It's Dad, thought Wilhelm, who is the salesman. He's selling me. He should have gone on the road.
Dr. Adler is deeply disdainful of his son, but he is also committed to keeping up appearances in society. This means that he will fudge the truth about Wilhelm, finding ways to brag about him and his job or embellish his story in order to make sure others do not know his son is a failure. Dr. Adler is concerned with appearances, with the "pretender soul" as Tamkin puts it.
Someone had said, and Wilhelm agreed, with the saying, that in Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn't tightly held down had slid into Southern California.
This is one of the most famous quotes of the novel, though it is a sort of throwaway line about a place that Bellow doesn't really even take us to within the novel. But it resonates nonetheless, encapsulating the seemingly endless sprawl of Los Angeles, its allure for misfits and runaways and strivers and psychotics, its lack of a center physically and morally. It is a place where someone like Wilhelm, with his undefined self, would naturally end up.
And he was about to make his first great mistake. Like, he sometimes thought, I was going to pick up a weapon and strike myself a blow with it.
Wilhelm is actually rather perspicacious, sometimes able to look critically at his actions and identify that they are problematic for some reason. Here, he is admitting that going to California to be an actor was a mistake; he should not have trusted Maurice Venice, should not have wasted so much time over there. He also uses a metaphor of hitting himself with a weapon, indicating how he is aware that he is often his own worst enemy.
He was unwilling to believe anything very bad about Venice.
For all Wilhelm's intuitions about Venice (and Tamkin), he just cannot seem to pull the trigger on actually being able to think ill of him. He knows Venice has done wrong—he did not advocate enough for Wilhelm, had a bad reputation in the business, and ran a ring of call girls. Yet he also is a failed son like Wilhelm is, fleshy and zestful like Wilhelm is, full of ideas and bluster like Wilhelm wants to be. Wilhelm likes people who (at least pretend to) like him, and it is thus hard to relinquish his loyalty to Venice.
Wilhelm had always had a great longing to be Tommy. He had never, however, succeeded in feeling like Tommy, and his soul had always remained Wilky.
Wilhelm struggles throughout his life to figure out who he is, to form a meaningful and solid sense of self. He decides when he moves to California that he will adopt a new name for himself—"Tommy." Tommy is who he wants to be; it is a bold American name that smacks of popularity and insouciance. Yet Wilhelm can never be Tommy, and wears the name uneasily. He is "Wilky" to his father and while he tries to be "Tommy" to himself, he is some sort of amalgamation of Wilky and Wilhelm and Tommy and Adler.
Dr. Tamkin had been putting into his mind many suggestions about the present moment, the here and now.
Tamkin says this to Wilhelm to drag him back to the present, from which he tends to run away whenever he gets a chance. The message here is a similar one as the title of the novella, Seize the Day, which suggests that people should celebrate the moment while it lasts instead of escaping to the past or daydreaming about the future. Only the “present” is real; the rest has either passed or is not guaranteed at all. The present can be good or bad but that is the only part of one’s life that is right there.
"In here, the human bosom—mine, yours, everybody's—there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul."
Wilhelm's changing of his name to "Tommy" is evidence enough that he is caught up in his "pretender soul," as Tamkin puts it. He loses sight of who the real Wilhelm is as he strives after fame, fortune, approval of his father, and validation by society. The image—the pretender soul—he wants to maintain is sometimes more potent than who he actually is, and oppresses him with its demands. It is only when he sheds this pretender soul at the end of the novella that he find catharsis and peace.
He believed that he must, that he could and he would recover the good things, the happy things, the easy tranquil things of life. He had made mistakes, but he could overlook these. He had been a fool, but that could be forgiven.
Wilhelm has several moments where he tries to talk himself into confidence and hope. He thinks perhaps things won't be that bad, and that he will rally. Here he decides he will get back to the way things were and that he will not be punished any further. The reader can surmise that Wilhelm has told himself something like this every time something goes wrong, and given the fact that he is a white, middle-class, cis-heterosexual male, it is not entirely farfetched that things indeed will be okay for him. It is hard to imagine other people from other demographics being as confident that things will naturally, unequivocally work out in their favor.
That the doctor cared about him pleased him.
Wilhelm knows Dr. Tamkin is a fraud. He knows his stories are embellished or outright lies, that he isn't totally trustworthy, that he tells people things to provoke them or manipulate them. Yet, he is so desirous of someone seeing him, thinking about him, that he cannot help but warm to Dr. Tamkin when the old quack tells him that he has been "treating" him. Wilhelm is desirous of human connection, especially connection with a human who doesn't make him feel like he is a loser.
"There's hope for you. You don't really want to destroy yourself."
Dr. Tamkin might be full of lies and embellishments and boasting, but he actually does make several good points about Wilhelm, and does give him the occasional piece of uplifting observation and advice. Here, he tells Wilhelm that he essentially has things to live for and that he should not give up; he makes Wilhelm feel strong, stronger than people who do give up. As with the prior quote, it isn't entirely surprising that Wilhelm continues to go along with Tamkin even when he doubts the outcome of his investment.
