9. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 336-371

From He reached his country place the following afternoon....

_____

A battered Herzog goes to Ludeyville and the old house.

Herzog's folly! Monument to his sincere and loving idiocy, to the unrecognized evils of his character, symbol of his Jewish struggle for a solid footing in White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America ("The land was ours before we were the land's," as that sententious old man declared at the Inaguration"). The "sententious old man" was Robert Frost, who had written a poem for the the inauguration of John F. Kennedy but, unable to read it in the glare and the chilling wind, instead recited his poem "The Gift Outright."

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become. 

Sententious, yes, but also possessing the usual Frostian ambiguities. And Herzog, too, is possessed by his possession, which is beginning to go back to the earth. He explores the house, finding dead birds in the toilet, owls in the light fixtures, and lingering traces of Madeleine and Gersbach: "The shower stall, for Gersbach's convenience -- the Gersbachs had no shower in Barrington -- was thoughtfully equipped with a handrail. 'If we're going to put it in, let's make it so Valentine can use it,' Mady had said. Ah well -- Moses shrugged."

But despite these traces of the past, Herzog finds himself liberated from it: 

He was surprised to feel such contentment ... contentment? Whom was he kidding, this was joy! For perhaps the first time he felt what it was to be free from Madeleine. Joy! His servitude was ended, and his heart released from its grisly heaviness and encrustation. 

Of course, we've seen Herzog in moods like this before, and an indication that he hasn't really been fully liberated shows itself in the fact that he starts writing letters. The first one is to "My dear sage and imbecilic Edvig," whom Madeleine had cited in the courtroom as an authority on Herzog's violent tendencies. He writes another to Ramona, but decides to conceal his whereabouts and have Asphalter post it from Chicago. Among other things in the letter, he contemplates the issue of suicide: 

Since the last question, also the first one, the question of death, offers us the interesting alternatives of disintegrating ourselves by our own wills in proof of our "freedom," or the acknowledging that we owe a human life to this waking spell of existence, regardless of the void. (After all, we have no positive knowledge of that void.)

Should I say all this to Ramona? Some women think that earnestness is wooing. She'll want a child. She'll want to breed with a man who talks to her like this. 

Yes, possibly a woman like Ramona would. He writes another letter to Marco, promising to come for Parents' Day, but including a grisly reference to Amundsen's Antarctic expedition which succeeded because they were able to butcher the weaker dogs and feed them to the stronger. And he puts them in an envelope to Asphalter, telling him he hopes he's recovered from his depression, but withholding his own state of mind: "But if I am out of my mind, it's all right with me." 

Another letter is drafted to Professor Mermelstein, whose book had made "a good deal of my work superfluous (Wallace and Darwin?" Again, he spirals off into reflections on suffering: 

I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games.... More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating.

And then comes a startling statement: "Thus began his final week of letters." There's something ominous in this: Herzog as we have known him is unimaginable without his letters. The statement can be taken to mean that he is cured and no longer needs to write the letters. But it can also mean that he dies. 

He posts none of the letters he has yet to write, even the ones to the living. There is a brief one to Madeleine and Gersbach, which while writing he recalls that Madeleine would look at her reflection in a knife blade while putting on lipstick in a restaurant. He tells Gersbach, "Enjoy her -- rejoice in her. You will not reach me through her, however. I know you sought me in her flesh. But I am no longer there." He writes to some anonymous "Sirs" about the rats in Panama City, urging them to try birth-control chemicals instead of poison, which only weeds out the weaker rats. And a longer one to Friedrich Nietszche, telling him, "Humankind lives mainly upon perverted ideas. Perverted, your ideas are no better than those of the Christianity you condemn." Another letter to the dead is addressed to a Dr. Morgenfruh, with whom he once played billiards in Madison, Wisconsin. "Until Willie Hoppe arrived to demonstrate, and put us to shame." 

He wanders through the house, finding more traces of his life there with Madeleine, including their wedding announcement and photographs -- all of him: "Madeleine had left those behind, taking the others. Intersting -- her attitude." He also finds the little piano they had bought, and decides to paint it green and send it to June in Chicago. He sits under the trees and contemplates the solitude of the place: "The patrimony of his children -- a sunken corner of Massachusetts for Marco, the little piano for June painted a loving green by her solicitous father. That, too, like most other things, he would probably botch. But at least he would not die here, as he had once feared." He once thought that he might die suddenly of a heart attack, and contemplated picking a spot there to be buried in. "Now he reflected that Madeleine would have had him cremated." 

He starts another letter to a Dr. Waldemar Zozo: "You, Sir, were the Navy psychiatrist who examined me in Norfolk, Va., about 1942, and told me I was unusually immature. I knew that, but professional confirmation caused me deep anguish." The diagnosis has haunted him, and he tells Dr. Zozo that he had seen him again last spring in the Primitive Art Museum in New York. Ramona was with him, and she told him that Zozo was a rich collector of African antiquities. "I recognized with joy how I abhorred you. It sprang fresh from my mind after 22 years!" 

"His mind took one of its odd jumps," and he starts to draft a version of the Iliad in which the characters are all insects, as a gift to June. But he quickly abandons the project. He wanders in the forest for a while, writes more in his diary, and then realizes that his eccentricities will be alarming to his brother Will. 

If you wear a wise look, he warned himself, you'll be in trouble, and fast. No one can bear such looks any longer, not even your brother. Therefore, watch your face! Certain expressions burn people up, and especially the expression of wisdom, which can lead you straight to the loony bin. You will have earned it!

The days pass. He paints the piano, he eats from the store of food in the house, he sleeps in the hammock. One morning he looks at the calendar and tries to figure out what day it must be. "His beard informed him better than his brain. His bristles felt like four days' growth, and he thought it best to be clean-shaven when Will arrived." 

Which Will does, driving his Cadillac up the hill to the house. Moses thinks he looks tired and needs something to eat, and offers to open a can of tuna for him. Will replies, "You're the one that doesn't seem to have eaten." But as they wander around the house, "Will showed him great politeness. He did not confront him harshly with fundamentals, as Shura would have done." But Moses is on his guard, especially when Will sensibly informs him that it would cost more than the piano is worth to ship it to June in Chicago. 

"Yes ... ? Only I like this color." This apple, parrot green, the special Ludeyville color. Moses' eyes were fixed upon his work with a certain inspired persistency. He was near a point of open impulsiveness, and some peculiarity might now dart forth. He couldn't allow that to happen. Under no circumstances must he utter a single word that might be interpreted as irrational. Things already looked bad enough.

And sure enough, Will carefully broaches the topic: "I'd like to see you less agitated. You must get some food and sleep. Probably a little medical care. A few days in the hospital, taking it easy." 

Moses' response is, "Will, I'm excited, not sick." He insists that he has to be at Marco's camp on the sixteenth, though he also admits that back in New York, he had thought about going to the hospital. But when Will reveals that he has already had his doctor phone a hospital in Pittsfield to arrange for his admittance, "'No,' said Moses, still shaking his head. 'No. Definitely.'" He insists that he is no more insane than their father: "Was it any more fantastic for me to have these wives, children, to move to a place like this than for Papa to have been a bootlegger? We never thought he was mad." And he recalls how their father had labels printed up for the booze he made: "White Horse, Johnnie Walker, Haig and Haig." And the children would paste them on the bottles, picking out their favorite labels: "My favorite was White Horse." 

He suggests that Will drive him into the town, he'll have the lights and the telephone turned on at the house, and he'll hire Mrs. Tuttle to clean up the place. So Will agrees, and at Tuttle's store he learns that Ramona has been trying to get in touch with him. She is in Barrington, and he telephones her. She says she's there visiting friends, and that "Everybody in Barrington says if you want things done in Ludeyville, call Tuttle," which is how she tracked him down. 

Will stood beside the booth, listening. Earnest, worried, his dark eyes discreetly appealed to Moses to make no more mistakes. I can't promise that, thought Moses. I can only tell him that I don't contemplate putting myself in the hands of Ramona or any woman, at this time. 

So he has Will drive him into Barrington where they meet Ramona. Moses invites her to have dinner with him. "Come up at six. We'll eat at seven and you can get back to your party in plenty of time." She agrees, and Moses goes into a store to buy some swordfish steaks. 

Will takes him back to Ludeyville and they say goodbye: 

"Am I leaving you in good hands, Mose?"

"Is it safe to go, you mean? I think you can, with confidence. Ramona's not so bad."  

"Bad? What do you mean? She's stunning. But so was Madeleine.  

"I'm not being left in anyone's hands." 

So Will leaves, and Mrs. Tuttle drives Moses back to the house, where the lights are turned on. Mrs. Tuttle starts to clean up. Moses goes out and picks flowers in the woods. 

He turned his dark face toward the house again. He went around and entered from the front, wondering what further evidence of his sanity, besides refusing to go to the hospital, he could show. Perhaps he'd stop writing letters. Yes, that was what was coming, in fact. The knowledge that he was done with these letters. Whatever had come over him during these last months, the spell, really seemed to be passing, really going.... Walking over notes and papers, he lay down on his Recamier couch. As he stretched out, he took a long breath, and then he lay, ... listening to the steady scratching of Mrs. Tuttle's broom. He wanted to tell her to sprinkle the floor. She was raising too much dust. In a few minutes he would call down to her, "Damp it down, Mrs. Tuttle. There's water in the sink." But not just yet. At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.  

There are those who think that Herzog dies here. The ending is too peaceful, too promisingly conclusive for the manic Moses Herzog. But that conclusion is really irrelevant: For the reader, all characters are dead at the end of the fictions in which they appear -- they cease to act except in our imaginations. If we are optimists, we may conclude that Herzog is, despite what he told Will, in the good hands of two women: Mrs. Tuttle and Ramona. If pessimists, we may conclude that Herzog will find another way to screw things up. But that would be another novel, another letter from Herzog, which is what this novel is. All we can safely say about the ending is that Herzog is, at least for the moment, at rest.

8. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 298-335

From At last he embraced his daughter ... through ... awkwardly taped, helped into his wrinkled shirt by his brother Will.

_____

Asphalter picks up June and brings her to Herzog at the Museum of Science, arranging to meet them at four p.m. to return her to Madeleine. Herzog does a little discreet questioning of his daughter, asking "Do I know Uncle Val?" when she refers to Gersbach that way, and reassures himself that June knows Gersbach as her "stepfather." She also seems untroubled by being locked into the car. She says she likes "Uncle Val" because "He makes faces." She finally admits, however that "Mama said I shouldn't talk about Uncle Val.... She said you'd be very very angry." He assures her that he isn't: "I'm laughing my head off."

After looking at some exhibits at the museum, June says she wants to go to the aquarium, so they return to the car he has rented. As they tour the aquarium, Herzog's thoughts turn first to the fact that their visit will be short -- "It seemed his fate to be the visiting father, an apparition who faded in and out of the children's lives" -- and then to parting from his daughter as an analogue to death. And then to his father's funeral:

For the first time he took a different view of the way in which Alexander V. Herzog had run Father Herzog's funeral. No solemnity in the chapel. Shura's portly, golf-tanned friends, bankers and corporations presidents, forming an imposing wall of meat as heavy in the shoulders, hands, and cheeks as they were thin in the hair. Then there was the cortege. City Hall had sent a motorcycle escort in recognition of Shura Herzog's civic importance. The cops ran ahead with screaming sirens, booting cars and trucks aside so that the hearse could speed through lights.... Moses said to Shura, "While he lived, Papa had the cops at his back. Now ... " Helen, Willie, all four children in the limousine, laughed softly at this remark. Then as the coffin was lowered, and Moses and the others wept, Shura said to him, "Don't carry on like a goddamn immigrant." I embarrassed him with his golfing friends, the corporation presidents. Maybe I was not entirely in the right. Here he was the good American. I still carry European pollution, am infected by the Old World with feelings like Love -- Filial Emotion.

It's a passage worth looking at because it packs in so many themes -- parents and children, Americans and immigrants, the living and the dead -- that reverberate through the novel, and because it foreshadows Herzog's own relationship to the cops. 

They leave the aquarium to get lunch, but although Herzog is "a circumspect driver," he is being followed too closely by a Volkswagen truck, and when he tries to slow and let its driver pass, he misjudges the amount of pressure to put on the unfamiliar brakes and is rear-ended. The impact forces his car into a utility pole. June is unhurt, but Herzog is thrown against the steering wheel and passes out. He wakes up on the grass to find June standing there between two black policemen. "They had his wallet, the Czarist rubles, and the pistol, of course."

He has a bleeding cut on his head which, when one of the cops points it out, he stanches with his necktie. He tries to reassure June, and hears the driver of the truck asking the other cop, "'You're going to take that guy's license away, aren't you?' Moses thought, I'm in bad because of the pistol, and this fellow wants to pour it own. Warned by this indignation, Herzog held his own feelings in." The cop asks if he has a permit for the gun, and points out that it has two bullets in it. Herzog explains that it belonged to his father and he was taking it back home to Massachusetts. He explains that the rubles are "Like Russian Confederate money. Stage money. Another souvenir."

His head still swam. He decided that this foolishness must stop, or things would go even worse. Running to Chicago to protect his daughter, he almost killed her. Coming to offset the influence of Gersbach, and to give her the benefit of his own self -- man and father, et cetera -- what did he do but bang into a pole. And then the child saw him dragged out fainting, cut on the head, the revolver and the rubles sliding from his pocket. No, weakness, or sickness, with which he had copped a plea all his life (alternating with arrogance), his method of preserving equilibrium -- the Herzog gyroscope -- had no further utility. He seemed to have come to the end of that. 

In the end, the driver of the Volkswagen truck is ticketed, and Herzog is taken to be booked for the misdemeanor of carrying a loaded weapon.

Now, in his misery, Herzog remembers a long-repressed incident from his childhood, when he was sexually molested by a man, a stranger. "The man clapped his hand over his mouth from the back. He hissed something to him as he drew down his pants. His teeth were rotten and his face stubbled. And between the boy's thighs this red skinless horrible thing passed back and forth, back and forth, until it burst out foaming." Herzog went home "and then turned up at supper as if nothing had happened." He now remembers "a piece of famous advice, grand advice even if it German, to forget what you can't bear."

In the hands of a lesser novelist than Bellow, this sordid event might have been exploited as the key to understanding the character. But here it is only a correlative for Herzog's current state of mind, and that's what makes it both more shocking and more meaningful.

Herzog, riding in the cop car with his daughter, admonishes himself that "all this has got to stop. By this he meant such things as this ride in the squad car. His filial idea (practically Chinese) of carrying an ugly, useless revolver. To hate, to be in a poisition to do something about it. Hatred is self-respect. If you want to hold your head up among people ..." He trails off from that line of thought, and launches into reflections about death. And reflections about his reflections: "Perhaps what had made him faint was not the accident but the premonition of such thoughts. The nausea was only apprehension, excitement, the unbearable intensity of these ideas." And after another swarm of thoughts about death and evil and God, he admonishes himself, "But no more of that!"

They are in the courtroom where he is being questioned and booked by a black police sergeant. After a string of questions that bring out Herzog's difficult relations with June's mother, the sergeant tells him they'll call Asphalter and Madeleine. "Herzog exclaimed, 'Oh, don't call her!'" The sergeant had already said it seemed like Herzog was "scared" of his ex-wife, and Herzog has tried to be exceedingly cautious in his responses. Now he gives in to a stoic acceptance, telling himself, "Well, let her come. Perhaps that was what he wanted after all, a chance to confront her."

The sergeant returns to the topic of the gun, and Herzog repeats: "I was only going to make a paperweight of it. I forgot to take out the bullets, but that's because I don't know much about guns so it didn't occur to me." He asks for a carton of milk for June and tells her a story. He watches others being arraigned, including a prostitute who reminds him of a girl he knew in high school. And then Madeleine arrives.

She doesn't look at him, doesn't speak to him. When she's asked about him, she says, "I don't know where he lives. It's none of my business." Herzog admires "the perfection of her self-control." And as the sergeant questions her, he drifts off into a long train of associations until he hears the sergeant ask Madeleine, "Well, he give you a hard time?" She ignores Herzog when he says, "Let's not have unnecessary trouble." She tells the sergeant that Herzog hasn't made any threats -- to her. Which of course makes the sergeant ask, "To who, then?" Herzog knows that she won't bring her relationship with Gersbach into the conversation because it might jeopardize her custody, but she says that "His psychiatrist ... saw fit to warn me." Herzog explodes in protest.

And then the sergeant asks if she recognizes the gun. "The radiance of her look as it rested on the gun was deeper than any sexual expression he had ever seen on her face." She says no, but she isn't surprised that he has one. She admits that she has never filed a complaint against him, but that she did give his picture to the Hyde Park police, "In case he prowled around the house." And to the sergeant's question if he did prowl, she replies, "He was never seen, but I know damn well he did. He's jealous and a troublemaker. He has a terrible temper." But she admits that she never had reason to file a complaint.

"Madeleine now spoke to Herzog for the first time, pointing with a rigid finger to the two bullets and looking him in the eyes. 'One of those was for me, wasn't it?'" But Herzog's retort, "And who was the other one for?" brings the risky topic of Gersbach into potential play again, and Madeleine backs off. The sergeant says she can take her child and leave, and she does, with Herzog bidding June a goodbye and promising, "I'll be back."

The sergeant finishes with the booking and lets Herzog call his brother Will to help him post the three hundred dollar bond. He waits for Will in a jail cell with a sleeping drunk and a black teenager. Again he vow, "No more of this hectic, heart-rent, theatrical window-peering; no more collision, fainting, you-fight-'im-'e-cry encounters, confrontations." He begins composing a letter to Dr. Edvig and one to Ramona. and makes a silent plea to God for mercy.

Will was an undemonstrative man, substantial, shrewd, quiet, shorter than his brother but with thicker, darker hair. In a family of passionately expressive people like Father Herzog and Aunt Zipporah Will had developed a quieter, observant, reticent style.... William did not share his brother's passion for reminiscence. He was an engineer and a technologist, a contractor and builder; a balanced, reasonable person, he was pained to see Moses in such a state.

They talk about Madeleine and about the house in Ludeyville, which Will urges him to sell -- "Will had great faith in real estate." He insists that Herzog see a doctor, who informs him that he has a broken rib. "'No lung puncture,' the doctor said. 'Six weeks or so in tape. And you'll need two or three stitches in your head. That's the whole story. No heavy lifting, straining, chopping, or other violent exercise." Will also prods the doctor to prescribe "some rest." 

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." 

6. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 224-261

From He took Ramona to her shop after breakfast.... through ... Some kill, then cry. Others, not even that.

_____

Herzog and Ramona indulge in a public display of affection in front of her store. "Had he had trouble enough, and paid his debt to suffering and earned the right to ignore what anyone might think?" Still, the experience leads him to some soul-searching when he returns home: What, at the age of forty-seven, "did he have to show for himself at the bar of judgment? He had had two wives; there were two children; he had once been a scholar, and in the closet his old valise was swelled like a scaly crocodile with his uncompleted manuscript," whose thesis had been published two years ago by a Berkeley professor, "confounding, overwhelming, stunning everyone in the field, as Herzog had meant to do."

He is spurred to do two things: write to Daisy that he would, after all, visit Marco at camp on Parents' Day, and "have a talk with lawyer Simkin. Immediately." He telephones Harvey Simkin for advice about his daughter, telling Simkin that he doesn't necessarily want to sue for custody but that he's concerned about her  welfare. Simkin suggests a private investigator, but warns that they are very expensive. He also suggests that Herzog "Get a clean-cut gentile lawyer from one of the big firms. Don't have a lot of Jews yelling in the court. Give your case dignity." Simkin has a history with Madeleine and her family, having been "like an uncle to her" during her neglected bohemian childhood. But Madeleine turned against him when he disapproved of her conversion to Catholicism. He also claims that Madeleine "injured a little cousin of mine, an epileptic girl, a sickly immature, innocent frail mouse of a woman who couldn't take care of herself," but when Herzog presses for details, Simkin only says, "That's another long story."

Herzog says, "I often think, if she died I'd get my daughter back. There are times when I now I could look at Madeleine's corpse without pity," but Simkin's reaction to the remark makes him cautious about saying more. "He wants me to say that I actually feel capable of mudering them both. Well, it's true. I've tested it in my mind with a gun, a knife, and felt no horror, no guilt. None." But he decides not to say anything of the sort to the lawyer. Simkin explains that he would have to prove that Madeleine and Gersbach "have an adulterous relationship to which the child is exposed." Merely being sexually intimate is not enough. "But if the fucking is at home and the child exposed to it, the judicial attitude is different. Damage to the little psyche." He also warns Herzog that the case would attract the attention of the Chicago papers. But Herzog thinks that Gersbach, who has become a local celebrity, would be more damaged by the publicity than he would be.

Herzog again feels himself "in the grip of that eccentric, dangerous force that had been capturing him," and he opens up to Simkin, admitting, "I sent him a telegram from the airport as I was leaving. I wanted to say that 'd kill him on sight. But Western Union doesn't accept such messages. So I wired five words -- Dirt Enters At The Heart. The first letters spell death." Simkin backs off from Herzog's increasingly obsessive talk, however. His client, he says, is waiting for him.  He gives Herzog the phone number of a cousin who works in the district attorney's office, and says he'll meet with Herzog later that day.

Left on his own again, Herzog tries to pull himself together, but he can't shake the obsession.

What really is on my mind? Probably this: shall I put those two on the stand under oath, torture them, hold a blowtorch to their feet? Why? They have a right to each other; they seem even to belong together. Why, let them alone. But what about justice? --- Justice! Look who wants justice! Most of mankind has lived and died without -- totally without it. People by the billions and for ages sweated, gypped, enslaved, suffocated, bled to death, buried with no more justice than cattle. But Moses E. Herzog, at the top of his lungs, bellowing with pain and anger has to have justice.

While he gets dressed, he thinks again about his other decision of the day: to visit Marco at camp. It would relieve Daisy of a burden, because she has been dealing with her mother's descent into senility. Polina "had got it into her head that Moses had divorced Daisy because she was a streetwalker" and had been badgering her to stop prostituting herself. Daisy, of course, in no way resembles a streetwalker: "An utterly steady, reliable woman, responsible to the point of grimness, Daisy was a statistician for the Gallup Poll." Finally, Polina had been sent to "a home for the aged somewhere on Long Island. So this is how the strongest characters end!"

He takes a cab to the courthouse, and accidentally gets the same cabbie who had driven him and Ramona to her shop that morning. The driver, Teodoro Valdepenas, is full of admiration for Herzog because of the ardor that Herzog and Ramona had demonstrated on parting. "When I get old I'm going to be doing just like you," he tells Herzog.

At the courthouse he has time to kill, so he takes a seat in a courtroom and watches a magistrate arraign a black man accused of assault and a young German who had been lured into making a pass at a plainclothes detective in a men's room. Herzog "opposed this perverse development in law enforcement. Sexual practices of any sort, provided they didn't disturb the peace, provided they didn't injure minor children, were a private matter. Except for the children. Never children. There one must be strict." That case is followed by a male prostitute accused of attempted robbery. Herzog realizes that he has been watching all of this attentively

with his look of intelligent composure, of charm and sympathy -- like the old song, he thought, the one that goes, "There's flies on me, there's flies on you, but there ain't no flies on Jesus." A man who looked so fine and humane would be outside police jurisdiction, immune to lower forms of suffering and punishment. 

He looks in his pocket for a dime for the pay phone, and stands up to reach the coins. "As soon as he was on his feet, he realized that there was something the matter with him." He wonders if he's having a heart attack, and he hurries out of the courtroom, gasping for air. In a few minutes he feels better: "The burning within his chest subsided. It had felt like swallowing a mouthful of poison.... To see people in the hands of the law agitated him."

Simkin seemed to see him as he saw that sickly innocent girl, the epileptic cousin whom Madeleine supposedly injured. Young Jews, brought up on moral principles as Victorian ladies were on pianoforte and needlepoint, though Herzog. And I have come here today for a look at something different. That evidently is my purpose.

He remembers when he was six or seven, he had asked his mother how Adam had been created from dust. She had taken him to a window and rubbed the palm of her hand, "rubbed until something dark appeared on the deep-lined skin, a particle of what certainly looked to him like earth. 'You see? It's true.'" And then he remembers when she died. He was sixteen, and his father worked nights. Herzog would sit in the kitchen reading books he had bought "out of the thirty-nine-cent barrel at Walgreen's -- The World as Will and Idea and The Decline of the West." He was reading the Spengler when his mother came from the sickroom to scold him for sitting up so late. She "thought I would need my eyesight and my strength on a certain day of reckoning." A few days later she lost the ability to speak, and "lifted up her hands and showed him her fingernails. They were blue. As he stared, she slowly began to nod her head up and down as if to say, 'That's right, Moses, I am dying now.'" He remembers how his brother Willie cried at the funeral. "Moses shook his head to be rid of such thoughts. The more he thought, the worse his vision of the past."

He telephones Wachsel, the man whose number Simkin had given him, but Wachsel hadn't heard from Simkin. He tells Herzog that Simkin is in a trial somewhere in the building and gives him some room numbers. Herzog goes into a courtroom where the trial of a couple accused of killing their three-year-old child is being held. He listens to one of the witnesses, who had known the defendant and had tried to be kind to the child.

I fail to understand! thought Herzog, as this good man, jowls silently moving, got off the stand. I fail to ... but this is the difficulty with people who spend their lives in humane studies and therefore imagine once cruelty has been described in books it is ended. Of course he really knew better -- understood that human beings would not live so as to be understood by the Herzogs. Why should they?

The description of the death of the child affects him even more. "Again he wondered if he was going to come down with sickness. Or was it the terror of the child that had gotten into him?" As he hurries from the courtroom, tasting "an acrid fluid in his mouth that had to be swallowed," he bumps into a woman walking with a cane. "She did not speak at all but was not ready to let him off. Her eyes, prominent, severe, still kept him standing, identifying him thoroughly, fully, deeply, as a fool."

He tries to focus on the murdered child, but "Herzog experienced nothing but his own human feelings, in which he found nothing of use."

And what was there in modern, post ... post-Christian America to pray for? Justice -- justice and mercy? And pray away the monstrousness of life, the wicked dream it was. He opened his mouth to relieve the pressure he felt. He was wrung, and wrung again, and wrung again, again.

5. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp.164 -223

From The telephone rang -- five, eight, ten peals.... through ... He stroked her thick hair and fell asleep.

_____

The picture of Moses Herzog keeps getting filled in, bit by bit, after the previous section's account of his childhood.

Ramona telephones him. A woman who works in her shop had seen him at Grand Central, and she's curious about where he had gone, but Herzog manages to avoid telling her about his aborted flight from her to the Vineyard. She chides him for making her chase him down, and invites him to dinner. The news that her Aunt Tamara, her father's elderly sister who lives with her, will be out of town clinches the deal with its implied promise of sex.

Herzog now realizes how late in the day it is: "He was astonished that a whole day had been spent scrawling a few letters. And what ridiculous, angry letters!" As he gets ready to go to Ramona's he foresees (accurately) the meal she will prepare and the Egyptian music that she will play, and even imagines the conversation that will follow. "She transformed his miseries into sexual excitements and, to give credit where  it was due, turned his grief in a useful direction." And as he's washing up and getting dressed, he begins writing more letters: to the author of a monograph, "The Ethical Ideas of the American Business Community," to Dwight Eisenhower, to a former tutor who now edits a publication called Atlantic Civilization. He witnesses himself as he "communicates with the mighty of this world, or speaks words of understanding and prophecy, having arranged at the same time a comfortable and entertaining evening -- food, music, wine, conversation, and sexual intercourse."

The erotic must be admitted to its rightful place, at last, in an emancipated society which understands the relation of sexual repression to sickness, war, property, money, totalitarianism. Why, to get laid is actually socially constructive and useful, an act of citizenship.

Something in Herzog demands that everything in his life receive intellectual validation. But guilt, in the form of Daisy's mother, Polina, an "old Russian Jewish suffragette," arrives in his memory. Polina was "Tolstoian, puritanical," and she once chided him, "First one woman and then another, then another;. Where will it end? You can't abandon a wife, a son for these women -- whores." He has just asked himself of his various romances, "Were those my real career?"

And so he begins another letter, to Sono, telling her, "You were right about Madeleine, Sono. I shouldn't have married her. I should have married you." Sono had seen Madeleine only once and had told him afterward to be careful. Sono, who has returned to Japan, never mastered English. They communicated mostly in French, in which he tells her that his life has become a frightful nightmare. She was a student in Paris when the war broke out, so she stayed there and then went to study design in New York after the war ended. He recalls her three-room apartment with the high ceilings and the unmade bed where they made love:

Have all the traditions, passions, renunciations, virtues, gems, and masterpieces of Hebrew discipline and all the rest of it -- rhetoric, a lot of it, but containing true facts -- brought me to these untidy green sheets and this rippled mattress.... The Jews were strange to the world for a great length of teim, and now the world is being strange to them in return. 

Sono admired him for his intellectual seriousness: "'T'es philosophe. O mon philosophe, mon professeur d'amour. T'es très important. Je le sai.' She rated him higher than kings and presidents." Thoughts of her fill him with regret:

Sono asked for no great sacrifices. She did not want me to work for her, to furnish her house, support her children, to be regular at meals or to open charge accounts in luxury shops; she asked only that I should be with her from time to time. But some people are at war with the best things of life and pervert them into fantasies and dreams.

He had exploited her, making her delay returning to Japan, disobeying her father and not being there when her mother died. And in the end he betrayed her by falling in love with Madeleine, of whom she said, "Elle est méchante, Moso. Je suis pas jalouse. Je ferai amour avec un autre. Tu m'as laissée. Mais elle a les yeux très, très froids." Madeleine is wicked, she tells him. Sono isn't jealous, and she will make love with someone else. But Madeleine has very, very cold eyes.

"Ah, in the midst of such realizations, a man needs some company. Herzog once more set off on his visit to Ramona." What follows, as he leaves his apartment and takes the subway to Ramona's, is a wonderfully free-associative few pages delineating what goes through Herzog's head. It comes close to Leopold Bloom's peregrinations through Dublin, though without Joyce's verbal fireworks. A padlocked vending machine reminds him of bank robber Willie Sutton, to whom he begins a letter. This segues into a letter to Erwin Schrödinger:

In What Is Life? you say that in all of nature only man hesitates to cause pain. As destruction is the master method by which evolution produces new types, the reluctance to cause pain may express a human will to obstruct natural law. Christianity and its parent religion, a few short millennia, with frightful reverses ... The train had stopped, the door was already shutting when Herzog roused himself and squeezed through.... But reluctance to cause pain coupled with the necessity to devour ... a peculiar human trick is the result, which consists in admitting and denying evils at the same time. To have a human life, and also an inhuman life.... To bite, to swallow. At the same time to pity your food. To have sentiment. At the same time to behave brutally....

And so on until he is interrupted by reaching his station and confronting the sights, sounds and smells above ground.

Herzog is conscious of Ramona's previous affair with a man named George Hoberly, who has twice attempted suicide and is still stalking her, sending her gifts and even money. Ramona's Aunt Tamara, who had approved of Hoberly but accepts Herzog as a replacement, put the money in a savings account in Hoberly's name. Ramona opens the door to her apartment on the chain because of Hoberly.

Herzog has picked up some soot on his face and Ramona suggests he go freshen up. In the bathroom, he free-associates about free-associating, beginning a letter to Spinoza:

Thoughts not casually connected were said by you to cause pain. I find that is indeed the case. Random association, when the intellect is passive, is a form of bondage. Or rather, every form of bondage is possible then. It may interest you to know that in the twentieth century random association is believed to yield up the deepest secrets of the psyche. He realized he was writing to the dead. To bring the shades of great philosophers up to date. But then why shouldn't he write to the dead?  He lived with them as much as with the living -- perhaps more.

After peeking into Ramona's medicine cabinet, he joins her for a glass of Campari, and she puts on the Egyptian music he had anticipated. When she goes to the kitchen he walks into the parlor in Aunt Tamara's part of the apartment. He looks out of the window at the view of the Empire State Building and the Hudson, and tells himself that "this asylum was his for the asking, he believed. Then why didn't he ask? Because today's asylum might be the dungeon of tomorrow."

Moreover, Ramona, like Sono, took him seriously as "a philosophe who cared only about the very highest things -- creative reason, how to render good for evil, and all the wisdom of old books." Ramona "thought she could restore order and sanity to his life, and if she did that it would be logical to marry her.... And it would be a union that really unified. Tables, beds, parlors, money, laundry and automobile, culture and sex knit into one web. Everything would at last make sense, was what she meant."

Ramona finds him in her aunt's "Czarist museum." They go in to dinner, which is pretty much exactly has Herzog has imagined it would be. She asks him what he has been doing, and he retreats in vagueness, partly because he hasn't been doing anything of consequence. She asks if he was running away from her when he was spotted on the train. "Not from you. But I suppose I was running." She says he's "still a little afraid of" her, and he admits to "Confused. Trying to be careful." She replies, "You're used to difficult women." (Which implies that she isn't one.) "To struggle. Perhaps you like it when they give you a bad time." He parries with "Every treasure is guarded by dragons," and asks if she minds if he loosens his collar.

He retreats from this little dance into intellectualizing it:

To look for fulfillment in another, in interpersonal relationships, was a feminine game. And the man who shops from woman to woman, though his heart aches with idealism, with the desire for pure love, has entered the female realm.

She assures him once again, "You look for domineering women. I'm trying to tell you that you've met a different type in me." They grow a little edgy with each other as they explore their former relationships, he insisting that he was simply trying to please Madeleine, to accommodate her. "I thought I had entered into a secret understanding with life to spare me the worst. A perfectly bourgeois idea." But she rejects this: "There's nothing so ordinary about marrying a woman like Madeleine or having a friend like Valentine Gersbach."

He explains that Gersbach "was only a one-legged radio announcer" but "Then Madeleine and I arrived, and a glamorous life began in Ludeyville." He had naively trusted Gersbach when Madeleine took trips to Boston "to be alone and think things over." "I asked Valentine to go and reason with her." Madeleine wrote letters calling him "overbearing, infantile, demanding, sardonic, and a psychosomatic bully" -- the last because when he got sick she claimed it was a way of dominating her. But the crowning blow came when Madeleine phoned Gersbach to bring her some things, and one of them was her diaphragm.

Ramona is astonished, the more so when Herzog tells her that when he asked Madeleine if she was sleeping with Gersbach, she claimed that he was "the brother I never had, and that's all," and that he was not her type because of the stink he left in the bathroom: "'Do you think I could give myself to a man whose shit smells like that!' That was her answer." In response to Ramona's horror, he says, "Madeleine wasn't just a wife, but an education. A good, steady, hopeful, rational, diligent, dignified, childish person like Herzog who thinks human life is a subject, like any other subject, has to be taught a lesson." He says that what Ramona calls "this stupidity" went on for several years. "Madeleine and I got together again, a while after this. And then she and Valentine ran my life for me. I didn't know a thing about it. All the decision were made by them -- where I lived, where I worked, how much rent I paid."

Ramona is so upset by this conversation that she breaks it off, and they wash dishes together because "As even Ramona's fingers were sexual, Herzog wanted to see how she would do ordinary tasks." He tells her that he hasn't decided whether to stay in New York or go to Chicago to keep an eye on his daughter. She urges him to stay: "Chicago would be a mistake. You'd only suffer." He replies, "Perhaps, and suffering is another bad habit."

After they finish the dishes, they are beginning to make love when the telephone rings. She doesn't answer it: "it's George Hoberly. He must have seen you arrive, and he wants to spoil things for us." She switches off the phone, and he reflects on the irony of supplanting Hoberly the way Gersbach supplanted him: "I think it's that while in New York I am the man inside, in Chicago the man in the street is me." She assures him that he's nothing like Hoberly: "You aren't weak, whatever else. You have strength...."

Herzog nodded. Once more he was being lectured. And he didn't really mind it. That he needed straightening out was only too obvious. And who had more right than a woman who gave him asylum, shrimp, wine, music, flowers, sympathy, gave him room, so to speak, in her soul, and finally the embrace of her body? ... She was a clever woman and, even better, a dear woman. She had a good heart. And she had on black lace underpants. He knew she did.

Ramona leaves him for "a few minutes," and Herzog, in a peculiar pre-coital mood, goes through one of his internal rambles, including a critique of "a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military biions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities." He frets about his sexual limitations: "Why was he such a Quaker in love-making? He said that after his diappointments of recent date he was glad enough to perform at all, simple missionary style." He ponders marriage, and its superiority to "the disorder and loneliness of bachelorhood." He thinks about going into the flower business with Ramona: "More contact with life, meeting customers. The privations of scholarly isolation had been too much for a man of his temperament." He wonders if he will finish his book: "The chapter on 'Romantic Moralism' had gone pretty well, but the one called 'Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel' had him stopped cold."

But then Ramona appears, naked to the hips, wearing "the black lace underthing" and three-inch spiked heels.

Herzog wakes only once in the night: "a jet plane -- something screaming with great power at a terrible height." He gets out of bed "prepared at once to write another message -- perhaps to George Hoberly. But when the noise of the plane passed the thought went, too.... He stroked her thick hair and fell asleep."

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.

3. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 73-111

From Dear Governor Stevenson, Herzog wrote.... through ... I don't think Madeleine is a bad mother, actually.

_____

Still writing letters on the train, he starts one to Adlai Stevenson about wanting an intellectual to be president, then begins an apology to Ramona for his abrupt departure.

He exclaimed mentally, Marry me! Be my wife! End my troubles! -- and was staggered by his rashness, his weakness, and by the characteristic nature of such an outburst, for he saw how very neurotic and typical it was. We must be what we are. That is necessity. And what are we? Well, here he was trying to hold on to Ramona as he ran from her. And thinking that he was binding her, he bound himself, and the culmination of this clever goofiness might be to entrap himself.

What traps Herzog, of course, is his inability to understand women, or to understand why he doesn't understand them. And for many readers the real puzzle may be why Herzog feels so compelled to be married, when he has proved so bad at it. For here he is again, talking himself into marrying: "Ramona truly was a desirable wife. She was understanding. Educated. Well situated in New York. Money. And sexually, a natural masterpiece." On the other hand, "Herzog had unfinished business," which includes a letter to Zinka, whom we have not yet met.

And then his mind wanders off to letters to Nehru, and to Martin Luther King Jr.: "I for one wish to go on record recognizing the moral dignity of your group." Then to Chicago politicians -- like the train, Herzog's mind rushes on from subject to subject. "He was in a whirling ecstasy," and even starts a letter to himself:

Dear Moses E. Herzog, Since when have you taken such an interest in social questions, in the external world? Until lately, you led a life of innocent sloth. But suddenly a Faustian spirit of discontent and universal reform descends on you. Scolding. Invective.

And his mind lights on Shapiro, whose book he is supposed to be reviewing. Shapiro is one of his intellectual colleagues and/or rivals: "He spoke in long sentences, Proustian he may have thought -- actually Germanic, and filled with incredible bombast." Shapiro and Madeleine were "stirred" by each other when he visited them at Ludeyville. "They found each other exceedingly stimulating."

Madeleine and the dignified visitor were talking about the Russian Church, Tikhon Zadonsky, Dostoevski, and Herzen. Shapiro made a great production of learned references, correctly pronouncing all foreign words whether in French, German, Serbian, Italian, Hungarian, Turkish, or Danish, snapping them out and laughing -- that hearty, sucking, snarling, undirected laugh, teeth moist, head worked back onto his shoulders.

It's clear that Shapiro has engaged Herzog in an academic dick-measuring contest, and that Herzog has lost. "Madeleine, Herzog thought, became almost dangerously excited." Shapiro reminds him of Gersbach: "He was so emphatic in style, so impressive in his glances, looked so clever that you forgot inquire whether he was making sense." Of course, the other problem is that Shapiro is also also showing up Herzog by taking such a deep interest in Madeleine's intellect, which she accuses Herzog of not doing: "She complained that he never really listened to her. He wanted to shine all the time."

In his memories of this conversation, Herzog characteristically tries to escape from the unpleasantness by recalling the sound of the cicadas shrilling in the trees: "Herzog had seldom heard anything so beautiful as this massed continual harshness." He also concentrates on the physically unpleasant aspect of Shapiro, "a greedy eater" who, when they had shared a cubicle at school "used to chew his pumpernickel-and-onion sandwiches with an open mouth." Herzog also recalls that, later in the afternoon of his visit, Shapiro had "vomited in the wash basin. He must have eaten squid, thought Herzog, who had to do the cleaning up. Why didn't he use the toilet -- too stout to bend?"

The afternoon had also been made unpleasant by a visit from the Gersbachs. But the worst blow was when Shapiro urged Madeleine to go to the University of Chicago to pursue her studies -- precipitating their move from Ludeyville and the house Herzog had bought for them. "'Chicago, by all means!' said Shapiro. 'That's the school for graduate studies. A little woman like Mrs. Herzog is just what the old place needs, too.' Fill your big mouth with herring, Shapiro! Herzog though, and mind your own fucking business."

So his imaginary letter to Shapiro is larded with intellectual pretentiousness: "Something else is happening, and that something lies closer to the vision of Comte -- the results of rationally organized labor -- than to that of Spengler." And so on. But eventually it comes down to his belief that he had been used by Madeleine as a stepping stone to her own intellectual career: "I understood that Madeleine's ambition was to take my place in the learned world. To overcome me.... Madeleine ... lured me out of the learned world, got in herself, slammed the door, and is still in there, gossiping about me."

In the imaginary letter, which he abandons because "it raised too many painful thoughts," he mentions that he had had his psychiatrist make a list of the characteristics of paranoia: "It read 'Pride, Anger, Excessive 'Rationality,' Homosexual Inclinations, Competitiveness, Mistrust of Emotion, Inability to Bear Criticism, Hostile Projections, Delusions." All of these he claims to have observed in Madeleine, which is why he wants to take custody of their daughter.

He starts a letter to his brother Alexander -- Shura -- asking for a loan.

Moses knew that the rich man would push a button and say to his secretary, "Send a check to screwloose Moses Herzog." His handsome stout white-haired brother in his priceless suit, vicuña coat, Italian hat, his million-dollar shave and rosy manicured fingers with big rings, looking out of his limousine with princely hauteur.

He also thinks of asking him to recommend a lawyer, since he had had a falling out with Sandor Himmelstein, whose couch he had slept on after the split with Madeleine. He begins a letter to Himmelstein, "a short man, misshapen from the loss of part of his chest. In Normandy, he always said.... It made Herzog uneasy, perhaps, that he had been discharged from the Navy owing to his asthma and never saw action." The stay at the Himmelsteins had not gone well, partly because of Himmelstein's teenage children, but mostly because Sandor and his wife, Beatrice, had sympathized with and defended Madeleine. "'I'll tell you,' said Sandor. 'It's your own frigging fault, too, if you want my opinion.... Because you're a highbrow and married a highbrow broad."

Himmelstein is the antithesis of Shapiro: loud, vulgar, anti-intellectual. Herzog's sense of isolation, of alienation, only deepens, even though Himmelstein insists that Herzog is "A human being! A mensch!" Bea Himmelstein assures Herzog that Madeleine loved him: "It was the middle-class female solidarity, defending a nice girl from charges of calculation and viciousness." Bea insists, "Basically, she must be a good person." Sandor maintains that Herzog will "come out of all this dreck smelling like a roast" -- he is given to malapropisms, describing Herzog as "baggard and gray-haired." But he tells Herzog that there's no way he can win custody of June from Madeleine in a jury trial.

Himmelstein rubs salt in the wound by praising Gersbach: "There's a man for you! That gimpy red-head knows what real suffering is. But he lives it up -- three men with six legs couldn't get around like that effing peg-leg." Herzog is furious at the advice not to sue for custody: "Madeleine put you up to that. She planted this, too. To keep me from suing." But Himmelstein insists that Herzog is a fool if he thinks he can win. In the letter Herzog tells him: "The more comfort you gave me, the closer I came to death's door. But what was I doing? Why was I in your house?" Then Himmelstein advises him to take out an insurance policy naming June as the beneficiary. He doesn't have to worry about Madeleine: "She'll be married soon. I took her to lunch at Fritzel's, and guys who haven't given Sandor H. the time of day for years came running with a hard-on, tripping over themselves. That includes the rabbi of my temple. She's some dish." And when Herzog protests that Madeleine is a "lunatic," Himmelstein shoots back:

"Who told you you were such a prince? Your mother did her own wash; you took boarders; your old man was a two-bit moonshiner. I know you Herzogs and your Yiches [Yiddish for "pedigree]. Don't give me that hoity-toity. I'm a Kike myself and got my diploma in a stinking night school."

Herzog and Himmelstein get in a furious fight. "He stood very close to Herzog, who was somewhat frightened by his shrillness and stared down, wide-eyed, at the face of his host." Herzog calls out for Beatrice to intervene, but she shuts the bedroom door. Finally, a shaken Herzog agrees to take out the insurance policy, which Himmelstein says will cost "four hundred and eighteen bucks." Having apparently calmed down, Himmelstein goes into the kitchen to make breakfast for Herzog, but throws another fit when he discovers dirty dishes in the sink: "He threw eggshells and orange rinds into the corner beside the garbage pail -- coffee grounds. He worked himself into a rage and began to smash dishes and glassware." Finally he calms down again and blames it all on his daughter Carmel: "I don't know how to handle her. I'm afraid the boys are getting into her pants already." He begs Herzog to "take an interest in her mental development.... Books -- ideas. Take her for a walk. Discuss with her. Please, Moses, I'm begging you!"

Himmelstein hits Herzog with a barrage of advice: rent a house in his neighborhood, hire a housekeeper who's "a good lay, too." He calls Herzog "my boy. My innocent kind-hearted boy." He kisses Herzog. "Moses felt the potato love. Amorphous, swelling, hungry, indiscriminate, cowardly potato love." And now, in the train, he calls himself a sucker: He gave Himmelstein money for an emergency and Himmelstein gave it to Madeleine to buy clothes. "Why did I become involved with him at all?"

The train reaches Woods Hole and he takes the ferry to Vineyard Haven where he catches a cab. "He had moments of sanity, but he couldn't maintain the balance for very long." When he reaches Libbie's house "he knew he had made a mistake." He is seething with resentment at what had been done to him. He wants to feel useful again: "Amorous Herzog, seeking love, and embracing his Wandas, Zinkas, and Ramonas, one after another? But this is a female pursuit. This hugging and heartbreak is for women. The occupation of a man is in duty, in use, in civility, in politics in the Aristotelian sense. Now then, why am I arriving here, in Vineyard Haven, on a holiday no less?"

He had helped Libbie "when her last husband, Erikson, went off his rocker and tried to stab her and take the gas himself.... But if she hadn't been so very beautiful, sexual, and obviously attracted to me, would I have been such a willing friend and helper?" Libbie comes out to meet him and introduces him to her husband, Arnold Sissler. Herzog admires their house and the view. "In the calm sky a helicopter steered toward Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys lived. Big doings there, once. The power of nations. What do we know about it? Moses felt a sharp pang at the thought of the late president."

Sissler shows him to his room and tells him that some neighbors are coming for dinner, including "One single lady. A singer. Miss Elisa Thurnwald. Divorced." He thanks him for helping Libbie. And he observes, "You got trouble, I can see that. Jumping out of your skin. You got a soul -- haven't you, Moses."

Moses lies down for a quarter of an hour, then writes a note: "Have to go back. Not able to stand kindness at this time." He slips out of the house, takes a cab to the airport where he flies to Boston and connects with a plane back to New York. "At eleven P.M. he was lying in his own bed, drinking warm milk and eating a peanut butter sandwich."

By his bed he has kept the letter from Geraldine Portnoy, Asphalter's student who revealed what was going on between Madeleine and Gersbach. He reads it now. In it, she too defends Madeleine: "I am not an enemy of Madeleine's. I sympathize with her, too. She is so vivacious, intelligent, and such a charmer, and has been so warm and frank for me. For quite a while, I admired her and as a younger woman was very pleased by her confidences. Herzog flushed. Her confidences would include his sexual disgrace." She notes that Asphalter had warned her "to look out for something dikey," which corresponds with the psychiatrist's odd inclusion of "Homosexual Inclinations" in his list of the symptoms of paranoia, "but then any intense feeling between members of the same sex is often, and unjustly, under suspicion."

She insists that "Madeleine is not bad with little June, basically." But then she reveals that when she came to sit for Madeleine, she found June locked in Gersbach's car. She has already noted that Gersbach "has an ambiguous position in this household." Gersbach had apparently quarreled with Madeleine and taken the child out to the car "and told her to play a while. He shut her up and went back in the house."

Herzog is enraged: "I'll kill him for that -- so help me, if I don't!" And he reads the rest of the letter which concludes, "I don't think Madeleine is a bad mother, actually."

It's possible at this point to wonder if Herzog isn't the only sane person in the novel.