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.

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."

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

I

_____

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."