Saul Bellow – Herzog – Lisa Yin Zhang

Bellow, Saul. Herzog. New York: Penguin Books, 1964.

Transcribed 1/30/20; 2/16/20.

General Thoughts

* reads like someone in the mindstate of: herzog, barrage, too much stimulus, overwhelming. i fell in love with and feared madeleine with him, sitting on the rim of the bathtub as she applied makeup like a dictator.

* this book made me question what exactly i’m doing, gathering quotes. its a general arc and not little focused lifted quotations. (1/30/20: same concern as with Zadie, not original. Wind-up is a little different).

* also, not really that pleasurable except occasionally and in general just the forward motion i think barrelling

* the holden caulfield of post-college intellectuals

* george hoberly an alter ego?

* interested in this japanese character

* at some points reading like scaling blocks up to marcus’s. now at 239

* lotsa quid pro quo in this book

my interest in this book undulates i suppose like ur interest in the goings ons of ur own life
(1/30/20) By the end I really liked it even though I disliked it at first. Ha — reminded me of a Murakami novel, tired of this main male character just fending off beautiful females while being incredibly passive and possibly mediocre

Forgot how much I love his prose
He travels in the same circuits as I do
Madeleine the kind of person I really fear becoming. A man less guileless though. (Last night… get me this, get me that. Dictatorial).

Quotes

(29) If you could call those foggy winter interval days. The sun was shut up in a cold botle. The soul shut up inside me… The wooden tables were stained, warped, tea-scalded.
(31) In the cab through hot streets where brick and brownstone buildings were crowded, Herzog held the strap and his large eyes were fixed on the sights of New York. The square shapes were vivid, not inert, but they gave him a sense of fateful motion, almost of intimacy. Somehow he felt himself part of it all—in the rooms, in the stores, cellars—and at the same time he sensed the danger of these multiple excitements. But he’d be alright. He was overstimulated. He had to calm down these overstrained galloping nerves, put out this murky fire inside. He yearned for the Atlantic—the sand, the brine flavor, the therapy of cold water.”
His duty was to live. To be sane, and to live, and to look after the kids.
(38) Leaving the cab, he thought how his mother would moisten her handkerchief at her mouth and rub his face clean. He had no business to recall this, he knew, and turned toward Grand Central in his straw ha. He was of the mature generation now, and life was his to do something with, if he could. But he had not forgotten the odor of his mother’s saliva on the handkerchief that summer morning in the squat hollow Canadian station, the black iron and the sublime brass. All children have cheeks and all mothers spittle to wipe them tenderly. These things matter or they do not matter. It depends upon the universe, what it is…. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.”
(91) Her dark brown eyes were set within strong orbital bones. Her lips were pink and vivid. Moses did not want to meet her gaze; he would have to hold it long and earnestly and nothing would come of it. He knew he had her sympathy but that she could never approve of him.”
(94) Sunday, with gray fog from the lake and the ore boats lowing like waterborne cattle. You could hear the emptiness of the hulls.”
(101 If his soul could cast a reflection so brilliant, and so intensely sweet, eh might beg God to make such use of him. But that would be too simple. But that would be too childish. The actual sphere is not clear like this, but turbulent, angry. A vast human action is going on. Death watches. So if you have some happiness, conceal it. And when your heart is full, keep yo ur mouth shut also.
(103) He wondered, even, why he should have wanted to survive. Others in his generation wore themselves out, died of strokes, of cancer, willed their own deaths, conceivably. But he, despite all bludneres, fucky-knuckles that he was, must be cunning, tough. He survived. And for what?
(105) She was in the time of her life when the later action of heredity begins, the blemishes of ancestors appear—a spot, or the deepingn of wrinkles, at first increasing a woman’s beauty. Death, the artist, very slow, putting in his first touches.
(108) Have to go back. Not able to stand kindness at this time. Feelings, heart, everything in strange condition.
(110) She owed her survival to intelligence. It was part of her sickness to be shrewd.
(111) “Herzog’s heart had pounded with dangerous thick beats at these words.”
(112) Was Madeleine really such a great beauty, or did the loss of her make him exaggerate—did it make his suffering more notable? Did it console him that a beautiful woman had dumped him?
(127) Very tired of the modern form of historicism which sees in this civilization the defeat of the best hopes of Western religion and thought, what Heidegger calls the second Fall of Man into the quotidian or ordinary. No philosopher knows what the ordinary is, has not fallen into it deeply enough. The question of ordinary human experience is the principal question of these modern centuries, as Montaigne and Pascal, otherwise in disagreement, both clearly saw. —The strength of a man’s virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life.

One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind hat my own actions had historic importance, and this (fantasy?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment.

(118) Adelina’s eyes were concentrated on the lighting of her cigarette. She took a match from Pontritter’s hand. Herzog remembered thinking how purely external that match game was, under the studio skylight. Artificial heat or none at all.
(121) At seven int he morning, seeming to anticipate the alarm clock by a split second, she stiffened, and when it rang she was already exclaiming with suffocated anger, “Damn!” and striding to the bathroom.
His open curiosity, the fact that he familiarly shared the bathroom with her, his nakedness under the trench coat, his pallid morning face in this setting of disgraced Victorian luxury—it all vexed her. She did not look at him while making her preparations…. Whatever she did, it was with unhesitating speed and efficiency, headlong, but with the confidence of an expert. Engravers, pastry cooks, acrobats on the trapeze worked in this manner. He thought she was too reckless at it—going too fast, about to have a spill, but that never happened.
(124) The fish were arrested, lifelike, int he white, frothing, ground ice. The street was overcast, warm and gray, intimate, unclean, flavored by the polluted river, the sexually stirring brackish tidal odor.
(127) “Maybe I have become a fanatic about conventional things,” said Madeleine, “But I won’t have it any other way.”
(128) Moses watched hera s though he were submerged, through the vitreous distortion of deep water.
(132) A year of work saved the house from collapse.
(133) Quos vult perdered dementat. (Full quote).
(135) “You can carry your Hegel to the city. You haven’t cracked a book in months anyway. The whole thing is a neurotic mess. These bushels of notes. It’s grotesque how disorganized you are. You’re no better than any other kind of addict—sick with abstractions. Curse Hegel, anyway, and this crappy old house.
Ex ipsius ingenio
Herzog, mulling over these ideas as he all alone painted his walls in Ludeyvlle, building Versailles as well as Jerusalem in the green hot Berkshire summers.
(143) It was a furnished apartment int eh style of the twenties—spitefully correct.
(146) “Most people are unpoetical, and you consider this a betrayal.” “Well, childhood friend, you have learned to accept a mixed condition of life. But I have had visions of judgment. I see mainly the obstinacy of cripples. WE do not love ourselves, but persist in stubbornnness. Each man is stubbornly, stubbornly himself. Above all himself, to the ned of time. Each of these creatures has some secrete quality, and for this quality he is prepared to do anything. He will turn the universe upside down but he will not deliver his quality to anyone else. Sonner let the world turn to drifting power. This is what my poems are about.”
(164) That was Ramona—no mere sensualist, but a theoretician, almost a priestess, in her Spanish costumes adapted to American needs, and her flowers, her really beautiful teeth, her red cheeks, and her thick, kinky, exciting black hair.
(165) For when will we civilized beings become eally serious? said Kierkegarrd. Only when we have known hell through and through. Without this, hedonism and frivolity will diffuse hell through all our days.
(168) Herzog’s mouth formed a soft but twisted smile as he considered whether he really had inwardly decided years ago to set up a deal—a psychic offer—meekness in exchange for preferential treatment. Such a bargain was feminine, or, extended to trees, animals, childloike. None of these self-judgments had any terror for him; no percentage now of quarreling with what one was.
(187) Why? Why did she always have to be just under the wire? Perhaps to show that she had an independent and active life; she did not sit waiting.
(188) Moses looked at her gently, suspicously as well, perhaps, lying back elegantly in the broken reclining chair. (Why?)
(192) The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust.
Innumerable millions of passengers had polished the wood of the turnstile with their hips. From this arose a feeling of communion—brotherhood in one of its cheapest forms. This was serious, thought Herzog as he passed through. The more individuals are destroyed (by processes such as I know) the worse their yearning for collectivity. Worse, because they return to the mass agitated, made fervent by their failure. Not as brethren, but as degenerates. Experiencing a raging consumption of potato love. Thus occurs a second distortion of the divine image, already so blurred, wavering, struggling. The real question! He stood looking down at the tracks. The most real question!
(193) The challenge was irresistible. Not the money, really, but the problem of getting in, and the companion problem of escape.
(194) Motive: The power and completeness of all human systems must be continually tested, outwitted, at the risk of freedom, of life.”
(195) To have a human life, and also an inhuman life. In fact, to have everything, to combine all elements with immense ingenuity and greed. To bite, to swallow. At the same time to pity your food. To have sentiment. At the same time to behave brutally. It has been suggested (and why not!) that reluctance to cause pain is actually an extreme form, a delicious form of sensuality, and that we increase the luxuries of pain by the injection of a moral pathos.
A museum ford from prelibidinous times.
(198) Broad disks of iridescent brightness swam under his lids. He wrote to Spinoza
(199) But better the void than the torment and boredom of an incorrigible character, doing always the same stunts, repeating the same disgraces.
(201) This Herzog, this man of many blessings, for some reason had endured a frigid, middlebrow, castrating female in his bed, given her his name and made her the instrument of creation, and Madeleine had treated him with contempt and cruelty as if to punish him for lowering and cheapening himself, for lying himself into love with her and betraying the promise of his soul.”
(203) “She says you brighten up the house.”
(207) And the poet said that indignation was a kind of joy, but was he right? There is a time to speak and a time to shut up. The only truly interesting side of the matter was the intimate side of the injury, the fact that it was so pentrating, custom-made exactly to your measure. It’s fascinating that hatred should be so personal as to be almost loving. Th knife and the wound aching for each other.Much of course depends upon the vulnerability of the intended. Some cry out, and some swallow the thrust in silence. About the latter you could write the inner history of mankind.”
She lowered her eyes. They moved and then came to rest beneath the lids. By candlelight, he observed this momentary disquiet of her face.
(208) “You make her sound adorable,” said Ramona.
(211) “Madeleine wasn’t just a wife, but an eduation. A good, steady, hopeful, rational, diligent, dignified, childish person like Herzog who thinks human life is a subject, like any other subject, has to be taught like a lesson.
(217) “But I think it’s that while in New York I am the man inside, in Chicago the man in the street is me.”
(218) Beyond, hot New York; an illuminated night which did not need the power of the moon. The Oriental rug and its flowing designs held out the hope that great perplexities might be resolved.”
“He was smilng, nodding a little as he listened to her. Much of what she said was perfectly right. She was a clever woman and, even better, a dear woman. She had a good ehart. And she had on black lace underpants. He knew she did.”
(219) “Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful super machinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you enjoyed delicious old-fashioned values? You—you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.”
(217)The music played. Surrounded by summer flowers and articles of beauty, even luxury, under the soft green lamp, Ramona spoke to him earnestly — he looked affectionately at her warm face, its ripe color. Beyond, hot New York; an illuminated night which did not need the power of the moon.
(220) Why should his memories injure him now? Strong natures, said F. Nietzsche, could forget what they could not master.
(224) Within the great open trench of Lexington Avenue, the buses pouring poison but the flowers surviving, garnet roses, pale lilacs, the cleanliness of the white, the luxury of the red, and everything covered by the gold overcast of New York.
(226) He pushes love to the point of absurdity to discredit it forever.
(227) She wants me to believe the body is a spiritual fact, the instrument of the soul.
(235) “I looked all over Chicago for him. Finally, I sent him a telegram from the airport a I was leaving. I wanted to say that I’d kill him on sight. But Western Union doesn’t accept such messages. So I wired five words — Dirt Enters At The Heart. The first letters spell death.”
(237) “He unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall behind him to the bathroom floor. Then he ran the water in the sink. The crude oval of the basin was smooth and beautiful in the gray light. He touched the almost homogeneous whiteness with his fingertips and breathed in the water odors and the subtle stink rising from the throat of the waste pipe. Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.”
(237) He was shivering with the extreme violence of thought and feeling.
(238) In fact, he remembered, for a few weeks in Ludeyville he required Madeleine to make love on the bathroom floor. She complied, but he could see when she lay down on the old tiles that she was in a rage. Much good could come of that. This is how the all-powerful human intellect employs itself when it has no real occupation.”
(244) Oratorial lechery, momentarily amusing
(248) A heavy and simple spirit, Herzog saw; a mesomorph, int eh catchword; the immortal soul encased in this somatic vault.
(252) Each of the windows had colored borders—yellow, amber, read—and flaws and whorls in the cod planes. At the curbs were the thick brown poles of that time, many-barred at the top, with green glass insulators, and brown sparrows clustered not he crossbars that held up the iced, bowed wires.”
(253) That was a frightful January, streets coated with steely ice. The moon lay on the glazed snow of the back yards where clumsy lumber porches threw their shadows.
(261) And what did he feel? Why he felt himself—his own trembling hands, and eyes that stung. And hat was there in modern, post… post-christian America to pray for? Justice—justice and mercy? And pray away the monstrousness of life, the wicked dream it was? He opened his mouth to relieve the pressure he felt. He was wrung, and wrung again, and wrung again, again.
The child screamed, clung, but with both arms the girl hurled it against the wall. On her legs was ruddy hair. And he lover, too, with long jaws and zooty sideburns, watching not he bed. Lying down to copulate, and standing up to kill. Some kill, then cry. Others, not even that.
(267) He guided her to a chair, holding her arm, and sat on the plastic-covered sofa. Under the tapestry. Pierrot. Clair de Lune. Venetian moonlight. All that phooey banality that oppressed him in his student days.
(270) Then Father Herzog said, ‘I have to sit down, Moshe. The sun is too hot for me.”
(271) (his monstrous egoism making its peculiar demands)
(275) He left by the back door; it made departure simpler. Honeysuckle grew along the rainspout, a in his father’s time, and fragrant in the evening—almost too rich. Could any heart become quite petrified?
(281) Everything horrible, everything sublime, and things not imagined yet.
(282) And among these spacious, comfortable, dowdy apartments where liberal, benevolent people lived (this was the university neighborhood) Herzog did in fact feel at home.”
(287) This, too, was perfectly just. Silent, he stared hard at her. The early and native tendency of his mind, lately acting without inhibitions, found significance in small bloodless marks on her face. As if death had tried her with his teeth and found her still unripe.
(296) Still, what can thoughtful people and humanists do but struggle toward suitable words?
(301) Sentiment and brutality—never one without the other, like fossils and oil.
(310) No, weakness, or sikness, with which he had copped a plea all his life (alternating with arrogance), his method of preserving equilibrium—the Herzog gyroscope—had no further utility.
(312) This was the post-quixotic, post-Copernican U.S.A., where a mind freely poised in space might discover relationships utterly unsuspected by a seventeenth-century man sealed in his smaller universe.”
(313) At her age he had seen everything vividly. And everything was beautiful or frightful. He was spattered forever with things that bled or stank. He wondered if she must remember just as keenly. As he remembered chicken slaughtering, as he remembered those fiery squawks when the hens were dragged from the lath coops, the shit and sawdust and heat and fowl musk, and the birds tossed when their throats were cut to bleed to death head down in tin racks, their claws going, going, working, working on the metal sheild. [sexual assault].
(314) The dogs in the back yards jumped against the fences, they barked and snarled, choking on their saliva—the shrieking dogs, while Moses was held at the throat by the crook of the man’s arm.”
(314) The tender-minded must harden themselves. Is his world nothing but a barren lump of coke?
(315) “History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think. We have experimented with every human capacity to see what is strong and admirable and have shown that none is. There is only practicality. If the old God exists he must be a murderer. But the one true God is death. This is how it is—without cowardly illusions.”
(326) But there was also the violence of her hatred, and that hatred had a fringe of insanity.
(338) He made his inventory with a sort of really curiosity about his onetime plan for solitary self-sufficiency—the washer, dryer, the hot-water unit, pure white and gleaming forms in which he had put his dead father’s dollars, ugly green, laboriously amde, tediously counted, divided in agony among the heirs.
The soul requires intensity. At the same time virtue bores mankind. Read Confucius again. With vast populations, the world must prepare to turn Chinese.
(340) A strange odor in the toilet bowl attracted his notice next, and raising the wooden lid he found the small beaked skulls and other remains of birds who had nested there after the water was drained, and then been entombed by the falling lid. He looked grimly in, his eheart aching somewhat at this accident.
(343) Fairly inhuman, and filled with vile paranoid hypotheses such as that crowds are fundamentally cannibalistic, that people standing secretly terrify the sitting, that smiling teeth are the weapons of hunger, that the tyrant is mad for the sight of (possibly edible?) corpses about hiim. It seems quite true that the making of corspes has been the most dramatic achievement of modern dictators and their followers.”
(345) I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis aethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I’ve had all the monstrosity I want.
(352) I recognize you last spring in the Primitive Art Museum on 54th Street.
(353) Moses, ple with this nheartfelt nonsesne, stared at the ground with brown eyes, standing round-shouldered, the notebook held behind him as he thought it over.
(355) But I am still on the same side of eternity as ever. It’s just as well, for I have certain things still to do. And without noise, I hope.
(361) By God Will, I’m about to cry! How did that happen? I won’t do it. It’s only love. Or something that bear s down like love. It probably is love. I’m in no shape to buck it. I don’t want you to think anything wrong.”
(370) I Anyway, can I pretend I have much choice? I look at myself and see chest, highs, feet—ahead. This strange organization, I know it will die. And inside—something, something, happiness… ‘Thou moves me.’ That leaves no choice. Something produces intensity, a holy feeling, as oranges produce oranges, as grass green, as birds heaet. Some hearts put out more love and some less of it presumably. Does it signify anything?
(370) A nail could be used, if it came down to that.
(371) He was being thoughtful, being lovable. How would it be interpreted? (He smiled slightly.) Still, he need only know his own mind, and the flowers couldn’t be used; no, they couldn’t be turned against him. So he didd not throw them away. He turned his dark face toward the house again. He went around and entered from the front, wondering what further evidence of his sanity, besides refusing to go to the hospital, he could show. Perhaps he’d stop writing letters. Yes, that was what was coming, inf act. The knowledge that he was done with these letters. Whatever had come over him during these last months, the spell, really seemed to be passing, really going. He set down his hat, with the roses and day lilies, on the half-painted piano, and went into his study, carrying the wine bottles in one hand like a pair of Indian clubs. Walking over notes and papers, he lay down on his Recamier couch. As he stretched out, eh took a long breath, and then he lay, listening to the steady scratching of Mrs. Tuttle’s brooms. He wanted to tell her to sprinkle the floor. She was raising o much dust. In a few minutes he would call down to her, ‘Damp it down, Mrs. Tuttle. There’s water in the sink.’ But not just yet. At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word.