by Amis, Martin
‘I hated me too. Why didn’t I? Chances are I’d’ve got away with it.’
‘You can put your mind at rest on that one, Martin. You would not’ve got away with it. Trust me.’
‘Oh well. But you looked so…I should’ve made a real pig of myself.’
‘And you didn’t! Absolutely inexcusable. Apart from Lily it was the main reason I spun you that line about Larkin. Uh, did it work, by the way?’
‘You mean did it bother me? Oh yes.’
She said fervently, ‘God, what a relief. How long did it work for?’
‘Five years. Ridiculous. And it worked in a way I’m sure you didn’t reckon on. For five years all it did was darken my…See, Phoebe, when I look back on my lovelife I mainly feel happy and proud, and grateful, and incredibly lucky. All those episodes of passionate fascination. All those wonderful women, very much including you – or even starring you. But for five years what I remembered was all my sins. My conscience turned on me, Phoebe. Every last instance of ruthlessness and coarseness – even just insensitivity, even plain bad manners. I…’
‘Do you good,’ she said. ‘Uh no, I didn’t reckon on that. I suppose you were just reliving it with the thought that you were useless with women. All thumbs and getting everything wrong…Don Juan in Hull. Five years. What made it stop?’
‘It hasn’t stopped, not entirely. Things keep emerging. Like a very flirtatious, even salacious, letter to Philip from Mum. Dated 1950.’
‘When you were safely born.’
‘Mm. And recently I’ve come to like the idea of them having a little affair. Do them good. Anyway. One day, in 2006, I saw a photo of Dad not long after the war, and I looked across the room at Nat – my older boy – and I thought, Jesus, they’re the same person. The continuity. Essence and aura, and not just looks.’
‘You look just like Kingsley too, you bloody fool. And you are a bloody fool. It’s what stops you being a total pill…You see, Martin, the thing is – you’re in the flow, you’re in the tide. You loved your parents and now you love your children. And I hate you for it. I’m like some nutter on the internet. Because me, I’m outside the flow. I’m outside. I’m the one that’s like Larkin. Fetch the book, if you would. It’s on the fridge. And while you’re at it bring me two choc ices, the ones in the dark wrappers. I want four but they melt.’
‘I’ll bring a couple more before I go…Which poem? Is it “Love Again”?’
‘No. “Faith Healing”. Here. “In everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to love.” Which is all there is to say. “That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache…” He was an unusually determined man, Father Gabriel.’
‘Mm. I suppose they all are, people like him.’ After a silence he said, ‘I think the consequences of that are entitled to be infinite. I think you’ve had a very hard road, Phoebe.’
‘Ah, so someone’s finally said it. Unusually determined, and unusually exacting too. Don’t loll, girlie, keep your hands busy, keep working little one…He even tried it on again later, after that thing with Timmy. He was rearoused, you see, by the idea of teachers and pupils. That’s when I got my first inkling of the other half of it.’
‘The other half of it.’
Don’t even change my name
There was a knock. Meg, with a tray: white wine, steel ice bucket, a single glass. It was six o’clock.
‘Jonjon’ll be here till seven, Miss Phelps. If you should…’
‘Thank you, Meg. I’ll ring if need be.’
Phoebe kept her gaze on the closing door, saying, ‘Graeme. Oh come on. There was my perfectly nice, perfectly weak, perfectly bedridden mother. And there was Sir Grae, the househusband, giving me my bath and then shooing me into the Jag. He didn’t hate money. Money was the love of his life. He just couldn’t earn any. And whenever he got his hands on a few quid he went and pissed it away at the Ritz. Graeme let it happen for money. So much a week. When the Timmy business happened, and Father Gabriel stirred, Daddy tried to coax me into it.’
Another silence. ‘A compound crime,’ he said, ‘giving you a compound wound – Graeme orphaned you, Phoebe.’
‘Yes. Jane was right. And not just that. He widowed me too. That’s how it feels. And now I’m Widow Twankey, up in her spinster pad. God’s blood.’ Another silence. ‘Sir Grae, when he was finally dying he clutched my arm and said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Can you forgive me? I said not a word. Then he coughed with a huge splat and he was gone. Gone to Hell…Then I really started to eat.
‘Notice all the books, Mart? I used to spend the whole time reading. Then I stopped. I didn’t want to be interested in anything. You know, that’s what I thought when I saw Christopher’d died. I thought, Oh and he was interested in so many things…Me, I could go any time. I’ve got a suicide pact’s worth of pills stored away. Any time at all.
‘There was a thing about you in the Mail. You and your tell-all novel. I want you to know that you can say anything you like about me. Anything. Don’t even change my name. And Martin. Did you love me? I think you must’ve, or how else did you stick it? I felt love coming at me, and I liked it, and I pretended a bit, but I couldn’t do it back. It’s like asthma. You can breathe in but you can’t breathe out. I’m sorry I couldn’t.’
‘Don’t be. I never said the words, but there was love. There was definitely love.’
‘Oh no…I was planning to be mean to you but I find I’ve gone and let you off. Give me your hand. I just want to kiss it goodbye. And then leave.’
‘One other kiss.’ He gazed down at her and imagined the full-length figurehead of a pagan sailing ship, carved out of the heaviest redwood and all swollen in the sun. Her face – he pressed his lips to it. ‘There.’
‘Thank you. Now let me sleep. Goodbye. Let me sleep now.’
*1 Life can be very simple. When I turned sixty I cut my carcinogen intake by about 80 per cent. It was no doubt far too little and far too late – but it instantly cured me of thinking about suicide. Probably because my death is no longer something I’m so actively engaged in bringing about. As I say, life can be very simple.
*2 Not quite a retch but somewhere between an abrupt gulp and a stoppered hiccup…I’d like to have a look at the technical literature on sexuality and the gag reflex. In my own male circle it was occasionally discussed, but only in the context of going to bed with two girls at once (what we called a ‘carwash’) – something never achieved by any of us; it had to do, then, with the vision of carnal gluttony…The reflex is not exclusively male; Janet Malcolm, the biographer of Sylvia Plath, acknowledged it when she first laid eyes on the husky Ted Hughes.
PART V
ULTIMATE: DOING THE DYING
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Those flies I thought I saw in Christopher’s room. Were they ‘death receptors’?
Death receptors actually exist – they occupy the surfaces of living cells. The science of it I find impenetrable, but I was haunted at once by the imagery. Death receptors are ‘signalling pathways’ from a cytoplasmic region known as ‘the death domain’, and may be imagined as ghostly groundsmen and chambermaids: their mission is to prepare the body to accommodate its strange new guest.
The swarming vermin in the sickroom were death receptors, given flesh and blood and a smear of hair by my eyes.
‘She died instantly’. Oh no she didn’t. I have never believed for a moment that anyone dies instantly. It takes a while to die; even the wallshadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki took a while to die. I have similar objections to ‘he died in his sleep’. Oh no he didn’t. He had to wake up first, just long enough to do the dying. Or maybe he had a certain kind of bad dream: the kind that under-anaesthetised patients are said to have during surgery…
The chapter heading above is the first line of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (1918). Our narrator, our warrior poet, has escaped
from battle, but only by being killed on its field. He has passed from life to death, and the immense and solemn toil of the crossing, with all it asks of you, is beautifully and terrifyingly rendered by means of high technique. The combination of the stately pentameter and the grating half-rhymes or slant rhymes (or, in Owen’s virtuoso use of them, dissonant assonances):
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped,
Through granites which titanic wars had groined,
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned…
Escaped, scooped, groined, groaned: the slant rhymes, the dissonant assonances that will roll through you when you do the dying.
The Poet
December 1985
In the latter months of 1984, the year before his body went over the waterfall, Philip Larkin was unprecedentedly overweight (sixteen stone), ‘terribly deaf’, and ‘drinking like a fish’. He would start the day with a glass or two of port – though he was disciplined enough to keep the bottle elsewhere, ‘so I have to get out of bed’. Within a few months he was subsisting on ‘cheap red wine’ and Complan (while Monica – recovered from shingles but recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s – relied on tomato sandwiches and gin). On the phone my mother made a suggestion: ‘Why don’t you try some nice red wine?’ But Philip persisted with cheap.
And his destined mood? The road outside the house (194 Newland Park, Hull, Yorks) was not much travelled, and in its spare time served as a bike track for local children; they sorely irritated Larkin, who objected not to their cries and chatter so much as their ‘presence’. He wrote to a very old friend about them, the ever-gruff Colin Gunner (now a misanthropic old swine – and Catholic convert – living in a caravan). ‘I had the pleasure’, he regaled Gunner, ‘of seeing one fall off his new tricycle, and set up a howl.’ I find I’m unwilling to imagine that pleasure taking facial form; anyway, he wasn’t pleased for long. ‘Instead of cuffing him about the ears the father walked him up and down in his arms. Grrr.’ Cheered to see a child in distress, enraged to see a sympathetic parent: Larkin’s destined mood was a candid and (slightly) playful inversion of the human norms.
In less than a week it would be New Year’s Day. ‘Happy ’85 – hope we stay alive,’ he said in a note to Conquest. Bob (b. 1917) had thirty years yet to come; Philip had eleven months.
* * *
—————
The poet’s familiar, steady-state ailments – insomnia, hay fever, piles, constipation, pre-thrombotic leg, pre-arthritic neck – were joined by ‘cardio-spasms’, confirmed by a Dr Aber, who also thought it worth noting that Larkin had ‘cancer phobia and fear of dying’. The most ominous development, it turned out, was ‘a funny feeling’ in the back of the throat. Sydney Larkin – he of the golden eagle and the paired lightning shafts – died at sixty-three (cancer). This portent now became a fixed idea. Philip was sixty-two.
His oesophagus was removed on June 11, 1985; it contained ‘a great deal of unpleasant stagnant material’, according to a Dr Royston; it was cancerous (and there were secondary tumours). Monica’s pre-operative forecast – ‘six months’ – was thus confirmed. She decided Larkin should not be told; and he never asked (‘felt I had enough to worry about’, he meekly informed a penpal).
In the post-operative period a never-identified visitor to the ICU at the Nuffield gave Larkin a bottle of Scotch. On June 19 he drank ‘most of it’ and flooded his lungs; he was unconscious for five days. Three weeks later a friend drove him back to Newland Park. At the end of August he fell backwards down the stairs.
By November he was ‘deathly thin’, and of course ‘intensely depressed’. He told Monica, in what she called his ‘lugubrious’ mode, that he felt he was ‘spiralling down towards extinction’. ‘He said it with a fascinated horror’ – looking as though he ‘was about to burst into tears’. After completing what he called ‘a wasted life’, he had ‘nothing to live for’. Now he was bearing the full weight of the closing sentence of ‘The View’ (1972), whose third and last stanza runs:
Where has it gone, the lifetime?
Search me. What’s left is drear.
Unchilded and unwifed, I’m Able to view that clear:
So final. And so near.
* * *
—————
‘I’ve been telling him this for – for forty years,’ said Kingsley. ‘Listen, you bloody fool, we all fear death, you bloody fool. But what we fear is dying. And you, you bloody fool, you fear being dead. You bloody fool.’
I said, ‘I bet he fears dying too. He says so. “…yet the dread / Of dying, and being dead, / Flashes afresh to hold and horrify”.’
‘Yes, but once you’ve got the dying out of the way, what’s wrong with being dead?’
Jane, who was leaving the kitchen (for her lie-down), paused at the doorway. ‘Did he mind it – all those centuries before he was born?’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘That’s what’s wrong with the poem. He can’t make not being alive sound horrifying. Or even irksome.’
It was mid-afternoon on Christmas Day, 1977, and on December 23 ‘Aubade’ had appeared, with some fanfare, in the TLS (we had an open copy on the table, staked out with wine bottles and chutney jars). I was twenty-eight and Kingsley, as ever, was the same age as Larkin.
‘He’s answering you here, Dad. “And specious stuff that says No rational being / Can fear a thing it will not feel…” Specious. Attractive but suspect.’
‘I know what it means.’
‘So he’s…he’s finding rationality suspect. And trusting in his superstition.’
‘Which is de-universalising, don’t you find? I mean, how many readers are bloody fools about being dead…Look. Even his technique wanders off. “…Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing / That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, / No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, / Nothing to love or link with…” Listen, mate. If there’s nothing to think with, you won’t know or care if there’s nothing to link with, you bloody fool. Pitiful rhyme, that.’
‘Pitiful. And two fears, and two nots in one line…Quite a poem, though. You used to be like that, Dad, didn’t you. Jelly-kneed and pant-wetting about being dead?’
‘Balls,’ he said, not lifting his eyes from the page. ‘Only about dying. I never gave a toss about being dead.’
* * *
—————
In his early thirties Larkin tried – in my view with considerable success – to imagine ‘the moment of death’. And I’m bearing in mind that he was already an admirer of Wilfred Owen (and would go on to write two essays on him, in 1963 and 1975). That final moment, he imagined, ‘must be a little choppy, a fribbling [stammering] as the currents of life fray against the currents of death’.
But then too the moment of death takes more than a moment; a full-grown human being is among other things a great fait accompli of aggregation; and all those experiences and memories need a while to disperse.
Still, in Larkin’s case…‘The Life with a Hole in it’ is the title of a poem of 1972; Larkin’s was a hole with a life in it. He kept it very thin, lenten, and gaunt, with nothing ‘worth looking back on’. So maybe the scattering, the fraying of the currents, was quickly over.
* * *
—————
June 20, 1985. At this time (following the episode with the whisky) the Guardian was publishing daily bulletins on PL’s health. I called my father and said, ‘Are you going up there?’
‘I offered. With Hilly. But he…Anyway, they’re saying he’s out of danger.’
‘You offered. And he what, he didn’t fancy it?’ Kingsley wasn’t really inclined to talk but I pressed him. ‘Why, do you think?’
‘…Because he might lose his nerve and he doesn’t want us to see him gibbering.�
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October 5. ‘And you still read him every night,’ I asked. ‘Really every night?’
‘Yeah, one or two. Last thing. As the other half of my nightcap.’
‘Any good stuff in that?’ I meant the letter on the kitchen table. ‘Is he still off solids?’
‘Uh…I can’t fuckin eat fuck all. It really is scaring…Three months ago my doctors said I should slowly get better. To my mind I am slowly getting worse. Here’s a quite funny bit. The GP listens to all this sympathetically, but rather as if he were the next door neighbour – without suggesting that it has any special relevance to his own knowledge or responsibilities. He signs off by saying he’s “not long for this world”. But he’s been saying that since he was twenty. Nothing about Monica.’
‘Christ,’ I said wonderingly. ‘How is Monica?…I mean to live with.’
‘Christ. How d’you think?’
December 3. ‘When are you going up there?’ Philip had done the dying. Now he was being dead (and awaiting burial). ‘Are you expected to speak?’
‘It’s on the ninth. Yes.’
The dying took place on December 2 – on a Monday, in the small hours.
On November 29, at home, he collapsed twice, in the sitting room, and then in the downstairs toilet, wedging the door shut with his feet. This is Motion:
Monica was unable to force the door open. She couldn’t even make him hear her – he had left his hearing aid behind – but she could hear him. ‘Hot! Hot!’ he was whispering piteously. He had fallen with his face pressed to one of the central heating pipes that ran round the lavatory wall.
She enlisted a neighbour and managed to haul Philip into the kitchen. He asked for some Complan; while she prepared it she rang for an ambulance. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Bun,’ he said as he was being stretchered back to the Nuffield…And he did see her on Saturday, and again on Sunday, but he was too thoroughly tranquillised to make any sense. On Sunday evening she went home to wait for the phone call, which came at half past one.