TW J

JOURNALS DIVISION
DIVERSITY OF
ISCON 引 N
PRESS
Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler
Author(s)： Allen Guttmann and Saul Bellow
Source： Contemporary Literature, Spring, 1973, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1973), pp. 157168
Published by： University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL： https://www.jstor.org/stable/1207650

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SAUL BELLOW'S MR. SAMMLER

Allen Guttmann

Saul Bellow's most recent novel has had a remarkable and dispiriting
reception. Published in the politically inauspicious spring of 1970, Mr.
Sammlefs Planet provoked many of its readers to passionate denunci-
ation. The response was partisan. Those loyal to the ideals of liberalism
were sympathetic; those inspired by the visions of the "New Left” were
antagonized. Irving Howe, writing in Harper's, praised Bellow's seri-
ousness and admired "that verbal impasto that mixes demotic richness
with mandarin eloquence.” 】 John J. Clayton, considerably radicalized
since the appearance of his laudatory study of Bellow's fiction, con-
demned the novel: "Saul Bellow, like Spiro Agnew and George Wallace,
is disgusted with the lack of law and order in America. Like Agnew, he is
revolted by young people in revolt and like Wallace, terrified of blacks. '以
The contrast between Howe's approval and Clayton^ rage has been
characteristic of the noveFs critical reception.
Mr. Sammlefs opinions are undoubtedly unfashionable. They are
occasionally authoritarian, frequently elitist, and almost always skeptical.
Many of his attitudes are, moreover, quite contrary to those dramatized in
Bellow's other novels and more directly avowed in his essays and
interviews. It may be, as some have averred, that Bellow has rushed
rightward from fear of the New Left, but alternative explanations are
more reasonable.
There has been a tendency for readers of Mr. Sammlefs Planet to
assume that the separation between author and protagonist is mini-

1
Harpefs, 240 (Feb. 1970), 106.
2
"Bellow and the Planet of Our Discontent/* The Valley Review, 1 (Dec.
1970), 14-15.

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE | XIV, 2

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mal. If three decades of New Criticism taught us anything, it should have
made us aware of the difference between an author and his characters, but
political passion has apparently overwhelmed critical awareness. The
ironic distance between Bellow and Sammler disappears when seen from
a politicized perspective, and Sammlefs weary humanism is condemned
as Saul Bellow's unrestrained bitterness.
The separation between author and protagonist must be insisted
upon. Although biographical data are far less important than what
happens in the novel, the distinction between Saul Bellow, polymath
novelist, and Artur Sammler, polymath journalist, is worth some con-
templation. Both men are secular Jews, but Sammler has a stronger
attachment to the State of Israel than Bellow has demonstrated. Both men
are immigrants, but the novelist came to America as a child and was
formed more by Chicago than by his Canadian childhood. Sammler, on
the other hand, arrives after the Second World War, which he barely
survives. He is, during the noveFs present, in his seventies, a prime
specimen of what used to be called the "good European,” a man shaped
by the internationalist culture of upper-class Polish Jews. Unlike his
creator, who has risen in the world, Artur Sammler has seen better days:
"Now he did things that cooks and maids had once done. He did them
with a certain priestly stiffness. Acknowledgment of social descent.
Historical ruin. Transformation of society. It was beyond personal
humbling. He had gotten over . . . all that, especially the idiotic pain of
losing class privileges.,,3
It is not simply that Sammler was bom and bred in a different
milieu; it is also of fundamental importance that he survived, as no
American novelist has, the traumatic experience we now—almost
familiarly—refer to as the Holocaust. Like Tiresias, who lived as male
and as female, Mr. Sammler has known life and death and has, pre-
sumably, attained the moral authority to utter opinions which might seem
arrogant coming from a novelist whose personal crises have been of less
mythic import. Rounded up by the Nazis, Sammler was clubbed, blinded
in one eye, lined up, shot at, and buried in a ditch with the corpse of his
wife and with hundreds of other dead and dying Jews. By a miracle, he
escaped, a wounded phoenix. He found refuge in a Polish tomb from
Polish guerrillas who sought a Jewless postwar Poland and was reborn to
become a symbol as puzzling to himself as to others: "Mr. Sammler had a
symbolic character. He, personally,
was a symbol. His friends and family had made him a judge and a priest.
And of what was he a symbol? He didn't even know" (p.91). He is ironic
about his role as a prophet. All the more reason to assume that Saul
Bellow has offered us a half-blinded seer. With one eye, Sammler sees
more clearly than most, but his vision is nonetheless impaired. There is
3Mr. Sammlefs Planet (New York: Viking, 1970), p. 7. All references to this
edition will be noted parenthetically in the text.
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no reason to doubt that Bellow stands behind Sammler, as he stands
behind Asa Leventhal, Augie March, Eugene Henderson, and, much more
closely, Moses Herzog, but Sammler is an older, narrower, more
crotchety, and opinionated Saul Bellow.
His opinions are, finally, what matter in the novel. He is part of a
richly complicated, almost Dickensian family, with a confused daughter
who turns Catholic at Easter, a niece who considers him an heirloom,
another niece who is a nymphomaniac, and a nephew whose crazy antics
provide much of the book's comedy, but the domestic context is less
important than the philosophical concerns. What matters is Sammler^
Weltanschauung—to choose the term that he might favor—and the way it
differs from Saul Bellow's.
Sammler^ relationship to his wife, dead and buried in a Polish
grave, is unclear, but his lack of strong affection for his devoted and
scatterbrained daughter is unmistakable. Her slovenly habits send
Sammler into fits of rage so severe that he chooses to live with Mar- gotte
Arkin, a niece of his late wife. This coldness to his daughter is quite
possibly linked to his almost pathological view of sexuality. Most of
Bellow's earlier novels were peopled by characters affirming the
pleasures, if not the values, of sensuality. Augie March had his Thea and
his Stella, Moses Herzog had his voluptuous Ramona, practiced in the
arts and crafts of love; Bellow has always seemed to share this view of
womankind, but Sammlefs attitude toward sex is mainly negative. More
often than not, he seems disgusted. In one of the many passages in which
he articulates his displeasure, he echoes Freud's Civilization and Its
Discontents but without Freud's respect for the positive contributions of
eros: ''Millions of civilized people wanted oceanic, boundless, primitive,
neckfree nobility, experienced a strange release of galloping impulses,
and acquired the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood for everyone" (p.
162). (Is it really necessary to remark that “sexual niggerhood" is not a
phrase expressive of Bellow's own sentiments?)
His niece, Angela Gruner, appears in a thick, Titianesque rape- of-
Europa swirl of thighs, bosom, and underwear, all redolent with the
smoldering odor of hormones. She appalls Sammler with her proudly
flaunted affairs: "'A Jew brain, a black cock, a Nordic

BELLOW I 159

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beauty,5 she had said, 'is what a woman wants* " (pp. 66-67). Unable to
swerve her from her obsessions or to effect a deathbed reconciliation
between Angela and her father, the old man blurts out his loathing:
''Diversions, group intercourse, fellatio with strangers― ne can do that
but not come to terms with one's father at the last opportunity" (p. 306).
Sammlefs revulsion from sexuality is also, as I shall shortly indicate, at
the core of his alleged hatred of the young and of Negroes. It may well be
the source of his satisfaction with the works of Meister Eckhart. It is
unquestionably something shared with the philosopher for whom he was
named—Artur Schopenhauer.
Sammler's political opinions are complex. As a young man he was a
believer in Marx and Engels. Although the progress of his political ideas
is not shown in the novel, Sammlefs great infatuation had been with the
utopian socialism of H. G. Wells. Speaking to a group at Columbia
University, Sammler becomes excited, as if once again entranced by the
dream of reason, as if once more hopeful about

the building of a planned, orderly, and beautiful world society: abolishing

national sovereignty, outlawing war; subjecting money and credit,
production, distribution, transport, population, arms manufacture et cetera
to world-wide collective control, offering free universal education,
personal freedom (compatible with community welfare) to the utmost
degree; a service society based on a rational scientific attitude toward life.
(p. 41)

But even H. G. Wells, epitome of rationality, had been flawed by the

irrational: "As a biologist, as a social thinker concerned with power and
world projects, the molding of a universal order, as a furnisher of
interpretation and opinion to the educated masses—as all of these he
appeared to need a great amount of copulation" (p. 28). Despite
concupiscence, Wells had been a light-bringer, but darkness had none-
theless fallen over Europe, and even Wells had grown discouraged.
America escaped catastrophe, but not entirely: "Sammler was testy
with White Protestant America for not keeping better order. Cowardly
surrender. Not a strong ruling class" (p. 105). Authority had abdicated.
The clergy, rather than beating swords into plowshares, devoted itself to
''converting dog collars into G strings" (p. 106). Once again, the political
views—authoritarian now rather than socialist— are associated with
Sammlefs disgust at lasciviousness, at the “sexual madness" that Sammler
imagines to be “overwhelming the Western world” (p. 66). What can be
hoped for when the President of the United States is widely believed to
have lowered his trousers before the Washington press corps in order to
ask whether or not a man endowed as he was not worthy to lead the
nation?
Impatient with American disorder and disillusioned by revolutions

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that end in despotism, the old man longs for a ruling class fit to rule, but
he holds no brief for those public men who cry out for law and order. He
is scornful of “the rich men he knew were winners in struggles of
criminality, of permissible criminality55 (p. 75). The expense-account
prostitute, the tax dodge, the depreciation allowance, and the cost-plus
defense contract—such phenomena bother him as they do not noticeably
bother George Wallace or Spiro Agnew.
Ironically, American society represents for Sammler the triumph of
equality and the institutionalization of the ideals of the Enlightenment.
The masses have come into their own; everywhere there is the taint of
sexuality: "The dark satanic mills changing into light Satanic mills. The
reprobates converted into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio
and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York,
Amsterdam, London. ... He saw the increasing triumph of Enlightenment
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Adultery!(p. 32). What
does it all mean: the universal right to “uninhibited, spontaneous,
urinating, defecating, belching, coupling in all positions, tripling,
quadrupling, polymorphous .・・” (p・ 33). Frenzied by the tedium of
its own way of life, the bourgeoisie looks for exoticism: "The dreams of
the nineteenth-century poets polluted the psychic atmosphere of the great
boroughs and suburbs of New York" (p. 33). For the homme moyen
sensuel there is the wretched choice between boredom and perversion,
ennui in the midst of material abundance or the desperate effort to find in
mere flesh some escape from modem anomie.
Although much can be made of differences in mood, although
Moses Herzog's contentment in pastoral Massachusetts contrasts sharply
with the grim determination of urbane Mr. Sammler, there are marked
similarities in the social attitudes of the two protagonists. The dreams of
the nineteenth-century poets were often of the apocalypse, but Sammler
rejects the day-of-doom pessimism that has been fashionable in recent
years: "I don't know whether humankind is really all that much worse. In
one day, Caesar massacred the Tencteri, four hundred and thirty thousand
souls. Even Rome was appalled. I am not sure that this is the worst of all
times. But it is in the air now that things are falling apart, and I am
affected by it. I always hated people who declared that it was the end"
(pp. 304-5). His comments can be set beside Moses Herzog's more
vehement renunciation of apocalypticism:
I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and
horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of
Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once
more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in
the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation,
apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our
heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the
rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough

BELLOW 1 161

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without these shivery games.4 5

In considerations of this sort, political opinion is clearly part and parcel of

a larger body of thought and feeling to which attention can profitably be
turned.
It seems likely, if Saul Bellow's public statements are any guide to
his attitudes, that Mr. Sammlefs rejection of romanticism is congenial to
Bellow. Moses Herzog learned that it was foolish to want to be a
“marvelous Herzog55; old Mr. Sammler seems never to have felt the
temptation to be marvelous. Romantic love is not an issue in this novel.
There is no relationship to compare in intensity with the mythic love of
Tristan and Isolde, no hint that passion leads inexorably to the Liebestod,
but if there were, we can be sure that Sammler would disapprove, as he
disapproves of the casual nature of contemporary couplings. It is another
aspect of romanticism's quest for the limitless that concerns Mr. Sammler,
an aspect that even he, with all his indurate skepticism, finds attractive.
In uLe Voyage," Baudelaire announced that Tes vrais voyageurs sont
ceux-la seuls qui partent/Pour partir. ,?5 Mr. Sammler is not quite ready to
voyage forth toward the infinite. He is not, as a matter of fact, all that
keen on voyages to the moon. But he does feel a tug that draws him from
his planet toward lunar space. It is this tug, this question of the
exploration of the moon, which lurks behind the book's title and forms the
substance of Sammlefs extensive dialogue with his friendly antagonist,
Dr. V. Govinda Lal.
The Hindu scientist is a stroke of novelistic genius. Traditionally,
the Faustian drive of Western man has been contrasted with the con-
templative spiritualism of the East. The scientist and the mystic, like the
yogi and the commissar, are polar opposites, but Bellow has chosen a
sharp-nosed, dolichocephalic Dravidian to personify man's quest for

4 Herzog (New York: Viking, 1964), pp. 316-17.

5 Charles Baudelaire, "Le Voyage," Les Fleurs du mal, Oeuvres completes
(Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p. 122.
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the unbonded. How much better than the more obvious selection, the
short-haired physicist from the Houston Space Center! For Dr. Lal, as for
many a theoretical and practical scientist, the journey into space is the
ultimate adventure: "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 55 (p.
217).
Earlier in the novel, meditating on Dr. Lal's manuscript, which his
daughter had purloined for him because of his interest in H. G. Wells,
Sammler had revealed that he was not immune to the Faustian impulse:
"Wasn't it the time—the very hour to go? For every purpose under
heaven. A time to gather stones together, a time to cast away stones.
Considering the earth itself not as a stone cast but as something to cast
oneself from—to be divested of. To blow this great blue, white, green
planet, or to be blown from it” (p. 51). The impulse passes. Why should
we despoil our home and then rush mindlessly from it:

And we know now from photographs the astronauts took, the beauty of
the earth, its white and its blue, its fleeces, the great glitter afloat. A
glorious planet. But wasn't everything being done to make it intolerable to
abide here. . . ? Not so much Faustian aspiration, thought Mr. Sammler,
as a scorched-earth strategy. Ravage all, and what does death get? Defile,
and then flee to the bliss of oblivion. Or bolt to other worlds, (p. 135)

Sammler5s considered judgment, expressed to his nephew Wallace, is

neoclassical: "I do not personally care for the illimitable 55 (p. 183).
When Sammler meets Dr. Lal at Elya Gruner's Long Island man-
sion, they have it out in friendly colloquy. For Dr. Lal, "Not to accept the
opportunity would make this earth seem more and more a prison 55 (p.
219), but Sammler draws back from the insatiable desire for unlimited
experience. Worldly and world-wary, he accepts the fact that those
around him have this irrational need to voyage into space, just as they
have less admirable needs to explore each other's bodies, but he declines
the invitation to become an interplanetary fellow-traveler. The
philosophical discussion is interrupted by mundane reality in the form of
wet feet. Wallace Gruner, in a monomaniacal search for hidden money,
has unscrewed a pipe and loosed a flood of water through the house. All
rally round to deal with the limitable.
Despite his lack of enthusiasm for romantic quests, Sammler holds
grimly to one belief that the great nineteenth-century romantics shared
with their neoclassic predecessors of the eighteenth century. The old man
clings—as Saul Bellow presumably does not—to the belief in an innate,
universal moral sense, an intuitive perception of right and wrong.

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Sammler, arguing with Dr. Lal, ridicules the foolish search for originality
at all costs. He lectures the Indian with an almost Wittgen- steinian
conviction that reality can be mapped: "All mapmakers should place the
Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality. It may be boring,
but one has to know where he is. We cannot have the Mississippi flowing
toward the Rockies for a change" (p. 228). Within this assertion there are
problems, but Sammler goes a good deal further. He assumes that there is
a normative moral nature within each of us as well as an objectively real
world outside of us. He articulates this faith on the first and last pages of
the novel 一 this in itself ought to emphasize the importance of the belief.
The first paragraph sets intellectualizing against intuiting:

Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. 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 sources 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. It had its own natural knowledge, (p. 3)

Convinced that human life is sacred, Sammler is annoyed by Hannah

Arendfs analysis of Adolf Eichmann: "Banality," thinks Sammler, “is the
adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience” (p. 18).
Without a conscience, a man is merely the most intellectual of animals.
Why, wonders Sammler, must these modem explicators explain away all
that makes us human?
In his nephew, Elya Gruner, the old man finds an exemplar of the
moral man. Elya, a successful doctor despite his dislike of the medical
profession, had followed the dictates of conscience and done his best
according to his lights. By no means perfect, he was nonetheless a good
man. Sammler visits him in the hospital and responds more lovingly to
him than he does to anyone else in the novel. When Elya dies, Sammler
descends to the hospitaFs subterranean morgue and prays for Elya's soul.
The prayer, which ends the book, is extremely significant:

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
— through all the confusion and degrading clowning of this life through
which

164 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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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 all know. For
that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we
know, we know, we know. (p. 313)

Through the highly unfashionable metaphor of the contract, Sammler

insists repeatedly that we know what our obligations are. The heart has
knowledge at which the mind can only guess. We need not forge anew
from the raw materials of experience, the uncreated conscience of our
race, because the soul, the inmost heart, already has its own natural
knowledge. The first and last pages of the book are a moral unity.
The pity of it, of course, is that we do not know. Does Saul Bellow
think we do? Given the evidence of his writings, criticism as well as
fiction, it seems highly unlikely. His work, in fact, is an arsenal of con-
trary examples. When Moses Herzog visits a courtroom and watches the
trial of a woman who murdered her son, while her lover looked on,
Herzog shivers with horror and then concludes, "Some kill, then cry.
Others, not even that.5,6 The world is filled with men and women who
murder as casually as they post a letter. But Moses Herzog, like his
creator, is clearly influenced by cultural relativism. Sammler, on the other
hand, belongs to an older tradition as well as to an older generation. It is
precisely this which makes him a poignant and, despite his many faults,
an attractive character.
En route to Elya's Long Island home, Sammler talks to Wallace
about a famous scene in War and Peace. Pierre Bezhukov was about to be
executed under the orders of a French general, but the two men— the
general and his prisoner—looked into each other's eyes:

"A human look was exchanged, and Pierre was spared. Tolstoy says
you don't kill another human being with whom you have exchanged such
a look.,,
"Oh, thafs marvelous! What do you think?"
"I sympathize with such a desire for such a belief.
“You only sympathize?55
“No, I sympathize deeply. I sympathize sadly? 5 (pp. 188-89)

Is it possible that Bellow is to Sammler here as Sammler is to Tolstoy? Is

it possible that Bellow, knowing morality to be the artifact of culture,
sympathizes deeply, sadly, regretfully, just as Sammler sympa

6 Herzog, p. 240.

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thizes with Tolstoy for thinking that a man cannot kill another man into
whose eyes he has looked? To Sammler's belief that our souls have their
own natural knowledge, Bellow says, in effect, “I sympathize with such a
desire for such a belief." The relationship of author to character is close,
but they are not congruent.
If one accepts this argument that Bellow's views are in many ways
divergent from his protagonists, one is in a better position to take up the
specific accusations made by Clayton and other outraged readers. Is Mr.
Sammler—if not Mr. Bellow—terrified by the young and the blacks?
Does he hate and fear them?
There is little doubt that Sammler's view of the young is un-
enthusiastic. He has scant patience with his wacky daughter and almost
none with the dirty, hairy, meagerly educated youngsters whom he
employs as readers. He despises them, with their “big dirty boots and the
helpless vital pathos of young dogs with their first red erections ...” (p.
37). He is shocked and pained when a young radical interrupts his
impassioned recollections of H. G. Wells, Bloomsbury, and the distant
time entre deux guerres:

A man in Levi's, thick-bearded but possibly young, a figure of

compact distortion, was standing shouting at him.
“Hey! Old Man!”
In the silence, Mr. Sammler drew down his tinted spectacles, seeing
this person with his effective eye.
u
Old Man! You quoted Orwell before."
“Yes?”
“You quoted him to say that British radicals were all protected by
the Royal Navy . . .T
“Yes, I believe he did say that.”
“That's a lot of shit.”
Sammler could not speak.
“Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counter-revolutionary. 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.” (p. 42)

The realism of the scene is not in question. Brutality of this sort has taken
place and has indeed been sympathetically explained as a response to
greater brutalities committed by the elites for whom the Orwells and
Sammlers of the world have apologized. It is important, however, to see
that Sammler is less offended by the interruption than

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by the ethical criteria employed by the young man in Levi 5s. How did
excrement come to be accepted as a standard for political judgment? How
does sexual potency function as a means of moral validation? How was
the penis transformed into a "metaphysical warrant" (p. 210)? If virility is
tantamount to truth, then nymphomaniacal Angela Gruner and her
weight-lifting, muscle-plated lover, Wharton Horricker, are in touch with
eternal verity.
There is then a good deal of truth in the accusation that Sammler,
and probably Bellow as well, is put off by the behavior and by the
ideology of young radicals, but it is not youth per se that Sammler finds
fearful and repugnant. He is repelled by the bestialization of language and
of behavior and by all that this implies for a man of his time, class, and
temperament. When old men ape the concupiscent vulgarity of the young,
they too are castigated. Sammler is much stricter with them than was
Thomas Mann with hapless Gustav von Aschenbach: "It was amusing—
Sammler noted in old women wearing textured tights, in old sexual men,
this quiver of vivacity with which they obeyed the sovereign youth-style.
The powers are the powers— overlords, kings, gods. And of course no
one knew when to quit. No one made sober decent terms with death" (p.
8). Like old Schlossberg, in The Victim, Sammler has a sense of what it
means to be human. Those who depart from this sense, which they know
in their inmost hearts, he will condemn, whether they are young or old.
Sammlefs attitude toward blacks is similar but more complicated
and perplexed. One of the central threads in the novelistic fabric is the
story of the handsome, elegantly attired black pickpocket who rides the
Riverside bus and calmly plies his trade. It is not excessive to say that
Sammler is obsessed by the man, whom he vainly reports to the utterly
uninterested police. Rather than shunning the bus, he rides it more often.
His ambivalence is revealed in his description of the pickpocket as "this
African prince or great black beast” (p. 14). Which is he―prince or beast,
or both at once? Sammlefs emotional reactions are confused. He fears the
man and is fascinated by him. In an eroticized world where potency is the
first of virtues, the pickpocket is prince. When the Negro observes
Sammler watching him, he pursues and traps the old man. The scene is
extraordinary: "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 ・ .(p. 49).
The metaphors

BELLOW I 167
are like those of a primitive religion. The man displays his sexual organs
as if the moment were an epiphany or as if he were a figure from a Greek

158 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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vase depicting some Dionysian mystery. The manner of the exposure
impresses Sammler: "The man's expression was not directly menacing but
oddly, serenely masterful. The thing was shown with mystifying
certitude. Lordliness55 (pp. 49-50). In this scene, the phallus is the
paradigm of modernity.
Two hundred pages later, the pickpocket reenters the story. One of
Sammlefs youthful acquaintances has foolishly photographed the Negro,
who now attempts to strangle him against the side of the stopped bus. By
accident, Sammler drives by, sees the two of them, notices his son-in-law,
Eisen, among the crowd witnessing the attack, and urges Eisen to
intervene. At first, Eisen is reluctant, but he finally acts. He swings a bag,
heavy with sculpted metal, and smashes the Negro in the head. Sammler
now tries to stop him: "Don't hit him, Eisen, I never said that. I tell you
no!” (p. 291). Too late. Eisen strikes a second time and knocks the man
bleeding to the street. When he prepares to finish him off, Sammler seizes
his arm and prevents the blow. Once again, as in the aftermath of the
exposure-scene, Sammlefs response is filled with ambivalence: "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 the idea of noblesse.
And how much Sammler sympathized with him—how much he would
have done to prevent such atrocious blows!" (pp. 293-94). The sympathy
is mysterious. It is impossible to say just what it is that Sammler feels
when in the presence of the majestic black: fear combined with
admiration, compassion tinged with terror? He is certainly attracted as
well as repelled, despite the fact that the sexually potent pickpocket
seems to represent all that has gone wrong with modem civilization. One
thing is, or ought to have been, plain: Sammlefs response is too complex
to be called hostility and then dismissed.
And what of our own response, finally, to Artur Sammler? What-
ever our political convictions, we ought to be able to see that Bellow has
created an extraordinary character and not a mouthpiece for the radical
right. To condemn this novel, as many have done, as a polemic and as a
political tract is to read badly and~~what is worse—to add one's bit to the
discouraging inhumanity of our time.

Amherst College

168 [ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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