*7 What I meant was: writers cannot ‘read’ their own books (in any normal sense of the word) until a year or two after publication. They are still correcting, they are still haunted by alternatives and missed chances. For them, the prose needs time to settle into something fixed and tamper-proof.
*8 We had already talked about the widespread habit of Blaming the Parents, which Saul sharply identified as a ‘vice’ (and if he wanted to cultivate it he had more to go on than most: when roused, his father used to strike his sons with a closed fist; and his mother died when he was fifteen)…For my part I said that I had hardly anything to reproach my parents for, and what little there was vanished with a shriek when for the first time I changed my first son’s nappy.
*9 ‘The children of the race [the ‘bootlegger’s boys reciting ancient prayers’], by a never-failing miracle, opened their eyes on one strange world after another, age after age, and uttered the same prayer in each, eagerly loving what they found.’ The scene is Napoleon Street, Montreal – ‘rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather’ – in the early 1920s. From Herzog (1964).
*10 James Wood, I think, got close to the nub of it when he wrote that ‘an awkward but undeniable utilitarianism’ needs to be applied: ‘the number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than can be counted on two hands, yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers’. In other words, right-and-wrong must bend to an author of sufficient quality and reach…Clio, the muse of history, and Erato, the muse of lyric poetry and hymns, might express unease at such presumption. But fiction is a young form (b. 1600), and auto-fiction is younger still (b. 1900), and there is, anyway, no muse to stick up for fiction – or to inspire its practitioners with the purity of her example. Perhaps that’s why fiction has always been a rougher barrio than any of the others.
*11 He wasn’t like this, either. During a marital clash at a riotous party (November 1960), Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, in the chest and in the back. As she lay haemorrhaging on the floor, Mailer reputedly muttered, ‘Let the bitch die.’ And she nearly did die: the blade had pierced the membrane enclosing her heart. Mailer
was arraigned for attempted manslaughter (in the end his lawyer bargained it down to simple ‘assault’). What tipped Norman over the edge, as Adele screamed back at him? Not the scurrilous doubts she cast on his manhood and sexual orientation. No, the husband cracked when the wife questioned his talent, intolerably suggesting that Norman was inferior to Dostoevsky…Mailer’s iconoclasm had many targets, probably including the notion of the good Jewish son. But we should be grateful that the notion of the good Jewish mother was fully embraced by Fanny Mailer: ‘My kids are tops,’ she summarised. And of her controversial son, Fanny settled for saying, ‘If Norman would stop marrying these women who make him do these terrible things…’ Matrimonially, Norman and Saul had one thing in common: the best came last.
*12 The sister of Aphrodite, Agape (pronounced like canapé) symbolises many kinds of love, ‘divine love’, ‘sacrificial love’, but her meaning seems to have settled on ‘social love’, or comity. The social-realist novel needs Eros, of course; but it also needs Agape.
*13 ‘The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen twenty. / Now it’s just thirteen sixteen. / There’s still time for some to go in, / And some to come out.’ This is the opening of ‘The Terrorist, He’s Watching’ by Wisława Szymborska. It occurs to me that the second couplet would be even darker if the lines were transposed, reading, ‘There’s still time for some to come out, / And some to go in.’
*14 The commentary is provided by the non-believer Jorge Luis Borges in one of his most charming and informative essays, ‘A History of Angels’. Angels outnumber us mortals, and by a wide margin: every good Muslim ‘is assigned two guardian angels, or five, or sixty, or one hundred [and] sixty’. Borges (like Bellow) formed a spiritual alliance with angels: ‘I always imagine them at nightfall,’ he writes, ‘in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colours are like memories or premonitions of other colours.’
*15 In To Jerusalem and Back Bellow quotes a leftist as saying, ‘We came here to build a just society. And what happened immediately?’ Bellow’s stance, here, was centre-leftist: along with Oz, Yehoshua, and Grossman, he supported the two-state solution. The left had a plurality in 1987; by 2013 it belonged to the fringe, or the past, polling at 7 per cent. And the two-state solution was dead.
Guideline Literature and Violence
So. From the Lord Protector to the Great Pretender…
Exactly a year has gone by since Donald J. ‘announced’ (I’m sure you recall the scene on the burnished chariot of the Trump Tower escalator: June 2015), and now’s a good time to pause, take stock, and get
