by Martin Amis
And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one’s mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood.
On 1 January 1995, I could already feel my questions, my eyes, my guns, turning on Rosemary. Her committal and week-long hearing would begin on February 6.
To say that the headline suicide ‘brought it all back’ is inaccurate and inadequate, because such things never go away: with such things, as Kingsley said, you can only hope to coexist; they’re just there … But it did entrain a new cycle of miserable and directionless meditation — a quieter version of David’s swearing and weeping: cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead. It would seem that I was anyway in poor shape, as the year turned. It would most definitely seem that I was in poor shape. Notebook: ‘If weepy is poor shape, then I’m in poor shape.’ I am easily moved to tears and (for instance) rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me). But that lachrymose, that crybaby Christmas was a formative convulsion, new to my experience. And then came 1995.
In ascending order of seriousness, I was structurally weakened by various severances (some of them professional as well as personal and all of them public), by the excruciating sunderings in the dentist’s chair (with their extended lessons, their conferences, on Anno Domini), and by the partings and separations from my wife and two children over the summer and the autumn. The theme is clear: partings, sunderings, severances, with the great depth-charge of my cousin Lucy, with her beautiful but now sorrowful surname. Additionally, alongside all this, my friend, mentor and hero Saul Bellow was on a breathing machine in an intensive-care unit with both his lungs whited out. The source of the massive attack on his nervous system was still unclear. In the Caribbean, olfactory hallucinations had given way to the symptoms of dengue fever. His wife Janis almost had to skyjack him from St-Martin to Puerto Rico and thence to Boston. In hospital he suffered heart failure and developed double pneumonia. One night he climbed out of bed and had a fall. His back was so inflamed, the doctor said, that it looked like a forest fire seen from the air. And Saul was almost eighty years old.
Finally there was Bruno: Bruno Fonseca, 1958–1994. Finally there was that moment in New York, when all the lines of grief converged … At the end of the dinner — was it, perhaps, on Christmas Eve? — your mother passed round the table a series of drawings she had had bound together: drawings of your brother Bruno as he lay dying. Drawings of Bruno sleeping, staring, waiting, they looked like self-portraits by the ghost of Goya; and there on the last page, most shockingly, was a photograph of Bruno at the age of twelve — his smooth bare chest and arms, his innocently wondering slouch and pout. The slim volume was passed to your father, Bruno’s father. All that year Gonzalo had been conspicuous for his composure. As one desolation followed another, I never saw him flinch or weep. He took it; a sculptor himself, he just deepened into the ground like one of his old stones on the hillside. Now I watched him while he leafed evenly through the pages. Gonzalo was faintly smiling in what I took to be acknowledegment of the quality of his ex-wife’s technique (a technique maintained against intense emotion). Then, exhaling, he turned to the photograph. Suddenly, sharply, involuntarily, he sucked the air back in through his underteeth. It was the sound you make as a wintry sea slaps your chest, or like the sea itself when a wave starts regathering over sand and shingle. He recovered at once. That was all … Later, I would find that thinking about this moment went very heavily with me. It made a disastrous connection. Because it encompassed my own sons (in their limbs and lineaments so like the boy in the photograph), and the matter of thwarted parental love, and all the discontinuities and disappearances of 1994.
Nothing Cures That
Fate, disguised as Michael Ignatieff,* brought Bellow and me back together in London in 1985, where the three of us made a late-night, discussion-type TV programme. Saul and I shared a cab or two. There was a dinner, where we were joined by my first wife, Antonia Phillips. Saul seemed to be travelling alone. I now know that his marriage to the dedicatee of Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984), his fourth wife, was over or ending. But I felt little curiosity about his personal life. I want to say that my feeling for him has always been based on — and formed and constantly refreshed by — literary admiration. That admiration is seldom more passionate than when, in his pages, he ‘reads’ a human face, a human presence. These readings are no mere impressions; they are visionary and biblical. So at that time I found his gaze testing. I felt tested by it. He could look at my face and tell exactly how much trouble was waiting for me.†
Early in 1987 I was asked to contribute a paper to a Saul Bellow Conference in Haifa, organised by the distinguished Israeli novelist A.B. (‘Bully’) Yehoshua.‡ My assignment was the forthcoming novel More Die of Heartbreak. With my wife I flew to Israel, arriving at the Haifa hotel very late at night, long after the kitchens had closed. I think we got an apple and a tomato out of them. Very early the next morning there came a brutal squawk from the telephone: I was told that ‘the Conference minibooce’, even now, was revving in the forecourt. Unfed and half-dressed I journeyed to a university building that resembled a multi-storey bomb shelter and listened to a series of American academics lecturing on things like ‘The Caged Cash-Register: Tensions Between Existentialism and Materialism in Dangling Man’. Saul was present. He was heard to say that if he had to listen to much more of this he would die, not of heartbreak, but of inanition.* Thereafter, Saul Bellow was not often to be found at the Saul Bellow Conference Centre. (Nor was I regularly seen there.) He was in stalwart attendance, though, on the last day, when I gave my paper alongside the novelists Alan Lelchuck and Amos Oz.
After exulting in the brilliance of the weather, and in the brilliance of the novel, I continued:
Here are further grounds for extreme complacence on my part: Bellow has been reading Philip Larkin. Now the narrator of More Die of Heartbreak grew up in Paris at the feet of heavy thinkers like Boris Souvarine and Alexandre Kojéve who talked geopolitics and Hegel and Man at the End of History and wrote books called things like Existenz (note the powerful z on the end, rather than the more modest ce). I grew up in Swansea, Wales, and Philip Larkin was a good deal around. He didn’t talk about post-historical man. He talked about the psychodrama of early baldness. Bellow quotes Larkin as follows: ‘In everyone there sleeps a sense of life according to love.’ Larkin ‘also says that people dream “of all they might have done had they been loved. Nothing cures that”.’ And nothing — i.e., death — did cure that. Love was not a possibility for Larkin. Because to him death overarched love and rendered it derisory. He died in 1985: by Bellow’s age, incidentally, he had been dead for years. For him, death crowded love out. With Bellow, it seems to be the other way around. More die of heartbreak, says the title. Well, Larkin never had any heartbreak, not in that sense. Perhaps one of many, many things the new novel has to say is that you need heartbreak, to keep you human … The right kind of heartbreak, mind you. Anyway, whether you need it or not, you are certainly going to get it.
I find this surprising, now, to see life behaving with such thematic obedience. Today (13/7/99) I came across the following in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987): ‘Very few men are capable of coming to terms with their own extinction … It is the hardest task of all to face the lack of cosmic support for what we care about. Socrates, therefore, defines the task of philosophy as “learning how to die”.’ Which made me think of Bellow’s remark: ‘Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.’
And that, in turn, brought me back to Larkin and his line, ‘the costly aversion of the eyes from death’. Costly! Yes, it would be costly: prohibitive, steep, ruinous, dearly bought. And yet there he was, on 21 November 1985, heading off to hospital, packing his pyjamas and his shaving things, and summoning the ease, the humour and the generosity for one more letter: to my father. And Larkin’s last words, addressed to the nurse who was holding his hand, were ‘I am going to the inevitable’. His last words, spoken to the last woman in the last room.
The Conference ended and we all headed south — to Jerusalem, where (by my reckoning) Saul and I made friends.
— Is Saul Bellow in some sense your literary father?
This was a regular (and not unwelcome) query, in interviews, when the affiliation became known, and I usually replied,
— But I’ve already got a literary father.
And that was true, then, in 1987.
Lurid
As 1994 ended my life became lurid. Lurid, according to the condensed epic poem of the Fowlers’ article in the COD, means:
1. ghastly, wan, glaring, unnatural, stormy, terrible, in colour or combination of colours or lights (of complexion, landscape, sky, lightning, thunder-clouds, smoky flame, glance, etc.); cast a ∼ light on, explain or reveal (facts or characters) in tragic or terrible way. 2. sensational, horrifying, (lurid details); showy, gaudy, (paperbacks with lurid covers). 3. (Bot. etc.) of dingy yellowish brown.
In The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage* my father has this to say under the heading ‘Single-handedly’:
Some illiteracies are presented in the name of literacy, or at least of regularity and common sense … Those who like to make words longer and more polysyllabic have not noticed or do not care that singlehanded is already an adverb … The lately fashionable overly, one of the ugliest intruders of this part of the century, is similarly an unnecessary extension of what was already a thriving and unquestioned adverb.
There are plenty of other adverbs vulnerable to creative illiteracy through not ending in -ly. Regardless is in the forefront, having three syllables already and perhaps standing in need of rehabilitation by being blown up into irregardless by a different kind of illiteracy. But no word of this sort — an adverb not already ending in -ly — can be considered safe. When can we expect to see quitely? Altogetherly? What nextly?
Here’s what nextly. Yesterday (30/4/99) I heard NATO spokesman Jamie Shay use the phrase ‘know fully well’. My first thought was to call my father but of course there was no father to call. Kingsley goes on (and here he gives a surrealistic glimpse of my lurid activities at this time):
An award-winning actress was recently witnessed … thanking all those who had contributed to her triumph, ‘lastly but not leastly’ some easily overlooked minor figure. And a New York dentist says ‘open widely’ on his best behaviour, but ‘open big’ when in a hurry.
The dentist was Todd J. Berman and the actress was Jessica Lange. Reduced to near-total Kinchhood by Todd in New York, I flew to Los Angeles and luridly mingled with Jessica, and with Sharon Stone and Sophia Loren, with Tom Hanks, with Quentin Tarantino, with John Travolta. John and I would share two intimate dinners at his rented home in Beverly Hills, north of Sunset, and then a farewell lunch in his trailer on the set of Get Shorty.
Notebook: ‘15 Dec. Tenderly driven there by Subhindra Singh (oh, now they’re sorry), I arrive at 307 E 49 under a near-fatal dose of Valium. Dick* gets a better drug from his dentist: “It makes you feel you don’t give a shit what they do to you.” And Valium, I find, isn’t quite that good. “Open widely.”
‘1) Explanation. 2) A dozen? injections. 3) extractions (rt) extractions left accompanied by a dystopia of scrape and grind — and stitching, with the yarn like bloodied dental floss. 4) The scan on the backlit screen: the bridge connecting the lower canines, with one surviving incisor — a pathetic little buoy in a sea of disease. Then the removal of the “large cyst”. “Do you want to see it?” I make a noise that means yes. It reminds me of a biology class in Swansea: a length of worm, dissected and opened out. 5) The endless deftness of the knitting. X-ray X 2.
‘Sit for an hour, waiting for bleeding to be staunched, in the “recovery” alcove. Scripts for penicillin and Valium. Also for Toradol and Percodan (Don DeLillo says that the names of pharmaceuticals sound like the gods of science fiction). “You’ll have to be a grouch for a while,” says Todd. No stretching the mouth. No smiling. I have my usual hundred bucks’ worth of painkillers.
‘That week: sleep (one day). Use the icepack. No sign of the expected discoloration. The whole jaw rigid and tender. In repose, not so much a pain as a presence, a wedge: the bone graft — cowbone, prescreened for AIDS. The Bug. Bruno.*
‘And what about my bone, the smell and spume of my burning bone, with irrigator, vacuum cleaner, and two pairs of hands in my mouth, all at the same time, and the drill, and of course the other drill, capable of making your vision shudder.
‘I advise dental patients to keep their eyes open during the procedure. It frees you, just a little bit, from internalisation. The dental patient must have something to stare at — the panels of the blinds, the framed certificates (Diplomate of the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. I once heard Todd say, in a dismissive boast, ‘I haven’t done any dentistry for years.’ Well this sure feels like dentistry to me), the assistant’s green smock, the surgeon with his tongue folded upward and outward over his upper lip, his straining eyes, his condomlike gloves which, during the third hour, are marked with fresh as well as dried and crusted blood, his hooked forefinger.
‘21 Dec. SB still in hospital but out of intensive care.
‘22 Dec. Stroll into Todd’s for a leisurely checkup. But no. The stitches have come undone. “Open big.”
‘Another bloodbath and the most painful yet, despite the eight or nine jabs. Down on the lower jaw, where the cowbone lives, great scouring and scoring. How the instruments squawk and rasp.
‘Once again staggering around 2nd Ave with a fat lip and a wad of bloodied Kleenex, like an old brawler who just never learns.’
The only package holiday that the longsuffering travel agent, Martin, could put together (‘What’s the latest?’ he kept wearily asking, as our plans chopped and changed) was five nights in Puerto Rico: San Juan, where, two weeks earlier, Janis Bellow had wheeled her dying husband across the tarmac … In preparation I bought a glow-in-the-dark linen suit from a chainstore called something like Sir Guy; once established at the Condado Plaza Hotel/Casino, I added a pair of black sateen flipflops which clacked incensingly at every footfall. It is a relief, sometimes, to embrace indignity. I embraced it. I would never wear the Clamp again. My lower jaw, I felt, was now too crippled to bear all that sneering mass.
Onset: Bellow’s first symptom, I repeat, was a horror — a hatred — of food, not just the taste but the smell of it, the sight of it. In the early stages the loss of appetite ‘seemed to merge with the malaise I had brought here from the North — a kind of uneasiness or dislocation, something like the metaphysical miseries’. At first, for his dinner, he could manage a bowl of cornflakes, and could still tell himself that such moderation was salutary, because ‘like everyone else in the USA I am grossly overfed’. One night he could manage only a spoonful of the chicken soup that Janis had managed to procure and prepare for him. Making a joke of his failure, he recalled the immigrant mothers of his childhood who cried out, ‘My Joey can’t eat an ice cream — he turns away his head — he’s got to be dying …’ But Saul was dying … In London, when children go to hospital with stomach complaints, the doctor will test for appendicitis with the following question: ‘Would you like a Big Mac?’ If the answer is no then they’ve got it. They put that question to my son Jacob as he lay in Casualty, squirming with gastroenteritis. The pain came in waves, every minute; as they approached he shouted out, ‘Help me Daddy! Help me Daddy!’ And I couldn’t help him … Saul, on the other hand, had no real notion that he was a
iling. The sickness had now gone on to attack the ‘sheath’ of the nerves.
Among the Condado Plaza’s restaurant concessions was Tony Roma’s, billed as ‘A Place for Ribs’. Clearly, Tony Roma’s was no place for me. Kinch would eat a sandwich with a knife and fork in his room; or, wearing an eyecatching swimsuit, he would sit sucking on a french fry under a palm tree with a hi-fi speaker bolted to its trunk. I was surrounded, here, not by the bums and mendicants and diagonal dope-fiends of the Lower East Side. Far less consolingly, I was being swept along in a pageant of American health, wealth and micro-managed facial pulchritude. Saul was no good at eating and I was no good at eating. It seemed a lonely affliction, especially at the Condado, where eating was the principal group activity. They ate while they were eating but also while they were strolling, shopping, volleyballing, swimming, diving. Reduced by now to my lowest-ever adult weight, I might have found the verve to exult in my slenderness, among all this bronzed rotundity. ‘Grossly overfed’? The hotel guests could not be mistaken for representatives of that strange capitalist innovation, the corpulent poor, who wear their obesity like a low-caste colour — and who, in sufficient numbers (after a daytrip, say, to a Native-American casino in Connecticut), can make the liner-sized ferry from New London to Orient Point wallow awful low in Long Island Sound … This was a different kind of casino crowd, middle-income, middle-weight, and disporting itself in a tropical setting. If the Caribbean, in Bellow’s phrase, has been developed into ‘one huge U.S. recreational slum’, there was also much creaturely immobility, much sated torpor, on which to rest one’s zestless gaze. I found myself increasingly attracted to one brontosauran family (mother, father, daughter, son). During the afternoons their four bellies would respire in unison as they slept, companionably and rightfully, as if after some demanding but successful collective effort. This collective effort, I suppose, was symbolised by lunch. Later, they liked to go and stand in the sea, neck-deep, perhaps to experience lightness, their biomass duly diminished by the weight of the water it displaced. I was thin and hollow and no good at eating; but I helped myself to the cafeterial sachets of salt (laid out with the ketchup and relish at the poolside commissaries), which hit the spot for my hourly mouthwash.
