(3 of 5)
He agrees to address a Columbia seminar on English literary life in the '30s. He arrives to find a huge hall filled with hairy leftists. One of them shouts him down, yelling that the old man can have nothing to say because at his age he can't achieve orgasm. Sammler leaves, marveling at the new standard for judging the soundness of argument. "How extraordinary! Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency? All this confused sex-excrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing, Barbary ape howling. Or like the spider monkeys in the trees, as Sammler once had read, defecating into their hands, and shrieking, pelting the explorers below."
Sammler is too tough to be shaken long by spider monkeys. But analyzing and explaining seems profitless. "Intellectuals do not understand," Sammler reflects. For he is tired of explanation. "Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear, out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted."
In Crakow, as a boy, Sammler had been rich and spoiled. When he coughed. Bellow writes wickedly, he used to cover his mouth with the hand of a servant, not wanting to dirty his own fingers. Compassion, which is compounded largely of humility, comes hard to him, but he has learned it. His compassion and his sanity bring to him a succession of fools who want to confess. Like most Bellow heroes, moreover, he comes set about with recognizable Bellowesque females. His men, even when flawed, are the strongest in American fiction. They are giants, patriarchs—but he elevates them, slyly, even beyond their strength by the womb-brained women with whom he surrounds them.
The most touching of Sammler's females is his fortyish daughter, Shula, an awkward, cracked creature who adores her father. The most significant is Margotte, a young widow, and niece by marriage, in whose apartment Sammler rooms. "Short, round, full," sloppy ("she couldn't wash a tomato without getting her sleeves wet"), Margotte suffers from two American diseases—a desire to talk every subject worthily to death, and the possession of energetic goodness "tremendously misapplied." She wants, for example, to discuss whether Sammler's pickpocket might be in favor of "black guerrilla warfare."
Such domestically provocative figures, gels of estrogen and eyeshadow, wobble about the moving scenery of Bellow's plot. It is a farce, perfunctorily funny, involving a stolen manuscript and a chase through New York and the suburbs in search of it. No matter that this somewhat mechanically produced piffle is intended merely to give the reader a respite between Sammler's soliloquies. Some sort of fictional shavings had to be packed around the old man to keep him from cracking, and there can be no real complaint.