Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  And Amos Oz was shackling himself, by being a public voice, and so were Yehoshua and David Grossman and others, and they knew it and complained about it, expressively describing this burden – but they could not do otherwise.

  In Israel, Yehoshua has said, the writer cannot attain the ‘true solitude’ that is the ‘prerequisite’ of art. ‘Rather, you are continuously summoned to solidarity,’ summoned not by any ‘external compulsion’ but ‘from within yourself’.

  You cannot do otherwise. And the same went for Saul: if it comes from within yourself, then you cannot do otherwise. No novelist can.

  D.H.L. failed to get anywhere much with ‘direct experience’, in my view. No one gets anywhere much with ‘life’. Its limitations are life’s limitations: poverty of incident, repetitiveness, imaginative thinness, and shapelessness.

  And there is something too democratic in it. Why surrender so much initiative and autonomy – so much power? Of writers, novelists are the most tyrannical. A playwright menially bows to practical logistics, a poet is menaced by tradition and formal constraints. But Lawrence wasn’t wrong when he said that the great thing about the novel was that you could ‘do anything with it’. Novelists are power-crazed usurpers; they are presidents-for-life who have illegalised all opposition…

  If I had to define writer’s block, I would say: It is what happens when the subconscious, for whatever reason, has become inert or has even absented itself. With auto-fiction, the subconscious is nearby and available; it is just woefully underemployed.

  But Saul Bellow did get somewhere with the real, the actual; he found in it an uncovenanted freedom. His way of doing this was completely instinctive, and blindingly radical.

  Divorce

  To the British, serial matrimony is ‘very American’ (not utterly unlike serial murder): a national enthusiasm to which writers show no obvious resistance. We associate it with Americans, but it is not something that anybody associates with Jews: divorce, let alone recurrent, recidivist divorce, is surely a goyish indulgence, like dipsomania. The big bearded WASP Ernest Hemingway might have had four wives; but Saul Bellow had five – and Norman Mailer had six, like Henry VIII.

  There was, I felt, something voulu about all Norman’s marrying and divorcing, as there was about all his drinking, his drugging, his loudmouthing and showboating, his slumming, his brawling…It was as if he had set himself the goal of becoming, not only the iconic anti-hero and anti-citizen (‘I am an American dissident’), but also the perfect anti-Jew. All this marrying and divorcing verged on the parodic: as if to prove the point, Mailer divorced one wife, married and divorced another, and married yet another – all in the space of a week. Bellow wasn’t like that.*11

  Still, five marriages meant four divorces. And even one divorce, my father wrote, ‘was an incredibly violent thing to happen to you’ – because you’re now in a war (and it’s usually a dirty war) with someone you loved. I had felt divorce from the vantage of a child, and I always feared it – as an admission of failure, above all. In Israel I was bathed in wavelets of a helplessness that I thought might precede defeat – not constantly, or even often, but every now and again.

  Rosamund would not experience divorce. I soon knew what she was: one of nature’s straight arrows. Like my mother, Hilary Ann Bardwell. Straight arrows can come from any source and any direction. And they are very thin on the ground, these people with no deviousness and no airs. And another thing: Rosamund was not just thoroughly committed – she was also thoroughly in love.

  In Vermont on their wedding day, 25 August 1989

  I already knew, as any reader of Herzog would already know, that Saul was a suitor with ‘an angry heart’, a suitor both sore and tender, the product of a collision: ‘At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life.’ He was like the poet in Peter Porter’s volume Once Bitten, Twice Bitten: often bitten, but never shy, and still coming back for more.

  Years later Rosamund would say, of this persistence, that Saul wanted and needed physical love at the centre of his life. And I thought of my father, back in 1987, sitting by the fire, unattached at sixty-five, and saying, yes, yes, he was ‘basically all right. But it’s only half a life without a woman’.

  Asked to name the Walt Disney character he would most like to meet, Andy Warhol selected Minnie Mouse. Why Minnie? ‘Because she can get me close to Mickey.’

  Now, Rosamund is not Minnie, and Saul is not Mickey, and it never crossed my mind until after the friendship was long established. But that was what Rosamund did: she got me close to Saul. She did it in her person, and with the transfusional power of her youth. She was not just his Muse and his Eros, she was also his Agape.*12

  Rosamund was a woman whose atavisms became visible only in her virtues: savagely protective, barbarically loyal. She would need that atavistic fire (though not yet, not for more than a decade), and then those virtues would be fully stretched.

  * * *

  —————

  We live this way

  Visiting Jerusalem in the late 1920s, the young Arthur Koestler found its beauty ‘inhuman’: ‘It is the haughty and desolate beauty of a walled-in mountain fortress in the desert, of tragedy without catharsis.’ Catharsis: the processing and the purgation of pity and terror.

  ‘I pass the little coffee shop’, wrote Saul in 1976,

  outside which the bomb exploded a few days ago. It is burnt out. A young cabdriver last night told…me that he had been about to enter it with one of his friends when another of his pals called to him. ‘He had something to tell me so I went over to him and just then the bomb went off and my friend was there.*13 So now my friend is dead.’ His voice, still adolescent, was cracking. ‘And this is how we live, mister! Okay? We live this way.’

  When the time came we all safely disbanded – a good six months before the (First) Intifada, which would start in December…Getting to the other planet, via El Al, is arduous, but getting back from it is just a slightly worse-than-average airline experience. The Bellows returned to America, and the Amises returned to England. In London I continued to read up on Israel – though my question about Zionist eyesight went unanswered for another twenty-six years. I’ll come to that answer in a page or two; it is shockingly stark.

  …There was a terroristic incident – in the Hitchensian sense – on our flight home. We were in the business-class cabin, which as well as being unusually garish was unusually empty. A lone pair of Hasids sent over the stewardess to tell Julia that they objected to her presence, on grounds (it was conceded in a regretful whisper) of possible menstruation…In Julia’s long and loud response I saw and heard not only rightfully appalled indignation, but also a) decisive antipathy to Israel, and b) renewed contempt for religion and patriarchy, and c) disappointment (or so I imagined) in a second husband who had failed to fill the void left by the first.

  Zeal

  I later found out that 1987 witnessed the convergence of certain historical lines, a convergence that would change the Middle East and (for an indefinite period) change the world…

  On May 27 of that year there was a gala dinner in New York, organised by the American Friends of Ateret Cohanim (‘Crown of the Priests’). In his address the leader of the movement, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, summarised its aims:

  We must settle the whole land of Israel, and over all of it establish our rule. The Arabs are squatters. I don’t know who gave them authorisation to live on Jewish land. All mankind knows that this is our land. Most Arabs came here recently. And even if some Arabs had been here for two thousand years, is there a statute of limitations that gives a thief a right to its plunder?

  The main speaker at the event was the Israeli Ambassador to the UN (a successor of the redoubtable Abba Eban), Benjamin Netanyahu, destined to oust David Ben Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

  Eight months later, on December 9, after several vio
lent incidents (the precipitant was a car crash that killed four Gazan workmen), the First Intifada began. Intifada: literally ‘a jumping up in reaction’; ‘to shake oneself’, ‘to shake off’. Over the following five years, Israeli deaths numbered 185; as always in these intramural conflicts, Palestinian deaths were very roughly ten times higher (estimated at 1,500). And of course the First Intifada, compared to the Second, now seems implausibly tame.

  On February 11, 1988, a new political party was established in the Holy Land. Drawing on the inhabitants of the twenty-seven refugee camps within Israel and the million-strong population of Gaza, it called itself the Movement of the Islamic Resistance, Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, and was soon known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas, or zeal; it was thus a key element in what some call the Islamic Revival, and others call political Islam, or Islamism, and yet others call takfir. This was a movement that was reaching critical momentum, and this was its founding idea: Islam huwa al hali – Islam, far from being the problem, is the solution.

  Islamist policy on Israel was maximally rejectionist and maximally Judaeocidal. Hamas itself quotes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – that long-exploded Tsarist fabrication – in its charter, if you can believe. Yes, but if you can believe…

  Is believing seeing, or is it not seeing?

  Ninety years earlier, in April 1897, a man called Herbert Bentwich, accompanied by twenty other Zionists, went on an exploratory pilgrimage to a certain province of the Ottoman Empire. Bentwich and the group he led were not from the ghetto or the shtetl; they were unbuffeted by White Guards and Black Hundreds. Affluent professionals, they sailed in style from London (the trip was catered by Thomas Cook, with carriages, horsemen, guides, servants). Their mission, assigned to them by the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was to assess the feasibility of settling in Palestine, and to submit a report to the first Zionist Congress (November 1897). Herzl’s Zionism was secular, even atheistic; but Bentwich was a believer.

  Ari Shavit is a modern Israeli, an author and veteran Haaretz columnist; he is also a great-grandson of the Right Honourable Herbert Bentwich. In My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (2013) Shavit retraces that Cook’s Tour. We remember Bentwich’s task: to decide whether the Jews should spurn this land or settle on it. Shavit feelingly but unsparingly interjects:

  My great-grandfather is not really fit to make such a decision. He does not see the Land as it is. Riding in the elegant carriage from Jaffa to Mikveh Yisrael, he did not see the Palestinian village of Abu Kabir. Travelling from Mikveh Yisrael to Rishon LeZion, he did not see the Palestinian village of Yazur…And in Ramleh he does not really see that Ramleh is a Palestinian town.

  And so it continues, as Bentwich trundles on, crisscrossing the entire region:

  There are more than half a million Arabs, Bedouins, and Druze in Palestine in 1897. There are twenty cities and towns, and hundreds of villages. So how can the pedantic Bentwich not notice them? How can the hawkeyed Bentwich not see that the Land is taken?…My great-grandfather does not see because he is motivated by the need not to see. He does not see because if he does see, he will have to turn back. But my great-grandfather cannot turn back.

  He believes, so he cannot turn back. He believes, so he does not see. As a case of selective blindness this would be sufficiently remarkable. But Bentwich is in the vanguard of something far more extraordinary.

  One member of his group was Israel Zangwill, the internationally celebrated writer known as ‘the Dickens of the Ghetto’, who at the turn of the century would popularise the Zionist slogan, ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’. By 1904 Zangwill had changed his mind (or regained full consciousness); he delivered a speech in New York which startled his audience and scandalised world Jewry (and for this ‘heresy’ he was pressured out of the movement for a decade). Palestine, he let it be known, was populated.

  Zangwill added, again controversially, that the Jews would have to learn the arts of violence, and claim the land with fire and sword.

  The spirits of the shady night

  And I went on reading Bellow, too…Regular novelists, non-life-writing novelists, how do they go about it? Typically they assemble their cast of individuals and then engage in a struggle for coherence; and the more ambitious of them, having long ago assumed universality, are now also struggling to achieve it on the page.

  With Bellow the process seems to operate in the other direction. He stares his way into the individual with a visionary power, a power that adores and burns, and so finds a way to the universal.

  ‘The rapt seraph that adores and burns’ is a line from Alexander Pope. In angelology, with its nine orders, the seraphim are one rung down from the cherubim; and whereas the sovereign cherubs are equipped with ‘the full, perfect, and overflowing vision of God’, the seraphs are engaged in ‘an eternal ascension toward Him in a gesture both ecstatic and trembling…’*14

  Bellow is a seraph, aspiring up, up (and as a Chicagoan, impatient with eternity, he quietly hopes for due acceptance on the uppermost tier). He is a nature poet almost rivalling Lawrence (who could tell you what this or that plant looked like in any given week of the year), and when he turns to society he is a nature poet now dealing in humans.

  He is a sacramental writer; he wants to transliterate the given world. He pirates the real; he is something like a plagiarist of Creation.

  * * *

  —————

  If countries are like people, then people are like countries.

  In common with most inhabitants of the free world, I am a liberal parliamentary democracy (one with certain grave constitutional flaws).

  I have known human-sized despotisms and theocracies. I have known oligarchs and anarchs and banana republics. I have known failed states…My oldest friend Robinson was a failed state. My younger sister Myfanwy was a failed state…

  Saul was a regional superpower – like Israel. Saul wanted and needed Israel to exist and survive; he identified his manhood with it, compelled by the events in Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945. But he was a social realist, and saw things as they really were.*15

  Bentwich was actuated by a sense of religious homing. The result, half a century later, would be Israel – a land chosen and duly settled

  by hallucinators…And today they are in the bind described in the closing couplet of Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’. In the course of a partly sectarian war, Puritans v. Catholics (1649–53), Cromwell brought to Ireland conquest, famine, plague, and death (eliminating 20 per cent of the population).

  ‘March indefatigably on,’ Marvell nonetheless urged the Lord Protector:

  Still keep thy sword erect;

  Besides the force it has to fright

  The spirits of the shady night,

  The same arts that did gain

  A pow’r, must it maintain.

  But power corrupts, and maintaining power corrupts; and violence corrupts.

  *1 He and I had exchanged a few letters by then, but I was only distantly aware that Saul had had an annus horribilis in 1985: the deaths, one after the other, of his two elder brothers (Maury and Samuel), followed within weeks by the sudden decampment of his fourth wife, Alexandra.

  *2 It was not a sin of omission, in my case. It was an error of inclusion. I didn’t omit them; I included them (along with everyone else I saw), because I couldn’t tell them apart. They’re all Semites, aren’t they – Arabs, Jews? Semite: ‘a member of a people speaking a Semitic language, in particular the Jews and Arabs’.

  *3 To gain entry to the US (in those days), all you had to do was fill in the form and say No to the questions that only the odd lunatic has ever said Yes to. No, I am not a fatally and contagiously diseased terrorist who’s spent the last six months immersed in pig troughs and sheep dips. This could change: the
2016 US election looms as I write…El Al still stipulates three hours, so it hasn’t become more rigorous since September 11; what has happened is that the world has caught up with Israel. Perhaps, one day, a neighbourhood bus ride will be like flying El Al.

  *4 From To Jerusalem and Back, in common with all the other unattributed quotes in this chapter. I was in Haifa for what billed itself as the First International Saul Bellow Conference; it was set in motion by the Saul Bellow Society, and coordinated by the genial Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua.

  *5 Although there are many hyper-intelligent pages in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1962), her central conceit – ‘the banality of evil’ – has over the years been steadily debunked. Artur Sammler, the hero of the Bellow novel of 1970, Mr Sammler’s Planet, played his part: ‘The idea of making the century’s great crime look dull is not banal,’ says Sammler on page 20. ‘Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite?…[D]o you think the Nazis didn’t know what murder was? Everybody (except certain bluestockings) knows what murder is. That is very old human knowledge’…And consider Eichmann’s statement in 1945 (quoted at the trial): ‘I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.’ What is banal, what is tediously commonplace, about that? I think Robert Jay Lifton, in The Nazi Doctors (1986), comes very close to the truth (and bear in mind that in the course of his research Lifton, a Jewish doctor himself, spent many hours face to face with twenty-eight such Nazis): ‘Repeatedly in this study, I describe banal men performing demonic acts. In doing so – or in order to do so – the men themselves changed; and in carrying out their actions, they themselves were no longer banal.’