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7. Mr. Sammler's Planet: Saul Bellow’s 1968 Speech at San Francisco State University
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153 7 Mr. Sammler’s Planet: Saul Bellow’s 1968 Speech at San Francisco State University Andrew Gordon Saul Bellow was never a systematic political thinker. An autodidact, stubborn and independent, never much of a joiner, like Augie in his novel The Adventures of Augie March, he preferred to “go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle.”1 As James Atlas writes, “always he resisted the party line.”2 Bellow’s views on politics and the writer he outlined in his essay, “Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly reminiscence.” There he traces his political development from the influence on his thinking as a young man of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky—he was a Trotskyist in the 1930s—through his gradual rejection of Marxist politics and a feeling that the proper subject matter of the writer was not politics but the soul. In the 1940s, “although I now drifted away from Marxist politics, I still admired Lenin and Trotsky.”3 “The more clearheaded of the Village intellectuals toward the end of the thirties were beginning to understand that the revolution was a disaster. Few of them, however, turned away from Marxism.”4 Bellow’s final rejection of revolutionary politics took place in Paris from 1948 to 1950. There he found that postwar European writers “accepted politics as their absolute.”5 But Bellow reacted strongly against that notion of the role of the writer, rejecting Sartre: “His [Sartre’s] hatred of the bourgeoisie was so excessive that he was inclined to go easy on the crimes of Stalin.”6 From the 1950s on, Bellow felt that “politics as a vocation I take seriously. But it’s not my vocation. And on the whole, writers are not much good at it.”7 He felt that the true subject matter of the writer was not politics but “the powers of soul, which were Shakespeare’s subject. 154 Andrew Gordon . . . [A]mong ourselves, in the West, the forces are not acknowledged, they cannot even be recognized.”8 Bellow may have been right that most writers are not much good at politics. But it does not then follow that Bellow’s fiction is apolitical. Shakespeare ’s subject may have been the human soul, but he was also centrally concerned with politics and history, and so is Bellow. Every Bellow novel comments on the culture and history of the time in which it is written and makes a political statement, if only implicitly. Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), although it has a strong religious streak and begins and ends by referring to “the soul,” is actually Bellow’s first explicitly political novel. In the turbulent 1960s, as in the 1930s, American writers were often asked to declare themselves on the vital questions of the day, including civil rights, women’s rights, and, perhaps the overriding issue of the decade in America, the war in Vietnam. But when Bellow was asked to take a political stand, his impulse was to head for the exits: “Vietnam, civil rights meant writers were ‘pressed’—if not quite in the old sense—to line up with the Mailer group, or Commentary group, lashed into one ideological column or another. I got tired of having my arm twisted to sign statements insulting Lyndon Johnson and so on. I got out.”9 Bellow’s major political fiction of the late 1960s is Mr. Sammler’s Planet. But there is a significant void at the center of the novel: unlike other major American political novels of the period, such as Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), John Updike’s Rabbit Redux (1971), or E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), which reference the then ongoing war roiling the American scene, Mr. Sammler’s Planet never mentions Vietnam. Although the book features vivid description of a Nazi massacre in World War II, of Artur Sammler’s killing of a German soldier, and of the 1967 Six-Day War in Israel (like Bellow, Sammler goes there as a journalist), the war in Vietnam does not exist in the novel. “Sammler does not perceive, nor is it pointed out in the novel, that the real cause of political disruption in America was not protesting college students but government prosecution of a disastrous war in Asia.”10 The absence of any mention of the Vietnam War, the motor for much of the widespread political protest and questioning of authority during the late 1960s, turns the young radicals in the...