Richard Poirier
BELLOWS TO HERZOG
H erzog
1
is an insufferably smug book, its smugness nourished
by an assumption common to the Jewish fiction of which Bellow is
the
recognized master. Put simply, the life of the urban Jew, far from
being
special, is assumed to be the life of the Modern American Everyman.
Not of course that the Jew
wants
to be, as more than one reviewer called
Herzog, "a representative man of the sixties." The implication, in fact,
is
that he becomes so only by losing the best of his Jewishness. The procesa
is like getting double indemnity for committing suicide while picking
up
the cash yourself. For accommodation to the City,' the type of Bellow's
Jewish hero demands to be its victim; to make being its victim into
the
City's fault (or Madeline's fault, or Gersbach's fault, or Eisenhower's
fault)-someone
is the Betrayer-he must of course make himself
a
necessary victim, The Victim. Quite a marvelous plot, really, so long
as
its creator isn't taken in by it-as Bellow is.
When he sticks to the initial and rather narrow situation of
the
Jew in the City, Bellow writes more powerfully about certain aspects
of
modem life, as in
Dangling Man, The Victim, Seize the Day,
than
when
he tries to transform it into something more general. That situation
is
almost ideal for a serious writer, full of the kind of cultural tensions,
here even stylistically embodied in the clashing mixtures of Yiddish·
American speech, that for a Jewish writer can produce works as great
as
Faulkner's. I mean Faulkner of the middle 'period when he started
honestly to write out of what Yeats would call his
ill
luck. His conflicts,
as a fictional resource, were not unlike those felt
by
Bellow and
his
Jewish heroes. Characteristically, that hero's participation in the City–
few of them indulge, Bellow's idea of debauchery being extraordinarily
boyish-is thwarted by recollections of childhood poverty and by a
nostalgia, sometimes a bitter one, for the emotional clarities, the abrasive
1 HERZOG. By
Saul Bellow. Viking.
$5.75.
