BELL ,OWS
TO HERZOG
back to the species for a primitive cure. But this was becoming
the up-to-date and almost conventional way of looking at any
single life. In
this
view the body itself, with its two arms and
vertical length, was compared to the Cross, on which you knew
the agony of consciousness and separate being. For that matter,
he had been taking this primitive cure, administered by Made–
line, Sandor, et cetera; so that his recent misfortunes might
be seen as a collective project, himself participating, to destroy
his vanity and his pretensions to a personal life so that he might
disintegrate and suffer and hate like so many others, not on
anything so distinguished as a cross, but down in the mire of
post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution,
next door to the Void. Everybody was in the act. "History" gave
everyone a free ride. The very Himmelsteins, who had never
even read a book of metaphysics, were touting the Void as if it
were so much salable real estate.
This
little demon was im–
pregnated with modern ideas, and one in particular excited his
terrible little heart; you must sacrifice your poor, squawking,
' niggardly individuality-which may be nothing anyway (from
an analytic viewpoint) but a persistent infant megalomania, or
(from a 'Marxian point of view) a stinking little bourgeois
property-to historical necessity. And to truth. And truth is
true only as it brings down more disgrace and dreariness upon
human beings, so that if it shows anything except evil it is
illusion, and not truth. But of course he, Herzog, predictably
bucking such trends, had characteristically, obstinately, defiantly,
blindly but without sufficient courage or intelligence tried to be
a
marvelous
Herzog" a Herzog who, perhaps clumsily, tried to
live out marvelous qualities vaguely comprehended.
269
Though Bellow is among the most intelligent of contemporary Ameri–
can writers, I can't find in this glib presumption to Thought any dif–
ference between his and Herzog's presence. Distinction of intellect is of
course not necessary to fiction; but what is most bothersome about the
passage is Bellow's failure to acknowledge the comic preposterousness of
the
kind of mental activity going on in it, a pretension that might itself
characterize the hero were he not at this point montaged with the author.
Nothing but nothing in Herzog'S career-are we to think of his surrender
of his wife's diaphragm to her messenger Gersbach?-suggests that his
self-hood or self-development has been "this great bone-breaking burden."
Such terms describe nothing in the book. They refer instead to a literary
historical commonplace about the self to which Bellow wants his book
attached. "Species," "primitive cure"-the vocabulary continues to mytho–
logize a life that has been shown
to
be at most pitiably insipid. Typically,
even the effort at inflation gets blamed on the times: Herzog abuses
himself
for thinking in a way so "up-to-date and almost conventional."
