6. Mr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow, pp. 211-260

VI

_____

Sammler arises to find the house empty except for Shula. Emil has taken Wallace to the airport and Margotte and Lal have gone off in the car they rented. Sammler wants to get back to the hospital to see Gruner, but his only option is to wait for Emil to return and take him either to the train station or all the way into the city. Shula goes out into the garden to talk to the flowers while Sammler waits and ponders:

First, how apt it was that Wallace should flood the attic. Why, it was a metaphor for Elya's condition. In connection with that condition there arose other images -- a blistering of the brain, a froth or rusty scum of blood over that other plant which lay in one's head. Something like convolvulus. No, like fatty cauliflower.

He desperately wants to speak with Gruner. "One could declare something like this: 'However actual I amy seem to you and you to me, we are not as actual as all that. We will die. Nevertheless there is a bond. There is a bond.... Elya at this moment had a most particular need for a sign and he, Sammler, should be there to meet that need." Finally he reaches Gruner in the hospital and assures him that he'll be there soon. Elya wants him to bring some clippings from the Polish newspapers for which he wrote during the Six-Day War -- a Polish doctor at the hospital has expressed interest in seeing them. He then tells Sammler that he may be going downstairs in the hospital for some tests, but something in the tone of his voice makes Sammler feel uneasy. He also mentions that Angela is coming to see him. Sammler says, "Good-by, for now." Gruner replies simply, "Good-by, Uncle Sammler."

He opens the French window so he can talk to Shula, and she asks why he had described Lal as "just a bushy black little fellow." He tries to discourage her interest in Lal: "scientists make bad husbands. Sixteen hours a day in the laboratory, absorbed in research. You'd be neglected. You'd be hurt. I wouldn't allow it." When she asks, "Even if I loved him," Sammler reminds her that she thought she loved Eisen. Besides, he tells her, Margotte is a better match for Lal because if he "was mentally absent for weeks at a time, she'd never notice." Shula is unconvinced, of course.

"Is Emil coming straight back or waiting for that lunatic," he asks, meaning Wallace. Shula asks why he calls Wallace a lunatic and Sammler is stumped: "To a lunatic, how would you define a lunatic?" He also asks her not to get involved in Wallace's search for the hidden money, and she confesses that she already is, and that Wallace has offered her a reward if she finds it. She notices that his shoes are still wet from the previous night's flood and takes them to dry in the kitchen.

Emil arrives, and just as he does a yellow plane flies over the house. He tells Sammler that it's Wallace. He agrees to take Sammler back to the city, and to stop at his apartment before going to the hospital. Wallace, he says, is going to return to Newark and take the bus. Wallace flies so low that Sammler is concerned that he's going to crash into the house.

They hear the phone ringing, and when Sammler says Shula is in the house and will answer it, Emil informs him that she isn't:  "When I drove up I saw her in the road, walking along with her purse." Emil answers the phone: It's Margotte, calling for Sammler. She tells him that they opened the lockers, and although the first one was filled with "one of Shula's shopping bags" containing "the usual stuff," the manuscript was in the second. She is going to take Lal home for lunch with her, but confesses, "I'm insecure about my ability to interest a man like Dr. Lal on the mental level." He advises her not to "get on the mental level."

Margotte talks on, but Sammler doesn't listen. His mind has turned to Elya Gruner, who "must have believed that he had some unusual power, magical perhaps, to affirm the human bond. What had he done to generate this belief? How had he induced it? By coming back from the dead, probably."

By coming back, by preoccupation with the subject, the dying, the mystery of dying, the state of death. Also by having been inside death. By having been given the shovel and told to dig. By digging beside his digging wife. When she faltered he tried to help her. By this digging, not speaking, he tried to convey something to her and fortify her. But as it had turned out, he had prepared her for death without sharing it. She was killed, not he. She had passed the course, and he had not.... There was no special merit, there was no wizardry. There was only suffocation escaped. And had the war lasted a few months more, he would have died like the rest. Not a Jew would have avoided death. 

He tunes back into Margotte when she asks if the cleaning woman is there: "I hear the vacuum running." He tells her it's Wallace buzzing the house in his plane, and ends the call. In the kitchen he finds his shoes ruined: "Shula had set them on the open door of the electric oven and the toes were smoking."

When Emil returns from picking up the cleaning woman, they get in the car and head for the city. Along the way Sammler reflects on urban decay and the state of the world. They stop at the apartment and pick up the clippings Gruner requested and resume their trip to the hospital. But when they get near Lincoln Center, Emil stops: "There's something happening across the street.... Don't you recognize those people, Mr. Sammler?" One of them is Eisen, and the other, who is involved in a fight of some sort, is Feffer. "On the east side of the slant street a bus had pulled to the curb at a wide angle, obstructing traffic. Sammler could see now that someone was struggling there, in the midst of a crowd.... Feffer, in the midst of the crowd, was fighting the black man, the pickpocket." Feffer is holding up his Minox camera, and the pickpocket is trying to take it away from him.

Sammler gets out of the Rolls-Royce and pushes through the crowd, urging them to help break it up. Finally he reaches Eisen, who says, "I was with my young friend on the bus when he took the picture. Of a purse being opened. I saw it myself." Eisen is carrying the green baize bag with the heavy medallions he had shown Sammler at the hospital. When Sammler urges him to help Feffer, Eisen refuses because he's a foreigner who has just got to the United States.

Sammler approaches the pickpocket and asks him to let go. "The man's large face turned. New York was reflected in the lenses [of his sunglasses], under the stiff curves of the homburg. Perhaps he recognized Sammler. But nothing was said." Sammler then tries to persuade Feffer to let go of the camera, and once again pleads with Eisen to do something. Eisen replies, "'Let them do something.' He motioned with the baize bag to the bystanders. 'I only came forty-eight hours ago.'" Sammler looks at the crowd: "They were expecting gratification, oh! at last! of teased, cheated, famished needs. Someone was going to get it! Yes.... Then it struck him that what united everybody was a beatitude of presence. As if it were -- yes -- blessed are the present. They are here and not here."

Sammler also becomes aware of his utter powerlessness. "To be so powerless was death. And suddenly he saw himself not so much standing as strangely leaning, as reclining, and peculiarly in profile, and as a past person." The pickpocket is now choking Feffer, and Sammler once again pleads with Eisen to do something: "Please. Just take the camera. Take it. That will stop this."

Then handsome Eisen, shrugging, grinning, making a crooked movement of the shoulders, working them free from the tight denim, stepped away from Sammler as though he were doing a very amusing thing at his special request. He drew up the sleeve of his right arm. The dark hairs were thick. Then shortening his grip on the cords of the baize bag he swung it very wide, swung with full force and struck the pickpocket on the side of the face. It was a hard blow. The glasses flew. The hat. Feffer was not immediately freed. The man seemed to rest on him. Obviously stunned. Eisen was a laborer, a foundry worker. He had the strength not only of his trade but also of madness.

And Eisen strikes again and again, to Sammler's horror. "What have I done! This is much worse!" Sammler finally grabs Eisen's arm and makes him stop, though Eisen protests that Sammler had told him that he had to do something. "The pickpocket had tried to brace himself on his elbows. His body now rested on his doubled arms. He bled thickly on the asphalt." And Feffer proudly tells him that he got two shots of the pickpocket at work, and asks Sammler, "Why are you so angry with me?"

Sammler sees a police car arrive. Emil comes over and advises, "You don't want any of this. We have to go." Sammler agrees and they leave.

Sammler was sick with rage at Eisen. The black man? The black man was a megalomaniac. But there was a certain -- a certain princeliness. The clothing, the shades, the sumptuous colors, the barbarous-majestical manner. He was probably a mad spirit. But mad with an idea of noblesse. And how much Sammler sympathized with him -- how much he would have done to prevent such atrocious blows!

They arrive at the hospital where Sammler finds Angela alone in the hospital room, dressed in "a low-necked satin blouse" and "a microskirt, a band of green across the thighs." She tells him that Wallace has crashed the plane: Flying too low over a house in Westchester he stripped off the landing gear on the roof and had to crash land. "Wallace is in seventh heaven. Overjoyed. He had to have stitches in his cheek.... You know we'll be sued for damages to the house. The plane is wrecked. Civil Aeronautics will take away his license. I wish they'd take him away, too."

They talk about her breakup with Horricker, and he chides her for distressing her father with that as well as her manner of dress: "But really, how do you expect your father not to be excited, to feel bitter, when he sees this provoking Baby Doll costume?" She is offended, and insists "Everybody wears these skirts." He confronts her with the fact that her father is about to die, and she says, "I'm sure you love Daddy.... Apart from the practical reasons, I mean." He replies that it's no secret that he's grateful to Gruner for having supported him and Shula. "If I were practical, if I were very practical, I would be careful not to antagonize you." She admits "I don't like the opinion I think you have of me."

He says that the prolongation of her father's death has given Gruner an opportunity to resolve some things with his family. "If you love him, you can make some sign. He's grieving. He's in a rage. He's disappointed. And I don't really think it is the sex. At this moment that might well be a trivial consideration." She says, "I should ask him to forgive me? Are you serious?" "I am perfectly serious." But she is furious at the suggestion.

What she threw at him was what the young man at Columbia had also cried out. He was out of it. A tallk, dry, not agreeable old man, censorious, giving himself airs. Who in hell was he? ... He ought not perhaps to have provoked Angela so painfully. By now he was shaking. 

Then the nurse comes in to tell him that he has a phone call from Shula. She has found Gruner's hidden money in a hassock in the den where Sammler had slept the night before. He tells her not to let Wallace know about it but to call Widick, Gruner's lawyer. "Call him to come and get it, and tell him you want a receipt for it." She protests, and then asks, "What will you live on, Father, when Elya is gone?" He admits that it's a good question, "a shrewd, relevant question." But he says, "We will live on what there is." She chides him for not commenting on how clever she was in finding it, and he admits that it was "damn clever." She also demonstrates some shrewdness in saying, "Of course I didn't say anything to Wallace. He'd squander it in a week. I thought I'd buy some clothes. If I was dressed at Lord and Taylor, maybe I'd be less of an eccentric type, and I'd have a chance with somebody." "Like Govinda Lal." "Yes, why not?" Sammler is amazed at her self-awareness.

She tells him that she thinks they should keep the money, and that Gruner would agree, but Sammler insists that they aren't thieves and that Gruner may already have informed the lawyer of the existence of the money. But he knows she will keep some of it.

He returns from the phone call to find Gruner's doctor waiting for him. He knows from the doctor's expression that Gruner has died. The "tests" had been a ruse to spare Angela from witnessing his death. The doctor asks if he wants to tell Angela, but Sammler says the doctor should do it. "What I want is to see my nephew. How do I get to him?" The doctor says it's against regulations, but when Sammler tells him he'll make "a bad scene out here in the corridor," he agrees to let the nurse take Sammler to see the body. And over Gruner's corpse he says,

"Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner, who, as willingly as possible and as well as he was able, and even to an intolerable point, and even in suffocation and even as death was coming was eager, even childishly perhaps (may I be forgiven for this), even with a certain servility, to do what was required of him.... He ... did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it -- that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know."

3. Mr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow, pp. 85-122

III

_____

On his way home, Sammler encounters Lionel Feffer, who apologizes for the behavior of his students, though not for abandoning Sammler during the lecture: "I assigned a girl to look after you," he says. Sammler asks if she was his wife, and Feffer replies, "Just a girl I fuck now and then, and look after." The man who denounced Sammler, he says "wrote a book about homosexuals in prison; he's like a poor man's Jean Genet." Sammler's offense was talking favorably about Orwell: "Lots of young radicals see Orwell as part of the cold-war anti-Communist gang."

They talk a bit about Wallace Gruner's money-making scheme, which Feffer insists is "really a very good business idea," and then he reveals that Shula didn't just borrow Dr. Lal's manuscript, she stole it. "Disappeared with the only copy of the work." Sammler, who is carrying the manuscript, makes sure that Feffer doesn't see it. The university has hired Pinkertons to investigate.

To hear what Shula-Slawa had done (folly-devotion-to-Papa-comedy-theft) filled oppressively certain spaces for oppression which had opened and widened during the last three decades... Sammler himself was treated like some sort of Enchanter by Shula. She thought he was Prospero.

He decides to get in touch with Shula immediately, though he hates the prospect of her making a scene. The fact that Shula is "his only contribution to the continuation of the species ... filled him with heartache and pity that he and Antonina had not blended better." His chief concern right now is what Dr. Lal might do: "Who knew what Asiatic form that man's despair was taking." Then he questions the stereotype, but not so much because it's a stereotype, because "he himself, a Jew, no matter how Britannicized or Americanized, was also an Asian. The last time he was in Israel, and that was very recent, he had wondered how European, after all, Jews weere. The crisis he witnessed there had brought out a certain deeper Orientalism."

Now, when he heads for the subway entrance to go home, he is confronted by Feffer, who guesses that Sammler is avoiding the bus because of the pickpocket he had seen on it. "So you're afraid of him. Why? Has he spotted you?" Sammler doesn't want to talk about it, and asks Feffer to "drop the matter," but Feffer persists until Sammler tells him about the encounter in the apartment lobby. Feffer's immediate response is to suggest that Sammler talk about it on TV: "I know a guy at NBC television who has a talk show.... You should denounce New York. You should speak like a prophet, like from another world.... Catch a criminal, sell the story to Look. Do a job on the police at the same time, and on Lindsay, who has no business being mayor while running for president. A triple killing."

Finally, Sammler gets to his apartment and is able to ditch Feffer. After making himself a sandwich he goes to Shula's apartment, but she doesn't answer his knock. When he returns to his apartment, Margotte tells him that he has had a telephone call from Eisen, his son-in-law. He is in fact in New York, and is looking for a studio. Sammler goes to his room and writes a letter to Dr. Lal, explaining that he has the manuscript and trying to get Shula off the hook: "My daughter evidently believed you were lending her this document."

He explains the situation to Margotte, who suggests that he should send Dr. Lal a telegram, but they both agree that telegrams are not being delivered anymore, and that the mail would be too slow: As Sammler puts it, "Even Cracow in the days of Franz Josef was more efficient than the U.S. postal system. And sula may be picked up by the police, that's what I'm afraid of." He doesn't want to take it himself, "especially at night, when people are being mugged." Finally, Margotte suggests that she deliver it, and Sammler agrees: "The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know.... Coming from a woman, it might have a softening effect."

So Margotte leaves to deliver the letter to Dr. Lal, and Sammler, finally alone, is left to his reveries, which include thoughts about Dr. Lal's topic: colonization of the moon. "Since the earth altogether was now a platform, a point of embarkation, you could think with a very minimum of terror about going.... The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good -- a melancholy good." But then his thoughts turn to a story Feffer had told him about an encounter with a man with a gun, and he thinks of his wartime experiences. He does not regard them as unique or even unusual: "Others had gone through the like. Before and after."

Things that happen, happen. So, for his part, it had happened that Sammler, with his wife and others, on a perfectly clear day, had had to strip naked. Waiting, then, to be shot in the mass grave.... Sammler had already that day been struck in the eye by a gun butt and blinded.

In New York he feels as if "there were live New York bodies passing as there had been dead ones piled on top of him." In the gutters he sees discarded food. "Bones, chicken bones, which, once, he would have thanked God to have" When he had joined the partisans fighting the Germans in Zamosht Forest in Poland, they ate "roots and grasses to stay alive."

There at very close range he shot a man he had disarmed. He made him fling away his carbine. To the side. A good five feet into snow. It landed flat and sank. Sammler ordered the man to take off his coat. Then the tunic. The sweater, the boots. After this, he said to Sammler in a low voice, 'Nicht schiessen.' ... Sammler pulled the triger. The body then lay in the snow. A second shot went through the head and shattered it. Bone burst. Matter flew out....He was then not entirely human.

Later, the Poles he had fought alongside turned against him and the other Jews. "The war was ending, the Russians advancing, and the decision seems to have been taken to reconstruct a Jewless Poland." It was then that he hid in the mausoleum until he felt it safe to emerge, "One of the doomed who had lasted it all out."

Mr. Sammler himself was able to add, to basic wisdom, that to kill the man he ambushed in the snow had given him pleasure. Was it only pleasure? It was more. It was joy. You would call it a dark action? On the contrary, it was also a bright one. It was mainly bright. When he fired his gun, Sammler, himself nearly a corpse, burst into life.

Now he gets ready to go back to the hospital to see Gruner, as he had told Margotte he was going to do.

And as he puts on his shoes, he reflects that they are the same ones he had worn in Israel in 1967, during the Six-Day War. He had felt compelled to go, "as a journalist, and cover the events." A friend in London arranged a press pass for him, and Gruner financed the trip. He was seventy-two, but "he could not sit in New York reading the world press. If only because for the second time in twenty-five years the same people were threatened by extermination: the so-called powers letting things drift toward disaster; men armed for a massacre.... He would not read a second day's reports on Shukairy's Arabs in Tel Aviv killing thousands. He told Gruner that. Gruner said, 'If you feel so strongly about it, I think you should go.' Now Sammler thought that he had been guilty of exaggeration. He had lost his head. Still he had been right to go.

Now he reflects on contemporary revolutionary talk: "In a revolution you took away the privileges of an aristocracy and redistributed them.... Killing was an ancient privilege. This was why revolutions plunged into blood." And the train of thought leads him back to the colonization of the moon, where civilization might make a new start.

What one sees on Broadway while bound for the bus. All human types reproduced, the barbarian, redskin, or Fiji, the dandy, the buffalo hunter, the desperado, the queer, the sexual fantasist, the squaw; bluestocking, princess, poet, painter, prospector, troubadour, guerrilla, Che Guevara, the new Thomas à Becket. Not imitated are the businessman, the soldier, the priest, and the square. The standard is aesthetic. As Mr. Sammler saw the thing, human beings, when they have room, when they have liberty and are supplied also with ideas, mythologize themselves.... One could not be the thing itself -- Reality. One must be satisfied with the symbols. Make it the object of imitation to reach and release the high qualities. Make peace therefore with immediacy and representation. But choose higher representations.

And so he boards the Crosstown bus, "a perfectly safe bus to take."

2. Mr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow, pp. 42-84

II

_____

Dr. V. Govinda Lal's lectures on the moon stir Sammler's imagination and also put him in a frame of mind to recall and reflect on the encounter with the pickpocket. He recognizes that the man's flaunting of his penis was "intended to communicate authority. As, within the sex ideology of these days, it well might. It was a symbol of superlegitimacy or sovereignty. It was a mystery. It was unanswerable." (Interestingly, the pickpocket's power display looms larger in Sammler's mind than the mockery of his own impotence in the lecture hall that preceded it.)

His reflections are interrupted by the arrival of Margotte's cousin, Walter Bruch, a singer and musicologist. Like Sammler, Bruch is a Holocaust survivor; he had been interned at Buchenwald. He is also a fetishist, and he interrupts Sammler's reflections on "the sex business" with his own confessions about his erotic fascination with women's arms: "They had to be youngish, plump women. Dark as a rule. Often they were Puerto Ricans." He tells Sammler of his latest encounter: He has bought a briefcase behind which he masturbates while a fleshy-armed cashier makes change for him at the counter in a drugstore. Sammler asks to be spared the details, but Bruch pleads, "Uncle Sammler, what shall I do? I am over sixty years old."

Sammler's response is that Bruch should be thankful that he lives in a time when such things are less stigmatized:

"Isn't it a comfort that there is no more isolated Victorian sex suffering? Everybody seems to have these vices, and tells the whole world about them. By now you are even somewhat old-fashioned. Yes, you have an old nineteenth-century Krafft-Ebing trouble."

But Sammler realizes that Bruch doesn't want to hear about how commonplace his fetish is: "Nothing seemed to hurt quite so much as being ravaged by a vice that was not a top vice." When he tells Bruch, "I will pray for you," this seems not only to surprise Bruch but to amuse him: "Uncle Sammler, I have my arms. You have payers?" And the conversation takes a more routine turn, in which Bruch reveals to Sammler that Shula's husband, Eisen, may be in New York: "He wants to show his paintings on Madison Avenue." Apparently Eisen has become an artist, specializing in grotesque portraits, sending members of family pictures of them he made from photographs. "They were appalling, Walter. An insane mind and a frightening soul made those paintings.... Everybody looked like a corpse, with black lips and red eyes, with faces a kind of left-over cooked-liver green." Bruch thinks that Eisen does portraits of "Lyndon Johnson, General Westmoreland, Rusk, Nixon, or Mr. Laird in that style he might become a celebrity in the art world."

When Bruch leaves, Sammler returns to his thoughts about the "sexual madness overwhelming the Western world." He recalls a story "that a President of the United States" (presumably LBJ) had once exposed his genitals to the press corps, "demanding to know whether a man so well hung could not be trusted to lead his country." Angela had taken him to see Picasso's last exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which consisted of images of sex organs. And he recalls what Angela said to him once when she was drunk: "'A Jew brain, a black cock, a Nordic beauty,' she had said, 'is what a woman wants.'" The remembrance turns him back to thoughts of the moon: "Artemis -- lunar chastity. On the moon people would have to work hard simply to stay alive, to breathe." They wouldn't have time for sexual fantasies.

Angela has become involved with a Madison Avenue marketing expert named Wharton Horricker. "He was younger than Angela. A physical culturist (tennis, weight lifting). Tall, from California, marvelous teeth." A health-food devotee, he had given Sammler yeast powder that Sammler finds "beneficial." He is also a dandy, who critiques Angela's wardrobe: "Once when he thought her improperly dressed, he abandoned her on the street." This reminds Sammler of the well-dressed pickpocket: "This cult of masculine elegance must be thought about." Inevitably drawn to Angela himself, he tries to keep a distance, reminding himself that she is: "The beautiful maiden. He was the old hermit." And he finds fault with her: "When she became hearty with him and laughed, she turned out to have a big mouth, a large tongue. Inside the elegant woman he saw a coarse one." But she persists in giving him details of her intimacy with Horricker. "Mr. Sammler was supposed to listen benevolently to all kinds of intimate reports."

He had similarly listened to H.G. Wells's confessions. "As Sammler remembered it, Wells in his seventies was still obsessed with girls. He had powerful arguments for a total revision of sexual attitudes to accord with the increased life span.... Yes, gradually the long shudder of mankind at the swift transitoriness of mortal beauty, pleasure, would cease, to be replaced by the wisdom born of prolongation."

Sammler's relationship to the Gruners was long and complex. He "had known Angela's grandparents. They had been Orthodox. This gave a queer edge to his acquaintance with her paganism." But then everything about modern life has a "queer edge" to Sammler:

You had to be strong enough not to be terrified by local effects of metamorphosis, to live with disintegration, with crazy streets, filthy nightmares, monstrosities come to life, addicts, drunkards, and perverts celebrating their despair openly in midtown. You had to be able to bear the tangles of the soul, the sight of cruel dissolution. You had to be patient with the stupidities of power, with the fraudulence of business.... When he tried to imagine a just social order, he could not do it. A non-corrupt society? He could not do that either. There were no revolutions that he could remember which had not been made for justice, freedom, and pure goodness. Their last state was always more nihilistic than the first. 

Sammler is Elya Gruner's uncle, but only technically. He "was only six or seven years older than Gruner," and was the child of his father's second marriage. Gruner was the son of Sammler's half-sister, but because Gruner "had longed for a European uncle," Sammler filled the bill "really by courtesy, by Gruner's pious antiquarian wish." But Gruner, who had become wealthy through his gynecological practice and through real estate, paid Anton and Shula's "rents, invented work for Shula, supplemented their Social Security and German indemnity checks." In addition to Angela, whose sensuality irritates Gruner, he has a son, Wallace, a dilettante and spendthrift. Gruner's "wife had been a German Jewess, above him socially, so she thought. Her family had been 1848 pioneers. Gruner was an Ostjude immigrant."

Gruner is now in the hospital, suffering from hypertension and threatened by an aneurysm. Sammler visits him there, where Gruner talks about, among other things, genealogy. "He had a passion for kinships," and has visited Israel several times to meet with relatives there. Sammler is not one for genealogy, and when Gruner asks him about his grandmother's brother, who was "a heavy contributor to the synagogue, Sammler is forced to admit, "I didn't have much to do with the synagogue. We were almost free-thinkers. Especially my mother. She had a Polish education. She gave me an emancipated name: Artur."

Gruner assures Sammler that he needn't worry about the future, that Margotte would continue to look after him. Sammler thanks him and leaves, but meets Wallace talking to Gruner's doctor. While waiting for Wallace to finish talking to the doctor about sports -- among other things Wallace is a handicapper and the doctor is a gambler -- he looks out the window at a graffiti-covered building that has been scheduled for destruction. The strange, cryptic symbols scrawled on the window of a closed tailor shop makes him think back to wartime Poland, where "particularly during three or four months when Sammler was hidden in a mausoleum, ... he first began to turn to the external world for curious ciphers and portents." He hid in a family tomb and the caretaker, Cieslakiewicz, brought him bread and water. "Cislakiewicz had risked his life for him. The basis of this fact was a great oddity. They didn't like each other. What had there been to like in Sammler? -- half-naked, famished, caked hair and beard, crawling out of the forest."

Sammler and his wife had been apprehended by the Nazis:

When Antonina was murdered. When he himself underwent murder beside her. When he and sixty or seventy others, all stripped naked and having dug their own grave, were fired upon and fell in. Bodies upon his own body. Crushing. His dead wife nearby somewhere. Struggling out much later from the weight of corpses, crawling out of the loose soil. Scraping on his belly. Hiding in a shed. Finding a rag to wear. Lying in the woods many days.

Nearly thirty years later, he looks out of the hospital window and the graffiti-scrawled tailor shop and wonders: "Is our species crazy? Plenty of evidence."

Wallace finally comes over to talk, and comments on Sammler's sense of humor, recalling several jokes Sammler has told him. He observes, "Poles love to tell jokes."

"Conquered people tend to be witty."

"You don't like Poles very much, Uncle."

"I think on the whole I like them better than they liked me. Besides, a Pan once saved my life."

"And Shula in the convent."

"Yes, that too. Nuns hid her." 

Wallace then tells him that he and Lionel Feffer have a business idea: They will take aerial photographs of large estates, then approach the homeowners to sell them not only the photographs but also include in the package identification of the trees and shrubs on the property, with labels in Latin and English. "People feel ignorant about the plants on their property." But they need money, and Wallace's father won't give it to them. Wallace believes that his father has hidden money in their home at New Rochelle, funds that he earned surreptitiously by doing abortions for socially prominent families. Wallace is certain that he can make a lot of money from the scheme and "spend the rest of my time reading philosophy. I can finish up my Ph.D. in mathematics." He believes the money is hidden in "phony pipes through the attic.... He borrowed a Mafia plumber once." He suggests that Sammler, "just slip in a reference to pipes or to attics in your next conversation. See how he reacts. He may decide to tell you."

1. Mr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow, pp. 1-41

I

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Artur Sammler, "a man of seventy-plus, and at leisure," wakes and prepares breakfast in his bedroom on Manhattan's West Side. It's early in the morning, but Sammler can't sleep, partly because he's obsessed with the pickpocket he has seen at work on the bus he takes to and from the Forty-Second Street Library, "a powerful Negro in a camel's-hair coat, dressed with extraordinary elegance, as if by Mr. Fish of the West End, or Turnbull and Asser of Jermyn Street. (Mr. Sammler knew his London.)"

He knows London because, though born in Poland, he spent "two decades in London as correspondent for Warsaw papers and journals." Though the Anglophilia he had developed "as a schoolboy in Cracow before World War I ... had been knocked out of him," his stay in London "had left him with attitudes not especially useful to a refugee in Manhattan," especially the Manhattan of the late 1960s. "New York was getting worse than Naples or Salonika. It was like an Asian, an African town, from this standpoint."

As he makes his coffee, grinding the beans in an old-fashioned hand-cranked grinder, he reflects, "In Poland, France, England, students, young gentlemen of his time, had been unacquainted with kitchens. Now he did things that cooks and maids had once done. He did them with a certain priestly stiffness. Acknowledgment of social descent." He shares the apartment with his daughter, Shula, and his niece, Margotte Arkin, whose apartment it is. Margotte was widowed three years earlier when her husband, Ussher, died in a plane crash. After Ussher's death, Margotte had invited him to take a bedroom in the apartment on West Ninetieth Street; she was not, in fact, his niece but that of his wife, who died in Poland in 1940.

Artur and Shula had come to the States in 1947 when Arnold Gruner, known as Elya, had discovered from an article in the Yiddish papers that they were in a displaced-persons camp in Salzburg. Elya's daughter, Angela, visits Artur frequently. "She was one of those handsome, passionate, rich girls who were always an important social and human category.... Angela sent money to defense funds for black murderers and rapists."

Sammler has seen the pickpocket at work several times since the first sighting, but when he tried to report him to the police, they said there was nothing they could do: "We haven't got a man to put on the bus." He is annoyed by this failure: "America! (he was speaking to himself). Advertised throughout the universe as the most desirable, most exemplary of all nations."

As the war broke out Sammler had made the mistake of returning to Poland with his wife, Antonina, and Shula to try to liquidate Antonina's father's optical-instrument business. They were trapped there, and Antonina was killed in 1940. He had never been indemnified for his father-in-law's business, which was taken over by the Nazis and moved to Austria. "Margotte received payment from the West German government for her family's property in Frankfurt," though she had fled from Germany in 1937 before the war, whereas Sammler "had actually gone through it, lost his wife, lost an eye" -- his left one. Although Margotte is "A bothersome creature, willing, cheerful, purposeful, maladroit," she elicits his sympathy: "As though to be Jewish weren't trouble enough, the poor woman was German too."

Worst of all, Margotte wants to discuss things with him like "Hannah Arendt's phrase The Banality of Evil." He listens to her patiently for as long as he can stand, and then replies,

"The idea of making the century's great crime look dull is not banal. Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite. With horrible political insight they found a way to disguise the thing. Intellectuals do not understand. They get their notions about matters like this from literature. They expect a wicked hero like Richard III.... This woman professor's enemy is modern civilization itself. She is only using the Germans to attack the twentieth century -- to denounce it in terms invented by Germans." 

Sammler is a relic of "the lovely twenties and thirties when he lived in Great Russell Street, when he was acquainted with Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and H.G. Wells, and loved 'British' views."

He regards his daughter, Shula, as an eccentric. "She seemed to know lots of rabbis in famous temples and synagogues on Central Park West and on the East Side.... But she had Christian periods as well. Hidden in a Polish convent for four years, she had been called Slawa, and now there were times when she answered only to that name. Almost always at Easter she was a Catholic." She had been married to a man named Eisen, who beat her, and Elya Gruner had paid for Sammler to go to Israel ten years ago to rescue her from the marriage.

For a time after Sammler returned from Israel with Shula, they lived together. But she got on his nerves -- "his claim for indemnity from the Bonn government was based upon damage to his nervous system as well as his eye." Shula agreed that he should move, and "told everyone that her father's lifework, his memoir of H.G. Wells, made him too tense to live with.... She had been a small girl when the Sammlers lived in Woburn Square, Bloomsbury, and with childish genius accurately read the passions of her parents -- their pride in high connections, their snobbery, how contented they were with the cultural best of England."

The memoir of Wells mostly exists in Shula's imagination. "Nowadays Sammler would recall him as a little lower-class Limey, and as an aging man of declining ability and appeal," as well as "a horny man of labyrinthine extraordinary sensuality." Angela Gruner is amused by Shula's "Wells routine," and asks Sammler if he really was close to Wells. He says, "The man's company was very pleasant" and that "on the whole he was a sensible intelligent person, certainly on the right side of many questions." But he's really more interested in Angela's physical presence: "Angela was in her thirties now, independently wealthy, with ruddy skin, gold-whitish hair, big lips. She was afraid of obesity. She either fasted or ate like a stevedore. She trained in a fashionable gym."

She is also his portal into the contemporary world, which unnerves him with its "libidinous privileges, the right to be uninhibited, spontaneous, urinating, defecating, belching, coupling in all positions, tripling, quadrupling, polymorphous, noble in being natural, primitive, combining the leisure and luxurious inventiveness of Versailles with the hibiscus-covered erotic ease of Samoa.... The dreams of nineteenth-century poets polluted the psychic atmosphere of the great boroughs and suburbs of New York.... Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility it might collapse twice."

He also makes contact with contemporary young people through the university students Shula hires to read to him, fearing for his remaining good eye. He is impatient with them: "To judge by their reading ability, the young people had had a meager education.... Hairy, dirty, without style, levelers, ignorant." But one of his former readers, Lionel Feffer, invites him to lecture to a seminar at Columbia. Feffer picks him up in a cab, but when the driver refuses to wait while Sammler delivers his lecture, Feffer is angry and refuses to tip him. Sammler urges Feffer not to treat the driver, who is black, so harshly. "'I won't make any distinction because he's black,' said Lionel. 'I hear from Margotte that you've been running into a black pickpocket, by the way.'"

He is surprised to find that the lecture is taking place in a large hall and not a small seminar room. He stands before them, "Doubly foreign, Polish-Oxonian," and "began to speak of the mental atmosphere of England before the Second World War." Suddenly he is "interrupted by a clear loud voice.... A man in Levi's, thick-bearded but possibly young, a figure of compact distortion, was standing shouting at him. 'Hey! Old Man!'" the man is taking exception to Sammler's quoting George Orwell as saying "that British radicals were protected by the Royal Navy." "That's a lot of shit," the man says.

"'Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It's good he died when he did. And what you are saying is shit.' Turning to the audience, extending violent arms and raising his palms like a Greek dancer, he said, 'Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry? He's dead. He can't come.'" 

Feffer is not in the room, and the auditorium is full of uproar. He finds himself guided from the room "by a young girl who had rushed up to express indignation and sympathy, saying it was a scandal to break up such a good lecture." Sammler "was not so much personally offended by the event as struck by the will to offend. What a passion to be real. But real was also brutal."

He makes his way to the bus, on which he finds the pickpocket again. He has cornered an old man and is going through the man's wallet, in which he finds what seems to be a Social Security check, which he pockets. "It was at this moment that, in a quick turn of the head, he saw Mr. Sammler. Mr. Sammler seen seeing was still in rapid currents with his heart. Like an escaping creature racing away from him." Sammler pulls the cord and gets off the bus, hoping that the pickpocket won't follow. He dodges into a building and waits for a while, then makes his way to a hamburger joint where he orders a cup of tea. He doesn't see the pickpocket and thinks he has eluded him. "By now Sammler's greatest need was for his bed. But he knew something about lying low. He had learned in Poland, in the war, in forests, cellars, passageways, cemeteries."

But when he gets to his apartment house and enters "the lobby of his building the man came up behind him quickly, and not simply behind but pressing him bodily, belly to back." He never hears the man speak, but he forces Sammler into a corner and holds him against the wall.

He was directed, silently, to look downward. The black man had opened his fly and taken out his penis. It was displayed to Sammler with great oval testicles, a large tan-and-purple uncircumcised thing -- a tube, a snake; metallic hairs bristled at the thick base and the tip curled beyond the supporting, demonstrating hand, suggesting the fleshly mobility of an elephant's trunk, though the skin was somewhat iridescent rather than thick or rough.

Then the man releases Sammler and leaves. Sammler goes up to his bed, where he finds a notebook left for him by Shula. It contains, Shula's note explains, "lectures on the moon by Doctor V. Govinda Lal." She urges him to read the lectures quickly -- "They connect with the Memoir" -- and return them because Dr. Lal is lecturing at Columbia and needs them back. He is irritated by "his daughter's single-minded, persistent, prosecuting, horrible-comical obsession," but he opens the notebook, titled The Future of the Moon, and reads, "How long ... will this earth remain the only home of Man?" And he reflects on the possibility: "To blow this great blue, white, green planet, or to be blown from it."