Madeleine’s totalizing hatred is “mysterious” in part because of Herzog’s ultimate benignity. Herzog has flaws: he’s fretful, timid, inattentive, self-absorbed, gloomy, and a philanderer; also, according to Mady, “overbearing, infantile, demanding, sardonic and a psychosomatic bully” (p. 609). What he is not is imperious, mean, in several senses, violent, sometimes physically, vindictive in act, and paranoid, qualities Sasha attributes to Bellow in her memoir and in our interviews, by way of explaining both her adultery and her anger. Wayne Booth, the literary critic, remembered encountering Bellow in Hyde Park shortly before he’d finished the final draft of Herzog. He was revising madly, he told Booth, four hours every morning, “going through the manuscript and weeding out parts of myself that I don’t like.”43 In making Madeleine’s malevolence mysterious, underdetermined, Bellow indulged vindictive feelings toward Sasha, but doing so also served fictional ends, licensing the character’s connection to a wider malevolence, comparably totalizing and underdetermined, generating passages of “great energy,” bravura demonizing passages, as in the screaming, cursing rages that leave Madeleine with “an odd white grime in the corners of her mouth” (p. 473), the furious glare “so intense that her eyes seemed twisted” (p. 541), a desire “to kick out his brains with a murderous bitch foot” (p. 510). Madeleine is not Sasha, she’s a character in a novel, a defense Sasha accepted. Did she ever confront Bellow about Herzog? Not at the time, nor in person. She read the excerpt in Esquire, when Madeleine was called Juliana, a name that made her laugh, being much too regal for the girl she remembered herself being in her early twenties, insecure, out of her depth. When she read the published novel several years later, “there was a certain resignation: ‘Well, what did you expect, you married a writer?’ ” Sasha’s tone in saying this recalled her tone when reminded of the scene in which Madeleine tells Herzog that the marriage is over just after he’s put up the storm windows. As was mentioned in Chapter 13, the idea that she would consciously do such a thing made her laugh. “I would never do that. Those are the kinds of things that make sense for the character of Madeleine.”
It is not just violence or hatred that degrades or traduces the human. “Potato love” does, too. The term first surfaces in the letter to Adlai Stevenson, whom Moses supported in 1952. “I am sure the Coriolanus bit was painful,” he writes, “kissing the asses of the voters, especially in cold states like New Hampshire. Perhaps you did contribute something useful in the last decade … the look of the ‘intelligent man’ grieving at the loss of his private life, sacrificed to public service. Bah! The general won because he expressed low-grade universal potato love” (p. 482). When Moses recoils from the bleakness of recent historical writing, including that of Mady’s tutor, Egbert Shapiro, with its “vision of mankind as a lot of cannibals, running in packs, gibbering, bewailing its own murders, pressing out the living world as dead excrement,” he forces himself to acknowledge the truth it points to: “Do not deceive yourself, dear Moses Elkanah, with childish jingles and Mother Goose. Hearts quaking with cheap and feeble charity or oozing potato love have not written history. Shapiro’s snarling teeth, his salivating greed, the dagger of an ulcer in his belly give him true insights, too. Fountains of human blood that squirted from fresh graves! Limitless massacre! I never understood it!” (p. 493). When Himmelstein tells Moses “I love you better than my own effing family,” that “You’re my boy. My innocent kind-hearted boy,” and gives him a kiss, “Moses felt the potato love. Amorphous, swelling, hungry, indiscriminate, cowardly potato love.” The next line reads: “ ‘Oh, you sucker,’ Moses cried to himself in the train. ‘Sucker’ ” (p. 507). Not all deep feeling, though, is fraudulent. Moses loves his old tutor, Harris Pulver, “tiny, nervous Pulver with his timid, whole-souled blue eyes” in an “immoderate heart-flooded way,” but a way distinguished from potato love. The marvelous Napoleon Street flashbacks, minimally adapted from “Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son,” are also “heart-flooded,” but again different from potato love, because rich with complicating, humanizing particulars. Real potato love is gross, a feature of the hard-headed, the “Reality-Instructor” (p. 446). “Sentiment and brutality,” Herzog says of Gersbach, “never one without the other, like fossils and oil” (p. 697). In addition, potato love is often a tactic, only partly conscious, using bogus feeling to get people to do what you want or see things your way.
Herzog sees the rise of potato love as a reaction to the horrors of modernity. In New York, as he drops his subway token in the slot, he sees “a whole series of tokens” within the lit and magnified glass:
Innumerable millions of passengers had polished the wood of the turnstile with their hips. From this arose a feeling of communion—brotherhood in one of its cheapest forms. This was serious, thought Herzog, as he passed through. The more individuals are destroyed (by processes such as I know) the worse their yearning for collectivity. Worse, because they return to the mass agitated, made fervent by their failure. Not as brethren, but as degenerates. Experiencing a raging consumption of potato love. Thus occurs a second distortion of the divine image, already so blurred, wavering, struggling (p. 594).
The “divine image” is taken from William Blake, who locates divinity in human particulars, human virtues, the human form.44 Current conditions have distorted this image, replacing it with a degenerate longing for communion with the mass, the folk or volk, the proletariat or comrades. The falsity of potato love breeds further falsities. “Having discovered that everyone must be indulgent with bungling child-men,” Herzog “willingly accepted the necessary quota of consequent lies,” which he calls “emotional goodies.” The lies in his case are to himself, about his professed devotion to “truth, friendship … children (the regular American worship of kids)” (p. 685). When his Chicago friend, the zoologist Luke Asphalter, agrees to give him a bed because “You’re an old friend,” Herzog to his surprise has difficulty speaking: “A swift rush of feeling, out of nowhere, caught his throat. His eyes filled up. The potato love, he announced to himself. It’s here. To advert to his temperament, call things by the correct name, restored his control. Self-correction refreshed him” (p. 687).
By not attending to things as they are, to the reality of his internal world as well as of the world outside, Herzog finds himself in his current fix. In the novel’s present, he is determined to see things aright, beginning with his own behavior. His childlike passivity, he now sees, was part of a “deal—a psychic offer—meekness in exchange for preferential treatment,” a self-judgment that held no “terror for him; no percentage now in quarreling with what one was” (p. 571). As he later puts it, “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” (p. 705). When Madeleine leaves him the first time, as Sasha did early in the summer of 1958, they get back together.
And then she and Valentine ran my life for me. I didn’t know a thing about it. All the decisions were made by them—where I lived, where I worked, how much rent I paid. Even my mental problems were set by them. They gave me my homework. And when they decided that I had to go, they worked out all the details—property settlement, alimony, child support. I’m sure Valentine thought he acted in my best interests. He must have held Madeleine back. He knows he’s a good man. He understands, and when you understand you suffer more. You have higher responsibilities, responsibilities that come with suffering. I couldn’t take care of my wife, poor fish. He took care of her. I wasn’t fit to bring up my own daughter. He has to do it for me, out of friendship, out of pity, and sheer greatness of soul. He even agrees that Madeleine is a psychopath (p. 612).
At the time this takeover occurred, Herzog was willfully blind, saw advantages in being so (as in the discovery that “everyone must be indulgent with bungling child-men”). Potato love replaces real love. “What the fuck does he know what it is to face facts,” cries Himmelstein
, barely restrained by his wife. “All he wants is everybody should love him. If not, he’s going to scream and holler” (p. 500). One recalls the adult Moses sitting at the side of the tub watching, like a child, as Madeleine, who thinks him “mother-bound” (p. 530), applies her makeup, or the way he listens to Himmelstein, “like a child to a tale” (p. 507). He was “used to being a favorite” (p. 528), to getting what he wants, which may account for his adult propensity to pursue every woman who attracts him, “one after another.” Why he wants them, however, “I myself didn’t understand, didn’t have a clue” (p. 584). A related childishness is his susceptibility to fantasy. Madeleine’s mother, Tennie, plays on Herzog’s weakness for “good deeds,” to act the knight in shining armor: “she flattered this weakness, asking him to save this headstrong deluded child of hers. Patience, loving-kindness, and virility would accomplish this. But Tennie flattered him even more subtly. She was telling Moses that he could bring stability into the life of this neurotic girl and cure her by his steadiness,” an appeal that “stirred his impure sympathies intensely” (p. 526).
MUCH OF HERZOG concerns Moses’s attempt to find in “thought” a force that can free him from “the humiliating comedy of heartache” (p. 583). This attempt is traced and dramatized in the unsent letters he writes “to explain, to have it out, to justify, to put in perspective, to clarify, to make amends” (p. 418). To Philip Roth, the novel’s “special appeal,” a product in large measure of the letters, lies in Bellow’s ability “to hoist the weight of [his] thinking up from the depths to the narrative’s surface without sinking the narrative’s mimetic power.”45 The letters overflow with erudite allusion and reflection, often inspired by the sorts of texts found in Humanities courses and the Fundamentals Lists of Committee students. Since Herzog is an intellectual historian, author of a book entitled Romanticism and Christianity, now at work, or meant to be at work, on a second volume, “on the social ideas of the Romantics” (p. 421), his erudition is dramatically appropriate, plausible (though as Stanley Edgar Hyman points outs, he’s “somewhat more fussed-over and foundation-granted, somewhat richer and freer, than his circumstances in the novel entitle him to be”).46 Herzog’s aim with the blocked second book is to challenge what he calls “post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the Void” (pp. 509–10), a fashionable pessimism that feeds into Romantic notions of the artist as alienated hero, a figure he parodies in the person of his childhood friend, Nachman, a clichéd Left Bank and Greenwich Village bohemian.
According to Herzog, in the letter to his old tutor, Harris Pulver, the Void or “Wasteland outlook” is found “in philosophy and literature as well as in sexual experience, or with the aid of narcotics, or in ‘philosophical,’ ‘gratuitous’ crime and similar paths of horror. (It never seems to occur to such ‘criminals’ that to behave with decency to another human being might also be ‘gratuitous’)” (p. 581). “The very Himmelsteins, who had never even read a book of metaphysics, were touting the Void as if it were so much salable real estate” (p. 510). Chief among the tenets of the Void is a view of the self or soul as a construction, a view conditioned by Sartre’s formulation “existence precedes essence” (Ellmann calls Herzog “the first anti-Existentialist hero”). “According to the latest from Paris and London,” says Herzog, in an early draft of the novel, “there is no person. According to Bertrand Russell ‘I’ is a grammatical expression.”47 For Herzog, in contrast, the self is “a mysterious given as unique as a face,”48 something with which we are born, no mere product of grammar or historical necessity. “In our greatest confusion,” Bellow has written, “there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.”49 Truth similarly, for all its elusiveness, is neither inaccessible nor “true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is illusion” (p. 510).
Herzog’s views are those of the liberal humanist, of a piece with his championing of freedom (despite a mothlike attraction to bullies, bosses, “Reality-Instructors”), generosity (contra Freud, who, like Calvin, offers “a lousy, cringing, grudging conception of human nature” [p. 474]), brotherhood (in defiance of “preachers of dread [who] tell you that others only distract you from metaphysical freedom” [p. 692]), and civic usefulness (“politics in the Aristotelian sense” [p. 511]). Often Herzog writes letters to the thinkers whose ideas he considers (Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Spengler), though ideas figure in other letters. In earliest versions of the novel there are no letters at all; then Bellow adds letters of a personal nature (for example, to Dr. Edvig, the therapist); only in later versions does he add what Daniel Fuchs calls “idea-letters (along with a heightening of the idea element in the straight dramatic parts).”50 Far from limiting the novel’s appeal, these letters helped to account for its commercial success, sparked by the approving attention they received from reviewers. Herzog spent forty-two weeks on the bestseller lists and sold 142,000 in hardback, a success that bred detractors, thought of by Bellow as “out there in the grass.”51
For all its prominence in the novel, “thought” proves of little assistance to Herzog, failing to explain or heal either his personal state or the state of the world. All it offers is “a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations” (p. 583). Like “theater” it distorts and simplifies. As Bellow put it in an interview with Norman Manea:
One of the things that bothers Herzog, that eats at him, is the fact that his extensive education doesn’t work for him at all. He put his money on the wrong horse, as an American would say. He assumed all along that if he played the game by the going rules that it would work for him, his education would work for him, as it does for others, but the question in Herzog is whether it works for anybody. The answer is probably not, because you can’t apply the lessons of high culture to the facts of ordinary life. That’s where the comedy comes from. Herzog finds no support in the culture that he embraced.… He’s been a good boy and he’d done all that the teacher told him to do and in a pinch nothing works.52
In an interview with Botsford, while talking of his time with Sasha, Bellow describes arriving at exactly this point in his own life:
I had an additional burden—my “higher education.” That counts for a great deal. When that higher education was put to the test, it didn’t work. I began to understand the irrelevancy of it, to recoil in disappointment from it. Then one day I saw the comedy of it. Herzog says, “What do you propose to do now that your wife has taken a lover? Pull Spinoza from the shelf and look into what he says about adultery? About human bondage?” You discover, in other words, the inapplicability of your higher learning, the absurdity of the culture it cost you so much to acquire. True devotion to Spinoza, et al. would have left you no time for neurotic attachments and bad marriages. That would have been a way out for you.
What the above argues is not that higher education is a bad thing but that our conception of it is ridiculous.53
HERZOG EXPRESSES VIEWS like these at several points in the novel. What intellectuals love, he says in the penultimate section, “is an imaginary human situation invented by their own genius and which they believe is the only true and the only human reality” (p. 725). “Human life,” he elsewhere says, mostly with Heidegger and Nietzsche in mind, “is far subtler than any of its models.… Do we need to study theories of fear and anguish?” (p. 691) (especially theories used to justify fear and anguish, if not by the theorists themselves then by their followers). “I can’t accept this foolish dreariness,” Herzog declares. “We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice” (p. 491). Such was to be the message of
Herzog’s blocked second book, ending “with a new angle on the modern condition, showing how life could be lived by renewing universal connections” (p. 455). It is also the message the letters struggle toward. After all, “what can thoughtful people and humanists do but struggle toward suitable words” (p. 692). As Herzog seeks these words, the novel draws closer to nineteenth-century or realist models. In a 1975 essay on Bellow, John Bayley argued that the “American-Jewish novel has the obvious but enormous advantage of continuity not only with the almost pre-fictional tradition of the honnête homme, but with the great humanistic liberal and Victorian novel world of Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot.… A certain kind of Jewish image today is a product not of the Torah and the Hasidim but of Little Dorrit and John Stuart Mill.”54
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