Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) is the story of a septuagenarian (20 years older than his author) possessed of only one good eye. "The left distinguished only light and shade. But the good eye was dark-bright, full of observation" (p. 4). Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a "registrar of madness," (p. 118) a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). He views himself as hors d'usage (out of service) (pp. 136, 307). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul.

He is a Polish Jew born in Cracow of Anglophile parents. He lived in Bloomsbury and was friends with H.G. Wells. Arrested by the Nazis during a visit to Poland to liquidate his father-in-law's estate, he was beaten and left for dead in a mass grave with his wife Antonina (pp. 15, 137, 273) dead beside him (p. 92). After killing a German soldier, he was concealed by partisans in a tomb (p. 90), effectively a second burial. In one of the most terrible indictments of the book, the partisans who saved Sammler's life in Poland resumed their traditional anti-Semitism after the war. He doesn't think of himself as a Holocaust survivor: "It wasn't surviving, it was only lasting" (p. 91). Eventually, his nephew, Dr. Arnold (Elya) Gruner, gynecologist, brings Sammler and his daughter to the U.S. in 1947, retrieving them from a DP (displaced persons) camp in Salzburg (pp. 10, 11). The novel takes place over a few days in New York in the 1960s, amidst sea changes in morals and sexuality. "Millions of civilized people wanted oceanic, boundless, primitive, neckfree nobility, experienced a strange release of galloping impulses, and acquired the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood for everyone" (p. 162). Interesting racial slur for the times. Kiernan (Saul Bellow) points out that Sammler is a kind of Lazarus or Tiresias - a posthuman figure, half-blind, twice-buried, who has survived the worst of the world's horrors. He embraces what seems a doomed planet and species. Symptomatic of a planet of malaise, New York is a wasteland. Criminals work their trades everywhere with impunity.

Chap. I. Most of the novel's sub-themes are introduced in the first chapter. Two of the most noteworthy episodes in the book are in this chapter: the pickpocket and the Columbia lecture gone bad. Sammler starts off with a riveting focus on the artfully dressed black pickpocket who plies his trade on the Riverside bus, getting on at Columbus Circle and exiting at 72nd St. Sammler has a habit of taking this bus after his day spent at the 42nd St. Public Library on his trip home to the apartment at w90th St. (p. 8). Sammler observes this pickpocket regularly with fascination, "illicitly, he craved a repetition" (p. 11) and soon he is observed observing or "seen seeing" (p. 5.). The pickpocket eventually follows Sammler to his apartment, corners him, and exposes his gargantuan penis in an act of total intimidation, in a manner of a geometric proof, effectively stating this contest is unequal. Bellow's description is classic.

The pickpocket unbuttoned himself. Sammler heard the zipper descend. Then the
smoked glasses were removed from Sammler's face and dropped on the table. He was
directed, silently, to look downward. The black man had opened his fly and taken
out his penis. It was displayed to Sammler with great oval testicles, a large
tan-and-purple uncircumcised thing - a tube, a snake; metallic hairs bristled at
the thick base and the tip curled beyond the supporting, demonstrating hand,
suggesting the fleshy mobility of an elephant's trunk, though the skin was
somewhat iridescent rather than thick or rough. Over the forearm and fist that
held him Sammler was required to gaze at this organ. No compulsion would have
been necessary. He would in any case have looked. The interval was long. The
man's expression was not directly menacing but oddly, serenely masterful. The
thing was shown with mystifying certitude. Lordliness. Then it was returned to
the trousers. Quod erat demonstrandum. Sammler was released (pp.
49-50).

In this chapter we learn that Shula has been abused by her husband Eisen in Israel and that Sammler intervened and brought her to New York (p. 24). Eisen was also a Holocaust survivor, having escaped "from Nazi-occupied territory" (p. 168). "Eisen had been wounded at Stalingrad....Later he had been thrown from a moving train. Apparently because he was a Jew. Eisen had frozen his feet; his toes were amputated" (p. 24). Sammler views Shula as "his only contribution to the continuation of the species!" (p.116). She is a "scavenger...seen hunting through Broadway trash baskets" (p. 21). Shula has been hiring Columbia students to read to her father (p. 35). An ex-reader, Lionel Feffer, invites Sammler to an amphitheater lecture at Columbia Univ., which culminates with catcalling from activists in a manner challenging to his virility (42). He leaves for the street and feels as if he is an impotent caricature of a Henry Moore sculpture, whose hollow and lean figures represented cultivated 20th century mankind (p. 43). This eruption by a student activist was felt to be so out of character, many critics lashed out at Bellow. In many ways, this is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's objective correlative (or its absence) explored in Hamlet and Eliot's Prufrock (previous posts), in that this outburst seems unjustified by external events.

We also learn that his daughter Shula is convinced that her father is writing a memoir about H.G. Wells, whom he knew in Bloomsbury (central London). When a Hindu biophysicist named Govinda Lal visits Columbia to lecture on moon travel. he alludes to Wells' ideas about interplanetary colonization. Shula promptly steals the manuscript to aid her father in writing the nonexistent memoir. Dr. Gruner's daughter, Angela, is introduced as she is visiting Sammler and revealing all of her details after psychiatric sessions (p. 31). Speaking of manuscripts, Sammler loves to spend the days reading Meister Eckhardt at the Library, a medieval German mystic who believed that God's comfort is achieved in abandoning all God's creatures, viz. humanity (pp. 37, 253). We also learn that Dr. Gruner has been admitted to the hospital (p. 35). In the course of this chapter, Sammler worries about a "second collapse" (p. 33) of civilization based on all he sees in the crazy fanatics surrounding him. Sammler has survived the worst of the world's horrors - "The luxury of nonintimidation by doom - that might describe his state" (p. 134).

Chap. II. Sammler cannot remove from his mind the pickpocket encounter. "What had that been about ?...there was the man's organ, a huge piece of sex flesh, half-tumescent in its pride and shown in its own right, a prominent and separate object intended to communicate authority" (p. 55). Enter a cousin named Walter Bruch, who inflicts a discourse on Sammler relating to Buchenwald and imitations of Hitler, and lurid accounts of masturbation (p. 59), a result of him falling in love with women's arms (p. 58). Bruch mentions Eisen's artistic talent - he paints living people as corpses (p. 65). Walter leaves and Sammler again ponders the pickpocket and contemplates "a sexual madness was overwhelming the western world" (p. 66). Angela's boyfriend Wharton Horricker is introduced (p. 68). We learn that Sammler was only 6 years older than Gruner, his nephew, by virtue that he was the child of a 2nd marriage, and that Sammler was his uncle through a half-sister (p. 76). Angela's brother, Wallace, tells Sammler that their father hid money in their New Rochelle home, money earned from doing abortions on the rich and famous (p. 101), hoping Sammler will learn something from Gruner in hospital before he dies.

Chap. III. Lionel Feffer brings Shula's theft of the "moon manuscript" (p.106) to Sammler's attention (p. 112). Sammler reveals that he was concerned Feffer was taking advantage of him in a money-making scheme (p. 108). Feffer makes an insightful observation about Sammler: "I know you are trying to condense what you know, your life experience...you only said that you would like to boil down your experience of life to a few statements" (p. 114). Sammler responds that these are the "short views" (pp. 114, 163) of Sydney Smith (1771-1845). Feffer also reveals that he knows about the pickpocket (p. 119). It is revealed that Sammler's blindness was from a blow from a gun butt (p. 137). Sammler also reveals escaping from Polish partisans turned against the Jews while he was hiding in Zamosht Forest, after he'd escaped from the mass grave (p. 140). Importantly, Sammler relates his killing of a German straggler in the Forest, where he disarms him and shoots to kill despite the soldier begging for mercy. He reflects: "The thing no doubt would have happened differently to another man, a man who had been eating, drinking, smoking, and whose blood was brimming with fat, nicotine, alcohol, sexual secretions. None of these in Sammler's blood. He was then not entirely human" (p. 139). And more: "to kill the man he ambushed in the snow had given him pleasure. Was it only pleasure ? It was more. It was joy...When he fired his gun, Sammler, himself nearly a corpse, burst into life...When he shot again it was less to make sure of the man than to try again for that bliss" (pp. 140-141). This brief encounter will figure again later in the book when Eisen beats the pickpocket. Sammler will struggle withg the message delivered to him on that day: "that reality was a terrible thing, and the final truth about mankind overwhelming and crushing" (p. 280).

The chapter also relates his 2nd trip to Israel, where he managed to secure a press pass and pose as a 72-year old journalist in June 1967, during the Six-Day War: "he refused to stay in Manhattan watching television" (p. 142). "At the beginning of the Aqaba crisis he had suddenly become excited" (p. 142), when Nasser closed the Gulf of Aqaba (May, 1967) to Israeli ships. He later details his visit to the Gaza strip and the Sinai Desert (p. 250).

Chap IV. Dr. Gruner's hospital room forms the backdrop for this chapter. We learn his son Wallace went to MIT but became a bartender in Cambridge (p. 152). Angela now believes there is money hidden in the house, her father having done favors for the Mafia, namely "performed abortions" (p. 162). Gruner is upset with Angela having learned that she has engaged in group sex (p. 159). She wants Sammler to intercede on her behalf. Sammler cannot bear the sordid details and fears having to depend on Angela when her father dies, yet "he decided that under no circumstances and on no account would he become involved in a perverse relationship with Angela in which he had to listen for his supper" (p. 160). Wallace and Eisen enter the hospital room. There is reference to their doing business together (p. 169). Eisen has a baize (felt) bag full of bronze medallions that he wants to show his Cousin Elya (p. 170).

Margotte calls Sammler at the hospital to inform him that Shula has once again absconded with the moon manuscript (p. 172). Dr. Lal is exasperated and Sammler thinks "This unlucky Lal, who must have been sick of earth to begin with if he had such expectations of the moon" (p. 174). The situation forces Sammler to abandon his passive state: "I don't use my authority often enough,. Believe me, I can control my daughter, and I shall" (p.175). Gruner awakes, disgusted with his offspring: "My daughter is a dirty cunt.....And my son, a high-IQ moron" (p. 177).

Chap V. Dr. Gruner's estate in New Rochelle forms the backdrop for this chapter. We meet Emil, chauffeur who will take us in the Rolls Royce. He is described as having a Savonarola nose (p. 180), a description which will reappear in Humboldt's Gift. Wallace engages Sammler in conversation, starting with H.G. Wells. Sammler prefers the ocean bottom to the moon: "I seem to be a depth man rather than a height man. I do not personally care for the illimitable" (p. 183). Arriving at the house, Sammler finds his daughter in the tub (p. 193). He learns she made a copy of the moon manuscript and "locked them in two lockers in Grand Central Station" (p. 195). Shula feels that the MS theft is justified for her father's creative project: "A creative person wouldn't stop at anything. For the creative there are no crimes. And aren't you a creative person?" (p. 199).

Margotte arrives at the house with Prof. Lal (p.201), whose expression is of shock and disappointment: "The inadequacy of words - the need for several simultaneous languages to address all parts of the mind at once, especially those parts left free by meager communication, functioning furiously on their own. Instead, as one were to smoke ten cigarettes simultaneously; while also drinking whiskey; while also being sexually engaged with three or four other persons; while hearing bands of music; while receiving scientific notations - thus to capacity engage" (p. 202). And so the long discourse between Lal and Sammler is set to begin. Sammler suspects that Shula "had run away with The Future of the Moon in order to create this very opportunity, this meeting" (p. 207). The discussion takes them to philosopy, Schopenhauer, who says "The organs of sex are the seat of the Will" (p. 209). Schopenhauer equates sexual potency with other forms of potency. Sammler's reticence in this area contrasts with the sexual shenanigans of H.G. Wells, Angela, Bruch, and of course, the pickpocket.

Long ago, writers became aristocrats through their skill in words, they felt obliged to go into action. Evidently, it's a disgrace for true nobility to substitute words for acts....You can see it...in Hamlet when he feels that humiliation...saying, 'I...must like a whore unpack my heart with words'" (p. 213), then "Or to Polonius, 'Words, words, words.' Words are for the elderly, or for the young who are old-in-heart" (p. 213). Talk turns to biology: "The biological fundamentals are like the peasantry, the whole individual considering himself to be a prince. It is the cigale and the fourmi. The ant was once the hero, but now the grasshopper is the whole show" (p. 216), then outer space: "outer space is an opposite - personally, an emotional pole. One is born between his mother's legs, afterward persisting outward" (p. 222). Nevertheless, crowded and disappointing though it is, Sammler's own planet is still a home he cannot give up. What Sammler has to offer in place of a defeatist departure into space is the point of the book.

The conversation is briefly interrupted, Sammler enquiring about the whereabouts of Wallace: "Oh, he went up with tools to fix something in the attic" (p. 222). Sammler talks about Nazi Germany: "Shula and I have been in this written-off category. If you chance nevertheless to live, having been out leaves you with idioysncracies. The Germans attempted to kill me. Then the Poles also shot at me. I would have died without Mr. Cieslakiewicz. He was the one man with whom I was not written off. By opening the tomb to me, he let me live. Experience of this kind is deforming" (p. 230). Sammler realizes the "nobility" of history books is no longer an option: "many have surged forward in modern history, after long epochs of namelessness and bitter obscurity, to claim and to enjoy...a name, a dignity of person, a life such as belonged in the past only to gentry, nobility..." (p. 235). The discourse ends abruptly when Shula notices water flooding the floor (p. 237). It's Wallace looking for hidden money in the attic pipes. The chapter ends with Sammler revisiting his trip to Israel during the Six-Day War (p. 262).

Chap. VI. Sammler finds himself alone with Shula at the House as all the other guests have left. He notes the flooding of the attic "was a metaphor for Elya's condition" (p. 259), viz his water on the brain. Wallace is out and about flying his Cessna for his new business venture photogaphing landscapes. On the return to Manhattan, after spotting the "Huntington Hartford Building" (p. 284) at Columbus Circle, which Bruch jokes is the "Taj Mahole" (see photo), Emil notices Feffer and Eisen caught up amongst a crowd of onlookers witnessing a scuffle with the pickpocket (p. 285). Feffer was fighting the pickpocket, who was after his Minox camera, having caught the pickpocket in the act of picking a purse on the bus (p. 286). Sammler coaxed Eisen to rescue Feffer, and he hit him with a bag filled with his crazy sculpture medallions. Symbolically, the pickpocket is no match for history (the weapon being a bagful of medallions celebrating Israel's achievements).

Sammler then felt Eisen was overbearing in his assault and vainly tried to stop the pummeling. Eisen was "amused at Sammler's ludicrous inconsistency" (p. 291). Eisen to Sammler: "If in - in. No? If out - out. Yes? No? So answer" (p. 292). No doubt Sammler was contemplating his own murder of the German soldier in Poland (p. 139). For Eisen, as a Jew, he crushes skulls when reasonable to do so without remorse. Sammler has difficulty with this notion. In the end, Sammler "sympathized with" the pickpocket, viewing him as "mad with an idea of noblesse" (p. 294). "The pickpocket stole because he took the slackness, the cowardice of the world for granted" (p. 47).

Back at the hospital, Dr. Gruner is close to death. Angela is still rationalizing her sexcapades in Acapulco with Sammler. "Wharton got his kicks out of that little broad. He liked her. Better than I liked the other man. I'd never see him again. But then on the plane Wharton perversely became jealous" (p. 299). For Angela, perversity is Wharton's change of heart, not the sex with another couple. Sammler sees that Angela has an "opportunity" (p. 305) to apologize to her father, to ask for forgiveness. In the end she refuses to do so. Sammler slams her: "I don't know what happened in Mexico. The details don't matter. I only note the peculiarity that it is possible to be gay, amorous, intimate with holiday acquaintances. Diversions, group intercourse, fellatio with strangers - one can do that but not come to terms with one's father at the last opportunity" (p. 306). Sammler pushes Angela over the edge, only to be interupted by Shula's call - she found the money stuffed in a hassock. All this time, we note that Wallace never even shows up at the hospital.

Meanwhile, Sammler is struggling to find some "word" (Angela failed) that will comfort his dying nephew. Gruner dies unreconciled. Standing by his nephew's body, he delivers his "word" in the form of a silent prayer: "At his best this man was much kinder than at my very best I have ever been or could ever be. He was aware that he must meet - through all the confusion and degraded clowning of thiis life through which we are speeding - he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, every man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it - that we all know, God, that we know, we know, we know" (p. 313). The mere assertion of individuality, the non-negotiable demands for one's own way, the leaps to ecstasy that by-pass commitments to others - such behavior debases the self it seeks to glorify. It is only by loyalty to the "contract" implicit in our humanity that we can safeguard our own sense of the self's value. By signs, by words, we make this planet a home for each other, we make a web of relationships that reach beyond the individual life.

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

Bellow followed up his huge novel The Adventures of Augie March with Seize the Day, a novella of 116 pages. Appearing simple on the surface, it takes a cue from the psychologist Wilhelm Reich. The fact that the psychiatrist's first name and that of the novel's protagonist are the same is evidence of intentional Reichianism. The novella takes place in a single day in New York's Upper West Side. The narrator is 3rd person omniscient, yet the point of view often changes and infiltrates the thoughts of the protagonist, taking on the 1st person. It therefore becomes hard to tell what is Tommy's imagination and reality. Water is a recurring motif that carries symbolic meaning.

Chap I. Tommy Wilhelm, the 44-year old protagonist joins his father Dr. Adler for breakfast at the Hotel Gloriana. Tommy and his father usually meet in the elevator, but "he was aware that his routine was about to break up and he sensed that a huge trouble long presaged but till now formless was due" (p, 4). We soon learn that Tommy has gone into a commodities investment venture with Dr. Tamkin, a psychologist. Tommy is desperate financially and yearns for the assistance of his father. Several flashbacks reveal the talent scout Maurice Venice, attracted to Tommy by his good looks in college. On film, Tommy proves to be awkward. Venice refuses to take him on, yet he lies to his parents, drops out of college, and moves to California. Actually, Venice was a fraud and involved in a prostitution racket. In many ways, Venice is a double for Tommy, a failure and a liar, a drowning man (Venice conjures canals and water). We also learn that Tommy changed his name from Wilhelm Adler, a first indication of him shedding himself from his father (his sister Catherine changes her name to Phillippa). Tommy is quick to blame others for his circumstance, yet takes credit for his own failure. Tommy believes that self-determination is impossible in his world: "there's really very little that a man can change at will. He can't change his lungs, or nerves, or constitution or temperament" (p. 24). Tommy's aversion to water is disclosed as he remembers a line from Milton's Lycidas: "Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor..." (p. 13), in which Lycidas drowns.

Chap II. We learn that Tommy has separated from his wife Margaret and his children, a fact that meets with great disapproval from his father. At breakfast, Dr. Adler hounds Tommy about his pill addiction. We learn that Tommy had a job with the WPA and had a hotel job in Cuba. Adler constantly criticizes his son for misjudgements, especially with Dr. Tamkin, who fantasizes just like Tommy. Tamkin once described an underwater suit he wanted to invent so that a man could walk across the Hudson in case of an atomic attack (p. 41). This is symbolic of the figurative "wet suit" he will provide Tommy to prevent him from "drowning." Tommy defends Tamkin's entrepreneurial spirit "Everybody wants to make something. Any American does" (p. 41). Yet Tommy's aversion to water is acute: "He used an electric razor so that he didn't have to touch water" (p. 36).

Chap III. Father and son meet for breakfast. Adler suggests that Tommy go to the baths, since water cures ailments (p. 44). But the last thing a drowning man needs is more water ! They discuss Tommy's wife Margaret, who is asking for money. It is revealed that Tommy had a lover, Olive. Adler tells Tommy that he will not "carry" him on his back and gives the same advice to his son (p. 55). Tommy and his father do not speak the same language. His father's language is too concrete, whereas Tamkin's is more poetic and attuned to Tommy's feelings. Tamkin acts as Tommy's surrogate father (Tam-kin = kin of Tom) because they share the same language.

Chap IV. Tommy has a flashback to the day in which he signed over his money to Tamkin, although Tamkin could not contribute his equal share. Tamkin tells Tommy about the duplicity of the soul: the true soul and the pretend soul. He claims that one should live in the "here-and-now. Seize the day" (p. 66). Tamkin gives Tommy a poem he has written about him entitled "Mechanism vs. Functionalism/Ism vs. Hism" (p. 75), a nearly direct translation of Reichian philosophy. Reich claimed that neurosis and imbalance arise out of the inner self (the natural) and the external world (that of monetary pressures). Tamkin posits this in terms of the real and pretend souls. Tamkin's poem is paradoxical in that it makes fun of Romantic poetry. Kiernan (Saul Bellow) says that the point of this preposterous poem is surely that Tommy's grasp of it is more grotesquely inept than even Tamkin's verse. He says to Tamkin "I'm trying to figure out who this Thou is" (p. 76).

Tamkin has some truth telling moments. "You can't march in a straight line to the victory...You fluctuate toward it. From Euclid to Newton, there was straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers" (p. 64). Tommy is in his "watery" state, on track to clarity. Tamkin feels Tommy must embrace the water he is drowning in to achieve rebirth. Contrast this to his father, an advocate of a straight line to victory. Bellow allows us to see books in Tamkin's home that exist in opposition or discuss opposing philosophies, e.g., W.H. Sheldon was a staunch anti-Freudian (p. 72). To add to the "naturalism" it is important to note the significance of the fact that Tommy's grandfather called him "Velvel," Hebrew for wolf. It points to Tommy's lonely howling, a Reichian animalistic trait. The last sentence of the chapter picks up the water theme: "The waters of the earth are going to roll over me" (p. 77).

Chap V. This chapter opens on Broadway and jumps to stock market floor. Tamkin becomes Tommy's guide in this chapter. Ironically, memory (not the here-and-now) is the most significant action for Tommy here as he recalls feeling at one with humanity in Times Square and Margaret nursing him back to health. His internal self and the external world merge in his Times Square memory: "Today, his day of reckoning, he consulted his memory and thought, I must go back to that. That's the right clue and may do me the most good. Something very big. Truth, like" (p. 85). In the second memory, Margaret reads to him "somewhat unwillingly" (p. 90) a poem about love. The poem is about someone who thought to leave the other until they grew in love. The memory is unresolved, like the love. This chapter is not about Tommy learning to swim but more about the process, it is a path to understanding.

Chap VI. Tamkin and Tommy have lunch. Tamkin tells Tommy not to "marry suffering" (p. 98). Tamkin says his wife died of drowning, which Tommy does not believe. After visiting the market, Tommy discovers that Tamkin is missing. This chapter appears regressive in that Tommy has lost faith in Tamkin. Although this is a backward step, Tommy will have to learn to get on without Tamkin. A mirror is presented to Tommy in the guise of the blind man Rappaport, who appears obsessed with money, a mirror image that Tommy fails to see. Tommy feels threatened in a naturalist way by his surroundings, as evidenced by the beggarly violinist who "pointed his bow at Wilhelm, saying, "You!'"' (p. 100).

Chap VII. The chapter begins with Tommy using his father's language "Tamkin was on my back" (p. 105). Tommy seeks Tamkin in the Hotel Gloriana. On entering the hotel, he is recognized as Dr. Adler's son. Tommy will have to learn to be more than just someone's son if he is to come to any understanding. He then seeks out his father, finding him in the massage. His father rebukes him once again in their final confrontation. On his way to look again for Tamkin, he takes a call from Margaret, asking for money. One, two, three, he sheds Tamkin, his father, and his wife. It is only when he is left completely alone that he can piece together the puzzle. Racing out onto the street, amidst teeming humanity, he believes he sees Tamkin at a funeral. He follows the funeral procession into the church in the final scene of the book. Tommy cries with all his heart over the dead stranger, ending the novella with redeeming tears. Again, it is only through distance and separation that Tommy can achieve understanding. The dead human being gives him a rare distance. In the end, he discovers his own language: feeling, tears, and love.

Kiernan observes that the parallel with Lycidas' regenerative death is unmistakable in the last paragraph containing the lines "sea-like music came up to his ears," "poured into him," and "sank deeper than sorrow" (p. 118). Most critics read the final scene in salvific terms. The passage should be understood as mocking Wilhelm's sense of himself as a drowning man. Ironically, his role as mourner links him to Milton rather than to Lycidas - to an ignoble Milton, in fact, drowning in self-pity.

Hamlet and His Problems by T.S. Eliot

Published in 1919, Hamlet and His Problems may be considered an example of "destructive criticism" in that it challenges established critical perspectives on a work of art. The essay is of greatest interest in it's formulation of the doctrine of the "Objective Correlative."

When T.S. Eliot revised his English collection Elizabethan Essays for an American edition twenty-two years after its initial publication, he made a number of serious cuts. In cutting "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca," "Hamlet and His Problems," and "Four Elizabethan Dramatists," he remarked that these essays "on re-examination embarrassed me by their callowness, and by a facility of unqualified assertion which verges, here and there, on impudence. The Hamlet, of course, had been kept afloat all these years by the phrase 'objective correlative'--a phrase which, I am now told, is not even my own but was first used by Washington Alston [sic]." Allston coined the term in 1840 in his "Introductory Discourse" of his Lectures on Art. Interestingly, these lectures were edited by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and published in 1850. Dana was the noted author of Two Years Before the Mast and his grandson was a noted Madison Ave. architect with Murphy & Dana.

Critics of "Hamlet and His Problems" tend to treat it as a patient etherized upon a table (language from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), from which they feel able to surgically remove the idea of the "objective correlative," dissociating it from its context. The essay itself is rarely discussed as having any bearing on Hamlet whatsoever, and has become little more than a vehicle for bringing into the critical vocabulary a conceptual formulation that has proved difficult and often unwieldy for criticism. It is surely one of Eliot's most epigrammatic, gnomically formulated pieces of literary criticism.

Eliot posits that most criticism is directed at the character Hamlet, rather than the play. He cites Goethe and Coleridge, who were not immune to this fallacy, who have substituted "their own Hamlet for Shakespeare's." Eliot claims they have imposed their personalities on Shakespeare's Hamlet. The reader may want to keep in mind that the logic and consistency advocated by Eliot are not essential to a play's success, nor to its greatness and immortality.

Hamlet and His Problems

FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.

Eliot, on the other hand praises Robrtson and Stoll, who tried to shift the critical focus of Hamlet to a right direction by pointing out the genesis of Shakespeare's play from his predecessors: "Hamlet is a stratification."

Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 observing that they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare’s art; and as they insisted on the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.

Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr. Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their “interpretation” of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.

Eliot goes on to examine the play from a historical perspective. Eliot argues that the revenge motives in the earlier plays are dramatically justified, but in Hamlet, there is a failure in establishing motive of the character. Eliot maintains that Shakespeare made certain changes from Kyd's play, but these changes were far from convincing.

We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham; and what this play was like we can guess from three clues: from the Spanish Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd’s Hamlet must have been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare’s lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the earlier, not from the later, play. From these three sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the action or delay is caused, as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards; and that the “madness” of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the Spanish Tragedy as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes—the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes—for which there is little excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very strong show of reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson’s examination is, we believe, irrefragable: that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.

Eliot then claims the play is an artistic failure. Shakespeare failed to impose a dramatic order. Eliot relates it to another great failure, the Mona Lisa, creating more controversy !


Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like

Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,

are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act v. sc. ii., Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting

That would not let me sleep…
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark
Grop’d I to find out them: had my desire;
Finger’d their packet;

are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other profoundly interesting play of “intractable” material and astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow the tragic successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as “interesting” as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.

The grounds of Hamlet’s failure are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:

[Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of his mother’s degradation.… The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.

This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the “guilt of a mother” that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize. You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you examine the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the Revenge of Bussy d’ Ambois, Act v. sc. i. We find Shakespeare’s Hamlet not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the earlier play.

Finally, Eliot uses a term (Objective Correlative) which would draw the attention of the critical community and goes on to put a solution through this. Eliot feels Shakespeare made use of the concept successfully in Othello and Macbeth, precisely not the case in Hamlet. Shakespeare could not project ant external elements or events which would fitfully reflect his inner world and could not present external events or elements which would justify his terrible mental anguish. According to Eliot, Hamlet's case is over-reaction. "Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her." In other words, Eliot made the point that in the "Closet Scene," when Hamlet confronts Queen Gertrude, his mother, in her bedchamber, his words demonstrate an animosity and a vindictiveness for which the audience is totally unprepared. There is a greater inconsistency than Hamlet's attitude toward his mother - it is Hamlet's almost total lack of concern for his loss of the Kingdom of Denmark.

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.

Finally, Eliot takes up the case of Hamlet's Madness and tries to refute conventional wisdom by arguing that Hamlet's madness "is less than madness and more than feigned." Eliot assigns the genesis of the drama to an unknown state of mind of the creator and hopes for exploration on the part of the Contemporary Literature Scholars and critics to solve "an insoluble puzzle."

The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’s hand; in the earlier play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.

Note 1. I have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer’s objections to Othello.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot's first important poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, appeared in Poetry in 1915. He first drafted the poem in 1909 while a student at Harvard, and at the time he signed it T. Stearns Eliot. Paralysis, the incapacity to act, has been the Achilles heel of many famous literary characters, notably Hamlet. Eliot parodically updates Hamlet's paralysis to the modern world. It is a song of a being divided between passion and timidity. The poem starts with action, an invitation to go, and moves to inaction. The poem is a monologue, spoken by "I" who is presumably Prufrock. He talks to a "you", who appears to be a companion, maybe a woman. The poem builds from strain to tension, to a relaxation of tension, to a cessation of all action. Prufrock does not dare to seek love for fear of disappointment. He is consciously unheroic, witness his own comparison of himself with Hamlet. The epigraph heightens Prufrock's frustration. It refers to the torture of Guido da Montefeltro in the eighth circle of Dante's Inferno. Prufrock lives in a world of fantasy and daydreaming. The epigraph reads: If I thought that my answer were to one who ever could return to the world; this flame should quake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee. The passage implies that the lovesong itself is not sung in the real world. It is an interior monologue. In the Inferno, the hero descends into the nine successive levels of Hell - suggesting the lowering of height and expectations. Prufrock sweeps reader on a downward ride - skyline to street life to down the stairs at a party and eventually the sea floor. Prufrock is descending into his own Hell, and he brings the reader with him for safety - just as Guido da Montefeltro tells Dante in his story in Hell only because he thinks Dante will never resurface and tell others about it. The poem opens with a command to the self (you) to accompany the physical him (I) to a distant "room." The object of the journey is to declare his love to a lady. The opening image of the patient suggests Prufrock's view of himself as helpless - etherized. Here Eliot deploys the objective correlative (see my blog on Eliot's Hamlet). The objective correlative is the use of objects, symbols or descriptions in art by which certain emotions are invoked. Lines 2,3 evoke helplessness, entrapment and impotence. The "one-night cheap hotels" suggest fruitless unsatisfying sexual relations in the past. The "sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells" suggest cheap jerry-built (sawdust) places with shell ashtrays. Arriving at the "room," he finds the women discussing Michelangelo, a figure to who Prufrock cannot aspire. The fog "that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes" evokes feline movement - the "cat" goes down from the high windowpanes to the "pools that stand in drains,' lets soot from the chimneys fall on its back, then leaps from the terrace to the ground. The cat does not enter or penetrate the house. Prufrock's prude-in-a-frock effeminacy emerges through the cat. The "works of days and hands" refers to Hesoid's "Works and Days." Distracting himself with the "fog" he persuades himself that he has timer to "prepare a face." His recurrent thought of the women leads him to speculate about their reaction to his physical self. He is aware of his baldness and thinness. He feels his first sense of doubt "do I dare disturb the universe?" The tedium and monotony of his life is clear. He has "measured out his life with coffee spoons." He rejects the eyes and recoils from the horror of being "pinned" down and dissected like a grasshopper. "Sprawling on a pin" refers to practice of pinning insect specimens for study. He rejects the arms, yet dwells on them in an erotic context. He reveals his insecurity again and again in the repeated "how should I presume." Prufrock has a disorder sense of time, witness "evenings, mornings, afternoons." A few lines later, Eliot uses the word "presume" in its latinate meaning - anticipate - rather than its vernacular usage - to undertake without clear justification. In the climactic passage, he mentions the only possibility for him, to descend the stairs and leave the room. Prufrock feels he should have been "a pair of ragged claws," an allusion to Hamlet, in which Hamlet mocks Polonius "for yourself, sir, should be as old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward" (2.2.205-206). The crab image of Prufrock adds to the cat and insect. S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats 5 Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question…. 10 Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 15 The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 20 And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window panes; 25 There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30 Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. In the room the women come and go 35 Talking of Michelangelo. And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— 40 (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”) My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) Do I dare 45 Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 50 I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? And I have known the eyes already, known them all— 55 The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60 And how should I presume? And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress 65 That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? And how should I begin? . . . . . . . . Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 70 And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?… I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. Prufrock, in his reverie, refers to the afternoon, quickly correcting himself to evening, as sleeping peacefully. His reverie reaches a climax as he refers himself to John the Baptist. A dancing girl, Salome, requested the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter from KIng Herod. Being beheaded may be a sign of being unmanned. He immediately denies the dignity of the comparison "I am no prophet." He considers himself the butt of a "footman," who symbolizes death. Prufrock has confessed his cowardice to himself. The poem moves towards the closing image of drowning. From this point, Prufrock speaks of what would have happened had it not been too late. The fear of being revealed causes him to rationalize his failure. "Squeeze the universe into a ball" refers to Andrew Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress." In the poem, the speaker urges his lady to have sex with him while they are still young and alive - "Let us roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball. / and tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life," suggestive of phallic penetration of the hymen. Yet Prufrock deludes himself into thinking he has plenty of time left. Marvel's protagonist is in a hurry, Prufrock is not, so the reference oozes with irony. . . . . . . . . And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! 75 Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep … tired … or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80 But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 85 And in short, I was afraid. And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, 90 To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it toward some overwhelming question, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— 95 If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.” And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, 100 After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: 105 Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.” In this final section, the tone changes gain, there is no more overwhelming question. He cannot even compare himself with Hamlet (literature's other great indecisive man), but rather with Polonius, a sometime wise "Fool." The lack of "I" in front of "Am an attendant lord [Polonius]" bespeaks of Prufrock's lack of ego. Prufrock echoes Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" in "nor was meant to be." He resolves to retreat to the beach, his white flannel trouser bottoms rolled up, pathetically approximating a bohemian style, an attempt to ward off death. He concerns himself with questions no more momentous than "Do I dare to eat a peach?" Parting his hair behind may hide the baldness. Eating a peach is as near the forbidden fruit as he dares to approach. The peach has long been a symbol for female genitalia. His anxiety about eating a peach has everything to do with his feelings of sexual inadequacy. The mermaids who tempted Ulysses will not sing to him. His conception of them has been a delusion. He is recalled to reality by the voices in the drawing room, and he awakens from his reverie too late. Prufrick switches from his first-person singular narration to first-person plural in the last stanza - for his final plunge, he wants to make sure that we, his Dantesque listener, accompany him into his self-pitying Hell. The concluding two three-line stanzas act as a sestet (six lines). Petrarchian sonnets complement the opening octet with a sestet. This is Eliot's final mock-allusion to yet another Renaissance artist (after Dante and Michelangelo). Petrarch unrequitedly mooned after his love, Laura, but Prufrock does not even have an attainable ideal love. . . . . . . . . 110 No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, 115 Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool. I grow old … I grow old … 120 I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. 125 I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130 Till human voices wake us, and we drown.