MR. SAMMLER'S PLANET by Saul Bellow. 313 pages. Viking. $6.95.
NOVELISTS have had less success than statesmen, if that is possible, in dealing with the ailments of the age. For one thing, they lack the statesman's surest strength, his reasonable chances of success by inadvertence. A novelist whose writing takes even the slightest notice of his society is obliged to make some sense of the times. That is his franchise, and fool luck will not help. He must be a seer or, at a minimum, the rarest sort of charlatan.
There is nothing of the charlatan in Saul Bellow, and perhaps it is time to admit that he is a seer. The author of The Adventures of Angle March, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog observes his age with no excessive charity. Chaos? Yes. Senselessness? Yes. Disintegration and despair? Be the author's guest. The dour view itself is not remarkable. Well-wrought chaos and subtly evoked senselessness have never been in such abundant literary supply. A reader thinks, with varying respect, of Mailer, Heller, Vonnegut, Cheever, Barth.
Yet wonders and horrors wear thin in months. If the West has truly declined to the point of broad collapse, the calamity itself should be enough to occupy generations of novelists. But no; barely nine years after Joseph Heller's Catch-22 bemused readers with loony proof that war is an insane farce, the somewhat similar propositions of Kurt Vonnegut can be read with mild impatience. Vonnegut is simply not saying enough. There is something mean and gritty in the two-transistor collective consciousness that asks, "O.K., O.K., the center cannot hold. Now what?"
The 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 hat. A fast and arrogant walker who can part a sea of taxis with a furled umbrella.
He lives in Manhattan, a city in which outdoor pay telephones are used as urinals. He judges that Manhattan has come to exceed Naples or Salonika in the fluorescence of its decay. But the fact neither dismays nor gratifies him. It is his belief, in fact, that people have grown too fond of "the tragic accents of their condition." They use the upset of former respectabilities to justify silliness, shallowness, distemper, lust. He has seen worse than fouled phone booths.