We were ordering dessert in Saul Bellow’s favourite Italian restaurant in his home town, Chicago. Besides Bellow, myself and my wife Sarah there was the philosopher Allan Bloom, his closest friend, after whose death he wrote Ravelstein, a memoir-novel. It was Bloom who told me that Bellow, who died this week, went through his drafts cutting out the jokes, for fear of appearing too light–minded, and his wit overflowed into his conversation.

It had been a scintillating meal, but now he was grave: he had asked for gelati and the non-Italian waitress was flummoxed. Bloom made some wisecrack sotto voce, everyone smiled and she suddenly broke down. “You all hate me, don’t you?” Bellow soothed her, remarking after she had gone: “There you have the American psyche. All brittle confidence on the surface and turmoil underneath.” Not a bad summation, I remember thinking, of his novels.

I had met him a year earlier when giving a lecture at the university. It was a super-intelligent, postgraduate audience, I was on my mettle, and seeing him in the front row, wearing his bow-tie and his quiet smile, made my confidence a little brittle, too. Afterwards Bloom introduced us, we made friends, and met on my trips to America and his to London.

Once he came as guest of honour at a function at Oxford University. It was not a success: he clearly found his hosts snobbish and introverted, not much interested in an elderly American writer. I made things worse. I was Minister for Higher Education at the time and told Margaret Thatcher that she had an admirer she should meet, and she invited us to tea at No 10. Introducing the Greatest Living Writer to the Greatest Living Stateswoman seemed like a great idea. It wasn’t.

Bellow asked me what would interest her. Tell her about Chicago and its race problems, I said (it was just after a local politician had accused Jewish doctors of poisoning blacks). Mrs Thatcher, too, wondered what they should talk about. Ask him about the race problem in Chicago, I suggested. She did — and launched into her own views before he could reply. On and on she went. Then she switched the subject — and did the same thing. Bellow took it well. Eventually he said: “If you’d like to know my opinion —” “Absolutely,” the Prime Minister interrupted, and talked on. “I didn’t get a word in, even edgeways,” Bellow smiled later. Mrs Thatcher thanked me for bringing such an interesting man to meet her.

I remember him driving me along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and thinking how tiny he looked in his vast SUV, but it was a tough smallness, and he always seemed in good health. Then suddenly he was poisoned eating red snapper in the Caribbean, and nearly died. When we met in Boston not long afterwards he was still seeing doctors, and seemed, well, reduced. His eye was as penetrating as ever, but he was using his wife Janis, literary scholar and critic and a serenely intelligent woman half his age, as a prop for his memory. He said he would never be coming to Europe and we left wondering whether we would see him again.

We did, at his 80th birthday party, and he seemed pretty much recovered. His brief speech was interrupted by the yelps of a small baby, but Bellow didn’t mind: the child was his, and he relished the incongruity of the occasion. The party was a smallish affair, and apart from his friend Philip Roth there were few writers. He didn’t move in a literary set, and after Bloom’s death had left Chicago – a big break – and was spending much of his time in his country place in Vermont, or in Boston. New York he had long disliked: too many people asking him to put his name to this or that political petition, he once told me, and was mad at himself when he broke his vow never to respond to journalists. Pressed about political correctness, which he hated, his wit ran ahead of his prudence. It was then that he said: “Who is the Proust of the Papuans and the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” The furore amused and irritated him: “I happen to be one of the few people who have read a Zulu novel.”

His own literary preferences, like his writing, were a combination of the intellectual and the sassy. It was Bellow who put me on to Elmore Leonard, whose stylishness he admired. After the Berlin Wall came down I had encouraged him to go to Russia — he was born in Canada but his origins were Russian-Jewish — but he seemed to have an instinctive aversion to the place, though not for its writers, and we shared a perverse taste for Nicholas Berdyayev, a Marxist philosopher turned spiritual.

Not only was Bellow still writing; with the English-born author and critic Keith Botsford he established The Republic of Letters, his “tabloid for literates”, set up by “a couple of Utopian codgers”. But the death of Bloom had hit him hard, and Ravelstein had seemed to me in memoriam for them both. “Unconscious, I had no more idea of death than the dead have,” he had written when the red snapper nearly got him. Somehow you feel that, beyond consciousness, Bloom and Bellow will be smart-talking still.