Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  *7 The quotes are from Lorrie Moore’s ‘People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk’, as are all the unattributed quotes in the rest of this section. Moore’s story is to be found in Birds of America (1998). It is – or it feels like – an example of life-writing that firmly elevates this rather dubious genre.

  How to Write

  The Mind’s Ear

  ‘He wasn’t just angry. He was beside himself.’

  Modern readers would more or less skim the second sentence while perhaps casually noting the cliché. But beside himself is a startlingly vivid image, and all credit to whoever used it first (probably a late-medieval translator who vivified the French phrase hors de soi, or ‘out of self’). The same is true of another image, the mind’s eye, which had been knocking around for at least as long – but in this case everyone knows who gathered it in and made it immortal:

  Ham.: My father – methinks I see my father.

  Hor.: Where, my lord?

  Ham.: In my mind’s eye, Horatio.

  * * *

  ∗

  If you’re struggling to describe a face or a landscape, try this: close your eyes and describe what your mind’s eye sees. The mind’s eye is a tool. And so is the mind’s ear.

  I want to talk about the mind’s ear, but before I do that I want to say a few more words about Vonnegut. His ear, his prose, his fire, and his destined mood.

  There really are such things as destined moods. At a certain point, usually in late middle age, something congeals and solidifies and encysts itself – and that’s your lot, that’s your destiny. You’re going to feel this way for the rest of your life. You have found your destined mood, and it has found you, too.

  You know, Kurt Vonnegut is statistically the favourite writer of very many of your peers; and I bet you have an affection for his stuff, as do I – its originality and charm. All right, his flights of inventiveness sometimes felt undercontrolled, and he was too strongly attracted to what Clive James called ‘gee-whiz writing’ (‘So it goes’); but what is inarguable is the quality of his ear. And I don’t just mean an ear for dialogue (an eavesdropper’s attention to varying rhythms of speech), though he excelled at that too. I mean the mind’s ear – your mind’s ear, which as we’ll see is the conductor, the musical director, of your prose.

  Kurt was an effervescently affable man who, in his final decade, lost all his mirth, turning away from the world and starting to fold inwards. My first encounter with the Later Kurt left me slightly shocked – and slightly hurt (I realised at that moment how fond I’d grown of him). We were in the antechamber of a function in New York; formerly he had always greeted me with his characteristically spluttering enthusiasm, but that night he just nodded distantly and gazed elsewhere. His face seemed drained of its responsiveness; it was resignedly static. And his bearing was different too: stolid, erect, even soldierly – no longer donnishly gangly and loose. He was on duty. And at that gathering his wheezily breathless laugh went unheard.

  Now Kurt did describe himself as a hereditary ‘monopolar depressive’ (his mother was a suicide); but psychological disorder, as an explanation, tends to frustrate all human curiosity; and besides he had lived with that for most of his adult life. In his Letters, it should be duly noted, he went on being affectionate, generous, and playful with relatives and old friends, right up until his death;*1 but with everyone else he could offer only a distant civility.

  As I see it (and I am only a remote observer), there were two other elements. His amatory timeline – a crucial determinant here – almost exactly corresponds to that of my father: born in 1922, early marriage and early children, divorced in his forties, second marriage terminated by second wife (after he discovered that ‘she had stockpiled a guy’ in her studio next door), and, thereafter, celibacy. And as Kingsley told me, late on, ‘it’s only half a life without a woman’. Bear in mind too that Kurt was far more uxorious (and monogamous) than Kingsley. Still, the result was the same: romantic defeat and an internal ‘snarl of disappointment’.

  The other component, for Kurt, had to do with literary pride. For writers, this is the rule of thumb: those who sell a lot want to be taken seriously, and those who are taken seriously want to sell a lot (and the latter ambition is clearly the more ignoble). Kurt, who sold a lot, wanted to be taken seriously; he felt under-esteemed. And don’t ever forget that the authorial ego is – and has to be – vulgarly and queasily vast. Probably not that many novelists and poets, argued Auden, would like to be the only novelist or poet who has ever lived; but most of them wouldn’t mind being the only novelist or poet who is living now.

  ‘I have to keep reminding myself that I wrote those early books,’ he said to me (in the course of an interview in 1983). Those early books – pre-Slaughterhouse 5 – were the ones he thought were the most cruelly skimped. ‘The only way I can regain credit for my early work is – to die.’ The very last time I saw Kurt was at a literary gala in the very early 2000s: he mounted the stage to receive a career-achievement award – and also to receive by far the longest and loudest ovation of the night. His response was dignified and subdued. I very much hoped that some alleviation and even some pleasure managed to filter through to him.

  Like Elmore Leonard,*2 Vonnegut was a popular – or demotic – artist gifted with an exceptional inner ear. Which meant that his prose was almost wholly free of ‘false quantities’ (in the non-technical sense): free of rhymes, chimes, repetitions, toe-stubs, letdowns, free of anything, in short, that makes the careful reader pause without profit. A near-frictionless verbal surface is usually the result of much blood, toil, tears, and sweat. I’ll be giving you a few tips on how to streamline the process.

  * * *

  ∗

  For example, when I am reading – this applies to fiction especially but not just to fiction – I partly imagine that what I have on my lap is a provisional draft of something that might have been written by me. So I’m thinking, Mm, I wouldn’t put it quite like that, I’d avoid that repetition, this phrase isn’t precise enough, that word should’ve been tucked in earlier in the sentence, and – again and again – is that rhyme/half-rhyme/alliteration intended or is it unintended? Et cetera.

  Going on being a writer while you are reading becomes second nature and helps train the ear. As for getting the prose to flow smoothly – that’s more mysterious. But certitude of rhythm can be cumulatively acquired. With Kurt, and with Elmore, it seemed to be innate. So we can marvel at them, but we can’t learn from them.

  * * *

  ∗

  Let me assure you that you do have an inner ear – everybody does; and it is a vital instrument (and helpmate), almost as vital as your subconscious. But before you can bond with it, you first have to find it. So let’s find yours. We can do that by setting your mind’s ear two modest – indeed fairly lowly – tasks.

  Number one: the ‘I or me?’ business. People often get this wrong in speech (I have heard well-known novelists and also professors of literature get this wrong), but it’s rare to see it in published prose. Here is a quote from Bill McKibben’s would-be green bible, The End of Nature: ‘A ten-minute walk brings the dog and I to the waterfall.’ Now, take out the ‘the dog and’ bit – lose the dog – and silently rehearse that sentence: ‘A ten-minute walk brings I to the waterfall’? Whether it’s the dog and I, or John and I, or the other board members and I, put the ‘I’ first for a moment, and your ear will guide you. Ditto, obviously, with ‘John and me met up with Mary’…Personally I find this less irksome than ‘Mary met up with John and I’, which is not only an illiteracy but also an attempted genteelism.

  Some people think that ‘myself’ is there to help them out. ‘John and myself met up with’, ‘brings the dog and myself’: it may not be an illiteracy, but it certainly sounds like one. Myself is just a crap word, that’s all, though some constructions – notably reflexive verbs
– force it on you. The other day, as Elena was lamenting one of her supposed character flaws, she said, ‘I hate me’; and I thought that was a definite improvement.

  Number two: the ‘who or whom?’ business. This is very slightly trickier. ‘John, whom I know to be an honourable man’ is right; ‘John, whom I know is an honourable man’ is wrong. Here’s what you do: you mentally recast the subclauses as main clauses – ‘I know him to be an honourable man’, ‘I know he is an honourable man’ – and your ear will guide you: ‘him’ demands ‘whom’, and ‘he’ demands ‘who’…In conversational prose be wary of whom. In the closing pages of Herzog, Bellow writes, ‘Whom was I kidding?’ This is grammatically correct; it also leaves the sentence up on one stilt. ‘Whom the fuck d’you think you’re looking at?’ Or even worse, ‘At whom the fuck d’you think you’re looking?’ Never worry about ending a sentence with a preposition. ‘That rule’, Churchill famously said, ‘is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.’

  These are rather menial exercises; but having established a relationship with your mind’s ear (your aural imagination), you can then go on to cultivate it. I spend a large fraction of my working day saying whole sentences again and again in my head. What I’m doing is probing for dissonances, for false quantities. And I never get them all, no, you never get them all…

  The thing is, literature differs from the other arts in one glaring particular. Not everybody can paint or sculpt, not everybody can act or sing. But everybody can write. So you’re in the position of a trainee pilot in a world where everybody – from the age of four or five – can fly an aeroplane.

  Words lead a double life, and so far as I can see what this means is that you have to become something of an expert on them – an expert on words; and I spend another large fraction of my day looking them up. I find it stabilising and also salutary. Every time I do it I feel a grey cell being born – while no doubt a billion are blindly dying off. Check the exact definition, check the origin. That word is then more firmly yours.

  * * *

  ∗

  …For a whole decade I was brimful of foreboding about my destined mood. That decade was my fifties (your fifties are spent coping with the negative eureka of your forties: no, you are not an exception to the rule of time). Is it going to be a fair mood or a foul mood? Well, guess who took care of that. Mr Christopher Hitchens, that’s who. I’m not even sure how he did it. But he did it.

  If your destined mood is your final mood, which it would seem to be, then it is part of your preparation for death. During this period, as you lie dying, there may be physical hardships and humiliations to get through; so long as you’re good and old, though (seventy-something will just about do), it’s philosophically straightforward. Remember. Time is a river that carries you away; but you are the river.

  * * *

  ∗

  By now of course ‘my mind’s eye’ is categorically unusable. Not, or not only, because it belongs to someone else. Immature writers imitate, said Eliot, and mature writers steal: you can pocket the odd phrase, but only if you then do something with it, something ‘mature’. The rightful owner is Shakespeare – so you’d get caught, and quickly, too. This is the Plagiarist’s Dilemma: your writers have to be worth stealing from, and their stuff is famous for that reason…

  You can’t use ‘the mind’s eye’ because you’d be violating a master law of writing, which is: Never use a form of words which is in any sense ready made. A form of words like stifling heat or biting cold or healthy scepticism or yawning gap; adjective and noun, long-married couples who ought by now to be sick of the sight of each other. And the same goes for shopworn novelties: rapidly ageing newlyweds of the kind we’ll be looking at in twenty pages or so, when we turn to the matter of Decorum.

  For now, I’ll leave you with a quote, which (conveniently) offends on both counts: ‘In business, I don’t actively make decisions based on my religious beliefs, but those beliefs are there – big time.’ Donald J. Trump, Crippled America: How To Make America Great Again (2015). In this instance, Trump is also peddling a consummate untruth (for targeted electoral gain). But let other pens dwell on that.

  *1 In January 2000, as I mentioned, Vonnegut sleepily upended an ashtray overflowing with butts of the untipped Pall Malls he always smoked, torching a fire in his Manhattan townhouse. He was rushed to hospital (smoke inhalation) and briefly listed as ‘critical’. His bodily recovery, it turned out, was swift; but he had lost his clothes, his bed, and all his books and papers. Four years later he wrote to Robert Weide (who did the screen adaptation of Mother Night) and the letter ended: ‘I have scarcely had a day worth living since the fire, am bored absolutely shitless by myself. Cheers – Kurt.’

  *2 And the last time I saw Elmore was at another literary gala in New York (November 2012), where he in his turn won an award for Lifetime Achievement. That night I gave an introductory speech, praising inter alia Leonard’s wholly original and swingeingly effective way with tense. He uses not the past tense (‘he lived in’), not the imperfect (‘he was living in’), not the historic present (‘he lives in’ – the present tense used to vivify completed actions, as in Updike’s Rabbit books), and not quite the present tense; he uses – or he invents – a present tense indefinitely suspended (‘Warren Ganz III, living up in Manalapan’, ‘Bobby saying’, ‘Dawn saying’). In Riding the Rap a louche character at a louche party is said to be ‘burning herb’ and (prudently) ‘maintaining on reefer’. And it is a kind of marijuana tense, vague and creamy, opening up a lag in time…After the presentations Elmore and I went outside (twice) for a smoke and a discussion of another seminal crime writer, George V. Higgins. Later we parted with embraces and warm words. His destined mood appeared to be one of slightly agitated high spirits. He was eighty-seven. And he never saw eighty-eight.

  Chapter 2

  Saul: Idlewild

  Wind chimes

  ‘Rage,’ said Rosamund.

  Does it make any sense to talk about Saul’s destined mood? Think for a moment…Well, does it?

  ‘Rage,’ said Rosamund.

  The two of us were sitting at the half-cleared lunch table in Vermont. Saul, Elena, and the children were for now elsewhere.

  ‘All the time he’s in a rage. Sometimes a quiet rage, sometimes not so quiet, but always in a rage.’

  I hadn’t found him much altered since the interlude of Pirates of the Caribbean and The Shadow-Line and James Bond. But what was settling in me was an incremental disbelief: to see him so often sitting there with no book on his lap, just sitting and gazing. I never got used to it; every exposure mystified me. And I had to drag myself back through the story all over again, as if in plodding homage to one of Saul’s (many) difficulties. I said,

  ‘Sometimes when I come into the room he looks at me with a jolt of surprise. Slightly affronted surprise. He recognises me, I’m almost sure, but it’s as if he had no idea I was in the house…I haven’t seen any rage.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s aimed at me.’

  ‘…You? What for?’

  With her eyes lowered she said, ‘I don’t know if I can bring myself to tell you.’

  But she didn’t have to tell me, not then, because all the others were returning from the pond.

  …We all used to swim – Saul included – in the little round pond, which was endowed with an alerting range of temperatures; even in high summer your calves tingled to the cooler currents…In a Bellow essay of 1993, Vermont, pastoral Vermont is called ‘the good place’. Pastoral Vermont, poor Vermont, with its tunnels of flora and its roadside syrup stalls, its backyards almost blotted out by old tyres and fenders and eviscerated cars and trucks and tractor-trailers and even excavators, its book barns, its patio wind chimes.

  The would-be forgotten

  I never saw the point of the Americanism ‘off of’ (surely the ‘of’ is always redundant) until I had children;
and then I absorbed its accuracy and justice.

  When I first started coming to stay at this house, in the late 1980s, I was accompanied by my first wife and our two very young sons, and I spent the entire time wiping shit off of everything. Later, when I came to stay in the late 1990s, I was accompanied by my second wife and our two very young daughters, and I spent the entire time wiping shit off of everything. In the early 2000s, when we paid our last two or three visits, I spent some but by no means all of my time wiping shit off of everything in a nearby hotel, rather than in the house, where the Bellows had a newcomer of their own, Naomi Rose, and where Rosamund at least was no doubt similarly and simultaneously engaged.

  …While we’re here we should again salute the unsung heroism of babies – of babyhood and infancy. And of parents, who perhaps deserve a double honour, having once been babies themselves (and knowing exactly what they’re in for). Of course human beings forget all that: this welcome loophole is confusingly called ‘childhood amnesia’ – whereby memory remains quiescent until the age of three and a half, which just so happens to coincide with emancipation from the nappy.*1

  In fact it is difficult, here, not to see a beneficent hand at work. Memory, in my theory of it, holds back – is loth to form – until the individual has attained mastery of the commode. Yes, memory has the everyday decency to recuse itself, to look the other way, during this awkward transition, sparing us that indignity. Over these things Mother Nature or some such genius erects her all-absolving screen; in ordering the scope of human remembrance, this mother takes the trouble to wipe the shit off of memory.