BELLOWS TO HERZOG
265
human closeness, the appreciation of the very substances of living, of
warmth and food, that can be the gift of poverty. Not unexpectedly,
the best, most haunting parts of
Herrog
are about the hero's childhood
in
Montreal, notably the scene, overheard by the children as they lie in
bed,
between father Herzog and the drunken boarder Ravitch: "It
amused
the boys to hear how their father coaxed drunken Ravitch to
get on his feet. It was family theater.
'Nu, landtsman?
Can you walk?
It's freezing. Now, get your crooked feet on the
step-schneller, schneller:
He laughed with his bare breath. 'Well, I think we'll leave your
dreckische
pants out here. Phew!' The boys pressed together in the cold, smiling."
To the grown man, in the emotional cold of the City, even comforts are
"distractions," a favorite word of Bellow's, "distractions" from self–
communion and somnolence, "distractions" so standardized as to preclude
the picturesque reminiscences of his European parents with their shadowy
evocations of an older culture. The American City is thus always a bit
alien, the superhighways, as Herzog discovers, as hard to manage as a
modern household. Like Bloom, the mock Ulysses and also a wanderer,
Herzog cannot in any sense, literal or metaphoric, keep his house in order.
And the neighborliness he finds in the City is mostly what Bellow calls
"potato love," an easy, flabby familiarity; in place of the passionate attach–
ments and conflicts within the enclosure of the Jewish family. Separating
him
even further from his past is the education of which Jewish parents
are
especially covetous for their sons, glutting the hero's mind with Ideas
that
attach him 'to a world wholly different and more abstract than the
substantial one of his childhood. Even the learned elegance of his English
is
shamed, though it hardly seems to be in the dazzling manipulations of
Bellow's sentences, by the rich metaphors and suggestive intonations
residually present from the language of parents and relatives.
Bellow isn't satisfied with what he can give us of these circumstances,
and since no one can "do" Jewish urban life more brilliantly, there is no
reason why he should be satisfied. But at issue is the achievement, not
the worthiness of his greater ambitions. What he wants to do is nothing
less than possess our minds with a portraiture alternative to the alienated
Waste Land figures of earlier twentieth-century literature. His strictures
on the subject are another reminder that modern literature in English
has been to some extent a competition among minorities for control of
the "world." Each of them has made some eccentric manner of life--if
anything is more peculiar than the Ireland of Yeats it is the South of
Faulkner-into what in school we called "the modern world," though of
course it resembled no world any of us lived in. The Jews, it seems
to
me,
are
muffing their turn, possibly because
in
fiction they no longer feel, they
