‘Herzog’: Saul Bellow’s heart laid bare
Though Saul Bellow never discusses Charles Baudelaire in his works, the bitter aphorisms and furious reflections in Baudelaire’s prose poems, My Heart Laid Bare (mid-1860s), had a powerful impact on Bellow’s novel Herzog (1976). Both writers portray the same pattern of love, betrayal, hate and desire, and transform their painful memories into art. Both the poet’s exotic mistress Jeanne Duval and the novelist’s ex-wife, portrayed as Madeleine in Herzog, made the writers suffer, suffering inspired their art and their art portrayed the malicious muses who made them suffer. Bellow constantly echoes Baudelaire, his semblable et frère, in his portrait of the miserable Herzog. Baudelaire’s life and work provide the most perceptive insights into Herzog’s tragicomic character.
Baudelaire compared love to a surgical operation. Between 1842 and 1860 he was ensnared by Duval, lived in a perpetual state of insecurity and distress, led a desperate and violent life, careened from one disaster to another, wallowed in degradation and squalor, and suffered abject poverty and a wretched death. His affair with Duval destroyed the self-destructive poet, who resembled the insulted and injured anti-heroes of his contemporary Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He lamented that she was a paragon of defects: stupid, cruel and treacherous, without kindness, sympathy or love. According to his letters and poems, she caused him anguish, shame and disgust as she slept with his friends. Yet even her infidelities excited his imagination.
Baudelaire confessed that this woman of the streets aroused a strange and disturbing mixture of emotions: “hatred and attraction, anger and pity, jealousy and the desire for tenderness,” which he never gets. He regretted, “I have wasted ten years of my life in this struggle. All my youthful illusions have fled. Nothing remains but a bitterness that perhaps I shall always feel.” In his autobiographical poems The Flowers of Evil (1857), he described her as both torturer and muse, cold and cruel, deceitful and treacherous. Baudelaire paid an excruciating price for his poetry, which moves from adoration and delight to repulsion and decay. Inspired by Duval, he idealised the sexually irresistible predator and experienced a kind of elegiac emotion, a masochistic pleasure drowned in pain and regret.
“Heart” is the crucial word for both Baudelaire and Bellow. When Baudelaire stabbed himself in a half-hearted suicide attempt, the melodramatic gesture “was meant to touch a heart other than his own”. In “An Apparition” he boils and eats his own heart. Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, whose title he borrowed from his idol Edgar Poe, suggests both a cardiac operation and an emotional confession. In his introduction to this work, Christopher Isherwood emphasises “Baudelaire’s nervous, unstable temperament
. . . his regrets for deeds done and undone, for health and vigour irretrievably wasted,” and concludes that with Duval he experienced “love, exasperation, pity, rebellion and hatred.” W. H. Auden describes Baudelaire, whose work foreshadows Moses Herzog’s mental and emotional struggle, as “a man fighting against time to eradicate a lifetime’s habits of thought and feeling, and set himself in order.”
Both authors express chaotic rather than carefully structured thoughts, and “work blindly, without aim, like a madman.” Baudelaire explained that his feelings were honest and alive, “I intend to begin My Heart Laid Bare, no matter where or how, and to continue from day to day, following the inspiration of the day and the circumstances, provided the inspiration is vital.” Throughout this brilliant confessional work he seems to be describing Herzog as well as himself. He takes “sensual pleasure in the company of those who behave extravagantly” and justifies his egoism, “Anyone, provided that he can be amusing, has the right to talk of himself.” He has a “taste for revenge, a natural pleasure in destruction, yet also cultivates a “thirst for voluptuous pleasures.” He reads Hegel, vents his spleen and reveals his jealousy. He paradoxically delights in feeling the “grandeur of a victim”.
Baudelaire was eviscerated by his experience with Duval, who inspired his fulminations: “Love is a crime which one cannot do without an accomplice. . . .The sorrows of the cuckold. The sorrow of despising those whom one loves. . . . To adore is to sacrifice and prostitute oneself. . . . He who clings to Pleasure is like a man rolling down a slope who, in trying to grasp hold of some bushes, tears them up and carries them with him in his fall. . . . Woman should inspire horror. She is in rut and she wants to be possessed. Woman is natural, that is to say abominable.” Baudelaire (again anticipating Herzog) fears insanity: “I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.”
Bellow’s extreme variations on My Heart Laid Bare, from heartthrob to heartache, is a recurrent leitmotif that appears more than 30 times in the novel. The thematic word reveals Herzog’s character, and makes it seem as if Baudelaire himself is speaking. Herzog’s heart does not measure his cardiac condition, but reflects his emotional states and intellectual attitudes, his feelings about family and friends, women and sorrows of the world. Bellow follows the command of the poet John Donne who asked God to “batter my heart”.
Photo portrait of Bellow from the dust jacket of Herzog (1964)
After Herzog had offended his father “his heart ached angrily because of me,” but “his brother Willie, after all, had the tender heart.” His children had to be “educated according to the Herzog standards of ‘heart.’ ” When a Navy psychiatrist who had once called him unusually immature surges into his consciousness, “I recognized with joy how I abhorred you. It sprang fresh from my heart after 22 years.” “His heart went out” to his depressed childhood friend Lucas Asphalter who mourns the death of his pet monkey. With conflicting feelings Herzog “watched his wife [Madeleine], on whom he doted, with a troubled, angry heart, another oddity among hearts.” When Mady is in bed with another man “Moses knew that in his heart his recumbent wife was cursing him.”
Moses’ heart is filled with pain. “He gripped his hat strongly and felt sick at heart. . . . Moses hated the humiliating comedy of heartache.” He remembered the old song “The Curse of an Aching Heart” and matched it with “an aching heart, a heart that aches with idealism.” Intensifying all that pain, he had “an injured heart, and raw gasoline poured on the nerves.” He wonders and fears, “Could any heart become quite petrified?” He offers, again like Baudelaire, to “open my heart to you if I could find the knob.” But it is dangerous to do so: “his heart had come open at this chapter of his life and he didn’t have the strength to shut it.” His exemplary, even sacrificial, suffering validates his existence and is worth the risk to preserve his identity: “The new attitude which makes life a trifle not worth anyone’s anguish threatens the heart of civilization.”
Like Baudelaire, Herzog suggests that suffering intensifies his sense of being alive.
After the simple relief of taking off his shoes, Herzog says, “A free foot on a summer night eases the heart.” But even his positive qualities are not beneficial: “the good in his heart didn’t count for much. . . . So much for the boyish purity of his heart. . . . A passionate heart is a bad credit risk.” He seems unknowingly to have “committed a sin of some kind against his own heart, while in pursuit of a grand synthesis” that continues to escape him. Using medical language, he lacerates himself by admitting his pathological condition, “my heart was infected with ambition, and the bacteria of vengeance.” He occasionally has high-minded impulses and tells friends, “I want to send you, and others, the most loving wish I have in my heart.” “So I wired five words—Dirt Enters at the Heart. The first letters spell death,” but that telegram brought no relief, “death was not the incomprehensible accepted by his heart.”
Moses seeks consolation in literature. Echoing W. H. Auden’s “Petition” (1930), “New styles of architecture, a change of heart,” he pleads with himself, “Oh, for a change of heart, a change of heart—a true change of heart!” He also seeks spiritual advice from the French philosophe Condorcet, but “hadn’t the heart to read further.” Herzog believes, “the man who has intellect, heart, let him consider” the serious questions of life, and he resolutely concludes by quoting two heartfelt passages from great French authors.
Auden in 1939
Blaise Pascal observed in his Pensées (1670), “La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” (“the heart has its reasons that reason doesn’t know—or understand”). Herzog also introduces a sympathetic phrase from the Confessions (1781) that suggests Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s own feelings represent those of all mankind: “Some hearts put out more love and some less of it. There are those who say this product of hearts is knowledge. ‘Je sens mon coeur et je connais les hommes.’ ” (“I feel my heart and I know men”).
Names in the novel are also revealing. In German Herzog means duke, which suggests Moses Herzog’s noble qualities, and also point to Herz (heart) and Schmerz (pain). Aged 47, he’s called Moses, Moshe, Mose, Moe and Moisé in different contexts. In Exodus 19:20 Moses saw God face to face and received the tables of the Law from Him. (God said, “Take two tablets and call me in the morning.”) A minor character named Herzog also appears in the “Cyclops” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), and Bellow adopts Joyce’s compound nouns, random associations and stream of consciousness.
Herzog opens with dramatic self-abasement: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) also begins with startling self-hatred: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I believe my liver is diseased. . . . My liver is bad, fine—let it get worse.” Herzog reveals that “I rose from humble origins to complete disaster. Aging, vain, terribly narcissistic, suffering without proper dignity,” he’s driven, like Baudelaire, by destructive powers beyond his control. But his savage self-deprecation is comical as well as caustic.
The novel mainly consists of the anti-hero’s rambling but fascinating thoughts printed in italics, of flashbacks to his parents, brothers and his childhood in Quebec and Chicago. His father, a Russian-born bootlegger, has been betrayed by his partner who sold out to a gang that beat him up and stole everything he had. Herzog the son is also betrayed by his ex-best friend Valentine Gersbach and by his beautiful ex-wife Madeleine, a sometime Catholic convert and Slavonic graduate student, coming up for her orals—in both senses. Like Baudelaire’s Jeanne Duval, Madeleine is a bitch and a terror, extravagant and extortionate, unfaithful and cruel. Herzog laments, “She lured me out of the learned world, got in herself, slammed the door, and is still in there, gossiping about me.” Herzog plans to shoot Valentine, an intellectual phony who’s replaced him as Mady’s lover and June’s father. But he can’t fire the pistol when he secretly watches Valentine tenderly bathing Herzog’s 5-year-old daughter June. Woody Allen’s character in Hollywood Ending (2002) imitates Herzog’s fanatical hatred of the man who seduced his wife and supplanted him. Like Herzog he constantly pulls the scab off his wound, obsessively veers off the current conversation and repeats the treacherous story at the most inappropriate times.
Baudelaire c. 1862
The novel, like Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, mainly takes place inside Herzog’s head. The plot moves slowly forward and has only a few dramatic events: meetings with his brother and old friends, his doctor and lawyer; his aborted trip to see a sympathetic woman on Martha’s Vineyard; the sensual encounters (and best parts of the book) with his exotic lovers, the Japanese Sono and the Argentine Ramona, who elaborately prepare their food for dinner and their bodies for sex.
His trip with June to the Chicago Museum of Science is disastrous. A vulnerable child, June had once been locked and left crying in Valentine’s car while he had sex with Madeleine in the bedroom. Now she’s in Herzog’s car when he’s involved in a highway crash that’s not his fault, and is frightened but uninjured. He’s arrested when the police find his father’s unlicensed pistol wrapped in old Russian rubles: the worthless symbols of Czarist Russia and of violent America.
The Baudelairean style of the novel is dazzling. Many learned allusions, mostly from the Bible and Shakespeare, illuminate Herzog’s character. Bellow keeps the reader alert by quoting words in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, and transcribes Yiddish speech into English. His wittiest lines proclaim that Mady, a florist, “had more faggots at her feet than Joan of Arc.” Valentine “walked on a wooden leg, gracefully bending and straightening like a gondolier.” He punctures the obscure pomposity of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger by asking: “what do you mean by the expression ‘the fall into the quotidian.’ When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened?”
Herzog is greatly enriched and enlivened not only by references to Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky and Auden, but also to Thomas Mann and Philip Roth. Like Gustav von Aschenbach in Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), Herzog dresses up in a new Madras jacket and straw hat while trying to change his image and look young. In Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Brenda Patimkin leaves her diaphragm at home in New York when her boyfriend Neil Krugman meets her for an intimate weekend in Cambridge, Mass. Brenda’s mother discovers the unmentionable object and ends their unfortunate liaison. In Herzog, Valentine takes Madeleine’s diaphragm when he carries her clothes from her country house to Boston. The unwitting Herzog finally discovers Mady’s infidelity when he notices that the essential diaphragm is missing from the bathroom cabinet.
Influenced by Baudelaire, Herzog has star-like brilliance, emotional intensity and intellectual depth.
Jeffrey Meyers published Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway with LSU Press in November. The Biographer’s Quest will appear in April 2026.
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