MORE THAN THREE DECADES after Herzog, Bellow confessed in a letter to Philip Roth that when he wrote the book he had been too close to his title character. As a result, Bellow said, Herzog was a “chump” and a “sentimentalist.” Even in the first wake of Herzog’s vast success, Bellow must have felt the urge toward a different kind of hero, someone more assured and Olympian, superior to the unstable Herzog with his restless heart. The now middle-aged novelist invented in his next book a hero who could claim a moral advantage that Herzog had lacked. He produced the Artur Sammler of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, a “Polish-Oxonian” Jew transplanted from the doomed Europe of the thirties and forties to crazy late sixties New York.
Bellow modeled Sammler’s character, at least in part, on the man who had gotten him his job at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, the haughty, formality-bound sociologist Edward Shils. Renowned in his field, Shils was from a working-class Jewish background, but he put on a rather stiff, donnish air; he used a walking stick and annotated papers and manuscripts scrupulously in his characteristic green ink. Shils spoke with a hauteur like Dr. Johnson’s, wore nothing but tweeds, and cultivated an intellectual superiority that frightened off many students and colleagues, though he could be a generous, affectionate teacher too—at least outside of class.
“I love Edward,” Bellow said early on in his friendship with Shils. For most of the sixties, the two men were inseparable. But their close bond would not survive long after Mr. Sammler’s Planet came out in 1970. Shortly after Sammler was published, Shils and Bellow began to quarrel. Shils, in his green ink, had abundantly annotated the rough draft of Sammler. But now Bellow began to irritate Shils. What rankled most of all was Bellow’s effort to promote the careers of two of his girlfriends, Edith Hartnett and Bette Howland, at the prestigious Committee on Social Thought. He tried to secure tenure for Hartnett, an accomplished scholar, but Shils stood in the door. “I refuse to let him use the Committee as a rest home for his old nafkes” (whores, in Yiddish), muttered Shils. Bellow retaliated in kind: in one letter, he called Shils an “unlanced boil.” The friendship had fallen apart. When Bellow tried to mend fences years later by visiting Shils on his deathbed, Shils refused to see him, announcing, “I have no wish to ease the conscience of that son of a bitch.”
In Humboldt’s Gift Shils appears as Professor Richard Durnwald, an honest, brave devotee of the life of the mind and a superior conversationalist. Though his relationship with Shils had soured by the time Humboldt was published in 1975, Bellow’s brief portrait of him in that novel lacks any satirical twists. Those would come later, in Ravelstein.
ARTUR SAMMLER IS the only elevated, refined superego figure in Bellow’s novels. But he is not perfectly armored: far from it. Sammler’s name means “collector” in German and Yiddish. He collects and marshals impressions, mostly pessimistic, but he is often enough in doubt about his own wisdom. Sammler likes to stand on the moral high ground, but his doubt is what makes for his stature. At the end of the novel it is even possible to say that he is more wrong than right, and therefore a better man than we had thought, more loving and more obligated. For Sammler is a novel about obligation, and about the love that goes along with being obligated.
Sammler’s style, mandarin, detached, and professorial, clearly owed much to Shils. Though Shils’s biography differs vastly from Sammler’s, it is clear that Bellow was working through his relationship with Shils in the novel. In the end, Sammler represents a quarrel with Shils much more than an endorsement. Bellow’s Sammler gets shaken out of his theorizing, his arm’s-length way of fending off the chaos that surrounds him. By the book’s conclusion he no longer looks down on people—he looks at them. Remarkably, Bellow is able to make this shift in Sammler occur without sentimentality.
That Shils was a sociologist is important to Bellow. By dunking Sammler so thoroughly in the mad social reality of his time, Bellow argues that a novelist can do something that a sociologist simply can’t. The novelist gravitates toward the chaos that sociology tries to tame and categorize. Novels give disorder a voice, letting us hear our own strange or hidden thoughts. A novelist’s picture of a place and time is usually freer and more intimate than anything we can find in a work of sociology, because the novelist understands what the more abstract-minded sociologist misses—the role of personality.
The sixties provide a perfect stage for the fight between the world in the streets and the intellectual. Sammler, like Shils, maintains his distance from the arrogant forces of disorder. But finally Bellow makes Sammler reckon with the people around him. Unreasonable and off-kilter, the characters who surround Sammler refuse to conform to intellectual categories. Their very flaws make them worthy of being loved, Sammler sees. Sammler passes the test; Shils, to Bellow’s mind, failed it. This is Bellow’s trick on the intellectual type: trap him in life and see what happens. Shils remained aloof, refusing to be captivated by Bellow’s key value, personality.
Shils, who was the son of a cigar maker, grew up in Philadelphia. On Sundays when he was a teenager he would leave the house in late morning and stay away until dinner-time, wandering through the city, drinking in its sights and sounds. These tours through Philadelphia’s human cityscape, its crowded reality from the poor scrambling ghettos of the North Side to the manicured wealth of Rittenhouse Square, primed Shils to become a sociologist. As a student at Penn and then the University of Chicago, he fell hard for the theories of Max Weber and Georg Simmel, though his BA was in French literature rather than sociology. He became a social worker in 1930s Chicago, responsible for about eight hundred black families (throughout his life Shils was an ardent supporter of civil rights). After serving with the OSS in World War II, he returned to Chicago, where he resumed his career at the U. of C.
From his college years on, Shils sharply distrusted communism. “How could one have any respect for a movement so crudely unrealistic, untruthful, and manipulative?” he asked. He was nevertheless well-known to the Trotskyist clique at Chicago, which included Bellow and his friends Harold “Cappy” Kaplan, Herbert Passin, Isaac Rosenfeld, Lionel Abel, and Ithiel Pool. (During Bellow’s time in Mexico, Al Glotzer, one of Trotsky’s bodyguards, promised Bellow and Passin a meeting with “the old man,” but they arrived a day too late, and saw Trotsky’s bloody, bandaged body in the morgue.) “I thought they were rather foolish in their political and social views,” Shils said of the Trotskyists, “but in their general culture and cleverness they were many cuts above the Stalinists.” It was hard to resist the Trotskyists’ energy, their strong appetite for ideas, their skill at debate. But Shils took their make-believe notions about proletarian revolution with a large grain of salt. It’s worth noting that Shils also denounced McCarthyism in his brilliant 1956 book The Torment of Secrecy. He was as suspicious of right-wing as he was of left-wing manipulators.
Joseph Epstein remembers Bellow asking him in 1973, “Do you know any intelligent people in this city?” and adding that he himself knew three: Harold Rosenberg, David Grene, and Edward Shils, all members of the Committee on Social Thought. Epstein says he then knew Shils for his reputation as “a very formidable figure, distinctly not a man to fool with.” (Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea Bellow, who was married to Bellow near the end of his friendship with Shils, told me that Shils “did his homework very thoroughly, he knew things about you that you wouldn’t dream of . . . he was tough, he was very tough.”) When Epstein finally met Shils sometime later, he discovered a paunchy, florid-faced professor wearing an old tweed jacket. Shils had an odd concocted accent, half Philadelphia and half Oxbridge, and, remarked Epstein, “a pronunciation system of his own devising.” When he came to your house, the first thing Shils would do was inspect the books on your shelves. He delighted in mixing obscure Yiddish terms into his English sentences. Epstein remembers Shils emerging with him from a chili joint one afternoon. Pointing to some dangerous-looking young men, Shils remarked, “Joseph, note those three shlumgazim.” Shils then had to explain to the baffled Epstein that “Shlumgazim . . . are highwaymen who, after stealing your purse, for sheer malice also slice off your testicles.”
“He loved America, with all its philistinism and coarseness,” Epstein wrote about Shils. But Shils also spent much time in Europe and consciously Europeanized his manners. He knew India well, too, and visited there often; he wrote about Indian intellectual life with sympathy and vividness. In his later years Shils lived in two homes, one in Chicago and one in Cambridge, England. In Chicago he had fifteen thousand books, all categorized precisely, library style. There were books everywhere you turned, floor to ceiling, along with busts of Joseph Conrad and Max Weber. Shils was a great reader of novels. The lover of Conrad, Dickens, and George Eliot never turned on the radio, and refused to own a television. Epstein, who replaced Bellow as Shils’s best friend, brought Shils bags of magazines, allowing him to keep up with contemporary culture (“what the dogs [are] up to,” as Shils put it). Shils’s wit was rapier-sharp, and he delighted in deflating reputations. He made clear his low opinion of one colleague by saying, “I fear he believes Richard Rorty is a deep thinker” (Rorty had a notably smooth, folksy style, unusual for a philosopher, and the polar opposite of Shils’s). Of a certain backstabbing professor, Shils noted that his specialty was putting bullets in other men’s guns.
Shils could be brash in conversation. Epstein remembers introducing him in the seventies to the journalist Henry Fairlie. Shils said, “Mr. Fairlie, you wrote some brilliant things in the fifties. Now, I hear you have become a socialist. Please explain yourself.” Fairlie, having had a few drinks, was more amused than offended. As editor of the academic journal Minerva, Shils said, “I take the leather whip to my contributors, but it doesn’t seem to matter. They have steel bottoms.” In his last years at Chicago, Shils had few friends among his colleagues except for Arnaldo Momigliano, a brilliant polymathic Italian-Jewish scholar. The long divorced Shils moved Momigliano into his apartment and took devoted care of him during Momigliano’s lengthy final illness.
Shils shared with Bellow not just his origin as an intellectually ambitious working-class Jew, but much else too. Both had a fiercely independent habit of thought, and both exhibited a surprising facility in the kitchen (Shils, like Bellow, loved to cook for guests). Both had a talent for malice-laced wit, though Bellow, unlike Shils, occasionally had qualms about his sharp tongue (as in the story “Him with His Foot in His Mouth,” which recalls, and regrets, a decades-old insult that Bellow directed at Irma Brandeis, a colleague at Bard). Shils, like Bellow, was generous with money—enormously so, in Shils’s case, when a friend or a student needed help.
Most important, like Bellow, Shils seemed to notice everything and was capable of unlocking someone’s personality with a single observation. In conversation Shils sometimes matched Bellow’s own high, inventive language: he sounded like a novelist. Shils once said about Bellow that “he is a man who often laughs but in between seldom smiles.” This is accurate and deeply telling: Shils shows something of Bellow’s own skill at defining people. More than Bellow, though, he was an implacable judge of others and spoke with an impersonal, lofty authority that Bellow himself never attempted.
At the time that Epstein met him, Shils was still what Bellow called his “alter super-ego.” But soon their friendship would fall to pieces. Decades later, after Shils’s death, when Bellow wrote Ravelstein, he would devastatingly depict Shils as the short-fused, pitiless Rakhmiel Kogon, who is “high-handed, tyrannically fixated, opinionated. His mind was made up once and for all on hundreds of subjects,” Bellow wrote. “His face wore a police expression and he often looked, walking fast, as if he were on a case.” Kogon’s notions of civility and decency, derived from Dickens, Burke, and Dr. Johnson, are overpowered by his “Weimar-style toughness.” “He looked like a tyrant, with the tyranny baked into his face,” Bellow remarked. And then the coup de grâce: Ravelstein insists that Kogon is attracted to men, while Chick, Bellow’s narrator, refuses to believe he has any sexual life at all. In Ravelstein Bellow had his revenge on Shils by doing a Shils number on him. Without mercy Bellow clobbered his old friend turned enemy, who was just five years dead.
Shils’s fondness for conventional authority had always put him at a certain distance from Bellow, the ex-Trotskyist and ex-Reichian. When he was Bellow’s colleague at the Committee on Social Thought, Shils proved even more resistant to what he called sixties antinomianism than he had been to the communism of the thirties and forties. At the center of the antinomian temptation, he wrote, is “the emancipation of the individual from the burden of obligations.” The rest of the creed, he declared with distaste, was that “charismatic authority is acceptable, but rational-legal or traditional authority is utterly repugnant,” and that “all human beings are entitled to be gratified as the promptings of the self require.”
The counterculture insisted that the realm of freedom was already beckoning to anyone willing to embrace it. To hear the beautiful young people tell it, perfect solutions to all social problems were readily available. “Youth is the sacred time of life,” they chanted. But what the young rebels were actually doing was not sacred but tawdry, at times even fascistic, Shils darkly reported. Shils announced in print that President James Perkins of Cornell, “embracing the black students armed with revolvers” and agreeing to their demands, was comparable to Heidegger with his Rektoratsrede in praise of the Nazi regime. Disorder had hoisted its ragged pirate flag over America’s finest universities, and Shils was appalled.
Shils prized the social bonds that were so rapidly fraying in the late sixties. The ebbing of solidarity troubled him deeply. What holds a society together? he asked. Shils found no answer in psychoanalysis, then a popular way to analyze social life. Psychoanalysis, he argued, did not explain or value human solidarity as it should. The superego could not speak in an intimate enough voice to cement the bonds among people. Freud’s idea of authority made it look too threatening, Shils thought. In Freud’s view authority works by making us afraid of it, instead of asking from us a reasonable, civilized obedience.
Shils believed that Freud was wrong. He knew that solidarity was strong and genuine, that it was founded on respect, obligation, humane impulse. Yet the sixties with its enthusiasm for disorder shook his confidence. The instinct to do as one liked had shattered the bonds of respect, and there seemed to be no way to put the broken world back together.
Shils’s fear of the anarchy in the streets made him discount the attractions of rebellion. Bellow once remarked to Stanley Crouch that Dostoevsky had taught him something profound about how humans could become addicted to disorder. Shils was no Dostoevsky; he didn’t want to understand the appeal of chaos. Shils’s enthusiasm was for Conrad instead. Conrad insisted that we are and must be responsible for one another, but could not base his argument on anything more than our sense of duty. Neither could Shils, in the end. And so he was as incapable as Conrad would have been of sensing the true dimensions of the sixties revolt, with its cry that duty was at best an empty word, and at worst a blasphemy against the human spirit.
Bellow’s friend John Berryman, in a letter to his mother, called Mr. Sammler’s Planet “the wisest artwork of my generation so far.” Berryman had long been a fire-breathing supporter of Bellow: when they taught together at Princeton he had read the manuscript of Augie March all weekend long, and then knocked on Bellow’s window at four o’clock on Sunday morning to wake him up and tell him he’d written a masterpiece.
At times Bellow named Sammler as his own favorite among his books. But he also voiced his doubts. “Sammler isn’t even a novel,” Bellow wrote in 1974 to Daniel Fuchs, a shrewd Bellow critic: “It’s a dramatic essay of some sort, wrung from me by the crazy sixties.” In his long interview with Norman Manea near the end of his life, Bellow remarked, “Where that book has intellectual content, the answers seem to me suspiciously easy.” He had, he thought, fallen back on a prefabricated argument, an easy polemic against the chaos of the sixties. He was afraid, perhaps, that he resembled Shils, ready to denounce disorder without providing a viable remedy for it.
Bellow was too hard on himself. Sammler in fact stands as the closest thing to a perfect book that he made in his long writing career. It is symphonic in its vigor, efficient and spacious at once. It’s also his most inflammatory novel, carefully designed to raise the reader’s hackles. Sammler has been called reactionary, racist, and unforgivably unjust to the young. Flirting with the crudest of stereotypes, Bellow depicts an exhibitionist black pickpocket, whom he likens to a flamboyant, “barbarous-majestical” animal. Most notoriously, his Sammler attributes to the sixties counterculture the goal of “sexual niggerhood for everybody.”
Bellow was not just playing with fire here, but openly shooting flames. Many years after the novel was published, the African American journalist Brent Staples revived the racial controversy over Mr. Sammler’s Planet by following Bellow through his lakeside Chicago neighborhood, sporting with the distinguished man of letters by watching to see if he would quicken his step, afraid of the black man behind him. (Bellow’s response when told of this was: Why didn’t Staples just come and talk to me?) Stanley Crouch, who is also African American, defended Bellow in his preface to a reissue of the novel, pointing out the way Bellow attributes beastlike sexual oddity to a number of characters, not just the pickpocket. “Temporarily there is an animal emphasis” is Sammler’s verdict on the sixties, and many of the book’s people bear bestial traits. But they are also people with souls—no one is pure beast. Compassion wins out in Sammler, a novel that has been wrongly seen by many as strident, prejudiced, and weighted toward the reactionary.
Mr. Sammler’s Planet is awash in the new humanity of the late sixties showing its exotic stripes, the whole scene played off against Artur Sammler, a man so much more than seventy, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, highly polished in London before the war, and now living in New York. He is a remnant, a man out of time—like Shils, an Anglophile who adheres to the strict standards demolished by the sixties youth cult.
On the novel’s first page Sammler opens his one good eye—the Nazis having long ago knocked out the other—on his spare Upper West Side bedroom. Considering the motley dirt-strewn city outside his window, he delivers a grand depressed reflection about the feeble nature of that “intellectual creature,” “explaining man,” who seeks “the roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why.” Shils was, of course, as perfect an instance of explaining man as has ever lived; and Shils proved immune to Sammler’s insight that “the soul wanted what it wanted,” and “sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.”
Unhappy with theories and reasons why, Sammler still spins out the theories and the reasons. But he knows that the soul, that poor bird, needs a perch in reality, a place of rest when the waters rise high.
Sammler is uncle to his nephew Elya, who is an old man like him, through a half sister. Elya has two children, Angela and Wallace. The cousins Shula and Angela, Sammler’s daughter and Elya’s, are both more than a little nutty. Shula’s biggest stunt occurs when she steals the manuscript of a book about moon colonization written by Dr. Govinda Lal, an Indian mathematician. She aims to aid her father’s research on H. G. Wells’s plan for lunar colonies, but Sammler is appalled by the theft, and frantically seeks to get the manuscript back to Lal. At her best, toward the novel’s end, the madly spirited Shula resembles a screwball heroine of the thirties.
Chapter One of Sammler centers on two iconic scenes, impossible to forget for any reader of the book. The first is based on an experience of Bellow’s own, when, wearing an expensive suit, he delivered a lecture at San Francisco State in 1968 and was heckled by the writer Floyd Salas. Salas admired Bellow’s books but felt crushed by the fact that Bellow had turned himself into an establishment man, a middle-aged eminence without a speck of sympathy for the student radicals. A beefy ex-boxer, Salas rose to his feet in the middle of Bellow’s talk (titled “What Are Writers Doing in the Universities?”) and reportedly proclaimed, “You’re a fucking square. You’re full of shit. You’re an old man, Bellow.” “So I left the platform in defeat,” Bellow wrote to a friend, the writer Mark Harris, having been “denounced by Salas as an old shit to an assembly which seemed to find the whole thing deliciously thrilling.”
Floyd Salas’s attack on Bellow becomes an even more brutal spectacle in Mr. Sammler’s Planet. The dignified and aloof Sammler is giving a lecture at Columbia about H. G. Wells. Suddenly a question bursts from one “thick-bearded” audience member: “Old Man! You quoted Orwell before. . . . Did Orwell say that British radicals were protected by the Royal Navy?” After Sammler’s mild reply, “Yes, I believe he did say that,” the heckler hurls at him a humiliating taunt, infantile-bravura in the manner of the late sixties:
“That’s a lot of shit.”
Sammler could not speak.
“Orwell 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.”
For a bare moment, with his Greek dancer’s gesture, this hairy Dionysus touches smartass elegance. But all the rest is crude, and cruel. Chanting shit, shit, he wallows in the thoughtless splurge of the youth movement with its “confused sex-excrement-militancy,” its “Barbary ape howling,” as Sammler calls it. Tolerant, liberal Orwell has become anathema now. The heckler silences Sammler, who stops his lecture, and a sympathetic young girl leads him from the auditorium. “What a pity! Old Sammler thought. A human being, valuing himself for the right reasons, has and restores order, authority.” But this mob will never show right reason. “Who had raised the diaper flag? Who had made shit a sacrament?” Outwardly composed, but with a prophet’s rage burning inside him, Sammler gets on the downtown bus to go back home.
Then comes Bellow’s second unforgettable scene. Sammler has for some time been watching a haut-dandy black pickpocket who works the bus near Columbus Circle, “a powerful Negro in a camel’s hair coat, dressed with extraordinary elegance”: Christian Dior shades, homburg hat, salmon-hued silk tie. During Sammler’s bus ride down the West Side from his aborted lecture, the pickpocket, who realizes he’s been seen in the act, decides to give Sammler a warning. Cool, unruffled, the towering, puma-like black thief follows Sammler off the bus and tracks him to the lobby of his apartment building. There he unveils his penis to the mesmerized old man:
The pickpocket unbuttoned himself. Sammler heard the zipper descend. Then the smoked glasses were removed from Sammler’s face and dropped on the table. 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. . . . The man’s expression was not directly menacing but oddly, serenely masterful. The thing was shown with mystifying certitude.
The refined, powerfully silent pickpocket and the ragged hippie protestor join together in their claim that the key is sex: that life force undeniable, asking obeisance. “We hold this, man, to be self-evident”: so Sammler imagines the bold new declaration. That memorable black penis, the “huge piece of sex flesh, half-tumescent in its pride,” haunts the novel. But the thief is nothing but splendid appearance. His famous dingus is not the thing itself, not power become flesh, but a paltry shadow.
Bellow’s Sammler, with its suspicion of the overdressed will-to-power acted out by the black criminal, reads like a riposte to Norman Mailer’s influential essay “The White Negro,” published in 1957 in Dissent. In a presage of the sixties, Mailer said that the white hipster had absorbed the primitive energy of black America. Mailer celebrated “hip, which would return us to ourselves, at no matter what price in individual violence,” and give us “an affirmation of the barbarian.” Hip, he explained, proposes that “every social restraint and category be removed.” Hipsters resemble psychopaths, Mailer argued, and “psychopathology is most prevalent with the Negro.” He went on, “The psychopath murders—if he has the courage—out of the necessity to purge his violence.” In the most notorious passage of his polemic Mailer announced that when “two strong eighteen-year-old hoodlums . . . beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper,” this brutal killing is really a way of “daring the unknown.” Mailer’s brave criminal Negro has existential panache; Bellow’s pickpocket, mere emptiness: he never says a thing. He is just one among the Dionysian horde in the streets, those “Hollywood extras” with their “imitative anarchy,” “these Chinese revolutionary tunics, these babes in unisex toyland, these surrealist warchiefs, Western stagecoach drivers.”
In his 1952 review of Ellison’s Invisible Man, Bellow commented, “It is thought that Negroes and other minority people, kept under in the great status battle, are in the instinct cellar of dark enjoyment. This imagined enjoyment provokes envious rage and murder; and then it is a large portion of human nature itself which becomes the fugitive murderously pursued.” Years before Mailer endorsed it, Bellow had already rejected the notion that blacks are, as he so precisely put it, “in the instinct cellar of dark enjoyment.” The primitive and the sophisticated cohabit in black America as they do anywhere else, Bellow added. It is not just racist, but dangerous, even “murderous,” to think otherwise. Bellow’s black man, unlike Mailer’s, is no catharsis-seeking psychopath. Shils too attacked the facile celebration of African Americans’ desperate conditions by writers like Mailer when he wrote that, in the sixties, “blacks, according to this view, were entitled to exemption from the obligations of law-abidingness and of assimilation of the higher culture of American and Western society. They gained merit from the fact that they lived in slums, in wretched dwellings.” Like Bellow, Shils spoke out against such easy romanticizing of the wretched of the earth.
Artur Sammler’s history leaves no room for romanticizing. He has survived the worst, crawling from a mass death pit in Poland, where he huddled next to the corpse of his wife until the Germans left. He is also a murderer, and he has enjoyed murder. But unlike Mailer, Sammler realizes it is mad to celebrate murder, to think of it as a wished-for freedom.
In the Polish woods, a famished half-human wreck, Sammler the partisan—“freezing, the dead eye like a ball of ice in his head”—carrying a gun, desperate, chewing grass and roots to keep alive, comes upon a German soldier. Sammler orders the German to strip: coat, sweater, socks, boots. In a low voice, the German pleads for his life. Without faltering Sammler shoots him twice, takes his bread, his gun, his clothes. “You would call it a dark action?” he muses to himself so many years later. “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. . . . His heart felt lined with brilliant, rapturous satin. To kill the man and to kill him without pity, for he was dispensed from pity.”
Sammler needed to kill to come back to life, to wake up. Taking life is “one of the luxuries,” he grimly decides. Stalin too, he thinks, must have experienced “that mighty enjoyment of consuming the breath of men’s nostrils, swallowing their faces like a Saturn.” Goya’s shocking scene of Saturn devouring his children with vast, gruesome delight haunted Bellow; he mentions it again in The Dean’s December.
No wonder that, when Sammler’s niece Margotte gives him a lecture about the banality of evil, he scorns Hannah Arendt’s famous theory. Sammler knows that the Nazis relished murder, and merely disguised it as banality. Here Sammler reflects Bellow’s own view: he thought the Nazis fooled the strident, gullible Arendt, whom Bellow in a letter once called “that superior Krautess.” The Germans of the Third Reich were no dutiful robots, but packed with vicious life.
Sammler meditates powerfully on the Nazi sense of humor, that high amused sadism with its “harshness toward clumsy pretensions, toward the bad joke of the self which we all feel.” To the Nazi eye, Jewish morality was mere conceit, a thing comically easy for a man with a gun to demolish. You call this the king of the Jews? the Germans crowed. A filthy, mauled one begging for life? This dignified and learned man, this rabbi kicked and beaten, set on fire in front of his children? The Holocaust was the most consequential joke ever told.
In his many sociological writings, Shils gave scant attention to the role of violence. Bellow redresses the balance in Sammler. Rushing to see Elya at the hospital before he dies, Sammler notices a fierce fight in the street near Columbus Circle, with a crowd gathered around to watch. The black pickpocket, enormously tall, in alligator shoes, with matching crimson belt and necktie (“How consciousness was lashed by such a fact!”), is throttling a man named Lionel Feffer. This Feffer, now gasping for his life, holds a tiny Minolta. He has gotten the pickpocket on film, caught him in the act.
Sammler appeals to the crowd: “Some of you. . . . Break this up.” He is met with silence, with the realization that “ ‘some of you’ did not exist.” No solidarity, no bond: the facts of ordered society that Shils cherished are missing. And so Sammler’s son-in-law, Eisen, steps in. Eisen is a veteran of Stalingrad, an Israeli metalworker and sculptor. He slams the pickpocket brutally with his bag of iron sculptures, and comes close to killing him. “Everything went into that blow, discipline, murderousness, everything,” thinks Sammler with horror. The black man’s face is gashed, swelling, crushed looking; and now Eisen prepares for his second blow. Eisen explains this to Sammler (for he is yet another explainer, in a novel full of them). “You can’t hit a man like this just once. When you hit him you must really hit him. Otherwise he’ll kill you. . . . If in—in. No? If out—out. Yes? No? So answer.” These are words from Stalingrad, to which Sammler has no reasoned answer.
Responsibility steps in where reason cannot. Doing what one ought, that Hebraic theme, is worked deeply into Sammler’s ending. After Eisen, Sammler’s second trial occurs in the hospital where Elya lies dying, and like the face-off with Eisen it concerns obligation. Elya knows his death is coming very soon. He learns that Angela is on her way to the hospital, and so he does a remarkable thing. He asks to be taken out of his room for tests, so that his daughter will not have to see him die.
At this very moment, in the hospital visitors’ lounge, Sammler is having a disastrous quarrel with Angela. He wants Angela to apologize to her father for her reckless behavior with men. This is a deeply wrong move on Sammler’s part. Indignant, wounded, Angela accuses Sammler of wanting “an old-time deathbed scene,” a piece of moral playacting. When he finds out what Elya has done to exempt her from such an encounter, that he has died alone, unwilling to make his daughter suffer his, and her, debt of last words, Sammler knows he has sinned with Angela. He realizes that Elya’s instinct to spare Angela was the right one, far better than Sammler’s own wish to make her play the penitent. Out of disappointed love, but love nonetheless, Elya has let her go, at the same time that he himself lets go of life.
When he described Elya’s choice to die alone, Bellow did something that Shils the rule-bound sociologist could never imagine. Shils and Bellow agreed on the crucial importance of obligation, but Shils never recognized the intimate form it could take. For him it was not part of the Old System, Bellow’s family matrix, but rather a kind of societal glue. Ironically, perhaps fittingly, the dying Shils would end up rejecting a deathbed scene with Bellow when he refused to see and forgive him in his final days.
On the last page of Bellow’s novel we finally hear Sammler pray. We know that he prays, for he has mentioned it several times, but now we hear him, and with force, as he remembers Elya: “At his best this man was much kinder than at my very best I have ever been or could ever be. He was aware that he must meet, and 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.”
Solidarity starts to dawn in Sammler’s closing, the real thing this time, not the loose sixties notion: the “we” in “we know.” “I want, I want” were the words that gnawed at Henderson. Tommy Wilhelm sobbed for everyone, but mainly for himself. But Sammler mourns with faith, because he is certain that we know what is required of us. And the members of his family—who else?—givers and takers all, are the ones who do the requiring.
The terms of Sammler’s contract are clear: to know others with compassion, and to remember. Memories tell us who we are, as Freud taught, but they do more. They demand from us a just report, an account of the human integer, the loved person. They unseal the judgment. To sum up our memories of someone like Elya, and to reach a judgment about him, is to honor the contract.
THE POLITICAL LESSON of Sammler may seem at first glance to be something like Shils’s claim that “liberals would sooner see their society ruined than learn something valuable to its preservation from conservatism.” But Bellow remains in the end unconvinced by Shils’s main message, that solidarity depends on tradition, authority, and adherence to civilized rules. For Bellow only conviction counts. The rescue from pessimism’s dead end comes via the individual soul, not the sociologist’s communal norms. What we owe, and how much, we ourselves know from the inside; no one else can tell us.
Mr. Sammler’s Planet imposes its test on the old more than the young. Critics have complained that Bellow in Sammler derides the youth-worshipping decade of the sixties, but they have neglected the most heartfelt feature of the novel: Bellow’s insistence that the aged Sammler must also stand trial. Sammler compares himself to Elya in his treatment of Angela, and finds that he falls short. The human lesson of Sammler goes far beyond liberal and conservative, old and young. Bellow tells us that our habits of judging will themselves be judged. No imagined moon colony, and no youth culture carnival, can transport us away from our knowledge of ourselves. The blackest history lurks in such knowledge, but love is there too.