Him with His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories Book

I read perhaps only the title story and one other, so my reading and review are notably incomplete--if not irrelevant. I found the title story well within the achivement I grant Bellow, as the best fiction writer of his and my time, with Updike a close second (but only in a couple novels, like Rabbit at Rest).
On the whole, Bellow breaches the common recurrence of fine writers' being better at short stories than novels: Flannery O'Connor, maybe Joyce, maybe VS Naipaul, etc. Bellow doesn't seem to benefit by brevity.
Who was it said I have to write a novel if I fail at a short story...

BTW, Saul Bellow's best friend at U Minnesota in late 50's was my doctoral advisor Leonard Unger; legend had it they together at the Faculty Club lunch wrote a translation of the first four lines of TS Eliot's "Wasteland"... into Yiddish. Leonard wrote the first book on Eliot, and through Eliot, knew Donne and Shakespeare well. Leonard was also a wit, like my undergrad Amherst College English profs.