Summary
Tommy Wilhelm is heading down the elevator in his apartment building to check his mail. He looks for his father, who also lives there and whom he often meets at this time, but does not see him. He is one of the youngest residents of the Hotel Gloriana, which is filled with mostly people in their seventies and beyond. He is comparably younger in his forties, “large and blond, with big shoulders” (2).
Wilhelm is an active man and likes to get out into the city early, which, since he has no job currently, has been easier. But now he feels like “his routine was about to break up” and “a huge trouble long presaged but till now formless was due” (2).
Wilhelm sees Rubin, the man at the newsstand, who is looking out dreamily at the Ansonia, an edifice built by Stanford White. Rubin says his father is already at breakfast, and compliments Wilhelm’s shirt and says he is looking pretty sharp today. Wilhelm is pleasantly surprised, and looks at himself in a window. He sees himself as a “fair-haired hippopotamus” with a “big round face” (4) and decides he should have done hard labor.
As a younger man in the 1930s, he had striking looks and was almost a successful actor. He tried for seven years in Hollywood, then stayed on in California for a time, indulging in laziness. He was, as a result, unfit for business and trades, and had been slow to mature.
Rubin and Wilhelm talk for a bit about the gin game, which Wilhelm had been joining recently but never won. Rubin asks if he wants to see the closing quotations from the stocks and Wilhelm says no, as he knew what they were. He has three orders of lard in the commodities market, which Dr. Tamkin had encouraged him to do four days ago.
Dr. Tamkin is a psychologist who lives in the building. He told Wilhelm about a way to get into investing without putting the full legal deposit down, and bragged how while many people gamble, he does it scientifically. Wilhelm was excited to hear him talk about how much money people were making, as Tamkin told him how so many people who were not even smart or capable were making a lot of money in stocks. Wilhelm told him he would be grateful to learn how to work it. Tamkin had agreed.
Dr. Adler, Wilhelm’s father, “lived in an entirely different world from his son’s” (7) but he had warned Wilhelm about Dr. Tamkin. Wilhelm did not like how his father was so detached about his son’s welfare. He also did not like how even though his father was retired and had a considerable fortune, he would not help his son. Recently Wilhelm had told him he was not in a good financial place and wished he had better things to share with him, but Dr. Adler was indifferent and treated him as he formerly did his patients. Wilhelm tried to tell himself not to take it too personally because old people grew strange and different from what they once were.
Dr. Adler is good-looking and tall, idolized by everyone in the building. People admire him, a former professor and doctor of internal medicine, “clean and immaculate” (9). Wilhelm is annoyed that he is so vain.
Wilhelm often lies about his education—he says he is an alum of Penn State but he actually left before sophomore year was finished. He is the only member of the family with no education, a sore point for his father. Once, though, he heard his father bragging that his son was a sales executive and was making good money. Wilhelm thought it was his father who was the true salesman, selling his son. But really, Wilhelm knows his father is ashamed of him. Dr. Adler was never much of a friend to his son when he was young, and looks down on him.
Wilhelm is nervous to go into the dining room. He thinks his face conceals his troubles but it does not. People will ask if he is Dr. Adler’s son, but will be confused and ask about his different name. Wilhelm took "Tommy Wilhelm" for his name when he went to Hollywood. He used to tell everyone that going to the West Coast was talent scout Maurice Venice’s idea, but Venice did not actually do much because Wilhelm’s screen tests were not great.
Wilhelm was in college and not taking it too seriously when a letter came from Maurice Venice. There were versions of this story, many of them lies, and today Wilhelm tries to remember what really happened. There was a Depression going on, of course, but he was barely aware of it. He received a letter from the scout, who saw his picture in the college paper. They met, and Venice was fleshy and huge, with noisy breath and a noisier outfit. At this time, Wilhelm looked healthy and slim, and was excited to make something of himself. Venice began defending himself as legitimate, which was odd to Wilhelm, who had no reason to think otherwise. He wanted to please Venice, who began going on about how great he was and how he worked with famous people.
Wilhelm did come to see that Venice was the “obscure failure of an aggressive and powerful clan” but “he had the greatest sympathy from Wilhelm” (17). He listened to Venice talk about what sort of roles he could have, but was disappointed to hear Venice thought he would be the “guy who lost the girl.” He looked sympathetic, Venice said, but women went for other types. This hurt and confused Wilhelm.
Venice liked him, though, and gave him a script and told him to prepare for the screen test. Wilhelm never returned to Penn State.
His mother did not want him to go to Hollywood and he promised if it did not work out he would go back to school. She said his father could get him into medicine and he replied he did not want to do that, as he was afraid to hurt someone and did not think he had the brains. His mother mentioned her nephew Artie, and how he was an honors student at Columbia in math and languages. Wilhelm was annoyed and jealous of Artie, and wondered if he was cynical about things (it seems to Wilhelm that everyone is cynical these days, as well as ironic).
Wilhelm wanted his parents’ blessing but never got it. He was eager for life to start and college was in the way, so he was ready to get to California. But Venice was disappointed with the screen test. On video Wilhelm had “many peculiarities, otherwise unnoticeable” (20). Venice tried to get rid of him, and told him he couldn’t take a chance on him. Wilhelm was devastated but couldn’t tell his family this truth, and went anyway.
When he reached California, he learned a recommendation from Venice was actually a career-breaker, and learned he was under indictment for running a ring of call girls. It was hard for Wilhelm to believe anything bad about Venice; he was much distressed.
He had taken his new name by now, which Dr. Adler would not accept. He still called him Wilky after all these years. Wilhelm never actually felt like a Tommy even though he wanted to, and against his will felt like Wilky. It was a mistake to change his name, which he could now admit, but it could not be undone and he wished his father would not remind him of it. He did not want to revisit humiliating memories.
He prays for God to let him out of his troubles and his thoughts, and admits he is sorry about the time he wasted. He wants a different life, and he asks God for mercy.
Analysis
Seize the Day is the shortest of Saul Bellow’s masterpieces, but it packs a punch—it is a trenchant look at a day in the life of a milquetoast, middle-aged man on the precipice of personal and financial bankruptcy. Wilhelm vacillates between being sympathetic and unsympathetic, likable and unlikable, the orchestrator of his own failure and the unwitting victim of forces beyond his control. Through this character and especially his interactions with Dr. Tamkin, one of Bellow’s most fantastic creations, Bellow urges his readers to ruminate on the deleterious effects of capitalism, the state of America in the 1950s, masculinity, Judaism, and much more.
We meet Wilhelm on the morning of the single day that comprises the narrative of the novel. He is reluctantly heading down to breakfast with his father, his mind occupied with the thought that his last remaining money is in the stock market, ready to increase in number or vanish, thrusting him into penury. He is aware that today “his routine was about to break up and he sensed that a huge trouble long presaged but until now formless was due. Before evening he’d know” (2).
Bellow is a master of drawing a character. While he still has “great charm” (3), Wilhelm is somewhat of a mess. He is separated from his wife, jobless, and a failed actor who was “slow to mature” (5). His aimlessness is mirrored in his clothes—“He liked to wear good clothes, but once he had put it on each article seemed to go its own way” (3)—showing that his attempts to be proper and fastidious in his appearance are subject to entropy. He knows what he looks like too, and lobs insults his own way— “Fair-haired hippopotamus!—that was how he looked to himself. He saw a big round face, a wide, flourishing red mouth, stump teeth” (4).
His encounters with Maurice Venice, the talent scout, give us more insight into Wilhelm’s character. Wilhelm had been eager to get out of college, and believed Venice when he told Wilhelm he could make him a star. Wilhelm had a “desire to make a pleasing impression” (15) and did not interrogate any of the suspicious claims he made. Even when he did start to realize at his first meeting with Venice that the man was trouble—“He was the obscure failure of an aggressive and powerful clan” (17)—this only elicits “the greatest sympathy from Wilhelm” (17), and he continues to stake his future on the promises of a man who turns out to be a criminal and an outcast in the industry. Wilhelm is smart, though, knowing that Venice, and later Tamkin, isn’t ideal and that the venture he hopes to embark upon probably isn’t the best idea, but something in him forces it anyway: “This was typical of Wilhelm. After much thought and hesitation and debate he invariably took the course he had rejected innumerable times. Ten such decisions made up the history of his life” (19).
Wilhelm’s father could not be more diametrically opposed to his son. Bellow describes Dr. Adler as “handsome” and “idolized by everyone” (9), with a “gentlemanly, low-voiced, tasteful” (8) mien. Unlike his penniless son, he has a “considerable fortune” (8), and unlike his son, who did not complete college, Dr. Adler went all the way through medical school and had been a prominent internal medicine doctor before he retired. Fastidious, elegant, and imperious, Dr. Adler is a significant foil to, and occasionally foe of, Wilhelm and his desire to change his circumstances. Elizabeth Frank writes of their relationship: “the more pleadingly Wilhelm tries to extract compassion, concern, mercy and love from his father, the more rigidly his father pulls back.” His father is full of contempt for his son, and, as Frank notes, “Bellow makes it very hard for us not to share in that contempt. Tommy even feels it for himself… Tommy feels sorry for himself—utterly, wretchedly, unattractively sorry for himself.” And as the reader will see, “Tommy sickens us by making, during the day, the same mistake over and over that, as psychoanalysts never tire of telling us, keeps us stuck like mice on a glue-trap to our own neuroses.”
