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

by Martin Amis

  There he sits, magnificently, everywhere you happen to be—our contemporary Othello, our Moor of Venice.

  * * *

  *

  Un-O.J.-ed, in Los Angeles, I do Tom Snyder, but find that I have been fractionally Shirleyed—by Miss MacLaine. My spot dwindles as Shirley talks interestingly and at great length about Terms of Endearment and Jack Nicholson’s various readings of the line “To kill the bug that you have up your ass.” Remember? Come to Laugh, Come to Cry, Come to Terms. The movie wasn’t any good and won about nineteen Oscars, and I particularly disliked the way Jack Nicholson read that (mediocre) line about the bug.

  Our dedicated chauffeuring firm has nothing smaller, so the next morning I am stretched to the beautiful Art Deco toy town of Burbank Airport; all small airports are beautiful, and the smaller the better, but not many are pretty, too, as Burbank is. Shortly after takeoff, the person beside me swivels and says to the person behind me, “Can I bug you for a couple of autographs?”

  A moment later, I ask the person beside me about the person behind me.

  “It’s Jack Nicholson,” he whispers, and adds, not at all complainingly, “He seems a little grouchy.”

  I don’t turn and stare at Jack. But I resolve to go amidships soon (for a ginger ale or the bathroom), so I can stare at him as I return to my seat. Then Jack goes amidships. He returns, and I stare at him: loose black suit, sunglasses, and the authentic movie-star aura—which comes from him seeming deeply familiar and deeply unfamiliar, simultaneously. He does seem grouchy—melodramatically so. For a while, he lingers in the aisle, flexing his face with great actorly glowers and frowns and sneers. He notices the book I am reading—The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow. As the proprietor of the movie rights to Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, Jack would notice this. The person beside me eventually gets his autographs, duly personalized.

  We land and prepare to disembark. Nicholson turns up his grimace dial an additional notch. Uncharitably I assume that this is the look all movie stars wear when they find themselves on nonprivate airplanes. But later I learn that Nicholson has some heavy family trouble in this part of the world. He may be a movie star, but he, too, has his internal chores and labors.

  As does O.J.—but he doesn’t show it. O.J. is an actor, and he has been told to do Serenity. His profile is like something on an ancient coin. Innocent or guilty, he can’t be feeling serene. Desdemona is gone, as is Cassio. But Iago is still around—inside his head.

  On my way through the airport I see Jack backing into a toilet; his weary scowl has a cork-tipped cigarette in the middle of it and his lighter is cocked.

  * * *

  *

  As a rule, writers scorn their youngers and revere their elders. This is a literary law; and I find myself propounding it almost nightly in the Q & A sessions that follow the readings—no doubt because its implications are still occurring to me.

  “Does your father like your work?”

  No, I explain. My father has read my first, third, and seventh novels, and none of the others. He can’t get going on them. He sends them windmilling through the air after twenty or thirty pages. But then my father, these days, mostly reads thrillers. Some time ago, he vowed to me that he would never read another novel unless it began with the sentence “A shot rang out.”

  More generally, I go on, older writers should find younger writers irritating, because younger writers are sending them an unwelcome message. They are saying, “It’s not like that anymore. It’s like this.” In the present context, that and this can be loosely described as the thought-rhythms peculiar to the time. Implicit in these thought-rhythms are certain values, moral, social, and aesthetic.

  Somerset Maugham had this to say about my father’s first novel, Lucky Jim: “Mr. Kingsley Amis is so talented, his observations so keen, that you cannot fail to be convinced that the young men he so brilliantly describes truly represent the class with which his novel is concerned.” This (rather trundling) sentence has been widely quoted. But it is misleading. The next sentence runs as follows: “They are scum.”

  * * *

  *

  American cities are so much better, so much more citified, than English cities. And, it has to be said, so much more glamorous.

  London is the equivalent of New York. And that’s fine. But then what do we have? Instead of Chicago we get Manchester. Instead of Washington we get York. Instead of Los Angeles we get Birmingham. Instead of Dallas we get Leeds. Instead of Boston we get Liverpool. Instead of Miami we get Bristol. Instead of New Orleans we get Portsmouth. Instead of Kansas City we get Stoke. Instead of San Francisco we get Grimsby.

  * * *

  *

  In Boston I have breakfast with Saul Bellow, who turns eighty this year and who, uncannily, continues to hear the thought-rhythms of the directly contemporary.

  Along the way I also encounter two inadmissibly promising juniors, both of them English: Will Self, again in Boston, and Lawrence Norfolk, in Chicago. These younger writers cause me to defy my own literary law: I like them. They aren’t scum; and they can write.

  Examining the perverse affection I feel, I find that my protective instincts have been roused. Twenty-odd years ago, when I started out, you wrote a novel and handed it in and that was that. There was a coherent reading public, prompted by word of mouth. There was no fourteen-city tour. There was no collateral activity whatever. At thirty-something, Will Self and Lawrence Norfolk are already old hands on the circuit. For them, the current arrangement—whereby your personality (whatever that may be) undergoes public processing—is simply the air they breathe. I had ten years of quiet; but they were born into noise.

  * * *

  *

  At the readings I continue to be surprised by the forceful laughter that greets the line “Poets don’t drive.” I am pleased to hear this laughter, but I don’t understand it. Are they laughing because it’s funny that poets don’t drive? Or are they laughing because it sounds like a ridiculous generalization?

  Anyway, it’s true. Poets don’t drive. A vivid personification of this fact is my friend James Fenton, now Oxford Professor of Poetry, who has failed his test six times. But Fenton is hardly typical. Nearly all the poets I know have never even had a lesson. They just sense that they’re not cut out for it.

  Poets, of course, are in general great pashas (and great drinkers), who like being ferried about by their admirers. Novelists (those nerveless brutes, those veteran A-to-Z jockeys) bomb around the whole time in their Volvos and VWs. When you drive, the streets and their grids plug themselves into some low-rent section of the brain. Some dud bit of the brain. Novelists are pashas and drunks, too; but they do have this dud bit of the brain. Poets don’t have this dud bit—the bit marked AUTOMOBILE.

  This picture may well be very different in the United States, where the cult of personal mobility—and the distances—are much more serious. Maybe, in America, poets drive, but drive badly. Did Lowell drive? Did Berryman? I want to see the math on this.

  Poets shouldn’t drive. And that’s the truth. It took the twentieth century, with its cars, to tell us something about poets’ brains.

  My father is a poet as well as a novelist—a big difference between us. I know he is a real poet because he doesn’t drive. He can drive (he veered around behind the wheel of a jeep once or twice in the war). He just doesn’t.

  * * *

  *

  Out in the Midwest, the word Johnson is constantly in use. For a start, everyone is called Johnson. I am reminded of the old loggers’ song lovingly quoted by Kurt Vonnegut:

  My name is Yon Yonson

  I come from Wisconsin

  I work as a lumberjack there…

  Everyone is called Johnson. And everything is called Johnson. And everywhere is called Johnson: streets, forts, bridges, creeks.

  Colloquially, Johnson has two meanings. It signifies the male organ, as in this snippet of dialogue from Bellow’s The Dean’s December: “I held the man’s
Johnson for him. You understand what I’m saying? I held his dick for him to pee in the flask.” A Johnson is also a regular guy and a standup American. “A Johnson honors his obligations,” writes William Burroughs in The Place of Dead Roads. “A Johnson minds his own business, will give help when help is needed.” In Madison, I get a fax from Will Self, reminding me to look up his friend Paul Ingram at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City. “Paul Ingram,” writes Self, “is a Johnson.” In Iowa City I have a lively dinner with Paul Ingram, in a joint called something like Johnson’s. Paul is definitely a Johnson of the second kind.

  By this stage of the tour, I am wondering what kind of Johnson I am: a robotically garrulous and insanely peripatetic hireling of my own novel. Later, on the West Coast, John Marshall of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer begins our interview by saying, “The woman I share a desk with read that profile of you in Vanity Fair and said it made you seem like a real asshole.”

  “That’s true enough.”

  Some interviewers have read your book twice and are bubbling with quotes. Others haven’t even finished the dust jacket—or even started it. Mr. Marshall is somewhere in the middle: robustly professional. I am a part of his weekly routine. Still, the hour and a half passes swiftly and pleasantly.

  “Nice meeting you,” he says.

  “Nice meeting you. Oh, and tell that bitch I’m not an asshole.”

  Tell her I’m a Johnson.

  * * *

  *

  People say that novelists, nowadays, are like rock stars.

  On what planet are they living?

  It’s been that way for years.

  This is my fourth or fifth World Tour, and there’s still something I can never get right. Every evening, as I prepare to abandon the ruined hotel room and search for my signing pen among the crack pipes and the splayed and sated groupies (or “inkies,” as we novelists call them), I keep trying to throw the TV out of the window and into the swimming pool. And the TV always lands in the flower bed or on the patio. For some reason my aim is much truer with the fax machine and the minibar.

  * * *

  *

  After reading at Book Soup, on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, I eat there with an old school friend and his wife, the three of us roosting on stools at the bar in order to persist with our smoking. Seated in a line beside me are ten or eleven people, and everyone is displaying at least one copy of a book by me.

  This sight gives me the purest rush of authorial megalomania. I think: That’s what the world is supposed to be like. All the bars should be like this bar. And all the restaurants. Nobody should even think of going anywhere without a Martin Amis.

  * * *

  *

  I enjoy getting out of the house and meeting people, partly because it is the opposite of what I do all day; and being sent on tour is a privilege. But I am trying to see the process from the outside. You are pinched and poked (as Updike put it), you are on exhibit, you are inspected, then politely lauded (or very occasionally traduced). All day you are talking into a mike: everything you say is amplified or recorded or transmitted. Everything you say is mediated.

  This article insists that you are a Johnson of the second kind; that article insists that you are a Johnson of the first kind, and of the first order. You are quoted and misquoted, represented and misrepresented. You tell yourself to hold something back but you can’t hold anything back—because your novel is out there, too, on display, and your novel holds nothing back.

  * * *

  *

  Earlier in the tour, the nightly reading felt like an ordeal, then a hurdle, then a testing routine. But by now it is almost as enjoyable as a bad habit; and I expect no grief at Denver’s Tattered Cover. A writer is nothing without a reader. A reader is needed to close the circle. A story is nothing without a listener. And this is old knowledge. Yet in the age of publicity the bond seems to require public confirmation. “Could you personalize that for me?” “Sure. What’s your name?” Meet the Author is becoming Meet the Reader. And I find it to be salutary.

  I have long thought, in addition, that every instance of travel is a kind of short story. So a long book tour almost amounts to a collection. Pondering this, I assume that such a volume would be very repetitive. But it is all in the telling—as John Updike showed in Bech: A Book. Here is another elder I feel free to admire.

  Earlier I said that the touring author is “very occasionally traduced.” In the greenroom after a reading at the Miami Book Fair, I was confronted by a fellow author—she was about my age and robustly punklike in appearance—who said, “In my opinion your stuff is shit.” I thanked her with a smile and a nod. “Yeah!” she added as I made my way by. “Not everyone thinks you’re marvelous!” I turned and thanked her again.

  Now she probably thought that my show of gratitude was politely insincere (just me being English). And so did I, at least to begin with. But her words, I soon decided, were just what I needed to hear. Because the idea was forming in me that everyone really did think I was marvelous. And how did that happen?

  On any given day many thousands of writers are touring America; dozens or scores of them hurry past you in every major airport. The whole business is eased along by semiprofessionalized rites of generosity and goodwill. And composers of literary fiction, perhaps, enjoy extra kudos, if only because they’re not responsible for (I don’t know) Drapes and Upholstery or Getting the Most out of Your Rottweiler.

  Not everyone thinks you’re marvelous. That’s worth remembering. In a continentwide country of 300 million people (which I keep flying over), a stretch of high modernity so multilayered and diverse, there are bound to be a few exceptions, scattered around here and there.

  The New Yorker 1995

  The King’s English*1

  Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist—in other words, my mother did it all. It should be noted, though, that if I did come across him (before he slipped back into his study), he always said something that made me laugh or smile. This went a very long way. And the humor usually derived from the originality of his phrasing. When I was sixteen or seventeen, and started reading books for grown-ups, I became in his eyes worth talking to. And when, half a decade later, I started using the English language in the literary pages of the newspapers, I became worth correcting. I was in my early-middle twenties; my father was still amiable, but he was lenient no longer.

  “Has your enormity in The Observer been pointed out to you?” he asked with enthusiasm over breakfast one Sunday morning. (I had left home by then, but I still spent about every other weekend at his house.) “My enormity?” I knew he was applying the word in its proper sense—“something very bad,” and not “something very big in size.” And my mistake was certainly humiliating: I had used martial as a verb. Later, while continuing to avoid hopefully (a favorite with politicians, as he insists), I pooh-poohed his reprimand about my harmless use of the dangling thankfully. I also took it in good part when, to dramatize my discipleship, as he saw it, of Clive James (a very striking new voice in the 1970s), Kingsley started reading out my reviews in an Australian accent.

  But there was one conversation that I still recall with a sincere moan of shame: it concerned the word infamous. In a piece about the “Two Cultures” debate, I referred to F. R. Leavis’s “infamous crucifixion of C. P. Snow.” “You leave us in no doubt,” said Kingsley watchfully, “that you disapproved of it.” I remained silent. I didn’t say, “Actually, Dad, I thought infamous was just a cool new way of saying notorious.” Infamous will in fact now serve as the reigning shibboleth (or “test word,” or giveaway). Anyone who uses it loosely, as I did, is making the following announcement: I write without much care and without much feeling. I just write like other people write. As Kingsley puts it in The King’s English (and “the King,” by the way, was a nickname he tolerated):

  Both adjective and noun [infamous and infamy] used to be terms of extreme moral
disapproval, equivalent in depth of feeling to “abominable” and “wickedness.” Then quite recently…the adjective weakened in severity to something on the level of “notorious” [or, he might have added, simply “famous”]….The noun infamy, although seemingly out of use, retains its former meaning, but infamous is now unusable through ambiguity.

  Kingsley gives some good examples (so-and-so’s undergraduate life in the 1920s “is now infamous”). But I wish he were alive to savor what must surely be the final profanation of this blameless adjective. A distinguished Guardian sportswriter recently referred to Steve McClaren—the sacked manager of the national football team—and “his infamous umbrella.” All McClaren had done with his umbrella was stand on the touchline under it, during a downpour (which was considered a little unmanly). With infamous, we see linguistic incuriosity in its most damaging form. A supposedly smart addition to the language becomes an inadvertent subtraction. “Unusable through ambiguity”: the same can be said of brutalize, decimate, crescendo, dilemma, alibi, avid, oblivious, optimistic, eke out, and refute, among many others.

  Such a tendency is nowhere better caught in The King’s English than in the entry under “Déjà vu, an uncanny sense of”:

  Its original application was to a transient psychological state, not uncommon among those under about forty, in which the subject feels that he has seen before some place where he has provably never been in this life (thus providing fanciful evidence for reincarnation). The journalistic contribution has been to apply this feeling to some event or situation a person has witnessed before.