Why Herzog Endures

As the Saul Bellow novel turns 50, Nicholas Mills explains its continuing power:

What made the appeal of Herzog so wide ranging were in no small measure Herzog’s insights into ’60s culture during the period between the assassination of John Kennedy and the nation’s full-scale involvement in the Vietnam War. Herzog’s descriptions are mini-critiques of his times.

In the New York City courthouse, while waiting to meet with his own lawyer, Herzog sees one poor defendant after another railroaded by the justice system. During a visit with his daughter, who now lives far away from him in Chicago, he experiences the price sexual freedom exacts on the children of divorce, and noting the growing impact of money on politics, he realizes with great sadness how intellectuals like himself are increasingly “lost in the arms of industrial chiefs and billionaire brass.”

The result is the kind of overview of the country missing in so many novels that revolve around a vulnerable, central figure absorbed by his own troubles. In this case the overview of the novel reflects Herzog’s desire to reach beyond himself. “He must live. Complete his assignment, whatever that was,” Herzog tells himself as he starts to get over the depression into which he has fallen.

Herzog belongs to a long line of American intellectual heroes who come to look down on the purely intellectual life. Like Ishmael in Moby Dick, who asserts that a whale ship was his Harvard and his Yale, and Thoreau in Walden, who finds his bean field endlessly fascinating, Herzog opts for a life built on contact with the everyday. He is not satisfied to end up as a recluse.