by Amis, Martin
I have a third and, I think, final reason for impregnable self-satisfaction — though more may yet occur to me. Whereas other speakers at this conference are addressing themselves to themes and structures, to literary correspondences and genealogies, existentialism, authenticity, percussive nouns and whatnot, all I've got to do is tell a story.
*In Philip Larkin: A 'Writer's Life Andrew Motion says of the title of Larkin's first mature collection, The Less Deceived: 'The phrase stands on its head Ophelia's remark in Hamlet that she is "more deceived" than the Prince.' I think this is wrong. Ophelia doesn't mean that she is more deceived than Hamlet ('I was the more deceived'). She means that she is more deceived than she was formerly - or more deceived than she thought she was. The poem in which the title phrase occurs, 'Deceptions', makes a comparison ('you were less deceived . . . Than he was'), but the title itself refers to comparison and degree ('very much undeceived' as well as 'less deceived than most'). In any case it suggests a turning away from Ophelia's world of love and risk - and rawness, raggedness, insanity, dissolution. Larkin wasn't going to have any of that.
It is a love story, but a modern one. 'Modern': what has Bellow done to that word? In Bellow, modern now conies with its own special static, its own humiliating helplessness, its own unbearable agitation . . . We begin with a conversation between the book's two main actors, Kenneth Trachtenberg, the narrator, an Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, and his colleague and uncle, Benno, Benn Grader, the distinguished botanist, who specialises in the anatomy and morphology of plants (a plant 'clairvoyant', 'mystic' and 'telepathic', as he is variously styled). The two men love two women but they also love each other: it is a 'devouring' friendship; they are central to each other's lives. As the novel opens Benn is in crisis. We see how things are going to be on the first page, when Benn draws Kenneth's attention to a Charles Addams cartoon which has come to obsess him:
A pair of lovers was its subject — the usual depraved-desolate couple in a typical setting of tombstones and yews. The man was brutal-looking and the long-haired woman (I think the fans call her Morticia) wore a witch's gown. The two sat on a cemetery bench holding hands. The caption was simple:
'Are you unhappy, darling?'
'Oh yes, yes! Completely.'
Kenneth is the younger by a couple of decades but he is by far the more worldly, with his Parisian, UNESCO, Euroculture background. On the other hand, everyone is more worldly than Benn. Kenneth has long hair, a 'Jesusy' look, like 'a figure in a sketch, somewhere between Cruik-shank and Rembrandt - skinny, long-faced, sallow and greenish (reflections from a Dutch canal). Modern life, if you take it to heart, wears you out . . .' Benn, for his part, has 'cobalt-blue' eyes and 'a face like the moon before we landed on it'. For Kenneth, Benn has 'the magics', a charismatic soul, purity, innocence; and it is these qualities that Kenneth has come to America to protect, 'to preserve Benn in his valuable oddity'. He has also come to America because America is 'where the action is', the real modern action; it is where modernity is.
This is Benn's trouble. After fifteen years as a widower-bachelor he has remarried. The second wife is 'more beautiful, more difficult, more of a torment'. What was he after? 'Two human beings bound together in love and kindness' — a universal human aim, as Kenneth concedes: 'In the West, anyway, people are still trying to do it, rounding off the multitude of benefits they enjoy.' Benn's attitude is of course not so brisk. He is, or was, infatuated, 'carried away by unreasoning passion' (that is the second dictionary definition of infatuation, the first being 'made foolish'). Kenneth is doubly sceptical. Benn got married on the sly, while Kenneth was away; he hadn't cleared it with Kenneth, and he damn well should have done. Benn 'had the magics, but as a mainstream manager he was nowhere'. Kenneth has always aspired to be Benn's mainstream manager, his modernity intermediary. And he has always felt that Benn had the love potential, 'he actually could fall in love', he was a strong candidate for love in 'a classic form'. To put it at its lowest (which is still pretty high these days), 'he was a man who really did have something to do — other than trouble others, which seems to be what so many of us are here for, exclusively.'
As the veteran Bellow-reader would by now expect, the full picture takes some time to emerge; it is a case of one step forward two steps back, with each sortie into the present demanding elaborate legitimisation from the past. While omens gather, we first review Benn's erotic career, and the usual modern spectacle: 'the best people are always knee-deep in the garbage of "personal life", to the gratification of the vulgar'. Or again: 'the private life is almost always a bouquet of sores with a garnish of trivialities or downright trash.' And here is Ben, 'dredged in floury relationships by ladies who could fry him like a fish if they had a mind to'. There was Caroline Bunge, the department-store heiress, the Valium queen, who, when Benn rushes to meet her at the airport, walks straight past him without blinking: 'Being on mood pills was 100 per cent contemporary. If you aren't up-to-the-moment you aren't altogether real. But crazies are always contemporary, as sandpipers always run ahead of the foam line on the beaches.' There was Delia Bedell, another contemporary personage. Having learnt from TV and the magazines that it's okay for the lady to take the initiative, she comes down from the apartment above and submits Benn to a matter-of-fact seduction. She practically debags him. Thereafter she haunts his front door crying, 'What am I supposed to do with my sexuality?' Benn slides into these things out of politeness (and 'politeness gets funnier the more the rules of order disintegrate'). He gets out of them less decorously: he does a runner, or a flyer, jetting off to Brazil, Japan, Antarctica, anywhere. 'He flies around, but his thought lag is such — I refer to the gap between his personal interests and the passions of contemporary life - that he might as well be circling the Dead Sea on a donkey.' Benn is not an old-fashioned figure, he is an eternal figure; he has innocence, and we all know what modernity will do with that. Innocence is a claim to immunity, and there is no immunity any more; modernity makes no exceptions. 'Towards the end of your life,' says Benn (and this is a very Bellovian strophe),
you have something like a pain schedule to fill out -a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes — like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. Next category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much, and you see the ravages everywhere, why not be sensible and sign off early?
'Because of immortal longings,' says Kenneth. 'Or just hoping for a lucky break.' Meanwhile, a Miss Matilda Layamon, modernity's erotic nemesis, patiently looms.
Kenneth is immersed, or rather stalled, in his own parallel difficulties: unrequited love for a girl called Treckie, the mother of his infant daughter. Early on Kenneth remarks that the nature of his own preoccupations marks him out as 'a genuinely modern individual. (Can you say worse of anybody?)' Compared to Treckie, though, Kenneth isn't modern at all. Compared to Treckie, Kenneth is positively Hanoverian, or Pushkinian. There is a lovely phrase later on in the book, when Benn is being extravagantly lunched by his appalling, his unforgivable, his inadmissible father-in-law; Benn is trying to be cheerful, but he can't 'get the note of TV brightness into his responses'. TV brightness: Treckie has plenty of that. I have a name for girls like Treckie; I call them Jackanory-artists, Blue Peter-merchants. Radiant with non-specific vivacity, they come on like kiddie-show hostesses ('And right after the break we'll be doing it again with me on top'). 'What kind of a name is Treckie?' asks Dita Schwartz, the other contestant for Kenneth's affections. A good question: what kind of a name is Treckie? Here, I think, we have a bit of subliminal inspiration on Bellow's part. In TV parlance a 'Trekkie' is a devotee of the space-opera TV series Star Trek. Trekkies model themselves on the cast of the show, would-be Captain Kirks and Lieutenant Uhuras who boldly go out into the universe, to pester alien life forms with the American Constitution
. . .
Treckie is a person with goals, a 'life-plan'. She is 'either very clever or playing by clever rules': the latter, definitely the latter. Treckie believes in growth, in change, in full self-realisation. 'The way to change for the better,' summarises Kenneth, is to begin by telling everybody about it, You make an announcement. You repeat your intentions until others begin to repeat them to you. When you hear them from others you can say, 'Yes, that's what I think too.' The more often your intention is repeated, the truer it becomes. The key is fluency. It's fluency of formulation that matters most.
This is no kind of fluency, no kind of conversation, no kind of girlfriend for a Bellow hero. How can you discuss life with somebody who lives a 'life-style' according to a 'life-plan'? When Kenneth talks to Benn about Treckie he uses 'skinny Gallic gestures to enlarge the horizon'. The horizon needs all the enlarging it can get.
I have no clue to what Treckie is waiting for. We don't talk about me. These last few days we talked mostly about her. She wanted to tell me about her progress in self-realization, the mistakes she's correcting, her new insights into her former insights and the decisions she's taken as a result.
And yet Kenneth is crazy for Treckie, crazy about Treckie: she has the franchise on his libido, whereas he can't begin to get a line on hers. Diminutive Treckie's sexual life-choice is masochism. She's a masochist and a pushy one, too: '. . . her legs were disfigured by bruises. Her shins were all black and blue. No, blue and green circles like the markings of peacock feathers . .. When she saw me staring at her she shrugged her bare shoulders, she laid her head to one side, and her underlip swelled softly towards me. There being a challenge in this, a "What are you going to do about it?" She seemed to take pride in these injuries.' Treckie likes rough men; Kenneth is a kind man, a delicate man. And that would appear to be that. There is nothing much that Kenneth, or indeed the novel, can do about Treckie. She must, she says, have her 'multiple acculturation', her 'multiple choices': i.e., she must have her multiple boyfriends. With Treckie, says Kenneth, 'it was just me versus contemporary circumstances, and against those I never had a chance'.
Kenneth's 'private life' is a mess but a static one. With Benn, contemporary circumstances assume more dynamic form. Matilda Layamon has been ominously hovering over the first third of the book (bad news, but what kind of bad news?); now she descends. She is rich, clever, beautiful, high-gloss, 'glittering, nervous': what does she see in Benn (and seeing is a good deal of what this novel is about: you are what you see, not what you eat, 'as that literalist German maniac Feuerbach insisted')? Look at the men Matilda might have had in Benn's stead! 'A national network anchorman, then a fellow who was now on the federal appeals bench, plus a tax genius consulted by Richard Nixon.' Why, her father plays golf with the likes of Bob Hope and President Ford. Yet she alights on Benn, with his awkward figure, the Russian 'bulge of his back like a wing-case', the infinity-symbol figure-eight spectacles, and his paltry sixty grand a year. This isn't going to be good. And why can't Benn see it? What, in fact, does Benn see in her?
When we read, we read with pencils in our hands. When we read something particularly significant or apposite, we draw a vertical line in the margin. The fit reader of the perfect book could thus run his pencil down the length of every last page. And in a way he is still none the wiser — it gets him no further forward. More Die of Heartbreak is a bit like that: read it twice, and all you've got is parallel tracks, right the way through. In its allusiveness, its density, its vigour, the novel comes at you like the snowstorm that Kenneth sees: a storm, but with each snowflake doing everything that is acrobatically possible. Yet these allusions, while sending their specific messages, also acquire an emotional aspect. Plants, Eden, a Tree of Life with which botanist Benn cannot commune, a reclining nude, tigers of desire, 'impulses from the fallen world surrounding this green seclusion' - 'twentieth-century instability'. And against this a different setting, the Antarctic, the setting of Benn's rambles and of Admiral Byrd's memoirs entitled Alone: out there, on the border of borders, the time quickly comes 'when one has nothing to reveal to the other, when even his unformed thoughts can be anticipated, his pet ideas become a meaningless drool', when 'people find each other out'. Hand in hand, modernity and Matilda have something in mind for Uncle Benn. It won't be anything obvious. It won't be secret drinking, infidelity, slobby habits — none of that old stuff. The takeover will have a contemporary subtlety. And it will require Benn's collusion.
As we said earlier, Benn is a strong candidate for love in 'a classic form'. Well, classic form is what Matilda seems at first to embody. Benn speaks of his bride as if she were a 'beloved' in a poem by Edgar Allan Poe: 'thy beauty is to me/Like those Nicean barks of yore . . .' 'Even a four-star general,' Kenneth reasons indulgently, 'will sing a Bing Crosby "Booboobooboo" refrain in a moment of softening or weakness about love.' But Benn? Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face', 'those Nicean barks of yore' - whatever they might have looked like. Seeing Benn and hearing the terrible poem, Kenneth decides, 'I would as lief have had Bing Crosby.' Still, when a botanist starts talking about hyacinth hair, maybe he is on to something. As another observer puts it later on, when Benn married Matilda 'he followed the esthetics of botany on to the human plane'. This is a risky enterprise, for obvious and numerous reasons. Plants, for instance, don't mind living in caves, or wasting their sweetness on the desert air. Plants are innocently beautiful: they don't know that they have an esthetic. Plants don't have plans of their own. Plants don't bite back.
Matilda is the only child of rich parents. As a goodwill gesture (this is rich-people etiquette), Benn moves into the family's penthouse duplex:
.. . and there was Uncle in this fantasia of opulence, every morning wandering in the long rooms of Persian rugs and decorator drapes, lighted cabinets of Baccarat and Wedgwood, and schlock paintings from the 18th century of unidentified (and I'd say uncircumcised) personages from Austria or Italy. Were they ever out of place! And Uncle perhaps was even more of a misfit than the portrait subjects, acquired by purchase.
Benn's awkward figure is itself soon draped in an $800 tweed suit. The plant observatory of his head is similarly encased in a costly haircut. Benn's transplantation has begun. Matilda's mother Jo is deliberately pale and shadowy but Matilda's father, Dr Layamon, is one of the most memorable characters in all Bellow. He is, in fact, a boiling nightmare of sly candour, frank cunning, corruption, complacence and 'TV brightness'. A modern entrepreneur, picking up I per cent of everything from his patients and pals, not so much a doctor as a health concessionaire, Layamon is locally known as Motormouth. What Sammler called 'the mad agility of compound deceit' is here elevated to 'conspiratorial inspiration'. When he sits next to Benn his face is so close that it 'is hard to tell whose breath was whose'. Horrible in itself, this TV intimacy has its ulterior aspect.
He was very physical with people. He dropped a hand on your knee, he caught you by the cheek, he worked your shoulder. He played every emotional instrument in the band. You couldn't, however, depend on the music. Suddenly a wild bray would break up the tune. He complimented Benn on his eminence in botany. Then he'd say, 'too bad those overlapping front teeth weren't corrected'; or else: 'Either you're wearing a tight shirt or your pectoralis major is overdeveloped - big tits, in other words.' At dinner, when Doctor passed behind Benn's chair, taking his time about it, Uncle couldn't doubt that his bald spot was being inspected. And when they were using old-fashioned urinals at the club, Doctor set his chin on the high partition and looked down through crooked goggles to see how Uncle was hung. His comment was: 'Fire-fighting equipment seems adequate, anyway.'
Matilda is not only Layamon's daughter: she is one of his prime investments. And what does a modern person do with an investment? He protects it, as best he can. 'Don't be annoyed,' he tells Benn, 'but we ran a little check on you, purely private and absolutely discreet. You can't blame us. These are kinky times ... If there was anything bad we wouldn't be sitting here together. Also, if
there was serious stuff in the fellow's report, he would have gone to you and tried to sell it to you first. That's the customary blackmail. One expects it.'
Meanwhile the Matilda omens build. Very ominously indeed, Layamon has said of his daughter; 'She didn't have to futz around in Paris with all that postwar sleaze. This girl had brains enough to be chief executive of a blue-chip corporation. With her mentality [mentality!] you could manage NASA . . . She's always watching from her satellite. She's never been too absorbed in the French junk to lose track of economics.' The French junk that failed to keep Matilda's mind off economics is sufficiently sinister in itself. She was researching cultural activities under the Nazi occupation: Ernst Junger, Celine.
. .. she won the confidence of the hysterical persons she interviewed, crooks, most of them, whose strange idea was to reconcile the atrocities of the war period with the highest goals of France as a civilization. For instance, to get information for the Resistance you slept with a collaborator, or after a double-dealer was shot you might discover that you truly loved him after all - that way you could have it all: pornography, heartfelt douleur, corrupt love, patriotism, and a fine literary style, so that the purity of French culture was preserved.