He did indeed ask about Nat and Gus. And I can’t claim I wasn’t warned.
I had arrived at the Bellow residence in Brookline ahead of schedule, at about eleven o’clock; the housekeeper, Marie, let me in. Rosamund was out somewhere, and Saul was in his study upstairs, and Rosie was with her minder in the front room. Marie gave me a cup of coffee and I slipped out of the kitchen and into the back garden for a smoke…I was in town as a guest of Boston University, and my mission was to lead a seminar alongside Professor Bellow. The book under discussion would be Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line. And as I sipped and puffed under the chestnut tree I wondered how Saul would react to a novella that formidably and thunderously excoriated religious belief. He would not rise up in zealous defence of his own inklings – about these he was always sweet and meek…
A faint rattling noise from behind – Rosamund, having returned, was coming out to join me. Her movements seemed hurried, yet she paused, and with almost pantomimic thoroughness she closed, she sealed, the double-layered door. Sealed it for sound. And even then – after the usual hug (or perhaps not so usual, more urgent, more heat-seeking) – she whispered,
‘For this class – don’t expect too much from him.’ She said it almost entreatingly. ‘He can’t…’
I waited. And I remembered something she told me on the phone only a month or two ago: that one day when Saul was teaching he faltered (in mid-paragraph, in mid-sentence) and trailed off (‘And normally he’d be flying’), and he gave a sudden frown, as if feeling a palpable occlusion.
‘He can’t…’ Her eyes were downcast, directed at her shoes or the silky traces of April frost on the blades of grass. My stepmother lowered her head when she spoke. It was her dyed and parted hair I had to interpret (from The Bellarosa Connection). Except Rosamund’s parted hair was undyed and grew with tangly force. She was forty-four, I was fifty-three, Saul was eighty-seven. ‘He can’t read any more.’
‘What?’ And I took a step away from her, to keep my balance.
She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Each time he gets to the end of a sentence,’ she said, or mouthed, ‘he’s forgotten how the sentence began…’
A line from Herzog: Life couldn’t be as indecent as that. Could it?
And I thought incoherently of the times I’d found myself on the London tube without a book, or, worse, with a book but without glasses, or, worse still, with book and glasses but no light (power out) – but the book and the glasses will be found and the light will come back on, and I won’t be sitting in the dark with a book on my lap for the rest of my life.*10
…Saul appeared and we embraced and he drank his coffee. The car that would drive us to the lecture hall was due at three, so there was plenty of time for the two of us to move into the rear sitting room for our talk.
Two-forty, and Saul was trussed up in his parka near the front door, waiting (waiting for the driver’s knock), but just waiting. He had the Conrad under his arm; he wasn’t looking at it. I said,
‘Now why is your copy twice as thick as mine? May I?’ I took it on to my lap. ‘Ah. You’ve got The Shadow-Line but also Typhoon. That’s a wonderful pairing, don’t you think? Typhoon – the malevolence of the storm. And The Shadow-Line – the malevolence of the calm…D’you remember that sea in Long Island? The one that put you on your ass?’ He smiled but said nothing. ‘We were on the beach and we…’
And so I went on until the driver came. I had learnt my lesson.*11
There is something going on in the sky
Our classroom contained about twenty-five students. Every other head of hair had the dark glisten, the mirrory radiance of our cousins from the distant end of Eurasia. As the cliché gears you to expect, the young Asians seemed inscrutable – but then so did the young westerners. This (a comparatively minor development of advancing years) is what had happened to me: youth itself seemed inscrutable. Youth, ‘that mighty power’, as Conrad repeatedly insists; but I could no longer feel its might. Only its strangeness.
Keith Botsford, I was relieved to discover, would supervise the seminar.*12 I had known Keith for almost as long as I had known Saul; and I was relieved, not because he would share the burden of a ninety-minute talk about Conrad (I could manage that), but because he would share the burden of disquiet if Saul never once opened his mouth (a strong likelihood, according to Rosamund). We settled.
I was slow to feel it coming over me, but an unfamiliar – an unrecognisable – mental state was imposing itself; it was something like a surfeit of significance, with too many elements and arguments struggling to cohere. I couldn’t control them – I had no idea what went where. It reminded me of the most painful gropings of authorship, when you’re unmanned by sheer complexity – only here I was in real life and real time, facing an arduousness normally found only in pen and ink, and not in flesh and blood.*13
There was some coughing and nose-blowing from the class. Saul sat there on the dais with his legs crossed, looking quiet and wise. The airy float of white hair, the broad mouth, the fine nose, the bicycle spokes of indentations on either temple (laugh lines) – eyes oystery with time but still rich and concentrated, full of things you badly needed to know…Handkerchiefs and tissues were put away, and replaced by pads and pens. Keith smoothly began.
The Shadow-Line was composed in the second year of the Great War and dedicated to Conrad’s
