Revelations Unto Clowns:

Saul Bellow's Seize the Day and The Last Analysis

The transition from page to stage is a difficult one for both novels and novelists: a change in conventions, expectations, and restrictions which some artworks or artists survive and others do not. Yet even if the literary form changes, the underlying concerns of an author are likely to remain intact. Saul Bellow has long had an interest in the theatre, and similar concerns and techniques appear in both his short novel Seize the Day and his only full-length play, The Last Analysis.

Seize the Day was actually first published in the United States in a volume with Bellow's first one-act play, The Wrecker, and was itself adapted for the stage (though only in manuscript, never produced) in the late 1950's (Opdahl, p. 195). The work would be very difficult to fully capture on the stage, relying as it does so much on language, descriptions, interior monologues. Yet even the novel has theatrical elements or references. Tommy Wilhelm is an ex-actor, or perhaps, better, an "ex-extra" -- Bellow is known for his frequent use of theatrical imagery (Dutton, pp. 41-6), from the drama critic Schlossberg in The Victim and his plea for more emotional acting to a climactic moment in Herzog, when "[Herzog's] intended violence turned into theatre, into something ludicrous" (from Dutton, p. 133).

Acting and theatre can be an escape, a false shadow of real emotions ludicrously and inappropriately displayed. Or they can be an attempt by the actor to understand, and to demonstrate: a two-fold opportunity wise authors and critics understand. Maurice Venice hints at this possibility when he tells Tommy "don't be afraid [during the screen test] to make faces and be emotional. Shoot the works. Because when you start to act you're no more an ordinary person, and those things don't apply to you." (p. 22) Characters in the theatre, like characters in much of literature, feel more than "normal" people, indeed are more than normal people, from the Greek gods to Shakespeare's kings to the almost "unnatural" depths and eloquence of modern psychological characters. Bellow seems aware of both the diminuitive and expansive senses of the theatre, and even combines the two at times -- though Seize the Day seems to lean more towards theatre as escape, The Last Analysis, particularly, treads perilously between the ludicrous and the philosophical.

Both Seize the Day and The Last Analysis have a dramatic flow: "In Seize the Day an exact economy prevails, the story's world being created only as it impinges on its hero, in a sequence of instants. Likewise the title asserts this notion of instantaneousness...." (Bradbury, p. 53) Like an old vaudeville show, or a series of dramatic sketches, the story and characters swirl about Tommy Wilhelm, appearing and disappearing. Bellow's actual play is constructed similarly, as one after another of Bummidge's relatives or acquaintances -- Winkleman, Madge, Pamela -- appear to "take their turn" as the plot and comedy unfold.

Indeed, structural similarities abound between Seize the Day and The Last Analysis. Both works open shrouded in an aura of the ordinary, even the decaying. Seize the Day shows Tommy Wilhelm in the Hotel Gloriana, an aging hotel for aging people ("Gloriana," an epithet used by Spenser in his Faerie Queen for Queen Elizabeth, thus paints the inhabitants as a group of almost Renaissance leftovers). The Last Analysis reveals at curtain's rise "a two-story loft in a warehouse," oddly decorated, but still decrepit, as the ratcatcher Bertram indicates -- "as soon as I saw the place I realized there were rats" (p. 37).

The comedian Bummidge in The Last Analysis is what Dr. Adler of Seize the Day should have been. Both are the patriarchs of their families, and fairly well off, at least in theory. Both have financially demanding sons: Tommy and Max. But Adler concentrates on his approaching death, Bummidge on memories of his childhood and birth (even going so far as to relive them). Adler rejects confessions of emotion, involvement with other's troubles: "Bummy" requires them. Of Bummidge's lack of interest in the investment possibilities of defective Czechoslovakian toasters, Max complains "another father would be proud" -- and Adler probably would be, of such initiative and mercantilism.

Yet Bummy, hero of Bellow's play, shares characteristics with the novel's protagonist as well. Both Bummy and Tommy (note the similarities in names -- and both have changed names, from Philip Bomovitch to "Bummidge," from William Adler to "Tommy Wilhelm"!) are outcasts from society and victims of financial shysters, the sharks of the capitalist system. Tamkin, pseudo-father-figure to Tommy, chisels money out of him with which to speculate, and Bummy's relatives Madge and Winkleman try to cadge money out of the old clown with which to bribe the housing inspector who has revealed their grossly substandard old folks' home (dim reflections of a low-class Gloriana?), or, later, to exploit him as his analysis methods prove popular. Each Bellovian protagonist, perhaps most simply, is a clown, "half ravaged, half dignified, earnest when he is clowning and clowning when he means to be earnest" (Analysis, p. ix), afflicted with Bummidge's "Pagliacci Gangrene." Named after the most famous of Italian clowns, such a disease would be an infection in the blood, a disturbance of one's vital fluids and force -- and both Bummidge and Wilhelm seem to have such an ailment.

Women act similarly in Bellow's two tales as well: they are often vampiric, money-hungry leeches. Bummidge claims "I've figured out the main forms of love. A man can love a woman on the tenderness system. That's very good. Or on the lust system. That's better than nothing. Or on the pride system. That's worse than nothing." (pp. 45-46). For Bummidge, it seems he loves Imogen tenderly (his "relation to her is entirely fatherly" (p. x)), his mistress Pamela lustily, and his wife Bella pridefully (out of social necessity -- for she is "not as estranged as he would like her to be" (p. ix)). Pamela, who represents "the grandeur and misery of the erotic life" (p. 75), turns out to be little but a low-class trollop, sleeping with a different man every night (as Detective Galluppo's photos prove) and conspiring with Madge and Winkleman to steal the money from Bummidge's valise. Bella, Bummidge's "ball-breaking wife" (p. 68), resembes in that epithet Tommy Wilhelm's own Margaret, the sort of woman who "knows how to cripple by sickening a man with guilt... [and] sends her curse to make a fellow impotent." (p. 97) And, like Margaret, Bella draws money from her estranged husband -- "two million dollars' worth of property"! Bummidge strongly implies, too, that she delibarately became pregnant in order to force the young up-and-coming comedian to marry her. We hear little of Tommy Wilhelm's sister Catherine/Philippa, aside from that she tries to get money for a gallery showing from Dr. Adler. But even she has a sort of reflection in The Last Analysis: Bummidge's "sordid sister" (p. 15) Madge is yet another of the grasping, super-capitalist breed, running a decrepit old folks' home where she feeds the inmates on a dollar a day. Bummidge tells her "you got into the habit of cheating, and you cheated and you cheated and you cheated...." (p. 114).

Both Tommy Wilhelm and Philip Bummidge are burdened by their pasts. Tommy feels his infamous "spirit, the peculiar burden of his existence, lay on him like an accretion, a load, a lump" (p. 44). And Bummidge, too, is troubled by his unhappy childhood. But where Tommy spends much of his fateful day alternately agonizing over and avoiding past mistakes, and holding others back from memories, Bummidge wholeheartedly embraces and relives them, even drawing others into the experience to help recreate it. Interestingly, both characters find release in a sort of death -- Tommy through an attempt at a stock market "killing," followed by his teary self-baptism at the funeral; Bummidge in a Lazarus-like descent to the dead and reemergence. Of course, these "deaths" in Bellow's hands become comic, with Tommy being mistaken for "the [dead] man's brother, maybe?" (p. 118) and Bummidge recycling old comedy routines as he sinks into a wardrobe-basket tomb. Note that Bummidge, unlike Tommy, is his own life-giving corpse -- his first appearance, lying on his back covered with a white sheet, presages this role.

Only in Bummidge do we see the aftermath of the rebirthing process, the end Tommy longs to achieve. Bummidge reappears tender, almost as if he has just molted -- "Oh, don't touch! ...See how my skin is wincing." (p. 109) One almost recalls Shakespeare's process of rejuvenation through madness in King Lear, and the old monarch's hand which "smells of mortality" (IV.vi.133). And indeed, says critic John Clayton, "'I'm stripped and kicked out,' Tommy groans (p. 117), and we agree. But it is only now that we see him as savable. He must stand naked on the heath before he is worthy of being decked with flowers." (Clayton, p. 114) At last, revitalized, renewed Bummidge rejects all his former parasites, dropping a net over the entire group and hustling them out of his apartment, and his life, accusing that they "came between me and my soul" (p. 117). Bummidge has come further than Tommy -- "It took me so long to get through the brutal stage of life. And when I was through with it, the mediocre stage was waiting for me. And now that's done with, and I am ready for the sublime." (p. 118)

Saul Bellow's novel Seize the Day and play The Last Analysis reinforce and build upon one another to show the author's basic themes and motifs. In each, we see a clown struggling through the mires of grasping friends, family, and acquaintances, struggling to come to terms with his past and his person, and ultimately succeeding through a sort of death and rebirth. This thesis should not be construed as a damning simplification -- even great American playwrights like Sam Shepard are sometimes accused of reusing the same story, but such recycling in no way diminishes the strength of their material. Such analysis and interpretation cannot diminish Bellow, either -- for his work, there can be no "last analysis."

Annotated Bibliography

Bellow, Saul.
"My Man Bummidge: He's Lost in a World Based on Metaphors" in The New York Times, Sunday Sept. 27 1964.

The American theatre "has no language... it lacks rhetoric or gesture." Despite vast differences between page and stage, Bellow has tried to bridge the two. "We are all of course molested by ideas in a world so transformed by thought as ours is, and we must all, without exception, educate ourselves." "Our comedian, Bummidge, does manage to burst the bonds of metaphor..., to 'get off the couch', to stand on his own feet, and even to dance a bit."

Bellow, Saul.
"Skepticism and the Depth of Life," in The Arts and the Public, edited by James E. Miller, Jr., and Paul D. Herring University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Examines the differences facing beginning writers between the 1930's and the 1960's. The problem lies in artists' very acceptance into society as compared with their previous alienation -- the cities where arts once flourished now seize upon and package art, leading young writers into leading fake artistic lives rather than doing real artistic work. Universities provide a home to some writers, but their compartmentalization and tendency to study and exhibit examples of existing art rather than produce new works produce the same difficulties as the cities. Artists must be willing to see beyond passivity and the "art life" and see where the soul of modern life has truly gone.

Bradbury, Malcolm.
"The Fifties Novels: 'The Adventures of Augie March', 'Seize the Day', and 'Henderson the Rain King'," in Saul Bellow, Methuen, London, 1982.

Explores "comic humanism," the combination of both revelling in absurdity and rejoicing in human potential, in Bellow's novels of the 1950's. Man is "divided between the practical material world and a larger world of being" (p. 54), and discovers and accepts the metaphysical aspects through comic efforts.

Clayton, John Jacob.
Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1968.

Studies Seize the Day in relation to the corpus of Bellow's work, and examines patterns of alienations and masochism, construction of self and world, images of darkness, and transformations in the novels of Bellow.

Dutton, Robert R.
"'Sunk Though He Be'" in Saul Bellow, Twayne Publishers, Inc., New York, 1971.

Links Seize the Day to the book's larger theme, of Bellow's characters as "subangelic," full of "a moral and intellectual humanism basic to their views of themselves" (p. 13), and art concentrating "not [on] what he is but [on] what he would be or wills to be" (p. 15). The chapter provides a good outline of accepted critical approaches to Seize the Day.

Harris, Mark.
Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1980.

This light-hearted, rambling biography/description of Bellow is as full of the author as the subject, but contains some interesting nuggets. The period the book mainly covers, the thirteen years from 1967 to 1980, is later than the works discussed in this paper, but provide some valuable observations on Bellow himself, and a few mentions of his extensive alimony payments to his former wives (source material for Margaret and Bella?).

Kiernan, Robert F.
Saul Bellow, Continuum Publishing, New York, 1989.

Chapter 5, on Seize the Day, proposes that, contrary to the usual sympathetic reading, the reader distrust Tommy as a pathological liar. Our sympathy comes from the close identification with Tommy caused by the almost-first-person narrative, but examples from his conversations with Maurice Venice, Margaret, and his father show that "Wilhelm may not have been successful in Hollywood, but he assuredly has an actor's instincts" for deception and attempted manipulation.

McCadden, Joseph F.
The Flight from Women in the Fiction of Saul Bellow University Press of America, Washington, DC, 1980.

Shows Bellow's recurring use of "females as destructive, mercantile figures" (p. 243) in both novels and plays, and his protagonists as possessed by a "crippling hatred of wives, feelings of inadequacy, and a sense of futility with their lives." (p. 89)

Opdahl, Keith
"The 'Mental Comedies' of Saul Bellow" in From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1983.

Examines the Jewish character of Bellow's one-acts and The Last Analysis, and finds it "important but not dominant" (p. 185) in the story. Still, the immigrant experience, the Jewish love of language and enthusiasm of emotion, the importance of confronting the past, all are important factors.

Taubman, Howard.
"Richly Textured Farce Opens at the Belasco" in New York Times, Friday Oct. 2 1964.

Views The Last Analysis as a "wildly untidy play...[a] flood of antic imagination, mad rhetoric and comic fantasy that [Bellow] has poured into this improbable, yet serious farce." Much plot summary, with a few more pithy observations: this is a favorable early review.