With Bellow the process seems to operate in the other direction. He stares his way into the individual with a visionary power, a power that adores and burns, and so finds a way to the universal.
‘The rapt seraph that adores and burns’ is a line from Alexander Pope. In angelology, with its nine orders, the seraphim are one rung down from the cherubim; and whereas the sovereign cherubs are equipped with ‘the full, perfect, and overflowing vision of God’, the seraphs are engaged in ‘an eternal ascension toward Him in a gesture both ecstatic and trembling…’*14
Bellow is a seraph, aspiring up, up (and as a Chicagoan, impatient with eternity, he quietly hopes for due acceptance on the uppermost tier). He is a nature poet almost rivalling Lawrence (who could tell you what this or that plant looked like in any given week of the year), and when he turns to society he is a nature poet now dealing in humans.
He is a sacramental writer; he wants to transliterate the given world. He pirates the real; he is something like a plagiarist of Creation.
—————
If countries are like people, then people are like countries.
In common with most inhabitants of the free world, I am a liberal parliamentary democracy (one with certain grave constitutional flaws).
I have known human-sized despotisms and theocracies. I have known oligarchs and anarchs and banana republics. I have known failed states…My oldest friend Robinson was a failed state. My younger sister Myfanwy was a failed state…
Saul was a regional superpower – like Israel. Saul wanted and needed Israel to exist and survive; he identified his manhood with it, compelled by the events in Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945. But he was a social realist, and saw things as they really were.*15
Bentwich was actuated by a sense of religious homing. The result, half a century later, would be Israel – a land chosen and duly settled
by hallucinators…And today they are in the bind described in the closing couplet of Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’. In the course of a partly sectarian war, Puritans v. Catholics (1649–53), Cromwell brought to Ireland conquest, famine, plague, and death (eliminating 20 per cent of the population).
‘March indefatigably on,’ Marvell nonetheless urged the Lord Protector:
Still keep thy sword erect;
Besides the force it has to fright
The spirits of the shady night,
The same arts that did gain
A pow’r, must it maintain.
But power corrupts, and maintaining power corrupts; and violence corrupts.
*1 He and I had exchanged a few letters by then, but I was only distantly aware that Saul had had an annus horribilis in 1985: the deaths, one after the other, of his two elder brothers (Maury and Samuel), followed within weeks by the sudden decampment of his fourth wife, Alexandra.
*2 It was not a sin of omission, in my case. It was an error of inclusion. I didn’t omit them; I included them (along with everyone else I saw), because I couldn’t tell them apart. They’re all Semites, aren’t they – Arabs, Jews? Semite: ‘a member of a people speaking a Semitic language, in particular the Jews and Arabs’.
*3 To gain entry to the US (in those days), all you had to do was fill in the form and say No to the questions that only the odd lunatic has ever said Yes to. No, I am not a fatally and contagiously diseased terrorist who’s spent the last six months immersed in pig troughs and sheep dips. This could change: the 2016 US election looms as I write…El Al still stipulates three hours, so it hasn’t become more rigorous since September 11; what has happened is that the world has caught up with Israel. Perhaps, one day, a neighbourhood bus ride will be like flying El Al.
*4 From To Jerusalem and Back, in common with all the other unattributed quotes in this chapter. I was in Haifa for what billed itself as the First International Saul Bellow Conference; it was set in motion by the Saul Bellow Society, and coordinated by the genial Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua.
*5 Although there are many hyper-intelligent pages in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1962), her central conceit – ‘the banality of evil’ – has over the years been steadily debunked. Artur Sammler, the hero of the Bellow novel of 1970, Mr Sammler’s Planet, played his part: ‘The idea of making the century’s great crime look dull is not banal,’ says Sammler on page 20. ‘Politically, psychologically, the Germans had an idea of genius. The banality was only camouflage. What better way to get the curse out of murder than to make it look ordinary, boring, or trite?…[D]o you think the Nazis didn’t know what murder was? Everybody (except certain bluestockings) knows what murder is. That is very old human knowledge’…And consider Eichmann’s statement in 1945 (quoted at the trial): ‘I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.’ What is banal, what is tediously commonplace, about that? I think Robert Jay Lifton, in The Nazi Doctors (1986), comes very close to the truth (and bear in mind that in the course of his research Lifton, a Jewish doctor himself, spent many hours face to face with twenty-eight such Nazis): ‘Repeatedly in this study, I describe banal men performing demonic acts. In doing so – or in order to do so – the men themselves changed; and in carrying out their actions, they themselves were no longer banal.’
*6 The historian Martin Gilbert, not content with being preternaturally prolific, goes so far as to assemble, and sign, his own indexes. Gilbert’s Israel (1998) is 700 pages long; and this
