by Harry Heuser
[This essay was written in the autumn of 1993 for Twentieth Century American Literature, an undergraduate course conducted by Mardi Valgemae (1935-2020) at Lehman College, CUNY. It has been edited for publication here.]
The Adolescent Son in Mid-Life Crisis: Adulthood in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956)
What does it mean to have reached adulthood and to have passed the stage that is often referred to as the formative years? Is adulthood a phase adhering to observable patterns comparable to the stages that mark human development in childhood? Or is it an invention, a construct imposed on nature to get a handle on an otherwise unstructured, unpredictable existence—that long, uncertain stretch to certain death?
“If the term ‘adult’ means anything,” Wallace Stegner argues, “its meaning must be social” (227). Questions about the signification of adulthood, especially male adulthood, have often been raised in the works of twentieth-century American authors who comment on a society obsessed with progress and growth associated with youth and terrified by the decline or disorder that is often perceived to be an inevitable result of the aging process and the gradual shutting down of our bodies.
According to Kenneth S. Lynn, “American literature in the early twentieth century was torn between a willingness to confront ‘what it means to be a man’ and a desire to postpone that confrontation as long as possible.” Lynn argues that it is
as if an adult principle and an adolescent principle were locked in a Manichaean struggle for possession of our literary souls. The struggle vacillates back and forth, with some authors even divided against themselves—Saul Bellow, for example, who scorns “[…] the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about Inauthenticity and Forlornness,” but can’t break free of them in his own books for more than two chapters at a time. (246)
As the debates surrounding the meaning of adulthood is at the core of Saul Bellow’s third novel, Seize the Day (1956), it is worth considering whether its author seeks to establish an “adult principle,” whether it is argued to be locked in a “Manichean struggle” with an adolescent one, and whether adulthood emerges as the malevolent contender of youth.
Jonathan Wilson contends that “adversaries” in Bellow’s fiction, “whether young or old, male or female, are associated with the adult, male world, another way of saying that they are coldhearted.” Wilson concludes that “to be an ‘adult’ in Bellow’s world” means to “control your own fate but has little else to commend it” (76). Wilson neglects to note that the terms “adult” or “adulthood” are missing in Seize the Day. The novel avoids a strict adult-child dichotomy through references to all stages of the life cycle, from infancy to death, a lifetime of experiences whose complexities and contradictions are heightened for the reader due to the compactness of the narrative.
Throughout the course of a single day, Tommy Wilhelm is faced with a series of major life crises, from trust issues to isolation, from role confusion to stagnation, to use dichotomies established in Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development. In Childhood in Society (1950), Erikson argues that
only a gradually accruing sense of identity, based on the experience of social health and cultural solidarity at the end of each major childhood crisis, promises that periodical balance in human life which—in integration of the ego stages—makes for a sense of humanity. But wherever this sense is lost, wherever integrity yields to despair and disgust, wherever generativity yields to stagnation, intimacy to isolation, and identity to confusion, an array of associated infantile fears are apt to become mobilized: for only an identity safely anchored in the “patrimony” of a cultural identity can produce a workable psychosocial equilibrium. (412)
Bellow’s substitutions for the terms “adult” and “adulthood”—“normal” and “the world’s business”—suggests that the novelist considers “adulthood” to be a social construct, although not necessarily a “workable” one. Critics who have called Wilhelm “Bellow’s worst loser” (Gullette 127) or an “overgrown child” (Wilson 97) appear to accept conventional definitions of maturity, whereas Seize the Day invites us to challenge such views, and with it the notion of an identity “safely anchored” in patrimony.
Forty-one years old at the time Seize the Day was first published, Bellow chose the forty-four-year-old Tommy Wilhelm as a representative of his own age group, which, in our attempts to systematize actualities and categorize individuals, has come to be known as middle-aged. In their forties, although legally quite clearly “of age,” individuals are generally assumed to enter some sort of limbo, a transitional stage that appears to be ripe for major confrontations.
Aware of his position—“More than half my life is over. More than half” (Bellow 1958)—Wilhelm is intimidated by remarks about his age. The very “hint” about it “hurt him” (1949), and he is insecure in any “in between” situation that defies boundaries and binaries: “[I]t was the punishment of hell itself not to be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well. The fathers were no fathers and the sons no sons” (1974).
By trying to arrive at a definition of self through comparisons with others, especially with considerably older men, Wilhelm places himself in a dreaded middle position. Even a potentially favorable comparison, leading him to the conclusion that “[h]e was comparatively young,” does not provide much comfort, as it does not center him in society but instead makes him feel “out of place” (1930). Rather than envisioning himself as a mediator between young and old, Wilhelm feels mean and middling by most standards.
William is even envious of his father’s looks, of the physical appearances of a septuagenarian. He believes that people consider the “handsome old doctor” to be “clean and immaculate” (1934-35), whereas his own “big, indecently big, spoiled body” looked like that of a “hippopotamus” (1944).
Such moments of self-devaluation are not the sign of a troubling mid-life transition alone, but the result of continuous friction in a to Wilhelm oppressive father-son relationship. During adolescence, Wilhelm had tried to “cast off his father’s name, and with it his father’s opinion of him.” Yet despite his desire to “be born differently,” which led to a brief and unsuccessful career as a movie actor, Wilhelm merely managed to make “a gesture.” And, far from the intended “bid for liberty,” his assumed name, the division of the self into multiple personae—“Adler being in his mind the title of the species, Tommy the freedom of the person. But Wilky was his inescapable self” (1942)—results in a profound identity crisis:
This large […] abrupt personality named Wilhelm, or Tommy, was here, […] this Wilky, or Tommy Wilhelm, forty-four years old, father of two sons, […] was assigned to be the carrier of a load which was his own self, his characteristic self. There was no figure or estimate for the value of this load. But it is probably exaggerated by the subject, T. W. […]. Who has to believe that he can know why he exists. Though he has never seriously tried to find out why. (1949)
What emerges, then, is not so much a “Manichaean struggle” between the principles of adolescence and adulthood but a struggle between society and self, as exemplified by the inseparable yet intolerable bond between father and son.
Wilhelm’s father, “a master of social behavior” (1943) who disapproves of his son’s life style, his “kid’s talk” (1948) and “dirty habits” (1945), has unquestionably been a role model to his son, who frequently reminds himself of his own age—“Wilhelm once more said to himself, ‘But man! You’re not a kid. Even then [i.e., when his mother died, more than twenty years earlier] you weren’t a kid’” [1944])—or finds fault with his own behavior. At a brokerage office, realizing the loss of a recent investment, he notices that he counts the figures “like a schoolboy at an exam,” and cautions himself not to “break down in front of them like a kid” (1985).
At one point, he remarks that “[e]veryone was supposed to have money” (1944), but corrects this statement later: “It is my childish mind that thinks people are ready to give it just because you need it” (1979). Although the expression “It is my childish mind that thinks” (instead of “it is childish of me to think”), may seem to support the idea of an inner struggle between child and adult, it is rather an indication of Wilhelm’s conscious or unconscious adoption of the word “childish” into his personal repertoire of terms for socially unacceptable behavior. It also suggests that Wilhelm thinks of his mind as something not quite under his control, as is illustrated by the statement “Wilhelm believed that when he put his mind to it he could have perfect and even distinguished manners, outdoing his father” (1944). Thus, Wilhelm reproaches and simultaneously dissociates himself from his behavior.
Tommy Wilhelm aside, Bellow populates Seize the Day with a number of “adult” characters who display behavior generally considered inappropriate for their age group. Significantly, it is Wilhelm who becomes aware—and rather censorious—of presumably “immature” behavior among the adults who surround him. He disapproves, for example, of his father’s youthful wardrobe, bought “in a college shop farther uptown. Wilhelm thought he had no business to get himself up like a jockey, out of respect for his profession” (1949). He begins to doubt his new friend, Dr. Tamkin, when he notices that he “wrote like a fourth-grader” (1960). About his own children, Wilhelm remarks, in a tone reminiscent of his father’s: “They’re not babies […]. Tommy is fourteen. Paulie is going to be ten” (1990).
Recalling the “story” of his departure for Hollywood, Wilhelm notes that his “memory was still good” (1936); yet he paints highly romanticized, idyllic, and hardly life-like portraits of early childhood:
Were there no longer any respectable old ladies who knitted and cooked and looked after their grandchildren? Wilhelm’s grandmother had dressed him in a sailor suit and danced him on her knee, blew on the porridge for him and said, “Admiral, you must eat.” (1978)
Wilhelm criticizes the present from an old-age perspective: New York City “was never so noisy at night as now, and every little thing is a strain” (1946); “Those damn teen-age hoodlums get worse and worse” (1946); “even though I was raised here, [. . .] I can’t take city life anymore, and I miss the country. There’s too much push here for me” (1952). He also seeks solace in saccharine associations of the “beginning of summer” with the time “when the candy stores take down the windows and start to sell sodas on the sidewalk” (1952). References to childhood emotions, to feelings of guilt or shame, fears of abandonment or inferiority, which could shed some light on Wilhelm’s development, as well as the father-son relationship, never truly surface.
Instead of confronting his past, Wilhelm has developed a number of defense mechanisms. Observing children, for example, enables him to re-experience childhood vicariously: “I sat down for a while in a playground. It rests me to watch the kids play potsy and skiprope” (1952). Wilhelm has also been a sales representative for a company manufacturing “[k]iddies’ furniture,” before losing his job to “this son-in-law” (1947). As Bellow drives home, competition is almost an act of sibling rivalry and a matter of contested primogeniture to Wilhelm. His rival’s name is Gerber, an allusion to the famous “Gerber Baby.”
It becomes clear why the dubious “Dr. Tamkin gave Wilhelm comfort” (1972), why Wilhelm “like[s] what [the would-be psychologist] say[s] about here-and-now” (1964). Tamkin’s ludicrously packaged but nonetheless applicable theory of the “two main souls,” a “real soul” and a “pretender soul” (1966), that represent self and society reveal to Wilhelm the concept of the Manichaean struggle within him as being at the core of his discontent. However, since Tamkin’s “here-and-now” approach to life also presents “counting” as a “sadistic activity” (1966), it allows Wilhelm to separate the self not only from societal obligations but also from any time-space relationship such as cause and effect, and from any sense of development through change. According to Erikson’s model of the Eight Stages of Man, the forty-four year old Wilhelm has reached the stage of Generativity Versus Stagnation.
Fatalism is particularly appealing to Wilhelm, whose existence is essentially static: “[T]here’s really very little that a man can change at will” (1941). To Wilhelm, transition is a precursor to death rather than a way of opening up to new potentialities in life: “Old people are bound to change […]. They must prepare for where they are going” (1934).
Distortions of the past, acts of sublimation, and a resentment toward change are Wilhelm’s way to cope with a patriarchal society that, being opposed to the dissipated and disorderly qualities of youth, forces its sons to channel their energy into acceptable (i.e. “adult”) behavior, to separate the grown-up body from the ostensibly childish mind, and that tolerates only the detached, romanticized representations of childhood as the source of an occasional escape to a long-surrendered, severed segment of self.
In the novel’s final scene, Bellow suggests that, after a life of deception and a day of revelations, following the separation from his father and his ersatz father (Dr. Tamkin), Wilhelm finally has a chance to discover his self, to sink “deeper than sorrow,” and to work “toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need” (1993), namely the incorporation of a self-actualized identity into a societal framework. At the coffin of a stranger, Wilhelm, as Ellen Pifer puts it, “undergoes his own symbolic death, ‘consummation’ and spiritual rebirth” (94). He realizes that adulthood, the prolonged, penultimate phase of our physical existence, is time added to the life cycle after millennia of human evolution and therefore not to be wasted.
Works Cited
Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2. Eds.
Baym, et al. 3rd ed. Norton, 1989.
Erikson, Erik H. Childhood in Society. 1950. Norton, 1985.
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Safe at Last in the Middle Years. U of California P,
1988.
Lynn, Kenneth S. “Adulthood in American Literature.” Adulthood. Ed. Erik H.
Erikson. Norton, 1978, pp. 237–47.
Pifer, Ellen. Saul Bellow: Against the Grain. U of Pennsylvania P, 1990.
Stegner, Wallace. “The Writer and the Concept of Adulthood.” Adulthood, edited by
Erik H. Erikson. Norton, 1978.
Wilson, Jonathan. On Bellow’s Planet: Readings from the Dark Side. Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 1985.
Harry Heuser 