by Amis, Martin
‘And what did you say?’
‘ “RECTOR!” I BEGIN, TURNING TO SAME, “I TEACH ENGLISH LITERATURE HERE IN YOUR HALLOWED HALLS.” TO WHICH, IN HIS STENTORIAN TONES, HE EXPOSTULATES THUSLY…“MADAM,” QUOTH HE. “IT IS NOT A FUNCTION OF MY OFFICE TO COMMIT TO PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY EACH AND EVERY…” ’
The speaker was Monica Beale Jones (whose mouth was perhaps a centimetre away from mine): Monica, a burly sixty-year-old in gunmetal satin tank top, thick brown trousers (my memory vacillates between crushed velvet and leatherette), and slablike black shoes with steel buckles; she also sported horn-rimmed glasses, earrings the size of horseshoes, and cropped tufty hair…In early photographs, from the late 1940s, her face is intelligent and shapely, and expresses a touching, striven-for self-possession. By May 1982 that face was fuller and squarer and naturally coarser. And it wasn’t just masculine; it was male. Rowdily, pugnaciously male, like her voice. When I visualise her now, I see an urka out on the razzle.*3 At this point Larkin had been with Monica for over thirty years.
And let’s have a look at him while we’re at it. I said that at Oxford he dressed with some flamboyance, but the cravats and the crimson flannels were put aside soon after graduation. And that evening in London he simply passed for what he’d eventually become – a fairly senior provincial archivist and administrator (who, most counterintuitively, also happened to be the widely beloved national poet). From the moment they entered the house,*4 PL exuded not benevolence so much as utter harmlessness, prim, timorous, and demure, as if content to hope that nothing would go too gravely awry. His demeanour, in short, was that of the politely longsuffering wife of a notoriously impossible husband.
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In the early 1980s I knew nothing much about Philip and Monica. I know a lot about them now. And nothing stands out as starkly as the letter quoted below.
They met in September 1946; by the summer of 1950 PL ‘had come to me’, as Monica quaintly put it; and in October 1952 he wrote to her with this advice:
Dear, I must sound very pompous…It’s simply that in my view you would do much better to revise, drastically, the amount you say and the intensity with which you say it…I do want to urge you with all love and kindness…I’d even go so far as to make 3 rules.
One. Never say more than two sentences, or very rarely three, without waiting for an answer or comment from whoever you’re speaking to; Two, abandon altogether your harsh didactic voice, & use only the soft musical one (except in special cases); & Three, don’t do more than glance at your interlocutor (wrong word?) once or twice while speaking. You’re getting a habit of boring your face up or round into the features of your listener – don’t do it! It’s most trying.
Now this is the kind of therapeutic routine that would need to be rehearsed at least twice a week. Rehearsed with all love and kindness, and also high moral energy (a smattering of sexual legitimacy would have been useful too – they were both about thirty). But it was an effort never made by him, and never made by her. In the early 1980s the Monica idiolect was just as PL described it in the early 1950s.
So they had their world, with its cosy jokes and whimsies, its pet names and imagined menageries, its confidences and indulgences, its childlike attempts at the physical (‘I’m sorry to have failed you!’). That was their own business. But when they mingled with others Philip was inflicting on the company what he had somehow managed to inflict on himself: unignorable proximity to a deafening windbag. And she wasn’t his weird sister or his crazy cousin: she was the woman you would have to call the love of his life.
A female observer of Saul Bellow’s amatory ups and downs remarked that he ‘was the kind of man who thought he could change women…And he couldn’t. I mean who can? You don’t.’ That’s right, you don’t: they don’t change you and you don’t change them. But it is surely a sacred obligation – to go on trying to impede, or at least retard, your lover’s journey into monstrousness.
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I said my goodbyes and then steered the black Mini to the significant house on the street off Ladbroke Grove, a street quite thickly flanked by trees of cherry blossom and apple blossom…
‘After she told the very long story about the rector,’ I said with my face in my hands, ‘she told a very long story about an alderman. A remarkably similar story. From which she also emerged with obscure credit.’ I looked up, blinking. ‘And you know, I sort of warmed to Monica at least to start with. I told myself, Relax – it’s only another boho evening. But she isn’t at all boho, and neither is he. No, they’re anti-boho. They’re bourgeois fogeys, the pair of them.’
Julia said, ‘Now sit back and have a big whisky. Is she mentally ill d’you think? I hate mad people.’
‘So do I. I couldn’t decide. Dad says she is. What’s the word, Asperger’s.’
‘It can’t be that. Asperger’s is meant to be mild.’
‘Well. She thoroughly enjoyed herself – she thought she was in wonderful form…That’s what I couldn’t get over. The gurgling.’
‘What gurgling?’
‘Are you very tired?’
‘No, not very. Go on. And have another big whisky. And talk. Talk now, or you’ll never sleep a wink.’
…Well, Julia, at dinner, in the intervals between one dumbfounding soliloquy and another dumbfounding soliloquy (a soliloquy, in which a stage character gives vent to thoughts ‘when alone or regardless of hearers’), Monica took little breaks or breathers; and during these she audibly gurgled, a continuous series of breathy gulps and grunts and swallows. What did this sound express? I was on Monica’s left, and it sounded to me like a stupor of self-satisfaction…
‘And I’d heard that same gurgling before. You know Robinson. He’s got a demented aunt who lives in a small manor house in Sussex. Surrounded by hopeful young relatives like Robinson – more or less patiently awaiting her death. And Aunt Esme, she seems all right, but she has this fatal flaw. She refuses to believe it isn’t May 16, 1958. Every day.
‘Rob told me to avoid, on pain of death, the slightest suggestion that it wasn’t May 16, 1958. When I was there it was a summer afternoon, and Auntie Esme was already on her guard because it was ninety-five degrees. “Rather unseasonal for May,” she kept saying. Which is apparently what she keeps saying whenever they get snowed in…Then after lunch the old nutter found the milkman’s bill on the doormat, and it was firmly stamped August 1, 1977. So she was fainting and having seizures and everyone was saying, Get the mail! Where’s the mail? What they meant was the specially preserved Daily Mail of May 16, 1958.
‘They finally found it and presented it to her, and she immediately went all smug and serene – at last a bit of sense…She curled up with it on an armchair, the yellowing, crackling relic of the Daily Mail. The headline was USSR LAUNCHES SPUTNIK III. And for half an hour Auntie Esme gurgled, exactly like Monica. And she gurgled gloatingly.’
‘…Mad but right.’
‘Vindicated, finally. Right all along. As if telling herself, “See? Some have said I’m a bore – but I’m not! I’m hugely entertaining!”…Ah well. There was a sweet moment early on. Nicolas spontaneously embraced his godfather, and Larkin embraced him back. For a moment he looked very fond and very gentle. And very happy. I could see what Dad meant when he called his manner “sunlit”.’
‘Sunlit. That’s a nice word to use,’ said Julia. ‘Come on, finish that and let’s go up.’
When he left the house the next morning a summery windstorm was in boisterous operation and having it all its own way – spelling the end of the spring blossoms, the cherry blossom, the apple blossom, for another year. And now the pink and the white buds and petals surged and swirled in reckless celebration, as if all the trees were suddenly getting married.
The fireside chat
In May 1982 I was thirty-two and Larkin was fift
y-nine. In December 1985 I was thirty-six (with a wife and a son, and another child on the way) and Larkin was dead.
…Haemorrhoids, neck-ache, an enlarged liver, giddiness, and other familiar complaints; and then some difficulty in swallowing. A ‘barium meal’ disclosed a tumour in his alimentary canal. His oesophagus would have to come out.
The night before the operation he summoned Monica from the kitchen to the sitting room. She was very poorly too: acute inflammation of the nerve endings (shingles). Beyond in the hall their walking sticks hung side by side…
The two of them settled in front of the gas fire. He said,
‘Suppose I’ve got cancer. Suppose I’ve got this. How long would you give me?’
Monica felt that ‘she couldn’t lie to him’, not then. So she said, rightly or wrongly but very accurately,
‘Six months.’
Larkin said, ‘…Oh. Is that all?’
*1 This obscure unease – it felt like a sin of omission, as yet undisclosed but always on the point of revealing itself. And there was a spiritual edge to it. I imagined that the religiously inclined would know how it felt: a fear of falling short, of missing out on something transformative – the Resurrection, the Rapture…
*2 ‘Life is first boredom, then fear. / Whether or not we use it, it goes, / And leaves what something hidden from us chose, / And age, and then the only end of age.’
*3 Dating back to Russia’s Time of Troubles in the 1600s, the urkas or urki constituted a dynamic subculture of hereditary criminals. In the Bolshevik Gulag they were classified as Socially Friendly Elements and were given the status of trusties; the urkas were thus empowered and encouraged to torment the counters and the fascists – i.e., the intellectuals, very much including the poets.
*4 They had spent the day at Lord’s Cricket Ground in St John’s Wood, watching a Test match between England and Pakistan. Monica immediately started putting everyone right about the visiting team’s spin bowlers. ‘IT WASN’T ABDUL QADIR! IT WAS IQBAL QASIM!’
How to Write
Impersonal Forces
Human beings are essentially social animals, and the anglophone novel is essentially a social form; it is in addition a rational form and a moral form. So one shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that, on the little planet called Fiction, social realism is the lone superpower. And although most modern writers, once or twice in their writing lives, will want to get out from under it and go off somewhere else, social realism still stands as their primary residence – their fixed address.
Literary experimentalists can do anything they want – indeed, they have already done just that by confronting you with a literary experiment. Literary social realists are temperamentally drawn the other way: they embrace solid conventions, and then work within and around them; and as they embark on a novel they reflexively accept that certain social norms will still apply. Readers are your guests, after all, and they come to your house as strangers; so you reassure them and make them feel at home, and then you start warming them up…
Now, if you ever paid a call on Anthony Trollope, the master social realist, I’m sure you’d be suavely received. Trollope was proud of his professional facility (he spent only three hours a day in his study, and produced over forty novels), and he would want to regale you with the fruits of his success (the house, the grounds, the dining room, the cellar, and other incidentals). Far more importantly, though, he would greet you with an alert and inquisitive eye, and would want to stimulate you into vividness…We now ask ourselves, What would James Joyce, the master experimentalist, be like to pay a call on?
The cryptic directions you were given lead you to a house that does not exist, or, rather, to a vast and gusty demolition site through whose soot and grit you can glimpse, in the middle distance, one unrazed building. And so you slither and hurdle your way down there and squelch through the mud and somehow activate the elaborate gong, and after a lengthy and soundless wait the door is wrenched open to reveal a figure who is angrily arguing with himself in several languages at once – before he again slips away, to be found an hour later in a distant scullery, where he gives you a jamjar of brown whey and a bowlful of turnips and eels.
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So don’t do that: don’t be baffling and indigestible. The good, the thoughtful host doesn’t do that. And he doesn’t do this: he doesn’t overwhelm you. Don’t, for example, harass your visitor with a multitude of fresh acquaintances, as Faulkner tends to do, beginning a short story with something like Abe, Bax, Cal, and Dirk were sitting up front, so I got in back with Emery, Fil, Grunt, Hube, and J-J (who used to be called Zoodie), and out on the flatbed I could see Keller, Leroy, Mo, Ned, Orrin…Even Muriel Spark, often the very deftest of writers, can quickly exhaust your powers of retention (there are far, far too many girls of slender means in The Girls of Slender Means). At the outset, before things loosen up, introduce only one character or maybe two, or possibly three, or at the very most four.
Take the earliest opportunity to give the readers a bit of typographical air – a break, a subhead, a new chapter. As I remember it, the first of Updike’s Rabbit books, Rabbit, Run, trundles on for thirty or thirty-five pages before we get so much as a line-space – long enough, at any rate, to establish an impression of fathomless garrulity. Don’t do that: don’t keep them waiting too long for a stretch of clear white paper. They will be grateful for a chance to catch their breath and to brace themselves for more; and so will you.
This is yet another example of the strange co-identity of writer and reader. Just as guest and host have the same root – from Latin hospes, hospit- (‘host, guest’) – readers and writers are in some sense interchangeable (because a tale, a teller, is nothing without a listener). And readers are artists, too. Each and every one of them paints a different mental picture of Madame Bovary.
Asked to sum up the pleasures of reading, Nabokov said that they exactly correspond to the pleasures of writing. I for one have never read a novel that I ‘wished I’d written’ (that would be simultaneously craven and brash), but I certainly and invariably try to write the novels I would wish to read. When we write, we are also reading. When we read (as noted earlier), we are also writing. Reading and writing are somehow the same thing.
‘I can’t start a novel’, my stepmother Jane used to say, ‘until I can jot down its theme on the back of an envelope. Just a few words – and it doesn’t matter how trite they are. Appearances are deceptive. Cheats never prosper. Look before you leap…Then I’m ready to begin.’
‘That would be impossible for me,’ my father Kingsley used to say. ‘I don’t know what its theme is. I’ve got a certain situation or a certain character. Then I just feel my way.’
‘Well I feel my way too. Once I’ve got going. But I can’t get going until I can at least fool myself that I know what I’m getting going on.’
…For me it’s a journey with a destination but without maps; you have a certain place you want to get to – but you don’t know the way. As you near that goal, though (one year later, or two, or four, or six), you can probably do what Jane did: you can formulate its gist in a single phrase; and that commonplace motto can serve as a touchstone during your final revisions. This is when you begin to sense the salutary pressure to cut…Particular sentences and paragraphs will feel strained and unstable; they seem to be hinting at their own expendability. And now’s the time to consult the back of that envelope: if the passage that disquiets you has no clear bearing on the stated theme – then (with regret, having saved what you can for another day) you should let it go. What you are after, at this stage, is unity.
Writing a novel is a…is a learning experience. In the old days I would get to the end of a first draft and then flip the whole thing over, and stare at it in wonder; and then start reading. And I was always astonished and embarrassed by how little I knew about that particular fiction, how larval it seeme
d, and how approximate. That’s the first page. By the last page you are back where you were (and confirming that, yes, the entire cast without exception has been transformed en route: their names, their ages, even sometimes their genders)…A much milder reprise of the same experience can be expected when you come to the end of draft two.
In writing this or that novel, you are learning – you are uncovering information – about this or that novel.
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I knew at once what he meant. ‘Mart,’ said my brother Nicolas on the phone. ‘It’s happened.’ In other words, Jane had bolted from the house on Flask Walk.
It wasn’t at all unexpected. Here was a marriage audibly pleading to be put out of its misery…Kingsley was hurt, romantically hurt (he came close to writing a poem about it – until his feelings fiercely hardened); and there was a great deal of disruption.*1 But there was no surprise and no censure. Everybody understood.
Still, I am forced to conclude that there was some resentment on my part (filial protective solidarity, perhaps), because I exacted a small but interesting revenge on Jane – strangely mean-spirited, as I now judge it. She ceased to be my legal stepmother in 1983, but she continued to be my confidante and mentor until her death (in 2014 at the age of ninety). It was a writerly revenge. I didn’t stop seeing her; I just stopped reading her.*2
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There are three impersonal forces – three guardian spirits – hovering over the theme park of fiction; they are there to help you; they are your friends.
First: genre. If you write Westerns, you will have the tacit support of all those who are attracted to Westerns. If you write historical romance, you will have the tacit support of all those who are attracted to historical romance. If you write social realism, you will have the tacit support of all those attracted to society and reality – a rather larger quorum. And you have the ballast of the familiar and the everyday; you have the ballast of human interaction and the way we live now.