BELLOWS TO HERZOG
267
between the narrative
"I"
and "he" being a blunt and even attractive
admission of this. And the curious identification of hero and author
is
apparent in other, ultimately more insidious ways. Thus Herzog is
allowed to characterize himself in a manner usually reserved to the
objectivity of the author: the letters he writes, and never mails, to the
living who betrayed his love, to the dead thinkers who betray his thinking,
to
the living great who betray him politically are, he says, "ridiculous."
(He -does not himself betray the book by also admitting that the letters,
for all the parroted praise the reviews have given them, are frequently
uninventive and tiresome.) He claims also not to like his own personality.
Bellow's novelist skill is here seen most adroitly at the service of his larger
intellectual and, too obviously, of his more personal motives. Allowing
no version of the alleged betrayals other than Herzog's, Bellow still must
protect his hero's claims to guiltlessness by a process all the more
ultimately effective for being paradoxical: he lets Herzog's suffering
mue forth less as accusations against others than as self-contempt for
his
having been cozened by them. There could be no more effective way
to
disarm the reader's scepticism about the confessions of such a hero
within so protective a narrative form. Bellow can thus operate snugly
(and smugly) withIn the enclosure of his hero's recollections, assured,
at
least to his own satisfaction, that he has anticipated and therefore
forestalled antagonistic intrusions from outside. He really does want
Herzog's mind to be the whole world, and the hero's ironies at his own
expense are orily his cleverest ruse in the arrangement. No wonder,
then, that Herzog's talk a:bout himself and about ideas is, in passages that
carry
great weight, indistinguishable from the generalized Bellovian
rhetoric by which here, as in Bellow's other novels, "victims" become
''modem man," their situation the World's: "He saw his perplexed,
furious eyes and he gave an audible cry.
My
God! Wh'O
is
this creature?
It
considers itself human. But what
is
it? Not human in itself. But it
has
the longing to be human."
The recurrence of such passages in Bellow's work is only one indica–
tion of how straight we are to take them, of how much he tends to
summarize himself in the pseudo-philosophical or sociological or historical
expansions of the otherwise parochial situations of his heroes. Perhaps the
most lamentable result of Bellow's complicity at such points is that he
loses
his customary ear for banality of expression or for the fatuity of
the sentiments thus phrased. 1 don't know another writer equally talented
who surrenders so willingly to what are by now platitudes about his own
creations. Seldom in Faulkner, even less in Joyce, and far less fre–
quently in Lawrence than people who can't listen to his prose like to
