Herzog

Hidden in the country, he wrote endlessly, fanatically, to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.

Poor Herzog -- even when this book was first written fifty years ago, it must have been pretty hard to feel sorry for the successful white man with his successful white man problems. His second marriage over and fresh back from a European self-pity tour, the professor's biggest problem is trying to figure out how not to marry the sex goddess who is throwing herself at him. It would all seem like the most foolish premise ever if the plot of Herzog didn't mirror the facts of Saul Bellow himself (whose second wife had indeed just left the author for his best friend), and once you place all of this mental anguish into the brain of an actual person, it is possible to sympathise. It must have been hard for the successful white man as feminism took root and divorce became normalised and birth control became more foolproof: the paternalism of a Father Knows Best world deserved to crumble, but it took victims along with it, and Bellow encapsulated this time and place in history through the eyes of poor Herzog.

Trying to straighten out his thoughts and work through the pain of losing another wife and child, Herzog's mind pings between reliving moments from his life and writing (mostly) angry letters that he'll never mail. As unstable as his mind is, so too are his actions: Herzog is forever jumping on a plane or a train and following the impulse to visit someone who might finally clarify everything for him. Every page of this book contains nuggets of wisdom and extraordinary insights, and more than anything, I wonder if his thoughts would have been shared more freely if he lived in our modern times -- what would have happened if Herzog had had a Twitter account?









Would Herzog have regretted his tweets on later reflection? Would a psychiatrist have been suggested sooner? Would he have straightened out his thoughts sooner if he had had some feedback from loving friends and family? The world has certainly changed since the early sixties, and Herzog is very much a book of its time, and as such, not quite my cuppa tea. Along with the pithy tweety bits, since Herzog is a professor, there are also many long philosophical (and imaginary) arguments that he has with the great thinkers, alive and dead, that I just found dull:

No, really, Herr Nietzche, I have great admiration for you. Sympathy. You want to make us able to live with the void. Not lie ourselves into good-naturedness, trust, ordinary middling human considerations, but to question as has never been questioned before, relentlessly, with iron determination, into evil, through evil, past evil, accepting no abject comfort. The most absolute, the most piercing questions. Rejecting mankind as it is, that ordinary, practical, thieving, stinking, unilluminated, sodden rabble, not only the laboring rabble, but even worse the "educated" rabble with its books and concerts and lectures, its liberalism and its romantic theatrical "loves" and "passions"--it all deserves to die, it will die. Okay. Still, your extremists must survive. No survival, no Amor Fati. Your immoralists also eat meat. They ride the bus. They are only the most bus-sick travelers. Humankind lives mainly upon perverted ideas. Perverted, your ideas are no better than those of the Christianity you condemn. Any philosopher who wants to keep his contact with mankind should pervert his own system in advance to see how it will really look a few decades after adoption. I send you greetings from this mere border of grassy temporal light, and wish you happiness, wherever you are.

Yours, under the veil of Maya,

M.E.H.

In the end, I can recognise what makes Herzog a classic without having loved it, and although I may not have completely worked out how I feel about it, I'll end with his own final thoughts:

At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.