May 19, 2009
Saul Bellow's Seize the Day is a great book. It is deeply atmospheric and the atmosphere is suffocating and claustrophobic. Bellow creates the feeling of oppressive enclosure by using cues of dress, weight, and weather, and through the elaboration of long cyclical conversations, crowded street scenes, and circular internal dialogue. We meet Tommy Wilhelm as he goes down to breakfast in the hotel where he lives. Within paragraphs we know that Wilhelm is stuck in a hole and he can't get out; as the novel unfolds we understand that the hole is his life, past, present, and future, a place he inhabits all at once, and a place dictated and circumscribed by his bad choices, his "mistakes".
As Tommy Wilhelm goes about his day we see him vividly. He is a big man enclosed in ill-fitting clothing, a handsome man past his sell-by date, an anxious man reliant on pills to calm, then stimulate himself. This day in his life is a big day for him, a day his investments will pay out or not. Wilhelm refers to the day again and again as his "day of reckoning", the day he must face up to his past mistakes, and rectify his future prospects: "Oh God....Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy."
Wilhelm sees his problems as money problems: he is not esteemed by his father because he is not making money; he is being choked by a wife's demand for money; he is not free to marry the woman he loves or be with his sons as he wants to be, for lack of money. For Wilhelm the world turns on a dime, literally, and if he has no dime, there is no turning of the world. Desperate, he turns to Tamkin for help. Tamkin is a professed doctor of psychology and expert on investments and many other things, but also, quite obviously, he is a con-man. Wilhelm both knows that he is a con artist and trusts that Tamkin is not conning just this one time, in their joint deal involving lard and rye. I found myself in the same position as Wilhelm: I knew Tamkin was a fraud, a big talker, and a liar, and yet I wanted him to come through for Wilhelm. He may be a charlatan but he could be also the one to offer Wilhelm at least the hope salvation through a good turn on the market.
But will money really help? An influx of cash will relieve certain immediate pressing concerns, like debts and rent owed. But Wilhelm's problem is more than money, it is the pressure of life itself, of feeling that he has lost the game of life and fallen by the wayside and he can see no way back onto the board. He looks for guidance but "[n]o one seemed satisfied, and Wilhelm was especially horrified by the cynicism of successful people. Cynicism was bread and meat to everyone. And irony too....Wilhelm feared it intensely." His father offers no advice, only blame, and his wife counsels him to go back to his old job (and come back to her, by extension); only Tamkin offers balm for Wilhelm's soul in the shape of constant story-telling, a poem, and deep conversations. Tamkin "spoke of things that mattered, and as very few people did this, he could take you by surprise, excite you, move you. Maybe he wished to do good...Who could tell?" Wilhelm tries to listen to Tamkin, to believe in him and to understand: "Secretly he prayed the doctor would give him some useful advice and transform his life."
Wilhelm is a man with many problems, all of which are common among us: lack of confidence, failure of resolve, naivete about the workings of the world, and a tendency to blame others or bad luck for his own badly calculated choices. But his primary problem is that he thinks there is one solution for the overall mess of his life: just one big score or one understandable homily from Tamkin, and he will be home free. What we gradually come to realize in this marvelously written book is that Wilhelm is not a loser obliviously seeking his way; he actually has many moments of deep insight but then the moment passes and he is muddled all over again. Instead of grasping that there is not one creed for living nor one act of deliverance nor one action taken (Seize the Day!) that can carry him confidently through life, Wilhelm persists in believing that there is one person or one event that will can save him.
In Wilhelm, Bellows is exposing the truth that we are doomed to struggle through life. We will have moments of clarity that we fight to hold onto, write down, share with someone else, but then the clouds will roll in, the fog will descend, and the light will fail. Once more we'll find ourselves uncertain of our place, our role, our destiny. There is not one day to seize, there is not one day of reckoning. There are many days that are like corners we must turn as we zigzag through life: we move not in straight lines but in zigs of certainty and order, then turn off into zags of muddle and morass. There are days when joy comes on so suddenly and there is a lightening of the spirit but poor Wilhelm distrusts what does not last for him; anything that fades away was a mistake he made. He refers to the sudden communion and love he feels for others to be a sensation as " random as a hard-on" and disparages it as unreal, and un-recoverable.
At the end of novel Wilhelm succumbs to a bout of crying at the funeral of a stranger: he sinks "deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart's ultimate need." What is this "ultimate need" that Bellow is referring to? Does the definition shift like the sands or is it the one stable and consistent factor in our life? I think it is simply the release, even if just for a moment, from the oppressive bindings of struggling and striving, from the oppression of needing and wanting and desiring. Throughout the book Wilhelm is fighting to get back in the game when what he needs is rest. In the defined and protected moments of his sobbing, he is freed from the race and he is resting from his life.
Bellow is an amazing writer, capturing in one breathtaking description the pull of the human crowd, "the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing around, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular essence -- I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want...." Yesterday I was walking the streets of New York and in seeing all those people around me hustling along in different states of emotion and age and health I felt suddenly and potently uplifted, energized, and comforted. I will always want to be close to a city: nature in the country could never sustain me the way seeing such alive humanity really, really does. And I felt all this before reading Bellow's description of the crowded sidewalks of New York, fifty years earlier! Bellow understood that we are all individuals in a crowd, a solitary body yet not alone, because we all struggle -- and most of us get by.
Bellow is a beautiful writer, describing the reflection that a glass of water makes on a table cloth as "an angel's mouth" or the sun's heat coming down on a city street as "the sunlight appeared like a broad tissue, its actual weight made him feel like a drunkard", or how Wilhelm feels when asked if he loves his father: "there was a great pull at the very center of his soul. When a fish strikes the line you feel the live force in your hand. A mysterious being beneath the water, driven by hunger, has taken the hook and rushes away and fights, writhing. Wilhelm never identified what struck within him. It did not reveal itself. It got away."
Bellow is a writer who reveals not himself but our selves: he holds up a mirror and makes us observe. Because of this, he is not an easy writer to read, he can make you feel uncomfortable, and even unhappy. He does not make the reading any easier by spelling out his message, or concluding with an uplifting homily, or tidily arranging a neat ending. But he is a great writer to read because we feel the truth and honesty of his books, we know he is right in his portrayal of our selves. He gives us our own story and we cannot deny that story. By reading Bellow, we know ourselves.
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