Seize the Day

 

Seize the Day is Bellow is a bite-sized chunk; not much more than a novella; a story set in a single day you could read in a single sitting. When I first read it, many years ago, 42-year-old unemployed salesman Tommy Wilhelm must have seemed like an ancient mariner. Now I see him as man who should be in his prime, tragically moored by circumstances largely of his own making. His father is a doctor and a success, but also a man lacking any compassion for his two children (and one imagines, formerly for his deceased wife). Maybe Wilhelm thought hard work was for suckers, because he fell for flattery, dropped out of college and moved to Hollywood, thinking show business could be his career. His handsomeness was one thing; an unusual speech impediment is another. At some point he falls into line, marries and becomes a salesman, until he feels an injustice has been done to him by the company and takes his bat and ball home. An obvious comparisons is to Miller's Death of a Salesman, though the drama here has nothing to do with Biff’s idealism of his father; rather Willy’s failings are visited upon his literary son, Tommy. 

Seize the Day is a one-act play of sorts. The day unfolds from breakfast on, as Wilhelm thinks about his separated family, his money troubles, and the false hope he places in the stock exchange via a pseudo-psychologist and myth-maker, Dr. Tamkin. Wilhelm knows that Tamkin’s stories are too incredible to be true, and yet he is drawn to his talk of a higher purpose: “He spoke of things that mattered and as very few people did this he could take you by surprise, excited you, move you” (p.82). At the stock exchange, Tommy follows an historical stream (whether from Tamkin or his own mind is unclear): 

 If you wanted to talk about a glass of water you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Modes and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler (p.83)

‘Going further’, Wilhelm concludes: “There is a larger body, and from this you cannot be separated” (p.84). Thus Lard (as a commodity) falls in value after a false climb, Tamkin vanishes, and Wilhelm is finally and completely broke. His father, in the middle of a massage, won’t lift a finger, and Wilhelm’s wife shows no mercy (“Are you in misery … But you have deserved it” [p.113])

In the book’s climax, Wilhelm finds himself on Broadway in the middle of “the great, great crowd” – humanity – “the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out”, as Bellow lists the verbs that drive our existence (like the listing at the beginning of his next novel, Henderson the Rain King): "I labour, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want" (p.115). Finally, the boy gives way to the man (or vice-versa) and swept into the funeral of a stranger, Wilhelm wept. A little like the fold of a Hemmingway story, or perhaps the ironic end of a Steinbeck novel, this sobbing hulk is assumed to be a man who greatly loved the deceased. At last, it seems, Wilhelm has joined that larger body; not a glass of water but “heavy sea-like music” which pours into him “in the centre of the crowd” as Wilhelm reaches “toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need” (p.118). 

The suffering of a flawed man and the need for it to mean something sounds a lot like mid-twentieth century literature. And yet I too wish for such depth and envy Tommy Wilhelm’s shaking shoulders and join with the bystander in saying: “Oh my, oh my! To be mourned like that”.