Postwar Paris—ration cards, public baths if a person developed an interest in cleanliness, and a romantic view of ambition as the most reliable means of winter heating—took up once more its honored role as a haven for young American writers. Bruised and lovely, Europe’s paradise of misery was still, in the late 1940’s, the capital of hope.
Along with Richard Wright, the most esteemed American writer in residence during my years there (1949-1951) was Saul Bellow, approximately ten years the senior of the likes of James Baldwin, Evan Connell, Terry Southern, Otto Friedrich, George Plimpton, Max Steele, and my own callow self. Bellow had published two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), appeared regularly in Partisan Review, collected a Guggenheim fellowship. The rumor got around that he was destined to be America’s next great novelist. His confident and graceful lounging, on view especially at the Café Le Rouquet near Saint-Germain-des-Près, seemed to confirm the rumor. He had a contract with Viking. He was writing, and sometimes reading aloud, what would become The Adventures of Augie March (1953). He was legal; the rest of us were stowaways.
We aspirants on our GI-Bill money or Fulbright checks, or selling our clothes, cigarettes, and dollars on the black market, saw him as an Old Master in his early thirties. He had climbed the heights while some of us were still peddling hashish to gullible Frenchmen under the chic American name “marijuana,” or serving as gigolos to existentialist millionaires, or, worst of all, cadging handouts from family grinds back home. A few English-language magazines—Points, Janus, Zero, and Death (the answer to Time Inc.’s Life)—had been started by young men and women of dependent means. Orson Welles gave the editor of Death a few bucks for food, which he shared with me in return for translating French restaurant menus; otherwise, he was reduced to ordering “Jumbo omelet, goddammit! Omelet jumbo!,” which, mysteriously to him, always came with ham.
I watched Saul from across a terrace, at his ease, and tried to fit this boyish person to his book The Victim, about a New York summer hot as Bangkok and the mutual sufferings of a crazed anti-Semite and his prey, which I had read during my first summer back in college after the army and the war. The dark-eyed young man with a shock of black hair and a large-lipped smile was what a writer should look like. Also he wrote, I thought, as a writer should write, with acute senses and astringent alertness to events. Naturally, I didn’t dare approach this formidable personage strolling under the plane trees or holding court in the cafés of the quarter.
I don’t remember exactly how we met; perhaps he was amused by my lurking, shy shadow. Without telling him, I sent the manuscript of my first novel, Birth of a Hero, to Viking and it was dug out of the slush pile by a young editor, Monroe Engel, who shepherded it to higher authorities, including the critic Malcolm Cowley, then an adviser to Viking. Since my return address was Paris, some prudent soul thought to ask Saul for an opinion—had I really written the book? Would I be likely to repay investment by writing another book?—and he gave a favorable verdict. Thanks partly to his generosity, I became a published novelist.
In Paris, with the news of imminent publication, I was adopted by some of the older expatriates in addition to the French students, artists, and layabouts who had already become my Left Bank friends. Rodin’s Balzac strutted belly-forward on his pedestal at Vavin-Montparnasse; encouraged by Sartre and de Beauvoir, huddling nearby at the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots, Diderot on his own pedestal pointed an accusing finger across the boulevard at the ancient church of St.-Germaindes-Près. Bellow was not one of these stony challengers; rather, an amiable deity for the fresh crop of Americans seeking out the Paris of Henry Miller.
Saul’s generosity was not the sum of his appeal. His complaints, particularly marital, and his neediness, which went back to childhood or perhaps to the origins of the human species, gave him the charm of a genius for grief. His lamentations, what I thought of as “The Book of Saul,” a long-running drama, had some of the eloquence of Job and Jeremiah: sackcloth, ashes, a wife who didn’t understand him, and sometimes, even worse, a woman who did. In that last variation, “The Book of Saul” departed Scripture in the direction of modern happy endings.
When his marriage boiled over, the spillage was uncontained by the boundaries of family. The shock of seeing this hero in a state of frantic self-pity bewildered my twenty-two-year-old wife and my twenty-four-year-old self. He was a mature person, about the age of Jesus when crucified, but we were kids. With his first two books, his handsome lounging, and his renown as the Designated New Voice, his fall into despair made us feel awe. It was as if the mountain crumbled as we watched; we heard the shrieks.
Usually these family quarrels, hot tongue and cold shoulder, had to do with boredom (his) and jealousy (his wife Anita’s). He cultivated the admiration of pretty young women; he received it. He liked to recall how, when his first story was published in a national magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, along with a photo of the author, he had received a telephone call from MGM Pictures. Did they want to make a movie of his story, we asked? He beamed; high wattage. There was an ironic glint in the large dark eyes. His smile delighted. No, they wanted to offer him a screen test.
When he glanced around the circle of admirers on the terrace of Le Rouquet at the corner of Rue des Saints-Pères and the Boulevard Saint-Germain, we all responded with an echo of his own joyous amusement, just as if we were receiving the tale for the first time. Sometimes there was at least one person present for whom it was new.
_____________
At the end of a sleety Paris winter, my wife Edith and I thought of hitchhiking south for a while to pick figs and swim in the Mediterranean. Saul had another dreadful long-run battle in progress with Anita and needed to get away. He decided upon a strategic retreat to Spain by automobile, and invited us to come along. We hoped to find cheap digs in one of the French towns near the Spanish border. This is how young we were: we felt we were making a necessary political gesture by stopping short of visiting Franco Spain.
The trip in Saul’s Citroën was no joyride. He wailed and wept as he drove. He was also funny and full of curiosity about himself, and he knew the map. I still connect his total recall for directions, his sensitive nose, with the quality of his gift, an almost metabolic perspicacity. Through the narrow medieval streets of Avignon he found our way, sniffing out the correct road. Ah, here would be a bread smell. And there it was—a good bakery. There was also an unnerving claim for attention to his marital agonies. His need was exclusive, unflagging, draining. He required an audience as devoted as the audience he gave himself.
Occasionally he rested from discourse about his conjugal griefs by talking about his book in progress, reading aloud during stops from The Adventures of Augie March. Although my approval was a foregone conclusion, he asked for fresh and renewed bursts of enthusiasm. Occasionally, for a little variety, I tried to speak of my own novel-in-progress. But this really wasn’t the program.
By the time we reached Banyuls, a few miles from the Spanish border, Edith and I were exhausted by the pleasure of Saul’s company. Enough; we were stopping. The long afternoon on those narrow roads of the Côte Vermeil, hearing of how only oblivion could offer Saul release from his sorrow, along with how his book would change the face of American literature, had left us hyperventilating. It was hot, bugs were swarming, and there may have been a mistral, that wind which makes folks crazier than usual.
We worried about leaving him alone in the hotel. We sat under an umbrella, drinking lukewarm soda, waving away the flies. We dreaded the meal we were about to have with him before he drove on into Spain. How would we cope with his paroxysms of despair?
Edith nudged my arm. “Look.”
He was bouncing toward us with a boyish grin, hair slicked down after his shower, eyes bright and skin fresh, chipper and restored. We were drained by the sufferings he seemed to have shed. He was ready for a glass of wine and a good meal of the local fish stew, and his nose was twitching as he approved of the girls on their high wooden clogs in the town square of Banyuls-sur-Mer.
_____________
A few months later, I handed Saul a story, “The Heart of the Artichoke.” He was traveling to Italy and said he would take it with him. In a week or so I received the letter every young writer wishes to receive from the maestro (it even came from Rome, like an encyclical). In his clear and comely handwriting it gave me the clear and comely news I wanted. One odd phrase stood out like a monument at the end of paragraphs of perfect enthusiasm: “All barriers are down.”
Through the inevitable discouragements to come, I remembered this grace note from on high and would mumble to myself, All barriers are down . . . all barriers are down . . . surely all barriers must come down. This zestful generosity of which the young Bellow was capable still fills me with gratitude, despite the narrower judgments of later years. It fits a time when birds sang sweetly in the courtyards of Paris and all our sleeves were stuffed with manuscripts.
In the early 50’s, Saul’s urban wit and angst—Kafka out of Chicago, Dostoevsky from the yeshiva, polymathical, polylinguistical, playful about it all—offered just the ticket for a GI-Bill generation that was heading from college into graduate work, although our parents had often not finished high school. He made fun of suffering, he made the suffering into fun, he was fully implicated in his own life.
His personal grace relieved the solipsism. It wasn’t that he didn’t need others; he wooed those around him with an eloquent performance. He enacted his inner life for his public on the stage he carried everywhere. Women loved him; men found him demanding but ingratiating. He managed to enlist the world in the narrative of his disasters. Later, Herzog (1964), drawn partly as an act of revenge after one of his marriage-and-friendship convulsions, would depict a beloved protagonist in a state of despair. Herzog ranted comically and proceeded from melodramatic scenes with his wife to episodes with women eager to offer solace. Such a scenario is unreal to experience—most of us, when mired in despair, are not beloved—but Saul’s star turn, dominating his own theater, helped to make it seem possible in his special case.
Of course, talent and reputation contributed to what in the Kennedys would come to be called charisma. Saul’s prose style married classical elegance to Mark Twain and the pungency of street speech; Yiddish played stickball with Henry James. As a young man, he rode the elements with terrific energy. He could spritz like a Lower East Side comedian and then lament like the biblical prophets. His fate as a writer was to insist that words matter, his own most of all; suffering matters, his own absolutely; and he was able to enlist an audience in his struggle to survive, marked and measured by the works-in-progress that devoured his life.
He performed jazzy riffs on his good education, Hebrew school, University of Wisconsin, University of Chicago, Trotskyism, making neediness the baseline. He never questioned the appropriateness of his stance at the center of the stage. Among contemporary novelists, he was surely the most serious about reading, studying, learning, and using it all, adding it all up. It was unified by that keening cry from the heart. Saul needed, needed, needed.
_____________
One morning in the late 50’s I drove with the novelist Ralph Ellison and his big black dog to Tivoli, New York, where Ralph and Saul were sharing the rambling old Hudson River house in which another of Saul’s marriages had ended. The dog grew agitated from the long trip confined in an automobile, and when Ralph stopped at an office at Bard College to pick up his mail, the dog began furiously barking and leaping. There seemed to be a discipline contest between Ralph and his dog. Ralph said, “Don’t let him out,” while in his stately way he proceeded to go collect the mail.
Piteously disillusioned at this desertion by his master, the dog let go a flood, a sheet, an avalanche of piss. I bolted out of the car and the dog followed. Now the dog was zestfully leaping about on the green. My flanks were dripping. Ralph reappeared, and commented with extreme irritation: “I told you not to let him out.”
Later, while I stood naked in the yard of the house, hanging my soaked clothes on a line to dry, Saul talked about the state of his career. “I want to be like Tolstoy,” he said, “more philosopher than anything else.”
“More than a great novelist?” I asked, shivering, watching the steam rise from the clothes I had dipped into a soapy bucket. “The later Tolstoy? ‘The Kreutzer Sonata?’ ‘What Is Art?’ Where he denied Shakespeare and Anna Karenina? Why that?”
“One more book,” he said, “and my position will be impregnable.”
In the house in Tivoli he read aloud from the manuscript of Henderson the Rain King (1959) while I tried to stifle my impatience, sometimes asking, “Couldn’t I just read it by myself?” But he needed to hear his own voice, test his rhythms, bounce them off others. Since I was there, I would do.
In this novel about a millionaire’s mid-life crisis I missed the gritty blues of his other books, his authentic monologuing plaint, and it seemed to me he was trying to put himself into a WASP aristocrat body that he did not in fact possess. I wondered if he was competing with the New England writers he reacted against, while creating a fable about a man’s search for his destiny that was indebted to Kafka and Melville. Was this part of constructing that “impregnable” position? I thought he was doing what he said not to do: writing from the head, not the heart; idea-writing, although in the end his heart’s cry interrupted the plan.
As for building his reputation, Henderson the Rain King seems not to have been a mistake, even if the book held less appeal for some of his admirers. There are those who like it best of all his work. As he said of another writer’s novels, it became a favorite for university instruction in American-lit courses. Professors enjoyed teaching it because there was so much to explain.
Himself, he didn’t like to explain his writing, but he loved to read it aloud. “I’m a bird,” he said, “not an ornithologist.”
_____________
Until I moved from New York to San Francisco in 1960, our friendship went through ups and downs with periods of intense intimacy; that is, Saul confided his troubles, I listened and felt warm about being invited in. Occasionally he stayed with me in New York and gave me the difficult gratification of hinting that I stood between him and some desperate act at the high window. These threats didn’t interfere with his intent sessions bent over the notebooks with their ruled lines upon which his fountain pen tracked his imagination and indignation. I learned that people don’t usually kill themselves in the middle of composing the suicide note.
I sought his approval for my own writing and sometimes got it. His words were used in advertising my books. I was still a young writer; he was a maestro; I felt both grateful and privileged to share his life’s disasters.
When I left the east coast, and therefore became unavailable during crises, the ups and downs of our friendship transformed themselves into a prolonged down. We exchanged letters for a while, but he needed regular nursing care. Others filled the requirement. I was irritated that he didn’t include “The Heart of the Artichoke,” the story he had praised so highly, in an anthology he edited. “I forgot,” he said, shrugging. “Why take such a thing seriously? I just forgot.”
He was right. It was merely my own writer’s vanity that was aggrieved. But the advice not to take it seriously was hard to accept, coming from a writer whose spirit could be broken by a slighting review in the Deseret News.
In the early 60’s, as a member of the international jury meeting in various European locales to award the Formentor Prize, I argued for Bellow. One year the favored French candidate was Nathalie Sarraute, a leader of the fashionable nouveau roman grouplet. As a friend of her daughter, I had known her during my student days in Paris. (The daughter’s husband pro tem was the journalist Stanley Karnow. He and I bought little Renault 4CV automobiles at the same time, and our wives had in common a resentment of our rude habit of running outdoors when it rained to make sure our cars were not melting.)
The Formentor deliberations were supposed to be secret; of course they were not, especially since the French delegation did not get its way about Nathalie Sarraute. Saul Bellow received the prize.
Later, when I saw Sarraute in Paris, the grand old lady looked me keenly in the eye and greeted me with a mantra which she repeated fairly frequently that Paris season: “Ah, Airbair! C’est vous le gangster.”
Barney Rosset of Grove Press, the organizer of the American delegation, asked me to present the award at a ceremony in New York. I felt pleased to have made a case, pleased for Saul, although at that point we were already not close. We were not really friends anymore. But as always when I saw him, the old warmth and gratitude welled up.
I handed him the check. Photographs were taken for the newspapers. We ate canapés, drank wine. A woman showed up who had been a lover of Saul’s, then found employment as a character in one of his books, and she picked an argument with me. “The really great writer, the one who should have been given the prize”—the writer she was currently studying—“is Ionesco. He’s international.”
“I like his plays.” I said. “The Lesson, The Bald Soprano, they’ve been running forever at the Théâtre de la Huchette. When I’m in Paris and I see the posters, I know nothing has changed around there, no matter that everything has changed.”
“Rhinoceros!” she cried. “The metaphors, the mythos! Compared to Ionesco, Saul is only. . . .” She wouldn’t say it. She shook her curls with that ferocity which he had captured in his fictional portrayal. “And take it from me, I know,” she announced, mandibles compressed, teeth gritting.
I remembered his image of a woman hiding a dagger in her stocking.
“Saul was, let me tell you how that bozo treated me—compared to Ionesco—”
Maybe it was in her garter belt, the dagger.
_____________
Herzog turned out to be Saul’s most popular book, his best-selling novel after The Adventures of Augie March, which had first broken through for a large public. Comic and sad, spiced with rants in the form of letters, Herzog was drawn directly from his personal travails, cuckoldry, a turbulent divorce, treason by protégé. He put the wife, the protégé, and friends into the book with hardly any disguise, as if the story was intended to be not so much about them as against them. The letters Herzog wrote to world figures were entertaining, garrulous, alternately wise, crazed, and self-mocking. He poured himself into this man-with-heart, Herzog, ranting, wronged, the seeker betrayed.
Self-justification gave an aspect of troubling ambiguity to the book. He intended to be the American Dostoevsky, but funny; the American Tolstoy, but a close witness to the times. But neither of his Russian masters would have portrayed himself as innocently aggrieved and yet fatally attractive to women. Most men know from experience that, when overwhelmed by jealousy, they are in a mood to grovel, whine, and smell bad—not very appealing. They may find nurses, but the sexy and delightful women tend to cross the road when they slump into view.
Herzog, despite his frenzies, remains the most charming man in the world; or so Saul seemed to hope; or so he wrote him. This made his revenge on life too perfect. The novel was flawed by its special pleading, its lyric of self-love.
Perhaps what made me uneasy is what appealed to both the large public and the National Book Award judges. Herzog’s dire suffering didn’t get in the way of fun. His letters to the great, alive and dead, were marinated in Saul’s learning and his moral passion to change the world, or at least punish it. The challenges of disaster in love and friendship, divorce laws and night sweats, were given chipper colors and a style that reached for the lugubrious in a middle-aged scholar’s yearning. Bathroom spying approached French-farce mechanism, with no French-farce mechanical cool. Yet the book allowed readers to perch on the bench as spectators at a circus of pain. It didn’t disturb too much. The trapeze whirled, and the clown fell safely into the sawdust. The elephants danced, dropped their elephant doo on the fallen clown, and he arose as a hero, covered with flowers, embraced by all. The book was an original and intelligent entertainment, a consolation.
A mutual friend of ours, call him Professor X, wrote to Saul to congratulate him on his National Book Award and also to give him his response to Herzog. Professor X, a man with severe and incurable physical problems, in lifelong pain, wrote admiringly of the book and with delight about the acclaim, but added a fateful sentence: “Of course, your novel doesn’t solve my problems.”
Saul cut off all connection. Professor X was bewildered and hurt. He was about to retire from his job, his body rapidly giving way. I hoped to be an intermediary, described the troubles of our friend and asked Saul why he was so angry. “I can’t be interested in what goes on with him,” he said.
“What happened?”
“He wrote me a poison-pen letter.”
The author of Herzog, with a protagonist who poured his advice, suggestions, and complaints into the mails, had received a letter from an old friend that ended a long association. This seemed a bizarre twist on the novel. I believed the letter must have been ruder than Professor X had said. I asked to see a copy, and of course, like a good academic, Professor X had made one. The letter was dense with praise and goodwill. But it did contain that offense: “Your novel doesn’t solve my problems.”
All the honors available worldwide couldn’t relieve Saul’s touchiness. Receiving hundreds of clippings with rave notices, he was still the man who could be thrown into a raging funk by that bad review in the Deseret News of Salt Lake City (or was it the Rocky Mountain News of Denver?).
_____________
More than fifty years of friendship and non-friendship include too many harsh memories. They begin, after gratitude, with ordinary puzzlement that a writer and man who inspired part of a generation, altered the tone of a literary period, wrote with such grace, nonetheless lived his life with flaws both large and petty, like other people. The flaws seemed to be magnified by the fineness of his achievement. Saul wrote in the rhythms of city speech, but stylized, pursuing the sense of his troubled American life. His anxiety made him frantic. He reflected upon each moment, defending himself with wit and charm. Again and again, he almost, temporarily, mastered his experience. And then the victory passed. He draped his life’s story in a prose that served to calm him—almost, temporarily—by displaying his nakedness fetchingly clothed. The narrative sometimes had the innocence of a boyish daydream, sometimes of a boy’s nightmare. The discourse both quickened and heartened his readers.
It wasn’t just style, the playful surface, the watchfulness. He really wanted to discover What It All Meant (he would never put it that way). His gifts enabled him to edge abruptly into scenes of vivid desire and grief, as in the last paragraphs of the great novella, Seize the Day (1956). During the best moments, he shared his sense of our lives in a way impossible for writers of mere self-justification and confession. The path of self-justification, he used to say, has been worked so deep that all you can see is the top of the heads of the writers who follow it.
The images in The Victim of a pair of tormentors chained together one hot summer in New York, or Augie March wrestling in Chicago, or the failed poet Von Humboldt Fleisher (in Humboldt’s Gift, 1975) raving in the grip of mania, and especially Tommy Wilhelm, the protagonist of Seize the Day, weeping for himself and mankind at the funeral of someone he doesn’t know, will endure as the memories of Saul’s personal faults fade. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, and Unamuno were not saints in real life, either. Their work and Saul’s teach something about generosity.
The effect of his presence was also generous for other writers. The example of his success invited to the feast those who followed after him in the priestly—rabbinic—calling of story-teller, lyric poet, questing philosopher. For a later generation, his rich use of vernacular speech energized the American language as Rabelais and Verlaine did for French, as Shakespeare and Laurence Sterne did for English, as Whitman and Twain did. Of this doing and redoing, there needs to be no end. The playfulness, grace, and grasp of American urban yearning by a writer from a Yiddish-speaking family resonated especially for other Jewish writers. We too could be Americans in the American language. (I am old enough to have been informed by a friendly editor that I should spell my name “Gould” when a first story of mine appeared in her magazine.)
Saul’s persistent heartfelt I want, I want, I want—his own cry and that of his protagonists—derived both from his condition as an outsider and the increasing recognition that being inside is no solution, either. Sometimes he glamorized his neediness by turning it into heroic appetite, as in Henderson the Rain King, elegantly but with a querulous edge, in a bewildering rush of haughty self-pity. No story or novel could settle matters for him. He never stopped trying. He turned away congratulations for his many prizes (Nobel, Pulitzer, National Book Award) by confiding that they interfered with his real business.
When he turned against old friends, such as a lawyer in Chicago whom he lampooned in one book, he was merciless, and they felt crushed. I know three people who wrote novels intended as revenge for what he had written about them. Their books were not published; rage and frustration provide unreliable fuel for inspiration. But when Saul wrote a book against, he had larger things in mind than self-justification and punishment of enemies. Freshets of soul and wit scampered through the prose, as if his essence were a glacier, the top warmed by the sun, chunks breaking off and sparkling streams pounding down the ice.
He wanted to be like Tolstoy, both a teller of tales and an inspirer, a moral philosopher; and he wanted to solve his own problems. Late in life, when he was ill with a failing heart, a friend said to him, “I hope you’re getting better,” and he answered, “I’ve been getting better my whole life, but look where it’s gotten me.”
_____________
Strolling with Saul down the Rue de Verneuil during the early days of our friendship, around the Rue du Bac, back up to the Café Le Rouquet at the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Rue des Saint-Pères—across the street from the garden of the Russian church—talking and talking amid that peculiar Paris smell of Gauloise Bleu, red-wine piss, and flowers, I happened to speak of Sinclair Lewis, who was still alive and writing his worn-out, alcoholic last novels. As a boy, when I first discovered grownup books, Babbit, Main Street, and It Can’t Happen Here opened doors to the world outside Lakewood, Ohio. But by 1950 it seemed that Lewis’s fingers were merely punching the typewriter, his rage had devolved to hysteria, the satire was diminished into abuse of a world he no longer fathomed. His erotic yearning—I was in my early twenties—seemed pathetic in an old man.
Saul interrupted, turning his warm and amused gaze on me, with a reproach that was just, aimed exactly right, naming the lack of generosity in a young man’s sniping against his elders. “Don’t count any writer out until he’s gone.”
These words imposed a long silence. I had a vision of eternity like the one called forth by one of my freshman professors, Oscar J. Campbell, when our class read Lucretius on time and death and he spoke of his stroke and then stopped speaking, lowering his head in contemplation of the unknowable. I accepted the shame Saul’s reminder brought down upon me.
Decades later, among my brother Sid’s papers after his death in 1999, I found a letter from Saul to me, written in response to a story of Sid’s that I had sent to The Noble Savage, the journal Saul edited for two years in the early 1960’s. Saul’s letter was full of good counsel, generous encouragement, and I had given it to my brother in the hope that it would nudge him toward finishing the endless, never completed novel that he spent forty years writing.
I wrote Saul now in a flood of remembrance and gratitude, and in sadness for our faded friendship. His reply was immediate and full of compassion about losses, his own and mine of my brother, and regret that we had “neglected to attend to our friendship.” Again I recalled his reproach when, aged twenty-four, I ridiculed Sinclair Lewis for his frantic and decrepit late novels. “Don’t count any writer out until he’s gone.”
We were back in touch, attending to our friendship. He wrote tenderly about Janis, his fifth wife, who kept him alive, he said, through caring, love, and the example of her youth. When he was eighty-four and she was pregnant, some women expressed anger at what they considered his sexist behavior. There is no symmetry in the matter; a man of eighty-four can father a child. “I try to keep in practice,” he said. Justice was hardly the point here.
On a balmy day in October 1999, we had lunch outdoors at the Nob Hill Café in San Francisco, and then sat in the sun on a bench in Huntington Park, both of us—I’m not reading minds here—remembering our Paris days when we used to pass the time like this. But we weren’t talking about Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, or the daily news of the trials of Nazi collaborators. He talked about his life in Boston and Vermont, about his regret for needing to fly with a helper now that his wife’s pregnancy was too advanced for her to travel with him. She wanted their child. She knew what the conditions were. He spoke about his end of the deal with a certain wryness, with an energetic resignation, his head cocked as he laughed about oncoming inevitabilities. “I always prided myself on my sense of smell. I always prided myself on my memory. I’m losing them.” When he laughed, throwing his head back, he was a boy again.
And then he said it was time for his nap. He took my arm as we walked back to the Huntington Hotel. That night he was having dinner with his eldest son, Gregory, whom I had known as a child in Paris. This father, grandfather, and father-to-be, still meaning to be a better writer and a better man, was hoping to mend his fences at a crucial time. “He has gripes about me he doesn’t want to give up,” he said. “I don’t blame him.”
_____________
