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."

5. Mr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow, pp. 148-210

V

_____

"Emil drove for Costello, for Lucky Luciano," Wallace tells Sammler in the Rolls-Royce on the way to New Rochelle. There is a full moon, and Wallace tells Sammler that he has signed up with Pan Am to fly there. (The defunct airline actually had a waiting list for prospective passengers to the moon, and in 2001: A Space Odyssey is the carrier for characters going to the moon base.) Sammler, who has been meditating on what effect colonizing the moon might have on civilization, tells Wallace, "I don't even want to go to Europe.... I am content to sit here on the West Side, and watch, and admire these gorgeous Faustian departures for the other worlds. Yes, I like ceilings, and the high better than the low. In literature I think there are low-ceiling masterpieces -- Crime and Punishment, for instance -- and high-ceiling masterpieces, Remembrance of Things Past."

Wallace turns the conversation to Sammler's encounter with the pickpocket, which Feffer has told him about. And like Feffer, Wallace pruriently wants details about the pickpocket's penis: "Well, tell me about his thing. It wasn't actually black, was it? It must have been a purple kind of chocolate, or maybe the color of his palms?" Unable to get Sammler to talk about it, he changes topics to his sister's relationship with Wharton Horricker. Angela has complained that Horricker is too muscular, and Wallace seems as fascinated by that information as he is by the pickpocket's equipment:

"They say that fellows that beef themselves up like that .. are narcissistic pansies. I don't judge anybody. What if they are homosexuals? That's nothing any more. I don't think homosexuality is simply a different way of being human, I actually think it's a disease. I don't know why homosexuals fuss so much and proclaimn themselves so normal. Such gentlemen.... I believe this boom in faggots was caused by modern warfare. One result of 1914, that slaughter in the trenches. The men were getting blasted. It was obviously healthier to be a woman than a man...."

And so on. Obsessively. After talking about Angela and Horricker some more, Wallace returns to the original theme: "What else did the man do, did he shake the thing at you?" Sammler tells him "the subject is becoming unpleasant," and Wallace ceases the direct interrogation. But the topic of race seems to fascinate him as much as that of homosexuality, and he retells a story that he says he read in the newspaper about a white boy who was attacked by "a black gang of fourteen-year-olds." The boy "begged them not to shoot, but they simply didn't understand his words. Literally not the same language. Not the same feelings. No comprehension. No common concept.... [T]he boys didn't even know what he was saying."

Sammler is reminded of the man he shot: "I was begged, too. Sammler however did not say this." Instead he talks about the scene in War and Peace in which Pierre is spared execution because he looks into the eyes of General Davout. "Tolstoy says you don't kill another human being with whom you have exchanged such a look." When Wallace asks if he believes this, Sammler says, "I sympathize with such a desire for such a belief.... I wish it were so." When Wallace says, "They say you were in the grave once," Sammler suggests that they change the subject.

When they reach the house, Wallace goes in first, leaving Sammler to grope about in the darkness, realizing that Wallace's chief goal is to search for his father's "real or imaginary criminal abortion dollars." So he goes in search of Shula and finally discovers her in a bathtub on the second floor. He backs off from his daughter's nakedness and goes to wait for her in a room that turns out to be the one Angela had when she was a girl. Finally Shula appears and he confronts her about the document. "She began to speak Polish. Severe, he denied her permission to speak that language. She was trying to invoke her terrible times of hiding -- the convent, the hospital, the contagious ward when the German searching party came." She confesses that she went to the office of Gruner's lawyer, Widick, and made a copy, then took both copy and original to two lockers in Grand Central Station. She gives him the keys.

Shula continues to insist that she did it for him: "I thought if you were really, really serious about H.G. Wells you would have to know if he predicted accurately about the moon, or Mars, and that you'd pay any price to have the latest, most up-to-date scientific information." He asks her if she has ever read a book by Wells. She says she read one "about God," which he identifies as God the Invisible King. And when she admits that she didn't finish it, he says he didn't either: "I just couldn't read it. Human evolution with God as Intelligence. I soon saw the point, then the rest was tedious, garrulous." Even when he tells her that he hasn't read all of Wells's books -- "No one could read them all. I've read many. Probably too many." -- she continues to insist, "We nearly lost you in Israel, in that war. I was afraid you wouldn't finish your lifework." As he is trying to tell her that it isn't his lifework and that he was in no danger in Israel, they hear a car outside. Shula runs to get dressed and Sammler goes to see who's there.

It's Margotte and Govinda Lal. Furious at first, Lal begins to settle down once Sammler assures him of the location of the manuscript and the copy and gives him the keys. Margotte goes off to the kitchen to prepare something for them to eat. Lal says the experience has been "Somehow the kind of terror I anticipated in America. My first visit." Sammler observes, "Twenty-two years ago, my own arrival was a relief."

"Of course in a sense the whole world is now U.S. Inescapable," said Govinda Lal. "It's like a big crow that has snatched our future from the nest, and we, the rest, are like little finches in pursuit trying to peck it. However, the Apollo flights are American. I have been employed by NASA. On other research. But this is where my ideas will count, if they are any use." 

Finally, Shula appears. "She had dressed herself in a sari, or something like it, had found a piece of Indian material in a drawer. It couldn't have been correctly wrapped.... On her forehead was a Hindu spot made with the lipstick. Exactly where the Ash Wednesday smudge had been. The general idea was to charm and appease the angry Lal." But it's also clear to Sammler that Lal, barely knows who she is. When she tells him that she thought he had loaned her the manuscript because she told him her father was writing about H.G. Wells, Lal has no memory of the conversation. As for Wells, "my impression is that he is very obsolete." Sammler begins to suspect that the whole thing grew out of an infatuation of Shula's with Lal: "Were he and Wells really secondary, then? Was it really done to provoke interest? ... Was this why Shula had taken the book? Out of female seductiveness."

Sammler sends Shula to the kitchen to help Margotte, and Lal admits that he would never have recognized her. "Yes? Without the wig. She often affects a wig," Sammler points out. They strike up a conversation in which Lal says that as a Punjabi he has something in common with Sammler: He's familiar with the phenomenon of extermination. They talk about his views of Wells, as an exemplar of the lower-class boy risen to prominence because of "universal education and cheap printing." "If you wrote for an elite, like Proust, you did not become rich, but if your theme was social justice and your ideas were radical you were rewarded by wealth, fame, and influence." Lal, in his turn, talks about the exploration of space:

"The U.S. is becoming the greatest dispenser of science-fiction entertainments. As far as the organizers and engineers are concerned, it is a vast opportunity, but that is not of high theoretical value. Still, at the same time something serious happens within. The soul most certainly feels the grandeur of this achievement. Not to go where one can go may be stunting. I believe the soul feels it, and therefore it is a necessity. It may introduce new sobriety. Naturally the technology will impress minds more than the personalities. The astronauts do not seem so very heroic. More like superchimpanzees. Especially if they do not express themselves beautifully. But after all, this is the function of poets. If any."

Margotte interrupts their conversation, which has dwelt on the fate of mankind and the biological imperative, to serve their "little supper," and Sammler begins to suspect an attraction between Margotte and Lal. At the table, Sammler is encouraged to expand more on his own ideas about the malaise of the contemporary world, which he locates in the impulse toward "originality."

"Antiquity accepted models, the Middle Ages -- I don't want to turn into a history book before your eyes -- but modern man, perhaps because of collectivization, has a fever of originality. The idea of the uniqueness of the soul. An excellent idea. A true idea. But in these forms? In these poor forms? Dear God! With hair, with clothes, with drugs and cosmetics, with genitalia, with round trips through evil, monstrosity, and orgy, with even God approached through obscenities?" 

He talks about Mordechai Rumkowski, whom the Germans set up as a kind of puppet administrator in the Łódź ghetto. "He was a dictator. He was their Jewish King. A parody of the thing -- a mad Jewish King presiding over the death of half a million people.... The theatricality of King Rumkowski evidently pleased the Germans. It further degraded the Jews to have a mock king. The Nazis liked that." Lal interrupts to say that he doesn't quite follow -- Bellow uses him as a surrogate for the reader here -- and Sammler admits that he isn't being entirely lucid. But Rumkowski is Sammler's example of the modern disorder of personality, of originality exhibiting itself in "The most monstrous kind of exaggeration.... Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder."

"It is right that we should dislike contrived individuality, bad pastiche, banality, and the rest. It is repulsive. But individualism is of no interest whatever if it does not extend truth. As personal distinction, enhancement, glory, it is for me devoid of interest. I care for it only as an instrument for obtaining truth," said Sammler.

Suddenly, Sammler's extended monologue is interrupted: "Water from the back stairs flowed over the white plastic Pompeian mosaic surface." The house is being flooded. Sammler immediately realizes what is happening: Wallace has been searching the pipes in the attic for his father's hidden cash. Everyone goes to see what is happening, and they find Wallace trying to reconnect the pipes he has been working on. Margotte goes to call the fire department and a plumber, while Lal and Shula try to search for a shutoff. Sammler stays with Wallace after fetching some plastic pails to try to catch some of the water: "it was a typical Wallace production, like the sinking of the limousine in Croton Reservoir, the horse pilgrimage into Soviet Armenia [Wallace almost set off an international incident], the furnishing of a law office to work crossword puzzles in -- protests against his father's 'valueless' success." He is upset that the fire department has been called because they'll file a report that might invalidate an insurance claim, so he tries to hide the tools he has been using. "I mean I want this to seem accidental." Sammler points out that pipes don't disconnect themselves and they "only burst in winter."

As Wallace is feeling sorry for himself, the water slows to a trickle, and Sammler observes that Lal must have found the shutoff. "Well, he certainly uses his head. It never once occurred to me to find out where our water came from," Wallace says. "It's supposed to be a sign of the Mass Man that he doesn't know the difference between Nature and human arrangements. He thinks the cheap commodities -- water, electricity, subways, hot dogs -- are like air, sunshine, and leaves on the trees." In the midst of a crisis, Wallace resorts to citing Ortega y Gasset. But then Sammler has just had his long monologue on Rumkowski and the disorder of modern civilization interrupted by a plumbing problem. It's characteristic of Bellow that he alternates high intellectualizing with low comedy.

Wallace now worries about the possibility that his father will disinherit him: "If I have to live on a fixed income from a trust it'll be the end of me. I'll never find myself then." (And he's been doing such a good job so far.) If his latest business scheme, the one with the airplanes and the botanical labels, doesn't pan out, he thinks he'll go to Cuba, not that he's a communist: "I do admire Castro, however. He has terrific style, he's a bohemian radical, and he's held his own against Washington superpower. He and his cabinet ride in jeeps. They meet in the sugar cane."

The firetruck arrives and some order is imposed on things, but Sammler is unable to sleep, his mind filled with thoughts of Gruner's dying, of all the odd and chaotic things that have been happening to him lately. He has a sense of unreality. "When had things seemed real, true? In Poland when blinded, in Zamosht when freezing, in the tomb when hungry." This was why he asked Gruner to finance his journey to Israel, which he now recalls. He had met "young Father Newell in his Vietnam battle dress" in Gaza, where they surveyed hundreds of Egyptian corpses. "The odor was like damp cardboard."

And this perhaps was what Sammler's instinct had directed him to do. To go to Kennedy, to get on a jet, to land in Tel Aviv, to have snapshots taken, to obtain a press card, to find a bus to Gaza, to visit the great sun wheel of white desert in which these Egyptian corpses and machines were embedded, to make his primary contact. Certain desires thus were met, for which he could not account.... Via London, ten days later, he flew home.... Then BOAC brought him back to Kennedy Airport, and soon afterward he was in the Forty-second Street Library reading, as always, Meister Eckhardt. 

Shula finds him walking on the lawn in the moonlight and gives him Gruner's afghan. He lies down and thinks about "what a strange species he belonged to, which had organized its planet to such an extent." Half of it lies asleep while the other half works. "And that is how this brilliant human race runs this wheeling globe."
 

4. Mr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow, pp. 123-147

IV

_____

Sammler finds Gruner asleep, so he goes to the waiting room where Angela is sitting. She has been crying. She tells him that her father is worried about Wallace, who "has been such a headache.... Daddy sent him to MIT. But next thing we knew he was a bartender in Cambridge, and he beat some drunk almost to death." She blames her self: "I think I decided in adolescence that my brother was going to be a queer. I thought it was my fault, that I was so slutty that he became frightened of girls." She knows of Wallace's belief that his father has hidden money in the house, and she admits that Gruner had Mafia friends, including Lucky Luciano, who "came out to New Rochelle now and then. And if Daddy did those things and they paid him in cash, it must have been embarrassing. He probably didn't know what to do with that money."

Sammler is surprised to hear from her that his son-in-law, Eisen, has been to see Gruner, and made sketches of him. "But then he tried to sell them to him. Daddy would hardly glance at them." And she confesses that her father is angry with her because she has broken up with Wharton Horricker: On a trip to Acapulco with Horricker they encountered another couple and exchanged partners. Sammler observes, "It seems to me that things poor professionals once had to do for a living, performing for bachelor parties, or tourist sex-circuses on the Place Pigalle, ordinary people, housewives, filing-clerks, students, now do just to be sociable." But Horricker, though he went along with the scheme, was angry that she had brought him into it. And Gruner has found out about it, probably through his lawyer, Widick, who is somehow related to Horricker.

Sammler finds the whole business yet another symptom of the disorder of the times, and reflects that "even Shula, though a scavenger or magpie, had never actually stolen before. Then suddenly she too was like the Negro pickpocket.... Millions of civilized people wanted oceanic, boundless, primitive neckfree nobility, experienced a strange release of galloping impulses.... Humankind had lost its old patience." Shula "was experiencing the Age."

Just as Wallace had asked Sammler to talk to Gruner about the hidden cash, now Angela asks him to talk to her father about the breakup with Horricker. He tells her he doesn't know how to bring the subject up, and that "he's not stupid, and giving a young woman like you a capital of half a million dollars to live in New York City, he would have to be very dumb to think you were not amusing yourself." But privately he thinks, "Great cities are whores.... Penicillin keeps New York looking cleaner. No faces gnawed by syphilis, with gaping noseholes as in ancient times." (A reminder that the novel was written before the advent of AIDS.)

While they were talking, Sammler had noticed that Angela was wearing "a playful cap" with a "large button of kid leather set in the radial creases." When she goes to check to see if her father is awake, "he remembered where he had last seen a cap like hers. It was in Israel -- the Six-Day War he had seen." For he had been a spectator on battle in the valley below Mount Hermon, watching tanks being bombed by planes. He and the others in his group of journalists had been safe. Then they were joined by some Italian photographers who "had brought with them three girls in mod dress. The girls might have come from Carnaby Street or from King's Road in their buskins, miniskirts, false eyelashes. They were indeed British, for Mr. Sammler heard them talking, and one of them had on just the sort of little cap that Angela wore, of houndstooth check." An argument followed when a Swiss journalist objected "that it was improper for these girls to be at the front.... He was an unbearable little man. His war was being ruined by these stupid girls in costume." Also in the group was a Jesuit priest, a Father Newell, who was reporting for "a newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was it, or Lincoln, Nebraska?" The priest was dressed in jungle camouflage from Vietnam.

His reverie is interrupted by the arrival of Wallace and Eisen. The latter greets him as "my father-in-law." Sammler notes that "Wallace must have taken him to one of those execrable mod male shops, like Barney's. Perhaps to one of the unisex establishments. The madman wore a magenta shirt with a persimmon-colored necktie as thick as an ox tongue." Eisen addresses Sammler in Russian, and Sammler replies in Polish. He learns, too, that Eisen is involved with Wallace's business scheme, designing labels for the trees that Wallace proposes to identify for customers. "Sammler did his best to say something appropriate and harmless though he was repelled by everything that Eisen set on paper." In addition, Eisen has designed some heavy medallions, which Sammler first identifies as "paperweights," representing "Stars of David, branched candelabra, scrolls and ram's horns" with inscriptions in Hebrew. He proposes to show them to Gruner, but Sammler objects that "Elya's sick. He can't handle this rough heavy metal." But Eisen persists and Sammler backs off: "he had been trained in the ancient mode of politeness. Almost as, once, women had been brought up to chastity."

A nurse comes to tell Sammler that Margotte has been trying to reach him and wants him to call. He finds a pay phone, and Margotte tells him that Dr. Lal's manuscript has disappeared from the desk where Sammler left it. He immediately deduces that Shula has been there and taken it, and the elevator man confirms it. Moreover, Dr. Lal is there with Margotte and knows that the manuscript has disappeared again. He has had a report from the detective who visited Shula and apparently frightened her. Sammler guesses that the only place Shula would go to would be the Gruner home in New Rochelle, so he tells Margotte that he'll get Wallace to take him there. Dr. Lal gets on the line, and Sammler tries to reassure him that he'll get the manuscript back.

Wallace tells Sammler that the chauffeur, Emil, is there with the Rolls-Royce and can take them to New Rochelle. He also says that Shula called him and asked if she could put something in Gruner's wall safe. Before they leave, Sammler goes in to talk with Gruner, who says, "It's a pity about Shula, poor woman. But she is only wacky. My daughter is a dirty cunt.... And my son, a high-IQ moron." Sammler tries to reassure him that they may change, but gets nowhere. He promises to come back to visit tomorrow.

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."