Herzog

My third look at the famous births of 1915 is Saul Bellow, the great Canadian-American writer. I have read a few of his books, but none lately, and they were later works. One of the amusing stories from my childhood is that I did my book report on his novel Humboldt's Gift in 10th grade, when all the other kids were doing horror novels.

His most acclaimed work is Herzog, published in 1964 and winner of the National Book Award. It fits into a genre of American literature that might be called Jewish--in many ways it's similar to the style of Philip Roth, and as with Roth's work, deals with the many loves of an academic who is cracking up.

Herzog has a thin plot. We find Moses Herzog as the book starts after the breakup of his second marriage, in his home in the Berkshires, roughing it. We will follow him to New York, Martha's Vineyard, and then to Chicago, the city Bellow is most associated with, as the hapless Herzog seeks to gain custody of his young daughter by carrying his deceased father's antique pistol with two bullets in it (his wife has left him for a family friend). Along the way, Herzog ruminates on his life, and writes many letters, both to people he knows and doesn't know, usually expressing some kind of outrage. None of these letters are sent.

The book, while at times highly amusing and with prose that can soar, is not an easy read. Often, due to a lack of a cohesive plot, I found my eyes sliding off the page. What Bellow does do is somehow make this guy likable and even sympathetic. His list of faults is nearly endless, including that he has no compunction about borrowing money from his richer brothers, but as we walk a mile or several hundred in his shoes he starts to grow on us.

Herzog is an academic, specializing in the Romantic poets, which is funny because romance is not Herzog's strength. He does have a successful relationship with an earthy woman named Ramona, who is also to be good to be true, and he remembers a relationship with a kind Japanese woman. But his second ex, Madeline, is a holy terror, who duped him into moving to Chicago and then having family friends, the Gersbachs, move with them, even to the point of getting the man, Valentine, a job. Madeline and Valentine were having an affair, and she throws Herzog out. His rage is understandable.

Setting is important in the novel. Bellow, though born in Montreal, was associated with Chicago, and when Herzog finally arrives there it feels like a climax of sorts. "He did not know these new sections of Chicago. Clumsy, stinking, tender Chicago, dumped on its ancient lake bottom; and this murky orange west, and the hoarseness of factories and trains, spilling gases and soot on the newborn summer."

While Chicago feels like Herzog's crucible, the Berkshires is his alternate world, where nature intrudes. It's a house in Ludeyville, which isn't even where the swells buy near Barrington, but off the beaten path. He has pumped a ton of money into the house, but it feels to him like an unnecessary appendage, and he can't keep the wild out. At the beginning of the book a mouse burrows its way into a loaf of bread, leaving a mouse-shaped hole in it, like a cartoon rodent. When he returns to it late in the book, he finds owls have made a nest in the light fixtures, and little bird skulls are in the toilet, where they perished after nesting and the lid closed to entomb them.

Herzog is the kind of book that requires more than one read and a major dose of concentration. It is about love and madness, which Bellow would seem to equate to each other: "In emancipated New York, man and woman, gaudily disguised, like two savages belonging to hostile tribes, confront each other. The man wants to deceive, and then to disengage himself; the woman's strategy is to disarm and detain him."

I'd like to read more Bellow, as I feel tantalized if not completely fulfilled yet.