Seize the Day (1956)

Although one of Bellow’s shorter works, Seize the Day is also one of his most ambitious. Written in an era in which business culture was king, and artists like Bellow were seen as the antidote to the crass consumerism of the masses, Seize the Day juxtaposes the high-minded idealism of art and the individual against the excesses of mass culture and the stock market.

The story of the abject salesman Tommy Wilhelm that forms the crux of Seize the Day is Bellow’s take on the American myth of success. Much like Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Willie Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Tommy Wilhelm is a figure whose complete trust in the American idea of economic success and cultural prestige sows the seeds of his destruction.

Throughout Seize the Day, Bellow contrasts the sad but majestic individual, Tommy Wilhelm, against the crowd. Tommy is seen amid the rushing crowds of Midtown Manhattan and amid the successful elderly businessmen in his father’s apartment complex. Seize the Day is primarily the story of a successful father and the son whom he perceives as a failure in business and manhood.

Tommy is the ultimate failure. He is unable to achieve success in marriage or as a father or, most particularly, as a son. Equally impressed by high-flying businessmen and the celebrity culture of Hollywood, Tommy is taken in by a series of con men. Basing it in part on an experience Bellow had as a youth, he provides a hilarious satire of America’s obsession with Hollywood when he depicts Tommy Wilhelm’s audition for a shady showbiz agent. Later in the novella, the pseudopsychologist and stock market speculator Tamkin, a father figure who manipulates the praise-seeking younger man, takes in Tommy.

As in “Looking for Mr. Green” and Herzog, in Seize the Day Bellow reveals a preoccupation with larger philosophical questions, particularly the question of time and how it works. Seize the Day, with its ironic invocation of the famous Latin phrase “Carpe diem,” takes place in one day. The day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm to which Bellow treats his readers stands in for all life, and the inevitable movement toward death that life carries. Seize the Day is filled with speculations about time.

Tommy’s interest in the stock market is about the future and his desire to control it. His interest in psychology and the psychoanalyst Dr. Tamkin arises from his parallel desire to master the past, particularly the death of his mother, about which he feels unbearably guilty because of the nature of his activities on the day she died. So, too, Tommy Wilhelm’s relationship with his father is simultaneously about the past, his mother’s death, and the child’s (“Wilkie,” as his father patronizingly calls him) past failures, and about the future, his father’s impending death, and the old man’s overweening fear of it.

As in David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), a book popular at the time Bellow wrote Seize the Day, the power of mass culture is seen to spell the end of the power of the individual in society. As society is ever more governed by the need for conformity, the individual’s every response becomes mechanized according to the tastes of the larger public. Seize the Day is Bellow’s ode to the abject man in the crowd.

For Discussion or Writing
1. In many ways, Seize the Day is a story about con men. Dr. Tamkin and the theatrical agent who promises Tommy Wilhelm a bright future as a second banana in pictures are the most obvious con men in the novella. But who else in Bellow’s work might be seen as untrustworthy? Can we trust Tommy as a narrator? Is his confession trustworthy? What might Bellow be attempting to say about American culture through his use of con men in this novella?

2. What part do mourning and death play in the novel? As Bellow makes clear throughout Seize the Day, both Tommy Wilhelm and his father are in arrested states of mourning and depression. How does Bellow construct the mournful tone of the novella? What do you make of the funeral scene at the end of Seize the Day and how might it be linked to Bellow’s choice to make his novella take place during the course of the day?

3. As mentioned, Bellow had an ambivalent relationship to Jewishness throughout his career. How does Jewishness play or not play a role in Seize the Day? How does the Holocaust maintain an offstage presence in this novella about the impossibility of properly mourning?

4. In Seize the Day, Bellow explores one of the themes that recur throughout his prose, the conflict between surfaces and depth, another way to render the clash between appearance and reality that George Grebe laments in “Looking for Mr. Green.” How does the role of secrets dramatize this conflict in Seize the Day? Why does everyone from the man doling out mail at the front desk to Tommy’s father have a secret?

5. Like David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, Seize the Day is deeply invested in the plight of the individual in mass culture. How might Reisman’s ideas apply to Bellow’s novella? How is Seize the Day a novel simultaneously about business culture and the death of the individual in society?