man on the edge of a nervous breakdown - on reading Saul Bellow's Herzog

1st edition cover

Sometimes I begin to read book club selections like a recalcitrant student, plowing through dutifully, and without much enjoyment.  Why do I pick these books? If I hadn't been contracted to facilitate the book group discussion, I probably wouldn't finish some of these selections.

But perversely, that's why I pick them.  I pick them because something inside me knows that I can't just stick to what comes naturally, to what comforts and entertains.  I want to grow as a person and as a reader, so I must get out of my comfort zone.  Probably this is why lots of people participate in book clubs.  The added incentive of discussion at the end,  gets us through books we wouldn't read otherwise.

Nine times out of ten, I understand upon finishing such books - in this case, upon finishing Herzog, why it was important reading and why it's considered a masterpiece. My understanding of literature and of humankind has been broadened.  My capacity for empathy has enlarged,  as has my admiration for the author, and for what goes into writing something that will stand the test of time.

But when I started Herzog, I was thoroughly annoyed. Something about Saul Bellow has always annoyed me.  Maybe because he comes from a certain epoch where casual sexism and racism, a sense of white male entitlement and being at the top of your game is never for a moment questioned.  And although this novel was written in 1964, there's no nod to a contemporary sensibility about the culture. It is a man's world - an intellectual white man's world at that, and there's no inkling of any social or political unrest brewing, any shifting mores for women or people of color, nor any attempt to see things through their eyes.

This is underscored by the character of Moses Herzog (and Herzog is a roman a clef), recently divorced and in a fragile psychological state. He decides to write letters to all and sundry: ex wife,  dead family members, New York Times, childhood pals.  He's sorting through his life, airing grievances, ranting and looking for escape. He buys new clothes although he professes not to care about them, and takes up social invitations in the hopes of distracting himself. But since most of the action takes place inside his head - the letters pour forth as the ramblings and scrawlings of a disturbed but brilliant mind.

Here he is writing to the Times.  "Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in the Marxian sense. In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair and to read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. De Tocqueville considered the impulse towards well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society...." etc.   Do you get why it's annoying?

Yet Herzog is perfectly justified to himself. He's no cuckold and no fool. Nor is he mad; he has intellectual range and taste. He appreciates women as sexual objects, especially Ramona who is "lovely, fragrant, sexual, good to the touch. " He also has a finely tuned sense of the injustice of his own personal history.  Maybe because his intellectual faculties are so finely tuned, as is his sense of his position in the world, I did not at first recognize that he's holding on to sanity by a thread.  He pays great attention to his physical care - to bathing,  shaving and dressing rituals with a self-satisfied vanity, and as he muses about his ex wife Madeleine, his friend and betrayer Valentine Gersbach, his childhood friend Asphalter, or lover Ramona,  we experience his whole life.

It isn't until the final third of the novel that all the pieces pull together.  He goes to Chicago to visit his daughter June and after a car accident visits a house he owns in the Berkshires.  The full force of his breakdown comes crashing down and the writing reaches a glorious crescendo.  Finally the notion of  "a man at the top of his game" is questioned and collapses.

Entering the house- the money pit Herzog invested in for Madeleine and June's sakes, he finds it in  terrible disrepair.  He enters the bedroom where "He found the young owls in the large light fixture over the bed where he and Madeleine had known so much misery and hatred. (some delight as well.) On the mattress much nest litter had fallen - straws, wool threads, down, bits of flesh (mouse ends) and streaks of excrement.  Unwilling to disturb these flat faced little creatures, Herzog pulled the mattress of his marriage bed into June's room.  He opened more windows, and the sun and country air at once entered. He was surprised to feels such contentment.... contentment?  Whom was he kidding, this was joy!"

And what joy I experienced reading these final chapters. The writing is so good that it almost disappears - and you are fully inside the experience. With the last lines of the novel, tears came into my eyes.   No, I never liked Moses Herzog. I actively disliked him. Were I to encounter a man like this in real life, I'd have neither patience nor sympathy.   So it's pretty wonderful to have spent several hours in his company and to have allowed his state, his story, to affect me like this.  The best kind of reading can be like that sometimes.

#herzog #saulbellow