‘They are, they are.’
‘God wouldn’t look like Maury. God wouldn’t look like anything we could imagine.’
‘Agreed. No Nobodaddy.’ Nobodaddy was William Blake’s unimprovable epithet for the sky-god of Christianity: the phantom patriarch. ‘And you, Saul, you still expect to re-encounter your father in the life to come…’
‘It’s not intellectually respectable, I know. It’s an archaism. All I have are these persistent intuitions. Call them love impulses. I can’t give up the feeling that I haven’t seen the last of my parents and my sister and my brothers…When I die they will be waiting for me. I don’t visualise any settings. And I don’t know what they’ll say. Very probably they’ll tell me things I badly need to know…It’s the power of early attachments. That’s all.’
Now Rosamund and Elena, trailed by a child or two, came out to tell us that there was food on the table.
‘We’re coming.’ And as I gathered my things I wanted to add, Saul. Go on doing what you’ve always done. Trust the child in you. Trust the ‘first heart’ (as you once put it). Continue to see the world with your ‘original eyes’. But all I said was, ‘Hey, Saul. What’s the difference between a Skoda and a Seventh-Day Adventist?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said expectantly.
‘You can close the door on a Seventh-Day Adventist.’
Back went the head, up went the chin…On the day my father died (in 1995) I rang Saul in Boston and told him the news. And we talked. And he told me what I badly needed to hear…He was never my ‘literary father’ (I already had one); and besides, he had his hands full with Gregory, Adam, and Daniel (and now Rosie). But I did say to him, a year or two later, ‘As long as you’re alive I’ll never feel completely fatherless.’ And after that, after Saul died, I would have – nobodaddy.
Laughter and the end of history
During lunch that day, at Elena’s urging, Saul sang ‘Just a Gigolo’ in his soft and persuasive baritone. And at breakfast he’d given us ‘K-K-K Katie’ and, with Rosamund’s equally pleasing harmonies, ‘You Are My Sunshine’. Like me at that time, Saul tended to wake up happy. Alzheimer’s would attack that happiness, and attack those harmonies. But not yet.
At some point in the afternoon I was sitting at the kitchen table with Rachael, Sharon, and Eliza; and Sharon was talking about her predecessor (as nanny to Rosie Bellow), saying,
‘And she seemed such a nice girl on the surface. Very sensible and responsible.’
‘Mm, I remember,’ said Rachael.
‘Very well brought up. No one dreamed she was such a…’ Sharon checked herself and glanced at the attentive Eliza. ‘No one dreamed she was such an ess el you tee.’
Eliza said, ‘Why was she a slut?’
This was followed by a rush of laughter (and a second rush, when I passed it on to the others)…English is ‘a beautiful language’, I would later be told at a dinner party in Switzerland by a group of European writers; and this surprised me. Italian is beautiful, Spanish is beautiful, French is beautiful, and I’m prepared to accept that even German is or can be jolie laide. But English? It is impressively advanced, I knew: no diacritical marks (no cedillas, no umlauts); ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘grammatical’ gender (cf. das Mädchen, where ‘girl’ is neuter); and an immense vocabulary.*7 Still, the thesaurus gets very thin when it comes to ‘amusement’; it is very hard, in English, to describe laughter.
Which you need to do when you write about Saul. With him, laughter was essentially communitarian; and perhaps this is why he liked all jokes, however weakly punsome (and however dirty). Jokes are invitations to laughter; so he liked all jokes, and liked belonging to a species that liked telling them.
—————
It was the cocktail hour, and I asked him, ‘Now what can I get you?’
One day in the late 1990s Saul was told that he shouldn’t drive any more – much resented, because he loved ‘the little princess’ (a recently acquired BMW). Not long afterwards he was told that he shouldn’t drink any more (Updike would be told the same thing when his time drew nearer). On the day of his arrival Saul asked for a small Scotch – comprehensively deserved, I thought. Tonight he asked for a glass of red wine, and he nursed it through dinner and beyond.
We ate outside. After about an hour the conversation was veering in a certain direction and I saw my chance, saying,
‘I want to tell you an anecdote about someone I hope to redeem in your eyes…You know who introduced me to your stuff, Saul? Without whom, perhaps, we wouldn’t be sitting here tonight, under the stars, under the m-moonlight? Hitchens. In about 1975 he said, “Take a look at this.” And gave me the red Penguin of Herzog.’
‘You’d’ve got there on your own,’ said Elena.
‘Yes, I would – but when? And why fritter your life away?’
Rosamund was still lightly bristling, but Saul said genially, ‘Tell your story.’
‘Well here’s what happened. He went to pick up a friend in the offices of Vanity Fair. And while he was waiting the photo editor staggered out of the darkroom, dropped his airbrush and his scalpel or whatever it was, sank into a chair, and said, That’s the biggest carve-down I’ve ever done in my entire life.’
‘What’s a carve-down?’
‘It’s when they’re trying to make somebody look less fat,’ I said. ‘And who was it? It was the much-maligned Monica Lewinsky…And Hitch had a realisation. America spent a year on O. J. Simpson, and another year on Monica Lewinsky. “Politics”, said Hitch, “was once defined as ‘what’s going on’. And now there’s nothing going on.” He’s nostalgic for the Cold War. There’s nothing going on.’
Rosamund said, more leniently now, ‘What’s he miss about the Cold War?’
‘…He’s ubi sunt about the USSR. You know – where are they now? Where the utopian dream? Where the hard pure men like Lenin and Trotsky? But I think what he really misses is
