7. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 262-297

From New York could not hold him now.... through ... "Good night, Moses." They shook hands.

_____

This would be a good time to think about the narrative voice in Herzog. Who is it, exactly? The anonymous omniscient authorial voice? Or is it Herzog himself, telling the story in the third person? There is, of course, something creepy about speakers who refer to themselves in the third person. (Bob Dole, I'm looking at you.) But creepiness is not exactly alien to the character of Moses Herzog. This is, after all, a person whose first words in the novel were "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog." We have just seen Herzog go out of his mind in the New York City courthouse.

So the question must be: If Herzog is the narrator, then how much can we trust what he's telling us? Can we really be sure that he is the aggrieved party, that he has been cuckolded by Madeleine and Gersbach, and that his daughter, June, is really in more jeopardy from them than she would be in Herzog's custody? Think back to the list of characteristics of paranoia that his psychiatrist drew up for him: "It read 'Pride, Anger, Excessive 'Rationality,' Homosexual Inclinations, Competitiveness, Mistrust of Emotion, Inability to Bear Criticism, Hostile Projections, Delusions.'" How many of those, which he applied to Madeleine, apply to Herzog?

Enough rhetorical questions. Herzog is now in Chicago, where his first stop is the house his father owned. We now learn of the existence of his father's second wife, Taube, whom Herzog refers to as "Tante Taube." She is "very ancient" and lives "quite alone in this small museum of the Herzogs." But she is shrewd enough to be a little wary of Moses, who finds himself contemplating a photograph of himself taken when he got his M.A. degree:

His younger face expressed the demands of ingenuous conceit. A man in years he then was, but in years only, and in his father's eyes stubbornly un-European, that is, innocent by deliberate choice. Moses refused to know evil. But he could not refuse to experience it. And therefore others were appointed to do it to him, and then to be accused (by him) of wickedness.

There is more than a whiff of paranoia in that observation.

We now learn something else that the narrator has neglected to tell us: Moses' father once threatened to shoot him. The cause of the conflict was his unstable behavior: the breakup with Daisy, the affairs with Sono and Madeleine, and the rumor that Moses was going to convert to Catholicism. He threatened to disinherit Moses and leave everything to Willie and Helen, and when he said, "Go. And don't come to my funeral," Moses replied, "All right, maybe I won't." Whereupon Father Herzog went and got his pistol and chased him from the house.

The old man in his near-demented way was trying to act out the manhood you should have had. Coming to his house with that Christianized smirk of the long-suffering son. Might as well have been an outright convert, like Mady. He should have pulled the trigger.

They would reconcile and quarrel again before his father's death.

Now Herzog tells Taube that he's come for something in his father's desk. Taube, sensing something, hesitates when he asks for the key, saying that it's hard to remember where it is. When he recalls that the key used to be in a music box, she claims that his father had taken it from there. But Herzog knows he has guessed right, and asks her to make some tea while he looks for it. He finds the music box in her room, and when he opens it "the cylinder turned within, the small spines picking out the notes from Figaro. Moses was able to supply the words:

Nel momento 
Della mia cerimonia 
Io rideva di me 
Senza saperlo."

A few words about this little verse, which means "At the moment of my ceremony I was laughing at myself without knowing it." But the curious thing about it is that it's not a tune that one would ever choose for a music box. It's not even a verse: It's the orchestra-accompanied recitative that precedes Figaro's Act 4 aria, "Aprite un po' quegli quegli occi." The words quoted above are taken from a longer sentence: "Nel momento della mia cerimonia ei godeva leggendo, e nel vederlo io rideva di me senza saperlo." A trick was being played on Count Almaviva, who had been trying to seduce Figaro's bride, Susanna, and Figaro had laughed to see the count reading the letter that supposedly arranged a meeting between the count and Susanna. But since then Figaro has come to believe that he is the butt of the joke, and Susanna is really meeting with the count. In the opera he goes on to sing a scathing aria about the unfaithfulness of women:



But if the little phrase is entirely inappropriate for a music box tune, it also evokes Herzog's central preoccupation: his cuckoldry by Valentine Gersbach. And Figaro's aria, in its bitter denunciation of women, echoes all of Herzog's troubles with them.

He finds the key and with it finds in the desk what he has been looking for: "Father Herzog's pistol. An old pistol, the barrel nickel-plated." It has two bullets in it, which is all he needs. He also takes some old rubles from pre-Revolutionary times that he and Willie had used as play money when they were kids. He has told Taube that he wants to give them to Marco. He returns to the kitchen, where Taube shrewdly sees through him again: "She muttered, 'You got a lot of trouble? Don't make it worser, Moshe." He assures her that everything's fine and takes a hurried leave.

He then drives to Madeleine's house.

What he would do when he got to Harper Avenue he hadn't yet decided. Madeleine had threatened him with arrest if he so much as showed his face near the house. The police had his picture, but that was sheer bunk, bunk and paranoia, the imperiousness of imaginary power that had once impressed him. 

He convinces himself that justice is on his side: "They had opened the way to justifiable murder. They deserved to die. He had a right to kill them. They would even know why they were dying; no explanation necessary." He parks around the corner from the house and walks down the alley behind it. From the back yard he can see Madeleine in the kitchen. He walks around the house to the bathroom window. Once, when he was putting up storm windows, he had stood on a concrete block to remove the screen before he discovered there wasn't a storm window that fit it. The concrete block is still there, and he stands on it as he watches Gersbach bathing June.

Gersbach speaks to June "not unkindly ... with authority, but affectionately.... Then Gersbach ordered her to stand, and she stooped slightly to allow him to wash her little cleft. Her father stared at this. A pang went through him, but it was quickly done." This moment of intimacy proves to be a turning point in Herzog's plan. The little girl leaves the bathroom and Gersbach stays to clean the tub:

Moses might have killed him now. He might have shot Gersbach as he methodically salted the yellow sponge rectangle with cleansing powder. There were two bullets in the chamber.... But they would stay there. Herzog clearly recognized that.... I seem to think because June looks like a Herzog, she is nearer to me than to them. But how is she near to me if I have no share in her life? Those two grotesque love-actors have it all.... As soon as Herzog saw the actual person giving an actual bath, the reality of it, the tenderness of such a buffoon to a little child, his intended violence turned into theater, into something ludicrous. He was not ready to make such a complete fool of himself.... Lingering in the alley awhile, he congratulated himself on his luck. His breath came back to him; and how good it felt to breathe! It was worth the trip.

So then he goes to see Phoebe Gersbach. And she contradicts everything that we have learned from Herzog about Valentine and Madeleine. She tells him that she and Valentine "had a quiet life till you and Madeleine descended on Ludeyville and forced yourself on me."

"You never understood a thing about him. He fell for you. Adored you. Tried to become an intellectual because he wanted to help you -- saw what a terrible thing you had done in giving up your respectable university position and how reckless you were, rushing out to the country with Madeleine. He thought she was ruining you and tried to set you on the right track again. He read all those books so you'd have somebody to talk to, out in the sticks, Moses. Because you needed help, praise, flattery, support, affection. It never was enough. You wore him out. It nearly killed him trying to back you up." 

She also denies that Valentine is living with Madeleine. He urges her to sue for divorce, to name Madeleine in the suit. "Together we could nail them." But Phoebe insists, "Valentine comes home every night. He's never out late. He should be here soon.... When I'm even a little delayed somewhere, why, he gets frantic with worry. He phones all over the city." And Herzog concludes, "With Gersbach she could still be a wife. He came home. She cooked, ironed, shopped, signed checks. Without him, she couldn't not exist, cook, make beds. The trance would break." He gives her a kiss that she can't avoid and leaves. And the novel is left on an uneasy balance between Herzog's view and Phoebe's, neither of which seems wholly adequate or free from delusions.

He goes to see Lucas Asphalter, who gives him a couch to sleep on for the night, and also arranges with Madeleine for Herzog to visit with June the next day. "She doesn't want to see you. Otherwise, you can visit with your little girl to your heart's content." Asphalter also reveals that he had written Herzog about a job revising the history entries in an encyclopedia. And he tells Herzog about a psychiatrist he has been seeing who has his patients imagine themselves dead and in a coffin. Herzog is skeptical: "Do you have to think yourself into a coffin and perform these exercises with death? As soon as thought begins to deepen it reaches death, first thing. Modern philosophers would like to recover the old-fashioned dread of death. The new attitude which makes life a trifle not worth anyone's anguish threatens the heart of civilization."

And he tells Asphalter about his letter-writing:

"I go after reality with language. Perhaps I'd like to change it all into language, to force Madeleine and Gersbach to have a Conscience. There's a word for you. I must be trying to keep tight the tensions without which human beings can no longer be called human. If they don't suffer, they've gotten away from me. And I've filled the world with letters to prevent their escape. I want them in human form, and so I conjure up a whole environment and catch them in the middle." 

4. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 112-163

From He was at his letter writing again in in the morning.... through ... Poor thing, poor thing -- she too must be in the cemetery.

_____

Today's correspondence starts with a letter to the priest, Monsignor Hilton, who presided over Madeleine's conversion to Catholicism shortly after she graduated from Radcliffe. Herzog recalls commuting from Philadelphia to see her three or four times a week. He was separated from Daisy but not yet divorced, and for a while lived with Sono Oguki. "Herzog smiled at this earlier avatar of his life, at Herzog the victim, Herzog the would-be lover, Herzog the man on whom the world depended for certain intellectual work, to change history, to influence the development of civilization."

He sought the approval of Madeleine's parents, the impresario Fitz Pontritter and Tennie, who was divorcing Pontritter but told him, "I had to stand by Fitz. He was blacklisted for years. I couldn't be disloyal. After all, he is a great artist ..." She was manipulating him into marrying Madeleine, who was working at Fordham and concerned about confessing about having sex with him -- "the worn, unshaven, sinful Jew, endangering her reputation.... She had been a Catholic for only three months, and already because of Herzog she couldn't be confessed, not by Monsignor, anyway."

Herzog thinks he's being played by Madeleine: "He thought difficulty was the whole object. She wanted Moses and the Monsignor to struggle over her. It heightened the sexual excitement. He fought her apostasy in the sack. And certainly the Monsignor made female converts with his burning eyes." She is also pleading with him to persuade Daisy to give him a divorce so they can get married. She is rebelling against the bohemianism -- the "grotesque nightmare" -- of her childhood, calling her parents "insane."

Probably so, Herzog mentally agreed. But now Madeleine wants white Christmases and Easter bunnies and to live perhaps in one of those streets of brick, semi-detached parochial houses in the dull wilderness of Queens borough, fussing over Communion dresses, with a steady Irish husband who sweeps up the crumbs at the biscuit factory.

She tells him that she was sexually assaulted by a man and "My fourteenth year is blacked out."  

But when all was said and done, Madeleine didn't marry in the Church, nor did she baptize her daughter. Catholicism went the way of zithers and tarot cards, bread-baking and Russian civilization. And life in the country. 

By moving to the country with Madeleine, Herzog was repeating the experience he had with Daisy, with whom he spent "a freezing winter in eastern Connecticut while he was writing Romanticism and Christianity." He read Rousseau and practiced the oboe that had been left him by his roommate in Chicago: "the sad music must have oppressed Daisy even more than the months of cold fog. Perhaps Marco's character had been affected by the experience, too; at times he showed a streak of melancholy." But he was sure it would be different with Madeleine, whom he married after she left the church and he persuaded Daisy to give him a divorce.

He bought the house in Ludeyville when Madeleine was pregnant, and then spent a year of do-it-yourself labor keeping it from falling down. But he encountered a kind of writer's block and spent a lot of time playing the oboe when he could have been working. Madeleine escaped from the music and went shopping, and they quarreled over how much she spent and how little work he was doing. "You're no better than any other kind of addict -- sick with abstractions. Curse Hegel, anyway, and this crappy old house. It needs four servants, and you want me to do all the work." She rejects the idea that he saved her from her bohemian parents and the priests and that "I took you away from Daisy and your son, and your Japanese screw."

He flirts with self-pity:

The progress of civilization -- indeed, the survival of civilization -- depended on the successes of Moses E. Herzog. And in treating him as she did, Madeleine injured a great project. This was, in the eyes of Moses E. Herzog, what was so grotesque and deplorable about the experience of Moses E. Herzog.

He contemplates a photograph of Madeleine in a riding costume at age twelve:

In jodhpurs, boots, and bowler she had the hauteur of the female child who knows it won't be long before she is nubile and has the power to hurt. This is mental politics. The strength to do evil is sovereignty. She knew more at twelve than I did at forty. 

Where Madeleine is slovenly and ambitious, Daisy was organized and dutiful:

Daisy was a country girl, a Buckeye who grew up near Zanesville. She was childishly systematic about things.... Stability, symmetry, order, containment were Daisy's strengths.... By my irregularity and turbulence of spirit I brought out the very worst in Daisy. I caused the seams of her stockings to be so straight, and the buttons to be buttoned symmetrically.... She took Moses' word for it that he was seriously occupied. Of course a wife's duty was to stand by this puzzling and often disagreeable Herzog.

He turns from his thoughts about his wives to his intellectual pursuits -- in other words, from one field of failed endeavor to another. He begins drafting a letter to one of his critics, a Dr. Mossbach, about the conservative classicist critic T.E. Hulme's "definition of Romanticism as 'spilt religion.'" But after wrangling with that for a while, he "abandoned this theme with characteristic abruptness," and begins a letter to Nachman, whom he first knew "nearly forty years ago -- playmates on Napoleon Street. The Montreal slums." He has recently seen Nachman on the street in New York, but "The stooped poet took one look at Moses and ran away."

Herzog and Nachman had also seen each other in Paris after the war, when Nachman came to him in distress because the father of his girlfriend, Laura, with whom Nachman had been wandering around Europe, had arrived and taken Laura home. Nachman needed to borrow money to follow her back to America. Herzog thinks that Nachman's recent flight from him was owing to the guilt he felt for never repaying the loan. He had seen Nachman again some years later when Laura had attempted suicide for a third time, and Herzog accompanied him to the asylum on Long Island. Nachman blamed Laura's instability on her family: "The bourgeois world of Westchester! Wedding announcements, linens, charge accounts, that was what her father and mother expected of her." He promised then that he would repay Herzog's loan.

"This is a crude world of finery and excrement. A proud, lazy civilization that worships its own boorishness. You and I were brought up in the old poverty. I don't know how American you've become since the old days in Canada -- you've lived here a long time. But I will never worship the fat gods." 

And recalling this sends Herzog back in time: "it was the child with his fresh face, the smiling gap in his front teeth, buttoned blouse and the short pants that was real, not this gaunt apparition of crazy lecturing Nachman." In this conversation on the bus on the way back to Manhattan from the asylum, fifteen years ago, Nachman mentioned Herzog's mother's kindness to his Uncle Ravitch. And now Herzog recalls Ravitch, who had boarded with his family back in 1922.

Ravitch worked in a fruit store. "The project of his life was to send for his family, a wife and two children who were still in Russia. He's have to find them first, for they were lost during the Revolution." But Ravitch's alcoholism gets the better of him. Herzog recalls Ravitch coming home drunk one night and his father, Jonah Herzog, going out to get him. His father "wore a Russian sleeping suit of linen with a pleated front, the last of his gentleman's wardrobe from Petersburg." The three brothers, Moses, Willie, and Shura, slept in a single bed. Herzog remembers his father standing "under the bulb, which had a spike at the end like a German helmet. The large loose twist of tungsten filament blazed."

Jonah Herzog saw Ravitch as "one of the symbols of his changed condition. In Petersburg there were servants. In Russia, Father Herzog had been a gentleman." Jonah "was not a big man, one of the small-boned Herzogs, finely made, round-headed, keen, nervous, handsome." And he was a failure: "First Father Herzog failed in Petersburg.... He had been importing onions from Egypt. Under Pobedonostsev [the conservative anti-Semitic adviser to Alexander III] the police caught up with him for illegal residence. He was convicted and sentenced." But he fled to Canada "where his sister Zipporah Yaffe was living," and bought some land near Valleyfield, Quebec. He "failed as a farmer ... and failed as a baker; failed in the dry-goods business; failed as a jobber; failed as a sack manufacturer in the War, when no one else failed. He failed as a junk dealer. Then he became a marriage broker and failed.... And now he was failing as a boot-legger."

On Napoleon Street he had five mouths to feed. Willie and Moses were sickly. Helen studied the piano. Shura was fat, greedy, disobedient, a plotting boy. The rent, back rent, notes due, doctors' bills to pay, and he had no English, no friends, no influence, no trade, no assets but his still -- no help in all the world. His sister Zipporah in St. Anne was rich, very rich, which only made matters worse. 

Mother Herzog had also been used to "linens and servents in Petersburg, the dacha in Finland (all founded on Egyptian onions). Now she was cook, washerwoman, seamstress on Napoleon Street in the slum. Her hair  turned gray, and she lost her teeth, her very fingernails wrinkled. Her hands smelled of the sink."

Napoleon Street, rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather -- the bootlegger's boys reciting ancient prayers. To this Moses' heart was attached with great power. Here was a wider range of human feelings than he had ever again been able to find. 

His rich Aunt Zipporah harshly criticized Moses' mother for her "ambition for her children, because she wanted them to be lawyers, gentlemen, rabbis, or performers." Helen is taking music lessons. Zipporah asks, "Why must your children go to the conservatory, the Baron de Hirsch school, and all those special frills. Let them go to work, like mine."

To haunt the past like this -- to love the dead! Moses warned himself not to yield so greatly to the temptation, this peculiar weakness of his character. He was a depressive. Depressives cannot surrender childhood -- not even the pains of childhood. He understood the hygiene of the matter. But somehow his heart had come open at this chapter of his life and he didn't have the strength to shut it. So it was again a winter day in St. Anne, in 1923 -- Aunt Zipporah's kitchen.

So he yields himself to memories: Zipporah urging economies: "Let your Helen and your Shura go to work. Sell the piano. Cut expenses." His father's bootleg truck is hijacked and he is beaten up, and Herzog recalls being "suffocated by this horror. I thought I would die of it. Whom did I ever love as I loved them?" But he attempts to put it in perspective:

What happened during the War abolished Father Herzog's claim to exceptional suffering. We are on a more brutal standard now, a new terminal standard, indifferent to persons. Part of the program of destruction into which the human spirit has poured itself with energy, even with joy. These personal histories, old tales from old times that may not be worth remembering. I remember. I must. But who else -- to whom can this matter? So many millions -- multitudes -- go down in terrible pain.

And he recalls where these recollections started, with Nachman. He concludes that Nachman's wife must be dead, that she must have succeeded in committing suicide, and that "Nachman ran away because (who could blame him) he would have had to tell Moses all about it.