MR. SAMMLER’S PRESCIENCE MELANIE PHILLIPS
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In 1970 the novelist Saul Bellow, a titan of American letters, published his masterpiece Mr Sammler’s Planet.
Its eponymous hero is a Holocaust survivor who, in a decaying New York City, sees into the heart of things. A calculated attack on a range of liberal pieties, the novel caused intense controversy. Sammler, and thus Bellow himself, was accused of being misanthropic, racist, sexist, and reactionary.
Not surprisingly, liberal literary America was outraged and affronted. Equally unsurprisingly, the book was brandished as proof that Bellow had “moved to the right”. This is, of course, the standard denunciation of irredeemable evil that has sunk countless reputations and careers on the jagged rocks of elite disgust — but is so often instead proof positive of the denounced individual’s clarity of vision and moral purpose.
So it was with Saul Bellow. Sammler is a latter-day prophet, seeing with his one functioning eye straight through liberal hypocrisy to call out civilisational decay.
What now seems all too familiar was all there in the novel — racial prejudice, sexual violence, civil disobedience and a no-holds-barred capacity to give offence, it seemed, to as many hyper-sensitive groups as possible. The premonition of today’s culture wars is striking.
Now Bellow’s son Adam has written in Sapir journal a reflection on the novel and the reputational charges levelled against his father. The result is an insightful, wry, luminous article (full disclosure: Adam is my publisher at Wicked Son — but it’s still a truly wonderful read).
Adam writes:
What I later understood from publishing books that challenged the reigning liberal consensus is that the critical attacks on Sammler were entirely political and had nothing to do with literature. Saul had become an iconic figure in American letters and a prominent subscriber to liberal causes, writing articles in the press and putting his name to all kinds of letters and petitions. For a long time during the ’60s he tried to maintain an intermediate position between expressing disapproval of the war and discomfort with the radical excesses of the antiwar, feminist, and black-power movements. Grateful as a Jew for the safety and security provided by America, he was not prepared to cross over into anti-Americanism. Meanwhile he was pressured to conform by friends and colleagues whose business should have been writing books, not leading protests. Something had to give, and eventually it did.
Why did he do it, knowing the reaction it would get? All I can say, having known him as I did, is that he wouldn’t surrender his independent judgment to any external authority. He wouldn’t surrender it to Marx. He wouldn’t surrender it to Freud. He wouldn’t surrender it to the Communist Party. He wouldn’t surrender it to any of the “mentors” who are supposed to have influenced his thought, like Ed Shils or Allan Bloom. And he certainly wouldn’t surrender it to the New York Review of One Another’s Books. He felt this pressure building up inside and had to let it out. Not the pressure of unexpressed bigotry and rage coming out in a literary tantrum, but of rebellion against the intellectual conformity that had become the price of membership in the liberal community. Because he felt that “lining up” over an issue was not his business as a writer.
For Saul to publicly turn to the right was unforgivable, a major blow to the prestige of the cultural Left and a breaking of ranks that could not be permitted. For more than anything else, Sammler was viewed as a betrayal by the author’s liberal friends. And those who break ranks must be punished — marginalized, canceled, rendered unpersons. This is how the sectarian Left always deals with heretics. Being called a racist is just what happens when you put pressure on the ideological assumptions that bind the liberal community together. People you have known for years get mad and call you the worst names they can think of in an attempt to drive you off the public stage and kill your reputation. To that extent, the debate about Sammler may be considered the opening skirmish in what came to be known as the Culture War.
There’s a poignant twist. For when Adam was a child, the New York that his father viewed with such horrified dismay as descending into chaos was merely an exciting and fun city in which to live and grow up. But now? Adam writes:
These days, however, Sammler’s catalogue of urban disorder comes across as charmingly retro. New York today, like San Francisco and other large liberal cities, seems to be going down the drain after a series of manmade shocks, including a society-wide lockdown, a season of race-driven riots, an economic slump that hollowed out the city’s business sector, a homeless crisis, an influx of undocumented immigrants, and a spike in violent crime and drug addiction. We see organised looting, public defecation, migrant encampments; we read in the Post about random stabbings, subway-track shovings, immigrant sex-trafficking gangs, all abetted by a hands-off approach to law enforcement. In short, it’s fair to say that things are objectively worse than they were in the ’60s.
So it would seem that, in gazing aghast at New York today — made yet worse still by epidemic antisemitism — Adam Bellow has effectively turned into his father. The painful irony isn’t lost on him.
Do read it all — admire Saul all over again, and laugh, weep and grieve over what America and the west have become.
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