…When the last day began Saul thought he was at sea on a transatlantic voyage. That was a venture, that was a crossing, of about the right size – the mighty waters, the great deeps, the unknowable doldrums and tormentas.
—————
Spring now reverted to fall, but Uruguay had largely regained its confidence and colour. Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires, used to imagine Uruguay as an Elysian Field where hard-pressed Argentinians, on expiration, were transformed into angels; they could then unobtrusively hobnob with the angels that were already in residence…Still, to my eyes, something was missing, something wasn’t there.
In the mid-period novella Him With His Foot in His Mouth Bellow’s elderly (and unnamed) narrator is languishing in British Columbia as he awaits extradition to Chicago – the fallguy for financial crimes committed by his family. Meanwhile there is no one to talk to except the landlady, Mrs Gracewell, a widowed mystic who likes to expatiate on Divinity:
The Divine Spirit, she tells me, has withdrawn in our time from the outer, visible world. You can see what it once wrought, you are surrounded by its created forms. But although natural processes continue, Divinity has absented itself. The wrought work is brightly divine but Divinity is not now active within it. The world’s grandeur is fading. And this is our human setting…
Well, that was how the world looked to me, when I was reinstalled in José Ignacio. The world was merely itself, for now, and had to get along without Saul Bellow – who had worked so fervently ‘to bring back the light that has gone from these molded likenesses’.
*1 No, it wasn’t unexpected. Saul’s ebbing was twofold, first the mind, then the body. For the past year he had been increasingly unmoored in time. As an eerie consequence of this, he was freshly devastated, bereaved again and again, by the deaths of contemporaries who had already predeceased him, for example his soulmate Allan Bloom (d. 1992) and his sister Jane (d. 2003). All the dead were in his custody, and he couldn’t let them go…He was unmoored in space, too, wondering where he was (on a train, on a boat?), and mistaking his own bedroom for a hotel (‘I want to check out. Give me ten dollars and get me out of here’)…The somatic trajectory was more conventional, marked by pneumonias, falls, a series of minor strokes, followed by difficulty in swallowing, then in breathing. He slept much of the time, but his death receptors were just waking up.
*2 I thought this gesture – the handful of dust – was both dignified and intimate. Almost at once several different mourners sought to amuse me with a deflating explanation: Roth did it that way to spare his bad back. Well, if you like. It was also said that Roth spent the occasion gaping (and stumbling) with grief. To me he looked sombre but also humorous – his usual disposition…After a death, as Zachary Leader notes in the second volume of his definitive Life of Saul Bellow, there is a short pause and then the world floods back in ‘with its animosities, anxieties, importunities’ – and its long-cherished resentments. Leader takes us through them, with their strange instances of cattiness and scepticism. Unsensed by me at the time, many grievances (amatory and literary) were reopened at the graveside (funerals no doubt have a way of encouraging recrudescences); but all the second-hand and unworthy rancour, I bet, was confined to its natural home – the periphery.
*3 Perhaps recalling Adam Bellow at the graveside (and his involuntary aria of tearful distress), I read out the last paragraph of ‘A Silver Dish’, a story that describes a very singular parting of father and son. The father, Pop, is an ancient Chicago grifter (and ‘consistently a terrible little man’); Woody, ‘practical, physical, healthy-minded, and experienced’, is his remarkably – even perversely – loving son…I think it may be the best thing in all Bellow: ‘After a time, Pop’s resistance ended. He subsided and
subsided. He rested against his son, his small body curled there. Nurses came and looked. They disapproved, but Woody, who couldn’t spare a hand to wave them out, motioned with his head toward the door. Pop, whom Woody thought he had stilled, had only found a better way to get around him. Loss of heat was the way he did it. His heat was leaving him. As can happen with small animals while you hold them in your hand. Woody presently felt him cooling. Then, as Woody did his best to restrain him, and thought he was succeeding, Pop divided himself. And when he was separated from his warmth, he slipped into death. And there was his elderly, large, muscular son, still holding and pressing him when there was nothing anymore to press. You could never pin down that self-willed man. When he was ready to make his move, he made it – always on his own terms. And always, always, something up his sleeve. That was how he was.’
*4 I had an audience with Saul in the same setting in 2003, where I read out a piece I’d written for the Atlantic. Its argument was that Saul was the greatest American novelist. ‘What should he fear?’ I quoted. ‘The melodramatic formularies of Hawthorne? The multitudinous facetiousness of Melville? The murkily iterative menace
