Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  *8 Flowers, somehow, are universally felt to propitiate death. Even Eliza, not quite five, understood this…On another autumn afternoon, in 2015, I stood outside the Bataclan in Paris: candles, letters (‘Cher Hugo’), unopened bottles of wine, empty bottles of beer, and bushels of flowers, sheathed in sweating cellophane.

  *9 They were the kind of people who like getting ill and like getting old. They preferred winter to summer and autumn to spring (yearning, as John wrote, for ‘grey days without sun’). In company the Bayleys were both high-spirited and dreamy; their love of grey days was aesthetic, not neurotic…On the other hand, Iris and John were also truly incredible slobs. ‘Single shoes [and single socks] lie about the house as if deposited by a flash flood…Dried-out capless pens crunch underfoot.’ As for the housework: in the past ‘nothing seemed to need to be done’, and now ‘nothing can be done’. At the Bayleys’, the bath, so seldom used, has become ‘unusable’, and even the soap is begrimed…Saul was a Jew and not entirely non-observant (there were occasional prayers and rituals and I would don a beenie); and he was strict about cleanliness…No, I thought, Saul won’t be like Iris. He wouldn’t be out prospecting for pebbles and pennies in the gutters; he wouldn’t be watching Teletubbies; he wouldn’t be saying to his spouse, ‘Don’t hit me.’

  *10 The right answer to the question ‘How many Jews were in the WTC on September 11?’ is ‘Why do you want to know?’ Among the wrong answers is ‘None’. This was widely believed or at least touted by Judaeophobes, conspiracists, and huge pluralities in the Middle East. There were many Jews in the WTC and many died there. The numbers given seem to me surprisingly various (perhaps reflecting decent disquiet at the thought of any ‘Jew Count’), but the median figure is 325.

  *11 In the fifteen years following 2001, about 750 Americans were killed by lightning strikes; in the same period, 123 Americans were killed by Islamists (accounting for one-third of 1 per cent of national murders: 240,000). Another database finds that ‘over 80 per cent of all suicide attacks in history’ have taken place since September 11; and the victims are very predominantly Muslim (estimates range ‘between 82 and 97 per cent’). In 2015 there were 11,774 terrorist attacks worldwide, with 28,328 victims; that year in the US, Islamist terrorism killed nineteen people, two fewer than those killed by toddlers who got their hands on household guns…It would seem to follow that any generalised fear of Muslims – and all talk of a Third World War or even ‘a clash of civilisations’ – is caused either by delusion or by political opportunism. A terrorist WMD will remain a possibility, but September 11 is already unrepeatable (in other words, the culmination came first, and out of a clear blue sky). Islamism has indeed changed the course of history, by scarring it with additional wars. For the West the lesson is this: the real danger of terrorism lies not in what it inflicts but in what it provokes.

  Chapter 5

  France in the Time of Iraq

  2: Shock and Awe

  Jed Slot

  Jed Slot was in the hotel bar – being interviewed. Himself a teetotaller, Jed did all his interviews in the hotel bar, and I’d arranged to do all my interviews in there too; but whereas Slot’s sessions lasted all day long and well into the night, mine only accounted for teatime (so I often went in early and came out late, just to listen). The truth was that I had taken up Jed like a new hobby. I had even read him.

  ‘Eh bien. Now tell me, if you would,’ began the questioner (a shrivelled sage with a briar pipe), ‘what is the difference between the novel and the short story – I mean compositionally, in terms of praxis?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Jed, ‘the novel is more expansive. By contrast, the short story is more succinct.’

  …The ceremonies involving Elena started at six-thirty; I was having a quick beer while she finished her preparations upstairs (having it out for the very last time with the bathroom mirror). I listened on.

  ‘Does the prescriptive exiguity make so bold as to encroach on the causal nexus?’

  After an unhappy silence Jed said, ‘Excuse me? The causal…?’

  Jed Slot was a young American writer of noir novels, but his latest book was a collection of noir short stories (called Court et noir: short and black). Already a minor icon in genre book clubs across France, Slot was suddenly the author of an uncontrollable bestseller that was engaging the critics’ deepest concern; and Slot’s sudden promotion moved his publishers to fly him over from Buffalo, NY…In his early thirties, in a slightly dank charcoal suit, with flat brown hair parted at the side, with weak nose and weak chin: Elena had twice got chatting with Jed, and pronounced him very polite but strangely charmless and uneasy-making. She also remarked that he knew no French at all, not even merci or bonjour.

  ‘Does the crystallisation process impel you in the direction of masque? Q-u-e?’

  Jed consulted the thick sheath of his schedule. He said, ‘I’m sorry uh, Professor Boysghellin, but could you –

  ‘Boisgelin. But you can simply call me Jean-Ignace. Or plain Jean.’

  Brightening, Jed said, ‘I’m sorry, John, but could you explain the meaning of that last word? The one with the q-u-e?’

  ‘No,’ said Jean-Ignace, ‘kabuki – the Shinto influence, but shorn of its fripperies, needless to add. In other words, Monsieur Slot – is the short story more abstract, more tropological if you prefer, more conceptualised than the novel?’

  ‘…The short story is more condensed than the novel. The novel is uh, more extended, more –’

  ‘Come on then,’ urged Elena from the passageway. ‘You’re making us late.’

  In the fresh air he said, ‘Jed’s going through it. As usual. His interviewers speak better English than he does, or than I do. And Jed’s only got one thing to say.’

  ‘Poor Jed. He told me some of them last two or three hours. He’s here till May. Lyon is next. And it’s his first trip abroad apart from Toronto.’

  ‘Elena,’ he said, halting and standing back from her. ‘…It would be a waste of breath to say how lovely, how intelligent, and how young you look.’

  ‘Why a waste?’

  ‘You know what I mean. It’s obvious. Even a crowd of anti-American Jew-hounders could see it. In your own person you tell your own tale.’

  Yes, and they linked arms…And it hit him in a rush – a sensation that was once very familiar, indeed almost routine. And this was the wrong time of day for it: the sensation of waking up happy.

  As a result he felt slightly stoned. You know – strange to the earth.

  High

  ‘Imagine…Close your eyes,’ said the salesman, ‘and you can see the sailsmen of two centuries since, fighting the invader. Imagine.’

  And I did imagine. Standing there with the French rep, Gilles (the dreamy, the faraway French rep), I looked down through leaded glass from an embrasure high up in one of the twin towers of the eviscerated castle, which now served as a convention centre, as a banqueting hall, and, this week in March, as Festival HQ. Below, the fists and claws of the jetty reached out into the North Atlantic, the ironwork rusted with blood and brine…At five foot six, I was getting further and further below average height (the average Dutchman was six foot one). In the developed West, Canada included, everyone was getting taller. Everyone except Americans – and no one knew why.*1 But I would’ve towered over the warrior-mariners of the 1800s, who were the size of modern twelve-year-olds (and famished and scrawny, too, unlike the twelve-stone twelve-year-olds currently rolling around the First World). So the pomp of inches might have made me brave, might have made me rather more inclined to stop, or momentarily impede, a cannonball for twenty centimes a day. I was beginning to be embrittled by age, and the thought of combat jarred my whole skeleton, as if all my bones were funny bones. I was shrinking, too. ‘Mart, if you want to grow,’ said my much taller brother (this was in early adolescence), ‘sleep with your legs dead straight.’ I tried it for a couple of years
, and I didn’t get much taller (and I didn’t get much sleep).

  ‘Will we go down?’

  ‘You go ahead. Nice talking to you, Gilles. I’ll be along directly.’

  Elena was in a side room somewhere nearby, being interviewed by this medium and then by that medium and then by the other medium, so I’d be all alone, without my wife – ma femme, cicérone, et interprète…As I came down the stone staircase I thought of something I’d read in a laddish American glossy on the Eurostar: Who unties France from the tree and helps her find her panties every time the Germans are done with her? America, that’s who. This was from one of many articles in a whole special number endorsing Francophobia in all its forms. Another think piece, using charts and statistics, argued that the French were schlumps and slatterns, too, on top of everything else: for instance, barely half the men changed their underwear every day (the women were admitted to be rather cleaner – those panties that America was forever helping her find had a much better chance of being fresh out of the drawer). In the canyonlike reception room there were perhaps 300 of them, the French. And for a time I wandered around down there, trying to gauge these individuals with (for the occasion) a neurotically fastidious eye. And all right, there were unshaven chins and heads of unbrushed hair, and several wide smiles disclosed a seam along the gumline of last night’s dessert (usually crème brûlée). But who cared? I was about as slovenly as the French, I reckoned, and I admired their lack of interest in how they looked. It freed them up for higher things, for the delirious pursuits of philosophy and art. Yes (I was deciding), France pullulated with poets and seekers (the 1954 census logged the existence of 1, 100,000 avowed intellectuals, with thinkers and dreamers (like the rep in the high tower), with bohemians, in a word. At certain times and in certain moods (e.g., the present) I was a boho imperialist: bohemians, I believed, should rule the world, marching forth with sword and fire to conquer, colonise, and convert until…

  I reached a glassed-off area, an internal conservatory or hothouse for the senior French writers, who were on exhibit but sequestered from the merchandisers, the publishers, the pundits, the conference bums, and of course the junior French writers. It now resembled one of those places compassionately reserved for smokers, still to be found in airports, even American airports…Was that one over there J. M. G. le Clézio? He was blondly haggard-handsome enough. In 1973 I reviewed a Le Clézio novel, War, and the piece was present in my mind because I’d recently collected it. War is an example of choseisme, or thing-ism; thus the author wanders about like a fact-finder from the planet Krypton (three pages on a department-store placard, four on a lightbulb)…*2 The senior French writers sat glazed and unsmiling (and among French intellectuals, I knew, it was considered trivial not to be clinically depressed). Did they find anything funny? One of the things that didn’t make them laugh, clearly, was laughable pretension…In Nabokov’s brightly mournful late novella Transparent Things (1972), flighty Julia takes the stolid hero, Hugh Person, to the avant-garde play that everyone is talking about: and when the curtain goes up Hugh is ‘not surprised to be regaled with the sight of a naked hermit sitting on a cracked toilet in the middle of an empty stage’. Nabokov has elsewhere made the point that all writers who are any good are funny. Not funny all the time – but funny. All the lasting British novelists are funny; the same is true of the Russians (Gogol, Dostoevsky, and, yes, Tolstoy are funny); and this became true of the Americans. Franz Kafka, whatever your professor might have told you, is funny. Writers are funny because life is funny. Here’s something else that is true: writers are life’s eulogists. The romanciers de grimace, the woe specialists, the wound flaunters, the naked-hermit and cracked-toilet crowd have gone and made an elementary mistake, thinking that writers are life’s elegists…Within the glass menagerie each scowlist was accompanied by an attractive young woman. And this was part of the trouble. In Herzog the hero calls for a sexual boycott of the professional melancholics – those who felt it was their duty to reject ‘worldly happiness, this Western plague, this mental leprosy’. ‘The world’, writes Bellow, ‘should love lovers; but not theoreticians. Never theoreticians! Show them the door.’ Yes, that might do it. I noticed that one no doubt much-praised sourpuss (his baldy haircut, his nicotine-rich moustache, his mouth like a half-empty goody bag with its lumps of fudge and butterscotch) was warmly berating the meek little blonde at his side, who sat with her hands clenched and her head contritely bowed. Come on, darling, I thought (as I secured yet another glass of white wine), heed Moses Herzog. ‘Ladies, throw out these gloomy bastards!’

  Now Elena appeared. She looked combative, self-sufficient, and insanely cheerful. No, he couldn’t go on evading it – he would have to sit down soon and come up with a definition of love.

  * * *

  ∗

  The presentation

  ‘You’re always saying I look insanely cheerful.’

  ‘Well you always do,’ he said. ‘And it’s particularly hard to miss around here. Elena – go and have a shriek and a cackle with J. M. G. le Clézio.’

  ‘…What have you been up to?’

  ‘Smirking at the scowl novelists – and mapping out my smirk novel. I’m committed to it, Pulc. I already feel it stirring within me.’

  ‘Mm. That one’ll go the way of The Crap Generation. You won’t write a word.’

  ‘Provably false. I’ve started it…Wait. Here we are. You’re on.’

  ‘…Et le vainqueur’, intoned an amplified voice, ‘du Prix Mirabeau de la Non-Fiction est – Enterrez-moi debout: L’odyssée des Tziganes!’*3

  ‘Careful now,’ he said. ‘Remember Jean-Jacques hates Sam.’

  ‘Fuck Jean-Jacques. Here’s my speech,’ she said, passing him two photcopied pages, ‘in English.’

  Another kiss and she was away, striding forward and up on to the stage. As he watched her go, and watched her climb, he found that a little caesura had opened up in his mind: he knew why France hated America, but he had quite forgotten why America hated France. Elena was about to remind him.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ she began. ‘En ce moment, les Français ne sont pas très populaires en America (et vice versa), parce que vous obstruez notre chemin vers la guerre. Because you obstruct our path to war. Mais vous êtes très, très populaires avec cette Americaine. Je vous remercie de tout mon coeur pour mon prix adorable…’

  She talked for another 105 seconds. During this time he followed the transcript but also looked around and became aware of the audience in the hall. Her unarguably, her ascertainably beautiful face filled half a dozen TV screens, like an electronic tutelary spirit. And the gradual smiles of the men and women gathered there slowly changed, from mildly reluctant to wholly unreluctant, even the smiles of the senior French novelists, as they acknowledged what was plain to see: a phenomenal concentration of blessings…

  Well, one thing was clear. Martin didn’t have a crap wife; he had a wife who was a blinding embarras de richesses. And the two of them dwelt harmoniously in a six-bedroom house near Regent’s Park…So what was all this about suicide? But it was a fact; it was undeniably the case that he was always wondering why everyone, including all his children, even Inez (who was now three), didn’t commit suicide. That’s right: each time he laid eyes on them he was agreeably surprised to find that they were still in one piece. Well, here he was in the Holy Land of the counterintuitive. In the country of Gide, Sade, Genet, and Camus, everyone would automatically see the point of his psychological acte gratuit.

  Why these thoughts – which, by the way, predated September 2001?…In 2010 or thereabouts (long after the phase had passed), he arrived at an explanation, partly trivial, partly universal (perhaps), and almost insultingly obvious.

  He was fifty-two and he stood on a lowered drawbridge held flat and taut by burnished steel chains, smoking, and waiting for his wife. Ah, here she was…

  Shock and Awe

  ‘The novel is more capacious,�
�� Jed Slot was saying. ‘The short story, on the other hand, is more uh, more confined.’

  ‘But yes,’ said Jed’s interviewer, a nervous, hard-living redhead of his own age, who tremblingly brandished a foot-long cigarette-holder and a tasselled rosary. ‘The short story can be plus pur, no?…Uh, more purer. The reality uh, reality, is atomisé, no? Granulaire. Et deffracté. So is the short story somehow less compromis? Less uh, compromised than the novel?’

  Slot pounced. ‘The story is less comprehensive than the novel. In a short story you’re more aware of limitations of space. So the story provides fewer…’

  I paid the extras on the bill and went upstairs for the bag, into which Elena was forcing stray pairs of shoes. I said,

  ‘It’s a good job Jed brought his thesaurus with him from Buffalo. He might get through the whole six weeks without saying shorter or longer.’

  ‘Don’t be mean. We’ve got to say our fondest farewells to poor dear Jed.’

  ‘You know that little nook to the side downstairs? They’ve got your book in there and my book, and the complete Jed Slot – in French and English. I did some browsing while you were having your massage. And there’s no difference at all except the stories are shorter than the novels.’

  ‘And the novels are longer than the stories.’

  ‘And I’ll tell you why he made you uneasy. Physically uneasy. He’s a woman-hater, El. Whenever a chick walks in, his whole tone goes weird. He coolly “sees through her”, he thinks, but it’s all fantasy and paranoia. Very striking.’

  She said, ‘I don’t think he’s a woman-hater. More like a resenter. He’s just sexually unlucky…Well things should perk up for him now. Now he’s taken seriously.’

  ‘Maybe. Yeah, maybe they will a bit.’