Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

At the gate to the front garden they peeled off from their daughters and made their way in shared silence to the northern rim of Regent’s Park. The taste of the air: it wasn’t local, he realised, or even hemispherical, or even terrestrial. Yes, the equinox, when day and night went halves on the twenty-four hours; it happened twice a year (the third week in March, the third week in September), as the sun crossed ‘the celestial equator’. So for an interlude you were subject not only to the home biosphere but also to the solar system and its larger arrangements. Did this explain the accompanying arrow shower of physical memories? You felt yourself as a multi-annual being; and instead of making you feel old, as you’d expect it to do, it made you feel young, precariously connecting you to earlier incarnations, to your forties, your thirties, your twenties, your teens and beyond, all the way from experience to innocence…The Child is Father of the man. True, O poet of the lakes; and twice a year, in March, in September, the man is father of the child.

  …Standing at the railings near the Zoo’s entranceway, they listened hopefully, and lingered long enough to pick up the odd neigh, whinny, roar, and trumpet.

  They started back and after a few paces Elena said, ‘For how long did she give you a hard time about Lily? Phoebe.’

  He readjusted. Then he said, ‘She didn’t. She barely mentioned it. Maybe she was still nuts on Parfait Amour. Weird, because Phoebe wasn’t one to forgive and forget. But she seemed to let it go. I wonder why.’

  Elena tightened her grip on his arm and brought him to a halt. She turned full face, full face, and pale in the light of the conscious moon.

  ‘Well now you know. That settles it, fool. She’d already got her own back – with your father.’ Elena shook her head. ‘You’re as blind as a kitten sometimes.’

  The manhole

  On October 7 the first American cruise missiles struck Afghanistan, and on October 11 Elena flew safely back to London; and on October 31 I myself crossed the Atlantic. To spend a few days in Manhattan and then take the shuttle to Boston. I had hoped of course to see Christopher, but he was in the city of Peshawar on the Pakistani–Afghan border, at the head of the Khyber Pass…

  ‘Some of them are really fired up about it – none more so than Norman.’ Them, in this sentence, meant New York novelists, and Norman was of course Norman Mailer. ‘He wanted to start writing a long novel about 9/11 on 9/12.’

  The speaker was a young publisher friend, Jonas. We were drinking beer in an empty dive on 52nd Street.

  I said, ‘The urge soon passed, I bet. Norman’s too wise about the ways of fiction. Have you read The Spooky Art? He’ll wait. Something like this takes years to sink in.’

  ‘I’m told that Bret’ – Bret Easton Ellis, the rather blithely unsqueamish author of American Psycho – ‘is struck dumb. For now.’ ‘Well. Everyone’s responding in their, at their own…’

  Jonas said, ‘We have a lady in Publicity who does the press ads? She reads the book, she reads all the reviews, and she assembles and arranges the quotes. She’s the best there is at that, and she’s eighty-three. Totally on the ball. And you know something? She can’t take it in. She was here – she saw what happened. But she doesn’t get what happened. “I can’t take it in,” she says. “It’s too big.” ’

  ‘…It’s too big.’

  Three times I went downtown to what they were now calling the Pile.

  My wife, in her piece,*7 wrote that Ground Zero made her think of a steaming manhole. A fourteen-acre manhole. When she was there, in late September, the double high-rise of the WTC had become a medium-rise – a rusted steel and rubbish heap stretching to twenty storeys (down from 110). Now, in early November, the medium-rise had become a low-rise, chewed at its periphery by excavators and various other mechanical dredgers and burrowers…

  ‘The unmentionable odour of death’ had lifted and dispersed. Later in Auden’s poem we read:

  Into this neutral air

  Where blind skyscrapers use

  Their full height to proclaim

  The strength of Collective Man…

  Down at the Pile the air was no longer neutral (it was redolent of doused flames, scorched electrics, and the dusty undertaste of a lost battle); but the strength of collective man was never more palpable. Here the colossal squid of American can-do, American will-do, was fully engaged, with ironworkers, structural engineers, plumbers, pipefitters, boilermakers, cement masons, with cognoscenti of asbestos, of insulation, of sheet metal, riggers, truckers, teamsters…Like millions of others, worldwide, I had seen the Towers collapse in real time; and before me now the hundreds of hardhats were testifying to the weight of what came down.

  …West 11th Street (I was staying there at my in-laws’, in the house where my wife was raised): on the corner of Sixth Avenue stood Ray’s Pizza, on the corner of Seventh stood St Vincent’s Hospital. When Elena was here both buildings were plastered with images of missing people: she read several hundred legends typed or scrawled beneath a candid face…Please call day or night if you have ANY information of ANY kind!!!!’ Elena wrote on:

  The posters give us many details: this daughter has a mole beneath her left buttock, this husband has a KO tattoo on his left arm, as if they are wandering around in a daze somewhere and don’t know who they are. But they’re not. It is we who are wandering around in a daze.

  And the lost will not be found. In total, three police officers, six firefighters, and eleven civilians were safely extracted from under the fused mass of the Pile, which contained approximately 2,700 dead bodies.

  Chinatown

  How was your trusted ex-girlfriend? asked Phoebe, drily, on the day of his return from Durham. She was well, he quietly answered. Lily was well in 1977 and she was well in 2001. They met for lunch on a Saturday in Chinatown.

  Like Elena (and like Julia), Lily was an American who had spent much of her life in England. He had known her for forty years. So they talked about the past, and their marriages, and especially their children, and not just about September 11.

  He had no reason to invoke that very congenial episode, up north. But he kept thinking of it while they ate. After the public event, the dinner, and the nightcaps in the hotel lounge, they went to her room and followed the dictates of muscle memory. Being faithful won’t do a damn thing for me (he’d briefly reasoned): I’ll be punished anyway…

  Now they were talking about certain of their exes, and he said,

  ‘Remember Phoebe? I never grilled you, but what was your impression?’

  ‘Well I hated her at first of course because of her figure and the way she eats. But after that I took to her. She made me laugh.’

  ‘Really? I’m glad, because she didn’t get on that well with other women. And you’re usually wary of those men-only types.’

  ‘She made me laugh about your lunch with Roman Polanski. In Paris that time – when was that?’

  ‘It was later on. I think it was ’79. You know, Roman was born in Paris?’

  ‘Was he? And you found him so charming.’ Lily looked furtive and amused. ‘Did you hear what happened there?…Well, when you went to the bathroom, he slid his hand between her thighs and said, Get rid of him.’

  ‘…The dirty little bastard. What’d she say?’

  ‘She said, or she said she said, How can I get rid of him? He’s writing a huge piece about you and we’ve only been here five minutes. Then he gave her his phone number on a napkin and made her swear that she’d call him the next day.’

  ‘And did she?’

  Lily shook her head. ‘That’s what I asked her. And I remember exactly. She said, Certainly not. He’d just jumped bail for drugging and buggering a thirteen-year-old. Perhaps I’m very old-fashioned, but I think that’s un peu trop, don’t you?’

  He said, ‘You know, Polanski insisted that everyone wants to fuck young girls. The lawyers, the cops, the judge, the jury –
they all want to fuck young girls. Everyone. I don’t want to fuck young girls. Any more than I want to fuck a pet rabbit or a puppy.’

  ‘But they do have a following, thirteen-year-olds.’

  ‘I suppose. No, clearly they do. Ooh, that dirty little bastard. He waits till I go to the bathroom, then he…’

  Now it was Lily’s turn to go to the bathroom, and as Martin asked for the bill he thought about that breakfast in bed, at the Durham Imperial, and about the journey back by train: many hours to consider Phoebe’s past warnings and threats (Woe betide you), which never materialised. Now he paid.

  ‘What’s she up to these days, Phoebe?’ said Lily as they were heading out.

  ‘I happened to see her niece the other day. Who told me Phoebe was rich. She gave up her business for a big cheque.’

  ‘What was her business?’

  ‘I was never really clear about that. Business business. Brokering. She took early retirement. With bonuses. Business.’

  ‘She put the wind up me once. It was very soon after you saved my life in Durham. Phoebe gave me such a look. Like Lucrezia Borgia wondering how to flay me alive. Then she threw her head back and laughed and said, Oh never mind.’

  Lily went south, and Martin walked north-west, through Chinatown and into Little Italy. The scents of a dozen different cuisines, as Elena had noted, and the sound of a dozen different languages: You can’t help thinking that the whole Taliban Council would go unnoticed walking down Canal Street…Across Houston, past NYU, up Broadway as far as the Strand Bookstore, then left to Sixth Avenue. Ray’s Pizza, no longer a would-be clearing house (no longer a kiosk thatched with photos and messages), but the locus of a neglected roadside shrine, keepsakes, scrawled farewells, and a little midden of petals, leaves, and stems.*8

  Roman Polanski, like Father Gabriel – men so stirred by violation that only children would do. Now that Martin had young daughters of his own all his thoughts and feelings about Phoebe were changed, recombined utterly. He used to imagine that he had weighed it and assessed its mass: the weight of the early betrayal, the weight of what came down. But now he knew he’d had no idea.

  Long shadows

  The mood of all New Yorkers just now, as Elena put it, is of a huge self-help group – cooperative, communitarian, even socialistic. But on November 7, in the paper, there was an informal interview with a civic-minded activist who every morning for eight weeks had stood on a corner nearby (with a score of others) bearing a sign that said SANITATION ROCKS.

  ‘We were there to cheer the sanitation trucks as they passed by,’ he told the reporter. ‘But yesterday the truck passed by and when we cheered the driver gave us the finger. So I guess everything’s slowly getting back to normal.’

  And normal New York was still tumultuous. A true-blue Monday afternoon, and I stood on Sixth Avenue looking for a cab to take me to LaGuardia; under a lowered sun the long-shadowed moneymen and moneywomen of Manhattan streamed by, getting and spending in a spirit of sharp-elbowed devotion to gain. This was the Village, I knew, and not the South Bronx, but still: no fighting, no biting, and never mind the great gamut of castes and colours and alphabets. All the passions and hatreds of the multitude – all the bitter furies of complexity – were delegated to the metal beasts of the road: barbarously impatient, subhumanly short-fused, squirming and jostling to find their place in the Gold Rush.

  Saul won’t be like Iris, I was telling myself. Iris was slightly nuts in the first place (as was John Bayley).*9 Saul wouldn’t be reduced to saying ‘Where is?’ and ‘Must do go’. But why couldn’t Saul absorb September 11? ‘The history of the world’, he used to say, not solemnly but not unseriously, ‘is the history of anti-Semitism.’ And there was plenty of anti-Semitism intertwined with September 11.*10 It was just ‘too big’: it was the size of the event that made it unwieldy, when Saul tried to contain it. That was what I kept telling myself.

  I stared at the red traffic light to my left on 11th Street. It looked to me like a Time magazine illustration of some newsworthy virus or bacterium, faceted like an insect’s eye, black-studded, and slightly hairy at the edges…

  Repeatedly turning my head south, towards downtown (where the cabs were meant to be coming from), I saw that insistent void where the Twin Towers used to be. You wanted to avert your eyes from the helpless nudity of the air. Skyscrapers would never look the same, and planes would never look the same, and even the oceanic Manhattan blue, so intensely charged, would never look the same.

  * * *

  ∗

  In the end I was driven to the airport, at appalling speed, by a certain Boris Vronski. Fitfully I read, but kept looking up and out…

  What exactly did ‘political Islam’ have in mind? World hegemony and a planet-wide caliphate. Attained how? Necessarily by defeating all the infidel armies, the British, the French, the Indian, the Japanese, the Chinese, the North Korean, the Russian, and the American – the infidel armies, with their aircraft carriers and their trillion-dollar budgets. The restored Caliphate: God willing. Yes, God would need to be willing. And able. That which political Islam had in mind made no sense at all without the weaponry of God.

  I was coming to the end of my book, Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide (1967), a study of the Tsarist concoction The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (in the Middle East an evergreen bestseller, along with Mein Kampf). Now I turned to the foreword (added in 1995) and read:

  There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower clergy] for the benefit of the ignorant and the superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.*11

  At Delta Shuttle I climbed out, confirmed that the Trump Shuttle was no more, and bought a ticket for the forty-minute flight to Logan.

  *1 Christopher told me there was a WMD scare in Washington: it got around that a rogue nuclear weapon was poised to vaporise the capital. Some friends were urging the Hitchenses to leave town – urging in vain.

  *2 For instance, I was secretly spending a lot of time with Philip Larkin: the Collected Poems, the Selected Letters, and Andrew Motion’s authorised Life. Although I knew these books well (I had written about them at great length in 1993), two main themes came at me with all the force of discovery…First, Philip’s father. Not many pages ago I called Sydney Larkin a fascist. That word was often used loosely in my time (parking wardens were called fascists), so it might help to be more specific. Sydney wasn’t a fascist, or only secondarily. He was something much more advanced. What he was was a Nazi. This remains a startling – and startlingly underexamined – truth: Philip had been raised and mentored by an adherent of Adolf Hitler…But what I kept thinking about, what I kept returning to, was the destitution – the irreducible church-mouse penury – of Philip’s lovelife.

  *3 Inez was two; so in her infinite book of secrecy only a little could I read. Maybe she seemed vague in distinguishing the falling towers from the US Open (or maybe she thought ‘tennis’ meant ‘television’), but she certainly registered the new atmosphere, the sudden congealing of mood in everyone around her…Eliza, almost five, was more

  transparent (see above): the plane, hauntingly, looks more like a Stealth Bomber (or a flying saucer) than a 767; and notice how the black smoke is leniently attributed to the WTC’s chimneys. That flower is all her own (with perhaps a nod to ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’)…When they spoke of the event, Bobbie, Nat, and Gus, all three of them respectful students of history, lowered their voices and their gazes, no doubt already aware that the political consequences would dominate much of their early lives. The Amises were all doing what they could
with September 11. Elena, protective and also pugnacious in the name and the spirit of New York City, where she was born and raised, wanted to ‘go home soon’ (and soon did).

  *4 The rebel angel Belial, consigned to Pandemonium (‘place of all demons’), puts it simply enough (Paradise Lost, Bk II): ‘For who would lose, / Though full of pain, this intellectual being, / Those thoughts that wander through eternity…?’ Alzheimer’s, like populism, is decidedly philistine; it hates the intellectual being.

  *5 Bin Laden would have points of agreement with Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal. His true soulmate, though, would be Jerry Falwell: ‘the pagans, the abortionists and the gays and the lesbians…all of them have tried to secularise America. I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen” ’…This line of reasoning always makes me think of two lines from ‘Leda and the Swan’. Yeats’s sonnet begins with an act of bestiality and rape: Zeus in animal disguise ravishes and impregnates the nymph Leda; and that child will be Helen of Troy. ‘A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower…’

  *6 This comes in the seventh chapter – the one that begins: ‘I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals.’ Humbert is instituting a regime of sexual bribes. Nabokov continues: ‘O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine…’ Lolita is described as ‘a cruel negotiator’. Phoebe was not a squeezer or a gouger; she was more like a cheerful auctioneer. And there were other differences. I wasn’t a stepfather, I wasn’t in loco parentis. And Phoebe was thirty-six, not thirteen.

  *7 Which ran in the Guardian on October 11. An expanded version appeared soon afterwards in the American Scholar.