Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (18 page)

The titles in the European stands at first seem a little more adventurous, but after a while some of the books look as familiar as the
A to Z
sported by the AA stall. Yo,
Claudius,
for instance, rings a bell, as does
Princesca Daisy;
and you don't have to puzzle long over
El 'shock' del Futuro
by Alvin Toffler. Mills and Boon, the pap heartache people, clearly qualify as a country of their own, or even a planet: A World of Romance. The titles shimmer by —
Untamed Witch, Dark Enigma, Dangerous Rapture.
These too are cravenly duplicated across Europe:
II Tempio della Luna, Si Beau et Si Etrange.
No doubt some frazzled translator is scratching his head over the latest run of hot paperbacks from Beeline Books in New York: To
Sir, With Lust, How Do I Lust Thee, Lust Me or Leave Me, To Know Her Is To Lust Her.

For it is to the New World that one must go for the prize lemons, for horrendous superfluity, for that mix of the frivolous and morbidly perverse. I have never seen so many books geared to the anxieties of sexual performance. What is going on over there?
The New Couple: Women and Gay Men
provides a clue. Ditto with
Finding Hope Again:

A Pastor's Guide to Counseling Depressed Persons,
With sound counselling you'll soon be back to
How to Renovate Yourself from Head to Toe
and
Good Lovemaking.
Why not forget the whole thing and curl up with
The Second Quitter's Companion
or
Fifty New Creative Poodle Grooming Styles?

In the hubbub of this endless hypemarket the publishers hedge and bob. They wield their special Frankfurt Diaries -all appointment-crammed. The hall is loud with false laughter and willed camaraderie. What is this year's 'Pope book' (i.e. the high-priced dud)? What will happen at the Harper and Row auction (for Thomas Thompson's bosomy novel of Fame, Passion, and Vengeance,
Celebrity)?
They cruise and hunker, closing those deals. George! Fran! Bud! Yukio, Sven, Fetnab! Simone, Gunther, Rashid! Bernardo! Ogbogbo! Piotr!

The big business is done at night, in the big hotels — the teaky Schlösser, the shadowy Gasthäuser. This would seem to be the trend: in fact the coolest of the cool don't take stands any more but simply wallow in their suites, receiving visitors and torturing room-service. In the bars of what remains of old Frankfurt, and in the dives and supermarkets and cash-and-carry outlets of the red-light district, you will find the atmosphere of the affordable resort: block your ears, and it could be Biarritz, or Blackpool, on a rainy night. 'Is this your first Frankfurt?' everyone asked me. 'Yes,' I said, 'this is my first time' (be gentle with me, Frankfurt). 'Oh
well
then,' they all said. 'You'll like it better the second time.' But there may not be a second time. Actually that's a pretty good definition of frivolity: going to Frankfurt, as a non-publisher, for the second time. Enough of this carping, and these whimpers of exclusion. You never feel at your best, perhaps, when you crash the works outing of another firm.

Observer, 1981

MORE DIE OF HEARTBREAK

This piece is a book review — with a couple of differences. It was read out loud by me in Haifa, Israel, and in the presence of the book's author. The occasion was a Saul Bellow Conference organised, or spearheaded, by the distinguished Israeli novelist A.B. ('Bully') Yehoshua. At this convocation of Bellovians most of the papers were delivered by American academics. Jolted awake on my first morning by a call from the foyer telling me that 'the Conference miniboose' was revving in the forecourt, about to begin its journey to the Conference Centre, I then sat breakfastless through two or three lectures called things like 'The Caged Cash-Register: Tensions between Existentialism and Materialism in
Dangling Man'.
During the first session Bellow was overheard to say: 'If I have to listen to another word of this I think I'm going to
die.'
Thereafter he was not often to be found at the Conference Centre. He was in stalwart attendance, however, on the day I gave my paper alongside Amos Oz and Alan Lelchuk.

The 'wallet' referred to in the first sentence was a leatherette lecture-pouch presented to each delegate on arrival with the compliments of Bank Hapoalim. My assignment was the novel
More Die of Heartbreak,
published later the same year (1987).

I am delighted to be here, for all sorts of reasons: the sun, the sea breezes, this new wallet, the convulsive coughing fits that will punctuate my discourse. And I have further grounds for self-satisfaction. We are all familiar with our Herzogs and Humboldts and Hendersons, we all know our Augies and our Arturs; but nobody here has read the new one. Perhaps you have heard tell of it, you are acquainted with its lovely title:
More Die of Heartbreak.
But only I have read it. That is to say I have reread it; and I become more and more convinced that you cannot read writers like Saul Bellow; you can only reread them. I have read the new one — and you haven't. Not even Saul Bellow has read it. Oh, he has peered at the typescript, he has agonised over the proofs. He has written it. But he has not
read
it, as I have.

Once the first days of creation are over (once life has been assigned to various hunches and inklings), writing is decision-making. After the big decisions, the medium-sized decisions; then the little decisions, lots of little decisions, two or three hundred a page. When Bellow reads
More Die of Heartbreak
he isn't reading; he is squirming and smarting, feeling the pulls and shoves and aftershocks of a million decisions. For him the book is a million clues to a million skirmishes — scars, craters, bullet-holes. For me, it is a seamless
fait accompli.
And I am here to tell you - I am literally here to tell you - that it is as dense, as funny, as thought-crammed, as richly associational and as cruelly contemporary as anything he has written. He's over seventy. What's the matter with him?

Here are further grounds for extreme complacence on my part: Bellow has been reading Philip Larkin. Now the narrator of
More Die of Heartbreak
grew up in Paris at the feet of heavy thinkers like Boris Souvarine and Alexandre Kojève who talked about geopolitics and Hegel and Man at the End of History and wrote books called things like
Existenz
(note the powerful
z
on the end, rather than the more modest
ce).
I grew up in Swansea, Wales, and Philip Larkin was a good deal around. He didn't talk about posthistorical man. He talked about the psychodrama of early baldness. Bellow quotes Larkin as follows: 'In everyone there sleeps a sense of life according to love.' 'He also says that people dream "of all they might have done had they been loved. Nothing cures that".' And nothing - i.e. death - did cure that. Love was not a possibility for Larkin. Because to him death overarched love and rendered it derisory. He died in 1985; by Bellow's age, incidentally, he had been dead for years. For him, death crowded love out. With Bellow, it seems to be the other way around. More die of heartbreak, says the title. Well, Larkin never had any heartbreak, not in that sense.* Perhaps one of the many, many things the new novel has to say is that you
need
heartbreak, to keep you human. You need it to keep America off your back. (The book is sometimes like a rumour of war against America.) The right kind of heartbreak, mind you. Anyway, whether you need it or not, you are certainly going to get it.

I have a third and, I think, final reason for impregnable self-satisfaction — though more may yet occur to me. Whereas other speakers at this conference are addressing themselves to themes and structures, to literary correspondences and genealogies, existentialism, authenticity, percussive nouns and whatnot, all I've got to do is tell a story.

*In
Philip Larkin: A 'Writer's Life
Andrew Motion says of the title of Larkin's first mature collection,
The Less Deceived:
'The phrase stands on its head Ophelia's remark in
Hamlet
that she is "more deceived" than the Prince.' I think this is wrong. Ophelia doesn't mean that she is more deceived than Hamlet ('I was the more deceived'). She means that she is more deceived than she was formerly - or more deceived than she thought she was. The poem in which the title phrase occurs, 'Deceptions', makes a comparison ('you were less deceived . . . Than he was'), but the title itself refers to comparison
and
degree ('very much undeceived' as well as 'less deceived than most'). In any case it suggests a turning away from Ophelia's world of love and risk - and rawness, raggedness, insanity, dissolution. Larkin wasn't going to have any of that.

It is a love story, but a modern one. 'Modern': what has Bellow
done
to that word? In Bellow,
modern
now conies with its own special static, its own humiliating helplessness, its own unbearable agitation . . . We begin with a conversation between the book's two main actors, Kenneth Trachtenberg, the narrator, an Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, and his colleague and uncle, Benno, Benn Grader, the distinguished botanist, who specialises in the anatomy and morphology of plants (a plant 'clairvoyant', 'mystic' and 'telepathic', as he is variously styled). The two men love two women but they also love each other: it is a 'devouring' friendship; they are central to each other's lives. As the novel opens Benn is in crisis. We see how things are going to be on the first page, when Benn draws Kenneth's attention to a Charles Addams cartoon which has come to obsess him:

A pair of lovers was its subject — the usual depraved-desolate couple in a typical setting of tombstones and yews. The man was brutal-looking and the long-haired woman (I think the fans call her Morticia) wore a witch's gown. The two sat on a cemetery bench holding hands. The caption was simple:

'Are you unhappy, darling?'

'Oh yes, yes! Completely.'

Kenneth is the younger by a couple of decades but he is by far the more worldly, with his Parisian, UNESCO, Euroculture background. On the other hand,
everyone
is more worldly than Benn. Kenneth has long hair, a 'Jesusy' look, like 'a figure in a sketch, somewhere between Cruik-shank and Rembrandt - skinny, long-faced, sallow and greenish (reflections from a Dutch canal). Modern life, if you take it to heart, wears you out . . .' Benn, for his part, has 'cobalt-blue' eyes and 'a face like the moon before we landed on it'. For Kenneth, Benn has 'the magics', a charismatic soul, purity, innocence; and it is these qualities that Kenneth has come to America to protect, 'to preserve Benn in his valuable oddity'. He has also come to America because America is 'where the action is', the real modern action; it is where modernity is.

This is Benn's trouble. After fifteen years as a widower-bachelor he has remarried. The second wife is 'more beautiful, more difficult, more of a torment'. What was he after? 'Two human beings bound together in love and kindness' — a universal human aim, as Kenneth concedes: 'In the West, anyway, people are still trying to do it, rounding off the multitude of benefits they enjoy.' Benn's attitude is of course not so brisk. He is, or was,
infatuated,
'carried away by unreasoning passion' (that is the second dictionary definition of infatuation, the first being 'made foolish'). Kenneth is doubly sceptical. Benn got married on the sly, while Kenneth was away; he hadn't cleared it with Kenneth, and he damn well should have done. Benn 'had the magics, but as a mainstream manager he was nowhere'. Kenneth has always aspired to be Benn's mainstream manager, his modernity intermediary. And he has always felt that Benn had the love potential, 'he actually could fall in love', he was a strong candidate for love in 'a classic form'. To put it at its lowest (which is still pretty high these days), 'he was a man who really did have something to do — other than trouble others, which seems to be what so many of us are here for, exclusively.'

As the veteran Bellow-reader would by now expect, the full picture takes some time to emerge; it is a case of one step forward two steps back, with each sortie into the present demanding elaborate legitimisation from the past. While omens gather, we first review Benn's erotic career, and the usual modern spectacle: 'the best people are always knee-deep in the garbage of "personal life", to the gratification of the vulgar'. Or again: 'the private life is almost always a bouquet of sores with a garnish of trivialities or downright trash.' And here is Ben, 'dredged in floury relationships by ladies who could fry him like a fish if they had a mind to'. There was Caroline Bunge, the department-store heiress, the Valium queen, who, when Benn rushes to meet her at the airport, walks straight past him without blinking: 'Being on mood pills was 100 per cent contemporary. If you aren't up-to-the-moment you aren't altogether real. But crazies are always contemporary, as sandpipers always run ahead of the foam line on the beaches.' There was Delia Bedell, another contemporary personage. Having learnt from TV and the magazines that it's okay for the lady to take the initiative, she comes down from the apartment above and submits Benn to a matter-of-fact seduction. She practically debags him. Thereafter she haunts his front door crying, 'What am I supposed to do with my sexuality?' Benn slides into these things out of politeness (and 'politeness gets funnier the more the rules of order disintegrate'). He gets out of them less decorously: he does a runner, or a flyer, jetting off to Brazil, Japan, Antarctica, anywhere. 'He flies around, but his thought lag is such — I refer to the gap between his personal interests and the passions of contemporary life - that he might as well be circling the Dead Sea on a donkey.' Benn is not an old-fashioned figure, he is an eternal figure; he has innocence, and we all know what modernity will do with that. Innocence is a claim to immunity, and there is no immunity any more; modernity makes no exceptions. 'Towards the end of your life,' says Benn (and this is a very Bellovian strophe),