Totally Saul

Frédéric Vitoux, Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), July 1994

There exists a very particular family of writers – collectors. They seem to wander around the many corners of the world for the simple pleasure of adding delightful or extravagant characters to their stories. In short, they are entomologists. Peeping Toms, or pickpockets who rummage around and then empty their secrets as others pinch wallet. But there is more. The real writers who are collectors, Peeping Toms, entomologists or pickpockets (your choice) aren’t activists, or even simply disposed to extricate a moral from their stories. To the contrary, they are completely disillusioned, amoral. They observe society – good or bad, familiar or exotic, it doesn’t matter – with a kind of tired vigilance, a nonchalant or suicidal curiosity, depending on the situation. Look at Somerset Maugham, Scott Fitzgerald or Maupassant. They all could have taken to heart the warning from Saul, their not unworthy Canadian successor. “Don’t think I’ve tried to breathe any meaning into these stories. They don’t have any.” Or, “Periodically, I long to submerge myself in a tide of insignificance.”

Tide for tide, each writer has his own favourite body of water, his own hunting ground, his own victims of choice. Some prefer old British colonialists, crippled by boredom and rheumatism in the Malay Archipelago (Maugham); others, gracious young women from the South who are intoxicated by their first love or first cocktails (Fitzgerald); still others prefer provincial noteworthies who oscillate between the conjugal bedroom and the whorehouse (Maupassant). But one would be hard pressed to see existential consequences or proof of their commitment. John Saul seems to divide his research or his fascination between two groups of people: ageing, rich Americans and dictators, of variable age, whose virtues Saul describes as: “the art of seducing crowds, which is intimately tied to large scale murder, in other words, theatre.” Which means that what separates Baby Doc in Haiti, General Dlimi in Morocco, and the wife of an industrialist in Denver or Chicago, are only degrees. The former execute their opponents the way we blow our nose; the latter only ruin their spouses, poisoning them or forcing them to eat so strictly they ultimately die.

Should one cry? Certainly not! Should one laugh? Yes indeed! For John Saul notices, irrefutably, that if Generals end badly as dictators, dictators too end badly, and Americans often miss their target and poison the wrong person. One can be a snob, a monster and stupid. One can also be, like Saul himself, very intelligent, convinced of the worst yet reveal an enchanting sense of humour, wickedness, irony. Multiple portraits, “things seen” and extravagant stories, each time presented with a new angle, aren’t easy. Like love, if one believes the words of an old American woman, words from one of the best stories in the book, words which sum up the delectable tone of the book: “At my age, sex is too repetitive…The last sexual innovation goes back to the time when human beings, or whatever we were then, climbed out of the ocean to live on dry land. Doing it on dry land, that, my dear, was something new.”