Herzog

Herzog and His Letters

Moses E. Herzog has recently emerged from the worst period of his life. His second wife, Madeleine, has left him for his best friend Valentine Gersbach, and Herzog — a historian of ideas, a failed academic, a man who has spent his life believing that the examined life is the only one worth living — is discovering that examination has not protected him from any of it. He is writing letters. He writes to Nietzsche. He writes to the Mayor of New York. He writes to Eisenhower, to his dead father, to philosophers he disagrees with, to a psychoanalyst whose methods he finds intellectually disreputable. He does not send any of them.

The letters are the novel’s great formal invention. They allow Bellow to give Herzog a mind that is working at full speed — making arguments, making connections, making jokes at his own expense — while also showing that all this activity is a form of avoidance. Herzog cannot feel his grief directly, so he intellectualizes it. He cannot confront Madeleine directly, so he writes letters to Heidegger. The comedy of this gap — between the size of Herzog’s intellectual apparatus and the smallness of his actual problems (he has been betrayed by his wife and his friend; this is common) — is both cruel and genuinely funny.

What saves the letters from being merely comic is that they are often right. Herzog’s disquisitions on the inadequacy of modern nihilism, on the romanticism that underlies supposedly tough-minded despair, on the way intellectuals mistake fashionable pessimism for serious thought — these are not foolish arguments. Bellow was making them himself. Herzog is not a satirical figure. He is a man who is right about many things and has used his rightness as a way of avoiding the one thing he cannot think his way through: the fact that he loved his wife, trusted his friend, and was wrong about both.

The Women

Madeleine, the second wife whose departure has triggered the crisis, is the novel’s absent centre — brilliant, beautiful, theatrical, and ultimately described entirely through Herzog’s devastated perception of her. Bellow does not give her a chapter of her own, which is both a formal choice and a limitation: we see only what Herzog sees, which is a woman who was captivating and who destroyed him. The reader is asked to take a good deal on trust.

The contrast is Ramona, the woman Herzog is seeing during the novel’s present action — a florist, sensuous and warm, who feeds him and asks relatively little of him. Ramona represents the simple pleasures of the body and human company as an alternative to the anguished life of the mind. Herzog’s relationship with her is affectionate but not quite trusting: he suspects that she wants to marry him, that he would be making the same mistake again, that warmth is not enough.

Between Madeleine and Ramona stands Daisy, the first wife, the mother of his son, whom Herzog has treated with the thoughtless cruelty of a man who married the wrong woman and knew it and stayed too long. The women in Herzog are largely instruments for understanding Herzog himself, which is both the novel’s principal limitation and, as a formal matter, what a novel written entirely from inside one consciousness must produce. Bellow is aware of this; whether awareness constitutes absolution is a question readers will answer differently.

Bellow’s Chicago

Herzog is, among other things, a great Chicago novel — specific about streets, neighbourhoods, the particular quality of intellectual life in a city that is not New York and knows it. The Chicago that Bellow creates is Midwestern and Jewish-American and academic, a world in which Hegel and the cost of apartment repairs exist in the same sentence because this is how it actually felt to be a certain kind of person in a certain kind of American city in the early 1960s.

This specificity — the physical, social, and intellectual texture of a particular world — is what separates Bellow from the more purely philosophical novelists (the European existentialists, say) to whom he is sometimes compared. Bellow believed that the novel’s job was to house ideas in the density of actual life, not to allegorize or to demonstrate propositions, but to show thinking happening in the world as it is. Herzog is the fullest expression of this belief: a novel of ideas that is also a novel of brisket, of the smells of Chicago in summer, of a man sitting in a car outside his ex-wife’s house with a loaded pistol he does not fire.

In the history of the American novel’s attempt to accommodate serious intellectual content without sacrificing the pleasures of narrative and character, Herzog represents a peak that has rarely been reached since. The voice Bellow found for this novel — ironic, self-aware, capacious, funny — was the ideal instrument for a story about a man whose greatest gift and greatest problem are the same thing.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — One of the great American novels about the life of the mind and its limits — enormous in ambition, genuinely funny, and surprisingly moving in its account of a man thinking his way through a breakdown he cannot think his way out of.