Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  I got to Munich International with an extra half hour to spare. And there in the terminal, bathed in watery early-morning light, behind the little rampart of his luggage (a squat gunmetal trunk, a suede briefcase with numerous zips and pouches), and leering into his cell phone, stood Geoffrey Vane. I hailed him.

  ‘Why are you here? I thought you were going to take it easy.’

  ‘Who, me? Me? Nah. No rest for the wicked. Her, her fucking bungalow burnt down last night. Electrics. It’s always electrics. Burnt to a fucking crisp.’

  ‘Really? She wasn’t in it, was she?’

  ‘Ma? No, at her sister’s in Sheffield. It’s muggins here that has to go and deal with the mess. See if we got any contents insurance. Or any insurance at all.’

  ‘Will it be hard to get to Lanzarote?’

  His face narrowed shrewdly. ‘You know what you do when something like this happens? When you’re a bit stranded? You go down under. Under here.’ And he soundlessly tapped his padded shoe on the floor. ‘That’s where the airline offices are. Under here. Ryanair, easyJet, Germania, Condor. You go down and you go around and you sniff out the best deal.

  ‘Well, good luck.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be all right. I’m not helpless. Because I’ve got the resources. Hey,’ he said, and winked. ‘Might even hop on a package. With all the old boilers. Cheers!’

  So there was time for lots of coffee and for delicious and fattening croissants in the lounge. Then the brand-new, hangar-fresh Lufthansa jumbo took off, on schedule. Soon I was gorging myself on fine foods and choice wines, before relishing Alien (Ridley Scott) and then the sequel, Aliens (James Cameron). I landed punctually…Would-be immigrants and even asylum seekers often have to wait two years, but after two hours, in the admittedly inhospitable environs of Immigration, I was allowed into America.

  VIII

  And what I returned to still held, Elena, and the teenage daughters – who went far and wide, as they pleased, who boldly roamed Manhattan, where their grandmother (I now heard it confirmed) was still installed in that deluxe sunset home which, very understandably, she kept mistaking for a hotel…

  How solid it all seemed, this other existence, how advanced, how evolved. It wasn’t the middling-class comforts that amazed me: it was the lights, the locks, the taps, the toilets, all eagerly obedient to my touch. How tightly joined to the earth it all was with its steel and concrete, the brownstone on Strong Place.

  Yes, the house felt ready to stay in one piece. But now its co-owner, in an unfortunate turn of events, suddenly fell apart.

  In the tranquillity of middle-distance hindsight I easily identified the probable cause: a synergy of long-postponed exhaustion, air-travel lag and air-travel bug (a very ambitious flu), and anxiety. Which persisted. The anxiety in me was deeply layered and durable because it went back to before I was born.

  My insomnia persisted too. Coming to terms with this involved mental labour, most of it done in darkness. I was home in America, the immigrant nation, stretching from sea to shining sea; and I couldn’t sleep. ‘Night is always a giant,’ wrote the champion insomniac, Nabokov, in a late novella, ‘but this one was especially terrible.’ I had another book on my bedside table. It was a short and stylish study by the historian Mark Mazower called Dark Continent; and I would sometimes go next door with that for an hour before defeatedly returning.

  When I closed my eyes I was met by the usual sights – an abstract battlefield or dismantled fairground at dusk, flowers in monochrome, figures cut out of limp white paper; and the thoughts and images verged encouragingly on the nonsensical. But no; my mind was in too low a gear for the cruise control of unconsciousness.

  * * *

  —————

  So many possible futures were queuing up and jockeying to be born. In time, one or other of them would break free and go surging clear of the rest…

  They were coming here, the refugees, in the eye of a geohistorical convergence – themselves and their exodus on the one hand, and on the other al-Qaeda, and al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram, and the Taliban, and Sinai Province, and Islamic State.

  And even now it was as if a tectonic force had taken hold of Europe and, using its fingernails, had scratched it open and tilted it, causing a heavy mudslide in the direction of old illusions, old dreams of purity and cruelty.

  And that force will get heavier still, much heavier, immediately and irreversibly, after the first incidence of takfir. At which point Europe – that by now famously unrobust confederation – would meet another historic test.

  And what they might be bringing, the refugees, was insignificant when set against what was already there, in the host nations, the spores and ash heaps of what was already there…Dark Continent is not a book about Africa. The rest of Mazower’s title is ‘Europe’s Twentieth Century’.

  Memo to my reader – 2

  As well as Germany I went to Austria, Switzerland, Poland, France, and also Spain. I say ‘also Spain’ because that country wasn’t implicated in the Holocaust, unlike all the others (very much including Switzerland – see in due course ‘Afterthought: Masada and the Dead Sea’).

  Postwar Deutschland obviously had the sternest work to do in arriving at an unillusioned reckoning. And it is my amateur impression that its efforts deserve to be called, well, broadly commensurate – in itself a stupendous achievement.* Not only is Nazi criminality a part of the national conversation; highly significantly, in my opinion, the young want to talk about it. And it has to be a ‘talking cure’, a long and nauseous iteration: what other way could there be?…And now Germany has become the first nation on earth to erect monuments to its own shame. So I expected the Germans to take my novel as a minor addition to the unresting debate.

  And they didn’t do that. Nearly all of them (according to my publisher’s laconic summary) rejected the book out of hand on literary principle: you see, I had on occasion applied to satire (‘the use of ridicule, irony, sarcasm, etc., to expose folly or vice’); and the German reviewers all insisted that humour could not coexist with seriousness. This is a primitively literal-minded credo which, as I’m sure you’ve already sensed, more or less obliterates the anglophone canon. The fact is that seriousness – and morality, and indeed sanity – cannot exist at all without humour…

  What did I infer from this? That German literary criticism had at some point made a benighted category error and then stuck to it? Well there was nothing of much interest to think about there. But I went on to wonder if I’d touched on an unexpected sensitivity; it could be that the Germans, while fully accepting that National Socialism was atrocious, were somehow unwilling to admit that it was also ridiculous.

  And it wasn’t just the reviewers. After public events one or two old boys would shoulder their way to the signing table to air their objections, and a festival organiser, under his breath, made me really wonder at his vehemence: ‘How can you presume to laugh at Hitlerism?’ I wanted to say, ‘Mockery is a weapon. Why do you think it is that tyrants fear it and ban it, and why did Hitler seek to punish it with death?’

  I am familiar with the theory of ‘Holocaust exceptionalism’, which has a literary application: in its bluntest form it maintains that the Holocaust is a subject that historians alone have the right to address. This has emotional force – it is an appeal to decent reticence. But I believe that nothing, nothing whatever, should be shielded from the writer’s eye. If this is the view of a literary fundamentalist, then that is what I am.

  * * *

  —————

  Oh. So you think they thought I was simply trespassing? Maybe that was part of it. And in that case another lesson beckons. In literature there is no room for territoriality. So politely ignore all warnings about ‘cultural appropriation’ and the like. Go where your pen takes you. Fiction is freedom, and freedom is indivisible.

  On December 31, Inez and I – an advance guard – returned to
Strong Place in late afternoon. Well before midnight we were out on the street. We too were homeless nomads. The house was a charred and sopping hulk.

  I have crossed the equator and I’m now standing on the threshold of the second half…

  Life, as I said, is artistically lifeless; and its only unifying theme is death.

  *1 The Historikerstreit (‘the historians’ quarrel’ of 1986–9) saw the last attempts to ‘historicise’ or ‘relativise’ (or somehow normalise) the Third Reich. From then on Nazism was firmly identified as a geopolitical ‘singularity’; it stands alone.

  PART III

  DISSOLUTIONS: ANTEPENULTIMATE

  Chapter 1

  The Shadow-Line

  Embedment: The dismissal of shame

  One evening in the late 1970s three baby boomers sought each other out at a drinks party in London: Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis of the New Statesman, and Joan Juliet Buck of Vogue. Christopher had met her through his onetime girlfriend, Anna Wintour, then of Harper’s Bazaar, and Martin had met her through his onetime girlfriend, Julie Kavanagh, the UK correspondent of Women’s Wear Daily.

  ‘Hello boys.’

  Joan Juliet was a darkly imposing beauty, an editor, an actress (and later a novelist), whose first language was French.

  ‘My dear, you look absolutely radiant.’

  This was Christopher. He was of course already merciless in public debate, but his social manners were decorous and harmonial (and some of his embellishments look florid in print, unleavened by his smile). Hitch reserved especial courtliness for women. It is there in his writing, too. Descriptions of attractive girls have him reaching for words like ‘poised’, ‘fragrant’, and ‘ravissant’.

  ‘Aglow with youth and vigour,’ he went on with a bow. ‘And forgive me for saying that I’m so pleased, because I heard you’d been in the wars. Those little uh, feminine ailments. If it wasn’t one thing, it was the other. I trust that’s all in the past?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Joan Juliet. ‘It’s my fucking tits now.’

  Candid, defiant, undiminished, and humorous: Christopher and Martin very much admired this remark, and for a while it was often quoted, joining the innumerable phrases and themelets and reference points that metronomically punctuated their conversation and their correspondence. Candour, humour, and above all a rejection of anything that could be mistaken for embarrassment or offended pride.*1 The dismissal of shame.

  Boston, 2003: Something altogether new

  ‘Tell me, how are Nat and Gus? How’re they getting along?’

  Saul and I were in the rear sitting room at Crowninshield Road, where we usually had our more earnest and more concerted chats, about politics, about religion, about literature. It was a comfortable room, a comfortable house: the habitat, you would say, of a senior Cambridge academic. ‘Guys, I’m rich,’ Saul announced to his friends in 1964, when Herzog was settling into its months as a bestseller (and publishers were splashing out on his backlist). ‘Can I buy you something? Do you need any money?’*2 Saul, in 2003, had been through several costly divorces; he had everything he wanted, and a bit more in reserve, but he wasn’t rich any more – not rich.

  ‘Nat and Gus, they’re fine, they’re great. And they’re tall, too.’ I said. Although Saul was acquainted with my younger daughters, he and my sons went back fifteen years. ‘They’re still at that school Latymer in West London. It’s not like St Paul’s or Westminster, but it’s solid enough. My mother’s father went there – in the 1900s it must’ve been.’

  Now a silence began to steal over us. It was a new kind of silence, one never heard before…I’d spent the entire winter in Uruguay, and one way or another I hadn’t seen Saul for eighteen months: not since November 2001. And during that visit – to my surprise and relief – he was soothingly lucid (not at all like Iris. September 11, I concluded, was indeed just ‘too big’). But the silence around about us now was a frightening silence. I felt powerless to break it. Then Saul broke it, saying,

  ‘Tell me. How are Nat and Gus?’

  …Was he joking? Was I dreaming? With an unsteady hand I lowered my coffee cup, and went through it all again: fine, great, tall, Latymer in West London…

  The silence returned. Crushing, smothering, and quite unbelievably loud. This wasn’t forgetfulness – this was something altogether new. A shadow-line had been crossed. He said,

  ‘Nat and Gus. Tell me, how are they?’

  …Well, I can’t claim I wasn’t warned.

  Long Island, July 2001

  Through the open windows of his study Martin could hear his middle daughter in the garden below; she was five, she was alone, and she was singing. What was that – what was solitary childsong? Something like a ventilation of happiness. Eliza, for now, was not letting off steam (as she frequently needed to do), but letting off happiness. Imagine.

  Her voice made him happy, and he was happy anyway, steady-state happy (mark the date), but not quite happy enough to add his voice to hers; similarly, when she skipped along the pavement, he felt no urge to keep in step. And when she did cartwheels, he stayed upright. Now why was that?

  As for Eliza’s little sister, Inez, well, she was twenty-five months. Not quite so many overflows of happiness for Inez, as yet. She had only just got here, only just touched down on the planet Earth; she was still feeling very shy, and there were all these new people – 8.5 billion of them. No wonder she sometimes hid her face and wept.

  By a wonderful coincidence Inez shared a birthday (June 10) with her godfather, Saul – who was expected with his clan that afternoon. And it was a true coincidence, because Saul had accepted the appointment months before her birth…

  Inez’s eyes made Martin think of the Bellows’ pond, over in Vermont, with its gradations of temperature. Gradations of trust, hope, uncertainty, and dread seemed to swim in Inez’s eyes.

  * * *

  —————

  To get from East Hampton, NY, to Brattleboro, VT, you drove to North Haven and took the little ferry to Shelter Island, which you then cut across before taking another little ferry to Greenport; these little voyages (one of the adornments of North American life) lasted about ten minutes each, and the flat boats were old and low-slung, so you could stand on deck and briefly commune with the even ripples and wrinkles of the Sound.*3 From Greenport you drove to Orient Point and boarded the big ferry (the size of a liner, with a bar and a cinema) for the eighty-minute cruise to New London, CT. Then the final leg: a drive of 130 miles, due north, through Massachusetts to Vermont.

  The Bellows would of course be coming the other way. Usually the journey went on for about seven hours, and today the temperature was very close to that of human blood. On June 10, 2001, in addition, Inez had turned two and Saul had turned eighty-six.

  Then you step out the caw and the heat hits you like a brick…Radger! Radger! Radger, get over here! The accent on that little girl!…I could listen to it all day lawng.

  This was the house imitation of the most vivid and expressive character the Amises had ever met on the ferry from New London to Orient Point (the little girl with the accent was Eliza). I said,

  ‘And I got her name. Desirée Squadrino.’

  Saul sipped his tea and said, ‘Well she was right about the heat. Getting in and out of the hold was pretty rough, but apart from that…I didn’t spot Desirée. All the people on board had spent the day playing craps and roulette. They’d just lost their shirts in a casino over the state line.’

  ‘And the scale of them,’ said Rosamund. ‘Really unbelievable. As if they’d got that way on purpose. Through sheer willpower. And the kids.’

  For a while they all talked about a report on the financial toll of pandemic childhood obesity. That generation would be sickly, true, and very expensive to treat; on the other hand, they would cost practically nothing to police, being too bulky and cumbrous to brawl, burgl
e, mug, rape, or flee. Elena said,

  ‘I keep thinking the ferry’s going to sink,’ said Elena. ‘It’s the cheap food. Cheap food is drenched in what they call saturated fats.’

  ‘We all know it’s not their fault,’ said Rosamund, ‘but you still feel they couldn’t get that way without buckling down to it.’

  I said, ‘Saul, your Sorella. In Bellarosa. She got that way on purpose. For a reason.’

  ‘Yes, she did in a sense. And for a good reason.’

  ‘A noble reason. Obeying a noble instinct.’*4

  In the kitchen other shapes and figures moved round about us, eating, slurping, tottering, lurching – namely Eliza and Inez Amis and Rosie Bellow (Eliza, five, was the eldest); also present were Catarina, the Amis nanny, and Sharon, the Bellow nanny, plus an auxiliary nanny, Rosamund’s (very popular) niece, Rachael…Soon it would be time for baths, naps, and nappies – before the principals met again for evening drinks.

  ‘If you’d come a week earlier,’ said Elena, ‘you’d’ve coincided with Hitch.’

  Rosamund closed her eyes and said slowly, ‘…Uch.’*5

  ‘Well Rosamund,’ I said, ‘if it’s any comfort I gave him a right slagging about that review. He didn’t answer back. Which means he knew he’d done wrong.’

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