Herzog by Saul Bellow

I’ve been reading Saul Bellow lately ever since I happened across a copy of Henderson the Rain King in a free book bin. I read The Adventures of Augie March last month. Like those two earlier novels, Herzog is exuberantly told. Bellow is fun to read. The plots are fanciful; the writing unconstrained. The words pour out. Bellow once said, before he began writing The Adventures of Augie March, that he was inspired by the sight in Paris one morning of the gutters being washed out: a constant uninterrupted flow. I like the idea of writing that simply starts with a rush of imagination and then finds its own way. It’s not exactly stream-of-conscious; Bellow’s sentences and paragraphs are well-constructed, and it’s highly literate, but it’s original and thrilling writing.

Where the story of Augie March spreads across decades, Herzog, by one measure is tightly bound: the story unfolds over just five summer days. Herzog, the title character, is forty-seven, twice married, twice divorced, two kids. Assuming he’s a stand-in for Bellow who was born in 1915, that would make the year 1962, two years before the novel was published. But more than a specific time or place, the novel is set in Herzog’s mind, which floats freely through incidents of his former life. The result, by that measure, is that Herzog (the novel) is expansive.

After a brief opening set at a home in the Berkshires, which we will return to at the end of the novel, Herzog flashes back to a week or so earlier in New York toward the end of June. Herzog is lying on a couch thinking to himself. We learn through his musings that formerly he had lived in that house in the fictional Berkshire town of Ludeyville with his wife, Madeline and their young daughter June. But their marriage had been difficult. Madeline had made Herzog abandon his career as a professor, he wrote a book on philosophy of the Romantic era, in order to move up to remote Ludeyville. Then she decided that the isolated life was a mistake and she insisted that the family move to Chicago so she and Herzog could pursue social and professional opportunities. She also asked Herzog to make arrangements for some neighbor friends they had made to move with them: Valentine Gersbach and his wife Phoebe. This, Herzog had done. Then, after a year in Chicago, the previous fall, Madeline had announced that the marriage had failed and she wanted a divorce. Herzog moved out, taking an extended tour in Europe, then came briefly back to Chicago, without seeing Madeline, and then to New York, where he got a job teaching at a night school. He also learned that Madeline and Valentine had been having an affair even while they were still in Ludeyville and that now, Valentine, while still married to Phoebe, was spending time at Madeline’s house and becoming a kind of step-father to June. June calls him “Uncle Val.”

At the night school, Herzog met a woman named Ramona and is beginning an affair with her. We also learn that in May, a few weeks before the novel begins, Herzog had started to write notes to himself, random, disconnected jottings and thoughts. These scribbled thoughts distracted him from his teaching duties, and eventually turned into rambling letters that he would sometimes actually write, but never mail and sometimes just compose in his mind: letters to Madeline and other persons in his life, and letters to previous acquaintances, and also authors of books he had read and famous figures, living and dead. The letters, sometimes long, sometimes fragments, are included in the novel in italics, seamlessly allied with his other jumbled thoughts. The letters allow Bellow to bring in larger themes while also making clear that Herzog’s mental state is agitated and unmoored. He’s on the verge of some kind of madness, but manages to stay just on the sane side. The novel’s quest, such as it is, is for Herzog to find his way back to mental peace.

A second literary device of the novel is that the tense regularly switches between first and third person. The novel begins in third person with what seems like an objective narrator. Then, suddenly, on page 32, for a few lines it switches. After, “His heart sank,” there are a few lines of dialogue, followed by, “And I so vulnerable, heavy with guilt.” Then, “I should have known that a woman like Wanda…” gives way a few lines later to, “The feelings he wanted to express were genuine.” and “She had been extremely kind to him when he was ill.” At first I thought I’d discovered an editing mistake, but the alternations keep happening. The back and forth isn’t difficult to follow and it helps to demonstrate Herzog’s unsettled mental state. The subject is always Herzog, but sometimes he speaks from his internal point of view, “I”, and sometimes he regards himself as though he were a specimen: “He.”

Day one: Ramona, the woman Herzog is beginning an affair with in New York, encourages Herzog to get some rest and invites him to spend some time with her at her place in Montauk. He shops for appropriate clothes for a seaside vacation but not wanting to get too close too quickly to Ramona, decides to go away by himself to Martha’s Vineyard where he has some friends he can stay with.

Day two, a long train ride out to Martha’s Vineyard. He writes numerous letters both actual and mental on the train and we learn more of his back story. At Vineyard Haven on the island, he meets his friends, who are happy to see him, but he instantly feels he was mistaken to come. He writes a note saying, “Not able to stand kindness at this time” (p. 106) and immediately turns around and goes back to New York.

Day three. He broods in his apartment all day, writing letters. That evening he has dinner with Ramona, at her apartment, and he spends the night with her.

Day four. He drops Ramona off at the flower shop where she works and goes back to his apartment. He has been disturbed by a letter he received from a friend of a friend who had been helping Madeline and Valentine take care of June in Chicago. One evening, while coming to the house, the woman had found June locked in the car in the driveway very upset and the woman had learned that Madeline and Valentine had been fighting and that Valentine put June in the car to keep her away from their quarrel. Herzog is concerned about his daughter. He calls a lawyer to see if there’s a possibility that he might be able to get custody of his child. The lawyer can’t talk to him but tells him that he might have time later that afternoon and that he could meet him at the courthouse. Herzog goes down to the courthouse and to kill time sits in on several trials. One of these is a horrifying case of neglectful and abusive parents accused of killing the woman’s young son. Greatly affected, Herzog skips the meeting with the lawyer and flies, that evening, to Chicago. First he rents a car, then he drives to his childhood home, now occupied by his step-mother, his father’s widow, living alone. He distracts her and opens a desk in a bedroom where he retrieves a pistol that belonged to his father. Then he drives over to the house where he had lived with Madeline with the vague idea that he will kill her, and Valentine, and take away the child. But when he gets there, he peers in through a back window to a bathroom where he sees June taking a bath and being gently, tenderly, bathed by Valentine. Herzog realizes the child is safe. He drives to Phoebe’s house, Valentine’s wife, and discovers that she is satisfied with the situation and won’t help him. Then he drives to a friend’s house and spends the night.

Day five. Herzog’s friend makes arrangements with Madeline for Herzog to spend the day with his daughter. June is delivered, by the friend, to the Museum of Science. Herzog and June have a wonderful few hours together, at the museum, and then at the lake, and then at the aquarium. But driving out of the parking lot from the aquarium, Herzog is rear-ended in his rental car and slams into a pole. June is fine and Herzog only has minor injuries: a cut on his head and a broken rib, he discovers later. But the car is totaled and when the police arrive they discover the loaded pistol in Herzog’s coat pocket. They take him down to the police station and call Madeline. She arrives to pick up June. Herzog spends an hour in jail while he waits for his brother, Will, to bail him out. Will is sympathetic, but worried. He wants to help and speaks of visiting Herzog at the house in Ludeyville and helping him decide whether he can sell the place. Herzog spends another night at his friend’s house.

Day six. The next afternoon Herzog is in Ludeyville. The house has been closed up for two years since he and Madeline had moved to Chicago with Valentine and Phoebe. Birds have gotten in through a broken window in the attic and nested. The power and water are turned off. There are canned foods in the basement. It’s here where the opening scene of the novel takes place, bringing us back full circle. And it’s here, also, where the tight day-by-day structure expands a little. Herzog lives alone in the house for a few days, camping out and writing his notes and letters including one to Nietzsche and finally, to God. To God he writes: “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” (p. 336). Then, his brother, Will, shows up, as promised.

Will suggests that Herzog could use some time under mental care and has made arrangements to take him to a hospital. But Herzog refuses. Instead, he has Will drive him into town so Herzog can speak to a couple there, the Tuttles, who will help him get the power turned on and the house cleaned up. While in town, the Tuttles tell him that they have a message for him from Ramona, currently with friends just a few miles away in the town of Barrington. Herzog and Will drive down to see Ramona and Herzog invites her to come to his house that evening for dinner. Will drives Herzog home again and then, with a word of caution not to rush things with Ramona, Will leaves. Mrs. Tuttle is already in the house starting to clean. The power comes on. And with this sense of order and normalcy being restored, the novel ends, with Herzog thinking, “Perhaps he’d stop writing letters. Yes, that was what was coming, in fact. The knowledge that he was done with these letters. Whatever had come over him during these last months, the spell, really seemed to be passing, really going.” And the last words of the novel: “At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.”

I felt that The Adventures of Augie March started great and then lost its way in the long later sections in Mexico and in the life raft with Bateshaw. It’s as though Bellow started the novel by opening a floodgate but then didn’t know how to close it off again as the earlier exuberance faded to a trickle. This novel starts well and gets better as it progresses. I really enjoyed the later scenes at the courthouse in New York where Herzog describes several trials followed by the long sequence in Chicago that evening and the following day. And in this novel, Bellow is able to bring the novel to a satisfying and definite close.

Like Joyce, in Ulysses; Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment; or Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye; there’s something tidy about a novel that takes place in a short period of time. Although in no other sense would I call Bellow a “tidy” writer!

Because I’m sensitive to such things, I want to point out a few incidents where homosexuality is mentioned in the novel. I’ve been thinking lately about how homosexuality is portrayed by heterosexual male American authors in mid-century novels. Far from being invisible, it seems a known part of life, and regarded rather neutrally. There’s the Mr. Antolini episode in The Catcher in the Rye. I recently wrote about the scene in The Sun Also Rises, where Lady Brett Ashley arrives at the bar with a group of gay men. There are a couple of brief mentions in Fitzgerald’s The Pat Hobby Stories. Pat Hobby might land a job replacing an extra because, “one of them went to jail in a “homo raid.” (“Pat Hobby and Orson Welles”). Pat Hobby has to clarify a statement when he tells a girl he’s taken for lunch at the commissary that the big wigs at the main table “don’t want ladies. At lunch, that is, they don’t want ladies” (“Boil Some Water–Lots of It”). And in the story “Teamed With Genius,” Pat Hobby assumes a writer is gay because he’s written a script based in the world of ballet. “You mean he’s–” The Producer answers, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” Then, later in the story, Pat Hobby is surprised when it turns out the guy and Pat Hobby’s female secretary are having an affair. “They like each other,” said Pat incredulously. “Why, he–” “Hold it, Pat. You’ve had trouble enough today,” says the Producer.

In Herzog, when Herzog is shopping for clothes in the opening pages he muses, “I bought a gaudy vest in the Burlington Arcade last winter, and a pair of Swiss boots of the type I see now the Village fairies have adopted” (p. 25). More significantly, when he’s hanging out in the courthouse, he observes two cases with homosexual defendants. In one, a gay man has been baited by a police office in the men’s room at Grand Central Station. The judge treats him sympathetically. Herzog says, speaking of the entrapment, “He opposed this perverse development in law enforcement. Sexual practices of any sort, provided they didn’t disturb the peace, provided they didn’t injure minor children, were a private matter. Except for the children. Never children. There one must be strict.” (p. 238). In the other court hearing, a transexual prostitute named either Aleck or Alice, depending, he says, on what sex the client wants him to be, has been arrested for trying to rob a bodega. Again, the boy is treated sympathetically, and he defends himself with admirable integrity and lack of shame. When he is sent back to his cell there’s this: “The magistrate shook his head. These fairies, what a bunch!” (p. 240) but his judgment is given with humor.

And lastly, there’s one more scene, an ugly memory of Herzog’s as a boy similar to the story in The Adventures of Augie March where Augie is accosted by a tramp in a train car. This comes in the section where Herzog is being held at the Police Station and he’s trying to prevent his daughter from being frightened by the experience. He remembers a traumatizing experience from his own childhood. “And this was near the lane–Herzog’s heart began to pound; he felt feverish–where he was overtaken by a man one dirty summer evening. The man clapped his hand over his mouth from the back. He hissed something to him as he drew down his pants. His teeth were rotten and his face stubbled. and between the boy’s thighs this red skinless horrible thing passed back and forth, back and forth, until it burst out foaming. The dogs in the back yards jumped against the fences, they barked and snarled, choking on their saliva–the shrieking dogs, while Moses was held at the throat by the crook of the man’s arm. He knew he might be killed. The man might strangle him. How did he know! He guessed. So he simply stood there. Then the man buttoned his army coat and said, “I’m going to give you a nickel. But I have to change this dollar.” He showed him the bill and told him to wait where he was” (p. 299). The man runs off. Moses waits awhile and then goes home. “He sat on the stoop awhile and then turned up at supper as if nothing had happened. Nothing! He washed his hands at the sink with Willie and came to the table. He ate his soup” (p. 299).

That Herzog had that experience as a boy explains his earlier, repeated, insistence that children be protected, while also expressing tolerance for homosexual adults.