How was the engine now, in 2002/3/4? Its short-term capabilities, as we have seen, were much reduced. Nevertheless he could still sometimes make contact with the long-ago. It was as if, in the sea cave of his brain, there were ledges and air pockets that the waters hadn’t yet breached. Yesterday night (for instance) he had given us a fascinating twenty minutes on the Norwegian writer and fascist Knut Hamsun, an influential admirer of the Third Reich who (via Goebbels) managed to bring about a (disastrous) tête-à-tête with Hitler.*2
∗
Saul and I were drinking tea on the deck of the nearby hotel – reminding me of the time, just a couple of years ago, when we had resumed our ongoing talks about deism and the supernatural and the life to come…Now, in my one-on-one sessions with Saul, I was testing the uses of silence. If his memory could no longer get him through a written sentence, then concerted duologue (I reckoned) must surely be a torment. It felt as though it didn’t fit, this silence; but by sharing in the unnatural constraint I could join him in his vacancy. We sat side by side, staring out; his visage was illegible, but every minute or so it gave a punctual flinch…He never had ‘the lion face’, as gerontologists call it: that top-of-the-food-chain impassivity. Saul always seemed to be thinking, or trying to.
Torment. And rage. I was remembering Rosamund’s words in the kitchen; and remembering the look in her eyes – one never seen before. I thought it was a look of terminal exasperation (which it wasn’t, not exactly), and it frightened me, because if Rosamund – savagely protective, barbarically loyal Rosamund – was weakening…Rage, she said. I never witnessed any of that, not once, though I knew it to be ever-present in him. Herzog again, with his ‘angry heart’.
If Saul consulted his long-term memory, there were good reasons to be furious, reasons both avocational*3 and romantic. Five marriages meant four divorces; I had been divorced once, and I weakly attempted to quadruple that alp-weight of pain, emotional violence, and above all failure. And to persist, to persist, to try again in the face of so much disappointment. With Rosamund the disappointment was solved and salved; she represented the triumph of innocence over experience. So why was this rage of his directed at her? Of all people – her.
Now I turned, and poured more tea from the pot, Saul assenting with a quarter-smile and a tolerant grunt; words of mild approbation were exchanged about the weather…Did his mood have something to do with hurt intelligence, with intellectual hurt? Was he thinking, Why am I just listening all the time, and not talking? Why am I following the conversation (with difficulty) and not leading it? And if you went back a way: his brothers – Samuel possibly, Maury certainly – and his father and almost everybody else in Chicago despised his type of intelligence; but his type of intelligence proved to be at least as effective (and far more remarkable) than theirs – and that includes you, Maury, and never mind your ‘suburban dukedom’ and your 300 suits. And now Saul, the lone survivor, was met by a design flaw, manifesting itself from within. Did it hurt? Was it a negative tingle in the brain? Did it itch? Couldn’t we depend on the Murdoch Law, as promulgated by John Bayley? Every new incapacity diminishes the awareness of loss…
I gave it up, I disembarked from this train of thought (and actually I was getting it all wrong, because I couldn’t free myself from the linear world of sequiturs), I gave it up and directed my citified, my townie eyes to the scene spread out in front of us. New England, or the New England I was used to (Connecticut, Long Island), had a beauty-parlour sheen to it, freshly primped and pared; but Vermont always looked as though it had just woken up and climbed out of bed, tousled, balding, indigent, guileless, and here before me were the crazy fairy queens of the trees sprouting up at all angles from the green and flaxen luminescence, and the minutely pullulating carpet meadow. Yes, the bumpy flatland seemed to writhe and live, and I lost myself in it to such effect that I re-experienced – or helplessly flashed back to – the least disastrous of the four or five acid trips I took during my second summer at university, when I was turning twenty-one.
‘Time to go?’ I said (apart from anything else I wanted a drink). Saul nodded.
He was the one who looked at nature as an established mystic and scholar, who sensed God’s veil over everything, who could give names to the things I saw, the shagbark hickory, and all that. And I liked to think he still sensed it. Saul got to his feet smoothly with no tremors or winces; he never lost his bodily solidity; mentally absent, he was physically present, warmly, influentially present…
‘I have invented a new genre,’ said Isaac Babel, to his writer friends in Stalin’s USSR, ‘– that of silence.’ A good remark and a good idea, though it didn’t save him. Of another writer, Boris Pasternak, Stalin said, ‘Do not touch this cloud dweller.’ Like Babel, Bellow was a Jew and a Trotskyite. But now you would look at him and say to yourself, No. Do not touch this cloud dweller.
Wandering off
A textbook hazard of advanced dementia is something called ‘wandering off’. This is not a reference to the sufferers’ conversational style. Wandering off means going missing; it means escape.
Iris wandered off. She was usually to be found in a neighbour’s garden, says Professor Bayley in Iris and the Friends, or patrolling the familiar stretch of pavement opposite the house.*4 One day – this was easily the most dramatic instance – she burst through the unattended front door and disappeared for
