After so many nights chugging away at it, I finally just finished probably one of the
best books I've ever read, Mr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow. When I realized this
was a book about a Jewish holocaust survivor, that won the Nobel prize for literature,
I rolled my eyes a little and prepared for it to be laid on thick. But this book is a
real look at what it means to be a human being, and Bellow writes with an amazing
amount of humility for the obviously brilliant writer that he is.
The main character is a bit of a grumpy old man, and often very little action happens
between his musings, but actual action does happen, and when it does it really seems
like it fits. When he finally gets to his Auschwitz recollections, he does so with
detached reality, and you don't feel like he's making a play for your emotional
attention.
Maybe this book is not everyone's style, so if not, at least check out a few quotes I
found amazing.
"Eisen, separate them," he said. "He's been choked enough. The police will come, and
then there will be arrests. And I must go. To stand here is crazy. Please. Just take
the camera. Take it. That will stop this."
Then, handsome Eisen, shrugging, grinning, making a crooked movement of his
shoulders, working them free from the tight denim, stepped away from Sammler as if
he were doing an amusing thing at his special request. He drew up the sleeve of his
right arm. The dark hairs were thick. Then shortening his grip on the cords of the
baize bag he swung it very wide, swung with full force and struck the pickpocket on
the side of the face. It was a hard blow. The glasses flew. The hat. Feffer was not
immediately freed. The man seemed to rest on him. Obviously stunned. Eisen was a
laborer, a foundry worker. He had the strength not only of his trade but also of
madness. There was something limitless, unbounded, about the way he squared off,
took the man's measure, a kind of sturdy viciousness. Everything went into that
blow, discipline, murderousness, everything. What have I done! This is much worse!
This is the worst thing yet. Sammler thought Eisen had crushed the man's face. And
now he was just about to hit him again, with his medallions. The black man took his
hands from Feffer and was turning. His lips came away from his teeth. Eisen had
gashed his skin and the cheek was bleeding and swelling. Eisen clinked his weights
from his wrist, spread his legs. "He'll kill that cocksucker!" someone in the crowd
said.
"Don't hit him, Eisen. I never said that. I tell you no!" said Sammler.
But the bag of weights was speeding from the other side, very wide but accurate. It
struck more heavily than before and knocked the man down. He did not drop. He
lowered himself as though he had decided to lie in the street. The blood ran in
points on his cheek. The terrible metal had cut him through the baize.
Eisen now heaved his weapon back over his shoulder, prepared to slam it down on the
man's skull. Sammler seized his arm and twisted him away. "You'll murder him. Do you
want to beat out his brains?"
"You said, Father-in-law!"
They quarreled in Russian before the crowd.
"You said I had to do something. You said you had to go. I must do something. So I
did."
I didn't say hit him with these damned irons. I didn't say to hit him at all. You're
crazy, Eisen, crazy enough to murder him."
The pickpocket had tried to brace himself on his elbows. His body now rested on his
doubled arms. He bled thickly on the asphalt.
"I am horrified!" Sammler said.
Eisen, still handsome, curly, still with the smile, though now panting, and the
peculiar set of his toeless feet, seemed amused at Sammler's ludicrous
inconsistency. He said, "You can't hit a man like that just once. When you hit him,
you must really hit him. Otherwise he'll kill you. You know. We both fought in the
war. You were a Partisan. You had a gun. So don't you know?" His laughter, his
logic, laughing and reasoning at Sammler's absurdities, made him repeat until he
stuttered. "If in�in. No? If out�out. Yes? No? So answer."
It was the reasoning that sank Sammler's heart completely. "Where is Feffer?" he
said, and turned away.
She crossed her legs on a chair too fragile to accommodate her thighs, too straight for
her hips. She opened her purse for a cigarette, and Sammler offered a light. She loved
his manners. The smoke came from her nose, and she looked at him, when she was in good
form, cheerfully, with a touch of slyness. The beautiful maiden. He was the old hermit.
When she became hearty with him and laughed, she turned out to have a big mouth, and a
large tongue. Inside the elegant woman he saw a coarse one. The lips were red, the
tongue was often pale. That tongue, a woman's tongue�evidently it played an astonishing
part in her free, luxurious life.
To her first meeting with Wharton Horricker, she had come running uptown from East
Village. Something she couldn't get out of. She had used no grass that night, only
whisky, she said. Grass didn't turn her on as she best liked turning on. Four
telephone calls she made to Wharton from a crowded joint. He said he had to get his
sleep; it was after 1 a.m.; he was a crank about sleep, health. Finally she burst in
on him with a big kiss. She cried, "We're going to fuck all night!" But first she
said she had to have a bath. Because she had been longing all evening with him. "Oh,
a woman is a skunk. So many odors, Uncle," she said. Taking off everything, but
overlooking the tights she fell into the tub. Wharton was astonished and sat on the
commode in his dressing gown while she, so ruddy with whisky, soaped her breasts.
Sammler knew quite well how the breasts must look. Little, after all, was concealed
by her low-cut dresses. So she soaped and rinsed, and the wet tights with joyful
difficulty were removed, and she was let to the bed by the hand. Or did the leading.
For Horricker walked behind her and kissed her on the neck and shoulders. She cried,
"Oh!" and was mounted.
Mr. Sammler was supposed to listen benevolently to all kinds of intimate
reports.
"His life had nearly been taken. He had seen life taken. He had taken it himself. He
knew it was one of the luxuries. No wonder princes had so long reserved the right to
murder with impunity. At the very bottom of society there was also a kind of impunity,
because no one cared what happened. Under that dark brutal mass blood crimes were often
disregarded. And at the very top, the ancient immunities of kings and nobles.
[�]
"And for the middle part of society there was envy and worship of this power to
kill. How those middle-class Sorels and Maurrases adored it -- the hand that gripped
the knife with authority. How they loved the man strong enough to take blood guilt
on himself. For them an elite must prove itself in this ability to murder. For such
a people a saint must be understood as one who was equal in spirit to the fiery
twisting twisting of crime in the inmost fibers of his heart. The superman testing
himself with an ax, crushing the skulls of old women. The Knight of Faith, capable
of cutting the throat of Isaac upon God's altar. And now the idea that one could
recover, or establish, one's identity by killing, becoming equal thus to any, equal
to the greatest. A man among men knows how to murder. A patrician. The middle class
had formed no independent standards of honor. This it had no resistance to the
glamour of killers. The middle class, having failed to create a spiritual life of
its own, investing everything in material expansion, faced disaster."
There was more...there were so many quotes from this book I wanted to share, but I
guess if you're interested you'll just read it.
