Mr. Sammler's Planet

Sammler’s New York

Artur Sammler is seventy years old, Polish-Jewish, and half-blind — his left eye is a clouded slit, a souvenir of the Nazi massacre in which he was shot and buried in a mass grave outside Zamość, from which he crawled out alive. He lives in Manhattan in the late 1960s, supported by his nephew Elya Gruner, a prosperous physician, and his niece Margotte, a well-meaning intellectual who fills their apartment with the kind of earnest progressive conversation that Sammler observes with exhausted patience. He has survived things that make their concerns seem, to him, small.

Every day Sammler rides the crosstown bus, and every day he watches the same large, elegantly dressed Black pickpocket working the passengers with a calm professionalism that Sammler finds, despite himself, aesthetically impressive. When the pickpocket notices that Sammler has been watching him, he follows him off the bus and, without a word, opens his coat to expose himself — an act of pure territorial menace that leaves Sammler shaken in a way the mugging itself does not.

The city around Sammler is in upheaval. The 1960s counterculture — its sexual liberation, its rejection of convention, its contempt for the bourgeois order — washes past him in a continuous spectacle. He is invited to lecture to students at Columbia, and the students shout him down: an old man talking about Orwell and civility is not what they are there for. Sammler watches all of this with a survivor’s cold clarity. He has seen what happens when civilization fails. He is not sentimental about civilization, but he is serious about it in a way that the people around him, who have never had to test their assumptions against actual catastrophe, are not.

The Holocaust and the Counterculture

The novel’s central argument is organized around a contrast that Bellow made explicit and that many readers have found uncomfortable: between the historical reality Sammler carries in his body — the mass grave, the years of hiding in a mausoleum in a Polish cemetery, the killing of a German soldier with a captured rifle — and the theatrical rebellion of American youth who have no comparably real stakes. Sammler does not hate the young. He observes them. But his observations are not neutral, and neither are Bellow’s.

This is Bellow’s most politically contentious novel. His Nobel Prize came nine years after its publication, and by then critics had spent a decade arguing about whether the book’s conservatism was a flaw or a position. Sammler’s judgments — about the limits of sexual freedom, about what civilization requires, about the difference between fashionable despair and genuine suffering — are rendered with full sympathy and are clearly close to Bellow’s own. Readers who find those judgments reactionary will find the novel difficult to inhabit. Readers who find them serious will find it one of Bellow’s most searching books.

What saves it from being a polemic is Sammler himself. He is not a comfortable figure, and Bellow does not make him one. He is judgmental, sometimes harsh, occasionally wrong. His one working eye sees clearly in some directions and not others. The ethical arguments he makes — about what we owe the dying, about the obligations that survival creates, about the human contract and what happens when individuals decide to exempt themselves from it — are made by a man whose authority to make them has been earned in a way that most people’s authority has not. Whether that makes the arguments correct is left, as it should be, to the reader.

The National Book Award and Bellow’s Later Work

Mr. Sammler’s Planet won the National Book Award in 1971, the third time Bellow received that recognition — he had previously won for The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog. The Nobel Prize followed in 1976. By the time the Nobel committee made their decision, Sammler had already established its place in the catalogue as the novel that divided Bellow readers most clearly between those who found his politics a limitation and those who found them a bracing challenge.

In the sequence of Bellow’s major work, Sammler sits after Herzog (1964) and before Humboldt’s Gift (1975). It is shorter and more concentrated than either, closer to a philosophical argument conducted through a central consciousness than to the sprawling digressive comedy of Herzog. Readers who have loved Herzog sometimes find Sammler too cold; readers who find Herzog self-indulgent often find Sammler more satisfying. The two novels make an instructive pair: both are about Jewish-American intellectuals confronting the disorder of their moment, but where Herzog is inside his own breakdown and half-comic about it, Sammler is outside everyone’s breakdown and entirely serious.

For readers new to Bellow, Herzog remains the better starting point — warmer, funnier, and more immediately involving. Mr. Sammler’s Planet rewards readers who already know Bellow well enough to understand what is unusual about this particular mode of seriousness, and to hear, beneath Sammler’s cool assessments, the sound of a man who has seen the worst and still refuses to stop thinking about what it means.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Bellow’s most morally demanding novel and his most politically exposed: an elderly Holocaust survivor’s cold-eyed encounter with 1960s America that earns its conservatism through the weight of what its narrator has survived.