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."

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.

2. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 31-72

From In the cab through hot streets ... through ... As for me, I was your patient ....

_____

Herzog is in a cab, on the way to the train station, in flight from Ramona toward his friend Libbie on Martha's Vineyard.

He knew he would think better, clearer thoughts after bathing in the sea. His mother had believed in the good effects of bathing. But she had died so young. He could not allow himself to die yet. The children needed him. His duty was to live. To be sane, and to live, and to look after the kids. This was why he was running from the city now, overheated, eyes smarting. He was getting away from all burdens, practical questions, away also from Ramona.

This snippet of the novel captures Bellow's narrative technique concisely: It is third person, but it is always telling us what is in Herzog's head, what he is seeing, thinking, and especially remembering. It is Joycean associative narrative without the conundrums thrown up by stream-of-consciousness technique. Partly this is because Herzog himself is an analyzer, always explaining himself to himself, as if he were a character in a novel being read by someone else. His Joycean counterpart, Leopold Bloom, is freer, less persistently self-conscious, less concerned about making himself understood.

In this passage, he moves, as he typically does, from the present (the consciousness of heading toward a destination) to the future (the effect of bathing in the sea) to the past (his mother) to the present (why he can't die), always in the name of self-justification. And as usual, he begins writing (this time in his head, but sometimes on paper) one of his letters. This one is to Smithers, who seems to be an academic colleague on some committee, or perhaps his department head. Smithers looks like Thomas E. Dewey, the failed presidential candidate who symbolizes political mediocrity, which provokes Herzog to a reflection on America itself: "Think what America could mean to the world. Then see what it is. What a breed it might have produced. But look at us -- at you, at me. Read the papers, if you can bear to."

He passes a store that reminds him of his ex-mother-in-law, Tennie, who is divorced from Madeleine's father, Pontritter, the celebrated impresario, whom Herzog last saw "wearing white duck trousers of bull-fighter's cut and alpargatas" -- the canvas and rope-soled shoes also known as espadrilles. Herzog's lawyer, Simkin, has told him that Tennie's feelings were hurt because he hasn't been to see her. "Of course Simkin knew all about Madeleine's affair with Valentine Gersbach, and what he didn't know his friends Pontritter and Tennie would tell him." Herzog is reluctant to see Tennie, he explains in the letter he imagines writing her, because it would mean having to be polite "while bursting with the wrongs your daughter did me. the same wrongs you have accepted from Pontritter, and forgiven him." He is certain that Madeleine sent Tennie to the zoo with June, their daughter, while Madeleine and Gersbach made love in Tennie's bed. He has a cruel vision of Tennie, "Divorced at fifty-five, still showing off her legs, unaware they now are gaunt. And diabetic, And the menopause. And abused by her daughter." He also knows that Tennie wants back the wedding present of Mexican silver cutlery that she gave them. He intends to return it:

I could never hold on to valuables -- silver, gold. With me, money is not a medium. I am money's medium. It passes through me -- taxes, insurance, mortgage, child support, rent, legal fees. All this dignified blundering costs plenty. If I married Ramona, it would be easier, perhaps. 

He has circled back to the reason for his flight from the city.

Stuck in traffic, he thinks back forty years to when his family took a streetcar to the train station in Montreal "with a basket (frail, splintering wood) of pears, overripe, a bargain bought by Jonah Herzog at the Rachel Street Market." He recalls the moment in vivid detail, including his mother moistening a handkerchief to wipe the dirt from his face.

These things either matter or they do not matter. It depends upon the universe, what it is. These acute memories are probably symptoms of disorder. To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and plow over the bones of the dead. 

In Grand Central he buys the Times but refuses himself a candy bar: "It would give the victory to the other side to let himself grow fat, jowly, sullen, with broad hips and a belly, and breathing hard. Ramona wouldn't like it either, and what Ramona liked mattered considerably," even though he is "buying a ticket to escape from her." He feels confused, "both visionary and muddy ..., feverish, damaged, angry, quarrelsome, and shaky." He notices a woman in the crowd with "bitch eyes" that "expressed a sort of female arrogance which had an immediate sexual power over him."

Is it the sex or the power that makes him think of writing to his Aunt Zelda? Her husband, Herman Umschand, has "former underworld acquaintances," and Herzog is flattered that Herman accepts him, a mere effete intellectual: "A politician in the Cook County Democratic organization who knew the Syndicate, the Juice men, the Policy kings, Cosa Nostra, and all the hoods, still found me good company, heimisch, and took me along to the races, the hockey games." But his divorce and his cuckoldry has lowered his status with Zelda and Herman, especially the humiliating fact that Herzog had found a house for Gersbach and his wife and a private school for their son. He believes that Zelda conspired with Madeleine, that she arranged for Herman to get him out of the house by taking him to a hockey game that he remembers vividly:

In the rink the players mixed like hornets -- swift, padded, yellow, black, red, rushing, slashing, whirling over the ice. Above the rink the tobacco smoke lay like a cloud of flash powder, explosive. Over the p.a. system the management begged the spectators not to throw pennies to catch the blades of the skaters.

And he fears that amid all this violent, masculine action, Herman knew that while they were at the game, Madeleine and Gersbach were cuckolding Herzog. He breaks out in a sweat in the air-conditioned train car.

He remembers being met in Chicago after his stay in Europe by Gersbach, "still my dearest friend as recently as that," who was holding Herzog's daughter in his arms. There was a blizzard, and the next day Herzog, staying in a motel, phoned Madeleine but she hung up on him, and unable to make contact with anyone else, he rode the bus out to the suburbs to see Zelda. He realized that she had taken Madeleine's side, and argued that Madeleine had poisoned her mind against him. Madeleine had complained that he was too wrapped up in the book he was writing: "that project of yours," Zelda called it, "that study of whatchamajig."

Herzog tried to explain what it was about -- that his study was supposed to have ended with a new angle on the modern condition, showing how life could be lived by renewing universal connections; overturning the last of the Romantic errors about the uniqueness of the Self; revising the old Western, Faustian ideology; investigating the social meaning of Nothingness.

Zelda countered that his obsession with his work had made a "prisoner" of Madeleine, sticking her with all the household duties, and that he had complained that the baby's crying disturbed him while he was working. He replied, "Yes, I was stupid -- a blockhead. But that was one of the problems I was working on, you see, that people can be free now but the freedom doesn't have any content."

And then Zelda delivered a knockout punch. "Zelda considered him for a moment as though to see whether he was strong enough to take it, and said, 'You were selfish.'" And he realized that Madeleine had told her about his problem with premature ejaculation. The accusation was unanswerable: "He couldn't invite her upstairs for a demonstration or produce affidavits from Wanda or Zinka."

In the train Herzog writes, "Will never understand what women want. What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood." He begins another letter, this one to his friend Lucas Asphalter, who has recently been the subject of a "human interest" item in the New York Post. A zoologist, Asphalter gave mouth-to-mouth respiration to one of his monkeys, Rocco, to try to save his life. Herzog is disgusted, partly because the monkey had died of tuberculosis and he fears Asphalter had contracted it, but also because of the peculiar celebrity the item had given to his friend, who had been the one who revealed to him Madeleine's affair with Gersbach. And the monkey, Rocco, had been present when Asphalter delivered the news: "All the while, the large brown monkey, with arms folded over his chest, and red, dry eyes, was looking on, silently disseminating his grimness." Asphalter had learned of the affair from one of his lab assistants, Geraldine Portnoy, who was a baby-sitter for Madeleine. Geraldine had written Herzog a letter, which Asphalter gave him.

On the train, Herzog wonders why he hadn't cried when Asphalter told him, and recalls that "Gersbach was a frequent weeper of distinguished emotional power" who had tears in his eyes "when Herzog landed at O'Hare and hugged his little daughter." He begins other letters: to Professor Byzhkovski in Warsaw about his study of the American Occupation of West Germany, to a Reverend Beasley about the problems of "Bowery bums" who trash his church, to the credit department of Marshall Field about the charges Madeleine has run up on his account,\ and to astronomer Fred Hoyle about "the Gold-Pore theory" (which is apparently a reference to a theory by Thomas Gold that Hoyle discusses in a chapter in his 1955 book Frontiers of Astronomy). Hoyle's book has evidently inspired cosmic thoughts in Herzog:

Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, who would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.

Then he begins a letter to the follower of Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, in which he talks about the problem of poverty based on his recently seeing the Satyajit Ray movie Pather Panchali. "He too had a daughter, and his mother too had been a poor woman. He had slept on sheets made of flour sacks. The best type for the purpose was Ceresota." He thinks of giving the house in the Berkshires to Bhave's movement, but can't imagine what they would do with it, and besides, he would have to pay off the mortgage before donating it.

He starts more letters: to his cousin Asher in Beersheba about a photograph of Asher's father in a Czarist uniform, to the president (presumably LBJ) about tax legislation, to Martin Heidegger about "the fall into the quotidian" ("When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?") and to a U.S. Public Health Service official named Emmett Strawforth about atomic fallout: "Recently Dr. Teller argued that the new fashion of tight pants, by raising body temperatures, could affect the gonads more than fallout. People greatly respected in their generation often turn out to dangerous lunatics."  He then decides to convert his letter to Strawforth into a letter to the editor, mentioning that he had known Strawforth at school and had played ping-pong with him: "He had a white buttocky face with a few moles, and fat curling thumbs that put a cheating spin on the ball." And somehow he is distracted into recalling the nursery rhymes he used to sing to June and Marco.

The conductor interrupts to punch his ticket, and Herzog decides instead to write to his psychiatrist in Chicago, Dr. Edvig. Madeleine had insisted that he see a psychiatrist, and he writes to Edvig:

I was allowed to choose my own psychiatrist. Naturally I picked one who had written on Barth, Tillich, Brunner, etc. Especially as Madeleine, though Jewish, had had a Christian phase as a Catholic convert and I hoped you might help me to understand her. Instead, you went for her yourself.

Edvig had told Madeleine that Herzog was "a reactive-depressive," but not insane, but Herzog said that she still thought he was insane. Edvig asked when she left the church, but Herzog wasn't sure that she had: "last Ash Wednesday she had the soot on her forehead." When he questioned her about it, "She tried to pass it off as one of my delusions, or something. But it was no delusion. It was a spot. I swear it was at least half a spot." And he writes Edvig, "By degrees, and I don't quite know how it happened, Madeleine became the principal figure in the analysis, and dominated it as she dominated me. And came to dominate you.... Because of the unusual facts of the case you said you had to interview her. By and by you were deep in discussions of religion with her. And finally, you were treating her, too."

She also accused Herzog of having her followed by a private detective. "She began this accusation with the slightly British diction he had learned to recognize as a sure sign of trouble." Edvig called it a "paranoid episode," but was unwilling to tell Herzog that he thought she was insane. And Herzog began to pity her: "Toward the sick, Moses was always especially compassionate." Then expensive things began to be delivered that she couldn't remember buying. "In ten days she ran up a twelve-hundred-dollar bill.... She did things in style, even when unbalanced. As he sent them back, Moses felt very tender toward her. Edvig predicted that she would never lapse into a true psychosis, but would have such spells for the rest of her life."

Pursuing a Ph.D. in Russian history, she begins reading old Russian religious texts in bed, and when Herzog protested, she attacked him, hitting "him in the face, too clumsily to hurt him." She accused him of "forcing her back into housework" whenever he complained that the house was dirty. Because Edvig responded to his complaints about Madeleine with professional detachment, Herzog turned to Valentine Gersbach for "a feeling reaction." But when he rang the doorbell, "he had to face the coldness (he couldn't understand it) of Phoebe Gersbach, who answered. She was looking very gaunt, dry, pale, strained ... of course, Phoebe knew her husband was sleeping with Madeleine." Herzog, however, thought it was because "she blamed him for aggravating Valentine's ambitions -- Gersbach the public figure, Gersbach the poet, the television-intellectual, lecturing at the Hadassah on Martin Buber. Herzog himself had introduced him to cultural Chicago."

He told Gersbach about the "wall of books" that Madeleine had built in their bed, but when he mentioned that he and Madeleine had had intercourse the night before the fight over the books, "Gersbach seemed extremely angry." Then he suggests that they sleep separately. "Dealing with Valentine was like dealing with a king," Herzog reflects. But then, "Herzog had a weakness for grandeur, and even bogus grandeur (was it ever entirely bogus?)" Gersbach tells him about the accident in the freight yards when he was seven that cost him his leg. "Valentine would have denied that the tears in his eyes were for himself. No: curse that, he'd have said. Not for him. They were for that little kid."

Herzog remembers Madeleine's ostentatious manner when he went to church with her before they were married. In his letter to Edvig he writes:

Somehow I got into a religious competition. You and Madeleine and Valentine Gersbach all talking religion to me -- so I tried it out. To see how it would feel to act with humility. As though such idiotic passivity or masochistic crawling or cowardice were humility, or obedience, not terrible decadence. Loathsome! O, patient Griselda Herzog! I put up the storm windows as an act of love, and left my child well provided, paying the rent and the fuel and the phone and insurance, and packing my valise. As soon as I was gone, Madeleine, your saint, sent my picture to the cops.

Madeleine, he concludes, completely fooled Edvig: "She snowed you completely. And you fell in love with her yourself, didn't you? Just as she planned.... She found you ... a useful instrument."

1. Herzog, by Saul Bellow, pp. 1-30

Through How do you say blond little cushioned knuckles in French?

_____

Moses Elkanah Herzog has ex-wives named Daisy and Madeleine, children named Marco and June, brothers named Shura and Willie, a sister named Helen, an arch-enemy named Valentine Gersbach, a psychiatrist named Dr. Edvig, a lawyer named Sandor Himmelstein, a physician named Dr. Emmerich, and girlfriends named Wanda, Zinka, Libbie, Ramona, and Sono. And when we first meet him he is deciding that if he's going crazy, it's all right.

When we begin, he is in the house he owns in the Berkshires, eating beans from the can and sleeping on a bare mattress. He is also writing letters that he carries around with him in a valise: "He had carried this valise from New York to Martha's Vineyard, but returned from the Vineyard immediately; two days later he flew to Chicago, and from Chicago he went to a village in western Massachusetts." And there he is questioning whether the rumor spread by Madeleine and Valentine that "his sanity had collapsed" is true.

We flash back to spring, when he is giving lectures on "The Roots of Romanticism" to night-school adult-education classes in New York City. But sometimes he interrupts his lectures to write things down as his class waits in silence for as long as five minutes.

At first there was no pattern to the notes he made. They were fragments -- nonsense syllables, exclamations, twisted proverbs and quotations or, in the Yiddish of his long-dead mother, Trepverter -- retorts that came too late, when you were already on your way down the stairs. 

(Trepverter, literally "staircase words," is also known as esprit de l'escalier, or staircase wit.) Herzog's terse little notes make me imagine what he might be like in the age of Twitter. He fears that they are "a symptom of disintegration."

We now learn that he is -- or thinks himself to be -- "a formerly handsome man," and that he wrote a brilliant Ph.D. thesis on The State of Nature in 17th and 18th Century English and French Political Philosophy and a book, Romanticism and Christianity. He feels guilt over his treatment of his first wife, Daisy, though "Madeleine, his second, had tried to do him in." He is "a loving but bad father" to his children, "an ungrateful child" to his parents, "affectionate but remote" to his siblings. "With his friends, an egotist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul, evasive." He is, in short, a mess.

And one of his chief problems is that he lost Madeleine to Valentine Gersbach, a radio announcer with "a thick chin, flaming copper hair that literally gushed from his head" and "a wooden leg" on which he walks "gracefully bending and straightening like a gondolier." Herzog had worked to please her, quitting an academic position, using the twenty thousand dollars he inherited from his father to buy a house in the apparently fictional Berkshire town of Ludeyville, and then closing it up and moving to Chicago where he even found a job for Valentine. And then she decided she wanted a divorce after all.


Madeleine is evidently no prize:

Only a week before she demanded a divorce, she had his things cleaned and pressed, but on the day he left the house, she flung them all into a carton which she then dumped down the cellar stairs. She said she needed more closet space.

She presents her demand for a divorce with "a certain theatrical genius," which she evidently inherited from her father, "a famous impresario -- sometimes called the American Stanislavsky," whom she hated. But Herzog's relationship with her was peculiarly masochistic: "There was a flavor of subjugation in his love for Madeleine. Since she was domineering, and since he loved her, he had to accept the flavor he was given." She informs him that she is humiliated "to admit defeat in this marriage. I've put all I had into it. I'm crushed by this?" And he thinks, "Crushed? She had never looked more glorious."


"Dr. Edvig, the Chicago psychiatrist who treated both Herzogs, agreed that perhaps it was best for Moses to leave town," so he borrows money from his brother Shura and goes to Europe, where he lectures in Copenhagen, Warsaw, Cracow, Berlin, Belgrade, Istanbul, and Jerusalem. In Poland he has an affair with a woman named Wanda, but also contracts a disease that he thinks is gonorrhea, but isn't. When he returns to Chicago, Madeleine regards his behavior as "so strange and to her mind so menacing" that she sends word through Gersbach for him to stay away, and gives a picture of him to the police with instructions that he should be arrested if he shows up in the neighborhood.

Herzog now wonders "what might have happened if instead of listening so intensely and thoughtfully" on the day she announced she wanted a divorce, "he had hit Madeleine in the face." But he rejects "this mental violence, sighing. He was afraid he was really given in secret to this sort of brutality." She had also told him she had seen a lawyer, who turns out to be Herzog's friend, Sandor Himmelstein. "He says you can stay with him until you make your new arrangements."

And so he spends his time writing letters, for example:

Dear Mr. President, Internal Revenue regulations will turn us into a nation of bookkeepers. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.

He also writes Daisy explaining that he won't be seeing Marco at camp on Parents' Day because the boy apparently blames him for breaking up with Madeleine and deserting his half-sister. He also claims to have been sick and under a doctor's care. "Herzog did not care for his own personality, and at the moment there was apparently nothing he could do about its impulses."

In June, "when the general revival of life troubles many people, the new roses, even in shop windows, reminding them of their own failures, of sterility and death, Herzog went to have a medical checkup." Dr. Emmerich, "an elderly refugee," tells him his health is fine. "He had been hoping for some definite sickness which would send him to a hospital for a while. He would not have to look after himself." His brothers and his sister, Helen, would take care of him. But even the infection he contracted in Poland had turned out to be easily curable.

Dr. Emmerich, who treated "the truly weak, the desperately sick, stricken women, dying men," is puzzled by Herzog's reaction to the news that he is all right. He offers him Miltown, a tranquilizer much prescribed in the 1950s, or snakeroot, the source of reserpine, an anti-anxiety drug, and offers to refer him to a psychiatrist. Herzog shrugs off the suggestions, and the doctor continues to ask him about "the big fellow with red hair, with the wooden leg" and to commiserate about Herzog's divorce. In turn, Herzog tries to get the doctor to talk about Madeleine, who had been his patient too, but the doctor deflects the questions, even after Herzog says, "She's a violent, hysterical woman." He suggests that Herzog see other women: "Do you have to eat dinner alone tonight?"

So Herzog thinks of Ramona Donsell, a woman in her thirties who had been a student in his class. She owns a flower shop on Lexington Avenue. "She come from Buenos Aires. Her background was international -- Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, and Jewish. She had gone to school in  Switzerland and still spoke with a slight accent, full of charm." She has firm breasts, which matters to Herzog greatly. On the other hand, "She was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years of age, he shrewdly reckoned, and this mean that she was looking for a husband."

So he decides on a trip to the Vineyard and gets in touch with "his friend Libbie Vane (Libbie Vane-Erikson-Sissler; she had just married for the third time and the house in the Haven belonged to her husband, an industrial chemist)." She invites him to stay with them and he accepts, then goes shopping for clothes "after shaving more closely than usual and brushing his hair (could he bear to see himself in the brilliant triple mirrors of a clothing store?)." But he is afraid that he will look ridiculous in the "reckless and gaudy" new styles.

Putzi Hanfstaengl

Undoubtedly Valentine Gersbach, who had beat him out with Madeleine, surmounting the handicap of a wooden leg, could wear those handsome brilliant candy stripes. Valentine was a dandy. He had a thick face and heavy jaws; Moses thought he somewhat resembled Putzi Hanfstaengl, Hitler's own pianist. But Gersbach had a pair of extraordinary eyes for a red-haired man, brown, deep, hot eyes, full of life. The lashes, too, were vital, ruddy-dark, long and childlike. And that hair was bearishly thick. Valentine, furthermore, was exquisitely confident of his appearance. You could see it. He knew he was a terribly handsome man. He expected women -- all women -- to be mad about him. And many were, weren't they? Including the second Mrs. Herzog.

So Herzog buys "a coat of crimson and white stripes" in a Fifth Avenue shop. But he gets crosswise with the salesman, who has "dog's breath" and when Herzog tells him his waist is thirty-four says, "Don't boast." And the triple mirror still intimidates him, especially when he recalls Madeleine standing nude in front of the bathroom mirror: "'Still young,' she said, taking inventory, 'young, beautiful, full of life. Why should I waste it all on you.'"

He buys swim trunks and a straw hat, which makes him look like "his father's cousin Elias Herzog, the flour salesman who had entered the northern Indiana territory for General Mills in the twenties." And he is off on a memory trip, recalling when he was eight years old and in the hospital in Montreal, where a Christian woman read aloud to him from the Bible.

"Where do you live, little boy?"

"On Napoleon Street."

Where the Jews live.

 "What does your father do?"

My father is a bootlegger. He has a still in Point-St. Charles. The spotters are after him. He has no money.

Only of course Moses would never have told her any of this. Even at five he would have known better. His mother had instructed him. "You must never say." 

He now packs his new summer clothes and makes "his getaway from Ramona." He also packs "the plastic container of Furadantin tablets." (Generic nitrofurantoin, an antibiotic for urinary tract infections.) Although he is cured of the infection he caught in Poland, he still "took an occasional pill just to be on the safe side." And he remembers the disapproving British doctor who treated him in Cracow. He thinks of writing in French to Wanda: "Every third-, fourth-, tenth-rate man of the world knew how to woo a woman in French, and so did Herzog. Though he was not the type. The feelings he wanted to express were genuine." She had insisted on his meeting her husband, "a poor, reproachful-looking man, with heart disease." Wanda had been Herzog's guide in Poland.

Still, he had been continually aware of drab Poland, in all directions freezing, drab, and ruddy gray; the stones still smellling of war-time murders. He thought he scented blood. He went many times to visit the ruins of the ghetto.

He regrets telling her about the infection, and now wants to write that he is cured: "Guéri de cette peite maladie. He ought not to have mentioned it to Wanda, for she was simply shocked and hurt.... He had made her cry."