It Was 50 Years Ago Today: ‘Herzog’ by Saul Bellow
May 12, 1965
Herzog by Saul Bellow
#1 on the New York Times Best Seller List (Fiction), October 25, 1964 – May 15, 1965
Saul Bellow was one of the leading lights to emerge from the postwar “American Jewish writers” boom, along with Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer, among others. (As with most writers swept into literary movements without their consent, however, Bellow often railed against this categorization, often emphasizing the “American” aspect of his writing over the “Jewish” part.) Bellow first attracted notice with his third novel, The Adventures of Augie March, which won the National Book Award in 1954. In 1960, the Pulitzer Prize committee for fiction chose his novel Henderson the Rain King, though it was ultimately overruled in favor of Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. In short, Bellow was a well-regarded writer before publishing Herzog in 1964. Nevertheless, that book became enthusiastically embraced by the reading public to an unexpected degree. It’s not often that an intellectually and philosophically dense novel also tops the best-seller list for 29 weeks.
The novel concerns Moses Elkanah Herzog, a former English professor whose second wife, Madeleine, recently left him for his best friend, Valentine Gersbach. Herzog spends the novel somewhat adrift, composing unsent letters to a variety of recipients both living and dead; flashing back to his youth in Canada and the Midwest; and vaguely trying to regain custody of Junie, his daughter with Madeleine. Herzog has abandoned the manuscript for his would-be magnum opus, The Roots of Romanticism, but his letter writing allows him to express his often complex (and, at times, barely comprehensible) literary interpretations and philosophical ideas. While it isn’t uncommon for novels to feature characters who are professors and academics, especially in the modern literary landscape — it’s a world many writers know well, and, as the aphorism goes, write what you know — few engage with actual ideas to the degree that Herzog does in his mental letters. Yet Bellow also interjects these decidedly cerebral passages with jokes and swipes at his protagonist’s self-importance, drawing into question how seriously the reader is meant to take Herzog’s arguments.
Similarly, many of the plot beats and characterizations that define Herzog have subsequently become so familiar in literary fiction that they verge on cliché: the middle-aged academic suffering from writer’s block, whose wife is divorcing him and whose life is falling apart, yet still owns a house in the Berkshires, can see his kids when he chooses, and has wealthy brothers and a glamorous, caring girlfriend who can bail him out when he’s down. While this subject was much more unconventional 50 years ago, what’s remarkable is how well Herzog still holds up. The novel succeeds largely because both Bellow and Herzog take a somewhat sardonic view of the protagonist’s circumstances without succumbing to facile satire or losing Herzog as an identifiable (if not always sympathetic) character. Nevertheless, Bellow believed that the public who made his book a bestseller largely missed its humor:
I was vastly surprised by the seriousness and solemnity of my readers….For some, the book was something like a six-hour comprehensive exam in the History of Modern Thought. When I was a kid at school, we were often told by a teacher (a moment of charm) to put on our thinking-caps. My readers were oppressed by the thinking-cap, and blind to the whirlwind comedy. Too bad.
Another way Herzog distinguishes itself is by gradually disclosing that the protagonist isn’t just having a mid-life crisis, but is genuinely going insane. The opening line, “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog,” may seem like a flip bit of humor, but the events of the novel demonstrate how badly his mental state has come unmoored. Herzog obsessively writes letters to people who will never receive them; makes bizarre mental leaps that may seem normal, until further reflection; and steals his late father’s antique gun with the thought of murdering Madeleine and Valentine, whom he is briefly convinced are abusing his daughter. Several characters try to persuade him to institutionalize himself.
Thankfully, Bellow doesn’t cheapen the novel by resorting to melodramatics; Herzog doesn’t murder anyone, nor was he ever really intending to. Instead, the novel ends with him starting to come to grips with his sanity, rejecting the theoretical approach of The Roots of Romanticism for a life lived according to Romanticism’s back-to-nature principles. He returns to his dilapidated house in the Berkshires, which he had abandoned when moving with Madeleine and the Gersbachs to Chicago, and treats it like his own private Walden. Herzog’s rebuilding of his life and mental state via repairing and renovating his house could feel heavy-handed coming from another author, but in the context of the novel, it isn’t just a metaphor; the actual process of working on the house is what allows Herzog to finally reorganize his mental state. The letters and flashbacks evaporate as he begins to live in the physical present.
Herzog is often considered to be an autobiographical novel, as many of its details are drawn from Bellow’s life. He once worked as an English professor; his second wife left him for a good friend; he grew up in Québec and Chicago; his father was an unsuccessful businessman and onetime bootlegger; he identified as Jewish, but ambivalently so. “I thought in Herzog I was having a certain amount of fun at my own expense; or if not at my own expense, I was making fun of my own type,” the author once stated. But even more than being literally about Bellow’s life, Herzog expresses the author’s personal philosophy of stripping the self away from the accumulated “mass of ‘learning’” and reflecting on the “essential questions”: “[Herzog] comes to realize at last that what he considered his intellectual ‘privilege’ has proved to be another form of bondage. Anyone who misses this misses the point of the book.”
In 1965, Herzog earned Bellow his second National Book Award; with Mr. Sammler’s Planet in 1971, he netted a third, becoming the only author ever to do so. While Bellow was one of the most celebrated writers of the Twentieth Century, eventually adding the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts to his collection of laurels, Herzog remains his only novel to top the New York Times Best Seller list. Perhaps, despite its overt intellectual trappings, Herzog‘s ultimate vindication of the intellectually simplified life struck a chord in the 1960s, as the culture began to question its own received wisdom, seek answers beyond typical sources, and discover the beauty and wisdom and the natural world.
(Quotes excerpted from Conversations with Saul Bellow: A Collection of Selected Interviews [ed. Sukhbir Singh, 1993].)
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