‘That’s what happens when you’ve won everything and imagine you’re safe at last. Really you’re more vulnerable than ever. They can hear your medals shake.’
Cocktails at Odin’s
I was always going on about Bellow, so my secret fiancée was to some extent prepared. Unlike most of my close girlfriends Julia was a reader. So she read Henderson the Rain King (his least typical novel) and liked it. A few days later, though, she looked up from page 30 of Augie March and said,
‘Does anything actually happen in this book?’
‘Well the title mentions his adventures. There’s development but no real plot.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘So it’s a babble novel.’
‘A babble novel?’
‘You know. Him just going on.’
Rather than expatiating on the babble novel, rather than defending the babble novel (as a route to self-liberation), I just said,
‘It’s the calibre of the babbler that counts. Anyway. You’re okay about the dinner?’
‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll probably be quiet at first. Pretend I’m not there. Talk to Saul. You don’t have to worry about me.’
—————
The Arts Club in Chicago had featured a de Kooning, a Braque, and a drawing by Matisse – ‘but as you see,’ Saul had commented, ‘it’s not an arts club. It’s just an exclusive grillroom for elegant housewives.’ In the same kind of way, Odin’s flirtatiously acknowledged the appeal (and the expense) of high culture – it was practically panelled with modern masters, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Patrick Procktor. In this setting, then, Julia and I were already ensconced on our velvet chairs when Saul Bellow was shown to the table.
I saw him come in. Fedora, checked suit with a crimson lining (not loud exactly, but a bit sudden as the English say); just below average height (he once complained that time had shortened him by at least two inches); resolutely and handsomely full-faced, and solid-looking. Half a decade from now it would be my habit to embrace Saul on meeting and parting; and I never failed to register his density of chest and shoulder: the build of a stevedore. At the age of seven, the ghetto child in Montreal lost a year of his life to tuberculosis; one of the many changes this wrought in him was the determination to become strong…In 1984 Bellow was in the middle of his third marriage – or was it his fourth? To tell the truth, I was not a keen student of Saul’s private life (in literary matters I was far too earnest for that); no, I was a keen student of the prose, the tone, the weight, the disembodied words.
Julia was introduced, and was duly enveloped in a deep syllable. For a minute or two they had a genial exchange about Henderson (‘Oh, you liked that one, did you?’). Then I said,
‘We’ve ordered cocktails. And for you?’
And Saul surprised me – and pleased me – by consenting to a Scotch.
Looking around for a waiter I said, ‘The owner isn’t here tonight.’ I meant Peter Langan, the controversial Irish restaurateur. ‘Unless he’s asleep under one of the tables. He’s a Celt, you know, and what they call a roaring boy. But a nice chap. They say he can get three bottles of champagne down him before lunch.’
Saul asked, ‘And how often does Peter accomplish this?’
‘Oh, daily, I think.’
There naturally followed a discussion about drunkenness and drunkards (with Saul describing the two drunkards he’d known best, the poets Delmore Schwartz and John Berryman). Saul had not yet come up with one of the great observations on drunkenness and drunkards (it appears in the late story ‘Something to Remember Me By’): There was a convention about drunkenness, established in part by drunkards. The founding proposition was that consciousness is terrible.*7 And then there was the mysterious American tilt to the nexus between writers and suicide…
I said, ‘There’s a paragraph in Humboldt’s Gift. I loved it and assented to it at once but I don’t really understand it. Maybe you have to be American.’
‘Let’s see if I understand it,’ said Julia.
‘Okay. Then we’ll know how American you are and whether you deserve a passport…That bit, Saul, when you say America preens itself on the suicides of its writers. The country is proud of its dead poets.*8 Why? Because it makes Americans feel virile?’
‘Well yes. I meant business America, technological America.’
‘Somebody wrote that you could count on the fingers of two hands the American writers who didn’t die of drink. I suppose he meant the moderns, because Hawthorne didn’t die of drink, did he? Melville didn’t. Whitman didn’t.’
‘Whitman was a temperance-leaguer. With episodes of frailty.’
‘Henry James didn’t. But nowadays, I bet, it’s only the Jews who don’t die of drink. Because they don’t drink at all. What does Herzog’s father say about his hopeless lodger? “A Jewish drunkard!” So it’s an oxymoron. Even their writers don’t drink.’
‘With exceptions, like Delmore. I’m wondering. Roth hardly drinks.’*9
‘Perhaps that explains the dominance of the Jewish American Novel.’
‘Yes. We just lay in our hammocks till the field was clear.’
I too wondered. ‘Heller drinks a bit. Mailer drinks.’
‘He sure does.’
‘Mm. I like old Norman.’
‘So do I.’
‘It’s strange. No one behaves worse or talks more balls than Norman, but he’s widely liked…The question remains. Why don’t Jews drink?’
‘Well, it’s the same with Jewish achievement in general,’ said Saul (as his drink arrived). ‘And that achievement is disproportionate.*10 Einstein put it pretty well. The great error is to think it’s somehow innate. That way anti-Semitism lies. It isn’t innate. It’s to do with how you’re raised. All good Jewish children know that the way to impress their elders is through application. Not sports, not physical strength or physical beauty, and not the arts. Through learning and studying.’
‘When did Einstein say that?’
‘I think just before the war. In 1938…You know, Einstein lived in Princeton, and in
