*4 The rebel angel Belial, consigned to Pandemonium (‘place of all demons’), puts it simply enough (Paradise Lost, Bk II): ‘For who would lose, / Though full of pain, this intellectual being, / Those thoughts that wander through eternity…?’ Alzheimer’s, like populism, is decidedly philistine; it hates the intellectual being.
*5 Bin Laden would have points of agreement with Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal. His true soulmate, though, would be Jerry Falwell: ‘the pagans, the abortionists and the gays and the lesbians…all of them have tried to secularise America. I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen” ’…This line of reasoning always makes me think of two lines from ‘Leda and the Swan’. Yeats’s sonnet begins with an act of bestiality and rape: Zeus in animal disguise ravishes and impregnates the nymph Leda; and that child will be Helen of Troy. ‘A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower…’
*6 This comes in the seventh chapter – the one that begins: ‘I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals.’ Humbert is instituting a regime of sexual bribes. Nabokov continues: ‘O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine…’ Lolita is described as ‘a cruel negotiator’. Phoebe was not a squeezer or a gouger; she was more like a cheerful auctioneer. And there were other differences. I wasn’t a stepfather, I wasn’t in loco parentis. And Phoebe was thirty-six, not thirteen.
*7 Which ran in the Guardian on October 11. An expanded version appeared soon afterwards in the American Scholar.
*8 Flowers, somehow, are universally felt to propitiate death. Even Eliza, not quite five, understood this…On another autumn afternoon, in 2015, I stood outside the Bataclan in Paris: candles, letters (‘Cher Hugo’), unopened bottles of wine, empty bottles of beer, and bushels of flowers, sheathed in sweating cellophane.
*9 They were the kind of people who like getting ill and like getting old. They preferred winter to summer and autumn to spring (yearning, as John wrote, for ‘grey days without sun’). In company the Bayleys were both high-spirited and dreamy; their love of grey days was aesthetic, not neurotic…On the other hand, Iris and John were also truly incredible slobs. ‘Single shoes [and single socks] lie about the house as if deposited by a flash flood…Dried-out capless pens crunch underfoot.’ As for the housework: in the past ‘nothing seemed to need to be done’, and now ‘nothing can be done’. At the Bayleys’, the bath, so seldom used, has become ‘unusable’, and even the soap is begrimed…Saul was a Jew and not entirely non-observant (there were occasional prayers and rituals and I would don a beenie); and he was strict about cleanliness…No, I thought, Saul won’t be like Iris. He wouldn’t be out prospecting for pebbles and pennies in the gutters; he wouldn’t be watching Teletubbies; he wouldn’t be saying to his spouse, ‘Don’t hit me.’
*10 The right answer to the question ‘How many Jews were in the WTC on September 11?’ is ‘Why do you want to know?’ Among the wrong answers is ‘None’. This was widely believed or at least touted by Judaeophobes, conspiracists, and huge pluralities in the Middle East. There were many Jews in the WTC and many died there. The numbers given seem to me surprisingly various (perhaps reflecting decent disquiet at the thought of any ‘Jew Count’), but the median figure is 325.
*11 In the fifteen years following 2001, about 750 Americans were killed by lightning strikes; in the same period, 123 Americans were killed by Islamists (accounting for one-third of 1 per cent of national murders: 240,000). Another database finds that ‘over 80 per cent of all suicide attacks in history’ have taken place since September 11; and the victims are very predominantly Muslim (estimates range ‘between 82 and 97 per cent’). In 2015 there were 11,774 terrorist attacks worldwide, with 28,328 victims; that year in the US, Islamist terrorism killed nineteen people, two fewer than those killed by toddlers who got their hands on household guns…It would seem to follow that any generalised fear of Muslims – and all talk of a Third World War or even ‘a clash of civilisations’ – is caused either by delusion or by political opportunism. A terrorist WMD will remain a possibility, but September 11 is already unrepeatable (in other words, the culmination came first, and out of a clear blue sky). Islamism has indeed changed the course of history, by scarring it with additional wars. For the West the lesson is this: the real danger of terrorism lies not in what it inflicts but in what it provokes.
Chapter 5 France in the Time of Iraq
2: Shock and Awe
Jed Slot
Jed Slot was in the hotel bar – being interviewed. Himself a teetotaller, Jed did all his interviews in the hotel bar, and I’d arranged to do all my interviews in there too; but whereas Slot’s sessions lasted all day long and well into the night, mine only accounted for teatime (so I often went in early and came out late, just to listen). The truth was that I had taken up Jed like a new hobby. I had even read him.
‘Eh bien. Now tell me, if you would,’ began the questioner (a shrivelled sage with a briar pipe), ‘what is the difference between the novel and the short story – I mean compositionally, in terms of praxis?’
‘Well, sir,’ said Jed, ‘the novel is more expansive. By contrast,
