Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (20 page)

The thick sycamores he gazed into were pale and brown. The root systems, like hairy mammoths, spread under pavements, around the sewer system and other installations, working underground and drawn towards the core of the earth ... As he stared at them he thought he heard a moan coming from behind, from the pasture-sized room at his back. What would it be moaning about? (It was not a human sound.) The only responsible interpretation was that it was a projection, pure and simple, inspired by the bare sycamores . . . He himself would have made such a sound if he hadn't been on his best behaviour . . . This vast place put up in 1910 by dry-goods merchant princes - its rooms, he said, made him think of cisterns of self-love that had dried out. . .

And who will pay for all this? Will Benn, on his salary of $60,000 ('just about what it costs to keep two convicts down in Stateville')? How can he? Yet Benn will pay, in more senses than one. Benn will pay.

Each morning, in the penthouse duplex, while Matilda scowls, swears at the maid, and drinks her pints of
caffe espresso,
Benn sits in the breakfast nook, obscurely waiting.

... all he could do was look out at the city, which fills so many miles. All those abandoned industries awaiting electronic resurrection, the colossal body of the Rustbelt, the stems of the tall chimneys nowadays bearing no blossoms of smoke. One of your privileges if you were very rich was to command a vast view of this devastation.

About now, one realises that the city, 'the great Rustbelt metropolis', is unnamed. I read
More Die of Heartbreak
in two slightly different versions, in British galleys and in an American bound proof (for when the books of great men go forth into the world they spawn and mutate, geometrically multiplying like a beneficent virus). In the earlier version it was possible to suppose that the city was an unnamed Chicago, nudged a little towards the north-east. In the later version Bellow has headed off this supposition. It is not an unnamed Chicago; it is not an unnamed city; it is a nameless city, and the more resonant for that, like a nameless dread. From the window, 'dominating those miles of rubble', Benn sees the Ecliptic Circle Electronic Tower, a high-tech, 'Jap-built' colossus. Bellow's spectral city is structured round that Tower. And so is his novel. Like all Bellow's most powerful symbols (though it is a symbol made concrete — massively concretised), the Tower steals up on you with meaning, looming into significance, casting a lengthening shadow. 'My old life is lying under it,' says Benn (and he is not speaking metaphorically), ' - my mother's kitchen, my father's bookshelves, the mulberry trees.' Matilda dislikes reminiscence about the humble past (she thinks it betrays a 'steerage mentality'), but Benn Grader's musings about the Electronic Tower are quietly indulged. For the Tower is built on the site of the Grader Home for Invalids. The usual nervous dinner at the Layamons':

'We used to live on that spot. We moved there from Jefferson Street when I was about twelve ... It came with a nice yard. There were two big mulberry trees and they attracted lots of grackles in June.' Little notice was taken of this natural history. 'Very fine trees, the kind with the white fruit. The purple mulberries have a better flavor.' Expressive looks passed among the Layamons. Uncle was aware of these but interpreted them as signs of boredom. There he was definitely wrong, as we shall see.

Benn and his parents once 'owned' the Electronic Tower, or its foundations. Thereby hangs a tale i.e. a deal, i.e. a swindle.

It is time now to gather Harold Vilitzer into the story: Vilitzer,
Uncle's
uncle. Here would seem to be a vastly contemporary phenomenon, a man formidably equipped with goals, a life-plan, a dream: 'His main objective was to pile up a huge personal fortune, and the hell with everything else.' Enter into a disagreement with Harold and he will put your head in a vice; either you change your mind or he will change your head. In the early days,

... he went on the street, right here in town, taking bets, paying off the police. As a bookie, he was such a success out in the fresh air that when he had a big loss the cops collected 50,000 bucks among themselves to keep him in business. It was worth it to them. Next thing we knew, he was in politics.

Where else? Political office, in this novel, is seen as a knife-edge between farcical elevation and federal indictment. In the Electronic Tower deal, Vilitzer routinely screwed his family out of several million dollars. Benn, always intoxicated by consanguinity (and Jewish consanguinity is a special phenomenon, we remember, an anachronism of which the Jews were about to divest themselves, until the present century intervened), Benn still loves his uncle and bears no grudge about the fraud. Vilitzer, over eighty and not well, has no regrets either, naturally: Benn is only a 'collateral relative', and the money rule, besides, is
mercilessness.
Kenneth understands: 'Death is merciless, and therefore the ground rules of conduct have to include an equal and opposite hardness. From this it follows that kinship is bullshit.' All very modern, and, compared to Benn, Vilitzer looks unpierceably contemporary. Compared to the Layamons, though, Vilitzer is a dinosaur. Benn had come 'haunting around the edges of the Layamon world, drawn by his longings'. And they received him, for much simpler — or much clearer — reasons of their own. As these become clear to him (and he will not quite face their clarity, clinging to that semi-spurious absentmindedness, the immunity claim, simultaneous innocence and guilt) something goes wrong with Matilda's beauty. As beauty, as polish, as gloss, it remains the same, but Benn's 'prophetic soul' (My prophetic soul! My uncle!) has been sending him messages from the other side. These are dreadful pages, full of high and harrowing comedy: an onslaught of mutinous impulses, 'associational anarchy', thought murders, sexual goblins that nip giggling past the bedroom door. Surveying the Electronic Tower one night, Mrs Layamon, with full TV suavity, dubs it 'an important piece of modern beauty'. Benn has to resist the temptation to reply: 'That's what your
daughter
is.' A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, sang the poet. A thing, or a piece, of
modern
beauty is a joy for about ten minutes, if that. It is more like an eternal torment. This is Kenneth:

Why shouldn't a man want a beautiful wife? If he's going to renounce all others, he might as well get a beauty, Only the present happens to be an all-time world climax, a peak of genius for external perfection and high finish . . . Heartless beauty has never been so wonderful. But with men and women, human warmth is poured into the invention. When there's light and heat in the eyes and cheeks of a woman, you can't possibly tell if it's genuine. Does your beauty yearn for love, for a husband, or is she after a front man, a suitable cover for her beauty operations?

These beauty operations Benn cannot penetrate. 'The higher the range of vision, the more your control is weakened': the only clues he gets are images of fear and repulsion. And by now, at night, 'the Electronic Tower floats close till it's right on top of him, every single window lighted and on a dead course for the penthouse'.

Just as reason 'doesn't seem to have the social base it once had', so 'the natures that could love have become too unstable to do it'. Looking at his uncle's face Kenneth decides that 'a head as round as that was born to roll'. Self-betrayed (the vision failed him), Benn falls in with what Dr Layamon calls 'the overall game-plan' ('You're entitled to live in style, a rich scientist and not just a research rat'). He agrees to confront Vilitzer; and this act involves him in a further sexual ordeal, itself a savage contrivance in this vigorously intricate novel. On the edge of indictment, only a few feet from the slammer, Vilitzer wheels himself up from Florida, from the sunbelt to the rustbelt, to attend a parole-board hearing -not as defendant but as supervisor. A rape case, a forensic spectacular, lab analysis, spermatazoa experts, a man with a ten-foot pointer identifying two images on a lit screen: a blow-up of the girl's underpants ('all those spatter marks, and ragged circles like spacecraft photographs of the moons of Uranus'), and one of her belly, on which the letters LOV have been scrawled with a broken Budweiser bottle. What makes this such a shrill image of modern sexuality? Not the rape, not the violence and the (thematically resonant) possibility of self-injury, not even the three gory letters, illiterate or merely forgetful. No, it is the display, the slides, the glare, the patient television cameras that comprise the gladiatorial blood-sport of contemporary Eros.

The meeting with Vilitzer, like so many significant meetings in this book, takes place in the middle air, fifty floors up, in a tinted cloudscape presided over by the Electronic Tower.

The scattering light of the morning spectrum all over the glassy conference room surrounded this conversation with a contemporary equivalent of church illumination. The sun itself, without the usual obstruction of nature prevailing at ground level, transmitted directly a message about our human origins. Signals from our earth's star circled us in radiant threads. It was our option to take note of them or not. Nobody is forced to, of course.

And what a conversation ensues, equally eloquent about our human origins and our human destinations. Enraged, 'proud of having dedicated himself to the high service of money', Vilitzer asks Benn: 'What do you need two million dollars for?' The answer is, of course: to make atonement to the Layamons — to pay for their wasted time. 'You see!' says Vilitzer in triumph. 'He doesn't understand even the first basic principle.' And this is how it goes, just before Vilitzer attempts to strike:

'You won't answer this, Uncle Harold,' said Benn. 'But what did you make on the sale of that property?'

'You think I'm going to go into that with a man like yow?'

'Why not with me?'

'Because you don't
know
anything!'

I shall foreclose the narrative here, on this great epiphany:

the illiterate half-dead hoodlum rejects, excludes, dismisses the world-famous pure scientist — because he doesn't
know
anything. And Vilitzer is right, he is dead right. Benn's world is entirely other; he has no business here. It is the Layamons, the new villains or the new utensils of villainy, the truly modern, who proclaim that there
is
no other, who bring everything in and use whatever is there to be used, including innocence, including beauty, including love.

I said that
More Die of Heartbreak
is like a rumour of war against America. Here in three widely separated quotes is how it is going, and how it will continue to go: America, and the war against her.

Doctor Layamon then said to him, .. . 'Glad to see you stand up for yourself.

Down from the sublime regions, where you had no access to him. Now, owing to self-interest, you could get a grip on Uncle. The Layamons had set themselves to bring Benn in, that is, to bring him back to the one great thing that America has, which is the
American.
You can't have a son-in-law by your American hearth who has another habitat - extraterrestrial or some such goddam thing.

People like ourselves weren't part of the main enterprise. The main enterprise was America itself, and the increase of its powers.

I could feel the perturbation widening and widening as I lay there and became aware that I had come to depend on his spirit. Without its support, the buoyancy went out of me, the city itself became a drag. The USA, too, that terrific posthistorical enterprise carrying our destinies, lost momentum, sagged, softened. There threaded itself through me the dreadful suspicion that the costs of its dynamism were bigger than I had reckoned ... The price was infinitely greater than the easy suppositions of the open society led you to expect . . . There seems to be a huge force that advances, propels, and this pro-pellant increases its power by drawing value away from the personal life and fitting us for its colossal purpose. It demands the abolition of such things as love and art ... of gifts like Uncle's, which it can tolerate intermittently if they don't get in its way.

In
To Jerusalem and Back
Bellow wrote: 'for the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. What is going on will not leave us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations.' Not only politics. Also economics. Also the military, since we are all in the army now, we are all on the front line. And, countervailingly, we have all entered the love race, the 'sexual marathon', whether we have the talent for it or not. Thus everyone seeks the sexual remedy, or as Kenneth more gently puts it: 'they do the act by which love would be transmitted if there
were
any'. Interviewed on TV about Chernobyl, Benn says that, bad as radiation is, he is sure that more die of heartbreak. 'And isn't that a crazy remark?' Kenneth is asked. 'Maybe not. If people were clear about it, more aware of their feelings, then you'd see a real march on Washington. The capital could never hold all that sorrow.'

I know that
More Die of Heartbreak
is a work of inspiration, another great efflorescence. How? Because it changes the way you see everything. It harrows and it enhances. In the age of science, in the modern age, the arts might become 'the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.' If I were feeling despondent, rather than exalted, I would tell Mr Bellow that he could pick my wallpaper any time he liked. But I will go the other way, with Kenneth, who demands that we make a turning point, that we make
ourselves
a turning point — I, we, you. 'No use for existing unless your life is a turning point. No use joining the general march ...' It sounds like a tall order. It is a tall order. But
he's
done it. Thank you. And thank you, Mr Bellow.