by Amis, Martin
In 2005 I was the son of a dead writer, Kingsley (1922–95). I ought to have known better than anyone that writers survive their deaths. A sceptic might say that only their books survive; but their books were and are their lives, and this was most pointedly true of Saul, the master of the Higher Autobiography – the Life-Writer.
The table in that spacious kitchen had an additional strength and virtue: it featured stacks of Saul – the novels, the stories, the essays and reportage – and they were often consulted during the week-long wake. There was one especially intensive session involving Rosamund and me plus the critic–novelist James Wood and his wife, the novelist–critic Claire Messud, and when it was over I thought – yes, the trick really works. I felt as stimulated, as stretched, and as satisfied as I used to feel after a long evening with Saul.*3 I hoped and trusted that Rosamund felt as I did. This transfusion from the afterlife of words must surely hasten another of the projects of grief: finding the space to step back, to step back and see the whole man (and in his fullest vigour), rather than simply the poor bare forked creature under your care, confused by the struggle to complete his allowance of reality.
‘I didn’t know what to expect,’ said Eugene Goodheart (literary theorist and the author of Confessions of a Secular Jew). ‘Would Saul be awake? Would he recognise me? So I decided to be brusque. I marched in there and…Saul was fully conscious and he looked – meditative, on that raised bed.*4 I even felt I might be disturbing his train of thought. Anyway I kept to my plan.’
Eugene: ‘Well, Bellow – what have you got to say for yourself?’
Saul: ‘…Well, Gene, it’s like this. I’ve been wondering. Wondering, Which is it? Is it, There goes a man? Or is it, There goes a jerk?’
Eugene (firmly): ‘There goes a man.’
‘Which was the right answer,’ I said. ‘If he’d asked me that…’ If he’d asked me that, I would’ve honestly (and I now see romantically) added, Saul, don’t worry about a thing. You never put a foot wrong.
But I also took note. In the end, it’s not your Nobel Prize you’re thinking of, it’s not your three National Book Awards, and all that. It’s your sins of the heart (real or imagined), it’s your wives, your children, and how things went with them.
* * *
∗
Saul’s last day on earth.
I heard about it from each of the three witnesses, Rosamund, Maria (the sweet-looking but incredibly strong Latina maid, who used to gird her spine, reach out her arms, and carry the forward-facing Bellow to the top of the stairs), and also from the devoted and indispensable factotum, Will Lautzenheiser.
That morning Saul woke up believing he was in transit – on a ship, perhaps? ‘He didn’t really know who I was,’ said Will. Saul wanted nothing to eat or drink (he was perhaps observing the traditional fast of the moribund – abstinence, with a garnish of penitence). Then he went back to sleep, or rejoined the light coma which, in his final weeks, patiently shadowed him. Time passed. His breathing became slow and effortful. Rosamund had an hour alone with him, and when the others came back into the room she was stroking his head, and she was talking to him, saying, ‘It’s okay, my baby, it’s okay.’ Saul opened his eyes and gazed at her in awe, a gaze from the heart, an ardent gaze; and then he died.
…When the last day began Saul thought he was at sea on a transatlantic voyage. That was a venture, that was a crossing, of about the right size – the mighty waters, the great deeps, the unknowable doldrums and tormentas.
* * *
—————
Spring now reverted to fall, but Uruguay had largely regained its confidence and colour. Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires, used to imagine Uruguay as an Elysian Field where hard-pressed Argentinians, on expiration, were transformed into angels; they could then unobtrusively hobnob with the angels that were already in residence…Still, to my eyes, something was missing, something wasn’t there.
In the mid-period novella Him With His Foot in His Mouth Bellow’s elderly (and unnamed) narrator is languishing in British Columbia as he awaits extradition to Chicago – the fallguy for financial crimes committed by his family. Meanwhile there is no one to talk to except the landlady, Mrs Gracewell, a widowed mystic who likes to expatiate on Divinity:
The Divine Spirit, she tells me, has withdrawn in our time from the outer, visible world. You can see what it once wrought, you are surrounded by its created forms. But although natural processes continue, Divinity has absented itself. The wrought work is brightly divine but Divinity is not now active within it. The world’s grandeur is fading. And this is our human setting…
Well, that was how the world looked to me, when I was reinstalled in José Ignacio. The world was merely itself, for now, and had to get along without Saul Bellow – who had worked so fervently ‘to bring back the light that has gone from these molded likenesses’.
*1 No, it wasn’t unexpected. Saul’s ebbing was twofold, first the mind, then the body. For the past year he had been increasingly unmoored in time. As an eerie consequence of this, he was freshly devastated, bereaved again and again, by the deaths of contemporaries who had already predeceased him, for example his soulmate Allan Bloom (d. 1992) and his sister Jane (d. 2003). All the dead were in his custody, and he couldn’t let them go…He was unmoored in space, too, wondering where he was (on a train, on a boat?), and mistaking his own bedroom for a hotel (‘I want to check out. Give me ten dollars and get me out of here’)…The somatic trajectory was more conventional, marked by pneumonias, falls, a series of minor strokes, followed by difficulty in swallowing, then in breathing. He slept much of the time, but his death receptors were just waking up.
*2 I thought this gesture – the handful of dust – was both dignified and intimate. Almost at once several different mourners sought to amuse me with a deflating explanation: Roth did it that way to spare his bad back. Well, if you like. It was also said that Roth spent the occasion gaping (and stumbling) with grief. To me he looked sombre but also humorous – his usual disposition…After a death, as Zachary Leader notes in the second volume of his definitive Life of Saul Bellow, there is a short pause and then the world floods back in ‘with its animosities, anxieties, importunities’ – and its long-cherished resentments. Leader takes us through them, with their strange instances of cattiness and scepticism. Unsensed by me at the time, many grievances (amatory and literary) were reopened at the graveside (funerals no doubt have a way of encouraging recrudescences); but all the second-hand and unworthy rancour, I bet, was confined to its natural home – the periphery.
*3 Perhaps recalling Adam Bellow at the graveside (and his involuntary aria of tearful distress), I read out the last paragraph of ‘A Silver Dish’, a story that describes a very singular parting of father and son. The father, Pop, is an ancient Chicago grifter (and ‘consistently a terrible little man’); Woody, ‘practical, physical, healthy-minded, and experienced’, is his remarkably – even perversely – loving son…I think it may be the best thing in all Bellow: ‘After a time, Pop’s resistance ended. He subsided and
subsided. He rested against his son, his small body curled there. Nurses came and looked. They disapproved, but Woody, who couldn’t spare a hand to wave them out, motioned with his head toward the door. Pop, whom Woody thought he had stilled, had only found a better way to get around him. Loss of heat was the way he did it. His heat was leaving him. As can happen with small animals while you hold them in your hand. Woody presently felt him cooling. Then, as Woody did his best to restrain him, and thought he was succeeding, Pop divided himself. And when he was separated from his warmth, he slipped into death. And there was his elderly, large, muscular son, still holding and pressing him when there was nothing anymore to press. You could never pin down that self-willed man. When he was ready to make his move, he made it – always on his own terms. And always, always, something up his sleeve. That was how he was.’
*4 I h
ad an audience with Saul in the same setting in 2003, where I read out a piece I’d written for the Atlantic. Its argument was that Saul was the greatest American novelist. ‘What should he fear?’ I quoted. ‘The melodramatic formularies of Hawthorne? The multitudinous facetiousness of Melville? The murkily iterative menace of Faulkner? No. The only American who gives Bellow any serious trouble is Henry James.’ Up to this point I still wasn’t sure Saul was listening (rather than sleeping). But now his head jolted on the pillow and he said, ‘Jesus Christ!’
The Essayist
December 2011
In ‘that sullen hall’ which Owen calls ‘Hell’, the dead soldier from England listens as his ‘strange friend’ – the dead soldier from Germany – explores certain memories and regrets (‘For by my glee might many men have laughed, / And of my weeping something had been left, / Which must die now’), and speaks of war and ‘the pity of war’. Finally ‘that other’ gently confronts the poet with a grievous revelation:
‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried, but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now…’*
Sleep – death’s brother…Wilfred Owen was killed in action soon after dawn on November 4. He was twenty-five, like Keats, and already, like Keats, a poet of Shakespearean pith. His mother Susan – who was Wilfred’s one essential intimate – received the telegram while all the bells of Salisbury were wagging and tumbling in celebration of Armistice Day – November 11, 1918.
* * *
—————
At noon on December 15, 2011, as I walked out into the enclosed forecourt of Bush Intercontinental (its low roof dripping with the tepid sweat of cars), Michael Z was as usual waiting for me. He had a book spread flat against the steering wheel, and he started like a guilty thing when I tapped lightly on the glass.
I got aboard and as usual we embraced. Then he straightened up.
‘…This is a dreadful thing to have to tell you, Martin,’ he said. ‘But basically it’s all over.’
Come here about me, you my Myrmidons…I had a sensation of nakedness, including a sensation of cold. That lasted for three or four seconds. Then I managed to lose myself in a finical linguistic question prompted by Salman’s email a day or two ago, addressed to Elena, in which he asked her, ‘Is it true that Christopher has died?’ Not ‘is dead’, I noticed, but the slightly softer ‘has died’. Slightly softer? Actually very much softer; there seems to be an inherent metrical stress on the word dead, imparting something decisive: not a process but a fact…Elena wrote back, saying it wasn’t true, he hadn’t died. But that was a day or two ago.
The car moved through the Houston suburbs (Christopher, now, was sleeping, deeply, and wasn’t expected to reawake) and as we drove the slowly melting igloo I’d been living in – the one with its name, Hope (or Denial), on a little plaque just above the entry tube – turned to slush. Come here about me was a summons: to my myrmidons, my praetorian guard of hormones and chemicals. That was my strategy, it turned out – blind negation, followed by clinical shock.
‘I was up there this morning,’ said Michael. Now we were in the different forecourt, under the shadow of the high-rise. ‘So I won’t…I think I’ll just go home.’
After a moment I said, ‘Yes, go home and be with Nina. How is Nina?’
‘The truth is we’re both very numb.’
Numb was something I understood. It seemed I was almost legless with internal sedatives and painkillers, but I was awake, I was above all alive, and I got out of the car and I walked into MD Anderson.
* * *
—————
Christopher was lying on his back with his head at an angle, his face averted, his eyes closed. I went straight to him and kissed his cheek and said in his ear, ‘Hitch, it’s Mart, and I’m at your side.’ His lashes, his eyelids, didn’t flicker…When after a minute I turned, I saw that there were seven others in the room. I registered them one by one: Blue, Blue’s father Edwin, Blue’s cousin Keith, Blue’s daughter Antonia, Christopher’s other children, Alexander and Sophia, and Blue’s very old friend Steve Wasserman. No doctors, no nurses: help from that quarter was at an end. The death-adoring flies, too, had sizzled off elsewhere; their work done, they had moved on elsewhere, they had moved on to another bed in another room.
And so had Christopher – because this wasn’t the familiar wardlet on the eighth floor. His possessions were there, half stowed or half packed, but this wasn’t the billet of an active being, no books or papers, no keyboard on the meal tray, no work in progress. A halfway house, a waiting room.
I quite soon realised what it was we were there to do. So I went round quietly greeting everyone, took a chair, folded my arms, and joined the death watch.
How young and handsome he was. How calmingly young and handsome. He looked like a thinker, a hard thinker, taking a brief rest, his neck bent back – to ease the strain of prolonged and testing meditations…Now reason slept, now the sleep of reason; he looked like Keats on his white bedding in Rome; he looked twenty-five.
From what Michael Z had said (and what Blue had let slip), I was beginning to understand. The disease that Christopher’s death would cure was not the emperor of all maladies, cancer; it was instead ‘the old man’s friend’–that old tramp, pneumonia. Yes, yet another hospital infection (his fourth, his fifth?), and for this particular bout he had waived all remedy.
Entirely typically, it had always been Christopher’s intention ‘to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense, and to be there and look it in the eye’ (‘wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span’). Had it worked? Had he, in some sense, already done the dying?
Well, he was insensible now, he was oblivious now. Which, I supposed, was a necessary condition for any death watch. How could it be effected otherwise? You could watch death come, but you couldn’t watch your own death watch. Not even Christopher would contemplate something so terrible…
Indeed, his eyes were closed and his face averted, as if to make doubly sure he wouldn’t see us all gathered there – all those faces that would soon conclusively disappear.
* * *
—————
‘[H]e gradually sank into death,’ wrote Joseph Severn, the portraitist, ‘so quiet, that I still thought he slept.’
There he lay…
Two hours had churned by, and we sat in place like art students in class, sizing up a model.
…Not long before I was born my teenage mother used to ‘sit’ at the Ruskin in Oxford. She told me that she passed the hours by ‘pretending to be dead’ – not that she felt at all embarrassed or uncomfortable (she regularly posed nude); no, she relayed the information just to equip me with a trick, or a spell, to make time go fast.
There were muted comments and whispered asides – but nothing that resembled conversation; every now and then one or other of us stealthily and briefly slipped away, to go to the bathroom, to make a phone call, to stretch the legs, to taste some variation in the air…
Around seven I had a smoke with Blue, out in the dusty shrubbery. She struck me as someone quite different from the woman I knew, decidedly reserved or even bashful, but neutrally and unaffectedly so, as if that was her real nature, and all the forthright liveliness I was used to merely belonged to an absent twin.
Days earlier, she told me, Christopher was as usual being prodded and tested and shifted and hoisted, and he said (in a very forceful tone), ‘That’s enough. No more treatment now. Now I want to die.’ He had run out of dry land, and recognised that the time had properly come to make the crossing. These weren’t his last words, not in any formal sense; his last words were a day or two away…
In Houston, even in the winter m
onths, the diurnal temperature seldom drops below sixty-five. Before us, before Blue and me, stretched a fine December evening, and one that looked set to last till midnight…We hurried back up and took our places, as in a gallery or a playhouse, to gaze at a portrait or a motionless mime.
Blue had spoken about Christopher’s coming end dispassionately, almost dismissively. She was getting through it by pretending to be cold.
There was another presence at the death watch, inorganic and at first unregarded, but by now wholly dominant – the point at which all our stares converged.
It was the tall contraption glowering over the far right-hand corner of the bed, and it looked like the innards of an elderly robot, a Bakelite and metal organ tree (stickled together, it seemed, at Crazy Eddie’s discount store): lit-up computer screens, mobile phones, clock radios, pocket calculators, walkie-talkies – each of them heaped one on top of the other, and then studiously titivated, here at MDA, with sacs and vials of nutrients and medicaments. Blood-red, sharp-shouldered digits flashed out their readings.
At eight the blood pressure said 120/80. At nine it said 105/65. It kept on going down.
…Nineteen months ago, when all this began, I used to think, with fearful anticipation, of Auden’s Icarus: ‘the splash, the forsaken cry…Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky’. But now the moment had come I thought of Eliot’s Christ-figure (in ‘Preludes’): ‘I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling: / The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.’