“Duke” by S. Bellow in summary
Fifty years a professor of history and literature, Moses Herzog wrote letters, wrote to absolutely everything in the world – the people personally familiar and unfamiliar, the living and the dead, the relatives of the former and on those, thinkers and presidents, publishers and fellow shop, church leaders, and so no one in particular, and sometimes, either to himself or to the Lord God. Among its recipients from the number of well-known personalities were listed Spinoza, Eisenhower, Nietzsche, Rozanov, Heidegger… And on one piece of paper was a place and debate with Herr Nietzsche’s Dionysian nature of beginning and gentle words to the left by a friend, and addressed to the president Panama’s advice is to fight the dominance of rats in the country using contraceptives.
Others explained this strangeness of the Duke by the fact that the old man, apparently, moved his mind, – and were wrong. It was just that the second divorce was too costly for him:
Perhaps, the Duke wrote his letters just to re-embark on a more or less solid ground – they served him as a thread, stretched in all sorts of directions to different epochs, ideas, social institutions, people… With their tension, these strings more or less fixed, determined the position of the Duke in the universe, asserted him, Moses Herzog, a person in the face of the rampant entropy that encroaches in our century on the spiritual,
Maybe, however, all this only seemed to him.
It did not seem, but clearly passed before Duke’s mental gaze, forming in memory from disparate episodes and flowing one into another plots, the eventual, actual side of his life. Unlike our hero, we try to restore the cause-effect relationships and time sequence, we start with the background.
Moses’ father, Ion Isakovich Duke, lived in Petersburg on falsified documents of the merchant of the first guild, flooding the Russian market with onion from Egypt. He flourished until the police, before the war, brought him to clean water; However, the process of papa Herzog did not wait and with the family hastily moved to Canada, where the prosperity of the Dukes came to an end. Jonah tried himself in a variety of occupations – from farming to bootlegging – but everywhere he was followed by a fatal bad luck. And after all it was necessary to feed the family, pay for housing, to take out four children – Moses, two of his brothers and sister. Only at the end of the life of Jonah, Herzog somehow got to his feet and settled in Chicago.
From the world of beggars, mostly Jewish neighborhoods, where Yiddish was heard much more often than English, Moses protruded his way to the university. At the end of the university, he was – and, indeed, he was – a promising young specialist. Soon he married Daisy, who gave birth to his son Marco. Zapershis for the winter with his young wife in the country wilderness. The Duke finished his work “Romanticism and Christianity”, which made almost a sensation in the scientific community.
But then Daisy somehow failed, they parted, and Duke began to wander from Philadelphia weekly, where he was reading his course, to see his son in New York. In Philadelphia meanwhile, in his life a touching, undemanding, tender and rather amusing Japanese Sono was formed, and a little later – Madeleine.
Madeline, with her eloquent Pontrythur name, was then a zealous Catholic convert and specialist in the history of Russian religious thought. Almost from the very beginning, she arranged for him in bed tearful scenes on the topic that she had been a Christian for weeks, but because of him, she could not go to confession anymore. The duke loved Madeleine, and therefore, having overcome inhuman difficulties, he obtained a divorce from Daisy in order to marry her; Sonno told him that Madeleine had evil, cold eyes, but Duke then wrote off her words for jealousy.
The religious fervor Madelin soon somehow came to naught, June she never baptized. The Duke, having succumbed to the temptation of patriarchy, committed an act, which he often regretted: he lost all his father’s inheritance, twenty thousand, to purchase and equip a house in Ludeville, a place in the west of Massachusetts, not even on the state map. Ludwill’s dwelling was to become the patrimonial nest of the Dukes, here he planned to complete his book.
The year spent by Herzog and Madeleine in the village house was marked by his purposeful work on the improvement of the dwelling and over the book, their general loving ecstasies, but also the hysterics and attacks of Madeline’s maliciousness, which she explained – when she felt it necessary to do so-annoyed that the mercy of the Duke, she mediocrely spends the best years of life in the wilderness; She once aspired to this very wilderness, Madeleine, as it were, forgot.
Over time, Madelin increasingly began to talk about moving. In the pursuit of large cities, she was supported by Valentine Gersbach, the neighbor of the Dukes, the announcer of a local radio station, constantly insisting that such a brilliant woman and promising specialist should be surrounded by interesting people who would appreciate her and her talents.
What is true is the truth. With society in Ludewila was tight – the circle of communication of the Dukes was limited to Gersbah and his colorless quiet wife, Phoebe. With them, Moses and Madeleine were close friends, Valentine aspired to create an image of a devoted, ardent friendship; sometimes taking a patronizing tone with respect to Duke, he nonetheless slavishly copied everything that he considered noble in Duke.
Madeleine managed to persevere, and the Dukes moved to Chicago, taking with them Phoebe with Valentine, to whom Moses, using old connections, found a good place in the city.
When Herzog rented the house, repaired something, arranged some more trifles, Madelin suddenly solemnly announced to him that everything was over between them, she no longer loves him and therefore he had better go somewhere, for example to New York, leaving Jun to her. Knowing that if a woman leaves a man, it is always final, the Duke did not argue or ask Madeline to think about it.
Then he was struck by Madelin’s inhuman foresight: the rent was paid far ahead; the lawyer-he generally considered him his friend-ruled out any possibility of registering Herzog’s custody of his daughter, and at the same time began to impose an insurance on which, in the event of death or mental illness, Duke Madeleine would be secured until the end of days; the doctor, also prepared by Madeleine, hinted that with his, Duke, the brain was going wrong.
Completely broken, Duke left Chicago, and then went to Europe for a long time, where he lectured in various countries, loved some women… In New York he returned in a worse state than he left. Here he began to write letters.
In New York, the Duke was somehow swift, but seemed to be firmly in touch with Ramona, who listened to his lectures at the evening classes. Ramona was the owner of a flower shop and a master’s degree from Columbia University in the history of art. The duke was more than pleased with this person, in whose veins a rattling mixture of Argentine, Jewish, French and Russian blood flowed: in bed she was a professional in the best sense of the word, excellent preparation, mind and spiritual qualities, too, did not want to desire anything more; slightly embarrassed only one thing – Ramone was under forty, therefore, deep down she would not mind to have a husband.
Thanks to Ramone, the Duke returned to active action. He went to Chicago.
The Duke had always had suspicions-for which he was insanely ashamed of himself-about the wife’s connection with Hersbach, but once he had to express them to Madeline, she answered him with murderous arguments in the way that supposedly she can sleep with a man from whom, when he uses the toilet, the stench stands on the whole house. But now Duke had a letter from the friend of his closest friend, Lucas Asphalter, who worked Madelin as a babysitter. It clearly said that not only that Gersbach almost always lives with Madeline, once they locked the little Jun in the car so that she would not stop them from making love. If you could prove that fornication is happening in the house where his child lives, the girl would almost certainly be given to her father. But the only person whose testimony on this score would have been irrefutable, Phoebe,
The Duke saw with his own eyes, having crept up to the house, as Gersbach bathed June. He had a revolver with him, which he took from his father’s table along with a pile of royal rubles, intended as a gift to his son – after Chicago, Duke planned to visit Marco in the summer camp. There were two cartridges in the revolver, but the Duke knew that he would not shoot at anyone, and he did not.
The next day, when, through Asphalter, having agreed with Madeleine, the Duke met with June and went with her to walk, see all sorts of interesting things, a minibus crashed into his car. June was not hurt, when the police pulled the unconscious Duke from the passenger compartment, his father’s revolver fell out of his pockets, to which, naturally, there was no permit, and suspicious rubles.
The Duke was immediately arrested. Called to pick up the girl, Madeleine declared to the police that the Duke was a dangerous and unpredictable man, that he carried a loaded pistol for good reason.
However, everything worked out: the rich brother of the Duke of Shura introduced a pledge, and he went to Ludeville to lick wounds. Another brother, Will, who was engaged in the sale of real estate, visited him there, and together they decided that while the house should not be sold – he could not return any money invested in him. House Duke found in a terribly neglected state, but before Will arrived did not even bother to take care of electricity, since all his time was spent writing letters. His brother convinced the Duke to do some basic improvement, and he went to a neighboring village. There he was found on the phone by Ramona, who was staying near friends. They agreed to dine with the Duke.
The coming visit of Ramona worried Duke a little, but, after all, they would just have lunch. Waiting for the guest, the Duke cooled the wine, grabbed the flowers. Meanwhile, electricity was turned on, a woman from the village continued to sweep the house out of the house…
Suddenly, between the deeds, Duke thought, and if the writing of letters had not exhausted itself. And from that day on, he no longer wrote them. Not a single word.
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