So at twelve-thirty I left the Oxford House and strode to the Chicago Arts Club. In my mind I was already sketching out some preliminary passages for the piece I would soon write, one of which went as follows (and I know it’s very bad form to quote yourself, and it won’t happen again*4):
This business of writing about writers is more ambivalent than the end-product normally admits. As a fan and a reader, you want your hero to be genuinely inspirational. As a journalist, you hope for lunacy, spite, deplorable indiscretions, a full-scale crack-up in mid-interview. And, as a human, you yearn for the onset of a flattering friendship.
Three wishes, then. The first came true. And so did the third – but not yet, not yet. That didn’t happen until 1987, in Israel, and it relied on the intercessionary figure of Bellow’s fifth and final wife, Rosamund. In the end it was she who put me through to Saul Bellow.*5
He had cheerfully told me on the phone that he would be ‘identifiable by certain signs of decay’. But in fact he looked scandalously fit – he looked like the American Eagle. And as he began to talk, I felt an acrophobic dizziness, and thought of the description of Caligula, the eagle in The Adventure of Augie March (1953):
[He] had a nature that felt the triumph of beating his way up to the highest air to which flesh and blood could rise. And doing it by will, not as other forms of life were at that altitude, the spores and parachute seeds who weren’t there as individuals but messengers of species.
—————
They can hear your medals shake
But let’s keep a sense of proportion and context: first things first. My character was about to reveal itself in the form of destiny; I was moving on to a further and a higher phase of adaptation to the adult world; I was about to get married; and not only that…
And it was all secret, for now. Still posing as a friendship (our mothers after all were expat neighbours in Ronda, Spain, and we’d known each other for years), our affair itself remained unacknowledged. On pain of death I was forbidden to tell anyone; so I only told Hitch.
‘Julia and I are having an affair,’ I said.
‘…I’m overjoyed to hear it. Though I had my suspicions. Bring her to dinner at my place. Just the four of us. Don’t worry, I won’t let on I know. Tonight.’
This happened, and was a riotous success.
‘Hitch,’ I said when he and I were briefly alone (the girls had gone down on to Portobello Road – it was Carnival weekend in Notting Hill). ‘I think the quest is over. I think she’s the…I think she’s the other half.’
‘Oh, without a doubt. Bind her to you with hoops of steel, Little Keith. Very clever, very attractive, and,’ he said (this settled it), ‘and a terrorist.’
Christopher was about to marry a terrorist of his own, the fiery Greek-Cypriot lawyer Eleni Meleagrou…A terrorist, in Christopher’s application, meant a woman with a strong personality – strong enough to inspire fear (when roused, terrorists became ungainsayable); and there weren’t all that many of them in the early 1980s, with the sexual revolution in only its second decade. I said,
‘Well Eleni’s definitely a terrorist. And yeah, I suppose Julia’s one too.’
‘All the best ones are.’
‘They’re feminists, which goes without saying, but not even feminists are all terrorists. Or not even all feminists are terrorists. Christ. What I’m trying to say is it’s not the same thing.’
‘No, not yet. Let’s go down. Bring your glass.’
And the four of us danced to the reggae on Golborne Road, as in an urban fertility rite, the boys shufflingly (and drunkenly), the girls with abandon and panache, again and again flinging their hands gracefully backwards above their heads…
—————
Martin flew to Chicago, ‘huge, filthy, brilliant, and mean’, in the words of its tutelary spirit (and the only American city that, like a terrorist, was frightening and proud of it, with those subterranean metal chutes on the way in, like a delivery system to the urban future). But Chicago admitted him, and let him out again. He flew back, and delivered his long piece to the Observer. Soon afterwards he happened to have a transatlantic conversation with Saul’s agent, Harriet Wasserman, who said,
‘Your piece. I read it out to him on the phone.’
‘On the phone?’ The piece ran to over 4,000 words. ‘The whole thing?’
‘The whole thing. And guess what he said when I finished. He said, “Read it again.” ’
In 1974 the unofficial shortlist for the Nobel Prize ran as follows: Bellow, Nabokov, and Graham Greene.*6 That year the joint winners were two Swedes of profound and durable obscurity, namely Eyvind Johnson and Harry E. Martinson. But Saul, unlike Greene and Nabokov, won it later, in 1976. He was sixty-one. And the Nobel was more or less the only prize (or award or medal or orb or gong) that wasn’t already his. Yet he sat there, on the phone, for well over an hour, listening to praise.
So when Bellow came to London in the spring of 1984, and I went to the welcoming party thrown by George Weidenfeld, I (indirectly) brought it up with him, the writer’s susceptibility to praise and dispraise (does it ever end?). We were out on the balcony, looking down at the Embankment and the Thames, and Saul said,
‘It’s an occupational vice. You fight it, and you don’t want to admit to it, but you’re never free of it. Do you know this story?…There was a girl in a village who was very good at everything and she won all the medals. She was covered in medals from head to foot. And a wolf came to the village,
