(5 of 5)
Moses Herzog, the urban Jewish intellectual, takes no more pleasure from the preening acrobatics of scholarship than Henderson does in the diseased elms of his Yankee proprietorship. He asks Henderson's question—how can a good man live?—but an element is added to the puzzle. Distracted by an acrimonious divorce and his sagging career, Herzog still takes more notice of the horrid confusions of the contemporary scene than Henderson. And the world does not help. At last, with foolish courage, Herzog thrashes his way back to a beginning: he finds that at least he does possess himself, and that his soul is a usable flat space, not too marshy, on which to build.
Sammler, perhaps like Bellow himself, is finished with these thrashings: he has calmed himself. Now he regards the world not approvingly, but with a measure of equanimity. Its study, in perspective, is a proper work of age. That notion, unfashionable in a society that clutches indecently at youth, is not the least of the gifts of Bellow's new novel.
In a justly famous scene, Augie March's mentor, Mintouchian, offers traditional advice to the young—be yourself. Rejecting it, Augie sadly states an eternal dilemma. "You will understand, Mr. Mintouchian," he replies, "if I tell you that I have always tried to become what I am. But what if what I am by nature isn't good enough?" Henderson goes further. He is counseled by his wiseman, the African king Dahfu, not only in the arts of public and private courage but in eschewing self-improvement, worldly or otherwise, in favor of pious awe at the variety of life. "Do you think the world is nothing but an egg and we are here to set upon it?" the king asks. "First come the phenomena. Utterly above all else."
Formally speaking, Mr. Sammler's Planet is not a philosophical novel. Sammler's approach to life may be summed up in précis as a mixture of Romanticism, resignation and a feeling of natural piety for elemental forces—the black pickpocket's majestic power, for instance—which cannot be savored (or explained away) intellectually. Structurally, it is the riskiest of books. A mighty character, moving amid scant novelistic furniture, miraculously does not put it out of balance. Its brilliance is of the very highest order. Its humanity is great. It will be read very quickly, then very slowly, then again. For it deals with those perceptions beyond intellectual argument through which men come to know the world for what it is and themselves for what it makes of them. Literarily, the book seems a culmination. Surely, it is not, but it is difficult to see how Bellow will move beyond it.