by Amis, Martin
Saul (b. 1915) was always known to wield exceptional powers of recall.
Mnemosyne operations got under way when he was two – so perhaps he remembered his dealings with the non-disposable nappies of World War I; certainly, his retrievals from 1917 have been corroborated by relatives. ‘Herzog persecuted everyone with his memory. It was like a terrible engine.’ And again: ‘all the dead and mad are in my custody, and I am the nemesis of the would-be forgotten.’
How was the engine now, in 2002/3/4? Its short-term capabilities, as we have seen, were much reduced. Nevertheless he could still sometimes make contact with the long-ago. It was as if, in the sea cave of his brain, there were ledges and air pockets that the waters hadn’t yet breached. Yesterday night (for instance) he had given us a fascinating twenty minutes on the Norwegian writer and fascist Knut Hamsun, an influential admirer of the Third Reich who (via Goebbels) managed to bring about a (disastrous) tête-à-tête with Hitler.*2
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Saul and I were drinking tea on the deck of the nearby hotel – reminding me of the time, just a couple of years ago, when we had resumed our ongoing talks about deism and the supernatural and the life to come…Now, in my one-on-one sessions with Saul, I was testing the uses of silence. If his memory could no longer get him through a written sentence, then concerted duologue (I reckoned) must surely be a torment. It felt as though it didn’t fit, this silence; but by sharing in the unnatural constraint I could join him in his vacancy. We sat side by side, staring out; his visage was illegible, but every minute or so it gave a punctual flinch…He never had ‘the lion face’, as gerontologists call it: that top-of-the-food-chain impassivity. Saul always seemed to be thinking, or trying to.
Torment. And rage. I was remembering Rosamund’s words in the kitchen; and remembering the look in her eyes – one never seen before. I thought it was a look of terminal exasperation (which it wasn’t, not exactly), and it frightened me, because if Rosamund – savagely protective, barbarically loyal Rosamund – was weakening…Rage, she said. I never witnessed any of that, not once, though I knew it to be ever-present in him. Herzog again, with his ‘angry heart’.
If Saul consulted his long-term memory, there were good reasons to be furious, reasons both avocational*3 and romantic. Five marriages meant four divorces; I had been divorced once, and I weakly attempted to quadruple that alp-weight of pain, emotional violence, and above all failure. And to persist, to persist, to try again in the face of so much disappointment. With Rosamund the disappointment was solved and salved; she represented the triumph of innocence over experience. So why was this rage of his directed at her? Of all people – her.
Now I turned, and poured more tea from the pot, Saul assenting with a quarter-smile and a tolerant grunt; words of mild approbation were exchanged about the weather…Did his mood have something to do with hurt intelligence, with intellectual hurt? Was he thinking, Why am I just listening all the time, and not talking? Why am I following the conversation (with difficulty) and not leading it? And if you went back a way: his brothers – Samuel possibly, Maury certainly – and his father and almost everybody else in Chicago despised his type of intelligence; but his type of intelligence proved to be at least as effective (and far more remarkable) than theirs – and that includes you, Maury, and never mind your ‘suburban dukedom’ and your 300 suits. And now Saul, the lone survivor, was met by a design flaw, manifesting itself from within. Did it hurt? Was it a negative tingle in the brain? Did it itch? Couldn’t we depend on the Murdoch Law, as promulgated by John Bayley? Every new incapacity diminishes the awareness of loss…
I gave it up, I disembarked from this train of thought (and actually I was getting it all wrong, because I couldn’t free myself from the linear world of sequiturs), I gave it up and directed my citified, my townie eyes to the scene spread out in front of us. New England, or the New England I was used to (Connecticut, Long Island), had a beauty-parlour sheen to it, freshly primped and pared; but Vermont always looked as though it had just woken up and climbed out of bed, tousled, balding, indigent, guileless, and here before me were the crazy fairy queens of the trees sprouting up at all angles from the green and flaxen luminescence, and the minutely pullulating carpet meadow. Yes, the bumpy flatland seemed to writhe and live, and I lost myself in it to such effect that I re-experienced – or helplessly flashed back to – the least disastrous of the four or five acid trips I took during my second summer at university, when I was turning twenty-one.
‘Time to go?’ I said (apart from anything else I wanted a drink). Saul nodded.
He was the one who looked at nature as an established mystic and scholar, who sensed God’s veil over everything, who could give names to the things I saw, the shagbark hickory, and all that. And I liked to think he still sensed it. Saul got to his feet smoothly with no tremors or winces; he never lost his bodily solidity; mentally absent, he was physically present, warmly, influentially present…
‘I have invented a new genre,’ said Isaac Babel, to his writer friends in Stalin’s USSR, ‘– that of silence.’ A good remark and a good idea, though it didn’t save him. Of another writer, Boris Pasternak, Stalin said, ‘Do not touch this cloud dweller.’ Like Babel, Bellow was a Jew and a Trotskyite. But now you would look at him and say to yourself, No. Do not touch this cloud dweller.
Wandering off
A textbook hazard of advanced dementia is something called ‘wandering off’. This is not a reference to the sufferers’ conversational style. Wandering off means going missing; it means escape.
Iris wandered off. She was usually to be found in a neighbour’s garden, says Professor Bayley in Iris and the Friends, or patrolling the familiar stretch of pavement opposite the house.*4 One day – this was easily the most dramatic instance – she burst through the unattended front door and disappeared for two hours (the police were called); eventually she was spotted by a vigilant academic in the far precincts of North Oxford…Now North Oxford is a quaintly prelapsarian Toytown, but streets are streets and cars are cars. A family friend ‘happened to see her – nearly at the top of Woodstock Road’, writes Bayley tensely (and many well-disposed readers will regret that he suppressed an exclamation mark).
When Saul wandered off, one time, he didn’t just go for a stroll and a potter around Crowninshield Road. After all, he was an American; he had absorbed the principles of mobility and self-reliance. So he took a cab to the airport and got on a plane. I was reminded of this incident out in Vermont when Saul’s secretary, a handsome and humorous BU graduate (cheerful, head-in-air) called Will Lautzenheiser, made one of his regular runs from Boston to bring the mail and a thick wedge of invitations and requests. He had been the point man when Saul went missing.
Will spent his couple of hours with Saul, and everyone had lunch, and then I walked him out to his car. We had met several times before and I always thought how lucky the Bellows were to have found such a congenial Boy Friday. Will was a hardened Joycean, by the way, with an unfeigned appetite for the avant-garde; he would save up and travel great distances to attend, say, a futuristic mime in Los Angeles or an atonal opera in Austin. I particularly liked Will’s attitude to his job and to his charge. It’s as if I’m making life a bit easier for Shakespeare, he told me. You’re proud to get the chance to do it. I now said in the driveway,
‘Rosamund described it to me but I’m hazy on the…Saul flew from Boston to New York – is that right?’
‘No. He flew from Toronto to Boston. He attempted to fly to New York – he bought a ticket to New York, he thought he was still living there. But he must’ve realised his mistake, or they…’
‘Mm, you have to do a lot of talking to get in and out of Canada. Customs, Immigration. Maybe they put him right. Wait. When did it happen?’
It happened surprisingly long ago: August 2001 (just after the visit to East Hampton and just before September 11). Saul had gone with Rosamund to Toront
o, where she was speaking at a conference on Under Western Eyes (Conrad’s second consecutive novel about terrorism, following The Secret Agent). They brought Rosie with them, counting on the support of two very capable Torontoans, Harvey and Sonya Friedman, Rosamund’s parents.
‘So where exactly did Saul do a runner from?’
‘The hotel. They were going to pick him up for dinner, but he checked himself out and…That night I got home late.’ That night Will had characteristically sat through a six-hour screening of Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom. ‘There was a message from Saul saying he was on his way in from Logan. Astounding.’
‘Yes he was uh, very bold.’
‘Very bold.’
And we laughed, shaking our heads.
‘It did seem kind of funny once we knew he was safe. When I called Rosamund in Toronto she was beside herself. The police were out. I was beside myself.’
And Will, I bore in mind, had a twin…He sprinted the mile to Crowninshield Road. Saul was there, tired, calm, lucid, and mainly just sad and anxious.
‘He thought Rosamund was about to leave him.’
‘…You’re kidding.’
‘I told him no, no, Rosamund loves you. And he said, Well that’s what I’ve always thought. But I’m not sure. I’m not sure today.’
‘He doubted Rosamund…Well he’s getting things wrong. Like he thought he lived in New York. He’s getting big things wrong.’
‘Yeah, he is.’ Will opened the car door, saying, ‘That night he talked on the phone with an old friend, who reassured him. So I got him to bed. And I stayed over.’
‘Good for you.’
In Will climbed. I told him to take care and I waved as he reversed into the lane.*5 For a while I stood on the drive, tangentially wondering if Saul, when he arrived at Toronto International, had asked for a ticket to Idlewild, which was what Herzog and everybody else called it, back in 1960.
Idlewild. There was much to admire in that name, that word. I always thought it derived from a flower, but it was just an inheritance from Idlewild Beach Golf Course, on which New York’s main airport was built in 1947 (to be rechristened JFK in 1963). ‘Idlewild’ is a familiar American place-name – there’s one in Michigan – but its origin is obscure. Some say it comes from a proverb or ditty: ‘idle men and wild women’…
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Rosamund said, ‘He keeps accusing me. Accusing me of…’
We were taking a turn in the garden (Eliza was up the slope and busy on the swing).
‘He keeps thinking I’m…’
The Alzheimer’s literature alerts relatives and carers to the sort of behaviour, or behaviours, considered ‘inappropriate’.*6 There are also pages and pages about infuriated (and of course delusive) sexual jealousy, among other concomitants. So I wasn’t completely astounded to learn the following: Saul was under the impression that Rosamund was interesting herself in other men.
‘Ah – poor you,’ I said. ‘How very awful.’ I clenched my eyes shut and groaned. And poor him, too. ‘I know this is asking a lot but you mustn’t take it personally. It’s just a symptom.’ Was that any better? Saul deindividualised, lost in a mess of symptoms and syndromes? I said feebly, ‘It’s like Elena’s mother. She wakes up every day thinking she’s been robbed in the night.’
‘He doesn’t think that.’
‘No, but he does think this.’
Again her frown, her defeated look. There was hurt in it all right, and lost patience. And another element, I saw: a self-accusing reassessment of her own strength. She believed she was up to it; now, facing daily insult and (truly definitive) injustice, she was wondering if that was true.
‘With the sexual stuff, when it recrudesces like this…You know it could be worse.’ What kind of comfort was that? And besides – it could very well get worse all by itself…I thought of the advice offered in the Alzheimer’s updates and downloads. In a case I’d read about, where the husband was wandering around half naked and fondling himself, the wife was told to learn how to distract and redirect him to more appropriate activities. Would that work on Saul? I said, ‘Well, the doctors do tell you to try not to bridle. And not to argue the point. Just make a simple statement to the contrary…Interested in other men. What men? Which men?’
‘The old guy fixing the roof. The fat kid delivering the groceries.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I know.’ She frowned sadly. ‘It’s never with anyone nice.’
Literature and madness
Saul’s affliction, his variant of dementia, was officially listed as a ‘mental illness’ – provoking great disgust among health professionals (mainly because it complicates the stigma). But Alzheimer’s does have an organic cause, distinguishing it from neurosis (which is inorganic and doesn’t involve a ‘radical’ loss of touch with reality). Like schizophrenia and like manic depression, Alzheimer’s (like religion) tends to involve a passionate belief in things that aren’t there.
Psychologists can do practically nothing with organic insanity (except give it drugs); and writers – perhaps not entirely noncoincidentally – can’t do much with it either. Neuroses, compulsions, repressions, and especially obsessions are the bread and butter, the meat and drink, of fiction. But it may be that organic insanity – like dreams, like religion, like sex – is fundamentally impervious to literary art.*7 Among writers there is one great exception – indeed, we might as well call him the Great Exception, the Singularity. As Matthew Arnold announces in the first line of his short poem, ‘Shakespeare’: ‘Others abide our question. Thou art free.’
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‘Internally, in itself, madness is an artistic desert. Nothing of any general interest can be said about it. But the effect it has on the world outside it can be very interesting indeed. It has no other valid literary use. [The subject of my book] was just how well or, mostly, how badly writers have described madness.*8
‘Shakespeare got it right. Lear, of course. Cerebral atherosclerosis, a senile organic disease of the brain. Periods of mania followed by amnesia. Rational episodes marked by great dread of the renewed onset of mania. That way madness lies – let me shun that – no more of that.
‘Perhaps even more striking – Ophelia. In fact it’s such a good description that this subdivision of schizophrenia is known as the Ophelia Syndrome even to those many psychiatrists who have never seen or read the play. It’s very thoroughly set up – young girl of meek disposition, no mother, no sister, the brother she depends on not available, lover apparently gone mad, mad enough anyway to kill her father. Entirely characteristic that a girl with her kind of upbringing should go round spouting little giggling harmless obscenities when mad.
‘The play’s full of interesting remarks about madness. Polonius. You remember he has a chat with Hamlet, the fishmonger conversation, and is made a fool of – the very model of a dialogue between stupid questioner and clever madman as seen by that, er, that unusual person R. D. Laing. Polonius says, I will take my leave of you, my lord. And Hamlet says, You cannot take from me anything I would more willingly part withal, except my life, except my life.
‘Very clever, very droll. But actually Hamlet’s only pretending to be mad, isn’t he. Polonius gets halfway to the point. How pregnant sometimes his replies are, he says, a happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of – as it happens, a remarkably twentieth-century view. Hamlet in general very cleverly behaves in a way that people who’ve never seen a madman, a madman fresh and unmedicated, expect a madman to behave.
‘In my view, though, Polonius is a rather underrated fellow. Earlier in the same scene he comes up with a very good definition of madness, not a complete definition, but an essential part of it, excluding north-north-west madness. He says, To define true madness, what is it but to be nothing e
lse but mad?’*9
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Saul was never close to that, not remotely (though Iris was close by the end). In any case the tragic hero Saul resembled during this phase of his was of course Othello. Wild imaginings (‘Goats and monkeys!’), but imaginings skilfully conjured up by a third party – Iago. And Saul’s Iago was an Iago of the mind.
Why does Iago destroy Othello, what is his ‘motive’? He has none. He invents grievances (Othello has thwarted my rise to the officer class, Othello has slept with my wife), but these are flimsy pretexts. He is like Claggart in Billy Budd (a very conscious iteration of the theme of motiveless malice). Iago allows us a brief glimpse of the truth when he talks, not about Othello, but about the bland prettyboy Cassio: ‘He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly.’ And this is why Claggart destroys Billy, the Handsome Sailor. The two destroyers are vandals; they vandalise beautiful souls.
And dementia is the vandal within. You cannot reason with it or distract it or soften it. All you can do is hate it. In Othello the most telling verdict on Iago belongs not to the Moor or to Desdemona or even to the keenly perceptive Emilia. It belongs to the well-gulled fop, Roderigo. These are his last words, addressed to the murderer crouching over him with the blade: ‘O, damned Iago. O, inhuman dog.’
And that’s what I say to Dr Alois Alzheimer.
O, damned Alois. O, inhuman dog.
’Tis the god Hercules
The night before we left he gave us an aural pen portrait of John Berryman. In 1972 Saul wrote a farewell address to John Berryman and the words were still in him (though when I later reread ‘John Berryman’ I found that the dinner-table version included many newly surfaced memories and details). Then we exchanged quotes and there were a couple of short readings from Dream Songs.