"I've become aware of a conflict between the modern university education I received and those things that I really felt in my soul most deeply. I've trusted those more and more....I know how a modern man is supposed to think....I know that people live by something far deeper than head culture; they couldn't live if they didn't. They couldn't survive if they didn't. What a woman does for her children, what a man does for his family, what people most tenaciously cling to, these thing are not adequately explained by Oedipus complexes, libidos, class struggle, or existential individualism--whatever you like. Now, I know that psychanalysis has found a natural preserve for poets and artist called the unconscious. A writer is supposed to go there and dig around like a truffle hound. He comes back with a truffle, a delicacy for the cultural world....Well, I don't believe that. I don't believe that we go and dig in the unconscious and come back with new truffles from the libidinous unknown. That's not the way it really is" (58-59).
"I think that the university contains all that there is left in this country, or indeed in most countries, of a literary culture" (60).
"I do believe that I have something of importance to transmit....I think of myself as speaking to an inviolate part of other people, around which there is a sort of nearly sacred perimeter, a significant space...a place where the human being really has removed to, with all his most important spiritual possessions" (63).
"Herzog....I think of him as a man who, in the agony of suffering, finds himself to be his own most penetrating critic. And he reexamines his life...by reenacting all the roles he took seriously. And when he has gone through all the reenactments, he's back at the original point....the professor, the son, the brother, the lover, the father, the husband, the avenger, the intellectual--all of it. It's an attempt really to divest himself of the personae....and when he has dismissed these personae, there comes a pause..[grace]..it's better than his trying to invent everything for himself, or accepting human inventions, the collective errors, by which he's lived. He's decided to go through a process of jettisoning or lightening" (64).
Herzog (1961)
Moses E. Herzog
authority on the Romantic Movement in literature
Madeleine
Ramona
"His heart was greatly stirred by the open horizon; the deep colors; the faint iodine pungency of the Atlantic rising from weeds and mollusks; the white, fine, heavy sand; but principally by the green transparency as he looked down to the stony bottom webbed with golden lines. Never still. If his soul could cast a reflection so brilliant, and so intensely sweet, he 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 your mouth shut also" (116).
"...his recent misfortunes might be seen as a collective project, himself participating, to destroy his vanity and his pretensions to a personal life so that he might disintegrate and suffer and hate, like so many others, not on anything so distinguished as a cross, but down in the mire of post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the Void. Everybody was in the act. 'History' gave everyone a free ride" (117-18).
"Oh, what a confusion he had made--what a waste of intelligence and feeling!" (118).
"The story of my life--how I rose from humble origins to complete disaster" (188).
"Is this, by chance, the reality you have been looking for, Herzog, in your earnest Herzog way? Down in the ranks with other people--ordinary life? By yourself you can't determine which reality is real. Any philosopher can tell you it's based, like all rational judgement, on common proof. Only this particular way of doing it was perverse. But it was only human. You burn the house to roast the pig. It was the way humankind always roasted pigs" (350).
"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, in fact" (415).
"At this time he had no messages for anyone. Nothing. Not a single word" (416).
Trachtenberg, Stanley. Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.
Brans, Jo. "Common Needs, Common Preoccupations: An Interview with Saul Bellow." 57-72. Reprinted from Southwest Review, 62 (1977), 1-19.