Marbles of the dancing floor,
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
‘Byzantium’, W. B. Yeats, 1932
The muse
In the presence of Julia and Jonathan, of Saul and his travelling companion, in the presence of novelists Alan Lelchuk and A. B. ‘Booli’ Yehoshua and the impeccably courteous Amos Oz, and in the presence of several dozen professional Bellovians, I croaked out my lecture. It had nothing to do with Marxism, or Israel, or even Judaism. Today I think that my words (given the location and the ambient mental temperature) could be regarded as offensively unprovocative. I talked about fictional effects, and about love – love in the setting of American modernity.
My assignment was More Die of Heartbreak, the Bellow novel published later that year. And I began by saying that I was the only person in the room who had read it; those who had not read it, I went on, included its author. He has written it, I argued, but he has not read it, as I have.*7 While I talked, and coughed, I stole the odd glance at the Nobelist and at his young friend, who sat demurely beside him, under an effusion of dark brown hair…The talk ended, and Saul gave a short and generous response; then the crowd churned and intermingled. I collected my wife, and we made for Rosamund – the muse.
Academic gossip had imagined her as someone like Ramona (Herzog) or Renata (Humboldt’s Gift). Both these characters are endearing in their way, but Ramona is a sophisticated man-pleaser, and Renata is a mixed-up gold-digger; and Rosamund was something else again. With her oval face and elliptical eyes, she could have been the kind and clever stepsister in a fairy tale. Rosamund was indeed very young – not just Saul’s junior, but mine too, by eight or nine years.
There was fresh commotion, as the entire crowd started funnelling down from the twenty-ninth floor to the first, to hear Shimon Peres (a Foreign Minister who knew his Flaubert) introducing Saul’s public lecture, ‘The Silent Assumptions of the Novelist’. The auditorium was full; listeners seemed to be up there cooing and fluttering in the rafters like pigeons, or like doves. There were no hawks: all were of one spirit – the unanimous reverence for learning.
Saul began. The voice was resonant, it carried, but with the beginnings of a new (and near-elderly) lightness of pitch. By my side, Rosamund sat rapt and intense…I knew then that I had been quite wrong, upstairs, claiming that I was the only one present who had ‘read’ More Die of Heartbreak. Rosamund would have read it, at least once. And she would have noted this passage (which I had recited an hour earlier). ‘Towards the end of your life,’ says Benn Crader (a world-renowned botanist, a ‘plant clairvoyant’),
you have something like a pain schedule to fill out – a long schedule like a federal document, only it’s your pain schedule. First, physical causes…Next category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist?
‘Because of immortal longings,’ answers Benn’s nephew and intimate, Kenneth (a teacher of Russian literature). ‘Or just hoping for a lucky break.’
Filling out the pain schedule, then, is something you do in your head, weighing the wounds, and the lucky breaks, that will decide your destined mood.
The next morning, after fruit, coffee, and breadrolls, the Bellows and the Amises journeyed to Jerusalem, the numinous city.
The sun can do no more with them
‘I gather you’ve been reading Philip Larkin,’ I said (which was no great inferential feat, because Larkin is cited twice in More Die). And by the spring of 1987, it should be remembered, Philip Larkin, my father’s exact coeval, was already dead – dead for seventeen months, dead at sixty-three, and not of heartbreak…
‘Yes I have,’ said Saul, ‘and with great pleasure. His poems make you laugh but all the time you’re sensing the heavy melancholy, like a medieval humour – what they used to call black bile. And maybe the comedy gains from that. The melancholia – it’s pointless to look for causes, but what was his background and his family?’
‘Blaming the Parents?*8 These are just impressions. His mum was supposed to be a great nag and whiner, but his dad, his dad sounded really unusual. Unusually right-wing Middle England. Yeah, I seem to remember he was a Germanophile – of all things. I think he even took Philip there. In the mid-thirties. For a holiday.’
We were having tea on the rooftop terrace of the government guest house, which lay just beyond the walls of Jerusalem; meanwhile, Mount Carmel, as gracefully as a mountain could manage it, had stepped aside in favour of Mount Zion. The guest house was called Mishkenot Sha’ananim, or ‘peaceful habitation’. And this was the spring of 1987, seven months before the end of one of Israel’s quiet times.
‘That poem…In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and they dream of all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.’
‘Was he not loved?’
‘I think his parents loved him. You mean later on?’ Whereas Saul’s tea was enliveningly laced with a slice of lemon, mine was qualified with milk – with the milk of concord. I lit a cigarette. ‘My father couldn’t believe how unambitious he was, how uh, defeatist he was about girls. To hear my father tell it, he worked his way through a tiny coven of weird sisters.’ Sympathetically Saul leant his head sideways. ‘And it’s odd, because poets get girls. As we know. What does Humboldt say when he bangs on the girls’ door? Let me in. I’m a poet and I have a big cock.’
‘…Did you meet
