`The Wrong Books, the Wrong Papers'

As students in Miss Murphy’s creative writing class during our junior and senior years in high school, we were expected to subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly as part of the curriculum. Each month she encouraged us to read the magazine cover to cover and required us to write something – review, essay, fiction, poem, whatever – based on what we had read. I wonder if even one high school or university class today is built around such an idea. Most of the books I was reading then (Kafka, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Thoreau) had been written by authors no longer alive. My evolving sense of a canon hardly made room for living writers, but reading the Atlantic with attentiveness and pleasure opened me to James Alan McPherson’s early stories, the urbane prose of L.E. Sissman, an essay by James Dickey on Theodore Roethke and Saul Bellow’s latest work.

I had already been devotedly reading Bellow’s past work but in November and December 1969, when I was 17, the magazine serialized his new novel (Like Dickens! Like Dostoevsky!), Mr. Sammler’s Planet. This was the first of his novels I read as it was published, even before it appeared in book form. There was a sense of urgency about a contemporary master writing in installments. This hot-off-the-presses excitement echoed the novel’s themes, for Mr. Sammler’s Planet is a book of its historical moment. Mr. Sammler’s principled bafflement and outrage reflect the cultural insanity of the late nineteen-sixties. A Holocaust survivor, a scholar in his seventies who witnessed countless killings and knew the undiluted thrill of righteous killing, who endured the triumph of barbarism, helplessly watches its return. His disorientation begins with the novel’s first sentence:

“Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers.”

Bellow’s delight in language remains evident – who else would modify “eye” with “bushy”? – but this is not the Whitmanesque gusto of The Adventures of Augie March or the loopy importunings of Herzog. Mr. Sammler’s Planet is an angry novel by a man about another man convinced their civilization had been betrayed. In the subsequent 40 years, the betrayal has succeeded more pervasively than either could have imagined. Given that, and given the book’s obvious contemporary pertinence, it was a pleasure to discover in the Spring 2008 issue of City Journal an essay celebrating the novel and its prophetic acuity. Thoughtful readers have never stopped reading Bellow’s work, but Myron Magnet encourages new readers, those without the good fortune of reading the Atlantic in 1969. He concludes with these words:

“From page one of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow himself insists that, beyond the explanations we construct through Enlightenment reason, the soul has `its own natural knowledge.’ We all have `a sense of the mystic potency of humankind’ and `an inclination to believe in archetypes of goodness. A desire for virtue was no accident.’ We all know that we must try `to live with a civil heart. With disinterested charity.’ We must live a life `conditioned by other human beings.’ We must try to meet the terms of the contract life sets us, as Sammler says in the astonishing affirmation with which Bellow ends his book. `The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. . . . As all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.’”