by Amis, Martin
‘All right, you know how touchy and vain France is. How sensitive Jean-Jacques can sometimes be. And your Secretary of Defense, Mr Rumsfeld, is already being impossibly rude – in all directions. Typical German.’
‘Why, what’s he done now?’
‘Well, this isn’t the main thing, but he said, if you please – he said he could easily do without my help in Iraq! After all that trouble I went to.’
‘You don’t want to be there anyway.’
‘No, I don’t. I personally don’t want us to be there. But Blair does. And Rumsfeld taunts him like that – his best ally.’ Martin carefully lowered his face towards the coffee cup (he had become suspicious, after innumerable spillages and breakages, of the stability of his hands). ‘I don’t want to be there. But Bush does. And so does Hitch. Hitch has gone on the road for this war. What he calls a media burn. Like the one he did on Princess Di and Mother Teresa. Remember?’
‘No.’
‘When was it? 1996 or ’97. They died in the same week, and Hitch was much in demand – for “balance”. He said he was the only human being in America who was perfectly ready to dump on the pair of them. Especially the nun.’
‘Okay, but why’s he doing a media burn for Iraq? It was that sex breakfast he had with Wolfowitz.’
‘It was more like a sex snack. In the Pentagon. Hitch wants regime change. What he’s after is the end of Saddam. Who grew up as a bucketboy in the torture corps.’
‘…And what was the main thing Rumsfeld did?’
‘Herr Rumsfeld?’ For effect Martin took his time. ‘He called Jean-Jacques an elderly…That’s right. He called me one too. That reference to “old Europe”. According to him, we’re just a load of old elderly. I happen to find that very hurtful.’
‘Yes, and a bit snide too – considering your demographic troubles…My birth rate is sound. Yours is crap. So is Europe’s. That thing we saw about Italy. Italy.’*4
Additional coffees were gracefully served. Martin said,
‘Jean-Jacques’ crap birth rate has tormented him for centuries. Dénatalité. But he got to work on that and his birth rate’s now better than Mario’s. Or Miguel’s. Jean-Jacques isn’t touchy about his birth rate. But don’t say anything about his war record. That’s a tender spot.’
‘I’ll bet. If it wasn’t for me, they’d still be here.’
Even when they weren’t playing party games, he often wanted to ask Elena to recast certain sentences using proper nouns (in this case, If it wasn’t for America, the Germans would still be in France), but he hardly ever needed to: after a couple of seconds he always knew what she meant. The point being that she reflexively felt that her thoughts were his thoughts – and after a beat or two they were. It was that inestimable thing, never complete of course and for good reason: co-identity.*5
‘After all,’ she said, ‘I won the war.’
‘Not so, El. If it wasn’t for you, you claim, Fritz would still be here. In 1940, after the fall of France, who still stood, who stood alone? Me. I. I stood alone against the fascist beast. For well over a year. While you, you quailed before Lindbergh and what was it, “America First”.’
‘But then I rode to your rescue.’
‘Then you came in – but not until Fritz called you out. By declaring war on you, my dearest. It’s true that once you joined me in the struggle I knew we couldn’t possibly lose.*6 Uh…hang on, what does GI stand for in GI Joe?’
‘General Issue. Or Government Issue.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘So that was the earlier version of grunt…GI Joe didn’t win the war. Nor did Tommy Atkins. It was Ivan who won the war, Elena. Ivan absorbed Fritz. At the cost of twenty-five million lives.’
She thought about this. ‘But you can’t say that if it wasn’t for Ivan, Fritz would still be here. Ivan would still be here…Well, we’d have won in the end, you and I.’
‘Mm, I suppose. But yes, Elena, we’d have seen off Fritz, you and I. And Yukio. And Mario. In the end.’
‘Precisely…Look at you. You talk about not offending the French. And look at you.’
He saw what she meant. Martin had before him, at chest height, an eyecatching paperback called France and the Nazis.
‘Quite right too,’ she continued. ‘I’m going to take that book and brandish it on stage. Why should I mollycoddle Jean-Jacques? He hates me. So why the hell should I humour Jean-Jacques? Fuck him.’
America hates France back
Christine Jordis, Martin’s editor at Gallimard, briefly stopped by, and in her wonderfully finished English enlightened them about the meteoric Jed Slot – and all the huge prizes and genius awards that were sure to come his way…
As it progressed the afternoon was getting ever warmer. Elena naturally and eagerly wanted a long stroll on the beach, plus a real hike on the cliffs and the headlands; but she had a media burn of her own to deal with, starting at four…They looked up. A solitary senior, somehow detached from his friends and minders, veered around in harmless disarray, coming so close to their table that they could read the address he had pinned to his shirt: C/0 Dr Priestly, 127 Marine Parade, Brighton, Sussex.
‘Jesus. I went to school on Marine Parade. That boarding crammer, remember?…Uh, let me try some counselling, some guidance here, Pulc.’ Pulc was short for pulchritude. ‘I want to help you and France work it out.’
‘France started it.’
‘Quite true,’ he said (and he registered, as he often did, the bare fact of Elena’s birth order: the youngest of four). ‘Because you, my bride, represent soulless modernity, you’re mechanised, standardised – according to son-of-the-soil Jean-Jacques. Okay. Now you’re entitled to resent his anti-Americanism. But back home, you’re letting Francophobia get out of hand.’
‘I know I am.’
‘You’re having one of your funny spells. One of your neurotic episodes.’ One of your ‘orrible turns. Yes – like the time you tried to give up drink, like the time you feared Reds under your beds, like the time you test-drove your domino theory in South East Asia. ‘And now you’re coming down with a nasty case of –’
‘It’s true. You’ve seen all this about freedom fries…’
‘I have.’ At the present time – mid-March, 2003 – cafeterias in the House of Representatives were offering ‘freedom fries’ and ‘freedom toast’, served no doubt with freedom mustard and a garnish of freedom beans, and (let’s clunk on with this for a while) congressmen in their hotel rooms were dispensing freedom kisses before peeling off the freedom knickers of their secretaries or interns and before peeling on their own freedom letters…*7 He said,
‘Will I still be able to say, “Excuse my French”?’
‘Excuse my French? Meaning sorry my French is crap?’
‘No. As in, He’s a rotten little prick, if you’ll excuse my French.’
‘I don’t see why not. Sure.’
They read their books. Elena had another coffee; and he took the opportunity to order a modest beer…Actually America, at present, would by no means excuse your French, in the literal sense. Francophobia was playing so well that it was on course to decide the 2004 general election. (‘Hi,’ began one Republican bigwig as he opened a meeting, ‘– or as John Kerry might say, Bonjour.’)…Martin received his beer and lit a cigarette to go with it. Most American politicians had foibles and episodes they wanted to play down: that ten-year relationship with the very special (if somewhat troubled) Times Square rentboy; that billion-dollar big-oil kickback for thwarting the environmentalists. And so it was with Kerry, who as a child had learnt to speak French. The rentboy was morals, the kickback was ethics, but speaking French was something like treason. Martin said,
‘You seem to have forgotten that France was your crucial ally in the Revolutionary War. Jean-Jacques helped Uncle Sam – to spite Tommy Atkins. Yorktown, Elena. If it wasn’t for France, I’d stil
l be there. In America.’
‘No. I’d’ve crushed you and swept you out long ago.’
‘All right. But you know on prize day they’re going to hate your fucking guts.’
‘Of course.’
‘Because you’re an American Jew.*8 This is the land of the anti-Semitic riot. Our George Steiner says that at any time you can get an “explosion” of French chauvinism against Jews.’
‘Not up here, surely. It’s like America – for that kind of thing you have to go south. Anyway, if there’s so much as a whisper of dissent on Friday, then I’ll…’
He said, ‘Now now, Pulc. Now now.’
Oradour
He sat back and sipped his beer and inhaled his fill of smoke. Oh, as Christopher often said, the miracle of the cigarette…
‘Are you going to stop?’
Stop what? he thought – but only for a moment (he knew very well what was coming, but as usual he sought to delay it or divert it). Stop what? Stop being a sap for Phoebe’s depth-charge venganza, stop brooding about Larkin, about Hilly? Stop thinking about suicide? Stop boning up on war and dearth and megadeath?
‘Stop what?’ He raised his eyes from the page. ‘Stop reading about massacres?’
She said, ‘I saw the books you brought along. What were they?’ Sadly Elena shook her head. ‘The Rape of Nanking and uh, the one about Rwanda.’
‘We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.’
‘There was one about an endless battle. Verdun. And a huge biography of Genghis Khan. Why? Why read about massacres?’
‘I don’t know.’ And he wondered, Why do we read what we read? Because it answers our state of mind? ‘There were plenty of massacres in wartime France. France and the Nazis deals with two of them. Tulle and Oradour.’ Elena seemed attentive (and unimpatient), so he continued. ‘In Tulle the SS ransacked people’s attics and cellars – looking for rope. They hanged ninety-nine men on the Avenue de la Gare. Off lamp posts and balconies. That was a reprisal for forty Germans killed by the partisans. But the next morning the same SS division went to Oradour and murdered absolutely everyone. The –’
‘Christ, well you’re not quiet any more…Would your mum like to hear all about Oradour?*9 Would your daughters?’
He frowned and said, ‘I think I read about violence because I don’t understand it. It’s the thing I hate more than anything else on earth and I don’t understand it…I’m like the memory man in Saul’s novella.’ This was The Bellarosa Connection (1997). ‘He has that Holocaust dream, and he’s shattered to discover that he doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t “understand merciless brutality”. Me neither.’
‘I don’t know, maybe that’s as it should be. Who does understand it?’
‘In the months before Liberation there were lots of little Oradours all over France…In your acceptance speech, Elena, don’t dwell too long on 1940 to 1944. Spare France that. Mm, I suppose it’s not especially considerate of me, reading this in the town square. The cover…’
He pushed the book across the table. There was the famous stock photograph (one of the most gruesome ever taken): Hitler at dawn in Paris, as conqueror (with the splayed calves of the Eiffel Tower in the background), sauntering around at the head of his aides, all of them in collar and tie, in leather greatcoat (and nearly toppling over backwards with power and pride); and there he is, his pale and pouchy face under that crested cap, wearing an expression of imperturbable entitlement.
‘Imagine if that was Big Ben. I don’t know, if that’d happened, I wouldn’t…’
‘What?’
‘I wouldn’t have been fit to marry you, El. Seriously. I would’ve choked even as I begged for your hand.’ Her face showed clemency as well as curiosity, so he continued, ‘Well, think. Let’s tick them off. Great Britain easily crushed in battle by the Wehrmacht. A fascist regime installed in uh, Cheltenham. With its militia sworn to combat democracy and “the Jewish leprosy” and defend Christian – i.e., Catholic – civilisation.
Meanwhile, SS massacres in Middle Wallop and Pocklington. And Jews being rounded up – by English bobbies following English orders – and carted off to Silesia.*10 Ferries from Hull to Hamburg…Given all that in my past, would you consent to be mine?’
Being alone freely
When I say he thought about suicide, I don’t mean he was sizing it up as his next move. He just went on thinking about it: suicide. And he seemed to believe that everyone else was thinking about it too: he was aware that they weren’t, but he seemed to believe that they were. This kind of mental tic was known in the trade as ‘suicidal ideation’ (and was considered an unpromising sign). But there it was: he kept asking himself, Why aren’t there more suicides?
‘The time has come for you to change your ways,’ she said. ‘It’s time.’
‘What ways? This book’s good, you know, thoughtful, well written. But there’s no index. If it did have an index, one entry would go Hitchens, Christopher, page 204.’
She asked for the bill and said, ‘Why? What’s Hitch up to in France and the Nazis?’
‘It’s weird. He’s singled out for praise by an inhabitant of present-day Vichy, Robert Faurisson. The nation’s premier negationist – Holocaust denier.*11 He met Hitch at some dinner and says he admires his stuff. Probably just fancied him – fell for the velvet voice and the Oxford charm…Uh, is that what you mean, Elena? Has the time come to stop reading books like France and the Nazis?’
‘No, that’s not what I mean. I mean the thing in your other hand. The thing with smoke coming out of it…Do you want to stop?’
Years ago Christopher said to him, ‘I don’t want to be a non-smoker.’ And Martin said, ‘I couldn’t agree more’ or ‘Exactly’ or even ‘Hear hear’ (or even ‘Hear him, hear him!’). Their attitude to nicotine – and to benzene, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, and all the other ingredients – seemed to be incurably adolescent.*12 They just couldn’t connect it to life and death.
‘You had one after breakfast,’ said Elena. ‘You had two after breakfast.’
‘Ah, but I was smoking for a worthy cause.’ He had managed to put it about that he needed a salutary cigarette or two after breakfast. To bring on the thing that Larkin called the daily ‘contact with nature’. With what nature? Human nature? Animal nature? ‘I was smoking in the furtherance of a noble dream.’
‘And how did it go?’
‘A disappointment. It was a crap shit, Elena, between you and me.’
‘What are you smoking for now?’
‘Uh, to steady my nerves. There’s your speech on Friday. And the Iraq War on Saturday. I’ll go on smoking for the duration, then quit when it’s over.’
‘I could be out of there in less than a month.’
‘We, you mean we. I’m going in there too.’
‘Yes, but I’m the one with all the power. I’m so powerful – why would I even bother to be anti-French?’
‘And that’s why you’re so loathed. Hating you was government policy in postwar France. And you know who made hating you respectable? Sartre. Terrible guy.’ In fact Martin had a soft spot for old Jean-Paul. Advised not very late in life that unless he gave up smoking he faced imminent quadriplegia, Sartre said he would need a while ‘to think it over’. ‘Him and Simone. They made hating you chic.’
‘Look,’ she said and nodded towards an owlish gentleman at the facing table, who was bent over a book (by Jean-François Revel) entitled L’obsession anti-américaine.
‘Well there you are. Come on. You’ve got Le Monde in ten minutes.’
The two of them stood and gathered their things. He said,
‘An American juive. Who comes over here and wins all their literary prizes…’
‘Not all their literary prizes. Only one.’
* * *
—————
He didn’t wake up happy in St-Malo – but very generally he resumed being happy in St-Malo. Why? He thought it might be the fact that he was never alone.
Very close to a hundred per cent of his working life was spent in unrelieved solitude: the room, the chair, the flat surface, the page. All day, every day (and especially Christmas Day)…And what was it he did for a living, in that annex at the back of the garden in NW1? A disembodied observer might conclude, after an hour or so, that all he did for a living was smoke. Oh yeah, and pick his nose and scratch his backside and stare into space. What he did was becoming more and more mysterious to him; and so was solitude. Larkin again (‘Vers de Société’):
Only the young can be alone freely.
The time is shorter now for company,
And sitting by a lamp more often brings
Not peace, but other things.
And for Martin this was existential. If he couldn’t be alone, if he couldn’t be alone freely…What was writing? Writing was a soliloquy: solus ‘alone’ + loqui ‘speak’. So what would happen if he couldn’t be alone?
‘Let’s go.’ She shouldered her bag. ‘Okay. Stop smoking. Stop reading so much about massacres. And stop brooding about Larkin and that hellhag Phoebe.’
‘Will do. Uh, remind me, Pulc,’ he said as he rose. ‘Why are we invading Iraq? I really can’t remember.’
‘Uh, weapons of mass destruction.’
‘Ah yes. Well we know for sure that Iraq hasn’t got any – otherwise we wouldn’t be invading it. WMDs make you unassailable…I suspect Bush is doing it just to get a second term. Americans never fail to reelect a president at war…You don’t have raison, Elena. And guess what a majority of your compatriots take to be their casus belli. I saw a poll. They think it’s vengeance.’
‘Vengeance for what?’