through New York City with Herzog

Through New York City with Herzog

September 18, 2009

It's one thing to follow the lines and notations on a map, something else entirely to hear the personal and idiosyncratic associations built up by an individual who travels a route day after day. It's something like this I was trying to get at in my virtual walk through Redlands (here) and that I have remarked on in connection with medieval Cairo (here). There's nothing I find more valuable than a running commentary on the world as it strikes a fellow human being.

This is what I find so remarkable about Saul Bellow's Herzog. In the process of working through the story of a middle aged man going through a divorce, it offers a meditation on private life and all its varied scenes. Take the following passage, which comes and goes:

Then he ran the water in the sink. The crude oval of the basin was smooth and beautiful in the gray light. He touched the almost homogeneous whiteness with his fingertips and breathed in the water odors and the subtle stink rising from the throat of the waste pipe. Unexpected intrusions of beauty. [636]

Archeologists would give their left arm for a similar passage that shows how someone once experienced the physical things that survive from their culture. There's obviously a lot more close description of things available in the modern world, but surprisingly little gets at the real experience of something. We have lots of photographs and moving images.. and fantasy stories.. but guides to our rich mental associations of things and places are hard to come by.

My favorite section of Herzog is a six page section in which Moses Herzog travels via the subway to the apartment of his mistress. It is a rich description of getting through New York, including this descent into the subway:

...he hurried underground, listening for a train, fingers examining the coins in his pocket, seeking a subway token. He inhaled the odors of stone, of urine, bitterly tonic, the smells of rust and of lubricants, felt the presence of a current of urgency, speed, of infinite desire, possibly related to the drive within himself... [593]

My attention goes to that image of nervously fingering the coins in your pocket, turning them over and over, perhaps in impatience. Then the attempt to recognize the token amidst the coins, and thereby avoid taking everything out from the pocket. It seems so small, but these are the things that need to be written.. not least because this is a long way from the contemporary experience of the subway. I found this image and accompanying note on Flickr:

Three essentials for getting around town. The wonderful MetroCard, which you swipe to get onto the subway, and then you refill it whenever its value gets low. A handy map of New York's subway lines, streets, neighborhoods, certain landmarks and attractions. Just handy enough without trying to be everything to everybody. And my cell phone, with which, if I'm lucky and actually can get a signal, makes it possible for me to contact friends, coworkers and emergency works

To rewrite this section of Herzog now—more than 40 years later—would mean adding an unbelievable dose of technology to the description. We walk the same streets but the inner experience is different.. and someday all these things talked about by Saul Bellow will seem odd.. and then someday after that they will be incomprehensible and the domain of the historian to explain.

Bellow has Herzog look to the walls of the subway:

Herzog made a tour of the platform, looking at the mutilated posters—blacked-out teeth and scribbled whiskers, comical genitals like rockets, ridiculous copulations, slogans and exhortations. Moslems, the enemy is White. Hell with Goldwater, Jews! Spicks eat SHIT. Phone, I will go down on you if I like the sound of your voice... Filth, quarrelsome madness, the prayers and wit of the crowd. [594]

It is the ground to be covered by Simon and Garfunkel in "Sound of Silence".. a song written in the same year that Herzog was published. Simon appears to have a similar scene in mind with these lines:

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the signs said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.
And whispered in the sounds of silence.

Both Bellow and Simon use the image of graffiti on subway walls as an apocalyptic sign of the times. The subway doesn't have that kind of salacious resonance anymore (although see image below for throwback!).. but these two portrayals of the subway from 1964 make us see and smell and feel a different world that is the same world.