Tag: Memory Culture

Two “Losers” – Bellow’s Seize the Day and Eisenberg’s A Real Pain

Recently, I happened to read a novel about one loser and shortly afterwards watch a movie about another. In Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, we have one day in the life of a man, friendless and in crisis. Meanwhile, in Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 film A Real Pain the focus is on two brothers on a memory tour of Poland, both of whom are in their own ways losers. What is interesting, in both works, is the way the stories frame their losers. In both, but in different ways, we are made to challenge and ultimately modify our understanding of how these characters really live, and who among them really deserves to be called a loser.

Saul Bellow’s short novel Seize the Day is the second of the writer’s works which I have read, after Herzog. It follows Tommy Wilhelm at the height of his midlife crisis (wife gone, job gone, money gone, aging tyrant father decidedly not gone) as everything comes together to slap him spectacularly in the face one fine day in 1950s Manhattan. Wilhelm is gullible, innocent, naïve, and totally incompatible with his world.

We can contrast Wilhelm with Benji Kaplan, from Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 film A Real Pain. Also innocent, also emotional, also Jewish, the key difference between the portrayals of him and Bellow’s hero is the worlds these luckless figures wander in. In Eisenberg’s film, Benji and his brother David are on a Holocaust tour in Poland. Where Tommy’s environment conspired to crush him, Benji’s encourages us to view him more positively – at least at first – as he charms the viewer and other characters with his positive, can-do attitude.

Seize the Day

Tommy Wilhelm is a loser. “The type that loses the girl”, he is told by a potential movie agent, he has signed over control of his last few hundred dollars to a charlatan to invest in lard, and he has lost his wife and children and his work. The reasons for this are not too complicated. The man is delusional, naïve, childish. When a sprinkle of nepotism means he needs to share his job with a director’s relative, Wilhelm resigns without a backup plan. When his wife demands he pay huge amounts of money for maintenance without letting him get a divorce, he just reaches for his chequebook. When Dr Tamkin, a (quack) psychiatrist, tells him to sign over his money to him to invest for a huge return, of course he does that too. He is “a man who reflected long and then made the decision he had rejected twenty separate times.”

The narration of Seize the Day reflects Wilhelm’s own failure and hardly ever seems willing to give him a break. Listen to the brilliant opening:

“When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow. So at least he thought, and there was a certain amount of evidence to back him up. He had once been an actor – no, not quite, an extra – and he knew what acting should be. Also, he was smoking a cigar, and when a man is smoking a cigar, wearing a hat, he has an advantage; it is harder to find out how he feels. He came from the twenty-third floor down to the lobby on the mezzanine to collect his mail before breakfast and he believed – he hoped – that he looked passably well: doing all right. It was a matter of sheer hope, because there was not much that he could add to his present effort.”

Whenever we have a statement, we backtrack. “No, not quite”, “he hoped”, “so at least he thought.” Here is a narration that is hostile to Wilhelm’s delusions and never lets them stay for long. It laughs at poor Tommy by refusing to do him the littlest courtesy – that of letting him off the hook for being wrong by not mentioning it. At one point later in the book he has a disastrous phone call and gets so upset he flees the booth, but not before the narrator can step in to tell us how he left most of his remaining coinage just sitting there on the side.

The narration seems cruel, but quite quickly we see that it’s also the whole world around Wilhelm that is cruel. During the novel, Wilhelm is staying in the same hotel as his father. This man, in his eighties, seems to have chosen a form of existence similar to dried meat – by removing all moisture, or in his case kindness, from himself he has prolonged his own life. Wilhelm desperately needs his father’s financial support, or even emotional support. Instead, the man is all rugged individualism – “carry nobody on your back.” Not even, as it turns out, your own children. Besides the father, there’s Wilhelm’s wife, and Dr Tamkin, who eventually absconds with all the money Wilhelm has left.

Central to the novel is the idea of the market, where Wilhelm gambles away his savings on lard futures. It is here that Wilhelm is a loser in the purest sense – in a game of luck, he has none of it. But the market also represents that unkind, cold world. Its movements are, to Wilhelm, utterly unpredictable. It seems also to be connected to violence – Mr Rappaport, one of the characters there, has made his fortune slaughtering chickens – and, furthermore, it is totally inescapable. The market creeps into the language of the book, with money as a proxy for status (one of the only times Wilhelm’s father seems a little uncomfortable is when he has to lie about Wilhelm’s employment history to big him up), but it goes further than that. We read that Wilhelm has failed at the “business of life”. Regardless of whether you place the emphasis in that phrase on the first or third word, it’s true. But we might also add that if life itself is a “business”, then there’s no way ever to escape the market – it truly is all-pervasive.

Everyone laughs at the loser Wilhelm, so obviously unsuitable for the world. Those laughing includes the reader too, for Seize the Day is a hugely funny book. But then, some two thirds of the way through the book and just as the humiliations are piling up so high we almost can’t see over the top of them, something shifts and the narration begins to change. A few days earlier, we learn, Wilhelm had a kind of revelation, one of those “subway things”: “a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast.” It doesn’t last, but he remembers it. Just like he remembers God, who lurks in prayers at the ends of chapters when things are really bad. The revelation connects Wilhelm to something authentic and higher, which nobody else in the book has any knowledge of.

Wilhelm is flawed and deluded, but so is everyone else. His father rejects him, his wife rejects him, his trusted investment partner runs with the money. All of these people choose to disconnect and trap themselves within their own sensibilities. But only Wilhelm connects with others through his heart, however briefly. It is he who ends the book sobbing over a stranger’s body, something it is impossible to imagine any other character doing. For that, he appears more noble, even if it comes as his abjection reaches its peak, than all the rest.

A Real Pain

In A Real Pain, through the cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David Kaplan (Eisenberg himself), we have another treatment of the idea of a loser, or failure in life. In the movie, the cousins come together to go on a tour of Poland’s Jewish legacy using some money left by their grandmother Dory after her death. Where Wilhelm is alone and competing against an ideal and successful version of himself, the central dynamic in A Real Pain is the real comparison between the two cousins. David is married, with a child and a high-paying job. (Albeit one – working with advertising banners – which Benji is quick to dismiss.) In comparison, Benji is emotionally variable, pot-smoking, and not quite employed.

Of the two, Benji is the obvious loser, with David the sensible family man. Money is less important than in Seize the Day, but it’s still there – Benji is a failure because he cannot hold down a job, David a success because he has a good one. The conversation where Benji dismisses David’s occupation is one of the film’s first ones, just as the one where Benji talks about his future employment without reference to anything more concrete than helping out a friend is one of the film’s last ones.

With the two men this idea of “loser” is questioned almost immediately in a way that it never is in Bellow’s novel. At one of the first scenes in Poland, at a memorial to the Warsaw Uprising, Benji runs and poses next to the sculptures in a way that David considers disrespectful and hence cannot fathom doing himself. Yet with his positive attitude and ebullient personality, Benji persuades the other guests on the tour to join him in a little reenactment, with David left – alone – holding the camera. If Benji is a loser, this is a strange idea of one. It is serious, dorky, David, who is left out.

This line of argument – that the intellectually or financially less blessed may yet be talented or wonderful in their own way – is not new. But rather than labouring it, A Real Pain takes the topic in another direction. Much like Wilhelm, in a number of incidents Benji appears naïve, inarticulate, emotional. When the tour travels to Lublin he complains about them being in a first-class coach, when fewer than a hundred years ago people like them would be herded like cattle into the train’s rear compartments and sent to their deaths. Then, at a cemetery, he complains to the guide that he doesn’t want to hear any facts and that instead they should be silent. He feels strongly, but his delivery turns the others in the group a little against him. At a dinner where he once again unnerves everyone before leaving to the bathroom, David confesses that Benji had tried to end his own life only a few months before – further evidence that his charm is only one side of a more complex and tragic figure.

A Real Pain is not ultimately Benji’s story. Like Wilhelm, he rages, he shows his positive sides, but by the end of the film he is exactly where he was when the story began – sitting in an airport. In this sense, regardless of whether loser is the right word for him, Benji stays one. David, the mirror – awkward, jealous of his cousin’s charm – is instead the person who grows. He comes to realise two things. The first is that he should not question his own life too much – he has a family, he has his job. One of the final scenes has him coming home to that happy little world, in contrast to Benji’s continued loafing around at the airport. David, in other words, has a destination. The second thing that David realises is that he must do more to help Benji, but he cannot save him on his own. That is the significance both of his inviting Benji to come round for dinner in the closing moments – and of his acceptance of Benji’s decision to stay at the airport instead.

Whether you want to call these works stories about losers or use a more nuanced term, the fact remains that for all their humour and wit, the strugglers stay where they are. Benji doesn’t grow, and while Wilhelm might feel connected to the world and have demonstrated to the reader that he’s a decent chap, he still ends with no money left and little prospect of getting some besides selling his car. The narration in both works doesn’t try to save these people from themselves – perhaps the creators thought that would be cheap. Instead, it shows them to be complex, human, individuals through both their flaws and good qualities.

The growth is elsewhere. In Seize the Day, it is for the reader, seeing the bad cruel world surrounding Wilhelm; while in A Real Pain it’s mainly for David, who sees that he was not the loser after all.

Concluding Comments

Your blogger is neither very experienced at writing about film nor at doing comparisons like this. To be honest, it feels a disservice to works that are both individually worth reading and seeing to give them each half a post! For example, given both are, at least in the background (in the Bellow), about Jewishness, I haven’t given it nearly enough space as I perhaps should have.

Then, with Bellow, there’s the prose. Plenty of people have said Bellow has great prose, but I really noticed it here and would have loved to delve more into that. Here’s just one shockingly lovely sentence:

“Light as a locust, a helicopter bringing mail from Newark Airport to La Guardia sprang over the city in a long leap.”

It does nothing except make you swoon.

I also would have wanted to write more about Dr Tamkin, who is one of the funniest characters I have yet encountered in fiction. Again, the pleasure would be in letting him speak for himself, rather than actually talking about what he had to say. (Bellow comes the Nabokov school of anti-psychoanalysis, which quite frankly is not interesting to me at all, so long after people have stopped taking Freud seriously except in literature departments.)

Still, both works are fun and interesting, and I hope I’ve succeeded in commending them to you.

Maria Stepanova – In Memory of Memory

I don’t know, both because I wasn’t born then and because I still haven’t read enough, whether at any other time there has been such an obsession with memory as there is in our own age. Still, I suspect not. There have been times in the past when humanity has loved some deeper past – commonly that of the Romans, the ancient Greeks, or Renaissance Italy – but that love was always for the big things, not the small, personal, or individual. We loved soaring city gates, the idea of military triumph, or some kind of atmosphere we believed to predominate among the homes of the great and the good. We only cared about the individual insofar as we could imagine how we ourselves would make use of this environment to grow our own strength, or more sinisterly, the strength of our own state. In that sense, this past-obsession has always been egotistical, uncaring. Nobody looks back to a time of shared bread, only the great wars or cultures bread fuelled.

We are more sceptical of such ideas now, the idea of building a state or even a self according to past models. I smile wryly at those men who try to construct and conduct themselves as if they were a Roman tribune. And as for states, the evidence seems pretty conclusive – the best way to build a future is to work in the present, not reshape things according to some untransferable past or imaginary utopian scheme.

Today, though, the past retains its power – what has changed is the focus. Individual memory has now come to take the place of the wider past in prominence. Maybe it has some connection with Francis Fukuyama’s much maligned idea of the end of history – that now that the present is sorted, we only need to do a little tinkering upon the past, and all will be perfected.  “Memory brings the past and present into confrontation in the search for justice.” This is how Maria Stepanova, the contemporary Russian-Jewish writer of poetry and prose, puts it in In Memory of Memory, translated into English by the poet Sasha Dugdale. We go back, but only personally, into the past, not in search of a better world, but to bring back evidence of the past’s unjustness, that we may not repeat it, or more simply not let it form false images in our mind.

(Maybe we go back for another reason. The world of the present is now, even if we discount the wars surrounding us and mounting tensions of all sorts, strangely soft and hard to find a foothold in. To go back into memory is to find something solid, to make something solid if we do it with our own past or another past we choose. It’s another manifestation of that urge to find some small sense of power in a world that seems both crying out for goodness but also near-impossible-seeming to influence as an individual.)

Instead of a description of death camps in history books, which to one politically aligned with such things can seem a jolly good idea or else a fabrication, or even the historical novel, which sadly can always and easily be denied any impact on the heart or mind by the latter charge, what is individual and evidence-based always makes a much stronger impression, at least on me. The German writer W.G. Sebald sits strangely but centrally in this world of memory, creating fiction (?) that is both evidence-based and not, bringing in sources that were both real (most of the facts) and not (some photos), something which has led to no small amount of controversy since his death.

In Memory of Memory is post-Sebaldian. You can read descriptions of it online in catalogues and on marketplaces and nobody quite knows whether its mix of genres contains fiction or not, and if so, how much. Like a work of Sebald our narrator is in the world, wandering about, talking to people, visiting old graveyards. Like Sebald, we have a range of media – diaries, letters, notes, photos. I have no ability to question whether Maria Stepanova is telling the truth, nor any particular desire to. The work feels true and I trust the narrative voice. Is it just that sense of doubt which makes something seem fictional?

Sebald often seems to present things as such clear truths that we might want to question him, especially with his love of coincidence; Stepanova is more likely to take us into her confidence when things go wrong. At the end of the first chapter of In Memory of Memory she has just visited the remote village of Pochinky, once home to part of her family, in search of clues as to their past existence. She finds none. On the way back she remembers that she should have checked the cemetery there and calls her contact. No cemetery left, she hears, but there was a Jew still living there. “She even knew his name: Gurevich. Strangely enough it was my mother’s maiden name.” This failure (and there are many others) is enough to make me trust Stepanova, to shift my attention from the teller onto the tale in a way that we never quite can with Sebald.

So, what tale? “This book about my family is not about my family at all, but about something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova can speak for herself, especially when the translation is done by a poet and is this consistently beautiful and clear throughout. On the one hand, In Memory of Memory is about Stepanova’s family. She tries to sift through documents, archives, and oral stories to create a picture of the fates of some of her relatives throughout the past hundred or so years – educated Jews for the most part, who somehow survived the worst of the 20th century. At the same time, the work stretches beyond this. It asks important ethical questions about how we treat the past and its people.

There’s a lot here. Not too much for itself, but too much for a blog post. In Memory of Memory is an incredibly rich work and one of the most brilliant I’ve read in recent years. Stepanova may tell us of a man expecting a knock on the door at any moment during the Great Terror who throws all his documents into the fire, but in spite of this and other incidents of destruction she manages to achieve a great deal – but never so much that her reconstructions seem unfairly wrought. To give an example, we have a chapter which is just descriptions of about twenty photos. The point, as I took it, was to undermine the idea that photographs are perfectly truthful or helpful documents. (Even before we talk of Stalin’s love of airbrushing). If we know no context, do not even know the people in the photos, then photos are strangely reluctant to provide any useful information.

Meanwhile, in the various “Not-a-chapters” scattered throughout the book we have other documents, typically letters, with what context Stepanova can provide for them.  In one, from 1947, we have a single letter, which makes reference to “our appalling conversation” but gives no more clues as to its meaning. There are, I think, clues elsewhere in the book, but only faint ones. Again, the purpose seems to be to emphasise that sometimes the past refuses to be receptive, to answer our requests for a complete story, a neat takeaway. Letters are missing, things are not written down, life is not neat. A diary which sets the book going has nothing personal in it at all until the odd message, the last one included in In Memory of Memory, where the writer notes “sleep is my salvation.” With Sebald, we feel the danger of forgetting; with Stepanova, we fear things have already been forgotten without possibility for return.

Only one chapter is story-like in its construction and conclusive in its ending. Where in other places absent information is like rust that has eaten away too much at the structure, here the absences we have make the text spongey, so that the imagination can enter into it all the better. It is the longest chapter in the book, and the most horrible. “Lyodik, or Silence”, is the story of a young man, Lyodik, who is in the Leningrad region during the siege. Stepanova has not only his own letters, but also the memoirs of those who were fighting in the region or just trying to survive, such as the writer and critic Lydia Ginzburg. Using these other sources to provide context, she uses Lyodik’s letters back home to give a kind of negative of Lyodik’s life, where what is important is what is not said, or said indirectly: a hospital visit he claims is for tonsilitis is almost certainly because of a war wound; the starvation and deprivation of the civilians (including relatives he visits in the besieged city) is something he can only hint at. And then finally, alongside a description of a battle from a memoirist, we have the official letter confirming Lyodik’s death. And then the death of his father, also fighting, soon afterwards. Such hammer blows need no further context or commentary. They are the kind of thing that makes you put the book down and step outside.

In Memory of Memory has its innocent working hypothesis, that everyone survived, that all was well in spite of the 20th century’s storms, but Stepanova’s discoveries in the end do not lead in this direction. (The Second World War / Great Patriotic War was always going to be the exception by the sheer weight of bodies it took into itself.) In the book’s third part the correction to the other notions comes. There’s a relative among the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by the Romanians when Odessa was occupied, and another, a manufacturer in Kherson, who seems to survive the changes in power during the Revolution, but at the cost of everything he owned. While looking for clues, Stepanova finds a comic note in an article but little more: “in his old age the former factory owner Gurevich, sitting in the warm sun, said laughingly that he remembered the war and the revolution, but he couldn’t recall making a present of his factory to the Communist Petrovsky”.

Another relative manages to survive the Revolution by joining the “special task units”, a kind of volunteer militia for the new state. There are no photos or documents, but “the terrible scars on his stomach and back, traces of something that pierced him through, are proof enough.” This man, later, burns his documents and paintings in 1938 because he believes that he will soon be taken away to an interrogation that may end his life. It does not happen. A doctor in the family, at the time of the “Doctors’ Plot”, where Stalin began systematically murdering Jews in the medical profession, somehow survives that too. (Thankfully, Stalin croaked first).

What may be a simple hypothesis is undermined by the sense that it does not really cover what matters. They survived, yes, but traumatised. The man who lost his factories also lost his family, who didn’t seem to want anything to do with him for reasons we cannot even guess for lack of evidence. There were the older familial patriarchs who watched in anguish as newer generations left the Jewish faith and even married other ethnicities. And then there are the smaller traumas, the people who won’t or can’t talk to each other for whatever reason. Can we really speak about a happy family when Stepanova’s conclusion is that “the more I think about our family history, the more it seems like a series of unfulfilled dreams.”

Stepanova, like Sebald, is memory-obsessed. Like Sebald, she lives like a ghost in the narrative, an “I” which is more “eye” than flesh-and-blood actor. Where she differs from the German is in her unease, which grows in the book. She goes back, she finds answers, she crafts narratives, tells stories. But the whole project seems to rot as she writes it. She realises that even as she is trying to remember, to bring justice, she’s also doing something wrong. She sees herself as a kind of exploiter of trauma, a little bit like the accusations that have been thrown at Sebald since his own death. “The dead have no rights: their property and the circumstances of their fate can be used by anyone and in any way.”

That is the theory, but it is not a moral thing to take lives and manipulate them, even when that manipulation is just an attempt to tell the truth. Stepanova sees the dead as being another group which we must soon come to treat with respect, the same way humanity had to come to treat slaves, and women, and certain ethnic, sexual, or religious groups with respect. What this would look like, I’m not sure either of us knows. What is clear is that “we, the people of the past and the present, are endlessly vulnerable, desperately interesting, utterly defenceless. Especially after we are gone”. That is precisely why things must change. There’s a powerful moment when she is trying to force her father to let her include some letters he wrote in a “not-a-chapter” section and he refuses, saying that the past was not really as he wrote it. “I was prepared to betray my own living father for the dead text.” Unlike the dead, he has a voice to refuse. The obvious implication is that they too, if they could, would have their reservations.

In Memory of Memory is not just the story of a Russian Jewish family, nor yet alone Stepanova’s reflections on the ethics of memory. The book is so much broader than that in its range. With its dialogues with French, American, German cultures and cultural figures (among others), it’s a book that consciously refuses the box some might prepare for it: as “Russian culture”, or “Jewish memory culture”. I learned, for example, about the box maker, Joseph Cornell, the photographer Francesca Woodman, the artist Charlotte Saloman. This is a book about trauma and the past, not just in the Russian or Russian-Jewish context. Its questions and answers touch all of us, drag all of us into the whirlpool.

“Kill the yids and save Russia”, a charming stranger says to Stepanova at a railway station, shortly after the Soviet Union has collapsed. It’s all still here, this trauma, this need, this obligation, to remember, to do better, not just for the Jews, but for all of us. At least we can be grateful that we have such a beautifully written and powerfully argued book to help us begin to do so.