Herzog
Older men always want to set me up with Saul Bellow. He’s both popular and prestigious, having ruled the bestseller list and racked up three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer, and the Nobel Prize. The Nobel committee praised him for
exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion… the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age.
Whew. Renown aside, my connection with Bellow should be personal, they say. We’re alums of the same schools and share a love of that great city, Chicago.
I smile at the suggestion and say I’ve heard about his tragicomedy of intellect and flesh, like Woody Allen on Paxil. The truth is, Bellow reminds me that I’ve always been a nice girl. When my elders — which is to say critics and scholars — introduce me to a book, I treat it with respect. If I dislike it, I make small talk (see above) and secretly light another candle at my altar to Henry James.
The problem with Bellow’s Herzog, however, was not that I disliked it. It left me so baffled that it took a few weeks before I could sit down and write an honest post. This tells us two things. One, that I am very young indeed. Before I explain the second, more about the novel.
Herzog follows a scholar whose wife left him for his best friend and took their daughter with him. Cuckolded and professionally impotent, Moses Herzog examines his life for a meaning that he finds in focusing on “private life,” in living intensely, in writing fiction in which the characters of his life come to a reckoning.
As the novel opens, Herzog has already begun his all-consuming project: writing letters “endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.” Through these letters we learn of his childhood, his siblings and lovers, and ramblings on the likes of Pascal and Hegel.
The plot elements that emerge in this meandering journey — a car crash, a visit to his ex-wife’s with a loaded gun — are not climaxes but rather afterthoughts that are comically deflated in their avoidance of high drama. Herzog returns to his house in the Berkshires, which he had fixed up with money inherited from his father. He returns, too, to his current lover, a florist in her late 30s named Ramona.
Herzog’s remembrances of his lovers loom large in this story. He pursues, not merely flesh, but intimacy: baths and Japanese massages with Sono, shrimp Arnaud and Armagnac in Ramona’s s boudoir. There’s an element of male fantasy in a virile older man — he’s 47 — who beds multiple, beautiful young women, who enjoys domestic comforts with minimal responsibility. Here’s Herzog taking stock of himself:
That’s okay, he thought; if the light’s not too bright, you’re still a grand-looking man. For a while yet, you can get women. All but that bitch, Madeleine, whose face looks either beautiful of haggy. Go, then — Ramona will feed you, give you wine, remove your shoes, flatter you, smooth down your hackles, kiss you, pinch your lip with her teeth. Then uncover the bed, turn down the lights, and go into the essentials.
Herzog is a picaresque hero, to be sure, a likable rogue who gets what he pleases, conventional morality be damned. In a successful picaresque, however, the women are fairly one-dimensional. They’re conquests, and often they’re as wily as the hero himself and partly complicit in the adventure. A flicker of sympathy for them causes the whole project to come into question. It’s easier to cheer for the guy who beats the system — the system being conventional courtship, marriage, commitment — when the system is faceless or corrupt, not a sweet, chatty lover he leaves in bed with pneumonia for a month while he cheats on her (and his first wife, if I have this right) with a new mistress. Ramona, for her part, wear fetching red dresses, plays exotic Turkish music, and shows up near his home in the Berkshires, supposedly to attend a friend’s party. Not merely the vamp, she listens to, cajoles, and worries about him.
Herzog recognizes (and is flattered) that her considerable arts of seduction are trained on winning him as a husband. He thinks of her with a vague sense of guilt, brief flickers in the long self-involved monologue that is this novel. He acts with precise calculation: how can he maintain the relationship without seeming too committed? Picking flowers for her is dicey — but he can allow her to kiss him in front of his brother because he likes to appear manly. His notion of living intensely amounts to his living the same way as he did before his crisis, except this time he’ll avoid commitment.
Herzog, like most of us, believes he’s a good person. Because he does no harm, others should not try to harm him. His ramblings about morality don’t jibe with the deceit he practices in life, but whose do? Bellow gives us a plausible, nuanced portrait of one man’s mind, and remarkable sketches of secondary characters to boot.
I remain perplexed by the heroic overtones at the end of the novel, when Herzog escapes death, returns home, and moves on. The ending seems almost grandiose: “At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.” What messages? He wrote letters that were never sent. Their function was to arrange his past into a story that proved he had not failed as a man or done wrong.
Disappointed with his career and his wife’s betrayal, Herzog decides, not only that “personal life” is more important than career, it’s the telos of history. In his version, he can depict the cheating wife as a crazy bitch with no sympathetic qualities whatsoever. I read Herzog, possibly perversely, as being a very human story about a man who refashions his experience into a version he can live with. He then sets the past behind him and does as he pleases.
