Hanging with Herzog

In my post about A House for Mr. Biswas, I noted that V.S. Naipaul created one of the richest characters that I had so far encountered.   But having now read Saul Bellow’s Herzog, I wonder if there weren’t something in the air in the early ‘60s that called for in-depth and epic concentration on a single mind and a single life.  Both Mr. Biswas and Moses Herzog are richly complex and conflicted characters, but whereas we encounter Mr. Biswas from the outside, watching his struggles, successes, and failures, we are brought into the very thoughts and questionably maddened mind of Herzog.  

Moses E. Herzog is a fascinating character!  Philip Roth, in his introductory essay to the Penguin edition of Herzog, beautifully describes him as having

an innocence as phenomenal as his sophistications,  [and being] intense yet passive, reflective yet impulsive, sane yet insane, emotional, complicated, an expert on pain vibrant with feeling and yet disarmingly simple, a clown in his vengeance and rage, a fool in whom hatred breeds comedy, a sage knowing scholar in a treacherous world, yet still adrift in the great pool of childhood love, trust, and excitement in things (and hopelessly attached to this condition), an aging lover of enormous vanity and narcissism with a lovingly harsh attitude toward himself, whirling in a wash cycle of a rather generous self-awareness.

All those contradictions coexist in Herzog, and Bellow allows us to feel them all first hand by employing a delicate mix of the first and third person narration.  Technically, the novel is written in the third person, but the narrator never veers from Herzog’s consciousness, and in fact he stays so close that the narration slips easily into the first person accounts and thoughts of our subject.  This movement between objectivity and subjectivity allows us direct access to the active tide of Herzog’s mind while giving us a firm reality to simultaneously hold on to.  We are in Herzog and above Herzog, within him and without him, a part of him and separate from him—and it is all a total joy to experience.  I can’t think of any fictitious mind that I would rather be submerged in.

What makes Herzog’s struggle so interesting is that he is an unanchored intellectual whose life has been falling apart but who seems okay with the disintegration:  “Considering his entire life, he realized that he had mismanaged everything—everything.  His life was, as the phrase goes, ruined.  But since it had not been much to begin with, there was not much to grieve about.”  How can you not love a character like that?

The scope of the novel follows Herzog for about a week of his life in the depth of his mental breakdown.  Some months before we find him, Herzog has taken to writing letters (both on paper and in his mind): “[H]e wrote 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.”  These letters intrude on the narrative with little prompting and even less fanfare, popping up and disappearing often without warning.  The reason for writing these letters, we are told early in the novel, is that  “Herzog had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends.”  A third of the way into the novel, Herzog is talking to his friend Lucas Asphalter about death, suffering, civilization, and reality, and he reframes why it is that he’s been writing letters:

The new attitude which makes life a trifle not worth anyone’s anguish threatens the heart of civilization.  But it isn’t a question of dread, or any such words at all . . . .  Still, what can thoughtful people and humanists do but struggle toward suitable words?  Take me, for instance.  I’ve been writing letters helter-skelter in all directions.  More words.  I go after reality with language.  . . . I must be trying to keep tight the tensions without which human beings can no longer be called human.  If they don’t suffer, they’ve gotten away from me.  And I’ve filled the world with letters to prevent their escape.  I want them in human form, and so I conjure up a whole environment and catch them in the middle.

These letters are a way to make sense of himself, his life, and the “reality” around him.  Herzog’s intellectual brain needs to take in everything and join it all together somehow, just has he has done in his scholarly work.  Throughout the novel, Herzog demonstrates an incredible knowledge of scientific, literary, and philosophical facts, and his intellect runs tirelessly over them.

In the end, what Herzog seems to be struggling for is a “grand synthesis.”  Near the end of the novel itself, Herzog is writing a letter to a Russian author whose work he admires, and he write, “’Synthesize or perish!’  Is that the new law?”  And indeed, that seems to be the pitch of his fevered mind.  At this stage in the novel, he is dubious of his abilities to achieve this synthesis: “Anyway the intellectual has been a Separatist.  And what kind of synthesis is a Separatist likely to come up with?”  But before this point, and throughout the novel, Herzog (and Bellow) play with all kinds of antitheses that seem to be in need of some healing syntheses:  there are concerns about what is the domain of man and what is the domain of woman, the Romanticists are pitted against the Realists, Herzog’s European feelings are held up in opposition to his brother’s American behavior, and Herzog’s emotional storm beats against the stoicism of those around him.  These are but a few of the recurring antithetical themes that play like individual melodies in search of a uniting symphony.  Herzog’s efforts, like everything else in his life, prove to be a failure, but like all the failures in his life, this one is hardly catastrophic.  In fact, it is sweet and beautiful and a gift to us readers.  He may not find the answer to it all, but he does find an inner peace, a moment when he had “no messages for anyone.  Nothing.  Not a single word.”

I had plans to discuss each one of the sets of antitheses above, but I see now that this post would be ridiculously long if I were to go on.  I will leave those essays for another day and most likely another person. 

This is my second Saul Bellow book, and while The Adventures of Augie March left me disappointed, Herzog has satisfied me greatly, filling my intellect, my sympathy, my humanism, and my love of a well turned sentence.  Herzog is by no means a quick read, but some things should force you to slow down and engage your mind and spirit.  This book is well worth the time.

Augie Marches On and On

My experience reading Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March was a mixed bag.  There were several aspects of the novel that I truly enjoyed and admired, and there were several things I learned about myself and what I want out of a reading experience.

What I really enjoyed in the novel was Bellow's entire cast of characters.  The novel is narrated in the first person by the titular Augie March.  Augie tells the story of his life from his early childhood on the South side of Chicago during the depression to his time in Paris as a married man in his mid- to late-twenties.  His adventures are filled with many wonderful odd and fantastically-sketched people who run in and out of his life.  And all these characters have their own motives, desires, and designs that dictate what they do.  Bellow has an excellent eye for characters.  None of them makes a false move or does something solely for the movement of the plot.  Each action is true to that character, and that is an impressive feat.

Augie himself is drawn with precision and consistency, and given how long the novel is, that too is impressive.  Unlike most first-person narrators, Augie is reliable in his account of his actions, motives, thoughts as well as those of others.  The continuous theme in Augie's life is that he is someone who "other people are always trying to fit into their schemes":

External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it.  You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances.  This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live.  And this is what mere humanity always does.  It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make believe.  The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that's what their power is.

Augie keeps running into people who attempt to "recruit" him, as he says.  But Augie also knows that he's "got opposition in" him too, and after being pulled in by these recruiters, he continually pulls away, giving up what he has been given for freedom to decide things for himself.  Aware of this tendency in others to recruit, Augie goes out of his way to avoid recruiting his readers.  Augie openly discusses his ugly impulses and his noble ones.  There is not a character that crosses his path in whom Augie doesn't find something admirable, something ugly, something good, and something bad.

Those moments of analysis and insight are some of the novels most enjoyable passages and rewarding parts.  Augie himself, in his even-keeled approach to others and honest reporting of his own actions, is a very likeable guy.

But in making such a likable and even-keeled character, Bellow has a hard time putting Augie into compelling situations.  As a reader, I never once worried about Augie.  I always had the same distance that he did and I never really felt like anything was risked.

For example, when Augie is engaged to Lucy, his brother's wife's cousin, he is on tenuous ground with Lucy's family.  Lucy has money and is a possible escape from poverty for Augie.  Meanwhile, Augie's neighbor Mimi becomes pregnant by her boyfriend and relies on Augie to help her obtain an abortion.  As Augie joins her in a trip to the doctor, Augie is seen with Mimi leaning against him by another one of Lucy's cousins who has it in for Augie.  His goose is cooked.  He can't possibly expect Lucy's family to believe the truth.  But there is zero point zero drama in this entire exchange.  Augie doesn't really care all that much for Lucy anyway, and he doesn't really care all that much for money either.  He's not even really bothered that he's going to be accused of something that isn't so.

The only time Augie even cares about a major change in his life is when Thea leaves him.  But by this point, Augie's resilience is so well established that I was never worried about his well being.  I knew that he would make it through with no real sense of loss or pain, that he would keep on keeping on and find love again. 

There was nothing to pull me on other than idle curiosity (and my desire to have read the book for the sake of this project).  It took me three months to read The Adventures of Augie March.  Now that's not all Bellow's fault, of course.  Part of the slow-going was because I am a slow reader.  Another part was because my October, November, and early December were incredibly busy, and my work ate up all my spare time.  But I imagine I would have made more time to read had the movement of Augie's story been more compelling.  I didn't try to sneak in a paragraph here or there to see what happened, because even when something was happening (and a lot did happen) it didn't hold any emotional weight. 

(As a side note, I discovered reading this novel, that I am a big fan of meaty scenes in a novel.  I love when a scene takes place and characters, grounded in a physical location, act and react to each other and move the story on by their exchanges and interactions.  So much of The Adventures of Augie March is about thoughts and theories and large actions that there are very few scenes that hold much weight.  The scenes that do take place give us bits of dialogue and interesting exchanges but nothing much to chew on.)

For all the things the book had going for it--character, sharp writing, interesting observations about life and purpose--this lack of propulsion and emotional contact undercut my ability to enjoy the novel.  If you read it, I hope you are able to get more out of it than I did.