by Amis, Martin
What I was referring to, I later realised, was the erotic picaresque of my early adulthood. This was one of my hopes of Julia: that she would emancipate me from the moronic inferno of my lovelife (best encapsulated in the person of Phoebe Phelps)…
Honour
Odin, god of poetry and war…Fortified by a second round of cocktails, we had moved on to America – America and the religious Right, and the erring clerics of the Bible Belt.
Saul was telling us about a reverse recently suffered by the Born Again community in West Virginia. An unusually puritanical video vicar (he hoped to criminalise adultery) was under federal investigation for swindling his flock (he peddled miracle cures, they said, and preyed on the ill and the old). In addition, the troubled divine had just been found under a stack of hookers in a de luxe Miami sex club called the Gomorrah, a visit he paid for with church funds…
‘We’d better leave aside the question of hypocrisy,’ said Saul. ‘As for relieving Christians of their jewels and disability cheques, he’ll just say, Well everyone else does it – which is no kind of defence, of course, though it happens to be true. As for the hookers and the church funds…You’ve got to understand that in America there are two distinct spheres of wrongdoing.’
‘Which are?’
‘Ethics and morals. Going to the Gomorrah – that’s morals. Paying for the Gomorrah out of the donations bowl – that’s ethics. Morals is sex and ethics is money.’
…Now Saul had a famous laugh: back went the head, up went the chin, and then you heard the slow, deep, guttural staccato. And Saul, by the way, loved all jokes, without exception, the feeblest, the dirtiest, the sickest. But the line about ethics and morals hardly qualified as a joke to Saul Bellow: it was just a sober statement about America (and is a fact confirmed every day).
So it wasn’t Saul’s laugh that now turned all heads, that stilled the tables, that made the waiters freeze and smile – it was Julia’s. An orchestral laugh, eruptive, joyous, with a note of pure anarchy that I never dreamt she had in her.
Saul and I looked at each other in wonder…And then we all cheerfully frowned over the menus, and ordered our nice pieces of fish and our costly white wine, and the dinner at last began.
* * *
—————
She was my age and she was a widow. Her first husband, a handsome and vigorous philosopher, died of cancer at the age of thirty-five. More than this, she was a pregnant widow; and I was the father.
You know, when my erotic life got going, in the mid-1960s, I pretty soon decided that I wouldn’t encumber myself with worries about honour. Given the historical situation (what with the sexual revolution and so on), honour, it seemed to me, would be nothing but trouble.
And the human being who would go on to set me straight about all this – not by suasion but by example – was already present, that night at Odin’s. A tiny amphibian, less like a newt than a tadpole, scudding and skittering about in there, enwombed. It was Nathaniel, my first son.
In conclusion: Memoir of a Philo-Semite
June 4, 1967, was a Sunday.
In the Middle East the armies of three nation states seemed poised to attack Israel – in a campaign that Gamal Abdel Nasser, their de facto generalissimo, promised ‘would be total’; and ‘the objective will be Israel’s destruction’.
In London W9, on the afternoon of June 4, I was watching a Zionist getting dressed. She reached for an item of clothing I now knew was called a panty girdle. It was as white as bridal satin; then she reached for her skirt, which was as black as mourning ribbon; then for her blood-red shirt.
She was called…oh, my fingertips are impatient to type it out, the sonorous double dactyl of her real full name. But I have written about her twice before (in a novel, in a memoir), and her pseudonym is here preserved: Rachel.
The black skirt, the red shirt.
‘I’ve got to rush,’ she said.
Rachel looked about herself, as if she might have left something behind. And she had: she had left it between the sheets, where I still lay…Even in the 1960s you occasionally heard that tender euphemism for virginity: ‘unawakened’. What Rachel had left behind that Sunday afternoon was her unawakened self, her unawakenedness.
I was pushing eighteen, she was a year older – the same age as Israel. It was first love, our first love, my first, her first.
‘It’s half past four,’ she said.
‘You’ll be in time. It’s only two stops.’
‘But it’s Sunday. On Sundays it takes longer because they insist on watching you recover. I don’t know why. They watch you having your cup of tea and your ginger biscuit. And they close early too. Sometimes they turn people away.’
I knew exactly what she was talking about. And I was already sitting up and getting dressed. ‘I’ll put you on the bus.’
‘Hurry up then.’
We embraced and kissed and sank on to our sides; but not for long. Rachel, a Sephardi, with her ebony hair, her fine tomahawk nose, her wide lips the same colour as her complexion (like damp sand at the seashore). I was seventeen, I read poetry, and I reckoned I knew an epiphany when I saw one.
Rachel had to go to the institute, she had to hurry to the institute on a Sunday, in time to give her blood to Israel. And there was no escaping the simple truth that she had just given her blood to me.
Which would have been enough, more than enough, to activate something durable. But it was already activated, it was already there.
A flying visit to Christmas Day, 1961. After a four-hour lunch I am playing Scrabble with Kingsley and Theo Richmond (an innermost family friend). My father takes two tiles from his rack and for a teasing moment, before withdrawing them, forms the word YID. I am twelve.
Do I even know what that word means? Anyway, Kingsley gives a shrugging laugh, and Theo gives a laugh of a kind (it is not his real laugh), and I woodenly do enough to seem to smile. Even as I write I can remember how my cheeks felt: like cardboard.
During that moment I must have made several quite strenuous deductions. That Theo was Jewish;*12 that yid was a hate word for Jew; and that hatred of Jews was something that existed, and was well established. And was dark and hot and insidious and violent.*13
What did I have to go on? Only some photographs I’d seen in the Daily Mirror, back in Swansea when I was nine or ten, and this exchange with my mother.
‘…Mum.’
She could see I was worried. ‘Yes, Mart.’
‘Hitler, and all those starved people.’ I was thinking of the railtracks, the smokestacks. ‘Why was Hitler…why was he –?’
‘Oh, don’t worry about Hitler,’ she said (very characteristically). ‘You’ve got blond hair and blue eyes. Hitler would have loved you.’
From that reassurance – that Hitler would have loved me – two whole novels would eventually emerge. Because novels come from long-marinated and unregarded anxiety, from silent anxiety…
* * *
—————
Rachel gave blood on Sunday. The next morning, at 07.10 Israeli time, the June War – now known as the Six Day War – began. Rachel’s anxiety too was silent, or mostly silent; it had eased by Wednesday; and that following weekend she was quietly and calmly stunned with relief.
I now ask myself, How much did she know? Did she know of Nasser’s pledge – that he would ‘totally exterminate the Jewish state for all time’? Did she know about extermination? Her tiny, witty grandmother, who lived in the family house high up on Finchley Road, was orthodox, to the extent that even her instant coffee, her green-labelled Gold Blend, was stamped Kosher (‘proper’); she knew about extermination. Rachel’s uncle, Uncle Balfour, knew about extermination…
And I, what did I know? Nothing. I was seventeen, and politically detached; more than this, I felt that history couldn’t reach me, somehow, that it couldn’t reach me. Invulnerable to H
itler, thanks to my colouring, I was also an irrelevance to Nasser, for the same reason. Both men might have found me guilty on a lesser charge: I was a Zionist sympathiser and I was a Jew-lover.
And I was. I loved Rachel, of course (as who would not?), but the point is I loved Theo, too, loved him anyway, from early childhood. I loved looking at his eyes, which seemed almost kaleidoscopic, like a mobile above a crib. In his case a living, stirring pattern of all the gentler human impulses. The intelligent gentleness of those eyes.
‘What is it, five hundred millilitres every six weeks? You give so much,’ I said, ‘I keep worrying you’ll disappear. And you don’t eat. Or sleep.’
They were at the bus stop and he had his arms round her middle. ‘You’re so slim anyway. That panty girdle – why d’you wear it?’
‘Because my stomach sticks out.’
‘It doesn’t stick out. It curves forward. It’s beautiful, and I love it.’
They embraced and kissed as the double-decker pulled up with an indulgent sigh.
* * *
—————
A theory – floated here with all due diffidence.
The philo-Semite and the anti-Semite do not stand in diametrical opposition, not quite. They are, alike, incapable of responding neutrally to what Bellow has called ‘the Jewish charge’, the stored energy of the Jew. Charge: ‘the property of matter that is responsible for electrical phenomena, existing in a positive or negative form’.
The stored energy, the stored history, existing in a positive or negative form.
*1 By ‘the crap generation’ I meant the one that came after the baby boomers – those born around 1970 (the Generation Xers). I couldn’t be sure, of course, but the generation that came after the crap generation (those born around 1990 – the Millennials) seemed more or less okay…The Crap Generation, as a project, was put out of its misery by Elena. ‘You’re not serious,’ she said. ‘Who do you think’ll review it, fool? Crap sociologists and crap historians and crap critics.’ This stirred my fighting spirit, and I said, ‘Yeah, well, they’ll have to take it on the chin and move on.’ Elena said, ‘Everyone’ll think you’re as bad as Kingsley. And they’ll be right. You’re having one of your dizzy spells. Forget it. The Crap Generation’s a crap idea.’
*2 Updike’s obvious living superiors did not form a numerous company, consisting at the time of Bellow and Nabokov. In his New Yorker reviews Updike was consistently impertinent in his evaluations of Bellow, and in my opinion slackly wayward and off-target in his evaluations of Nabokov (though wonderfully expressive about the prose). Having saluted Bellow’s exuberance and melodiousness, Updike adds, in more or less the same breath: ‘at this point of his career, Bellow has sat atop the American literary heap longer than anyone else since William Dean Howells’. William Dean Howells? This is, and was meant to be, slyly insulting. Unmasked by the passage of time as a bloated mediocrity, Howells lived from 1837 to 1920. In any serious critical sense, the man who sat atop the American literary heap during this period was Henry James (1843–1916)…There’ll be more to say about Updike, and more to say about James.
*3 Oh, and my fifth novel was just a few months away from completion. My first four novels, like all the British novels published in the 1970s and early 1980s, consisted of 225 pages (and took eighteen months to write); my fifth took twice that long and nearly twice that length (it seems that I’d taken a leaf out of Bellow’s book and trusted to voice)…But anyway, the arrival of my fifth novel was about fifth on my roster of imminent amplifications.
*4 I won’t be quoting myself, but I will be repeating myself (in paraphrase). This long novel is almost certainly my last long novel, and some of it – about 1 per cent – has the character of an anthology. Self-plagiarism is not a felony; I would agree, though, that I am open to the charge of authorial misconduct. Much of the time I’m simply relaying necessary information. As for the rest, I’m usually turning again to an unanswered question, one that refuses to leave me alone.
*5 Me, and others too. Having spent time with the Bellows in I think Vermont, Philip Roth (until then a probationary intimate) wrote: ‘Dear Saul: At last you’ve married a woman who understands me. Love, Philip.’
*6 Whose shade, by the way, warily awaits the destiny of William Dean Howells. I was a late developer, and Greene was the first serious writer I ever read; and I revered him, I think, largely for that reason. Forty years later I incredulously revisited Brighton Rock and The End of the Affair, and it became quite clear to me that Greene could hardly hold a pen. His verbal surface is simply dull of ear (a briar patch of rhymes and chimes); and his plots, his narrative arrangements, tend to dissipate into the crassly tendentious (because they’re determined by religion. See below). The Stockholm Prize is adjudicated by a standing committee, so it is less scattershot than some; still, there have been many famous absurdities (and the great Borges said that not giving him the Nobel was ‘an old Scandinavian tradition’). A Laureate Graham Greene would have been as historically embarrassing as the Laureate Eyvind Johnson…I interviewed Greene, in Paris, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday (1984), and came out with the rudest question I have ever asked anyone. It was a sort of accident: my question was in fact kindly meant (and at that stage I still thought he was some good). As we’ll see in about twenty pages’ time, he took it rather well.
*7 I naturally had an encyclopedic knowledge of drunkards and drunkenness. ‘Now and then’, wrote my father in his Memoirs, ‘I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time.’ In addition, Myfanwy, my little sister, would drink herself to death (2000); and so would Robinson, my most long-established friend (2002). By then I felt I could add a modest corollary to Saul’s Law. Consciousness is terrible; and tomorrow, moreover, is neither here nor there, because tomorrow, for drunkards, doesn’t exist. There: consciousness is terrible, and tomorrow is crap. Suicides, on the whole, climactically subscribe to both propositions. John Berryman, a suicide, wrote about the struggle to forgive his father, another suicide, and recalled the ‘frantic passage’ of Berryman Sr, ‘when he could not live / an instant longer’ (The Dream Songs)…My brother Nicolas and I were teetotal until our early twenties – because we associated alcohol with louts, hooligans, and tramps. This was unaccountable. We grew up in literary bohemia. Why didn’t we associate alcohol with all the poets, novelists, playwrights, and critics we saw every other day, slurring, weeping, singing, declaring war, professing love, and falling crunchily down the stairs?
*8 Later I regaled Julia with the following quote. The country ‘takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness and despair of these martyrs…So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, “If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn’t get through this either.” ’ And Julia understood.
*9 For Roth in his comic novels drunkenness is a goy thing, an Irish thing (the owner, Peter Langan, would be very much on the premises, would be fatally in situ, when he burnt his house down in 1988), a Polack thing – those people, as Alexander Portnoy puts it, whose names ‘are all X’s and Y’s’.
*10 The Nobel Prize, first awarded in 1901, gives us a useful index. Twenty-two per cent of its recipients are Jewish; and Jews comprise just 2 per cent of the world population.
*11 ‘An illiterate, underbred book…the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating.’ This was a diary entry, admittedly, and not a published statement – but still. ‘A queasy undergradu
ate scratching his pimples’, she says elsewhere: and this is at least fleetingly sane. When she returns to the pimples motif, though, she writes: ‘the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges’. I wonder if Woolf was slightly thrown by the fact that Ulysses is, among its other strengths, a masterpiece of anti-anti-Semitism.
*12 ‘Richmond’, I now know, was an Anglicisation of ‘Ryczke’ (pronounced Rich-ke). Thirty-four years later Theo would publish Konin: A Quest, his reconstruction (through oral testimony) of the Polish shtetl of that name. Konin, the Ryczkes’ home town, was wiped off the map by the Germans in 1939.
*13 My father’s anti-Semitism was of course reflexive and non-visceral, and far less insistent than the anti-Semitism of Virginia Woolf. It belonged, not to the drawing room, but to the parlour or the lounge: it was in origin suburban and lower middle class. That it was inherited and largely unexamined was shameful enough, I think; but Kingsley seemed to accept it as you would a birthmark. It was mild and idle, and had no public aspect. When he went into print on the matter he knew the difference between right and wrong. ‘Anti-Semitism in any form’, he wrote in a letter to the Spectator the following year (1962), ‘must be combated’, ‘including the fashionable one of anti-anti-anti-Semitism’. Nietzsche coined ‘anti-anti-Semitism’, which was his own position, just as Hitchens’s Communism (seemingly) resolved itself into ‘anti-anti-Communism’.
Guideline
Things Fiction Can’t Do
Before we go on to the next chapter do you mind if we take a short break? I want a rest, just now, from ‘the fury and the mire of human veins’ (Yeats). My conscience, when I train it on Phoebe, is reasonably clear, but it’s still a – she’s a –