Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  Later, when he meets me for dinner with his girlfriend, she does me the honor of not treating me as if I'm totally harmless. They bait me for reminiscing about times in the Village before herpes and AIDS. When they go off together (I say I'm sleepy), I decide to sit awhile at the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas took his last drink and where Norman Mailer, in 1958, in his alternating Irish brawler and Texas cowboy phases, told me he didn't like Israelis because they spoke Yiddish, that language of his childhood in Brooklyn. Either he didn't yet know that the language of Israel is Hebrew, or more likely, he was making the point about his adopted roles, or most likely, he was simply announcing that he lacked any interest in the concerns of the non-headbutting Jewish writer from Cleveland. It was the era of Advertisements for Myself. We've both outgrown that quarrel.

  In recent years I also notice changes in my children. Ari kept glancing behind to see how I was managing as we bicycled; Ethan explained three times how to get to his apartment in Los Angeles; Ann telephones every day, and calls her siblings if she doesn't reach or hear from me within a few hours. Hey, Ari, is my bike wobbling? Ethan, do you expect me to wander in the City and County of Los Angeles until a kindly social worker leads me to you? Ann: What if something interesting is happening and I'm too busy to call? Judy hasn't yet reached the stage of adjusting pillows behind my head to make sure I'm comfy. Nina did, however, try to help me snap on a seatbelt.

  I've passed the traditional cutoff point for elders and have no justification for persistence. Genes, vitamins, Haiti, children, a wife I loved and lost are on offer; maybe my father's grandfather, who according to family legend lived to be 122, is the culprit. He was said to pass his later years dangling money on a fishing line out of a second-story window and jerking it out of reach when passersby bent to pick it up, his cackles of laughter resounding down the street. I haven't yet bought my fishing equipment. Trying to teach others to nurture their old loves, hatreds, and ambitions is a mug's game, or a televangelist's. Balzac (maybe someone else) said that Paris is the paradise of misery and the capital of hope. Old age is something like this grand ancient city, a stalwart relic shared with the rest of the natural world. We begin in dust and end in dust, true; but… new rocks appear in the terraced mountain fields of Haiti, no matter how often the peasants clear them. In the ceaseless churning of the earth, fresh outcroppings grow out to replace the disappeared ones.

  I can't reject old age. (I don't have a choice, do I?) Diligently observing the situation, I'll embrace it cautiously, tentatively, considering that it will not last forever. On the days of the Real Foods senior discount—it's Tuesday and Thursday, if you want to conserve resources—I tell the cashier I'm still eligible.

  When Ann telephones to check on my welfare, I enjoy asking her if she would like me to take a healthy young wife to see to it that I'm not dangerously alone. The new wife could also make good use of the inheritance otherwise merely dissipated by children and grandchildren. “You want me to be happy, don't you, Ann? If she turns out to be a heavyweight drinker, hair colorer, and shopper, but she's nice to me and I have a stroke in her arms, wouldn't that be a pleasant way for your dad to go?”

  Alexander Dumas’ children used to listen at the bedroom door as their old father, the most famous French writer of his time, made love to a succession of respectful demoiselles. No prurient interest; they simply worried about his health. At a crucial moment, they heard one of the acolytes cry out in ecstasy, “Now, oh now, Monsieur le Dramaturge!”

  Like my children, like everyone, I entered the world noisily, but most likely will go out in silence, nobody slapping my rump. Betweentimes, most of us do our best to stir things up in such a way that others—family, friends, lovers, even adversaries and enemies—accompany our departure with their thoughts. They make comments. They may be preoccupied for a time with our images. They glimpse reminders in the street, styles of walking or the familiar shape of a head. Flashbacks are evidence of our existence. Someone has a loving dream. Someone else dreams of revenge, waking to realize that it's too late for revenge, and hatred can bring no further satisfaction.

  Gradually, the memory fades. Perhaps there's a pang like Buddy's on his wife's birthday. In some cases, there's a historical record, at least a stone or a plaque. The grave marker is what remains of most of us, not how we grinned at the smell of roast beef or touched a beloved with a yearning hand. Fortunately we're no longer in the neighborhood to notice how we have been forgotten. Staring into the time when I am gone is like standing near a crowded pool where I am forbidden to swim. Look, they're splashing and laughing! They're bumping and flirting!… But I'm behind thick glass, dreaming I could join them.

  On good days I still wake to the beginning of life, expectations of crisp air, appetite, victories. The force that drives the red fuse through the body renews itself. I'm still alive, although those words echo the resigned beat of Tolstoy's last diaries, a nearly daily account of his dreadful quarrels with his wife, his final defeats and oncoming end: Still alive.

  Yet life goes on, as we assume it will in the future, now with the living and later without them, us, me (1924–?).

  12

  The Romance of Ambition: Memories of Saul Bellow

  What it seems that I have taken up in my life, and continue to practice in the hope of improving my practice, is the vocation of literature. That's the evidence in the archeology of my past. At the end of the war my generation calls “our war,” I knew where I needed to be.

  Post–World War II Paris—ration cards, public baths if a person developed an interest in cleanliness, and a romance of ambition, the most reliable means of winter heating—took up its honored role once more for a hive of young American would-bees. Bruised and lovely, the paradise of misery was still the capital of hope.

  Along with Richard Wright, the most esteemed American writer in residence during my years there, 1949–1951, was Saul Bellow, approximately ten years the senior of such as James Baldwin, Evan Connell, Terry Southern, Otto Friedrich, George Plimpton, Max Steele, and my callow self. Bellow had two published novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, appeared regularly in Partisan Review, collected a Guggenheim Fellowship. The rumor got around that he was destined to be America's new great novelist. His confident and graceful lounging, on view especially at the café Le Rouquet near Saint-Germain-des-Prés, seemed to confirm the rumor. He had a contract with the Viking Press. He was writing, and sometimes reading aloud, what would become The Adventures of Augie March. He was legal; the rest of us were stowaways.

  We would-bees on our G.I. Bill money, our Fulbright money, our selling our clothes, cigarettes, and dollars on the black market, saw him as an Old Master in his early thirties. He had climbed the heights while some of us were still peddling hashish to gullible Frenchmen under the chic American name “marijuana,” or serving as gigolos to existentialist millionaires, or worst of all, cadging handouts from family grinds back home. A few magazines, Points, Janus, Zero, and DEATH (the answer to Time Inc.’s LIFE), were started by young men and women of dependent means. We wouldn't get rich writing for Sindbad Vail's Points. Orson Welles gave the editor of DEATH a few bucks for food, which he shared with me in return for translating French restaurant menus; otherwise, he was reduced to ordering “Jumbo Omelet, goddammit! Omelet Jumbo!” which mysteriously always came with ham.

  I watched Saul from across a terrace, at his ease, and tried to fit this boyish person to his book The Victim, about a New York summer hot as Bangkok and the mutual sufferings of a crazed anti-Semite and his prey, which I had read during my first summer back at school after the Army and the war. The dark-eyed young man with a shock of black hair and large-lipped smile was what a writer should look like. Also he wrote, I thought, as a writer should write, with acute sense, and an astringent alertness to events. Naturally, I didn't dare approach this formidable personage strolling under the plane trees or holding court in the cafés of the quarter.

  I don't remember exactly how we met; perhaps he
was amused by my lurking shy shadow. Without telling him, I sent the manuscript of my first novel, Birth of a Hero, to Viking, where it was dug out of the slush pile by a young editor, Monroe Engel, who shepherded it to higher authorities, including Malcolm Cowley. Since my return address was Paris, some prudent soul thought to ask Saul for an opinion—Had I really written the book? Would I be likely to repay investment by writing another book?—and he gave it a favorable verdict. Thanks partly to his generosity, I became a published novelist, returning to Cleveland, the Paris of Northeastern Ohio, after my Fulbright–G.I. Bill years in exile. I planned to buy a three-cent stamp at the post office in the Public Square, which would surely have my picture on it. (The novel came out, but it was still Benjamin Franklin on the three-cent stamp and Herb looking for work in a hamand-eggs factory—whatever—to support self, wife, child, another child on the way.)

  In Paris, with the news of imminent publication, I was adopted by some of the older expatriates, in addition to the French students, artists, and layabouts who had already become my Rive Gauche friends. Rodin's Balzac strutted belly-forward on his pedestal at Vavin-Montparnasse; encouraged by Sartre and de Beauvoir, huddling nearby at the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots, Diderot on his own pedestal pointed an accusing finger across the boulevard at the ancient church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Bellow was not a stony challenger; rather, an amiable deity for the fresh crop of American would-bees seeking out the Paris of Henry Miller. Saul's generosity was not the sum of his appeal. His complaints, particularly marital, and his neediness, which went back to childhood or perhaps to the origins of the human species, gave him the charm of a genius for grief. His lamentations, which I thought of as “The Book of Saul,” a long-run drama, had some of the eloquence of Job and Jeremiah; sackcloth, ashes, a wife who didn't understand him, and sometimes even worse, a woman who did. In that last variation, “The Book of Saul” departed scripture in the direction of modern happy endings.

  When his marriage boiled over, the spillage was uncontained by the boundaries of family. The shock of seeing this hero in a state of frantic self-pity bewildered my twenty-two-year-old wife and my twenty-four-year-old self. He was a mature person, above the age of Jesus when crucified, but we were kids. With his first two books, his handsome lounging, and his renown as the Designated New Voice, his fall into despair made us feel awe. It was as if the mountain crumbled as we watched; we heard the shrieks.

  Usually these family quarrels, hot tongue and cold shoulder, had to do with boredom (his) and jealousy (his wife's). He cultivated the admiration of pretty young women; he received it. He liked to recall how, when his first story was published in a national magazine, Harper's Bazaar, along with a photo, he received a telephone call from MGM Pictures. Did they want to make a movie of his story?

  He beamed; high wattage. There was an ironic glint the large dark eyes. His smile delighted. No, they wanted to offer him a screen test.

  When he glanced around the circle of admirers on the terrace of Le Rouquet at the corner of the rue des Saints-Pères and the boulevard Saint-Germain, we all responded with an echo of his own joyous amusement, just as if we were receiving the tale for the first time. Sometimes there was at least one person present for whom it was new.

  At the end of a sleety Paris winter, my wife Edith and I thought of hitchhiking south for a while to pick figs and swim in the Mediterranean. Saul had another dreadful long-run battle in progress with Anita, his wife, and needed to get away. He decided upon a strategic retreat to Spain by automobile, invited us to come along. We hoped to find cheap digs in one of the French Basque towns near the Spanish border. This is how young we were; felt we were making a necessary political gesture by stopping short of visiting Franco's Spain.

  The trip in Saul's Citroën was no joyride. He wailed and wept as we drove. He was also funny and full of curiosity about himself and knew the map. I still connect his total recall for directions, his sensitive nose, with the quality of his gift, an almost metabolic perspicacity. Through the narrow medieval streets of Avignon, he found our way, sniffing out the correct road. Ah, here would be a bread smell. And there it was—a good bakery. There was also an unnerving claim for attention to his marital agonies. His need was exclusive, unflagging, draining. He required an audience as devoted as the audience he gave himself.

  Occasionally he rested from discourse about his conjugal griefs by talking about his book in progress, reading aloud from The Adventures of Augie March. Although my approval was a foregone conclusion, he asked for fresh and renewed bursts of enthusiasm. Occasionally, for a little variety, I tried to speak of my own novel-in-progress. But this really wasn't on the program.

  In a park in Avignon, amid Roman ruins and blood-red meridional blooms, we saw a white-haired old man lovingly dandling a child. I said, “What a beautiful grandchild you have,” and the man said, “My daughter.” Perhaps I was fated not to satisfy my elders.

  By the time we reached Banyuls, a few miles from the Spanish border, Edith and I were exhausted by the pleasure of Saul's company. Enough; we were stopping. The long afternoon on those narrow roads of the Côte de Vermeil, hearing of how only oblivion could offer Saul release from his sorrow, along with how his book would change the face of American literature, had left us hyperventilating. It was hot, bugs were swarming, and there may have been a mistral, that wind which makes folks crazier than usual.

  We worried about leaving him alone in the hotel. We sat under an umbrella, drinking lukewarm soda, waving away the flies. We dreaded the meal we were about to have with him before we drove on into Spain. How would we cope with his paroxysms of despair?

  She nudged my arm. “Look.”

  He was bounding toward us with a boyish grin, hair slicked down after his shower, eyes bright and skin fresh, chipper and restored. We were drained by the sufferings he seemed to shed. He was ready for a glass of wine and a good meal of the local fish stew, and his nose was twitching as he approved of the girls on their high wooden clogs in the town square of Banyuls-sur-Mer.

  * * *

  A few months later, with the eagerness of the would-be, I handed Saul a new story, “The Heart of the Artichoke.” He was traveling to Italy and said he would take it with him. A week or so later I received the letter every young writer wishes to receive from a maestro (it even came from Rome, like an encyclical). In his clear and comely handwriting, it gave me clear and comely news I wanted. One odd phrase stood like a monument at the end of the paragraphs of perfect enthusiasm: “All barriers are down.”

  Through the inevitable discouragements to come, I remembered this grace note from on high and would mumble to myself, All barriers are down… All barriers are down… Surely all barriers must come down.

  The zestful generosity of which the young Bellow was capable fills me with gratitude despite the narrower judgments of later years. It fits a time when birds sang sweetly in the courtyards of Paris and all our sleeves were stuffed with manuscripts.

  In the early fifties, Saul's urban wit and angst—Kafka-out-of-Chicago, Dostoyevsky-from-the-yeshiva, polymathematical, polylinguistical, playful about it all—offered just the ticket for a G.I. Bill generation that was heading from college into graduate work, although its parents had often not finished high school. He made fun of suffering, he made the suffereing into fun, he was fully implicated in his own life.

  His personal grace relieved the solipsism. It wasn't that he didn't need others; he wooed those around him with an eloquent performance. He enacted his inner life for his public on the stage he carried everywhere. Women loved him; men found him demanding but ingratiating. He managed to enlist the world in the narrative of his disasters. Later, Herzog, drawn partly as an act of revenge after one of his marriage and friendship convulsions, would depict a beloved protagonist in a state of despair. Herzog ranted comically and proceeded from the melodramatic scenes with his wife to episodes with women eager to offer nursery solace. Such a scenario is unreal to experience—when mired in despair, most of
us are not beloved—but Saul's star turn, dominating his own theater, helped to make it seem possible in his special case. Of course, talent and reputation contributed to what in the Kennedys came to be called charisma. He banged on his high chair with his spoon and asked to be served. He demanded respect and was in a position to get it. If he sometimes seemed like a child, he was a beautiful baby.

  Saul's prose style married classical elegance to Mark Twain and the pungency of street speech; Yiddish played stickball with Henry James. As a young man, he rode the elements with terrific energy. He could spritz like a Lower East Side comedian and then lament like the prophets. His fate as a writer was to insist that words matter, his own most of all; suffering matters, his own absolutely; and he was able to enlist an audience in his struggle to survive, marked and measured by the works in progress that devoured his life.

  He performed jazzy riffs on his good Hebrew-school, University of Wisconsin, and University of Chicago Trot-skyite education, making neediness the baseline. (“I want, I want, I want.”) He never questioned the appropriateness of his stance at the center of the stage. Among contemporary novelists, he was surely the most serious about reading, studying, learning, and using it all, adding it all up. It was unified by that keening cry from the heart. Saul needed, needed, needed.

  Time…

  Worships language and forgives

  Everyone by whom it lives…

  One morning in the late fifties, I drove, along with Ralph Ellison and his big black dog, to Tivoli, New York, where Ralph and Saul were sharing the rambling old Hudson River house in which another of Saul's marriages ended. The dog grew agitated from the long trip confined to an automobile, and when Ralph stopped at an office at Bard College to pick up his mail, the dog began furiously barking and leaping. There seemed to be a discipline contest in progress between Ralph and his dog. Ralph said, “Don't let him out,” while stately he proceeded to collect his mail.