In the common room I at once linked up with the novelist Jonathan Wilson (a Jewish Londoner whose academic base was now in Boston). His expression as he surveyed the crowd was almost succulently ironic, brimming with guarded, hoarded amusement. The mayors and ministers, the duo of famous Israeli novelists, the many escorts and facilitators, plus local and national journalists and a radio team and perhaps a TV team, and there through the windows the sky-god blue of the Levant; but Jonathan was gripped in particular by the huddled delegates and dons, crouched over their coffees and stolidly dealing out inch-thick typescripts to one another…In a tone that presupposed the answer No, I said,
‘Any sign of Saul?’
‘Yes. In fact he looked in on the opening ceremony. With his girlfriend. She’s uh, younger than he is.’
I nodded. ‘I assumed she’d be younger than he is.’
‘She’s appreciably younger than he is.’ Jonathan paused. ‘Oh, look at the crazy professors…You know, Bellow calls himself a comic novelist. And this isn’t the setting for a comic novelist, is it. They’re all stucturalists and semiologists and neo-Marxists. And dogged careerists. And they haven’t forced a smile in years.’
Apparently Saul the day before had writhed his way through a paper called something like ‘The Encaged Cash Register: Tensions Between Existentialism and Materialism in Dangling Man’. Now I already knew that this was the kind of literary pedagogy, or one of the kinds of literary pedagogy, that Saul despised with every neutrino of his being. Jonathan continued,
‘Oh, he was suffering. Somebody heard him whisper, If I have to listen to another word of this, I think I’ll actually die.’
‘Mm. The last thing he ever wants to be told is what Ahab’s harpoon symbolises.’
‘Well, here he’ll be told what Herzog’s hat symbolises…Did you hear about Oz?’
I had been to Israel before so I knew the process (as inexorable as having your passport stamped): the immediate baptism in a riptide of urgencies…That day the multinational Bellow buffs, the Israeli scholars, and all the others were still recuperating from Amos Oz’s introductory address, entitled ‘Mr Sammler and Hannah Arendt’s Notion of Banality’.*5 Israel’s most celebrated novelist had opened up three controversies, two of them familiar and digestible enough, the other disconcertingly arcane.
‘He was in a weird mood, all driven and defiant,’ said Jonathan. ‘To begin with, he asked, he demanded to know – first in Hebrew, then in English – why the conference wasn’t bilingual. He said English-only, in an Israeli university, was a disgrace.’ And Oz somehow went on from there to suggest that Jewish ‘passivity’, in the face of Auschwitz, had something to do with the showers; subconsciously the Jews themselves craved ablution, Oz argued, to wash away the calumnies of millennia. ‘I know – very odd. And all this was said scathingly.’
‘And metaphorically.’
‘Hard to tell. He’s an impressive man and it was all quite compelling. Anyway, the showers weren’t banal either, according to Oz. They were the manifestation of a devilish insight.’
‘Will this stir things up?’
‘For a while. What writers say here really matters. Writers have power.’
We frowned at each other. Only English writers, perhaps, would find this notion quite so bizarre. I said,
‘Maybe it goes to their heads. It’d go to mine.’
‘In Israel writers aren’t just entertainers. They’re prophets. This isn’t the diaspora. This is the pointed end.’
…I moved around the common room looking for the door to the open air and the minibus. By now the tabletalk had moved on from Amos Oz – to Bellow’s ‘muse’ (as she herself, in the papers, spiritedly called herself); the speculations were indulgent and mildly and enviously salacious; they found it reassuring that Saul was cleaving to type, that of the sensual intellectual. Somebody claimed that the muse was Bellow’s junior by half a century.
Sheen
Julia and I mingled and explored, and at some point Jonathan drove us to Tiberias, where we sat on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and ate St Peter’s fish…
But I still had to complete my essay or lecture, and I had a raw throat and a dry cough. So Julia sat in the garden with George Eliot, and I sat in our room and wrote and smoked and read while, in my peripheral vision, an attaché case quietly gleamed on the glass table; it was complimentary (issued to all delegates); it was made of soft matting and Naugahyde; and it seemed to embody the surface of Israel and its pseudo-normality – the business-class interiors of the modern state, the market state, the business state. And here we were in this business hotel, a business hotel like any other, in a port city like any other on the northerly littoral of the Mediterranean. Haifa seemed innocent, in 1987, to my innocent eye.*6
Inside – in the cafés, bars, and eateries, and in the corridors and commissaries of the university–you felt the steady gush of earnest debate: ‘exposition, argument, harangue, analysis, theory, expostulation, threat, and prophesy…[And] the subject of all this talk is, ultimately, survival.’
Outside, the extraordinary air with its tang of lemon-grove antiquity, the rounded hillocks, the orchards – and the stones. ‘Many times cleared, the ground goes on giving birth to stones; waves of earth bring forth more stones.’ All day you heard the mad ratchetings of the crickets (or were they locusts?) and the bedraggled yawns of the goats.
Beyond, down there, the bay, the sand, even the tame and tideless wavelets of the Med, look silently ominous. This is the Promised Land, after all, this is utopia, this is
