Saul Bellow: "Zetland: By a Character Witness," "Leaving the Yellow House" and "What Kind of Day Did You Have?"

It is time to read some serious mainstream literature!  Let's attack three stories from the middle of the 2001 hardcover edition of Collected Stories by Saul Bellow that I bought at the book sale at the Central Branch of the Public Library of Des Moines many years ago.

"Zetland: By a Character Witness" (1974)

This is a 14-page biography of a sickly Jewish genius, born in the Chicago of the early Twenties, the son of a poor man who moved his way up to become a buyer at a department store.  Zet the genius reads all the hard books and has opinions about all the avant garde artists and is intimately familiar with all the major composers, even as a little kid.  He studies philosophy in college and marries a sexy Macedonian girl whom his father detests and he gets a fellowship at Columbia and they move to New York but there he suffers a recurrence of his childhood illness and loses interest in philosophy, drops out of Columbia and starts hanging out in Greenwich Village.  The story ends without telling us what happens to this guy other than that he wants to join up during World War II and has a son born during the war; it is not even clear if he ever joins the military (seems unlikely--he is quite unhealthy) or ever gets a real job or just lives off his wife's earnings as an office worker--it is made clear that Zet himself is unsuited to office work.  It seems possible he becomes a novelist, as during his illness he becomes smitten by Moby Dick.    

At times the story, which I guess is primarily meant to be a vivid reconstruction of American Jewish life before 1945, seems like a celebration of Jewish intelligence and affinity for the life of the mind, what with how we are told again and again how Zet and his father know all about art, literature and music, and how Zet is fun and kind and generous to everybody, but at the end you have to suspect it is a tragedy--Dad doesn't like the girl his son is so crazy about and Zet is apparently too sick (or maybe too scatterbrained and unfocused?) to really do anything much productive with his superbrain.  There is also the issue of Zet's politics--as a young man he is a commie, but the behavior of the Soviet Union in 1939 seems to disillusion him.  And then there is the title, with its reference to the unobtrusive narrator, who knew Zet when they were teens--is he a "character witness" because during or after the war Zet got in trouble with the law?

The story sort of lacks a climax and resolution, but it is dense with detail.  Some of these details seem to suggest Zet is a romantic poseur, almost a goofball (he relishes living in crappy apartments, for example), and others are surprising, perhaps meant to shock.  Zet's household growing up included two maiden aunts, and we are told they notice a smell like herring coming from Zet's wife--they have never had sex themselves, and assume this smell is a sign of disease, when in fact Bellow tells us it is just the normal smell of a woman who has had sex.

After first appearing in 1974 in the scholarly journal Modern Occasions, "Zetland: By a Character Witness" would be reprinted in the 1984 collection Him With His Foot In His Mouth and Other Stories.

"Leaving the Yellow House" (1958)

I'm not Jewish and I'm not very smart, but I can identify with a guy who likes books and moves to New York City to attend grad school and then disappoints his parent by dropping out and marrying a woman parent does not approve of.  "Leaving the Yellow House" is more challenging for me to inhabit, as it is about an old woman who likes to drink and lives in the desert in the South West.  

Hattie is something of a loser, a septuagenarian divorcee who likes nothing more than to drink booze and smoke cigarettes.  From a middle-class East Coast family, she suffered a severe decline in her fortunes and has had jobs and relationships she found demeaning, and has done things for which she is ashamed, like publicly accusing a neighbor of killing her dog when it was she herself who had to kill the aggressive beast when it attacked her.  Her last job was to be the live-in companion of a more sophisticated woman whom she was supposed to discourage from drinking--Hattie instead became her eager drinking companion.  When this woman died she left Hattie her yellow house with the beautiful view of the lake and mountains.  This story is largely about Hattie's determination to keep this yellow house even as she declines and people keep telling her she should sell it or rent it out and move because she can no longer look after it or herself--this house to her represents her greatest triumph, it being the only thing she has ever really owned, and she does not want to give it up.  Bellow creates tension in the story as he gives us so many reasons to see Hattie as irresponsible, selfish, and a troublemaker, but also a figure of pity who has suffered--can we excuse her foolishness and her disregard for the safety of others because she herself has had a tough time of it?  

"Leaving the Yellow House" was included in Mosby's Memoirs and Other Stories after its initial appearance in an issue of Esquire the cover of which is reminding me of the work of Yayoi Kusama, whose current exhibition at the Hirshhorn my sister dragged me* to a few days ago--that woman loves dots!  (I'm going to level with my fellow philistines and tell you that I thought Kusama's work banal gimmickry and her poem about coronavirus highlighted at the Hirshhorn exhibition like something a child would write; I like this Esquire cover much better--maybe it belongs in the government museum!)

"What Kind of Day Did You Have?" (1984)

Clocking in at some 70 pages, "What Kind of Day Did You Have" is almost three times as long as "Leaving the Yellow House," which I have to admit felt sort of lengthy. This one has a big cast of characters.  The central figure is Katrina Goliger, mother of two little kids.  Her husband Alfred was a jewelry and antiques dealer who travelled around the world all the time and cheated on Katrina, she in turn cheated on him, so now they are divorced and in a custody fight over the kids.  Katrina for over a year has been in an affair with a famous 70-something intellectual, Victor Wulpy, a guy who gives lectures all over the place on modern poetry and painting and philosophy and has written articles about E. E. Cummings (Wulpy capitalizes it), Karl Marx and Paul Valery.  Wulpy has a wife and is a serial adulterer, and Katrina is his favorite mistress, the one who can really get him going, really get his septuagenarian penis erect.  A somewhat mysterious police officer, a Lieutenant Krieggstein, is also courting Katrina.  Krieggstein, as his name perhaps reflects, carries with him at all time three pistols, so is always ready to fight, but he is losing the competition for Katrina, stuck in what the kids call "the friend zone":  Krieggstein is always doing favors for Katrina, like walking her dog and looking after the kids and helping her with the custody fight, but he never makes any progress with Katrina--it is the famous Wulpy who treats her like a sexual plaything whom Katrina desires; nice guy Krieggstein finishes last.  Katrina has a sister, Dorothea, whose husband, head of a plastics company, died, so that now Dorothea is trying to run the business herself; Dorothea is envious of her sister, now that she is having sex with a world class intellectual and meeting famous brainiacs and celebs like Buckminster Fuller, Willem de Kooning and Jackie O.  There's also the black woman who was nanny to Katrina and Dorothea and is now nanny to Katrina's own kids, Ysole, who may or may not be on the side of Katrina's husband in the custody fight.

"What Kind of Day Did You Have?" is about how life, especially the effort to build human relationships, is essentially futile.  It is impossible to make connections with other people; love is always a one-way street, a yearning that will not be requited.  The people who theoretically should love you--your parents, your children, the nanny who actually raised you, the people you have sex with--are opponents you combat or exploiters to whom you submit.  Across the lines of sex and race and age, connections are impossible--Bellow describes many marital relationships, parental relationships, and business relationships in the story, and presents all of them as humiliating and painful. 

The plot.  Wulpy is in Buffalo on his way to Chicago and wants company so he calls up Katrina, who lives in Evanston, Ill., and gets her to meet him at the airport in Buffalo so she can fly with him back to Chi-town.  Katrina loves being with Wulpy so accedes to his request, even though she will miss a court hearing and may be putting her right to custody of her kids (whom she doesn't seem to get along too well with anyway) in jeopardy.  At the airport in the Empire State, Wulpy tells Katrina all about the talk he just gave in Buffalo--set up by his daughter, a student at the college where he spoke, it was on how the insights of Marx's famous The Eighteenth Brumaire can be applied to 1970s America--and a talk he must give tomorrow to some business executives in Chicago.  Then appears an old acquaintance of Wulpy's, Larry Wrangel, an attendee of this Buffalo lecture.  Wrangel was a philosophy student at NYU and a writer for Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comic books when Wulpy first knew him, now he is a Hollywood director who has made a blockbuster science fiction movie that the characters keep comparing to Star Wars.  (I recall there being SF references in Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet and Herzog, which I read years ago.)  These two rich creatives discuss whether an analysis of America that relies on European class categories is of any actual value, and the related idea that Americans create themselves, are deracinated self-made men left adrift, unmoored.  Well, at least I think that is what these guys are talking about:

"Well," said Wrangel, "I have a friend who says that the created souls of people, of the Americans, have been removed.  The created soul has been replaced by an artificial one, so there's nothing real that human beings can refer to when they try to judge any matter for themselves.  They live mainly by rationales.  They have made-up guidance systems." 

Wrangel admires Wulpy, sees him as a great man, even compares him to FDR (whose vast temple I  traversed on Sunday while attending with my sister the cherry blossom festival in the capitol of our empire of artificial-souled rationale followers) but Wulpy treats him shabbily, in part because Wrangel doesn't slavishly follow Wulpy's thinking, but challenges it--he seems to suggest that ideas--to which Wulpy has devoted his life--do not really drive life and history.  Wulpy has gotten rich and famous and has been able to have sex with lots of women because of his facility with ideas, but his work doesn't really matter in the long run.

Wulpy and Katrina catch their flight to Chicago, but snow over the Windy City diverts it to Detroit, where they meet Wrangel again for more wrangling over ideas.  There is a dearth of flights to Chicago.  Will Wulpy miss his speech to the executives?  Will Katrina's lie to her kids and her black nanny about what she is really up to be exposed?  Wulpy contacts the executives, and they send a private jet to pick him and Katrina up and bring them to Chicago.  As they wait in a Detroit hotel room, Katrina calls the nanny, who accuses her of lying about where she is, and humiliates her by saying she always lied as a child, leading Katrina to reflect that black people hate white people:

They hate us, said Trina to herself, after Ysole had hung up.  They hate us terribly.

and on what it is she admires about Wulpy:

Katrina again felt: Everybody has power over me.  Alfred, punishing me, the judge, the lawyers, the psychiatrist, Dotey--even the kids.  They all apply standards nobody has any use for, except to stick you with.  That's what drew me to Victor, that he wouldn't let anybody set conditions for him. Let others make the concessions.  That's how I'd like to be.  Except that I haven't got his kind of ego, which is a whole mountain of ego.  Now it's Ysole's turn.     

(No doubt feminists, Marxists, BLM activists and every other species of liberal or leftist could write reams about this scene in which a duplicitous white middle-class woman who hobnobs with celebrities whines that her "Negro" servant has power over her!)   

In the hotel room Katrina and Wulpy have sex, and Katrina indulges in memories of earlier pivotal moments in the history of their relationship, providing insight into how Wulpy manipulates her as well as his wife, and suggesting that he doesn't really love either of them, though Katrina speculates that perhaps he manipulates her for (his conception of) her own good.  For example, Wulpy insisted Katrina read Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, a book that she interprets as debunking the very idea of love--is this just callousness, or some kind of test, or an effort by Wulpy, who is much older than Katrina and nearly died a year ago, to prepare Katrina to accept Wulpy's death?--the solipsistic Wulpy may not love Katrina, but he can easily believe that his own death will break her heart.  

The private plane picks Katrina and Wulpy up, and, caught in severe turbulence, they fear they will crash and die.  Katrina tries to get Wulpy to tell her he loves her, and he dismissively refuses.  Back in Chicago, Katrina is reunited with her kids and with Krieggstein, who has been using his resources to help her in her custody fight.  Her overtures to the kids are rebuffed--her own children ignore her--and it looks like despite his efforts on her behalf Krieggstein's love for Katrina is going to remain unrequited for the foreseeable future.       

"What Kind of Day Did You Have" is a dense story, with lots of stuff going on, but there are so many striking little details and so little fat and no tedious repetition that it doesn't feel slow or long; Bellow also doesn't actually tell you what you are expected to think about the characters or their actions, he just throws a bunch of evidence at you and lets you make up your own mind, which keeps you engaged.

Among the odd details, we have, as in "Zetland," a surprising reference to female sexual smells ("the woman-slime odor--that swamp-smell") and in response I came up with a theory that Bellows says this sort of stuff because he is trying to be the kind of audacious mountain of ego who ignores social conventions and refuses to make concessions that he portrays Victor Wulpy as.  

An interesting piece of symbolism comes in the form of a violin.  Wulpy's daughter in Buffalo hands her expensive violin (which Wulpy bought her and the resale value of which he monitors as if he really thinks of it as an investment) to him to take to Chicago to have worked upon by experts.  Wulpy, as a rhetorician, promotes art, argues that one of America's problems is we don't take art seriously, that asserts that art should be treated as something as vital as oxygen and food, and by carrying around this valuable violin he is physically embodying the role of protector of fine art.  All of Bellow's mentions of how Wulpy (and then Katrina) are carrying it and where they are putting it add suspense to the story, as the reader expects it to get crushed or lost at any moment.

The references to popular culture in the story are amusing, in particular how Katrina caused a crisis in her relationship with Victor by dragging him to see the film M*A*S*H*, which she had already seen and felt deserved a strong recommendation; he detested the movie and lost respect for her taste.  Katrina, after reflecting that her own children are alien to her, suggests that Victor told her that "Star Wars flicks corrupted everybody, implanted mistrust of your own flesh and blood."  I thought this was wild, in part because early in the week my sister dragged me* to a loud, garish and horrendous Smithsonian exhibit celebrating how TV, cinema and sports advanced diversity and other au currant values and the opinion the government museum espoused about Star Wars was that it renewed America's spirit after the USA had made the humiliating blunder of opposing communism in South East Asia.    

It seems a version of "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" appeared in Vanity Fair on the cover of which Bellow's tale was promoted as "an extraordinary love story" inside a heart scrawled by Keith Haring (having slagged the work of Yayoi Kusama as childish and gimmicky, you can perhaps guess how I feel about Haring's work.)

*So you don't think this was a totally one-sided phenomenon, I'll own that I dragged my sister to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art to see sculptures by Paul Manship and Augustus Saint-Gaudens and paintings by Abbot Handerson Thayer.  

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These are good stories, "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" probably the best, as it has so many economically interwoven characters and themes, though "Zetland: By a Character Witness" is probably my fave because it builds a vivid portrait of a past world in which I am interested and offers plenty of sharp images.  

It is undeniably worthwhile to spend a week reading "real" 20th-century American literature and marching hither and thither through Washington, D.C. attending festivals and visiting monuments and bookstores and museums and eating for lunch braised lamb at Cava three out of four days, but I am looking forward to hunkering down in MPorcius Fiction Log's rural HQ next week and getting back to my usual diet of SF stories and inexpensive groceries.  See you soon!

Herzog by Saul Bellow

He realized he was writing to the dead.  To bring the shades of great philosophers up to date.  But then why shouldn't he write the dead?  He lived with them as much as with the living--perhaps more; besides his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death?

Back in January of 2016 I visited an odd bookstore in Edgewood, PA (mere steps outside Pittsburgh) with poet Jason Irwin and purchased a few things, among them a hardcover edition of Saul Bellow's 1964 novel Herzog with a jacket in a lovely blue.  Over the last week or so I read the novel, I believe the sixth novel by Bellow I have read (I have also read several of his short stories.)  Herzog, in my interpretation, is the story of an immature, irresponsible and alienated intellectual who over the course of a week resolves his psychological issues, recognizing his place in society and growing to maturity.

The first 200 pages of the 341 page novel introduce us to Moses Herzog and set the stage.  Herzog is a forty-seven-year-old college professor, an expert on modern intellectual history whose career has not really achieved its early promise--his dissertation on The State of Nature in 17th and 18th Century English and French Political Philosophy and his first book, Romanticism and Christianity, were well received, but since then all his ambitious projects, among them another book on Romanticism, have been aborted, despite the research grants he has received and some progress, in the form of piles of manuscript pages sitting in a closet, made.  Herzog is also a handsome womanizer with a long string of affairs and two failed marriages behind him; his second marriage, to Madeleine, an intellectual of varied and intense interests (ranging from de Maistre and Slavonic languages to murder mysteries and science fiction novels) recently collapsed and she is now shacked up with Valentine Gersbach, a poet and radio and TV personality who was one of Herzog's closest friends.  Depressed and confused, Herzog considers spending time with one of his girlfriends, 30-something Ramona, another intellectual woman and one of his students, but instead decides to stay with a friend out on Martha's Vineyard.

Herzog is a compulsive composer of letters, letters he never sends and many of which never make their way to paper, only ever existing in his mind.  The first one hundred pages of Herzog's 341 pages are taken up by the trip from Manhattan to the Massachusetts sea shore, and almost all of them consist of these letters and the flashbacks and reflections occasioned by these letters.  Thus we learn all about Herzog's life and thought.

An hour after Herzog gets to Martha's Vineyard and greets his friends he sneaks back to New York without saying good-bye--the whole trip itself was meaningless (and perhaps a reflection of Herzog's inability to see anything through)--it was Herzog's letters and memories that mattered to him and should matter to the reader.  The first part of Herzog is thus experienced by the reader as a series of episodes or anecdotes, presented out of chronological order and interspersed with philosophical asides, in which Herzog deals with a vast panoply of other characters, all of them, like Herzog, members of a rarefied intellectual and cultural elite, most of them, like Herzog, Jewish.  These individual episodes are all readable and entertaining, and are used to show Herzog's starting point, the position and problems he grows out of and leaves behind.

Many of the characters, including Herzog, come across as self-absorbed, self-pitying, unproductive and even parasitic, members of an elite which has contempt for the rest of society.  There are plenty of complaints from the characters about how America is a "mass society" or a "money society," and plenty of bragging about how they have risen from humble beginnings.  One of Herzog's phantom letters is to Adlai Stevenson, and in the letter Herzog laments that the mindless common people had put a career soldier into the White House instead of an intellectual.  A letter that appears almost 100 pages later, addressed to the man who defeated Stevenson, Dwight Eisenhower, self-pityingly claims that it is the intellectuals who are the victims of contempt.  Significantly, Herzog tells Ike that intellectuals suffer not only the contempt of others, but have contempt for themselves: "Intelligent people without influence feel a certain self-contempt...."   Intellectuals may think that they should be telling other people what to do, but Herzog's own life suggests the folly of putting intellectuals in charge: Herzog once thought he could have made a difference to the world with his research on Romanticism, which is silly enough, but then he wasn't even able to finish that work!

As the letter to Ike suggests, the first half or so of the novel has an aura of uselessness and hopelessness.  Herzog, though regularly praised by others as a genius, a good man, a mensch, can't seem to accomplish anything--his academic career peters out, his marriages fail--and these failures cannot be ascribed to outside forces--they are due to his own psychological limitations.  Selfishness is perhaps chief of these limitations; there is a scene in which Herzog takes Marco, his son with his first wife, Daisy, to the zoo, but even though his time with the boy is very limited, instead of focusing on the child, Herzog's mind is occupied with plotting how to dump his current lover, Sono Oguki, a Japanese woman who lived in Paris during WWII, so he can make Madeleine his full-time mistress.

Related to this sense of uselessness and hopelessness (and also reflected in the letter to Eisenhower) is a sense of alienation.  Herzog and many of the other characters are people unsure where they belong, people who don't feel a part of the place they are in and move restlessly from place (be it spiritual, psychological or geographical) to place.  When Herzog first starts his affair with Madeleine, she, in an act of rebellion against her bohemian Jewish leftist parents whom she says taught her the "ABCs" from Lenin's State and Revolution, has been a convert to Catholicism for three months.  She soon abandons Catholicism, and once married to Herzog she convinces him to spend all his money on a country home in the Berkshires, then soon insists they abandon Massachusetts for Chicago.  Sono is a Japanese who has spent her life in Paris and New York.  Herzog is friends with a biologist who feels more kinship with a monkey than with his fellow human beings.  Throughout the period covered in the novel and throughout his life, Herzog himself is always moving, never settling down.  Herzog (like Bellow) was born and spent much of his childhood in Canada, and Herzog's comrades during his brief stint in the Navy perceived him as a foreigner.  Ramona likewise distinguishes him from other Americans: "You're not a true, puritanical American.  You have a talent for sensuality.  Your mouth gives you away."

Starting at around the 200 page mark the actual plot, Herzog's journey from alienation and immaturity to integration with society and maturity, kicks into gear.  For one thing, it starts to look like Herzog may actually marry Ramona.  More importantly, and more immediately, he takes steps to play a larger role in the life of June, his daughter with Madeleine.  Suspecting Madeleine and Gersbach are poor parents, he calls up a lawyer, Simkin (an art collector and epicure as well as a high-powered attorney), and discusses fighting Madeline for custody of June.  Then he rushes to Chicago to spy on Madeleine and Gersbach; he has his father's old gun in his pocket, and Bellow provides the reader some suspense by hinting that Herzog just may go out of his mind and murder Gersbach.  Then he takes June out for the day, getting in a minor traffic accident in which he breaks a rib and comes to the attention of the police, who bring him in because he is carrying the unlicensed and loaded revolver.

Herzog's quest to get closer to June put him in contact with the law enforcement system and expose him to the apparatus of the state, the lower classes, and minority groups.  These may be the scenes of the novel of most immediate interest to 2017 readers, living as we do in an intellectual climate consumed with identity politics.  In Manhattan, Herzog takes a cab downtown to the court to meet Simkin, and his cabby is a voluble Puerto Rican who presents his view of sexual relationships.  Waiting at the courthouse for his meeting with Simkin, Herzog sits in a courtroom audience, watching black drunks and gay prostitutes brought before the judge in mugging and robbery cases.  In Chicago, Herzog himself is brought to the police station by black police officers and spends time in a cell with a drunk and "a Negro boy."  To varying degrees Herzog sympathizes or identifies with these people, perhaps signifying a recognition of a kinship with members of the larger American society and an expansion of Herzog's concern beyond his self and his own small elite community.

Herzog's adventures in Chicago--the recognition (due to his spying) that Madeleine and Gersbach are not such terrible parents, the accident, and his arrest--have the effect of reorganizing Herzog's priorities and resolving his psychological issues; Herzog has matured.  Herzog sets about fixing up the overgrown and somewhat decrepit Berkshires estate, and on the last page of the novel Bellow indicates that Herzog will no longer be compulsively writing all those letters--the letters were a reflection of Herzog's anxiety about his place in the world and a sign of his immaturity.

As the novel has progressed Herzog has spent less time with psychiatrists and lawyers and such parasitic types, and gravitated toward his family--not only his children, but his brothers, who are successful businessmen, and Ramona, a potential member of the family as a prospective wife who also operates a business; should we see Herzog as a Candide who, after a dangerous journey, has learned the value of tending to his own garden and the value of productive work as opposed to sterile intellectualism?

Did I enjoy this novel?  I certainly was affected by the scenes set in New York that mirrored events of my own life--spotting an attractive woman in Grand Central and sadly thinking, "I'll never see her again," and then sitting in an outbound train, writing nonsense in a notebook no other person will ever read--sitting in Verdi Park--being dragged into a church by your Catholic wife and not having any idea what you are supposed to do in there.  The many references to literary and philosophical figures can be fun if you are already familiar with them--I enjoyed spotting references to Proust and Samuel Johnson on page 3, for example, but a lot of stuff went over my head and some of the philosophical asides about the meaning of life and the fate of the individual in a collectivist or mechanical society were rough going, leading my attention to drift.  

The many characters are interesting, if not necessarily likable--Bellow uses them primarily to illustrate his themes.  I haven't read any biography of Bellow or criticism of Herzog, but it is easy to imagine that many of the characters are caricatures of people Bellow knew.  One of the recurring stylistic motifs of the novel that struck me is how people's appearances, especially facial features, reflect their character, histories, or fleeting emotions.  The book has many many characters, and it seems like every other page includes a detailed description of somebody's face and/or body and a line or two like these:

Her downcast look, Moses at first took as agreement or sympathy; but he realized how wrong he was when he observed her nose.  It was full of mistrust.  By the way it moved he realized that she rejected everything he was saying.  (37)

His pale round face was freckled, and his eyes large, fluid, dark, and, for Moses's sake, bitter in their dreaminess.  (43)

Those eyes might be blue, perhaps green, even grey-he would never know.  But they were bitch eyes, that was certain.  They expressed a sort of female arrogance which had an immediate sexual power over him.... (34)

His green eyes were violently clear, his lips were continually tensing.  He must have been convinced that he was cutting the dead weight of deception from Herzog's soul, and his long white fingers, thumbs and forefingers worked nervously.  (84)

She had a smooth, long-suffering countenance, slightly tearful even when she smiled, and most mournful when you met her by chance, as Moses did on Broadway, and saw her face--she was above the average height--coming toward him, are, smooth, kindly, with permanent creases of suffering beside her mouth.  (108)

And on and on.  This idea reaches its acme in two men: Valentine Gersbach, Herzog's former friend and Madeleine's lover, and Herzog and Madeleine's Chicago lawyer, Sandor Himmelstein.  Gersbach has a wooden leg, having been run over by a train as a child, and Himmelstein, who is so short that Herzog thinks of him as a dwarf, was wounded at Omaha Beach, losing part of his chest.  "It made Herzog uneasy, perhaps, that he had been discharged from the Navy owing to his asthma and never saw action.  Whereas this dwarf and hunchback was disabled by a mine near the beachhead.  The wound had made a hunchback of him."  One of the novel's themes seems to be men's wounds, how men are created by their wounds, or how suffering a serious wound is a rite of passage that signals one's achievement of maturity--at the start of the novel Herzog has not suffered such a wound, but he does in Chicago, breaking a rib in that auto accident.

A worthwhile read that, I suspect, offers pleasure proportionate to the amount of work the reader is willing to put in trying to figure it out.

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I provide below a scan of the flier the very chatty owner of AF Booksellers gave me the day I bought Herzog from him.  A place worth checking out if you are in the Pittsburgh area.

Horizontal Woman by Barry Malzberg

“You see, Miss Moore,” Mandleman says, “let me, if I may, explain to you a few basic facts and so on and then your mind will be set at ease and there will be no difficulty. It is impossible to maintain these buildings properly. These people are pigs; the way they live is indescribable. They are not like you and me but are rather totally undisciplined and on a level of savagery.”

In our last episode we talked about a sex novel by Barry Malzberg which, instead of glorifying sexual promiscuity and celebrating sexual liberation, portrayed sex as degrading, unfulfilling and exploitative. Well, here's another Malzberg paperback sex novel, this one from 1972 and available currently as an e-book from Prologue Books, Horizontal Woman.  Let's see if our buddy Barry takes a different tack in this one.

(Check out the blog Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books for a different take on Horizontal Woman and an idea of what the 1972 edition, and a 1977 reissue under the title Social Worker, looked like.)

Elizabeth Moore is a 23-year-old in 1964 who, after college (at "Beloit University") moved from the MidWest to Brooklyn to work for the New York City welfare administration. An "investigator" who visits recipients of public aid in their homes and throws around a lot of Freudian theory and jargon ("decompensated" seems to be her favorite word), she has her own theories and methods of how to lift her clients out of poverty--she has sex with them to raise their self esteem!

...helping her clients to get better so that they could recover their self esteem and get off relief and assume a higher socio-economic level and begin to lead normal middle-class lives.

Three clients who receive this innovative and much-welcomed service from the comely Miss Moore are the focus of the narrative. We've got Puerto Rican father of about a half dozen kids, Felipe Morales, who hasn't worked for fifteen years due to a self-diagnosed heart condition (no doctor has ever been able to diagnose this condition.)  There's 18-year old African-American (the text says "Negro") William Buckingham III, who starts pimping Moore out to his friends after his third or fourth bout of intercourse with her. And there's Rabbi Schnitzler, a Lubavitcher and father of 13, who becomes ridden with guilt after his first session with Elizabeth and actually confesses to his wife (who, incidentally, is pregnant with number 14.)

Another important character is Elizabeth's supervisor, James Oved, a black man who, when he isn't upbraiding her for being too soft on the clients ("you letting those cats take you over the coals with a lot of lies and old bullshit")--which is most of the time--is always aggressively asking her out and calling her a "prejudiced chick" when she turns him down.

Horizontal Woman is an exploration of liberal guilt and an indictment of the welfare state. And in the same way you might say that Everything Happened to Susan was about gender and relationships between men and women, Horizontal Woman could be said to be about race and ethnicity and relationships between blacks and whites, Jews and Gentiles, etc.

Malzberg does not paint Morales, Buckingham (Moore calls him "Willie"), and Schnitzler as sympathetic; they are obviously poor due to laziness and foolishness and not due to racism or oppression or bad luck or whatever. They are not above lying to Moore or any other government agent to get more benefits, and we witness other welfare recipients ("the relief class") casually throwing trash around their neighborhoods and acting boorishly. Willie, apparently, is a burglar, among other things. For her part, while Moore claims to care about them, she (like the entire government apparatus) treats the poor not like equal citizens, but contemptuously and condescendingly, like they are "retarded" children ("at this socio-economic level, how subtle can you be?" she wonders at one point.)  She tells Schnitzler his religion is silly and should be abandoned, and when confronted by a gang of Willie's friends, admits to herself that black youths all look the same to her.

A pivotal scene in the middle of the novel is a flashback that shows why Moore has taken up her bizarre and risky policy of having sex with her clients. When she confronted a Jewish landlord, Holocaust survivor Irving Mandleman, over the terrible conditions in which his welfare recipient tenants live, Mandeman explains that the tenants are to blame for their poor living conditions because they are savages and pigs (see above) and that the only person who really cares about these people is Mandleman himself!  He keeps them alive even though he loses money by sheltering them (the taxpayers pay their rent, of course, but it doesn't cover Mandleman's bills.)

"The Mayor's office is not populated with people who would take them into their homes for bed and board.  The liberal politicians are for relief only because giving them relief will keep them at a distance and keep the society from crumbling."

Mandelman asserts that even Moore doesn't really care about the poor: "you are so industrious and so dedicated but the fact is that you are only reacting to your own disgust.  You have no more feeling for these people than the office of the Mayor, believe me."  Moore starts her insane policy of having sex with her clients that very day as a way of proving to herself that she does care.

In the final third of the book, Oved, calling her a "dirty little Jewish cunt," tells Moore she is being transferred to the Bronx.  Her last visits to her clients are disastrous. Morales, crying out "Morales not a pig or a chicken, he a man," rapes her, Willie's mother threatens her with a broom ("You smart white bitch...you lucky I don't take a knife to you") and Willie reveals to her he has "the clap."  When she gets back to the building where her office is she finds that hundreds of Hasidim have laid siege to the place, looking for her; the last sentence of the book leaves you to wonder if she escapes with her life.

This is another Malzberg book about which I have to warn readers who may be easily offended, it being full of unflattering stereotypes. There's the vulgar and oversexed Negroes, religious people who breed like rabbits, the ethnocentric ("there are a few orthodox Jews in these tenements which, I agree, somewhat lifts the level of tenancy") Jewish slumlord, and the white liberal who has jungle fever (though Elizabeth claims "her passions in fornication with the clients have been purely on the professional level....")

Horizontal Woman is not as funny as Everything Happened to Susan, but it is a better novel. Elizabeth Moore is a better character than Susan; not only does she have an interesting psychology, but she has agency and makes important decisions that drive the narrative, whereas Susan was just a passive victim.  Morales, Willie, Schnitzler, Mandleman and Oved all inspire some feeling in the reader, unlike the flat caricatures we found in Everything Happened to Susan.  I actually think Malzberg's little work here fits into the same genre or tradition of Jewish-American writing that addresses the issue of Jewish and African-American life in the New York-New Jersey area in which reside Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet. And there are some good jokes, and it is also just possible someone might find the sex in this book to be titillating, particularly someone into exhibitionism, group sex, voyeurism, and/or interracial sex.

A quick read that is worth a look for Malzberg fans and those interested in subversive (what today we would call "politically incorrect") vintage paperbacks.

Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

My copy of the novel

Many years ago I tried to read The Adventures of Augie March by Canadian-born Jewish-American writer Saul Bellow. In my memory, the book is 3 inches thick and stuffed with tiny tiny print. I gave up on the third or fourth page.

I didn’t quite give up on Bellow, though, and five or eight years or so after being defeated by Augie March I read and enjoyed the much shorter The Dangling Man and The Victim, and a bunch of Bellow's short stories. Early in the period of my exile from New York City I read Seize the Day, which I liked a lot, and last year I read Henderson the Rain King. Recently the Des Moines Library had a huge booksale, and I bought a hardcover edition of Mr. Sammler’s Planet for pennies. This week I read the 1970 novel.

Artur Sammler is a Polish Jew, 70 years old, a more-or-less retired journalist, living on the West Side. (I lived on the East Side when I lived in Manhattan, and, as a stupid joke, pretended to be a rabid pro-East Side, anti-West Side, partisan. Whenever we would go to the West Side I would complain that the bus was slower, the subway was dirtier, etc. In fact, of course, there are many interesting and beautiful places on the West Side.) Sammler grew up in Poland and spent the 1920s and 1930s in England, among the intellectual elite, getting particularly close to H. G. Wells. But business took him back to Poland, where he and his wife and daughter got caught up in the start of the Second World War. Sammler’s wife was murdered, and Sammler and his daughter, separately, only barely escaped being killed.

Now, in late ‘60s New York, with one blind eye and British manners (he carries an umbrella around) Sammler lives among his various neurotic relatives who come to him to confess their sexual problems. In the course of just a few days Sammler suffers several shocks: he is terrorized by a black mugger, his nephew is revealed to be terminally ill, and his daughter, who ceaselessly urges Sammler to write a book on H. G. Wells, steals from a Punjabi scholar a valuable manuscript about the possibilities of colonizing the moon. Sammler, who lacks much family feeling, long ago lost his youthful illusions about improving society through revolution or government planning, and feels out of touch with the current sex-crazed generation, begins to seriously consider the notion of colonizing the moon and other planets.

This book kept reminding me of Thomas Disch. Like 334, this is a book about New York life, and like 334 it includes a reference to the first victim of Rashkalnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In 334 a lesbian stabs her girlfriend with a fork; in Mr. Sammler’s Planet a woman says she will stab her abusive husband with a fork. Like On Wings of Song it includes a character who adapts old musical scores for modern use. Uncanny.

I was also reminded, more obliquely, of Jack Vance. A person who read this book before me underlined and inscribed question marks next to words he did not know, like “autochthon” and “dugong.” Jack Vance uses “autochthon” a lot, and I think the first time I came upon the word was in a Vance story.  Bellow also employs "tellurian," which I think I only ever have seen in books by E. E. Smith.

This novel also gave me the damndest case of déjà vu. One of Sammler’s relatives (a grand nephew, I think) had the idea of offering to rich people the service of identifying all the trees and shrubs on the lawns of their estates. Somehow, I was sure I had read about just such a scheme, just recently, but I could not remember where. I guess I must have read that passage the day I bought Mr. Sammler’s Planet, at the library booksale, when I was flipping through to make sure no pages were missing.

I enjoyed Mr. Sammler’s Planet quite a bit; it was certainly more fun than Henderson the Rain King, which I remember being too long and sometimes dragging. Mr. Sammler’s Planet does not drag; everything in it was interesting. Of course, the novel is largely about things that I find interesting -- New York, World War II and the Cold War, revolution, space exploration -- but I also found the various characters and their relationships and odd problems engaging. The ending, in which Sammler, despite all the horrible things he has endured and witnessed, asserts that we all know, instinctively, right from wrong, is powerful because it is so tragic. Either Sammler is sadly deluded, and good and evil are just opinions, or Sammler is right: we all know what is good and what is evil, and the world is full of people who do evil in the full knowledge that what they are doing is wrong.

So, a thumbs up for Mr. Sammler’s Planet; perhaps I have taken one small step (or maybe one giant leap) closer to tackling Augie March a second time.

UPDATE FEB 23 2014:  In the comments veteran book blogger Tarbandu points out a long and detailed, and quite good, essay on Mr. Sammler's Planet by Myron Magnet that focuses on crime and civilization in New York from the late '60s to the '80s.