Mr Sammler’s Planet

"I do think in America in particular politics, sociology and culture are inextricable. The party we belong to, the candidates we support, the ideas we espouse in the political realm, overlap with our cultural tastes and our perception of where we fit in – or where we don’t fit in – among the other members of this huge society. Bellow’s novel Mr Sammler’s Planet made an enormous impression on me when I read it at the age of 18 or 19 when I was in college. It was the first time I had seen this great writer – probably the greatest of all modern American novelists – actually critique liberal assumptions. I had grown up in a liberal household, but my father, who was a political scientist, was very uneasy about the uprisings in the late 1960s on campuses, the disdain for liberal professors and liberal ideas. Mr Sammler’s Planet is really the first and only great classic of neoconservatism. Bellow’s character, Arthur Sammler, is a Polish Jewish émigré who survived World War II , raised on the great British liberalism of the early 20th century. His heroes are figures like H G Wells , a very pragmatic, quite utopian socialist. And Sammler, living in New York, sees and describes – and Bellow with his extraordinarily vivid tactile prose really brings it to life – the actual physical, sexual and moral decay of Manhattan. There is a kind of licentiousness in sexual relations, there is disdain for older, inherited values. “Mr Sammler’s Planet is really the first and only great classic of neoconservatism” Sammler, in an episode based on Bellow’s own experience, gives a lecture at Columbia where he is denounced and hooted out by undergraduates who don’t have a fraction of his learning, or respect for ideas and intellect. Liberalism itself is coming under assault. So what Bellow – through Sammler – does is to ask whether liberalism itself is somehow complicit in its own dissolution. And when I read this as a college student, just vaguely aware of these things going on around me, it was just a revelation. The power of the prose, the precision of the argument – it’s not one of Bellow’s very best books, but if you read it at the right moment it’s shockingly powerful. The critic Alfred Kazin, a contemporary and friend of Bellow’s, said Mr Sammler’s Planet is not a novel, it’s an austere set of opinions, but those opinions are very brilliantly and philosophically expressed."