The Wandering Jew

Rebecca Markowitz

Herzog
by Saul Bellow
Penguin Classics, 400 pgs.
Originally published in 1964

With his passing in April 2005, Saul Bellow's legacy lives on through his works, from The Adventures of Augie March to Humboldt's Gift. In 1964, with his most intellectual novel, Herzog, Bellow artfully tapped into the American psyche and captured the hearts of thousands, establishing himself as a prominent literary voice of the post-WWII era. Like many people both in Europe and America, Herzog, the protagonist, is displaced, without a home, without a clear ideology. He is a model of the lost, wandering Jew, emancipated yet fearful of the society in which he lives, the society which had turned its back on him. While the novel is postwar in character, in its essence it presents the timeless struggle of one man coming to terms with a disordered life of suffering. Herzog strives, in a world of challenges both personal and intellectual, to be a survivor in the legacy of his ancestors. Bellow's masterful characterization of his beloved protagonist has led many to believe he was modeled after Bellow himself. Bellow once told a reporter, "My life is a mess like everyone else's."¹ Herzog is not Bellow alone, but each one of us as well.

At the beginning of the novel we find the protagonist on the brink of insanity. ("If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.") As is typical of Bellow's works, our hero is a raving lunatic who is deeply embedded in a midlife crisis of the worst kind, one in which no sphere of life offsets the chaos that consumes all the others. He is the victim of two divorces, the first from Daisy, and the second from the beautiful and manipulative Madeleine who drained him of all his money and self-worth before running off with his best friend, the Russian cripple, Gersbach. He is the estranged father of two children, Marco and Junie. He is also a failed scholar hopelessly stuck in the middle of his latest book on Romanticism.

Herzog's scholarship in Romanticism significantly relates to his emotional breakdown. The predominantly 19th century movement of Romanticism reached its peak in a mixture of individual emotional empowerment and intense nationalism and faded in the aftermath of WWII. Herzog's reluctance to let go of old ideas (especially ones that hinge on the individual and one's emotions) and embrace those of the post-WWII period of globalization, forced contact, and shared communion looms as the root of his funk.

In an attempt to break the funk, Herzog plunges into an intense letter-writing campaign. He writes to Madeleine, to Gersbach, to his children, to Edvig the psychologist, to Himmelstein the lawyer, to Ramona his Latin lover, to Nietzsche, to Eisenhower, to himself, to the dead, and to God, just to name a few. Seamlessly woven into the narrative, these letters constitute half of the novel, placing Herzog in the tradition of the English epistolary novels of the 18th century. The catch: the letters remain unsent—forever locked into the narrative of Herzog. They function as psychological outbursts which seize Herzog on the train, in the bathroom, while making love. Herzog's letters serve as one-sided attempts to confront and come to terms with the players in his life. They afford him the power to manipulate words on paper, to rewrite his past in order to make sense of it and seize control. This authority he is afforded as an author does not carry over to other spheres of his life. As Herzog asks, "Well, how would you like it if you woke up to see that all your best tries were nothing but sleepwalking?" While meant to rescue Herzog from complete and utter isolation, these letters only become a further sign of his refusal to be rescued.

Seen as a model for the pre-WWII isolationist Jew struggling to participate in the post-WWII world of globalization and assimilation, Herzog's letter-writing provides only a weak attempt at entry into that new world. This idea further manifests itself in Herzog's nomadic movements. Throughout the novel, he spends much of his time on trains or airplanes, traveling from New York to Philadelphia to Chicago to Massachusetts, sometimes for thought-out, practical purposes like business or rest, at other times on mere whims. He has a house in the Berkshires, a job in Philadelphia, an ex-wife and a child in Chicago, and an apartment in New York City, but there is no sense of home for Herzog. It is no accident that he is named after Moses, the biblical leader of the tribe of Israel, who wandered in the wilderness for 40 years waiting to get to a homeland. Moses was never allowed entry into Canaan. Beyond this biblical allusion, Herzog is a uniquely contemporary construct of the wandering Jew—an intellectual who cannot find comfort or staying power in any idea that crosses his mind.

While many of Herzog's letters are addressed to prominent historical philosophers—Nietzsche, Freud, Rousseau, Marx—Herzog struggles with the ideas they propose. We learn from Herzog that all the philosophy in the world can't save us from the mistakes of our personal lives. Herzog, unfortunately, learns this lesson the hard way. His one moment of confrontation (outside of his letters) comes late in the book. After receiving a letter from a friend expressing concerns about his daughter Junie's well-being under the care of Madeleine and Gersbach, Herzog races to Chicago in a heroic quest to save his child from Madeleine and her lover. First, Herzog acquires a loaded gun. Planning to murder Madeleine and Gersbach, Herzog stealthily stakes out their house and through the window sees Gersbach affectionately bathing Junie. Realizing that Junie is in no real danger, Herzog admits that using the gun was only a passing thought like everything else, and that he would never have unloaded the two bullets. As much as Herzog attempts to intellectualize life's situations, he can't change the essence of who he is, nor can he change his past.

Given the volume of letters that consume the novel and the scarcity of action, the story of Herzog in any other writer's hands could easily have turned into an unsuccessful tale of deep frustration—for Herzog, for the reader, for the author, and for everyone involved. Bellow, however, renders it masterfully. A common rule of fiction writing is if you introduce a gun, it goes off with a bang. Bellow violates this rule and still succeeds. Herzog, after being granted visitation rights, takes Junie on a trip to the aquarium, and on their way back they get into a car accident. Herzog passes out and wakes up to the hazy sight of two Chicago police officers. In their hands lies the gun. Arrested on misdemeanor charges, Herzog is brought to the police station, where he is forced to confront Madeleine.

While the gun doesn't go off in the typical sense, it does so in a manner befitting Herzog's character. No matter how justified, Herzog would never shoot someone: he would get caught with a loaded gun. After all, he's someone who writes letters to people and doesn't send them. The genius of Bellow lies in his knowledge of his characters' needs, desires, and actions. Herzog is a sufferer. As much as his letter-writing is an attempt to break the funk of suffering, in the end, Herzog is meant to suffer. It's his religion. It's his brand of Judaism. What Herzog comes to realize is that being a sufferer does not preclude him from being a survivor.

On one of his many trips, Herzog enters a New York City subway station. While passing through the turnstiles he is finally struck by the single idea of the novel that has staying power. Bellow writes:

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 divine image, already so blurred, wavering, struggling. The real question! He stood looking down at the tracks. The most real question!

Herzog realizes that as anonymous individuals in a city swarming with the like, we are all the same in what we endure. After all, Bellow asks, don't we all pass through the same turnstile, experience the same ominous wooden slats staring us down as we stare down at them? This is the communion New York City has to offer. It is not the communion expressed through county fairs or block parties, but it is perhaps a more basic, more honest brotherhood—a brotherhood of suffering and surviving.

And what to make of this "potato love" of which Herzog often speaks? It is the deep, sad, Irish-masses-type starvation for love. When Herzog uses this term throughout the novel, it is usually to describe the affection he feels for his family. Here, in the transience of passing through a metal turnstile in a New York City subway station, Herzog is again moved to mention this "potato love." Though he is tempted to gawk at it and label it as false and artificial like the industrial lights of the station, he also senses its validity, its heavy truth. "We're all whores in this world, and don't you forget it," remarks the lawyer Himmelstein, as if to express the search for cheap love, for the step up, for the easy bye that will momentarily lessen the weight of the forces around us. What's more, realizes Herzog, is that we are all in this world together, trying to make sense of the hands we are dealt. We may seek comfort in our family or religion, but when they fail us, and they almost always inevitably do, we can seek comfort in the shared experience of humanity. The power Herzog finds in this idea finally removes him from his funk. The last line of the novel concedes, "At this time [Herzog] had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word."

Ironically, while Herzog no longer has any letters to write, Bellow recalls the volume of letters sent to him by readers of his novel: "I received two or three thousand letters from people pouring out their souls to me, saying, 'This is my life, this is what it's been like for me.' And then I understood that for some reason these themes were visited upon me, that I didn't always pick them, they picked me."² Rereading Bellow in 2006, I feel no less convinced that Herzog is me and the man or woman sitting next to me on the subway.

¹ James Atlas. Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), 258.

² Ibid., 335.

REBECCA MARKOWITZ is a junior in Columbia College majoring in Economics and concentrating in Creative Writing.