by Amis, Martin
He was pretty close to his very best, and when he again fell silent, I said rather impulsively, hoping to keep him in it (and also rather drunkenly),
‘The guy, the college janitor who found Berryman’s body’ – on the river shore under the bridge in Minneapolis – ‘had an interesting name. Art Hitman…Saul, aren’t you weary of the line reality is stranger than fiction? Or that it’s becoming stranger? I think it’s always been stranger. Ooh, you couldn’t put Art Hitman in a novel! Well you couldn’t – because you wouldn’t want to. Reality is stranger than fiction. And it’s crasser than fiction too.’
I felt Elena’s shoe on my shin, a jab and then a steady pressure. I readjusted. She was right: I was talking as if to the old Saul, the ever-renewing Saul, and there he was, across the table, fading, withdrawing…
‘Mm,’ he said, ‘I’m just feeling…I miss Delmore. I miss Hart Crane. I miss poor John Berryman.’
Well at least he knew they were gone. Rosamund told me that he kept forgetting that the dead were dead, and, when reminded, was bereft all over again…
Later, as I sought sleep (early departure, get the girls in the car, New London, ferry to Orient Point, ferry to Shelter Island, ferry to North Haven and Sag Harbor), I was thinking about what Philip Roth said to Andrew Wylie (Philip’s agent, Saul’s agent, my agent), ‘He’s depressed? You’d be depressed if that universe was shutting down on you.’
Shutting down. In Act 4, Scene 3 of another Shakespearean tragedy, on the night before the sea battle of Actium (and the conclusive defeat, and the paired suicides), four soldiers are patrolling the grounds of the Alexandrian palace:
[Music of the hautboys – oboes – as under the stage.]
Fourth Soldier: Peace! what noise?
First Soldier: List, list!
Second Soldier: Hark!
First Soldier: Music i’ the air.
Third Soldier: Under the earth.
Fourth Soldier: It signs well, does it not?
Third Soldier: No.
First Soldier: Peace, I say! What should this mean?
Second Soldier: ’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, Now leaves him.
*1 One afternoon in London in 1999 I was minding Eliza in her room. She wore a dark brown Babygro; she was not quite three. We both had books on our laps (Mrs Dalloway for me, Mr Silly for her). A sudden and very loud noise caused me to look up. ‘…Oh,’ I said with resignation. ‘Well I suppose we ought to make a start. Would it be simpler if I just ran a bath?’ In a dignified voice and without raising her eyes from the page, Eliza said, ‘That was just an enormous fart, Daddy.’ She was thirty-four months…A small percentage of infants (‘potty prodigies’) are fully trained by the age of two; the median age is three and a half (though there will still be ‘oopsies’ up to year five). Three and a half is when memory begins. Girls are potty-trained earlier than boys; and their memory begins earlier, too; in both cases the difference is about three months – not long enough, I suppose, to explain why little girls are measurably brighter than little boys.
*2 ‘A warrior for mankind, a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations’: this is from Hamsun’s ‘eulogy’ published after Hitler did away with himself on Walpurgisnacht (April 30) in the ruins of Berlin. Then again old Knut was in his mid-eighties at the time, and probably dementia contributed to his clinching trahison. The long-lobbied-for audience with the Führer, which came to fruition in June 1943, is in retrospect pretty satisfying. Confronted by a garrulous critique of his Norwegian policies (during which Hamsun touted the merits of Vidkun Quisling), Hitler tried to shout Hamsun down, but found for once that he couldn’t just rely on a hollered monologue, couldn’t just activate ‘the usual gramophone record’ (Mussolini) – because Hamsun was deaf. Recent scholarship, from Oslo, tells us that Hamsun, by the end of this great meeting of minds, was in tears, and Hitler’s post-interview tantrum, as his press officer tells it, took three days to subside.
*3 He had got the Jewish-American novel up and running, making a start with Dangling Man in 1944: 1944, a time when anti-Semitism in the US was at its historical apogee, with desecrations, beatings, daubed swastikas. Nonetheless, the Jewish-American novel survived and endured; it dominated the national literature for over half a century. During that emergence many wounds were given and received. And how ironic, and how tragic, it is that the Judaeophobic fulmination should exactly coincide with the Holocaust; and the weight of public opinion inevitably moved Roosevelt to restrict Jewish immigration. In 1941–5, no Jew was murdered in America; the attendant butcher’s bill was paid in Europe. One example. In 1939 the steamship St Louis, from Hamburg, was denied permission to land in Florida; of the 980 passengers, 254 are known to have died in the Holocaust.
*4 Iris would collect things. ‘Old sweet wrappings, matchsticks, cigarette-ends’ – a Coca-Cola tin, a rusty spanner, a single shoe. Bayley pictures her ‘fiddling incessantly with her small objets trouvés – twigs and pebbles, bits of dirt, scraps of silver foil, even dead worms’. Bayley (in common with most readers) quietly accepts this as a continuation of Iris’s necessary dreaminess. John and Iris were authentic and uninhibited bohemians, low-bohemian in the life, like hippies or tramps, and high-bohemian in the mind – until, in her case, there was no mind.
*5 And I would see him again in Boston, where he remained on board right to the end. Will Lautzenheiser’s later story can be found online; it tells of phenomenal calamity – and phenomenal resilience. He is now forty-something.
*6 Even back then, in the earliest years of the century, I marvelled at the illustrious future assembling itself at the feet of this word. Up until the renovation of ‘inappropriate’, ‘offensive’ and ‘potentially offensive’ were rather desperately holding the fort; but now Americans (and some others) at last had a multisyllabic euphemism that meant ‘the kind of thing that some individual or other might not like’…Less woollily it can also mean ‘the kind of thing that certain people should by definition be spared’. In 2010 or so Inez (eleven) was entertaining two family friends aged seven and five; the three of them were watching a show about teen romance, and after a few minutes Inez reached protectively for the remote control, mouthing at me: ‘Inappropriate.’ In 2017, in the course of defending Judge Roy Moore of Alabama, President Trump conceded that the accusation (molesting underage girls), ‘if true’, would be ‘incredibly inappropriate’.
*7 I once had a long talk about this with a writer friend who has made notable efforts in the sphere of madness, Patrick McGrath (The Grotesque, Spider, Asylum), at a time when I was wondering how mad I ought to make the anti-hero of my thirteenth novel. The essential difficulty, we agreed, was this: a work of art needs to cohere (‘together’ + ‘to stick’) and organic madness is the sworn enemy of coherence. So the author faces an unfamilar hazard, namely a surfeit of freedom: as in dreams, anything at all can happen…Mad characters, therefore, have to be surrounded – and constantly challenged – by sane characters; madness must never be allowed to take centre stage. So no mad heroes or mad heroines and no mad narrators (of the sort you too often find in the early work of Elena Ferrante). It is like nonsense verse: a very little goes a very long way.
*8 The speaker is Dr Alfred Nash, a character in Kingsley’s novel of 1984, Stanley and the Women. Nash’s monologue was based on, or made possible by, Jim Durham, a learned and literary psychologist and a close family friend…When I was in my early twenties Jim effortlessly cured me of what felt like a serious mental condition – incapacitating panic attacks on the London Underground (‘Just remember’, he said, ‘that no harm can come to you’). And I would have gone to him with the confusions induced by Phoebe Phelps in 2001; but by then he had repatriated himself to Australia, where he runs a psychiatric hospital in Sydney.
*9 Kingsley had an obviously very memorable encounter with somebody who was nothing else but mad: a middle-aged woman on a bus
. She was mad, he wrote, mad to the ends of her hair.
How to Write
Decorum
We are living, you and I, through a kind of Counter-Enlightenment. Popularly known as ‘populism’, it is a movement supposedly attentive and responsive to ‘the interests and opinions of ordinary people’. Another word for populism is ‘anti-elitism’. Ordinary people know best; crowds are wise. ‘I love the undereducated,’ said Trump at a rally. ‘We’re the really smart ones.’
Every now and then there’s an urge to apply the same emphasis to the arts; and the most vulnerable is literature – literature in prose. To populists, the novel is especially inviting because it is already the most populist of the forms, the most egalitarian and democratic: it asks for no special tools or training. All you need is what everyone automatically has – a ballpoint and a scrap of paper.
So we saw the anti-Great Books movement, the anti-Dead White Males movement, and the like. In Britain twenty years ago there was a movement that called itself the New Simplicity; it was anti-metaphor, anti-polysyllable, anti-adverb, and anti-subordinate clause. The New Simplicity, I thought, was a secular version of the vow of poverty. Or even the vow of silence.
I confess that I don’t understand the impulse (though I can see that it’s entirely sociopolitical and not at all literary). Do you know any reflexive anti-elitists – I don’t mean the bookish types so much as the rank and file?…Fascinating. Are these anti-elitists, I wonder, feeling anti-elitist, feeling anti-expertise, when they go to the doctor? Or when they board a plane? Or when they hire a lawyer – or an electrician or indeed a hairdresser? Show me a sphere where we exalt the ‘ordinary’, the inexpert, the amateurish, the average.
Well, there’s always that leisure-class boondoggle known as fiction. Here the lit-crit sociopoliticians have found an endeavour so unserious that no one need bother about levels of competence. Who listens to literature? Who cares what it says?
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∗
The good reader cares, of course, and listens. And the good reader automatically expects high proficiency – which is achievable by anyone willing to put in the time. It is possible, and pleasurable, to learn more about words and how they go together. If writing is your job, then it’s just a matter of self-respect.
You’re not trying to set yourself up as an exquisite or a mandarin. The modest goal is to leave the reader in as little doubt as possible that you know what you’re doing. As you negotiate this task, you will realise, very early on, that elitism has got to start somewhere. And I think I know just the place.
On the table there are three recent historical studies, all of them by apparently genuine scholars, all of them reviewed at deferential length. The top one (on the American Revolution) tells me, inter alia, that early readers of Jonathan Swift, unused to the genre of satire, must have been ‘gobsmacked’ by A Modest Proposal (which was published in the early eighteenth century); the middle one (on the Third Reich) tells me that Hitler was feeling ‘upbeat’ when he returned to Berlin after a holiday in the Bavarian Alps; the bottom one (on Stalin) tells me that Kaiser Wilhelm I, in delegating foreign affairs to Otto von Bismarck, showed ‘smarts’.
What kind of reader does this kind of writer think he’s pleasing? ‘Smarts’ (for instance) derives from ‘street-smart’, and Kaiser Wilhelm never went near a street in his life; but this writer considers that ‘acuity’, say, or ‘good sense’, would be a wasted opportunity or a missed trick, given the availability of ‘smarts’. I suppose there must be one reader in a hundred who will greet this or any other stop-press colloquialism with an approving leer (and forget about that reader, never mind that reader, you don’t want that reader). And there must be many more, presumably including all the reviewers I read, who don’t mind or just don’t notice.
When the context is historical, you see at once how ruinously these vulgarisms distort the tone. Here, toadying to the contemporary is not just resoundingly anachronistic; it also does violence to decorum, to literary decorum, which has nothing to do with etiquette and simply means conformity of style to content. I resent being told that Hitler was at any point feeling ‘upbeat’, which chummily accords him a human status that was never his. I find this inappropriate. And as for the idea of readers being ‘gobsmacked’ in 1729…
From here a larger lesson follows.
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∗
To re-emphasise: never use any phrase that bears the taint of the second-hand. All credit to whoever coined no-brainer and (I suppose) to whoever coined go ballistic and Marxism lite and you rock and eye-popping and jaw-dropping and double whammy and all the rest of them. Never do it – not even in conversation. Never say (let alone write) You know what? or I don’t think so or Hello? or Hey (jocularly, as in ‘But hey, we all make mistakes’). Even in a quite handy-looking little tag like anytime soon you can hear the bleats and the cowbells. Don’t write, don’t say, and don’t think Whatever (this is probably the most counter-literary item in the entire lexicon).*1 Shun all vogue phrases, shun all herd words; detect them early on and shun them. Been there, done that, took the selfie, got the T-shirt…
Clichés have in their time put in some honest toil for the canon – Evelyn Waugh’s foreign-correspondent journalese in Scoop (‘The body of a child, like a broken doll’), the placid but maddening catchphrases in the cabman’s shelter in Ulysses (‘the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat’). These are venerable clichés, solidified by time. The clichés of the moment are evanescent; even in the impoverished lodgings of platitude they are mere transients.
In a work of fiction, ‘gobsmacked’, ‘upbeat’, and ‘smarts’ could achieve decorum – just about and not for long – if put into the mouth of a minor character, a representative (in Saul’s phrase) of ‘the mental rabble of the wised-up world’. Such speech would lose its threadbare legitimacy in a year or two, and the character would himself become an anachronism.
So cleanse your prose of anything that smells of the flock and the sheep dip. Your prose, obviously, should come from you, from you yourself – purpose-built, and not mass-produced.
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∗
‘The hidden work of uneventful days’…That’s Saul’s marvellous evocation of the subconscious, the subconscious hard at it, trying to clarify and modulate. And it also evokes the process of writing, writing something long: writing a novel.
John Banville has described the mental atmosphere of composition as a dreamy or a dreamlike state, and so it is. And yet Banville intended no paradox when on another occasion he said with some vehemence, ‘The most important thing? Energy, energy, energy.’ Abstraction combined with exertion, producing a thrilled and thwarted tingle, like an ungratified need to sneeze; it is the tingle of creative life. That sensation, that feeling of pregnant arrest, was what Saul, at the last, was mourning.
Bellow Sr, Abraham Bellow, who died in 1955, always described Saul as a desperate sluggard, the only son ‘not working only writing’. Not working? From Augie March:
All the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done…[I]n yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
‘It’s the same idea, isn’t it,’ I said to Rosamund. ‘The hidden work of uneventful days.’
‘This time given the bravura treatment,’ she said. ‘But it’s the same idea.’
We had the book out on the kitchen table at Crowninshield Road. Rosie was nearby, of course,
and so were Rosamund’s parents, Sonya and Harvey. It was April 2005, just a few days – a few uneventful days (the quiet visits to the synagogue, the quiet procession of friends and neighbours dropping off cooked meals, mostly stews or thick soups, in tureens and engraved samovars) – after the funeral.
* * *
∗
Phoebe Phelps is about to revisit us, but before we open the door and let her in…You know, every now and then, as I age, I discover a fresh refinement in ‘the complex symbol’, which is also the complex reality – meaning death.
It’s like this. There I am, staked out in the Boca Raton hospice; until recently I was retching and whimpering away with some brio, but now I’m in the Critical Care Unit and trussed up with tubes and pumps and catheters. I imagine that Elena, Bobbie, Nat, Gus, Eliza, and Inez were all there, all round about me. But they’re not. Together with my brothers and my friends and everyone alive whom I have ever loved – they’re in mid-air on a chartered jet, coming to Florida to say their goodbyes. And halfway through the flight (JFK to West Palm Beach), the plane suffers what they call a failure cascade, and by the time it crosses from South Carolina to Georgia it has no hydraulics, no flaps, no spoilers, no reverse thrust, and no brakes.
I have entered a light coma and my vital signs are flickering, and the plane is busy dumping fuel just east of Savannah as it prepares to ditch at, say, Brodie Air Force Base, a few miles north of the Sunshine State (also known, remember, as the Seniors’ State). Brodie has a runway of 12,000 feet, and they need twenty, thirty…As my medical team applies the jump leads, hoping to hot-wire me for a final half hour, the plane comes yawing through the lower air, smashes down on the Brodie tarmac, tears along its length, bursts through the barricade of foam, bubble-wrap, and bouncy castles, shinnies up the grassy knoll at the far end, and explodes.