Saul Bellow's Glittering Eye

...These letters telling General Eisenhower about American aims or warning the New York Times against Dr...

...a lying denial of this adultery that she makes to Herzog on p. 193 of the book is the most unspeakable remark that I have ever seen attributed to a Radcliffe girl...

...The childhood scenes are hard going because they are full of untranslated Yiddish, but they are the best part of the book...

...He discovers that his neurotic aim has been to be a child again, beloved of his parents, back on Napoleon Street in Montreal: "All he ever wanted was there...

...her energy was limited...

...A moving scene in which Herzog attends the trial of a young woman for beating her child to death is ruined by an overstated and flatulent account of Moses' reaction...

...We leave him in his house, the current turned on and fresh flowers picked (watch out for those symbols, deep readers), waiting for Ramona to arrive for dinner...

...He has a compulsion to tell all, to overtell, to explain all, to explain away...

...Moses woos Ramona by endlessly retelling his sad story, "how he was swindled, conned, manipulated, his savings taken, driven into debt, his trust betrayed by wife, friend, physician,' and Ramona dutifully converts "his miseries into sexual excitements...

...There is too much of everything in Herzog: too many Chicago Jews who talk alike, too many old women with dyed hair turned to quills...

...Herzog's family claims descent from "the greatest Hasidic rabbis," and the purest moments in the novel are Hasidic affirmations of joy...

...she must have been past the point of irony...

...The change of outlook is in the philosophy of history...

...All of Gersbach's wife Phoebe is summed up in one remarkable sentence: "Phoebe was not strong...

...The switches in time and place as Moses moves from New York to Chicago to Ludeyville, and in memory to various stages of his life, are sometimes confusing but ultimately justify themselves: the present Herzog is the believable product of his history...

...Bellow himself, impaled on the point of irony, is a master of life's incongruities...

...My mother thereupon rubbed the palms of her hands together—just as she did in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them—and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as a proof that we were made of earth...

...both have been several times married, have gray hair, and so forth...

...The letters are the ghosts of dialogues, monologues arguing against known positions...

...When Moses' friend Luke first tells him about Madeleine's affair with Gersbach, it is in a room in which Luke's pet monkey sits dying of tuberculosis...

...Herzog, in short, is a self-caricature, not a selfportrait...

...Teller arise, let us say, out of the same impulse that periodically turns Norman Mailer into cabinet timber, but like the self-pity the oracular impulse is mocked and ironically undercut...

...He hasn't forgiven Madeleine, but he is drained of messages to the world, and perhaps he is drained of spite too...

...Most important, he discovers that he has been "his father's son,' blindly repeating the patterns of his father's life...

...It is as a novel, then, that Herzog must be judged...

...Herzog remembers wheeling Junie in her stroller in the warm Chicago lake wind, reciting nursery rhymes to her while she cried out, "More, more.' After shaving before an evening with Ramona, Herzog dances and leaps on the soiled tiles of his bathroom floor...

...he flies back after two days and camps out in his closed-up house in Ludeyville, Massachusetts...

...The transitional Herzog recognizes: "History is the history of cruelty, not love...

...They contain all the rich awfulness, the stink and cursing, of immigrant Jewish life, but also its nostalgic attraction...

...The letters are a tribute to Bellow's intelligence and the breadth of his learning, and the best of them are brilliant...

...This did not suit me and I expressed doubts of the doctrine...

...Similarly, I do not think that Augie's author ever trained an eagle to hunt iguanas...

...Not only does Bellow tell this of Herzog, but he expands and weakens it, losing the economy and wry humor of Freud's anecdote, even having Moses' mother say to him: "Look carefully, now, and you'll see what Adam was made of...

...Both were born near Montreal in 1915, grew up in the Jewish slums of Chicago, and attended the University of Chicago...

...All this time his life flashes back to him and he writes frantic letters to "the newspapers, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead...

...The climactic scene, in which Herzog decides not to shoot Madeleine and her lover when he looks through a window and sees Gersbach tenderly bathing little Junie, is fatally weakened when Bellow adds an explanation beginning: "As soon as Herzog saw the actual person giving an actual bath...

...This alteration creates an odd imbalance in the book, since Moses is somewhat more fussed-over and foundationgranted, somewhat richer and freer, than his circumstances in the novel entitle him to be...

...Herzog, and his daughter Junie are...

...The danger is garrulousness...

...Moses Herzog looks at first like Saul Bellow, scarcely disguised...

...It is the role of Herzog's letters to fill out with ideas the novel's wealth of sensations...

...These lyric moments, too, get ironically mocked— the toy trumpet is inaudible, Herzog has been given Junie to wheel so that Madeleine can pop into bed with Gersbach, the bathroom tiles come loose from the grout and have to be kicked under the tub—but they remain notes so pure and piercing that all the book's torrent of words cannot drown them out...

...he spends a night with Ramona, an amorous florist who aspires to the dubious security of being the third Mrs...

...During that time Moses flees from New York to Martha's Vineyard to stay with friends, then flees back immediately because he is "not able to stand kindness at this time...

...More than most, all of Bellow's protagonists are autobiographical projections...

...I am going through a change of outlook," Herzog tells Ramona, but what he wants is "a change of heart—a true change of heart...

...It might be that the recognition that history is the history of cruelty and love requires a change of heart in addition...

...For a good part of their marriage Madeleine has been cuckolding Moses with his best friend, Valentine Gersbach...

...Herzog returns relentlessly to his childhood because he is a nostalgic depressive, and, as he says, "depressives cannot surrender childhood...

...The former Herzog wrote himself a memo, "To do justice to Condorcet," that is, to defend the view of history as benign...

...Bellow is a word-spinner, as a consequence of which the sources of his strength lie very close to the sources of his weakness...

...The principal change has been to make Herzog, not a famous and successful novelist, but an academic, a once-promising historian of ideas and authority on Romanticism...

...My astonishment at this ocular demonstration knew no bounds and I acquiesced in the belief...

...Its action covers a few weeks of crisis or breakdown in the life of Moses Herzog, an intellectual in his late 40s...

...Herzog's inadequacy is so complete that he cannot even pride himself as a bird-watcher: the birds fly away before he can get his fieldglasses into focus...

...At the end of the book, camping out in his deserted house, Herzog finally feels free of Madeleine, and experiences nothing less than "joy...

...Riding through the garment district, Moses sees a Negro pushing a wagon of ladies' coats: "He had a beautiful beard and blew a gilt toy trumpet...

...For reader as well as writer he serves as a therapeutic vessel that we can repeatedly fill with tears of self-pity, then empty with cleansing sloshes of selfmockery...

...When the babysitter writes Herzog a letter to tell him that the lovers once mistreated little Junie, the letter begins by explaining that when the babysitter took Herzog's course in Romantics as Social Philosophers she disagreed about Rousseau and Marx, but that she has since come around to his view...

...Freud tells it in The Interpretation of Dreams: "When I was six years old and was given my first lessons by my mother, I was expected to believe that we were all made of earth and must therefore return to earth...

...Herzog's second wife Madeleine resembles no real or imaginable person, but is a vicious madwoman, based on the Poison Damsel of folktale...

...If Herzog is autobiographical in any important sense it is autobiographical in that Bellow has developed one aspect of himself—primarily his guilt and desperation—into a character and a story...

...Here was a wider range of human feelings than he had ever again been able to find," Moses thinks fondly...

...During his brief stay in Chicago, Moses arms himself with a loaded revolver and sets out to kill Madeleine and Valentine—an eagle for the iguanas, obviously...

...he flies on impulse to Chicago, where Madeleine, the second Mrs...

...The unifying framework of Herzog is Moses' selfanalysis and self-discovery...

...Embracing his little daughter, Herzog pictures himself as "her careworn, busted, germ-carrying father"—this might be a Herbert Gold character back in Cleveland if Moses were not obviously making fun of himself...

...He discovers that what he has substituted for Napoleon Street is "potato love...

...If there are overdoings in Herzog, there are also some perfect doings...

...Details about his father that Bellow told an interviewer in 1953 are now attributed to Herzog's father...

...Joseph in Dangling Man is constructed out of Bellow's Angst, Leventhal in The Victim out of his ambivalence, Augie in The Adventures of Augie March out of his gusto, Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day out of his sense of weakness and failure, Henderson in Henderson the Rain King out of his Faustian drives...

...The clearest signal that Herzog is not reliable autobiography is a memory of Moses' childhood that Bellow has lifted from—of all places—one of Freud's childhood memories...

...Shakespeare's plays are autobiographical in the same fashion: Othello is made out of some bitter experience of betrayal, but Shakespeare was never a Moor mad with jealousy...