by Amis, Martin
‘Good morning – this is room twenty-seven. I’ll soon be checking out.’ And he asked them to prepare the reckoning.
…I will arise. I will arise and go now, with a suitcase to the callbox. A phone call will I make there…All he wanted was somewhere to lie down and, if at all possible, the extreme unction of a pliant palm on his brow.
5. Florence Nightingale
Let us stand back for a moment.
Question: Who would present herself as his carer and redeemer, who would deliver him from this bottleneck of sexual opportunism and abuse?
Answer: The world’s most glamorous and celebrated feminist. That’s who.
He made the phone call and steered himself to the broad deep house off Ladbroke Grove, up near Portobello. Of course Germaine had no knowledge of his latest doings; to her he was only an occasional friend and visitor. But she took him in.
He slept on a mattress in a nook just beyond her bedroom door, so she could hear his groans, his piteous cries; she tended him and soothed him until one morning, after about a week, having brought his usual cup of tea and settled herself down to cradle him in her arms, as she did every morning, Germaine said,…Oh. You really are feeling better, aren’t you. I’ll just go and brush my teeth.*4
The planetary forces of retribution, the local genies of justice, we can assume, were inactive in that precinct of West London during a certain month in 1974. All they could come up with was Germaine Greer – to minister to me in my trial.
6. Freedom and Ariadne
Now you probably wouldn’t mind hearing more about the author of The Female Eunuch (1970), my host and my nurse, and there is plenty more to say; but if you’ll bear with me I’m thematically obliged to concentrate on whatever it was she nursed me out of.
I have not stopped thinking about that little packet of my life – those five or six nights in the complicit South Kensington hotel (I only remember the Regency caddishness of the striped wallpaper in its single public room); and I have gone on thinking about those two young women. The unanswerable malaise that overtook me clearly derived from an awareness of transgression. But which transgression?
No trawling of the conscience has ever presented me with a single reservation about what went on with Rita. With Ariadne, though, I sometimes feel about myself an inner rumour of parasitism. It was I hope a gentle encounter – in mid-afternoon, beginning with tea and biscuits (brought to us by room service). Still, I felt a deficit of volition in Ariadne; and I feared I was the beneficiary of something outside myself. Something like an indoctrination. Ariadne was nowhere near as experienced as Rita, and I now wonder what kind of tuition she was given as she acclimatised herself to the culture of escort work.
But in truth there was plenty of that in the 1970s: the exploitation of cultures, of currents of thought. To put it more crudely, men ponced off ideology. I ponced off anti-clericalism, I ponced off rejectionist ageism, and most generally of course I ponced off the tenets of the Sexual Revolution – meaning I applied peer pressure and propagandised about the earthy wisdom of the herd.
Ariadne was what is now known as an outlier. In her modest way she represented a reactionary force, that of female submission. And, given the chance, I (silently) ponced off that. She wasn’t acting in perfect freedom. Who ever was, back then? Who ever is?
Anyway, that wasn’t what laid me low.
7. Revolutions
Now. What do you do in a revolution? Very broadly, three things. You see what goes, you see what comes, you see what stays.
In the Sexual Revolution, what went was premarital chastity; what came was a gradually widening gap between carnal knowledge and emotion; what stayed was the possibility of love. The Sexual Revolution made no particular demands on writers; all it did was grant them a new latitude. They could now busy themselves with subjects that were previously forbidden, by law; and nearly all of them tried it (without success).
But imagine for a moment, that you are a poet or a novelist in a real revolution, and a very violent revolution – like the one in Russia (incomparably more violent than the one in France). For the novelist or poet, what went was freedom of expression; what came was intense line-by-line surveillance;*5 what stayed was the creative habit of putting pen to paper. So how was a writer to adapt and adjust?
Well, you could be like the novelist and dramatist Alexei Tolstoy (distantly related to the author of Anna Karenina and also, through marriage, to the author of Fathers and Sons). Alexei was a venal cynic who confessedly ‘enjoyed the acrobatics’ of trimming his work to ‘the general line’, or to current Bolshevik orthodoxy (a protean contraption). This is also the man who said that one of the things he hated most in life was windowshopping with inadequate funds…
Alternatively you could be like Isaac Babel, the writer of sharply expressive short stories, who at a certain point declared himself to be ‘the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence’. It was a noble intention. But even if you stopped writing, you could hardly stop talking; Babel said enough, and was shot in a Moscow prison in 1940.
‘Of the 700 writers who met at the First Writers’ Congress in 1934,’ writes Conquest, ‘only fifty survived to see the second in 1954.’
The choice, then, was active collaboration or mutism. There was also a third way, involving what we might call a delusion of autonomy. Writers of the third way persuaded themselves that they could proceed, could get on with their stuff (quietly and yet publishably), without grave internal compromise. Alexei Tolstoy could flourish because he had the thick skin of artistic indifference – in common with all RAPPists (members of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers); privileged and decorated, they lived well; more basically, they lived on. It was the idealists who were culled, one way or the other. The lethal element here was literary authenticity; if you had it within you, you were doomed.
A glance at the fate of two poets.*6 The talented Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote obligingly gruff-voiced hymns to bayonets and pig-iron statistics; and he put a bullet in his brain in 1930, aged thirty-six. The talented Sergei Yesenin wrote obligingly soft-voiced hymns to rural toilers and reapers; and hanged himself in 1925, aged thirty. What these two men had done was betray their gift and their avocation; and therefore they fell afoul of the sources of their being.
Me, I wrote a bit of hack reportage about escort girls in a nude magazine. But to compare little things with large is a salutary habit; the little thing tells you a little about the large thing. In miniature, little things, like exceptions, prove the rule – using prove in the older sense of ‘test’.
Yesenin and Mayakovsky told what they knew to be lies in their poems. Me, I wrote lies about escort girls in a nude magazine. Consequently I didn’t kill myself. I just had the third cousin of what Solzhenitsyn had when pressured (unsuccessfully) to denounce, to delate, to ‘write’, as they said (‘Does he/she write?’ was a common, and anxious, enquiry). He said to himself: ‘I feel sick.’ Yesenin and Mayakovsky were self-denouncers, in their verse.
All the writers whose last decision was suicide were killed by the State. Their situation affected them like a slow-acting poison, delivered (perhaps on the point of a phantom umbrella) by ‘the Organs’, as the secret police were popularly known; or like a course of mind-altering drugs, administered over months or years, in national psychiatric wards specialising in the ideologically insane.
But the poet-suicides had to have something within them to make the spell firm and good. Demyan Bedny, the obese ‘proletarian poet laureate’, lived complacently (until the later 1930s); he had a town named after him, his face appeared on postage stamps, and he was the only writer in the USSR to be honoured with an apartment in the Kremlin. None of this seemed to bother Bedny, and why would it? He was manqué, and could say of any of his poems, I didn’t really mean it. The writers who really did mean it ended differently; in their own souls they were playing with fire.
8. Ever at the lips
My thing with Phoebe Phelps went on until Christmas 1980. The night of shame was merely the halfway point; and for a while, for a year, for two years, there was love, there was unquestionably love. But after that she attenuated, gradually receding from me. Today, when I think long enough about her as she was then, as she faded, I end up with a version of Keats’s line about ‘Joy’ (capitalised, like Pleasure and Delight, in ‘Ode to Melancholy’): those hands of hers (moving languidly now) seemed to be ever at her lips, bidding adieu. And she lost her quiddity and solidity, no longer novelistic, merely lifelike…
Phoebe will not tend to dominate these pages, as she would in a work of unalloyed fiction; but she will periodically resurface. There was her bold move in the summer of 1981, and her even bolder move on September 12, 2001. And, much later, there was the meeting in London in 2017, when she was seventy-five.
* * *
—————
Before we sign off on the nice idea about the genres and the seasons, I will suggest that the progress of a human life can also be evoked in genres and seasons. In this minor thought experiment, chronology is reversed (do you think that’s significant?): the three-score-and-ten begins around August 31, moves backwards through summer and spring and then winter and autumn, and comes to an abrupt halt around September 1. I’ll be brief.
Life begins, then, with summer and romance. Childhood and youth constitute the phase of the fairy tale – with domineering fathers, wicked stepmothers, vicious half-siblings, etc., to be included ad hoc. The time of quests, dragons, and hidden treasure. The Brothers Grimm, and Alice in Wonderland.
Then comes spring and comedy. The problem comedy of one’s twenties and thirties, the phase of the love story, the picaresque, and the bodice-ripper, the sentimental education and the Bildungsroman, leading one way or another to marriage and probably children, Love in the Haystacks leading to All’s Well That Ends Well.
Then comes winter and satire. Maturity and middle age, the phase of the brackish roman-fleuve and the increasingly sinister Aga saga, with sour whispers gathering in the kitchen dusk. For some, the great losses and injustices of life can be tamed and borne; for others, the debit ledger breaks free and burgeons. It is the time of Can You Forgive Her? (yes, you can) and He Knew He Was Right (no, he was wrong).
Then comes autumn and tragedy: decline and fall, the roman noir, the Gothic ghost story, the book of the dead.
9. Identity crisis
Until September 2001, when I was fifty-two, I’d never given my ‘identity’ (my what?) a moment’s thought. Why would I? I was white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, non-believing, able in mind and body…Identity crises were for the rest of the world to worry about, the present world (the extant, the actual), fluid and churning and chameleonic, with its array of syndromes, conditions, disorders, and its burgeoning suite of erotic destinies (I’m bi, I’m trans, I’m chaste). In short, your identity sleeps inside you, unless or until it is roused.
Yet it occurred, my crisis, it took place – it elapsed. Not that I would dare to claim any kind of parity with the outliers, the anomalies, those singled out for questioning in the planet-wide identity parade. My case was peculiar. There were no models or patterns, no support groups or integration programmes, no experts or counsellors, no newsletters, no ‘literature’. I was all on my own.
…As Larkin wrote (in a letter of 1958, complaining to a woman friend about the banal irritations of the Christmas season, and briefly comparing her trials to his): ‘Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.’ There. It even rhymes; it may not scan – but it rhymes.
And the poet’s comment is a useful check, perhaps, on the ambitions of the sympathetic imagination. Mine is happening to me – a factor of incalculable weight. The identity crisis in question was a humble thing; but it was exclusively and indivisibly mine.
*1 Yes, this all took place a very long time ago. Forty-odd years later, London taxis persist in not costing £5: they now cost £88.80. But back then the sum of £5 was only seen on the meter of a taxi bound for the airport. (And £5, as Phoebe reminded us, was what the agency would have paid Ariadne.)
*2 Genghis Khan is revered today only in Mongolia (whose premier airport bears his name). Elsewhere and always – even in Nazi Germany – he is remembered as a blood-smeared genocidaire. He killed about 40 million: close to 10 per cent of the global population in 1300. We remember him too, now, as a hyperactive satyr and rapist: 16 million people alive today are not being at all deluded when they claim to feel the blood of Genghis coursing through their veins…Hitler’s declaration – part of a morale-stiffening lecture to his military brass – was made on August 22, 1939, when the immediate prospect was the ‘depopulation’ of Poland; and Genghis, said Hitler (getting slightly carried away), ‘hunted millions of women and children to their deaths, consciously and with a joyous heart’. We may incidentally note that the
liberal thinker Alexander Herzen, in one of his extraordinary premonitions, said in the 1860s that a Russian post-revolutionary power might resemble ‘Genghis Khan with the telegraph’. Khan is Turkic for ‘ruler, lord, prince’ (and when Churchill heard the news on March 11, 1953, he said, ‘The great khan is dead’). At that point Stalin was revered as ‘the father of the peoples’ by about a third of humankind (China, et al.). So you could say that Stalin got away with it (i.e., his personal toll of 20-odd million), in the West at least, until the publication of Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968) and more comprehensively Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the early 1970s. Today, in 2018, Stalin’s approval rating in Russia is over 50 per cent.
*3 Specifically ‘a real dilly of a VD’, in the words of William Burroughs. One of the books I was reading at the time was The Naked Lunch. ‘The disease in short arm hath a gimmick for going places…And after an initial lesion at the point of infection [it] passes to the lymph glands of the groin, which swell and burst in suppurating fissures, drain for days, months, years…’ Elephantiasis of the genitals is ‘a frequent complication’, as is gangrene, to the point where ‘amputation in medio from the waist down [is] indicated’.
*4 Germaine was unwaveringly kind and gentle, and in every way – but the amatory demeanour of the world’s most glamorous feminist is surely of scant general interest in this day and age…I don’t think she and I ever talked except glancingly about the situation of women. Germaine’s strength was wild brilliance, not sober instruction; she certainly infused her influence, but the job of turning me into a true believer devolved upon the world’s second most glamorous feminist, Gloria Steinem, with whom I spent a not especially relaxing but highly educational day, as an interviewer, in New York State in 1984…It was said of Florence Nightingale that she was ‘very violent’ – tacitly. All the great feminists of my era had moral menace in them. And they were almost invariably childless. They had to harden their hearts: such was the historical demand.
*5 ‘He could feel quite tangibly the difference in weight between the fragile human body and the colossus of the State. He could feel the State’s bright eyes gazing into his face; any moment now the State would crash down on him…’ The extreme asymmetry in mass defines the ‘fear that millions of people find insurmountable…this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow – this terrible fear of the State’. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate.
*6 And one senses that the third way attracted more poets than novelists. Obviously it did. Poetry by definition a) tends to be oblique, b) resists paraphrase, and c) can find refuge in extreme brevity. It is the work of a moment to imagine an opaque haiku about (say) the collectivisation of agriculture (1929–33); it is very hard to imagine an extended socialist-realist narrative on the same subject with not a thought in its head about the annihilation of several million peasant families.
PART II
Chapter 1
France in the Time of
Iraq 1: Anti-américain
Invisible ink
There’s no doubt about it: this is the life.
St-Malo, on the north-west coast of France, in March 2003. The name of the seafront hotel was Le Méridien…
Freshly showered, and wearing only a pair of kitten-heeled red shoes and an attractive lower undergarment (arguably her coolest pants), she came out of the bathroom and into the bedroom and stood quite still with her back to the bright bay window. There was a one-page single-spaced typescript in her hand…
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So wrote the Irish novelist Margaret Hungerford (1855–97; typhoid) in her best-known novel Molly Bawn (which earns a friendly mention in Ulysses). It is a generous thought, and memorably expressed; its spirit is inclusive and egalitarian (there’s hope for us all, it murmurs); and it has the further merit of being broadly true. But ‘beauty’, here, is a misnomer or an example of poetic licence: Mrs Hungerford means physical charm, or appeal, or the power to attract and endear. Her aphorism doesn’t really apply to the beautiful.*1
You see, in the case of the woman with her back to the window – it wasn’t just him. In her case there was more than one beholder; there was in fact something like a beholder consensus. To take one concrete example, in the mid-1990s Vogue magazine ran a feature called ‘The World’s Hundred Most Alluring Women’; and she came thirty-sixth…She was half Uruguayan and half Hungarian-American Jewish – a very good mixture, that: and just look at it all. Behold the moist brown flesh, the graceful power of the legs, the thick black hair wet and gleaming. Her figure, by the way, had been variously described in print as ‘hourglass’ and ‘pneumatic’.