Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

I was looking for Dangling Man. I had read a reference to that novel, I don’t remember where, and thought I would read it. I had read several of Saul Bellow’s novels earlier this year and admired them enough to read another. But my branch library didn’t have a copy of Dangling Man on the shelf; I’m sure it’s available in the system but it wasn’t there at hand, and Seize the Day was, so I came home with this novel instead.

Seize the Day is Bellow’s fourth novel, coming after The Adventures of Augie March and followed by Henderson the Rain King and Herzog. Where The Adventures of Augie March is long and sprawling, Seize the Day is short and tight, focused on just a few characters, a few settings, and taking place on a single day: less than a complete day, actually: from breakfast through mid-afternoon. It can be read in a day. It took me two.

Narrated in third person, the main character is Tommy Wilhelm. He was born Wilhelm Adler but adopted a stage name for an attempt at a film career and kept the invented name even when the acting career failed. His father, Dr. Adler, who is never given a first name, calls his son Wilky, a childhood nickname, so neither man uses Wilhelm’s real name. Questions of identity are an important theme in the novel. Wilhelm has a sister who also doesn’t use her given name. Another Dr. without a first name, Doctor Tamkin, explains his theory to Wilhelm that every person has multiple souls including a “pretender soul” that desires love, perverts sincere affection for others with ego self-gratification, and finally leads the true soul astray in looking for what it cannot have. Doctor Tamkin’s advice is to sever the attachments to the past and the anxieties of the future and live in the moment: seize the day. Doctor Tamkin isn’t psychologically sound himself so his advice maybe should be taken skeptically. In any case, Wilhelm is a perpetual prisoner of his past regrets and future anxieties, and his present isn’t so hot either.

Wilhelm, in his forties, and his elderly father live in the hotel Ansonia, on Broadway between 73rd and 74th on New York’s Upper West Side. They live under one roof, the father jokes, but are miles apart temperamentally. Dr. Adler was a successful physician: responsible, successful, well-mannered, cares about appearances. His wife died more than thirty years ago. He’s nearing the end of his own life. His son is a disappointment to him. Wilhelm is a loser or a victim depending on whether you think his sad state is more the outcome of bad luck or bad decisions. He’s desperate for his father’s approval and has a sense that he’s owed it, even though he has never done anything to earn it. There’s a wide, aching gulf between the two.

Wilhelm dropped out of college when a Hollywood talent agent saw his yearbook picture and thought he’d make it in the movies. After giving Wilhelm a screen test the agent changed his mind, but Wilhelm decided to give California a try anyway, where he quickly fails. While there, he marries a woman named Margaret. They have two boys together, now aged 14 and 10, but the marriage has also failed. She and the boys live in the Bronx and are bleeding Wilhelm dry financially, while he lives at the hotel. Wilhelm’s last job was as a salesman for a company called Rojax. He had an affair while on the road with a woman named Olive, but she’s tired of waiting for him to get the divorce that Margaret refuses him. He quit his salesman job when, instead of receiving a promised promotion, the owner brought in a nephew and halved Wilhelm’s territory. Now Wilhelm is unemployed and just invested his last $700 in lard futures on the commodity market on the recommendation of another resident of the Ansonia, the untrustworthy character Doctor Tamkin, who may or may not be some kind of psychologist.

Seven scenes come pretty quickly in seven short chapters. (The novel could easily work as a play.) One: an opening scene in the hotel lobby as Wilhelm buys a newspaper at the newsstand and prepares to enter the dining room to meet his father for breakfast. Two: Wilhelm and Dr. Adler have breakfast along with a third man named Perls. Three: the father and son continue their breakfast after Perls has left. Four: Leaving breakfast, Wilhelm runs into Doctor Tamkin in the hotel lobby and together they go back into the dining room for Doctor Tamkin to have his breakfast. Five: a brokerage house near the hotel where Wilhelm and Doctor tamkin watch the stock market returns. Six: a cafeteria where the two take a lunch break. When they get back to the brokerage house, Doctor Tamkin goes in while Wilhelm is coerced into accompanying an old man to a cigar store. When Wilhelm gets back to the brokerage house he discovers he’s lost all his investment and Doctor Tamkin has disappeared. Seven: Wilhelm searches for Doctor Tamkin back at the Ansonia, first in Doctor Tamkin’s room, then down in the baths below the hotel (where his father is getting a massage). Wilhelm has a conversation with his wife on the hotel lobby payphone. Then, still searching for Doctor Tamkin, Wilhelm runs out onto the street where he’s pushed by a crowd gathered for a funeral into the funeral parlor and in the last paragraphs breaks down weeping over the dead man, a stranger, lying in the coffin.

The novel, a short novel, has a setting and interesting characters, but not really a story. As we turn pages we learn more about Wilhelm’s pathetic state and his inability to take charge of his life but not much happens. It becomes clear he’s once again made a disastrous decision and will lose everything and we wait for that denouement to unfold. His father is unbending. His wife is unyielding. But no resolution arrives. At the end there’s neither a miraculous reversal, which would be artificial and unsatisfying, nor a final collapse, which would be depressing. He weeps at the coffin, perhaps because he recognizes the common tragedy of human existence but there’s no sense that he’s learned anything in the experience that would propel him into a different future. He weeps for himself, but it’s hard to feel much sympathy for a character we’ve just tracked through 114 pages and forty-odd years of stupidity.

Bellow published this short novel in 1956 in a collection that also included three short stories and a one-act play. Interestingly, the baths in the hotel Ansonia, where Dr. Adler receives his massage at the end of the novel, became, in 1968, the site of the Continental Baths, the gay bath house where Bette Midler and Barry Manilow and many others performed. In 1977, the baths transformed into the straight swinger’s club called Plato’s Retreat. Today, the building is condos.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.