`Deeper Things'

The oldest of my three sons is 18 and busy reading some of the same books I read when I was that age or a little younger – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky (at this moment, The Idiot), Bellow – and reading them with the same happy doggedness I did. Of Bellow he has read Henderson the Rain King, The Adventures of Augie March and The Victim, and I have been urging him to begin Seize the Day, the most Russian of his novels, as James Wood has said. With Bellow, as with Shakespeare and James, it’s impossible to choose a favorite. Generally, it’s the title I have most recently read, which for the moment means this 1956 novella.

There’s a moment early in Seize the Day I have always loved. Tommy Wilhelm, separated from his wife and children, obsessed with pleasing his father, soon to fall for a con man’s pitch, lives in a faded hotel on the Upper West Side. He is feckless and adrift, almost innocent:

“He folded over the Tribune with its heavy, black, crashing sensational print and read without recognizing any of the words, for his mind was still on his father’s vanity. The doctor had created his own praise. People were primed and did not know it. And what did he need praise for? In a hotel where everyone was busy and contacts were so brief and had such small weight, how could it satisfy him? He could be in people’s thought here and there for a moment; in and then out. He could never matter much to them. Wilhelm let out a long, hard breath and raised the brows of his round and somewhat circular eyes. He stared beyond the thick borders of the paper.

“`…love that well which thou must leave ere long.’

“Involuntary memory brought him this line. At first he thought it referred to his father, but then he understood that it was for himself, rather. He should love that well. `This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong.’”

Wilhelm, of course, is remembering Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”

The couplet Wilhelm remembers, in reverse order, suggests the ironic carpe diem theme of the title. The story’s next sentence tells us Wilhelm remembers Shakespeare because he is under the influence of Dr. Tamkin, one of Bellow’s power brokers who, in this case, intends to fleece Wilhelm in an investment scheme. Tamkin refers vaguely to poetry, the classics and his own, in a manner that charms Wilhelm. He recalls another wayward, unidentified scrap of poetry – “Sunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor…” -- from Milton’s "Lycidas." Bellow’s prose is often as intricate and allusive as Joyce’s, and Milton’s image shows up again in the final, great sentence of Seize the Day:

“He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need.”

Wilhelm realizes he has been taken, pursues Tamkin but ends up pushed into a chapel where the funeral of a stranger is underway. He explodes with grief – for the dead man, for his life, for humanity. Another mourner, unaware that Wilhelm has no idea of the identity of the corpse, says, admiringly, “Oh my, oh my! To be mourned like that.”

Such scenes, such thoughts, have been on my mind of late. Philip Roth’s Everyman, his latest, starts with the funeral of the title character and ends with his death. Much of Sabbath's Theater takes place – shockingly, hilariously, heart-breakingly – in cemeteries. Roth’s Patrimony chronicles his father’s illness and death, and there’s the title, from Yeats, of The Dying Animal (2001). Consider the final scene in Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow’s 1975 novel, also set in a cemetery, not to mention the title character in Ravelstein (2000), dying of AIDS.

The elegiac impulse, the recognition of death as life-defining, is strong in both writers, though Bellow’s interests were teleological – remember his interest in Rudolph Steiner in Humboldt’s Gift – and Roth remains a problematic nihilist with deep human feelings. My oldest son recently read Portnoy’s Complaint for the first time and last until he injured himself. I don’t know if he’s ready for the later, darker books, though on the basis of my review of Everyman he says he intends to read it.

"I guess I am a sucker for people who talk about the deeper things of life," says Tommy Wilhelm. Me, too, to a degree, and so is my son.