Dangling Man by Saul Bellow

I don’t remember what I was reading recently that referred me to this novel. I always enjoy following a chain of titles, from one to the next, and I’m sure that some mention sent me here, but it must have been in one of the books I had borrowed from the library and already returned, because I couldn’t find the mention again when I looked for it. In any case, I had read much of Saul Bellow before, so I was happy to give another of his novels, his first in this case, a go.

The novel, from 1944, takes the form of a journal with entires from December 15, 1942 through April 9, 1943. The journalist, Joseph (no last name) is a young man living in Chicago. He’s married to a woman named Iva. The previous May, before he started the journal, he responded to call for induction into the armed services and quit his job at a travel agency. But his call to service has been delayed, first by the fact that he is still a Canadian citizen despite having arrived in the U. S. as a child and later through mere bureaucratic sclerosis. Thus, Joseph has become a “dangling man”, placeless and depending on others to place him.

In Kafka’s The Trial another Joseph with no last name (Joseph K.) waits on an indifferent bureaucracy to summon him. Perhaps Bellow is nodding to that work. But Joseph isn’t menaced. The military service never communicates with him. He spends his days reading the newspapers, meeting friends, contemplating life, writing in his journal. At the end of the novel he enlists voluntarily in the service rather than waiting for the induction to come through, a choice he could have made at any time, apparently, so, whatever.

The journal entries are not convincing as an actual journal. Though individually dated and coming in chronological order, many are actually tellings of incidents that happened weeks or months earlier, stretching out the timeline far beyond the dated entries. Joseph relates details and dialogue, not notes: a scene he causes during lunch with a friend, an argument with a bank teller, a conflict with another tenant at the rooming house where he lives, a dinner with his older brother and his wife where Joseph fights with his fifteen year-old niece over a record player and ends up spanking her. The journal entry dated December 22 is a 20 page retelling of a drunken party he and his wife attended the previous March. No one keeps a journal like this one.

Many of the incidents involve Joseph acting badly. He’s angry and ill at ease. He’s irritated by his wife. He insults or ignores his friends. He has an on again off again relationship with a mistress. Throughout the novel more and more friends and acquaintances are mentioned, few of them developed into memorable characters. For most of the names I had trouble remembering who was who and it didn’t seem to matter.

Fleshing out the incident stories are Joseph’s philosophical musings about them, including, in a couple of chapters, imagined dialogues with an earlier version of himself, before he quit his job and began his “dangling” existence. His thesis seems to be that since the Enlightenment, men have been taught to believe that the individual is a person of infinite possibility and that our failure to achieve our latent greatness causes us to feel shame and respond with violence. The war is the collective expression of our failures but in itself offers a kind of salvation because it obscures individuals into a mass mission. Thus the novel’s closing words are, “Hurray for regular hours! And for the supervision of the spirit! Long live regimentation!”

I didn’t find Joseph’s philosophy convincing, or interesting. And the irony is that the renouncing of individual greatness comes from a man who is regarded as one of the greats of American literature and a winner of the Novel prize (in 1976). There is little through narrative, just a series of incidents, often involving new characters who appear and disappear, and the waiting. The landlady dies at the end, and the fellow tenant that Joseph had been feuding with for months moves out. That, along with Joseph finally being called up gives the only shape to the novel it has.

For a first novel it has ambition, but not success. If not for Bellow’s future achievements I don’t see much value in reading it.

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.