by Amis, Martin
‘But not by much. The trouble is he’s still queasy and bitter. I booked our cab.’
‘That’s why he’s sick enough to please the French. They don’t mind writers being aggressive about women. Odd, when you think that political correctness was born and raised in France. They don’t mind Beckett saying So I kicked her in the cunt. When’s it coming, our cab?’
‘Not till twelve.’
‘Hitch must be on pins.’
‘Why particularly?’
‘It’s almost upon us, Pulc. Six hours to go. Shock and Awe.’
* * *
—————
Shock and Awe was the nickname of the doctrine officially entitled Rapid Dominance. The idea, according to military philosophers, military poets, and military dreamers, was to induce in the enemy a state of hysterical disorientation. High-tech ‘precision engagement’ would minimise civilian casualties while inflicting ‘nearly incomprehensible levels of mass destruction’; US forces should also be ready to shut down communications, transport, food production, and water supply, in which case the Shock part of it would be ‘national’.
‘Given all that,’ he said to his wife, ‘at what point are they supposed to feel like dancing in the street?’
‘They may do. No more Saddam. We’ll see.’
Certain locations in Baghdad were being bombarded on March 19. March 20 saw boots on the ground and Running Start. On March 21 it would be the turn of Shock and Awe, scheduled for 17.00 GMT.
And March 21 was today.
‘Did you ring the Jews?’
‘Yes,’ said Elena.
‘And they’re all right?’
‘They’re fine.’ The Jews were their daughters (and they were full Jews too, by the ancient law of matrilinearity, and could simply walk into Israel as full citizens). Eliza and Inez were also known as the rats, the poems, the fools, and the flowers. ‘Right. Allons.’
It would’ve made a better – and slightly longer – short story if the Hôtel Méridien was a citadel of swinish luxury; in fact it was a modest three-star (representing a 1950s vision of modernity: their room looked like the guest quarters of a Sussex polytechnic). But he for one was taking his leave with a heavy regret, lightened only by this dependable truth: being away from home makes home seem exotic (and at this stage the little girls seemed almost other-worldly). He wanted to get back to his house and his desk – but not to his silences and his circling thoughts…
While Elena was making her final inspection he opened the window and stuck his head out of it: under one vast and lonely cloud (as wispily flotational as an elderly combover), in freakish sunshine, little figures paddling, splashing, jumping, running…He remembered being a boy and running as fast as he could across sand;*4 a year or two ago he was able to remember this with his whole body, but now he just pictured it or half-imagined it. That boy was further away from him than he used to be, running across sand, running away from him across sand…
Looking out, he listened. ‘The distant bathers’ weak protesting trebles’; and he silently recited the closing lines of the poem:
If the worst
Of flawless weather is our falling short,
It may be that through habit these do best,
Coming to water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.
Those last seven words. When he first read them (in the collection High Windows in 1979), he was thirty; and he considered it a right-minded and dignified conclusion; in March 2003 he saw their grim duteousness – and his eye kept straying left to the word clowning. The old fools, the old clowns. That would be years away. But it was limping ever closer…
What you see here is a man in his fifties. Your fifties – the Crap Decade.
‘Now today we’re going to have to have a change of heart.’
‘Oh?’ she said as she continued to look observantly out of the cab window.
‘We’re going to stop being against the war and start being for it. We’re going to hope for total success and the best possible outcome. For Joe and Tommy and also of course for Kasim.’
‘And Fetnab. Okay,’ she said, now straightening up and searching for the tickets in her bag. ‘Agreed. You don’t want a disaster just to win an argument.’
‘Exactly…I still can’t see why Hitch is so keen. After all, it is a war, and war is hell. Oh, and guess what he told me on the phone. He said Hans Blix was on the take! Now how could Hitch swallow that. Imagine it. Saddam says to this venerable Swede, We’re rolling in WMDs, but you keep your mouth shut and here’s ten million quid.’
‘We’ll have to hurry.’
‘So will they, Elena. So will they. They’re calling it the Race for Baghdad.’
Love songs in age and youth
On the slow, crowded, and companionably talkative train to Paris (full of all the people they’d met in St-Malo), he put aside his holiday reading (a book about Verdun and the battle that lasted for the entirety of 1916), and tried to be sociable; but then a headline on the cover of one of Elena’s magazines took his fancy, and he was at once helplessly engrossed. The long article didn’t squarely concern itself with mass death, though the days of its dramatis personae were obviouly numbered. No: it was about the lovelife fitfully enjoyed by the occupants of sunset homes.
There used to be a time, in sunset homes, when the old men and the old women were vigilantly kept apart (especially after dinner). Now that approach was considered old-fashioned. Why, these days, in sunset homes in Denmark, there were porno screenings every Saturday night, and assignations were cautiously encouraged. ‘With many frail elderly,’ the reporter allowed (echoing doctors’ concerns), there was ‘the risk of serious injury’; and ‘questions of consent’ could be complicated when one or both parties happened to be senile.
So far as Martin could tell, there was absolutely nothing to be said for lovelives in sunset homes; but lovelives in sunset homes there were, and they looked like the future. His future, too. He now had a vision of himself in the nodding, swaying, mumbling, drooling recreation room; there he sat, next to his latest girlfriend, as they watched the jolting tattoos of an adult video. A wattled cheek was pressed against his boneless jowl, and a crablike hand trembled on his wasted thigh; and he would be full of wonder. Wondering about serious physical injury; wondering where on earth he’d put his horn pills; and wondering whether she meant it when she said yes, and whether he meant it when he asked her to.
The train came to rest in a siding just before Chartres. A delay of fifteen minutes was announced, and at least half the passengers clambered out for a smoke (they were good little smokers, the French – another bohemian bond). When he was once more at Elena’s side he said,
‘My smirk novel – it’s taking shape. I’ll need your help with the title, El. I fancy a Rousseauesque intonation. How about Confessions of a Sexually Irresistible Genius? Bit of a mouthful, I agree. Or Seer and Stud: His Confessions…I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’ll make everyone hate me.’
‘They hate you already.’
‘Mm.’ In the autumn of that year he would find out how true this was, when he published his eleventh work of fiction (which wasn’t remotely a smirk novel). ‘But that’s the unavoidable consequence of smirk novels. How about something simpler. More direct and man-to-man. Like I Fucked Them All.’
She said patiently, ‘Where’s the genius element in I Fucked Them All?’
‘Good point. We could partly fix it by having my name in really gigantic letters. But you’re right. The title needs more work.’
‘…You haven’t really started it, have you.’
‘Yes I have. At the moment I’m tackling the dedication. Which is going to run for about twenty pages. Girls’ names in alphabetical order. Look. Aadita, Aara, Aba, Abba. T
he real fun starts with the Abigails. There’ll be dozens of them. See? Abi, Abie, Aby, Abbi, Abbie, Abby. I’ll round it off with a few Zuzis and Zuzannahs, then a Zyra, then an italicised note saying And all the rest. Or possibly And all the others, God bless them.’
‘Christ,’ said Elena. ‘Read your book.’
He read his book. After a night of rain the ground at Verdun looked like the clammy skin of a monstrous toad. Then the battle resumed, the sky a thunderhead of iron and steel, the Mort Homme (as they called this eminence) a volcano of blood and fire, the smell of death thicker than the mustard gas, and the scarce water rations fouled by rotting flesh, the trench rats bloated like war profiteers, and everywhere the flies, huge, black, and silent. The Battle of Verdun was fought over a strip of land a little larger than the combined Royal Parks of London (and, once taken, opened up grave strategic risks). But the battle, l’ogre, seemed to shake off all human direction. Europe is mad. The world is mad. Man is mad. A bullet was nothing. What you feared was the pulping of your entire body: during bombardments, your leg was afraid, your back was afraid, your blood was afraid.
And where were the suicides? Where were they?
City of Light
‘Monsieur, s’il vous plaît. Donnez moi’, I said, holding up finger and thumb, ‘uh, trois centimetres de vodka, avec uh, deux de Campari, et…un de Vermouth rouge.’
‘Mm,’ said the waiter as he swivelled. ‘Very esspensive drink.’
‘And very fattening,’ subtended Elena. ‘And very damaging in every way.’
‘Come now, Pulc. Here we are in the City of Man. Your prize. This spree. It’s a special occasion.’
‘Yes. And your funeral will be a special occasion.’
In Paris they’d changed stations. The capital was having one of its crimp-lipped strikes (because French unions were strong – a mere memory in England), and so the Amises’ five-day idyll was puzzlingly marked by a ninety-minute traffic jam – ninety minutes of hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait for the red gold and green. Now, booked on a later train, they sat at a sticky and rickety café table across the way from the Gare du Nord.
‘Elena, your health!’ He drank. ‘They also call it the City of Light. But Saul goes on about the gloom. Foggy, dripping…’
‘La grisaille.’
‘He called it one of the grimmest cities on earth.*5 I don’t remember it like that.’
‘I do. I was miserable here.’
‘Come on, you’ve been to London, haven’t you? Isn’t London just a latitude worse? Anyway I remember the light here as painterly. You could always –’
‘Painterly, my ass.’
‘That’s what Saul said. Gay Paris? Gay, my foot. But Anthony, that painter friend of mine, he said he never got as blue here as he did in London – because he could always go outside and get something from the light.’
‘With me it was simpler. I didn’t know any people and I didn’t know any French. Well it was better than Jed’s, but I couldn’t chat in it.’
They had both lived in Paris for the same few months in 1979/80, and in the same quarter (the Latin). They never met. Elena, at least at first, was wretchedly installed in la place Saint-Michel. Whereas Martin, flush with screenplay money, and writing his fourth novel, was renting a flat that belonged to the ex-wife of an Italian film star (Ugo Tognazzi), on rue Mouffetard, up by the Panthéon (and much of the time he was sharing it with Phoebe Phelps). He said,
‘Your speech was perfect, and everyone did fall in love with you. You were very sweet to our hosts.’ He rolled and lit a cigarette. ‘Impossible to tell what they’re going through, inside. Imagine. A great warrior nation. Charlemagne, Napoleon. They were much better than me in World War I. But it was sauve qui peut in 1940. Then – spontaneous collaboration. A joint effort – with the Nazis.’
‘In other words, they banded together to round me up.’
‘Too true, kid. As a way of embracing their humiliation…Where’s that really murky part of Paris? The redlight-and-rentboy part. The gypsy part.’
‘Pigalle. And we’re in it. It’s right across the street. Look.’
He looked – the heaps of rubbish, the shimmer of trespass and perversity…
‘Nostalgie de la boue,’ she said. ‘Love of slime. The French love of rottenness.’
‘Yeah, love of murk. Their writers have it too. I was thinking last night. There’s hardly any murk in our literature, El. I have Lawrence and you have Kerouac and Burroughs and Bukowski – all of them the toast of Paris in their day. Here, murk is it. Murk’s the Great Tradition. It’s their history and their dirty conscience. In the soul of every French writer there’s a…’
‘There’s a Quartier Pigalle.’*6
‘…Yes. But you’re safe with me, my dear. You now enjoy the protection of my proud Nordic blood.’
‘Nordic? You mean Celtic. You mean your proud Welsh blood.’
This was a frequent tease. According to Elena, he ‘was born in the heart of Wales’ (rather than in Oxford) and could trace his lineage back, on both sides, to Owen Glendower, or Owain Glyndŵr, who flourished in the fourteenth century.
‘I’m no Taff. I’m no Gael. I’m a true-blue Anglo-Saxon. Pur, Elena.’
‘Mm. Remember what Hilly said about you and Hitler? It’s what made you right about him.*7 Guilt Anyway, all countries have done terrible things. You know what I did? I kidnapped and enslaved Africans to work the land I stole from the Indians.’
‘No, put that way it doesn’t sound very nice. But you didn’t do all that in 1940.’
‘I killed millions of South East Asians around 1970.’
‘And I killed nearly a million Indian Indians in 1947. Breakneck partition. I did terrible things. But I didn’t do them in England. Jean-Jacques did terrible things right here in the City of Light. While Fritz looted his shops and fucked his women.’
‘Fritz fucked them all. Anyway I love Jean-Jacques because he gave me my prize.’
‘Oh yeah, I meant to ask. Did he give you any money as well?’
‘Yup. Five thousand euros. It’s already spent.’ And she frowned sorrowfully, saying, ‘I bought a hideous dress last week.’
…For a year or two in the later 1970s, many women and quite a few men used to claim with a straight face that all men and all women were basically interchangeable (this was ‘equalitarian feminism’ in its idealist form). Now, no man has ever said or would ever say, I bought a hideous suit last week. He might very well have bought a hideous suit last week, but he wouldn’t say it (because he wouldn’t think it – because he wouldn’t know it). I took Elena’s hand and elongated its little finger.
‘I am you and you are me. It’s almost time, El. Pinkies clenched for Shock and Awe.’
‘Pinkies clenched for Shock and Awe…Now let’s read for a while.’
A fly was staring at me from the tabletop. Being a fly, it was in the heraldic posture we may call ‘crappant’ (this was the coinage of a certain contemporary poet famed among other things for his descriptions of urban dogs). The wet, viscid linoleum surface combined with the insect’s suction pads to root it in place. Stale beer was probably of some interest to flies, but there was nothing here to engage their deepest fascination, no shit or blood or death.
Did they have ‘horseholders’ at Verdun? He remembered the horseholder from another book, and the night under shellfire: ‘What can one man do with four terrified horses? If shells burst behind they lunge forward. If shells burst ahead they go back on their haunches, nearly pulling your arms out of their sockets. A week in the front-line trenches is better than one night as a horseholder under shellfire.’ Eight million horses were killed in the First World War, and at Verdun 7,000 were killed in one day…
With every line of their bodies eloquent of innocence, the horses wouldn’t have wanted to be there. But the flies, like the rats, were there of set purp
ose. Tensed on the tabletop, the fly in Pigalle continued to stare at him with its compound eyes. He waved it away but it returned and crouched and stared. Did he who made the horse make thee? Little lover of wastes and wounds and wars…
‘I’m glad we never met here back then, El. I was thirty and you were what, eighteen? You needed to have your adventures. The timing would’ve been off.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but we could’ve made some sort of start.’
Which was exactly what he was thinking.
The power and the glory
The administrators of the Prix Mirabeau had seen fit to provide first-class tickets for the Eurostar, and so this attractive pair savoured a glass of champagne, and prepared themselves for red wine and red meat. He said,
‘Is life worth living on these terms? You know, if I could speak French I would’ve gone into that glass booth and told the writers to stop writing the murk novel and start writing the smirk novel.’
‘…I’m trying to think if there are any. Smirk novels.’
‘There’s plenty of smirk stuff in Nabokov. My striking if somewhat brutal good looks. The crazed beauties that lashed my grim rock. But it’s all ironic.’
‘There couldn’t be a smirk novel that plays it straight.’
‘I only know of one. By John Braine.’ Like Kingsley, John Braine was a lower-middle-class Angry Young Man (a journalistic label derived from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger) who became increasingly reactionary as he got older and angrier (and richer). In his early and more successful years (Room at the Top, Man at the Top) he gained renown as an unusually noisy provocateur (‘I want to go back to Bingley’, South Yorkshire, ‘in an open car with two naked ladies covered in jewels’), but towards the end he became a much-feared drunk and drag (‘You ate me, daunt yer,’ he once told a silenced lunch gathering, ‘as I never went to university’). His smirk novel was his last, written as his dismal destiny loomed. Martin said,