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February 14, 2010February 14, 2010

Seize the Day

February 2010 might not be a good time to reread Seize the Day. Unemployment is troubling everyone this month, and the book questions whether unemployment, or adversity in general, is simply chance, or do those who suffer adversity actually control their fate. The novel has an answer, but the answer is not easy to accept.

Seize the Day is a short (119 pages in the Penguin edition) and frequently praised novel by Saul Bellow. I finished reading it for the second time this morning. I don’t recall exactly when I first read it, but it must have been when I was high school in the sixties, some time after I read Herzog, but before I left for college. Although I don’t remember much from my first reading, it stayed with me as a disturbing and moving novel: one that I did not want to reread, but could not forget.

Synopsis

The book is easy to summarize. Tommy Wilhelm has lost his job and and has left his wife and two sons. He is almost out of money, the rent is due, his wife demands money, his father won’t lend him a cent. Impetuously, Tommy hands his last seven hundred 1956 dollars to Dr. Tamkin, a quack psychiatrist, to invest in the commodities market. On the fateful day of the novel, Tamkin loses Tommy’s money and leaves town. Chasing after Tamkin, Tommy stumbles into a funeral and breaks down into ecstatic tears. End.

For its shortness and simplicity, many people consider it to be Bellow’s best work. The characters are vivid, bizarre.

Tamkin

Tamkin, whose “bones were peculiarly formed, as though twisted twice where the ordinary human bone was turned only once, and his shoulders rose in pagoda-like points,” writes illiterate doggerel that he tries to pass as poetry and delivers psychological homilies whose only point is to goad Tommy into acquiring money for Tamkin to embezzle away.

Guy in the Newsstand

The guy in the newsstand “had poor eyes. They may have not been actually weak but they were poor in expression, with lacy lids that furled down at the corners.”

Maurice Venice

Tommy found Maurice Venice, the talent scout turned pimp who lured Tommy into a short and failing career as an actor in Hollywood, to be “huge and oxlike, so stout that his arms seemed caught from beneath in a grip of flesh and fat; it looked as if it must be positively painful. He had little hair. Yet he enjoyed a healthy complexion.”

Is Tommy Wilhelm a Dope?

The comic characters that surround Tommy are no help to him. Tommy’s father resolutely refuses to take on any of Tommy’s burdens, thus avoiding Tommy’s fate for himself. Tamkin urges Tommy to take risks, but when Tommy does risk his last bit of money with him, Tamkin promptly takes his own risk, grabs the money and runs. Is Tommy just a dope?

The Funeral

The answer comes at the funeral of a stranger. Tommy’s breakdown at the funeral does not offer a resolution and there is no clue that his problems will abate. His adversity, tragedy, even suffering, is inevitable and endless. Comic figures like Tommy’s father and Tamkin avoid suffering with ploys that avert disaster but they are no better prepared than Tommy when the dime drops.

The novel ends and we are amused, left thinking that when all the conniving Tamkins have been blown away by the futility of their squirming, Tommy will struggle on.

January 31, 2010February 14, 2010

Saul Bellow, Herzog

Last week, I read Herzog by Saul Bellow for the second time. The first time I read it, I was fifteen, maybe fourteen. I read it then because I had convinced my mother to subscribe to the Book-of-the-Month-Club and Herzog was either the selection of the month or one of the generous premiums the BOMC gave out for joining. I read it this time because I read an article in the New York Times about sex scenes in popular literature and I happen to have registered for a creative writing class on writing love scenes. (What will this sixty year old grandpa do next?) John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Phillip Roth were held up as authors of pre-women’s liberation sex scenes.

I was reminded that Herzog was the first book I read that addressed sex openly. I discount certain scenes in Heinlein and Horatio Hornblower, which were certainly exciting to a fourteen year old in the sixties, but were suggestive cartoons, not passion.

Hyde Park and the University of Chicago play as background to Herzog, and I wonder if reading Bellow had anything to do with the fact that I chose to go off to Chicago for college. I’m not sure. While I was a student at the UC, I did not seek out Bellow, although I met him and his poodle on the street, probably Dorchester Ave, every morning one quarter when his dog walk and my class schedule happened to intersect. After the first few encounters, we began to nod, but our relationship never went farther than a nod. At the time, I am not even sure I connected the man with the poodle to the author of Herzog.

Rereading Herzog, I now realize how funny the novel is. Herzog is a buffoon in a straw boater hat and an unreliable narrator. The sex scenes are suggestive, but not graphic. The bawdiest moment it the entire book is when Herzog recounts an old joke about the Shakespearian actor who, when complimented for his physiognomy, replies “Madame, I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” I trotted this chestnut out several times to show off my fifteen year old worldliness, but failed to calibrate the audience properly every time, and got only uncomprehending stares and shaking heads instead of sophisticated laughter.

Now, I wonder what it was that I enjoyed in the novel in 1965? Certainly the character of Herzog, who in some ways foreshadows some of my own intellectuality and passion for history of ideas and I think there is a certain amount of resonance between my own European heritage and Herzog’s Jewishness.

Of course, I missed entirely the bizarre absurdity of Herzog’s life and the preposterousness of twentieth century United States seen as a logical consequence of the enlightenment mixed with Nazi extremism and American materialism. But I can’t say that I understand the book now. I feel there is something I should understand, but it is all unclear.

Consequently, I feel compelled to re-read Saul Bellow’s entire corpus and figure out what it is that I almost understand. Over the years, I have read most of his books, but now I must reread them all.

January 30, 2010January 30, 2010

January Snowdrops

The snowdrops are beginning to bloom this week. They are not native to the Pacific Northwest. A cursory search on the Internet traces them to Asia Minor and they were garden favorites in Britain and Ireland before they appeared in the new world.

Here on the farm, snowdrops are thriving and spreading. My mother or grandmother planted them in the front yard flower beds, but lately, patches of snowdrops have been popping up in semi-shaded areas of heavy leafmold at edge of the woods and in the windbreaks. The patches began as little clumps, but the largest is now is close to twenty feet across. I suspect the proliferation stems from the absence of dairy cows snuffling and trampling over the delicate snowdrop beds, but that is only a guess.

New species scare me. My grandmother planted English ivy and now it threatens to choke the natives out. A couple years ago, it nearly strangled one of the evergreens in the yard with vines that grew as thick as a man’s arm. We cut the vines with axe and chain saw and pulled the ivy up that surrounded the base of the tree with the tractor. Dead vines still wrap the tree, but each year the tree grows a little healthier and the damage less apparent.

I hope the snowdrops are not invaders. January needs reminders that spring is not far away. This is an el Nino year and January has been warm, the temperature occasionally making it into the sixties, and I believe we have not seen a single snowflake. Still, the sun seldom shines, and when it does, the landscape is muddy and muted. The holidays are past and spring is still remote.

The snowdrops are thriving and even the lilacs are beginning to bud. There is still a chance of a bitter Northeaster, but the chance diminishes every day. The good comes with the bad. Warmth comes hand in hand with foggy overcast nights and the young astronomers have not had a single clear night for the telescope since Christmas.