Love and Strife (1965-2005) by Zachary Leader

Author:Zachary Leader
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

Adam’s view of his father’s speech at the panel, or his manner in delivering it, was that “he’d asked for it, hadn’t he?” Presumably by identifying writerly hostility to the state, to all states, as naïve or “Rousseauistic.”59

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ON MARCH 18, 1986, two months after Bellow’s return to Chicago, Bernard Malamud dropped dead of a heart attack. He was only a year older than Bellow. At the PEN Congress, Malamud had not looked well. Richard Stern, who hadn’t seen him in years, “felt queasy at how age and illness had worked him over.”60 The day after Malamud’s death, Bellow flew to London to give another PEN talk, this one entitled “American Writers and Their Public—The American Public and Its Writers.” English PEN paid for his flight and put him up at the Capital Hotel in Knightsbridge, which he didn’t like, though London itself he had grown to like. He was close to Barley Alison, his London publisher, and on previous visits had befriended her brother, Michael, Mrs. Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary since 1983. Michael and his wife, Sylvia, dined with Bellow several times at the House of Commons, and Bellow became a friend of their family as well.

Bellow’s agreeing to give the English PEN address may have been influenced by the success of a visit to London five months earlier. On that visit, he was filmed in conversation with Martin Amis, for the first of four television programs on Channel 4 in a series entitled Modernity and Its Discontents. The first program’s title was “The Moronic Inferno” and it was moderated by Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian author and public intellectual, later leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. According to Amis’s account of the visit, which features as an episode in a draft of his forthcoming autobiographical novel, Inside Story, Bellow judged the filming to have gone “very smoothly.” Bellow was staying at Durrants Hotel, not far from Oxford Street, and he and Amis had tea there the day after filming. Amis describes the hotel as “all lace and chintz” and Bellow as “very sure of himself in London,” “very Asser and Kisser” [from Turnbull & Asser, the Jermyn Street shop where Bellow bought his shirts]. At one point in the novel, Bellow “delighted” Amis when he said, “They treat me very well here—he meant his publishers and facilitators—because they think me a toff” (that is, upper-class, from “tuft,” which, according to Amis, was “used to denote the gold tassel worn on the cap by Oxbridge undergraduates”). “London was a town where Saul Bellow could legitimately feel like a toff,” the fictional Amis recalls, an impression confirmed by the real-life Amis, in an interview. “The universal eligibility to be noble: this was one of Saul Bellow’s core principles.”61 Four or so months had elapsed by the date of this visit since the deaths of Bellow’s brothers, and although relations with Alexandra were poor, she had not yet kicked him out. He was no longer stricken. Amis likens his

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