‘Agreed. If Gore’s addicted to conspiracies, Noam’s addicted to moral equivalence. Or not even. He thinks if anything Osama’s slightly more moral than we are. As proof, he reminds us that we bombed that aspirin factory in Khartoum. Killing one nightwatchman. I had to point out to him that we didn’t bomb crowded office blocks with jets full of passengers.’
‘…Well keep it up, Hitch. You’re the only lefty who’s shown any mettle. It’s your armed-forces blood – the blood of the Royal Navy. And you love America.’
‘Thank you, Little Keith. I do, and I’m proud that I do.’
‘You know, what I can’t get over is the dissonance. Between means and ends. The intricate practicality of the attack – in the service of something so…’
‘Benthamite realism in the service of the utterly unreal. A global caliphate? The extermination of all infidels?’
‘The whole thing’s like a head injury. Last question – I’m being called to dinner. Will there be more?’
‘Maybe that’s it for now. But it’s probably just the beginning. We’ll see.’
What we saw the next day was the delivery of the first of the anthrax letters. And at that point the occult glamour of Osama reached its apogee. It was as if his whisperers and nightrunners were everywhere, and you could almost hear the timed signals of his hyenas and screech-owls, and rumours were skittering about like a cavernful of bats.*1
There would be a war – no one doubted that.
…‘The silent work of uneventful days’: this prose pentameter is from Saul Bellow’s autobiographical short story ‘Something to Remember Me By’. He means the times when your quotidian life seems ordinary, but your netherworld, your innermost space, is confusedly dealing with a wound (for Saul – he was fifteen – the wound was the imminent death of his mother), and has much silent work to get through…The populations of the West were for now otherwise occupied, with the coming intervention in Afghanistan; they were busy; and the silent work it very much needed to do would have to wait for uneventful days.
An act of terrorism fills the mind as thoroughly as a triggered airbag smothers a driver. But the mind can’t live like that for long, and you soon sense the return of the familiar mental chatter – other concerns and anxieties,*2 other affiliations and affections.
Like everyone else I processed a great many reactions to September 11, but none proved harder to grasp than the reaction of Saul Bellow. Somehow I just couldn’t take it in.
There was no difficulty in understanding Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (those Chaucerian racketeers of the Bible Belt), who said that September 11 was due punishment for America’s sins (especially its failure to criminalise homosexuality and abortion). It was rather harder to tell what Norman Mailer was going on about when he said that the attack would prove salutary, because only ceaseless warfare could maintain the virility of the US male…And more routinely I attended to all the appeasers, self-flagellators, defeatists, and relativists on the left, as well as all the pugnacious windbags on the right; and I could see their meaning. Even Inez’s struggles I could faintly make out.*3 But not Saul’s.
‘He can’t absorb it.’
‘What?’ I was on the line to Mrs Bellow in Boston. ‘Can’t absorb it?’
Rosamund was confining her deep voice to a throaty whisper, so I knew Saul must be somewhere in the house – the house on Crowninshield Road. She said,
‘He keeps asking me, Did something happen in New York? And I tell him, in full. And then he asks me again. Did something happen in New York? He just can’t take it in.’
And I couldn’t take it in either – the news about Saul.
Two years earlier Saul had personally fathered a child (setting some kind of record) and his somatic health seemed imposingly sound (Rosamund still described him as ‘gorgeous’); but the fact remained that Bellow was born in 1915.
For some while there had been an uneasiness having to do with his short-term memory; and in March 2001 Saul was tentatively diagnosed with ‘inchoate’ dementia (whose progress would be gradual and stop-start). I went to Boston that spring and was present on the morning of an important test or scan; the three of us then had lunch in a Thai restaurant near the medical centre, and for the first time I heard mention of Alzheimer’s.
She disguised it but Rosamund, I thought, was (rightly and prophetically) alarmed. Saul was reticent but seemingly untroubled; it was as if he’d made a resolution not to be cowed. He would be eighty-six on June 10…A little later, in July, the Bellows came to stay with us on Long Island. I convinced myself that ‘all marbles’ (to quote the title of a novel he would never finish) were ‘still accounted for’ – until I watched our home movie of that visit, which was full of portents.
My habitual response to disastrous diagnoses of close friends, as we’ll see, was one of studied insouciance: fatal diseases, in this world view, were hollow threats, scarecrows, paper tigers…
All the same, back in London after Labor Day, I made an effort to discover what all the fuss was about: I got hold of a couple of books and tried to settle down to them. But I found myself immediately unnerved: Alzheimer’s clearly meant what it said; Alzheimer’s followed through. And I, I, who cruised through whole libraries devoted to famine, terror-famine, plagues, and pandemics, to biological and chemical weaponry, to the leprous aftermaths of great floods and earthquakes, was quite unable to contemplate dementia – in its many variants, vascular, cortical, frontotemporal, and all the rest.
Why? Well, call it the universal cult of personality, call it the charismatic authority of the self – the divine right of the first person. And this particular numero uno wasn’t going to wake up one morning in the Ukraine of 1933 or in the London of 1666; but anybody can wake up with Alzheimer’s, including the present writer, including the present
