“Herzog” is the book that made Saul Bellow famous. He was forty-nine years old when it came out, in 1964. He had enjoyed critical esteem since the publication of his first novel, “Dangling Man,” in 1944, and he had won a National Book Award for “The Adventures of Augie March” in 1954. But “Herzog” turned him into a public figure, a writer of books known even to people who don’t read books—an “author.” At a ceremony honoring the success of “Herzog” at city hall in Chicago, Bellow’s home town, a reporter asked the mayor, Richard J. Daley, whether he’d read the novel.
Seize The Day By Saul Bellow
“I’ve looked into it,” Daley said. You get enough people saying that and you have a best-seller.
“Herzog” sold a hundred and forty-two thousand hardcover copies and remained on best-seller lists for forty-two weeks. Paperback rights to that novel and Bellow’s earlier books were bought for big advances, and, for the first time in his life, Bellow had money. A house he owned in upstate New York that he had complained about for years as a white elephant he gave away, to Bard College, to get the tax deduction. “Herzog” also marks the moment when, in terms that Bellow’s son Greg later used to describe his father, “young Saul” began to turn into “old Saul.” Authors are objects of cathexis, some of it idolizing, some of it envious, a fair amount both. Their names are on every short list; their views are solicited on every topic. Bellow ended up with the most impressive trophy haul in his generation of American writers: three National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and a Nobel.
Summary Of Seize The Day By Saul Bellow
He also got drawn into political, generational, and culture-war-type disputes of the sort that, as a young man, he had been careful to avoid. Bellow was sharp, well read, and observant, and he prided himself on his street smarts. But he was a fictionalist, not an editorialist—a bird, as he liked to say, not an ornithologist. Recognition magnifies idiosyncrasies. Personality traits affectionately condoned “in the family” display differently on the big stage. A characteristic of Bellow’s mentioned by nearly everyone who knew him was his touchiness. He cut people who commented critically on drafts he sent them for comment, and he imagined conspiracies operating behind negative reviews or press coverage that he regarded as less than flattering.
He broke with old friends after political disagreements over dinner. These reflexes did not serve him well out in the arena. After he got in trouble with multiculturalists for asking an interviewer “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, the Proust of the Papuans?,” he published a Times Op-Ed piece in which, while attempting to distance himself from the remark, he called his critics Stalinists. RPC Main.
This did not clear the air. There’s something else that people who knew Bellow almost always mention, which is that he was uncommonly good-looking. Also charming, seductive, and totally game: he fell for beautiful women and beautiful women fell for him. Sexual attention matters to everybody; it mattered exceedingly to Bellow.
He was described by women who knew him intimately as domineering but needy. Successful seduction seems to have been a form of validation, and a prescription refillable as necessary. In short, Bellow was a man who liked to be stroked, and who was suspicious of strokers. Factor in brains and an exceptional gift and you get a fairly complicated piece of work.
And every book that has been written about Bellow by someone who was close to him is to some degree hostile toward its subject. This is true of books by Bellow’s literary agent Harriet Wasserman (“Handsome Is”: title says it all), his son Greg (“Saul Bellow’s Heart”), and his first biographer, James Atlas. Two biographers-in-waiting, Mark Harris and Ruth Miller, eventually admitted defeat and published books in which Bellow figures as an enchanting but exhausting tease. Zachary Leader met Bellow only once. That was in 1972, at a party near Harvard, where Leader was a graduate student and Bellow was being awarded an honorary degree. Leader says that Bellow seemed bored, and he remembers nothing of what Bellow said.
In the genre of Bellow biography, this counts as a credential. Leader’s “The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune” (Knopf) is the story of young Saul. It opens in Russia, where Bellow’s parents and his three siblings were born, and it closes with “Herzog.” (A second volume is promised.) As a piece of research and writing, the book is worthy in multiple ways. The best thing about it is that Leader understands literature—he is a professor of English who teaches in London—so he’s interested in Bellow for the right reasons, and his critical assessments are informed and disinterested. He knows his way around the inbred worlds of the little magazines where Bellow made his name and the college literature departments where, for many years, he earned his living. Not the best thing about the book is the length. Together with the unusually informative notes, the text is more than seven hundred and eighty pages, and there are forty years still to go.
That’s over a hundred pages longer than Atlas’s biography—which is also well researched and well written, and which Leader cites and acknowledges frequently. The trouble is not that Leader is verbose. The trouble arises from the central problem of Bellow criticism, which is how to pull the life apart from the art. Leader is alive to the problem; he devotes much of his introduction to it. But he hasn’t entirely solved it.
“I am an American, Chicago born” begins the famous first sentence of “The Adventures of Augie March.” The author of that sentence was actually an illegal immigrant, Canada born, and the words were written in Paris. Bellow’s father, Abraham Belo, was born in a shtetl inside the Pale of Settlement. He began his career in St. Petersburg as a produce broker, specializing in Egyptian onions and Spanish fruit.
The family seems to have been quite well off. Abraham had used a forged document to work in St. Petersburg, and, when this was discovered, he was arrested and convicted.
He may have gone to prison. But he managed to escape and, in 1913, to get his family to Canada.
They settled in Lachine, outside Montreal, where Abraham tried farming, and where, in 1915, Saul was born. When the farm failed, the family moved into the city and Abraham took up bootlegging, a venture that ended even more disastrously. In 1924, he moved again, to Chicago, and engaged some bootlegging associates to smuggle his wife and children across the border to join him. Abraham spent the rest of his life in Chicago, and he ended up running a retail coal business.
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But he never really learned English—Yiddish was the language at home—and he never became a citizen. He had no passport and no driver’s license (which didn’t prevent him from driving). Saul did not become an American citizen until 1943. But Chicago was a city of immigrants. It also had a large Jewish population—by 1931, according to Leader, nearly three hundred thousand in a city of 3.3 million. All the Bellow children assimilated happily and all became well off. Saul is often associated with the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years as a member of the legendary Committee on Social Thought.
He was a student there, but for less than two years. He had to withdraw for financial reasons (a truck driver was killed in an accident at his father’s coal yard and the insurance had lapsed), and he transferred to Northwestern, from which he graduated in 1937. In his Op-Ed about the Zulu Tolstoy, Bellow made much of his academic training in anthropology.
After leaving Northwestern, he did become a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. But he completed just one course before dropping out and returning to Chicago, where he married a woman, Anita Goshkin, who was studying for a master’s degree in social work, and began his career as a fiction writer and itinerant college teacher. His first job was at Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College, on South Michigan Avenue, in downtown Chicago. I have just given you the back story and the dramatis personae of “Herzog.” “Herzog” is a novel about a forty-seven-year-old man having a nervous breakdown after learning that his much younger wife, who has left him abruptly, had been cheating on him with his closest friend.
The man seeks succor in the arms of a loving, patient, and understanding woman. There is at least one respect in which the novel is not based on real life: Bellow didn’t have a nervous breakdown.
He wrote “Herzog” instead. He also got married again, in 1961, to Susan Glassman, another celebrated beauty, this time eighteen years younger. (Glassman was a former girlfriend of Philip Roth, who said that the transfer of affections “turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me and the worst thing that ever happened to Saul.” The marriage lasted five years; she was still taking Bellow to court in 1981.) “Herzog” is a revenge novel. The ex-wife, Madeleine, is a stone-cold man-killer. Her lover, Valentine Gersbach, is described as a “loud, flamboyant, ass-clutching brute.” Ludwig had a Ph.D. And a damaged foot; Bellow makes Gersbach a radio announcer with a wooden leg. The Herzog character is passive, loving, an innocent soul who cannot make sense of a world in which people like his estranged wife and her lover can exist.
He is an ex-university professor, the author of a distinguished tome called “Romanticism and Christianity.” The Rosette Lamont character, called Ramona, is a sexpot with a heart of gold; she specializes in intimate candlelight dinners and lacy lingerie. She is a professor of love, not French. “Herzog” was nevertheless received the way all Bellow’s novels had been received: as a report on the modern condition. Many of the critics who reviewed it—Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Richard Ellmann, Richard Poirier—knew Bellow personally and knew all about the divorce. (Poirier was an old friend of Ludwig’s; the review he published, in Partisan Review, was a hatchet job.) None of these reviewers mentioned the autobiographical basis of the book, and several of them warned against reading it autobiographically, without ever explaining why anyone might want to. The world had no way of knowing that the story was not completely made up.
Howe wrote that “Herzog” was a novel “driven by an idea”—the idea that modern man can overcome alienation and despair. Howe could see the appeal of this idea, but he was worried that it might not have been “worked out with sufficient care.” The reviewer in the Times Book Review thought that the novel offered “a credo for the times.” “The age is full of fearful abysses,” the reviewer explained. “If people are to go ahead, they must move into and through these abysses,” and so on. Bellow must have been tickled to death. The inventive feature of “Herzog” is a series of letters that the protagonist, in his misery, composes not only to Madeleine and Gersbach but to famous people (like President Eisenhower) and philosophers (like Heidegger and Nietzsche). These long letters, unfinished and unmailed, are sendups of an intellectual’s effort to understand human behavior by means of the conceptual apparatus of Mortimer Adler’s Great Books.
Herzog is a comic figure, a holy fool, a schlimazel with a Ph.D. The whole point of his story is that when you are completely screwed the best you can hope for is a little sex and sympathy. The Western canon isn’t going to be much help. The determination to consider the novel strictly as fiction extended even to its characters. Rosette Lamont reviewed the novel. She, too, treated the book as pure make-believe. She breezed right by the Ramona character (“Her religion is sex, a welcome relief from Madeleine’s phony conversion.
But Herzog is too divided in his mind, too busy with resentment to free himself from a heavy conscience. Besides he is suspicious of pleasure, having learned Julien Sorel’s lesson,” and so on).
She concluded with the thought that at the end of the novel Herzog enters into “a theandric relationship with the world around him.” And it got even better. Jack Ludwig reviewed the novel. He informed readers of Holiday that “the book is a major breakthrough.” By no means should it be read as autobiography—“as if an artist with Bellow’s enormous gifts were simply playing at second-guessing reality, settling scores.” No, in this book, Ludwig wrote, “Bellow is after something greater.” The greater something turns out to be “man’s contradiction, his absurdity, his alienation,” and so on. It was pretty chutzpadik, as even Bellow had to admit.
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But by then he was laughing all the way to the bank.
Download EBOOK Seize the Day PDF for free The author of the book: Format files: PDF, EPUB The size of the: 474 KB Language: English ISBN-13: 612 Edition: Penguin Publishing Group Date of issue: 4/15/2003 Description of the book 'Seize the Day': “What makes all of this so remarkable is not merely Bellow’s eye and ear for vital detail. Nor is it his talent for exposing the innards of character in a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It is Bellow’s vision, his uncanny ability to seize the moment and to PDF see beyond it.” –Chicago Sun-Times Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared.
In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: He is separated from his wife and children, at odds with his ePub vain, successful father, failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once cast him as the “type that loses the girl”), and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious philosophizing con man grants him a PDF glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding, and offers him one last hope. This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Cynthia Ozick.
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