The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  The so-called media says you have no ideas. Like the Democrats. Now I’m a big military person [though a scrupulous noncombatant: what they call a chicken hawk], and I’ve come up with two ideas that no one’s ever thought of before. Number one, we should’ve taken the oil in Iraq, as a return on our investment. You just siphon it off through a tube, like stealing gasoline, but on a larger scale. Number two, we keep telling everybody what we’re about to do, like with ISIS. So you lose the element of surprise! Why can’t these huge modern armies just sneak up on the enemy? My two new ideas have gotten nowhere. Zero. And why? Bureaucracy, that’s why. Well, all that stops right now, folks. And you’ll finally get the leadership you deserve.

  The citified smart-asses say you live in a bubble. What’s wrong with that? Bubbles are great. Me, I’m so out of it that I only see the little folder they hand me every morning, mostly stuff from Breitbart and the Drudge Report. As far as I’m concerned my speech to the Boy Scouts met with universal acclaim. There was no “mixed,” okay?

  To tell you the truth, I’m the least racist person there’s ever been in the history of the world, and I say that with great surety. I just don’t like Muslims, and I don’t like Mexicans coming here and taking our jobs and living off our welfare. Plus I support—I spearhead—voter suppression. Look at that new committee I’ve formed about “electoral integrity.” And you can’t really do something like that without believing, deep down, as you do, my friends, that “people of color,” as the PC pointy-heads call them, shouldn’t vote. Or shouldn’t vote so often and in such huge numbers.

  Steve Bannon said I was the greatest American orator since Brian William Jennings, whoever the hell he may be. But Steve was joking, right? This evening I talked on autocue, but anyone who’s read my interviews knows fully well I can hardly brawl my way out of a five-word sentence. I’m like you. And we’re the really smart ones.

  All this. But yet I’m up there with the .01 percent. And you aren’t—or not yet! It’s true that I’m no longer the leader of the Free World. I unloaded that one on Angela Merkel, and I wish her lots of luck with it. But I’m still President of the United States of America. I’m the multibillionaire Commander in Chief. Okay?

  So draw your own conclusions....I don’t know why I even bother to say that. Because you already have.

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  When the young Bismarck left St. Petersburg after his four-year stint at the Prussian Embassy, he had the following verdict engraved on a ring: La Russie, c’est le néant. Sterile, sclerotic, and fatally introverted, the Tsarist autocracy was “nothingness,” a vacuum, a void. Donald Trump is le néant. There’s nothing there. No shame, no honor, no conscience, no knowledge, no curiosity, no decorum, no imagination, no wit, no grip, and no nous. Into this spotlessly empty vessel, certain Americans contrive to pour their anger, their resentments, their ambitions, and their hopes. How is it done?

  *

  The Trump transfusion, the way the utterly callous plutocrat gives heart to the stranded proletariat, was on lavish display in Youngstown. And it is a hauntingly desperate spectacle.

  Some sensitive souls—Nabokov was among them—are repelled by circuses and zoos and other settings where animals are “trained” by humans. What they find unwatchable is the insult visited on animal dignity. The audience in Youngstown was human, but the humans had surrendered their individuality to the crowd. So it is hard to say what kind of animal they had reduced themselves to. A millipedal hydra, perhaps—and the size of a leviathan. And at the direction of its tamer, this colossal beast performed its party tricks, its chants, its boos and hisses, its cheers and whoops; and for this it will be given no sugar lump.

  The boos are elicited by references to Democrats, gun control, Obamacare, immigration (“We want them the hell out of our country!...We’re sending them the hell back where they came from!”), and anything at all to do with political correctness; the whoops are elicited by references to law enforcement, the armed forces, the Second Amendment, jobs, putting America first, defending our borders, family, fidelity, and faith in God.

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  The Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh recently observed that impulsive, burn-your-boats populism is turning out to be a purely Anglo-American phenomenon (now watched with pity by the other developed nations). Plebiscitary frivolousness, Ganesh argued, is the result not of hardship but of relative ease—and decades of internal stability. France and Germany (though not Italy: think of Berlusconi) have been successfully inoculated by the experience of deep historical tragedy, and deep guilt (the Third Reich, Vichy), which still presides over their living memory. What “nightmare,” apart from Obamacare, was the American working class struggling to awake from? Flat wages, a feeling of national ostracism, the dominance of elite expertise, and the shackles of political correctness.

  No one ever claims to be politically correct, but every day we are being reminded how much we owe to that modest and no longer particularly erratic or repressive ideology. Its civilizing effects have strengthened evolutionary progress, much to the benefit of women, minorities, and society as a whole, very much including heterosexual whites. In other words, the status quo wasn’t the terminal carnage pictured by the yahoo with the microphone. The electorate nonetheless wanted change, and at any price. “Donald Trump may give us nuclear war,” said a supporter, early on. “But anything’s better than Hillary.”

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  President Trump is not quite le néant. He is, for one thing, a truly gigantic category mistake—a category mistake made by the American people. When he said in mid-campaign that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing any votes, Trump subliminally blundered on a central truth. Because the electorate wasn’t fully persuaded that he was “real”: he was real only in the sense that reality TV was real. Well, Trump is real now all right, and his sick meltdown is happening in the Oval Office.

  Last November Steve Bannon somehow induced a plurality of citizens to vote in direct defiance of their own interests (as did Nigel Farage in the UK). It may be invidious to single out a particular constituency, but how can one avoid focusing on the huge “minority” whose interests are already in shreds?

  There were plenty of women in the Covelli Centre (some of them sitting under placards that read WOMEN FOR TRUMP); there were a few black and brown faces; there was even a black grandmother. Now that Roe v. Wade itself is under threat (from Justice Neil Gorsuch), and now that the attacks on Planned Parenthood, plus the notorious “gag order,” are destroying female lives all over the world, I would like to address these closing words to the 53 percent of white women who, on November 8, 2016, voted not for a proactive feminist but for a relentlessly coarse and compulsive gynophobe. By making a considerable effort (all right, you’re autonomous citizens and don’t want your vote merely to reflect your gender), I can roughly understand how you felt then. But how do you feel now? And one additional question, which all freshly horrified Trumpists might care to answer: what on earth did you expect?

  Esquire 2017

  * This piece wasn’t published until November 2017. As usual, under Trump, there were hourly bombshells to stay abreast of, most notably Trump’s shameful response to the violence in Charlottesville; on that occasion he declined to condemn the murderous alt-right. Rather, Trump saw moral equivalence between the neo-Nazis and the…who? The neo–Khmer Rouge? The version printed here dates from the second week in August, just before the exit of Steve Bannon.

  Twin Peaks 3

  Bellow: Avoiding the Void

  Zachary Leader The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964

  When Saul Bellow emerged and solidified as an intellectual presence—in Chicago and New York during the 1940s—he seemed formidably, enviably, indeed inexcusably well equipped to flourish in the spheres of literature and love. “Extremely handsome,” according to one observer; “stunning,” “beautiful,” “irresistible,” according to others. A
fter his first novel appeared, in 1944, Bellow got a call from MGM: although he was too soulful-looking for a male lead, they explained, he could prosper as the type “who loses the girl to…George Raft or Errol Flynn.” We may be sure that Bellow hardly listened. And it doesn’t sound quite right for him, does it—aping a series of sexual inadequates (Ashley to Gable’s Rhett?), in makeup and fancy dress, under the hot stare of the kliegs?

  No, from the start Bellow radiated what Alfred Kazin called in his 1978 memoir, New York Jew, “a sense of his destiny as a novelist that excited everyone around him.” Electrically sensitive to criticism, Bellow had a chip on his shoulder—but it was what one critic called “the chip of self-confidence.” As Kazin wrote, “He expected the world to come to him.” And it did. To quote from the opening sentence of Zachary Leader’s magisterial biography, Bellow would go on to become “the most decorated writer in American history.” He faced only one serious obstruction, and this vanished, as if at a snap of the fingers, on a certain day in 1949, when he was thirty-three and discovered “what I had been born for.” As for women and love, on the other hand, he didn’t get it right until 1986, when he was seventy-one.

  To round out the panoply of the young Bellow’s attractions, he had about him the glamour and gravitas of turbulent exoticism. When his family crossed the Atlantic from Russia (St. Petersburg) to Canada (Lachine, then Montreal) in the early teens of the century, Saul was no more than a twinkle in his father’s eye. Well, Abraham’s eyes were capable of twinkling; far more typically, though, they blazed and seeped with frustration and rage. A versatile business flop, he struggled as a farmer, a wholesaler, a marriage broker, a junk dealer, and a bootlegger. “His talent,” Saul would later write, “was for failure.” Bellow Sr. eventually thrived (peddling fuel to bakeries), but he got angrier as he aged, and had fistfights in the street well into his sixties. The aggression was intelligible: Abraham knew what it was to wear the moral equivalent of the Star; Russian autocracy had condemned him to outlawry, imprisonment, ruin, and flight; later, too, he lost three sisters to the mechanized anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany.

  In the end, Abraham was grateful to America (and even came to tolerate the novelty of paying his taxes), yet his assimilation was always fragmentary. “Wright me,” he wrote to Saul, late in life: “A Ledder. Still I am The Head of all of U.” And his wife, vague, frail, dreamy Liza, a figure of quiet pathos, simply didn’t live long enough to adapt. As Leader records (and this is a typically luminous detail):

  A great treat for Liza was a movie matinee on the weekend. Bellow sometimes accompanied her and remembered a low rumbling in the theater, that of dozens of child translators, himself included, whispering in Yiddish to their mothers.

  Home life, then, was archaic, violent, loudmouthed, and “wholly Jewish.” A mixed blessing, you might say, but that’s the kind of blessing that all writers hold most dear.

  At the start of 1924, Abraham made his way to Chicago, and six months later the rest of the family was “smuggled across the border by bootlegging associates,” arriving on the Fourth of July in the capital of American “hard-boileddom” (Bellow’s epithet). And of all the “reality instructors” who lined up to shape Saul’s sensibility, the most dominant was that exemplary Chicagoan, Maury, the oldest of the brothers. Maury bestrides Bellow’s fiction, making no fewer than five undisguised appearances.* “You don’t understand fuck-all,” Maury characteristically informs his bookish kid brother. “You never will.” Originally a Mob bagman (and a skimmer), Maury married money and set about amassing a fortune in that hyperactively venal fringe between business and politics (one of the guests at his daughter’s wedding was Jimmy Hoffa). As he saw it, all other concerns were mere snags in the engine of materialism.

  “Enough of this old crap about being Jewish,” Maury used to say. In Herzog (1964), when the hero weeps at his father’s funeral, the senior brother, Shura, snarls at him, “Don’t carry on like a goddamn immigrant.” Brazen American plenitude was what Maury championed and embodied—with his “suburban dukedom,” his hundred pairs of shoes and three hundred suits. When Bellow won the Nobel, in 1976, Maury was at first affronted (“I’m really the smart one” was his attitude), then indifferent, despite a brief interest in the prize money—Was it tax-free? Could Saul stow it offshore? Yet Maury, a secret reader, harbored depth and convolution, and Bellow always believed that there was something tragic, something blind, headlong, and oblivion-seeking, in his drivenness. It was the revenge life takes on the man who knowingly chooses lucre over love.

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  And what about Bellow and love—the many affairs, the many marriages? Before we turn to them, we have to acknowledge a unique peculiarity of Bellow’s art. When we say that this or that character is “based on” or “inspired by” this or that real-life original, we indulge in evasion. The characters really are their originals, as we see from the family froideurs, the threatened lawsuits, the scandalized friends, and the embittered ex-wives.

  Leader deals with this crux immediately, in his introduction, and partly endorses the verdict of James Wood (one of Bellow’s most well-attuned critics), which invokes “an awkward but undeniable utilitarianism….The number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than can be counted on two hands, yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers.” Bellow himself conceded that the question was “diabolically complex.” But who in the end would wish things otherwise? That the characters come alive, or remain alive, on the page is not the result of artistic control so much as the sheer visionary affect of the prose. Bellow is sui generis and Promethean, a thief of the gods’ fire: he is something like a supercharged plagiarist of Creation.

  In his dealings with women he could be glacially passive, and he could be excitedly precipitate. “Somewhere in every intellectual,” the brutal lawyer, Sandor, tells Herzog, “is a dumb prick.” Bellow would have wholeheartedly agreed.

  He got engaged to his first wife, Anita, in 1937; he was twenty-one. And the only surprise is that the relationship took so long to wind down—after fifteen years, twenty-two changes of address, and numberless infidelities. “I have no intention,” he then wrote to his agent in 1955, “of bouncing from divorce into marriage.” But that of course was exactly what he did, homing in, despite a fusillade of warning shots, on the naïve and volatile Sasha. Early on, a female friend noted that Bellow “was the kind of man who thought he could change women….And he couldn’t. I mean, who can? You don’t.” This is well said. But one surmises that the answer, if there is one, had more to do with literature than with life.

  Happiness, noted Montherlant, writes white; it is invisible on the page. And the same is true of goodness. Anita was upstanding and altruistic, and is therefore a pallid presence in the novels; Sasha, by contrast, would be mythologized, demonized, and immortalized in Herzog as the terrifying emasculatrix, Mady. The terms of divorce number 2 were settled in 1961, and within a month Bellow was married to the equally glossy and unpromising Susan. It seems that his creative unconscious was attracted to difficulty—to make his fiction write black. This time he did at least manage an interlude of what Leader calls “strenuous womanizing”: he returned from a tour of Europe “trailed by letters not only from Helen, Annie, Jara, and Alina” but also from Maryi, Hannah, Daniela, Maude, and Iline. As the first volume of the Life closes, Bellow is halfway through his matrimonial career; we know that there are two more divorces to go (Susan, Alexandra) before all is solved and salved with Janis, his true Platonic other. Hope triumphed over disappointment, and innocence triumphed over experience.

  Something similar unfolded in the fiction. Again and again in his Letters (assembled in 2010), Bellow describes himself as a “comic” novelist, and this feels just. But there was little sign of such a cheerful self-assessment, and such an outcome, in his “prentice works” of the 1940s, Dangling Man and The Victim, which epitomize the sullen, cussed earnestness of the midcentury mood. His life-changin
g moment came with the conceptual birth of The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and took place, fittingly, in Paris—the world HQ of cerebral gloom. Bellow was in despair about his third novel, and with good reason: it was about two invalids in a hospital room. As he paced the streets one day Bellow watched the gutters being sluiced in “sunny iridescence.” And it was a comprehensive epiphany: that was that. Marx, Trotsky, Sartre, ennui, cafard, nausée, alienation, existential woe, the Void, et cetera: all this he canceled and cursed. From here on he would commit himself to the free-flowing, and to the childhood perceptions of his “first heart” and his “original eyes.” In short, he would trust his soul. And now the path was clear to the exuberantly meshuga glories of Augie March, Henderson, Herzog, and all the rest.

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  I knew Saul Bellow for two decades; I have known Professor Leader for three, and he is the author of a much-praised biography of my father, Kingsley Amis. So I may be disinterested, but I am not impartial. All the same, it is certain that I will not be alone in the expectation that The Life of Saul Bellow will prove definitive. Leader is respectful but unintimidated, balanced but never anodyne, and his literary criticism, like his prose, is unfailingly stylish and acute. The book is very learned and very long—the author happens to be a putter-in, not a leaver-out. But readers who enter into it will find a multitude of various fascinations: the gangland machine of Chicago, for instance; the tremors and prepercussions of the sexual revolution; Bellow’s Romantic lineage (the affinities with Blake and Wordsworth); and the currents and commotions of the American cultural terrain, with its factions and rivalries, its questing energies, its stormy loyalties, and its stormier hatreds.