals, poetry and protest. His encounters with James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison and Toni Mormon reflect the literary tradition within which he has worked, while his shrewd assessments of such legendary leaders as Richard J. Daley, Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson reveal his ambivalence about the political climate of "the city that works" — but for some better than others. On this score Forrest writes, "My own hate/love relationship with Chicago is best revealed not in the lines of any particular writers but rather in the words of the Rev. Louis Rawl's son, when he sings: 'I despise you cause you funky — but I love you cause you home.'"

Bernice Gallagher, director of writing programs at Lake Forest College, enhances our appreciation of the state's rich — if often unsung — literary history with quite a different collection. In Illinois Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century she analyzes 58 novels written by 36 Illinois women, published from 1854 to 1893 and selected for display at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Women's writing — now a familiar genre — had just emerged as a literary category when this collection was assembled a century ago, and many of the issues it addresses, such as the tension in women's lives between dependence and independence, have contemporary as well as historic significance.

In rescuing these works from oblivion, Gallagher hasn't unearthed any forgotten geniuses or neglected masterpieces; however, she does conclude that a surprising number of the books offer aesthetic rewards in addition to sociological insights. The authors typically tell an idealized love story set against a realistic social backdrop. If the novels sometimes feature the chance reunions, sudden conversions and miraculous cures of the romance form, they also depict such grim problems as rape and prostitution, alcoholism and domestic violence, racial prejudice and labor unrest. Although most of the writers were middle-class daughters and wives of professional men, their general commitment to greater social equality seems surprisingly modern.

Perhaps the most famous name among them is Emma Altgeld, schoolteacher, wife of John Peter Altgeld (governor from 1893 to 1897) and author of Sarah's Choice (1887), a saga about small-town Midwestern life. Certainly the most prolific of the authors is Mary Catherwood, who was one of the first women in this region to support herself by her writing, publishing over 30 books. Fiction like theirs sank from public view largely because it was dismissed by critics as sub-literary, a judgment Gallagher challenges as part of a general revision underway within English studies.

Similarly, within the field of history, material culture has often been ignored as a source of useful information about the past. Compensating for this short-sighted practice is a handsome book on the craft of quiltmaking in Illinois that details its historical and aesthetic value. History from the Heart is by E. Duane Elbert, a specialist in American folk life and decorative arts, and Rachel Kamm Elbert, who with her husband has spent years stitching quilts and preserving family traditions. Their book is based on findings of the Illinois Quilt Research Project, which registered nearly 16,000 pre-1950 quilts made and/or owned by Illinoisans. Over 100 of these quilts, dating back to 1813, are pictured in full color.

True to its title, however. History from the Heart offers readers more than a feast for the eyes. It also teaches an engaging lesson in women's history by surveying the quilt paths charted across the state as these reflected foreign immigration, domestic migration, ethnic heritage and technological development.

Although some of the featured quilters remain anonymous, we meet many of the artists behind the artifacts. A case in point is Verdilla Zook (1848-1925), whose mariner's compass quilt dates from around 1880. Born to an Amish family who had settled in Pennsylvania to enjoy religious freedom, she moved to Naperville in the 1870s. The quilt she worked there passed from her daughter Mary to Mary's daughter Mabel and finally to Mabel's brother Rollin. Appropriately, Verdilla's compass suggests the mobility that brought immigrants to America and took them across the continent, just as her family's retention of the quilt over successive generations shows the value Americans have placed on continuity in the midst of change. Through the story of Verdilla and other Illinois quilters named or nameless, the Elberts remind us of the eloquence as well as the elegance of such heirlooms. They have much to show and tell us.

Verdilla's compass suggests the mobility which brought immigrants to America and took them across the continent

Judith L. Everson is associate editor of Illinois Issues and associate professor in the English program at Sangamon State University, where she teaches modern American literature and women's studies.

Quartet of books features Bellow, quilts, women, Forrest essays