Mr. Sammler Planet

by Saul Bellow

  Sammler was considering how much alike Wallace and Shula were, with their misdeeds. You had to stop and turn and waft for them. They would not be omitted. Sammler held the second bucket under the splashing pipe. Wallace had gone to empty the first from the dormer, turning back with grimy wet hands, bare-chested, the short black hairs neatly symmetrical like a clerical dickey. Arms were long, shoulders white, shapely to no purpose. And with a certain drop of the mouth, smiling at himself, transmitting to Sammler as he had done before the mother's sense of the graceful boy, the child's large skull and long neck, the clear-lined brows, crisp hair, fine small nose. But, as in certain old paintings, another world was also represented above, and one could imagine on a straight line over Wallace's head symbols of turbulence: smoke, fire, flying black things. Arbitrary rulings. A sealed judgment.

  "If he would tell me where the dough is, it would at least cover the water damage. But he won't, and you won't ask him."

  "No. I want no part of it."

  "You think I should make my own dough."

  "Yes. Label the trees and bushes. Earn your own."

  "We will. In fact, that's all I want from the old man, a stake for the equipment. It's his last chance to show confidence in me. To wish me well. To give me like his blessing. Do you think he loved me?"

  "Certainly he loved you."

  "As a child. But did he love me as a man?"

  "He would have"

  "If I had ever been a man according to his idea. That's what you mean, isn't it?"

  Sammler, having recourse to one of his blind looks, could always express his thought. Or if you had loved him, Wallace. These are very transitory opportunities. One must be nimble.

  "I'm sorry that so late at night you have to be bailing. You must be tired."

  "I suppose I am. Dry old people can go on and on. Still, I am beginning to feel it."

  "I don't feel so hot myself. How is it downstairs, bad? A lot of water?"

  No comment.

  "It always turns out like this. Is that my message to the world from my unconscious self?"

  "Why send such messages? Censor them. Put your unconscious mind behind bars on bread and water."

  "No, it's just the mortal way I am. You can't hold it down. It must come out. I hate it too."

  Lean Mr. Sammler, delicately applying the light pail to the pipe, while the rapid water splashed.

  "I know that Dad had guys up here installing phony connections."

  "I would have thought if it was a lot of money the false pipe would be a thick one."

  "No, he wouldn't do an obvious thing. You have the wrong image of him. He has a lot of scientific cool. It could have been this pipe. He could have rolled the bills tight and small. He is a surgeon. He has the skill and the patience."

  Suddenly the splashing stopped.

  "Look! He's shut it off. It's down to a dribble. Hurray!" said Wallace.

  "Dr. Lal!"

  "What a relief. He found a turnoff. Who is that fellow?"

  "Professor V. Govinda Lal."

  "What is he a professor of?"

  "Biophysics, I think, is his field."

  "Well, he certainly uses his head. It never once occurred to me to find out where our water came from. There must be a well. Can you imagine that! And we've been here since I was ten. June 8, 1949. I'm a Gemini. Lily of the valley is my birth flower. Did you know the lily of the valley was very poisonous? We moved on my birthday. No party. The van got stuck between the gateposts on moving day. So it's not municipal water-I'm so astonished." With his usual lightness, he introduced general considerations. "It's supposed to be a sign of the Mass Man that he doesn't know the difference between Nature and human arrangements. He thinks the cheap commodities-water, electricity, subways, hot dogs-are like air, sunshine, and leaves on the trees."

  "Just as simple as that?"

  "Ortega y Gasset thinks so. Well, I'd better see what the damage is and get the cleaning woman in."

  "You could mop up. Don't let the puddles stand all night."

  "I don't know the first thing about mopping. I doubt that I ever even held a mop in my hands. But I could spread newspapers. Old Timeses from the cellar. But just one thing, Uncle."

  "What thing is that?"

  "Don't dislike me on account of this."

  "I don't."

  "Well, don't look down on me-don't despise me."

  "Well, Wallace…"

  "I know you must. Well, this is like an appeal. I'd like to have your good opinion."

  "Are you depressed, Wallace, when things go wrong like this?"

  "Less and less."

  "You mean you're improving," said Sammler.

  "You see, if Angela inherits the house that ends my chances for the money. She'll put the place up for sale, being unmarried. She doesn't have any sentiment about the old homestead. The roots. Well, neither do I, when you come right down to it. Dad doesn't really like the place himself. No, I don't feel any black gloom about the water damage. Everything is replaceable. At exorbitant prices. But the estate will pay the bill, which will be a real gyp. And there's insurance. Possessive emotions are in a transitional phase. I really think they are." Wallace could turn suddenly earnest, but his earnestness lacked weight. Earnestness was probably Wallace's ideal, his true need, but the young man was incapable of finding his own essences. "I'll tell you what I'm afraid of, Uncle," he said. "If I have to live on a fixed income from a trust it'll be the end of me. I'll never find myself then. Do you want me to rot? I need to crash out of the future my father has prepared for me. Otherwise, everything just goes on being possible, and all these possibilities are going to be the death of me. I have to have my own necessities, and I don't see those anywhere. All I see is ten thousand a year, like my father's life sentence on me. I have to bust out while he's still living. When he dies, I'll get so melancholy I won't be able to lift a finger."

  "Shall we soak up some of this water?" said Sammler. "Shall we start spreading around the Times?"

  "Oh, that can wait. The hell with it. We'll get screwed anyway on the repairs. You know, Uncle, I think I'm just half as smart as a man needs to be to work out these things, so I never get more than halfway there."

  "So you have no connection with this house-no desire for roots, Wallace. "

  "No, of course not. Roots? Roots are not modern. That's a peasant conception, soil and roots. Peasantry is going to disappear. That's the real meaning of the modern revolution, to prepare world peasantry for a new state of existence. I certainly have no roots. But even I am out of date. What I've got is a lot of old wires, and even wires belong to the old technology. The real thing is telemetry. Cybernetics. I've practically decided, Uncle Sammler, if this enterprise doesn't pan out, with Feffer, that I'll go to Cuba."

  "To Cuba, is it? But you aren't a Communist, too, Wallace?"

  "Not at all. I do admire Castro, however. He has terrific style, he's a bohemian radical, and he's held his own against Washington superpower. He and his cabinet ride in jeeps. They meet in the sugar cane."

  "What do you want to tell him?"

  "It could be important, don't make fun of me, Uncle Sammler. I have ideas about revolution. When the Russians made their revolution, everybody said, 'A leap forward into a new stage of history.' Not at all. The Russian Revolution was a delaying action-ah, my God, what a noise. I'd better run. They could just bash down the door. They have an orgy, these guys, with their axes. And I have to have an alibi for the insurance."

  He ran.

  In the yard the rotating lights swept through the trees, dark red over the lawn, the walls and windows. The bell was slamming, bangalang, and deeper down the road, gulping passionate shrieks, approached the mortal-sounding sirens. More engines were arriving. From the attic window Sammler watched as Wallace ran out, his hands raised, explaining to the helmeted men as they sprang in the soft gum boots from the trucks.

  Water, they had brought.

  Mr. Sammler had some wakeful hours that night. A predictable
result of worry over Elya. Of the flood. Also of the conversation with Lal which had compelled him to state his views-historical, planetary, and universal. The order probably should be reversed: first there were the views, planetary or universal, and then there were hidden dollars, water pipes, firemen. Sammler went out and walked in the garden, behind the house, up and down the drive. He was dissatisfied. He had explained, he had taken positions, he had said things he hadn't meant, meant things he hadn't said. Indoors, there were activities, discussions, explanations, arrangements, rearrangements. In the house of a dying man. It was the turn again of certain minor things which people insisted on enlarging, magnifying, moving into the center: relationships, interior decorations, family wrangles, Minox photographs of thieves on buses, arms of Puerto Rican ladies on the Bronx Express, odi-et-amo need-and-rejection, emotional self-examinations, erotic businesses in Acapulco, fellatio with friendly strangers. Civilian matters. Civilian one and all! The high-minded, like Plato (now he was not only lecturing, but even lecturing himself), wished to get rid of such stuff-wrangles, lawsuits, hysterias, all such hole-and-corner pettiness. Other powerful minds denied that this could be done. They held (like Freud) that the mightiest instincts were bound up in just such stuff, each trifle the symptom of a deep disease in a creature whose whole fate was disease. What to do about such things? Absurd in form, but possibly real? But possibly not real? Relief from this had become imperative. And that was why, during the Aqaba crisis, Mr. Sammler had had to go to the Middle East.

  At this moment, walking in white moonlight on Elya Gruner's washed gravel, which had been cut with black tracks by the fire engines, he recognized and again identified his motives. He had gone back to 1939. He wanted to refer again to Zamosht Forest, to more basic human characteristics. When had things seemed real, true? In Poland when blinded, in Zamosht when freezing, in the tomb when hungry. So he had persuaded Elya to let him go, to send him, and he had renewed his familiarity with a certain sort of fact. Which, as he was older and more fragile, had made his legs tremble more; the more he tried to stiffen himself up the more he faltered. Few outer signs of this were given. But wasn't he too old? Did he have any business to fly to a war?

  It was announced in Athens, on the plane, that this flight would not continue because the fighting had already begun in Israel. Grounded! He must get out. The Greek heat was dizzy, in the airport. The public music circled through Mr. Sammler's unwilling head. The sugary coffee, the sticky drinks, also were a trial to him. The suspense, the delay, gnawed him intolerably. He went into the city and visited airline offices, he asked a business friend of Elya's, in oil or gasoline, to help, he visited the Israeli consulate and obtained a seat on the first El Al flight. He waited again at the airport until four a. m. among journalists and hippies. These young people-Dutch, German, Scandinavian, Canadian, American-had been encamped at Eilath on the Red Sea. The Bedouins on the ancient route from Arabia into Egypt had sold them hashish. It was a jolly place. Now with their guitars they wanted to go back. Responding to a primary event. Though recognizing no governments.

  The jet was packed. One could not move. For lean old men, breathing was difficult. A television man beside Sammler offered him a pull from his whisky bottle. "Thank you," said Sammler, and accepted. He swallowed down Bell's scotch. Just then the sun ran up from the sea like a red fox. It was not round but long, not far but near. The metal of the engines, those shapely vats in which the freezing air was screaming-light into blackness, blackness into light-hung under the wings beside Sammler's window. Whisky from a bottle-he smiled at himself-made him a real war correspondent. An odd person to be rushing to this war, although no more odd than these Stone Age bohemians with their solemn beards. There were others besides who did not seem very useful in a crisis. Sammler would be filing his old-fashioned dispatches to Mr. Jerzy Zhelonski in London to be read by a very mixed Polish public.

  Mr. Sammler had had no business, at his age, in a white cap and striped seersucker jacket, to be riding in a press bus behind those tanks to Gaza, to Al Arish and beyond. But he had managed it all himself. There was nothing accidental about it. In these American articles of dress he had perhaps passed for a younger man. Americans and Englishmen always looked a little younger. Anyway, there he was. He was one of the journalists. He walked about in conquered Gaza. They were sweeping broken glass. In the square, armor and guns. Just beyond, the cemetery walls, the domes of white tombs. In the dust, scraps of food baking, sour; odors of heating garbage and of urine. Broadcast Oriental jazz winding like dysentery through the bowels. Such deadly comical music. Women, oldish women only, went marketing; or set out to market; there couldn't have been much to buy. The black veils were transparent. You saw the heavy-boned mannish faces underneath-large noses, the stem mouths projecting over stonelike teeth. There was nothing to keep you in Gaza for long. The bus stopped for Sammler, and young Father Newell in his Vietnam battle dress greeted him.

  Knowing modern warfare, the Father was able to point things out which Sammler might have missed when they passed the last of the irrigated fields and entered the Sinai Desert. Then they began to see the dead, the unburied Arab bodies. Father Newell showed him the first. Sammler might never have noticed, might have taken the corpse for nothing but a greenish gunnysack, stuffed tight, dropped from a truck on the white sand.

  Driven off the road, sunk in the sand, wrecked on the dunes, many burnt-all these vehicles, the personnel carriers, tanks, trucks, the light cars smashed flat, wheels freed, escaped; and very thick about these machines, the dead. There were dug positions, emplacements, trenches, and in them, too, there were hundreds of corpses. The odor was like damp cardboard. The clothes of the dead, greenish-brown sweaters, tunics, shirts were strained by the swelling, the gases, the fluids. Swollen gigantic arms, legs, roasted in the sun. The dogs ate human roast. In the trenches the bodies leaned on the parapets. The dogs came cringing, flattening up. The inhabitants had run away from the encampments you saw here and there-the low tents, Bedouin-style, but made of plastic crate wrappings dumped from ships, pieces of styrofoam, dirty sheets of cellulose like insect moltings, large cockroach cases. Poor folk! Ah, poor creatures!

  "Well, they did a job, didn't they," said Father Newell. "How many casualties, would you say?"

  "I have no idea."

  "This was a small Russian experiment, I believe," Father Newell said. "Now they know."

  In the sun the faces softened, blackened, melted, and flowed away. The flesh sank to the skull, the cartilage of the nose warping, the lips shrinking, eyes dissolving, fluids filling the hollows and shining on the skin. A strange flavor of human grease. Of wet paper pulp. Mr. Sammler fought his nausea. As he and Father Newell walked together, they were warned not to step off the road because of mines. Sammler read out for the priest the Russian letters stenciled white on the green tanks and trucks GORKISKII AUTOZAVOD, most of them said. Father Newell seemed to know a lot about gun calibers, armor thickness, ranges. In a lowered voice, out of respect for the Israelis who denied its use, he identified the napalm. See all that reddish, all that mauve out there? Salmon-pink with a green tinge in the clinkers was the sure sign. Positively napalm. It was a real war. These Jews were tough. He spoke to Sammler as one American to another. The long blue seersucker stripes', the soiled white cap from Kresge's, the little spiral book in which Sammler made his notes for Polish articles, also from Kresge's, accounted for this. It was a real war. Everyone respected killing. Why not the priest? He walked in the big American battle boots as if he were not altogether a priest. He was not a chaplain. He was a newspaperman. He was not what he was assumed to be. Nor was Sammler. What Sammler was he could not clearly formulate. Human, in some altered way. The human being at the point where he attempted to obtain his release from being human. Wasn't this what Sammler had been getting at in the kitchen, talking to Lal and the ladies of divorce from every human state? Petitioning for a release from God's attention? My days are vanity. I would not live always. Let me alone. To be v
isited every morning, to be called upon, to be magnified. Let me alone.

  Walking the narrow road with Father Newell, picking up curious objects, shells, bandages, Arab comic books and letters, stepping aside for trucks stacked high with bread, weighing down the springs, projecting at the rear. But really the main subject could not be changed, the subject of the dead. Bristling in the green-brown and gravy-colored woolens. The suffocating wet cardboard fumes they gave off. In the superhot, the crack light, the glassy persistency and distortion of the desert light, these swollen shapes were the main thing to be seen. They were the one subject the soul was sure to take seriously. And this perhaps was what Sammler's instinct had directed him to do. To go to Kennedy, to get on a jet, to land in Tel Aviv, to have snapshots taken, to obtain a press card, to find a bus to Gaza, to visit the great sun wheel of white desert in which these Egyptian corpses and machines were embedded, to make his primary contact. Certain desires thus were met, for which he could not account. And this war was, as human affairs went, a most minor affair. In modern experience, so very little. Nothing at all. And the people involved in it, the boys, after fighting, played soccer at Al Arish. They cleared a space, and they kicked and butted, they leaped up, they trotted on the sand. Or in the shade of the hangars they took out their books and read biology or chemistry, philosophy, preparing for exams perhaps. Then he and Father Newell were called over to look at captured snipers on the bed of a truck, trussed up and blindfolded. Below these eye rags, the desperate faces, as if it were not a most minor affair. One saw those, and then the next things, and then other things. And evidently Mr. Sammler had his own need for these sights, for which he mastered the trembling of his legs or the wish to cry which flashed through him when he saw the snipers' bandaged faces. He was taken down to the sea by some men. They entered the water to refresh themselves. He too went in and stood. In a broad band along the beaches the foam mixed with heat-shimmer for many miles, in varying deep curves of seething white between the sand and the great blue. For a little while, in the water, he did not smell rotting flesh, but soon had to tie a handkerchief over his face. The handkerchief quickly absorbed the smell. It tainted his clothing. His spittle tasted of it.