Customer Reviews

Dangling Man

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This early novella actually contains some of Bellow's best writing. Set in 1942-43, it is the diary of a young man waiting to be drafted (Bellow himself was deferred so long that eventually he joined the Merchant Marine). Although the self-centered story of Joseph waiting for his draft call becomes annoying at times--it brings to mind the criticism made about James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," namely that it focuses too intently on the author gazing into a mirror in unblinking self-regard--Bellow manages to insert some wonderful lyric passages into the diary form of the story.

For someone of my age (71) it's especially nostalgic to read the contemporary references to the World War II era: "both doors of the phonograph were open;" the songs "Mr. Five-by-five" and "Chattanooga Choo-Choo;" rationing of leather goods, sugar, coffee, gasoline, and butter; hoarding; the conga; baking days and washing days; the navy transport plane called the Catalina; a blacked out street lamp bent over a curb on a rainy night; war mothers knitting mufflers; "Your Hit Parade;" doors shut with pneumatic arms; pants in the new style saving cloth, without cuffs; Bataan.

Bellow cites other telling details that resonated with me personally: "I was forever buying books...As long as they surrounded me they stood as guarantors of an extended life..." "I fell back into bed and spent an hour or so...watching the dark beams from the slats of the blind wheeling on the upper wall."

Bellow's protagonist is a "reflective man" who suffers from a feeling of strangeness, who seeks to know who he is. Like his literary successor, Augie March, he is fenced around, less than a whole man. He holds lengthy internal debates with his Other whom he calls "But on the Other Hand, Tu As Raison Aussi."

Yet he can appreciate the majesty of nature: "The clouds were sheared back from a mass of stars chattering in the hemispheric blackness--the universe, this windy midnight, out on its eternal business."

The author's magnificent ability with words stops the reader cold: "For every need there is an entrepreneur, by a marvelous providence. You can find a man to bury your dog, rub your back, teach you Swahili, read your horoscope, murder your competitor."

There is a great deal of autobiographical reference in this work: Bellow actually grew up on St. Dominique Street in Montreal, mentioned in the text; in Chicago he lived near Humboldt Park, also referred to. Though the story is short on plot--a drunken party, a fight, a long period of waiting and privation, a stressed marriage--his writing can reach inside the reader's gut, as in his description of the pleasure he took in shining shoes as a child (in my case it was polishing coins): "the stove shone on the davenport and on the oilcloth and on my forehead, drawing the skin pleasantly. I did not clean shoes because I was praised for it, but because of the work and the sensations of the room, closed off from the wet and the fog of the street, with its locked shutters and the faint green of the metal pipes along the copings of its houses." In fact, his descriptions of the slum inhabited by Joseph have a strongly Dickensian ring: "chimneys pointed heavenward in openmouthed exhaustion...houses, their doors and windows open, drawing in the freshness, were like old drunkards of consumptives taking a cure....[T[he smeary blind eyes of windows...in hope of an impossible rejuvenation."

"Dangling Man" is an underappreciated, under read marvel.

I made a terrible mistake in my first reading of Dangling Man. Hailed as one of the great works to come out of World War II America, I figured that it was great in the conventional way that war novels are great. My expectations were horribly violated by the book's form (it is a journal) and by the subject matter (a man in the doldrums because of bureaucratic and self-imposed inaction while waiting to be drafted). I was not expecting an existential mediation on the human condition conducted on that most bland of World War II fronts--the American home front.

Because of this violation of expectations, I was initially put off by the book. This was ultimately extremely wrong- headed. The genius of this work lies in how it uses the vast historical background of the war and unemployment to show Joseph, the fictional journal keeper, descend further and further into his own personal short-comings, narcissism, and irascibility. A mixture of pessimism and comical farce, the reader of the work is privy to the inner workings of a personality that is watching its degradation.

We find at the journal's opening that Joseph has been awaiting conscription for several months. Initially believing that he was to be mobilized within several weeks of his initial notice of mobilization, Joseph had left his regular work-a-day life behind him in order to concentrate on putting all his affairs in order. Government bureaucracy interceded to make this much more complicated than it otherwise should have been. Because of his Canadian nationality and because of certain completely reasonable regulations, Joseph found himself in a position that would have been familiar to many of his generation only a few years before during the Depression; out of work and with a lot of time on his hands.

A somewhat bookish and highly intellectual person, Joseph and his infinitely patient wife Iva, both welcomed the free time as a chance for study and as an extended vacation. As time wears on though, and it really wears on Joseph, he develops not only an intelligent critical viewer of friends, family, the war, and society, but also an unbearable wretch as he goes further and further into himself. Every disgusting personality trait that Joseph possess becomes exacerbated and almost beyond his control. To many readers of this work in 1944, this would have resonated with their personal experiences with political and economic redundancy, or with what they saw occur in their families and communities during the Depression. For Joseph though, this would have to much more alienating than it would have been for him just a few years before. During the Depression, it was plain to see that if you were unemployed, you were part of a vast multitude of the like. With full employment during the war, the opposite would have been true. Joseph really is alienated from the mainstream of America.

Although Joseph's irrational side is what we are first exposed to, his insights into what America is and is becoming because of the war and the prosperity it is bringing in its wake are, from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, nearly prophetic. The very hard learned lesson of the depression, that what is good for the wealthy is not necessarily good for the country and ultimately not even the wealthy, is fading fast from even the memory of small business owners like Joseph's tailor acquaintance, Mr. Fanzel. After long period of economic marginality, Fanzel is up to his ears in orders. Abandoning not only his poverty, he has also abandoned much of his human feeling since his time has become valuable beyond any previous comparisons. His outlook on life is best summed up in Joseph's opening reflection in the journal entry he recounts a recent conversation with him: "Look out for yourself, and the world will be best served." (109) His thinking are a blandly frightening caricature of everything that went wrong with America before the Depression--this includes a positive reference to a newspaper piece by the disgraced President Hoover that argued for more war profiteering. Joseph sees in Fanzel's behavior a great amount of rationalized selfishness that would allow Fanzel, and any others that conformed to his way of thinking, to accept human degradation as moral, if not a necessity. This is a sentiment Joseph can not abide, and its growth does not bode well for the post-war history of America.

What is truly terrifying to Joseph though is the thought of being a bystander. Not only of being bystander during the war, but of being a bystander period. He remembers as traumatic experiences that he had as a child when his mother died and nightmares where he was forced to take a powerless position in the wake of a massacre. These are just some of the extreme cases of where he feels himself impotent. He feels and sees the entire world going about him, without him and without need--though there is plenty of regard--for him. Joseph is not at home with feeling doubtful or is any good in the morally ambiguous circumstances the war has given birth to. As a supporter of the American war effort Joseph is ambivalent enough and honest enough to say that "between their imperialism and ours, if a full choice were possible, I would take ours. Alternatives, and particularly desirable alternatives, grow on imaginary trees." (84) Joseph's need to end his status as a bystander will eventually overtake some of his ambivalence about the war, but I would be giving away a great deal if I explained how. Joseph unfortunately gives in to a need for regimentation that the rest of the country is allowing itself to be subjected to as necessary to win the war. It is sad to witness, especially since this comes at the books end.

Joseph's recounting is comic-opera in many instances. The lack activity that he tries to accustom himself to leads into extreme tension and hyper-sensitivity. He constantly feels his dignity insulted by the actions of those around him and as far as he is concerned no can do right. Joseph had some lousy personality traits prior to his period of dangling--he was a know-it-all Communist, an adulterer, and something of a brawler--but in the eleven months that he is waiting to be called to duty, he becomes an out and out prick. He is unwilling to accept either his friends, families, or wife's personal foibles while he expects them to all tolerate his meanness and irritability. He is slowly but surely turning into a hypocritical and petty man, incapable of compassion for anyone but himself. He describes his brother's wife after giving him a very mild reproach for spanking their daughter as finding her "farther on the hellward side than ever." (78) He denounces his wife and all women in general, as naturally given to frivolity and not teachable simply because Iva has not bent totally to his will. (98) At one point early on in the book he even makes a huge seen in a restaurant, embarrassing a friend when a former comrade from the Communist Party that he abandoned does not acknowledge. Joseph is bent on picking fights wherever he can find them, and to recount all of them would be redundant. The book makes obvious that if Joseph is not descending into madness, he is at least descending into silliness and absurdity.

One sees in this book all the aspects of intellect and personal struggle that will characterize Bellow's novels and short stories during the more than half-century after this work's publication. In Dangling Man we are given the very ordinary situation of a man living in a burdensome situation trying to use his intellect as guide to get closer to a proper way of living. The war as background is extraordinary, but the situation is anything but that.

Some consider this novella Bellow's worst piece. At the other extreme, it has been compared to Dostoevsky's "Notes From the Underground". I am in the latter camp. "Dangling Man" might not strike chords quite as high as Dostoevsky's "Notes", but it's at least in the same ballpark. The April 8 and April 9 entries (the book is written in journal form), on the last two pages of the book, bring everything home, and put this book among the top ten of existentialist fiction.

For those who may have read a full-length novel or two of Bellow's, and found it/them overly heavy and tortured, try his early novellas, especially "Dangling Man".

Bellow's first novel is a finely written, tightly constructed little gem of American alienation. The main character has received his call-up papers for WW II, and is now waiting in a hotel room - dangling - as the weeks go by and he is still not called up. He begins to think about himself and those around him in a new light - being out of circulation, in enforced idleness, causing him to think about himself and others really for the first time. His detachment grows and he becomes stranger and stranger - or is it the others, his family, friends, work mates, passers by, who are getting stranger. One day in a cafeteria he goes really bonkers upon seeing an old political acquaintence from his youthful days in a radical party, who is now ignoring him. This leads to an explosive, almost surreal scene in which the dangling man is screaming about his "right to be answered" - which of course is a salesman's motto, the cold-caller's motto, while other people's supreme right is, of course, the right to personal privacy. This interesting question, that goes to the heart of what we are as Americans, is only one of the many interesting ideas thrown up by the young Bellow in this short book. If you like *Seize the Day,* you'll probably like this one, too. Bellow's shorter novels (I include *The Victim* in here, too) are among the best examples of American alienation ever written.

I am a Bellow fan and have read most of his novels.

Saul Bellow wrote two manuscripts in the early 1940s. One was so bad that he threw it out. The second was published and this is it. "Dangling Man" is probably his worst novel, or tied with "The Actual," but there are some good passages. Many think that this book is among his best and that he lost his way in later years. I completely disagree and thought the present book lacks warmth, depth, and the charm of the later books. Technically speaking, the book is compact and well written, but not an entertaining novel.

The the book came out in 1944. It had good book reviews and the publisher liked the book but they only sold a small number of copies. Still, it was enough to go on to another book. It would not be among the Bellow books that I would read. However, being new to Bellow myself, I did read it first and thought that it was well written but overall just so so. After reading all his other novels I concluded that this is probably the worst novel, and it is nothing like his later works.

In case you are new to Bellow, his novels reflect his life, his writings, and his five marriages during his five active decades of writing. He hit his peak as a writer around the time of "Augie March" in 1953 and continued through to the Pulitzer novel "Humbolt's Gift" in 1973. He wrote from the early 1940s through to 2000. His novels are written in a narrative form, and the main character is a Jewish male, usually a writer but not always, and he is living in either in New York or Chicago. Bellow wrote approximately 13 novels plus other works. Bellow progressed a long way as a writer over the five decades. The early novels "Dangling Man" and "The Victim" were written 25 years before his peak. Those were heavy slow reads. "Dangling Man" is often boring, and Bellow was in search of his writing style in that period of the 1940s. Some compare his style in "Dangling Man" with Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground." Having read both I would say that "Notes" is brilliant while "Dangling Man" is at best average and sometimes a bit boring.

The book is short. It follows the Bellow pattern: a narrative about a Jewish man livig in Chicago or New York. Here it is Chicago. The central character, Joseph, does simple day to day activities such as going out for lunch. He has quit his job and waits for his draft orders for WWII. The only memorable excitement is a confrontation between Joseph and his niece in the attic. Bellow describes the Joseph's life as "a narcotic dullness." Around 75% of the way through the book becomes a terrible bore, its own "narcotic dullness" and I was more than happy to see the end of the book.

There are many small touches that we see in subsequent Bellows novels such as the wealthy brother. There are many sections that beautifully written and I quote this passage:

"On the platform the rush-hour crowds were melting under the beams of oncoming trains. Each train was followed by an interval of darkness, when the twin colored lamps of the rear car hobbled around the curve. Sparks from the street below were caught and blanketed in the heavy, flat ladder of ties."

In later years, Bellow himself would be critical of this novel since his style had not developed and it was somewhat inhibited when he first started.

Lukewarm recommendation, 4 stars. He has many better novels.

"There was a time when people were in the habit of addressing themselves frequently and felt no shame at making a record of their inward transactions." So begins Bellow's first novel and one of the most consistently excellent oeuvres in American fiction. It's Chicago, 1942, and in preparation for his imminent draft into the army, Joseph has given up his job and moved himself and his wife into one-room lodgings in a boarding house. That was nine months ago and the draft letter hasn't come. Joseph is dangling - alienated, without real purpose, but no longer distracted by the banal minutiae of everyday working life. He begins to see the absurdity of social roles, the hypocrisy of long-held ideologies, and the horror of life without routine. Breaking from friends and family, Joseph observes the slow disintegration of his social self. Significantly, while unthinking discipline is offered as one way out of such a nightmare, we're not encouraged to see this as the only or best solution. Bellow never comes down on one side or the other. This announces one of the central themes of Bellow's work generally: that there is a big difference between thinking and having an idea. Thinking involves a free opposition of ideas, and it raises the work from the level of a tract to the level of art. The opposites are free to range themselves against each other, and they are passionately expressed on both sides. At its best, it is energetic, passionate, and open. An idea, in contrast, is a state of closure which kills truth because it denies the multivalence of experience. According to Bellow, thinking is vital to a novel. The continuing dilemma which concludes most of his narratives may well be aimed at this effect. Thinking is still in progress - hopefully in your head. "Dangling Man" achieves this: Bellow doesn't tell us what to think, he invites us to think for ourselves. This novel is also notable for its bold project of bringing a European form - the sophisticated, introverted, philosophical diary novel - into the American mainstream as a deliberate antidote to hardboiled-dom, both in fiction and in life. Bellow adheres closely to its formal requirements: like his European forbears, Joseph is an alienated, bookish, unemployed part-time flaneur, part-time room hermit, whose impotence and hermetic isolation are underscored. Yet he has an unmistakable touch of America about him, which makes him all the more accessible for readers in the English-American tradition. Bellow puts American life under a European microscope, and finds the central issue much the same: the problem of being human.

Saul Bellow was born in Quebec and was a Canadian citizen for quite some time. He was 4th child to a poor immigrant family of Russian Jews, previously called Belo. The family moved on to Montreal and then to Chicago. At 29 he published his first novel, the Dangling Man, about somebody resembling him too much not to be at least in part a self portrait. The book came out in 1944.

The novel is set in 1942/43. The US is in WW2, the depression is not fully over. We read the diary of a young Canadian called Joseph, who is waiting to be called up to the US army (North Africa campaign ongoing). He apologizes (to whom?) for writing a diary, which in itself is too soft and emotional and not in line with the requirements of the age of hard-boileddom, as he fears.

He lives in Chicago, is unemployed (as he gave up his job in a travel agency expecting to be called up faster), married, bored, `dangling'. He is something of a lost intellectual. He is alienated from his family, his friends, even from his own former self (he says he wears the cast off clothes of his own former self). When he quit his job, he planned to read and to write essays. It has not happened. He is aggressive, searching fights where he can find them. His poverty is self-inflicted, as his brother, who made it in business, has offered him a job, which he declined, as he also rejects help in form of money. He had been a radical student, but has only contempt for that line of thought now. He wants to be non-conformist, but takes care not to conform too much to non-conformism. A dangling man.

Joseph observes himself and tries to understand his situation. The expected call up for war almost seems like the only salvation in sight. He despises the war. He hopes to survive it, but would rather be a victim than a beneficiary. He does not try to become an officer. What's wrong with being a private?
Life in his circles seems more like St.Petersburg, London or Paris than America. There is writing ancestry in Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Orwell, Camus, Sartre here. Nausea or even The Stranger come to mind.
My personal reaction: I find it much more readable than I expected. Bellow is a bit of an unknown continent to me. I remember that I read Humboldt's Gift 30 years ago, and enjoyed it despite understanding it only half. After this Dangling Man I will certainly go for more.

Saul Bellow published his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. The protagonist is a young draftee, Joseph, who is waiting to be inducted into the army during World War II. He has resigned his position in the expectation of being inducted, so he has a lot of time on his hands while he waits. He hopes to indulge his love of books but, now that he has almost unlimited time to read, he finds that no book can hold his interest. Mostly, he mopes around a room in a boarding house that he and his wife rent with her salary.

Joseph is a sensitive person, and his alienation leads him to an uncomfortable awareness of the defects of his acquaintances and the ugliness of the physical artifacts of a large city. Ugliness is only recognized when it is contrasted with beauty, of course, and Joseph can still recognize love (for his wife) and physical beauty where he finds it. One evening, he reports that: "We had an enormous sunset, a smashing of gaudy colors, apocalyptic reds and purples such as must have appeared on the punished bodies of great saints, blues heavy and rich. I woke Iva, and we watched it, hand in hand. Her hand was cool and sweet."

Eventually, Joseph becomes unhinged by solitude and idleness, and he lashes out at family members and acquaintances. He finds that he must "give himself up" by requesting that the army induct him "at the earliest possible moment." On his last day before reporting to basic training, he rejoices at the prospect of being occupied:

"Hurray for regular hours!
And for the supervision of the spirit!
Long live regimentation!"

Few first novels are perfect, but this is a very good one. One might observe that Bellow more effectively conveys Joseph's problem to the reader when he does so indirectly. A couple times he has Joseph deliver soliloquies about the "invariable question" that occupies him; I reread these a number of times but found them incomprehensible. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this brief novel tremendously.

Saul Bellow's short and first published novel "Dangling Man" (1944) explores broad themes of community and alienation in the words of a self-centered young man awaiting induction into the Army in 1942-43 during WW II. The book sold poorly but it established Bellow as a writer of promise. The story is set in Chicago and is told exclusively by means of diary entries of the protagonist, who is identified only as Joseph, between December 15, 1942, and April 9. 1943. As befitting diary entries, most of the book is recounted in the first person. But in several places, Joseph tries to study and describe himself and speaks of his life in the third person. In diary entries late in the story, Joseph holds lengthy philosophical discussions with an alter-ego.

Joseph is 27 years old and a Canadian citizen. As the book opens, issues of citizenship have delayed Joseph's induction into the Army for seven months, during which he becomes the "dangling man" belonging neither to civilian nor military life. During this time, Joseph leaves his job working for a travel bureau. He is supported by his long-suffering wife of five years, Iva. He becomes increasingly resentful of his dependency on his wife. With their economically marginal situation, Joseph and Iva have given up their modest but reasonably comfortable flat for a squalid rooming house. Joseph expresses his disgust throughout the book for his landlord and landlady and many of the cotenants.

As his diary entries reveal, Joseph had tried before he saw himself as the dangling man (which in fact had been his situation throughout his life) to create a balance between his work and his interests which are largely intellectual and scholarly. For a brief time, Joseph had been a communist. He left the party and his former comrades shun him. He tries to think through the nature of American society and its relationship to individualism. When Joseph loses his job, Iva encourages him to read and to pursue his writings on the Enlightenment and on Romanticism. But with his restlessness and his new-found if precarious liberty, Joseph is unable to do so. He sits for long hours in his room unable to do anything, takes short walks for meals, has an affair, fights with his family and former friends, and he broods.

In one of several scenes of fighting in the book, Joseph and Iva visit his brother Amos, his wife Dolly, and daughter Etta for New Years. Amos has made a financial success of his life and presses Joseph to accept financial help which he proudly refuses. During the catastrophic New Years dinner, Joseph refuses his brother's offer of a holiday gift of cash. More tellingly, Joseph finds himself in a highly-compromising, sexually charged situation with his brother's daughter. Other fights with former friends and colleagues occur througout the book as part of Joseph's inability to decide what to do with himself.

Joseph wants to accept and function in American society and not to pursue the criticism and rejection which was common among intellectuals then and remains so today. He supports, however tentatively, the war effort and tries to make his peace with capitalism and materialism. These efforts are unsuccessful as Joseph cannot avoid his stance as an alienated outsider. Joseph finds he cannot make use of the freedom with uncertainty that has been offered to him as the draft board finally resolves Joseph's status. At the end of the book, Joseph is about to be inducted, facing an uncertain future with his wife and family, and the induction comes as a relief to him from his own purposelessness.

Although set in Chicago, Bellow's novel is heavily influenced by the themes of European philosophy and existentialism. Dostoevsky's anti-hero in "Notes from the Underground" is a predecessor of Joseph. Joseph is also preoccupied with the writings of Goethe as an attempted counter-balance to his own situation.

As in much of Bellow's later writing, "Dangling Man" juxtaposes scenes of American toughness and street life with long passages of philosophical reflection. The themes of alienation and liberty presented in this book cut deeper than the specific situation that confronts Joseph. As a narrator, Joseph is solipsistic and narcicistic. He also dislikes women. A disturbing tone of subtle racism underlies the book. Although short, the book drones on at times and lacks the sparkle of Bellow's later writing. Still, "Dangling Man" is a thoughtful and ambitious novel that captures something important about freedom and the American dilema.

Robin Friedman

The novel is very good when the narrator is talking to himself - his long introspective diary entries are compelling. However there are to many banal conversations between the narrator and his dull friends in the middle third. Doubtless Bellow is making a point in detailing these dialogues, but after a bit it gets boring and one longs for Joseph to get back to his favourite past times: talking to himself, asking the big questions (why am I here?, who is it that I'm going to war for?, etc) and having breakfast. Joseph and his aquaintances drink coffee and quote Shakespeare, Goethe and Spinoza a lot. He looks out over the slums of Chicago, smells the decay, observes the desperate people living their mean lives: is he going to go to war to fight for these wretches?; or is he going because he needs to get away from them? This is a novel with a small plot and a lot of interesting ideas. Bellow shows (convincingly) how Joseph's perspectives on himself, his life and the world change in the final 4 months before he joins up.