by Amis, Martin
There would be a war – no one doubted that.
…‘The silent work of uneventful days’: this prose pentameter is from Saul Bellow’s autobiographical short story ‘Something to Remember Me By’. He means the times when your quotidian life seems ordinary, but your netherworld, your innermost space, is confusedly dealing with a wound (for Saul – he was fifteen – the wound was the imminent death of his mother), and has much silent work to get through…The populations of the West were for now otherwise occupied, with the coming intervention in Afghanistan; they were busy; and the silent work it very much needed to do would have to wait for uneventful days.
An act of terrorism fills the mind as thoroughly as a triggered airbag smothers a driver. But the mind can’t live like that for long, and you soon sense the return of the familiar mental chatter – other concerns and anxieties,*2 other affiliations and affections.
Like everyone else I processed a great many reactions to September 11, but none proved harder to grasp than the reaction of Saul Bellow. Somehow I just couldn’t take it in.
There was no difficulty in understanding Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (those Chaucerian racketeers of the Bible Belt), who said that September 11 was due punishment for America’s sins (especially its failure to criminalise homosexuality and abortion). It was rather harder to tell what Norman Mailer was going on about when he said that the attack would prove salutary, because only ceaseless warfare could maintain the virility of the US male…And more routinely I attended to all the appeasers, self-flagellators, defeatists, and relativists on the left, as well as all the pugnacious windbags on the right; and I could see their meaning. Even Inez’s struggles I could faintly make out.*3 But not Saul’s.
‘He can’t absorb it.’
‘What?’ I was on the line to Mrs Bellow in Boston. ‘Can’t absorb it?’
Rosamund was confining her deep voice to a throaty whisper, so I knew Saul must be somewhere in the house – the house on Crowninshield Road. She said,
‘He keeps asking me, Did something happen in New York? And I tell him, in full. And then he asks me again. Did something happen in New York? He just can’t take it in.’
And I couldn’t take it in either – the news about Saul.
Two years earlier Saul had personally fathered a child (setting some kind of record) and his somatic health seemed imposingly sound (Rosamund still described him as ‘gorgeous’); but the fact remained that Bellow was born in 1915.
For some while there had been an uneasiness having to do with his short-term memory; and in March 2001 Saul was tentatively diagnosed with ‘inchoate’ dementia (whose progress would be gradual and stop-start). I went to Boston that spring and was present on the morning of an important test or scan; the three of us then had lunch in a Thai restaurant near the medical centre, and for the first time I heard mention of Alzheimer’s.
She disguised it but Rosamund, I thought, was (rightly and prophetically) alarmed. Saul was reticent but seemingly untroubled; it was as if he’d made a resolution not to be cowed. He would be eighty-six on June 10…A little later, in July, the Bellows came to stay with us on Long Island. I convinced myself that ‘all marbles’ (to quote the title of a novel he would never finish) were ‘still accounted for’ – until I watched our home movie of that visit, which was full of portents.
My habitual response to disastrous diagnoses of close friends, as we’ll see, was one of studied insouciance: fatal diseases, in this world view, were hollow threats, scarecrows, paper tigers…
All the same, back in London after Labor Day, I made an effort to discover what all the fuss was about: I got hold of a couple of books and tried to settle down to them. But I found myself immediately unnerved: Alzheimer’s clearly meant what it said; Alzheimer’s followed through. And I, I, who cruised through whole libraries devoted to famine, terror-famine, plagues, and pandemics, to biological and chemical weaponry, to the leprous aftermaths of great floods and earthquakes, was quite unable to contemplate dementia – in its many variants, vascular, cortical, frontotemporal, and all the rest.
Why? Well, call it the universal cult of personality, call it the charismatic authority of the self – the divine right of the first person. And this particular numero uno wasn’t going to wake up one morning in the Ukraine of 1933 or in the London of 1666; but anybody can wake up with Alzheimer’s, including the present writer, including the present reader (and most definitely including about a third of those who live beyond sixty-five). As ever, I was Saul’s junior by three and a half decades. Even so and even then, reading about Alzheimer’s brought me close to the onset of clinical panic…The death of the mind: dissolution most foul, internal treachery most foul – as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and terrifying.*4
Iris
Now it happens that life (normally so slothful, indifferent, and plain disobliging) had gone out of its way, in this very peculiar situation, to provide me with a ‘control’, a steady point of comparison: if I wanted to know what Alzheimer’s could do to a brilliant, prolific, erudite, lavishly inspired, and excitingly other-worldly novelist, then I needed to look no further than the example of Iris Murdoch.
Iris was a very old friend of Kingsley’s. As undergraduates they were both card-carrying Young Communists – they marched and agitated and recruited, heeding the diktats of Moscow. And in later life they continued to fraternise as they crossed the floor (more or less in step) from Left to Right…
So Iris had been an intermittent presence since my childhood. The last time I saw her was at a party or function in 1995 or 1996. It was being put about in the press, around then, that she was suffering from nothing more serious than writer’s block; I had no reason to doubt this polite fiction, and I said,
‘How awful for you, Iris.’
‘It is awful. Being unable to write is very boring. And lonely. I feel I’m somewhere very boring and lonely.’
‘Writer’s block – I get that.’ Yes, but only ever for a day or two. ‘You can’t do anything but wait it out.’
She said hauntedly, ‘And I already have a waiting feeling.’
We talked on. Present as always throughout was Iris’s one and only husband, the distinguished literary critic John Bayley (who was crooked forward in gentle commiseration). As I was leaving I laid a hand on her wrist and said,
‘Now Iris. Don’t let yourself think it’s permanent. It isn’t. It will lift.’
‘Mm. But here I am somewhere dark and silent,’ she said, and kissed me on the lips.
That at least hadn’t changed. With Iris (who was Irish), if she liked you she loved you. It was the way she was – until February 8, 1999, when she ceased to be.
Not satisfied with giving me a control experiment in the example of Iris, life, in September 2001, was suddenly giving me a detailed crash course on the further decline of Iris: earlier in the summer Tina Brown (then editor of Talk magazine) had asked me to write a piece about Iris, and to this end I read John Bayley’s two memoirs (Iris and Iris and the Friends) and arranged to go to a preview of Richard Eyre’s biopic, Iris. So I was in no position to echo Harvey Keitel’s line in Taxi Driver: ‘I don’t know nobody name Iris.’ In principle, I knew a fair amount about Iris, and about Alzheimer’s, or so you might suppose.
…Towards the end of the morning of Friday, September 14, I went to the screening room off Golden Square. In the thoroughfares the pedestrians, the comers and goers, still gave off an impression of tiptoe or sleepwalk, a flicker of contingency, as they moved past the boutiques and bistros of aromatic Soho…John Bayley was standing at the door; with a dozen others we took our seats as the lights were going down.
Kate Winslet plays the younger Iris – all hope and promise and radiance. Judi Dench plays the older, incrementally stricken Iris: her growing apprehension, and then the shadowing and clouding over as her mind starts to die. And before very long you are the witness of
an extraordinary spectacle: Britain’s ‘finest novelist’ (John Updike), or ‘the most intelligent woman in England’ (John Bayley), sits crouched on an armchair with an expression of superstitious awe on her face as she watches…as she watches an episode of the preschooler TV series, Teletubbies.
This is now Iris on a good day: Iris, the author of twenty-six novels and five works of philosophy, including Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. And you thought, Oh, the tragicomedy of brain death, the abysmal bathos of dementia…‘It will lift,’ I had told her in 1995 or 1996. ‘It will win,’ says the young doctor in Iris. And he was right.
After the lights came back up I established that the only dry eyes in the house belonged to Professor Bayley. Perhaps he was seeing the film for the second time – or let’s say the third time, in a certain sense. We only had to watch it, but John, in addition, had had to live it.
It won’t be like that with Saul, I kept saying to myself, almost dismissively, throughout the autumn. He couldn’t ‘take in’ September 11. Well who could?
It won’t be like that with Saul.
The first crow
‘Hitch, when did all this get going? Islamism. When did Muslims stop saying Islam is the problem and start saying Islam is the solution?’
‘In the 1920s. Atatürk dissolved the Caliphate in ’24, banned sharia, and separated church and state. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded four years later. Islam is the solution was the first clause in its charter.’
Then I asked him: when did jihadi attention turn from the near enemy to the far enemy? When did it turn from the Middle East to the West?
‘I suppose 1979 is the date. Khomeini versus the Great Satan. Or 1989. First, the Ayatollah provokes an epic war with Iraq. And with that out of the way he –’
‘And how many dead? I’ve read that Iran lost a million. Can that be true?’
‘Nobody’s really sure. But prodigious. And while the citizens of Persia are digesting that, the loss of an entire generation for no gain, Khomeini looks for a means to “re-energise the Revolution”. I.e., to regather some legitimacy. He needs a cause. And he alights on…The Satanic Verses. And our friend.’
‘Mm. Khomeini said Salman was paid a million dollars by world Jewry to write it…What did Salman call the fatwa?’
‘Looking back, he called it the first crow flying across the sky.’
A day or two later Christopher said, ‘Tell me about the feeling over there.’
‘Well I did an event the other night. And for once you could mention America without the room freezing over. Instead you got a wave of sympathy and fellow feeling. I think it’s like that all over Europe. Even in France.’
‘It’s worldwide. There were candlelit vigils in Karachi and Tehran. Both Shia of course. The Shias having always been slightly cooler than the Sunnis.’
I said, ‘Quite a bit cooler…America’s in Britain’s good books for now. But of course the softening of mood doesn’t extend to Israel.’
‘Mm. Are they saying that all the Jews who worked in the Twin Towers called in sick on September 11?’
‘No. That’s conspiracy stuff, that is. In England, as you know, anti-Semitism is just another chore of snobbery. Though it does lend spice to their anti-Zionism.’
‘It’s the same here. I seem to be surrounded by people who think…They think that Osama would take off his trunks the minute there’s a country called Palestine. Or the minute we lift the sanctions on Iraq. Et cetera. They don’t understand. I think Osama probably does lose sleep about those GI “devils” polluting Mecca and Medina. But inasmuch as it’s secular, his casus belli is about the end of the Islamic ascendancy. What bothers him is that the Muslim host was defeated at the gates of Vienna. The year was 1683 and the date was September 11.’
Later in the week he said,
‘Mart, what do you hate about America? I don’t mean its wars. I mean internally.’
‘Oh, there’s no end of things to hate. America is more like a world than a country – attributed to Henry James. And it’s the best starting point. You can’t say you love a world…Generally, what do I hate?’ And I started out on the usual roster. Racism, guns, extreme inequality, for-profit healthcare…Oh yeah, and the Puritan heritage. I can’t bear the way they love to say “zero tolerance”. It means zero thought.’
‘So all that. But what Osama hates about America isn’t what we hate about it. It’s what we love about it. Freedom, democracy, secular government, emancipated chicks driving around in cars, if you please.’
‘And plenty of sex.*5 I was reading…in Islam, apparently, Satan, Shaytan, is first and foremost a tempter. Whispering to the hearts of men. They’re tempted by America. Because a side of them fucking loves it.’
‘Yeah, that’s certainly in the mix. How dare America have the arrogance to tantalise good Muslims? Osama didn’t include that in his list of wrongs.’
‘With Osama I sometimes think fuck it, it’s all to do with birth order. I mean, seventeenth out of fifty-three – that’s a notoriously difficult spot.’
‘And living proof that his dad, the illiterate billionaire, wasn’t at all opposed to fornication. In Islam there’s no free love till you’re dead. With the virgins.’
‘With the virgins. And on that cool white wine that makes you drunk without any impairment or hangover.’
‘Mm, I sure could use a little of that. Yes, rightly did Khomeini call life, actual life as we know it, the scum of existence. Ah, Christ. This is a fight about religion, Mart. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. And those fights never really end.’
Equinoctial
It was September 26, and he was vainly pleading with his wife. Elena had not weakened in her determination to go to Manhattan (and to Ground Zero).
‘Don’t do it yet awhile, El. Any day now they’re going to start fucking up Afghanistan. And then we’ll have another Walpurgis Night in New York. I hate it when you fly anyway. Don’t do it yet awhile.’
She said, ‘What’ll they do there after they kill Osama?’
‘Uh, kill Mullah Omar, the one-eyed cleric, and so get going on the Taliban.’
Elena and her husband, for their part, were walking at dusk along Regent’s Park Road, heading for Camden Town and Pizza Express. Eliza and Inez would be waiting for them (minded by their faithful nanny, Catarina)…He looked around and sniffed the air. There was an instability in the weather, moist, brisk, rich, with a seam of something unsettling and arousing, like a welcome but careless embrace; the taste of it was familiar, too, though for now he couldn’t tell why or how. It would come to him. Elena said,
‘Well I’m off the day after tomorrow. Sorry, mate, but there it is. I have to.’
After a couple of moments he made it clear that he would accept this without much further complaint. At the same time he dimly consoled himself with the thought of a night or two of snooker and poker (and perhaps a night of darts with Robinson).
She said, ‘Uh, how did it work itself out with Phoebe? You know. After you got back from your quid pro quo with Lily. Up north.’
‘Oh.’ They turned into Parkway and there across the road were the outdoor tables and the milk-bar lights of Pizza Express. ‘Oh, we got past it somehow.’
But now they were within (and he could see the back legs of Inez’s highchair just round the corner). There were greetings and hugs and kisses, and it was almost the same – almost the same as before.
‘Four Seasons, me,’ he said. ‘And you?’
‘American Hot,’ said Elena.
As he drifted in and out of the small talk, doing more gazing than listening, his thoughts gingerly and discontinuously returned, not to the night of shame with Phoebe but to what followed it: i.e., the month of shame with Phoebe. During that time he very closely resembled Humbert Humbert in Part Two of Lolita.*6 As you get older you can of course remember what you went and did
when you were younger; you can remember what you did. What you can’t remember is the temperature of the volition – of the I want. You can remember why you wanted what you wanted. But you can’t remember why you wanted it so much.
Their pizzas came, and while they ate Martin joined the conversation (a notably unstructured exchange about the dangers faced by somnambulists, especially those somnambulists who lived on aeroplanes, as Eliza planned one day to do). But it was not yet seven o’clock and he wasn’t hungry enough, so he made what progress he could with the house red before slipping outside for a smoke…
It had never bothered him, morally – what he thought of as the transactional phase or blip in his time with Phoebe. All the haggling and counterbidding was conducted in a febrile, giggly, not to say mildly hysterical spirit; it was comic relief from the gravity of a wrecked childhood, and somehow allowing them to move sideways – into their earthly paradise…Martin ground out his cigarette under his shoe and went back to watch the girls primly wallowing in their ice creams.
* * *
∗
‘I need to see the ruin,’ Elena said outside. The others had gone on a few yards ahead (Eliza shouldering her way through the wind). ‘I want to see what’s left.’
‘They say it stinks…There’s a couplet of Auden’s daubed all over the city. The unmentionable odour of death / Offends the September night. And it does smell of death, apparently. And of liquefied computers. Hitch says he took all his clothes straight to the cleaner’s.’
‘I want to feel the weight of what came down…’
He took her arm. ‘Are you going to write about it?’
‘Maybe.’ When Elena emphasised maybe on the first syllable, as here, she usually meant yes. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Walk me to the Zoo and back. Come on.’