Herzog

Who's Afraid of Saul Bellow?

The rocking chair looked comfortable enough when I decided to sit here and read, but I find myself shifting, distracted. I keep looking up to watch people passing on the sidewalk, following them until they disappear from sight. I seem to be looking for distractions, looking for ways to avoid what I should be doing --reading. The book on my lap is Herzog, by Saul Bellow. I know it's a good book, an important book, one that I want to read, should read, but I've been struggling to finish it for a week now, trying to find a way into it, around it, through it.

It's here on the porch that I realize why I am putting it off, putting it down, putting it away. The book, not the rocking chair, is making me uncomfortable. It's not the discomfort of a novel poorly written, but the opposite. My discomfort is that of a child holding the pieces of a broken vase in front of his mother. Of a woman standing nearly naked in a dressing room and asking a salesperson on the other side of the door for a larger size. It's the uneasiness of someone driving alone with the gas gauge light on and no service station in sight. Herzog is making me nervous.

At the novel's beginning we find the title character, facing his second divorce, separation from his second child, and another in a long line of mistresses, confronting himself: "Late in the spring Herzog had been overcome by the need to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends." What starts out as the listing of proverbs, quotations, and other bits of wisdom expands until Herzog is writing letters. These are addressed to family, to friends, to church clergy, to philosophers and politicians both living and dead, and finally even to God. Herzog begins by writing his story, recounting his wife's infidelity in the arms of his closest friend, but again expands until he is not just discussing his own life but larger questions of life, death, happiness, misery, and obsession.

That I should be so consumed with this novel is surprising to me. That it is making me emotionally uncomfortable is a revelation. Within this novel, there is no stream of action; in fact, little happens outside of Herzog's own mind. But it is within this landscape that he asks the most difficult questions. What is the purpose of living? Is love worth a man's soul? Is religion a way toward life or away from it? Is it within one man's capability to make a difference in the world?

Herzog's obsession with the truth is tainted only with his own weaknesses: his love of sex, of good food, of intellectual stimulation, and of the passions of life. Even in the midst of his own self-deception, Herzog manages to somehow see himself and laugh at his own failings. As he views himself in a mirror, conceding that he is aging and yet still attractive, he allows his sexual desires to overtake his growing realization of his own sadness.

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.

He recognizes, and yet gives into, his own vanity and engrossment with emotional upheaval. Even as he attempts to rise above his own feelings, leaving behind anger over his divorce, sorrow over the loss of his children, and confusion over his past, he is consumed by his own passions. And yet within the letters Herzog becomes more than another tragic figure. His words betray him as thoughtfully moving through his life, finding and facing his faults, admitting to his weaknesses, and seeking higher paths. This all seems like familiar terrain for a novel --love gained then lost due to some personal failing. So why is it bothering me so much?

In the opening line, Herzog questions his own sanity: "If I am out of my mind . . .". At times throughout the novel, his thoughts might very well be beyond the comprehension of most people in his life. But it becomes clear that it's more that he is within his own mind, not out of it. What is making me so nervous is Herzog's ability to confront the generalizations we all accept in life, refining them and stripping them away so that only the barest truths remain. During the course of the day, he is routinely honest with himself in a way most of us are only at our darkest hours; Herzog pulls those dark truths out into the light, even going as far as to write them down. In a sense, that is one of the narrative tensions of the book, that he gives light and words to such brutal self-reflection, that he toys with sending it out into the world. In the midst of this mining his own life for answers, he writes: "The dream of a man's heart, however much we may distrust and resent it, is that life may complete itself in significant pattern."

Herzog attempts to define the patterns in his life by removing himself from his physical life, whether it is in a jail cell in Chicago or holing up in the Berkshires. But he quickly understands the paradox that he will never understand his life if he is out of it. He attempts to leave behind women, his family, his children, and even himself, but with each step, he realizes that it is not in the separation of himself from things but in their presence that he can find understanding.

Within these pages he somehow manages to arrive at the highest truth, that of comprehension. And yet it is in this arrival that he realizes he is unable to reach his goal of understanding. In his cell, he writes: "Neuroses might be graded by the inability to tolerate ambiguous situations. . . . Allow me modestly to claim that I am much better now at ambiguities." While at his home in the country, he writes to God: "How my mind has struggled to make coherent sense. I have not been too good at it, and you, without symbols. Everything of intensest significance. Especially if divested in me." The very fact of his existence, with all of his traits, quirks, and habits, makes it impossible for him to comprehend his life, much less the idea of life in general. Life distracts Herzog from his life. In this moment I can finally clarify for myself what is so unsettling about Bellow's novel. If what Herzog realizes is true, that complete comprehension is beyond our reach, what then can any of us hope to understand? If I find myself sitting on a porch in Georgia, is there meaning in that? Or in the man who walks back and forth up the street carrying an umbrella? If not in those, if not in the smallest of things, then how can we look for it in the largest? In family, God, religion, or love?

His own brother ultimately focuses the power of Herzog's understanding. Responding to Herzog's assertions that he will not marry Ramona, his latest love, Will says, "If you didn't give a goddamn, it wouldn't matter. You could marry five more wives. But with your intense way of doing everything . . . and your talent for making a fatal choice . . .". It is unclear whether Herzog has finally fully recognized his weaknesses and has chosen to live with them, or if even in the face of the irrefutable truth of his letters, he still operates under the impression that he can see beyond himself. Perhaps it's in the tension between those two that a life is lived.

I sleep with Herzog on my bedside table even though I have finished reading it weeks ago. It no longer torments me, baiting me with its questions. Instead somehow it gives me comfort, knowing that even under an intense, ruthless scrutiny like Herzog's, the truths about life often escape us. It is as if in our attempt to bend down and pick up the very answer that we are searching for, we inadvertently kick it ahead of us, sending it rolling further along the path. As I lie in bed at night, letting my thoughts creep into the dimly lit places in my mind, I understand the realization Herzog reaches: that we may either torment ourselves with our own weaknesses or we may embrace them, realizing that perhaps there is not one truth that rules over all of life, but a more intimate truth that we construct from our own understanding.

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