by Amis, Martin
Just for a moment she tipped her head back and sneered at him, the scrolled upper lip slightly skewed to the side – Presleyesque. This porno sneer was in fact a respectful acknowledgement of his performance, half an hour earlier, in the bed where he yet sought his ease…In the porno version he would’ve been, say, a local cat burglar who, once within the hotel, is surprised in mid-theft by the elegant lady guest – but succeeds in reassuring her, to such effect that before very long…
‘Who’s paying for this?’ he said.
‘I am,’ she said. ‘They are.’
Now she dipped down and took a gulp of orange juice from the breakfast tray.
She said, ‘Are you ready? Have you got your watch?’
‘Oui. Right…Go!’
Exactly two minutes later he said, ‘Exactly two minutes.’
‘Perfect.’
‘Perfect.’
What was she doing, standing there near-naked with the typescript in her hand? She was rehearsing and timing her acceptance speech for the Prix Mirabeau (category: Non-Fiction). Her speech was in French.
And she was his wife.
And this was the life.
Yes, perfect, perfect. Still, his recurring thoughts, the recurring questions posed in his mind, even when he was half asleep, all had to do with suicide. Not his own suicide, not exactly, but suicide.
Why? What was eating Martin Amis?
Oh, he had his troubles. And on top of everything else, in a planetary beauty contest – a real-life Miss World – with approximately 1,800,000,000 bobbing hopefuls up there on the stage, his wife only came thirty-sixth. Hence, conceivably, his obscure cafard. Or was there more to it than that?
* * *
—————
So what about this couple (we ask, while they ready themselves for the outside world)? How can one possibly address them in print? They had been together for nearly a decade, and their union was blessed not only with children (those two young daughters of theirs) but also with happiness.
And happiness, in literature, is a void and a vacuum, an empty space. Happiness writes in white ink on a white page, said a certain poet, novelist, and playwright, namely Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant (1895–1972). And it’s true. You can take a blank sheet of paper and cover it with fine prose; but the sheet is still blank. What can the pen do with happiness – with the invisible ink of happiness?
The struggle for coffee
‘I want my grand crème,’ she said.
He said, ‘And I want my double espresso.’
Making their intention quite plain, this enviably – indeed nauseatingly – compatible pair stepped out of Le Méridien and turned right towards the croisette and the Atlantic Ocean. She said,
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘The heat! The people!’
It was certainly a warm day, a warm day on the coast of Brittany. And there were certainly people, people, people – everywhere. Festival-goers, and writers and publishers and representatives of the media, and also families, large families, pressing coastward…
‘Yeah, we’ve had it relatively easy so far, El.’ El was short for Elena – and also for Elvis, whom she did resemble when she had her hair up in a quiff. ‘Now things could start getting really rough. And I want you to make me a promise. That you’ll watch yourself here in France.’
‘We’re getting no nearer to the sea…Why, particularly?’
‘Because it’s a sensitive time – with your tanks revving up, even now, in the deserts and marshes. You’re an American. And you a Jeeew. And you know what France is like. Promise me you won’t take any of France’s shit.’
* * *
—————
It was barely more than a party game I sometimes played with Elena: the aforementioned notion that people were like countries and countries were like people. And we have already drawn one obvious conclusion: countries are like men.
Seagoing vessels are often feminised in spoken and written English. Are boats like women? Admirers of Melville and Conrad will need no persuading that sailing ships, at least (galleons, yachts, schooners), have qualities that might be considered feminine. But what made anyone think for a moment that countries were like girls?
For instance, how clearly absurd it would be to write: ‘Prerevolutionary China considered that it was in her interests to maintain the status of women at about the level of livestock.’ Or, more relevantly, try this: ‘A year after her victorious campaign in Western Europe in 1940, Nazi Germany turned her attention to a war of annihilation in the USSR.’
Historically countries are men; they have always behaved like men.
In St-Malo I was trying to imagine France as a person, France as a bloke, in 2003…Well, contrary to popular belief, France has made substantial and still-evolving efforts to come to terms with those ‘dark years’ of his: the Occupation, from the summer of 1940 to the autumn of 1944. During this period, to quote the historian Tony Judt, France ‘played Uriah Heep to Germany’s Bill Sikes’ (and he was an unusually energetic Uriah, as we know). In trying to face up to his sins and crimes, France was and is encumbered by the persistence of a certain superstition: that of anti-Semitism.*2
What immediately concerned me here was how he, France, was feeling about this venture in Mesopotamia, this thrust by the US-led Coalition of the Willing. Because the imminent Iraq War brushed up against another French neurosis: anti-Americanism…In the coming days my wife would be often in the public eye; and she was an American Jew. So how would he take to her, France?
‘Finally.’
Yes, here at last was the North Atlantic with its rollers and combers and breakers. And, yes, an abnormally, a freakishly warm day, and there were citizens, down on the sand, who were cautiously availing themselves of it. French parents and grandparents on towels and blankets, French boys and girls with buckets and spades and beach balls, and dozens of French dogs jumping and digging and running their laps and loops…
‘The miniature gaiety of seasides,’ he said. ‘Larkin.’
‘I can’t believe you’re still going on about that.’
‘Surely I’m allowed to quote him aren’t I?’
‘All right,’ she said longsufferingly. ‘Go on then.’
‘Steep beach, blue water, red bathing caps, Elena. The small hushed waves’ repeated fresh collapse. What’s wrong with that? I used to quote him before.’
‘I can’t believe you’re bending over for her. For Phoebe Phelps.’
‘How am I bending over for Phoebe Phelps?’
‘By letting yourself get…bedevilled. It was such an obvious attempt to spook you. And it worked. Look at you, you’re cooperating, you’re collaborating with that mad bitch…And all that was years ago.’ (It was eighteen months ago: September 12, 2001.) ‘It’s why you’ve been so quiet, so…’
‘Mm.’
This was true and it was a grief to him. Elena, he guiltily noted, had taken to ending many of her declarative sentences with a plaintive don’t you think? or wouldn’t you say? or, more simply, right? It was a gentle and a just reproach. He too was exasperated by it: why this silence, why this unwelcome seclusion? And it was worse than unfriendly. It was unhusbandly. But it was real.
‘I’m very sorry. A temporary condition, and it’s lifting. I don’t feel quiet today.’ No, in fact he felt uncontrollably garrulous. Realising this, he jumped to a new conclusion: So now I’m bipolar…His relationship with his sanity was becoming self-conscious, or going back to being self-conscious – the way it was in his teens. ‘I’m feeling talkative, and I’ll tell you for why. I’m thinking of starting a smirk novel.’
‘What’s a smirk novel?’
‘A novel of self-congratulation, of unalleviated self-congratulation. There aren’t many of them but they do exist – smirk novels. The one I read gloried in the author’s literary fa
me and stupendous success with women. We’re in the land of the scowl novel. Le roman de grimace. Just the place to get going on a roman de…What’s French for smirk?’
She considered. ‘I don’t think they have a word for smirk. It would be something like un petit sourire suffisant.’
‘Really? Not just smirque with a q? All right. A roman de petit…’
‘Sourire suffisant.’
‘A roman de petit sourire suffisant. A smirk novel. Now what the fuck is all this?’
Their pace had slowed – in forced deference to an unusual concentration of pedestrians. Unusual demographically, that is. One often saw children en masse, but Martin wondered if he had ever seen such an army, such a serried host of seniors. These ancient parties, these Decembrists, were inching their way along the narrow strip between the housefronts and the kerbside barriers. All this was clearly going to take a very long time. He said,
‘How’d it happen? We stepped out for a simple – an honest – cup of coffee. And now we’re trapped in this incredible operation with all these elderly.’
Yes, his Concise Oxford Dictionary was behind the game with elderly, confining itself to ‘adj. old or ageing’; future editions would be forced to add ‘n. (pl. same) an old or ageing person’. In America nowadays they confidently used elderly as a noun: The guy freaked out in the hospital, for example, and gunned down three elderly.
‘I want my cappuccino,’ said Elena. ‘And I keep wondering how old I’m going to be when we get there.’
‘Me too. But you, you’ll still be reasonably young. I’ll be an elderly.’
It could have been worse – much worse. Martin wasn’t ninety-three, he wasn’t eighty-three, he wasn’t seventy-three, he wasn’t even sixty-three, not yet; he was fifty-three (a slightly vampiric fifty-three to Elena’s forty-one), and just crossing the line, just turning the corner and beginning to make out, in the grey twilight, the shapes and forms of what lay ahead of him. Sensory adjustments to the new order of being were already well under way. For some time he had been aware that, in his outward guise, he was physically undetectable by anyone under the age of thirty-five. In the year 2000, in Uruguay, he walked around a crowded nightclub (in search of a young cousin) and he realised something: he was the Invisible Man.*3
The young had stopped seeing him; and now, in dubious recompense, he saw afresh that hitherto invisible population, the seriously old.
‘I encountered Jed Slot,’ she said as they stood there waiting.
‘So did I.’ Jed Slot was the mystery-man writer at Le Méridien. ‘When I saw him I thought his huge bestseller must be about computers or video games. What was he doing when you saw him?’
‘Being interviewed. By an incredibly brainy-looking old lady with a lorgnette. What was he doing when you saw him?’
‘Being interviewed. By two incredibly brainy-looking students or post-grads.’
‘His book’s fiction, Mart, and it’s not just a bestseller. It’s a succès d’estime.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Nah. Good luck to Jed. All power to Slot. He seemed nice enough…Jesus, c’est incroyable, ça – these old wrecks!’ He said, ‘Mark it well, kid. The future is going to look like this. In twenty years or so. And I don’t just mean me. They say it’s the gravest demographic change of all time. The silver tsunami.’
‘I’m preparing myself for it. That’ll be when all you filthy baby boomers get sicked on us.’ She smiled. ‘You’re the crap generation.’
The continuing struggle for coffee
Nothing had changed.
‘What we’re in’, he said, ‘is no longer just an emergency. It’s a humanitarian crisis. A deepening humanitarian crisis. I want my coffee.’
‘I want, I want my coffee,’ sang Elena (to the tune of ‘I Want My Potty’). ‘I want my coffee. I’ve just thought. If Robinson was North Korea, what’s Hitch?’
‘Good question. Suggest somewhere.’
‘Israel.’
‘I was going to say Israel. Yes, like Saul in a way, Hitch is Israel. He has chosen the most difficult position. And the most difficult position for him – for him in particular. An anti-Zionist who turns out to be Jewish.’
‘He didn’t choose to turn out to be Jewish. But I see what you mean about difficult positions. And now Hitch, the Marxist hawk, is going to get his war. I saw him on CNN while you were having your shit.’
‘Elena…Uh, and how did he look about his war?’
‘Very steely.’
‘Mm. Did I tell you he rang the day before we left? To “encourage” me, as he put it. “What are your doubts, Little Keith?” Well we’d been through everything else so I just said, “Two things. In the war on terror, is this the best use of resources? And, second, lack of legitimacy.” ’
‘Is that all? And?’
‘He pooh-poohed the first, but the second gave him pause. He acknowledged a certain deficit of legitimacy. But you know what he said to Ian – a couple of weeks ago? Hitch said, “It’s going to be a wonderful adventure.” ’
‘An adventurist war,’ they both said at once.
Actually Martin was starting to think it was something even more capricious than that: it was an experimentalist war. He said, ‘While you in your turn were powdering your nose, Elena, I too had a look at CNN. They’d moved on to Bush. And I didn’t like the way the president was playing with his dogs. With Barney and Spot. I didn’t like the way he was playing with Barney and Spot.’
His wife shifted her weight from foot to foot. ‘Have you told Hitch?’ She gave him a few seconds until he understood. ‘Or didn’t you want to bother him with Larkin at this stressful time.’
‘No, I haven’t. But I do want to bother him. Because he understands something about Larkin that I know I’ll never get. I won’t get it because I don’t want it. The love of that England, you know, all those muddy little villages with fucking stupid names like Middle Wallop and Six Mile Bottom. And Pocklington.’
‘Wait. What’s the Phoebe business got to do with Larkin? I know it’s ostensibly about Larkin. But what it’s really about is Phoebe and your father. And about you. Christ.’
* * *
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She meant all the oldsters – the slowly and tremulously bobbing coachloads of oldsters…Their numbers had at last begun to thin, and there was a loose sense of calibrated delay – as in a stacked aircraft groaning around high above the tarmac, with the captain coming on to say they were ninth in line for landing. The coachloads of oldsters continued to filter through the gap, stiffly upright, the feet moving in soft-shoe shuffle (no space admitted between cobble and sole); every few seconds they glanced at one another, to give encouragement or to seek mutual recognition – or mutual verification; on they edged, their faces flickering not just with discomfort, difficulty, and mistrust but also with innumerable calculations, every step measured on a scale of soreness, effort, and jeopardy. Looking beyond them, beyond their denim-clad shoulders, their pinions of cloud-white hair, their ears furry in the sun, Martin saw that the next stretch of road seemed reverse-telescoped, and the next junction felt implausibly remote, like gate 97E in a Texan airport. The elderly were making him think of planes – planes, and the poetry of departures. Here we are on our journey. Is it far? Are we nearly there?
* * *
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Old age kills travel…
I interviewed Graham Greene (1904–91) in Paris on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, and I interviewed V. S. Pritchett (1900–97) in London on the occasion of his ninetieth. ‘Old age kills travel,’ said Pritchett.
Greene talked about failing powers, but only in the context of his religion, his faith. Faith was a power, and faith weakened with time. His listener, who was thirty-five, was far from terrified by this prospect: if it made you less inclined to crave the good opinion of supernatural beings, I reasoned, t
hen old age wasn’t all downhill. Pritchett talked about failing powers in the context of putting words on the page. And that was frightening. His verdict was often on my mind, in 2003.
‘As one gets older,’ he said, ‘one becomes very boring and longwinded to oneself. One’s thoughts are longwinded, whereas before they were really rather nice and agitated. The story is a form of travel. As I go across the page my pen is travelling. Travelling through minds and situations that reveal their strangeness to you. Old age kills travel. Things don’t come suddenly to you. You’re mainly protecting yourself.’ He meant protecting yourself physically and emotionally: no surprises, please. ‘Stories come up on you almost by accident. And now one tends to live a life in which there are no accidents.’ Pritchett paused, and then added with a smile of pain, ‘It’s nothing to do with that really. It’s just getting older.’
Martin said, ‘You mean…?’
‘I mean one can’t travel any more. And one’s pen can’t travel any more. So one can’t write any more.’
Now they were suddenly on the move. His wife stepped forward, and he followed.
Is Europe an elderly?
‘Merci beaucoup,’ she said. ‘Cela va bien.’
And it is now the novelist’s pleasant duty to report that the cappuccino, and indeed the double espresso, were at last on their way.
‘Écoute, Elena. I understood bits of your speech but not all of it. I hope it’s nice and tactful. You know how sensitive France can be.’
‘Sensitive. You mean touchy and vain.’
The two of them were seated side by side at a table in the market square, facing the town’s dominant hotel (which had an Alpine, cuckoo-clock look to it); above their heads striped awnings faintly clacked and rattled in the ozonic gusts. He said,