The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  The Bayleys were eccentric—“out of center”—in their complementary brilliance (he is a novelist, a quondam poet, a literary critic of effortless fluidity). But they were also famously weird in their temperament and habits; and if you’re an American, you don’t know the type. They’re the kind of people who like being ill and like getting old, who prefer winter to summer and autumn to spring (yearning for “grey days without sun”). They want rain, gloom, isolation, silence. “We had no TV of course,” writes Bayley, commalessly; and the reluctant acquisition of a radio feels like a surrender to the brashest promiscuity. The Bayleys were further cocooned and united, it has to be said, by their commitment to extreme squalor.

  At their place, even the soap is filthy. “Single shoes [and single socks] lie about the house as if deposited by a flash flood….Dried-out capless plastic pens crunch underfoot.” An infestation of rats is found to be “congenial, even stimulating.” Everywhere they go, they have to hurdle great heaps of books, unwashed clothes, old newspapers, dusty wine bottles. The plates are stained, the glasses “smeary.” The bath, so seldom used, is now unusable; the mattress is “soggy”; the sheets are never changed. And we shall draw a veil over their underwear. On one occasion a large, recently purchased meat pie “disappeared” in their kitchen. It was never found. The kitchen ate it.

  One of the unforeseen benefits of having children is that it delivers you from your own childishness: there’s no going back. John and Iris, naturally, did not toy long with the idea of becoming parents; it was themselves they wished to nurture (“two quaint children” and “co-child” are typical Bayleyisms). This is intimately connected to their embrace of dirt and clutter, a clear example of nostalgie de la boue—literally, homesickness for the mud, for the stickiness and ooziness of childhood, babyhood, wombhood. The plan seems to work. Professor Bayley and Dame Iris are crustily cruising into a triumphant old age. And then a three-year-old comes to stay, to live, to die. It is Iris Murdoch.

  Richard Eyre’s movie is devotedly faithful to the main lines of Bayley’s narrative. Yet there is also an undertow of creative defiance. The director has taken a highly unusual story about two very singular people—a story saturated with oddity, quiddity, exceptionality—and he has imbued it with the universal. How?

  In the Iris books, Bayley glides around in time and space, indulging his “intellectual being,” in Milton’s phrase, and “the thoughts that wander through eternity.” Eyre, characteristically, is direct and rigorous, almost geometrical in his approach. He constructs a double time scheme of present and past, and lays down a reciprocal rhythm of back and forth, ebb and flow. Throughout, the film tremulously oscillates between the 1950s, when the two principals are just entering each other’s force fields, and the 1990s, and the protracted visit from “the dark doctor”: Doctor A.

  Thus, in the opening scenes, we watch the young Iris riding her bicycle (comfortably outspeeding the more timorous John), her head thrown back in exhilaration, appetite, dynamism; she is rushing forward to meet the fabulous profusion of her talent. Then we fade to the elderly Iris, in the chaos of her study, working on what will be her final fiction. In the margin she writes out, again and again, the word puzzled. Puzzled puzzles her; she is puzzled by puzzled. “All words do that when you take them by surprise,” says her husband, comfortingly. Iris puzzles on; and in her eyes we see an infinity of fear. “It will win” is the pathologist’s prognosis. It will win: age will win. Eyre’s emphasis is very marked. Iris becomes a tale of everyman and everywoman; it is about the tragedy of time.

  What scenarists would call the “backstory” is a comedy of courtship. A vital symmetry establishes itself here, because young John is younger than young Iris (thirty-one to her thirty-seven) and most decidedly the junior partner. He is a lovestruck provincial virgin with a bad stammer. She is a robust bohemian and free spirit; and he soon learns “how fearfully, how almost diabolically attractive” she is to all men (and most women). Her numerous lovers are artists and scholars, big brains, dominators. And her greatest resource is the private universe of her imagination. This, though, turns out to be John’s entrée. In at least two senses, Iris settles for him, however lovingly. She intuits that domesticity—and the scruffier the better—will liberate her art.

  The “front story,” the age story, begins with the onset of the disease, and spans the five years between diagnosis and death. Soon, “the most intelligent woman in England” (Bayley’s plausible evaluation) is watching the Teletubbies with a look of awed concentration on her face. This is now Iris at her best. A clinging, smothering dependence is punctuated by spells of terrifying agitation; she rattles the latch; she bolts, she flees. Alzheimer’s is symmetrical, too, in its way: each new impoverishment reduces the awareness of loss. It is John’s sufferings that multiply; and we are not spared his surges of rage, bitterness, and contempt. He had always wanted to possess her mind and its secrets. Now, as total master, he does possess it. And there’s nothing there. Murdoch readers won’t mind (because they already know), but the movie never quite gives a sense of the intellectual height from which she fell.

  Certain cerebrovascular disasters are called “insults to the brain.” As already noted, the more prodigious the brain, the more studious (and in this case protracted) the insult. Iris’s brain was indeed prodigious. Returning to her novels, with hindsight, we get a disquieting sense of their wild generosity, their extreme innocence and skittishness, their worrying unpredictability. Her world is ignited by belief. She believes in everything: true love, veridical visions, magic, monsters, pagan spirits. She doesn’t tell you how the household cat is looking, or even feeling: she tells you what it is thinking. Her novels constitute an extraordinarily vigorous imperium. But beneath their painterly opulence runs the light fever of fragility, like an omen.

  Eyre’s film is built on the cornerstones of four performances. As the young Iris, Kate Winslet is slightly hampered by the conventionality of her good looks; but the seriousness and steadiness of her gaze effectively suggest the dawning amplitude of the Murdoch imagination. Hugh Bonneville and Jim Broadbent play Bayley quite seamlessly (their stutters must have been calibrated by stopwatch); much more is asked of Broadbent, of course, and it is duly given. As for Judi Dench, as the mature Iris: she is transcendent. I knew Iris; I have respectfully kissed that cunning, bashful, secretive smile. It is as if Dame Judi and Dame Iris were always on a metaphysical collision course. Her performance has the rarest quality known to any art—that of apparent inevitability.

  Maritimers talk of a turn in the tide as the moment when the waves “reconsider.” Over and above its piercing juxtapositions of youth and age, Iris has an oceanic feel, and this provides a further symmetry. Although she never cared for George Eliot (or, relevantly, for bathwater), as Bayley notes, Iris’s “wholly different plots and beings remind me of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss saying, ‘I am in love with moistness.’ ” And “Against Dryness” was one of the more famous of her philosophical essays. The imagery of Eyre’s film is against dryness: the lakes and rivers in which John and Iris habitually immersed themselves; the sea, of course (Iris’s key novel was The Sea, the Sea); and the rain, the rain, that seemed to hide them from the world. Hold yourself in readiness, too, for the floods of your tears.

  Talk 2001

  Postscript. In the row behind me at the screening of Iris sat John: Professor Bayley. When I staggered up to him afterward, it seemed to me that, of the dozen of us in the theater, John was easily the most composed. He wasn’t undone by Iris, as we were. He had already lived it. He alone was perfectly prepared.

  The House of Windsor

  Princess Diana: A Mirror, Not a Lamp

  The strapline on the news channel was saying PRINCESS DIANA IN PARIS CAR CRASH; then it was saying PRINCESS DIANA SERIOUSLY INJURED; then it was saying PRINCESS DIANA DEAD. And for just an hour or so it felt like November 1963. “This will be a fixing moment in your lives,” I intoned to my two sons, Louis and Jacob. (
I was thinking, naturally, about their two contemporaries, William and Harry.) “You will always remember where you were and who you were with when you heard this news.” Princess Diana dead: it seemed brutally inordinate. Because Diana had never been hard news, until then; Diana, in every sense, had always been soft. For once I found myself longing for a euphemism: passed away, perhaps, or succumbed.

  A sense of proportion would soon return. Or at least it would in my house. The true comparison, of course, is not with Kennedy but with Kennedy’s wife: only fortuitously celebrated. (And consider the passive figure of Mr. Zapruder, his shutter innocently open on the grassy knoll, as opposed to the darting figure of the crack paparazzo.) But in the immediate aftermath, one experienced some of the emotions associated with a major loss. You felt stunned from nowhere, as if something had veered in out of your blind spot.

  That fatal ride has the quality of a dreadful dream. What was it like, being driven by a vainglorious drunk at an insane velocity in an urban tunnel? With rising claustrophobia, the passenger will sense that the driver’s mind is disorganized—that “control” is in the process of being relinquished. And so it was. It makes your shins shudder to imagine the atrocious physics of the impact, as the Mercedes transformed itself into a weapon of blunt force. Next, the SWAT team of photographers and the final photo shoot. Whether or not the paparazzi helped cause Diana’s death, they undoubtedly defiled its setting. They took pictures of the dying woman. How could they? But they did. And now the two sons, the princes, face not only the loss of a loving and lovable mother but also a bereavement uniquely contaminated by the market forces of fame.

  Let us for a moment examine the nature of Diana’s fame. One might call it a collateral celebrity, because it relied on no discernible contribution—except to the gaiety, and now the grief, of nations. Lady Diana Spencer awakened the love of the introverted heir to the English throne. And that was all. Brightness of eye, whiteness of tooth, a colluding smile, a certain transparency, a vividness, an exposed vulnerability: it was enough for him, and it was enough for us. Madonna sings. Grace Kelly acted. Diana simply breathed. She was a social-page figure who became a cover girl. One can soberly assert that the Diana story, in itself, was a nonstory, remorselessly and fanatically annotated by our own projections and desires. Rather, we are the story. Equipped with no talent, Diana evolved into the most celebrated woman alive. What does that tell us about our planet?

  She certainly believed she had a talent: a talent for love. She felt she could inspire it, transmit it, increase its general sum. It has been said about her (what hasn’t been said about her?) that she adopted various charities as “accessories.” But the causes Diana was most strongly identified with—AIDS, hospices, land mines—demanded more than an unreflecting commitment. There is no question that she made a difference to the gay community, in England and perhaps elsewhere; her support came at a crucial time, in defiance of tabloid opinion as well as royal prudence. Yet the fact remains that Diana was far less dedicated than, for instance, her onetime sister-in-law, Princess Anne, whose Hanoverian homeliness consigned her to near-total obscurity. Through no fault of her own, Diana was the heiress of the tyranny of appearances and the snobbery of looks.

  She could touch and soothe; perhaps she believed she could heal. Watching her on television, jolting with tears as she listened to a speech praising and defending her work, one saw signs of an almost delusional inner drama. If power corrupts the self, then absolute fame must surely distort it. Her enthusiasms were crankish, hypochondriac, self-obsessive: aromatherapy, colonic irrigation, the fool’s gold of astrology. Diana, I repeat, was “soft” news. She caused sensations by wearing a strapless party dress or by gaining a kilo of weight.

  Here was a woman who made headlines with every wave of her hand, every twitch of her eyebrow. This is why her death—her metamorphosis into hard news—feels so savage. Death has enshrined her and frozen her in time. It has also fulfilled her own prophecy. She did have a gift for love: look at the people, in their millions, weeping on the streets of London. Diana was a mirror, not a lamp. You looked at her and saw your own ordinary humanity, written in lights. After all, everyone is a star, everyone is a prima donna, in the karaoke age.

  On the larger scale, Diana’s contribution to history is both paradoxical and inadvertent. She will go down as the chief saboteur of the monarchy. It wasn’t just the divorce, the tell-all boyfriend, the married rugby star. She introduced an informality, a candid modernity, into a system that could offer no resistance to it; and she had a daily beauty in her life that made the Windsors ugly.

  Above all she will be remembered as a phenomenon of pure stardom. Her death was a terrible symbol of that condition. She takes her place, among the broken glass and crushed metal, in the iconography of the car crash, alongside James Dean, Albert Camus, Jayne Mansfield, and Princess Grace. These other victims died unpursued. They weren’t fleeing the pointed end of their own renown: men on motorcycles with computerized cameras and satellite-linked mobile phones. The paparazzi are the high-tech dogs of fame. But it must be admitted that we sent them into that tunnel, to nourish our own mysterious needs.

  Time 1997

  The Queen’s Speech, the Queen’s Heart

  Word of the accident reached Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, at one o’clock in the morning of August 31, 1997. Word of the death came through at four. Prince Charles was in residence, with his sons; the Queen advised him not to wake them (they would be needing their strength), and added, “We must get the radios out of their rooms.” Charles broke the news just after seven. Prince Harry, then twelve, couldn’t quite take it in. Was everyone sure? he asked; would somebody check? The boys were asked if they would like to accompany the family to church (it was Sunday). Prince William, then fifteen, wanted to attend—so he could “talk to Mummy.”

  “The world’s going to go completely mad,” Charles said, presciently, when he heard. By the following Thursday, the Royal Family was facing the strangest crisis in its history. Certainly, King Egbert (802–839) would not have known what to make of it; and neither did Queen Elizabeth II (1952– ). “We don’t have protocol here,” an eminent equerry once drawled, “just bloody good manners.” But national cohesion, and indeed public order, now depended on a preposterous punctilio: the people wanted a flag flying at half-mast above Buckingham Palace, and the Queen wasn’t having it. Flags were flying at half-mast at other royal seats; the flag at the palace flies only when the Queen is staying there (and she was still tarrying in Scotland: a further scandal). The flag at the palace doesn’t go halfway down for anybody’s death, even the monarch’s. Within the inner circle, the dispute was unprecedentedly fierce. (“A lot of people,” said an aide, “were heavily scarred by it.”) The desperate courtiers were unanimous: the flag must go (halfway) up. But the Windsors hadn’t yet sensed which way the wind was blowing.

  As in all matters royal, we are dealing here not with pros and cons, with arguments and counterarguments; we are dealing with signs and symbols, with fever and magic. To the Queen, the flag (or its absence) was an emblem of her nonnegotiable inheritance. To her subjects, the flag was an emblem—a display—of grief; and a display of grief was what they were demanding. Prime Minister Tony Blair was onto “the mood” so quickly that you feel he must have partaken of it. Before noon on that same Sunday, he huskily addressed the nation: “We are today a nation, in Britain, in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief that is so deeply painful for us….She was the People’s Princess, and that’s how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and in our memories forever.” Now the British newspapers, having cheerfully savaged Diana for years (right up to and including that weekend), were cheerfully at work on her black-bordered canonization. “WHERE IS OUR QUEEN? WHERE IS HER FLAG?” “SHOW US YOU CARE.” “YOUR PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING. SPEAK TO US, MA’AM.”

  Diana’s funeral was set for Saturday. The Queen had intended to process south, in the royal train, on Friday night. But by now she had adapte
d to the new reality—had remembered that she was a servant as well as a potentate. She flew down on Friday afternoon; she would speak, she would show us she cared; the flag, which had not been lowered for her father, George VI, would be lowered for Diana. There were heightened fears for the safety of the Queen and Prince Philip when they arrived at Buckingham Palace. Obligingly they climbed out of their limousine and inspected the shoulder-high heaps of flowers and tributes (“Diana, Queen of Heaven,” “Regina Coeli,” and so on). It was felt that, at the very least, there might be a repetition of Queen Victoria’s experience in her Golden Jubilee year (1887), when she was greeted in the East End by what she called “a horrid noise” she had never heard before: booing. It didn’t happen. Here is Robert Lacey’s account in his exemplary book Monarch: The Life and Reign of Elizabeth II:

  As Elizabeth II, dressed in black, walked down the line of mourners, an eleven-year-old girl handed her five red roses.

  “Would you like me to place them for you?” asked the queen.

  “No, Your Majesty,” replied the girl. “They are for you.”

  “You could hear the crowd begin to clap,” recalls an aide. “I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, it’s all right.’ ”

  Well, not yet. There was also the speech. The Queen would have to come as close as she could bring herself to pretending that she loved Princess Diana.

  * * *

  *

  Lacey is very good on the Queen’s feelings about feelings, the “curious knotting in the impulses” that complicates her attempts to exercise emotion. She could write a passionate four-page letter to a friend in response to a brief commiseration about the violent death of a favorite corgi. This was heartache of a manageable and articulate order. But when, in 1966, a hill of slag collapsed on a village in South Wales, Aberfan, killing 116 children (and twenty-eight adults), the Queen, against all advice and family precedent, delayed her visit for more than a week. Her husband and her brother-in-law went (and so did the PM, Harold Wilson); but she felt she would be an immodest distraction from the continuing rescue and relief.