`The Inexhaustable Current'

Memory frays but Seize the Day (1956) I’m certain was the first Saul Bellow title I bought and read – a used Viking Compass paperback from Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland, where years later I worked as a clerk. I loved the novel for its conmen, New York grit and Dickensian verve, and it still spells city life for me:

“On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence – I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally. The sidewalks were wider than any causeway; the street itself was immense, and it quaked and gleamed…”

This might have been Whitman on a Manhattan omnibus, a paragraph stricken from Specimen Days. In How Fiction Works, James Wood devotes almost three pages to a four-sentence, throwaway passage from Seize the Day:

“A long perfect ash formed on the end of the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency. It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well.”

Wood rightly calls these 44 words “gorgeous, musical,” and in the syntax I hear a distant echo of Bellow’s dear friend John Berryman. That was enough to prompt my seventh or 12th reading of Seize the Day. It also sent me back to New York Proclaimed, the city profile V.S. Pritchett published in 1965, accompanied by Evelyn Hofer’s vivid photographs and packaged like the old Life magazine. Text and pictures capture a vanished city, A.J. Liebling’s city, close in time to Seize the Day and the Manhattan scenes in Herzog (1964). Here’s what I remembered reading:

“The real life of New York – and what rumors one hears of it: of the street of eonists [cross-dressers], of the street of cake-eating old Viennese who look like archduchesses, of the drug haunts, of strange dentists, familiar doctors, men playing the market, of Saul Bellow’s hero in Seize the Day. This novel catches something permanent in the modern city: the womb life that a man will live between his room in the apartment hotel and the restaurant below, between the restaurant and the newsstand in the foyer, between the newsstand and the ice-water jar, between the ice-water and the telephone call to a divorced wife, up and down, across and back, as if he were and automaton, and expression of something human in only a generalized way, a consumer, or item. Saul Bellow has caught the plain neuter quality of personal relationships and the bizarre fantasy life going on in the faceless human heads. Yes, seizing the day is the spur of those millions who live on Manhattan’s shelves.”