Seeing the worshippers slowly jerk back and forth in their rockinghorse rhythm (also strikingly onanesque), Christopher would have felt contempt, with perhaps a garnish of pity; me, I felt a weaker resistance – say bafflement and exasperation; and Saul, without question, would be feeling something else again.
In him the religious impulses survived. Wistful, tentative, diffident – but still there; you could sense it in the restlessness of the eyes: and it was an indispensable component of who he was. What other modern master, describing a sunshot New England landscape, would write ‘Praise God’ and unironically refer to ‘God’s veil’?
Like Christopher, Saul was an old Trotskyist, and temperamentally anti-clerical (sympathy was almost wholly withdrawn from religion once it got itself organised and collectivised); but even the pilgrim, scraping his pale brow against the slabs and boulders of the Wailing Wall, would not be uncongenial to him.*9 It seems that what he valued was the same thing Christopher despised: continuity, rote continuity. Rote continuity, to Saul, was still continuity. Continuity by heart, he might have said…
Bellow was alive to all that was maddening and impossible about Jerusalem, about Israel. It was he who redirected our attention to Herman Melville’s travel notes of 1857. Melville (a most interesting and attractive case) was recovering from some kind of psychosomatic breakdown, considering himself ‘finished’ after Moby-Dick had uneventfully come and gone (back in 1851, when he was thirty-eight). He was still physically vigorous. After Jerusalem (the ‘color of the whole city is grey and looks at you like a cold grey eye in a cold old man’), he rode to the Dead Sea: ‘A mounted escort of some 30 men, all armed. Fine riding.’ And then Judea:
…whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape – bleached – leprosy – encrustation of curses – old cheese – bones of rocks, – crunched, knawed, & jumbled…No moss as in other ruins – no grace of decay – no ivy – the unleavened nakedness of desolation…Wandering among the tombs – till I begin to think myself one of the possessed with devels.
That is the phrase, that is exactly what you writhingly thrill and shiver to in the Holy Land. The encrustation of curses.
The actual
‘One day when he saw me in the library he asked me to come to dinner. And I said yes, with a shrug. I thought, I know – pizza and dictation.’
Rosamund must’ve told me this later on, but I helpfully insert it here…She was a grad student in Chicago. And when professors invited you over after dark it was for exactly that: pizza and dictation.
‘But when he opened the door to me he was in an apron. He was cooking.’
There was wine and there was dinner; there was no pizza and no dictation.
That dinner was in 1984. ‘And since then we haven’t spent a night apart.’
I keep disclaiming any interest in Saul’s personal life, but of course I already knew a great deal about it – and on terms of the most searching intimacy – from his fiction. And as I gazed at Rosamund, I no doubt slightly protectively wondered how it would go. I seemed to remember that wife number two or number three wrote a piece entitled ‘Mugging the Muse’…
Because Saul wrote fiction about real men and women. Even as I type those words (on this page of a novelised autobiography) I haven’t lost the suspicion that writing fiction about real men and women is an extraordinary thing to go and do.
And the first serious life-writer – come to think of it – was someone Saul and I always argued about (Saul having the higher opinion of him): David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930). D.H.L. started it, and he started much else. In actuarial terms Lawrence (like Larkin, one of his greatest admirers) died without issue; culturally, though, he left behind him two of the biggest children ever to be strapped into highchairs: the sexual revolution and life-writing…
When a writer is born into a family, Philip Roth has fondly but slyly said (more than once), that’s the end of that family…Ah, but only if that writer is a life-writer. It is life-writing, not writing, that is the homebreaker. In fact, life-writing goes so far as to flirt with criminality: throughout his career Lawrence was bedevilled by the law, and they went after him on two main counts – obscenity and libel.
In Saul’s case, auto-fiction gave rise to weeklong bouts of sleepless anxiety about lawsuits (he made last-minute proof changes, he asked people to sign waivers) – plus family troubles (with father and eldest brother), broken or suspended friendships, the deepening rancour of ex-wives and ex-lovers, and above all the indecipherable disquiet of children. It is morally treacherous ground, and Bellow himself thought the question ‘diabolically complex’.*10 Diabolically complex, and – I would’ve thought – fatally self-shackling. Fiction is freedom? Well, the life-writer seems to be crying out for boundaries and impediments and restraints. Crying out for them, or crying out against them – but nevertheless inviting them in.
And Amos Oz was shackling himself, by being a public voice, and so were Yehoshua and David Grossman and others, and they knew it and complained about it, expressively describing this burden – but they could not do otherwise.
In Israel, Yehoshua has said, the writer cannot attain the ‘true solitude’ that is the ‘prerequisite’ of art. ‘Rather, you are continuously summoned to solidarity,’ summoned not by any ‘external compulsion’ but ‘from within yourself’.
You cannot do otherwise. And the same went for Saul: if it comes from
