Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Isaac’s family troubles derive from the country-club deal, in which his siblings had originally been included. At the last minute they pulled out, leaving him with an hour to come up with seventy-five thousand dollars. At great personal risk, he succeeds in finding the money. Although he loves his brothers and sister, never again will he include them in real-estate deals, a decision that enrages Tina. She accuses him “of shaking off the family when the main chance came,” though in fact she and the brothers had deserted him “at the zero hour” (p. 103). Eventually, Isaac and the brothers are reconciled, but Tina remains implacable, refusing to see him, spreading malicious gossip about his business dealings and connections. Every year, on the Day of Atonement, Isaac comes to Tina to make peace, and every year she sends him away. “She said she hated his Orthodox cringe. She could take him straight. In a deal. Or a swindle. But she couldn’t bear his sentiment.” When Isaac appeals to her “in the eyes of God, and in the name of souls departed,” she cries: “Never! You son of a bitch, never!” (p. 106). Only when she is dying of cancer of the liver does Tina agree to see Isaac. But she has one condition: he must pay her twenty thousand dollars.46

  Braun’s opinion of Cousin Tina is that she “had seized upon the form of death to create a situation of opera, which at the same time was a situation of parody” (p. 108) (a form of Herzog’s “potato love”). The emotions released at the end of the story are operatic, but they are also powerful. Braun is “bitterly moved” in recalling them—though, being a child of the New World, he also finds them baffling. “What good were they! What were they for! And no one wanted them now. Perhaps the cold eye was better. On life, on death.” This view Braun quickly rejects, declaring that at such moments “humankind…grasped its own idea, that it was human and human through such passions.” The story ends poised between these two views. First the claims of feeling are forwarded:

  Oh, these Jews—these Jews! Their feelings, their hearts! Dr. Braun often wanted nothing more than to stop all this. For what came of it? One after another you gave over your dying. One by one they went. You went. Childhood, family, friendship, love were stifled in the grave. And these tears! When you wept them from the heart, you felt you justified something, understood something. But what did you understand? Again, nothing! It was only an intimation of understanding. A promise that mankind might—might, mind you—eventually, through its gift which might—might again!—be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived. Why life, why death.

  This qualified affirmation is not given the final word. As Braun lies back in bed, the “intimation of understanding” afforded him by deep emotion vanishes. Braun the scientist is given the final word:

  When Dr. Braun closed his eyes, he saw, red on black, something like molecular processes—the only true heraldry of being. As later, in the close black darkness when the short day ended, he went to the dark kitchen window to have a look at stars. These things cast outward by a great begetting spasm billions of years ago [p. 116].

  Mr. Sammler’s Planet ends somewhat differently, perhaps because Sammler comes from the Old World. Not only is he less baffled by Old World values than Dr. Braun, he finds the New World repulsive, in part because he was once drawn to it, though mostly because of the horrors he has lived through. He is Old World by default. As Ijah Metzger, the narrator of Bellow’s story “Cousins” (1974), puts it, intense family feeling of the sort Sammler now admires is “an archaism of which the Jews, until the present century stopped them, were in the course of divesting themselves. The world as it was dissolving apparently collapsed on top of them, and the divestiture could not continue.”47 The novel ends with Sammler’s prayer over Elya’s dead body:

  “Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner, who, as willingly as possible and as well as he was able, and even to an intolerable point, and even in suffocation and even as death was coming was eager, even childishly perhaps (may I be forgiven for this), even with a certain servility, to do what was required of him….He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet—through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding—he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As 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. 260].

  Although the novel’s ending is more affirmative than that of “The Old System,” it remains only half convinced (as Sammler, who lost an eye in the war, is only half prophet, unlike blind Tiresias or the Oedipus of Oedipus at Colonus). Neither Bellow nor Sammler wholly or openly embraces the faith they seek. Early in the novel, Sammler notices some enigmatic graffiti on a vacant building: “On the plate glass of the empty shop were strange figures or nonfigures in thick white. Most scrawls could be ignored. These for some reason caught on with Mr. Sammler as pertinent. Eloquent. Of what? Of future nonbeing. (Elya!) But also of the greatness of eternity which shall lift us from this present shallowness” (p. 72).

  What Sammler means by “the contract” is explained in the immediately preceding scenes. As Elya lies on his deathbed, Sammler and Elya’s daughter, Angela, wait in the hospital for news of his condition. Sammler wants Angela to make amends to her father: she has been a sorrow to him, spoiled, sexually promiscuous, a child of the sixties. “I should ask him to forgive me? Are you serious?” Sammler is perfectly serious, but Angela cannot bring herself to do as he asks. “It goes against everything. You’re talking to the wrong person. Even for my father it would be too hokey.” As Sammler persists, bringing up Angela’s sex life, she takes offense. What does he know about such matters? Angela is like Cousin Tina in her stubbornness, also in her sexuality (it was Cousin Tina, sullen and stout, who initiated young Braun in the mysteries of sex). Asking for forgiveness “goes against” what Sammler sees as the fashionable freedoms of the day. At Sarah Lawrence College, Angela had “a bad education. In literature, mostly French.” This education drew her to outlaw types. She sent money, her father’s money, “to defense funds for black murderers and rapists” (p. 7). Angela is “beautiful, free and wealthy” (p. 22), but she is crude, and not only sexually. “I’m sure you love Daddy,” she tells Sammler. “Apart from the practical reasons, I mean” (p. 250).

  Sammler wants Angela to ask her father for forgiveness because “he’s put an immense amount of feeling into you. Probably most of his feeling has gone toward you,” but also because “he’s been a good man. And he’s being swept out” (p. 254). Elya was a better man than Sammler because he treasured “certain old feelings. He’s on an old system” (p. 250). Many of the operations he performed as a gynecologist he hated, but “he performed them. He did what he disliked. 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.” Sammler, in contrast, “was simply an Anglophile intellectual Polish Jew and person of culture—relatively useless. But Elya…has accomplished something good. Brought himself through. He loves you” (p. 251).48 “So he’s human,” says Angela, “all right, he’s human” (p. 251). For Sammler, though, being human is “not a natural gift at all. Only the capacity is natural” (p. 250). Elya’s virtues (more spoken of than displayed, a possible fault of the novel) were “feeling, outgoingness, expressiveness, kindness, heart—all these fine human things which by a peculiar turn of opinion strike people now as shady activities. Openness and candor about vices seem far easier. Anyway, there is Elya’s assignment. That’s what’s in his good face. That’s why he has such a human look” (p. 251).

  * * *

  —

  SAMMLER’S EMBRACE OF THE OLD SYSTEM goes hand in hand with a ferocious attack on modernity. For Bellow, Sammler was a means of letting rip, something he needed at this period. Creating a protagonist of “seventy-plus” years allowed him, in Ruth Wisse’s words, to assume “for the first time the authority of a Jew, and the perspective of a disciplining parent,” in
defiance not only of the sixties but of traditional patterns of Jewish American fiction: “In a reversal of the immigrant novel that brought Jews to America looking for salvation, Mr. Sammler’s Planet imports a Jewish refugee from Europe with valuable hard-won wisdom to impart.”49 To begin with, Sammler has no illusions about human depravity. Although not wholly despairing, he is convinced that “liberal beliefs did not seem capable of self-defense, and you could smell decay. You could see the suicidal impulses of civilization pushing strongly” (p. 26).

  Although wise, Sammler is powerless, impotent—half blind, with heart trouble that forces him to rest periodically, dependent on the charity of his nephew, too old to live on his own. In the forty-eight hours of the novel’s action, his powerlessness is brought home to him in several ways. First and foremost there is his experience with the black pickpocket. The pickpocket works the bus along Riverside Drive. Four times Sammler has seen him in operation, opening handbags, lifting wallets, “without haste, with no criminal tremor” (p. 6). The pickpocket is a big man, about thirty-five, handsome, wearing an expensive camel-hair coat, designer dark glasses, and a single gold earring. Sammler likens his expertise to that of a surgeon, and is appalled and fascinated by the way he “took the slackness, the cowardice of the world for granted” (p. 38). He reports the pickpocket to the police and is greeted over the telephone by a voice “toneless with indifference or fatigue”:

  “O.K.”

  “Are you going to do anything?”

  “We’re supposed to, aren’t we? What’s your name?”

  “Artur Sammler.”

  “All right, Art. Where do you live?”

  “Dear Sir, I will tell you, but I am asking what you intend to do about this man.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “Arrest him.”

  “We have to catch him first.”

  “You should put a man on the bus.”

  “We haven’t got a man to put on the bus. There are lots of buses, Art, and not enough men….”

  “I understand. You don’t have the personnel, and there are priorities, political pressures. But I could point out the man.”

  “Some other time.”

  “You don’t want him pointed out?”

  “Sure, but we have a waiting list.”

  “I have to get on your list?”

  “That’s right, Abe.”

  “Artur.”

  “Arthur” [pp. 9–10].

  The effect this exchange has on Sammler, “tensely sitting forward in bright lamplight,” is to make him feel “like a motorcyclist who has been struck in the forehead by a pebble from the road, trivially stung.” Sammler smiles: “America! (he was speaking to himself). Advertised throughout the universe as the most desirable, most exemplary of nations” (p. 10).50

  * * *

  —

  DISCUSSING THE PICKPOCKET with Margotte Arkin, the niece with whom he lodges, and with his daughter, Shula, Sammler refers to him as “this African prince or great black beast” (p. 10). He is not without admiration for the pickpocket’s manner and appearance. He also discusses him with Lionel Feffer, a graduate student studying diplomatic history at Columbia, one of several students Shula has employed in the past to read to him, to spare his partial eyesight. Feffer is “an ingenious operator, less student than promoter,” “a bustling, affectionate, urgent, eruptive, enterprising character” (p. 30). In addition, he’s “a busy seducer, especially, it seemed, of young wives.” Although his various schemes are moneymaking, he also has time “to hustle on behalf of handicapped children” (p. 31). Sammler finds Feffer charming—like Bellow, he’s drawn to “characters”—and he agrees to address a seminar Feffer has arranged as part of “a student project to help backward black pupils with their reading problems” (p. 30). Feffer suggests that Sammler talk about “The British Scene in the Thirties,” since for two decades before the war Sammler had been the London correspondent for several Warsaw papers and journals. What such a talk has to do with backward black pupils is unclear, but Sammler, “not always attentive,” is often unclear about Feffer’s schemes. “Perhaps there was nothing clear to understand; but it seemed that he had promised, although he couldn’t remember promising. But Feffer confused him. There were so many projects, such cross references, so many confidences and requests for secrecy, so many scandals, frauds, spiritual communications” (p. 30).

  When Sammler arrives at Columbia, Feffer leads him into a large room filled with students, “a mass meeting of some sort.” This is the audience he is meant to entertain with anecdotes about R. H. Tawney, Harold Laski, George Orwell, and H. G. Wells. Surprised and frightened, having expected only “a handful of students,” Sammler gathers his courage and begins to speak of “the mental atmosphere of England before the Second World War” (p. 32). That the scene is set at Columbia nicely fits Bellow’s purposes. Columbia had been much in the news during the writing of Sammler. In April 1968, the SDS and SAS (Student Afro Society) led angry protests against the construction of a university gymnasium at Morningside Park, only a few blocks from Columbia but stretching into and through the black neighborhoods of Harlem and Morningside Heights. There were also demonstrations against the university’s affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons-research think tank connected to the United States Department of Defense. In the course of these protests, several university buildings were occupied, including Hamilton Hall, which housed a number of administrative offices, and Low Library, where the president’s office was located. During the occupation, the acting dean was held hostage for a day; a photograph of a student, David Shapiro, sitting in the president’s chair, wearing sunglasses, and smoking a cigar, was widely reproduced in newspapers and periodicals; and relations between white and black protesters deteriorated. The black protesters occupying Hamilton Hall insisted that their white counterparts move to other occupied buildings, part of a wider separatist trend among black radicals of the period (as in the purging of white officers from the Congress of Racial Equality, including, presumably, Marvin Rich, editor of the ill-fated volume “They Shall Overcome” [discussed in chapter 1 and its notes], with whom Bellow corresponded over the book’s preface). After a week of occupations and fruitless negotiations, Columbia called in the New York City police on April 30, and the protesters were violently ousted; 132 protesters were injured, along with four faculty, and twelve policemen, and there were seven hundred arrests. One policeman was permanently disabled when a student jumped on his back from a second-story window.

  Bellow imagines Sammler facing an audience made up of such students. If anything, their behavior is worse than that of the students at San Francisco State. At San Francisco State, Bellow was able to finish his talk; Sammler gets only halfway through his. In the midst of discussing H. G. Wells’s “Cosmopolis,” his project for a World State, “feeling what a kind-hearted, ingenuous, stupid scheme it had been,” Sammler is interrupted by “a man in Levi’s, thick-bearded but possibly young…shouting at him.” The questioner has taken exception to something Sammler said about George Orwell. “That’s a lot of shit,” he shouts (p. 33).

  “Orwell was a fink. He 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.”

  Sammler hears several voices raised in protest, but he feels, as Bellow felt at San Francisco State, that “no one really tried to defend him. Most of the young people seemed to be against him” (p. 34). Feffer has left the room, having been called to the telephone. A sympathetic girl bundles Sammler out of the auditorium and down a flight of stairs, “and he was on Broadway at One-hundred-sixteenth Street” (p. 34).