Summary
Wilhelm is irritated with his father, who knows he is not doing well financially but refuses to help him. He remembers when he first moved to the Hotel Gloriana away from his wife and kids, and his father looked at him and remarked that it seemed like Wilhelm brought with him his confusions and what did he expect him, his father, to do with them?
Indeed, Dr. Adler is often astonished by his son, who seems to be fishing for something, though he does not know what. He refuses to indulge the boy.
Wilhelm believes that when he puts his mind to it, he can have perfect and distinguished manners. He has somewhat of a thickness to his voice and thinks he is a good listener but isn’t.
Any conversation with his father rattles him and dissatisfies him. When talk centers on his late mother, Wilhelm often thinks his father is glad to be set free and wishes his son and daughter, Catherine, were also not around.
Wilhelm is getting older (and losing his shape), yet, vexingly, he is an adult still struggling with his father.
He has many troubles beyond his father. Margaret, Wilhelm’s wife, refuses to divorce him. She often says she will and then reneges, and demands more money. Wilhelm pays her, and pays the boys’ educational policies, which were taken out by his mother-in-law. Though she is now dead, he has to keep paying them and while that is hard, he sees it as his duty to his kids. The bills are piling up and he is filled with resentment. People are supposed to have money, he thinks, and he does not know why his former company does not understand that. They have all the money they need and did not need to let him go. Margaret’s demands plague him; does she not know he is nearly at the end of his rope?
Wilhelm enters the dining room and sees his father from afar. His father likes the corner of the room that looks out across Broadway to the Hudson and New Jersey. Dr. Adler looks up and greets “Wilky,” and asks if he has met their neighbor, Mr. Perls.
Wilhelm says hello but finds fault with the man. It is not rational, but he is still antipathetic to his presence, wondering where his father finds these scruffy German men. Dr. Adler says Perls is a hosiery manufacturer. Perls asks if this is the son in the selling line. Dr. Adler replies yes, that he has only one son and a daughter who was an important anesthetist before she was married. Dr. Adler often boasts of his children, Wilhelm notes. Catherine is fine in Wilhelm’s opinion, but she wants to be a painter and nothing is distinguishing about her work.
Dr. Adler finds Wilhelm abnormally untidy this morning, his eyes red-rimmed from smoking, his breath heavy, his collar turned up annoyingly. Dr. Adler asks what is wrong but then immediately tells him he is taking too many pills. Wihelm complains he is no longer used to New York, which is strange since he was born here. He complains about the car situation; he has an old Pontiac and does not like to move it around for fear of losing his space. His father hates driving with him.
Perls adds his own complaints about some of the odd people in the hotel. Wilhelm orders a Coke and takes a pill. His father asks disapprovingly what the pill is, and Perls questions his choice of a Coke for breakfast.
Dr. Adler speaks of Wilhelm’s role in the Rojax Corporation. Wilhelm goes along with this bragging, explaining he was with the company for almost ten years and “parted ways” (32) because they hired a son-in-law and gave him the Vice Presidency that Wilhelm was in line for.
Dr. Adler becomes concerned that Wilhelm is too open about his troubles, and interjects that Wilhelm made five figures. Perls is impressed. Wilhelm is less so; he is disgusted by their love of money. In fact, it seems like everyone in this country is “feeble minded about everything except money. While if you didn’t have it you were a dummy, a dummy!” (32). He feels himself growing agitated and starts to eat.
Dr. Adler watches his son with distaste, noting his dirtiness and lack of manners. Wilhelm returns to the subject of his company and how he does not want to let them get away with what they did, especially as he did so much for them. Dr. Adler sighs and tells him to stop looking for trouble and embarrassment; he ought to focus on his obligations. Wilhelm says he did that for years. He looks at his father, grudgingly admiring that he is a “healthy and fine small old man” (34) but wondering why he insists on dressing like a jockey.
As Perls talks about Wilhelm’s job, Wilhelm wonders why he is always the one talked about—why not Perls? Dr. Adler jumps in, trying to increase Perls’ respect for him by saying Wilhelm is taking it easy and considering various propositions.
Wilhelm is weary, feeling like “the spirit, the peculiar burden of his existence lay upon him like an accretion, a load, a hump” (35). He is dismayed remembering the money that used to flow for him.
Perls brings up Dr. Tamkin, saying he heard Wilhelm is going into investing with him. Dr. Adler compliments Tamkin as an “ingenious fellow” (36) but wonders if he really is a medical doctor. Perls says he writes prescriptions and talks about his patients and everyone thinks he is, but Dr. Adler suggests he is a “cunning man” who is a “little vague” (36). He thinks perhaps Tamkin was a doctor in California, but out there a thousand dollars will buy a degree. He tells Wilhelm he ought not to trust Tamkin, especially as Tamkin has mentioned knowing something about chemistry and “hypnotism.”
Surprised to hear this, Wilhelm asks why Tamkin is untrustworthy and his father says he is probably a liar and just because he was written about in Fortune, as Wilhelm reminds him, does not mean he is legitimate. Perls interjects knowingly that Tamkin could be both sane and crazy, as people are these days. Wilhelm defends Tamkin and his inventions—there was apparently one that was an electrical shock for truck drivers to wear in their cap so they did not fall asleep—but Perls and Dr. Adler laugh about it. What especially frustrates Wilhelm is that they are laughing about the man to whom Wilhelm gave power of attorney over his last seven hundred dollars.
Trading will be opening soon, and he will see how it is going.
Analysis
The reader mostly has Wilhelm’s side of the story when it comes to his life, so it should be no surprise that there are some lingering questions about his marriage and his job. What was the real reason behind him being let go from Rojax? Was it fair and aboveboard, or did he do something wrong? Dr. Adler will later suggest there was some sort of “scandal,” but Wilhelm hotly protests there was nothing of the sort. The circumstances of his leaving his job matter, as we are constantly negotiating how much of Wilhelm’s current conundrum is of his own making and how much is a result of bad luck or more powerful forces outside of his control. The same questions apply to his marriage—why exactly did he leave Margaret? Was it just to chase another woman? Was Margaret oppressing him somehow? Did marriage not suit him for other reasons, and should he be blamed for that? Wilhelm is often very revealing about his emotions and motivations as well as possessive of insights into his own character, but he is also quite prone to a sort of inane idealism about things, not to mention a tendency to whine and adopt the pose of the victim/martyr.
One of his hypocrisies, for example, is that he is critical of his father and Mr. Perls’ obsession with money, but both before and after this thought (and, frankly, throughout the entire text) Wilhelm rues his own lack of money. He tells himself “Everyone was supposed to have money” (27) but later thinks of the old men in disgust, “How they love money… They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money!” (32).
Unsurprisingly, some critics see the novel as a critique of capitalism. In terms of the stock market, as Julia Eichelberger writes, “Comically inept as it is, Wilhelm's investment in the commodities market is an activity his culture legitimizes and even applauds. If Bellow had wished to depict Wilhelm as merely self-destructive and foolhardy, he could have had his protagonist betting at the racetrack, or engaging in illegal get-rich-quick schemes; he chose instead to have Wilhelm risk his money in a public, widely-accepted enterprise. Thus Bellow presents this venture as a symptom of a whole society whose members strive not to produce goods or services, but to acquire cash. Wilhelm is a product of this society, so the phenomenon of attaining instant wealth and leverage over others is already familiar to him; his dreams of success partake of pre-existing cultural assumptions and mythology.” Wilhelm himself is a problem, yes, but the real problem is his culture: “Bellow consistently reminds readers that Wilhelm's culture rewards the exercise of power: of competitive, aggressive, domineering behavior, of artificially created leverage. Success in each of Wilhelm's careers depends not so much on Wilhelm's competence but on a kind of cultural incompetence. His society does not recognize the value of the individual or of the natural world, for it gives little reward to production, creation, conservation, nurturance, and imagination, activities that meet human needs and foster harmony.”
Even though Dr. Tamkin does not step onto the stage until the next chapter, the reader is already starting to get a vivid picture of the old psychiatrist. In Chapter 1, Wilhelm gave us the origins of the investment scheme, remembering how Tamkin impressed him with his effusive explanation of how anyone, even if they were not intelligent or well-versed in the stock market, could make a great deal of money. To the reader, these claims are noticeably absurd and it’s easy to wonder how stupid Wilhelm could be to fall for such unverifiable claims about what essentially amounts to gambling; however, readers also know Wilhelm is desperate, willing to believe anything that might help him, and probably easily swayed by the words of an old man who, unlike his father, actually seems to want to help him.
Dr. Adler is clearly fascinated by him, but also cogently observes he is not trustworthy. He and Perls are amused by the man’s various pursuits, but that’s all they allow themselves—they would never invest their funds in any sort of scheme Tamkin proposed. Wilhelm also has a gut feeling Tamkin is untrustworthy, but as detailed in Chapter 1, he has a tendency to just barrel ahead with a decision even if he is ambivalent about it. His failure on the market is almost preordained, but the reader nonetheless follows Wilhelm throughout his day to see what happens.
