Saul Bellow. The American Thomas Mann? A serious alternative to beatnicks? A Chicago anti-hero? Bellow's work, at least as I have come across in my first reading of him, the fantastically difficult novel Herzog (originally published in 1964), provides a chromatic blend of the drama of adulthood, the subliminal concentrations of the romantic, 20th-century travel and communication, and Dostoyevskian rage. This is a book of problems, as Philip Roth describes throughout his "introduction" to the Penguin Classics edition (of which I read, with the great photography on the cover by Martin Scott-Jupp, the edition being from 2003), though the problems are delightfully portrayed as manageable by Herzog throughout the verse: "If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog." Thus the book starts off and at times it's very confusing. What is conflict? Does conflict have to be above the surface or behind the lines, or maybe it has to be both. The third person, the reader, gets the greatest conflict of all in this book, and that's trying to define.
Below I've tried to throw in as many crucial quotes from the first sections of the book, quotes which zero in on those problems, but also touch on the master descriptions, of character and environment, that Bellow so beautifully provides in a haphazard glance sidelong and penetrating.
"How paradoxical it is that a man who uses heroin may get a 20-year sentence for what he does to himself . . . ." (56)
"De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse." (57)
"'I don't agree with Nietzsche that Jesus made the whole world sick, infected it with his slave morality. But Nietzsche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some crisis, some fall from classical greatness, some corruption or evil to be saved from. I call that Christian.'" (61)
"Paranoia is perhaps the normal state of mind in savages. And if my soul, out of season, out of place, experienced these higher emotions, I could get no credit for them anyway." (64)
"Each man has his own batch of poems." (69)
"But Madeline was putting on lipstick, and fluffing out her blouse, and checking her hat. How lovely she could be! Her face was gay and round, pink, the blue of her eyes was clear. Very different from the terrifying menstrual ice of her rages, the look of the murderess. The doorman ran down from his rococo shelter in front of the Plaza. The wind was blowing hard. She swept into the lobby. Palms and pink-toned carpets, gliding, footman . . ." (71)
"Herzog, now barely looking through the tinted, immovable, sealed window felt his eager, flying spirit streaming out, speaking, piercing, making clear judgments, uttering final explanations, necessary words only. He was in a whirling ecstasy. He felt at the same time that his judgments exposed the boundless, baseless bossiness and willfulness, the nagging embedded in his mental constitution." (75)
"The lawn was on an elevation with a view of fields and woods. Formed like a large teardrop of green, it had a gray elm at its small point, and the bark of the huge tree, dying of dutch blight, was purplish gray. Scant leaves for such a vast growth. An oriole's nest, in the shape of a gray heart, hung from twigs. God's veil over things makes them all riddles. If they were not all so particular, detailed, and very rich I might have more rest from them. But I am a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness. They are too exciting. Meantime I dwell in yon house of dull boards. Herzog was worried about that elm. Must he cut it down He hated to do it. Meanwhile the cicadas all vibrated a coil in their bellies, a horny posterior band in a special chamber. Those billions of red eyes from the enclosing woods looked out, stared down, and the steep waves of sound drowned the summer afternoon. Herzog had seldom heard anything so beautiful as this massed continual harshness." (79-80)
"But we mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals. The canned sauerkraut of Spengler's "Prussian Socialism," the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook, the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about Inauthenticity and Forlornness. I can't accept this foolish dreariness. We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice--" (82)
"We are survivors, in this age, so theories of progress ill become us, because we are intimately acquainted with the costs. To realize that you are a survivor is a shock. At the realization of such election, you feel like bursting into tears." (83)
"perhaps we, modern humankind (can it be!), have done the nearly impossible, namely, learned something. You know that the decline and doom of civilization refuses to follow the model of antiquity. The old empires are shattered but those same one-time powers are richer than ever." (83)
"It was easy for the Wastelanders to be assimilated to totalitarianism. Here the responsibility of artists remains to be assessed. To have assumed, for instance, that the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization led straight to cultural fascism." (84)
"The little demon was impregnated with modern ideas, and one in particular excited his terrible little heart: you must sacrifice your poor, squawking, niggardly individuality--which may be nothing anyway (from an analytic viewpoint) but a persistent infantile megalomania, or (from a Marxian point of view) a stinking little bourgeois property--to historical necessity. And to truth. And truth is true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion, and not truth." (103)
"Not to be a fool might not be worth the difficult alternatives. Anyway, who was the non-fool? Was it the power-lover, who bent the public to his will--the scientific intellectual who administered a budget of billions? Clear eyes, a hard head, a penetrating political intelligence--the organizational realist?" . . . "The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with. This was where such as he came in. The progress of civilization--indeed, the survival of civilization--depended on the successes of Moses E. Herzog. And in tr4eating 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." (137)
"Modern science, least bothered with the definition of human nature, knowing only the activity of investigation, achieves its profoundest results through anonymity, recognizing only the brilliant functioning of intellect. Such truth as it finds may be nothing to live by, and perhaps a moratorium on definitions of human nature is now best." (142)
"To haunt the past like this--to love the dead! Moses warned himself not to yield so greatly to this temptation, this peculiar weakness of his character. He was a depressive. Depressives cannot surrender childhood--not even the pains of childhood." (156)
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