CORRESPONDENCE
the novel until it became a best–
seller) Bellow in
Herzog
performed
a delightful variation upon that
oldest of devices, the epistolary
novel. Herzog's epistles are not for
publication, however ; they are, let
it be emphasized, the workings of
a fevered brain, sparks shooting off
the emery-wheel of personal crisis,
by turns amusing, silly, and oc–
casionally profound. This is how
Bellow wanted it. Herzog is an
imagined character, in spite of any–
one's insistence that he is a tape–
recording from Bellow's own life,
and in spite of Poirier's judgment
that the letters are "uninventive
and tiresome."
Poirier feels that Bellow is too
insufferably ambitious, wanting to
"possess our minds" with a "por–
traiture alternative to [sic] the
alienated Waste Land figures of
earlier twentieth-century litera–
ture." And not only is Bellow's idea
of debauchery inadequate, but the
entire literary method in
H erzog
is "disastrously claustrophobic," and
the narra1:ive form "protective."
Bellow's preoccupation with "ideas"
is glib, naive, irrelevant, sopho–
moric, shabby, and dressed in "un–
convincing rhetoric," while those
wretched ideas are inferior to S.
J.
Perelman's comedy. Accompanying
these assertions, now apparent and
now hidden, like a dolphin playing
about a .ship, is the criticism that
the imaginative construction and
the rhetorical burden are out of
balance.
The form of
H
er~og
is of course
"enclosed"; that enclosure again
is carefully worked out, and why
not? Most novels tend to be, unless,
like
The Adventures of Augie
March,
they are deliberately open.
The narrative form is of course
"protective." Every novelist is con–
cerned to "protect" his material in
481
one manner or another. That is
form; that is the art of the novel.
Herzog and the other characters,
the letters, the changes in point of
view, the formal structure, the
"ideas" evoked throughout the nar–
rative--all constitute what in old–
fashioned criticism was called, in
Trilling's words, a literary idea.
Poirier confuses idea-ideas with
Bellow's always controlled, always
projected literary idea. And that
literary idea might
be
defined as
the depiction of crisis in the life
of an interesting, middle-aged man
(not
Jew) who is impatient with
the easy answers provided by con–
temporary American pseudo-intel–
lectual life. Bellow is not giving us
an alternative to the "alienated
Waste Land figures" of the recent
past ; to say so is to inflate the
novel intolerably and to misread
what is in fact there. Rather, the
imbalance or "gap" that Poirier
refers to between form and content
is a calculated and successful por–
trayal of the distance we all see
between the social or political or
philosophical, and the merely per–
sonal. Herzog's whizzing confusion
between politics, God, Eisenhower,
and Madeline is a marvelous
rendering of a basic, modern dis–
parity between the self and the
world, one for which I remain
grateful.
There is of course a further dis–
parity between Bellow's ambition
and his achievement in
Herzog,
a
disparity which he happens to share
with Choderlos de Laclos, Jane
Austen, Proust, Mann, Baroja,
Broch, and various other novelists.
No question that Ramona and her
shrimp Arnaud are bores, although
it should not be necessary to say
that like the shrimp, Ramona is
intended as a joke, one of the
handful of jokes scattered through
