Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  Now I suspect you wouldn’t mind hearing a bit more about the fire, and of course I’ll be glad to oblige. Not for the only time in these pages, a clear calamity leads to a relatively happy ending, one laid on by life, which moves in mysterious ways…22 Strong Place didn’t burn down – it burnt up. It was what they call a chimney fire.

  A chimney fire? I thought chimneys were where fires were meant to be at home. Anyway, ours leaked. It had been leaking sparks for months…

  It happened on New Year’s Eve, remember, and it was all over by twelve. So – the fire was the farewell party thrown by 2016. First Brexit, then Trump, then no house and out on the street at midnight in midwinter.

  Inez and I were there at the time, whereas…Hang on – some background. We have a small house in West Palm Beach. I can never say that without thinking of a cameo in Evelyn Waugh. Having introduced himself, a stranger on a train starts up a conversation with something like, I have a small house in Antibes. Friends have been kind enough to say I have made it comfortable. The cook there, in his simple seaside way, is one of the best I have.

  There is no cook in West Palm, or anywhere else, but the fact remains that we have a small house in West Palm. And Nat and Gus were there for Christmas and it was great – reading by the pool all day and then noisy dinners in the soft warm air. Oh and most mornings Nat cycled off to Mar-a-Lago, to observe…

  My wife and Eliza stayed on, but I came back to Brooklyn with Inez on December 31. We joined my younger brother, Jaime, my much younger half-brother, a whole generation younger, and his wife Isa. She’s Spanish and he’s bilingual – he was born there. They’d spent the holiday in Thugz Mansion, and it was their first time in New York. And they’d had a thrilling week…

  So the four of us, me and Inez, Jaime and Isa, were making a festive night of it. New Year’s Eve. Drinks round the crackling hearth. And we were well into dinner when the doorbell rang.

  It was a local posse. ‘Look!’ they said, pointing upwards. Cinders were streaming out of the cracked fifth-floor window. 911 had already been called.

  There’s a fleet of fire trucks pulling up outside the house, I told Elena on the phone. She seemed to be holding herself together, but poor Eliza was frantic, because it was happening in her room – all her clothes, all her drawings. I went up there with Jaime and it was just a sheet of asphyxiating white smoke.

  That was the only dramatic part. Then came the only funny part. Elena rang back to say in a very calm and patient voice, When the firemen come, could you ask them to take off their boots before they go upstairs? She was thinking of her runner – the strip of carpet. She was in shock. I suppose we all were.

  The firemen came. Ten huge Darth Vaders yelling, GET OUTTA HERE! GET OUT! GO! GO! GO! I got out, with the others. I didn’t linger – didn’t linger to ask them, in my ponciest English accent, to slip out of their boots. And up they stomped. We all got out and stood staring. Now there were flames up there. Flames up there like hyenas after a kill. So busy. So greedy. So much to do. So much to eat…

  We spent the night as guests of kindly neighbours, Jaime and Isa across the road, Inez and I a couple of doors along. The two Amises had very temporarily joined the 60,000 homeless of New York City.

  I know what you must be asking yourself. What’s all this about a happy ending? Well it did come about. I can still feel its blessing, and I must gather such things to me, as I age, ever mindful of the destined mood…

  Bright and early next morning we visited the scene. The FDNY, New York’s Bravest, rightly so called, had to drown all those jackals – every last one of them. And quickly too – there were babies sleeping in numbers 20 and 24. So they strode to the top floor and humourlessly unleashed the regulation gigaton of water.

  And yes, the fire was gone. But so was the house. Elena’s precious runner, for example, was gone – and so were the banisters, the sidewalls, and the stairs.

  Now as you’re getting on in years, my reader, that kind of mishap can be conclusively discouraging. I’m certain, for example, that Kurt Vonnegut, having started a fire in his house – an ashtray fire – never recovered from it. In his Letters it’s there as a totem. Ever since the fire…And it set the emotional tone of his Act V. I was uncharacteristically firm in my mind that we wouldn’t get defeated by the fire. And we haven’t been.

  But the happy ending concerns Inez…

  Now Inez, taking after me, is petite, is little. One day, aged fourteen or so, she stood in the hall in Strong Place and said, with adult clarity, ‘What do I want? I want to grow.’ You can imagine how helpless that made me feel. True helplessness – it’s like finding yourself floating in water, without connection…

  She was taken to a specialist who said she’d be lucky to reach five feet. Inez burst into tears. I’m glad I wasn’t there for that (Elena was of course there for that). But I was there for much else. You see, I know short, I know all about being short. So I was rooting every day for Inez. I was her growth coach – I was with her every millimetre of her ascent to five feet. You can do it, Bubba. And she did it, she did do it.

  ‘Now you’re fine, you’re safe,’ I said at the impromptu party that developed on Sixty Inches Day. ‘You made it.’

  That was not very long ago. So I was hugely surprised when…Wait. Before we moved into my mother-in-law’s place, we moved into my brother-in-law’s place. Where we camped out under the January snows. Every day Elena returned to the dripping ruin of Strong Place, saving what she could. As seldom as I dared, I joined her, and stood in my study gathering scraps of paper and wringing out books.

  So not a very festive time. And then one night, at the family table, Eliza nonchalantly revealed that Inez had grown two more inches.

  I scraped my chair backwards and said, ‘Two inches?’

  ‘Not two inches,’ said Inez. ‘Two and a half.’

  And for some reason no one had thought to tell me, me, the titch-in-chief, the oldtimer from Lilliput. And I was so glad I hadn’t heard – because it was such overpowering news. Two and a half inches! When I was her age I’d hardly dare dream about two and a half inches. It would’ve made me practically five foot nine. Even now my head spins…

  And right then and there I thought, Fair enough! If God had said, Inez will grow a bit more, but it’ll cost you your house, I’d’ve said, Where do I sign?

  So that’s my destined mood, maybe. Because something similar happened with regard to Hitch…My mother-in-law, Betty, is getting on for ninety years old, and at present she’s in Battery Park at an assisted-living parlour called Brookdale and subtitled ‘Senior Solutions’.

  In a way that’s an attractive American attitude (and selling point) – senior solutions. But it’s a misnomer. Old age, as I’m coming to realise, is insoluble. There are no senior solutions. There are no senior solutions.

  Christopher sought and found a senior solution. Only he wasn’t a senior. He was sixty-two. Maybe that’s it. Maybe you need to be comparatively junior, if you’re going to find the senior solution.

  Chapter 1

  Christopher: Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day

  ‘Who else feels,’ I read out from the moist sheet of thin white paper on my lap, ‘who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence”. Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep on believing that, Atheists.’ I paused and Hitch said,

  ‘As you may be starting to suspect, Mart, this chap isn’t very bright.’

  ‘I wondered…Yeah, keep thinking that, Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonising death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortu
red and set afire.’ I said, ‘I’m beginning to see your point.’

  ‘But at least he means well.’

  ‘Also rather repetitive, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Mm. He plods through his premise. And then after he’s done that, with that out of the way, he plods through it again. Besides, it isn’t the only body part I’ve used for blasphemy.’

  ‘…Sorry, Hitch, I don’t get you. What other body parts?’

  ‘Well, my dick, I suppose, and my brain and my tongue. But that’s the least of it. Think what sort of god is being summoned. Literal-minded, thin-skinned, madly insecure, and wildly childish.’

  ‘Especially childish…You know, when Nat wasn’t quite two, I displeased him in some way, and he scowled at me fiercely as I left the room. A couple of minutes later I came back in – and he was astonished to see me.’

  ‘That you’d survived. Because he’d wished you dead.’

  ‘Dead or at least very fucked up. And there I was, bold as brass and still breathing, if you please. For about six months children think they’re omnipotent.’*1

  ‘Boy children anyway. Alexander was like that, except he didn’t want to use lightning bolts. He wanted to do the job himself. But not even children insist on being metronomically praised.’

  I asked him, ‘How would you feel, no, what would you think, if you got scanned in the morning and found you were miraculously cured. Miraculously.’

  * * *

  —————

  This subsection is a flashback. Our talk about blasphemy took place in Washington DC, on Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day, which fell on September 20, 2010 (Houston and the synchrotron were still six months ahead of him).

  Yes, Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day. So far as the religious community was concerned, the Christopher prognosis – made public that June – was the most newsworthy development in almost a decade. God hadn’t had this kind of attention since September 11.

  So Christopher at that point was on the receiving end of innumerable communications from the nation’s churchgoers. And although a fraction of them were written by admirers and proponents of hellfire, the rest were expressions of solicitude – and love. One day earlier, in the hall, as I made my re-entry, he showed me some of it, or rather showed me some of the extent of it: hefty hardboard folders, in stacks. I said,

  ‘That’s the key thing about you, Hitch. You excite love.’

  He said, ‘My dear Little Keith…’

  ‘Even among the puritans. Who don’t know what a dirty little bastard you really are. But the love, Hitch – it’s the key thing. When was an essayist last loved?’

  …Some correspondents said tenderly that they would refrain from praying for him (out of respect for his ‘deepest convictions’) and other correspondents said even more tenderly that they were going to pray for him anyway.

  When two acquaintances, both of them evangelical clerics, reported that their congregations were praying for him, Christopher wrote back with the question: Praying, exactly, for what?

  And of course it turned out that these letters weren’t get-well-soon cards, or not in the normal sense. We are, to be sure, concerned about your health, too, but that is a very secondary consideration. While they’d be pleased enough if Christopher’s body put itself right, their primary consideration was the fate of his soul.

  Apart from all the religious (and all the secular) websites devoting themselves to the Hitch, a further online amenity encouraged you to place bets on whether or when he would lose his nerve – would crack, and hurriedly convert.

  It was now nearly half past eleven. Hesitantly and of course drunkenly, I said,

  ‘Put aside Pascal’s Wager for now – Christ, how did that ever get itself capitalised? – and just think about Bohr’s Tease.’*2

  It was five to twelve and Christopher said, ‘If on the stroke of midnight I became cancer free I’d be overjoyed, but I wouldn’t go down on my knees. I’d be delighted to thank a doctor. But I’m not saying o gracias – aw, muchísimas gracias – to no Nobodaddy.’

  ‘…And anyway, prayer’s so potent that it doesn’t care if you don’t believe in it.’

  ‘Still, it would be a very irritating coincidence…Our blogger friend – the Hellfire artist. If he thinks God awards the appropriate cancers, what does he make of childhood leukaemia? They haven’t blasphemed, they haven’t sinned. And they haven’t spent forty-five years living like there’s no tomorrow, let alone no eternity.’

  Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day was a Monday. Christopher and his entourage were not especially disheartened to find him unrecovered on Tuesday morning.

  At this point he was no longer living as if there was no tomorrow. He was still smoking and drinking (up to a point), and he was still eating, and he was still talking (all four habits would soon be in serious question). He was still writing his thousand words a day and he was still engaging in public debates. And he was still giving time to pundits and profilists: open a paper or a magazine, and there’d almost always be something about the Hitch.

  Once or twice Christopher described these pieces as gun-jumping obituaries, but the ones I saw were careful to avoid the slightest suggestion of finality. His younger fans and followers, in particular, always signed off rousingly, with something like If anyone can beat cancer, it’s Hitchens or Up against Hitchens, cancer doesn’t have a chance. Although I approved and concurred, I could tell that these codas were to some degree expressions of hope – rhetorical hope.

  My hope wasn’t rhetorical. It was actual. Christopher, I was sure, would win his fight, whether anyone prayed for him or not. But I must have known – mustn’t I? – that cancer at least had a chance.

  Texas: Come again another day

  The word went forth from the state house in Austin. Governor Rick Perry announced with no little pomp (‘I do hereby proclaim’) that April 22–24, 2011, Good Friday through Easter Sunday (Crucifixion through Resurrection), were to be known as the Days of Prayer for Rain…

  It was a tense weekend for Christians. It was a tense weekend for atheists, too. And in our daily communications (between New York and Houston), Christopher and I had to admit that it was a tense weekend for Texans, after three months of drought, high winds, and no humidity, and with a million acres already on fire. We sympathised, semi-hypocritically, but the truth was we hoped for continued or even intensified dehydration: we wanted no April showers in Texas, not over Easter and not for at least a month or two after that. We wanted a decent interval so that no one could run away with the idea that the Prayer for Rain had actually worked.

  I flew there on May 4; and the Lone Star state was incorrigibly parched.*3

  That night Hitch and I and Blue were settling down to dinner. Not in the Lone Star Hotel, and not in a party-hat Chinese restaurant, but on a broad lawn, attended to by loyal retainers and surrounded by fish ponds and fountains, statues and sculptures, flowers and bowers. And our hostess, Nina Zilkha (née Cornelia O’Leary), with her honeysuckle vowels, lent the occasion an antebellum air – the gracious South. Well, Texan Nina was gracious (and literary), but Texas itself, with its heritage of lawlessness, slavery, revolt, defeat, Jim Crow, big oil, packed churches, weekly death sentences, and its enduring thirst for secession?

  Still, that evening it would have been quite reasonable to say (as Herzog said in the Berkshires), Praise God – in the sense of praise nature, or praise life. The Hitch was home from MDA. And on top of that we were looking forward to some harmless knockabout fun on TV: the first (of nine) Republican presidential debates.*4

  Meanwhile the plates of melon and prosciutto were being laid out, and the bottles of wine. And this spread must have seemed almost abstract to Christopher, who had been nil-by-mouth for some while. I looked his way. Downward-averted, his face expressed something I recognised, and with fellow feeling: unwelcome self-absorption. The causes and symptoms of it in me were
usually idly psychological; but in Christopher, just now, they seemed to be of the body.

  He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t drink – and not so long ago (though that was over now) he couldn’t speak. What else couldn’t he do?

  Christopher suddenly raised his arm upright and we fell silent.

  He said faintly, ‘I can’t…’

  * * *

  —————

  That expanse of real estate – tended by six or seven gardeners – belonged to an old friend of Christopher’s and mine, Michael Zilkha.*5 One of the many remarkable things about Michael, who is rich, left, and green (his business at the time was biofuel), is his habit of personally transporting you to and from the airport – a gallantry nowadays unthinkable even for newlyweds. The very first time I met him, at Anna Wintour’s apartment in 1979, he ended up personally transporting me to JFK (for my return flight to London). And when I arrived at Bush Intercontinental on May 4, 2011, Michael was waiting outside Arrivals in his new electric car. That day he dropped me at the hospital and took my suitcase on to his guest house, where the Hitchenses were already installed…

  At MD Anderson I rode up to the eighth floor, as instructed, and a passing orderly pointed to Christopher’s room or wardlet. Which was empty. Returning to the central bay I asked the registrar.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, thinking I must’ve misheard, ‘– he’s gone where?’

  ‘To the gym.’

  ‘The gym?’

  Hitch had never gone to a gym in his life (though I suppose they might have made him look in there once or twice at boarding school). Nowadays he would hardly know how to say the word ‘gym’…In normal life Christopher was willing to take a long stroll now and then, a country walk with a pleasant destination in mind (a country pub, say), but readers can rest assured that he never, ever, took any exercise for the sake of it – and in gyms that was all anybody did. Frowning, I said,