Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow
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What is Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day and why does James Wood introduce it here?
Hello, and welcome to Who's Afraid of Realism, a close readings podcast from the London Review of Books. I'm James Wood, and today we're discussing a wonderful brief novel by the American writer Saul Bellow. It's called Seize the Day, and it was published in 1956. In some ways, the novel has a canonical status in Bellow's work for those who know that work. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1976, for instance, this novel was cited as a prime reason for that prize. But perhaps in the popular sense of Bellow, if there is one left anymore, it's been supplanted by the big antique comic novels that we think of as typically Bellowvian. I'm thinking of The Adventures of Augie March from 1953, his novel Herzog from 1964, which amazingly enough was a bestseller in the United States.
in the days when literary novels, very briefly, a brief window when literary novels still could be bestsellers, and his wonderful novel about his old friend Delmore Schwartz, the poet, called Humboldt's Gift from 1975. Those are the books, I guess, along with a later book called The Dean's December that perhaps people would put on a shelf and say, you know, that's Bellow. Whereas this small 100-page book that the English writer V.S. Pritchett once called a small gray masterpiece sits slightly to one side of those big pioneering books. But it's a wonderful novel. I'm very fond of it. And something I'll get to in a second. It also works very nicely for our series about realism. It's like Mrs. Dalloway.
It's set on a single day. And the plot, such as there is, can be easily summarized. Tommy Wilhelm, a sloppy, out-of-work, divorced 44-year-old, former salesman for the Rojax Corporation, has made a mess of things, has made a mess of his life, and is trying, I would say, for the first 40, 50 pages of the book, essentially just to get a blessing from his father. His father is, in every important respect, the opposite of Tommy Wilhelm. Dr. Adler, and I'll come to the name change in a minute, Dr. Adler, Tommy's father, is a distinguished retired physician, continent, discreet, orderly, self-disciplined, and severe. Both of them live in an apartment hotel called the Gloriana, which is wonderfully evoked.
In fact, the whole Upper West Side of Manhattan, where this book is set, is wonderfully evoked. And on the day of this novel, Tommy is heading towards breakfast to talk to his father. He needs things from his father. First of all, he needs a kind of emotional support that his father can't give. He also will need, so we discover, some help with the rent, which Tommy can't pay. His And Tommy needs sorting out because he's also got mixed up with a charlatan, trickster, shyster figure called Dr. Tamkin. I'm using that word shyster with deliberation because I think the novel, as I'll explain later, is very much to do with questions and varieties, problems, varieties of Jewishness. So he's got mixed up with a sort of false prophet called Dr. Tamkin, who also lives in the Gloriana.
Tamkin is a psychologist and sort of amateur business speculator and has persuaded Tommy to lend him $1,000 in order to speculate on the commodities market, specifically in lard and rye. And as the day proceeds, so we will gather that things are not going well on the commodities market. Tommy's going to lose out. But that's essentially the shape of the novel. And it begins its first 20, 30 pages rather wonderfully. It's just Tommy hesitating to go into. He comes out of the Gloriana, goes and gets a newspaper from the cigar store and a Coca-Cola. And then hesitantly stands on Broadway about to go in to have breakfast with his father, but actually for about 20 pages thinking about his life going back to childhood and the mess he's made of things.
As I said a minute ago, it's a great book for purposes of our series, because although it's written in 1956, in some ways, if we go back to that term that I used at the very beginning of the series, the grammar of realism. In some ways, the grammar of realism really hasn't changed since 1856, since Flaubert.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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