by Amis, Martin
*6 The historian Martin Gilbert, not content with being preternaturally prolific, goes so far as to assemble, and sign, his own indexes. Gilbert’s Israel (1998) is 700 pages long; and this is what you’ll find, in its index, under ‘Haifa’. Even in my shortened version it has a certain gothic flair (the page references are omitted). Haifa: ‘and “gangs of criminals”; Jews murdered in (1938); an internment camp near; a death in; sabotage in; a Jew murdered on the way back from; Jewish terrorist attacks near; an Arab act of terror in; and the War of Independence; bombarded (1956); and the October War; Scud missiles hit…’ And this was Haifa, which, from the crest of Mount Carmel, looked as artless as dew. I now find myself wondering if there is a single acre of the Holy Land that is free of recent memories of blood and grief. And what does this do to the man called Israel?
*7 What I meant was: writers cannot ‘read’ their own books (in any normal sense of the word) until a year or two after publication. They are still correcting, they are still haunted by alternatives and missed chances. For them, the prose needs time to settle into something fixed and tamper-proof.
*8 We had already talked about the widespread habit of Blaming the Parents, which Saul sharply identified as a ‘vice’ (and if he wanted to cultivate it he had more to go on than most: when roused, his father used to strike his sons with a closed fist; and his mother died when he was fifteen)…For my part I said that I had hardly anything to reproach my parents for, and what little there was vanished with a shriek when for the first time I changed my first son’s nappy.
*9 ‘The children of the race [the ‘bootlegger’s boys reciting ancient prayers’], by a never-failing miracle, opened their eyes on one strange world after another, age after age, and uttered the same prayer in each, eagerly loving what they found.’ The scene is Napoleon Street, Montreal – ‘rotten, toylike, crazy and filthy, riddled, flogged with harsh weather’ – in the early 1920s. From Herzog (1964).
*10 James Wood, I think, got close to the nub of it when he wrote that ‘an awkward but undeniable utilitarianism’ needs to be applied: ‘the number of people hurt by Bellow is probably no more than can be counted on two hands, yet he has delighted and consoled and altered the lives of thousands of readers’. In other words, right-and-wrong must bend to an author of sufficient quality and reach…Clio, the muse of history, and Erato, the muse of lyric poetry and hymns, might express unease at such presumption. But fiction is a young form (b. 1600), and auto-fiction is younger still (b. 1900), and there is, anyway, no muse to stick up for fiction – or to inspire its practitioners with the purity of her example. Perhaps that’s why fiction has always been a rougher barrio than any of the others.
*11 He wasn’t like this, either. During a marital clash at a riotous party (November 1960), Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, in the chest and in the back. As she lay haemorrhaging on the floor, Mailer reputedly muttered, ‘Let the bitch die.’ And she nearly did die: the blade had pierced the membrane enclosing her heart. Mailer
was arraigned for attempted manslaughter (in the end his lawyer bargained it down to simple ‘assault’). What tipped Norman over the edge, as Adele screamed back at him? Not the scurrilous doubts she cast on his manhood and sexual orientation. No, the husband cracked when the wife questioned his talent, intolerably suggesting that Norman was inferior to Dostoevsky…Mailer’s iconoclasm had many targets, probably including the notion of the good Jewish son. But we should be grateful that the notion of the good Jewish mother was fully embraced by Fanny Mailer: ‘My kids are tops,’ she summarised. And of her controversial son, Fanny settled for saying, ‘If Norman would stop marrying these women who make him do these terrible things…’ Matrimonially, Norman and Saul had one thing in common: the best came last.
*12 The sister of Aphrodite, Agape (pronounced like canapé) symbolises many kinds of love, ‘divine love’, ‘sacrificial love’, but her meaning seems to have settled on ‘social love’, or comity. The social-realist novel needs Eros, of course; but it also needs Agape.
*13 ‘The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen twenty. / Now it’s just thirteen sixteen. / There’s still time for some to go in, / And some to come out.’ This is the opening of ‘The Terrorist, He’s Watching’ by Wisława Szymborska. It occurs to me that the second couplet would be even darker if the lines were transposed, reading, ‘There’s still time for some to come out, / And some to go in.’
*14 The commentary is provided by the non-believer Jorge Luis Borges in one of his most charming and informative essays, ‘A History of Angels’. Angels outnumber us mortals, and by a wide margin: every good Muslim ‘is assigned two guardian angels, or five, or sixty, or one hundred [and] sixty’. Borges (like Bellow) formed a spiritual alliance with angels: ‘I always imagine them at nightfall,’ he writes, ‘in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colours are like memories or premonitions of other colours.’
*15 In To Jerusalem and Back Bellow quotes a leftist as saying, ‘We came here to build a just society. And what happened immediately?’ Bellow’s stance, here, was centre-leftist: along with Oz, Yehoshua, and Grossman, he supported the two-state solution. The left had a plurality in 1987; by 2013 it belonged to the fringe, or the past, polling at 7 per cent. And the two-state solution was dead.
Guideline
Literature and Violence
So. From the Lord Protector to the Great Pretender…
Exactly a year has gone by since Donald J. ‘announced’ (I’m sure you recall the scene on the burnished chariot of the Trump Tower escalator: June 2015), and now’s a good time to pause, take stock, and get our bearings.
In my struggle to assimilate Donald Trump – and as you see The Art of the Deal (1987), Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007), and Crippled America (his campaign manifesto, released last November) are there on the table – I’ve found some guidance in two oddly undervalued hypotheses, namely ‘The Barry Manilow Law’ and ‘The Maggot Probability’.
Let’s begin with the Barry Manilow Law (promulgated by Clive James). When faced by the inexplicable popularity of this or that performer or operator, apply the Barry Manilow Law, which states: Everyone you know thinks Barry Manilow is absolutely terrible. But everyone you don’t know thinks he’s great. And bear in mind that the people you know are astronomically outnumbered by the people you don’t know…
As with Barry, so with Donald – but there’s an important difference. The Barry Manilow fans cannot increase my exposure to Barry Manilow, but the Donald Trump fans can certainly make me watch, hear, and otherwise attend to Donald Trump – maybe until February 2025 (when I’ll be well over seventy and, more to the point, he’ll be nearing eighty…).
If that happens then the Maggot Probability (formulated by Kingsley Amis) will come into play. It would work as follows: faced day after day by the senseless notions and actions of an elderly madcap, I won’t bother to parse and analyse. I’ll simply shrug and say to myself, It’s probably just the maggot, or alternatively, The maggot’s probably acting up. The maggot is the virus or bacterium – or actual grub, with antennae and maw – that devours an ageing brain; and the maggot acts up whenever it finds a patch of relatively healthy grey matter, and settles down to a square meal.
…I adopt this facetious tone more or less willy-nilly, because Trump’s candidacy is in itself a sick joke. It began as a business venture – an attempt to boost his tarnished brand (mineral water, neckties). Then someone like Steve Bannon told him that his only imaginable route to Pennsylvania Avenue lay in white supremacism. And Trump, perhaps recognising that whiteness (endorsed by maleness) was his only indisputable strength, limply acquiesced.
Next, having registered the stupendous welcome given to this approach, Trump began underscoring it with the moronic sincerity of violence – inciting his crowds to ‘beat the crap’ out of
protestors, and openly thirsting for mass deportations and collective punishments (plus more torture and more police brutality)…Doing harm to the defenceless: it seems to be a recent enthusiasm, an urge awakened or unleashed by his political rise. And on the way he has discovered something about himself. He likes it. He is one of those people who finds violence exciting.
Which surprised me, I confess. In his memoir The Art of the Deal (heavily and cleverly ghosted by Tony Schwartz), Donald, then aged forty, comes across as a man instinctively averse to the rough-and-ready aspects of his trade (coercive rent-collections, coercive evictions, etc.), associating ‘that kind of thing’ with his rags-to-riches father, the gnarled and mottled Fred C. Trump; and while Fred was applying himself in the outer boroughs, the young Donald, his gaze on Manhattan, was tonily nourishing ‘loftier dreams and visions’. We therefore presume that Trump’s sudden liking for violence is just another corruption: violence vivifies his proximity to power.
Joe the Plumber never got anywhere. As against that, next month in Cleveland, Ohio, Don the Realtor will be anointed as the…But wait. I’ll return to Trump at the end of the section, if there’s time (as you know, tomorrow morning we’re off to England), and after that you’ll also be away for a while. So let’s get on. And we won’t be changing the subject. The subject will still be violence.
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What is the good of the novel, what does it do, what is it for?
On this question there are (as so often) two opposed schools of thought, in the present case the aesthetes versus the functionalists. The aesthetes would wearily and indeed pityingly explain that the novel serves no purpose whatever (it is just an artefact – nothing more). The functionalists see it as earnestly progressive in tendency: fiction is (or should be) involved in improving the human condition.
Well, the progressivists may indeed be wrong, I have always felt; but the aesthetes can’t possibly be right. We can, if we like, sophisticatedly agree that a certain kind of novel can be purposeless. But can a novelist be purposeless, be monotonously purposeless, for an entire adult lifetime? Can anybody?
It’s a matter of pressing interest, I find. What is the purpose of my average day?
If you’d asked me that five years ago, I would’ve equably cited John Dryden, who said that the purpose of literature is to give ‘instruction and delight’. That verdict goes back three centuries, and in my opinion has worn pretty well.*1
You hope to delight, and also to instruct. Instruct in a way that you hope will stimulate the reader’s mind, heart, and, yes, soul, and make the reader’s world fuller and richer. My ambition is summed up by a minor character in the late-period Bellow novel The Dean’s December: a stray dog, on the streets of Bucharest, whose compulsive barks seem to represent ‘a protest against the limits of dog experience (for God’s sake, open the universe a little more!)’.
And that’s what I would have answered in early 2011. Then I read Steven Pinker’s massive and authoritative The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which the author – a cognitive scientist, a psychologist, a linguist, and a master statistician – fully earns and justifies his subtitle, which is Why Violence Has Declined.
Violence has declined, has drastically declined. You frown; and on first hearing this I too frowned. Because it certainly doesn’t feel that way – partly explaining why Pinker’s book has yet to bring about a real shift in consciousness: his thesis and its conclusions are jarringly counterintuitive, and provoke much natural resistance. My nerve ends insist, as do yours, that the world, with its steady accumulation of weapons of every grade, has never been more violent. But it isn’t so.
As measured by Pinker, ‘violence’ is the probability of sudden death at the hands of others (and includes deaths on the battlefield). Now let me ask you a question: Which was more violent, the England of The Canterbury Tales and Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, or the England of The Waste Land and the two world wars?
Professor Pinker ran a survey. The typical respondent ‘guessed that twentieth-century England was about 14 per cent more violent than fourteenth-century England. In fact it was 95 per cent less violent.’
Violence has declined. Why and how? And what, you might ask, has this got to do with writing novels?
In his book Pinker presents what he takes to be the decisive influences.
1) The rise of the nation state, which in effect demands the monopoly of violence.*2 Pre-state societies were basically warlord societies, and they were up to ten times more violent than societies of the later phase. ‘Leviathan’ wields a police force, and the word politics (the art or science of governing) derives from police.
2) The rise of doux commerce – ‘soft’ commerce, grounded on cooperation and mutual advantage (and not on cheating, gouging, welching, and sueing).
3) The rise of a modestly generalised prosperity. What used to be called ‘a competence’ settled on more and more people, giving them more to lose from disruption and more to fear from it.
4) The rise of science and the rise of reason; this included the retreat of superstition and the retreat of that evergreen casus belli, religion.
5) The rise of literacy, which gradually burgeoned into a mass phenomenon – roughly 300 years after the invention of printing (1452).
6) The rise of women. Violence is almost exclusively a male preserve, and cultures that ‘respect the interests and values of women’ are destined to become not only much more peaceful but also much more prosperous.
7) The rise of the novel.
At first number 7 looks like an interloper, don’t you think? In terms of efficacy it is no doubt the last among equals; but the novel shouldn’t be shy to find itself in such grand geohistorical company. The novel has other reasons for embarrassment, true, but these are minor and comical, having to do with the messiness of its birth.
Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was hugely influential, but the totemic anglophone book, here, is unfortunately Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). I own the four-volume Everyman edition, and over time I have put in about a dozen hours with it. And it is terrible. Clarissa is terrible, and Richardson is terrible: fussy, prissy, finicky, and batted about the place by anxieties connected to religion, class, and above all sexual repression (pious Clarissa is finally drugged and raped by the brooding anti-hero Mr Lovelace, and dies of shame, all alone). It is in addition unforgivably long – the longest novel in the language.*3
But we have to note that early admirers of Clarissa, a vast company, felt themselves connected to the heroine with unprecedented intimacy and warmth; they identified, they sympathised, they shared and understood her feelings; a new and quite unexpected stage of the reader–writer relationship had been reached – one that pressed home the elementary lesson about doing to others as you would have them do to you…So we feel grateful to Richardson; and never mind, for now, that literary – or literate – England, in the late 1740s, found itself passionately rooting for a prig, and a prig dreamed up by a philistine.
Everything has to start somewhere. And, besides, this deep-sea wave of enlightenment has already rolled through villages (and now extends, as Pinker shows, to our treatment of sexual minorities, of children, and of animals)…It seems there was an evolutionary readiness to be more thoughtful, in both senses, thinking more, and thinking more considerately.
To return for a moment to the Pinker paradox. ‘In 1800,’ he writes (in a later book), ‘no country in the world had a life-expectancy above forty.’ And what is it now? ‘The answer for 2015 is 71.4 years’ – worldwide. If progress has been made, and it has, why do we persist in feeling it hasn’t?
Well, there’s the news media of course (‘if it bleeds, it leads’, etc.); there’s the inherent difficulty (as all novelists know) of writing memorably about well-being; and, perhaps most perniciously, there’s the intellectual glamour of gloom. The idea that sullen pes
simism is a mark of high seriousness has helped to create an organic (perhaps by now a hereditary) resistance to the affirmative and a rivalrous attraction to its opposite – the snobbery of one-downmanship.
Optimists are quickly exasperated by pessimism (I know I am), by the habitual lassitude and disgust we associate with adolescence – early adolescence. So I tell you what: I’m going to leave all that for another fifty pages, and wait till I visit the world HQ of ennui, cafard, and nausée – yes, France.
So for now I’ll say au revoir to the counter-Enlightenment spirit, only pausing to glance at Goya’s famous etching of 1798. This shows a slumbrous philosophe against a background of bats and screech-owls. The Sleep of Reason, runs the title, Brings Forth Monsters.
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On July 21, as we’re all aware, that strictly non-combatant bruiser, that chicken-hawk, that valorised ignoramus, that titanic vulgarian (dishonest to the ends of his hair) will be anointed as the Republican contender for the 2016 presidential election.
But tomorrow the Amises fly to London, in good time for the Brexit referendum. Elena has dual nationality, so that’ll be two sure votes for Remain…And take my word for it, this won’t be a close-run thing. As with Scotland and breakaway ‘independence’ – once you get in that booth, you stop fancying a leap in the dark. No: the Brits are going to stick with the devil they know.