#13.1 HERZOG (9/10)

by Saul Bellow, part 1

I wanted to find a commanding way to introduce my boss to my blog so I decided to read his favourite novel by Saul Bellow. This is the first post, it’s about the creative and social perils of writing auto-fiction.

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“Ivan, what’s your favourite novel by Saul Bellow?”

Ah, Bellow. You’re going to read a Bellow are you?

(I musn’t over-do his Irishness but I’ve got to make it clear at the beginning)

It’s probably going to be HERZOG, but it could be HUMBOLDT’S GIFT.

He reaches for another cigarette and offers me one. Neither of us have eaten lunch yet and we’re both smartly dressed so this feels like a professional kind of rock’n’roll… I accept.

Well (spark pass) you probably read HERZOG to work out how clever you are, or well-read. And for those of us who are neither, you simply wait for those moments when Herzog’s rant’ll speak to you anyway—and it will, because there are some of the best wedding speeches on the human condition you’ll ever find in this novel… it’s not always transcendental, but fuck man it’s deeply human. Pathetic. Real. You’ll feel bad for the guy. He’s a lovable loser type like Charlie Brown or, the male lead in a Woody Allen film—in fact, you’ll probably fancy him (laughs) he’s an academic going through a mid-life crisis—of faith. Where his failed god is his intellect. And on top of that he’s beaten down by a broken marriage and some kids he doesn’t see desperately trying to take stock of his life by writing letters to people he’ll never meet… Lincoln, Nietzsche, Martin Luther King...¹ People love to question Herzog’s sanity. And they’d be right to. But at the heart of Herzog is just the kind of insanity inherent to all reality… the human juggle, made raw. The madness of multiple conflicting realities all occurring at the same time overlapping and shifting and shitting on each other which, you know I love...² but most of all it’s about the writing. Because the writing is ab-so-lut-e-ly ferocious. I mean this is a man delighting in his own gift…

What Ivan represented to me in that moment was someone who had simultaneously read a lot in private & also someone who could speak about it at length in public³—a combination which is rarer than it seems. Imaginably, this is why he’s a successful literary agent.

When he left for his next meeting I went straight to Foyles to buy HERZOG and started reading it on the bus home. As is the case with many dense literary novels, I needed to find a few “personal footholds” along the way… and finally, I did find something when Bellow started to make deliberate mistakes in the narrative voice which is what I’ll write about here. The pot-holes of writing about yourself, from yourself. I hope you learn something and enjoy.

Bellow’s writing in HERZOG is a wonderful combination of great things:⁴ neurotically detailed, highly intellectual—but still with heart. Like a more… humane David Foster Wallace? (It’s very annoying when people reference people who aren’t directly at hand. I won’t do that again)—in most simple terms, HERZOG made me think, made me write, and changed my life (writing-wise)—yes, reading HERZOG changed my life because it helped me think through these two technical problems which every writer faces:

1. Writing about my self leads to dodgy characterisation

2. Writing from my self leads to strained audience relations

This first point has something to do with the paradoxical way in which we as humans have to approach self knowledge; the creative process involved in presenting ourselves as (compelling and tangible) characters on the page. (Do we do self-knowledge for anything else?) And the second point, has something to do with social dynamics around the fire.

1. Writing about my self leads to dodgy characterisation

Usually an author makes the decision of which way to tell their story and then sticks to it, like a good boy/girl/they-them. And either it’s from the outside looking down (she/he/they) or, it’s from the inside looking out (I, I, I)—but not in HERZOG. Because in HERZOG it subtly fluctuates between the two and this is weird and cool. Bellow writes MOST of HERZOG in the first mode, i.e. from the outside looking down e.g Herzog does, Herzog thinks, Herzog is—UNTIL, PAGE 30. This is when we have the first “narrative glitch”. See here:

He noted the book on Herzog’s knee, for Herzog typically carried a book to read on the subject or in the bus. What was it that day, Simmel on religion? Teilhard de Chardin? Whitehead? It’s been years since I was really able to concentrate…

Did you catch that? I would circle it if I had a pen… the I. It’s like someone dropped their knickers for a sec after thirty long pages of he, he, he… I mean, who the fuck is the I there? You tell me. Is it the I of Herzog the character or is it the I of Bellow the author or is it the I of Saul Bellow’s fictional storyteller whose operating from the prismatic space in-between the two? There’s an “Anyway” shortly after to demonstrate that the narrative voice has indeed realised it made a mistake here (accidental slipping down, into _I_) because it’s seen to get flustered and look for a bridge of sensible bandwidth to bandage the unfortunate “I”: “Anyway.” Anyway. This is what I’m here for: “accidents” in self-presentation and what Saul Bellow’s trying to say by orchestrating it—oh it’s this, btw: “Moses Herzog” is necessary for Saul Bellow to pull “Saul Bellow” off.

When you design a fictional character through which to hold yourself up (or put yourself down,) paradoxically, you’re able to do it much better if you approach yourself as if you aren’t writing about yourself. (Don’t ask me about the mechanics of this in the brain, I don’t know…—but what I do know is that on the page at least, when you create a distancing device through which to present your self—and your story,—you’ll probably do it much better. In other words, create a damn alter ego already.

Self-help gurus and manifestation coaches could probably tell you this quite easily. There are similar identity-splitting exercises going on in Jungian shadow work for example. The logic goes something like: oh you wanna see yourself? You mean really really _see_ yourself? Well then you’ve got to pretend you’re on the outside looking in. Talk to, or _around_ yourself, —NOT _from_ yourself, obviously. Why not? Because YOU can’t be trusted, duh.

So just by swapping “I” to “She” then you will begin to gain the beginnings of a clarifying distance. For example, just to show you what I mean here, I will narrate myself right here right now using she:

She sits in an awkward place in the kitchen under the sky light up against the microwave in pink moth-eaten coffee-stained cashmere—actually, to be truthful, that was a few minutes ago and now she’s moved to an even awkwarder place next to the dirty fishbowl because her laptop is going to die and this is where the plug-socket is but she lied at first because she’d prefer it if you associated her with the light… she has a frothy cough two weeks on…

And I hope, already (as if by accident) I have revealed some elements of myself here in the third-person that I wouldn’t have been able to do as easily had I used “I”, or at least not the same elements without being either very harsh or judgmental e.g., in oblique terms:

“I don’t care about my physical appearance when I’m at home and I don’t know how to take care of myself when I’m sick.”

Of course, writing about yourself in the third-person using your own name is quite nauseating. E.g., Tilly can’t possibly write about herself in the third person using her own name because it makes her feel a bit, …sick, just as Saul Bellow imaginably couldn’t either… just as no one really can? At least not publicly without tipping the balance and sounding mad or self-obsessed… there are exceptions of course. There are always exceptions. Karl Knauusgard has to be one? Proust isn’t though. And neither am I. Saul Bellow isn’t either. This is one reason why he creates the character of Moses Herzog.

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Many writers i’ve edited have ended up doing this kind of projection work naturally, fictionalising their real experiences by projecting them onto different characters, and situations—though not for psychological or creative reasons but social and legal ones instead.

The risk here is that they could get sued by the baddies in their real lives if their novel ever went onto be published and no publisher wants even the unlikely potential of being sued. So when the writers I’ve worked with fictionalise their own experiences, they’re not doing it the name of accuracy, but deniability. They’re transplanting their experiences onto similar but different characters and scenarios as a form of disguise.

But the tendency I see is not to take it far enough.

They don’t twist hard enough to fit the needs of their art form.

Why not?

Many reasons.

One of them seems to me to be bitterness. Some part of them wants the person who wronged them to recognise who they are. The want to Monumentalise the Fuckery.

This is a trap—can be. Avoid weakly transposing your memoir into a novel… because it’s lame, and generally, I can tell.

Instead, you should just write auto-fiction.

When I was reading the literary fiction submissions for Mulcahy Sweeney Literary Agency it was always obvious to me when a writer had based their principal character on themselves too closely or without creating a compelling cipher first, because their characterisation was imbued with so much understanding/tolerance/nuance/“truth” that to me (reader-outsider) it lacked all the bright blocky primary colours or “two-dimensional cartoon handles” that are necessary to create truly compelling characters on the page. Surprisingly, some two-dimensionality in characters is advised for them to successfully pop up, and out, from the page.

There are other creative and psychological motivations for why you should seriously consider fictionalising your life story.

For example, make yourself sound bad.

Go on.

Do it.

And not the kind of bad that decent writers do, actually present yourself as unlikeable/mad/sick/mean/stingy or self-obsessed… that’s quite hard. Which makes sense. Because your personal integrity is at stake here—

But what this means for the work is that, creatively speaking, you’re not truly free to create.⁵

This is another problem of writing about the self, from the self.

It’s very hard to be accurate, compelling, AND most importantly, creatively free.

The other sticky thing you have to navigate—which finally takes us onto the second point, is the relationship it creates with your audience.

2. Writing from my self leads to strained audience relations

Think of the best autobiography you’ve ever read, or the most well-received book-length monologue there ever was… come on. Surely you know one? Ok. Got it?

…

Hmmmmmmmmmm, I see.

Hopefully you failed to think of anything there because what I wanted to remind you of were all the hours that generally you’re not willing to sink into the me, me, me of someone else…

But the her? her? her?

Well now we’re gossiping. Yes, we’re talking about other people and we all know how fun it is to talk about other people… for good reason too (we’re not all evil.)

When we talk about other people we’re free (as readers, as reacting vessels) to react freely to what we hear—as opposed to a scenario where the storyteller IS the main character and then we have to bear in mind that their feelings and real-life are at stake here AND therefore there’s is a certain (over-powering) responsibility to the things we hear.

Once I went to a reading where someone read out loud a piece of writing which related a traumatic incident from their childhood. I experienced it like a very intense fishing hook to the soul—and this I found, to be a little unfair, and overwhelming. For I had not given this consent to be connected to her this way… for life it seems, on a night out. I didn’t know how to disengage after hearing something like that…

Sharing tragic things about your own life can be incredibly intense for other people.

Around the fire then (with a beer,) we’d much rather hear about something that happened to somebody the storyteller knows rather than the storyteller’s own sob-story.

It makes for much more light-hearted and enjoyable story-time around the fire.

Of course this is one of the problems with the word “blog”:

hey, wanna read my blog?

It evokes all of those inner-dialogue-preserving feelings in people.

And yet, done well… there can be a real sex appeal to otherness.

To hear—of, & from—the other self themselves…

Can you get any closer to someone’s lived experience?

Sean Thor Conroe

is good at it.

But it’s rare.

Sean shows me at least that though you may think it is incredibly obvious and easy to write about your own life on your, blog, actually, when you spend enough time here on Substack, you’ll realise that not as many people as you think are doing it. Hence, lots of cultural criticism (aka newsletters, not blogs.) Newsletters are much safer than writings which aim to be real about real people—that’s really hard.

I never would have read Sean’s Substack of course had it not been for reading and falling for his voice in his novel FUCCBOI, first.

So it stands that, generally speaking, I need someone to have done something exceptional (like publish a very successful and brilliant first novel) in order for me to give up my screen-time and indulge in their life-story. (If I know you personally, it’s a different story…)

I’m always going to choose novels over memoirs, because though I love life-like, I need art-form.

If you want someone to drop all their defences and listen to your life story, I suggest you put on a wig and channel the old mariner before stepping up to the fire. Consider going to some lengths to distract people from the fact you’re asking them to silence their own inner monologue in order to listen to yours… i.e. be theatrical, or pretend you’re talking about someone else. It isn’t too hard. When writing fiction you can use your own story (it’s NOT a failing of imagination) but do be sure to transpose your story or personality onto someone else first, for that clarifying distance. And then you can always bring it back to homie afterwards.

This is what my eyelash lady does (s/o Minnie).

As I lay there she tells me a story about one of her clients. “One of my clients did this…”; “This happened to one of my clients…”

And then she asks me what I think about it. And it’s perfect because it gives me the space to respond freely to what I hear because nobody in the room is directly implicated (though I have started to suspect that some of the stories are hers…)

It’s probably not within the realms of my personality to do this kind of harmless smoke and mirror work in real life, but it’s definitely something I look forward to doing on the page: don a disguise and take my reader through shark-infested waters… don’t worry I’ll make it worth their time.

So here’s the clincher: writing fiction requires a delicate balance—or, just the right approach.

Don’t use your reality to make good art.

Much better to transcend your reality by making good art.

That distinction counts.

And very revealing of my own literary tastes—which are equally practical and reality-orientated, as they are literary and aesthetic.

I like life to point to art to point back to life again… this for me is where the real gold lies.

And if you aren’t doing that, writing to lay testimony/redeem your suffering/transform your life or self… then I think you’re at risk of becoming a poor unbalanced loser like Moses Herzog is. (Read more about that in Part 2.)

So with the squeeze of my thighs (because I’m fighting the urge to piss,)

Tilly

1. I am definitely letting Ivan’s characterisation down here because when he spoke to me that day he remembered HERZOG best for the contrast between Moses Herzog and his brother Shura and how those two characters represented very different kinds of men in life, and in business. Imaginably this is because Ivan himself has been both OR—to this day, oscillates between the two. If I’ve learnt anything from this awkward business of trying to ape my boss’ voice it’s that you have to give the people you’re trying to animate things to say… and if you admire them then that usually means giving them some of your own darlings—which, felt a bit annoying to be honest… but having said that, I was unable to give Ivan things to say which were genuinely in keeping with his fascinations. So far as my writing is concerned then, I do not yet know how to draw out those thorny aspects of existence which have not personally pricked me, yet.

2. Ok but that preoccupation IS Ivan. It’s one I can easily get behind.

3. This is my project. I am mute man waiting for the novel which will make me talk.

4. Don’t you always have to begin literary considerations with something sweeping to show everyone you’ve flown over the whole thing?

5. Unless you have no shame. Working on that...