At the novel’s close, an ineffable calm and resolve settles over Herzog. Intimations of this state occur earlier in the novel. At Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, he waits for a ferry in the late afternoon sun:
He loved to think about the power of the sun, about light, about the ocean. The purity of the air moved him. There was no stain in the water, where schools of minnows swam. Herzog sighed and said to himself, “Praise God—praise God.” His breathing had become freer. His heart was greatly stirred by the open horizon; the deep color; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising from weeds and mollusks; the white, fine, heavy sand; but principally by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines. Never still. If his soul could cast a reflection so brilliant, and so intensely sweet, he might beg God to make such use of him (p. 508).
This wish Herzog immediately checks: “too simple,” “too childish,” the sun is in fact “not clear like this, but turbulent, angry” (p. 508). Nonetheless, the moment, like Tommy Wilhelm’s perception of the luminescent water glasses in Seize the Day, lingers, as does a comparable moment in a Western Union office in Hyde Park. Standing in the office, Moses suddenly finds “ground to hope that a Life is something more than such a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light. This was by no means a ‘general idea’ with him now. It was far more substantial than anything he saw in this intensely lighted telegraph office. It all seemed to him exceptionally clear” (pp. 685–86). A similar clarity, what Richard Ellmann in his review of the novel calls “a state of secular blessedness,” is reached by Herzog at the novel’s close. He returns to his ramshackle house in Ludeyville in the Berkshires, a thinly fictionalized Tivoli. In the sparkling summer light, the unoccupied house “rose out of weeds, vines, trees and blossoms” (p. 730). Herzog calls it his folly, “Monument to his sincere and loving idiocy, to the unrecognized evils of his character” (p. 730). As he begins to recount these evils, he stops: “But enough of that—here I am. Hineni! How marvelously beautiful it is today” (p. 731).
Hineni is Hebrew for “Here I am,” the word of acceptance uttered by Abraham as he prepares to sacrifice Isaac. It signals Herzog’s acceptance not only of his situation, but of his faith in the ideals the modern world would deny, and behind them, of something, a radiance, that stands in the place of Abraham’s God. Herzog surveys the garden, “a thick mass of thorny canes, roses and berries twisted together. It looked too hopeless—past regretting” (p. 731). He enters the musty house. Cans of food are stacked in the kitchen, “fancy goods bought by Madeleine … S.S. Pierce terrapin soup, Indian pudding, truffles, olives” (p. 731). He starts a fire in the fireplace and as the bark drops away from an old log, the insects underneath, “grubs, ants, long-legged spiders,” scramble away. He gives them “every opportunity to escape” (p. 731). In the toilet bowl he finds “the small beaked skulls and other remains of birds who had nested there after the water was drained, and then had been entombed by the falling lid. He looked grimly in, his heart aching somewhat at this accident” (p. 733). Flat-faced owls perch on the red valances in the bedroom. “He gave them every opportunity to escape, and, when they were gone, looked for a nest. He found the young owls in the large light fixture over the bed where he and Madeleine had known so much misery and hatred” (pp. 733–34). Not wishing to disturb the owlets, he lugs the mattress into June’s room. He opens windows to let the clear summer air in and is “surprised to feel contentment … contentment? Whom was he kidding, this was joy! … His servitude was ended, and his heart released from its grisly heaviness and encrustation” (p. 734). Now begins the last series of letters, including a letter to Madeleine and Gersbach: “Dear Madeleine—You are a terrific one, you are! Bless you! What a creature! … And you, Gersbach, you’re welcome to Madeleine. Enjoy her—rejoice in her. You will not reach me through her, however. I know you sought me in her flesh. But I am no longer there” (p. 739).
Forgiveness is offered, but with bite, lending realism to Herzog’s transformation. Also realistic is the shakiness with which he negotiates the visit of his brother Will, who has come to Ludeyville to see if he’s all right. Will is worried that Moses may need to be committed to some sort of hospital. “He must be very careful with Will,” Herzog thinks, “and talk to him only in the most concrete terms about concrete matters” (p. 747). The dialogue between the two brothers (briefly discussed in Chapter 4) is touching. Will shows “great politeness” (p. 751) to Moses, is obviously concerned and obviously loves him; Moses, in turn, feels great sympathy for Will, for the restraints he has imposed upon himself. Will, being a Herzog, “had a good deal to hold down” in maintaining his habitual “poise and quiet humor, part decorousness, part (possibly) slavery” (p. 749), a realization that brings Moses to the verge of tears. The meeting between the brothers follows the last of the letters written from Ludeyville, a few brief lines to God:
How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense. I have not been too good at it. But I have desired to do your unknowable will, taking it, and you, without symbols. Everything of intensest significance. Especially if divested of me (p. 747).
At this point Moses lies down under the locust trees outside the house. He feels “confident, even happy in his excitement, stable” (p. 747). In the very last pages of the novel Ramona comes to visit and Herzog treats her with new consideration. She has afforded him, as have his other lovers, consolation and escape, not only from Madeleine but from the self-image Madeleine has left him with, as failed lover and husband. Now he will care for her. He buys candles for the dinner they are to have, because he knows she likes them. He picks flowers for her, confident “that they couldn’t be turned against him” (Ramona is a florist). Ellen Pifer is good on this moment: “Herzog is for once the assertive host rather than Ramona’s passive guest. Earlier in New York City, she had been ‘emphatic about the wine,’ refusing to let him bring a bottle along for the dinner. At that time Herzog attributed her insistence that he not bring wine to the ‘feeling of protectiveness’ he ‘produced’ in people. Now it is Herzog’s turn to insist on supplying all the provisions for dinner—and the ‘emphatic’ tone is his. ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ he tells Ramona when she offers to bring the wine.”55
In the novel’s final paragraph Herzog declares that he will write no more letters. “Whatever had come over him during these last months, the spell, really seemed to be passing, really going” (p. 763). After returning home with provisions, he lies down again, this time on the couch. He hears the “steady scratching” of the cleaning lady’s broom and thinks he should tell her to sprinkle the floor with water, so as not to raise so much dust. “In a few minutes he would call down to her, ‘Damp it down, Mrs. Tuttle. There’s water in the sink.’ But not just yet. At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.” These are the final words of the novel and their effect, or one of their effects, is to call to mind and complicate the novel’s opening sentence, consistent through all drafts: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” This sentence, the ending reminds us, is uttered after the “spell” has broken, and refers not to Moses’s fevered letter writing and erratic behavior, but to his newfound calm. In a review of Herzog in The Massachusetts Review, Rosette Lamont, the model for Ramona, commends the “wonderful sense of peace” at the novel’s conclusion, describing as “Buddhist” Herzog’s reverence for all forms of life.56 She also recalls his attraction to the Russian religious philosophers Soloviev (with his theory that for the Jews God is “a subsistent I”) and Berdyaev (who claims that religious life, in Lamont’s paraphrase, “must pass from the subjective, individualistic phase into a phase of supra-rational, supra-personal spirituality”).57 The Russian she might also have mentioned is Tolstoy. At the end of Anna Karenina, a novel Bellow frequently taught while at work on Herzog, Levin, like Herzog, returns to his estate in the country and attains a sp
iritual certainty difficult for him to explain:
“This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened me all of a sudden as I had dreamed it would.… There was no surprise about it either. But whether it is faith or not—I don’t know what it is—but that feeling has entered just as imperceptibly into my soul through suffering and has lodged itself there firmly.
“I shall still get angry with my coachman Ivan, I shall still argue and express my thoughts inopportunely; there will still be a wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife, and I shall still blame her for my own fears and shall regret it; I shall still be unable to understand with my reason why I am praying, and I shall continue to pray—but my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen, every moment of it, is no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an incontestable meaning of goodness, with which I have the power to invest it.”58
NOT ALL CRITICS OF HERZOG were persuaded by Moses’s comparable transformation, not even those who praised the novel and counted themselves Bellow’s friends. Ted Solotaroff found the prose of the concluding section “so naturally luminous and moving that one tends to overlook the fact that it is quietly burying most of the issues that earlier had been raised in connection with Herzog’s relations to society. At the end, he rests more firmly and spiritually in his passivity, but it is still passivity.” And later: “Isn’t he merely availing himself of the solace of faith without committing himself to its substance? … God requires more desire than Herzog has to give; so far he hasn’t abandoned the old Self but merely found an illusion of having done so.”59 Another critic, Roger Sale, also in a positive notice, described Herzog in the concluding part of the novel as “simply and unhelpfully full of faith.”60 The most forceful and wounding of the objections to Herzog’s transformation came from Richard Poirier, who first met Bellow in 1960 at Bard College, “when I was visiting my friends and his, Jack Ludwig and his wife Leah [Leya].”61 Poirier and Ludwig coedited the volume Stories, British and Modern (1953) and during the years Bellow and Ludwig were best friends, the three men met on several occasions, both in New York and in Boston (where Poirier was a professor of English at Harvard from 1953 to 1961). Bellow and Poirier also met for dinner at Lillian Hellman’s house in Martha’s Vineyard, when Poirier was a houseguest and Hellman was helping Bellow with The Last Analysis. Bellow invited Poirier to the launch party for Herzog at “21,” where, according to Poirier, they “had a brief but pleasant exchange, though not about the book, which I hadn’t yet read. He asked, among other things, how I was getting on at Partisan Review (where I had been an editor) with William Phillips and Philip Rahv.”
That Poirier’s review appeared in Partisan Review (“Bellows to Herzog,” Spring 1965) compounded Bellow’s upset and caused a bitter break with William Phillips (Rahv at this time, according to Phillips, “contributed very little to the daily running of the magazine, very little to the editorial side”62); many years later, when Poirier and Phillips were admitted as members of the Century Association, Bellow resigned in protest.63 Poirier’s review begins “Herzog is an insufferably smug book” and ends by calling its hero’s ideas “sophomoric tag-lines” that “don’t deserve the status of ‘ideas.’ Whatever they are they’re really as comfortable as old shoes, especially when you can so believe in their ‘unbearable intensity’ that you can lie down. And it is from this position that the story is told.”64 The letters, Poirier writes, “for all the parroted praise the reviews have given them, are frequently uninventive and tiresome” (p. 267). They are “pseudo-philosophical or sociological or historical expansions” of the hero’s parochial or personal dilemmas, lamentable because Bellow takes them straight, having lost “his customary ear for banality of expression or for the fatuity of the expressions thus phrased” (p. 267). Poirier was a formidably well-read and penetrating critic who deserves to be taken seriously. So was Frank Kermode, who reviewed the novel in the New Statesman (November 5, 1965). For Kermode, the letters are an ingenious way of showing “an intellectual operating in the world.” “They seem to me to have the exceptional merit of turning the technical trick and then, because sparingly used and full of wit, to become delightful in themselves.” In a passage of Poirier’s review that recalls John Bayley on Bellow’s debt to the Victorians, the “thought” or “idea” sections of the novel are said to “read like a lesser Middlemarch, the longest of the ‘ridiculous’ letters offering pretty much what Bellow-Herzog want to say about ‘modern’ life.” “Ridiculous,” here, is Herzog’s word and points to Poirier’s other main objection to the novel: that Herzog’s self-criticisms allow Bellow to “operate snugly (and smugly) within the enclosure of his hero’s recollections, assured, at least to his own satisfaction, that he has anticipated and therefore forestalled antagonistic intrusions from outside.” Herzog’s sufferings at the hands of Gersbach and Madeleine (whose versions of the betrayal, which Poirier calls “alleged,” never appear) “issue forth less as accusations against others than as self-contempt for his having been cozened by them.” As a consequence, according to Poirier, they help to support the hero’s “claims to guiltlessness” (p. 267). Poirier’s “alleged” I take to be a slip, as it calls to mind the book’s real-life origins, high-mindedly ignored elsewhere in the review. The novel itself offers no reason to question the betrayals.
Poirier’s criticisms nestle cheek by jowl with praise for the Napoleon Street sections of the novel and what he calls “the world of Herzog,” a creation of “an energy marvelously wasteful of detail, dazzling in its plays of style, properly self-delighting in its ingenuities of pace and timing and proportion” (p. 266). Poirier associates energy with excess, transgression, performance, qualities Herzog distrusts and relates to Romantic and modernist notions of the artist as alienated outsider or outlaw. In Poirier’s view, the letters and other extended “ideas” passages in Herzog are deficient in energy; he sees them, I’d suggest, much as others see the heroes and heroines of Dickens novels (the Esther Summersons and David Copperfields) or Milton’s God in comparison to his Satan. “My objection isn’t merely that Bellow would replace the ‘commonplaces’ of alienation with even more obvious commonplaces about ‘the longing to be human,’ ” Poirier writes. “I mean that his works, the truest and sure direction of their energy, suggest to me that imaginatively Bellow does not himself find a source of order in these common places” (p. 268). For Poirier, goodness or “the longing to be human,” like Henry de Montherlant’s happiness (“Le bonheur”), writes white, as Milton, for William Blake, “was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”65 Poirier admired the writing of Norman Mailer, very much a writer of the Devil’s party, author of “The White Negro” (1957), with its praise of the hipster as psychopath. Mailer’s latest novel, An American Dream (1965), was serialized monthly in Esquire in 1964. It opens with the hero, Stephen Rojack, strangling his wife, then walking downstairs to bugger the wife’s German maid. Mailer was famous for having stabbed his second wife in 1960 and nearly killing her. Poirier defended the novel against the criticisms of Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Rahv, and others in a review in the June 1965 issue of Commentary.
Mailer at this date was almost as famous for literary pugilism as for wife stabbing, and had been jabbing at Bellow for some time. He called The Adventures of Augie March “a travelogue for timid intellectuals,” complaining that Bellow’s writing “does no obvious harm, but I think one must not be easy on art which tries for less than it can manage.”66 Though he praised Henderson the Rain King in a review in Esquire—the review begins “Well, one might as well eat crow right here. Henderson is an exceptional character, almost worthy of Gulliver or Huckleberry Finn”—he also pronounced the ending a damp squib and Bellow “too timid to become a great writer.”67 Bellow responded coolly in an interview of 1964. “I’m sure I’m not a great writer in Norman Mailer’s light, but then I don’t want to be a great writer in Norman Mailer’s light. I satisfy neither his
idea of greatness nor mine.… I sense in Mailer a certain pathos; he senses a rudderless feeling in himself and all the rest. He sees me with a bit of a rudder but sailing in the wrong way.”68 When Herzog was published Mailer was asked to comment about both the novel and Bellow’s not wanting to be Mailer’s sort of great writer. At a publishers’ association press conference, Mailer declared that the “moral nihilists” Herzog and Bellow attacked “are responsible for all the real developments in literature. We are the adventurous ones. Conventional morality attacks violence … but better to attack an act of violence against one person than to curb that impulse and spend twenty years poisoning the lives of everyone around you.” As for Herzog, “I admire the novel … very much. But it is not a book of ideas. There is nothing intellectually new in it. Bellow is mindless. There is depth of feeling in his novel. His humanity gets to you. But his mind is that of a college professor who had read all the good books and absorbed none of them.” Mailer concluded by calling his rival novelist a “hostess of the intellectual canapé table,” a remark J. Michael Lennon, Mailer’s biographer, describes as “widely quoted.”69 In less public settings, Mailer was harsher, yet also more admiring. In a letter to Bellow of December 23, 1964, Aaron Asher paraphrased an unprompted drunken monologue Mailer treated him to at a party given by Rust Hills:
He read Herzog with his “pistol out.” Nothing in it works, the women are no good, Herzog is no good, the ideas are no good—Bellow is shopping around among other men’s ideas. The book is scummy. But—he doesn’t exactly know why—the scum is only scum, on the surface. Underneath runs something clean and strong. It’s an important book, “he’s done it, something.” Ramona, what’s she doing with this slob? She should put a pistol to the back of his neck and pull the trigger, “I would.” But there’s all that compassion in it. If Hitler had read the book he would have spared half his victims. I asked, “Are you tougher than Hitler?” He said not to take him literally when he spoke of pistols. All this in his staccato, but fuzzy with drink. And then he said, “But why does Bellow always write about people who are dumber than he is? He’s smart and he writes about fools. I’m the opposite. There aren’t two people in the world less alike than we are.”
The Life of Saul Bellow Page 84