Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

And soon everything must change.  Men would set their watches by other suns than this.  Or time would vanish.  We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed.  We would be designated by other nouns.  Days and nights would belong to the museums.  The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery.  The seas powdering our bones line quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good--a melancholy good.

It's 1968 and man is on his way to the moon.  Artur Sammler is living on the Upper West Side, a Polish emigre.  His daughter, perhaps unwittingly, steals a manuscript by an Indian cosmologist named V. Govinda Lal in order to share it with Sammler, to use in a memoir he's writing about H. G. Wells.  They were once friends, Sammler and Wells, and Wells' optimism about humankind's ability to remake itself provides vital context for the novel.  Mr. Sammler's Planet is one of those talky, thinky Bellow novels like Herzog and Seize the Day, full of meditations on Max Weber and Julius Caesar and Freud and god knows what else, but the manuscript caper gives it a bit of the shaggy feeling of more plotty novels like Augie March.  While Sammler dreams about the moon, his daughter is hiding manuscripts in a locker in Grand Central Station.

At the same time, Sammler faces the impending death of his beloved nephew Elya, who has had a hemorrhage in his neck.  The moon landing, and the dream of the future, is contrasted with the finality of death.  As Sammler tells Elya's daughter, Angela, "But we don't have to decide whether the world is ending.  The point is that for your father it is the end."  Bellow beautifully captures one of the fundamental ironies about the tale of human progress: while mankind has a future, individual men and women can only partake in the smallest part of it.  Sammler envisions the future person, "a colossal figure, a beautiful green color, with a hand that had evolved into a kit of extraordinary instruments, tools strong and subtle, thumb and forefinger capable of exerting thousands of pounds of pressure."  But this future man (he sounds like the Jolly Green Giant) is no one you know.

Sammler knows about death.  He survived the Holocaust; his wife did not.  He dug her grave; he survived by hiding in a mausoleum.  He leapt out of the grave twice over.  He has faced death, and it provides him a kind of wisdom and moral authority that he is reluctant to use.  Sammler can only observe: again and again he sees a pickpocket on the Riverside Drive bus, but he rejects the possibility of action.  The whole world, he feels, is sliding into a kind of barbarism, into crime and sex.  The green men of the future may be different, but who's to make things better now?

Okay.  Now let's talk about this: the pickpocket, who is black, sees Sammler seeing him.  He chases Sammler into the lobby of his building, where he corners him and shows him his penis.  It's a show of masculine force, of course, an assertion of manhood meant to menace Sammler.  The pickpocket is nattily dressed in a violet suit and Dior sunglasses, but his penis is coded as animal, barbaric--and starkly black.  It's upsetting to see such a rankly racist symbol in the work of Bellow, who is often so perceptive.  The fear of a black man's dick is so shallow, so juvenile, so sadly familiar.  And of course, it's Sammler, the meticulous Jew, that gets to stand in for the forces of civilization.  The ugliness of the scene poisons the whole book.

Or maybe it just reveals a conservative paranoia at the heart of the novel.  It certainly makes me more suspicious of the way the novel deals with sex, which is always dangerous and always female.  Elya's daughter Angela is a free-love advocate in the 60's mold, and an abortive swing in Mexico has Elya livid.  When Sammler chastises her, are we supposed to read that as him finally recovering his moral voice?  And why is Sammler unable to look at her without thinking about sex, as if it's something that radiates from her body, like stink-lines?  "Smearing all," as he says, "with her female fluids."

I had a tough time with this novel.  At the level of the sentence, the word, there might not be a better prose stylist in the English language than Bellow.  He certainly knows how to describe a penis with flair.  But why does he have to do it at all?  Augie March calls himself a "Columbus of the near at hand," a man interested in exploring the depth of life all around him, but Sammler shrinks from it, fears it, and here at least so does Bellow.  Why is Bellow able to extend a sympathetic eye to the green giant of the future, but not the black New Yorker of the present?  The dream of the moon is the dream of a better human; but it's a dream of a better, kinder novel, too.