Summary
Wilhelm is certain he will recover the good things in life. Sure, he has been a fool, but he will be forgiven. His plan is to get out of the city.
Wilhelm and Tamkin walk into the brokerage office, which is humming with noise and energy. Tamkin is a different man here, impatiently asking after lard.
Wilhelm sees a corpulent, old Chinese businessman and two women who were famed moneymakers. He sits between Mr. Rowland, an elderly man, and Mr. Rappaport, an even older man. Tamkin confides that it is easy for Rowland to play with money since he has no dependents. Wilhelm wonders if Tamkin has dependents, thinking of all the random people Tamkin seems to help out.
Tamkin asks about Wilhelm’s dependents and how much money he makes. He says the fifteen thousand Wilhelm says he needs is enough, and comforts Wilhelm with stories of how much money he’s made. Wilhelm is hopeful Tamkin can save their money.
Tamkin confidently explains that he closed out one of the lard contracts and bought rye instead and now rye is doing well. Wilhelm is thrilled. He watches lard and rye, the former fluctuating and the latter moving up.
His thoughts turn to his small yard in Roxbury, his desire to get out of New York. He watches Tamkin circulate and talk to everyone, thinking he is a “rare peculiar bird” (78). The man can speak excitedly, take people by surprise, move them. As Wilhelm thinks more and more about Tamkin. He starts to vacillate and now fears for the investment and wonders how Tamkin made his money. Does someone support him? Perhaps the beautiful girl? Is he a lunatic?
Rappaport keeps asking him about certain figures, being too blind to make them out himself. According to Tamkin the man was basically the “Rockefeller of the chicken industry,” but this idea makes Wilhelm queasy. He has passed chicken farms before and they nauseated him with the shit and the blood.
Wilhelm is bothered by Rappaport, his excessive elderliness and his constant queries. The old man finally asks Wilhelm about himself, specifically if he has reserved his seat for Yom Kippur. Wilhelm says no. His mother was Reform but his father is not; he knows his father thinks his son is the wrong kind of Jew. Wilhelm wishes Rappaport would give him some sort of clue, as he is so good at playing the market, but Rappaport does not.
Rye does go up and Wilhelm says to Tamkin that they ought to get out now. Tamkin chides him for thinking that and says they must stay in. Wilhelm does not want to gamble anymore. Tamkin starts to criticize his character by saying he is the neurotic type, which makes Wilhelm testy and annoyed. Tamkin tries to placate him by calling attention to his role as a salesman and artist, which makes Wilhelm feel a bit better. Tamkin encourages him to try his tried and true mental exercises, which are all about focusing on the present.
As Tamkin drones on about the present and all the observable things around them, Wilhelm remembers one time when he was sick and how Margaret nursed him. Tamkin reminds Wilhelm he must focus on the present; he must narrow down and keep one thing in his head. Wilhelm wonders if Tamkin is trying to hypnotize or con him. He thinks more about Margaret as Tamkin drones on. Rappaport butts in to see the wheat prices.
Analysis
Tamkin is a magnificent literary creation—a charlatan, a sage, a shaman, a quack, a con man, a performer, a trickster. He befuddles the reader as much as he befuddles Wilhelm, sometimes offering cogent, compelling advice and analysis and other times spouting off absurdities and blatant embellishments. He is hard to pin down, but his singularity means that, unsurprisingly, many critics have tried. Mark Cohen writes that most critics share “share the view that [Tamkin’s] personality is better compared to a folkloric, mythic, or fantastic type than one more realistic,” and Gilead Morahg states that with Tamkin, “Bellow has created a compelling fictional enigma that attracts the attention and demands the consideration of both protagonist and reader.”
So what do we make of Tamkin? Of his life, his stories, his job, his poem? Is anything he tells Wilhelm worth heeding? Regardless of how trustworthy he is, he’s undeniably fascinating and exciting, and Wilhelm sees how he and others are affected by the man. Tamkin talks a great deal but rarely says anything that is easily taken at face value, which, as Cohen suggests, means he has a “lack of center, the absence of a distinct personality” and “is a little bit of everything.” He is full of contradictions; he is, as the character Perls muses, both sane and crazy, and to Cohen is “honest and a crook, trustworthy and a liar.” He is also an outsider who has “not found a place in the American world of work.” He is on the fringes (which is why Dr. Adler is wary of him), outside the boundaries of respectability.
Yet, despite all of this, as Morahg writes in his insightful article on Tamkin, the old man is not entirely a negative force for Wilhelm. He is a liar and manipulator, yes, but “he is a source of authentic values and redeeming ideas that precipitate Wilhelm's transformation by providing him with a conceptual key for a truer vision of external reality, of the internal self, and of a morally satisfying relationship between them. Wilhelm emerges a better, freer, and more aware individual from his encounters with the protean psychologist.”
Tamkin explains to Wilhelm that all people have many souls, a “real soul and a pretender soul” (66) and that they ought to break free from “your own betrayer” (66). He urges the younger man to “have confidence in nature [so] you would not have to fear” (72). Using the language of mindfulness and meditation, he suggests to Wilhelm, “You should try some of my ‘here-and-now’ mental exercises. It stops you from thinking so much about the future and the past and cuts down confusion” (85). And he says that he wants Wilhelm to see “how some people free themselves from morbid guilt feelings and follow their instincts” (93); some people “marry suffering” (94) and he does not Wilhelm to do that. Wilhelm admits this is valid—“This time the faker knows what he’s talking about” (94).
Mohrag explains, “Tamkin defines salvation in terms of breaking the bonds of the egocentric pretender soul and attaining accord with the real soul. He describes the role of the real soul as directing the individual towards the experience of love which, in turn, will result in his attainment of authentic selfhood and thus lead to the consummation of his heart's ultimate needs. The pretender soul diverts the individual from his true course by substituting vanity for love and social success for genuine selfhood. Yet man, in his blindness, yields to the domination of the pretender soul.” This is what Tamkin does not want for Wilhelm, though Bellow complicates things by having Tamkin be the one whose investment machinations deprive Wilhelm of all his money—did Tamkin do this on purpose to change Wilhelm’s life, or is it an unfortunate coincidence? Bellow leaves that up to our interpretation.
