by Amis, Martin
Inside – in the cafés, bars, and eateries, and in the corridors and commissaries of the university–you felt the steady gush of earnest debate: ‘exposition, argument, harangue, analysis, theory, expostulation, threat, and prophesy…[And] the subject of all this talk is, ultimately, survival.’
Outside, the extraordinary air with its tang of lemon-grove antiquity, the rounded hillocks, the orchards – and the stones. ‘Many times cleared, the ground goes on giving birth to stones; waves of earth bring forth more stones.’ All day you heard the mad ratchetings of the crickets (or were they locusts?) and the bedraggled yawns of the goats.
Beyond, down there, the bay, the sand, even the tame and tideless wavelets of the Med, look silently ominous. This is the Promised Land, after all, this is utopia, this is Byzantium, this is the City on a Hill, this is Jerusalem. And how do you reach it, the land of the golden bells? On a dolphin’s back they come, ‘spirit after spirit’:
Marbles of the dancing floor,
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
‘Byzantium’, W. B. Yeats, 1932
The muse
In the presence of Julia and Jonathan, of Saul and his travelling companion, in the presence of novelists Alan Lelchuk and A. B. ‘Booli’ Yehoshua and the impeccably courteous Amos Oz, and in the presence of several dozen professional Bellovians, I croaked out my lecture. It had nothing to do with Marxism, or Israel, or even Judaism. Today I think that my words (given the location and the ambient mental temperature) could be regarded as offensively unprovocative. I talked about fictional effects, and about love – love in the setting of American modernity.
My assignment was More Die of Heartbreak, the Bellow novel published later that year. And I began by saying that I was the only person in the room who had read it; those who had not read it, I went on, included its author. He has written it, I argued, but he has not read it, as I have.*7 While I talked, and coughed, I stole the odd glance at the Nobelist and at his young friend, who sat demurely beside him, under an effusion of dark brown hair…The talk ended, and Saul gave a short and generous response; then the crowd churned and intermingled. I collected my wife, and we made for Rosamund – the muse.
Academic gossip had imagined her as someone like Ramona (Herzog) or Renata (Humboldt’s Gift). Both these characters are endearing in their way, but Ramona is a sophisticated man-pleaser, and Renata is a mixed-up gold-digger; and Rosamund was something else again. With her oval face and elliptical eyes, she could have been the kind and clever stepsister in a fairy tale. Rosamund was indeed very young – not just Saul’s junior, but mine too, by eight or nine years.
There was fresh commotion, as the entire crowd started funnelling down from the twenty-ninth floor to the first, to hear Shimon Peres (a Foreign Minister who knew his Flaubert) introducing Saul’s public lecture, ‘The Silent Assumptions of the Novelist’. The auditorium was full; listeners seemed to be up there cooing and fluttering in the rafters like pigeons, or like doves. There were no hawks: all were of one spirit – the unanimous reverence for learning.
Saul began. The voice was resonant, it carried, but with the beginnings of a new (and near-elderly) lightness of pitch. By my side, Rosamund sat rapt and intense…I knew then that I had been quite wrong, upstairs, claiming that I was the only one present who had ‘read’ More Die of Heartbreak. Rosamund would have read it, at least once. And she would have noted this passage (which I had recited an hour earlier). ‘Towards the end of your life,’ says Benn Crader (a world-renowned botanist, a ‘plant clairvoyant’),
you have something like a pain schedule to fill out – a long schedule like a federal document, only it’s your pain schedule. First, physical causes…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?
‘Because of immortal longings,’ answers Benn’s nephew and intimate, Kenneth (a teacher of Russian literature). ‘Or just hoping for a lucky break.’
Filling out the pain schedule, then, is something you do in your head, weighing the wounds, and the lucky breaks, that will decide your destined mood.
The next morning, after fruit, coffee, and breadrolls, the Bellows and the Amises journeyed to Jerusalem, the numinous city.
The sun can do no more with them
‘I gather you’ve been reading Philip Larkin,’ I said (which was no great inferential feat, because Larkin is cited twice in More Die). And by the spring of 1987, it should be remembered, Philip Larkin, my father’s exact coeval, was already dead – dead for seventeen months, dead at sixty-three, and not of heartbreak…
‘Yes I have,’ said Saul, ‘and with great pleasure. His poems make you laugh but all the time you’re sensing the heavy melancholy, like a medieval humour – what they used to call black bile. And maybe the comedy gains from that. The melancholia – it’s pointless to look for causes, but what was his background and his family?’
‘Blaming the Parents?*8 These are just impressions. His mum was supposed to be a great nag and whiner, but his dad, his dad sounded really unusual. Unusually right-wing Middle England. Yeah, I seem to remember he was a Germanophile – of all things. I think he even took Philip there. In the mid-thirties. For a holiday.’
We were having tea on the rooftop terrace of the government guest house, which lay just beyond the walls of Jerusalem; meanwhile, Mount Carmel, as gracefully as a mountain could manage it, had stepped aside in favour of Mount Zion. The guest house was called Mishkenot Sha’ananim, or ‘peaceful habitation’. And this was the spring of 1987, seven months before the end of one of Israel’s quiet times.
‘That poem…In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and they dream of all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.’
‘Was he not loved?’
‘I think his parents loved him. You mean later on?’ Whereas Saul’s tea was enliveningly laced with a slice of lemon, mine was qualified with milk – with the milk of concord. I lit a cigarette. ‘My father couldn’t believe how unambitious he was, how uh, defeatist he was about girls. To hear my father tell it, he worked his way through a tiny coven of weird sisters.’ Sympathetically Saul leant his head sideways. ‘And it’s odd, because poets get girls. As we know. What does Humboldt say when he bangs on the girls’ door? Let me in. I’m a poet and I have a big cock.’
‘…Did you meet any of these sisters?’
‘Only the main one – Monica. And it was just the other day. Well. 1982. So not long before he started to ail.’
‘What was it in the end?’
I told him the little I knew. ‘And Monica was…’ How to put it? Never mind, for now, her room-flooding quiddity. ‘She looked like a trusty in drag.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.’
The colour of the day was changing. Late afternoon light on the stones, Saul had written ten years earlier, only increases their stoniness. Yellow and gray, they have achieved their final color; the sun can do no more with them. I said,
‘Well, he took Yeats’s advice. Seek perfection of the work, not of the life.’
‘Yeats doesn’t always talk sense. Like his advice to writers – never struggle, never rest. And you won’t find perfection in anyone’s life. Or in anyone’s work.’
‘I know. In another poem the poet steps back from himself and sees Books; china; a life Reprehensibly perfect. Well there was no danger of that.’
‘Anyway there must be a life. Yeats certainly had one.’
‘Mm. And so did Primo Levi.’ Until just the other day: on April 11 Levi threw himself down the stairwell of his apartment block in Turin. ‘Sincere condolences, Saul…I’m trying to see his
suicide as an act of defiance. A way of saying, My life is mine to take, mine and mine alone. But that’s…’
‘Primo Levi – he never wasted a single word.’
A silence. Then I told him about the new apparitions – my sons…But as the day withdrew Mount Zion seemed to glow and glower (yes, a yellow light, but powerful: tiger-yellow). What was the matter with us, the mountain seemed to ask – how could we go on neglecting the only possible subject? Which was Israeli survival.
‘It’s a garrison state,’ said Saul, ‘but it’s here. And without Israel, Jewish manhood would’ve been finished.’
I at first took him to mean that the Jews would stop feeling the desire to reproduce. That was literal of me. There was another way of disappearing.
‘Assimilation,’ he said, ‘abject assimilation, and the end of the whole story.’
The story that went back 4,000 years.
But now we had to go and find Julia and Rosamund, and Saul’s sidekick Allan Bloom (author of The Closing of the American Mind), and get ready for our dinner in the Old City with (among others) Saul’s old pal Teddy Kollek, Mayor of Jerusalem.
Encrustation of curses
‘Stone cries to stone,’ writes James Fenton.
My history is proud.
Mine is not allowed.
This is the cistern where all wars begin.
The laughter from the armoured car…
From the same poem, ‘Jerusalem’: ‘It is superb in the air…’
Bellow and Kollek in 1987
And it is. Many, including the Sages themselves, have claimed that the air of Jerusalem is thought-nourishing. Saul, in his book, is ‘prepared to believe it’:
…on this strange deadness the melting air presses with an almost human weight…the dolomite and clay look hoarier than anything I ever saw. Gray and sunken, in the thoughts of Mr Bloom in Ulysses. But there is nothing in the brilliant air and the massive white clouds hanging over the crumpled mountains that suggests exhaustion. This atmosphere makes the American commonplace ‘out of this world’ true enough to give your soul a start.
As you pick your way from tomb to tabernacle, from shrine to icon, from cave to chasm (each consecrated to a different monotheism – so it’s hats off here and shoes on there, and hats on here and shoes off there), you gradually absorb the fact that you are wandering in the graveyard of at least twenty civilisations (their rise and fall punctually enriched by massacre, with blood flowing bridle deep). The earth ‘acts queerly on my nerves (through the feet, as it were), because I feel that a good part of this dust must have been ground out of human bone’.
* * *
—————
The air feeds thought, but it also feeds one of the opposites of thought – which is faith, which is religion: the belief in a supernatural patriarch, together with a desire to win his favour (through worship). And Jerusalem remains the planetary HQ of idolatry. It is a low-lying babel of confessions.
Look. In the Old City a black-haired man with sidelocks topped by a wide-brimmed black hat, in a black frock coat, walks at speed down this or that blind alley (his face drained of all colour by secluded study, by epic memorisations, among other causes, possibly including the sin of Onan); and he progresses quite unseeingly, like a frantically inspired poet homing in on his desk and his writing pad. The black-clad ghost is halted in mid stride by the upraised palm of a tanned and cuboid middle-aged American in a hot-pink T-shirt and polka-dot Bermudas.
‘My friend!’ the American cries. ‘My friend! Time to think anew! Oh, time to feel Jesus come into your heart. Come into your heart with such love…’
The Hasid pauses long enough to form an expression of concentrated, of distilled incredulity, and then, with a bristling flourish, strides on. Watching him go, the American sorrowfully shakes his head and mutters to himself about Israeli narrowmindedness…You see, he is a born-again fundamentalist, and his goal is modest enough: all he’s trying to do is speed up the Second Coming, which can’t get started until every single Jew has been Christianised.
Only literal evangelicals take the conversion of the Jews as a necessary precondition (for Apocalypse and then Rapture); everyone else takes it as a metaphor for the end of time. ‘I would love you ten years before the flood,’ Andrew Marvell assures his coy mistress, ‘And you would, if you please, refuse / Till the conversion of the Jews.’ And the Jews too will tarry, as will their own Messiah…That hill up there, Megiddo, is earmarked for Armageddon – the last battle between good and evil. Then the dead will eventually be kicked awake by furious angels, to face the Day of Judgment.
Hitchens had recently spent time in Israel, and I wished we were there together in Jerusalem that spring – to wonder at this fantastic entrepôt of wild goose chases, snark hunts, and fool’s errands. Here the faithful use up nearly all our metaphors for futility. Look at them, grasping at shadows, writing on water. No one is visibly trying to extract blood from a stone; but if you want to see an endless press of people beating their heads against a brick wall then go to the Wailing Wall itself, on the western flank of the Holy Mount.
Seeing the worshippers slowly jerk back and forth in their rockinghorse rhythm (also strikingly onanesque), Christopher would have felt contempt, with perhaps a garnish of pity; me, I felt a weaker resistance – say bafflement and exasperation; and Saul, without question, would be feeling something else again.
In him the religious impulses survived. Wistful, tentative, diffident – but still there; you could sense it in the restlessness of the eyes: and it was an indispensable component of who he was. What other modern master, describing a sunshot New England landscape, would write ‘Praise God’ and unironically refer to ‘God’s veil’?
Like Christopher, Saul was an old Trotskyist, and temperamentally anti-clerical (sympathy was almost wholly withdrawn from religion once it got itself organised and collectivised); but even the pilgrim, scraping his pale brow against the slabs and boulders of the Wailing Wall, would not be uncongenial to him.*9 It seems that what he valued was the same thing Christopher despised: continuity, rote continuity. Rote continuity, to Saul, was still continuity. Continuity by heart, he might have said…
Bellow was alive to all that was maddening and impossible about Jerusalem, about Israel. It was he who redirected our attention to Herman Melville’s travel notes of 1857. Melville (a most interesting and attractive case) was recovering from some kind of psychosomatic breakdown, considering himself ‘finished’ after Moby-Dick had uneventfully come and gone (back in 1851, when he was thirty-eight). He was still physically vigorous. After Jerusalem (the ‘color of the whole city is grey and looks at you like a cold grey eye in a cold old man’), he rode to the Dead Sea: ‘A mounted escort of some 30 men, all armed. Fine riding.’ And then Judea:
…whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape – bleached – leprosy – encrustation of curses – old cheese – bones of rocks, – crunched, knawed, & jumbled…No moss as in other ruins – no grace of decay – no ivy – the unleavened nakedness of desolation…Wandering among the tombs – till I begin to think myself one of the possessed with devels.
That is the phrase, that is exactly what you writhingly thrill and shiver to in the Holy Land. The encrustation of curses.
The actual
‘One day when he saw me in the library he asked me to come to dinner. And I said yes, with a shrug. I thought, I know – pizza and dictation.’
Rosamund must’ve told me this later on, but I helpfully insert it here…She was a grad student in Chicago. And when professors invited you over after dark it was for exactly that: pizza and dictation.
‘But when he opened the door to me he was in an apron. He was cooking.’
There was wine and there was dinner; there was no pizza and no dictation.
That dinner was in 1984. ‘And since then we haven’t spent a nigh
t apart.’
I keep disclaiming any interest in Saul’s personal life, but of course I already knew a great deal about it – and on terms of the most searching intimacy – from his fiction. And as I gazed at Rosamund, I no doubt slightly protectively wondered how it would go. I seemed to remember that wife number two or number three wrote a piece entitled ‘Mugging the Muse’…
Because Saul wrote fiction about real men and women. Even as I type those words (on this page of a novelised autobiography) I haven’t lost the suspicion that writing fiction about real men and women is an extraordinary thing to go and do.
And the first serious life-writer – come to think of it – was someone Saul and I always argued about (Saul having the higher opinion of him): David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930). D.H.L. started it, and he started much else. In actuarial terms Lawrence (like Larkin, one of his greatest admirers) died without issue; culturally, though, he left behind him two of the biggest children ever to be strapped into highchairs: the sexual revolution and life-writing…
When a writer is born into a family, Philip Roth has fondly but slyly said (more than once), that’s the end of that family…Ah, but only if that writer is a life-writer. It is life-writing, not writing, that is the homebreaker. In fact, life-writing goes so far as to flirt with criminality: throughout his career Lawrence was bedevilled by the law, and they went after him on two main counts – obscenity and libel.
In Saul’s case, auto-fiction gave rise to weeklong bouts of sleepless anxiety about lawsuits (he made last-minute proof changes, he asked people to sign waivers) – plus family troubles (with father and eldest brother), broken or suspended friendships, the deepening rancour of ex-wives and ex-lovers, and above all the indecipherable disquiet of children. It is morally treacherous ground, and Bellow himself thought the question ‘diabolically complex’.*10 Diabolically complex, and – I would’ve thought – fatally self-shackling. Fiction is freedom? Well, the life-writer seems to be crying out for boundaries and impediments and restraints. Crying out for them, or crying out against them – but nevertheless inviting them in.
