‘Well I was caught up in that too,’ said Saul. ‘Being a Trot made you feel you had a role in world history. Aiming for something higher than mere Mammon.’
‘Exactly. Hitch loves America and he’s committed to America. But he also wants something higher – and he lives for struggle. He says, “All the piss and vinegar’s gone out of it.” He says he’s going to ease off politics and write more about literature.’
‘Uh-oh,’ said Elena.
And at last we did move on to Francis Fukuyama and his famous book.*8
‘History isn’t over,’ said Saul as we were beginning to move inside. ‘Though it sometimes seems that way…History is never over.’
When September 11 happened Saul couldn’t quite take it in. And soon, for him, history would indeed be over, in the sense that the past would be over, memory would be over. Laughter would be the last to go.
The convergence of the twain
One night there was an ultraviolent storm, many miles offshore (and reports of mountainous seas). What we saw of it – and how we all stood and stared – was economically evoked by Nabokov in Pale Fire: ‘distant spasms of silent lightning’…
For some reason it was just me and Saul on the beach the next day. We had devoted the morning to a tour of East Hampton, with Elena at the wheel: visits to what were once the studios of two painters, old friends, Jackson Pollock and Saul Steinberg. ‘You’d get there after breakfast, and he was already drunk,’ said Bellow of the former. As a celebrated artist in America, Steinberg was insulated by his Jewishness and lived a long life; but Pollock was a helpless goy from Wyoming, and died while driving under the influence at the age of forty-six…
Saul said, ‘Shall we swim?’
‘Oh I don’t know about that. Look at it. No – listen to it. But let’s get our feet wet.’
Now normally, after one of its tantrums, its hysterical debauches, the North Atlantic would present itself as the picture of eirenic innocence, orderly, almost prim (a storm? What storm?), its waves quite lofty perhaps but unfolding reliably and negotiably towards the strand. Not today.
From a distance it looked flattened, stunned, though its surface raced crazily sideways (as if in desperate search of something), and when we entered up to our shins, then our knees, and found that the sea was…hideously hungover – but not as a human would be, not diffident, taciturn, and self-absorbed. All undertow, it seethed and hissed with hatred and hostility, snarling, sucking its teeth, smacking its chops, as ravenous as wildfire.
The experience was oxymoronic: a thrilling and perilous paddle, with the bright water careening past and tugging at our calves. It was a sea that refused pointblank to be swum in, but for half an hour we unsteadily ploughed through it, marvelling and laughing at its vehemence…
I was the first to turn and make for the shore, with Saul following; and I didn’t see him go down. When I turned again he was flat on his back – in the shallowest shallows. He rose up. And he stood there and stared, stared out to sea. What was in that stare?…I moved to his flank and saw his face and his level eyes, which remained fixed. His eyes were eloquent of respect but also defiance and in themselves held an undertow of menace.
Saul never forgot a slight or an insult, and this ocean, as he would certainly admit, had just put him on his ass. If the Atlantic was a woman or a man, he could exact revenge by lousing it up in a novel. But the novels were over, like history.
All the same, during those two or three minutes it looked to me like a contest of equals. The sea was a force of nature. And so was Saul – so was Saul’s prose. A force of nature.
Home movie
The Amises returned to London on Labor Day, which in 2001 fell on September 3. On September 6 or 7, there was a screening of the home movie (directed and presented by Elena) about the Bellows’ visit to Long Island…That July I thought Saul was pretty much round and whole; but the camera, as all actors know, sees things that we don’t see.
As the film began I was utterly absorbed by an Amis, not a Bellow: namely Inez. How very far she had come since June, the time of Christopher’s stay: he couldn’t go near her without inspiring a squall of tears (‘Christ, how bad can it be?’ he asked, after his fifth attempt to home in on her)…In what we might call the pre-credit sequence, Inez sprinted naked from the sitting room to the garden, and then, methodically using her rump, scaled the two or three steps to the raised deck where I, Saul, Rosamund, and Elena were drinking coffee, every now and then visited by Eliza, Rosie, Catarina, Rachael, Sharon…How happily and busily Inez moved among us, and with what soft attentiveness she heeded parental warnings when she picked up something heavy or went too near the edge. At one point she reflexively steadied herself, placing a hand on Saul’s knee.*9 Saul’s knee, Saul’s eyes.
‘Look at his eyes,’ said Elena.
‘I am,’ I said.
…Schizophrenia typically strikes when the victim is eighteen or nineteen: that’s when the ‘voices’ start. But long before then the sufferer knows that something isn’t right. And this was Saul’s state, in July 2001. He could feel it coming on.
The home movie continued. Elena was priming him with general questions (‘I’m sorry, I’m interviewing you,’ she said), and Saul answered them with eloquence and ease. But his eyes weren’t right – busy, flickering, over-alert. It was as if he was staring into his own brain and wondering what it would do to him next.
Typhoon
‘Tell me,’ he asked for the fourth or fifth time, ‘how’re Nat and Gus?’
By now all my efforts were aimed at dissimulating misery. And as I made my mechanical
