Reprise: Herzog by Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel about “a man without a foothold”

“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel about a “man without a foothold” begins with these words by the eponymous anti-hero. Going through failures — academics, marriage — he is holed up in a village in western Massachusetts, writing letters to “everyone under the sun,” family, friends, lovers, colleagues, dead philosophers. We learn that these letters are not sent. Herzog’s life appears to be disintegrating — he is alone in a big, old house, sharing slices of bread with rats.

Though one corner of his mind remains open to the external world, hearing the crows in the morning, the thrush at dusk, and he looks keenly at everything, Herzog feels half blind. In that acute loneliness, he begins to take stock of his wrecked life. Herzog tries to understand the reasons for the affair of his wife Madeleine with his friend Valentine Gersbach; he wonders what kind of a father, son, husband he is, measuring up his frailties with that of people he knows. “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And then? I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. And what next?”

A failed teacher of Romantics, he leans on Shelley to ascertain the magnitude of his suffering. Isn’t his personal travails worth less than the shared distress of people who went through the Holocaust and other wars? Writing in the

New Yorker , fellow American writer Philip Roth said Herzog was Bellow’s “grandest creation, ...that labyrinth of contradiction and self-division.”

As his personal crisis peaks, we have Herzog taking in a demolition: “At the corner he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlour. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire, fed by the wreckage.”

In the introduction to The Life of Saul Bellow , Leader Zachary writes, “Bellow was a famed noticer and his novels and stories are packed with things perfectly seen.” For Zachary, “the lazy weight of the wrecking ball gains resonance from Herzog’s breakdown, his sense of having been pounded.” From this depth of darkness, Herzog, with a mind of immense possibilities, will emerge into the light. Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work.” Talking about Bellow’s characters, it said he writes about people who keep trying to find a foothold in “our tottering world.”

The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight