Anyway, I thought I played the whole thing down. aids is more frightening and catastrophic than I chose — or was able — to suggest. But I have enough imagination, and enough health anxieties of my own, to guess at the feelings of the sufferer, lying in the sawdust of his defences, with nothing between him and the wind and the rain. Also, I believe aids will emerge as an evolutionary trauma, a tactical defeat for the species. Sex and death have never before been linked in this way, except by the poets. The ancient venereal diseases were fatal but late-acting: plenty of things could kill you before syphilis did. Perhaps the only remote analogy is an exclusively feminine one: not cervical cancer, but childbirth. Now, with aids, the opportunities for human distrust are boundless.
As for 1985, it took more than non-yellow journalism to ease society through to the next stage in its understanding, its confrontation with aids. It took Rock Hudson, a figure with the necessary TV-and-tabloid constituency, someone whose face we had known all our lives. People are now infinitesimally more receptive to the truth, and this is a start. But it will be a long and wretched road.
Saul Bellow in Chicago
The room at the Quality Inn was large and cheap, with thermal drapes and barebacked plugs. All it lacked was quality. But I stood at the very centre of what Saul Bellow has called ‘the contempt center of the USA’; and the view was enthralling.
From my window I could see a Christian Science church that looked like a hydroelectric plant, the corncobs of two vertical parking lots, a stilted Marina Bank and the limousine glass of IBM Plaza, the El train, a slow roller-coaster, churning round the bend. Just over the crest stood the abandoned University of Chicago building, a charred, black-stoned old scraper, its golden turret like the crown of a tooth. Just below lay Sheldon’s, prominently offering ‘Art Material — for the artist in everyone’. On the telephone I arranged to meet the Nobel Laureate in the Chicago Arts Club at one o’clock. He would be identifiable, he cheerfully informed me, ‘by certain signs of decay’.
I felt more than averagely nervous at the prospect of tackling this particular Great American Writer. I wondered why. After all, I’ve done quite a few of these guys by now. I knew that Bellow was no manipulator, eccentric or vaudevillian. He wouldn’t be poleaxed by a hangover, as was Truman Capote. He wouldn’t open proceedings with a het-taunting joke, as did Gore Vidal (‘Oh to be in England’, drawled Gore, ‘now that England’s here’). He wouldn’t be a model of diffidence and sweet reason, as Norman Mailer had been, then later denounce me as ‘a wimp’ on British TV. Joseph Heller was all brawny and jovial self-absorption. Kurt Vonnegut was delightfully dreamy — a natural man, but a natural crackpot too.
Saul Bellow, I suspected, would speak in the voice I knew from the novels: funny, fluent and profound. A bit worrying, that. This business of writing about writers is more ambivalent than the end-product normally admits. As a fan and a reader, you want your hero to be genuinely inspirational. As a journalist, you hope for lunacy, spite, deplorable indiscretions, a full-scale nervous breakdown in mid-interview. And, as a human, you yearn for the birth of a flattering friendship. All very shaming, I thought, as I crossed the dun Chicago River, my eyes streaming in the mineral wind.
One final complication: whereas the claims of his contemporaries remain more or less unresolved, Saul Bellow really is a great American writer. I think that in a sense he is the writer that the twentieth century has been waiting for. The present phase of Western literature is inescapably one of ‘higher autobiography’, intensely self-inspecting. The phase began with the spittle of Con-íessionalism but has steadied and persisted. No more stories: the author is increasingly committed to the private being. With all sorts of awkwardnesses and rough edges and extraordinary expansions, supremely well-equipped, erudite and humorous, Bellow has made his own experience resonate more memorably than any living writer. And yet he is also the first to come out the other side of this process, hugely strengthened to contemplate the given world.