*5 She wasn’t still brooding about that disastrous dinner in 1989 (I drove Christopher to Vermont and we spent the night. He appeared at breakfast smoking a cigarette – but that was the least of it). What Rosamund was still brooding about was Christopher’s review of Ravelstein (2000). And so was I. Christopher would go on to ridicule late novels by Philip Roth and John Updike, but only in Saul’s case did he attribute the deficit to age and failing powers (‘tired’, ‘thin’, ‘quavering’)…‘You can’t do that, man,’ I told him. ‘It’s worse than insolent. It’s ungrateful. I’ve forgiven you for 1989. You were getting divorced, and divorcees are allowed to go nuts for a year or two. But I haven’t yet forgiven you for this.’ It came up again in 2007, when he wrote a long, respectful,
and very interesting piece about Augie March. ‘Good piece,’ I said. ‘But Saul’s dead now, and you never thanked him for all the pleasure he gave you.’ Christopher was longsufferingly silent – the closest he ever came to admitting the possibility of fault. In my view he was not a literary critic so much as a political critic of literature. The attack on Ravelstein was in essence an attack on Saul’s turn to the right and on some of the positions of Saul’s best friend Allan Bloom (the model for Abe Ravelstein). It was an attack on neoconservatism. Ironically is a word often misused to mean no more than ‘oddly’ or even ‘by contrast’; but there would be irony in this for the Hitch – something to be revealed as contradictory.
*6 Herzog (1964)…What, or when, is modernism? Auden: ‘At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say Greek or Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say every post-Classical author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the Thirties, the Forties, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be classifying them, like automobiles, by the year.’ I think it is quite easy to give a date for the arrival of ‘high’ or developed modernism. 1922 – Ulysses and The Waste Land.
*7 By one calculation English comes top with 750,000 words, French second with 500,000, and Spanish third with 380,000. ‘You use so many words for the verb to walk,’ a Spanish translator once complained. ‘To stroll, to saunter, to shuffle…Why can you not just say andar?’
*8 The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Its thesis: history was over in the sense that ‘mankind’s ideological evolution’ was over. Conflicts would of course continue, and there would continue to be events, possibly titanic events; but the only viable state model was capitalist democracy…As it happened, a titanic event was only seven weeks away – one supposedly heralding a different state model: that of a (worldwide) caliphate which would enforce Islamic law.
*9 Inez was horrified by Hitch in June, and was still capable of being horrified by me and by her brothers…Saul was undemonstratively sensitive to children and had a relaxing effect on them. I was always moved by the talent he had for it and the importance he attached to it. From a letter of June 1990: ‘We loved seeing you and Julia. She served
us a dinner that made all the other dinners in Europe look sick. Also, Gus immediately recognised me as a friend which did much to restore my confidence in myself, none too firm these days.’ With favoured male adults, Gus sped up to them and seized both their hands and proceeded to climb up their legs; he would then execute a reasonably neat backwards somersault and land on his feet. ‘Just mind my dock,’ cautioned Saul.
*10 The writer’s life is tripartite, divided between writing and reading and…oh yeah, living. Don’t forget living. That has to be got done too. If you can’t read then you clearly can’t write, so all you can do is live. And then stop living. There’s no avoiding that either. As James Last, the ailing hero of Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, puts it: ‘I must live until I die, mustn’t I?’
*11 ‘I just kept repeating myself,’ I said to Rosamund, ‘– about Nat and Gus.’ We were in the kitchen, where she was readying lunch. The radio was on, loud, and she was making as much noise as she could with blenders and gushing taps. ‘I just kept repeating myself. I was as bad as he was!’ All invention, all imagination, seemed to abandon me. ‘You were probably in shock,’ she said. ‘…That’s probably true. I should’ve just babbled about anything – Uruguay, Elena, London, the girls. Conrad.’ ‘Don’t feel bad about it. Maybe he wouldn’t’ve wanted that. Because it’s you.’ I said, ‘Rosamund, that’s the gentlest comfort you could possibly give me. But no. I should’ve just filled the silences. Christ!’ All the same, it was dumbfounding. Like being under the brow of an empty mountain – a mountain all hollowed out. So: fill the emptiness, fill the silence. It was the only thing you could do.
*12 Keith was a veteran literary maverick and boho; and his air of rakish irresponsibility had always fascinated Saul. For instance, Keith ‘appears’ in Humboldt’s Gift (under the name of Pierre Thaxter), where he comes across as a flamboyant fantasist (with his debts, his wives, his innumerable children) and as something of ‘a purple genius of the Baron Corvo type’. Recasting actual contemporaries in literature has consequences which some (including me) find uncomfortably worldly. I heard that Keith was asked to sign a libel waiver in the weeks before Humboldt appeared; he cheerfully obliged.
*13 Real life is almost always complicated, but it is hardly ever complex. When Freud called death ‘the complex symbol’, he meant that it
