Modern Language Society

SAUL BELLOW AND THE THEATER OF THE SOUL

Author(s)： Blake Nevius
Source: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, Vol. 73, No. 1/3 (1972), pp. 248-260
Published by： Modern Language Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43345355
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248 BLAKE NEVIUS

SAUL BELLOW AND THE THEATER OF THE SOUL

Since the heartening though rather baffling commercial success Qi Herzog in

1964, Saul Bellow's position as the leading contemporary American novelist has
been marked by certain ironies. He has enlarged and consolidated the public he
originally found with The Adventures of Augie March (1953), but apparently he
has lost some of his favored status with the New York literary establishment.
Moreover, when one tries to define his audience it is impossible to disregard the
legion of serious readers who, having been told that they should know Bellow's
work, have made a run at it but failed to get beyond the first few chapters. It is
difficult, in fact, to think of another American novelist, past or present, who has
achieved so large a public and at the same time made so few concessions to the
common reader.
To anyone unacquainted with Bellow's work, his latest novel, Mr. Sammler's
Planet (1970),1 may explain all those conscientious but frustrated readers. Like
its predecessor, Herzogs it represents a return to the congenial form of Bellow's
first, short novel, Dangling Man (1944). Except in The Victim (1947) and to a
lesser degree in Seize the Day (1956) and Henderson the Rain King (1959),
Bellow has shown little regard for the significant plot. He seems always to have
been bored by the necessity of providing a means for his characters to express
themselves in action. Dangling Man was cast in the form of a journal; his latest
novel tends toward reverie. It is apparently difficult for him to dramatize the
issues, easier to let them jostle each other in the arena of the mind. His method is
curiously like that attributed to his character, Moses Herzog: " A person of
irregular tendencies, he practiced the art of circling among random facts to
swoop down on the essentials.55 The open, seemingly spontaneous structure of
The Adventures of Augie March and of the two most recent novels recommends
itself to a mind like Bellow's, speculative, discursive, furbished with wide and
miscellaneous reading - a mind on which nothing is lost and whose contents
sometimes refuse to yield priority to each other.
The notion voiced in the early nineteenth century, by Emerson among others,
that the novel would ultimately become journal, memoir, autobiography, because
the romantic stress on the individual must eventually

1 New York: The Viking Press, 1970.

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 Saul Bellow and the Theater of the Soul 249
convince the novelist that the most convenient “case'' for precise psychological
annotation is himself is vindicated by the post-war American novel in general
and by Bellow's novels in particular. From the beginning, his fiction has been the
vehicle for the protagonists9 continuing dialogue with themselves as they attempt
to answer that essential question, "How should a good man live; what ought he to
do?" or to meet that ringing imperative, "I must know what I myself am, 55 both
formulated by Joseph in Dangling Man. The issues have remained constant
presumably because they reflect Bellow's own, and not merely his characters 9,
personal dilemmas. The autobiographical element in his fiction has always been
recognized. He seems in all his novels to be trying to achieve a personal catharsis
(Herzog's self-admonition, 5 5 Hitch your agony to a star, 9 5 is not bad advice for
the novelist). He has been engaged from the first in casting off masks, mainly
comic, of the self (to borrow Yeats's phrase), and in his last two novels author
and protagonist have merged to a degree that makes the mask seem superfluous.
It is mainly in its externals that the characterization of Artur Sammler, seventy-
six, nearly blind in one eye, a survivor of Nazi genocide, and at present a stranger
in a strange land, reflects some attempt on Bellow 5s part 一 all the more
desirable, perhaps, after the intense self-communion of Herzog - to distance
himself from his protagonist and to disguise his own views by an act of
ventriloquism.
Artur Sammler personifies a vanished tradition of wisdom, courtesy, humility,
tolerance. He has retained an intermittent capacity for rage, otherwise he could
hardly serve as the vessel of Bellow 5s more Swiftian moods, but the stance he
tries to maintain is one of disinterestedness. Having experienced a kind of death
and resurrection in the Zamosht Forest, where he was shot by the Nazis, thrown
into a ditch, later rescued by a Pole and concealed for several months in a
mausoleum, he is inevitably, though in a special sense, detached ("Very harsh
surgery,55 he comments. "One cannot come out intact 55). In short, everything has
conspired to separate him from his earthly ties, to make him a non-person, but he
remains stubbornly alive, stubbornly human. He is denied the complacency of
perfect detachment, of Oblomovian withdrawal. Like all of Bellow5s protagonists
he is a dangling man, suspended in a void between alternatives of thought and
action, freedom and necessity ("Once take a stand, 55 he observes, "once draw a
baseline, and contraries will assail you"), and consequently he maintains the
skeptical and accomodating habit of mind

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250 BLAKE NEVIUS

which tries to strike a balance between tentative absolutes. A spiritual DP, after
twenty-two years in New York, he thinks of himself as the "visiting
consciousness,5 5 the bemused observer of a vast and spreading vulgarity, like
Henry James, who following an exile of many years cast himself^ in The
American Scene, in the role of the revisiting consciousness, ,s the civilized mind
assailed by a new, complex, and for the most part uncongenial reality and
searching among the most diverse and bewildering phenomena for some
principle of order and some clue to the American character.
Except for Augie March, all of Bellow's protagonists are demoralized when we
first encounter them (Joseph, Henderson, Tommy Wilhelm, Herzog) or they are
moving toward demoralization (Asa Leventhal, Mr. Sammler). Sooner or later
they will feel, as Joseph does, that they are ,5a sort of human grenade whose pin
has been withdrawn/9 and like Joseph they will find it imperative, at the verge of
breakdown, to talk to themselves, in a journal, in letters never mailed, in secret
dialogue, or, when the burden of self-communion becomes too heavy, as it does
even for Mr. Sammler, to others. Bellow compels us to share in their perpexity,
their sense of disorder, because the novel in our time, as he has remarked,
engages life "at the commoner level, where confusion is inordinate, 551 The
extreme dilemma in which his characters find themselves, that void between
heaven and earth in which they are suspended and in which they try to isolate and
define the self^ is the product of the central contradiction which every man
recognizes between freedom and necessity. The ultimate motive of the human
quest, as Joseph defines it, may be "the desire for perfect freedom, 55 but the
responsibility of that freedom is difficult to bear, and Joseph in the end must
confess his failure and disappear into the Army: ”1 am no longer to be held
accountable for myself; I am grateful for that. I am in other hands, relieved of
self-determination, freedom canceled. 5* Necessity in Bellow's novels assumes
various guises, exhibiting itself primarily in the many forms of appetite 一 sex,
power, personal distinction 一 as well as in history and in the consciousness of
history. But its crowning guise is death 一 that quietly obsessive concern in
Bellow. "Death," says Joseph, "is the abolition of choice. The more choice is
limited, the closer we are to death. 5} And Herzog, later, understands "that life was
life only when it was clearly understood as dying. 5 J Consequently, in that brief
and severely con-

1
"The Writer as Moralist,” Atlantic, 211 (March, 1963), p. 62.
ditioned span of freedom which is man's term on earth every effort must be bent
toward realizing the self and by the same act governing it. "It is our humanity, 5}

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 Saul Bellow and the Theater of the Soul 251
says Joseph, "that we are responsible for it [the self], our dignity, our freedom. 55
And it is that essential human dignity that Bellow's characters struggle to
preserve, against ludicrous or tragic odds 一 the sense that they are granted a
measure of freedom and that they are responsible for their own destinies.
To be able at once to recognize the self and to govern it suggests a fusion of
romantic and classical views of the nature of man. From the beginning of his
career Bellow5s thought is characterized by a certain ambivalence toward that
revolution of the human spirit known as Romanticism. Moses Herzog has been
engaged for years in writing a book on the subject. Significantly, he cannot finish
it 一 ostensibly because of the ordeal and eventual collapse of his marriage, but
just as clearly because he cannot settle the issues he has raised. He is not an anti-
Romanticist: not for him the hard, dry skepticism of T. E. Hulme and the
totalitarian bent of the WasteLanders. His rationale is similar to that of Joseph, in
Dangling Man, who, reviewing 59that creature of plans" he used to be, describes
himself as 5,a person greatly concerned with keeping intact and free from
encumbrance a sense of his own being, its importance, 95 and at one point in his
journal identifies the general and essentially terrifying human situation brought
about by the Romantic movement:
It is because we have been taught that there is no limit to what a man can be. Six
hundred years ago, a man was what he was bom to be. Satan and the Church,
representing God, did battle over him. . . But, since, the stage has been reset and human
beings only walk on it, and, under this revision, we have, instead, history to answer to.
We were important enough then for our souls to be fought over. Now, each of us is
responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is
the rock our hearts are abraded on.

Twenty-five years later, this view of human history, with its existential
overtones, is asserted again, with somewhat different emphasis, in Mr. Sammler 5s
long conversation with the Punjabi scientist, Dr. Lal. He is skeptical about the
success of the revolution:
"I think we may summarize my meaning in terms like these: that many have surged
forward in modem history, after long epochs of namelessness and bitter obscurity to
claim and to enjoy (as people enjoy things now) a name, a dignity of person, a life such
as belonged in the past only to gentry, nobility, the royalty or the gods of myth. And that
this surge has, like all such great movements, brought misery and despair, that its
successes are not clearly seen, but that the pain of heart it makes many people feel is
incalculable, that most forms of personal existence seem to be discredited, and that there
is a peculiar longing for nonbeing.**

Between Dangling Man and Mr. Sammlefs Planet lies a quarter of a century of

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252 BLAKE NEVIUS

war, hot and cold, of accelerating technological development, violent protest,

disintegrating community and individual relationships. By the late Sixties, the
resolve of a Joseph to govern the self has given way, and what had been merely a
lurking apprehension in Joseph's mind has now, in the minds of Herzog's and Mr.
Sammler5s contemporaries, become explicit: there is a terror of governing oneself
What assails and oppresses the self in our time is complexity, the burden of
miscellaneous facts and experience, "compelling the frail person to receive, to
register, depriving him because of volume, of mass, of the power to impart
design." (MSP, 26) Without the power to discriminate among the data of
experience, to order the facts in obedience to some vision of the good life, we are
adrift. The most extreme distortions of personality occur when the individual, in
the attempt to evade the problem of self-governance, tries to rise above the self or
to delve below it (9^rans-descendence,91 thinks Herzog, "that was the new
fashionable term for it"). Even Mr. Sammler, the most rational and humane of
Bellow's characters, acknowledges these twin impulses in himself, though he is a
beacon of sanity in a darkening world, in which, as Bellow has remarked, "an
extraordinary sense of dulling and levelling drives people to extremes in their
quest for what is interesting."
Bellow5s evocation of this world, beset by fear, by terror of the self and terror
of the sublime, and teetering on the edge of madness, is unsparing. The utopian
vision of Mr. Sammler's friend, H. G. Wells, of a "service society based on a
rational scientific attitude toward life, 5 5 has dissolved into a nightmare in which
collectivization has driven the masses into a feverish quest for novelty, in which
individualism has become anarchy, with human nature molding itself into
increasingly grotesque shapes and embracing "mere creatureliness 55 to the point
of bestiality. "Make Nature your God,” thinks Mr. Sammler, "elevate
creatureliness, and you can count on gross results? 5 His mood ranges from that of
Lear, as he listens to Angela Gruner's account of her sexual adventures and
relates it to the modern demand "to be uninhibited, spontaneous, urinating,
defecating, belching, coupling in all positions, 9 s to that of Gulliver, when after
being hooted down by the Columbia University students he contemplates "all this
confused sexexcrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing,
Barbary ape howling. Or like the spider monkeys in the trees . . . defecating into
their hands, and shrieking, pelting the explorers below."
One of the more depressing features of the contemporary American scene is
the taste for theatrics, for extravagant and all but meaningless roleplaying, the
adoption of "life styles5* (that perdurable cant phrase of the Sixties) which have
little or no reference to personal reality. The crisis of individual identity is upon

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 Saul Bellow and the Theater of the Soul 253
us, and the world of make-believe has moved into the streets. One can be
whatever he likes, at whatever risk of degrading his model. The accouterments
for any role 一 Indian, cowboy, guru, soul brother 一 are available at the nearest
boutique, as well for the middleaged swinger as for the young. "Humankind,"
thinks Mr. Sammler, 5scrazy for symbols, trying to utter what it doesn't know
itself?' For what the roles imply, beyond the substitution of one set of symbols
for another 一 the rejection of the gray flannel suit for the beaded headband or
the levis with artificial patches 一 is difficult to formulate because the
revolution, if that is what it is, has been preempted, mass-produced, and
profitably packaged by the boutiques. "Emancipation resulting in madness, 55
complains Herzog to his New York lawyer, Simkin, "Unlimited energy to choose
and play a tremendous variety of roles with a lot of coarse energy. 5 s It is Life
imitating Art, concludes Mr. Sammler, and in the process debasing it: "more
possibility, more actors, apes, copycats, more invention, more fiction, illusion,
more fantasy, more despair ..

Reality forcing itself into all these shapes. Just look (Sammler looked) at this imitative
anarchy of the streets - these Chinese revolutionary tunics, these babes in unisex
toyland, these surrealist warchiefs, Western stagecoach drivers . . . They sought
originality. They were obviously derivative.

Bellow's minor characters, in Mr. Sammlefs Planet as elsewhere, exhibit a

range of sartorial eccentricity which is sometimes merely comic in effect, at other
times may indicate a failure or dislocation of personality: Father Newell in Israel
wearing Vietnam battle dress, Eisen in his cast-off Ivy League garments and red
Chelsea boots, Shula-Slawa in Hindu costume, and the gaucho Mr. Sammler
encounters on a road in Israel 一 "Bessarabian- Syrian-South American - a
Spanish-speaking Israeli cowpuncher from the pampas." But these vagaries of
dress are the lesser manifestations of a serious malaise. The more prominent
characters, like Madeleine and Gersbach in Herzogs are flamboyantly theatrical,
adept at shifting from one role to another and at keying other person's roles into
their own self-conceptions. To Madeleine, Herzog during their courtship is the
5,
fatherly, graying patient seducer5 9 and as such a necessary actor in the drama of
her conversion to the Catholic faith ("She had her white convert's face and
Herzog couldn't refuse to play opposite 59), and the conversion itself^ as Herzog
writes to Madeleine5s priestly confessor, was "a theatrical event. 55 Even Herzog,
at a crucial moment, finds himself verging on the enactment of melodrama.
Having gone to Madeleine's house with the half-formed resolution of shooting
her and her lover, he stands outside the bathroom window and watches Gersbach,

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254 BLAKE NEVIUS

who has usurped his role of husband and father, bathe his small daughter: "To
shoot him 一 an absurd thought! As soon as Herzog saw the actual person giving
an actual bath, his intended violence turned into theater^ into something
ludicrous.n
It is Mr. Sammler5s obsession with "theater" that prompts his long account of
Rumkowski, the mad Jewish "King" of Lodz, clearly one of the central thematic
episodes in the novel. "You can see," he tells Dr. Lal, in whose civilized presence
he feels a rare impulse to explain himself and his beliefs, "that I am always
talking about play-acting, originality, dramatic individuality, theatricality in
people, the forms taken by spiritual striving. It goes round and round in my head,
all of this. I cannot tell you how often, for instance, I think about Rumkowski, the
mad Jewish King of Lodz." 】 Rumkowski, the failed businessman, a butt of
ridicule in the Jewish community, J,a man with a bit to play, like so many modern
individuals/5 who is elevated by the Nazis to a position of authority and proceeds,
in the midst of famine and death in the ghetto, to sponsor the most bizarre of
pageants, with himself as leading actor, the parody monarch, ,5ruler of corpses,9s
with his court, his carriage, his paper money and postage stamps, "a terror to the
Jews of Lodz," but on one occasion also their champion,

1
Mr. Sammler's Planet originally appeared in two installments in The Atlantic, 224
(November-December, 1969), pp. 96-150, 100-142. The Atlantic version differs in certain
important respects (which will be considered later in this essay) from the book version
published early the following year. Among other things, Bellow added to the final, book version
two references to Rumkowski (pages 18 and 188) which, since they precede the recital of
Rumkowski's story, help strengthen Mr. Sammler's claim that the story fascinates him.
who at the end, perhaps in a moment of desperate sanity, "voluntarily stepped on
a train for Auschwitz," - this Rumkowski is a figure of great symptomatic
importance for Mr. Sammler. It is not merely that in his lunatic apotheosis he
carries to an extreme pitch the theatricalizing tendency of our age or that in his
final gesture he may illustrate what Bellow has called the need of the modern
consciousness to "explode its own postures.9 91 What fascinates and dismays Mr.
Sammler, as it does Bellow in his essays of the last decade, is the assault on the
very notion of the self, particularly the Romantic version, 55triumphant in the 19th
century but intolerable in the 20th,59 and, by extension, on our former notions of
the dignity, privacy, and supremacy of the individual.
A major "assault on the separate Sel£" Bellow has written, "sprang from
Germany in 1939., ， 2 The holocaust of the extermination camps raised, among
other issues, 5 5the meaning of survival, the meaning of pity, the meaning of
justice and the importance of being oneself the individuaPs consciousness of his

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 Saul Bellow and the Theater of the Soul 255
own existence.55 The Nazis have tried to eliminate Mr. Sammler 一 to make him
a nonperson 一 by shooting him; in Rumkowski's case they exercise a perverse
humor in making their victim a parody: "These antics of failed individuality, 59
comments Mr. Sammler, 55 . . . this odd rancor against the evolution of human
consciousness, bringing forth these struggling selves, horrible clowns, from every
hole and comer. Yes, this would have appealed to those people. 55 So
RumkowskiJs story dramatizes unforgettably both the forces in our century that
threaten to eliminate or degrade the self and the mad postures that in the absence
of a clear idea of the self usurp its place. What Mr. Sammler, in telling the story,
is trying to bring out is "the weakness of the outer forms which are at present
available for our humanity, and the pitiable lack of confidence in them. 5 5 His
daily life in New York is a perpetual encounter with grotesque forms of
humanity; he thinks of himself wryly as "Mr. Artur Sammler, confidant of New
York eccentrics; curate of wild men and progenitor of a wild woman; registrar of
madness.59 In their frantic gestures of selfassertion or self-transcendence, his
charges provide a kind of three-ring sexual circus: they are omniverous like
Angela Gruner, ambivalent like her brother Walter, perverse like Walter Bruch,
or repressed like Sammler^
1
Herzog (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), p. 193.
2
"Recent American Fiction," a lecture delivered at the Library of Congress, January 21,
1963 (Washington: Reference Department of Library of Congress, 1963), p. 2. daughter,
Shula. In sexual behavior, as in matters of dress or ideology, there is a J,fever of
originality,9 9 a strenuous quest for novelty. "The idea of the uniqueness of the
soul," remarks Mr. Sammler.
"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? ,,

But suppose, he asks, "one dislikes all this theater of the soul? 55 Suppose one
finds it tiresome, as he does, "to have to meet it so often and in such familiar
forms?9, Oppressed by the spectacle, one may understandably relinquish the
effort to be human, may become tired, as Bellow suggested in a 1967 lecture, "of
our own human carrying-on,,:l and skeptical of the possibility of redeeming
human nature from its present limbo. Clearly, beginning with Herzog, Bellow's
vision has darkened toward apocalypse and the old Bellow affirmations are
harder put to survive.
But it is with this skepticism, Bellow in his lecture urgently concluded, "that
the writer today has to deal.59

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256 BLAKE NEVIUS

So Mr. Sammler, as "visiting consciousness, 9, becomes the vehicle not only of

Bellow5s skepticism, which he shares with his age, but of his persistent if rather
desperate optimism. The question that Mr. Sammler puts to himself is the
question that has solicited Bellow's moral imagination from the start: "Where is
the desirable self that one might be?" It is another form of Joseph's question in
Dangling Man, "How should a good man live; what ought he to do?" The
answer, Mr. Sammler adds, speaking, as it were, as surrogate for the novelist,
"depends in part on the will of the questioner to see merit. It depends on his talent
and his disinterestedness.55 And as Mr. Sammler^s Planet moves toward its
conclusion it becomes apparent that the answer lies in the character and history of
the wealthy surgeon, Elya Gruner, Mr. Sammler^ nephew and benefactor, whose
imminent death has thrown a long shadow across the old man's waking thoughts.
Thematically, Gruner provides a foil to Rumkowski; dramatically, to his children,
Angela and Wallace, and in fact to all the strange, futile, theatrical creatures of
Mr. Sammler's world.
It is necessary to pause here to consider briefly the revisions that Bellow made
in the serial version of Mr. Sammlefs Planet that appeared in The
1
"Skepticism and the Depth of Life/* in The Arts and the Public (Chicago: The Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 29.

Atlantic in the interval before the novel emerged as a book, because the central
function of Elya Gruner is far more clearly realized in the final version. 1 Hardly a
page of the novel in its Atlantic form was exempt from some kind of revision,
and there are major alterations in Chapters 5 and 6. In addition to the minor
changes, which represent the novelist's second thoughts in such matters as diction
and paragraphing, and the attempt by deletion or expansion to confirm or modify
the emphasis in numerous passages, there are certain patterns of revision that
help to corroborate the overall intent of Bellow 5s argument. Just as he had
prepared for Mr. Sammler5s account of Rumkowski, the mad Jewish King of
Lodz, by inserting earlier references to Mr. Sammler 5s preoccupation with the
story, so in at least twenty-six new or amended passages he intensified the im-
pression of the old man 5s concern for his dying relative. What had been in the
earlier version a recurrent motif in Mr. Sammler 5s thoughts now becomes almost
an obsession. The additions to the text range from the parenthetical interjection of
Elya5 s name - no more-in the context of Mr. Sammler5s ruminations about death
to such long passages as that beginning on page 260 with the sentence, "Elya was
not finally ruled by business considerations,55 and ending on page 261 with the
phrase, "exclamations of grief.55 The earliest new allusion to Gruner's situation is

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 Saul Bellow and the Theater of the Soul 257
on page 35, the last on page 261. In the interval the dying man's predicament has
intruded itself frequently into Mr. Sammle^s thoughts and occasionally into his
conversation. A few examples will serve to indicate the mixed feelings of sorrow,
guilt, helplessness, and concern, as well as the attempt to define the specific
human value of Gruner's history, that characterize the graph of Mr. Sammler 5s
consciousness:
A dependable man, a man who took thought for others. (85) Was he cold-hearted about
Elya? No, he was grieving. But what could he do? (87) He was very full of his nephew,
a man much different from himself He admired him, loved him. (105) Elya had never
wanted to be a physician. He disliked the practice of medicine. But he had done his duty.
(162) He [Sammler] belonged at the hospital. An old relative in the waitingroom. Much
more appropriate. (193) Elya reappeared strangely and continually, as if his face were
orbiting 一 as if he were a satellite. (223)

In reply to Dr. LaFs sympathetic "You are very sad about your nephew," Mr.
Sammler comments: "It is really a frightful moment, But what can one do? The
thoughts continue turning.55 (215) And as a final example:
1
See p. 254, n. 1.

7 the second sentence of a passage on page 247 which originally read, "Mr.
Sammler had some wakeful hours that night. A predictable result of the flood/5
becomes, "A predictable result of worry over Elya. Of the flood/5
Bellow5s whole effort is to make it possible for us to see, in retrospect,
Gruner5s life and the manner of his death as a victory of the human spirit, as an
assertion of human values, as giving the lie to despair 一 another demonstration
of what Herzog calls "the strength of a man5s virtue or spiritual capacity
measured by his ordinary life.99 It is in the final interview with Angela Gruner, in
the hospital waiting-room, that Mr. Sammler^ recurrent but fragmentary thoughts
and feelings of the preceding two days coalesce into a moving farewell tribute to
his benefactor. The whole episode was drastically revised from the Atlantic
version, and the nature of the revision is indicated in an exchange, in the final
version, between Mr. Sammler and Angela. When the latter complains, "You're
criticizing me,59 Mr. Sammler replies, "No, I5m praising your father?5 In both
versions Mr. Sammler is trying to persuade Angela to give her dying father some
sign that she loves him and to ask his forgiveness. But in the book version the
rehearsal of Angela's transgressions has been modified, the suggestions of sexual
aberrancy are less specific, and a wholly new emphasis - the vindication of the
human in the life and character of Elya Gruner 一 has been introduced. Not
unaware of Gruner's little weaknesses, his vanity, his sentimentality, his

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258 BLAKE NEVIUS

indiscriminate heartiness, or his lapses from public virtue (such as his rumored
abortion practice among the daughters of the Mafia), Mr. Sammler nevertheless
finds in the balance sheet a preponderance of the human that enables him to
maintain his precarious faith in the race:
"He had an unsure loyalty to certain pure states. He knew there had been good men
before him, that there were good men to come, and he wanted to be one of them. I think
he did all right."

Even as Mr. Sammler is speaking to Angela, Elya Gruner has felt the onset of
death and at his own request been removed from his hospital room in order to
spare his daughter's feelings. Through his doctor Elya has transmitted his
goodbye to Mr. Sammler. Now, as the surgeon5s body lies on a stretcher awaiting
autopsy, Mr. Sammler pays his last respects to his old friend:
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

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 Saul Bellow and the Theater of the Soul 259
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 all know. For that is the truth of it - that we all know, God, that we know, that
we know, we know, we know.

What the "terms" are 一 what we "know" — has been indicated in two
passages added to the Atlantic version. Discussing with Dr. Lal the "peculiar
longing for nonbeing^, characteristic of the age, man's wish to 55transcend his
unsatisfactory humanity,55 Mr. Sammler concedes that s5maybe man should get
rid of himself,5* but then, almost in the same breath, he conquers this skeptical
impulse and asserts that man also "has something in him which he feels it
important to continue.55 At this point Bellow added to the book version the
following gloss:
"It is something that has to go on, and we all know it. The spirit feels cheated, outraged,
defiled, corrupted, fragmented, injured. Still it knows what it knows, and the knowledge
cannot be got rid o£ The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence. So it
seems to me."

Later, stranded on Long Island, thinking of Elya, and feeling that some sign,
some 55compassionate utterance,,s must be made to reassure the dying man, Mr.
Sammler formulates the message he will never be able to deliver to Elya:
"However actual I may 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." Mr. Sammler believed
that if this was not said in so many words it should be said tacitly. In fact, it was
continually asserted, in many guises.

"And anyway,95 Bellow added to this soliloquy in the final version, ^we know
what is u)hat：‘
Elya's legacy to Mr. Sammler, who is close to despair, is to reaffirm the human
bond, not only by forcing the old man to come to terms with the prospect of his
own death, but by vindicating, in his domestic and professional conduct, the
reality for the individual of such currently debased or outworn concepts as
dignity, honor, courage, compassion 一 in short, by imparting new substance to
the ,^fbrms^^ available to our humanity. Mr. Sammler earlier has cited the
failure of the imagination in our time "to produce a human figure of adequate
stature55 and has rephrased the operative question of all of Bellow 5s novels,
"What is the true stature of a human being?" In the ordinary, fallible humanity of
Elya Gruner, as in that of

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Henderson and Herzog, Bellow finds the only answer that can sustain him as a
novelist. Mr. Sammler has known from the beginning what the answer must be.
His own history and character, whose significance he modestly underestimates,
have had for Gruner the same value that Gruner 5s has for him, "some unusual
power, magical perhaps, to affirm the human bond." But because Gruner 5s death
has caught him at a moment when he feels particularly old, powerless, despairing
(Bellow in his revisions enhanced the symptoms of bodily stress - there are
recurring references to Mr. Sammler5s sick headache - and psychic tension which
the events of the past two days have aggravated), it is the peculiar value of the
physician's legacy that he is returning in kind and with a renewed currency the
gift that Sammler had given him. His life and death convey to Mr. Sammler that,
however insecure the future of this planet may be, it is here that we must work
out our destiny. For Dr. Lal the moon may be the answer - the margin of safety
that the open frontier once provided, the 55rational necessity/9 as he calls it. But
Mr. Sammler, though he admits the possibility that "we must jump off, because it
is our human fate to do so," cannot accept the moon adventure unless it can be
^advantageous for us metaphysically.5 5 The earth is Mr. Sammler's planet. So
long as it can produce 5,a human figure of adequate stature/ 5 like Elya Gruner, he
is not prepared to abandon it altogether.

University of California Los Angeles, California

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