What was I reading? I want to convey a mood, and what you are reading is a constituent of how you feel. In biographies they should always tell us that, routinely, in the margin: what they were reading. What was I reading, in San Juan? As usual I failed to make a note of this valuable aide-mémoire — but of course I remember what I was reading. I was reading you and I was reading me. In our room I lightly subedited Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey and ponderously embossed the American proofs of The Information. A decade of work was disappearing from our desks. And for many a moment I felt wonderfully happy and proud* … The tumour in my underjaw now languished on a petri dish in New York. It was gone from me; I would soon know whether to expect it to return, and with what degree of virulence. ‘Life-tenure’, as Bellow puts it, had lost some of its substance. I trod softly through the after-tremors of my coup de vieux. A gnarled and arthritic thumb was bearing down on the Fast Forward. The body complained about this, but the body, suddenly a little less stupid, took what it could from the experience. All the same I was lurid with it, ghastly, numb-brown, like the reflection of my face, perched on the puddly linen suit — the reflection of my face, slithering over the gunmetal of the slot machines as I moved through the cold casino.
It would be years before I understood where Saul Bellow had ended up when he journeyed to the rented apartment on the tiny island of St-Martin. He made a side-trip, a fantastic voyage to the limits of mortality and the ends of the earth. Quite right, absolutely right, to stop eating. Eating, it transpired, was what had taken him to intensive care. And what was he reading? That was also crucial. He was reading about the Iron Guard atrocities in wartime Bucharest — the slaughterhouse and the meathooks, the cleavings, the flayings. And he was reading about the marvellously ‘appetising fragrance’ of human flesh as it roasts on the headhunters’ campfires in New Guinea, among torrents and cataracts of blinding flora.
Notebook: ‘Tailor-like fitting for the upper set, at the hands of Mike Szabatura. A blue spot is daubed on the tip of my nose, to help calibrate symmetry. Nazi-doctor measuring. That’s how Nazi doctors spent much of their time: measure measure measure.
‘Can’t believe the US proofs of The Info. A termitary of imported commas, each one like a papercut to my soul.*
‘Jan 3, 95. Big day. Todd. Stitches removed. No infection. Cleanout painless. Jaw feels freer, looser. More penicillin — 3rd dose in a month. The treatment, like the patient, is getting old.
‘But good news, good news. The lab report on the pathology: the cyst is unexotic. I’m not dying. I will live. This is good news.
‘On Seventh Avenue I got hold of a copy of The Sun. The prison suicide at Winson Green. The terrible pleading face. He looks like some wretch being led yet again to the stocks, and hoping, this time, for reasonably rotten fruit and vegetables. No bricks or spanners or roofslates.
‘I am praised by my dentists: for holding still. Many patients, they tell me, are “moving targets”. My unflinching rigidity makes the best results possible … Here’s another thing they sometimes say: “Sorry for torturing you like that.” My dear Mike, my dear Todd: if you had been trying to inflict pain, like the Nazi dentist, Szell, in Marathon Man, instead of trying not to … Besides, I am assuming that torturers never apologise. But do they ever explain?
‘Big day. I can tell immediately by the breathiness of Janis’s message on the Bellow answering machine that Saul is much better. He is getting ready to come home.’
I too came home, and settled into the lurid and lugubrious New Year.* My notebook records that during this period I was busted in my study by my older son. ‘Are you crying?’ Louis asked. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry. Things are so much better now.’ Were they? My cousin was dead, and your brother was dead. But I wasn’t dying and neither was Saul. ‘The Forest Ranger’, I informed my boys, ‘is out of hospital.’ They nodded solemnly … Years earlier, with their mother, on a trip to Vermont: the Nobel Laureate was to link up with us at a market in a small town near his house. He arrived in a jeep and dropped down from it wearing some kind of municipal combat jacket with (I think) the words FIRE SERVICE stitched into its shoulders. I told the boys he was a forest ranger. And they couldn’t be blamed for believing me. That’s what he looked like, towards the end of a summer of writing, walking, cycling and chopping wood. And now such exchanges as
— Who are you going to see?
— The Forest Ranger.
or
— Who said that?
— The Forest Ranger.
or
— What are you reading?
— The Forest Ranger
have become commonplace … I talked to Saul on 9 January (Notebook: ‘completely himself. Janis’s voice so moved’) and a week later I would see him, in Boston, on my way to Los Angeles and my rendezvous with John Travolta.
In Ravelstein† (2000) — and doesn’t that look weird? — the narrator, hospitalised and on the threshold of death, seems to be entertaining himself with hallucinations, delusions — ‘fictions which did not have to be invented’. Bellow writes:
A male hospital attendant on a stepladder was hanging
Christmas tinsel, mistletoe and evergreen clippings on the wall
fixtures. This attendant didn’t much care for me. He was the
one who had called me a troublemaker. But that didn’t stop me
from taking note of him. Taking note is part of my job-
description. Existence is — or was — the job.
I second that. Existence still is the job.
* These quotes are from Stephen and Mae West’s book, Inside 25 Cromwell Street. Stephen elaborates: ‘He was determined to keep out of trouble and he called everybody Sir. Even the other prisoners when he saw them. I was with him one day when another bloke came by. He was in there for murdering his whole family and Dad said: “Hello, Sir.” ’ I am reminded of KA’s poem in The Anti-Death League when Mae says of her father’s suicide: ‘I believe God has split us up and is trying to kill us all. If it’s a nightmare then please God let me wake up now.’
* He lied as unstoppably as he stole. Stephen: ‘He stole anything he could get his hands on. He was an incredible thieving machine.’ Mae: ‘At least 99 per cent of the contents of the house were stolen, including the lino on the floor.’ It is impressive — it is astonishing — to hear such force of life in these two voices, and in the voice of Anne Marie, the most senior in years, in suffering and in isolation. Well, they had each other: one assumes that they created some kind of alternative world within Cromwell Street. The other children are or were: Charmaine (murdered, along with her mother, Rena, West’s first wife), Heather (murdered), and then ‘the young kids’, Girl A, Girl B, Boy C, Girl D and Girl E, four of whom were halfcastes fathered by Rose’s ‘clients’. Girl A, Girl B, Boy C, Girl D and Girl E were taken into state care in August 1992, after the Wests were charged with abuse and neglect — eighteen months before the exhumations began … Frederick West’s lying was chaotic and serendipitous. He would say, for example, that he owned a string of hotels, and had toured the world with the pop star Lulu.
* John West died while a jury was deliberating evidence against him on numerous sex offences committed at Cromwell Street. Anne Marie West alleged that, over a period of years, she had been forced to submit to him more than 300 times. Rosemary was sleeping with John too — and with her own father, Bill Letts, who had always been a domestic psychopath. And of course Frederick was regularly raping Anne Marie. It began when she was eight (Rosemary participating in the initiatory torture), and continued until her ectopic pregnancy at fifteen.
* Gratifyingly, the gentle Michael shares a surname with the recurring villain in George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman books, Count Ignatieff, one of the most tirelessly vicious characters in popular fiction. (We shall return to Flashman later, unexpectedly, and in mortifying circumstances.)
† Oh, and I should say that I sent a copy of Money to him, too, as well as to Larkin,
and his response had deeply thrilled me. But I was still vulnerable to that brown-eyed gaze. The TV programme we had made together was called ‘Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno’. It occurred to me that Saul was Saul and I was Moronic. Or better say that he had a panoptic view of the modern confusion, and that I was within it, looking out.
‡ Bully’s nickname was tremendously well-established, though I never saw the logic of it. In a formal after-dinner speech Shimon Peres would refer to Bully as ‘Bully’ without feeling the need for any elaboration. Peres was at that time leader of the Labour opposition. As Bellow himself observed in To Jerusalem and Back (1976), Peres is so impossibly youthful in appearance that you imagine he subsists entirely on organ meats.
* At the time I thought he was merely embarrassed (and, of course, bored). But his pain was not only personal. ‘The universities’, as he remarked in an essay of 1975 (‘A Matter of the Soul’, collected in It All Adds Up), ‘have failed painfully.’ They quench literature of all its agitation and excitement, producing the BA who ‘can tell you, or thinks he can, what Ahab’s harpoon symbolises or what Christian symbols there are in Light in August’. Melville and Faulkner would have been tormented by such observations, just as Bellow was tormented that morning in Haifa.
* When this book appeared, in 1997, it was widely assumed that the title was a nod to Henry and Frank Fowler’s The King’s English (1906). And so it was. But ‘the King’, along with Kingers, was a diminutive, one seldom used in Kingsley’s presence although he knew about it and vaguely approved of it. Rob, for example, invariably referred to Kingsley as the King, as in ‘How’s the King?’ or ‘I saw the King on TV the other night’. So the title is apt: the book is about his English — the King’s English — as well as everybody else’s.
* The social critic Richard Cornuelle, Elizabeth Fonseca’s second husband.
* Bruno Fonseca contracted the virus at a brothel in Barcelona, where he was seeking to entertain an uncle visiting from Uruguay.
* I recall that I was also rereading Dennis Overbye’s Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos (HarperPerennial, 1992). Despite its so-so title, this is in my view the best popular book on modern cosmology: on the kind of human intelligence involved in it, and on the kind of questions the universe puts to that intelligence. Mr Overbye’s pages offered another perspective on daily life at the Condado Plaza, with its talking lifts (‘Going up’), its ferocious refrigeration, its great sprawl of negative entropy.
* ‘And the function of the editor? Has one ever had literary advice to offer?
‘By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor — which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet!” ’ Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (1974). ‘Pompous avuncular brutes’ is exquisite: it commands satirical truth, skewering a whole generation of Anglophone publishers (now vanished — though the occasional throwback remains).
* Lurid, because my case continued to be widely discussed by the Fourth Estate. The gravamen, the crux of it was that I had demanded a big advance for The Information so that I could fritter a lot of it away on cosmetic dentistry. Plus all the usual other stuff.
† I have seen Ravelstein in three versions. Some of the quotes in this section have been cut from the final draft. In his foreword to the compact fictions that make up Something to Remember Me By (1991), Bellow writes: ‘[W]e respond with approval when Chekhov tells us, “Odd, I have now a mania for shortness. Whatever I read — my own or other people’s works — it all seems to me not short enough.” I find myself emphatically agreeing with this.’ There followed, in 1997, the powerful but minimalist novella The Actual. So Bellow’s return, with Ravelstein, to an earlier, freer, more voice-driven exuberance is an astonishment to me. I have to keep reminding myself that the author was born, not in 1950, but in 1915.
Letter from College
Exeter College,
Oxford.
[Spring? 1970]
Dearest Dad and Jane,
I enclose my Battels — I haven’t really looked at them but I rather fancy that the coupon money (£6) is cancelled out by my dinner credits (£6 — 6). In any case, I require a check by Friday otherwise they’ll fine me. It’s so boring because I’ve never felt quite so ill in all my life. I wake up every morning feeling terrible in a completely different way from the morning before. Last Thursday: my neck & top part of my back were alive with those fibrous nodules that one gets between one’s muscles (I can’t see why I should get those since I haven’t drunk any Shandy* recently); Wednesday featured a feverish chill; Friday — a bulging headache, and on Saturday I had what felt like a coronary. Yawn, but I always have this before exams. My morning sortie to get the papers now invariably includes a call at the Chemist’s.
I’m working so hard now that my work can’t fail to come into focus before next Monday. Anglo Saxon grammar has proved to be the principal hang-up although I try & liven it up with awful jingles to remember the sound-changes — but mostly it’s just staring gloomily at endless lists of verbs, swearing softly every few minutes.
I met an incredible reactionary yesterday who supports the Arabs vs. Israel, Russia vs. Czechland, and Nigeria vs. Biafra. Rather like Peter Simple* — I’ve stopped taking the Bellygraph since that ‘Lost Bouquet’ piece (how much better it was in 1830). I’ll close now because I’m having an early night — I’ll be very relieved to see you all in a couple of weeks.
Ros. sends love.
Love Mart X X X
P.S. Thanks for your letters. Love to all, not excluding Miss Plush.
* Even a glass of lager and lemonade was too much for the flirtatious valetudinarian. More testimony to his extreme lightness of head.
* Pseudonym of a right-wing humorist in the Daily Telegraph.
Women and Love — 2
1970: it all started going wrong in 1970. From a letter to Robert Conquest, written in 1991:
I continue to lead a charmed life and never set eyes on the bag. Almost unbelievable that it’s now 8 years last Nov that I last did … It amazes me now that for several months after she went I was v cut up about it, wanted her back, contemplated a poem on the subj if you don’t fucking well mind. Now I wish it had happened in — well I suppose about 1970 would be right. Well it’s all experience, though it’s a pity there had to be so much of it.
This is an example of Kingsley in revisionist mode (and a relatively mild example, too: he is much more energetically ungallant elsewhere). I think I now understand the need for that revision, though I wonder if my father ever did; and it still pains me to see it. 1970? Surely not. But how would I know? In several senses, marriages are secrets, shared only by the principals. In the spring of 1976, at any rate, the writing was on the wall. There was the wall of the big house, and the writers were writing the writing on it, in italic capitals. It seemed that everything had changed in the space of a week. Now, the most incurious visitor, sticking his head round the front door for ten seconds, could have told you that the marriage of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard was ineluctably doomed.
For reasons that may appear more obvious than they really are, I have lost all appetite for apportioning blame in matters of the affections — in failed unions, sunderings, divorces. The symbiosis, the dyad, it fails, and that’s that … It is very difficult, it is perhaps impossible, for someone who loves his mother to love the woman whom his father left her for. Because the Other Woman has made you cautious about love: she herself has created caution in you about love. However this may be, I got very close to loving Jane. ‘I’m your wicked stepmother,’ said Jane, after the wedding. And she was my wicked stepmother — but only in the sense meant by my son, Louis, when he tells me (for instance) that he is ‘wicked at Latin’. Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affe
ctionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you. And she worked on this little vice, and overcame it. When I see her now I resent our vanished relatedness, cancelled by law but not by feeling. I also admire her as an artist, as I did then.* Penetrating sanity: they both had that, in their work. And I kept thinking, as I watched the household start to collapse, that if they could just stand back from this, if they could write it instead, then, surely, they would see … But writers write far more penetratingly than they live. Their novels show them at their very best, making a huge effort: stretched until they twang.
What happened? Addressing this question, Eric Jacobs, KA’s official biographer, muses: ‘Both plain and mysterious forces are at work in such shifts. The decline of Amis’s marriage to Jane was a bit like this: plain and mysterious, their relationship disintegrating even as it continued, like an art form moving slowly and imperceptibly towards exhaustion.’* Well, yes. The causes were both proximate and not so proximate, as always, both commonplace and inimitable. But the actual precipitant, I can disclose, was The Mask of Fu Manchu … Kingsley told me how it went. The whole day, he said, had been unusually enriched by the prospect of the Karloff classic (late screening). Dusk settled; midnight struck; and the film, when it came, was incredibly boring.† He sat up, alone, for another hour, in what he described as ‘a trance of depression’. Something, he reasoned, must be missing from his life. And he decided that what was missing was London. He wanted to leave the big house … So the marriage might have been extended for at least an additional twenty-four hours, if The Mask had been any good. As it turned out, the marriage would last another five years. But it was over, effectively, the minute those credits rolled.