Mr. Sammler Planet

by Saul Bellow

  "Margotte, you had better check with that priest. A search warrant in that apartment? She has been filling it with trash for twelve years. If the police put down their hats, they'll never find them again. But I would say she has gone to New Rochelle."

  "Do you think so?"

  "If she's not with Father Robles, that's where she is." Sammler knew her ways; knew them as the Eskimo knows the ways of the seal. Its breathing-holes. "She is protecting me now, because the stolen property is in my hands. She must have been terrified by the detective, poor thing, and then waited till we had both gone out." Spying on my door like the black man. Feeling that she was not included by her father among his most serious concerns. Determined to regain the top priority. "I have let her go too far with this H. G. Wells nonsense. And now someone has been hurt."

  This unlucky Lal, who must have been sick of earth to begin with if he had such expectations of the moon.

  And partly he was right, for humankind kept doing the same stunts over and over. The old comical-tearful stuff. Emotional relationships. Desires incapable of useful fulfillment. Over and over, trying to vent and empty the breast of certain cries, of certain fervencies. What positive balance was possible? Was this passional struggle altogether useless? It was the energy bank also of noble purposes. Barking, hissing, ape-chatter, and spitting. But there were times when Love seemed life's great architect. Weren't there? Even stupidity might at times be hammered out as a golden background for great actions. Mightn't it? But for these weaknesses and these tenacious sicknesses, were there true cures? Sometimes the idea of cures seemed to Sammler itself pernicious. What was cured? You could rearrange, you could orchestrate the disorders. But cure? Nonsense. Change Sin to Sickness, a change of words (Feffer was right), and then enlightened doctors would stamp the sickness out. Oh, yes! So, then, philosophers, men of science, of brilliant intellect, understanding this more and more clearly, are compelled to sue for divorce from all these human states. Then they launch outward, moonward, their flying arthropod hardware. "I shall go to New Rochelle with Wallace," said Sammler. "She is certainly there. To be sure, we will check with Father Robles. If he knows where she is… I'll call back."

  Because she was not an American he felt a certain solidarity with Margotte. From her he did not have to conceal his (foreign) mortification. And she had shown delicacy in remembering not to ring Elya's room.

  "What shall I do with Dr. Lal?"

  "Apologize," he said. "Reassure. Comfort him, Margotte. Tell him I'm sure the manuscript is safe. Explain Shula's respect for the written word. And please ask him to keep the detectives out of this."

  "Wait a minute. He is here. He would like to say a word."

  An Eastern voice enriched the wire.

  "Is this Mr. Sammler?"

  "It is."

  "Dr. Lal, here. This is the second robbery. I cannot tolerate much more. Since Mrs. Arkin has appealed for patience, I can hold off just a very little longer. But very little. Then I must have the police detain your daughter."

  "If only it would help to put her behind bars! Believe me, I am sorrier than I can say. But I am perfectly sure the manuscript is safe. I understand you have no other copy."

  "Three years of composition."

  "That is distressing. I had hoped it was more like six months. But I can see how much careful preparation it would need." Normally Sammler shunned flattery, but now he had no choice. Moisture formed upon the black instrument, against his ear, and on his cheek was a red pressure mark. He said, "The work is brilliant."

  "I am glad you think so. Judge how it affects me."

  I can judge. Anyone can clutch anyone, and whirl him off. The low can force the high to dance. The wise have to reel about with leaping fools. "Try not to be too anxious, sir. I can recover your manuscript, and will do it tonight. I don't use my authority often enough. Believe me, I can control my daughter, and I shall."

  "I had hoped to publish by the time of the first moon landing," said Lal. "You can imagine how many bad paperbacks will be out. Confusing to the public. Meretricious."

  "Of course." Sammler sensed that the Indian, probably passionate, resisting great internal pressure, was after all being decent, allowing for the frailty of an old man, the tightness of the situation. He thought, The fellow is a gentleman. Inclining his head within the soundproof metal enclosure, the dotted voile of insulation, Sammler yielded to Oriental suggestion: "May the sun brighten your face. Single you out among the multitude (imagining Hindus always in crowds: like mackerel-crowded seas) many years yet." Sammler was determined that Shula should hurt no one but himself. He had to put up with it, but no one else should. "I shall be interested in your comments on my essay."

  "Of course," said Sammler, "we will have a long talk about it. Please stand by. I will phone as soon as there is some news. Thank you for bearing with me."

  Both parties hung up.

  "Wallace," said Sammler, "I think I shall be driving to New Rochelle with you."

  "Really? Then Dad did say something about the attic?"

  "It has nothing to do with the attic."

  "Then why? Is it something about Shula? It must be."

  "Why, yes, in fact. Shula. Can we leave soon?"

  "Emil is out there with the Rolls. Might as well use it while we can. What is Shula up to? She called me."

  "When?"

  "Not long ago. She wanted to put something in Dad's wall safe. Did I know the combination. Naturally I couldn't say I knew the combination. I'm not supposed to know."

  "Where was she calling from?"

  "I didn't ask. Of course you've seen Shula whispering to the flowers in the garden," said Wallace. Wallace was not observant and took little interest in the conduct of others. But for that very reason he prized highly the things he did notice. What he noticed he cherished. He had always been kind and warm to Shula. "What language does she speak to them, is it Polish?"

  The language of schizophrenia, very likely.

  "I used to read Alice in Wonderland to her. Those talking flowers. The garden of live flowers."

  Sammler opened the patient's door and saw him sitting up, alone. Dr. Gruner in his large black spectacles was studying, or trying to study, a contract or legal document. He would sometimes say that he should have been a lawyer, not a doctor. Medical school had not been his choice but his mother's. Of his own free will he had probably done little. Consider his wife.

  "Come in, Uncle, and shut the door. Let's make it fathers only. I don't want to see children tonight."

  "I understand that feeling," said Sammler. "I've had it often."

  "It's a pity about Shula, poor woman. But she is only wacky. My daughter is a dirty cunt."

  "A different generation, a different generation."

  "And my son, a high-IQ moron."

  "He may come around, Elya."

  "You don't believe it for a minute, Uncle. What, a ninth-inning rally? I ask myself what I spent so many years of my life on. I must have believed what America was telling me. I paid for the best. I never suspected that I wasn't getting the best."

  Had Elya spoken in excitement, Sammler would have tried to calm him. He was, however, speaking factually and he sounded utterly level. In the goggles he looked particularly judicious. Like the chairman of a Senate committee hearing scandalous testimony without loss of composure.

  "Where is Angela?"

  "Gone to the ladies' to have a cry, I suppose. If she isn't Frenching an orderly, or in a daisy chain. When she goes around the corner, you never know."

  "Oh, too bad. You ought not to be quarreling."

  "Not quarreling. Just making things plainer, spelling them out. I figured this Horricker to marry her, but he'll never do it now."

  "Is that certain?"

  "Did she tell you what happened in Mexico?"

  "Not in detail."

  "That's just as well, if you don't know the details. The joke you made was right on the head, about the billiard table in hell, about something green where it's
hot."

  "It wasn't aimed at Angela."

  "Of course I knew my daughter with twenty-five thousand tax-free dollars must be having herself a tine. I expected that, and as long as she was handling herself maturely and sensibly I had no objections. All that, theoretically, is fine. You use the words 'mature' and 'sensible,' and they satisfy you. But then you take a close look, and when you take a close look, you see something else. You see a woman who has done it in too many ways with too many men. By now she probably doesn't know the name of the man between her legs. And she looks… Her eyes-she has fucked-out eyes."

  "I'm sorry."

  Something very odd in Elya's expression. There were tears about, somewhere, but dignity would not permit them. Perhaps it was self-severity, not dignity. But they did not come out. They were rerouted, absorbed into the system. They were subdued, converted into tones. They were present in the voice, in the color of the skin, in the lights of the eye.

  "I must go, Elya. I'll take Wallace with me. I'll be back tomorrow."

  V

  Emil in the Rolls Royce may have had an enviable life. The silver limousine was his faucet. He had all that power to turn on. Also, he was outside the wretched, anxious rivalry, rancor, hatred, and warfare of ordinary drivers of cars. Double-parked, he was not molested by cops. As he stood beside the grand machine, his buttocks, given a rectilinear projection by the formal breeches, were nearer to the ground than most people's. He seemed also to have a calm, serious spirit; heavy creases in the face; lips that turned inward and never showed the teeth; midparted hair like a cowl descending to the ears; a heavy Savonarola nose. The Rolls still carried MD on the license plates.

  "Emil drove for Costello, for Lucky Luciano," said Wallace, smiling.

  In the light of the padded gray interior, Wallace was beard-stippled. The large dark eyes in the big orbits wished to offer courteous entertainment. When you considered how profoundly Wallace was absorbed and preoccupied by business, by problems of character, by death, you recognized how generous and how difficult this was-how much trying, shaking, rousing, what an effort was required. Arranging a kindly smile for the old uncle.

  "Luciano? Elya's friend? Yes. Eminent Mafia. Angela mentioned him."

  "Connections from way back."

  They drove out on the West Side 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? Mr. Sammler was ready to think it might have a sobering effect on the species, at this moment exceptionally troubled. Violence might subside, exalted ideas might recover importance. Once we were emancipated from telluric conditions.

  In the Rolls was a handsome bar; it had a small light, within the mirror-lined cabinet. Wallace offered the old man liquor or Seven-Up, but he wanted nothing. Enclosing the umbrella between high knees, he was reviewing some of the facts. Outer-space voyages were made possible by specialist-collaboration. While on earth sensitive ignorance still dreamed of being separate and "whole."

  "Whole"? What "whole"? A childish notion. It led to all this madness, mad religions, LSD, suicide, to crime.

  He shut his eyes. Breathed out of his soul some bad, and breathed in some good. No, thank you, Wallace, no whisky. Wallace poured some for himself.

  How could the ignorant nonspecialist be strong with strength adequate to confront these technical miracles which made him a sort of uncomprehending Congo savage? By vision, by archaic inner-preliterate purity, by natural force, nobly whole? The children were setting fire to libraries. And putting on Persian trousers, letting their sideburns grow. This was their symbolic wholeness. An oligarchy of technicians, engineers, the men who ran the grand machines, infinitely more sophisticated than this automobile, would come to govern vast slums filled with bohemian adolescents, narcotized, beflowered, and "whole." He himself was a fragment, Mr. Sammler understood. And lucky to be that. Totality was as much beyond his powers as to make a Rolls Royce, part by part, with his own hands. So perhaps, perhaps! colonies on the moon would reduce the fever and swelling here, and the passion for boundlessness and wholeness might find more material appeasement. Humankind, drunk with terror, calm itself, sober up.

  Drunk with terror? Yes, and fragments (a fragment like Mr. Sammler) understood: this earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, "Enough!" The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement. Timor mortis conturbat me. Dies irae. Quid sum miser tunc dicturus.

  The moon was so big tonight that it caught the eye of Wallace, drinking in the back seat, in the unlimited luxury of upholstery and carpets. Legs crossed, leaning back, he pointed moonward past Emil, above the smooth parkway north of the George Washington Bridge.

  "Isn't the moon great? They're buzzing away, around it," he said.

  "Who?"

  "Spacecraft are. Modules."

  "Oh, yes. It's in the papers. Would you go there?"

  "Would I ever! In a minute," said Wallace. "Out-out? You bet I'd go. I'd fly. In fact, I'm already signed up with Pan Am."

  "With whom?"

  "With the airlines. I believe I was the five-hundred-twelfth person to phone for a reservation."

  "Are they already taking reservations for moon excursions?"

  "They most certainly are. Hundreds of thousands of people want to go. Also to Mars and Venus, jumping off from the moon."

  "How very odd."

  "What's odd about it? To go? It isn't odd at all. I tell you, the airlines get bales of applications. What about you, would you take the trip, Uncle?"

  "No."

  "Because of your age, maybe?"

  "Possibly age. No, my travels are over."

  "But the moon, Uncle! Of course you wouldn't physically be able to do it; but a man like you? I can't believe such a person wouldn't be raring to go."

  "To the moon? But I don't even want to go to Europe," Mr. Sammler said. "Besides, if I had my choice, I'd prefer the ocean bottom. In Dr. Piccard's bathysphere. I seem to be a depth man rather than a height man. I do not personally care for the illimitable. The ocean, however deep, has a top and bottom, whereas there is no sky ceiling. I think I am an Oriental, Wallace. Jews, after all, are Orientals. I am content to sit here on the West Side, and watch, and admire these gorgeous Faustian departures for the other worlds. Personally, I require a ceiling, although a high one. Yes, I like ceilings, and the high better than the low. In literature I think there are low-ceiling masterpieces-Crime and Punishment, for instance-and high-ceiling masterpieces, Remembrance of Things Past."

  Claustrophobia? Death is confinement.

  Wallace, continuing to smile, softly but definitely differed; yet took a subtle interest in Uncle Sammler's views. "Of course," he said, "the world looks different to you. Literally. Because of the eyes. How well do you see?"

  "Partially only. You are right."

  "And yet you described that Negro man and his thing."

  "Ah, Feffer told you that. Your partner. I should have known he'd rush to tell. I hope he's not serious about snapping photographs on the bus."

  "He thinks he can, with his Minox. He is sort of a nut. I suppose that when people are young and full of enthusiasm, you say, 'All that youth and enthusiasm,' but as they grow older you just say, about the same behavior, 'What a nut.' He was very excited by your experience. What actually did the man do, Uncle? He exhibited himself. Did he drop his trousers?"

  "No."

  "He opened them. And then he took out his tool. What was it like? I wonder… Did it occur to him that your eyesight
wasn't good enough to see?"

  "I don't know what occurred to him. He didn't say."

  "Well, tell me about his thing. It wasn't actually black, was it? It must have been a purple kind of chocolate, or maybe the color of his palms?"

  Wallace's scientific objectivity!

  "I don't wish to talk about it, really."

  "Oh, Uncle, suppose I were a zoologist who had never seen a live leviathan but you knew Moby Dick from the whaleboat? Was it sixteen, eighteen inches?"

  "I couldn't say."

  "Would you guess it weighed two pounds, three pounds, four?"

  "I have no way to estimate. And you are not a zoologist. You just this minute became one."

  "Uncircumcised?"

  "That was my impression."

  "I wonder if women really prefer that kind of thing."

  "I assume they have other interests in addition."

  "That's what they say. But you know you can't trust them. They're animals, aren't they."

  "Temporarily there is an animal emphasis."

  "I'm not taken in by the gentle-dainty-lady line. Women are lustful. They're raunchier than men in my opinion. With all respect for your experience and knowledge of life, Uncle Sammler, this is a field where I wouldn't be inclined to take your word. Angela would always say that if a man had a thick dick-excuse me, Uncle."

  "Angela is perhaps a special case."

  "You prefer to think she's off the continuum. What if she's not?"

  "I'd like to drop the subject, Wallace."

  "No, it's really too interesting. And this is pure objectivity, not a dirty conversation. Now, Angela gives a good report on Wharton Horricker. It seems he's a long, strong fellow. She says, however, that he takes too much exercise, he's too muscular. It's hard to get tender emotions from a man who has such steel cable arms and heavy thick weight-lifting pectorals. An iron man. She says it interferes with the flow of tender feeling."

  "I hadn't thought about it."

  "What does she know about tender feeling? Just some guy between her legs-Everyman is her lover. No, Anyman. They say that fellows that beef themselves up like that-'I was a ninety-pound weakling'-that such fellows are narcissistic pansies. I don't judge anybody. What if they are homosexuals? That's nothing any more. I don't think homosexuality is simply a different way of being human, I actually think it's a disease. I don't know why homosexuals fuss so much and proclaim themselves so normal. Such gentlemen. Of course they have us to point at and we're not so great. I believe this boom in faggots was caused by modern warfare. One result of 1914, that slaughter in the trenches. The men were getting blasted. It was obviously healthier to be a woman than a man. It was better to be a child. Best of all is to be an artist, combining child, woman, or dervish-do I mean a dervish? A shaman? A necromancer is probably what I mean. Plus millionaire. Many a millionaire wants to be an artist, or a kid or woman and a necromancer. What was I talking about? Oh, Horricker. I was saying that in spite of all that physical culture and weight lifting he was not a queer. But that he did have a fantastic image of male strength. A person making a determined self-effort. Angela's job seemed to be to take him down a few pegs. She's weepy about him today, but she's a pig, and hell be forgotten tomorrow. I think my sister is a swine. If he's got too much muscle, she's got too much fat. What about that fat bust interfering with the flow of tender feeling? What did you say just now?"