*2 And the last time I saw Elmore was at another literary gala in New York (November 2012), where he in his turn won an award for Lifetime Achievement. That night I gave an introductory speech, praising inter alia Leonard’s wholly original and swingeingly effective way with tense. He uses not the past tense (‘he lived in’), not the imperfect (‘he was living in’), not the historic present (‘he lives in’ – the present tense used to vivify completed actions, as in Updike’s Rabbit books), and not quite the present tense; he uses – or he invents – a present tense indefinitely suspended (‘Warren Ganz III, living up in Manalapan’, ‘Bobby saying’, ‘Dawn saying’). In Riding the Rap a louche character at a louche party is said to be ‘burning herb’ and (prudently) ‘maintaining on reefer’. And it is a kind of marijuana tense, vague and creamy, opening up a lag in time…After the presentations Elmore and I went outside (twice) for a smoke and a discussion of another seminal crime writer, George V. Higgins. Later we parted with embraces and warm words. His destined mood appeared to be one of slightly agitated high spirits. He was eighty-seven. And he never saw eighty-eight.
Chapter 2 Saul: Idlewild
Wind chimes
‘Rage,’ said Rosamund.
Does it make any sense to talk about Saul’s destined mood? Think for a moment…Well, does it?
‘Rage,’ said Rosamund.
The two of us were sitting at the half-cleared lunch table in Vermont. Saul, Elena, and the children were for now elsewhere.
‘All the time he’s in a rage. Sometimes a quiet rage, sometimes not so quiet, but always in a rage.’
I hadn’t found him much altered since the interlude of Pirates of the Caribbean and The Shadow-Line and James Bond. But what was settling in me was an incremental disbelief: to see him so often sitting there with no book on his lap, just sitting and gazing. I never got used to it; every exposure mystified me. And I had to drag myself back through the story all over again, as if in plodding homage to one of Saul’s (many) difficulties. I said,
‘Sometimes when I come into the room he looks at me with a jolt of surprise. Slightly affronted surprise. He recognises me, I’m almost sure, but it’s as if he had no idea I was in the house…I haven’t seen any rage.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s aimed at me.’
‘…You? What for?’
With her eyes lowered she said, ‘I don’t know if I can bring myself to tell you.’
But she didn’t have to tell me, not then, because all the others were returning from the pond.
…We all used to swim – Saul included – in the little round pond, which was endowed with an alerting range of temperatures; even in high summer your calves tingled to the cooler currents…In a Bellow essay of 1993, Vermont, pastoral Vermont is called ‘the good place’. Pastoral Vermont, poor Vermont, with its tunnels of flora and its roadside syrup stalls, its backyards almost blotted out by old tyres and fenders and eviscerated cars and trucks and tractor-trailers and even excavators, its book barns, its patio wind chimes.
The would-be forgotten
I never saw the point of the Americanism ‘off of’ (surely the ‘of’ is always redundant) until I had children; and then I absorbed its accuracy and justice.
When I first started coming to stay at this house, in the late 1980s, I was accompanied by my first wife and our two very young sons, and I spent the entire time wiping shit off of everything. Later, when I came to stay in the late 1990s, I was accompanied by my second wife and our two very young daughters, and I spent the entire time wiping shit off of everything. In the early 2000s, when we paid our last two or three visits, I spent some but by no means all of my time wiping shit off of everything in a nearby hotel, rather than in the house, where the Bellows had a newcomer of their own, Naomi Rose, and where Rosamund at least was no doubt similarly and simultaneously engaged.
…While we’re here we should again salute the unsung heroism of babies – of babyhood and infancy. And of parents, who perhaps deserve a double honour, having once been babies themselves (and knowing exactly what they’re in for). Of course human beings forget all that: this welcome loophole is confusingly called ‘childhood amnesia’ – whereby memory remains quiescent until the age of three and a half, which just so happens to coincide with emancipation from the nappy.*1
In fact it is difficult, here, not to see a beneficent hand at work. Memory, in my theory of it, holds back – is loth to form – until the individual has attained mastery of the commode. Yes, memory has the everyday decency to recuse itself, to look the other way, during this awkward transition, sparing us that indignity. Over these things Mother Nature or some such genius erects her all-absolving screen; in ordering the scope of human remembrance, this mother takes the trouble to wipe the shit off of memory.
Saul (b. 1915) was always known to wield exceptional powers of recall.
Mnemosyne operations got under way when he was two – so perhaps he remembered his dealings with the non-disposable nappies of World War I; certainly, his retrievals from 1917 have been corroborated by relatives. ‘Herzog persecuted everyone with his memory. It was like a terrible engine.’ And
