Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  ‘Well. There I was in my new flat, Leamington Road, minding my own business. And she rang from the airport and –’

  A knock, and another hairdo round the door.

  ‘Ah,’ said Christopher. ‘Good afternoon, my dear.’

  This was the pain lady, or the painkiller lady (something of a cult figure at MDA; and Christopher’s neck, I knew, was hurting, and so were his arms, and so were his hands and his fingers). And he was now readying himself for relief (‘a sort of warming tingle with an idiotic bliss to it’). As I was edging my way out she said,

  ‘Mr Hitchens! Good afternoon! And how are we today?’

  ‘Well, Cheryl, you’re obviously in top form. As for me, I have some uh, discomfort, as they call it here. But I felt twice the price the moment I saw your face…Ten minutes, Mart. Then the long version.’

  The cancer pincer

  Out on the main deck I was beckoned into an alcove and found myself in an informal, water-cooler symposium convened by Christopher’s carers – or perhaps convened by Blue, who was asking many questions. By now she was up to PhD standard on Oesophageal Cancer, Stage Four (she knew the names and doses of all the drugs), and so the talk was mostly above my reach. But I soon fell into a whispered exchange with the blue-smocked figure called Dr Lal…Dr Lal was the most attractive of all the MDA oncologists – a lean Indian gentleman with a poet’s face, full of sadness and humanity, a face formed over many decades and many bedsides: Dr Lal was that increasingly rare kind of specialist, one who engaged with the patient, and not just with the patient’s disease. He said in an undertone,

  ‘Mr Hitchens is now faced with a choice. To stay here or to go home.’

  I said, ‘You mean home to Washington?…No, I suppose not, or not yet. Home to our friends’ house ten minutes away? He could do that, could he?’

  ‘Theoretically, yes. He has the, the option of going home. Let me briefly explain.’

  Christopher was caught in the double bind of his sickness: the doublecross of cancer. The tumours had been shrunken, scorched, and effectively cauterised by chemicals and protons; but the patient too was much reduced (and his immune system ravaged). Dr Lal went on,

  ‘He is without defences. And if he stays here, a secondary infection will certainly follow. It’s not if or when. It’s when.’

  ‘Then I don’t…What could be the reason for staying here?’

  On the one hand, home, Michael’s: the material and emotional comfort, the padded density, the numerous staff (including the two security men who courteously and affectionately materialised to help Christopher from the car to the house, and then rematerialised to help him upstairs to his bedroom). On the other hand, MDA: the stasis, the locked windows, the false smiles and false sparkle, the hairless children – and the invisible but inevitable gigabugs, biding their time in sinks and drains…

  Dr Lal arched his back, saying, ‘You see, there is the psychological element. And the fact remains that Mr Hitchens doesn’t want to leave.’

  Why? What possible counterforce would make him want to stay?

  The answer was that he somehow felt less threatened in hospital. And here we have to imagine a sense of limitless frailty – unquantifiably worsened by a state of mind always characterised, first and foremost, as one of overwhelming fear. It was a double bind within a double bind.

  …Another, older name for battle fatigue is soldier’s heart. And whenever I try to evoke that fear I think of what soldiers say (and write) about the hours before battle. The heart is full of love, but the physical instrument, the outward being, is full of fear; my neck is afraid, my shoulders are afraid, my arms are afraid, my hands are afraid, my fingers are afraid.

  Lord of the Flies

  You housefly, you horsefly – did he who made the lamb make thee?

  There were no insects at MDA, not even in its slightly frowsy cafeterias at the close of a long weekend. No insects. So what lay in my view was without doubt an illusion; solemnly, stonily, I sat through it, waiting.

  First, though, let us make terms with the actual. There was Christopher in his dressing gown, and he was already ill, additionally ill, as ill as I’d ever seen him, as ill as I’d ever seen anyone. Coughing, stiffly twisting in his chair, rocking from side to side, tipping himself forwards, his face wearing a light sheen of silvery sweat in the afternoon grey: that was the actual. He wasn’t groaning, he wasn’t complaining, he wasn’t swearing, he wasn’t even saying Christ. No, he was using his voice to respond to the tautened needs and nerves of his loved ones, more specifically to intercede in a row between his son and his second wife (in itself a most difficult position); the row was logistical (to do with Alexander having to foreshorten his stay), and it was unrestrained. Don’t forget that they, we, had had eighteen months of this, Blue (much the most proximate), Alexander, and I too. None of us were really ourselves: we were all someone else. And Christopher mediating and moderating, and turning aside now and then to get on with the business of being very ill. Meanwhile I sat silent in the corner with my suitcase and my plane ticket, feeling strange, feeling strange to the world. That was also actual.

  What wasn’t actual was this: the room was full of flies.

  All the way back to Brooklyn – all the way, from the hospital cab rank to the blue front door of 22 Strong Place – the usually reliable narrator, Martin, tried to make sense of his hallucination: a trick of the ear as well as the eye, for the flies thronged like bumblebees, as fat, as hairy, and also as noisy, purring, fizzing, sizzling. In his imagination and in his novels flies had always represented necrosis: little skull and crossbones, little gasmasked survivalists, little flecks of death – little shiteaters, little admirers of trash, wounds, battlegrounds, killing fields, abattoirs, carrion, blood, and mire.

  Watch the vermin swarm for long enough, stand among them for long enough when they swarm (I used to do this in our Brooklyn woodshed), and you feel in their triumphal excitement the undoing of the whole moral order…In demonology the little flecks of death owe fealty to the Seventh Prince of Hell, who excites lust in priests, who excites jealousies and murders in cities, who excites in nations love of war – Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies.

  *1 In the context of premature mortality, all talk of earning this or deserving that, all talk of justice and injustice, is understandable but delusive self-pity, which Christopher instantly recognised: that same paragraph ends, ‘To the dumb question, “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?’…Larkin never grasped this and never got beyond it. ‘I really feel’, he maintained, in the last paragraph of the last letter he ever wrote, ‘[that] this year has been more than I deserve.’

  *2 ‘To say the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back.’

  *3 I had recently read Philip Caputo’s famous Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War, published in 1977 (when PTSD was first recognised and described). After nearly a year of front-line combat, Caputo rises from his cot on ‘a quiet day, one of those days when it was difficult to believe there was a war on. Yet my sensations were those of a man actually under fire…Psychologically, I had never felt worse…a feeling of being afraid when there was no reason to be’; and of dissociation (sometimes known as ‘doubling’) – a feeling of being there and also not being there.

  *4 There was nothing blithe or heedless about it. ‘Oh, man. I’m living in a world of pain,’ he said when I reached him on the phone, in the late 1990s, during an intense but transient furore. While never, ever admitting he was wrong, Christopher suffered quietly but sharply for his errancies. Above all, naturally, he was tormented by the proliferating disaster of Iraq – a neocon experiment that he supported (no, championed)
from the standpoint of the hard left…

  How to Write

  The Uses of Variety

  I’ll be in London all next week, as I’m sure I told you. Well, mostly to see my eldest daughter Bobbie and her clan – her husband Mathew and their little boy and their little girl – my pretty grandchildren…I’m also due to have an audience, over afternoon tea, with Phoebe Phelps. Now I haven’t seen Phoebe for thirty years. All this was brokered by the niece, Maud. Who seems to confine herself to briskly merciless hints. For instance she casually mentioned that Phoebe never goes out. Outside. She never goes outside…

  Nothing can prepare you in any way for that kind of meeting. Certainly not literature, which is curiously incapable of helping you through the critical events of an average span (for example, the deaths of parents). I suppose the lesson is that you have to enter into it and see for yourself…At Larkin’s funeral my father talked of ‘the terrible effects of time on everything we have and are’. So I’m expecting some of that, vivified and enriched by the fact that she and I were lovers for five years, in our prime and in our pomp. Our meeting impends before me like the worst kind of medical examination. Which it is, in a sort of sense. An hour with Doctor Time.

  * * *

  ∗

  Now…Oh before I forget – a few words about paragraph size.

  Many eminent writers don’t seem to sense that paragraphs are aesthetic units; so they’ll give you a short one, then a long one, then a very long one, then a medium one, then another medium one, then a short one, then a very short one, etc. Paragraphs should be aware of their immediate neighbours, and should show it by observing a flexible uniformity of length: usually medium, though retaining the right to become uniformly long or uniformly short as you vary the rhythm of the chapter. Going from short to long (and back again) resembles a change of gear. Long paragraphs are for the freeway, short paragraphs for city traffic.

  * * *

  ∗

  ‘There is only one school of writing,’ said Nabokov, ‘that of talent.’ And talent can’t be taught or learned. But technique can be; and so can the foundations of palatable prose. All it asks of you is a reasonable commitment of time and trouble.

  Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading (1938) was originally – and very briefly – entitled ‘Invitation to an Execution’. Now why do you think he changed it?

  ‘…The repeated suffix?’

  Exactly. Invitashun to an execushun. It sounds like doggerel. So keep an eye on the suffixes; maintain a safe distance between words ending (say) with -ment, or -ness, or -ing; and the same goes for prefixes, for words beginning (say) with con-, or pre-, or ex-. Try it. You’ll notice that the sentences feel more aerodynamic. Oh yes. Can you use the same word twice in a sentence? This is arguable (see below). But do try not to use the same syllable twice in a sentence (which can only be the result of inattention): ‘reporter’ and ‘importance’, ‘faction’ and ‘artefact’, and so on.

  When I’m at my desk I spend most of my time avoiding little uglinesses (rather than striving for great beauties). If you can lay down a verbal surface free of asperities (bits of lint and grit), you will already be giving your readers some modest subliminal pleasure; they will feel well disposed to the thing before them without quite knowing why.

  * * *

  ∗

  As you compose and then revise a sentence, repeat it in your head (or out loud) until your ear ceases to be dissatisfied – until your tuning fork is still. Sometimes, along the way, you’ll find you want a trisyllable instead of a monosyllable, or the other way round, so you look for a more congenial synonym. It’s the rhythm, not the content, that you’re refining. And such decisions will be peculiar to you and to the rhythms of your inner voice. When you write, don’t forget how you talk.

  It is here that you’ll need the thesaurus – whose function is much misunderstood, especially by the young. When I was about eighteen, I used to think that the thesaurus was there to equip me with a vocabulary brimming with arcane sonorities: why would you ever write ‘centre of attraction’ or ‘arid’, given the availability of ‘cynosure’ and ‘jejune’?

  Although the passion for fancy words (and the more polysyllabic the better) is a forgivable phase or even a necessary rite of passage, it soon starts to feel like an affectation. So for years my thesaurus went unconsulted, scorned as a kind of crib. But now I use it as often as once an hour – just to vary the vowel sounds and to avoid unwanted alliterations. It sits on my desk alongside the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and I often spend twenty minutes going from one to the other, making sure that the word I’m tracking down still passes the test of precision.

  * * *

  ∗

  Mark this well. There is a need for elegance and, to that end, there is a need for variation. There is never any need for what is called Elegant Variation (EV) – where the adjective is of course ironic and sour.

  My favourite example of EV comes from a thoroughly average biography of Abraham Lincoln: ‘If the president seemed to support the Radicals in New York, in Washington he appeared to back the Conservatives.’ Thus ‘seemed to support’ becomes ‘appeared to back’ – without the slightest variation of meaning. And yet you can almost hear the author’s little cluck of contentment: he has avoided repetition, and done it with style.

  ‘The fatal influence’, writes the great usage-watcher Henry Fowler, ‘is the advice given to young writers never to use the same word [or phrase] twice in a sentence…Such writers are ‘first terrorised by a misunderstood taboo, next fascinated by a newly discovered ingenuity, & finally addicted to an incurable vice…’

  Christopher, eccentrically enough, was for a while a dogged exponent of EV. I tormented him about it for a decade and a half. I would say,

  ‘Ooh, you won’t catch the Hitch using use twice in a sentence – the second time it comes up, he employs employs. He’s that elegant.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ he said without much irritation (these were early days), ‘that’s what they taught me at school.’*1

  A few years later (having not let up in the interval) I said, ‘You did it again! You employed used and used employed.’

  He sighed. ‘I tell myself to stick to use and not be tempted by employ. But I can never quite bring myself to follow through…Do me a favour, Mart. Stop going on at me about Elegant Variation.’

  I said, ‘Okay. I’ll stop reproaching you for Elegant Variation. From now on I’ll uh, I’ll upbraid you for Gracious Dissimilitude.’

  ‘Christ…I suppose I could just swear off it.’ Which he did (pretty much). ‘And start denying myself that – what was it? That little cluck of contentment.’

  …Eliot said that poetry ‘is an impersonal use of words’: it has no designs on the reader, or eavesdropper, because poets are not heard – they are overheard. To a lesser extent this applies to the novelist. Sickeningly rife in discursive prose, EV is comparatively rare in fiction – though it regularly vandalises the ‘beautiful’ sentences of Henry James (in which ‘breakfast’ becomes ‘this repaste’, ‘teapot’ becomes ‘this receptacle’, and ‘his arms’, pitiably, becomes ‘these members’).

  The little cluck of contentment: in general, something has gone very wrong when one finds oneself picturing the fuddled toilers at their desks; the reader, in effect, becomes conscious of the writer’s self-consciousness; with a blush, the reader becomes the reader of the writer’s mind.*2

  * * *

  ∗

  Your path as a writer will be largely determined by temperament. Are you cautious, buoyant, transgressive, methodical? It is temperament that decides the most fundamental distinction of all: are you a writer of prose or a writer of verse?

  On this matter Auden’s sonnet ‘The Novelist’ wields great authority. ‘Encased in talent like a uniform’, the poet is pure royalty, to the manner born, tolerating no distractions or competing voices; the poet
sings as the sole begetter. By contrast the novelist is a putschist upstart, and cannot aspire to such purity (or any purity at all), and must become ‘the whole of boredom’, ‘among the Just / Be just, among the Filthy filthy too’. The novelist is partly an everyman – and partly an innocent.

  ‘Everything is to be viewed as though for the first time,’ advised Saul Bellow (in one of his essays); accept Santayana’s definition of that discredited word piety – ‘reverence for the sources of one’s being’; reawaken the childhood perceptions of your ‘original eyes’ and trust your ‘first heart’; and never forget that the imagination has its own ‘eternal naivete’.

  I’ll be needing to say more about innocence, at the very end. But now I have to pack. It’s one of those dawn departures. They’re meant to be good, Elena says, because you only lose a day, and not a night; but once I’ve got up at five in the morning it feels as though I’m losing both…

  When I come to write the next chapter (which I hope to do while I’m there) I’ll be able at some point to slip into something more comfortable – namely the light armour of the third person. Before I write it, though, I’ll first have to live it. And when I reach Phoebe’s room, and when the room opens up to let me in, there’ll be no third person. It’ll just be me – and her.

  *1 Early advice, or early commandments, can be pernicious. I love the short stories of Alice Munro; but someone must have told her, when she was little, to shun everyday contractions like ‘couldn’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ and ‘hadn’t’ (for example, ‘[Enid had to tell Rupert] that she could not swim. And that would not be a lie…she had not learned to swim’). It makes for a choppy, counter-conversational forward flow. But in the end all those nots only amount to a flesh wound: bits of buckshot on the body of Munro’s prose…Whoever introduced Henry James to the joys of EV (see below) has systemic ills to answer for – among them gentility and evasiveness.