D.H.L. failed to get anywhere much with ‘direct experience’, in my view. No one gets anywhere much with ‘life’. Its limitations are life’s limitations: poverty of incident, repetitiveness, imaginative thinness, and shapelessness.
And there is something too democratic in it. Why surrender so much initiative and autonomy – so much power? Of writers, novelists are the most tyrannical. A playwright menially bows to practical logistics, a poet is menaced by tradition and formal constraints. But Lawrence wasn’t wrong when he said that the great thing about the novel was that you could ‘do anything with it’. Novelists are power-crazed usurpers; they are presidents-for-life who have illegalised all opposition…
If I had to define writer’s block, I would say: It is what happens when the subconscious, for whatever reason, has become inert or has even absented itself. With auto-fiction, the subconscious is nearby and available; it is just woefully underemployed.
But Saul Bellow did get somewhere with the real, the actual; he found in it an uncovenanted freedom. His way of doing this was completely instinctive, and blindingly radical.
Divorce
To the British, serial matrimony is ‘very American’ (not utterly unlike serial murder): a national enthusiasm to which writers show no obvious resistance. We associate it with Americans, but it is not something that anybody associates with Jews: divorce, let alone recurrent, recidivist divorce, is surely a goyish indulgence, like dipsomania. The big bearded WASP Ernest Hemingway might have had four wives; but Saul Bellow had five – and Norman Mailer had six, like Henry VIII.
There was, I felt, something voulu about all Norman’s marrying and divorcing, as there was about all his drinking, his drugging, his loudmouthing and showboating, his slumming, his brawling…It was as if he had set himself the goal of becoming, not only the iconic anti-hero and anti-citizen (‘I am an American dissident’), but also the perfect anti-Jew. All this marrying and divorcing verged on the parodic: as if to prove the point, Mailer divorced one wife, married and divorced another, and married yet another – all in the space of a week. Bellow wasn’t like that.*11
Still, five marriages meant four divorces. And even one divorce, my father wrote, ‘was an incredibly violent thing to happen to you’ – because you’re now in a war (and it’s usually a dirty war) with someone you loved. I had felt divorce from the vantage of a child, and I always feared it – as an admission of failure, above all. In Israel I was bathed in wavelets of a helplessness that I thought might precede defeat – not constantly, or even often, but every now and again.
Rosamund would not experience divorce. I soon knew what she was: one of nature’s straight arrows. Like my mother, Hilary Ann Bardwell. Straight arrows can come from any source and any direction. And they are very thin on the ground, these people with no deviousness and no airs. And another thing: Rosamund was not just thoroughly committed – she was also thoroughly in love.
In Vermont on their wedding day, 25 August 1989
I already knew, as any reader of Herzog would already know, that Saul was a suitor with ‘an angry heart’, a suitor both sore and tender, the product of a collision: ‘At home, inside the house, an archaic rule; outside, the facts of life.’ He was like the poet in Peter Porter’s volume Once Bitten, Twice Bitten: often bitten, but never shy, and still coming back for more.
Years later Rosamund would say, of this persistence, that Saul wanted and needed physical love at the centre of his life. And I thought of my father, back in 1987, sitting by the fire, unattached at sixty-five, and saying, yes, yes, he was ‘basically all right. But it’s only half a life without a woman’.
Asked to name the Walt Disney character he would most like to meet, Andy Warhol selected Minnie Mouse. Why Minnie? ‘Because she can get me close to Mickey.’
Now, Rosamund is not Minnie, and Saul is not Mickey, and it never crossed my mind until after the friendship was long established. But that was what Rosamund did: she got me close to Saul. She did it in her person, and with the transfusional power of her youth. She was not just his Muse and his Eros, she was also his Agape.*12
Rosamund was a woman whose atavisms became visible only in her virtues: savagely protective, barbarically loyal. She would need that atavistic fire (though not yet, not for more than a decade), and then those virtues would be fully stretched.
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We live this way
Visiting Jerusalem in the late 1920s, the young Arthur Koestler found its beauty ‘inhuman’: ‘It is the haughty and desolate beauty of a walled-in mountain fortress in the desert, of tragedy without catharsis.’ Catharsis: the processing and the purgation of pity and terror.
‘I pass the little coffee shop’, wrote Saul in 1976,
outside which the bomb exploded a few days ago. It is burnt out. A young cabdriver last night told…me that he had been about to enter it with one of his friends when another of his pals called to him. ‘He had something to tell me so I went over to him and just then the bomb went off and my friend was there.*13 So now my friend is dead.’ His voice, still adolescent, was cracking. ‘And this is how we live, mister! Okay? We live this way.’
When the time came we all safely disbanded – a good six months before the (First) Intifada, which would start in December…Getting to the other planet, via El Al, is arduous, but getting back from it is just a slightly worse-than-average airline experience. The Bellows returned to America, and the Amises returned to England. In London I continued to read up on Israel – though my question about Zionist eyesight went unanswered for another twenty-six years. I’ll come to that answer in a page or two; it is shockingly stark.
…There was a terroristic incident
