Seize The Day: A Novel

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957)

’Bringing people into the Here-and-Now. The real universe. That’s the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real – the here-and-now. Seize the day.’

Another example of the novelist writing over his character occurs (briefly) in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day. Tommy Wilhelm, the out-of-work salesman down on his luck, neither much of an aesthete nor an intellectual, is anxiously watching the board at a Manhattan commodity exchange. Next to him, an old hand named Mr. Rappaport is smoking a cigar. "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."

It is a gorgeous, musical phrase, and characteristic of both Bellow and modern fictional narrative. The fiction slows down to draw our attention to a potentially neglected surface or texture—an example of a "descriptive pause," familiar to us when a novel halts its action and the author says, in effect, "Now I am going to tell you about the town of N., which was nestled in the Carpathian foothills," or "Jerome's house was a large dark castle, set in fifty thousand acres of rich grazing land." But at the same time it is a detail apparently seen not by the author—or not only by the author—but by a character. And this is what Bellow wobbles on; he admits an anxiety endemic to modern narrative, and which modern narrative tends to elide. The ash is noticed, and then Bellow comments: "It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well."

Seize the pay is written in a very close third-person narration, a free indirect style that sees most of the action from Tommy's viewpoint. Bellow seems here to imply that Tommy notices the ash, because it was beautiful, and that Tommy, also ignored by the old man, is also in some way beautiful. But the fact that Bellow tells us this is surely a concession to our implied objection: How and why would Tommy notice this ash, and notice it so well, in
these fine words? To which Bellow replies, anxiously, in effect: "Well, you might have thought Tommy incapable of such finery, but he really did notice this fact of beauty; and that is because he is somewhat beautiful himself."

Then Wilhelm had said, "Yes, that was the beginning of the end, wasn't it, Father?"

Wilhelm often astonished Dr. Adler. Beginning of the end

Then Wilhelm had said, "Yes, that was the beginning of the end, wasn't it, Father?"

Wilhelm often astonished Dr. Adler. Beginning of the end? What could he mean - what was he fishing for? Whose end? The end of family life? The old man was puzzled but he would not give Wilhelm an opening to introduce his complaints. He had learned that it was better not to take up Wilhelm's strange challenges. So he merely agreed pleasantly, for he was a master of social behavior, and said, "It was an awful misfortune for us all."

He thought, What business has he to complain to me of his mother's death?

...As Wilhelm approached, Rubin did not see him; he was looking out dreamily at the Hotel Ansonia, which was visible from his corner, several blocks away. The Ansonia, the neighborhood's great landmark, was built by Stanford White. It looks like a baroque palace from Prague or Munich enlarged a hundred times, with towers, domes, huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork and festoons. Black television antennae are densely planted on its round summits. Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or like sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight. This morning it looked like the image of itself reflected in deep water, white and cumulous above, with cavernous distortions underneath. Together, the two men gazed at it.

In 1953, Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March struck out on a course so independent from the tide of American fiction that no literary lessons could flow from it: it left no wake, and cut a channel so entirely idiosyncratic as to be uncopyable. Much earlier, Ernest Hemingway had engineered another radical divergence in the prose of the novel: having inherited the stylistic burden of the nineteenth century, with its elaborate "painting" of interiors and landscapes, its obligatory omniscience, and its essaylike moralizing, he mopped up the excess moisture ("clothing like curds," he called it) and lopped subordinate clauses and chopped dialogue and left little of the old forest of letters standing. An army of succinctness-seekers followed in a movement that accommodated two or three generations of imitators, until finally the distinctive Hemingway dryness flaked off into lifeless dessication. The Hemingway sentence became a kind of ancestral portrait on the wall, and died of too many descendants. Augie March, by contrast (though it had its own ancestors, not so much in style as in character), was in itself too fecund to produce epigones or copyists or offspring - as if every source and resource of procreation were already contained in, or used up by, its own internal energies.