by Amis, Martin
‘We used to have a lot of fun, me and Kingsley, elaborating on Braine’s first page. We got it down to something like: My ravishing young mistress, Lady Aramintha Worcestershire, pulled the top sheet over her bulging breasts, sighed happily, and said, “It’s just not fair. You’re a world-famous novelist, adored by millions of readers. You dine at the choicest restaurants with the cream of the intellectual elite. You make a fine living simply on the strength of your intellect and your talent. And yet you have the body, and the stamina, of a young boy. It’s just not fair.” “Thanks, loov,” I said. And going on like that for three hundred pages. That’s a smirk novel.’
‘I think you told me. Isn’t there a good bit about bad reviews?’
‘Yeah. At some snobbo cocktail party a titled connoisseur says to him, So the critics weren’t very keen on your latest effort. And the hero says gruffly, Aye, no one was very keen on it – except the pooblic.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Hang on.’ He took his watch off and held a hand aloft. ‘Baghdad is two hours ahead of Paris. When I slice my hand through the air we’ll have Shock and Awe.’ He sliced his hand through the air. ‘Now it begins.’
They quietly returned to their books for an hour and then dinner started coming.
‘Hans Blix,’ he said, as they addressed their rather superior beefsteaks and quaffed the more than acceptable Bordeaux. ‘You know what I reckon it was? Hitch got too close to power.’ He chewed and sipped. ‘It’s dangerous stuff, power, and very infectious. And I wonder about his immunity to it.’*8
‘But now,’ said Elena, ‘we want our soldiers to be feted in the streets and pelted with rosebuds.’
‘Definitely. I hope they get some frat, too.’
‘Frat?’
‘Frat. There’s a funny footnote on frat in a Kingsley poem – about an army reunion. “ ‘Fraternisation’ between Allied troops and German women was forbidden by order of General Eisenhower in 1944. Phrases like ‘a piece of frat’ soon became current.” ’
‘Well, there’ll be no frat with Fetnab. And they’re not allowed any alcohol either. You and I will be very careful not to offend our Muslim hosts.’
‘Quite right too,’ he said. ‘But there’s bound to be a vast black market. Not in frat but in booze. They’ll find a way.’
‘On TV last night Hitch was all blue-eyed and doubt-free.’
‘Mm. People are saying he’s gone neocon. But I don’t think he’s changed at all. People don’t change. He’s basically still a streetfighting Trot.’
‘Then why’s he considering Bush–Cheney in 2004?’
‘I don’t know. I think he thinks Kerry won’t have his heart in it. Hitch wants regime change, but from the left. An anti-fascist crusade. He thinks Republicans are better at it. War.’
‘…I’m trying to remember something. Yes, Barney and Spot.’
There would in the end be quite a fuss about Barney and Spot – the president’s dogs. Or about the fact that he had been filmed playing with them. Bush quite testily complained that he shouldn’t have been filmed on the White House lawn, playing with Barney and Spot. Playing? Well, he wasn’t going to roll around with them, not on the eve of the invasion. Bush played with Barney and Spot like a taskmaster, as if he was training them or testing them. He played with Barney and Spot without the slightest amusement. And who can be unamused by their dogs?
‘He played with them as if he was saying, I can make you do this, I can make you do that. I can make this happen. Do you know what else I can make happen? Do you, Barney? Do you, Spot? Jesus, the way he walks. With his arse muscles tensed. The way he salutes – you know, when he gets off his helicopter. Bush doesn’t drink any more but he’s absolutely smashed on power. You’d think his dad might’ve had a word with him about that.’
‘But he doesn’t listen to his dad. He says he listens to a “higher father”.’
‘Great…Darling, it hurts me to say this, but you should’ve gone on calling it the axis of hatred. You were wrong to change it to the axis of evil. It might’ve helped you get used to the idea. Of being hated. Your trouble is that you keep expecting to be loved. Even in Iraq you expect it. Poor you. You keep expecting to be loved.’
Taking it personally
‘He’s steely enough, but Hitch could never be a politician. He’d have to give up smoking…I asked,’ she said. ‘There’s a smoking car in second class – near the back. You might rock down there for a while.’
‘That’s kind in you, El. That’s good in you.’
‘But you’re going to quit, right?’
‘I hope to, yes.’
‘You hope to. I told you what Eliza said. She said, Daddy’s going to die, and you’ll get married again, and I’ll have a stepfather. She looked wretched. That’s what’s going to happen next.’ Elena yawned and shuddered. ‘Nap time. Bye.’
He kissed her and then with his book under his arm he picked up two miniatures of whisky as he headed south.
Where were the suicides?
Ah, here they were at last, the suicides. In the perpetual anguish and filth of the front line, during the gaps between the thunderbolts and the earthquakes, you could hear the wounded pleading for it, for oblivion; and in the field hospitals, under lamps black with airborne vermin, they hollered for it at the top of their voices (there was a French soldier who stabbed himself to death with a kitchen fork, clubbing down on the shaft with his fist). Martin drank a toast. Human beings, staked out on the soil of the Mort Homme, I honour you…
In the Middle East ‘a cigarette’ was a unit of time (about ten minutes), as in, Q: How long will he be gone? A (shrugging): Three cigarettes. Anyway, three cigarettes later Martin closed the book and, as he often did (with writers both living and dead), drafted a mental thankyou note to its author. The ‘Crap Historians’ segment of The Crap Generation would’ve made the following case: crap-generation historians were crap because they thought emotionlessness was a virtue. And Martin believed that you couldn’t write history without emotion (however restrained and controlled). You had to take history personally. It produced you and it formed you. How else were you going to take it?
The book about the Battle of Verdun was old-school: it was beautifully emotional and therefore cathartic; terror and pity decisively deepened its prose. Dear Professor, he was murmuring to himself. And then he remembered something: in London, almost thirty years earlier, not for very long and with little success, he had paid court to the daughter, yes, she was the daughter – the daughter of the memorialist of Verdun…
Respected Professor, I am by now sympathetically aware that a father can be easily hurt by revelations about a daughter’s lovelife, and I want to assure you, Sir, that she was a very good girl – in this case. She eventually allowed me to discompose her upper clothing; and that was all. Oh, we fooled around, Professor, but that was as far as she’d go. For my part, I was the perfect gentleman. A good pal of mine tried it on with her too, and when we later compared notes over a few drinks it turned out that his inroads were no less limited than mine. And I can say that her behaviour, Sir, was highly untypical of the mid-1970s, a time when young women would succumb even if they really didn’t want to (that’s generational ideology for you). With her patrician good looks and her authoritative bearing, she struck me as supremely well-equipped to negotiate the new freedoms, the new powers, that society was proposing to offer her (unlike my unfortunate sister, who was destroyed by these same freedoms and powers). I hope and trust that she remains healthy and happy. I congratulate you on your daughter, as I do on your fine book, which…
Yes, too many early deaths just now, I’m afraid, too many, too many for me, the poet Ian Hamilton at sixty-three, my teenhood friend Robinson at fifty-one, and my little sister Myfanwy at forty-six, each of them a horseholder, wrenched and jerked and tugged and racked by the horses of their own apocalypse.
The train dived underwater as the white cliffs neared.
True life
Elena’s nap had been a clear success: he could tell by the warmed way she stretched her arms upwards to receive him.
‘What’s the matter? You look red-eyed.’
‘You won’t believe who I was moping about,’ he said. ‘That poor sod John Braine.’
‘Why?’
‘You asked what happened to him. He ended up in a bedsit with one spoon, one knife, and one fork. His last Christmas dinner was in a soup kitchen…That was the setting for his smirk novel.’
Braine’s smirk novel, Martin had decided in the smoking section of the Eurostar, wasn’t a smirk novel. It was a wank novel, a roman de…
‘What’s French for wank? W-a-n-q-u-e I suppose.’
‘No.’ And she told him.
‘Feminine! How nice. Well then. A roman de branlette. A wank novel. Because there was no ravishing young mistress.’ Martin had of course interviewed John Braine (for the New Statesman in 1975). And Braine looked like a guard in a prison or borstal, with a wide, full, strangely slack mouth, and his grey northern face coated with a thin Soviet sweat of difficulty. ‘Not that bad a bloke, really. A funny sort of innocent. After a glass or two, though…Braine was just a crap drunk.’*9
‘He was probably pissed when he wrote his wank novel. It couldn’t be true.’
‘Mm. And his first novel was such a sensation. Unbelievably.’ Indeed, you wondered what kind of shape the British imagination could have been in during the mid-1950s, to get itself ‘captured’ by Room at the Top. ‘The paperback sold a million copies. They made a film of it. Starring Laurence Harvey – and Simone Signoret for Christ’s sake. And then it all spiralled downwards. Like with Angus Wilson.’
‘It couldn’t happen to you.’
‘Elena – don’t tempt fate like that. Of course it could happen to me.’
‘…How long did Braine live?’
‘Till sixty-odd. His dates are the same as Larkin’s.’
‘Now don’t you start.’
Loose London in the night was hurriedly and guiltily reassembling itself. The urban shapes thickened. And I could feel it about to resume – the unwelcome self-absorption, the slow twelve-bar blues of my thoughts…For suicide, the metaphysical model I favoured was that of Islam. In the Islamic afterlife, the self-slaughterer was on a loop, re-experiencing his death for ever and ever. But what was the loop’s duration? If it was no more than a minute, then I would choke on my own vomit till the end of time. If on the other hand it was a fair bit longer, then a preliminary hour or two of drugged and drunken stupefaction, under a heap of vodka bottles and pill jars and tins of tobacco, seemed as good a way as any of getting through eternity…Suicide resembled the kind of marriage very frequently portrayed in art, where husband or wife or both just had to get out. Everyone on earth was married to life; and the suicides went because they couldn’t stay, they just couldn’t stay another second. I was married to life, but also to Elena. And I could stay, couldn’t I? I could stay.
‘What’s French for short story?’
‘Not sure. Une conte maybe.’
‘I’m feeling sad about John Braine,’ I said, as the train continued to loiter a mile or two south-east of Waterloo. ‘And guilty about Jed Slot.’
‘Guilty? About that little schnook?’
‘Yes, guilty, Pulc – we should’ve come to his rescue. “Jed?” we should’ve said. “Let us handle this.” We could’ve stepped in and talked about all the different types of short story. The parable. The squib. The anecdote. The sting in the tail. The slice of life.’
‘Your voice has gone all gravelly.’
‘I know. I can hear it…Ninety per cent of short stories are slices of life. And that’s what life is like, in the end. Not a novel. A sliced loaf of short stories. But with different grains.’ Different textures and thicknesses. Some as knotty as V. S. Pritchett, some as smooth as Alice Munro (some as cruel as ‘Sredni Vashtar’, some as tender as ‘The Circular Ruins’). I said, ‘ “St-Malo” qualifies as a smirk short story, El.’ Actually it qualifies as a conte de branlette – but with one vital difference. Quite possibly unique in the soiled little archive of wank fiction, ‘St-Malo’ is true.
*1 No, not even silver-spoon Ivy Leaguers were getting taller; and no one knew why. In a long and fascinating essay in the New Yorker, the scientist–writer, having exhausted all possible explanations, ended with what amounted to a poeticism. His guess was that the cause might be extreme inequality. Extreme inequality, we now know, has an adverse effect on every index of societal health – including economic health…Incidentally my height would have kept me out of the First World War; but not for long. In August 1914 you had to be at least five foot eight. By October it was five foot five (and soon after that it was five foot three). Similarly, twenty-twenty vision, as a requirement, soon degenerated; even basic bifocalism was waived, and you could join up with one eye.
*2 This kind of obsessiveness can be done funnily (as in early Nicholson Baker), but Le Clézio goes about it with a solemnity I found as leaden as his heroine’s opening sally (oh, the falsity and boredom of that ‘perhaps’ and that ‘simply’ and that ‘suddenly’): ‘this girl blurted out, jokingly perhaps, or simply because it had suddenly become the truth: “I am nothing.” ’ Well, it isn’t the truth; and who could possibly take it ‘jokingly’?
*3 Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey. That migration was from India to Eurasia, mainly to the countries of Eastern Europe. The title proper derived from a folk saying repeated to the author by a Bulgarian activist, Mustapha (at a conference in Slovakia): ‘Bury me standing. I’ve been on my knees all my life.’
*4 My early childhood in South Wales was dominated by the sea. Hilly needed no urging from Nicolas and me and later Myfanwy to go to the beach (there were several beaches) in any weather. Two hundred times a year I ran across sand with our big dogs. The dogs, prominent among them Bessie, then Flossie, then Nancy, also did their duty by the Amis children in giving us our first taste of death and grief. That’s how you start.
*5 It was not because he shared Bellow’s view of Paris that Hitler, in 1944, gave the order to destroy it (the order was disobeyed, as were other Führer Orders or ‘Nero Orders’ of his final year)…Saul was in Paris, with his first wife and his first child, from 1948 to 1950 on the GI Bill (and hating the French almost as much as Dostoevsky had hated them in 1862). ‘Americans of my generation crossed the Atlantic…to look upon this human, warm, noble, beautiful and also proud, morbid, cynical, and treacherous setting.’ ‘My Paris’, collected in It All Adds Up.
*6 The last train to Auschwitz left France on August 22, 1944 (bringing the total of doomed deportees to about 76,000). August 22 was a Tuesday. The following Saturday de Gaulle officially inaugurated the Liberation of Paris. That same weekend Philippe Pétain and his crew were being forcibly transferred from one spa town to another, from Vichy in central France to Sigmaringen in southern Germany (in whose castle they gibbered to their defence lawyers while praying for a Nazi victory)…Now there is in world literature a venerable continuity of two-ply humanism in the form
of writer–doctors: Rabelais, Henry Vaughan, Smollett, Goldsmith, Schiller, Chekhov, Bulgakov, William Carlos Williams. In Schloss Sigmaringen the goddess of history staged a negative epiphany. The writer–doctor in attendance there was the nth-degree nihilist and Judaeophobe, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. It was Céline’s fate to listen to Pierre Laval’s interminable self-vindications as he treated the old quisling’s ulcer.
*7 By 2003 I had written a novel about the Third Reich, ten years earlier; and ten years later I would write another…‘When I’m at my desk, Mum,’ I once or twice told her, ‘I get at least as much from you as I get from Dad.’
*8 In this area I knew myself to be rather frail. When I became back-half editor of t
he New Statesman I was assigned my own secretary. After a week I noticed a similar sort of expression on all the faces I knew best: a guarded reluctance to meet my eye. When I questioned them, I heard phrases like unbearably grand and unrecognisably smug. In short, I had gone insane. Because I had a secretary.
*9 As a non-reclusive man of letters from the British Isles, I could not but have encyclopedic experience of the effects of alcohol. Alcohol usually made people more this or more that – more high-spirited, more loud-voiced, more volatile, and so on. But the thing to look out for, as ever, is personality change. Those who undergo it are the dipsomaniacs, actual or potential. All else is just heavy drinking.
Interludial
Memos to my reader – 1
My American friends and relatives tell me I can’t say they’re nuts any more, not after Brexit. But I think I still can, up to a point. See, in the UK, no one had any idea what Brexit looked like. And in the US everyone knew exactly what Trump looked like. They’d been seeing little else for seventeen months. And if my British compatriots had known that Brexit looked like a hairy corn cob balancing on a Halloween pumpkin, then they would’ve voted Remain.
This brings us to the end of the first half.
…On the day after I got back from a book tour in Europe in October 2015 I said to Elena, ‘Now I know I’ve got to get on with my real-life novel, but in Munich I walked straight into a real-life short story – and I’d better write it while it’s fresh.’ I did write it, and the story came out in the New Yorker at the end of that year. The title was ‘Oktober’; and it appears below.
The novel I’d gone on the road for – my most recent – was set in Auschwitz in 1942–3. ‘Oktober’ makes no mention of the book about the Holocaust, so I’ll add a few lines about the German response to it, which powerfully surprised me (and not because it was in any way positive).
I saw very many homeless nomads in Europe, most of them self-evacuees from the Middle East.