Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  Oh quiet, Spats. Stop it at once. Excuse me, I’ll have to attend to him for a moment, and while I’m at it I’ll make some more tea…Oh that’s very thoughtful of you. Thanks. Yes, black, please. No sugar.

  …Anyway I want to go on for a while about the things fiction can’t do – and its blindspots are in themselves illuminating. I’ll have to generalise with some shamelessness, as usual, so bear in mind that a generalisation, in these pages, isn’t meant to have the force of an axiom; it merely draws notice to a marked tendency. And it follows that a generalisation is not dismayed by the unearthing of one or two exceptions – or one or two thousand exceptions.

  It is sometimes said that Coleridge (d. 1834) was the last man to have read everything. But not even a veteran mythomaniac would dare to claim that title in 2016, no, not even the studious Mr Trump. Thus the blandest possible generalisation must now coexist with an unknowable multitude of anomalies. So let’s forget about the anomalies and concentrate on the generalisations – about what fiction can’t do.

  Oh, on the stranger-than-fiction front…Actually nothing is stranger than fiction. You may well have ‘troubling dreams’, these days, but you’re not going to wake up ‘transformed into a gigantic insect’. And such lines as no writer could invent a character more outlandish than our would-be president and our would-be president has made satire redundant are almost touchingly naive. One thing literature can do, and has always done and will always go on doing (with no particular exertion), is conjure up characters stranger than Trump. As for satire: while turning him into art, would Swift, Pope, Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, or Don DeLillo, say, feel that there was nothing to add?

  * * *

  —————

  …In real life – in society, in civilisation – we bow to the old rule, No freedom without laws. Novels and stories aren’t like that: in fiction there are no laws and at the same time freedom is limitless. Fiction is freedom. Mm, I suppose that’s what some people find so terrifying, early on, about the blank sheet of white paper: write anything you want; no one’s stopping you.

  Still, I’ve come to an awkward conclusion: there are certain things that fiction must broach with extreme caution, if at all, certain sizable and familiar zones of human existence that seem naturally immune to the novelist’s art. At the least, fictional successes, in these areas, are dismally rare. Just the three things, by my count (though there may be more) – and that’s not many things.

  One. Dreams. This would be the least controversial…

  ‘Tell a dream, lose a reader’ is a dictum usually attributed to Henry James (though I and others have failed to track it down). Dreams are all right as long as they exhaust themselves in about half a sentence; once they’re allowed to get going, and once the details start piling up, then dreams become recipes either for stodge or for very thin gruel. Why is this? Any dream that lasts a paragraph, let alone a page, is already closing in on another very solid proscription, Nothing odd will do long (Samuel Johnson). But it’s even more basic than that.

  Dreams are too individualised. We all dream, but dreams are not part of our shared experience. Oh, we’ve probably all had the one where you’re sitting a major exam in a crowded public space, and your pen doesn’t work and for some reason you’re in the nude. And there are a couple of others – the aeronautic dream, the dream where your legs turn to liquid as the demon draws near, and so on. Mainly, though, and fatally, dreams are plucked from the random world of the unconscious, the subterranean perverse, reducing the dreamer–author to an agglomeration of quirks – a trait it shares with our next customer.

  Two. Sex. This would be the most controversial…

  I used to say that Pride and Prejudice has only one serious flaw: the absence of a thirty-page scene involving Mr and Mrs Darcy on their wedding night (in which Lizzie is irresistible and Fitzwilliam, too, acquits himself uncommonly well). A futile notion: where would Jane Austen find the language or even the thought patterns of sex? Even so, there’s a startlingly worldly exchange, very close to the wedding day and the festive conclusion, when Elizabeth is called in to her father’s library, and the very intelligent but very cynical Mr Bennet identifies her as a young woman of forceful and perhaps transgressive erotic range…

  It takes almost the length of the novel for Elizabeth’s dislike of Mr Darcy to evolve into love (and he has certainly earned it). Unaware of the recent sea change, Mr Bennet has rather woundingly decided that she’s about to stoop to the ‘disgrace’, as Jane Austen habitually calls it, of marrying for money. ‘I know your disposition, Lizzie,’ he tells his favourite daughter:

  I know you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband…Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape discredit and misery.

  In other words, Lizzie’s ‘disposition’ would cause her to take those ‘lively talents’ elsewhere – she would stray, she would fall. Just for a moment, listening to Mr Bennet, I miss the chapter-length sex scene even more…

  Mr Bennet’s brief speech is probably the dirtiest thing in all Jane Austen. I am now going to quote what is probably the dirtiest thing in the entirety of mainstream Victorian fiction. It comes in Dickens – Hard Times (1854). Thomas Gradgrind, the pinched, the parched utilitarian schoolmaster (who thinks that the first thing you need to know about a horse is that it’s a ‘granivorous quadruped’), is urging his beloved child, Louisa, to marry his friend Josiah Bounderby, a bumptious minor industrialist who is three times her age.

  ‘I now leave you to judge for yourself,’ said Mr Gradgrind. ‘I have stated the case, as such cases are usually stated among practical minds…The rest, my dear Louisa, is for you to decide.’

  Removing her eyes from him, she sat so long looking silently towards the town, that he said, at length: ‘Are you consulting the chimneys of the Coketown works, Louisa?’

  ‘There seems to be nothing there, but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire [note the superstitious capital] bursts out, father!’ she answered, turning quickly.

  ‘Of course I know that, Louisa. I do not see the implication of that remark.’ To do him justice he did not, at all.

  And so saying, Charles Dickens, perhaps the most headstrong writer in English, shyly shuffles from the room.

  In the West the mainstream novel got going around 1750.*1 And for a couple of centuries it was simply illegal to write about sex. Then something happened.

  Sexual intercourse began

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (Which was rather late for me) –

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles’ first LP.

  Philip Larkin, ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (1967)

  D. H. Lawrence is unquestionably the bridging figure – indeed, the putative father of the sexual revolution. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was privately printed in Italy in 1928, and then – heavily self-censored – in England in 1932. The unexpurgated version was grudgingly acquitted thirty years later, in the UK, the US, and Canada (though still found guilty in Japan, India, and Australia). Thereafter, in the anglophone world, novelists were suddenly allowed to write about sex – to write about sex without fearing the siren and the policeman’s knock.

  And so they all had a go at it. Of course they did (I fondly imagine them crouched at their desks in the on your marks position, raring to take it on). In the past, they couldn’t write about sex. Now they could. And guess what. They still couldn’t. They were free to write about it, but they couldn’t write about it with the necessary weight, they couldn’t write seriously about it; they couldn’t find – and they still haven’t found – the right voice.*2

  It is a startling and baffling lacuna – possibly the strangest of all strange things having to do with literature on the one hand and, on the other hand, life. Ph
ysical love is the force that peoples the world; and yet novelists get nowhere with it. They can’t find a tone for the transcendental element, which most of us know to be there. Lawrence spent a very long time trying (a huge fraction of his forty-four years), and he couldn’t find a tone for it either.

  The collective failure is complete – and truly abysmal. Dreams are a spume that dances on the surface of a troubled pond or puddle; but sex is oceanic, and covers seven-tenths of the globe. A force so fundamental, so varied, so grand, so rich. And yet its evocation on the page is somehow beyond us.

  Writers will just have to grin and bear it, and look for comfort where they may. Well, I suppose it magnifies our respect for the act, the act that peoples the world. It does do that. We can bow with honour to what is ineffable, and follow Dickens to the door. But why can’t we describe it? What makes our hands loth and cold?

  Just as human beings are not yet intelligent enough to understand the universe (we are at least six or seven Einsteins distant), we are also not yet sensitive enough to render physical love creatively, on the page. The attempt has been going on for only fifty-odd years, I concede. But the weight of the past is for the time being insurmountable. Centuries of inhibition and euphemism and embarrassment (and furtive chortling) have conspired to keep us underevolved.

  So avoid or minimise any reference to the mechanics of making love – unless it advances our understanding of character or affective situation. All we usually need to know is how it went and what it meant. ‘Caress the detail,’ said Nabokov from the lectern. And it is excellent advice. But don’t do it when you’re writing about sex.

  Three. Religion. This would include all ideologies, all institutionalised networks of committed belief…

  People who talk at any length about dreams, or about sex, will soon find themselves standing alone at the bar. And the same goes for faith.

  That outrageous impertinence I served up to Graham Greene – in Paris, if you remember, in the headmasterly mist of greys and greens (and browns) that pervaded his spacious but unairy apartment on the boulevard Malesherbes, during a visit-interview-lunch on his eightieth birthday in 1984? It really was outrageous: a comprehensive and quite detailed insult packed into a single sentence. And I swear I never meant it that way…A few minutes after arriving, with a look of sincere friendliness on my face, I said,

  ‘Now that you’re passing this milestone, your religion must be more of a comfort to you than ever – don’t you find?’

  In other words: you’re going to be dead quite soon, so your gullibly self-interested expectation of heavenly reward must be a welcome sedative as you…

  Greene took it well, I hasten to repeat – he rose to the occasion. With a marked yodel in his voice he replied,

  ‘Oh no! Oh no! Your faith weakens as you age. In common with all your other powers.’

  Faith as a power (a power that weakens). That’s good.

  But to speak truthfully…Reading a Graham Greene ‘theological’ (the Bollywood name for the genre) can be likened to a train journey, a train journey of a curious kind. You have boarded and settled, and with a soft lurch you leave the station; you have opened your book and you’re pretty happy, entering a different mind and a different world, and occasionally glancing out to see a landscape set in motion (and you too are trusting in the impetus of a confident narrative); then, after half an hour or so, with a clack and a clatter the tea trolley enters the compartment and starts to rattle down the aisle.

  And by then you may well feel like a cup (and a pause and a think) before going back to Greene’s tale – but that’s the end of your reading experience, because the tea trolley will clack, clatter, and rattle away for the rest of the ride. That tea trolley, in Greene, is religion.

  The importation of a completely extraneous value system: the miracles, the conversions, the monotonous negation of free will, the commandments (adulterers must be punished, the apostates must either disintegrate or tremulously ‘return’), the obedience to an inherited architecture of belief (and to a vast cliché), et cetera. In a theological, most crucially, death ceases to be death (it is sapped of its energy and force). No, fiction can’t be doing with religion, because fiction is essentially a temporal and rational form – a social-realist form, as we’ll see.

  English literature is imbued with the Bible, and would be unrecognisable if shorn of those rhythms. And all that. But the poem, and not the novel, is the natural home of religion; and the religious poets hovered around the centre of the canon for a millennium. Poetry and religion are in some sense co-eternal, having to do, perhaps, with pre-literate longings…

  This is not to suggest for a moment that writers aren’t desperately interested in the spiritual self, in the psyche (a key word, that, because it includes the soul), and in questions of morality.

  But Phoebe awaits, so can we leave morality out of it for a little while longer?

  * * *

  —————

  Universality: it appears that all three no-entry signs – Dreams, Sex, Religion – warn of a deficit of universality. We have seen how dreams and sex confine the writer to an unshared consciousness; religion does it differently, because it claims, at least, to have universal application. In fact, the main monotheisms explore a dully partial view of the cosmos, whatever the sect or sub-sect. Greene’s faction was Roman Catholicism. So he might have commanded a plurality in fifteenth-century Europe. But not now: in an intellectual age that has grown used to quasars, singularities, and curved spacetime, Greene’s novels are still inviting us to gape at the burning bush.

  We have been begging a question – a big question and a very pertinent question. How can an autobiographical novel possibly attempt, let alone achieve, the universal (though Saul found a way)? But let’s go on begging it for now.

  * * *

  —————

  As you see, I’m stalling for time. Yes, yes, Phoebe. Christ, she’s as bad as Spats…

  Remember that homily of Saul’s about ethics and morals, about ethics being money and morals being sex? In a civilised society on a good day morals and ethics are part of the same thing, which is integrity – though it must sometimes be soothing to compartmentalise them, as Americans do. Then you can say to yourself, Well, my ethics may not be too clever, but my morals seem to be holding up. Or alternatively, My morals are admittedly not of the very finest, but my ethics…

  Morals and ethics, money and sex. Dear oh dear. Julia would have laughed with far greater abandon if she’d known the half of it, the tenth of it – the penultimate truth about me and Phoebe Phelps.

  Novels produced by people in their early twenties are more or less bound to be loosely autobiographical. Write about what you know and what you’ve lived has become a widely circulated and valuable piece of advice; but that’s what you’d be doing anyway, willy-nilly, because you’re clueless about everything else.

  So I put ‘Rachel’ in my first book – I even put her in the title. When it came out she read it, and rang me up, and we met, and that night the affair resumed. I was astonished: all the gross indiscretions, all the painful secrets laid bare – and that deliberately but repulsively cold-hearted final chapter! Oh, life-writing (as Churchill said of Russia) is ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. But somehow the very act of composition is an act of love.

  Now imagine for a moment that Phoebe was herself imaginary: only very glancingly true to life, a made-up character in a made-up novel. As I set about fashioning her, how would I proceed?

  Well, first I would take Phoebe and stylise her looks and her emotional presence – largely through gross exaggeration (this part is always fun). Next I would cumulatively burden her with qualities that answered to the general design of the novel I was trying to write (its arguments, themes, patterns, imagery, and all the rest). She would then have to behave herself, never deviating from her designated role. And by then, after all t
hat, the original Phoebe would have disappeared, buried like a fossil under the sediment of invention.

  This novel, the present novel, is not loosely but fairly strictly autobiographical. And to qualify for an appearance in such a work all you need is historicity. You just need to have happened – and you’re in.

  *1 The very first mainstream novel came well over a century earlier, and it wasn’t in English…Restlessly searching for prototypes, literary historians have tried to enlist Petronius, Apuleius, St Augustine, and Rabelais (or some antique satire or icicled Norse saga), but I see no reason to push it back any further than Don Quixote. Even now the reader feels the awe and apprehension of being present at a birth – the birth of a new genre. Don Quixote, Part 1 (1605) is instantly recognisable as a modern novel. And, not content with that, Cervantes gives us Part 2 (1615), instantly recognisable as a post-modern novel (this may be the greatest double-coup in all literature)…There is of course no sex in Don Quixote, and not only because our hero’s love-object, the glamorous Dulcinea del Toboso, is just another delusion.

  *2 Things go rather more smoothly when the novel in question is all about sex (as in Lolita, say, or Portnoy’s Complaint). Here the sex scene is no longer a divagation: thematically it earns its keep, and doesn’t just drain the unities. (Notice how, at the end of an interposed sex scene, the writer suddenly has to snap out of it and ask, Uh, where was I?…Ah, yes.) In addition, any signs of specialised interests, marked preferences (and any signs of authorial excitation) bring to mind Kurt Vonnegut’s one-sentence parody: ‘She let out a cry, half pain, half pleasure (how do you figure a woman?), as I rammed the old Avenger home.’ Sexual failure – the dreaded fiasco – can be written about, but in such cases there isn’t a great deal to describe. In his gentle book of essays, On Love, Stendhal treats the fiasco as ‘tragedy’ (which is certainly how it feels at the time), but all one’s writerly instincts assign it to comedy. Sex is itself assigned to comedy. What is our reaction to sex written about earnestly? Laughter.