266
RICHARD
POIRIEI
won't feel, except cutely, like a minority. Bellow, the most accomplished
Jewish novelist so far, takes the job of transforming his world into
The
World, and it isn't of course even a necessary job, much too easily. Though
he creates his world, the world of Herzog, with an energy marvelously
wasteful of detail, dazzling in its plays of style, properly self-delighting
in
its ingenuities of pace and timing and proportion, he wants to
be
admired,
I'm afraid, for larger, comparatively deficient embraces of the "modern
world."
With what he tells brilliantly, the career of Herzog, everyone
is
probably now familiar: a twice married sometime professor of English,
author of
Romanticism and Christianity
and of a child in each of
his
marriages, Herzog has recently been divorced, at 47, by his second wife
Madeline. She, in his recollections, shows unusual competence in disposing
of her body, other people's ideas, and Herzog's schedule, thus
taking,
unobserved, his best friend and confidant, Valentine Gersbach, to her
bed.
It
is a story of betrayals, and of a mind so fevered by them that it
remembers them with an attention luridly bright and constantly shifting:
to
his lawyer, to his psychiatrists, to his colleagues, to his family, to
his
various women, especially Ramona, middle ageing, generous, loveable
and nonetheless made a bit ridiculous, as is everyone in Herzog'S account
except children and a few other minor characters. Everything we know
about these people we know from Herzog's mind. They are confined
to the jumble of his recollections as he lies alone in the run-down house
he bought for Madeline in the Berkshires, cheated in this, too. He .returns
there at the end of the novel, which is also the conclusion of the actions
about which he begins to reminisce on page one. The enclosed,
self·
protective quality of the book
is
thus formally sealed: its end is its
beginning.
Given Bellow's ambitions so much to exceed the confined
cir·
cumstances of his hero's life and
to
make it a "representative" modem
one, his method seems, on the very face of it, disastrously claustrophobic.
Normally we'd wonder how the author is to operate freely within such a
book, much less manage to puff it up. Of course he makes himself felt
in the ordering of things, so that the fragments of the story as they
flash
through Herzog's mind are comically, sometimes critically juxtaposed
with his intellectual theorizings. And the very first line,
"If
I am out
of
my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog," is a joke about
the hero's "rightness" and about his "thinking" that maybe we're expected
to carry like a comic tuning fork through the rest of the book. But the
evidence increases as one reads that Bellow is in the novel whenever
he
wants
to
be
simply by becoming Herzog, the confusions at many points
