Nobel Prize-Winning Negative Self-Talk

Seize the Day (1956) by Saul Bellow

“Ass! Idiot! Wild boar! Dumb mule! Slave! Lousy, wallowing hippopotamus! Wilhelm called himself as his bending legs carried him from the dining room. His pride! His inflamed feelings! His begging and feebleness! And trading insults with his old father—and spreading confusion over everything. Oh, how poor, contemptible, and ridiculous he was!” (p. 52)

I recently returned from Montreal after viewing last Monday’s total solar eclipse, so I figured it would be appropriate to review a book by one of the city’s native sons. Montreal was fantastic: so cool, vibrant, walkable, and steeped in so much Jewish culture! For all of Saturday we ate nothing but Jewish food: bagels at St. Viateur’s in the morning, beef bologna sandwiches from Wilensky’s for lunch, and smoked meat sandwiches and poutine from Schwartz’s for dinner. We walked by Leonard Cohen’s last house, my all-time favorite musician and an artist who fully claimed Montreal as home. 

Total solar eclipse in Magog, Quebec

Saul Bellow, on the other hand, seemed shy about his Quebecois roots. He was born in Lachine, QC (now a part of Montreal) in 1915 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. The family moved to Chicago when he was 8. He graduated from Northwestern and spent decades as a professor on the storied Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Many of his books are set in Chicago and he devotes many rapturous pages to describing the unique characteristics of the city. He never wrote a novel set in Montreal, though some of his characters have roots in Quebec. 

Despite having won the Nobel Prize for Literature and enjoying a long career of best-sellers throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, Saul Bellow is one of those writers that seems to have been forgotten, at least by my generation. Many of even my most well-read friends have never bothered with him. I never read or even heard of him until college, when I read Herzog for a class (cross-listed with Social Thought). Philip Roth has, for some reason, endured in the popular imagination in a way that Bellow has not. This is a shame; I’m still working my way through both corpuses, but so far I find the quality and precision of Bellow’s language to be much finer than Roth’s serviceable prose.

I’ve read a small handful of Bellow’s books and I tend to favor the ones that feature Chicago prominently: Herzog, Ravelstein, and Humboldt’s Gift (which I’m currently reading) are front-runners for me. I was born and raised in Evanston, just north of Chicago, and attended the University of Chicago as a Classics major, which has a fair degree of overlap with the Committee on Social Thought, so I’m predisposed to find the glimpses of Bellow’s Hyde Park thrilling. Allan Bloom, Bellow’s longtime friend and the inspiration for Abe Ravelstein, and Leo Strauss, an elder colleague who similarly haunts his work, were legendary ghosts in my Classics curricula. 

But beyond my affinity for anything Chicago, I see a rough pattern to Bellow’s bibliography. His Chicago books are full of light, joyous eloquence, and wry humor. His New York books are dark and airless, their humor bitter and scathing. At least, that’s what I’ve found in Mr. Sammler’s Planet (which deserves a post of its own) and now in Seize the Day. 

I read Seize the Day, appropriately, in a single day. It is slight, at 114 pages, but it is feverish and heavy. The action of the novel takes place over the course of fewer than 12 hours, yet it manages to trace the failures of a lifetime of one Tommy Wilhelm Adler. Wilhelm is a sad bastard, and he did it all to himself. He loathes himself, teetering on the verge of a terrible self-awareness, yet never quite reaching a point from which he is capable of improving himself or his circumstances. Wilhelm is unlikable— he is a slob, he is an adulterer, he is a swindled fool. He is incapable of communicating with his elderly father like an adult. 

Yet, at the same time, Bellow renders Wilhelm’s seemingly endless faults in such exquisite, unflinching detail that one is incapable of dismissing him as a mere buffoon. Wilhelm’s ruminations, his disgusting habits, his self-admonitions, are written with unsparing lyricism, bringing a kind of beauty to the grotesque inner workings of a contemptible man. One is forced to confront the essential humanity of the hippopotamus that Wilhelm imagines himself to be. Yes, the searching spotlight of Bellow’s descriptions is harsh, but one detects almost a tenderness behind it, rather than the expected cruelty. 

Wilhelm ruminates at length on his own faults and past mistakes, particularly his choice to drop out of college in the ‘30s to pursue an acting career that went nowhere:

 “I didn’t seem even to realize that there was a depression. How could I have been such a jerk as not to prepare for anything and just go on luck and inspiration? With round gray eyes expanded and his large shapely lips closed in severity toward himself he forced open all that had been hidden. Dad I couldn’t affect one way or another. Mama was the one who tried to stop me, and we carried on and yelled and pleaded. The more I lied that louder I raised my voice, and charged—like a hippopotamus. Poor Mother! How I disappointed her.” ( p. 12)

These reflections on the long ago disappointments punctuate the present action plot, in which Wilhelm gradually comes to realize that he has been swindled out of his last $700 by a shady psychologist turned day trader. His misery swells over the course of the day until it reaches an epiphanic crescendo in the final pages.

The result is a painful, oppressive read, yet one that I found difficult to put down. It is essentially an expanded character study, a technical marvel. This book was not fun to read and I wouldn’t recommend it as anyone’s first Bellow. But it is brilliant in its own way, a captivating train wreck, a beautifully crafted masterpiece of empathy and disgust.