Herzog

"Actually when I began my work in the field of Yiddish literature, my doctoral dissertation was written on “The Schlemiel As Modern Hero,” and I devote a chapter to this Bellow novel. I define schlemiel in that study as “a loser as winner.” In other words, a person who is hapless, who is cuckolded very often, who is made fun of because he’s a weakling, but who is given the moral credibility — he has the moral authority. I begin with a joke from World War I: a Jew gets lost on the border between warring nations. Suddenly he is at the border and the searchlight shines on him and the guard says, “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” And the Jew says, “What? Are you crazy? Don’t you see this is a human being?” Nobody nowadays ever laughs at that, but it’s uproarious. For the Jew, it’s an absurdity. “You’re going to shoot me because I’m stepping over a boundary line?” On the other hand, you see the implications of this idiocy, the sense that in the real world it’s fatal. Herzog, I think, grows out of that tradition. What Bellow does — magically almost — is to make the schlemiel into a liberal humanist. Herzog is cuckolded. Here you have this great intellectual, this man who has written a tome on romanticism, Moses Herzog, a prominent professor and what happens? His best friend is making out with his wife and everybody knows about it. The only person who doesn’t know about it is he. That’s a classic comic situation, from Chaucer onwards everybody has always made the cuckold into a comic figure. But here again, Herzog is in control of the narrative. Everything in the book is seen from his perspective. He begins with the statement, “If I’m out of my mind, it’s alright with me.” He is accepting that limitation. It’s as if the whole book is there to show us that there are other forms of wisdom than that kind of philosophical or scholarly intelligence or the cynicism of realists who want you to double down on the facts. Herzog realizes that he’d be prepared to make the same mistakes again. Yes. It’s actually one of the most autobiographical works that Bellow wrote. Not only in the sense of being based on the facts of his life, but in that he really draws on his own childhood, on his own use of Yiddish. Bellow was one of the best Yiddish speakers I ever met in my life, and one of the reasons we became friends is because we could speak Yiddish together. His brothers, with whom he had spoken Yiddish, had died and he just loved speaking Yiddish. This was a great bond between us. So there’s that in the book, with which he advertises its Jewishness. But I think that what he is grappling with is — so you’re a good person, you’re a sweet person, you’re that innocent person in the joke that I quoted. And you’re living in a world where there is a lot of evil, and some of that evil happens to you. Then Herzog is also a witness to things — that terrible courtroom scene where a mother and her boyfriend have beaten a child to death against the wall. He sits there in the courtroom listening to this case and he’s devastated. He has to deal with that. So what do you think, the world is going to be a sweet place, because you, Moses Herzog, want it to be that? He realizes that his innocence is not typical and it’s not going to win him points. But, at the end, he comes back to that same sentence, “if I’m out of my mind, it’s alright with me,” meaning, there are worse things than losing your pride. He has a short introduction to a collection of Jewish short stories that he was once asked to edit and it includes one of the best descriptions of Jewish humour I’ve seen. He explains why he is quoting so many jokes and he says, “I call the attitudes of these stories characteristically Jewish, in them laughter and trembling are so curiously mingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two.” And he shows you what he means by that. That is very funny to me, because of course he is playing on “fear and trembling,” that the Jewish equivalent is “laughter and trembling.” Exactly, the Jewish Kierkegaard would have written Laughter and Trembling. Bellow realized that he himself had a religious sensibility. He plays around with it, but it’s there in book after book. Again, he knew that if he were to deal with this very seriously no one would pay attention or take it seriously. But if you deal with it in a semi-humorous way then you can show a person who is profoundly spiritual and believes himself to be living in a world which is, in some sense, governed by a moral authority."