On June 10, 1995, I rang him in Vermont and said,
‘Happy birthday. And congratulations.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But what exactly are the congratulations for?’
‘You’re eighty – you’ve made old bones. You should be feeling very proud and grand. Old bones is a great thing. A very great thing.’
I said it more or less unreflectingly, just to buck him up and give him heart, and I was pleased to hear him laughing (‘Uh – uh – uh’); but a little reflection informs me that old bones is indeed a very great thing.
‘Strange Meeting’, the last poem written by Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), proceeds:
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
‘Strange friend,’ I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn.’
‘None,’ said that other, ‘save the undone years…’
Old bones will give you plenty of causes to mourn, naturally, but you wouldn’t linger long on the undone years. Old bones has the power to enervate death, depriving it of its tragic complexity. Dying two months short of your ninetieth birthday: this may call for any number of adjectives, but not tragic.
I was at my desk in the coastal village of José Ignacio, in the province of Maldonado, in the country of Uruguay: Uruguay: civically, socially, and humanly the princess of the nether America.
When we were down there – and we were down there, with intermissions, from 2003 to 2006 – I worked in a separate building a hundred yards from the house (it had a bedroom and a bathroom, and would in fact soon serve as the self-contained cabana of the Hitch, who was coming south for a long weekend). To get to my study, Elena would climb down the external steps from the balcony and walk past the swimming pool, which in April was in my opinion already unusably cold. Because in Latin America, below the latitude of Equador, April is the beginning of fall. Elena was coming by to tell me something.
This study of mine was glass-fronted and gave you a horizon-wide vista of the sea, which surged about us on all three fronts of the peninsula – the South Atlantic Ocean, with its occasional whales and daily cloud-shadows (and the cloud-shadows always looked like whales idling or basking just beneath the foam); the distinctively pale blue sky issued its weather forecasts, redder than fire when the sun went down, or else racked at dawn by portents of coming tormentas – thunderstorms – that were prehistoric in their power…A human shape now encroached on the stillness, and I knew by her tread and her blank face exactly what she had come to tell me.*1 Elena stood there outside the window slowly shaking her head.
‘How did you hear?’ I said as I stepped out into the air.
‘It was on the news. The funeral’s tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ I said. ‘Well that’s that. There’s nothing I can do.’ I waved an uncommunicative and even accusatory arm at her and went back inside.
…Saul, then, had desisted, desisted from living, stopped being alive. So I went back inside and tasted the ancient flavours of desistence and defeat. And helplessness. Also a kind of terrestrial disaffection: the paradise around me didn’t become infernal or purgatorial; it just became ordinary…
An hour later I was still muttering it – There’s nothing I can do – when Elena reappeared on the far side of the glass. You see, Elena, as well as being Elena, was an American, and unresigned. She was smiling now and the red-foiled ticket she was holding streamed and palpitated in the wind.
…So Carrasco Airport in Montevideo, then Ministro Pistarini Airport (known as Ezeiza) in Buenos Aires, then (eleven hours and five minutes later) Kennedy Airport in New York, then Logan Airport in Boston; and I got to Crowninshield Road just as the first of the towncars was leaving for the cemetery in Brattleboro, Vermont – a distance of a hundred miles, to add to my five and a half thousand; and meanwhile, here, winter was stepping aside for spring.
In the little reception area of the local synagogue there was a cardboard box full of beanies – black skullcaps, yarmulkes. Rosamund took one, and when she saw me hesitate she said,
‘You needn’t bother.’
‘I don’t mind. And I’m married to a Jew.’
‘Well take it, but you won’t have to put it on.’
Just as the two of us settled in our seats (while the rabbi ululated) an elderly woman turned and with a stiffly and rapidly jutting hand pointed to the crown of her head.
Rosamund whispered, ‘She wants you to put it on.’
I put it on.
…Earlier that day, in the Jewish section of Morningside Cemetery, a black cloth with a white Star of David was drawn away from the coffin just before it was lowered, and at the same time the black ribbons we had been issued were torn up (not just a rite, this, but an enactment – for many did it frowningly, almost scowlingly, as if in great bitterness), to symbolise grief and loss…
Religion. When I was a child (in a household where that kind of thing just never came up), other children’s parents sometimes took me along to church on Sunday mornings; and I sat through it all in perplexity, estrangement, and, after five or ten minutes, heartfelt and then passionate boredom. But now I was half a century older, and – let’s be fair – the Judaic faith was twice as old as the Christian; so I was intrigued and perhaps minutely solaced by the strength of these continuities and observances.
By one in particular. On the brink of the grave stood a considerable pyramid of earth intermixed with orange sand. In Jewish lore it is felt that the dead should not be inhumed by strangers – that this work belongs to the near and dear, to the loved and loving, to family and friends. Rosamund went first, getting right down on her haunches and emptying the shovel gently and almost soundlessly; followed by the three sons (the three half-brothers), Gregory, Adam, Daniel; followed by all able-bodied mourners, in their turn…When it came to Philip Roth, he gave the shovel a dismissive glance and reached into the grit with his bare right hand, raised his arm, and splayed his fingers over the rectangular cavity in the ground.*2 Most of the real spading, and the conscientious levelling of the surface, fell to Mr Frank Maltese, the local man who built Saul’s nearby house, back in 1975.
And death is still death, whenever it comes – death is always death. Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale:
What is this world? what asketh man to have?
Now with his love, now in his cold grave,
Alone, withouten any company.
Shiva, the prescribed period of mourning, starts immediately after interment and lasts seven days. I stayed in Boston for about that long, putting up at a downtown Marriott and presenting myself at Crowninshield Road before lunch and leaving after dinner. I was just present and around, autonomous but available, along with Rosamund’s parents, her sister, her niece, and other friends and helpers, and of course Rosie – we were the circled wagons of Rosamund’s train.
That week there were further attendances at shul, and there were other rituals. At Crowninshield Road life solidified around the kitchen table, where we talked and reminisced, and although there was a great deal of eating there was hardly any cooking. Every day at dusk a family group would appear on the front doorstep: neighbours, in this Judaeo-academic enclave, bearing those tubs and tureens heavy with thick stews and thick soups…You could hear a laconic exchange of words but there was no ingress, no intrusion. And always, it seemed, a companionable little party was in progress on the front path, people coming or going, bearing meals or bearing away various rinsed containers and utensils, and modestly reminding you that food is love.
In 2005 I was the son of a dead writer, Kingsley (1922–95). I ought to have known better than anyone that writers survive their deaths. A sceptic might say that only their books survive; but their books were and are their lives, and this was most pointedly true of Saul, the master of the Higher Autobiography – the Life-Writer.
The table in that spacious kitchen had an additional strength and virtue: it featured stacks of Saul – the novels, the stories, the essays and reportage – and they were often consulted during the week-long wake. There was one especially intensive session involving Rosamund and me plus the critic–novelist James Wood and his wife, the novelist–critic Claire Messud, and when it was over I thought – yes, the trick really works. I felt as stimulated, as stretched, and as satisfied as I used to feel after a long evening with Saul.*3 I hoped and trusted that Rosamund felt as I did. This transfusion from the afterlife of words must surely hasten another of the projects of grief: finding the space to step back, to step back and see the whole man (and in his fullest vigour), rather than simply the poor bare forked creature under your care, confused by the struggle to complete his allowance of reality.
‘I didn’t know what to expect,’ said Eugene Goodheart (literary theorist and the author of Confessions of a Secular Jew). ‘Would Saul be awake? Would he recognise me? So I decided to be brusque. I marched in there and…Saul was fully conscious and he looked – meditative, on that raised bed.*4 I even felt I might be disturbing his train of thought. Anyway I kept to my plan.’
Eugene: ‘Well, Bellow – what have you got to say for yourself?’
Saul: ‘…Well, Gene, it’s like this. I’ve been wondering. Wondering, Which is it? Is it, There goes a man? Or is it, There goes a jerk?’
Eugene (firmly): ‘There goes a man.’
‘Which was the right answer,’ I said. ‘If he’d asked me that…’ If he’d asked me that, I would’ve honestly (and I now see romantically) added, Saul, don’t worry about a thing. You never put a foot wrong.
But I also took note. In the end, it’s not your Nobel Prize you’re thinking of, it’s not your three National Book Awards, and all that. It’s your sins of the heart (real or imagined), it’s your wives, your children, and how things went with them.
Saul’s last day on earth.
I heard about it from each of the three witnesses, Rosamund, Maria (the sweet-looking but incredibly strong Latina maid, who used to gird her spine, reach out her arms, and carry the forward-facing Bellow to the top of the stairs), and also from the devoted and indispensable factotum, Will Lautzenheiser.
That morning Saul woke up believing he was in transit – on a ship, perhaps? ‘He didn’t really know who I was,’ said Will. Saul wanted nothing to eat or drink (he was perhaps observing the traditional fast of the moribund – abstinence, with a garnish of penitence). Then he went back to sleep, or rejoined the light coma which, in his final weeks, patiently shadowed him. Time passed. His breathing became slow and effortful. Rosamund had an hour alone with him, and when the others came back into the room she was stroking his head, and she was talking to him, saying, ‘It’s okay, my baby, it’s okay.’ Saul opened his eyes and gazed at her in awe, a gaze from the heart, an ardent gaze; and then he died.
…When the last day began Saul thought he was at sea on a transatlantic voyage. That was a venture, that was a crossing, of about the right size – the mighty waters, the great deeps, the unknowable doldrums and tormentas.
Spring now reverted to fall, but Uruguay had largely regained its confidence and colour. Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires, used to imagine Uruguay as an Elysian Field where hard-pressed Argentinians, on expiration, were transformed into angels; they could then unobtrusively hobnob with the angels that were already in residence…Still, to my eyes, something was missing, something wasn’t there.
In the mid-period novella Him With His Foot in His Mouth Bellow’s elderly (and unnamed) narrator is languishing in British Columbia as he awaits extradition to Chicago – the fallguy for financial crimes committed by his family. Meanwhile there is no one to talk to except the landlady, Mrs Gracewell, a widowed mystic who likes to expatiate on Divinity:
The Divine Spirit, she tells me, has withdrawn in our time from the outer, visible world. You can see what it once wrought, you are surrounded by its created forms. But although natural processes continue, Divinity has absented itself. The wrought work is brightly divine but Divinity is not now active within it. The world’s grandeur is fading. And this is our human setting…
Well, that was how the world looked to me, when I was reinstalled in José Ignacio. The world was merely itself, for now, and had to get along without Saul Bellow – who had worked so fervently ‘to bring back the light that has gone from these molded likenesses’.
*1 No, it wasn’t unexpected. Saul’s ebbing was twofold, first the mind, then the body. For the past year he had been increasingly unmoored in time. As an eerie consequence of this, he was freshly devastated, bereaved again and again, by the deaths of contemporaries who had already predeceased him, for example his soulmate Allan Bloom (d. 1992) and his sister Jane (d. 2003). All the dead were in his custody, and he couldn’t let them go…He was unmoored in space, too, wondering where he was (on a train, on a boat?), and mistaking his own bedroom for a hotel (‘I want to check out. Give me ten dollars and get me out of here’)…The somatic trajectory was more conventional, marked by pneumonias, falls, a series of minor strokes, followed by difficulty in swallowing, then in breathing. He slept much of the time, but his death receptors were just waking up.
*2 I thought this gesture – the handful of dust – was both dignified and intimate. Almost at once several different mourners sought to amuse me with a deflating explanation: Roth did it that way to spare his bad back. Well, if you like. It was also said that Roth spent the occasion gaping (and stumbling) with grief. To me he looked sombre but also humorous – his usual disposition…After a death, as Zachary Leader notes in the second volume of his definitive Life of Saul Bellow, there is a short pause and then the world floods back in ‘with its animosities, anxieties, importunities’ – and its long-cherished resentments. Leader takes us through them, with their strange instances of cattiness and scepticism. Unsensed by me at the time, many grievances (amatory and literary) were reopened at the graveside (funerals no doubt have a way of encouraging recrudescences); but all the second-hand and unworthy rancour, I bet, was confined to its natural home – the periphery.
*3 Perhaps recalling Adam Bellow at the graveside (and his involuntary aria of tearful distress), I read out the last paragraph of ‘A Silver Dish’, a story that describes a very singular parting of father and son. The father, Pop, is an ancient Chicago grifter (and ‘consistently a terrible little man’); Woody, ‘practical, physical, healthy-minded, and experienced’, is his remarkably – even perversely – loving son…I think it may be the best thing in all Bellow: ‘After a time, Pop’s resistance ended. He subsided and
subsided. He rested against his son, his small body curled there. Nurses came and looked. They disapproved, but Woody, who couldn’t spare a hand to wave them out, motioned with his head toward the door. Pop, whom Woody thought he had stilled, had only found a better way to get around him. Loss of heat was the way he did it. His heat was leaving him. As can happen with small animals while you hold them in your hand. Woody presently felt him cooling. Then, as Woody did his best to restrain him, and thought he was succeeding, Pop divided himself. And when he was separated from his warmth, he slipped into death. And there was his elderly, large, muscular son, still holding and pressing him when there was nothing anymore to press. You could never pin down that self-willed man. When he was ready to make his move, he made it – always on his own terms. And always, always, something up his sleeve. That was how he was.’
*4 I had an audience with Saul in the same setting in 2003, where I read out a piece I’d written for the Atlantic. Its argument was that Saul was the greatest American novelist. ‘What should he fear?’ I quoted. ‘The melodramatic formularies of Hawthorne? The multitudinous facetiousness of Melville? The murkily iterative menace of Faulkner? No. The only American who gives Bellow any serious trouble is Henry James.’ Up to this point I still wasn’t sure Saul was listening (rather than sleeping). But now his head jolted on the pillow and he said, ‘Jesus Christ!’