by Amis, Martin
In the days leading up to the passage of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act of 2010), I listened on the radio to ‘a town hall’. ‘I happen to be an American,’ said a woman in the audience, her voice yodelling and hiccuping with emotion, ‘and I don’t want to live in a country like the Soviet Union!’ Or, she might have said, a country (at last) beginning (at least) to emulate Canada, Australia, and all the constituent states of the EU. But in the US saying ‘like Europe’, or ‘like England’, or ‘like France’, or ‘like Switzerland’, is the rough equivalent of saying ‘like the Soviet Union’ – which disappeared for ever in 1991.
A marginally better-phrased version of the same distaste was put to me by John Updike, in the panoramic setting of Mass. Gen., or Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston (the year was 1987). In the pre-interview chat I was absorbing the sight of hundreds of Updike’s compatriots (and rough contemporaries) milling about the place in search of bargains (or good buys or sweet deals) on longevity, and I couldn’t help saying,
‘Look at them. Well, it’s a shameful spectacle. To my eyes.’
‘It’s our system,’ he said. ‘Anything else would be unAmerican.’
Which was a tautology, as any truthful answer on this matter is bound to be.
It was not the highly individualised boho Updike who talked to me about healthcare in Mass. General; it was the lumpen bohunk Updike, the Rabbit Angstrom side of Updike – which is certainly there and is also the reason the Rabbit novels (particularly volumes three and four) are so good and so inner. But Rabbit was saying what almost all Americans say, or whisper: the more you earn, the longer you deserve to live.*4 For-profit healthcare is such an obvious moral and economic fiasco that only ideology – in the form of inherited and unexamined beliefs – could possibly explain its survival.
Rabbitism is especially strident on the healthcare question because the basic aversion is to spending money on the poor – who, it is felt, got that way through moral unregeneracy. This was the prevalent view in mid-nineteenth-century England, and clarifies the meaning of Bumble the Beadle’s repeated references (in Oliver Twist) to ‘them wicious paupers’. Bumble, one of the vilest characters in all Dickens, hates and fears the poor – because he can so vividly see himself among them. But in America everyone hates and fears the poor, even the very rich.
An individualist, a libertarian, and a credulous believer in the underlying wisdom of the market, Uncle Sam, don’t forget, is also a Puritan. Good, rich, clean-living Americans want to punish the unregenerate – as they would want to punish their own vulnerabilities, temptations, and nostalgias. The violent hypocrisy of them wicious paupers is of course an extreme manifestation of the urge. And perhaps Dickens, in creating Bumble, had in mind an even more savage exemplar.
This is from Lear – from one of the mad hero’s great visionary fits of perception in Act 4:
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand.
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back.
Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp’st her.
Then Lear continues, penetrating yet further:
Through tattered clothes great vices do appear;
Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.
Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw doth pierce it.
* * *
—————
With a groan he threw down his pen and sat back sharply…
‘All agree’, said Christopher, ‘that paperwork is the bane of Tumortown.’
‘Yes, and everywhere else in America that has a hospital. Or a doctor. In New York I went to get my ears sluiced and they handed me a ten-page questionnaire.’
‘They’re just covering their asses,’ he said, opening another bill. ‘I wonder when I’ll run out of money…’
Christopher Hitchens was a bestselling author and a highly paid columnist, with the unqualified support of a thriving magazine (and its famously bountiful editor, Graydon Carter); he also had full insurance. Yet there he was at his desk (in a gap between radio and chemo) with a stack of mail and a chequebook, wondering when he’d run out of money.*5
I said, ‘You’re an American, Hitch.’ True, as of 2007. ‘And for now you’re a sick American. So you’re not just a patient. You’re a customer. But you won’t run out of money.’ True again; the synchrotron treatment, whose starting price (I’d learnt) was close to $200,000, would be duly covered. ‘You’ll just worry about it. Money.’
It wasn’t the time to elaborate on this, but I wanted to say, American healthcare feels like an assault. Hasn’t anyone here realised that money worries are bad for you? Bad for your health? Doesn’t this partly explain why Americans don’t live that long? Shelling it out while not bringing it in – the doublesqueeze of US healthcare…
‘What’s bothering you’, I said, ‘is the enforced inactivity. It’s the work ethic of the Hitch. You’re not producing your thousand words per day, and you feel – what’s that Larkin line? – you feel you’ve been pushed to the side of your own life.’
There was a lull; shadows moved. And I found myself telling Christopher everything about the Larkin complication and Phoebe Phelps.
Brent: life goes on
‘Hi.’
‘Hi. Who the hell are you? I’m sorry.’
‘Grant. I’m sorry too, but who the hell are you?’
‘Cadence. Grant, do you know what happened with Brent?’
‘I’m just filling in here, Cadence. Who’s Brent?’
‘Jesus. Well where’s Trent?’
Now about to take my leave, I realised I was at home in Houston; I knew how it went here. Grant was probably all right, and Trent and Brent were probably all right. And Cadence was apparently all right, for now. But her husband was not all right: a day or two ago, in the forecourt, I saw him being stretchered out of a hearselike limousine while Cadence looked fearfully on…Everyone in the bar was probably sick, or was at least the spouse or child or parent or sibling of someone who was sick. It was a developed local fact – like the staggering array of wheelchairs waiting like city bikes in Arrivals at Miami Airport.
‘Trent’s on at nine.’
‘Nine? What’s it now?’
‘Six. Five after.’
‘…I won’t make it. I’ll have a ministroke at the very least…’
* * *
—————
In the Houston Center, with over thirty restaurants to choose from, Christopher chose the Hong Kong Cookery; and its ambience of neon lights and paper hats and party tooters suffused in us a mood that was no doubt quite common in Tumortown (and other warzones): the eerie euphoria of adversity.
That night Christopher wore the expression that his loved ones loved best. Blue called it ‘his foxy face’, crafty, greedy; to me it spoke of witty insubordination; and our friend Ian was not alone in maintaining that this particular smile went all the way back to his schooldays. ‘Hitchens,’ the masters kept telling him, ‘take that look off your face!’ From his memoir:
‘Hitchens, report yourself at once to the study!’
‘Report myself for what, sir?’
‘Don’t make it worse for yourself, Hitchens, you know perfectly well.’
It was a look nicely suited to (artful) protestations of innocence, while in reality giving flesh to the phrase no whit abashed. It was the look of a boy who (despite a regime of cold showers, caning, and prayers – with nothing private, and everything either compulsory or forbidden): a boy who is putting together an articulate, subversive, and indomitable inner life.
Oh, keep that look on your face, Hitchens. And don’t ever take it off.
* * *
—————
‘Trent!’
‘Cadence!’
My bags were packed, my goodbyes were said, my bill was paid; and I was having a final jolt in the Lone Star Saloon before heading off to George H. W. Bush Intercontinental – while also hoping, I admit, to hear tell of Brent.
‘I talked with “Grant”,’ said Cadence, ‘who didn’t know squat. Well?’
‘With Brent? Okay. Now take a deep breath, Cadence. Ready?’
‘Ready. Catering Sales Coordinator? Under Chef?’
‘Neither…Banquets.’
‘Banquets,’ Cadence whispered. ‘Oh wow.’ She sighed, and blinked tensely, squeezing two teardrops out of the corners of her eyes. ‘I love to hear that.’
‘Yep. Executive Comptroller of Banquets…Now easy, Cadence.’
‘Oh I love to feel that. In this God-awful town. Oh I love to feel that. I just do.’
With my wheelie at my side I went into the fresh air. And for a moment I thought the hotel’s fire alarm was out of service, and in American accordance with American regulations all the guests had been evicted from their rooms and sent outside (to sleep like tramps on the subway vents). No. It was just a queue for cabs – multitudinous but fast-flowing; nor did this massed exodus fail to include the basketballer (with four or five of his equally extensile teammates), the wonderfully pretty dwarf, and the cuboid bodyguard, stylishly wiggling his leg as he ground out a butt with a twirl of his shoe.
Escape velocity
What was it Cadence loved to hear, what was it she loved to feel?
As I tightened the belt round a gutful of relief, pity, guilt, and hope (and more than hope: belief), I knew what Cadence meant – and I felt what Cadence felt. Grateful submission to the force that wakes you up in the morning, lifts you to your feet, and impels you outwards into the world; the return of time and motion; the shaking off of thwartedness. Cadence loved what Christopher loved – life, life, which so famously goes on…
The plane pushed back, made its stately two-point turn, cruised forward in search of the exit chute – then lowered its head and began its desperate sprint. Escape velocity, lift-off, climb.
There he was aimed – at the stripped house on Regent’s Park Road, where life, London life, was withering away. The work of resumption and renewal would need to be done here, in America.
And now the customers in their seats could gaze down from on high at the customers in their beds – fellow denizens of the strange land.
*1 Described by him, without much exaggeration, as ‘the toast of two continents’, this was familiarly known as ‘the pelt of the Hitch’. It insulated him so thoroughly that he seldom wore a sweater, let alone an overcoat, even in the cruellest winters.
*2 Before, during, and after my stay in Texas, 5 Regent’s Park Road continued to denude itself of furniture. The house seemed well aware that we were forsaking it; the rooms, the gap-toothed bookcases, the stairs, the passages (even the garden) looked increasingly hurt and strained…
*3 You feel like a crazy professor for saying so, but the US spends about a fifth of its GDP on healthcare, while Sweden spends about a twelfth; and in life expectancy America comes in just behind Costa Rica. Here, free healthcare is never called ‘free healthcare’; it is superstitiously known as ‘the single-payer system’ – where the single payer turns out to be the government. ‘Free healthcare’ doesn’t sit well on the native tongue. It would confuse the sleep of a fully monetised society; every American subliminally accepts that, in the land of the free, absolutely nothing at all should be free of charge.
*4 In the course of the (mainly literary) interview that followed I effusively praised ‘The City’, Updike’s long short story about a man falling very ill on a business trip. Years later it occurred to me that Updike on American health had affinities with Gogol on Russian serfdom: as citizens they might have seemed to accept it, but as artists they rejected it tout à fait. See Dead Souls; and see ‘The City’ and much else, including Rabbit’s lengthy hospitalisations…The theme of literary self-contradiction – meaning differences between the conscious and subconcious mind – cries out for a monograph. Dickens, in his ‘editorial’ voice, championed incarceration for bad language and flogging for bigamy, and approved the practice of strapping mutinous sepoys to the mouths of artillery pieces and firing cannonballs through them. All these positions are undermined by his fiction – and not just his fiction: in American Notes, Dickens (who elsewhere denounced black suffrage as ‘a melancholy absurdity’) writes hauntingly about passing from free territory into slave states, and declares that the ambient deformation is palpable in the very physiognomies of the whites…Updike, too, was capable of giving his inner hick access to the typewriter. In his memoir Self-Consciousness, the chapter called ‘On Not Being a Dove’ (i.e., on being a hawk on Vietnam) is unreconstructed – and self-pitying – Rabbit: ‘It was all very well for civilised little countries like Sweden and Canada to tut-tut in the shade of our nuclear umbrella and welcome our deserters and draft-evaders, but the US had nobody to hide behind.’ Updike continues this strophe by dully repeating, word for word, the number-one herd-think justification for prolonging the war: ‘Credibility must be maintained.’ Which is a dismal cliché even among bureaucrats.
*5 When I did some research into HIV/AIDS, in the early 1990s, an activist lawyer told me that many sufferers were advised to render themselves sufficiently indigent to qualify for federal assistance (Medicaid) – a process known as spend down.
Chapter 5
And say why it never worked for me
‘Now you can’t ever ask her,’ Elena had said one morning out of the blue, in 2010.
It was a few days after Hilly’s death, so Martin could easily fill in the spaces: Now you can’t ever ask your mother if by any chance Philip Larkin knocked her up in December 1948.
‘That’s right,’ he said. And he was glad. It was the only solace he would ever get from his orphanhood. ‘Now I can’t ever ask her.’
* * *
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The book in your hands calls itself a novel – and it is a novel, I maintain.
So I want to assure the reader that everything that follows in this chapter is verifiably non-fiction.
The doll on the mantelpiece
1. ‘Germany will win this war like a dose of salts, and if that gets me into gaol, a bloody good job too.’ Philip Larkin, December 1940 (aged nineteen).
2. ‘If there is any new life in the world today, it is in Germany. True, it’s a vicious and blood-brutal kind of affair – the new shoots are rather like bayonets…Germany has revolted back too far, into the other extremes. But I think they have many valuable new habits. Otherwise how could D.H.L.*1 be called Fascist?’ July 1942.
3. ‘Externally, I believe we must “win the war”. I dislike Germans and I dislike Nazis, at least what I’ve heard of them. But I don’t think it will do any good.’ January 1943 (aged twenty-one).
These sentences, notable for their moral defeatism (disguised in the first quote as gruff immunity to illusion), their ignorance, and their incuriosity, come from the early pages of the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1991). So here we confront a youth turning twenty who ‘dislikes’ Nazis (or at least what he’s heard of them). By January 1943 he might have heard of what we now call the Holocaust (‘probably the greatest mass slaughter in history’, as the New York Times reported in June 1942). Did he hear of it later on? Neither in his correspondence nor in his public writings is there a single reference to the Holocaust – not one, in his entire life.*2
Philip’s father, Sydney Larkin, OBE, who somehow acquired a reputation for intellectual rigour, was a self-styled ‘Conservative Anarchist’; he was also a zealous Germanophile. He went on being pro-German even after September 1939 – and even after November 1940, and even after VE Day in May 1945…In November 1940 more than 400 German bombers descended on Sydney’s hometown of Coventry, destroying the city centre,
where he worked (as a senior municipal accountant), the fifteenth-century cathedral, nine aircraft factories, and much else; the raid wounded 865 and killed 380. The Luftwaffe raids began in August 1940 and continued until August 1942 (with a final death toll of over 1,200). And Sydney went on being pro-German.
Before the war, in 1936 and again in 1937, Sydney took his only son along with him on one of his regular pilgrimages to the Reich: consecutive summer holidays, the first in Königswinter and Wernigerode, the second in Kreuznach (so both trips saw a rare omission for Syd: no Nuremberg Rally, with its 140,000 kindred souls). As Philip wrote, much later (in 1980), when the facts of Sydney’s affiliation were about to be drawn attention to in a PL Festschrift:
On the question of my father and so on, I do think it would be better to say ‘He was an admirer of contemporary Germany, not excluding its politics.’ In fact he was a lover of Germany, really batty about the place.
Nowhere is it written that Sydney was an anti-Semite.*3 But how could it have been otherwise, for an admirer of the politics of Nazi Germany?
One wonders what else he liked about the place. A serious and compulsive reader (with a particular affection for Thomas Hardy, on whom he once gave a public lecture), Sydney was not in any ordinary sense a philistine; and he would have felt the weight and glamour of German literature and German thought.