Over the years, I found that whenever writers and readers mentioned Saul Bellow, they became zealous quoters, sharing their spoils rapidly and eagerly. The bit in 'A Silver Dish' when the narrator fights with his father and they roll on the ground, and his father feels to the son like 'a stout fish'- someone would say. And someone else would return: or the bit in The Dean's December when he says of the young man, Mason, that you could see 'the pollen of adolescence on his nose'. And at this point I might chip in: how about the wooden-legged Valentine Gersbach in Herzog, 'bending and straightening gracefully, like a gondolier'? Or the rabbi in the same novel, his 'large soft nose violently pitted with black'? Or the tyrannical art critic in 'What Kind of Day Did You Have?', who 'wore his pants negligently'. Or Lake Michigan in Humboldt's Gift , seen at the end of a street, with its 'blue teeter' of water, and its 'limp silk fresh lilac drowning water.' Or the cigar-end in Seize The Day , 'the ash, the white ghost of the leaf, with all its veins and its fainter pungency'.

• Adam Bellow
• Saul Bellow Books

People disagreed about Bellow's final stature, but no one really disagreed with the quality of the prose. Most writers are called 'beautiful' at one time or another, as most flowers are called pretty, but there are never very many really great prose writers alive. Bellow was one, to my mind the greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century - and thus one of the greatest in American fiction. It was a prose for all seasons; it seemed to do more of what one wanted from prose than any other competitor. It was intensely lyrical and musical, its rhythms a pressing mingle of Yiddish, American, English, and Hebrew (after Lawrence, Bellow was the most biblical of modern writers in English); but it was also grounded in speech, and seemed incapable of preciousness (unlike, say, the lovely but often pampered lustres of an Updike); it was witty, metaphysical, sensuous, playful. Above all, Bellow saw the world anew. When he looked, say, at icicles hanging from a hospital roof, he saw them resembling the teeth of a large fish, and then saw the 'clear drops burning at their tips'. Burning! When he described a younger man helping an old man across a street, he noted the 'big but light elbow' of the old man. Big but light! There indeed was a writer attending to the world, attending to the body, missing nothing.

1. In Saul Bellow's novella, Seize the Day, Wilhelm is a character in the midst of great struggle. Going through a mid-life crisis, he finds problems converging from all sides. These difficulties.
2. Check out this Infographic to learn more about Saul Bellow's Seize the Day. Study visually with character maps, plot summaries, helpful context, and more. Study visually with character maps, plot summaries, helpful context, and more.
3. ©1956 1974 by Saul Bellow. Renewed 1984 by Saul Bellow (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Critic Reviews “It is the special distinction of Mr. Bellow as a novelist that he is able to give us, step by step, the world we really live each day - and in the same movement to show us that the real suffering of not understanding, the deprivation of light.

Seize the Day [Excerpt] Bellow, Saul. Because of copyright restrictions, this article is only available in print. Article as PDF (2 KB) Article as EPUB; Print this Article; Add to My Favorites. Articles in PubMed by Saul Bellow; Articles in Google Scholar by Saul Bellow; Other articles in this journal by Saul Bellow. Peter Hyland, Saul Bellow, New York, 1. Gerhard Bach (a cura di), The Critical Response to Saul Bellow, Westport, 1. Harriet Wasserman, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow, New York, 1. Gerhard Bach e Gloria Cronin (a cura di), Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction, East Lansing, 2. Sammler's Planet, Paperback by Bellow, Saul; Crouch, Stanley (INT), ISBN, ISBN-437834 Mr. Artur Sammler, a survivor of the Holocaust, haunted by memories of his literal escape from the grave, is living out his days in New York City.

Years ago, an old friend of mine murmured that she hadn't found much in Bellow. Was his writing really that good? I read to her a passage from Herzog, about a demolition crew:

At the corner, he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire fed by the wreckage .. Paint and varnish smoked like incense. The old flooring burned gratefully - the funeral of exhausted objects. Scaffolds walled with pink, white, green doors, quivered as the six-wheeled trucks carried off fallen brick. The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and the west, was surrounded by a dazzling broth of atmospheric gases.

It is such precise yet rich writing, and so surprising. How original to see not the noise and violence of a wrecking ball, but its calm stillness - the 'lazy' weight 'browsing' and 'entering' rooms, as the original homeowner might have done. The writing is metaphorical, but there is hardly a simile in it: most of the weight is being held by verbs, or by single adjectives. It is urban realism, but something more than realism (something mythical or almost religious). And that special music: to an English ear, the rhythms sound American, or at least non-English. They have an interrupted, stop-start quality about them. Just as a sentence seems to be settling down, it ups sticks and goes somewhere else, or just ends.

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Bellow was a great pleasure-giver; and a very serious pleasure-giver, too. I mean that he treated the novel in the highest terms, considered it a metaphysical vessel, a form for the examination of the self and its strivings. He once wrote that the greatest 19th-century novelists were all trying to establish a definition of human nature. His own seriousness had, I think, a Russian flavour (he was nearly born in St Petersburg, but his family emigrated to Canada just three years before his birth in 1915). Seize The Day is perhaps the most Russian novella ever written in America. Like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, whom he read and reread, he was intensely interested in questions of knowledge and belief. Without being ever a believer, he was uneasy with the mere rejection of the spiritual, preferring a tender agnosticism. What do we know of a spirit-world beyond our own? Is it simply the case that the self is bounded by its biological and physiognomic sheath, or might there also be available a religious or mystical definition of the self? (His mysticism perhaps resembled Nabokov's in this respect.)

And he was always concerned with the modern self, the American self. It is usual to give writers like DeLillo and Pynchon credit for what seems the essentially postmodern insight that we are colonised, mediated, and finally oppressed by modern forms of knowledge - by television, film, advertising, the newspapers - and that this mediation has the effect of making our own mental activity somewhat self-conscious. But Bellow believed that public life drives out private life, and that this pressure on the private was a unique contemporary invention. His modern heroes are clogged with belated thought - they arrive so late in history, when there is too much too know, too much to bear, and no one speaks the same language. Tommy Wilhelm in Seize The Day laments that just to ask for a glass of water in a place like New York, just to cry out something as simple as 'I am thirsty,' you have to go all the way back to Newton, and then refer to Freud, to Nietzsche, to Hitler, to Lenin etc. Only once you have done all that can you utter your simple request. Moses Herzog, the ambitious but unproductive academic, spends his time writing mad mental letters to Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Schrodinger, Eisenhower. Before such giants, he is like a child hanging his head before his stern parents; intellectually, coming so late in the game, we are like spoiled children who don't know how to spend our wealth. Vainly, foolishly, Herzog asks for guidance from his imaginary correspondents. (This novel also reminds us that there is often something entrepreneurial about fiction: we read Herzog and think to ourselves, what a wonderful idea to create a character who writes letters in his head! Why hadn't anyone thought of that before?)

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And Bellow was himself a modern, because this Russian-inflected American, of great high seriousness, could not help making fun of ideas, and especially of those who entertain them (commonly called intellectuals). Bellow taught for years at the University of Chicago, and was among the most intellectual of American writers, happy to throw around allusions to Hegel and Pascal, but who also took lifelong pleasure in burlesquing 'the professors'. His characters are often 'higher-thought clowns,' people who, absurdly, lust for total explanations, for help from the realm of ideas, but whose own lives are confused and cloudy, and whose relations to ideas are, to say the least, somewhat impure. Bellow's ability to do real thinking in novels like Seize The Day, Herzog, and Humboldt's Gift , while simultaneously mocking certain ideas by passing them through the minds of fallible comic heroes - his ability to be at once serious and riotously funny about the life of the mind - is one of his most appealing elements, and the foundation of his warm comic vision. It is also one of the definitions of his modernity. 'Oh so much mental thread being wound on the most trivial of spools,' laments the narrator of More Die of Heartbreak .

I knew Bellow only in the last decade of his life, when he was already declining. He was still formidable, and capable of lizard-quick wittiness, but the humour was perhaps less biting than it had been. He had been a very handsome man, compact and dark, with a fine nose and a full, brimming lower lip, and he was still a commanding presence. After Chicago, he taught at Boston University for many years, and seemed to relish transmitting his enthusiasm for Tolstoy and Chekhov and Lawrence and Joyce to young people. I co-taught his class with him for one term, and I insisted that I put Seize The Day on the syllabus so that the students get a sense of the stature of the man who was their professor. Bellow modestly absented himself for that particular class, so that the students could freely concentrate on the writing. Now he has absented himself for ever, but we have the writing for ever.

*Manhattan

Adam Bellow

*Manhattan. Borough of New York City in which most of the novella’s action takes place, particularly among the fashionable neighborhoods near Broadway in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. During a single day, Tommy Wilhelm remembers growing up in his family home on West End Avenue, visits the brokerage house where his commodities are losing value, eats lunch with Dr. Tamkin in a nearby cafeteria, takes old Mr. Rappaport to a cigar store—all familiar locations on the Upper West Side in the 1950’s.

Gloriana

Gloriana. Aging Manhattan hotel. The major characters here, Tommy, his father (Dr. Adler), and his enigmatic advisor (Tamkin), all live at the Gloriana. Tommy spends time talking with Rubin at his newsstand in the lobby, eating breakfast with his father and then Tamkin in the dining room, and finally chasing Dr. Adler into the subterranean massage room where the father rejects his son. Housing mostly retired Jewish men and women, the Gloriana is contrasted with the Ansonia, a hotel built by turn-of-the-century architect Stanford White.

*Brooklyn

*Brooklyn. New York City borough that is home to Wilky’s family, his former wife and two sons. While it has been a site of much of Wilky’s suffering, it is also the location of Ebbets Field, where Wilky has taken his boys on happier days to watch the Dodgers play baseball.

Saul Bellow Books

*Los Angeles

*Los Angeles. Southern California home of Hollywood and the scene of Tommy’s first failure, in the 1930’s, when, lured by the idea of easy money, he goes to the West Coast hoping for a career as an actor, and there changes his name from Wilhelm Adler to Tommy Wilhelm.

Funeral parlor

Funeral parlor. Scene of Tommy’s final epiphany. At the end of the novel, searching for the elusive Tamkin, Tommy is pushed by a crowd into a funeral parlor, observes the corpse, and sobs. In Saul Bellow’s symbolic prose, Tommy achieves some kind of catharsis.