The Victim (1947)
by Saul Bellow
294 pages - The Vanguard Press
'In these cases, though, you get all kinds of rumors. Who knows? The truth is hard to get at. If your life depended on getting it, you'd probably hang. I don't have to tell you how it is. This one says this, and that one says that. Y says oats, and Z says hay, and chances are...it's buckwheat. Nobody can tell you except the fellow that harvested it. To the rest it's all theory.'(pg.87)
Asa Leventhal lived through some difficult times in his young adulthood, but now has reasonably established himself in a respectable job, married and living in New York City. While his wife is away at her mother's during the summer, Leventhal runs into Allbee, a man who he's only met on a few occasions, but who has noticeably come down in the world. Allbee blames Leventhal for ruining his life, and doing it maliciously. Allbee keeps on harassing Leventhal, and though Leventhal is annoyed by this, he is also afraid that there may be some truth to what is being said. Adding to Leventhal's stress during the summer is the illness of a child in his brother's family.
What this novel really does well is explore the inner chaos that can result when you are obsessed with what other people might be thinking of you, and the impossibility of getting a clear picture of what opinion people
really have of you. There are some very good sections, but others are quite dull, especially in the group conversation scenes, and Bellow regarded his first two novels (of which this is the second) as the 'apprenticeship' before his real work. Just as the first,
Dangling Man borrowed its structure from Dostoevsky's
Notes from Underground, many people see a parallel between this novel and two Dostoevsky stories,
The Eternal Husband and
The Double. Another possible symbolic level is a sort of transposition of the story of World War II, specifically the Holocaust, as Leventhal is Jewish while Allbee, who heaps blame for all his troubles on him, is a gentile; a possible interpretation that gains more validity in the last few pages of the novel with an attempted poisoning by gas.
'You couldn't find a place in your feelings for everything, or give at every touch like a swinging door, the same for everyone, with people going in and out as they pleased. On the other hand, if you shut yourself up, not wanting to be bothered, then you were like a bear in a winter hole, or like a mirror wrapped in a piece of flannel. And like such a mirror you were in less danger of being broken, but you didn't flash, either. But you had to flash. That was the peculiar thing. Everybody wanted to be what he was to the limit.' (pg.98)
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Dangling Man (1944)
by Saul Bellow
143 pages - Penguin Classics
This is the diary of Joseph during the Second World War - a diary he keeps while idling around Chicago waiting to be called up for the military. He quit his job almost a year ago as he was about to be drafted, but as he was born in Canada (as was Bellow himself), various procedural red tape has been holding that up, and so he just lives in a rooming house along with his employed wife. The diary charts his thoughts, rants, and a few encounters in which he often embarrasses himself or quickly becomes angry.
This is Bellow's first published novel, and it does end up being a bit scattered and uneven in quality. There are some really excellent passages, but other parts seem to meander for pages and pages without coming to any particular point. It's not quite Notes from Underground, but it is a good illustration of an isolated and alienated individual who is mostly cut off from outside society, and the frustration he experiences when he tries to solely rely on his own individual faculties.
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Seize the Day (1956)
by Saul Bellow
135 pages - Penguin Books
This novella follows a day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, general failure. He is 44 years old and living in a hotel in New York City that is mostly populated by elderly residents such as his father. Wilhelm dropped out of college to pursue a movie acting career in Hollywood for the slimmest of reasons, and then went into sales for children's furniture, a job he also quit. He is married with two children but separated from his family. During the course of the day he will feel the pressures on him increase as he needs money, but the last of it has been entrusted to an investment made by Dr. Tamkin, another resident of the hotel.
This is a great, involving little book. You very effectively sense the despair and helplessness of Wilhelm - he has nowhere to turn, no one that will give him support, or useful advice, while he is stuck inside a society who only values you if you can steadily generate an income. Wilhelm is both damnable and sympathetic - you see how he has made bad choices, and keeps on making bad choices, but he in many ways is no worse than others who have been far more 'successful' in life. I find Tamkin a very interesting character - he seems like a charlatan, though he dispenses some pearls of wisdom along with his tall tales, and I wonder if even the negative influence that he has on Wilhelm's life doesn't end up helping Wilhelm in the end. If I could pick out a single theme from this work, I think Bellow is saying that sorrow is a part of life that we need to embrace, and when we try and run away from it it is only to our own detriment.
But the mistake couldn't be undone now, so why must his father continually remind him how he had sinned? It was too late. He would have to go back to the pathetic day when the sin was committed. And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father's. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then general forgiveness. Didn't he suffer from his mistakes far more than his father could?
"Oh, God." Wilhelm prayed. "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." (pg.27)
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