He was pretty close to his very best, and when he again fell silent, I said rather impulsively, hoping to keep him in it (and also rather drunkenly),
‘The guy, the college janitor who found Berryman’s body’ – on the river shore under the bridge in Minneapolis – ‘had an interesting name. Art Hitman…Saul, aren’t you weary of the line reality is stranger than fiction? Or that it’s becoming stranger? I think it’s always been stranger. Ooh, you couldn’t put Art Hitman in a novel! Well you couldn’t – because you wouldn’t want to. Reality is stranger than fiction. And it’s crasser than fiction too.’
I felt Elena’s shoe on my shin, a jab and then a steady pressure. I readjusted. She was right: I was talking as if to the old Saul, the ever-renewing Saul, and there he was, across the table, fading, withdrawing…
‘Mm,’ he said, ‘I’m just feeling…I miss Delmore. I miss Hart Crane. I miss poor John Berryman.’
Well at least he knew they were gone. Rosamund told me that he kept forgetting that the dead were dead, and, when reminded, was bereft all over again…
Later, as I sought sleep (early departure, get the girls in the car, New London, ferry to Orient Point, ferry to Shelter Island, ferry to North Haven and Sag Harbor), I was thinking about what Philip Roth said to Andrew Wylie (Philip’s agent, Saul’s agent, my agent), ‘He’s depressed? You’d be depressed if that universe was shutting down on you.’
Shutting down. In Act 4, Scene 3 of another Shakespearean tragedy, on the night before the sea battle of Actium (and the conclusive defeat, and the paired suicides), four soldiers are patrolling the grounds of the Alexandrian palace:
[Music of the hautboys – oboes – as under the stage.]
Fourth Soldier: Peace! what noise?
First Soldier: List, list!
Second Soldier: Hark!
First Soldier: Music i’ the air.
Third Soldier: Under the earth.
Fourth Soldier: It signs well, does it not?
Third Soldier: No.
First Soldier: Peace, I say! What should this mean?
Second Soldier: ’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, Now leaves him.
*1 One afternoon in London in 1999 I was minding Eliza in her room. She wore a dark brown Babygro; she was not quite three. We both had books on our laps (Mrs Dalloway for me, Mr Silly for her). A sudden and very loud noise caused me to look up. ‘…Oh,’ I said with resignation. ‘Well I suppose we ought to make a start. Would it be simpler if I just ran a bath?’ In a dignified voice and without raising her eyes from the page, Eliza said, ‘That was just an enormous fart, Daddy.’ She was thirty-four months…A small percentage of infants (‘potty prodigies’) are fully trained by the age of two; the median age is three and a half (though there will still be ‘oopsies’ up to year five). Three and a half is when memory begins. Girls are potty-trained earlier than boys; and their memory begins earlier, too; in both cases the difference is about three months – not long enough, I suppose, to explain why little girls are measurably brighter than little boys.
*2 ‘A warrior for mankind, a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations’: this is from Hamsun’s ‘eulogy’ published after Hitler did away with himself on Walpurgisnacht (April 30) in the ruins of Berlin. Then again old Knut was in his mid-eighties at the time, and probably dementia contributed to his clinching trahison. The long-lobbied-for audience with the Führer, which came to fruition in June 1943, is in retrospect pretty satisfying. Confronted by a garrulous critique of his Norwegian policies (during which Hamsun touted the merits of Vidkun Quisling), Hitler tried to shout Hamsun down, but found for once that he couldn’t just rely on a hollered monologue, couldn’t just activate ‘the usual gramophone record’ (Mussolini) – because Hamsun was deaf. Recent scholarship, from Oslo, tells us that Hamsun, by the end of this great meeting of minds, was in tears, and Hitler’s post-interview tantrum, as his press officer tells it, took three days to subside.
*3 He had got the Jewish-American novel up and running, making a start with Dangling Man in 1944: 1944, a time when anti-Semitism in the US was at its historical apogee, with desecrations, beatings, daubed swastikas. Nonetheless, the Jewish-American novel survived and endured; it dominated the national literature for over half a century. During that emergence many wounds were given and received. And how ironic, and how tragic, it is that the Judaeophobic fulmination should exactly coincide with the Holocaust; and the weight of public opinion inevitably moved Roosevelt to restrict Jewish immigration. In 1941–5, no Jew was murdered in America; the attendant butcher’s bill was paid in Europe. One example. In 1939 the steamship St Louis, from Hamburg, was denied permission to land in Florida; of the 980 passengers, 254 are known to have died in the Holocaust.
*4 Iris would collect things. ‘Old sweet wrappings, matchsticks, cigarette-ends’ – a Coca-Cola tin, a rusty spanner, a single shoe. Bayley pictures her ‘fiddling incessantly with her small objets trouvés – twigs and pebbles, bits of dirt, scraps of silver foil, even dead worms’. Bayley (in common with most readers) quietly accepts this as a continuation of Iris’s necessary dreaminess. John and Iris were authentic and uninhibited bohemians, low-bohemian in the life, like hippies or tramps, and high-bohemian in the mind – until, in her case, there was no mind.
*5 And I would see him again in Boston, where he remained on board right to the end. Will Lautzenheiser’s later story can be found online; it tells of phenomenal calamity – and phenomenal resilience. He is now forty-something.
*6 Even back then, in the earliest years of the century, I marvelled at the illustrious future assembling itself at the feet of this word. Up until the renovation of ‘inappropriate’, ‘offensive’ and ‘potentially offensive’ were rather desperately holding the fort; but now Americans (and some
