by Amis, Martin
The chest continued to rise and fall, but shallowly now.
The breathing weakened smoothly – visibly but not audibly. No wheezing, no gasping and gulping, no choking: no struggle, no tremor – nothing sudden.
The continuously undulating line at the base of the heart monitor, like a childish representation of a wavy sea, now stretched itself out into a dead calm.
The widow, after a silence, briskly began to assemble her things, and she rose to her feet, saying,
‘Come on. There’s nothing there now. That,’ she whispered to me, meaning the body, ‘there’s nothing in it any more. It’s just – rubbish.’ As we headed into the corridor she turned and saw something among his belongings that for just a moment made her stride falter. With a sharp intake of breath she gasped out,
‘His…shoes!’
* * *
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Mortality, which appeared in early 2012, lies on my desk in Brooklyn, here in 2018, and I can say with certainty that it is a valiant and noble addition to the literature of dying.
Christopher’s last words were formulaic (though also in my view characterologically superb). But why are Last Words in general so predominantly second-rate? And I mean the last words of our greatest poets, thinkers, scientists, leaders, visionaries, our supermen and our wonderwomen: why can’t the ne plus ultra of articulate humanity, faced with this defining moment, do a little better?
Henry James (1843–1916) came up with ‘So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.’ This is rhetorically very splendid – last words in the high style. He claimed that his valedictory flourish was spontaneous (his ‘first thought’ as his leg gave way and he embarked on a fall). But the high style, by definition, is never spontaneous – and what’s ‘distinguished’ about falling over? I’d say that James had been working on his last words since about 1870.
The best last words known to me belong to Jane Austen (b. 1775), who was dying (of lymphoma) in unalleviable pain at the age of forty-one. Asked what she needed, she said, ‘Nothing but death.’ This sounds impulsive, unbidden, perhaps even serendipitious; it also sounds both weary and resolute, both impatient and stoical. Not content with that, Austen’s crystallised poeticism – even the ‘but’ plays its part – dramatises a fell reality, because ‘nothing’ and ‘death’, here and elsewhere, are synonyms. ‘Nothing but nothing’ was her meaning.
Otherwise, last words are dross, like the defunct human body. And the words that precede death could hardly be as feeble as they are unless something about death rendered them so. Being impenetrable, death defeats the expressive powers, and our best and our brightest can do nothing with it. Well, ne plus ultra – ‘the most perfect or most extreme example’ – derives from the mythological KEEP OUT sign inscribed on the Pillars of Hercules: ‘not further beyond’.
We got back from MDA round about midnight and sat untalkatively in the kitchen and on the patio of the guest house (untalkatively joined by Michael Z). Although my mental state was obscure to me, my body, after its saturnalia of chemicals (now reinforced by Chardonnay), felt familiar: the comedown would soon be followed by the hangover, and a hangover of the spiritual category, strongly featuring remorse and regret. Christopher wrote that regret was for things you did and remorse was for things you didn’t do – sins of commission as against sins of omission…Everyone stayed up, trying to de-coagulate. And around noon the next day most of us went in groups to the airport, and defeatedly boarded flights to San Francisco, Washington DC, New York, and perhaps other cities.
…Christopher’s last words, unlike James’s (and unlike Larkin’s), were unrehearsed. Also inadvertent, because he lost consciousness in mid-thought: his last words – there were only two of them – were simply the words he said last. They were rhetorically primitive, barely more than a slogan or a chant. Yet anyone who knew him is sure to find them full of meaning and affective force. It was Alexander who described the scene to me, over a paper cupful of coffee a few hours before the death; and we both smiled and closed our eyes and nodded.
Yesterday Christopher was lying there alive but unstirring, with his mind in that region between deep sleep and light coma, and he softly articulated something. Alexander (and Steve Wasserman, also in attendance) drew closer and urged him to repeat it. He did so: ‘Capitalism.’ When Alexander asked him if he had anything to add, he said faintly, ‘…Downfall.’ That was the Hitch, comprehensively unconverted – except when it came to socialism, and utopia, and the earthly paradise. Crossing the floor to death: and yet he never changed.
‘Alexander, your father’s not dying at sixty-two. He’s about seventy-five, I’d say – because he never, ever went to sleep.’ We sat there with our paper cups. ‘Christ, it’s so radical of him to die,’ I said. ‘It’s so left wing of him to die.’
…There it lurks before me, under the angle lamp, Mortality – droll, steadfast, and desperately and startlingly short. Usually I pick it up and put it down with the greatest care, to avoid seeing the photo that fills the back cover; but sometimes, as now, I make myself flip it over and I stare. We never talked about death, he and I, we never talked about the probably imminent death of the Hitch. But one glance at this portrait convinces me that he exhaustively discussed it – with himself. Those are the eyes of a man in hourly communion with the distinguished thing; they hold a great concentration of grief and waste, but they are clear, the pupils blue, the whites white. Christopher, long before the fact, mounted his own death watch. Prepared for the Worst was the title of his earliest collection of essays (1988), and it was his lifelong stance and slogan. He felt the compulsion to go looking for the most difficult position, and here he is, in the most difficult position of all – the most difficult position for him, and for everyone else on earth.
On the day D. H. Lawrence stopped living (at the age of forty-four) he said three interesting things. His antepenultimate sentence was ‘Don’t cry’ (addressed to Frieda); his penultimate sentence was ‘Look at him in the bed there!’; his ultimate sentence was ‘I feel better now’ (the last words of many a waning murmurer). Lawrence got the order wrong: he should’ve signed off with Don’t cry…
Don’t cry. They weren’t Christopher’s last words – but they were his legacy, and in the strangest way. He himself was very open to emotion, he was quickly and strongly moved by poetry (literary and political), and he was unalarmed by the sentimental and even the spiritual; but he wouldn’t have anything whatever to do with the supernatural. And so I now say to his ghost,
‘After you died, Hitch, something very surprising happened…It wasn’t supernatural, obviously. Nothing ever is. It only felt supernatural.’
‘How supernatural?’
‘Mildly supernatural. Only a bit supernatural.’
‘And are you suggesting that I brought this about from beyond the grave? Or from beyond the incinerator, because as you know my grave is in the sky.’
‘True – the mass grave of so many of your blood brothers and your blood sisters. No I’m not saying that. It was all your own work – but the work was done when you were alive.’
‘Explain.’
‘I will explain, and I’ll try to make you understand.’
* ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’ has strong claims to being the greatest line of war poetry ever written. And incidentally it could have been ‘I am the enemy you killed, my love’. See ‘Shadwell Stair’, which opens, ‘I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair’, and closes, ‘I walk till the stars of London wane / And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair. / But when the crowing sirens blare / I with another ghost am lain.’
Postludial
Christopher once wrote of ‘the light, continuous English rain’ that was part of his ‘birthright’. I know that rain, I know that island rain, which hardly has the weight to fall and comes on tiptoe, as if trying to pose as the silent element; and it is not the silent element.
&nb
sp; Snow is the silent element. It is also the informative element: silently snow tells you, at great length and with great precision, how old you are, how old in body, how old in mind. And how does snow communicate this?
When I was a boy in winter I used to go to sleep tearfully praying for snow, tearfully imploring the heavens to send me snow. And I can still taste the deliciously mentholated pang in my throat whenever I jerked up from sleep, two-handedly wrenched open the curtains on the side of my bed – and saw a world of white…Snow loves the young (giving them snowballs and snowmen together with many other treats); and the young love it back.
But in recent years a world of white does no more than replenish my loathing and dread. After a night of snowfall, when snow has heavily but silently settled, I winch up the blinds in the morning and face an antagonist who I half-hoped had forgotten me…Snow hates the old.
There are gradations, true. To this day, reluctantly and with thorough ill grace, I still have to hand it to snow. I don’t want to go out into it (I want to stay indoors with a rug on my lap), and I don’t want it to tell me how old I am; but I do still want to marvel at it, while it’s white and new. The silent element, snow falls silently, and has the other-worldly power to silence a city…
But all that’s over for another year, thank God; and then came spring, and here is summer.
* * *
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Hello again, thank you for coming, and welcome back…All right, not back exactly. After a year as wandering freeloaders, as passengers, we’re customers again, and this is our new place, up on the twentieth floor (my sons call it the skypad). And yes thanks, you find me in fairly resilient spirits – for three reasons.
First, my Green Card finally came through, after however many years it’s been. So no more staggering from office to office at the hateful Department of Homeland Security. Tax cuts for the rich don’t trickle down, but moral squalor in high places is the Steamboat Geyser; and the atmosphere in and around the Immigration Court is now one of smug and insolent contempt. On your way into Federal Plaza you can witness teenage doormen jeering at bewildered Hispanic couples because they can’t even speak English…
Second, Trump is in trouble as the mid-term elections loom. Of course, he’s always in trouble, and always will be, for this simple reason: he honestly can’t tell the difference between right and wrong…No, even if he finagles his way to a second term, we have no plans to move to Canada. Trump’s not a reason to leave; he’s a reason to stay. Later tonight I’m joining my immediate family and about two dozen of our American cousins. And that’s what Americans are – my cousins.
Three, the last page of Inside Story is now visible to the naked eye. Finishing a novel is usually the cause of grim satisfaction with a trace of tristesse. But just now the emotions feel rather differently configured…
Anyway, I suppose, my friend, that this will be goodbye. We’ve been through a lot together, and you’ve shown incredible patience and constancy. So let’s mark the occasion by taking an ice bucket and a bottle of wine out on to the roof, where we can watch the sunset.
…Have we got everything? This staircase has no handrail, not yet, and I’ve learnt that approximately 100 per cent of elderly disasters happen on stairs. And even you should be careful, carrying all that. Just two short half-flights and we’ll be there.
You know, in Uruguay, very near our house, there was a nightclub on a sloping lawn and all these young people used to gather at dusk to see the show. And when the sun at last disappeared over the far brim of the South Atlantic they would applaud, every night, with sincerity and gratitude. Very Uruguayan, that, and very sweet we always thought. And vaguely ancient as well as vaguely postmodern. Hang on. Mind the…
New York Harbor.
With Liberty Island in the middle of it. Behold…Lady Liberty often makes me think of Phoebe Phelps – physically, at seventy-five, enormous and weighty, and seemingly without an ounce of superfluous tissue, hard to the touch, like a rubber dinghy stiffly – maximally – inflated. But what’s the opposite of liberty? Subjection. Encumbrance. Thraldom. Lifelong liability (from French lier, ‘to bind’). Well then – Lady Liability…
Whenever I look out there at the whole field of view I find I’ve got myself trapped in a metaphor, because I keep imagining it as a kind of urban Serengeti. Look at all the cranes, the near ones and the ones over there, in New Jersey, look at the exact angle of their necks, and don’t you think for a moment that they’re herds of mechanical giraffes? And those various beasts in and around the water, the hippos of the storage tugs, the great stretching crocs of the barges, the Jurassic diehards of the…Et cetera, et cetera, with further correspondences rather too readily suggesting themselves. It’s known as an ‘epic simile’. But let’s cast off its shackles…
See that plane approaching so low over the water – at helicopter height. It’s a widebody, what the industry calls a heavy. Now to my sensorium it is homing in – with every sign of vicious determination – on Freedom Tower, there, One World Trade Center, the tallest structure in your sight…This trick of the eye is a ‘parallax illusion’, having to do with perceptions of depth. All will right itself the moment the plane passes safely beyond its target. As it does – now…A trick of the eye, and the reflex of a mind conditioned by 2001 – when you were a child. I really should be able to tell the difference, because the planes of September 11 were going about three times faster than that sedate and blameless 767…
Our whole section of downtown Brooklyn is a martyr to the US system of criminal justice. Courthouses and lockups and parole-board fora, and all the go-betweens – bailbondsmen, shyster lawyers, bent attorneys – who work the interface between freedom and its opposite. As well as busloads of police, who then fan out on motorbikes and in squadcars, and they’ve even got one of those pathetic two-seaters, with NYPD emblazoned on it…
See that fortified rooftop right in front of us? I tell you, that there’s the exercise yard of Brooklyn Detention Complex on Atlantic Avenue…It’s an encaged basketball court, and through the mesh you glimpse these lithe figures bobbing around within. Not much to see but plenty to hear. There was a ringing Fuck you followed by the usual six-letter salutation, but it was black-on-black – and friendly, even admiring, in tone, as if in recognition of some successful stunt or feint beneath the hoop…
They’re all black. The queues outside the seats of trial and correction, they’re all black. Last year Elena toured a high-security prison upstate – they’re all black. And we spent half a day together on the vast holding pen of Rikers Island – and they’re all black. It feels like a dogged answer to the African-American ‘question’. In about 1985 someone suddenly said, I know – let’s just lock them all up…No, really. Have a look at Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
See that massive orange brick powering through the water? It could be a prison hulk on its way to Alcatraz, couldn’t it, but it’s only the Staten Island ferry, full of commuters and a few daytrippers in funny hats. I love that ferry now. So ingenuously, so loyally ploughing its furrow…
Yes, it was strange, it was passing strange with the Hitch. I don’t live in fear of being thought sentimental, as you know, but even I find it a shade embarrassing. Anyway, let’s save that for last.
…Look at Lady Liberty there, holding her golden torch aloft. She’s actually staring right at us, though we can’t clearly see that face of hers, with the Roman nose and the sneer of cold command – a conqueror’s face. And genderless too. It was always thought that the sculptor, Bartholdi, modelled her on his mother, but a recent view has it that he modelled her on his brother…
I went there, I went inside her, back in 1958, when I was nine. In her left hand she holds a tablet with a date in Roman numerals – July 4, 1776. At her feet lies a broken chain…
Far, far and away the most hateful thing about DJT is his – well, let me put it this way.
Picture in your mind the four black college students who in mid-afternoon ordered four cups of coffee at the wrong Woolworth’s lunch counter (Whites Only) on Monday, February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina; they were denied service and directed to the Colored Section, heckled by incredulous locals. But they stayed in their seats, reading, until the store closed. This taut ritual was re-enacted the next day, and the next, and the next, in ever-strengthening numbers on both sides. By the end of the week, over 1,000 black protestors were faced by an equal number of whites…
Picture in your mind Ruby Bridges, who in the same year walked to school accompanied by four federal marshals, in New Orleans, a slender six-year-old in white bobby socks, clutching a satchel and a yellow ruler; she crossed the cordon of hollering, gesticulating citizens with her head unbowed and with firm steps entered William Frantz Elementary. All the other children had been spirited away by their parents, and all the teachers had left their posts and were on strike, all except one…
As we know and have always known, there is in this country a vast and inveterate minority (about 35 per cent) whose sympathies lie not with the silently studious protestors, in Greensboro, but with the rejectionists yelling in their ears and pouring sodas on their heads and then beating them to the ground; not with six-year-old Ruby Bridges, in New Orleans, but with the hate-warped face of the housewife in the picket line brandishing a black doll in a toy coffin.
…Is Trump a genuine white supremacist – or did he surmise, early on, that white supremacism was his only path to power? Is he an entirely unreflecting barbarian or is he an unusually scurvy opportunist? He is surely both. In any case, he thought it worth doing: to take the great American stain/taint/wound/block/blight/shame/crime – hate crime – and give it another season in the sun.
On clear mornings she looks at her very best, she looks as she’s supposed to look, an iconic beacon lighting the way to a glorious idea. When the clouds are low and the mist thickens, she looks like the remaining stub of a civilisation that has come and gone: two vast and trunkless legs of stone, in the soiled remnants of a robe.