Word: sammler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...question marks a line between Saul Bellow and every other modern American novelist. His early work moved, sometimes falteringly, toward the question. His later novels move with increasing confidence toward a personal answer. What Bellow continues to do with splendid energy in his new book, Mr. Sammler's Planet, is nothing less than clear a place in the rubble where a man can stand. An affirmation? The cant word embarrasses. It suggests fetid molecules of doubt coated with pine scent. But yes, Bellow affirms...
...Uncle Sam." Mr. Sammler's planet is perhaps not the planet Sammler would have chosen. Sammler is a Polish Jew by birth and persecution, one-eyed by blow of a gun butt, a chance survivor of a Nazi mass burial, an alumnus of a guerrilla band. Earlier, during a period of happiness and snug snobbery, he was a journalist in London, a member of the Bloomsbury literary set. Now he is old, a friend and pensioner of his middle-aged nephew, a wealthy New York gynecologist named Gruner. He is tall, dried, durable, with a floppy great...
...Terms of Life. The comedy ends with Sammler recommending his friend's soul to God. He did what was required of him, says Sammler. "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 we all know. For that is the truth of it-that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know...
...know. Perhaps; but Sammler is the first Bellow character who has not misplaced the information so thoroughly that an entire novel was required to follow him through the search for it. The earliest searchers found nothing. The hero of Bellow's accomplished but thin first novel, Dangling Man (1944), sleeps, eats, does nothing. There is little focus to his faint discontent, and while his paralysis of spirit is clearly a statement of some kind, it is not one that he understands...
...asked, in a roar, Bellow's central question-how can a good man, no weakling, live in the modern world?-and he must have some answer if the novel is to be more than a hideously bad joke. The roaring is that of personality, and a line of Sammler's applies: "Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder." Henderson roars himself out literally-impersonating a lion-when the author's mad plot sends him into the bush with a tribe of lion worshipers. He returns...