by Martin Amis
Naturally Bellow was capable of a rational — indeed a Benthamite — discussion of Israel, pros and cons. But it wasn’t that kind of evening. No, it wasn’t that kind of evening. Very soon Janis and I were reduced to the occasional phoneme of remonstration. And Saul, packed down over the table, shoulders forward, legs tensed beneath his chair, became more laconic in his contributions, steadily submitting to a cataract of pure reason, matter-of-fact chapter and verse, with its interjected historical precedents, its high-decibel statistics, its fortissimo fine distinctions — Christopher’s cerebral stampede.
Then it was over, and we faced the silence. My right foot throbbed from the warm work it had done beneath the table on the shins of the Hitch, availing me nothing … As I shall explain, I too think about Israel with the blood. But my blood wasn’t thinking about Israel, not then. A consensus was forming in the room, silently: that the evening could not be salvaged. A change of subject and a cleansing cup of coffee? No. Nothing for it, now, but to finish up and seek our bedding. But for the time being we sat there, rigid, as the silence raged on.
Christopher was still softly compacting his little gold box of Benson & Hedges. He seemed to be giving this job his full attention. Before him in the silence lay the stilled battlefield: the state of Israel, thoroughly outmanoeuvred, comprehensively overthrown … In his clefish novel of London literary life, Brilliant Creatures (1983), Clive James said of the Hitchens-based character that the phrase ‘no whit abashed’ might have been invented for him. But Christopher did now seem to be entertaining the conception of self-reproof. During the argument the opinions of Professor Edward Said had been weighed, and this is what Christopher, in closing, wished to emphasise. The silence still felt like a gnat in my ear.
— Well, he said. I’m sorry if I went on a bit. But Edward is a friend of mine. And if I hadn’t defended him … I would have felt bad.
— How d’you feel now? said Saul.
Rachel
Suppose I were to talk to him about the roots of memory in feeling — about the themes that collect and hold the memory; if I were to tell him what retention of the past really means. Things like: ‘If sleep is forgetting, forgetting is also sleep, and sleep is to consciousness what death is to life. So that the Jews ask even God to remember, “Yiskor Elohim”.’
God doesn’t forget, but your prayer requests him particularly to remember your dead. But how was I to make an impression on a kid like that?*
1987 was not my first time in Israel. I had been there the year before, as a guest of the Friends of Israel Educational Trust, with four other writers: Marina Warner, Hermione Lee, Melvyn Bragg and Julian Barnes. We had audiences with rabbis and academics, we had a cafeteria lunch with a couple of politicians in the Knesset, we went to Harodian, Masada, the Dead Sea, Bethlehem, Jericho, we stayed at a kibbutz on the Golan Heights.† We had a glass of tea with the postcard Bedouin in his tent, and took a ride on his camel. And we had a great time. But we were not introduced to any Palestinians or to any of the Holy Land Heretics — people like Israel Shahak, Witold Jedlicki and Emmanuel Faradjun — with whom Christopher Hitchens, around now, was stimulatingly engaged. V. S. Naipaul, in his travel books, puts nation states on the psychiatrist’s couch and then takes a reading of their mental health. All writers, all travellers, do something of the kind. After a couple of days your body gives you a verdict on the place you’re in; and I felt invigorated — rejuvenated. The Palestinians, true, remained invisible; but no one I spoke to was anything less than earnest about their situation and its affront to justice and democracy.
A year later this society already seemed to me to be turning. The health check I gave it left me feeling underrelaxed.* My wife was at my side, and I kept noticing certain unreflecting male emphases — the anxiety about female hygiene, for example. To see the guy in the beanie doing his stuff at the Wailing Wall now put me in mind of Nabokov’s remark about chimpanzees dressed up for circus tricks and how this demeaned their animal nature. What was being demeaned here? Something like human autonomy. And who were these scholars and cantors who kept sweeping unseeingly past you on their wild-goose chases, their fool’s errands? (They would be accosted, now and then, by proselytising home-church Americans: ‘Friend! There’s another way!’) And once, in the Arab Quarter, I had a mild altercation with one of the gatekeepers of the Holy Mosque, and I saw in his eyes the assertion that he could do anything to me, to my wife, to my children, to my mother, and that this would only validate his rectitude. Human kind, or I myself, cannot bear very much religion. Politically, too, it seemed a little harder to speak your mind. Naipaul, perhaps, would have drawn attention to certain symptoms of longterm (and largely justified) persecution mania. This is the garrison state, and this is the attrition of beleaguerment.
I have hopes for Israel and will never be entirely reasonable about her. I think about Israel with the blood.
In 1967, while Saul Bellow was nosing corpses in the Sinai (the ‘sour-sweet, decayed-cardboard smell becomes a taste in the mouth’),* I was lying in the arms of a Sephardic Jewess in Golders Green. When the invasion began, on 5 June, she went off, hectically, to give blood for Israel. And at that moment I knew that this was love: first love … My only friend, Rob, resignedly said that she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen: her mouth was wide, her nose unignorably warlike, her hair an ebony shoeshine. She lived with her mother (who worked for Lord Sieff of Marks and Spencer) and her grandmother, who was ancient, tiny, humorous, and orthodox: in her pantry even the instant coffee was kosher. My girlfriend was a year older than me, and she was a virgin. When, eventually, it happened, we looked for the blood and found none. We were inseparable for half a year. And then, of course, we separated.
The affair had a coda. Six years later she read The Rachel Papers and rang me up. We arranged to have dinner in ‘our’ bistro, off Baker Street, and I went along there, I must confess, expecting a three-hour denunciation, a slap in the face, and a libel suit. There has been much talk, in these pages, about real and made-up people. When you begin a novel at the age of twenty-one (or so I found), all you’ve got is your own consciousness; autobiography is forced on you because there isn’t anything else. Rachel, in the book, is sympathetic but also sad and baffled; and I enormously exaggerated the coldness with which she is finally spurned. I arrived at the bistro and looked for my first love. But she wasn’t there. In her place sat a woman of twenty-five, and fully formed† … It was one of those meals where the waiters keep asking you if there’s something wrong with the food. Because the body is full, tight, sated, and nothing can be added to it; the body is already too rich. I was powerfully delighted, gorgeously relieved, greatly moved — and astonished, all the same, when she finally said, ‘Do you want to come back to my room? For coffee.’ And then she added, uncharacteristically (I thought. But what did I know?), ‘As well as the obvious’ … I spent the first of several nights in the residential wing of her training college, down the Metropolitan Line. She was studying medicine and would soon be leaving the country: for ever. Where did she end up? Australia? Canada? Israel, whose army her blood had fuelled? In the morning I took the train straight into Blackfriars and the TLS. Climbing aboard I would say to myself that the ‘obvious’ was ineffable, and remember my amazement (even my alarm) at the elevation of my blood.
So I will never be entirely reasonable about Israel. I will always think about her with the blood. Not my blood. The blood of my first love.
Death of a Feeling
The Forest Ranger tends to be cheerful in the morning and will normally give you a couple of numbers over the toast and cereal — ‘K-K-K-Katie’, for instance, and, if there are children to be entertained, the one about O’Hogan’s goat. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there were no songs, no nursery rhymes, to be heard as Christopher, pausing to extinguish a cigarette in the fireplace, reoccupied his spot at the table. Breakfast was polite. He and I didn’t linger, and soon we were steering off into the mist and the Eastern Woodlands — ‘
the beeches, the yellow birches, and maples, the basswoods, the locusts, the rocks, the drainage ditches, the birds, and the wildlife, right down to the red newts on the roads … The poplar leaves, when you narrow your eyes, are like a shower of small change.’ That was the trouble, or part of it: Vermont was meant to be the green world, a distraction from distraction. Vermont was the good place.*
On the way back to the Cape I exacted — the phrase is James Fenton’s — an SBIR: a small but interesting revenge. I didn’t see my stunt as a retributive act, not at the time (for our return journey was marked by the usual fraternal ease); I thought I was merely surrendering to some juvenile impulse. Now I clearly apprehend that I did, in fact, want satisfaction … Somewhere in rural Massachusetts we took the necessary break — for the many powerful drinks and the huge uneaten meal without which the Hitch could not long subsist. It was when we crossed the bridge and joined Route 6, gaining the peninsula of the Cape, that Christopher began to press the case, not for a repartitioned Jerusalem, but for an immediate rest-stop. The cream Celebrity bowled on. After another twenty minutes or so, by which point Christopher’s whimpers had become a whine for mercy (he reminded me of my sons and their terminal cry: ‘Dad, quick! I’m desperate!’), I veered on to a slip-road and, at sixty miles per hour, ground my sore right foot into the brake pedal. The bladder of the Hitch, so intimately pleached and triced in the seatbelt, jackknifed forward and then, even more horribly, twanged back into its bucket. I find it difficult to duplicate the double-groan he gave, approximately Uh-da! — as alarm quickly modulated into the most earnest suspense. And he remained resolutely unamused by the incident. When he came back from the drenched spinney and I in my turn slipped into it (the shrub, the scrub, the butt-ends, the air always tangy with the gasps of human relief), the Hitch attempted a finessing getaway in the Celebrity, abandoning me to a walk of, I guessed, several miles. As it turned out he couldn’t make the car start.*
That evening, in the house on Horseleech Pond, Christopher and I had our longest and loudest laughing-fit, ever, followed by our longest and loudest fight. The laughing-fit I will return to. The fight was predictable, and had to come: ‘So you were defending your friend! Your friend Edward! Well Edward wasn’t there! The friend who was there was me! What about that friend! And what about MY friend! AND you were doing that horrible thing with your lips!’ I then broadened my fire, arraigning Christopher as the cause of the recent upheavals in his life.* But there are times when manners are more important than the state of Israel — just as there was a time, in Israel, when manners were more important than the end of the world … Life, just here, is behaving like a short story, and everything is connected. Everything is connected: all for love, the world well lost, the deaths of feelings. Christopher was coming to the end of a world, with great shiftings, massive rearrangements. All the imagos, all the picture cards — the face cards — were being shuffled, king and queen and jack.
On the phone the next day, still shocked, indignant and guilty, I was saying,
— And tell Janis I’m sorry.
— Please don’t worry about it.
— You deserved a night off, I thought. Saul was emphatic:
— Martin, you’re not to be hard on yourself about it.
— Thank you. But when you bring —
— Listen, I’m used to it. I get that kind of thing all the time.
— That’s what the Hitch said!
We couldn’t avoid laughing at that; and accordingly the case began to close. Some summers later I was in the same kitchen in Vermont when Christopher sent the Bellows an apology, or at least a thank-you note, enciphered in a piece he published in the London Review of Books. The communication was leniently — no, warmly — received. And so was my wife, a different wife, who came with me on that later visit; and I was reaccepted in my new reality … It is a simple desire, to try to triangulate your friends; and I am ready, on this one, to go in again. What gives the thing justice is that it was Hitchens who introduced me to Bellow — as a reader. ‘Look at Humboldt’s Gift,’ he told me, with a serious inclination of the head, on the staircase at the New Statesman, in (I think) 1977. I looked instead at The Victim, and after very few pages I felt a recognition threading itself through me, whose form of words (more solemn than exhilarated) went approximately as follows: ‘Here is a writer I will have to read all of.’ Everything else followed from this, and it remains the basis of the connection. I see Bellow perhaps twice a year, and we call, and we write. But that accounts for only a fraction of the time I spend in his company. He is on the shelves, on the desk, he is all over the house, and always in the mood to talk. That’s what writing is, not communication but a means of communion. And here are the other writers who swirl around you, like friends, patient, intimate, sleep-lessly accessible, over centuries. This is the definition of literature.
Oh yes: that laughing-jag. It was the kind of paroxysm that turns you inside out and leaves you with a new set of bodily fluids. Immenso giubilo. The joke — the improvisation — had nothing to do with Israel, or Vermont, but we are still in this short story, and everything measures up. In one of his most stunning utterances Nietzsche said that a joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.* Our improvisation was violently scatological, and would not survive transcription. But feelings were being mourned: feelings about the first half of life. Youth can perhaps be defined as the illusion of your own durability. The final evaporation of this illusion parches the skin beneath the eyes and makes your hair crackle to the brush. It was over. There would be hell to pay. Dying suns of a certain size perform the alchemist’s nightmare: they turn gold into lead. And there we were, in 1989, heading towards base metal. Transmutation had come to him, and would soon come to me.
‘It has all followed hard upon,’ I said to him, that lugubrious Christmas, when suddenly it was my turn. ‘Breakup, separation from children, health-crisis.’ Lucy Partington, Bruno Fonseca, Saul Bellow in the ICU. And a five-year novel, The Information, begun in peace and finishing, now, in spasm war … Christopher sat there, offering his presence. Say as much as you like or as little as you like. He could contemplate me, I felt, from a vantage of senior humanity. Acknowledging this, I said, ‘All I need now is the death of a parent.’
But here, for a little while longer, is the house on Horseleech Pond. Here are the trees where Christopher and I, at the age of thirty-six, stood posing for photographs with our sons in our arms: Louis, Alexander. The women taking the photographs were Antonia and Eleni. And there would be other births: Jacob, Sophia. All this is going to go. All this is going to disappear. This will fail. I will fail. I said to myself, Look at it: Look at what you’ve done. There is the rented car, a different rented car, in which you will drive alone to Logan. There is your wife, crying in the drive. Beyond her are your boys on the patch of grass, with that zoo of theirs — the frogs, the turtles.
* All publicity isn’t good publicity. As a New York publicist put it: ‘What: the guy’s an asshole so I’ll go and buy his novel?’
* The other two were James Fenton and Bruce Page of the Sunday Times. Hitch and I pushed our luck in an attempt to secure the job for our friend (impracticably, because James was still in his twenties). The great V. S. Pritchett, who was on the committee, voted for Ascherson. That would have been the logical and achievable outcome. With the committee split, the job went to Bruce Page, and the decline of the NS was thereafter sharply accelerated. All this was national news at the time, which tells its own story.
* As I see it this event marks the beginning of our friendship. I knew Christopher only slightly when I read about his mother’s death — in a Sunday tabloid. I wrote to him and he wrote to me, and the friendship began. (It was a suicide, by the way: another suicide.)
† See ‘On Not Knowing the Half of It: Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs’ in Prepared for the Worst (1988). Christopher’s mother had kept her Jewishness a secret from her husband, children and (perhaps wisely) from the Oxford she grew up in during
the early-middle decades of the century. It was an admirable — an indispensable — decision of Dodo’s to tell the truth to her grandsons.
* Along with Lucky Jim of course, and, I would hope, preeminently, The Green Man, The Alteration, Girl, 20, Ending Up, the stories ‘Dear Illusion’, ‘All the Blood Within Me’ and ‘A Twitch on the Thread’, the Collected Poems, The King’s English and perhaps the Letters. The Old Devils won the Booker Prize, or should I say the ‘prestigious’ Booker Prize, because that adjective has got itself firmly attached to the Booker Prize, particularly in America; I would bet that there are many Americans who think the thing is called the Prestigious Booker Prize, which is as it should be. Here is the Fowlers’ article in the COD: ‘prestigious (-jus) a. having or showing prestige; hence [-]LY adv., [-]NESS n. [orig. = deceptive, f. L. praestigiosus (praestigiae juggler’s tricks; see -OUS)].’ But the award is administered by an ad hoc and not a standing committee. So what it signally lacks is prestige, in every sense except the etymological: ‘F, = illusion, glamour.’
* The situation changed after 1995 (and again after 1999), as we shall see. And I would eventually say the words to Saul, in 1997, across the table of a Boston diner.
† Against the Hitch physical and intellectual opposition are equally futile. When in 1978 he left the New Statesman (we would all soon leave it) for the bourgeois broadsheet, the Daily Express, I went mano a mano with him among the sawdust and fagsmoke and bumcrack of an infernal Irish pub in a basement off Piccadilly Circus. I was in the unwonted position of attacking Christopher from the left: for defection, for betrayal, for taking the rich man’s shilling. Sadly watched by James Fenton (and the altercation had something wretched and near-tearful in it), our wills, my will and the will of the Hitch, became concentrated in the glass we were both holding with our right hands. It was a wine glass, and it contained a single whisky. We were squeezing it, while looking implacably into each other’s eyes, squeezing it till it began to creak … I desisted. I climbed down. Because I suddenly knew that he would not desist, not in a million years, and when we went off to Casualty together (James squaring the cabdriver and sadly accompanying us), the Hitch would have no regrets, no regrets about that gashed palm, that missing finger, lost in the sawdust: none. Later that year James and I, and Christopher, would journey by train together to cover the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool. There was a difference but not a lessening in our affections. The Express had installed the Hitch at the Grand, with its view of the Irish Sea. James and I were in a fiver-a-night bed-and-breakfast up some distant backstreet. Now that’s being left-wing: you lie awake on your narrow cot, listening to the only other piece of furniture in the room — the hulking wardrobe, as the beetles eat it.
