‘Christ,’ I said. ‘And wasn’t American anti-Semitism very strong before the war?’
‘During the war – that was its historic apogee.’
‘I confess I just don’t understand it, anti-Semitism. You copped some more of the same, didn’t you, with The Dean’s December.’
‘Yes, but from a different quarter. Not from the world of primitive superstition but from high academe.’
‘From Hugh Kenner, wasn’t it?’
‘Uh. Hugh Kenner. He tormented Delmore and now he torments me. He managed another hissy fit in defence of uh, “traditional culture”.’
‘Meaning non-Semitic culture?’
‘Meaning anti-Semitic culture, in this case. The traditional culture of Pound and Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot.’
‘Mm. Well, two nutters and a monarchist. And Wyndham Lewis did at least come up with that wonderful phrase…How do you think it went, by the way? I mean the moronic inferno?’
‘I thought the moronic inferno went rather well.’
‘Me too. The moronic inferno went very smoothly.’
‘What’, asked Julia, ‘is the moronic inferno?’
The moronic inferno
Two or three days earlier Saul and I had taped a TV programme entitled (with a glance at Freud) Modernity and its Discontents, chaired by Michael Ignatieff; and that had been Michael’s first question. ‘I’m wondering what you meant, Saul Bellow, when you picked up that phrase from Wyndham Lewis’: the moronic inferno. And Saul answered:
Well, it means a chaotic state which no one has sufficient internal organisation to resist. A state in which one is overwhelmed by all kind of powers – political, technological, military, economic, and so on – which carry everything before them with a kind of heathen disorder in which we’re supposed to survive with all our human qualities.
And the question before us, Saul went on, is whether this is possible…So we talked about that, bearing in mind that writers, as he said, are expected to have ‘a fairly well-organised individuality’, and are therefore able to put up some opposition – some internal opposition to the moronic inferno…
It lasted about an hour, and then the car dropped Saul and me off in Gower Street, and we strolled through Bloomsbury – the garden squares, the plaques and statues, the museums, the houses of worship and the houses of learning. As we crossed Fitzroy Square I talked scornfully about the Bloomsbury Group (in my view a disgrace to bohemia); and we moved on to the major class antagonisms that were only now beginning to fade…Saul needed no goading to think ill of what he called Bloomsbury ‘patricianism’, though he was surprisingly relaxed about Bloomsbury Judaeophobia.
‘But Saul, it was so fierce and it was all of them.’
‘Yes, even Maynard Keynes. But they were only reflexive anti-Semites. Not visceral. Being anti-Semitic was just one of the duties of being a snob.’
‘…Maybe also one of the duties of being second-rate. The only one who wasn’t was Forster – not anti-Semitic and not second-rate. As for Virginia Woolf…’
‘But bear in mind she was married to a Jew. Leonard…That kind of drawing-room anti-Semitism – it’s mostly just a posture. They’d’ve been horrified by anything serious.’
‘True. I suppose. But that Virginia though…Imagine reading Ulysses and mainly coming away with the notion that Joyce was vulgar.*11 You know, common. And that’s what strikes her most…Unbelievable.’
‘Well it’s a hard life, being a snob. You can’t relax for a moment…You know, a decade ago I spent six weeks in the Woolfs’ country house. East Sussex. It was very cold, and I expected Virginia to haunt me and punish me. But she never did.’
Next, the full English tea at the hotel, crustless cucumber sandwiches, quite possibly, and maybe even scones and cream, with the two of us swathed in the lace and chintz of Durrants. Saul was quietly tickled by all this, I realised. And at one point, that afternoon, he did actually say (revealing a fondness, too, for Anglicisms),
‘You know, they treat me very well here. Because they think I’m a toff.’
And in general how pleasant, how touching, how humorous it was to re-experience London through the eyes of one’s older American friends, who saw the place as a bastion of courtesy, rootedness, and imperturbable continuity (and, through them, I could see it too); but otherwise, in everyday life, London felt to me like discontented modernity, stoked by subterranean powers…
The conversation with Michael Ignatieff was reprinted in a BBC publication, and so that longish quote from Saul is verbatim. The transcript tactfully omits my final remark – when I startled myself with a quavering cri de coeur. I said that Bellow stood above the moronic inferno, and could survey it from on high, whereas I was still in it, still under it, pinned and wriggling, and looking out.
What I was referring to, I later realised, was the erotic picaresque of my early adulthood. This was one of my hopes of Julia: that she would emancipate me from the moronic inferno of my lovelife (best encapsulated in the person of Phoebe Phelps)…
Honour
Odin, god of poetry and war…Fortified by a second round of cocktails, we had moved on to America – America and the religious Right, and the erring clerics of the Bible Belt.
Saul was telling us about a reverse recently suffered by the Born Again community in West Virginia. An unusually puritanical video vicar (he hoped to criminalise adultery) was under federal investigation for swindling his flock (he peddled miracle cures, they said, and preyed on the ill and the old). In addition, the troubled divine had just been found under a stack of hookers in a de luxe Miami sex club called the Gomorrah, a visit he paid for with church funds…
‘We’d better leave aside the question of hypocrisy,’ said Saul. ‘As for relieving Christians of their jewels and disability cheques, he’ll just say, Well everyone else does it – which is no kind of defence, of course, though it happens to be true. As for the hookers and the church funds…You’ve got to understand that in America there are two
