by Amis, Martin
Late morning the following day…I asked,
‘Do you still believe in him, in it?’
‘I do. I find that I still do.’
We were on the deck, with our heavily spiced Virgin Marys (‘A good drink,’ said Saul, weighing his glass)…Although he seemed to me to be intact and entire, there were differences. In earlier times our sessions resembled the best and friendliest kind of one-on-one tutorial – where the subject would’ve been RI or RK, and R would’ve stood for Reality (and there was no category shift when we turned to Saul’s religious urges; they were part of his reality). The dialogue retained its slightly formal aspect but it was more like a panel or an ‘in conversation with’. And he was dreamier, noticeably dreamier; unaccustomed pauses opened up, and I found myself doing more and more of the talking.
‘It’s impossible to justify,’ he said. ‘But I still do…believe.’
‘Well it is uh, anomalous. “God’s veil over everything.” “Praise God – praise God.” Arresting to see that in a work of high modernism.’*6
Saul shrugged and smiled.
‘A religious frame of reference’, I persisted, ‘comes naturally to poetry. Religion and poetry feel somehow co-eternal, don’t you think? But the mainstream novel is a rational form…I think I know what you are, Saul. Technically. You’re not a theist. You don’t believe in a god that interferes with the world. You’re a deist. You believe in a supreme being that minds its own business.’
He said, ‘Is belief the right word? There’s no logical ground for it. Why should I do without proof in this one case? You reject scripture of course. You reject the idea that God writes books. Why would God write books? We write books.’
‘So what’s it look like, your supreme being?’ I waited. Then I stepped in and paraphrased a couple of sentences from Ravelstein. Which are: God appeared very early to me. In childhood. His hair was parted down the middle. I understood that we were related because he had made Adam in his image, breathed life into him. ‘I think that’s lovely, but…Does he still wear his hair like that?’
Head back, chin up, Saul laughed (uh, uh, uh) – as he did not only at all jokes (however feeble) but at all quotes from his work (however sombre).
‘I think,’ he said, ‘I think I was mingling him with my eldest brother. He wore his hair like that.’
‘Maury. Rest in peace.’
‘Those were early or primal impressions. And older brothers are as gods.’
‘They are, they are.’
‘God wouldn’t look like Maury. God wouldn’t look like anything we could imagine.’
‘Agreed. No Nobodaddy.’ Nobodaddy was William Blake’s unimprovable epithet for the sky-god of Christianity: the phantom patriarch. ‘And you, Saul, you still expect to re-encounter your father in the life to come…’
‘It’s not intellectually respectable, I know. It’s an archaism. All I have are these persistent intuitions. Call them love impulses. I can’t give up the feeling that I haven’t seen the last of my parents and my sister and my brothers…When I die they will be waiting for me. I don’t visualise any settings. And I don’t know what they’ll say. Very probably they’ll tell me things I badly need to know…It’s the power of early attachments. That’s all.’
Now Rosamund and Elena, trailed by a child or two, came out to tell us that there was food on the table.
‘We’re coming.’ And as I gathered my things I wanted to add, Saul. Go on doing what you’ve always done. Trust the child in you. Trust the ‘first heart’ (as you once put it). Continue to see the world with your ‘original eyes’. But all I said was, ‘Hey, Saul. What’s the difference between a Skoda and a Seventh-Day Adventist?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said expectantly.
‘You can close the door on a Seventh-Day Adventist.’
Back went the head, up went the chin…On the day my father died (in 1995) I rang Saul in Boston and told him the news. And we talked. And he told me what I badly needed to hear…He was never my ‘literary father’ (I already had one); and besides, he had his hands full with Gregory, Adam, and Daniel (and now Rosie). But I did say to him, a year or two later, ‘As long as you’re alive I’ll never feel completely fatherless.’ And after that, after Saul died, I would have – nobodaddy.
Laughter and the end of history
During lunch that day, at Elena’s urging, Saul sang ‘Just a Gigolo’ in his soft and persuasive baritone. And at breakfast he’d given us ‘K-K-K Katie’ and, with Rosamund’s equally pleasing harmonies, ‘You Are My Sunshine’. Like me at that time, Saul tended to wake up happy. Alzheimer’s would attack that happiness, and attack those harmonies. But not yet.
At some point in the afternoon I was sitting at the kitchen table with Rachael, Sharon, and Eliza; and Sharon was talking about her predecessor (as nanny to Rosie Bellow), saying,
‘And she seemed such a nice girl on the surface. Very sensible and responsible.’
‘Mm, I remember,’ said Rachael.
‘Very well brought up. No one dreamed she was such a…’ Sharon checked herself and glanced at the attentive Eliza. ‘No one dreamed she was such an ess el you tee.’
Eliza said, ‘Why was she a slut?’
This was followed by a rush of laughter (and a second rush, when I passed it on to the others)…English is ‘a beautiful language’, I would later be told at a dinner party in Switzerland by a group of European writers; and this surprised me. Italian is beautiful, Spanish is beautiful, French is beautiful, and I’m prepared to accept that even German is or can be jolie laide. But English? It is impressively advanced, I knew: no diacritical marks (no cedillas, no umlauts); ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘grammatical’ gender (cf. das Mädchen, where ‘girl’ is neuter); and an immense vocabulary.*7 Still, the thesaurus gets very thin when it comes to ‘amusement’; it is very hard, in English, to describe laughter.
Which you need to do when you write about Saul. With him, laughter was essentially communitarian; and perhaps this is why he liked all jokes, however weakly punsome (and however dirty). Jokes are invitations to laughter; so he liked all jokes, and liked belonging to a species that liked telling them.
* * *
—————
It was the cocktail hour, and I asked him, ‘Now what can I get you?’
One day in the late 1990s Saul was told that he shouldn’t drive any more – much resented, because he loved ‘the little princess’ (a recently acquired BMW). Not long afterwards he was told that he shouldn’t drink any more (Updike would be told the same thing when his time drew nearer). On the day of his arrival Saul asked for a small Scotch – comprehensively deserved, I thought. Tonight he asked for a glass of red wine, and he nursed it through dinner and beyond.
We ate outside. After about an hour the conversation was veering in a certain direction and I saw my chance, saying,
‘I want to tell you an anecdote about someone I hope to redeem in your eyes…You know who introduced me to your stuff, Saul? Without whom, perhaps, we wouldn’t be sitting here tonight, under the stars, under the m-moonlight? Hitchens. In about 1975 he said, “Take a look at this.” And gave me the red Penguin of Herzog.’
‘You’d’ve got there on your own,’ said Elena.
‘Yes, I would – but when? And why fritter your life away?’
Rosamund was still lightly bristling, but Saul said genially, ‘Tell your story.’
‘Well here’s what happened. He went to pick up a friend in the offices of Vanity Fair. And while he was waiting the photo editor staggered out of the darkroom, dropped his airbrush and his scalpel or whatever it was, sank into a chair, and said, That’s the biggest carve-down I’ve ever done in my entire life.’
‘What’s a carve-down?’
‘It’s when they’re trying to make somebody look less fat,’ I said. ‘And who was it? It was the much-maligned Monica Lewinsky…And Hitch had a r
ealisation. America spent a year on O. J. Simpson, and another year on Monica Lewinsky. “Politics”, said Hitch, “was once defined as ‘what’s going on’. And now there’s nothing going on.” He’s nostalgic for the Cold War. There’s nothing going on.’
Rosamund said, more leniently now, ‘What’s he miss about the Cold War?’
‘…He’s ubi sunt about the USSR. You know – where are they now? Where the utopian dream? Where the hard pure men like Lenin and Trotsky? But I think what he really misses is the debate. About an alternative to capitalism.’
‘Well I was caught up in that too,’ said Saul. ‘Being a Trot made you feel you had a role in world history. Aiming for something higher than mere Mammon.’
‘Exactly. Hitch loves America and he’s committed to America. But he also wants something higher – and he lives for struggle. He says, “All the piss and vinegar’s gone out of it.” He says he’s going to ease off politics and write more about literature.’
‘Uh-oh,’ said Elena.
And at last we did move on to Francis Fukuyama and his famous book.*8
‘History isn’t over,’ said Saul as we were beginning to move inside. ‘Though it sometimes seems that way…History is never over.’
When September 11 happened Saul couldn’t quite take it in. And soon, for him, history would indeed be over, in the sense that the past would be over, memory would be over. Laughter would be the last to go.
The convergence of the twain
One night there was an ultraviolent storm, many miles offshore (and reports of mountainous seas). What we saw of it – and how we all stood and stared – was economically evoked by Nabokov in Pale Fire: ‘distant spasms of silent lightning’…
For some reason it was just me and Saul on the beach the next day. We had devoted the morning to a tour of East Hampton, with Elena at the wheel: visits to what were once the studios of two painters, old friends, Jackson Pollock and Saul Steinberg. ‘You’d get there after breakfast, and he was already drunk,’ said Bellow of the former. As a celebrated artist in America, Steinberg was insulated by his Jewishness and lived a long life; but Pollock was a helpless goy from Wyoming, and died while driving under the influence at the age of forty-six…
Saul said, ‘Shall we swim?’
‘Oh I don’t know about that. Look at it. No – listen to it. But let’s get our feet wet.’
Now normally, after one of its tantrums, its hysterical debauches, the North Atlantic would present itself as the picture of eirenic innocence, orderly, almost prim (a storm? What storm?), its waves quite lofty perhaps but unfolding reliably and negotiably towards the strand. Not today.
From a distance it looked flattened, stunned, though its surface raced crazily sideways (as if in desperate search of something), and when we entered up to our shins, then our knees, and found that the sea was…hideously hungover – but not as a human would be, not diffident, taciturn, and self-absorbed. All undertow, it seethed and hissed with hatred and hostility, snarling, sucking its teeth, smacking its chops, as ravenous as wildfire.
The experience was oxymoronic: a thrilling and perilous paddle, with the bright water careening past and tugging at our calves. It was a sea that refused pointblank to be swum in, but for half an hour we unsteadily ploughed through it, marvelling and laughing at its vehemence…
I was the first to turn and make for the shore, with Saul following; and I didn’t see him go down. When I turned again he was flat on his back – in the shallowest shallows. He rose up. And he stood there and stared, stared out to sea. What was in that stare?…I moved to his flank and saw his face and his level eyes, which remained fixed. His eyes were eloquent of respect but also defiance and in themselves held an undertow of menace.
Saul never forgot a slight or an insult, and this ocean, as he would certainly admit, had just put him on his ass. If the Atlantic was a woman or a man, he could exact revenge by lousing it up in a novel. But the novels were over, like history.
All the same, during those two or three minutes it looked to me like a contest of equals. The sea was a force of nature. And so was Saul – so was Saul’s prose. A force of nature.
Home movie
The Amises returned to London on Labor Day, which in 2001 fell on September 3. On September 6 or 7, there was a screening of the home movie (directed and presented by Elena) about the Bellows’ visit to Long Island…That July I thought Saul was pretty much round and whole; but the camera, as all actors know, sees things that we don’t see.
As the film began I was utterly absorbed by an Amis, not a Bellow: namely Inez. How very far she had come since June, the time of Christopher’s stay: he couldn’t go near her without inspiring a squall of tears (‘Christ, how bad can it be?’ he asked, after his fifth attempt to home in on her)…In what we might call the pre-credit sequence, Inez sprinted naked from the sitting room to the garden, and then, methodically using her rump, scaled the two or three steps to the raised deck where I, Saul, Rosamund, and Elena were drinking coffee, every now and then visited by Eliza, Rosie, Catarina, Rachael, Sharon…How happily and busily Inez moved among us, and with what soft attentiveness she heeded parental warnings when she picked up something heavy or went too near the edge. At one point she reflexively steadied herself, placing a hand on Saul’s knee.*9 Saul’s knee, Saul’s eyes.
‘Look at his eyes,’ said Elena.
‘I am,’ I said.
…Schizophrenia typically strikes when the victim is eighteen or nineteen: that’s when the ‘voices’ start. But long before then the sufferer knows that something isn’t right. And this was Saul’s state, in July 2001. He could feel it coming on.
The home movie continued. Elena was priming him with general questions (‘I’m sorry, I’m interviewing you,’ she said), and Saul answered them with eloquence and ease. But his eyes weren’t right – busy, flickering, over-alert. It was as if he was staring into his own brain and wondering what it would do to him next.
Typhoon
‘Tell me,’ he asked for the fourth or fifth time, ‘how’re Nat and Gus?’
By now all my efforts were aimed at dissimulating misery. And as I made my mechanical reply, I was thinking that Saul, in preparation for our talk, might even have written it down: Ask about NAT and GUS…
He did indeed ask about Nat and Gus. And I can’t claim I wasn’t warned.
I had arrived at the Bellow residence in Brookline ahead of schedule, at about eleven o’clock; the housekeeper, Marie, let me in. Rosamund was out somewhere, and Saul was in his study upstairs, and Rosie was with her minder in the front room. Marie gave me a cup of coffee and I slipped out of the kitchen and into the back garden for a smoke…I was in town as a guest of Boston University, and my mission was to lead a seminar alongside Professor Bellow. The book under discussion would be Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line. And as I sipped and puffed under the chestnut tree I wondered how Saul would react to a novella that formidably and thunderously excoriated religious belief. He would not rise up in zealous defence of his own inklings – about these he was always sweet and meek…
A faint rattling noise from behind – Rosamund, having returned, was coming out to join me. Her movements seemed hurried, yet she paused, and with almost pantomimic thoroughness she closed, she sealed, the double-layered door. Sealed it for sound. And even then – after the usual hug (or perhaps not so usual, more urgent, more heat-seeking) – she whispered,
‘For this class – don’t expect too much from him.’ She said it almost entreatingly. ‘He can’t…’
I waited. And I remembered something she told me on the phone only a month or two ago: that one day when Saul was teaching he faltered (in mid-paragraph, in mid-sentence) and trailed off (‘And normally he’d be flying’), and he gave a sudden frown, as if feeling a palpable occlusion.
‘He can’t…’ Her eyes were downcast, directed at her shoes or the silky traces of April f
rost on the blades of grass. My stepmother lowered her head when she spoke. It was her dyed and parted hair I had to interpret (from The Bellarosa Connection). Except Rosamund’s parted hair was undyed and grew with tangly force. She was forty-four, I was fifty-three, Saul was eighty-seven. ‘He can’t read any more.’
‘What?’ And I took a step away from her, to keep my balance.
She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Each time he gets to the end of a sentence,’ she said, or mouthed, ‘he’s forgotten how the sentence began…’
A line from Herzog: Life couldn’t be as indecent as that. Could it?
And I thought incoherently of the times I’d found myself on the London tube without a book, or, worse, with a book but without glasses, or, worse still, with book and glasses but no light (power out) – but the book and the glasses will be found and the light will come back on, and I won’t be sitting in the dark with a book on my lap for the rest of my life.*10
…Saul appeared and we embraced and he drank his coffee. The car that would drive us to the lecture hall was due at three, so there was plenty of time for the two of us to move into the rear sitting room for our talk.
Two-forty, and Saul was trussed up in his parka near the front door, waiting (waiting for the driver’s knock), but just waiting. He had the Conrad under his arm; he wasn’t looking at it. I said,
‘Now why is your copy twice as thick as mine? May I?’ I took it on to my lap. ‘Ah. You’ve got The Shadow-Line but also Typhoon. That’s a wonderful pairing, don’t you think? Typhoon – the malevolence of the storm. And The Shadow-Line – the malevolence of the calm…D’you remember that sea in Long Island? The one that put you on your ass?’ He smiled but said nothing. ‘We were on the beach and we…’
And so I went on until the driver came. I had learnt my lesson.*11
There is something going on in the sky