by Amis, Martin
Second: structure. If it has energy, fictional prose will tend to be headstrong. Structure is there to keep it in line. It’s a question of chopping up the narrative and parcelling it out in a satisfying pattern. Once the pattern is formed, you can be confident that the building won’t fall apart overnight; the scaffolds are in place.
Third: the subconscious.
On this subject I hesitate to say too much – because I don’t want to spook you. The mysterious contribution of the subconscious, in particular, is spooky (it’s why Norman Mailer called his collection of his very perceptive ‘thoughts on writing’ The Spooky Art). The business of compiling a novel puts you in near-daily contact with a force that feels supernatural (and duly gives rise to superstitions).
I’d been writing fiction for twenty years before I was personally aware of its existence, let alone its power. In the old days when I was young, if I came up against a difficulty, a stretch of prose that bloodymindedly went on resisting me, I would simply redouble my attack on it; after a nasty couple of weeks I would grind out something that never satisfied me (a little later I came to recognise these dead bits and to jettison them, after only a couple of wasted days). If I can spare you one such session of pointless struggle, then…
No one will ever understand the subconscious; but you can learn to humour it. Nowadays, when the obstruction announces itself, I don’t bang my head against the wall; rather, I stroll off and do something else. This has become instinctual and even crudely physical: my legs straighten up and bear me away from the desk, usually from hard chair to easy chair, where I sit and read while I let time pass. It may take an hour, it may take a day, a night, two days, three nights, until I find myself again in the hard chair, because my legs have delivered me there, just as my legs, earlier on, drew me away. It means that the path is now clear.
A sinister process, but benign: a type of holistic white magic (and I’m convinced, incidentally, that ‘writer’s block’ simply describes a failure in the transmission belt: an internal power cut). One of the several hindrances in life-writing is that it gives the subconscious so little to do. With fiction, you often have to sleep on it – to rejoin the world of dreams and death, from which, many believe, all human energy comes. Life-writing (the facts, the linear reality of things that went ahead and happened) doesn’t leave much room for the subliminal. And this cannot be anything but a loss.
Most fictions, including short stories, have their origin in the subconscious. Very often you can feel them arrive. It is an exquisite sensation. Nabokov called it ‘a throb’, Updike ‘a shiver’: the sense of pregnant arrest. The subconscious is putting you on notice: you have been brooding about something without knowing it. Fiction comes from there – from silent anxiety. And now it has given you a novel to write.
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A few minor points.
Dialogue should be very sparely punctuated. Just use the comma, the dash, and – above all – the full stop. People talk in short sentences (however many of them they string together). For centuries it was a convention to represent (say) rural labourers as saying things like Arr, the master lived over there: beyond them hillocks; he used to loik coming over the…Despite what some novelists still seem to believe, no one talks with colons and semicolons – not farmers, and not phoneticians.
If you want to show a moment of hesitation, use the ellipsis, the dot-dot-dot (which has many other very civilised uses); it will save you the indignity of typing out such makeweight formulations as ‘She paused for thought, and then continued’. Otherwise, in dialogue, confine yourself to those marks that have some kind of aural equivalent: the comma (a short pause), the full stop (a rounded-off statement followed by a longer pause), and the dash.
The dash is a versatile little customer – but a word of warning. A single dash will do as an informal colon (among many other functions). Two dashes signal a parenthesis, like brackets (though without their slight sotto voce effect). But never present your reader with three dashes in the same sentence (as some highly distinguished writers persist in doing), typically with two serving as brackets and one as a colon. This is a sure formula for syntactical chaos.
Last and also least (so far as I’m concerned), there is the subjunctive, the verbal mood that deals in conjecture (‘if I were a carpenter’). Well, I’m pleased to report that it’s on its way out. The subjunctive, in English, used to swan around the place with some freedom. No verb was safe from it. If she have a fault. I recommend that Mrs Jones face a sentence of no less than…But for some time the subjunctive has been confined to one verb and one verb only: to be. Yes, to be is the last man standing (note too those rusting trinkets as it were and albeit). So for a little while longer it’s just a question of if she were or if she was.
And which is it?…That question has inspired huge volumes of linguistic philosophy, full of graphs and equations. No doubt it is all nauseatingly complicated. I stick to a simple rule. If I’m writing in the present tense I use it, and if I’m writing in the past tense I don’t. So it’s she wishes she were and it’s she wished she was. The present can go either way. The past is settled. I really think that’s all you need to know. He wishes his friend were alive. He wished his friend was alive. Is that at least reasonably clear?
*1 It was of course the disruption, and not the hurt, that (feebly) agitated Philip Larkin. ‘Sorry to hear about your misfortunes. To me the loss of a loved one (in this sense) would be nothing at all compared to the consequent throes of MOVING – I think I hate moving almost more than anything. Are you really going to have to do all that?’ So Phoebe was right. ‘He’s never going to move to London, he’s never going to move out of Hell. He couldn’t. He couldn’t move next door.’
*2 And this half-conscious retaliatory flail cost me far more than it cost Jane Howard. It postponed my engorged encounter with her five-volume magnum opus, the Cazalet Chronicles. And it deprived Jane of the many hours of detailed praise I would’ve given it, face to face (and she needed detailed praise, in life and in art). To hear that would have pleased her, and to voice it would have pleased me. Of course, it’s too late now. She no longer needs that praise. Nevertheless, the omission, and all the attendant regret, is lastingly mine.
Chapter 4
Beelzebub
Xalapa
As for how Christopher might be amusing himself otherwise, if he hadn’t been pushed to the side of his own life, the subject never came up. It never came up because it so obviously groaned with frustration and futility. But there was this one time, in Texas in the fall of October 2011, brought about by happenstance…
It was then seventeen months since onset and a full year since he published his first report from the land of the stricken (it would become Chapter 1 of Mortality), where he wrote, ‘I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it.’*1 What he was most immediately looking forward to, Blue told me, was a leisurely circuit of various universities with their daughter Antonia, who was then seventeen, and by October 2011 that window had closed.
The missed opportunity I was about to present him with was in comparison vanishingly slight. But minor wounds, too, can hurt and connect (‘once one has got used to the big wrongs of life,’ wrote V. S. Pritchett, ‘little ones wake up, with their mean little teeth’). We were in the Zilkhas’ garden, among its statues and butterflies, and I said as casually as I could,
‘When I leave tomorrow I’ll be heading south. Over the Rio Grande.’
‘Oh? To what end?’
‘Just a festival. By air to Veracruz, then by road to Xalapa.’
And it struck me: I couldn’t think of an adventure he would find more powerfully enticing. The late flight out of Houston, the midnight landing in violent Veracruz, the drive to the complimentary hotel, the international cast of thinkers and drinkers, the fresh audiences of upturned faces – in Mexico, with its voluptuous flora, its
tangily effectual margaritas and mojitos, its scorching spices, land of revolution and of knifepoint anti-clericalism, land of the implacable rebel, of Álvaro Obregón, of Pancho Villa, of Emiliano Zapata…
‘Sorry, Hitch.’
‘What for?’ he said without any sign of disappointment in his open face. ‘Someone’s got to do it. They did ask me, if I remember.’
‘Of course they asked you. I saw your picture in one of the programmes.’ Instead of going to Mexico, Christopher would be going to MD Anderson, most days – for monitoring and therapy. I thought of the past summer, when he returned to Washington and a) waited out a throat-to-navel radiation rash (caused by thirty-five days under the synchrotron),*2 and b) was admitted to a DC hospital which gave him ‘a vicious staph pneumonia (and sent [him] home twice with it)’; during that time – certainly, confessedly – he came very close to despair and to surrender; but then there were ‘intervals of relative robustness’ marked by nothing much worse than ‘annihilating fatigue’. I now said, ‘But I’m changing my ticket. I’m coming straight back here. By the weekend, Hitch, I’ll once again be in your arms.’
On Tuesday evening as I climbed into the yellow cab (Michael Z was unaccountably elsewhere), Christopher came to see me off, out on the driveway, in shirtsleeves, cheerfully and lovingly…And then the flight south through the darkness, and the long bus ride to Xalapa with a score of other attendees, and the meal break en route at a roadside bodega, where I had a stimulating talk with the historian Niall Ferguson (husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on whom the Hitch had long had a crush). He, Christopher, might’ve had all this happen to him too, together with me, in the alternate world of health.
* * *
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‘I didn’t want to be discouraging, but now you’re back safe and sound, Little Keith, I can tell you a very crunchy story about Mexico City. It’s a good one.’
‘Please.’
Out of hospital for a while, Christopher, by now very much used to being in and out of hospital, was in hospital. Up in the Tower and in his own room – the scattered notebooks and typescripts, the beeping monitors, the high bed standing to attention.
‘A Nordic theologian,’ said Christopher, ‘a gentleman and a scholar, landed at the airport and took a taxi to his hotel. Before he could get inside he was snatched and bundled into a car. They had him humped over on his knees in the back and they kept jabbing his arse with their awls and skewers – as he told them all his passwords and pin numbers. Then they drove him around to various ATMs and had great fun with his bank account. And you’d think that’d be the end of it. But no…Now the narrative takes on a tragic complexion.’
A tap on the door was instantly followed by a flight attendant pushing a drinks trolley – or so for an instant I thought. It was in fact a wheeled tray of vials and tubes steered by a nurse who sang out,
‘Good afternoon!’
‘Good afternoon,’ said Christopher. ‘Ah. Blood work. I used to tell my visitors, This’ll only take a minute and it doesn’t hurt. Both claims are no longer true.’ He looked to his left. ‘And how are you, my dear?’
‘Great! And how are you doing today?’
‘Medium cool, thank you…Mart, this young lady’s prepping me for a PIC line, which is a uh, a peripherally inserted catheter. Once that’s in, there’ll be no more probing around for usable veins. Ten minutes. Go and have a quick burn.’
…Outside on the plant-lined pathway I lit up and strolled back and forth. Has all this put you off smoking? asked Alexander on one of his recent visits. No, I said. What it’s done is put me off medical treatment. So I dragged and puffed and stared at the dusty flora, each little bush and shrub on its midden of cigarette ends, which looked almost decoratively organic, like thick white catkins…
‘Success?’ I said, as the blood lady was rattling off to her next customer.
‘Yeah, as far as it went. For the actual insertion, the blood lady said she’ll need the help of at least one or two blood blokes. Where were we?’
‘Our tragic Scandinavian. Then what?’
‘Ah. Well once they’d cleaned him out the droogs took him off into the wilderness and left him naked in a paddy field miles from town. They beat him up of course – but get this. They smeared him with dogshit. All over his face and hair.’
‘…What was that in aid of? Why?’
‘Why. A very interesting question. Which I’m sure he asked himself – accustomed as he was to balancing divine providence against the existence of evil. Anyway, he flew without incident back to Stockholm or Oslo. That was three years ago. And, it’s a funny thing, but he hasn’t said a word since.’
‘Christ.’
‘Mm. Most unfortunate. He’s in a darkened room in some cackle-factory up in the tundra. But wouldn’t you agree, Little Keith, that Mexico’s much maligned? You’d never guess that the murder rate in Mexico City is much lower than St Louis.’
I said, ‘From what I saw they’re a lovely people. And you know, I was in a two-hour traffic jam in Xalapa and I didn’t hear a single horn.’
He and I talked of Mexico until the arrival of Blue, and then Alexander, and we got ready to go. Here was another thing Christopher would have been doing otherwise: joining us that night for rounds of cocktails and a three-course meal. We all commiserated in our different ways. I said,
‘You awe me, Hitch. You don’t have an issue with us going off to a snazzy grill? You don’t find it uh, concerning? You’re comfortable with that?’
‘Of course,’ he said, picking up his book. ‘I’d much rather think about you doing it than think about you not doing it. I do like to feel it’s getting done.’
‘That’s good in you, Hitch. And listen, Xalapa’s on every October and we’ll go there together a year from now. Let’s shake on it. Xalapa, in 2012.’
* * *
—————
The examined death
The Hitchenses, as a couple, were returning to Michael’s guest house less and less often. Blue slept there (except during crises), and so did I whenever I flew down: waking up to a leisurely breakfast with Blue on the sunny porch, both of us eating cereal laced with berries, and getting through enormous quantities of caffeine and tobacco. Blue and I, we were calm and companionable; when we talked about Christopher’s condition, we scoffed at his cringeing tumours and his punily curable pneumonias. Around noon we would climb into one of Michael’s cars and make the brief journey to the Tower.
And there would be Christopher, for whom ‘every passing day represents more and more’ – as he wrote that same month – being ‘relentlessly subtracted from less and less’.
* * *
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Denial, rage, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance.
Christopher summarised ‘the notorious stage theory’ in his first dispatch from the sickroom (September 2010). And only the other day, eight years later, did I learn that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s subject was not mortal illness; it was bereavement.
Which of course changes everything. In the case of bereavement, you are negotiating psychic terms with someone who is already dead – and not with someone who may yet survive.
So the stages would have to be revised. It wasn’t denial that ensnared us, all three of us, Blue, me, and (to an unknowable but I think lesser extent) the patient himself. It was more like hardened hope, or blind faith, or adamantine wishfulness.
About six months after the diagnosis I wrote a long piece about Christopher; in the London Observer, and I cleared it with him and with Blue, and also with Ian, who said (I am conflating emails and phone calls),
‘Here and there you’re too severe, I think. When you quote the more minor Hitch. I mean you’re not wrong, but…’
‘Well he and I have a tradition of being hard on each other not in person but in print. If it didn’t have some vinegar in it he�
�d find it – oily.’
‘I agree with your general point. And I agree about puns. But a couple of the examples you give, and what you say about them. Does he need to see that now?’
‘Now?’
‘Now he’s dying.’
I felt a jolt and had a strong impulse to say, with real indignation, ‘But he’s not dying’…I didn’t say it. I just thought it. I just thought: But he’s not dying.
A minute later I rolled a cigarette and went outside to the stone-paved garden behind the house on Regent’s Park Road, where the cold sun was staring down through huge voids and tunnels in the covering cloud. I was reminded of how it feels to be an expectant father in the days immediately before the birth – the infinite restlessness and the sense of being almost criminally underemployed. As Prince Hal says in ambivalent mockery of Hotspur: ‘He that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife: “Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.” ’ Oh, what to do with all this stoppered energy. Release me. Let me go and rearrange heaven and earth with my bare hands…Is that what religion is, the groping of the powerless?
As Blue understood it, Christopher’s chances of ‘cure’ or long remission were between ‘5 to 20 per cent’. But Ian told me that even the lower figure was too high – and about medical science he was never wrong. Oesophageal Cancer, Stage Four. And yet, as Carol Blue wrote in her exemplary afterword to Mortality:
Without ever deceiving himself about his medical condition, and without ever allowing me to entertain illusions about his prospects for survival, he responded to every bit of clinical or statistical good news with a radical, childlike hope.