Mr. Sammler Planet Read online

  He walked once around Stuyvesant Park, an ellipse within a square with the statue of the peg legged Dutchman, corners bristling with bushes. Tapping the flagstones with his ferrule every fourth step, Sammler held Dr. Govinda Lal's manuscript under his arm. He had brought it to read on the subway, though he didn't like being conspicuous in public, passing pages back and forth before the eye, pressing back the hat brim and his face intensely concentrated. He seldom did that.

  Drop a perpendicular from the moon. Let it intersect a grave. Inside, a man till now tended, kept warm, manicured. Those heavy rainbow colors came. Decay. Mr. Sammler had once been on far more easy terms with death. He had lost ground, regressed. He was very full of his nephew, a man quite different from himself. He admired him, loved him. He could not cope with the full sum of facts about him. Remote considerations seemed to help-the moon, its lifelessness, its deathlessness. A white corroded pearl. By a sole eye, seen as a sole eye.

  Sammler had learned to be careful on public paths in New York, invariably dog-fouled. Within the iron-railed plots the green lights of the grass were all but put out, burned by animal excrements. The sycamores, blemished bark, but very nice, brown and white, getting ready to cough up leaves. Red brick, the Rlends Seminary, and ruddy coarse warm stone, broad, clumsy, solid, the Episcopal church, St. George's. Sammler had heard that the original J. Pierpont Morgan had been an usher there. In Austro-Hungarian-Polish-Cracovian antiquity old fellows who had read of Morgan in the papers spoke of him with high regard as Piepernotter-Morgan. At St. George's, Sundays, the god of stockbrokers could breathe easy awhile in the riotous city. In thought, Mr. Sammler was testy with White Protestant America for not keeping better order. Cowardly surrender. Not a strong ruling class. Eager in a secret humiliating way to come down and mingle with all the minority mobs, and scream against themselves. And the clergy? Beating swords into plowshares? No, rather converting dog collars into G strings. But this was neither here nor there.

  Watching his steps (the dogs), looking for a bench for ten minutes, to think or avoid thinking of Gruner. Perhaps despite great sadness to read a few paragraphs of this fascinating moon manuscript. He noted a female bum drunkenly sleeping like a dugong, a sea cow's belly rising, legs swollen purple; a short dress, a mini-rag. At a corner of the fence, a wino was sullenly pissing on newspapers and old leaves. Cops seldom bothered about these old-fashioned derelicts. Younger people, autochthonous-looking, were also here. Bare feet, the boys like Bombay beggars, beards clotted, breathing rich hair from their nostrils, heads coming through woolen ponchos, somewhat Peruvian. Natives of somewhere. Innocent, devoid of aggression, opting out, much like Ferdinand the Bull. No corrida for them; only smelling flowers under the lovely cork tree. How similar also to the Eloi of H. G. Wells' fantasy The Time Machine. Lovely young human cattle herded by the cannibalistic Morlocks who lived a subterranean life and feared light and fire. Yes, that tough brave little old fellow Wells had had prophetic visions after all. Shula wasn't altogether wrong to campaign for a memoir. A memoir should be written. Only there was little time left for relaxed narration about this and that, about things fairly curious in themselves, like Wells at seventy-eight still bucking for the Royal Society his work (on earthworms?) was not acceptable. Not earthworms. "The Quality of Illusion in the Continuity of Individual Life in the Higher Metazoa." They would not make him a Fellow. But to unscramble this would have taken weeks, and there were no free weeks for Sammler. He had other necessities, higher priorities.

  He shouldn't even be reading this-this being the pages of Govinda Lal in bronze ink and old-fashioned penmanship. He wrote a Gothic hand. But Mr. Sammler, having seen through so much, had no resistance to real fascination. On page seventy, Lal had begun to speculate on organisms possibly capable of adapting themselves in exposed lunar conditions. Were there no plants which might cover the moon's surface? Water and carbon dioxide would have to be present, extremes of temperature would have to be withstood. Lichens, thought Govinda, possibly could make it. Also certain members of the cactus family. The triumphant plant, a combination of lichen and cactus, certainly would look weird to the eyes of man. But life's capacities are even now inconceivably diverse. What impossibilities has it not faced? Who knows what the depths of the seas may yet yield? Creatures, perhaps even one to a species. A grotesque individual which has found its equilibrium under twenty miles of water. Small wonder, said Govinda, that human beings stress so fiercely the next realizable possibilities and are so eager to bound from the surface of the earth. The imagination is innately a biological power seeking to overcome impossible conditions.

  Mr. Sammler raised his face, aware that someone was hastening toward him. He saw Feffer. Always in a rush. Feffer was stout, should have lost weight. He had trouble with his back, and wore at times an elastic orthopedic garment. Large, with fresh color, with the vivid brown Franзois Premier beard and straight nose, Feffer always seemed to demand haste from his body, his legs. An all-but-running urgency. The hands, awkward and pink, were raised as if he feared to collide with another rush like his own. The brown eyes were key-shaped. As he grew older, the corners would be more elaborately notched.

  "I thought you might stop here a minute," said Feffer. "Wallace said you had just left, so I ran down."

  "Indeed? Well, the sun is shining, and I was in no hurry to go down into the subway. I haven't seen you since the lecture."

  "That's right. I had to go to the telephone. I understand that you were wonderful. I genuinely apologize for the behavior of the students. That's my generation for you! I don't even know if they were real students or just tough characters-you know, militants, dropouts. It's not the kids who start the trouble. All the leaders are older. But Fanny looked after you, didn't she?"

  "The young lady?"

  "I didn't just disappear. I assigned a girl to look after you."

  "I see. Your wife, by chance?"

  "No, no." Feffer quickly smiled, and quickly went on, sitting on the edge of the bench. He wore a dark-blue velvet double-breasted jacket with large pearl buttons. His arm reached the backrest of the bench and lay affectionately near Sammler's shoulder. "Not my wife. Just a girl I fuck now and then, and look after."

  "I see. It all seems so rapid. It strikes me that there is something electronic about your contacts. You shouldn't have left. I was your guest. Too late, I suppose, for you to learn manners. Still, she was very nice. She conducted me from the hall. I didn't expect such a large crowd. I thought you might be making money on me"

  "I? No. Never. Believe me-no. It was a benefit for black children, just as I said. You must believe gone, Mr. Sammler. I wouldn't put you into a con, I have too much regard for you. You may not know it, or it may not matter to you, but you have a special position with me, which is practically sacred. Your life, your experiences, your character, your views plus your soul. There are relationships I would do anything to protect. And if I hadn't been called to the phone, I would have blasted that guy. I know that shit. He wrote a book about homosexuals in prison; he's like a poor man's Jean Genet. Buggery behind bars. Or being a pure Christian angel because you commit murder and have beautiful male love affairs. You know how it is."

  "I have a general idea. But you misled me, Lionel."

  "I didn't mean to. At the last minute a speaker didn't show for another student thing, and some of my graduate-school buddies who were frantic got hold of me. I saw a way to double the take. For the remedial-reading project. I assumed it wouldn't make so much difference to you, you would understand. I made a deal. I got the best of them."

  "What was the subject of the missing speaker?"

  "Sorel and Modern Violence, I think it was."

  "And I talked about Orwell and what a sane person he was."

  "Lots of young radicals see Orwell as part of the cold-war anti-Communist gang. You didn't really praise the Royal Navy, did you?"

  "Is that what you heard?"

  "If it hadn't been such an important call I would never have left.
It was a question of buying or not buying a locomotive. The federal government creates these funny situations with tax breaks to encourage investment. Where it thinks dollars ought to go. You can buy a jet plane and lease it to the airlines. You can lease the locomotive to Penn Central or the B amp; O. Cattle investments get similar encouragement."

  "Are you already making such sums that you need these deductions?"

  Sammler didn't want to lead Feffer into dream conversation, exaggeration, fantasy, lying. He didn't know how much the poor young man made up simply to impress, to entertain. Feffer had a strange need to cover himself with the brocade of boasts. Money, brag-Jewish foibles. American too? Being deficient in contemporary American information, Sammler was tentative here. It was, however, no kindness to listen to this big talk. Sammler appreciated the degree of life in young Feffer, the marvelous rich color of his cheeks, the passion-sounds he made. The voice resembling an instrument played with higher and higher intensity but musically hopeless-the undertones appealing really for help.

  But sometimes Mr. Sammler felt that the way he saw things could not be right. His experiences had been too peculiar, and he feared that he projected peculiarities onto life. Life was probably not blameless, but he often thought that life was not and could not be what he was seeing. And then again, most powerfully, he occasionally felt on the contrary that he was a million times exceeded in strangeness by the phenomena themselves. What oddities!

  "Really, Lionel, you aren't about to buy a whole locomotive."

  "Not alone. As part of a group. One hundred thousand dollars a share."

  "And what about this other plan, with Wallace? Photographing houses and identifying trees."

  "It does sound hokey, but it's really a very good business idea. I intend to experiment with it personally. I have a great gift for salesmanship, I'll say that for myself. If the thing pans out, I'll organize it nationally, with sales crews in every part of the country. We'll need regional plant specialists. The problems would be different in Portland, Oregon, from Miami Beach or Austin, Texas. `All men by nature desire to know.' That's the first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics. I never got much farther, but I figured that the rest must be out of date anyway. However, if they desire to know, it makes them depressed if they can't name the bushes on their own property. They feel like phonies. The bushes belong. They themselves don't. And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up. I've gone to shrinkers for years, and have they cured me of anything? They have not. They have put labels on my troubles, though, which sound like knowledge. It's a great comfort, and worth the money. You say, 'I'm manic.' Or you say, 'I'm a reactive-depressive.' You say about a social problem, 'It's colonialism.' Then the dullest brain has internal fireworks, and the sparks drive you out of your skull. It's divine. You think you're a new man. Well, the way to wealth and power is to latch on to this. When you set up a new enterprise, you redescribe the phenomena and create a feeling that we're getting somewhere. If people want things named or renamed, you can make dough by becoming a taxonomist. Yes, I definitely intend to try out this idea of Wallace's."

  "It's ill-timed. Does he have to have a plane?"

  "I can't say if it's essential, but he seems to have a thing about piloting. Well, that's his bag. Other people have other bags."

  This last statement about other people was injected with much significance. Sammler saw what was happening. Feffer was pretending to hold back, out of a delicacy he didn't have, a piece of information he couldn't wait to release. His eagerness shone from his face. In the eyes. Upon the ready lips.

  "What are you referring to?"

  "I'm really referring to a certain Hindu scientist. I believe that his name is Lal. I think that this Lal is a guest lecturer at Columbia University."

  "What about him?"

  "Several days ago, after his lecture, a woman approached him. She asked to see his manuscript. He thought she just wanted to glance at something in the text and he let her take it. There was a small crowd of people around. I believe H. G. Wells was mentioned. Then the lady disappeared with the manuscript."

  Mr. Sammler removed his hat and placed it on his lap over the sea-marbled cardboard.

  "She walked off with it?"

  "Disappeared with the only copy of the work."

  "Ah. How unfortunate. The only, eh? Quite bad."

  "Yes, I thought you might think so. Dr. Lal expected her to come back with it, that she might be just an absentminded person. He didn't say anything for twenty-four hours. But then he went to the authorities. Is it the department of astronomy? Or some space program Columbia has?"

  "How is it that you always have information of this sort, Lionel?"

  "I have to have these contacts in my way of life. Naturally I know the security people-the campus cops. Anyway, they weren't equipped to handle this. They had to call in investigators. The Pinkertons. The original Pinkerton was picked by Abraham Lincoln himself to organize the Secret Service, you know. You do know that, don't you?"

  "It doesn't seem to me an item of great importance. I suppose these Pinkertons will know how to recover this article. Isn't it stupid to have only one copy? With all these Xeroxes and reproducing machines, and the man is a scientist."

  "Well, I don't know. There was Carlyle. There was T. E. Lawrence. Brilliant people, weren't they? And they both lost the only copy of a masterpiece."

  "Dear, dear."

  "By now the campus is covered with posters. Manuscript missing. And there is a description of the lady. Often seen at public lectures. She wears a wig, carries a shopping bag, is associated somehow with H. G. Wells."

  "Yes, I see."

  "You wouldn't know anything about it, would you, Mr. Sammler? Naturally I want to help."

  "I am astonished by the amount of information that sticks to you. You remind me of a frog's tongue. It flips out and comes back covered with gnats."

  "I didn't think I was doing any harm. Where you are concerned, Mr. Sammler, I have only one interest, and that is protection. I have a protective instinct toward you. I am aware it might be Oedipal-the names, again-but I have a feeling of veneration toward you. You are the only person in the world with whom I would use a word like veneration. That's the kind of word you write down, not say."

  "Yes, I understand rust somewhat, Lionel." Mr. Sammler's forehead, grown damp, was itching. He touched it finely with his ironed pocket handkerchief. It was Shula who brought back his handkerchiefs ironed so smooth and flat.

  "I know that you are trying to condense what you know, your life experience. Into a Testament."

  "How do you know this?"

  "You told me."

  "Did I? I don't remember ever saying that. It is very private. If I am saying things unaware, it's a bad sign. I certainly never meant to mention it."

  "We were standing in front of the Bretton Hall Hotel, that miserable bunch of decay, and you were leaning on the umbrella. And may I say"-there were signs of an upward expansion of feeling-"I may have doubts about other people, whether they're even human, but I love you without reservation. And to relieve your mind, you didn't discuss anything, you only said that you would like to boil down your experience of life to a few statements. Maybe just one single statement."

  "Sydney Smith."

  "Smith?"

  "He said, 'Short views, for God's sake, short views.' An English clergyman."

  To hear what Shula-Slawa had done (folly-devotion-to- Papa-comedy-theft) filled oppressively certain spaces for oppression which had opened and widened during the last three decades. Because of Elya, they were all agape today. Before 1939 Sammler could recall no such heaviness and darkness. Was there anywhere in the world a shrinking-tincture that could be prescribed for such openings? Mr. Sammler did try to turn toward the fun of the thing, imagining Shula in space shoes, disorderly crimson on the mouth, coming up like a little demon body from Grimm's Fairy Tales, making off with the treasure of a Hindu sage. Sammler himself was treated like some sort of Enchanter by
Shula. She thought he was Prospero. He could make beautiful culture. Compose a memoir of the highest distinction, so magical that the world would long remember what a superior thing it was to be a Sammler. The answer of private folly to public folly (in an age of overkill) was more distinction, more high accomplishments, more dazzling brilliants strewn before admiring mankind. Pearls before swine? Mr. Sammler, thinking of Rabbi Ipsheimer, whom he had been dragged by Shula to hear, revised the old saying. Artificial pearls before real swine were cast by these jet-set preachers. To have thought this made him more cheerful. His nervously elegant hand made a shaking bridge over the tinted spectacles, adjusting them without need on the nose. Well, he was not what Shula believed him to be. Moreover, he was not what Feffer thought. How could he satisfy the needs of these imaginations? Feffer in the furious whirling of his spirit took him for a fixed point. In such hyperenergetic revolutions you fell in love with ideas of stability, and Sammler was an idea of stability. And how lavishly Feffer flattered him! Sammler was sorry about that. He made sure his large hat was covering the notebook entirely.

  "Is there anything you would like me to do?" said Feffer.

  "Why yes, Lionel." He rose. "Walk with me to the subway. I'm going to Union Square."

  By the wrought-iron gate they left the little park, westward past the Quaker Meeting House, and then the cool sandstone buildings set back among trees. The chained bellies of garbage cans. One of the chains even wore a sheath. And there were dogs, more dogs. Devoted dog-tendance-by schoolchildren, by women in fairly high style, by certain homosexuals. One would have said that only the Eskimos had nearly so much to do with dogs as this local branch of mankind. The veterinarians must be sailing in yachts, surely. Their fees were high.

  I shall get hold of Shula right away, Mr. Sammler decided. He hated scenes with his daughter. She might set her teeth, burst into screams. He cared too much for her. He cherished her. And really, his only contribution to the continuation of the species! It filled him with heartache and pity that he and Antonina had not blended better. Since she was a child he had seen, especially in the slenderness of Shula's neck, so vulnerably valved, in the visible glands, and blue veins, in the big bluish eyelids and top-heavy head, a pitiful legacy, loony, frail, touching him with a fear of doom. Well, the Polish nuns had saved her. When he came to the convent to get her, she was already fourteen years old. Now she was over forty, straying about New York with her shopping bags. She would have to return the manuscript immediately. Dr. Govinda Lal would be frantic. Who knew what Asiatic form that man's despair was taking.