by Amis, Martin
Martin thought he was old friends with the sad animal, with the creature in its tristesse; but the animal had never been quite as sad as this. And for only the third or fourth time in his life, he felt like a dirty little bastard (and one whose recent exploits might very well spark interest in the papers, even in 1978). He prepared and put a match to a cigarette in the accumulating dawn.
A couple of seconds later Phoebe turned to him saying,
‘Now how much did that set you back…I make it fourteen hundred and twenty. You know, Mart, you reminded me of someone. Haggling away in bed nineteen to the dozen. If you do that, you’ll get this. Et cetera. You reminded me of someone.’
She reached for his handrolled burn, and dragged, and, for once, inhaled…
‘You know who?’ She expelled smoke. ‘He got around to money in due time, of course. But at first he used sweets. Father Gabriel.’
*1 Now, with a dictionary and a thesaurus on my lap, I scroll through the indulgent synonyms (‘captivate’, ‘tantalise’), seeing no connection at all to the practices of Phoebe Phelps, till I arrive at the following: ‘(of a bird) flap or wave (its wings or tail) with a quick flicking motion’. And again with coquette (a feminised ‘dimin. of coq “cock” ’): ‘1. a flirtatious woman 2. a crested Central and South American hummingbird’. And that was Phoebe: a quickly flickering hummingbird, diffusing an agitation that looked obscurely purposeful, as she pollenised her garden moving from stem to stem…
*2 A long footnote, this, but one that will serve as a short guide to Phoebe’s mental state…In a party political broadcast of April 15, 1978, Mrs Thatcher referred to Solzhenitsyn as ‘Solzhenitskin’. I heard it! They said she mixed him up with Rumpelstiltskin! cried Phoebe that night (she had the radio on in the bathroom); and early the next morning she was on the phone with Noel: her forecast was that Thatcher would be ousted as leader (by April 30), and Noel got good odds…Of course, Thatcher’s error made not the slightest impression, and Phoebe herself only knew it was ‘Solzhenitsyn’, and not Solzhenitskin or for that matter not Rumpelstiltskin, because all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were on display in my flat (and I sometimes talked about him and his rural exile in Vermont)…How much was your bet? I asked her on May 1. She looked away and said, Well that’s the thing. Um. About the same as your advance for the last one. The advance for my third novel amounted, by the skin of its teeth, to four figures. Plus about twice your salary. I was by then full literary editor of the New Statesman. So Phoebe had lost £11,000. In short, Martin, she said, I’m ruined.
*3 In calmer and happier times, bouts of heavy petting were an occasional feature of our weekends. Protracted and strenuous (everything-but and not for the queasy), those sessions used to end with Phoebe – holding a bouquet of paper tissues in her free hand – granting him brisk relief, in the manner of a therapist or, more exactly, a dairymaid. These days it was different: she simply waited for the phase of maximum engorgement, then just stopped, desisted, without a word or a glance. When I eventually rolled out of bed I still had a little diving board (recently bounced on and vacated) attached to my pelvic saddle. You couldn’t call it foreplay; nothing followed from it…In this chapter, I notice, much that is pertinent but embarrassing has been confined to the footnotes: a sort of internal exile or house arrest.
*4 Those spare tenners. Life goes on, after all; and it became clear, a week or two after the cohabitation began, that my monthly income would for a while increase by a factor of twelve. And ‘writing’, for now, meant humouring Kirk Douglas and Harvey Keitel (who were always in venomous opposition). But that’s another story – some of which is told in my fifth novel (1984)…The film was presided over by Stanley Donen, who in his twenties co-directed On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain with Gene Kelly…One night after work Stanley invited me to dinner at his ‘local place’; Phoebe was in Belgrade, so without hesitation I went along to his plush and panelled sanctum in St James’s…Now at that time Stanley was married to Yvette Mimieux, wife number four (and his past lovers included Judy Holliday and Elizabeth Taylor). Having picked Christopher’s brains about girls and madness, I took the chance to pick Stanley’s brains about girls and coquetry – a subject that was on its way to becoming my chief concern. Stanley talked discreetly, naming no names, but otherwise with boundless candour, and for almost two hours my ears hummed to tales of Hollywood’s most famous vamps (some of them famous actresses, some of them just vamps and famous for nothing else – chorus-liners, body doubles). And even in this company, I reckoned, Phoebe could hold her head high…By the way (a footnote to a footnote), nearly forty years later I ran into Harvey Keitel at a Christmas party in Manhattan (December 9, 2016). We agreed that this was one of life’s little epiphanies: it was Kirk Douglas’s one hundredth birthday.
*5 Phoebe’s evident favourite, ‘This Be the Verse’ (‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’), has a technically near-identical sister poem, ‘The Trees’, which ends: ‘Yet still the unresting castles thresh / In fullgrown thickness every May. / Last year is dead, they seem to say, / Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’ At the foot of the manuscript Larkin wrote, ‘Bloody awful tripe’. But he let the lines stand; and rightly. ‘The Trees’ represented a very different kind of mood; but in both cases the poet has to explore it and get to the end of it. As Auden writes in another context (with accidental but complete appositeness), ‘Follow, poet, follow, right / To the bottom of the night…’ Larkin comes to London once a year, I said that same afternoon. There’s usually a party. I’ll introduce you. The meeting did in fact take place; and it was eventful, too.
*6 In fact Phoebe’s prompting was only marginally ahead of its time. In the UK in the very early 1980s, the newspapers were getting thicker and thicker – first the Sundays, then the Saturdays, then all the days in between; and what filled these extra pages was not additional news stories but additional features. Soon the featurists were running out of people to write about – running out of alcoholic actors, depressive comedians, ne’er-do-well royals, jailed rockstars, defecting ballet dancers, tantrum-prone fashion models, reclusive film directors, adulterous golfers, wife-beating footballers, and rapist boxers. The dragnet went on widening until journalists, often to their palpable irritation and dismay, were reduced to writing about writers: literary writers.
*7 Pornography has become a sorry business all round (though I ask readers to ponder a remark I heard from the amiable Art Spiegelman, cartoonist and graphic novelist: ‘Banning pornography would be like killing the messenger’)…In the era under review, pornography had not yet revealed itself as an intensely misogynistic form, and nude magazines were admired, amassed, and exchanged by – among countless others – Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and also by Robert Conquest, who went as far as to publish a poem in praise of them.
*8 So when I characterised Phoebe’s shoot as ‘classy’, well, I knew whereof I spoke…In a sombrero and frilly bikini bottoms, and larking around in a studio sandpit, Doris had graced a cheerful little sauce-sheet called Parade (late 1960s, and costing one shilling and three grim and grimy old pence); Aramintha, by contrast, wholly and pallidly and uneasily naked, wandered the racks of a shadowy wine cellar, in the pages of a short-lived glossy called something like Atelier (mid-1970s, and costing an outrageous £3.50)…Among the young at least it was silently accepted that posing in nude magazines was just another thing girls could do. Doris and Aramintha did make me wonder about their personal reasons for taking this step – but not for long: Aramintha did it to spite and sully her father (a prominent Tory MP), and Doris, Doris McGowan, did it because that was more or less her job (she also featured regularly in Fiesta and Razzle)…Oui was a British cousin of Playboy and cost just over a quid.
*9 I never expected to forget the sexual terror-famines imposed by Phoebe Phelps, and I never have. Well, the famines proved indelible. The terror element (the antic hummingbird) turned out to be more evanescent. The only time I c
an’t help reliving it, funnily enough, is when I’m acutely jet-lagged. Acutely jet-lagged, I look at my watch – and its hands seem cruel and crazy: saying not two forty-five but a quarter to nine, saying not half past six but twelve-thirty. Phoebe was like that. Her hands, her arms, her legs: in the wrong position. And there was this element, too. All her eroticism capsized: from lover to hater. Because I knew, in detail, the quality of what seemed to be on offer, on offer to every man but me.
Transitional
The Sources of the Being
…Poor Phoebe. This is the first thing that needs to be said. Poor, poor Phoebe…
After what we’ve just been through, though, I think a cleansing thought experiment – or thought exercise – is in order, don’t you? And there’s more confessional stuff to come, including the Worst Thing I Ever Did. So let’s take a break and briefly repair to the cool symmetries of art.
1. The four seasons
A great philosopher of literature – the Reverend Northrop Frye – suggested that the four seasons correspond to the four major genres. I think that’s a sweet and lyrical notion (though I admit that nothing really hangs on it). Now I suspect you know what the four seasons are. And here are the four major genres: tragedy, comedy, satire, romance. So the question is: Which genre corresponds to which season?
Tragedy, in its shape, follows the mouth on the tragic mask. Picture that ominous grimace: a starting point (on the lower left-hand corner), a steep rise, a flattening out, then a steep decline. The tragic hero is simultaneously transcendent and earthbound – human, all too human in the end: only human. That monumental individuality is one of the reasons why tragedy is now so seldom seen – a rare bird in the grey sky of post-industrial modernity.
Comedy, classical comedy, is similarly obedient to the line of the mouth on its mask. In this case it’s a smile: a deep descent that levels out and gathers into a fresh resurgence. The logistics of classical comedy are touchingly straightforward: a young man and a young woman fall in love and eventually get married (overcoming the obstacles cast in their way by the more hidebound society that surrounds and frustrates them). All Shakespeare’s comedies, and all six of Jane Austen’s novels, strictly adhere to this form (and my own father’s Lucky Jim, considered so rowdily iconoclastic in the mid-1950s, shows lamb-like submission to it). Comedies end happily, tragedies unhappily. The tragic hero is conspicuously distinguished; the comic hero is an everyman, the comic heroine an everywoman, and they are distinguished only in their charm.
Satire is best understood as militant irony. Vice, affectation, and stupidity are exposed to ridicule and implicit moral correction but also to anger and contempt. Whereas comedy tends to run only a light fever of subversion (off with the old), the mood of satire is revolutionary and hotly roused.
Romance, classical romance, only incidentally includes sentimental or idealised love stories; neither is it confined to medieval tales of chivalry. Romance, with its delirium and voodoo, identifies itself as being largely indifferent to the cause-and-effect of everyday life. For example, science fiction of the ‘star tsar’ variety (Nabokov’s anagrammatic phrase) is pure romance. Harry Potter et cetera is romance. Anything that reifies fantasy is romance.
I’ll give you a few minutes to think. Tragedy, comedy, satire, romance; spring, summer, autumn, winter. If, say, tragedy is winter (and it isn’t), what are the affinities?
2. Disgrace
While you consider that, consider this.
George Orwell famously said that ‘autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful’ (‘a man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying’). By that measure at least, what follows is gospel truth.
Unintellectual girls (including avowed philistines and bibliophobes) are one thing, and girls who pose in nude magazines are another, and girls on the borders of criminality are yet another – but not even escort girls, non-retired escort girls, escort girls going about their business, lie beyond my experience (or make that his experience. In this context the words come much more willingly when you wear the loincloth of the third person).
In the early–middle 1970s Martin himself contributed to Oui magazine, and under his own name (unlike the prudent Phoebe). There were two pieces: the first was about decadent London nightclubs; the second was about escort girls. And the second piece was a pack of lies. More than that, it aspired to the stout condescension of an old Fleet Street exposé, along the lines of I made my excuses and left. In reality, of course, the present writer did nothing of the sort; he made no excuses, and he stayed.
At that time Martin was fresh from a summary eviction. He had been told to leave the flat he shared with his longterm sweetheart (arraigned for infidelity). So by the time he began his research on the question of escort girls, he was already to be found in a hotel – a decadently welcoming little place in South Kensington. Although the published piece claimed to describe his engagements with three escort girls, in reality there were only two: Ariadne and Rita.
Ariadne was from Athens; Rita was from Whitechapel in the East End. These were atypical escort-girl experiences, he assumed: the subject of money never came up. In fact, when he casually offered Ariadne a fiver for cab fare (it was raining), she said, ‘A taxi does not cost five pounds.’*1
Why did Ariadne and Rita go to bed with Martin for nothing? A brief trance of self-satisfaction would seem to be in order. As against that, though – well, he was anomalously young (twenty-five), and he was anomalously respectful and unpresumptuous: he treated them not like escort girls – and how would you go about that? – but like blind dates whom he naturally wished to please with his inquisitive and undivided attention. Anyway, go to bed with him they did…
Meanwhile, as he wondered what he was about, his whole being, his history, his childhood, his Ribenas at Sunday school, his particular elders, his heroes and heroines in poetry and prose: his entire inner life was saying to his inner ear, You can’t possibly get away with all this – and nor should you.
He agreed (quite right), and bowed his head, thinking, Come on. What was the world waiting for?
…The quote that opened this segment is one of Orwell’s more limited epigrams. He was writing about a memoir by Salvador Dalí, the kind of man who was far more likely to belittle his virtues, if any, and aggrandise his sins. It is not for nothing that Orwell is regarded as quintessentially English; and the English literary tradition, unlike those of the mainland, is quintessentially moral, never having come up with many exponents (or many readers) of the perverse. There is only Lawrence, that perennial exception…With just a single novel under his belt, Martin knew very well that this was the tradition he belonged to. ‘You’ve done wrong,’ his mother used to say all her life, humorously (and nearly always referring to herself). ‘So now you’ve got to be punished.’
3. Genghis Khan
Satire is winter, wintry, bitter; the frost has its teeth fast in the ground.
Romance is summer, a time of freedom and adventure, and dream-strange possibilities.
Comedy is spring, the burgeoning of the flora, the Whitsun weddings, the maypole.
Tragedy is autumn, the sere, the yellow leaf…
While every death is a tragedy, Stalin famously observed, the death of a million is just a statistic. The second half of this statement is untrue. In giving voice to it, the big moustache laid bare his hope for some historiographical leniency – as did the little moustache when he said that the court of time listens exclusively to the victors, and so for example ‘history sees in Genghis Khan only the great founder of a state’.*2
A million deaths are at the very least a million tragedies (to be multiplied by the children, spouses, and immediate family of each victim). Every death is a tragedy; but then so is every life. Every life is a slave to the curve, the upended U, the woeful gape of the tragic mask.
4. The gravamen
In the decadent
hotel Martin typed out the piece on his Olivetti (now was the moment, Leonora was clearly suggesting, when I should conjure up the ‘gratuity’ or the ‘little present’, i.e., the carnal bribe, to call it what it was; but with a smile of regret, etc., etc.), placed the folded sheets in the addressed envelope, and went downstairs to give it to the desk clerk; then he returned to his room and smoked and waited.
Retribution was surely impatient to come his way – and from so many angles. Let him think: a dramatic intervention from Ariadne’s mountain-dwelling, junta-loving father (and all his male clan); or a surprise visit from one of Rita’s many ex-convict ex-boyfriends; or an invasion of passionately mercantilist pimps armed with baseball bats and straight razors…At the very minimum (what was keeping it?) he hourly foresaw a targeted nemesis, one brewed by Mother Nature.*3 In the end even his dealings with the nude magazine would advance smoothly; Oui at once accepted and processed his perjured report (and duly printed it without challenge), and remitted him £200…
Thus the world did nothing. Society, equity, law, God, the Protestant ethos, common justice – all these spirits and entities stood down and sat on their hands. In the end only one precept applied. If you want something done (i.e., punishment), you have to do it yourself.
It started in the hotel room as he was packing his bag: a marshland, illumined by marshlights and fireflies and phosphorescent earthworms, was opening up beneath his feet. The sudden sickness felt mortal; in somatic synergy, organ after organ, one after the other, would be apologetically shutting down. At no point did he connect this horrible turn with his recent trespasses; it was perfectly simple: he had reached the end of his span. There was the phone on the bedside table. Should he dial 999?…When you’re young, and you find yourself in sole charge of the bodily instrument, you may be infinitely hypochondriacal, of course; but you’re also much too fatalistic to squander your last breaths among doctors. He sank back and dialled 0.