Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  Our classroom contained about twenty-five students. Every other head of hair had the dark glisten, the mirrory radiance of our cousins from the distant end of Eurasia. As the cliché gears you to expect, the young Asians seemed inscrutable – but then so did the young westerners. This (a comparatively minor development of advancing years) is what had happened to me: youth itself seemed inscrutable. Youth, ‘that mighty power’, as Conrad repeatedly insists; but I could no longer feel its might. Only its strangeness.

  Keith Botsford, I was relieved to discover, would supervise the seminar.*12 I had known Keith for almost as long as I had known Saul; and I was relieved, not because he would share the burden of a ninety-minute talk about Conrad (I could manage that), but because he would share the burden of disquiet if Saul never once opened his mouth (a strong likelihood, according to Rosamund). We settled.

  I was slow to feel it coming over me, but an unfamiliar – an unrecognisable – mental state was imposing itself; it was something like a surfeit of significance, with too many elements and arguments struggling to cohere. I couldn’t control them – I had no idea what went where. It reminded me of the most painful gropings of authorship, when you’re unmanned by sheer complexity – only here I was in real life and real time, facing an arduousness normally found only in pen and ink, and not in flesh and blood.*13

  There was some coughing and nose-blowing from the class. Saul sat there on the dais with his legs crossed, looking quiet and wise. The airy float of white hair, the broad mouth, the fine nose, the bicycle spokes of indentations on either temple (laugh lines) – eyes oystery with time but still rich and concentrated, full of things you badly needed to know…Handkerchiefs and tissues were put away, and replaced by pads and pens. Keith smoothly began.

  The Shadow-Line was composed in the second year of the Great War and dedicated to Conrad’s son Borys, who was about to enlist – at the age of seventeen. Borys would survive, and survive the Somme, gassed, wounded, and shell-shocked. Conrad, pained and agitated (‘I am nearly driven distracted by my uselessness’), could at least assert paternal solidarity in this darkly autobiographical novella about the seminal crisis of his own life: his first command, in the South China Sea (the year was 1887, when Conrad was turning thirty). ‘To Borys and all the others’, runs the dedication, ‘who like himself have crossed in early youth the shadow-line of their generation WITH LOVE.’

  Non-coincidentally, The Shadow-Line is also one of the most aggressively godless testaments in the English language. From the introductory Author’s Note:

  No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the merely supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

  And to add insult to insult, the author weaves a secularist taunt into the very structure of his tale.

  Sailing south from Bangkok (for Australia), the narrator’s sleek merchantman, the Otago, is very soon utterly becalmed in the Gulf of Thailand; one by one the hands are ailing (as if suffocated by the malarial miasmas gathering in the static air), and will be reliant for their survival on the quinine supposedly stored in the ship’s medicine chest. Then the young captain makes his ‘appalling discovery’: the quinine is gone; it was sold by the old captain, his predecessor (a malign figure, now dead), to finance a pitifully gullible infatuation in the backstreets of Haiphong.

  We glimpse the woman, who resembles ‘a low-class medium’, only in a photograph (characterised as ‘an amazing human document’); and it is one of those moments when Conrad reaches for his most scathing register. There is the captain (‘bald, squat, grey’), ‘and by his side towered an awful, mature white female with rapacious nostrils and a cheaply ill-omened stare in her enormous eyes’. So honest men were stripped of their health, strength, sanity, and youth to foster a sordid mystic and her theatrical stare…

  * * *

  —————

  Keith ended his preamble and turned to me and Saul. ‘Would you like to weigh in?’ Saul shifted silently in his seat. ‘Martin?’

  I took out the draft I’d written a week ago, and I said, ‘The Shadow-Line is in the end a thrilling piece of work, but its structure is hopelessly inept. It has the shape, according to one critic, of a tiny teacup with a ludicrously large handle. All that harbourfront politicking and clubroom one-upping ashore. Very turgid, very dull, and very opaque. This goes on for six-tenths of the whole. Once the Otago gets out of port, the book at last spreads its sails and fills its lungs. Now Conrad draws himself up to his full height and looks you searchingly in the eye. And when he writes like this he is an honour to read. So with your permission – Keith, Saul – I suggest we go through a couple of passages…’

  What were these components searching for unity in my head? I can try to list them. One: the malaise that enfeebles and deranges the officers and men on that voyage; this was of course painfully resonant. Two: Conrad’s dismissal of religion – with the ‘hereafter’ treated with especial scorn – was resonant. Three: the question of auto-fiction, of ‘life-writing’, was resonant (the book is subtitled A Confession). And, four, our students themselves, or at least half of them, were roped into the argument because the book is set in their original longitudes – the Gulf of Siam (as it was then called) bounded by Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam; and the sickness smothering the crew, Conrad has his narrator suspect, is profoundly oriental in its mystery and power. All that, and also youth, war, isolation, sin, guilt, masculinity, madness, death…

  ‘There is something going on in the sky like a decomposition,’ I read out, ‘like a corruption of the air…A great overheated stillness enveloped the ship, and seemed to hold her motionless…The punctual and wearisome stars reappeared over the mast-heads, but the air remained stagnant…’ I turned some pages and pressed on: ‘The effect is curiously mechanical; the sun climbs and descends, the night swings over our heads as if somebody below the horizon were turning a crank. It is the pettiest, the most aimless…And Conrad breaks off the sentence, as if defeated by fatuity, by futility, as if there’s nothing worth saying, nothing worth thinking…There were moments when I felt, not only that I would go mad, but I had gone mad already.

  ‘This is the shadow-line, the climacteric, the inner test that our narrator seems bound to fail. The loss of grip, the loss of connection, the weakening of consecutive thought. He succumbs to mere superstition, quailing at the local hexes and voodoos. He can’t even…’ Christ, I thought, how much more of this is there? I checked and saw there were two apparently gleeful paragraphs on the horrors and humiliations of the disintegrating mind. So I said, ‘Now let’s turn to the prose, and note the second-language writer’s attraction to cliché. In the twinkling of an eye appears three times at ten-page intervals, my head swam twice in adjacent paragraphs. And how about this spare part of boilerplate: The feeling seemed to me the most natural thing in the world. As natural as breathing. On page ninety-nine we’re told that you could have heard a pin drop in a silence so profound that you…’

  But all occasions informed against me. As I toiled on, plausibly enough I suppose, I was thinking about the pure, the platonic Alzheimer’s death, which happens when ‘breathing’ joins all the other activities that the patient forgets to do.

  ‘It is the insistent Conradian crux,’ said Keith, winding up. ‘The Shadow-Line is about nature’s indifference to its most exotic creation – human consciousness.’ He then shrugged and said, again fairly, ‘But it’s a mistake to ask what a novel’s about.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘It’s not something you can print on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker.’

  ‘Yes. I mean, Saul, what’s Augie March “about”?’

  And Saul said, ‘It’s about two hundred pages too long.’
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br />   At the time, and given the circumstances, I thought this was perfect: aslant, athwart, and inspiring a burst of relieved laughter…A decade later I learnt that Saul’s joke went all the way back to the time of Augie’s publication in 1953. The long-term memories of the victims of Dr Alois, as I would go on to see, are more readily available than whatever it was that happened five minutes ago.

  And I would still say that after half a century Saul’s joke stood up pretty well. All the same, it was his only utterance of the afternoon.

  Wrecking ball

  He was becalmed in the doldrums of dementia – in windless stasis. That was one way of imagining it. What were the other ways? When he asked me about Nat and Gus, and went on asking me about Nat and Gus, I was stunned by the extent of the destruction already wrought; it was as if a host of Goths or Vandals had come and gone; everything that was beautiful or holy had been looted or wrecked. Yet here there was no human agency; the thing was insensible and indifferent…I eventually realised that Saul himself had come up with the most telling image, and he did it forty years ago, in Herzog.*14 From a famous paragraph:

  At the corner he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust.

  And Dr Alzheimer’s mission was not yet fully accomplished. The story wasn’t over, any more than the day was over for Moses Herzog: ‘The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and the west, was surrounded by a brilliant broth of atmospheric gases.’

  James Bond and Captain Sparrow

  ‘He likes James Bond,’ said Rosamund on the phone.

  ‘He likes James Bond?’

  ‘Yes. If we could watch James Bond. With snacks. Little pastries and chocolates. I’ll get all that.’

  The idea was to appease Saul’s frantic restlessness, at least for a couple of hours – to lull him with James Bond…

  Rosamund said, ‘He likes James Bond. We like James Bond.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Come around two. I like James Bond.’

  * * *

  ∗

  In the pre-credit sequence James Bond – or Pierce Brosnan – is arriving in some Far Eastern fleshpot by sea, having crossed a great stretch of the South Pacific, not by sailing ship like Conrad on the Otago, but by surfboard…

  The three of us were crouched round the screen, eating the little snacks.

  On the beach or the harbour shore the great Brosnan unzips his wetsuit to reveal a tuxedo – an hommage to the much more commanding and graceful Sean Connery in (perhaps) From Russia with Love. And pretty soon Pierce is closeted in the penthouse bedroom with a champagne bucket and a scheming beauty…

  ‘Is this it?’ said Saul.

  ‘Apparently so,’ I said.

  During that visit I had prolonged my stay at a hotel that followed the all-suite format, and my rooms were chintzily gemütlich, as were the pastries and chocolates in their twirly wrappings. The pay-per-view service was efficient, the tea hot and fresh. The only distraction, I found, was the reproachful daylight beyond the wispy curtains, making me feel that I must’ve shirked some vital duty. The heavens that afternoon were interestingly split-level, baby blue below, but glowered down on by black smears and coalescing thunderheads.

  By now Brosnan was kaleidoscopically involved with high-performance automobiles, mountain roads, manmade avalanches, hovering Predator drones.

  Saul had stopped eating and was stiffly thrashing about in his seat. Suddenly he said with a touch of raggedness and even despair,

  ‘Are we going to be here all night?’

  * * *

  —————

  In the evening of my last full day in Boston he and I companionably watched a video of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. We exchanged words during the screening, words about the film, words about this and that. Rosie was of the audience, gazing up now and then from her other interests, toys, picture books; and Rosamund, who was making one of her expert dinners, passed through with appetisers and glasses of wine (for me).

  ‘Unsentimental,’ I said to Saul, after Captain Sparrow’s forensic visit to a whorehouse – a whorehouse that evidently spanned a whole island. The men were all drunkenly brawling and crashing around, and the women bore the vivid traces of maulings and batterings. ‘You couldn’t call it schmaltzy.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘Christ, look at the size of the bruise on that blonde’s cleavage.’

  But now Captain Sparrow was once again on the high seas. His quest? To locate and reclaim his old ship, the Black Pearl, stolen from him by his onetime messmate Hector Barbossa…

  ‘Pirates have been classified as terrorists,’ I said, not really expecting any response. ‘They were religious too, often – Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, though not Jewish, I don’t think. And they were often all-gay…We’re fond of pirates. We indulge them.’

  ‘Bluebeard,’ said Saul.

  I had seen Pirates of the Caribbean before (sitting between Nat and Gus). Saul had also seen it before, last night, here at Crowninshield Road, and would be seeing it tomorrow, and the next day. We were actually seeing it again fifteen minutes later, because the tape mysteriously rewound and restarted. Now Captain Sparrow (Johnny Depp) was about to rescue Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley); he stood on the taffrail of the anchored galleon, and then he made the dive into the dark water.

  In considered admiration Saul said, ‘He’s a brave boy.’

  ‘He certainly is,’ I said. ‘A very brave boy.’

  Brave was what we were all going to have to be from now on. None more so than Rosamund…The strangely dogged interconnectedness of that spell in Boston, the way reality seemed to have banished everything not strictly relevant (one way or another) to Saul’s plight – the plight of the half-state, of half-being. Even Captain Sparrow made his contribution, discovering that Captain Hector Barbossa, and all his crew, had succumbed to the ‘curse’ of the Black Pearl: these men were now undead (deceased but technically animate). In Barbossa’s words:

  For too long I’ve been parched of thirst and unable to quench it. Too long I’ve been starving to death and haven’t died. I feel nothing. Not the wind on my face nor the spray of the sea, nor the warmth of a woman’s flesh.

  The mariners, the hands on the black-sailed Black Pearl, were exposed by moonlight. They were skeletons, frames of bone with the odd patch of skin and gristle…

  Saul could still feel the warmth of a woman’s flesh – and he could still transmit warmth (he was warm to be with on that last night). He always found Rosie’s presence both soothing and strengthening. And perhaps he was beginning to feel the consolation that Alzheimer’s carelessly throws your way. ‘As the condition gets worse’, wrote John Bayley in Iris, ‘it also gets better’: each new impoverishment reduces the awareness of loss.

  But there were tropical deliriums yet to come. And I found it impossible not to keep thinking of Larkin’s weighty lines in the early poem ‘Next, Please’:

  Only one ship is seeking us, a black-

  Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back

  A huge and birdless silence: in her wake

  No waters breed or break.

  Cross purpose: ‘Go to your emails’

  On June 29, 2010, I picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello?’

  ‘Martin.’

  ‘Ian.’

  ‘Bad news.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘bad news. Oh, very bad. We had old friends here, and we were all having a warm and wonderful time, and then the call came through and I just – I just deliquesced.’

  ‘…The call from?’

  ‘From Spain. Nicolas’s wife, saying she’d just
died.’

  ‘Sorry. Who’d just died?’

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  And as Ian commiserated, with real feeling (Hilly had endeared herself to all my friends, and indeed to everyone she’d ever met, as the obituaries unanimously stressed), I felt the unspoolings and untwinings of cross purpose…

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I said. ‘I flew back yesterday, from the funeral.’ I breathed in. ‘But that wasn’t why you rang, was it. There’s more bad news.’

  ‘There’s more bad news. Are you in your study? Go to your emails. I’ll hang on, so take your time. It’s to do with Hitch. I’ll hang on.’

  * * *

  —————

  ‘Instant deliquescence’ was about right: I turned to water; I was sixty, but I might as well have been six. And then, the next morning and beyond, a furtive disarray, like a relatively stable panic attack.*15 No, the death of the mother is unlike the death of the father – quite unlike.

  On the night the clocks went back in 1995 I called Saul Bellow in Boston and after brief preliminaries I said,

  ‘My father died at noon today…So I’m afraid you’ll have to take over now.’

  Towards the end of our talk I felt the truth of a (more or less) throwaway line in Herzog:

  ‘It’s as you say. We are born to be orphaned and to leave orphans after us. My mother’s still there of course…I’ll write. Goodbye.’

  ‘Well, I love you very much…Goodbye.’

  And those deep syllables got me through. Within three or four days of Kingsley’s death I had the sense that I was moving, with my eyes wide open, from the reservists to the front line; the intercessionary figure was gone, and now I had to step up, I had to step forward. Again and again my body tingled with a sense of almost physical levitation; somewhere in the calves it seemed to hum…