Saul Bellow was a phenomenon of love; he loved the world in such a way that his readers reciprocated and loved him in return. The same goes for Philip Larkin, but more lopsidedly; the world loved him and he loved the world in his way (he certainly didn’t want to leave it), but so far as I can tell he didn’t love a single one of its inhabitants (except, conceivably, my wholly unfrightening mother: ‘without being in the least pretty’, she was, he wrote in his last letter, ‘the most beautiful woman I have ever seen’). Anyway, the love transaction has always operated, to various degrees, with each and every repeatedly published novelist and poet. With essayists, the love transaction was more or less unknown until Christopher Hitchens came along – until he came along, and then went away again.
This is literature’s dewy little secret. Its energy is the energy of love. All evocations of people, places, animals, objects, feelings, concepts, landscapes, seascapes, and cloudscapes: all such evocations are in spirit amorous and celebratory. Love gets put into the writing, and love gets taken out…
Now I must get ready to go, I’m afraid. Come on, I’ll see you to the door. Pick up that glass there, if you would, and follow me down.
…Did you bring anything, a coat, a bag, a hat? Now my parting words to you would normally be: I’ll see you – or some slightly different version of you – in due course, in 2021, say, or soon thereafter. But next August I enter my seventieth year. There are a good few short stories I mean to get done (most of them about race in America), and I have in mind a third fiction about the Third Reich – a modest novella. You see, another full-length fiction, let alone another long fiction, now seems unlikely. Time will tell. Maybe towards the end I’ll just shut up and read…In which case, oh, I’ll miss it, I’ll grieve for everything about it, even its pains, trifling and fleeting compared to its pleasures, but formidable in their way. With every work of fiction, with every voyage of discovery, you’re at some point utterly becalmed (like Conrad on the Otago), and you drop overboard and sink through the fathoms until you reach the following dual certainty: that not only is the book you’re writing no good, no good at all, but also that every line you’ve ever written is no good either, no good at all. Then, when you’re deep down there, among the rocks and the shipwrecks and the blind and brainless bottomfeeders, you touch sand, and can start to gird yourself to kick back up again.
I’ll miss that. And I’ll miss you too, your warmth, your encouragement, your clemency. Here we are.
‘Well, goodbye.’
Goodbye, my reader, I said. Goodbye, my dear, my close, my gentle.
Afterthought Masada and the Dead Sea
I scaled Masada in 1986 and I scaled it again in 2010. For some reason (and no one has yet told me why), it was much more difficult the second time. It would seem that during the passage of that quarter-century certain processes were at work…Nevertheless, I hope to scale Masada a third time, one of these days. Perhaps (you never know) it will be even more difficult in, say, 2035.
…At this point I’d like to steal a fluent and assured three-liner from DJT. Asked on British radio about David Cameron calling his Muslim ban divisive, stupid, and wrong, Trump said, Number one, I’m not stupid, okay? I can tell you that right now. Just the opposite. Well I’m not stupid either, and I do know I’m getting older. But it seems that being in Israel can make it hard to face the obvious.
In 2010 I holidayed there with Elena and our daughters, Eliza and Inez, and we stayed in Tel Aviv-Yafo (Jaffa) with Michael C and his American wife, Erin, and their daughters, Noa, Maia, and Edie…At this stage Larkin had been dead for twenty-five years and Saul for five, and in fifteen months Christopher, too, would be dead.
Whereas Michael Z emerged from Iraq, Michael C (a prosperous executive based mainly in London) is a Sabra, that is to say a native-born Israeli: the word comes from modern Hebrew – it means ‘cactus fruit’. And Michael C does have certain affinities with the prickly pear.
For instance, he is uninhibitedly sympathetic to most of the views of the secular hard right and is thus an all-out territorial maximalist. But there’s drollery in it somewhere, I suspect. Whenever there’s the slightest political reverse or retardation in his schema, Michael C just waves a hand and says brightly, ‘Well – build more settlements!’ Such a line goes down frictionlessly in Israel (where the left, everyone says, has shrunk to next to nothing), but naturally causes heated bewilderment in Britain. Michael C dutifully and wryly shoulders the ill fame.
I have known and liked Michael for many years, and have always been grateful for his generosity both as a host and as a correspondent (he is my man in Tel Aviv). But I still can’t decide what I make of him and the positions he holds. Does the abrasive rind conceal something softer and sweeter? I felt closest to an answer when I carefully raised the subject of his mandatory three-year service in the Israel Defense Forces – 1980–83 (seeing him through from eighteen to twenty-one).
He talked about this period sombrely and again dutifully – the same spirit he brought to his national service, where he was mostly a kind of jailer. Michael’s very blue blue eyes admitted to a degree of humiliation, the humiliation he imposed and the humiliation he himself suffered in being its instrument. Onerous, grievous, even injurious, to be sure; but it had to be done. A Jew in Israel has
