Mr. Sammler's Planet Book

Third or fourth reading. Published in 1970, when New York was on the precipice of bankruptcy, I felt the pessimism of the early sections'and Sammler has every right to his pessimism, being a Holocaust survivor'so readily echoed the present that I was thrown. New York, of course, was in shambles at the time. There wasn't money to paint the bridges. There wasn't money to pay the sanitation workers. Crime was rampant. You had this immense infrastructure crumbling etc. It was the time of the Sexual Revolution. There was no HIV. Even so today the degradation isn't physical as much as moral. It seems the rot was only briefly allayed and then shifted to the global stage. We always have this work to do, this getting out from under. To read Sammler is to reflect on just how perennial the problem is. Like many people who had seen the world collapse once, Mr. Samuel entertained the possibility it might collapse twice. He did not agree with refugee friends that this doom was inevitable, but liberal beliefs did not seem capable of defense, and you could smell decay. (p. 33)

So what at first appears to be dated fiction is in truth just a one period-specific cycle in the long unwinding history of human suffering. C.f. Aeschylus, Edward Gibbon et al. Let's call it the American chapter. Collapse twice? What is it but one in an ongoing and unending series of collapses? See Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. You may also want to check out AcemoÄŸlu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail.

To old Sammler . . . It was plain that the rich men he knew were winners in struggles of criminality, of permissible criminality. In other words, triumphant in forms of deceit and hardness of heart considered by the political order as a whole to be productive; kinds of cheating or thieving or (at best) wastefulness which on the whole caused the gross national product to increase. (p. 75)

One thing, though, the disciplined hate the undisciplined to the point of murder. Thus the working class, disciplined, is a great reservoir of hatred. (p. 147)

Great cities are whores. Doesn't everyone know? Babylon was a whore. Ô La Reine aux fesses cascadantes. Penicillin keeps New York looking cleaner. No faces gnawed by syphilis, with gaping noseholes as in ancient times. (p. 163)

Brilliant use of third-person limited POV. Sammler, a gentleman, is appalled by the Sexual Revolution, especially as he sees it in Angela, his niece, and daughter of his wealthy protector, Elya. His interstitial musings are of great interest. His is in essence a critique of the youth culture. Before the war he managed to get to London where he met the Bloomsbury gang and befriended H.G. Wells, an adulterous hound. Sammler's not a hater, but a relentlessly curious-minded man who crawled from a Nazi mass grave in Poland in which his wife remained, and slowly'they thought he was dead'limped through a fetid bog to a cemetery where the groundskeeper hid him for months in an ornate mausoleum feeding him bits of bread. He ate like a bird. So his varied experience, and vast reading, not to say his years as a partisan, give him a special perspective on America's age of excess.

They drove out on the Westside Highway, along the Hudson. There was the water'how beautiful, unclean, insidious! and there the bushes and the trees, cover for sexual violence, knifepoint robberies, sluggings, and murders. On the water bridgelight and moonlight lay smooth, enjoyably brilliant. And when we took off from all this and carried human life outward? [The U.S. moon landing was imminent.] Mr. Sammler was ready to think it might have a sobering effect on the species, at this moment exceptionally troubled. Violence might subside, exulted ideas might recover importance. Once we were emancipated from telluric conditions. (p. 181)

The failure, though, to allow women to enjoy sex, feels stifling. Women are guilt tripped here by the men. It's not even Sammler so much who expresses this misogyny, but the Gruner family member's themselves, the males, against sister and daughter, Angela. Naturally it's not the men whose sexual exploits end up under review, though it's clear they're getting theirs. Sadly, this was the age. Like so much else of the time, Bellow dutifully evokes it (Though it's not like Bellow doesn't have a dog in this fight. He married five times.)

If you like the book with all its vivid scenes, and highflown philosophical sections, you will enjoy the discussion late in the book when Sammler gets to meet Dr. Govinda Lal, a scholar of Indian origin. Poor Sammler, he so alone with his fascinating mind. But with the appearance of Dr. Lal he finally meets an intellectual peer. They talk at length about humankind's journey into space; is it rational, or PR? Why does power destroy the sanity of men? (Barbara Tuchman has a wonderful book about this phenomenon, it's called The March of Folly.) I found the discussions with Lal enormously satisfying. Bellow is a master without, I think, a dud in his vast oeuvre. Please read him.