Herzog by Saul Bellow – A Review
Vladimir Nabokov said that one cannot read a book.
What do we readers make of that?
He said you can only re-read it.
I’ve read Herzog at least four times and always find newness, insights I had not noticed, observations that only make sense now because of my age.
Herzog is a book for life.
Moses Elkanah Herzog, an academic who might have had a bright professional future, is now a pitiful figure. He has fallen for the considerable charms of the formidable Madeleine Pontritter, they have married, they have an adorable pre-schooler girl, Junie, and Mady has planned a secret campaign, with military precision, to expel him from her life and enable her to continue a relationship with a close friend of Moses, the one-legged Valentine Gersbach who, superbly, “walked on a wooden leg, gracefully bending and straightening like a gondolier.”[2]
Mady persuades Moses to resign his professorship to work on his great book project. They they move to a dilapidated country house near a village, Ludeyville, in an empty part of Massachusetts. Here, we works at and fails with his madly broad subject, his book that will demonstrate:
“a new angle on the modern condition, showing how life could be lived by renewing universal connections; overturning the last of the Romantic errors about the uniqueness of the Self; revising the old Western, Faustian ideology; investigating the social meaning of Nothingness. And more.”[3]
The world needs him, he believes:
“This was where such as he came in. The progress of civilization – indeed, the survival of civilization – depended on the successes of Moses E. Herzog.”[4]
Mady does not want to be married to a failure. She had expected Moses to succeed. After a year, she wants to study in Chicago. Moses looks for jobs for himself and for Valentine – and here he should have been suspicious – at Madeleine’s insistence. She feels that they cannot leave Valentine and his wife Phoebe alone in the mountains. After a year in Chicago, she divorces Moses and he finds himself under terrible strain, particularly when he realises that Madeleine is in love with Valentine and everything has been set up in advance to enable her to evict him and have her lover spend time at her home:
“And life was very bad in Ludeyville – terrible, I admit. But then didn’t we buy the house because she wanted to, and move out when she wanted to? And didn’t I make all the arrangements, even for the Gersbachs – so we could all leave the Berkshires together?”[5]
Devastated, Moses wanders to Europe (mentioned only in occasional flashbacks), but the core of the story is his picaresque rambling between New York, Massachusetts and Chicago, all the while writing strange letters. He has a new woman friend in NYC, the viscerally real and adorable Ramona, “sexually, a natural masterpiece”[6]; we hear about his first wife, Daisy (and their son Marco), and, working away from home for a year, how he adulterously “shacked up with Sono Oguki,”[7] leading Daisy to ask sarcastically when he came home, “How’s Japan?” And his fling with Wanda in Warsaw.
Herzog himself feels “The paltriness of these sexual struggles.”[8]
One great joy of the book is, as ever with Bellow, the cast of breathing (often with halitosis, one imagines), smelling, shouting, extraordinary, visceral, diverse, and divisive characters, particularly Mady of course, but also Ramona, plus the magnificent “reality-instructors,” often lawyers, who don’t hold back on their opinions about Moses or his case. After advising him not to claim custody of Junie, his lawyer Sandor Himmelstein – “That’s right. She won’t even know you next time you see her” – becomes enraged over an insurance policy that Moses does not want:
“The small mustache bristled, a fierce green, milky poison rose to his eyes; his mouth twisted. ‘I’m getting out of this case!’ Himmelstein began to scream.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Herzog said. ‘Where’s Beatrice? Beatrice!’
But Mrs Himmelstein only shut her bedroom door.
‘She’ll go to a shyster firm!’
‘For God’s sake, stop screaming.’
‘They’ll kill you.’
‘Sandor, quit this.’
‘Put you over a barrel. Tear your hide off.’
Herzog held his ears. ‘I can’t stand it.’
‘Tie your guts in knots. Sonofabitch. They’ll put a meter on your nose, and charge you for breathing. You’ll be locked up back and front. Then you’ll think about death. You’ll pray for it. A coffin will look better to you than a sports car.’[9]
Amongst several of these fierce lessons, a softer episode is important. The tenderness between Moses and Junie when he takes her for the day and they visit the Aquarium is touching and necessary: to contrast with bizarre adult life. Unfortunately, it does not end well, Mady coming to the police station to collect the child.
And Mady is the towering presence in this story. Inimitable, irresistible, emotionally violent, she is simply monstrously magnificent. Bellow gorgeously illustrates Madeleine’s dominant temperament and her strength in one of the finest passages I have read in Bellow, when she has prepared herself to tell Moses the marriage is over, relishing her power while disingenuously denying it:
“She had prepared the event with a certain theatrical genius of her own. She wore black stockings, high heels, a lavender dress with Indian brocade from Central America. She had on her opal earrings, her bracelets, and she was perfumed; her hair was combed with a new, clean part and her large eyelids shone with a bluish cosmetic. Her eyes were blue but the depth of the color was curiously affected by the variable tinge of the whites. Her nose, which descended in a straight elegant line from her brows, worked slightly when she was peculiarly stirred. To Herzog even this tic was precious. precious. There was a flavor of subjugation in his love for Madeleine. Since she was domineering, and since he loved her, he had to accept the flavor that was given. In this confrontation in the untidy parlor, two kinds of egotism were present, and Herzog from his sofa in New York now contemplated them – hers in triumph (she had prepared a great moment, she was about to do what she longed most to do, strike a blow) and his egotism in abeyance, all converted into passivity. What he was about to suffer, he deserved; he had sinned long and hard; he had earned it. This was it.[10]
…She was saying, ‘We can’t live together any more.’
Her speech continued for several minutes. Her sentences were well formed. This speech had been rehearsed and it seemed also that he had been waiting for the performance to begin.
Theirs was not a marriage that could last. Madeleine had never loved him. She was telling him that. ‘It’s painful to have to say I never loved you. I never will love you, either,’ she said. ‘So there’s no point in going on.’
Herzog said, ‘I do love you, Madeleine.’
Step by step, Madeleine rose in distinction, in brilliance, in insight. Her color grew very rich, and her brows, and that Byzantine nose of hers, rose, moved; her blue eyes gained by the flush that kept deepening, rising from her chest and her throat. She was in an ecstasy of consciousness. It occurred to Herzog that she had beaten him so badly, her pride was so fully satisfied, that there was an overflow of strength into her intelligence. He realized that he was witnessing one of the very greatest moments of her life.
‘You should hold on to that feeling,’ she said. ‘I believe it’s true. You do love me. But I think you also understand what a humiliation it is to me to admit defeat in this marriage. I’ve put all I had into it. I’m crushed by this.’
Crushed? She had never looked more glorious.”[11]
Moses has no chance against such power.
When we consider ourselves and Moses’s predicament, Bellow chides us to remember a great, sad truth:
“Herzog momentarily joined the objective world in looking down on himself. He too could smile at Herzog and despise him. But there still remained the fact. I am Herzog. I have to be that man. There is no one else to do it.”[12]
Moses exacerbates this mess of his life. With Junie, he crashes the car, emerging from unconsciousness to see that the police have found the (loaded) revolver that he was carrying. He seeks refuge in the house by Ludeyville.
There, there might just be peace. A late outburst is a letter to Nietzsche:
“No, really, Herr Nietzsche, I have great admiration for you. Sympathy. You want to make concerts and lectures, its liberalism and its romantic theatrical ‘loves’ and ‘passions’ – it all deserves to die, it will die. Okay. Still, your extremists must survive. No survival, no Amor Fati. Your immoralists also eat meat. They ride the bus. They are only the most bus-sick travelers. Humankind lives mainly upon perverted ideas. Perverted, your ideas are no better than those of the Christianity you condemn. Any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption. I send you greetings from this mere border of grassy temporal light, and wish you happiness, wherever you are. Yours, under the veil of Maya, M.E.H.”[13]
Insofar as he can, Moses is gradually coming to terms with his situation. He can see that:
“His state was too strange, this mixture of clairvoyance and spleen, esprit de l’escalier, noble inspirations, poetry and nonsense, ideas, hyperesthesia – wandering about like this, hearing forceful but indefinite music within, seeing things, violet fringes about the clearest objects. His mind was like that cistern, soft pure water sealed under the iron lid but not entirely safe to drink. No, he was better occupied painting the piano for the child.”[14]
He decides to stop writing letters, and there is a peace in the silencing. The joy of letting go, of silence for those of words – writers, but also lawyers, and many others – is not a new insight, but it remains profound. I remain deeply indebted to Thom Gunn’s For a Birthday, which begins, ‘I have reached a time when words no longer help’.
Herzog, the man and the novel, is a riot of words. Moses is no Everyman. He is very much the man he has to be. But, like him, however different our circumstances and outlook, we all face the truth of our life: There is no one else to do it.
Gally Maxwell
4 May 2024
[1] The quotation in the title is at 158 of Bellow, Saul. Herzog (Penguin Modern Classics) Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
[2] Page 5. This is so superb a description that Bellow uses it again later (p200), and rightly so. He is aware of the repetition, having Moses’s listener say that he has said this before.
[3] Page 40-41. And see p78.
[4] Page129.
[5] Page 41.
[6] Page 68.
[7] Page 106.
[8] Page 5.
[9] Pages 90-91.
[10] Page 9.
[11] Pages 9-10.
[12] Page 69.
[13] Pages 334-335.
[14] Pages 339-340.
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