Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  The images in The Victim of a pair of tormentors chained together one hot summer in New York, or Augie March wrestling with Chicago, or Humboldt raving in the grip of mania, and especially Tommy Wilhelm, the protagonist of Seize the Day, weeping for himself and mankind at the funeral of someone he doesn't know, will endure as the memories of Saul's personal faults fade. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, and Unamuno were not saints in real life, either. Their work and Saul's teach something about generosity.

  The effect of his presence was also generous for other writers. The example of his success invited to the feast those who followed after him in the priestly—rabbinic!—calling of storyteller, lyric poet, questing philosopher. For a later generation, his rich use of vernacular speech energized the American language as Rabelais and Verlaine did for French, as Shakespeare and Laurence Sterne did in English, as Whitman and Mark Twain did. Of this doing and redoing, there needs to be no end. The stylistic playfulness, grace, and grasp of American urban yearning by a writer from a Yiddish-speaking family resonated especially for other Jews. We, too, could be Americans in the American language. I am old enough to have been informed by a friendly editor that I should spell my name “Gould” when a first story of mine appeared in her magazine. Later, a writer who had changed his name to something bland and generic informed me, with a grin both stern and smug, that he could be a real American writer, but I, alas, burdened by the name “Gould,” could not. After Saul's success, writers who once believed they needed names like “Shaw,” “Harris,” or “Algren” no longer required these “Made in America” labels. They could call themselves Ginsberg, Litwak, Leavitt, Canin, Gold, whatever names they came with, and this was liberating.

  Saul's persistent heartfelt I want, I want, I want—his own cry and that of his protagonists—really means I need, I need, I need. Insatiability derived both from his condition as an outsider and increasing recognition that being inside is no solution, either. Sometimes he glamorized his neediness by turning it into heroic appetite, as in Henderson the Rain King, elegantly, but with a querulous edge, in a bewildering rush of haughty self-pity. No story or novel could settle matters for him. He never stopped trying. He turned away congratulations for his many prizes (Nobel, Pulitzer, National Book Award) by confiding that they interfered with his real business.

  He wanted to be like Tolstoy, both a teller of tales and an inspirer, a moral philosopher; and he wanted to solve his own problems. He kept on trying, sustained by the devotion of Janis, his fifth wife. He became something like a shadow Tolstoy, running toward a devoted woman instead of away from her. An older Tolstoy wrote his passionate novella Hadji Murad, hot-eyed and rampaging over terrain he knew from his youth, after the great periods of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Then, overwhelmed, he turned to the autumnal achievements of The Kreutzer Sonata, “What Is Art?” and the fabular tracts with which he sought to teach moral lessons while his own family life fell into ruins. The spare precision of Bellow's first novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, opened into the rich language-busting of The Adventures of Augie March. Swaggering and full of delight at rafting down the wide river of American speech, he broke patterns as Twain and Whitman had, giving the street and the library equal place. And then, avidity still the habit he lived by, he became less hungry. He judged the century and found it lacking. The rebellious dangling man, the Trotskyite who had studied the violin and anthropology, became a defender of the established order, frightened by rock music and the Chicago he helped redefine. It made me fear my own old age to look into those great dark eyes and see the laughter in retreat.

  Strolling with Saul down the rue de Verneuil during the early days of our friendship, around the rue du Bac, back up to the café Le Rouquet—across the street from the garden of the Russian church—talking and talking amid that particular Paris smell of Gauloise Bleu, red-wine piss, and flowers, I happened to speak of Sinclair Lewis, who was still alive and writing his worn-out, alcoholic last novels. As a boy, when I first discovered grownup books, Babbitt, Main Street, and It Can't Happen Here opened doors to the world outside Lakewood, Ohio. But by 1950 it seemed that Sinclair Lewis's fingers were merely punching the typewriter, his rage had devolved to hysteria, the satire was diminished into abuse of a world he no longer fathomed. Sinclair Lewis's erotic yearning—I was in my early twenties—seemed pathetic in an old man.

  Saul interrupted, turning his warm and amused gaze on me, with a reproach that was aimed exactly right. “Don't count any writer out while he's still alive,” he said.

  These words imposed a long silence. I had a vision of eternity like the one called forth by Oscar J. Campbell, when our class read Lucretius on time and death, and he spoke of his stroke and then stopped speaking, lowering his head in contemplation of the unknowable. I accepted the shame Saul's reminder brought down upon me.

  Through difficult times in a long friendship, the early paradox remains, young Saul in crisis, that smiling person with rosy cheeks and hair freshly wetted by his shower, bouncing down mossy steps toward the café in Banyuls where we waited for him more than a half century ago. Edith and I expected someone exhausted by griefs without end on the roads from Paris to the Côte de Vermeil. Instead, what appeared for the bouillabaisse and wine was an avid young winner, sure of his powers. We had been exhausted by listening to his suffering. He was refreshed by the telling of it.

  The irritable old person in gray and black who warily and impatiently pulled away from our encounter in New York still lived by the standard of that passionate and spend-thrift willfulness. Since he was an artist, still alive, still alive, he couldn't be counted out. Within his irritability still swelled the indomitable young writer with pains he adored, restlessly seeking how to say them better.

  Among my brother Sid's papers after his death, I found a letter from Saul to me, written in the early sixties, in response to a story of Sid's that I had sent to The Noble Savage, the journal Saul edited. Saul's letter was full of good counsels and generous encouragement, and I gave it to my brother in the hope that it would nudge him toward finishing the endless, never completed novel he spent a lifetime writing.

  I wrote Saul in a flood of remembrance and gratitude and in sadness for our faded friendship. His reply was immediate and full of compassion about losses, his own and mine, of my brother, and regret that we had “neglected to attend to our friendship.”

  We were back in touch, attending to friendship. He wrote tenderly about Janis, his last wife, who kept him alive, he said, through caring, love, and the example of her youth. When he was eighty-four and she was pregnant, some women expressed anger at what they considered sexist behavior. There is no symmetry in the matter; a man of eighty-four can father a child. “I try to keep in practice,” he said. Justice is hardly the point here.

  On a balmy day in October 1999, we had lunch outdoors at the Nob Hill Café in San Francisco, and then sat in the sun on a bench in Huntington Park, both of us—I'm not reading minds here—remembering our Paris days when we used to pass the time like this. But we weren't talking about Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, or the daily news of the trials of Nazi collaborators. He talked about his life in Boston and Vermont, about his regret for needing to fly with a helper now that his wife's pregnancy was too advanced for her to travel with him. She wanted their child. She knew what the conditions were. He spoke of his end of the deal with a certain wryness, with an energetic resignation, his head cocked as he laughed about oncoming inevitabilities. “I always prided myself on my sense of smell. I always prided myself on my memory. I'm losing them.” When he laughed, throwing his head back, he was a boy again.

  And then he said it was time for his nap. He took my arm as we walked back to the Huntington Hotel. That night he was having dinner with his eldest son, Gregory, whom I had known as a child in Paris. “He has gripes about me he doesn't want to give up,” he said. “I don't blame him.” But this father, grandfather, and father-to-be intended to mend his fences at a
crucial time.

  For me, Saul is still fully present. There was a generous dreamer locked within his vanity, a young poet and lover in the body of the wary old party; and when he emitted his voice, sent out his courting signals to the world, which he desperately asked to understand him—often in scenes filled with pleading and tears—he managed to bring something gallant into our lives. He helped to create a new permission, not only for Jewish writers, but also for others previously exiled to an odd regionality without regions—blacks, Latinos, second- and third-generation immigrants, founding sons of not-founding fathers. Like all artists, his personality was stuffed with surprises, and not always delightful ones; like all human beings.

  When the days and nights end for a writer, something keeps going on if he has shed his magic light and darkness upon the miracle of life. “The death of the poet is kept from the poems.” And Saul Bellow struggled to leave us a record of days and nights that would not disappear after his troubled and fortunate time on earth.

  Afterword

  These pages are about love and memory, about why both are blessings and sorrows and a form of immortality. There's some repetition, or, as I prefer to define it, elaboration. (Complaints may be addressed to the Literary Structure Licensing Bureau.) This is a book about aging and time passing, and also about time moving forward into the uncharted future; about aging and time passing, and about not aging and time standing still. The L. S. Licensing Bureau is open for business all day, all night.

  Provisionally Facing Facts (In an Interim Sort of Way)

  These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air….

  Francis Xavier, Victor, Beatrice's avidly loyal husband Harold …I hope their last breath will be peaceful despite the uncanny rattle of matters closing down. They struggle to conceal their future by reclaiming the past, remaking it in their dreams. If I squint at myself, I can see me doing the same, as if there were no last rattle of breath in my program.

  In the sexual ramble, the human creature differs from more sensible beasts. We dream of completion by joining another. Many of us are never too old to be juvenile, just as we're never too young to be emptied, worn-out. A randy old guy like Yeats, years-laden, pursued his longing, by means of his avid last lyrics in avid grasping toward a lovely young woman. The old man on a stick still danced, had to, thought he could. “When the mouth dies, what is there?”

  “Who speaks of love has sad eyes,” sang Jean Ferrat. He who dreams of love has sad eyes, usually. Those who need love to save them often have sad eyes. Old men and old women have sad eyes. It's called “experience.” Sometimes, for the fortunate ones, the tired eyes are wrinkled with merriment.

  Lovers, when in love, have happy eyes.

  There used to be carnival midways, there still are a few, but if they disappear entirely, our lives on earth will still be turbulent and filled with delight and deceit, like a carnival midway. If there were a God, his all-seeing eyes would have to be tearless as He observes us from afar. His tears would run out; too exhausting even for a God to observe our actions without smiling during our brief span between the endless past and the future. Surely, while laughing, He would squeeze out one more tear. Older than Francis Xavier, Victor, Howard, but perhaps still a lover in his own fashion, He should also have sad eyes.

  There were years I expended in philosophical self-questioning, trying to deal with a dilemma. Did I want a woman of intellect, kindness, and an instinct for good times, or a woman with an irresistible leg (preferably two), shining hair, and the etcetera of physical bounty nature endowed her with? Many late dinners ensued as a product of this dubious quest. I didn't resolve the question as I should have. Instead, I decided: Both! I want both, I need both! I'll find a reader of Kierkegaard who rocks, a woman with sly glances after that late dinner whose eyes also brim with feeling when we listen together to the Mozart Requiem. I was corrupted by personal ads before I ever read one. Optimistic American trial and error led to a harvest of five children.

  Although not a medical expert or biotech researcher like so many in northern California, I've identified my disease as Restless Beatnik Syndrome with Nosy Metaphysical Complications. My doctor doesn't have a remedy, so I've self-medicated with Mozart, Bob Dylan, Woods-Walking, and Café-Sitting. This chronic condition hasn't worn off during the twenty-first century. Earlier, I joined my fellow postwar young would-bees who booked third-class passage to France in search of Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, horse meat and cheap Algerian wine in a time of no heat, food rationing, bad teeth, and the massive intention of Paris to become Paris again, the capital of hope and the paradise of misery; absolutely not Lakewood, Ohio, or Stockton, California, or even Brooklyn, New York. We had the G.I. Bill, we had Fulbrights; some had trust funds or family happy to get rid of them; we had clothes, cigarettes, or bodies to sell; we had black market hustles. We would be young forever, and forever friends and rivals, both in the making of Art, Truth, & Beauty and the selling of hashish to French existentialists under the chic Marshall Plan label of “Le Marijuana Américain.” (It wasn't at all. It was mere Algerian hemp, the gullible existentialists thereby financing our purchase of an equally rancid product, Algerian wine.)

  We were multitaskers, due to financial and hormonal imperatives, needing money for heat, coffee, black market food, and lessons in French from lovely, sallow, bad-teethed French girls called Juliette or Chérie. Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern found time to write Candy between café deliveries of le marijuana Américain. We also had the task of hanging out, measuring the literary competition, including Saul Bellow and Harry Hershkowitz (who?). I had an additional problem, a wife married after three years in the U.S. Army, which had trained me in weaponry, parachuting, and the Russian language, but had neglected to prepare me for her.

  When a rosy-cheeked young man, Otto Friedrich, scored an interview with André Gide (“Gide liked me and I liked him”) and then George Santayana in Rome (“Santayana liked me and I liked him”), we tried to overcome our jealousy by saying this was mere journalism. (Although I liked journalism and wanted journalism to like me.) Otto later wrote good books about Germany and Hollywood, edited The Saturday Evening Post, hired me to interview Vladimir Nabokov.

  We thrived in the yellow-gray Paris light. At the predawn hours, I sometimes left my room at the Hôtel de Verneuil, which also housed Jimmy Baldwin, an androgynous Norwegian journalist, a film buff who changed his name to Stein in honor of Gertrude Stein, a Dutch painter whom a little bug-eyed Spaniard tried to visit, plus— hélas! —the first wife I had married for poor reasons. When I politely asked the Spanish visitor to the hotel, the one with the hyper-thyroid eyes, how to identify him for the Dutch painter, he pronounced his name clearly: “Mais c'est moi, Pi-cas-so.”

  It was a crowded world of heavy smoking and bath-needing international Francophiles at the hotel aslant on its rotten timbers. A lover of night and silence, an aficionado of time away from the wife married by mistake, I walked before dawn to Vavin-Montparnasse to commune with the Rodin statue of Balzac on its pedestal near the Dôme café, not far from the Select. The cafés were shut at this hour, wicker chairs chained to the terraces, and even the transvestite club, Le Jockey, had discharged its last sad group of clothes-wearers. I stood in front of Balzac in the iron cloak, which seemed to make his belly even more naked, forward, and arrogant, and I vowed like Rastignac at the world: It's between us two now ! It was a contest between one buzzing would-be against the other would-bees to conquer our yearnings by fulfilling them. At that age, I never considered this might be a permanent state of contention.

  In later life, sometimes called “late life,” “those golden sunset years,” and treated as a person in that state by courteous younguns on San Francisco buses when they leap up to offer a seat to Chinese ladies laden with pink plastic shopping bags or gray-bearded writers, I found for myself a third alternative to the two categories of the True Love variety pak. Perhaps
some are intended to live alone. The facts on the ground and the feet in my shoes have spread. I've learned something new, although I still move in hiking boots, don't shuffle in slippers. Behind the wheel at a stoplight, I might yet catch the eye of a Kierkegaard fan in a white tennis dress, and transform into Francis Xavier, Victor, or Harold. I don't have far to go. Man's fate is provisional until his spirit is melted into air, into thin air.

  I'll be a better person, a better man,

  Really do it, if I can

  Persistence and the Green Fuse

  When applying language to life as a way of living it, I prefer the word “oldguy,” even if it isn't a word, to the words “sliding downhill,” “senile,” or “gaga” (French pejorative). I don't wear a bus pass strung on a shoelace around my neck. No one has yet offered to help me find my way home from the corner store. I'm cheerful in the morning, which experience tells me can displease overnight residents or visitors.

  Lack of a natural gift for melancholy is a disturbance, taken as a failure of human fret. However, life has made up for the flaw by giving me instructions in desolation, a lesson I didn't choose. The morning when a telephone call awakened me with news of a helicopter accident is forever lodged in every day. Sleepless predawn alertness brings the news; rain brings the news, so does the sunrise; the eyes of my children remind me, although nowadays we seldom speak of the event. Melissa, the mother of our sons and daughter, died a few days before her forty-eighth birthday. When they do speak of it, our sons and daughter say she didn't die, she was killed, because her life ended when she was still captivatingly, enchant-ingly vigorous and young. She and I had scheduled a birthday lunch together. I had propped a birthday gift for her at my door, not that I'd forget. Now I forget what I did with it.