Review: Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1953) · 3:05am Apr 21st, 2014
Seize the Day
Saul Bellow, 1953
I chose this novel the way I choose most novels: by wandering around the library's fiction section until I found an author I recognized but hadn't read, and reading his shortest book. I like to add those random elements to the process, partly due to my distrust of critics and canon, partly out of the romantic instinct that makes a religious fanatic seek inspiration by opening the Bible to a random page. (It's ironic that I think I can understand an author from one book, since I pride myself on never writing two stories that sound like they were written by the same person.)
Bellow won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Nobel for literature, another National Book Award, Congress' National Medal for the Arts, and another National Book Award. If authors wore medals, he'd jangle like a general.
As I Lay Dying was a difficult novel to review. It was hard to know what the story was about; hard to decide whether it was insightful or trivial; hard to tell what Faulkner was trying to do; hard to see how some of its most annoying aspects were responsible for some of its most striking effects. It required two reviews in one, one as a novel, and one as an experiment. In both cases I was left wondering after reviewing it whether I understood it at all.
The modern literary canon is a mixture of books that are great novels and books that are great experiments. As I Lay Dying is a great experiment, but maybe not such a great novel. Unfortunately, literary critics don't distinguish between great novels and great experiments, and tell us we should love them all, even if we're not writers and just want to read a novel. (The critics seem to be out-of-touch with real people, but they're just trying to turn them into literary critics.)
An experimental novel, like Ulysses, makes the reader sweat to figure out what the author is trying to say, and the author's puckish tricks of concealing, misleading, and teasing make it seem like the writing was fun and effortless. We know Joyce worked hard on Ulysses, but I still suspect that kind of writing is fun and relatively effortless, because concealing ideas is much easier than communicating them.
Persian carpet-weavers still make a deliberate mistake in each carpet, I'm told, because only Allah makes things perfect, and so making a perfect carpet would be an act of arrogance.
How many legs does a horse have?
The real act of arrogance, of course, is imagining that your carpet would be perfect, like Allah's creations, if not for your deliberate mistake. Artists who believe they must do something new have that arrogance if they believe the old ways are too restrictive for their genius, and that just trying to get an ordinary story right is too simple to be a worthy ambition for them.
Seize the Day has one protagonist and one plot line. It's easy to tell what the story is about. Every sentence is there to tell the story. The ending doesn't resolve things like a commercial novel would, but that's because it's about a life that doesn't resolve. A real novel, like Seize the Day, is easy for the reader, but we can see the author sweating, pushing himself to his limit not in exotic literary tricks, but in trying to say how it really is and who these people really are.
A 1975 interview with Bellow said,
The category of “great public writers,” in which he includes himself, are those novelists and poets who express social concerns and who write for a general readership. The other group, he remarked in an interview about his current novel, “Humboldt’s Gift,” write for a restricted audience, and their importance has been exalted by critics and academics far beyond their significance.
“Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Proust, who are typical of the small-public writers, no doubt have produced interesting work,” Mr. Bellow said, but they have become too much the darlings of the critics.
In addition to exalting the “small-public writers,” critics have performed a disservice by attempting to classify “great-public writers” according to their ethnic origins, Mr. Bellow went on. “A few years ago it was fashionable to describe Roth, Malamud and me as the Hart, Schaffner and Marx of writing,” the novelist said. ... Academics and critics gave writers who were Jews or blacks a “ghetto description of themselves.”
40 years later I still see some of that: anthologies with names like New ____ Voices, collecting authors together for being black, or gay, or ethnic. There are good reasons for such anthologies, but it must be frustrating for an author to be a "gay author", instead of being an "author" as Oscar Wilde, Thornton Wilder, and Evelyn Waugh were. But I wonder whether Bellow wasn't looking at the split between stories and experiments, and interpreting it as racial discrimination. Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Proust are prototypical experimental writers. "Ethnic" authors, gays, and now notably Indians, are much more likely to write traditional novels, perhaps because they are much more likely to have had difficult or unusual lives that gave them something to write about.
Seize the Day describes one day in the life of Wilhelm, a man in his forties who has come to ruin, in every sense, without having done anything very wrong. He dropped out of college to move to Hollywood and be an actor, which it's easy to call foolish in retrospect, but how many movie stars finished college? He left his wife after she refused to divorce him, which turned out to be a tactical mistake in the endless legal battles that followed, but the reader can't tell, because Wilhelm can't tell, what really happened, what went wrong. He was a successful salesman for 20 years, but left his company on bad terms because when the time came for the big promotion he had been promised, they gave it to the young son of a company executive instead. His sister won't talk to him, his mother is dead, and his father Dr. Adler disdains him for not being a success like he was. He has no job, no skills, and in the 1950s when this was written, there were not many ways for a man in his forties to start over. He has signed power of attorney over his last $700 to a man named Tamkin, knowing that he's some kind of scheister, but also sensing that he has no other choice anymore, that he has exhausted the possibilities of the safe, sensible life, and only a rogue like Tamkin has the cunning to help him now.
This one day is crucial in that it is the day he runs dry, financially, and knows for sure he's ruined and that his father will not help him. But we gather it's also just like every other day of the past 5 or 10 years of his life.
Bellow published the novel when he was 38, just after he narrowly escaped middle-age failure himself with the sudden success of his novel Augie March. Was he writing about an alternate Saul Bellow in a world where he'd gone with Penguin instead of Viking? Was he expiating his guilt over his sudden success?
The shortest adequate explanation of the novel is the novel itself, which I suppose is the highest praise I can give. It's only about 40,000 words long. It's instructive if you read the novel, and then read the SparkNotes page on Themes, Motifs, and Symbols. The instructive point is how useless the SparkNotes page is. Yes, the novel makes some use of psychology, and the author compares the characters to different animals, and uses their clothing to indicate their internal state:
[Wilhelm] liked to wear good clothes, but once he had put it on each article appeared to go its own way.
The paragraph on water might have something to it. But everything else written in the SparkNotes is either the product of a hyper-imaginative imagination, so banal as to be not worth saying (the sections on the internal life, psychology, and the urban landscape), or says nothing new to anyone who's read the story. No one can clarify the story in a 2,000-word essay because the story uses all 40,000 of its words making itself clear. The book's 6,000-word introduction by Cynthia Ozick, who is a good writer, also fails to add anything. There are many other attempts at summarizing it online, but they all sound phony to me, looking for failings in Wilhelm to explain his failure karmically, when I don't think the novel does that. Penguin Reading Guides says, "Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day is both inspired and burdened by the American myth of success." No; that would be Death of a Salesman. The New York Times says, "Mr. Bellow describes Tommy Wilhelm (born Adler), a 42-odd-year-old salesman who, despite a wife and two children, has not learned to think of himself as a grown and independent being." I have no idea where that even came from. James Wood says, "Seize The Day is perhaps the most Russian novella ever written in America. Like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, whom he read and reread, [Bellow] was intensely interested in questions of knowledge and belief." I suppose so; but the story is not merely spiritual, and does not claim that there is some attitude or belief Wilhelm can adopt that will make his life bearable.
One could write an essay on Dr. Tamkin (and many have), who is not made clear because the story isn't about him. Dr. Tamkin talks incessantly, a mixture of hogwash, snake oil, and sharp insight. He wants to use Wilhelm but also, we think, genuinely wants to save him, and knows he needs saving himself. He is not a simple trickster or picaro. He isn't a comic figure at all; we aren't supposed to laugh either at him or with him. The important question is why he's in the story.
I think he is constructed to represent, precisely, Wilhelm's best hopes for salvation from his problems, and his fears that those hopes are empty and deceptive. He is the saviour that Wilhelm would dream up for himself--but in a real dream, the kind you can't control and that could turn into a nightmare. Tamkin diagnoses Wilhelm's problems:
In here, the human bosom--mine, yours, everybody's--there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. ... 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' ... Nothing. In the heart of hearts--Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody else instead. You can't be that strict to yourself. You love a little. Like you have a dog or give some money to a charity drive. Now that isn't love, is it? What is it? ... It's a way to love the pretender soul. ... Your own betrayer is inside of you and sells you out. ... The true soul is the one that pays the price. It suffers and gets sick, and it realizes that the pretender can't be loved. Because the pretender is a lie. The true soul loves the truth. And when the true soul feels like this, it wants to kill the pretender.
But what is the solution? Wilhelm has done nothing worse than many successful men have done; as his downfall seems to be from bad luck, he looks to good luck (on the futures market, through Tamkin) to pull him from it. The distribution of what we count as luck, unfortunately for Wilhelm, is not symmetric around zero utility; a day without disaster would, to a properly-calibrated mind, count as good luck. Tamkin has other things to say, platitudes about attitude, and they are exactly the combination of insightful and fraudulent that Tamkin himself is. Tamkin represents society's advice, and the falling man's best hope: Necessarily optimistic to the point of being fraudulent; sincere; well-meant; giving the assurance that one controls one's fate while relying mainly on luck for salvation; unlikely to succeed, yet the best hope available.
Technically, it's sometimes brilliant and always serviceable. I could quibble with one scene in which the point of view, which is otherwise entirely Wilhelm's, bounces back and forth between Wilhelm and Dr. Adler, but that would be mean-spirited of me.
So, yes, I think it's a great novel, though Bellow said later that he didn't like it. But do I recommend it?
Not... really. Because it's really freaking depressing. Who ought to read this novel? Someone who hasn't come to that mid-life failure, too late to recover from, probably won't understand it, and will just get depressed and fearful if they do. Someone who has will probably just get more depressed. It's a lose-lose proposition. I believe that art is anything that helps us take perplexing situations like this, understand them, and deal with them. The problem is that I don't see the concluding "deal with them" in Seize the Day.
I suppose, though the novel might not help a Wilhelm deal with his own problems, it could help society to acknowledge the plight of its many Wilhelms. The people who most ought to read it are the successes, the Dr. Adlers unable to sympathize with their children. But they probably wouldn't get it if they did.
I found A Streetcar Named Desire to be rather depressing. I know it may be hard to compare between different forms of literature, but how would Seize the Day compare to Streetcar in terms of how depressing it is?
I think I might take a look at this novel.
Nearly they stood who fall.
Themselves, when they look back
see always in the track
One torturing spot where all
By a possible quick swerve
Of will yet unenslaved–
By the infinitesimal twitching of a nerve–
Might have been saved.
Nearly they fell who stand.
These with cold after-fear
Look back and note how near
They grazed the Siren’s land
Wondering to think that fate
By threads so spidery-fine
The choice of ways so small, the event so great
Should thus entwine.
Therefore I sometimes fear
Lest oldest fears prove true
Lest, when no bugle blew
My mort, when skies looked clear
I may have stepped one hair’s
Breadth past the hair-breadth bourn
Which, being once crossed forever unawares
Forbids return.
--C. S. Lewis, "Pilgrim's Regress"
2030003 I think Streetcar is sadder; Seize the Day is darker. Blanche in Streetcar--I don't want to say that she made her own problems, since she didn't rape herself or commit herself to the mental hospital, but she sure made a lot of bad decisions. She is one particular, distinctive person with a sad story. Wilhelm in StD is an everyman, and so StD says that the world is made such that this complete failure and despair can happen to anyone, maybe to most people.
2030219
Gotcha, thanks. I think I will pick it up when the opportunity presents itself.
I suppose it's a mark of a well-done review that I was ready to write that last paragraph myself before laying eyes on it.
Is there nothing redeeming in it then, as a pure read? Something to make it, in your opinion, worth the time and effort to think on? Or would it be more like well-written contemplation, fuel on a bed of coals, so to speak? I really am interested in your opinion.
2030042 That was beautiful and beautifully appropriate. I love that!
Should I feel guilty for enjoying the experimental novels you can't stand, then?
I mean, don't get me wrong, I've seen cases where there's some superfluous trickery to disguise a writer's shortcomings (looking at you, David Cage), but I've seen a few cases where I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of an experimental novel, even if I might not have come to the conclusions the author intended.
2031319 I didn't say I can't stand them. But critics should stop classifying them as novels. They're a different kind of game, and I think fooling people into approaching them as novels ruins them for most people. It's like if you're getting together with your buds after a day fishing, and you say, "Let's watch a movie!", and you get the beer and pretzels, and somebody puts a David Lynch movie on.
Experimental novels should be analyzed as experiments. A class studying As I Lay Dying should study how Faulkner used point of view, not what the story means or what it says about its characters. If the class is composed of students who don't need to know different ways to use point of view, they should study a different novel.
You should probably feel guilty for something anyway, though, so go ahead.
The corollary is that authors should be allowed to re-use techniques from experimental novels. Faulkner did all this work to develop a new way to use point-of-view, but if anybody used it, they'd get spurned for "just imitating Faulkner".
2031319 I hate something, though, don't I? I don't hate Ulysses or As I Lay Dying. I hate the literary establishment that hails them as the right kind of writing. I hate the arrogance of pricks like TS Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams, who say that they know the One True Way to write, and that anything else is garbage. I hate the endless combative nature of art, where each generation feels like they gain the most glory for themselves not by adding to what came before, but by being revolutionaries who depose the old rulers and stand them up before a firing squad.
(Which proves that Kipling was a lesbian.)
To answer that, I'd have to know why you read, or have a general theory of what novels are supposed to do. But I don't. It's not a fun read. I have a selfish reason for not recommending it: I don't want people to think of dreary hopeless novels when they think of me. That's why I write so many happy stories.
It's for the person who wants to understand the world even if it makes her miserable, I guess.
2031449
Whenever a supposed champion of either popular and straightforward entertainment works or high-minded and oblique works insults and denigrates the other side, I bristle and feel the need to white knight. I value both of them pretty much equally.
2031467
Sometimes I like a shot of misery in my diet. I've often found beauty in melodramatic, intricate tragedies, which I think taps into the same sense of satisfaction I get when I see huge domino art get knocked down piece by piece.
2031449
I don't know much about Marianne Moore but I do like to cite one of her works as a serviceable defense of fanfic:
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must...
--"Poetry"
Gertrude Stein. Ah yes. Of her Richard Armor says, "She claimed her poetry was inspired by the brushstrokes of a Cezanne painting that she kept hanging over her typewriter. Her style in turn inspired many contemporary authors such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald who kept pictures of Gertrude Stein, hanging, over their typewriters."
2031795 That poem is a fine poem, except for one thing: It argues that "A poem should not mean, but be"--which, in the context of Marianne Moore's life, I take as meaning that a poem should not have a purpose or a clear meaning, but should be, like a William Carlos Williams or Marianne Moore poem, a factual description of a red wheelbarrow or some other humble object.
...yet she made that argument in a poem.
Stein, Moore, and Williams were, as I understand it from what little I've read by and about them, against artists organizing or summarizing anything, against artifice (and, I'd say, therefore against art). Gertrude Stein said that a church's stained glass window would be more beautiful if it had fallen on the ground and shattered, so that it was pure and natural rather than having a message imposed on it. Here are the first 4 stanzas of her poem "Yet Dish" (1913):
2031890
Really? I had always thought, based on the text and my knowledge of its times, that it was a defense of poetry against those critics, among both the intellectuals and the bourgeois, who would dismiss it as trivial. Moore seems to be saying, rather affably, "Yes, a lot of it is, but some of it is capable of creating an actual physical reaction, a sympathetic one, in the reader. Words on paper do this! Surely that is not trivial."
I would love to defend this view but it seems I cannot, for you know more about Moore than me. So I must accept that this is no large - spirited defense of those demesnes that bards in fealty to Apollo hold against the encircling barbarian hordes, but a mean - spirited gambit in the game to determine which faction will rule 'em.
So I guess that makes Edna St. Vincent Millay, what--Daenerys Targaryen? Who's Tyrion Lannister, then?
2031939 I defer to you in matters of poetry. I know some of her history, vaguely, but I jumped to conclusions on that particular poem.
2032655
Oh.
So you don't want to beta my Game of Thrones/Great Gatsby crossover fic, then?
2031467
It's a fair question, and one I really hadn't thought on as much as I should have. Honestly, my goal in reading - once I get past "entertainment" or "escape" - is to find something in the story, and the way it's conveyed, that teaches me more about myself and who I want to be as a person. At the very least I want to understand what the author might be trying to convey, or at least evoke. I don't want anyone to tell me how to think or feel, but I would like to be able to understand their perspective. Sorry if it all sounds a little glib, but it's exactly how I feel.
So, I wasn't really asking if I should read it - though I suppose in some way I really was - but if you felt there was something that redeemed it despite its morbid hopelessness.
In retrospect the question's a bit redundant, so, sorry about that.
I really like these reviews that you do, BH.
I knew I liked you for a reason. I speak from less knowledge and experience with the field and its literature than you, but from what I've seen, I very much agree with you, though I'm sure there's people out there with an actual good head on their shoulders (such as Thomas Uzzell's book I recommended). And really, my battleground for this sort of arrogance is more so in the arena of fanfiction, where I witness it the most (because of where I spend the majority of my time).
All in all, welcome to the pride of human kind. That's where all of this stems from: the individual's pride.
By the way, have you ever read The Prisoner of Zenda? It's a classic romantic adventure, and one of my favorite books of all time. Give it a shot sometime. It's not "serious literature" but I think that's its strength.
I tried, but I could never collect more than five pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom.
2038980
Ha! Funny you should mention that. I'm about to play some Legend of Zelda right now. But seriously, check that book out sometime; it's great fun, with some poignancy thrown in for great measure. Plus it's really short; you could probably finish it in a day or two.