Saul Bellow: Seer with a Civil Heart

MR. SAMMLER'S PLANET by Saul Bellow. 313 pages. Viking. $6.95.

NOVELISTS have had less success than statesmen, if that is possible, in dealing with the ailments of the age. For one thing, they lack the statesman's surest strength, his reasonable chances of success by inadvertence. A novelist whose writing takes even the slightest notice of his society is obliged to make some sense of the times. That is his franchise, and fool luck will not help. He must be a seer or, at a minimum, the rarest sort of charlatan.

There is nothing of the charlatan in Saul Bellow, and perhaps it is time to admit that he is a seer. The author of The Adventures of Angle March, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog observes his age with no excessive charity. Chaos? Yes. Senselessness? Yes. Disintegration and despair? Be the author's guest. The dour view itself is not remarkable. Well-wrought chaos and subtly evoked senselessness have never been in such abundant literary supply. A reader thinks, with varying respect, of Mailer, Heller, Vonnegut, Cheever, Barth.

Yet wonders and horrors wear thin in months. If the West has truly declined to the point of broad collapse, the calamity itself should be enough to occupy generations of novelists. But no; barely nine years after Joseph Heller's Catch-22 bemused readers with loony proof that war is an insane farce, the somewhat similar propositions of Kurt Vonnegut can be read with mild impatience. Vonnegut is simply not saying enough. There is something mean and gritty in the two-transistor collective consciousness that asks, "O.K., O.K., the center cannot hold. Now what?"

The question marks a line between Saul Bellow and every other modern American novelist. His early work moved, sometimes falteringly, toward the question. His later novels move with increasing confidence toward a personal answer. What Bellow continues to do with splendid energy in his new book, Mr. Sammler's Planet, is nothing less than clear a place in the rubble where a man can stand. An affirmation? The cant word embarrasses. It suggests fetid molecules of doubt coated with pine scent. But yes, Bellow affirms.

"Uncle Sam." Mr. Sammler's planet is perhaps not the planet Sammler would have chosen. Sammler is a Polish Jew by birth and persecution, one-eyed by blow of a gun butt, a chance survivor of a Nazi mass burial, an alumnus of a guerrilla band. Earlier, during a period of happiness and snug snobbery, he was a journalist in London, a member of the Bloomsbury literary set. Now he is old, a friend and pensioner of his middle-aged nephew, a wealthy New York gynecologist named Gruner. He is tall, dried, durable, with a floppy great hat. A fast and arrogant walker who can part a sea of taxis with a furled umbrella.

He lives in Manhattan, a city in which outdoor pay telephones are used as urinals. He judges that Manhattan has come to exceed Naples or Salonika in the fluorescence of its decay. But the fact neither dismays nor gratifies him. It is his belief, in fact, that people have grown too fond of "the tragic accents of their condition." They use the upset of former respectabilities to justify silliness, shallowness, distemper, lust. He has seen worse than fouled phone booths.

Considering Sammler, a reader at first suspects that he is about to be afflicted with yet one more sensitive, cultivated, mournful Jewish intellectual of the kind that have haunted recent fiction. Gradually, the perception dawns that Sammler is to such literary figures approximately what a peregrine falcon is to a street sparrow. Sammler, in fact, is a wiseman, though the description, which would once have been adequate to describe his position in society, is now vague. Though Sammler once was an intellectual, he no longer is. He wrote once, too, but he no longer does.

Though it is mere frippery, Bellow has provided Sammler and other characters with punnish names suggesting, in Sammler's case, faint resonances with "Uncle Sam" and "storage battery," which is Sammler in German. It will be possible for critics to see the old man as a repository of all the Western attitudes and wisdoms accumulated since the Renaissance, confronting America today and attempting an impossible task, not to pass judgment, but to shape some humane yet honest likeness of its complexity. Sammler's real objective, though, is trying to live "with a civil heart." He is a kind of reference volume in which fools and others can look to find what sanity is. His principal life's labor is to be sane.

Harder than Herzog. The span of the book is that of a brief dying. Gruner, his benefactor, a decent man with a longing for family roots, has entered a hospital for "minor surgery." Actually, there is a frayed blood vessel in Gruner's skull. In the few days it takes him to die, the city wind whirls scraps and tatters of the times about Sammler's ears: violence, florid sexuality, the dissolution of order, the clamor of too much sensation at jammed nerve ends. This is the book--an elderly man. jostled about, thinking. It is easily the most exciting novel Bellow has written. Sammler is a spiritual adventurer at least as rambunctious as Henderson, that daft giant who rummaged Africa in search of himself. And Sammler's mind has a far harder edge to it than Herzog's.

It copes calmly with an accumulation of trivia, of enormities: "Is our species crazy?" Sammler muses. "Plenty of evidence." He sees a pickpocket at work on a bus, tries unsuccessfully to report him to the police (they are not interested) and sees him again. Fascinated --crime vivifies all phenomena, he notes --Sammler is trailed to his apartment by the pickpocket. A tall, princely, beautifully dressed Negro, he holds Sammler against the wall of the lobby, unzips his fly and contemptuously exposes himself. Then he leaves. An omen, but of what? Sammler, set free, broods that "a sexual madness was overwhelming the Western world." He recalls hearing that a U.S. President "was supposed to have shown himself in a similar way to the representatives of the press."

He agrees to address a Columbia seminar on English literary life in the '30s. He arrives to find a huge hall filled with hairy leftists. One of them shouts him down, yelling that the old man can have nothing to say because at his age he can't achieve orgasm. Sammler leaves, marveling at the new standard for judging the soundness of argument. "How extraordinary! Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency? All this confused sex-excrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing, Barbary ape howling. Or like the spider monkeys in the trees, as Sammler once had read, defecating into their hands, and shrieking, pelting the explorers below."

Sammler is too tough to be shaken long by spider monkeys. But analyzing and explaining seems profitless. "Intellectuals do not understand," Sammler reflects. For he is tired of explanation. "Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear, out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted."

In Crakow, as a boy, Sammler had been rich and spoiled. When he coughed. Bellow writes wickedly, he used to cover his mouth with the hand of a servant, not wanting to dirty his own fingers. Compassion, which is compounded largely of humility, comes hard to him, but he has learned it. His compassion and his sanity bring to him a succession of fools who want to confess. Like most Bellow heroes, moreover, he comes set about with recognizable Bellowesque females. His men, even when flawed, are the strongest in American fiction. They are giants, patriarchs--but he elevates them, slyly, even beyond their strength by the womb-brained women with whom he surrounds them.

The most touching of Sammler's females is his fortyish daughter, Shula, an awkward, cracked creature who adores her father. The most significant is Margotte, a young widow, and niece by marriage, in whose apartment Sammler rooms. "Short, round, full," sloppy ("she couldn't wash a tomato without getting her sleeves wet"), Margotte suffers from two American diseases--a desire to talk every subject worthily to death, and the possession of energetic goodness "tremendously misapplied." She wants, for example, to discuss whether Sammler's pickpocket might be in favor of "black guerrilla warfare."

Such domestically provocative figures, gels of estrogen and eyeshadow, wobble about the moving scenery of Bellow's plot. It is a farce, perfunctorily funny, involving a stolen manuscript and a chase through New York and the suburbs in search of it. No matter that this somewhat mechanically produced piffle is intended merely to give the reader a respite between Sammler's soliloquies. Some sort of fictional shavings had to be packed around the old man to keep him from cracking, and there can be no real complaint.

The Terms of Life. The comedy ends with Sammler recommending his friend's soul to God. He did what was required of him, says Sammler. "He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet --through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding--he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As we all know. For that is the truth of it--that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know."

We all know. Perhaps; but Sammler is the first Bellow character who has not misplaced the information so thoroughly that an entire novel was required to follow him through the search for it. The earliest searchers found nothing. The hero of Bellow's accomplished but thin first novel, Dangling Man (1944), sleeps, eats, does nothing. There is little focus to his faint discontent, and while his paralysis of spirit is clearly a statement of some kind, it is not one that he understands.

A different Bellow came bursting out in 1953 with The Adventures of Augie March, a big, dizzy, exuberant book. Augie is tough, cheerful, naive, a searcher and an optimist. His problem: where to roost? The Jewish life of his Chicago boyhood? Wonderful! A spell as a thief? Why not? The university? That too. The book ricochets about the Chicago of Bellow's own young manhood; but if the author has a wild yarn to tell about a madman in a lifeboat, he ships Augie out on a tanker; if Mexico appeals to author or hero, off they both go.

Augie was a lucky book, as Bellow admits: he has said that his method of writing it was to stand ready with buckets waiting to catch what came. Augie's wistful, cheerful, aimless adventuring won Bellow his first National Book Award (the second came for Herzog).

Impersonating a Lion. The sensational fizz of the novel made its large flaws seem unimportant. But the big novel loosened Bellow's collar. His next important outburst was Henderson the Rain King (1959). He could not work twice the trick of making literary shapelessness a virtue. And he managed an enormous feat in leading the new novel --wilder and funnier than Augie March --toward resolution. It was one thing to leave young Augie, grinning and scratching his head at the end of the novel. But Henderson, the Yankee millionaire who charges off to Africa in a frenzy of exasperation and despair, is 55 years old. He has asked, in a roar, Bellow's central question--how can a good man, no weakling, live in the modern world?--and he must have some answer if the novel is to be more than a hideously bad joke. The roaring is that of personality, and a line of Sammler's applies: "Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder." Henderson roars himself out literally--impersonating a lion--when the author's mad plot sends him into the bush with a tribe of lion worshipers. He returns to the new world calmed, ready to enter medical school.

Moses Herzog, the urban Jewish intellectual, takes no more pleasure from the preening acrobatics of scholarship than Henderson does in the diseased elms of his Yankee proprietorship. He asks Henderson's question--how can a good man live?--but an element is added to the puzzle. Distracted by an acrimonious divorce and his sagging career, Herzog still takes more notice of the horrid confusions of the contemporary scene than Henderson. And the world does not help. At last, with foolish courage, Herzog thrashes his way back to a beginning: he finds that at least he does possess himself, and that his soul is a usable flat space, not too marshy, on which to build.

Sammler, perhaps like Bellow himself, is finished with these thrashings: he has calmed himself. Now he regards the world not approvingly, but with a measure of equanimity. Its study, in perspective, is a proper work of age. That notion, unfashionable in a society that clutches indecently at youth, is not the least of the gifts of Bellow's new novel.

In a justly famous scene, Augie March's mentor, Mintouchian, offers traditional advice to the young--be yourself. Rejecting it, Augie sadly states an eternal dilemma. "You will understand, Mr. Mintouchian," he replies, "if I tell you that I have always tried to become what I am. But what if what I am by nature isn't good enough?" Henderson goes further. He is counseled by his wiseman, the African king Dahfu, not only in the arts of public and private courage but in eschewing self-improvement, worldly or otherwise, in favor of pious awe at the variety of life. "Do you think the world is nothing but an egg and we are here to set upon it?" the king asks. "First come the phenomena. Utterly above all else."

Formally speaking, Mr. Sammler's Planet is not a philosophical novel. Sammler's approach to life may be summed up in precis as a mixture of Romanticism, resignation and a feeling of natural piety for elemental forces--the black pickpocket's majestic power, for instance--which cannot be savored (or explained away) intellectually. Structurally, it is the riskiest of books. A mighty character, moving amid scant novelistic furniture, miraculously does not put it out of balance. Its brilliance is of the very highest order. Its humanity is great. It will be read very quickly, then very slowly, then again. For it deals with those perceptions beyond intellectual argument through which men come to know the world for what it is and themselves for what it makes of them. Literarily, the book seems a culmination. Surely, it is not, but it is difficult to see how Bellow will move beyond it.

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