Shop Talk (18 page)

It's a mind rich and wide-ranging but turbulent with troubles, bursting, swarming with grievance and indignation, a bewildered mind that, in the first sentence of the book, openly, with good reason, questions its equilibrium, and not in highbrowese but in the classic vernacular formulation: "If I am out of my mind..." This mind, so forceful, so tenacious, overstocked with the best that has been thought and said, a mind elegantly turning out the most informed generalizations about a lot of the world and its history, happens also to suspect its most fundamental power, the very capacity for comprehension.

The axis on which the book's adulterous drama turns, the scene that sends Herzog racing off to Chicago to pick up a loaded pistol to kill Madeleine and Gersbach and instead initiates his final undoing, takes place in a New York courtroom, where Herzog, loitering while waiting for his lawyer to show up, comes upon the nightmare-parody version of his own suffering. It is the trial of a hapless, degraded mother who, with her degenerate lover, has murdered her own little child. So overcome with horror is Herzog at what he sees and hears that he is prompted to cry out to himself, "I fail to understand!"—familiar-enough everyday words, but for Herzog a humbling, pain-ridden, reverberating admission that dramatically connects the intricate wickerwork of his mental existence to the tormenting grid of error and disappointment that is his personal life. Since for Herzog understanding is an impediment to instinctive force, it is when understanding fails him that he reaches for a gun (the very one with which his own father once clumsily threatened to kill
him
)—though, in the end, being Herzog, he cannot fire it. Being Herzog (and his angry father's angry son), he finds firing the pistol "nothing but a thought."

But if Herzog fails to understand, who
does
understand, and what is all this thinking
for?
Why all this uninhibited reflection in Bellow's books in the first place? I don't mean the uninhibited reflection of characters like Tamkin in
Seize the Day,
or even King Dahfu in
Henderson,
who seem to dish out their spoof wisdom as much for Bellow to have the fun of inventing it as to create a second realm of confusion in the minds of heroes already plenty confused on their own. I'm referring, rather, to the nearly impossible undertaking that marks Bellow's work as strongly as it does the novels of Robert Musil and Thomas Mann: the struggle not only to infuse fiction with mind but to make mentalness itself central to the hero's dilemma—to think, in books like
Herzog,
about the
problem
of thinking.

Now, Bellow's special appeal, and not just to me, is that in his characteristically American way he has managed brilliantly to close the gap between Thomas Mann and Damon Runyon, but that doesn't minimize the scope of what, beginning with
Augie March,
he so ambitiously set out to do: to bring into play (into
free
play) the intellectual faculties that, in writers like Mann, Musil, and him, are no less engaged by the spectacle of life than by the mind's imaginative component, to make rumination congruent with what is represented, to hoist the author's thinking up from the depths to the narrative's surface without sinking the narrative's mimetic power, without the book's superficially meditating on itself, without making a transparently ideological claim on the reader, and without imparting wisdom, as do Tamkin and King Dahfu, flatly unproblematized.

Herzog
is Bellow's first protracted expedition as a writer into the immense domain of sex. Herzog's women are of the greatest importance to him, exciting his vanity, arousing his carnality, channeling his love, drawing his curiosity, and, by registering his cleverness, charm, and good looks, feeding in the man the joys of a boy—in their adoration is his validation. With every insult they hurl and every epithet they coin, with each fetching turn of the head, comforting touch of the hand, angry twist of the mouth, his women fascinate Herzog with that human otherness that so overpowers him in
both
sexes. But it is the women especially—until the final pages, that is, when Herzog turns away from his Berkshires retreat even well-meaning Ramona and the generous pleasures of the seraglio that are her specialty, when he at long last emancipates himself from the care of another woman, even this most gentle fondler of them all, and, so as to repair himself, undertakes what is for him the heroic project of living alone, shedding the women and, shedding with them, of all things, the explaining, the justifying, the thinking, divesting himself, if only temporarily, of the all-encompassing and habitual sources of his pleasure and misery—it is the women especially who bring out the portraitist in Herzog, a multitalented painter who can be as lavish in describing the generous mistress as Renoir; as tender in presenting the adorable daughter as Degas; as compassionate, as respectful of age, as knowledgeable of hardship in picturing the ancient stepmother—or his own dear mother in her slavish immigrant misery—as Rembrandt; as devilish, finally, as Daumier in depicting the adulterous wife who discerns, in Herzog's loving and scheming best friend, Valentine Gersbach, her crudely theatrical equal.

In all of literature, I know of no more emotionally susceptible male, of no man who brings a greater focus or intensity to his engagement with women than this Herzog,
who collects them both as an adoring suitor and as a husband—a cuckolded husband getting a royal screwing who, in the grandeur of his jealous rage and in the naiveté of his blind uxoriousness, is a kind of comic-strip amalgam of General Othello and Charles Bovary. Anyone wishing to have some fun in retelling
Madame Bovary
from Charles's perspective, or
Anna Karenina
from Karenin's, will find in
Herzog
the perfect how-to book. (Not that one easily envisions Karenin, à la Herzog with Gersbach, handing over to Vronsky Anna's diaphragm.)

Herzog
lays claim to being a richer novel even than
Augie March
because Bellow's taking on board, for the first time, the full sexual cargo allows for a brand of suffering to penetrate his fictional world that was largely precluded from
Augie
and
Henderson.
It turns out that even more is unlocked in the Bellow hero by suffering than by euphoria. How much more credible, how much more important he becomes when the male wound, in its festering enormity, ravages the euphoric appetite for "the rich life-cake," and the vulnerability to humiliation, betrayal, melancholy, fatigue, loss, paranoia, obsession, and despair is revealed to be so sweeping that neither an Augie's relentless optimism nor a Henderson's mythical giantism can stave off any longer the truth about pain. Once Bellow grafts onto Henderson's intensity—and onto Augie March's taste for grandiose types and dramatic encounters—Tommy Wilhelm's condition of helplessness, he puts the whole Bellovian symphony in play, with its lushly comical orchestration of misery.

In
Herzog,
there is no sustained chronological action—there's barely
any
action—that takes place outside Herzog's
brain. It isn't that, as a storyteller, Bellow apes Faulkner in
The Sound and the Fury
or Virginia Woolf in
The Waves.
The long, shifting, fragmented interior monologue of
Herzog
seems to have more in common with Gogol's "Diary of a Madman," where the disjointed perception is dictated by the mental state of the central character rather than by an author's impatience with traditional means of narration. What makes Gogol's madman mad, however, and Bellow's sane, is that Gogol's madman, incapable of overhearing himself, is unfortified by the spontaneous current of irony and parody that ripples through Herzog's every thought—even when Herzog is most bewildered—and that is inseparable from his take on himself and his disaster, however excruciating his pain.

In the Gogol story, the madman obtains a bundle of letters written by a dog, the pet belonging to the young woman of whom he is hopelessly (insanely) enamored. Feverishly, he sits down to read every word the brilliant dog has written, searching for any reference to himself. In
Herzog,
Bellow goes Gogol one better: the brilliant dog who writes the letters is Herzog. Letters to his dead mother, to his living mistress, to his first wife, to President Eisenhower, to Chicago's police commissioner, to Adlai Stevenson, to Nietzsche ("My dear sir, May I ask a question from the floor?"), to Teilhard de Chardin ("Dear Father ... Is the carbon molecule lined with thought?"), to Heidegger ("Dear Doktor Professor ... I should like to know what you mean by the expression 'the fall into the quotidian.' When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?"), to the credit department of Marshall Field & Co. ("I am no longer responsible for the debts of Madeleine P. Herzog"), even, in the end, a letter to God ("How my mind
has struggled to make coherent sense. I have not been too good at it. But have desired to do your unknowable will, taking it, and you, without symbols. Everything of intensest significance. Especially if divested of me").

This book of a thousand delights offers no greater delight than those letters, and no better key with which to both unlock Herzog's remarkable intelligence and enter into the depths of his turmoil over the wreckage of his life. The letters are his intensity demonstrated; they provide the stage for his intellectual theater, the one-man show where he is least likely to act the role of the fool.

Mr. Sammler's Planet
(1970)

"Is our species crazy?" A Swiftian question. A Swiftian note as well in the laconic Sammlerian reply: "Plenty of evidence."

Reading
Mr. Sammler's Planet,
I am reminded of
Gulliver's Travels:
by the overwhelming estrangement of the hero from the New York of the 1960s; by the rebuke he, with his history, embodies to the human status of those whose "sexual madness" he must witness; by his Gulliverian obsession with human physicality, human biology, the almost mythic distaste evoked in him by the body, its appearance, its functions, its urges, its pleasures, its secretions and smells. Then there's the preoccupation with the radical vincibility of one's physical being. As a frail, displaced refugee of the Holocaust horror, as one who escaped miraculously from the Nazi slaughter, who rose, with but one eye, from a pile of Jewish bodies left for dead by a German extermination squad, Mr. Sammler registers that most disorienting of blows to civic confidence—the disappearance, in a great city, of security, of safety, and, with that, the burgeoning among the vulnerable of fear-ridden, alienating paranoia.

For it is fear as well as disgust that vitiates Sammler's faith in the species and threatens his tolerance even for those closest to him—fear of "the soul ... in this vehemence ... the extremism and fanaticism of human nature." Having moved beyond the Crusoe-adventurousness of ebullient Augie and Henderson to delineate, as dark farce, the marital betrayal of the uncomprehending genius Herzog, Bellow next opens out his contemplative imagination to one of the greatest betrayals of all, at least as perceived by the refugee-victim Sammler in his Swiftian revulsion with the sixties: the betrayal by the crazy species of the civilized ideal.

Herzog, during his most searing moment of suffering, admits to himself, "I fail to understand!" But, despite old Sammler's Oxonian reserve and cultivated detachment, at the climax of
his
adventure—with license, disorder, and lawlessness within the network of his vividly eccentric family and beyond them, in New York's streets, subways, buses, shops, and college classrooms—the admission that is wrung from him (and that, for me, stands as the motto of this book) is far more shattering: "I am horrified!"

The triumph of
Mr. Sammler's Planet
is the invention of Sammler, with the credentials that accrue to him through his European education—his history of suffering history, and his Nazi-blinded eye—as "the registrar of madness." The juxtaposition of the personal plight of the protagonist with the particulars of the social forces he encounters, the resounding, ironic rightness of that juxtaposition, accounts for the impact here, as it does in every memorable fiction.

Sammler, sharply set apart by his condition of defenseless dignity, strikes me as the perfect instrument to receive anything in society at all bizarre or menacing, the historical victim abundantly qualified by experience to tellingly provide a harsh, hardened twentieth-century perspective on "mankind in a revolutionary condition."

I wonder which came first in the book's development, the madness or the registrar, Sammler or the sixties.

Humboldt's Gift
(1975)

Humboldt's Gift
is far and away the screwiest of the euphoric going-every-which-way out-and-out comic novels, the books that materialize at the very tip-top of the Bellovian mood swing, the merry music of the egosphere that is
Augie March, Henderson,
and
Humboldt
and that Bellow emits more or less periodically, between his burrowings through the dark down-in-the-dumps novels, such as
The Victim, Seize the Day, Mr. Sammler's Planet,
and
The Dean's December,
where the bewildering pain issuing from the heroes' wounds is not taken lightly either by them or by Bellow. (
Herzog
strikes me as supreme among Bellow's novels for its magical integration of this characteristic divergence. If one wished to play literary chef and turn
Humboldt's Gift
into
Herzog,
the simple recipe might go as follows: first, cut away and set aside Humboldt; next, extract from Humboldt his mad suffering and bind it to Citrine's reflective brilliance; last, toss in Gersbach—and there's your book. It's Gersbach's betrayal that stirs up in Herzog the murderous paranoia that is excited in Humboldt by, among others, Citrine!)

Humboldt
is the screwiest, by which I also mean the most
brazen of the comedies, loopier and more carnivalesque than the others, Bellow's only joyously open libidinous book and, rightly, the most recklessly crossbred fusion of disparate strains, and for a paradoxically compelling reason: Citrine's terror. Of what? Of mortality, of having to meet (regardless of his success and his great eminence) Humboldt's fate. Underlying the book's buoyant engagement with the scrambling, gorging, thieving, hating, and destroying of Charlie Citrine's on-the-make world, underlying everything, including the centrifugal manner of the book's telling—and exposed directly enough in Citrine's eagerness to metabolize the extinction-defying challenge of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy—is his terror of dying. What's disorienting Citrine happens also to be what's blowing narrative decorum to kingdom come: the panicky dread of oblivion, the old-fashioned garden-variety Everyman horror of death.