May 9, 2025 • 53 mins
Sure we can philosophize, but what happens when we put carpe diem to the test in the modern world of capital?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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5.15 Bellow
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The Dream
mI was 12 and my dad was getting increasingly anxious that I did not yet have a job. He wanted me to understand the value of work, of money, of responsibility. But didn’t he understand? I was busy! I had things to do! I couldn’t possibly take more hours from my busy 6th grade schedule to find work. Besides. I wasn’t old enough to work, yet, was I?
It didn’t matter. Some kids did lawn work. My friend Jon had a paper route. Keith was just getting started as a golf caddy.
And I don’t now remember how I got introduced to it, but I’ll guess it was a neighbor talking to my mother who said that her 20-something son had a great job selling cleaning products–he set his own hours, found clients, and then let the money come in. In fact, he was ready to have someone else get connected into his work. Maybe you guessed it. It was Amway.
Now, there was a ton I didn’t know about Amway Corporation. It was the 1970s, kids, and we didn’t have the internet. It would still be a few years down the road before the illegal dealings in the US and abroad emerged in this enormous company. The DeVos family here in Michigan were the owners, and we knew very little about them, either–who could have guessed that one would become a Secretary of Education under President Trump? But even by that time most people (except me and my dad, I think) knew that Amway was running a pyramid scheme and that suits had been filed by the Federal Trade Commission.
But hell, I was twelve, what did I know? I bought my first box of products to sell and it cost about $80 to get me started. (For you all calculating at home, today that’s close to $600 today.) My dad spent it and said it was a loan against my first profits.) And maybe it was fate. Maybe I was just bad at it. Maybe I didn’t have the spirit or motivation for sales. Maybe I was just an ugly little kid with glasses hovering around people’s porches with a cardboard box. But whatever it was, after a few small “pity sales,” the well ran dry quickly.
The box eventually went into storage and my parents slowly used some–but by no means all–of the products. It was a major loss, that first foray into business, and I won’t say that it had no effect on my future motivations or opinions about capitalism. A few years later I would read Death of a Salesman and I knew that if I wasn’t careful, I’d end up like Willy Loman.
Now there’s more to this story, and I’ll tell the rest if we get a chance along the way, here, but I’ve been reflecting a bit on this little brush with risky business schemes and get-rich-quick models while I’ve been reading Saul Bellow’s short novel, Seize the Day. There are parallels enough, but what I’m fascinated by right now is irony. Bellow wrote his book in 1956, Miller wrote about his traveling salesman Willy in 1949–in fact, there are dozens of novels and stories of failed and bogus business doings in the early 20th century beginning with Frank Norris’s The Octopus in 1901 and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle just a few years later.
What would it take, then? I mean, knowing that the modernist art and literature was highly and publicly critical of shady business practice, that Saul Bellow had written about schemes and scams in Seize the Day in 1956, that only three years later a family–completely without a sense of irony, I suspect–founded a company like theirs and called it Amway?
It would be years before the Amway stories started to appear in book form, and I will admit I have read absolutely none of them. Founder Rich DeVos has written at last two (00:10):
Simply Rich, and Compassionate Capitalism. Amway fan James Robinson called his book on Amway nothing less than Empire of Freedom. And while there are a few that are exposes, the best sellers praise the company with other titles like American Victory, and–it’s true–Jesus Was a Double Diamond, referring to the highest level of achievement in Amway sales..
I’m just glad they err on humility and not hyperbole. But that is the tradition, isn’t it? Some people are making money, and a lot of it. The company is now worth over $9 billion, which is not bad for starting out selling soaps. Ah,this is the dream. And they called themselves Amway.
Because, if you didn’t know, Amway is a portmanteau, the combination of two words. Was it pride? Or mere shamelessness? Or maybe they just started out with an honest dream. I couldn’t say–I haven’t read the books, remember? (Probably from a childhood shame.) But the Amway portmanteau is obvious once you know it’s there. It’s everything we’re talking about today. It’s quite simply — the American Way.
Intro Theme
This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.
I’m Steve Chisnell, and today we’re deciding how we spend this single day.
A Glowing Future
Saul Bellow’s story, written in 1956, is hardly the first to attack our notion of the American Dream, that Puritan-founded belief of “a kind of romantic expectation, a belief in the possibility of achieving some kind of glowing future through hard work and sincere devotion.” Let me offer you that definition again, because there is a lot going on there. Think of it as a promise, founded on the ethics of American Puritan communities early in our history (00:17):
“A kind of romantic expectation, a belief in the possibility of achieving some kind of glowing future through hard work and sincere devotion.”
That definition came again from my dear old American literature professor Walter Brylowski. Careful listeners may remember him as “He of the Classroom Slap” fame.
If we are sincere, hard-working, and devoted to our work, we can have a kind of ‘double-diamond’ glowing future; but Brylowski’s definition also names it as a “romantic expectation,” a dream or subjective wish more than empirical reality. The truth is that very few of us reach that imagined place, even those of us who get the money we long for. Now, I know there are several studies out there about this (00:19):
some say a rise in happiness goes up with wealth but levels off after a certain income; others say there is no plateau–it just keeps going up. I’m interested in an adversarial study, which combined the Wharton and Princeton studies, suggesting that the relationship is far more complex than any one-to-one correspondence. It definitely shows that for many people, more money creates more misery.
More importantly to our idea of the American Dream, though, the study recognizes that it isn’t exactly “happiness” that we’re lining money up with. If we define “happiness” as only the absence of want, the suffering from need, then that bar is pretty low, and it’s no wonder that most hit a plateau. Once our basic needs are met with some security that they will continue to be, we can turn to other things for real contentment, for meaningful lives. That makes sense. So while whatever is meant by the American Dream’s “glowing future” might be unclear, the definition works from the premise that everyone who dreams it is somewhere below that plateau, still in places of insecurity or anxiety.
And here we are, most of America and most of the world, because generations ago, the American Dream began to export its romantic ambitions. Maybe someday we’ll do some math in how, even with the US mostly under the happiness plateau, we consume around 25% of the world’s resources with about 5% of its population. But math isn’t important right now, I guess. We’ll just say that, so long as the American Dream has been offered to us, most haven’t made it (00:21):
but, we are urged, “Just bend your head back down to hard work and sincere devotion,” and it will likely turn out fine.
But as I said, Saul Bellow was hardly the first to cry BS at this idea. We’d already had Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and even Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” by then. Franz Kafka’s works had been translated into English for some time, as had the Russians Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. French philosophers Camus and Sartre were circulating their existentialism in English by then, too. There was plenty of grousing and despair to go around.
So I’m going to ask two key questions, I think, as we move into our discussion of Bellow’s book today:
1. What is Bellow doing that these others haven’t? (Because we will easily find attacks on American capitalism here.)
2. What exactly does Bellow expect us to think from our “Seizing” of the Day?
There is a third question hovering in my mind, too, though, as we move forward. What is the difference between the American Dream and the American Way? Is that important? It is for my 12-year-old business kid me; and it might be for others. Just putting a pin in that for now . . .
But we’re in a very good place to think about this, aren’t we? For those of you new to the podcast today, maybe a little less so, but you’ll be fine! For those who have been with us through much of this journey so far, we’ve got quite an arsenal of carpe diem tools and literary history and approaches at our disposal. The only thing we’ve read on this topic more recent than Bellow has been a Star Trek episode; but everything else is fair game as we consider and compare, even Krzanaric’s thinking on it, since he also is looking at the long philosophical trends out there.
So let’s get into it. And if you already know the story, go ahead and skip this next chapter of the podcast unless you’d like a refresher. Then we’ll come back and see what we can do with our questions.
Bellow’s Seize the Day in Brief
The entire book takes place in a single day, probably our titular day that needs “seizing.” Poor Wilhelm Adler has quit his job after being cheated there, he’s separated from his wife, paying more and more money for their kids, and has taken a room in the same New York hotel where his wealthy and retired father is now living. There’s a distraught relationship here, because Wilhelm feels dependent on dad, but for what is more complicated (00:30):
the old guy is quite content sharing neither feelings nor money with his failure son.
I say “failure,” though, not necessarily to blame Wilhelm, but to underline that this is what everyone–including Wilhelm himself–thinks of him. He failed to follow parent’s advice and go into medicine, choosing instead to try acting (00:31):
and there he was run over and ignored by a fast-talking agent. He lost his job and marriage, he’s hemorrhaging money, and he’s come to New York looking for . . . anything at all. Yes, Wilhelm is gullible, buys into schemes and dreams too easily, feels obligated and trapped, increasingly desperate in his appeals to a father who has done with him.
This desperation has him turn to a “Doctor” Tamkin who claims to be a psychologist, but is equally a philosopher, gambler, financial wizard, and probably con man. Many know this and talk about it openly, but when Tamkin offers Wilhelm a Wall Street investment chance in lard futures–no, that’s right, he hopes to make quick money from speculating on pig fat–he gives Tamkin his last $700, the equivalent of about $8000 today. Hoo . . .
And why? Along the way, Tamkin tells Wilhelm that he must “seize the day,” focus on the now, not get anxious about the future. The present is the only reality. He also tells Wilhelm that people have two souls, the “true soul” and “the pretender” soul, this last one tied to vanity and ego; it prevents the true soul the opportunity for happiness and love. I should point out here that Wilhelm is not our main guy’s social name. He changed his name for his failed acting career and never really left it. Born Wilhelm Adler, he changed his name to “actor” Tommy Wilhelm; it’s another reason Wilhelm’s father disapproves of him.
And, what can we say? Wilhelm loses everything even while the expensive hotel bills pile up and his wife wants more money for his kids. Tamkin vanishes, his dad rejects him, and Wilhelm stumbles through the city in despair, finding himself in the closing scene at a stranger’s funeral service. Standing at the coffin, he begins to weep, loudly, the only one in the room to do so. Bellow’s closing lines are powerful and bewildering:
The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm’s blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need.
Tragedy? Awakening? Catharsis? Disintegration? Seizing the Day? Hmm.
Capitalism and Alienation
To describe the world of American capitalism as dehumanizing is not a heavy lift. It is in the nature of a competitive environment to “beat” one’s competition, to tear one down so we can step up. Now this isn’t an economics class and I’m not going to make any statements of profitability and success measurements, the needs for networks and collaborations, and the like. But our global dialogue has for more than a century been filled both with the narrative of capital and the narratives of resistance to its ideologies. And Bellow is no stranger to them.
The modern life of 1950s New York still feels familiar to us (00:39):
mechanical (now perhaps digital), full of wires and brick, and artificial. Bellow frequently describes it ironically with nature metaphors
Wilhelm-slash-Tommy is here, too, of course, trying to understand it, but it’s very clear he is inept. Tommy has in his own words “escaped” from the brow-beating terrors of his wife, but she has the home which he still provides for but does not share. He’s been fed to this city, then, one of competition, domination, status-seeking, and deception. We could describe the characters in Bellow’s world as humanistic, perhaps, before calling them human. His father refuses to offer sentiment or be caught up in the follies of his son. Even at the end, with all of it gone, Wilkie asks for a single word of kindness, and his father’s
mouth opened, wide, dark, twisted, and he said to Wilhelm, “You want to make yourself into my cross. But I am not going to pick up a cross. I’ll see you dead, Wilky, by Christ, before I let you do that to me.”
All of this contempt, but when it comes to talking about his son to others, his father steps easily into this social role of status, bragging about how he is making close to six figures in salary.
So the machine of capitalism works on all of these successful men. They prey on each other, they intimidate and parade before each other, they never show emotion to each other which reveals vulnerability, and they never offer secrets. And we’ll get to Tamkin in a bit, but he says of the markets (00:43):
"One thing should be clear to you by now. Money- making is aggression . . . People come to the market to kill. They say, ‘I'm going to make a killing.' It's not accidental."
Hmm. Nope, this should all be familiar to us. The world of money-making is not pretty, it requires a certain degree of perception and bloodthirstiness not to mention a will to self-suppression, and we sign up for it, because we believe it leads us to happiness.
Of course, a key irony is that that happiness comes at the price of alienation. We become distanced, separated, or isolated, lost in the absurdity of it. This is Wilhelm’s problem, certainly. We readers see Wilhelm’s danger in trusting Tamkin from the beginning, the danger in gambling everything in the stock market. So powerful is that capitalist narrative that we have normalized it, “the price of doing business” requires a bit more savviness than Wilhelm has ever had. We’re taught from the beginning not to trust strangers, but in this world everyone is a stranger, even our fathers and former wives.
So we’re really met with two dysfunctions, aren’t we? On the one hand the urban world Wilhelm is in–fragmented and predatory–dehumanizes those who succeed in it and runs over those who do not. On the other, our middle-aged hero is pathetically ill-equipped to adapt–has always been run over–and spends a fair amount of the time groveling for help. Yes, he needs money from his father, but he says clearly that there are other things a father can give to his son which are worth more. As baldly as his father rejects the money pleas, it is this last request that so dramatically stirs him to cruelty. We’re tempted as we read to find both pathetic people–one too cruel and unfeeling, the other too feeling and naive–but we can’t miss the fact that each exists this way only beneath this modern materialistic landscape where estrangement is the norm. Bellow offers us two men (00:46):
both victims.
I want to point out, too, that Bellow does all this with superb skill. Father and son are a microcosm of the larger society, of course. But since most of the novel is told with a narrow omniscience, offering us mostly Wilhelm’s stream-of-consciousness thinking, we see his struggles in distinguishing what is from what it seems to be, reality from appearance. We also occasionally get insights into his father’s thoughts, but these are usually only to reveal that what Wilhelm believes is true is not what his father believes. In brief, like so many modernist novels and so much literature in the great sweep of it, this is a novel built upon dramatic irony. As Wilhelm struggles to understand, he is our ironic or limited perceiver. We know with some assuredness that this is the journey we’re on, then (00:47):
not just what happens to him, but whether or not in the end, he will come to understand.
A further irony is that much of the ‘message’ that Wilhelm needs to hear, perhaps, comes from the very man that is setting him up for failure. The con man Tamkin, an enormous presence in the novel, seems to maneuver many people into positions where he can financially benefit. Wilhelm sees through him frequently, privately calling him a liar and a phony as he spins stories and puffs himself up, but none of it is enough for him to back away from the stock deal. Tamkin labels himself a doctor, a healer, a giver, a mentor for Wilhelm, and we will yet talk about whether those labels are merely false or perhaps ironically true.
Seizing and Seducing
Now we can’t pretend we’ll examine everything in this novel. For a short read, we could ourselves spend many hours here working through its facets, but we’re today only on a search for two (maybe three) questions (00:50):
What makes Bellow’s take on capitalism unique, and how does this connect to our discussion of carpe diem?
So far, my description of the novel’s dehumanization and alienation in the modern business world is absolutely parallel to just about everything else out there with a similar message. Wilhelm gets run over; in Steinbeck, the Joad family gets run over; in Miller’s play, Willy Loman gets run over; in Gatsby, Myrtle quite literally gets run over. How many times do we need to see it?
There’s a certain catharsis in tragedy we can relate to, I know. Even Aristotle said so. It weirdly feels good to see others suffer, because perhaps it eases that personal alienation we feel (00:52):
someone else is also getting run over, and the car that hits them is bigger than the one that keeps hitting me–and theirs keeps rolling back and forth. Hmm. Or maybe that’s in Stephen King’s Christine or maybe Final Destination. It was definitely in one of the Purge movies.
But we all have to learn this sooner or later in the world of materialism we have inherited, right?
When I was 12, I still hadn’t quite learned it. Stuck with a barely-sold box of weirdly-labeled cleaning products, I was a little Wilhelm (00:54):
totally unprepared, gullible enough to believe a guy not quite twice my age across the street, and not enough will power to do more than nod to the deal and finally surrender to my failures in shame.
But I wasn’t quite done with the American Way, though I suspected there was a secret that I wasn’t quite understanding, a trick to the success of it, if only I could grasp it. I needed motivation, and the guy across the street invited me to an Amway meeting. My dad drove me there and we sat near the back of a rented school auditorium one night to learn the secrets. My memory of the meeting is not super clear, but I remember a band playing–or at least drums and cymbals, building up to the speakers. There was a suit-wearing master of ceremonies who gave us all motivational ideas that the crowd responded to in unison. They had been to these meetings several times, caught up in the moment. Then we heard stories about successful people and how good they felt after the first $100, the first $1000, the first $10,000.
Yes, they said, this was the place to be. The place to get rich, just for a few hours of work each week! Several stood up in the auditorium and told their stories, too, all of us cheering, I guess, because we wanted to be like them. I know now more about the script and buzz phrases they had used, but then, all I noticed was the fanfare. Everything was big, bigger, a hype. It was somewhere between a political rally and a religious Chautauqua tent. I don’t remember if God specifically was mentioned or shouted at the meeting, but He might well have been.
But for whatever reason, the meeting scared me a bit. It felt bigger than I was ready for, and perhaps that is what saved me. For my dad, he finally recognized the pyramid scheme that was in practice, how I could sell products for a few bucks, but the “real money” was always in getting someone below me to do it, just how my trusted neighbor had set me up to sell in his network. Unlike Wilky’s dad, mine seemed okay with quietly setting the box aside, in storage, and I would not repay the business loan. Yes, we were out almost the same amount of money that Wilhelm put in the stock market–his $700 and our equivalent of about $600–but we were in a place different from Bellow’s characters. My dad was by no means wealthy; but we were secure enough that we could weather the loss.
It wasn’t the last business deal I would fail in, but it was one that began the next half-century so far of skepticism. Lesson learned.
Does Wilhelm learn, at last? What are we to make of his closing collapse, his public tears at a stranger’s funeral? Here are those closing lines again:
The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm’s blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need.
He is at religious service. Flowers and lights fuse in a kind of ecstacy, blinding him. Between his own tears and the sea-like music pouring in, he may be drowning in the experience. His tears are a “great happy oblivion” but also a sinking further into sorrow, towards a consummation. A consummation is a completion, a fulfillment, the “con-” of ‘altogether’ with the “summa” of ‘total.” And it is not a consummation of his heart’s desire but of his “heart’s ultimate need.”
Let’s note first how lines like these are so utterly different from everything we’ve been talking about in the urban world of business. Tamkin has told us about a “true soul” and a “pretender soul,” and if this is true (feels real), then it’s possible that Wilhelm has found that true soul. But isn’t it also possible, the simplest route, that Wilhelm has simply witnessed death, the ultimate end, and is crying in despair that this is all there is, the great angst of death we’ve been talking about so often?
To answer this, I need to take us back to the process of interpretation we’ve been putting together.
So far, we’ve talked about three steps (01:04):
Notice, Significance, and Pattern. Start with what you notice, what stands out, because we trust you as a reader to recognize something as important, even if you don’t know immediately why. We might put together a list of things we notice in a reading
Well, yes, maybe. In terms of the music “pouring in” we also have the word “oblivion” which could be a kind of death. The music and lights and flowers could also represent a divine light at the moment of death. Of course, he’s at a funeral, so he is literally looking at death. It’s a fit! These all come together in a pattern, so we’re most of the way there for a meaning to the section.
And now we come to the last of the four steps for reading interpretation. And that is Coherence. Does the meaning “hold together” with everything else we are discovering about the text? For instance, if I had focused only on all of the wet images and decided that the Pattern is that Wilhelm wants to die by drowning, this could work only until we tested it against the lights and ecstasy and ultimate need. And oops, it’s a cool pattern we found, but it doesn’t hold together with all of the other images, so we’ll need to revise our thinking. Go back and try again, looking for other things to notice, other patterns, to see what sticks together and what does not.
This is where we are with this final “heart’s ultimate need.” If he is simply falling apart in despair, broken completely and at last, how is this possibly a “heart’s ultimate need”? To answer, I’m speculating that the meaning of the “true soul” as named by Tamkin may fit, may cohere, to this interpretation. It’s not that Wilhelm dies, but that he finally, maybe, sheds his “pretender soul,” the one that everyone else in New York has adopted and made firmly predatory. That dies. And let’s notice, too, that Wilhelm doesn’t sink into “deeper sorrow.” That’s a misreading, and we have to be careful not to make the text say something it doesn’t. It says, “deeper than sorrow,” as if he is going to a place beyond even sorrow and despair, somewhere towards this consummation which isn’t sorrow but something else. It’s something profound, something emotional, something true against all of the cons and false images he has endured.
Does he learn to love the humanity around him? Does he finally connect with others, even if it is in a place of grief? Does he finally realize that playing the game all this way towards inevitable death is its own sorrow? That something else is more important? Is he finally bringing together his divided self, Tommy and Wilky and Wilhelm? Is it even an affirmation not of death, but of rebirth? How do we know which is meant?
Let’s go back to Tamkin’s truths for a moment, because he has already given us some clues from his various philosophical musings. At one point, he gives Wilhelm a poem that he has written for him. It closes with the stanza:
Look then right before thee.
Open thy eyes and see.
At the foot of Mt. Serenity
Is thy cradle to eternity.
Wilhelm is angry at the poem, and not just because it’s bad writing. But now, here at the end, looking at a coffin or cradle to eternity, does this hold together, too? Can Wilhelm finally put to death his “pretender self” so that his “true self” may rise, be born, to a new life? Here’s the rest of the poem. How well does it fit this final scene?
If thee thyself couldst only see
Thy greatness that is and yet to be,
Thou would feel joy–beauty–what ecstasy,
They are at the feet, earth-moon-sea, the trinity.
Why-forth then dost thou tarry
And partake thee only of the crust
And skim the earth’s surface narry
When all creations art thy just?
Seek ye then that which art not there
In thine own glory let thyself rest.
(01:25):
Witness. Thy power is not bare.
Thou art King. Thou art at thy best.
Look then right before thee.
Open thy eyes and see.
At the foot of Mt. Serenity
Is thy cradle to eternity.
The poem is subtitled “Ism vs. Hism.” Belief vs. Self? Let the true self be born and rule our lives. That way lies joy, not the surfaces or crust of life, the appearances.
When Wilhelm and we readers receive the poem, we are equally dismayed. We worry for the stocks, though by now we can anticipate the calamity ahead. We want Tamkin to be straight, his ruse revealed, but he defers with strange made-up travel stories and strange gift poems. He says he has been treating Wilhelm psychologically for some time, and we scoff. And yet, only when we look at the final scene, the breakdown at the funeral of a stranger, do we see the possibility that con man Tamkin was actually leading him here, to a place of ecstatic happiness and consummation. It is sudden, traumatizing, but seemingly final and, in Bellow’s word, “needed.”
Ethics of a Machine
The modernist machine of industry, profit, and machismo (all of the women are at home if they are not mistresses in Bellow) leaves us nothing happy. Got it. But what, after all this, does Bellow mean by his title? An announcement of subject or an interpretation of it?
We’ve already divided the translations of carpe diem into the “seize” camp and the “pluck” camp. You and I, we’re now on Team Pluck. We’re not using this ‘seize’ thing anymore, for reasons which seem to match exactly what people like Marvell and Bellow and Roman Krznaric all warn us about. Tamkin is once again our proponent of seizing the day, and seemingly without irony.
But we do have to be aware of the hugely ironic position Tamkin has. He is the man who seems to be elusive, living a projected or pretender self; a con man. He appears to idiosyncratically help Wilhelm with advice though he is also leading him down a path of financial ruin, even as he has done for many before him. He uses the carnivorous market system to destroy Wilhelm’s last wealth but opens up for him the possibility for renewal.
He speaks of seizing the moment when Wilhelm should jump into business speculation, into investing, but really, what he wants for Wilhelm, is that he should “pluck” or “harvest” of life what is there. Wilhelm understands–and says several times–that he cannot “seize the day” as other successful people have because he has almost nothing with which to do it. He’s down to his last $700. But he goes forward, seemingly not because he wills himself but because he does not have the will to defy Tamkin. Ironically, it is not Wilhelm’s last $700 which places him in a position to move to his “heart’s ultimate need” but the absence of it. Perhaps even a single dollar is enough to keep the capitalist game of “seizing” going for us.
Did Tamkin do all this intentionally? It’s possible. We aren’t given him in enough detail to know. He appears at this critical moment in Wilhelm’s life and then utterly vanishes (even emptying out his hotel room as if planned). He’s elusive; he’s a con artist; he’s a philosopher; he’s a trickster figure.
The Trickster archetype in literature is another symbol we will have to explore at more length another time, but he’s generally a trouble-making, cunning, or humorous character who upsets social norms. Trickster figures are often paradoxical and they are almost always transformational. Think of Loki in mythology (less in Marvell), Bart Simpson, the Chesire Cat in Alice’s Wonderland, Bugs Bunny, Batman’s Joker, or Q in Star Trek. They mess with the world, break a few rules, upset most, but in the end, we discover something we hadn’t understood before.
So whether Tamkin intentionally helped Wilhelm in this way (I am leaning towards “yes” based on his own description as wanting to help him) is less important than that he did. What I think is a marvelous possibility about this is the reversal of the irony. We savvy readers see through Tamkin’s cons pretty fast, and eventually so does Wilhelm. But in this interpretation of Tamkin, which I think holds well—coheres–to the rest of the book, we are the ironic perceivers. We think the con is the truth of him and the advice is a smokescreen. But instead, the con is the ruse, the method that Tamkin uses to bring that smokescreen into a true focus. In this way, privilege and power in the world is not a virtue but a submission to the “pretender self” which has been fueled by “seize” the day. The way to discover “pluck,” at least for Wilhelm, is to dissolve privilege and power completely.
In the world of “seizing the day,” Wilhelm is impotent. He cannot make choices, and the ones he does struggle to make always fail. He does not play well at this game of de-humanizing, and that is to his credit. Through the whole book he is whining, suffering, lost, questioning, bewildered, angry. But this is “Tommy,” the false self he has created in order to play the game–importantly, in order to “act” the game. He could instead return to Wilhelm, make the one choice that matters, the internal one not to play.
Philosopher Krznaric tells us that “I choose, therefore I am.” At the center of carpe diem is choice, our choice to make the most of our lives, to discover what our hearts ultimately need, or to waste our lives in the material and transient, what in the end matters far less. Once our needs are met, once we reach a plateau of security, the correlation between happiness and wealth falls apart.
Suppose Wilhelm’s $700 hit big, and he could also begin to live a life of luxury as he continued to build his wealth. What would he have become? We can’t know, absolutely, but we can guess how Bellow might write it. What is likely, though, is that he would not find himself somewhere unexpected, shedding tears for shared human suffering. I suppose he might have written a profit-making book called Compassionate Capitalism. Bellow is offering us a morality test for carpe diem, and most of us are failing.
Answering the Question
So I have to say that not everyone has a reading of Bellow’s book that matches mine, not by a long shot, and that is pretty much as it should be. My take on it today is even a bit more optimistic than most readers who see in Bellow a book that–like The Great Gatsby–the too-romantic, too-feeling character who play-acts at being important ends up dead in a swimming pool.
(01:46):
But I want you to see plainly how we went about it. The first thing that makes our reading different is that you and I have been together for a few months now and reading and talking about the same ideas. We’ve got Horace and Marvell and Rilke in our heads, Dorian Gray, Star Trek, and even my experience playing jazz piano.
We’ve got some common tools in our literary toolbox, too (01:47):
dramatic irony, uncertainty, and a heritage of ekphrastic literature. And now, too, we’ve even got a process that is fairly simple in approach but will require lots of practice
Another thing we have in common that got us here are the questions I posed (01:48):
what makes this novel different from the others of its theme? Once posed, I set about trying to answer that difference. The questions we ask of great readings will deliver us different answers. And that’s not just okay, it’s essential. That’s how it works. Today, I absolutely limited our analysis into a very narrow beam, not appreciating more fully what Bellow has achieved. We could have spent an hour talking about Wilhelm’s clothing choices, or about a possible third identity for him, Velvel, the name given to him by his grandfather. And wow, once we add those issues and others in . . . . but not today.
We still have to resolve a few approaches, too. Why, for instance, am I asking for an interpretation to have Coherence when I also say that Uncertainty is a vital part of our meaning-making? That will all come as we move forward, but it’s a good question.
All this time we’ve been looking at what to do with the inevitable death that Marvell’s speaker dreads, with how to live our lives, how to approach the now of harvesting our days. Bellow says that the way of materialism is not only not it, but suggests that every dollar we have performing in it holds us back from discovering that harvest. I don’t know about that. But I do know that I outlined this episode over a coffee with a zero-calorie cinnamon flavor shot, and then followed it up with a very-bad-for-me Dunkin Donuts blueberry glaze. I didn’t need those, but I tried to slow down and enjoy them. And I know I am comfortable enough that I can buy at least these luxuries again, if I want them. I don’t know if Bellow is right, or even if that’s what he was imagining. He says that he was writing a novel with a broad, universal message. I’ll take him at his word, though we should never have to ask the writer about intention–it should be there for us to see on its own.
What we have in Bellow, though, is something we haven’t really met in any of the other works we’ve touched on (01:51):
a dose of practical reality, of some modern real-world applications of carpe diem. Marvell’s, Horace’s, and Rilke’s poems were more exercises in philosophy, Oscar Wilde and Star Trek offered us parables, fantasies; but Bellow's more complex carpe diem themes, grounded in social reality, psychology, and ethics–these are some real testing.
I was in a place of security when I put the Amway box into storage, and as I said, I didn’t fully appreciate for some years the skepticism, even prejudice, I would build against business schemes. I may have fallen to other tricks and scams later because the lesson was not so hard-learned as Wilhelm’s. But I did have some perceptivity develop.
The last part of my American Way story is about a friend of mine in middle and high school. We did projects together through school, two fairly bright students, and talked a lot about the ideas we met (01:53):
he was more math and science, I was more history and English, but we did well together. I’ll call him Dave. When we graduated, he had determined that he would join seminary school and minister. We fell out of touch sometime during college, though I knew secondhand that he had graduated and had gone on to working successfully with a community congregation.
Well, we ran into each other somewhere–was it at our 10-year high school reunion?–it was the late 1980s. And, we began to catch up. I was teaching in my first public school assignment, making what little money early-career teachers make. He asked if he could come over and talk about a “business opportunity.”
I remember us sitting down and having small talk, and he said that he wanted to see if, as a teacher, I wanted to make more money with a side job. Surprised and curious, I asked him to continue. He said that he had left his practice as a counselor and minister because he had grown disillusioned, that the people he met were not happy because they did not have what they needed. And he wanted to help people, to be able to give them what they needed. “Like what?” Well, for instance, he said, looking at my old television, wouldn’t you want a new stereo and TV? In my divinity work I couldn’t give them that. I remember joking that no, a 36” inch color screen was not something Jesus talked about. But however I said it, he didn’t seem to get the joke. He went on to talk about how he and I could help others get what they wanted to make them happy.
Now, my red flag warning signs were up, so I played it quiet and let him talk. After he began to break down the details, about candy and cosmetics and household product sales, I finally asked, “Dave, are you talking about Amway?” He balked, because he seemed surprised by my question. Then he said, “Well, um, we don’t use that name, anymore.” Sure enough, the American Way had split into multiple companies and was now into dozens of different industries. Without irony, Dave told me that at last, he could help people the way they needed to be helped.
I don’t remember how we ended our meet-up. I’m sure I made some agreeable sounds about “letting him know” if I was interested. We never spoke again.
I don’t think I need to say a thing more about this, do I?
But what we will talk about, next time, is the feedback I received on my poem which answers Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” and we’re going to talk more directly and practically about writing back, about taking what we’ve been thinking and reading and turning it into the first steps towards action. And this time, we’ll be looking at approaching the dreaded essay–maybe we’ll call it short-form non-fiction to ease the sting a bit.
We’re reaching the end of our carpe diem journey–we have the readings and the tools. It’s time to put it all to use.
What questions have been in your head? What challenges to anything we’ve read or I’ve spoken about? Put together a little list and have it ready! And somewhere in the week, too, be sure you
Go read something.
Outro
*Screech* Wait! I never got a chance to tell you my theory that Tamkin and Marvell’s speaker in “To His Coy Mistress” are the same person! Older dudes preying on younger folks with philosophies of time, both abusing the carpe diem arguments in manipulative and self-serving ways, both are obviously con men for readers to spot, and both are still ambiguous and hard to pin down. Bah! Another time. *Screech*
Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com. That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening!
Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles
Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski
Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.
5.15 Bellow
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The Dream
mI was 12 and my dad was getting increasingly anxious that I did not yet have a job. He wanted me to understand the value of work, of money, of responsibility. But didn’t he understand? I was busy! I had things to do! I couldn’t possibly take more hours from my busy 6th grade schedule to find work. Besides. I wasn’t old enough to work, yet, was I?
It didn’t matter. Some kids did lawn work. My friend Jon had a paper route. Keith was just getting started as a golf caddy.
And I don’t now remember how I got introduced to it, but I’ll guess it was a neighbor talking to my mother who said that her 20-something son had a great job selling cleaning products–he set his own hours, found clients, and then let the money come in. In fact, he was ready to have someone else get connected into his work. Maybe you guessed it. It was Amway.
Now, there was a ton I didn’t know about Amway Corporation. It was the 1970s, kids, and we didn’t have the internet. It would still be a few years down the road before the illegal dealings in the US and abroad emerged in this enormous company. The DeVos family here in Michigan were the owners, and we knew very little about them, either–who could have guessed that one would become a Secretary of Education under President Trump? But even by that time most people (except me and my dad, I think) knew that Amway was running a pyramid scheme and that suits had been filed by the Federal Trade Commission.
But hell, I was twelve, what did I know? I bought my first box of products to sell and it cost about $80 to get me started. (For you all calculating at home, today that’s close to $600 today.) My dad spent it and said it was a loan against my first profits.) And maybe it was fate. Maybe I was just bad at it. Maybe I didn’t have the spirit or motivation for sales. Maybe I was just an ugly little kid with glasses hovering around people’s porches with a cardboard box. But whatever it was, after a few small “pity sales,” the well ran dry quickly.
The box eventually went into storage and my parents slowly used some–but by no means all–of the products. It was a major loss, that first foray into business, and I won’t say that it had no effect on my future motivations or opinions about capitalism. A few years later I would read Death of a Salesman and I knew that if I wasn’t careful, I’d end up like Willy Loman.
Now there’s more to this story, and I’ll tell the rest if we get a chance along the way, here, but I’ve been reflecting a bit on this little brush with risky business schemes and get-rich-quick models while I’ve been reading Saul Bellow’s short novel, Seize the Day. There are parallels enough, but what I’m fascinated by right now is irony. Bellow wrote his book in 1956, Miller wrote about his traveling salesman Willy in 1949–in fact, there are dozens of novels and stories of failed and bogus business doings in the early 20th century beginning with Frank Norris’s The Octopus in 1901 and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle just a few years later.
What would it take, then? I mean, knowing that the modernist art and literature was highly and publicly critical of shady business practice, that Saul Bellow had written about schemes and scams in Seize the Day in 1956, that only three years later a family–completely without a sense of irony, I suspect–founded a company like theirs and called it Amway?
It would be years before the Amway stories started to appear in book form, and I will admit I have read absolutely none of them. Founder Rich DeVos has written at last two (00:10):
Simply Rich, and Compassionate Capitalism. Amway fan James Robinson called his book on Amway nothing less than Empire of Freedom. And while there are a few that are exposes, the best sellers praise the company with other titles like American Victory, and–it’s true–Jesus Was a Double Diamond, referring to the highest level of achievement in Amway sales..
I’m just glad they err on humility and not hyperbole. But that is the tradition, isn’t it? Some people are making money, and a lot of it. The company is now worth over $9 billion, which is not bad for starting out selling soaps. Ah,this is the dream. And they called themselves Amway.
Because, if you didn’t know, Amway is a portmanteau, the combination of two words. Was it pride? Or mere shamelessness? Or maybe they just started out with an honest dream. I couldn’t say–I haven’t read the books, remember? (Probably from a childhood shame.) But the Amway portmanteau is obvious once you know it’s there. It’s everything we’re talking about today. It’s quite simply — the American Way.
Intro Theme
This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.
I’m Steve Chisnell, and today we’re deciding how we spend this single day.
A Glowing Future
Saul Bellow’s story, written in 1956, is hardly the first to attack our notion of the American Dream, that Puritan-founded belief of “a kind of romantic expectation, a belief in the possibility of achieving some kind of glowing future through hard work and sincere devotion.” Let me offer you that definition again, because there is a lot going on there. Think of it as a promise, founded on the ethics of American Puritan communities early in our history (00:17):
“A kind of romantic expectation, a belief in the possibility of achieving some kind of glowing future through hard work and sincere devotion.”
That definition came again from my dear old American literature professor Walter Brylowski. Careful listeners may remember him as “He of the Classroom Slap” fame.
If we are sincere, hard-working, and devoted to our work, we can have a kind of ‘double-diamond’ glowing future; but Brylowski’s definition also names it as a “romantic expectation,” a dream or subjective wish more than empirical reality. The truth is that very few of us reach that imagined place, even those of us who get the money we long for. Now, I know there are several studies out there about this (00:19):
some say a rise in happiness goes up with wealth but levels off after a certain income; others say there is no plateau–it just keeps going up. I’m interested in an adversarial study, which combined the Wharton and Princeton studies, suggesting that the relationship is far more complex than any one-to-one correspondence. It definitely shows that for many people, more money creates more misery.
More importantly to our idea of the American Dream, though, the study recognizes that it isn’t exactly “happiness” that we’re lining money up with. If we define “happiness” as only the absence of want, the suffering from need, then that bar is pretty low, and it’s no wonder that most hit a plateau. Once our basic needs are met with some security that they will continue to be, we can turn to other things for real contentment, for meaningful lives. That makes sense. So while whatever is meant by the American Dream’s “glowing future” might be unclear, the definition works from the premise that everyone who dreams it is somewhere below that plateau, still in places of insecurity or anxiety.
And here we are, most of America and most of the world, because generations ago, the American Dream began to export its romantic ambitions. Maybe someday we’ll do some math in how, even with the US mostly under the happiness plateau, we consume around 25% of the world’s resources with about 5% of its population. But math isn’t important right now, I guess. We’ll just say that, so long as the American Dream has been offered to us, most haven’t made it (00:21):
but, we are urged, “Just bend your head back down to hard work and sincere devotion,” and it will likely turn out fine.
But as I said, Saul Bellow was hardly the first to cry BS at this idea. We’d already had Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and even Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” by then. Franz Kafka’s works had been translated into English for some time, as had the Russians Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. French philosophers Camus and Sartre were circulating their existentialism in English by then, too. There was plenty of grousing and despair to go around.
So I’m going to ask two key questions, I think, as we move into our discussion of Bellow’s book today:
1. What is Bellow doing that these others haven’t? (Because we will easily find attacks on American capitalism here.)
2. What exactly does Bellow expect us to think from our “Seizing” of the Day?
There is a third question hovering in my mind, too, though, as we move forward. What is the difference between the American Dream and the American Way? Is that important? It is for my 12-year-old business kid me; and it might be for others. Just putting a pin in that for now . . .
But we’re in a very good place to think about this, aren’t we? For those of you new to the podcast today, maybe a little less so, but you’ll be fine! For those who have been with us through much of this journey so far, we’ve got quite an arsenal of carpe diem tools and literary history and approaches at our disposal. The only thing we’ve read on this topic more recent than Bellow has been a Star Trek episode; but everything else is fair game as we consider and compare, even Krzanaric’s thinking on it, since he also is looking at the long philosophical trends out there.
So let’s get into it. And if you already know the story, go ahead and skip this next chapter of the podcast unless you’d like a refresher. Then we’ll come back and see what we can do with our questions.
Bellow’s Seize the Day in Brief
The entire book takes place in a single day, probably our titular day that needs “seizing.” Poor Wilhelm Adler has quit his job after being cheated there, he’s separated from his wife, paying more and more money for their kids, and has taken a room in the same New York hotel where his wealthy and retired father is now living. There’s a distraught relationship here, because Wilhelm feels dependent on dad, but for what is more complicated (00:30):
the old guy is quite content sharing neither feelings nor money with his failure son.
I say “failure,” though, not necessarily to blame Wilhelm, but to underline that this is what everyone–including Wilhelm himself–thinks of him. He failed to follow parent’s advice and go into medicine, choosing instead to try acting (00:31):
and there he was run over and ignored by a fast-talking agent. He lost his job and marriage, he’s hemorrhaging money, and he’s come to New York looking for . . . anything at all. Yes, Wilhelm is gullible, buys into schemes and dreams too easily, feels obligated and trapped, increasingly desperate in his appeals to a father who has done with him.
This desperation has him turn to a “Doctor” Tamkin who claims to be a psychologist, but is equally a philosopher, gambler, financial wizard, and probably con man. Many know this and talk about it openly, but when Tamkin offers Wilhelm a Wall Street investment chance in lard futures–no, that’s right, he hopes to make quick money from speculating on pig fat–he gives Tamkin his last $700, the equivalent of about $8000 today. Hoo . . .
And why? Along the way, Tamkin tells Wilhelm that he must “seize the day,” focus on the now, not get anxious about the future. The present is the only reality. He also tells Wilhelm that people have two souls, the “true soul” and “the pretender” soul, this last one tied to vanity and ego; it prevents the true soul the opportunity for happiness and love. I should point out here that Wilhelm is not our main guy’s social name. He changed his name for his failed acting career and never really left it. Born Wilhelm Adler, he changed his name to “actor” Tommy Wilhelm; it’s another reason Wilhelm’s father disapproves of him.
And, what can we say? Wilhelm loses everything even while the expensive hotel bills pile up and his wife wants more money for his kids. Tamkin vanishes, his dad rejects him, and Wilhelm stumbles through the city in despair, finding himself in the closing scene at a stranger’s funeral service. Standing at the coffin, he begins to weep, loudly, the only one in the room to do so. Bellow’s closing lines are powerful and bewildering:
The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm’s blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need.
Tragedy? Awakening? Catharsis? Disintegration? Seizing the Day? Hmm.
Capitalism and Alienation
To describe the world of American capitalism as dehumanizing is not a heavy lift. It is in the nature of a competitive environment to “beat” one’s competition, to tear one down so we can step up. Now this isn’t an economics class and I’m not going to make any statements of profitability and success measurements, the needs for networks and collaborations, and the like. But our global dialogue has for more than a century been filled both with the narrative of capital and the narratives of resistance to its ideologies. And Bellow is no stranger to them.
The modern life of 1950s New York still feels familiar to us (00:39):
mechanical (now perhaps digital), full of wires and brick, and artificial. Bellow frequently describes it ironically with nature metaphors
Wilhelm-slash-Tommy is here, too, of course, trying to understand it, but it’s very clear he is inept. Tommy has in his own words “escaped” from the brow-beating terrors of his wife, but she has the home which he still provides for but does not share. He’s been fed to this city, then, one of competition, domination, status-seeking, and deception. We could describe the characters in Bellow’s world as humanistic, perhaps, before calling them human. His father refuses to offer sentiment or be caught up in the follies of his son. Even at the end, with all of it gone, Wilkie asks for a single word of kindness, and his father’s
mouth opened, wide, dark, twisted, and he said to Wilhelm, “You want to make yourself into my cross. But I am not going to pick up a cross. I’ll see you dead, Wilky, by Christ, before I let you do that to me.”
All of this contempt, but when it comes to talking about his son to others, his father steps easily into this social role of status, bragging about how he is making close to six figures in salary.
So the machine of capitalism works on all of these successful men. They prey on each other, they intimidate and parade before each other, they never show emotion to each other which reveals vulnerability, and they never offer secrets. And we’ll get to Tamkin in a bit, but he says of the markets (00:43):
"One thing should be clear to you by now. Money- making is aggression . . . People come to the market to kill. They say, ‘I'm going to make a killing.' It's not accidental."
Hmm. Nope, this should all be familiar to us. The world of money-making is not pretty, it requires a certain degree of perception and bloodthirstiness not to mention a will to self-suppression, and we sign up for it, because we believe it leads us to happiness.
Of course, a key irony is that that happiness comes at the price of alienation. We become distanced, separated, or isolated, lost in the absurdity of it. This is Wilhelm’s problem, certainly. We readers see Wilhelm’s danger in trusting Tamkin from the beginning, the danger in gambling everything in the stock market. So powerful is that capitalist narrative that we have normalized it, “the price of doing business” requires a bit more savviness than Wilhelm has ever had. We’re taught from the beginning not to trust strangers, but in this world everyone is a stranger, even our fathers and former wives.
So we’re really met with two dysfunctions, aren’t we? On the one hand the urban world Wilhelm is in–fragmented and predatory–dehumanizes those who succeed in it and runs over those who do not. On the other, our middle-aged hero is pathetically ill-equipped to adapt–has always been run over–and spends a fair amount of the time groveling for help. Yes, he needs money from his father, but he says clearly that there are other things a father can give to his son which are worth more. As baldly as his father rejects the money pleas, it is this last request that so dramatically stirs him to cruelty. We’re tempted as we read to find both pathetic people–one too cruel and unfeeling, the other too feeling and naive–but we can’t miss the fact that each exists this way only beneath this modern materialistic landscape where estrangement is the norm. Bellow offers us two men (00:46):
both victims.
I want to point out, too, that Bellow does all this with superb skill. Father and son are a microcosm of the larger society, of course. But since most of the novel is told with a narrow omniscience, offering us mostly Wilhelm’s stream-of-consciousness thinking, we see his struggles in distinguishing what is from what it seems to be, reality from appearance. We also occasionally get insights into his father’s thoughts, but these are usually only to reveal that what Wilhelm believes is true is not what his father believes. In brief, like so many modernist novels and so much literature in the great sweep of it, this is a novel built upon dramatic irony. As Wilhelm struggles to understand, he is our ironic or limited perceiver. We know with some assuredness that this is the journey we’re on, then (00:47):
not just what happens to him, but whether or not in the end, he will come to understand.
A further irony is that much of the ‘message’ that Wilhelm needs to hear, perhaps, comes from the very man that is setting him up for failure. The con man Tamkin, an enormous presence in the novel, seems to maneuver many people into positions where he can financially benefit. Wilhelm sees through him frequently, privately calling him a liar and a phony as he spins stories and puffs himself up, but none of it is enough for him to back away from the stock deal. Tamkin labels himself a doctor, a healer, a giver, a mentor for Wilhelm, and we will yet talk about whether those labels are merely false or perhaps ironically true.
Seizing and Seducing
Now we can’t pretend we’ll examine everything in this novel. For a short read, we could ourselves spend many hours here working through its facets, but we’re today only on a search for two (maybe three) questions (00:50):
What makes Bellow’s take on capitalism unique, and how does this connect to our discussion of carpe diem?
So far, my description of the novel’s dehumanization and alienation in the modern business world is absolutely parallel to just about everything else out there with a similar message. Wilhelm gets run over; in Steinbeck, the Joad family gets run over; in Miller’s play, Willy Loman gets run over; in Gatsby, Myrtle quite literally gets run over. How many times do we need to see it?
There’s a certain catharsis in tragedy we can relate to, I know. Even Aristotle said so. It weirdly feels good to see others suffer, because perhaps it eases that personal alienation we feel (00:52):
someone else is also getting run over, and the car that hits them is bigger than the one that keeps hitting me–and theirs keeps rolling back and forth. Hmm. Or maybe that’s in Stephen King’s Christine or maybe Final Destination. It was definitely in one of the Purge movies.
But we all have to learn this sooner or later in the world of materialism we have inherited, right?
When I was 12, I still hadn’t quite learned it. Stuck with a barely-sold box of weirdly-labeled cleaning products, I was a little Wilhelm (00:54):
totally unprepared, gullible enough to believe a guy not quite twice my age across the street, and not enough will power to do more than nod to the deal and finally surrender to my failures in shame.
But I wasn’t quite done with the American Way, though I suspected there was a secret that I wasn’t quite understanding, a trick to the success of it, if only I could grasp it. I needed motivation, and the guy across the street invited me to an Amway meeting. My dad drove me there and we sat near the back of a rented school auditorium one night to learn the secrets. My memory of the meeting is not super clear, but I remember a band playing–or at least drums and cymbals, building up to the speakers. There was a suit-wearing master of ceremonies who gave us all motivational ideas that the crowd responded to in unison. They had been to these meetings several times, caught up in the moment. Then we heard stories about successful people and how good they felt after the first $100, the first $1000, the first $10,000.
Yes, they said, this was the place to be. The place to get rich, just for a few hours of work each week! Several stood up in the auditorium and told their stories, too, all of us cheering, I guess, because we wanted to be like them. I know now more about the script and buzz phrases they had used, but then, all I noticed was the fanfare. Everything was big, bigger, a hype. It was somewhere between a political rally and a religious Chautauqua tent. I don’t remember if God specifically was mentioned or shouted at the meeting, but He might well have been.
But for whatever reason, the meeting scared me a bit. It felt bigger than I was ready for, and perhaps that is what saved me. For my dad, he finally recognized the pyramid scheme that was in practice, how I could sell products for a few bucks, but the “real money” was always in getting someone below me to do it, just how my trusted neighbor had set me up to sell in his network. Unlike Wilky’s dad, mine seemed okay with quietly setting the box aside, in storage, and I would not repay the business loan. Yes, we were out almost the same amount of money that Wilhelm put in the stock market–his $700 and our equivalent of about $600–but we were in a place different from Bellow’s characters. My dad was by no means wealthy; but we were secure enough that we could weather the loss.
It wasn’t the last business deal I would fail in, but it was one that began the next half-century so far of skepticism. Lesson learned.
Does Wilhelm learn, at last? What are we to make of his closing collapse, his public tears at a stranger’s funeral? Here are those closing lines again:
The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm’s blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need.
He is at religious service. Flowers and lights fuse in a kind of ecstacy, blinding him. Between his own tears and the sea-like music pouring in, he may be drowning in the experience. His tears are a “great happy oblivion” but also a sinking further into sorrow, towards a consummation. A consummation is a completion, a fulfillment, the “con-” of ‘altogether’ with the “summa” of ‘total.” And it is not a consummation of his heart’s desire but of his “heart’s ultimate need.”
Let’s note first how lines like these are so utterly different from everything we’ve been talking about in the urban world of business. Tamkin has told us about a “true soul” and a “pretender soul,” and if this is true (feels real), then it’s possible that Wilhelm has found that true soul. But isn’t it also possible, the simplest route, that Wilhelm has simply witnessed death, the ultimate end, and is crying in despair that this is all there is, the great angst of death we’ve been talking about so often?
To answer this, I need to take us back to the process of interpretation we’ve been putting together.
So far, we’ve talked about three steps (01:04):
Notice, Significance, and Pattern. Start with what you notice, what stands out, because we trust you as a reader to recognize something as important, even if you don’t know immediately why. We might put together a list of things we notice in a reading
Well, yes, maybe. In terms of the music “pouring in” we also have the word “oblivion” which could be a kind of death. The music and lights and flowers could also represent a divine light at the moment of death. Of course, he’s at a funeral, so he is literally looking at death. It’s a fit! These all come together in a pattern, so we’re most of the way there for a meaning to the section.
And now we come to the last of the four steps for reading interpretation. And that is Coherence. Does the meaning “hold together” with everything else we are discovering about the text? For instance, if I had focused only on all of the wet images and decided that the Pattern is that Wilhelm wants to die by drowning, this could work only until we tested it against the lights and ecstasy and ultimate need. And oops, it’s a cool pattern we found, but it doesn’t hold together with all of the other images, so we’ll need to revise our thinking. Go back and try again, looking for other things to notice, other patterns, to see what sticks together and what does not.
This is where we are with this final “heart’s ultimate need.” If he is simply falling apart in despair, broken completely and at last, how is this possibly a “heart’s ultimate need”? To answer, I’m speculating that the meaning of the “true soul” as named by Tamkin may fit, may cohere, to this interpretation. It’s not that Wilhelm dies, but that he finally, maybe, sheds his “pretender soul,” the one that everyone else in New York has adopted and made firmly predatory. That dies. And let’s notice, too, that Wilhelm doesn’t sink into “deeper sorrow.” That’s a misreading, and we have to be careful not to make the text say something it doesn’t. It says, “deeper than sorrow,” as if he is going to a place beyond even sorrow and despair, somewhere towards this consummation which isn’t sorrow but something else. It’s something profound, something emotional, something true against all of the cons and false images he has endured.
Does he learn to love the humanity around him? Does he finally connect with others, even if it is in a place of grief? Does he finally realize that playing the game all this way towards inevitable death is its own sorrow? That something else is more important? Is he finally bringing together his divided self, Tommy and Wilky and Wilhelm? Is it even an affirmation not of death, but of rebirth? How do we know which is meant?
Let’s go back to Tamkin’s truths for a moment, because he has already given us some clues from his various philosophical musings. At one point, he gives Wilhelm a poem that he has written for him. It closes with the stanza:
Look then right before thee.
Open thy eyes and see.
At the foot of Mt. Serenity
Is thy cradle to eternity.
Wilhelm is angry at the poem, and not just because it’s bad writing. But now, here at the end, looking at a coffin or cradle to eternity, does this hold together, too? Can Wilhelm finally put to death his “pretender self” so that his “true self” may rise, be born, to a new life? Here’s the rest of the poem. How well does it fit this final scene?
If thee thyself couldst only see
Thy greatness that is and yet to be,
Thou would feel joy–beauty–what ecstasy,
They are at the feet, earth-moon-sea, the trinity.
Why-forth then dost thou tarry
And partake thee only of the crust
And skim the earth’s surface narry
When all creations art thy just?
Seek ye then that which art not there
In thine own glory let thyself rest.
(01:25):
Witness. Thy power is not bare.
Thou art King. Thou art at thy best.
Look then right before thee.
Open thy eyes and see.
At the foot of Mt. Serenity
Is thy cradle to eternity.
The poem is subtitled “Ism vs. Hism.” Belief vs. Self? Let the true self be born and rule our lives. That way lies joy, not the surfaces or crust of life, the appearances.
When Wilhelm and we readers receive the poem, we are equally dismayed. We worry for the stocks, though by now we can anticipate the calamity ahead. We want Tamkin to be straight, his ruse revealed, but he defers with strange made-up travel stories and strange gift poems. He says he has been treating Wilhelm psychologically for some time, and we scoff. And yet, only when we look at the final scene, the breakdown at the funeral of a stranger, do we see the possibility that con man Tamkin was actually leading him here, to a place of ecstatic happiness and consummation. It is sudden, traumatizing, but seemingly final and, in Bellow’s word, “needed.”
Ethics of a Machine
The modernist machine of industry, profit, and machismo (all of the women are at home if they are not mistresses in Bellow) leaves us nothing happy. Got it. But what, after all this, does Bellow mean by his title? An announcement of subject or an interpretation of it?
We’ve already divided the translations of carpe diem into the “seize” camp and the “pluck” camp. You and I, we’re now on Team Pluck. We’re not using this ‘seize’ thing anymore, for reasons which seem to match exactly what people like Marvell and Bellow and Roman Krznaric all warn us about. Tamkin is once again our proponent of seizing the day, and seemingly without irony.
But we do have to be aware of the hugely ironic position Tamkin has. He is the man who seems to be elusive, living a projected or pretender self; a con man. He appears to idiosyncratically help Wilhelm with advice though he is also leading him down a path of financial ruin, even as he has done for many before him. He uses the carnivorous market system to destroy Wilhelm’s last wealth but opens up for him the possibility for renewal.
He speaks of seizing the moment when Wilhelm should jump into business speculation, into investing, but really, what he wants for Wilhelm, is that he should “pluck” or “harvest” of life what is there. Wilhelm understands–and says several times–that he cannot “seize the day” as other successful people have because he has almost nothing with which to do it. He’s down to his last $700. But he goes forward, seemingly not because he wills himself but because he does not have the will to defy Tamkin. Ironically, it is not Wilhelm’s last $700 which places him in a position to move to his “heart’s ultimate need” but the absence of it. Perhaps even a single dollar is enough to keep the capitalist game of “seizing” going for us.
Did Tamkin do all this intentionally? It’s possible. We aren’t given him in enough detail to know. He appears at this critical moment in Wilhelm’s life and then utterly vanishes (even emptying out his hotel room as if planned). He’s elusive; he’s a con artist; he’s a philosopher; he’s a trickster figure.
The Trickster archetype in literature is another symbol we will have to explore at more length another time, but he’s generally a trouble-making, cunning, or humorous character who upsets social norms. Trickster figures are often paradoxical and they are almost always transformational. Think of Loki in mythology (less in Marvell), Bart Simpson, the Chesire Cat in Alice’s Wonderland, Bugs Bunny, Batman’s Joker, or Q in Star Trek. They mess with the world, break a few rules, upset most, but in the end, we discover something we hadn’t understood before.
So whether Tamkin intentionally helped Wilhelm in this way (I am leaning towards “yes” based on his own description as wanting to help him) is less important than that he did. What I think is a marvelous possibility about this is the reversal of the irony. We savvy readers see through Tamkin’s cons pretty fast, and eventually so does Wilhelm. But in this interpretation of Tamkin, which I think holds well—coheres–to the rest of the book, we are the ironic perceivers. We think the con is the truth of him and the advice is a smokescreen. But instead, the con is the ruse, the method that Tamkin uses to bring that smokescreen into a true focus. In this way, privilege and power in the world is not a virtue but a submission to the “pretender self” which has been fueled by “seize” the day. The way to discover “pluck,” at least for Wilhelm, is to dissolve privilege and power completely.
In the world of “seizing the day,” Wilhelm is impotent. He cannot make choices, and the ones he does struggle to make always fail. He does not play well at this game of de-humanizing, and that is to his credit. Through the whole book he is whining, suffering, lost, questioning, bewildered, angry. But this is “Tommy,” the false self he has created in order to play the game–importantly, in order to “act” the game. He could instead return to Wilhelm, make the one choice that matters, the internal one not to play.
Philosopher Krznaric tells us that “I choose, therefore I am.” At the center of carpe diem is choice, our choice to make the most of our lives, to discover what our hearts ultimately need, or to waste our lives in the material and transient, what in the end matters far less. Once our needs are met, once we reach a plateau of security, the correlation between happiness and wealth falls apart.
Suppose Wilhelm’s $700 hit big, and he could also begin to live a life of luxury as he continued to build his wealth. What would he have become? We can’t know, absolutely, but we can guess how Bellow might write it. What is likely, though, is that he would not find himself somewhere unexpected, shedding tears for shared human suffering. I suppose he might have written a profit-making book called Compassionate Capitalism. Bellow is offering us a morality test for carpe diem, and most of us are failing.
Answering the Question
So I have to say that not everyone has a reading of Bellow’s book that matches mine, not by a long shot, and that is pretty much as it should be. My take on it today is even a bit more optimistic than most readers who see in Bellow a book that–like The Great Gatsby–the too-romantic, too-feeling character who play-acts at being important ends up dead in a swimming pool.
(01:46):
But I want you to see plainly how we went about it. The first thing that makes our reading different is that you and I have been together for a few months now and reading and talking about the same ideas. We’ve got Horace and Marvell and Rilke in our heads, Dorian Gray, Star Trek, and even my experience playing jazz piano.
We’ve got some common tools in our literary toolbox, too (01:47):
dramatic irony, uncertainty, and a heritage of ekphrastic literature. And now, too, we’ve even got a process that is fairly simple in approach but will require lots of practice
Another thing we have in common that got us here are the questions I posed (01:48):
what makes this novel different from the others of its theme? Once posed, I set about trying to answer that difference. The questions we ask of great readings will deliver us different answers. And that’s not just okay, it’s essential. That’s how it works. Today, I absolutely limited our analysis into a very narrow beam, not appreciating more fully what Bellow has achieved. We could have spent an hour talking about Wilhelm’s clothing choices, or about a possible third identity for him, Velvel, the name given to him by his grandfather. And wow, once we add those issues and others in . . . . but not today.
We still have to resolve a few approaches, too. Why, for instance, am I asking for an interpretation to have Coherence when I also say that Uncertainty is a vital part of our meaning-making? That will all come as we move forward, but it’s a good question.
All this time we’ve been looking at what to do with the inevitable death that Marvell’s speaker dreads, with how to live our lives, how to approach the now of harvesting our days. Bellow says that the way of materialism is not only not it, but suggests that every dollar we have performing in it holds us back from discovering that harvest. I don’t know about that. But I do know that I outlined this episode over a coffee with a zero-calorie cinnamon flavor shot, and then followed it up with a very-bad-for-me Dunkin Donuts blueberry glaze. I didn’t need those, but I tried to slow down and enjoy them. And I know I am comfortable enough that I can buy at least these luxuries again, if I want them. I don’t know if Bellow is right, or even if that’s what he was imagining. He says that he was writing a novel with a broad, universal message. I’ll take him at his word, though we should never have to ask the writer about intention–it should be there for us to see on its own.
What we have in Bellow, though, is something we haven’t really met in any of the other works we’ve touched on (01:51):
a dose of practical reality, of some modern real-world applications of carpe diem. Marvell’s, Horace’s, and Rilke’s poems were more exercises in philosophy, Oscar Wilde and Star Trek offered us parables, fantasies; but Bellow's more complex carpe diem themes, grounded in social reality, psychology, and ethics–these are some real testing.
I was in a place of security when I put the Amway box into storage, and as I said, I didn’t fully appreciate for some years the skepticism, even prejudice, I would build against business schemes. I may have fallen to other tricks and scams later because the lesson was not so hard-learned as Wilhelm’s. But I did have some perceptivity develop.
The last part of my American Way story is about a friend of mine in middle and high school. We did projects together through school, two fairly bright students, and talked a lot about the ideas we met (01:53):
he was more math and science, I was more history and English, but we did well together. I’ll call him Dave. When we graduated, he had determined that he would join seminary school and minister. We fell out of touch sometime during college, though I knew secondhand that he had graduated and had gone on to working successfully with a community congregation.
Well, we ran into each other somewhere–was it at our 10-year high school reunion?–it was the late 1980s. And, we began to catch up. I was teaching in my first public school assignment, making what little money early-career teachers make. He asked if he could come over and talk about a “business opportunity.”
I remember us sitting down and having small talk, and he said that he wanted to see if, as a teacher, I wanted to make more money with a side job. Surprised and curious, I asked him to continue. He said that he had left his practice as a counselor and minister because he had grown disillusioned, that the people he met were not happy because they did not have what they needed. And he wanted to help people, to be able to give them what they needed. “Like what?” Well, for instance, he said, looking at my old television, wouldn’t you want a new stereo and TV? In my divinity work I couldn’t give them that. I remember joking that no, a 36” inch color screen was not something Jesus talked about. But however I said it, he didn’t seem to get the joke. He went on to talk about how he and I could help others get what they wanted to make them happy.
Now, my red flag warning signs were up, so I played it quiet and let him talk. After he began to break down the details, about candy and cosmetics and household product sales, I finally asked, “Dave, are you talking about Amway?” He balked, because he seemed surprised by my question. Then he said, “Well, um, we don’t use that name, anymore.” Sure enough, the American Way had split into multiple companies and was now into dozens of different industries. Without irony, Dave told me that at last, he could help people the way they needed to be helped.
I don’t remember how we ended our meet-up. I’m sure I made some agreeable sounds about “letting him know” if I was interested. We never spoke again.
I don’t think I need to say a thing more about this, do I?
But what we will talk about, next time, is the feedback I received on my poem which answers Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” and we’re going to talk more directly and practically about writing back, about taking what we’ve been thinking and reading and turning it into the first steps towards action. And this time, we’ll be looking at approaching the dreaded essay–maybe we’ll call it short-form non-fiction to ease the sting a bit.
We’re reaching the end of our carpe diem journey–we have the readings and the tools. It’s time to put it all to use.
What questions have been in your head? What challenges to anything we’ve read or I’ve spoken about? Put together a little list and have it ready! And somewhere in the week, too, be sure you
Go read something.
Outro
*Screech* Wait! I never got a chance to tell you my theory that Tamkin and Marvell’s speaker in “To His Coy Mistress” are the same person! Older dudes preying on younger folks with philosophies of time, both abusing the carpe diem arguments in manipulative and self-serving ways, both are obviously con men for readers to spot, and both are still ambiguous and hard to pin down. Bah! Another time. *Screech*
Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com. That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening!
Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles
Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski
Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.
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