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

by Martin Amis

  Which is your favorite of your own novels and why?

  Richard Long, by e-mail

  Your novels are like your children, so you don’t have a favorite. But you will certainly nurse a soft spot for the one that had the hardest time of it. So I will go for Yellow Dog. My fellow novelist Tibor Fischer contributed a gun-jumping hatchet job; and, after that, everyone who could hold a pen was suddenly feeling brave. For writers, a grudge is a terrible drag (though I hereby embrace the opportunity to repeat that Fischer is a creep and a wretch—and, oh yeah, a fat arse). Didn’t he say somewhere that he wrote the review just to stir things up and make a name for himself? Well, there’s some transient reassurance to be gained from the likelihood that he will be remembered for nothing else. But grudges should be quickly evacuated, as if they were poisons. These acrimony pageants bother you to no purpose: as Robert De Niro says in Goodfellas, “Don’t give them the satisfaction.” I doubt that there is any satisfaction in it for anyone.

  Although I was fond of Yellow Dog and still am, it wasn’t my favorite—not until I had to watch it being taunted and scragged in the school yard.

  How do you think you might have ended up spending your working life if your father hadn’t been a famous writer?

  John Gordon, Eastleigh

  Well, John, that would wholly depend, as must be obvious, on what Kingsley had chosen to do instead. If he had been a newsagent, then he would have fixed me up with a delivery round. If he had been an estate agent, then I would have walked into a job at, say, Stickley & Kent. If he had been a philosopher of subatomic thermodynamics, then I would have…Are you beginning to get the idea?

  No. It is in ourselves that we are thus and thus.

  Now that Saul Bellow has passed away, who do you regard as the greatest living American novelist(s)?

  Philip East, by e-mail

  John Updike, and then your namesake, Mr. Roth. With Don DeLillo coming up on the flank. That’s just my opinion. Time will sort it out. Bellow’s preeminence, while he was here, seemed to me conclusive; it stared me in the face. As Matthew Arnold said of Shakespeare, “Others abide our question. Thou art free.”

  Why are you such a snob?

  Beatrice Franks, by e-mail

  In the USSR a very high status was accorded to “hereditary proletarians.” I can’t aspire to that, but I have certain credentials. My father was a lower-middle-class scholarship boy from South London (Norbury). So it would hardly be my place, would it, to go and give myself airs?

  A snob is “a person who has an exaggerated respect for high social position or wealth and who looks down on those regarded as socially inferior.” In Yellow Dog I described the institution of the monarchy as “a wank”—a designation free, I think, of exaggerated respect. As for the so-called socially inferior, I have devoted many hundreds of pages of fiction to them, and only a novelist manqué can write with a sneer on his face. If you want to learn about the human disaster of snobbery, read Trollope. Apart from anything else, snobbery is a full-time job: you’re never off duty. You never have a moment’s peace.

  On the other hand, I think snobbery is due for a bit of a comeback. But not the old shite to do with “class.” “There is a universal eligibility to be noble,” said Bellow rousingly. There is clearly a universal eligibility to be rational and literate. Sometimes snobbery is forced upon you. So let’s have a period of exaggerated respect for reason; and let’s look down on people who use language without respecting it. Liars and hypocrites and demagogues, of course, but also their fellow travelers in verbal cynicism, inertia, and sloth. “High social position” brings no immunity. Princess Diana was also the princess—no, the empress—of secondhand speech, of moldering novelties, of gullible vulgarisms, of what might be called herd-words and herd-phrases. Seen it, done it, been there, got the T-shirt, had a banana. No-brainer. I don’t think so.

  What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?

  Nesa Gardezi, by e-mail

  One day I returned home from a book tour in the United States, and I suddenly noticed that the leading edge of the toilet roll in the bathroom wasn’t folded into an inviting V—as it was in all those American hotels.

  Not only that. I then had a tedious five minutes issuing instructions about the new arrangement to my wife.

  Is it true that the Lorne Guyland character in Money was based on Kirk Douglas, and, if so, did old Kirk really stand naked in front of you and ask, “Is this the body of a sixty-five-year-old man?”

  John Niven, by e-mail

  Lorne Guyland, let us say, was made possible by Kirk Douglas. Kirk didn’t disrobe for me personally, but, on the set, he was always ripping his clothes off. Movie stars are funny that way (or used to be). During the same shoot I had dinner with Harvey Keitel in his room at Claridge’s, and he was stripped to the waist throughout. It was a hot night, I allow. Kirk was very bright and very sweet in his way. As he said to the director (who was soon to be fired), “The thing is, John, I’m unbelievably insecure.” He was, again, naked at the time.

  Do you ever worry you have inherited some of your father’s misogyny? Wasn’t Julie Burchill right that Nicola Six, in London Fields, is a murderer’s dream-girl?

  Jenny Donovan, Cardiff

  Try telling my fully politicized wife that I’m a misogynist—and see what you get.

  To spell this out: I am not only a feminist—I am a gynocrat. That is to say, I believe in rule by women. Feminism is in fact the subject of my next novel, which is called The Pregnant Widow. Why the title? The Russian thinker Alexander Herzen said that after a revolution we should, on the whole, be braced by the fact that one order has given way to another; but what we are left with, he added, is not a birth, not a newborn child, but a pregnant widow—and there will be much grief and tribulation before we hear the baby’s cries. In other words, consciousness is not revolutionized by the snap of a finger. And feminism, I reckon, is about halfway through its second trimester.

  If you think that Nicola Six is a misogynistic creation, you should read The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark. And I love this stuff about “dream-girls.” The heroine of House of Meetings, too, has been described, here and there, as a “male fantasy figure.” All they’re saying is that she’s pretty. I think that certain reviewers have subconsciously persuaded themselves that male novelists are by definition physically unattractive, and so consort, willy-nilly, with the physically unattractive, and when alone are reduced to having male fantasies about male fantasies.

  How has your motivation for writing changed throughout your career?

  Bob Swankie, Dundee

  I don’t think motivation is quite the right word. Writing fiction is less mental and more physiological than is generally understood—once you’re started, decisions and calculations, matters of reason, hardly ever come into it. It took me years to find out how true this is. When I was younger, I would come up against a difficulty in the narrative and I would beat my head against it for hours and days at a time. Now I feel prompted to leave my desk and pick up a book; and I don’t return to my desk until my legs take me there. When they do, I find that the difficulty has been resolved. Your unconscious does it. Your unconscious does it all.

  How did you research your new novel, House of Meetings? You have not, I believe, ever been to Russia?

  Oksana Everts, London

  No. I did it by reading (and imagining). The Daily Mail school of criticism would have it that all writers are sneak thieves and bag snatchers—that they simply ponce off nonfiction. But reading is the other half of writing, or the other third: you write, you read, and you live. Also, Oksana, it got to the point where I thought a visit to Russia (very desirable in itself) would only confuse and impede me.

  What is the most depressing thing about Britain you have observed since your return? And the best?

  Grant Mullin, Surrey

  I lived in Uruguay for nearly three years. Since my return, the most depressing thing was the sight of white middle-class d
emonstrators, last August, waddling around under placards saying, WE ARE ALL HIZBOLLAH NOW. Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can. As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: “We don’t want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you.” Similarly, when I went on Question Time the other week, a woman in the audience, her young voice quavering with indignation, presented the following argument: since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting, or rather peppering, the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, “should be dropping bombs on themselves!” And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism and white guilt, have become the apologists for a creedal-political wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, imperialist, inquisitorial, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those who want them dead.

  That was the most depressing thing. The best thing has been to find myself living in what, despite its faults (despite a million ills), is an extraordinarily successful multiracial society. This is a beautiful idea, with a good chance of becoming a beautiful reality, too.

  The Independent 2007

  Politics 2

  Ivan Is Introduced to the USSR: All Together Now

  Mark D. Steinberg, ed. Voices of Revolution 1917

  This is a formidably boring book—which is itself of some interest, given the desperate fascination of the historical moment. The documents collected here allegedly vivify “the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the Russian people—workers, peasants, soldiers” during that “landmark” year in a “rich and complex language.” And even as one toils, tills, and battles one’s way through Mark D. Steinberg’s introduction and the first of his three scene-setting historical essays, one still imagines that a great feast lies in store.

  The sense of anticipation, as is meet, seems strongly progressive and egalitarian in tendency. You think: down with the pontifications of arid academics; let us hear from the salt of the earth….What we get, of course, is another revolution that failed. With a handful of exceptions, the words of the people are even more boring than Professor Steinberg’s. This has very little to do with the fact that the contributors are “lower-class” (a shocking designation in the context of the author’s sanitized editorials. How about “unempowered”?). It is more fundamental than that; and more integral, too.

  If we exclude the poems (which there are good reasons for doing anyway), then the great majority of the documents are not “voices”; they are choruses. They are resolutions, appeals, protocols, petitions, and “instructions” from various councils, initiative groups, general meetings, commissions, regimental associations, and village assemblies. “A joint resolution,” then, “of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies”; or prepare yourself for the stifling intimacy of a “Resolution Passed at the General Meetings of 3 and (illegible) August 1917 by the Cultural-Educational Commission Under the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies of the Factory of the Rozhdestvensky Manufacturing Company of P. V. Berg in Tver.” “In the name of…” “We, the undersigned…” Elias Canetti told us something about crowds and power. Professor Steinberg tells us something, with mad iteration, about crowds and prose: they can’t do it. This book demonstrates that writing is somehow synonymous with the isolated self. And one wonders afresh whether collaboration, in literature, has ever produced anything better than the workaday. Nothing flowers, even when the co-author is William Shakespeare.

  Most readerly responses can be dramatized by quotation—but not boredom. Of the three categories, the workers are the most committed to collective utterance, and their texts are therefore more boring than those of the soldiers and the peasants. So here (by reverse psychology) is the most interesting paragraph from the shop floor:

  Citizens! Like a venerable oak standing in the middle of the forest, the giant Putilov factory stands in the middle of state industry, making the earth quake with the heavy blows of its hammers. From all ends of Russia, workers have come to work in it, and while they are working they think thoughts: to the whistle of the saw, the screech of the drive belts, the dispiriting sight of the gun carriages and cannons, gloomy thoughts creep into your mind. In work as hard as prison labor, the mothers and fathers who gave us birth die, and we too are dying right here: in despairing alienation from the joys we envy, from the wealth and culture that is enjoyed not far from us—separated only by a fat monument, the old Narva Gates—by the rich, “educated” minority.

  Despite the swift breakdown of the opening simile, there is much to admire here (or there is if you are on page 187 of Voices of Revolution, 1917): the pride, the anger, and the sacrificial heroism which the Bolsheviks would go on to demand and enforce; it also reads like the work of an individual. Elsewhere, minor anomalies (“Approved unanimously; opposed 1”) and stray vehemencies (“The Duma must die!!!”) get you through another couple of inches of text. Usually, and essentially, though, the workers are simply listing their demands: food, higher wages, peace (ritually “without annexations or indemnities”), plus all power to the Soviets, and long live the Constituent Assembly (promised for November). From the outset—March 1917—the proletarian rhetoric feels thirdhand. We know that factory, and what it makes is boilerplate.

  As already noted, the soldiers and peasants are more inclined to wander off on their own, and very occasionally they give us what we realize we are missing: details, anecdotes—nonabstractions. There is a stunned, numbed letter from a soldier who has just witnessed the murder of three officers suspected of treachery in the Kornilov affair: “Vasiliev the general was dragged over the pavement: he was covered with blood and asked for nothing, just kept crossing himself.” This is a lonely example of unselfconscious observation, from a lonely pen. In the main, one relies on mere accumulation of instances for one’s sense of the terrifying squalor of the front. The army was of course almost entirely made up of peasants. Those that remained in the countryside were the elderly, and those that returned to it were the wounded (together with a growing stream of deserters). The communications from the “esteemed reapers” (in Stalin’s facetious phrase) are written by the literate minority, who for obvious reasons sought a left-leaning cohesiveness. This voice or chorus is revealing only when it shows exasperation and then alarm at the extent of rural unpreparedness for the great experiment:

  I categorically declare that in our the village [sic] of Belogorenka…we do not have any provocateurs…. Comrade soldiers, I beg you to send provocateurs here because I can’t deal with this alone and I don’t know what’s going on there in Petrograd.

  He means “propagandists”: educators, indoctrinators, radicalizers. There were plenty of propagandists in the cities and (more spottily, true) at the front.

  Steinberg’s book gets livelier in the final section, oddly called “Soviets in Power: From the October Revolution to the Closing of the Constituent Assembly” (oddly, because the Soviets, in this period, were joining the long queue to the ash heap of history), and livelier still after the Bolsheviks began to show their hand. A letter to Trotsky: “I am sending you a New Year’s greeting from the whole Russian people. God damn you to hell!” A letter to Lenin (the preobscenity endearment is superb):

  It’s been four whole days since we’ve had a glimpse of bread, we are walking around naked and barefoot….If you’ve picked up the reins then go ahead and drive, and if you can’t, then, honey, you can take a flying fuck to hell, or as we say in Siberia, you’re a goddamned motherfucker, son of an Irkutsk cunt, who’d like to sell us out to the Germans.

  It is clear, incidentally, from another volume in the Annals of Communism series, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (edited by Richard Pipes), that the Bolsheviks took money from the German “scum”—Lenin—before and after October. This was opportunism on his part, not the high treason of which he was widely ac
cused. If the socialist experiment had gone on schedule, then Germany would have staged a cooperative revolution in 1918, and the clandestine payments would have been just another brilliancy in what Lenin, referring to another deception, called “a beautiful plan.”

  Communism was a beautiful plan. And a beautiful intention, in its way (if you happen to be attracted to a creepy utopia where, according to Trotsky, your neighbors will all be Goethes and Beethovens). Similarly, a book representing the soliloquys of the common dramatis personae of 1917: that would have been nice, too. But in revolutionary times, it seems, the inner voice has to sleep in the dark, and the self is inevitably folded outward to the world, and expresses itself collectively. Steinberg’s contributors are under the impression (and it is not quite an illusion) that their two bits might shape the destiny of a great nation. This whiff of power, in any case, is enough to overload the individual. The poems included here are similarly distorted; they are marching songs, or factory hooters, or unearned excursions into the high style, in which the authors speak not for themselves but for Russia—or for all humanity.

  So-and-so’s “language is marked by the richness of visual imagery that typifies folk language,” writes Ekaterina Betekhtina in a supplementary essay called “Style in Lower-Class Writing in 1917.” Having chain-smoked his way through that, the present reviewer was moved to recall how little he had relished the essays by Professor Steinberg (which amount to some 130 pages). Steinberg is also a politicized being. To the grim piety long associated with history “from below” he adds his peculiar moral bloodlessness. And if he has simply succumbed to the advice of the editorial board, then we are left staring at another example of the literary antitalent of committees.