The Tree Of Life
1985
HUGH AND MARILYN NISSENSON were members of the network known as the Friends of Amos Elon (already alluded to in Amos’s chapter). Introduced by Amos, we met in Florence. I took them out of the city on a summer’s day to Ugolino, a country club with a swimming pool; on another occasion Hugh invited us to lunch at the exclusive Villa Medici, an architectural monument upgraded to five-star hotel. Hugh took trouble about his appearance and in my hearing once described himself as “spiffy.” Staying with us in London, he bought a sword-stick, and walked the streets with this innocent-looking object which is potentially lethal on account of the blade hidden in the handle. In their New York apartment was a foul-mouthed green parrot that Hugh wooed with the words “Give us a French kiss.” The parrot would oblige. Beneath its cage lay the immense white and fluffy Old English Shepherd Dog whose need for exercise regulated much of the day’s time-table. The Nissensons also owned a house in France, in the small town of Pontlevoy not far south of Blois. Hugh handed to Marilyn all responsibility for the French language. Having supper at the opera and seeing that Kurt Waldheim, the compromised Secretary General of the United Nations, was at the adjoining table, Hugh called out “Nazi bastard” loudly enough to be sure of being overheard.
This apparent gentleman of leisure was a dedicated artist. Consisting of half a dozen novels, some short stories and essays, his collected works pay homage to the power of story telling. In his view, literature deals with the whole human experience; nothing is so delicate or so brutal that it can’t be written about. From Homer and Virgil to James Joyce and Primo Levi, the greatest artists have told stories – mythologies, if you prefer – that explain to people how they come to be who they are. Put another way, culture is really the stories about themselves and their nation that people believe to be true, whether or not they are. Hugh lived and loved the stories that Americans tell themselves. For one of his novels, he taught himself to use an eighteenth-century musket. A novel purporting to be the diary of an early Puritan settler in the New World necessitated a trip to Britain and close study of the language of the period. A perfectionist, he kept on re-writing until the narrative does what he wants it to do. He consulted Marilyn, herself an author, and he treated films and television serials as primary sources. It was thrilling (his favorite superlative) when experience confirmed what was going on in his head.
Over the years, reviewers and academics have been writing the obituary of fiction on the grounds that everything that could be done in a novel has been done. Hugh believed in the classic art form and gave it a modern lease of life. In an interview that I filed for reference, he made a declaration of faith: “I really feel compelled to make beautiful things, beautiful artifacts, out of my words.” In a passage with a weird and wonderful imagery that celebrates the telling of stories, Vladimir Nabokov is speaking of Gogol but he might just as well be speaking of Hugh’s novels. “At this super-high level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the underdog or cursing the upper-dog. It appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.”
Below his inscription on the flyleaf of The Tree of Life Hugh wrote some lines of Swinburne’s which Marilyn tells me that he particularly liked to quote.
“Yea, is not even Apollo with hair and harpstring of gold,
A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?”