So it was incredibly warming to see you, Dad. And why don’t you come more often like that? As a messenger, and not just as a shade whom I swamp and harass and bore with obeisances.
It was incredibly warming to see you, but I didn’t really need the reassurance about your wishes. Because my wishes are your wishes, and I am you and you are me.
The Cunning of Babies
When my first son was born I wanted a girl, but I was quick to take his point (traditionalist and Kingsleyish though it was) about starting off with a boy. When my second son was born I wanted a girl, and it took me several minutes to forgive him for not being a daughter. My second son was delivered by caesarian section. I had not been present at the moment when ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ get lost in the more general urgency — hence my puzzlement on being told, by a nurse, that the girl was, in fact, a boy. Nevertheless, all my life I wanted a girl. Even when I was a boy I wanted a girl.
At St Mary’s I had been wondering, off and on, whether the baby would arrive in time to make the four-o’clock to Oxford; but the joke was definitely over well before parturition. Earlier, for a full minute, the baby’s heart had stopped beating; and from then on all thoughts were primitive and choric — just a steady whine for mercy. But my faith in the cunning of babies was strong; I knew that in this process they were neither passive nor disinterested — they did mean to live, to persist in their being. Both the boys had come early, dangerously early, and they had persisted. The new baby had gone to term and would be even better prepared, even more resourceful and resolute and sly … In the delivery room there was now an atmosphere of industrious crisis-management. Auxiliaries — a pediatrician, two more midwives — stood ready as the Venteuse, the suction instrument, was decisively applied.
Mr Marwood parted the baby’s thighs with a matador’s flourish. I took this in; but what riveted me more was the lower lip, which was still trembling, as if in an attempt to resist tears. Well, it had been a difficult journey, through all kinds of freak weather. After a while I took the hot soul next door to be washed, weighed, measured and tagged, and to receive the prefatory instalment of administered pain, in the thigh, from the nurse’s needle.
Our first visitor the next day was Delilah Seale. On her way up she had stopped at the in-house florist’s on the ground floor. She said,
— When she was wrapping the flowers the woman asked me, ‘Nephew or niece?’
— What did you tell her?
Delilah’s words made me happy, but they also made me realise how many days and nights I had spent on the planet.
— ‘No, sister,’ I said. ‘Sister.’
Two had gone into that room and three had come out. Later I told Isabel that motherhood brought with it another and less tangible privilege: she would now be able to complete or round out her love for her parents, an outcome unavailable to the childless. At the birth of your child, you forgive your parents everything, without a second thought, like a velvet revolution. This is part of the cunning of babies. There was time for that, but not much time, because Gonzalo Fonseca died the following year. Death was lenient with him, and came suddenly. After a day of spartan travel from New York, he had his dinner and sought his bed in the house near Pietrasanta, home of sculptors and quarrymen. One went into that room and none came out. So the new baby would be doubly bereft. Grandmothers, yes; but no Abu, no Nonno, for the unbelievable Fernanda. Fernanda is a girl. She is also a Jew. She is also quarter-Kingsley, quarter-Betty, quarter-Hilly, quarter-Gonzalo.
Gonzalo was the one who was sitting with Bruno when he died, just as Sally was the one who was sitting with Kingsley. Everyone agreed that that was how it should have been.
‘Life is mainly grief and labour …’ That’s true, Dad. Life is mainly deaths and babies; ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters, the white magic of growth, and then the other magic at the other end of the line, the black magic, just as strange, just as feverish, and just as out-of-nowhere.
Four years on, Sally is still capable of calling me in tears when she is having ‘a bad Dad day’. After Kingsley died we were all chastened by the dimensions of the void that replaced him. It goes all right for me, pretty much, because the books are still here and, therefore, so is his presence: sleeplessly available.
I hated it, in the Phoenix Ward, when he turned away from me — when he turned away. I hate it, now, when they turn away. It could be anyone, even an animal: the Alsatian sleeping by the side of the road, that elephant-seal beached on a tropical shore. My daughter, revolving on her axis for the first time in her life, and turning away from me. I hate it when they turn away.
* My relationship with V. S. Naipaul bears a light but pleasing symmetry — enough for a (perhaps rather old-fashioned) short story. Two of his precepts are well-known: unpunctuality is inexpiable and ‘never give anyone a second chance’. So when I first met him I simply thought, Well that’s that. Because I read a poem at his brother Shiva’s memorial service, and I was late. Seriously and basely late. My contribution to the remembrance of the endearing and talented Shiva was the unself-censored Auden: ‘Time that is intolerant/Of the brave and innocent,/And indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique,//Worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives.’ But Sir Vidia has appeared to pardon me. When I sent him the invitation to Kingsley’s wake an impulse made me add (was this a plea for tacit forgiveness?), ‘Don’t be late.’ In the pews at St Martin-in-the-Fields I reminded him of this, and his eyes swiftly sought the apex of the church at the notion of such a solecism. ‘I was not … late,’ he said. And, perhaps mistakenly, perhaps wishfully, I felt the gratitude of the absolved. Or the gratitude of somebody who had been given a second chance.
* Iris, a great friend of my father’s (he bowed to her in brainpower), died of Alzheimer’s in 1998. At this stage her condition was being discreetly camouflaged as a case of writer’s block. During the reception afterwards, at the Garrick, I said to her that she would live to look back on this, and that the words would come again. They did not. In 1990 or thereabouts I was named writer of the year by the Sunday Times, precipitating a public dinner where readers could mingle with literary types at so much a plate, this being the object of the exercise. Iris and John were there, and Iris drew me to her and, with plumped lips, kissed me firmly on the mouth. Now that was an honour, and I told her so. The Bayleys were genuinely eccentric, genuinely dreamy, while also being vivid physical presences, tousled, humid, intimate; John would take an olive out of his deep trouser pocket and say, ‘Have one. They’re frightfully good.’
* Vladimir and Véra Nabokov’s only child: mountaineer, racing driver, opera singer, and, of course, the chief translator of his father’s work and the guardian of his memory.
* He said, in parting, ‘Well I love you very much.’ I am not his son, of course. What I am is his ideal reader. I am not my father’s ideal reader, however. His ideal reader, funnily enough, is Christopher Hitchens.
* See the closing lines of Difficulties with Girls. Naomi Rose Bellow was born on 23 December 1999.
† Kingsley has a good poem on this, ‘The Huge Artifice’, in which all creation is reviewed by a moralising (and specifically Leavisite) littérateur. ‘We can be certain, even at this stage,/That seriousness adequate to engage/Our deepest critical concern is not/To be found here,’ he says, by way of preamble, before deciding: ‘Concepts that have not often been surpassed/For ignorance or downright nastiness—/That the habit of indifference is less/Destructive than the embrace of love, that crimes/Are paid for never or a thousand times,/That the gentle come to grief — all these are forced/Into scenes, dialogue, comment, and endorsed/By the main action, manifesting there/An inhumanity beyond despair.’
* His posthumous wishes, which I stood accused of contravening. See Appendix.
† The underjaw finally collapsed as late as the summer of my forty-ninth year. I only had to do without it for the ten minutes it took to walk from Todd Berman’s to Mike Szabatura’s. My lower lip, flaccid with a
naesthetic, hung over my chin like the tongue of a dog. ‘Hey, you look great!’ quipped Mike when I hauled myself into his chair. He meant the cowbone graft under the vanished incisors. Then he screwed and welded the implant into place, and there it was, like iron, like the grate of a fire. Halfway whole, I was ready for the next again. Mike Szabatura got off early that day. I rode down in the lift with him. Mike Szabatura was in civvies now: polo shirt, white slacks. How did it go? ‘I dare not withstand the cold touch that I dread./Draw from me still/My slow life! Bend deeper on me, threatening head,/Proud by my downfall, remembering, pitying,/Him who is, him who was!’ Mike Szabatura will always glow in myth for me. But here he stood, in 1998, just another dentist heading back to Westchester.
Postscript: Poland, 1995
Three weeks after my father died I journeyed alone to Warsaw, where I was met at the airport by Alexandra, the lady from the publishers, and by Jeff, the man from the British Council. On the way into the city the oily weight of traffic seemed to be making a direct contribution to the smog-enhanced sunset. There was a press conference in a basement bar — and a good fracas involving the official interpreter and Alexandra, who kept reinterpreting him. One journalist commiserated with my bereavement, and I found myself freely discussing my father for the first time outside the family huddle. I said how terrible it must have been: the defection of the words. And that this was surely the inner death-moment for him … Then a signing-session without a reading in a bookshop (always painful the world over). Then a dinner. Having read so widely about my teeth, Alexandra had gone and cleansed the menu of all things al dente (she sympathetically divulged her own meandering upper gumline). This was thoughtful of her, though it lent no savour to the untoothsome jellied carp (and I could, now, have eaten a steak). I liked the people there, and I liked the way they exercised their English. ‘Between you, me and the lamppost.’ ‘So put in the word for us.’ Then a radio show: Radio Zet. The host began with the results of a vox pop establishing that no one in Poland had ever heard of me. So when I was asked the question ‘What do you think about Poland?’ I said that I hadn’t ever heard of her — although, of course, I had heard of Poland, and thought several things about her. I thought that she was one of the planet’s greatly wronged nations and that you felt an intimation of this in every question, every glance. The next morning I met up with an old friend, Zbigniew, now a Warsaw businessman valued for his perfect English (conversational and technical), but once a skilled carpenter moonlighting in London.* Zbigniew had made the bookcases in my Notting Hill flat, a place characterised by him (he had in mind its bar, its dartboard, its pinball machine) as ‘a fucking paradise’. That morning we drank some coffee and then visited, first, the Warsaw Uprising Monument, the great highstyle socialist frieze commemorating the events of 31 July 1944 (the retreating Nazis reduced Warsaw to ‘a name on the map’ and left it to the Red Army), and then, secondly, the black marble statue of Nicolaus Copernicus, the man who exploded the anthro-pocentric universe — the man who said that the illusion was in fact a delusion, and the sun was not our satellite. He powered the Enlightenment. I ate lunch with publishers and translators, and gave my lecture (on Lolita) … At the hotel that night I relaxed on an Expo metal chair in the club-world brothel of the bar. I had been warned against these women: after renting pass-keys from the concierge they would let themselves into your room and start negotiating while you were already in bed.† Zbig had told me that Warsaw was now ‘a money city’, and on the way out in the plane I had noticed that Poland was coverboy on the issue of Business Week that everyone was reading. So the hotel bar would put forward its version of that: the blondes in pink pants-suits would have been inevitably conjured up, like a market force, by the arrival of the ponderous entrepreneurs in their jackets of suede and leather. Meanwhile the piped music preached free love: ‘If You Go to San Francisco’ by the Flowerpot Men.
I went to Cracow, and on to Oświeçim.
It was as a ten-year-old that I first came across the images: the railtracks, the smokestacks.
— Mum. Who was Hitler?
— Don’t worry about Hitler. You’ve got blond hair and blue eyes. Hitler would have loved you.
I often think that this exchange, and the unworthy relief it gave me, formed the first pang of a novel I would write thirty years later: a novel about the Holocaust narrated by a man with blond hair and blue eyes. My book was partly set there, but I had never been to Auschwitz.
Here is the town: Oświeçim (1 KM). And here is the train station, in its day the size of a Victoria, a Gare du Nord, a Grand Central. There too is the cafeteria, the hotel. And here is my guide, a young woman called Dovota.
From which dream do you escape with the greater hunger for full consciousness, the dream where you are murdered, or the dream where you are the murderer (or his abbettor, his familiar, his host)? The first kind of dream will shake you more, perhaps, but the second kind will stay with you longer. Auschwitz is now a museum, an inert monument to memory; inertly it continues to generate mortal shame, for Germany, and unending insult, for Poland.
When we touched on this my guide said,
— Poland had ceased to exist.
Yes of course. And not for the first time. 1939: Aryanised, Sovietised; Hitlerised, Stalinised. When the war was over Poland found herself reduced in size (and shifted westward); the capital was razed; the population was reduced by one quarter. What Poland was left with was Auschwitz, and the other islands of the Kat-Zet archipelago … My guide was called Dovota; sturdily elegant, soberly soft-voiced. Her makeup had been applied with care, and her skin had a glazed look. But her eyes were not glazed; they were fresh and uninured.
— We now have people coming here, she said, who think that all this has been constructed to deceive them. Not just from Germany. From Holland, from Scandinavia. They believe that nothing happened here and the Holocaust is a myth.
How did she deal with them?
— I concentrate on proof. Point by point. They deny it, though. They don’t believe it.
One has to admit that Auschwitz-Birkenau is very difficult to believe. But the unaverted heart can still feel its fierce rhythms. Auschwitz itself is disgustingly intimate (Hoess’s house nestles in behind the gallows; his wife and children used to play in the garden there), Birkenau disgustingly vast. It is easier to believe in the cruelty than it is to believe in the contempt, the unbelievable contempt. And what about the bottomless literalmindedness of the project (all the Jews in Europe? Even the Jews of Ireland were slated — all the Blooms and Herzogs)? And what about the patina of efficiency and thrift? How efficient is a work camp where the slaves last three months (it was always three months. You were killed immediately, or you organised yourself and survived. Otherwise it was always three months)? How cost-effective were those mounds of toothbrushes, those mad trains full of human hair? During the war there was a meteorology department in the Ahnenerbe dedicated to ‘proving’ that the Aryan race, untainted by evolution, had been preserved in ice from the beginning of time on the lost continent of Atlantis. Ideologically it was all on that level, tubthumping, tabloidal — the world of talking animals, resurrected celebrities, miracle panaceas, alien abductions, two-headed babies. The other end of it, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where ideology becomes action, is like a formal dystopia dramatising the mind of the babbler, the monologuist, the man on the milk-crate with the flickering eyes.
Any serious immersion in this subject will take you through several phases. I found that these were: fully replenished incredulity, despite all previous acquaintance with the facts; thwarted anger, as the body casts about for a way to make itself felt; obscene vituperation, swearing and weeping, cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead; a sense of lousiness, like an infestation; a nausea resembling, though not representing, extreme guilt (this is species-shame, perhaps); and, towards the end, capitulation, defeated assent. At last you have toiled your way from incredulity to belief. Or the mind has. The body, I suspect, takes longer to surre
nder and dumbly struggles to do so. It does this slow work at night, churning, mashing, heaving. Maybe this is also physical empathy, or an attempt at it. The internal rearrangements used to wake me suddenly, and I would feel as you do after a day spent in a speeding car or on rough water, with the torso committed to motion and also tensing itself against it … I had been through this process before and I recognised every stop along the way as I fought for sleep in the hotel bed in Cracow.
I think now of that meeting with my cousin, David Partington. He told me that he couldn’t see the word west (as in westerly, southwest, the West) without horror (West: the one-man Kat-Zet). He told me that when he carried his sister’s coffin he was grateful for the way the strap chafed his hand — grateful for the pain and its insistence on reality. It was for this insistence, too, that Marian went to see and touch her sister’s bones … David told me about the hours of swearing and weeping, how he rose in the night to swear and weep. And I felt then that atrocity does this; when you are close in, as he is, the task is not to accept but simply to believe. Atrocity defies belief and also persecutes it, demanding something that can never be freely given: one’s assent. Lucy Partington was my mother’s sister’s child. She was my cousin, not my sibling, not my daughter. I have never been told to believe something really unbelievable, just the usual articles of faith for a man of fifty (and they seem unlikely enough): that the parents are going, the children are staying, and I am somewhere in between.
* After he watched Jerzy Skolimowski’s film Moonlighting (1982), Zbigniew became convinced that Jeremy Irons was Polish — was, in fact, a Pole moonlighting in London. He was scandalised when I showed him a few clips of Irons as Charles Ryder, simpering his way through the TV version of Brideshead Revisited.
† The already-in-bed or part-way-there principle reminded me, obliquely, of the impoverished backstreet abortionist in William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Times are so hard, he says, that he is reduced to hustling pregnant women in the street.