Visiting Mrs Nabokov

by Amis, Martin

  It is no surprise that Keene lies in his book ... in an obvious attempt to wash his hands of the affair. Now, in shameless hypocrisy, he charges 'incorrect decisions by the President'.

  Campo's main adversary, however, is not Raymond Keene. Campo's main adversary is far more centrally placed. He is Gary Kasparov.

  Why did Campo do it? Possibly he bowed to pressure from the Soviet Chess Federation, whose officials have a stake in Karpov. But then Campo has a stake in him too. All these careers and ascendancies are interlinked. 'You can't expect to please everybody, or even anybody,' said Campo, with astounding serenity, among the hoots and guffaws of the Moscow press conference. Campo didn't please anybody. Karpov looked sick, up on the podium with the glozing Campo, he looked morally queasy. Soon afterwards he claimed that his 'sports and public reputation' had been 'blasted'. 'By his decision,' Spassky has said, 'Karpomanes' had 'actually destroyed Karpov'.

  During the rematch in 1985 Karpov's image took a further tousling. Der Spiegel accused him of diverting $½ million through a German agent, who had absconded with the money and was now wanted by the police. It was further claimed that Campo was trying to retrieve the money on Karpov's behalf. The crisis was spectacularly unwelcome. But by this Stage, anyway, Kasparov had the whole world behind him. To stamping feet, to cries of 'Gary! Gary!', he surged to victory on a crest of rectitude. Youth, aggression, justice! Only the Chess Federation Karpovites were left muttering in the press room. 'There is nothing we can do,' they said. 'There is nothing we can do.'

  So things will stand when White pushes his first pawn tomorrow afternoon. And the question remains: what are they up to? What of the chess itself, the eerie engagement with the 32 pieces and the 64 squares?

  'Their styles are so different,' says Tony Miles, 'you can't even compare them. Kasparov is the perfectionist: he analyses to infinity. He likes to establish a tree of complications, say a five-move line with six alternatives per move. He thrives on complexity. You can't out-analyse him. You'll get blasted out of sight. Karpov is more practical and classical, more of an artist in his way. He likes straightforward positions with no forcing continuations. He makes intuitive general assessments and consolidates small advantages. Then he makes them pinch.'

  And if you raise your eyes from the board? 'When I played Karpov,' says Nigel Short, 'it took me about half an hour to get over my awe at playing the World Champion. Then it was business as usual, just another game. With Kasparov — it's hard to describe. I found his presence uniquely disturbing. I have never faced such an intense player, never felt such energy and concentration, such will and desire burning across the board at me.'

  One can well imagine the exhaustion of playing Kasparov. Watching him do a ten-minute spot on a chat show is exhausting enough. The galvanic giggling, the agitation, the expressiveness: he doesn't sit on his chair - he hovers on it. Recently Kasparov beat ten computers simultaneously, blindfolded. How flattering for the species. There are over 288 billion possibilities through the fourth move (by White and Black). Yet the mark of a good chessplayer is not how many moves he considers but how few — as Karpov knows.

  Although the betting is on Kasparov, some of the emotional money is tending back towards Karpov, the saddened swat with the Baskerville eyes.

  'Chess is like life,' said Spassky. 'Chess is life,' said Fischer, who paid the penalty for his obvious mistake. Chess has been called an art, a science and a sport. It can't be an art, because every brilliancy depends on the fuddled collusion of the opponent: even 'the Immortal Game' would have died the death if Black had had his wits about him. It can't be a science, because, simply, it has no content: the singularity of chess is not its readiness but its refusal to serve as a matrix for anything else. And it can't be a sport, not quite, because it is both infinite and precise; every game is recoverable; every game can be re-experienced through the markings on a page. 'It's definitely not an art,' said Nigel Short. 'If I have the choice between a beautiful combination and a mundane way of wrapping up the game, then I'll wrap up the game. You must win. It's not an art. It's a fight. It's a fight.'

  Observer, 1986

  THE ROLLING STONES AT EARLS COURT

  Throughout the entire course of my visit to the first of the Rolling Stones concerts at Earls Court Arena last Friday night, I did not get my eyes spooned out, my teeth stomped in, or my head kicked off. Neither was I deafened, trampled, robbed or maimed. For these small highpoints in an otherwise rather disappointing evening, I hereby give laconic thanks.

  Invited to appear promptly for the eight o'clock concert (people who arrived as late as 8:15, one gathered, would be 'turned away'), we joined the panting, aromatic multitude at 7:30 on the hotdog-strewn steps of the Earls Court building. The multitude was also, apparently, a queue: it contracted like a dying amoeba as the semi-circular throng oozed through the doors. Once inside, panic and claustrophobia jockeyed routinely for one's attention; for every hundredweight of humanity that surged through the doors, a tardy click could be heard, somewhere in the distance, every twenty seconds or so, as the ticketed trickle inched past the two or three turnstiles. Some people fainted, or were haggardly led to the pockets of air at the front of the queue. In the high tradition of all the best rock concerts, you were treated as if you had come to sate some vile addiction rather than simply to exchange cash for entertainment. Beyond the crush at the turnstiles, fans and policemen could be glimpsed moving about in relative freedom. A mere half an hour later, we joined them.

  The ante-hall of the Earls Court Arena was a Brobding-nagian underground carpark of remote and overcrowded bars, sweet shops and dirty hot-drinks machines. Normally a token homogeneity obtains at the average rock concert: David Bowie fans all look and behave like David Bowie, Bryan Ferry fans all look and behave like Bryan Ferry etc. But everyone is a Stones fan. On the concrete safari from the turnstiles to the concert area I was impartially menaced by sick junkies, posh druggies, junior droogs, fat suburbanite tikes (who half-tried to lure away the two girls I diffidently squired), elderly men in suits, platformed teenagers — and, I suppose, people like myself, who had quite liked the Stones a few years ago, who had somehow been given or got hold of tickets, and who were now wondering why they weren't somewhere else.

  We entered the auditorium. Imagine a hot, dark, sealed football stadium - with people massed on the pitch as well as in the stands. Our tickets said row 'C' (hence the pack of Malleable Muffler Earplugs I had purchased on the way to the show). A T-shirted attendant appeared, frowned at our tickets, scratched his head, and took out a map. In the distance, about 3,000 fans away, a lone ginger-bearded policeman rocked on his heels. Perfect, perfect, I couldn't feel more secure. Our seats were as far away as they could possibly be from the bay through which we had entered, about 150 yards to the right of the podium. We gained them, and sat.

  Meanwhile a bad supporting group called the Meters had started up — bad supporting groups being the conventional rock-concert means of (i) sapping your initial high spirits, and of (ii) paving the way for mass hysteria when the star attraction arrives. A coloured New Orleans group, the Meters gave a good indication of what was to come: their steely clatter made short work of what are laughingly known as the 'acoustics' of the venue, sending a torrential wall of sound boomeranging from one corner of the auditorium to the other. Once you were in your seat, too, the real proportions of the place could be gingerly absorbed. As in the Hells of Blake and Doré, the vaultfuls of shadowy supplicants stretch up high into the middle air; along the cornice level are squares of yellow light, where silhouettes of angular figures lean and hover. The Meters packed up their set. People got ready to be hysterical. As quivering roadies groped and blinked about on the stage, I fondled my earplugs. After the usual courteous delay — barely twenty minutes — we were off.

  To a 'Dawn of Man'-type prelude from some undisclosed source, the huge leek-shaped tube behind the original stage started to unpeel in segments — and there, perched high on the tip of one of the desce
nding petals, was the awful Mick himself. The stage flattened bouncily out, Mick began jumping up and down on the end of it, and the whopping chords of Honky Tonk Woman cracked out into the darkness. Immediately, as is the way at rock concerts, everyone got to their feet. I assume that the first few people to stand up do so out of genuine excitement; the rest do so because they can't see if they don't. People who prefer not to stand up get angry with people who do, and luckily I had a particularly strident and foul-mouthed lot of people behind me to yell at and threaten the lot of people in front of me, who had stood up but soon sat down again. (I turned to see a clump of hate-contorted faces that kept me safely strapped to my seat throughout.)

  I was glad I could see the stage, unimpressive though it was from my vantage — and it must have been a flea-circus to the thousands further back. Glad, because it soon became clear that the evening would offer nothing to gratify even the rudest ear. Mick's voice came over as a strangled, monotone holler; the instruments weren't distinguishable from one another; the two percussion men (Watts plus a grinning bongoist) merely provided a basic fuzz on the general cataract of sound. And this wasn't, as they say, just me: a dozen bars of Get off my Cloud, easily identifiable on record, passed without comment from the audience, and only when Mick started up did the crowd click, granting the applause traditionally accorded to an ex-number one. Indicatively, too, the two or three new Jagger-Richards creations left the fans embarrassingly cold; only the songs already embossed on the responses could be recreated by the frenzied approximations from the stage. No, it was all too big; there were too many people; you couldn't respond to the music because it couldn't respond to you.

  Visually, though, one got some of the point of it - or some of the point of Mick. This well-put-together, vitamin-packed unit of a human being does not really dance any more: it's simply that his head, his shoulders, his pelvis, both his arms, both his legs, both his huge feet and both his buttocks are wriggling, at great speed, independently, all the time. When at one point Mick abruptly fell over, for instance, you couldn't tell whether or not he had meant to; it didn't particularly matter, but you couldn't tell. And when he swung out on a cable over the adoring stalls, I wondered how he could contain his galvanic twitching long enough to stay attached to the rope. No question: Mick is, without a doubt, one of our least sedentary millionaires.

  Such energy communicates itself, even to a half-engaged audience. 'My head is really scrambled,' a nearby fan sobbed after Midnight Rambler. 'Want some Kit-Kat?' droned another lugubriously to his girlfriend after the same song. But the more vehemently eager-to-be-pleased sections of the audience, having set their hearts on losing their heads, now began to behave as if they actually had. Jumping up and down was the favourite form this activity took, and soon everyone near me was doing it, despite the vicious denunciations from further behind. 'Are you feeling good?' Mick demanded. 'ARE YOU FEELING GOOD?' No, not at all, I thought, deciding to leave, And having staggered through the forsaken halls into the Earls Court Road, I was obscurely relieved to find that the world hadn't gone mad in my absence. Perhaps I'm too old for this sort of thing now — too old to buy fruitless discomfort at £1 an hour. I shouldn't have gone. I'm never going again.

  New Statesman, 1976

  PHANTOM OF THE OPERA: THE REPUBLICANS IN 1988

  The Republican Convention is history now, and history didn't look too good down in New Orleans, sapped and battered by eight years of Ronald Reagan. Before I develop that thought, though, I feel it's high time I said a few words about my family. I have a wife and two little boys. Over here to cover the Convention, I happened to miss them very much. Why, just before I left, my three-year-old gazed up at me with those big blue eyes of his and said I was the best daddy in the whole world. My wife and I love our boys. And they love us. Okay?

  On closing night it looked like a day-care centre up there on the podium, with the three junior Quayles and Bush's great troupe of grandchildren. They all romped and cuddled among the balloons and spangled confetti. (And what do balloons remind you of? How tall are the people you know who like balloons?) Candidates can't keep their hands off the little ones when they're in public, perhaps because it's the only time they ever see them. The Quayles' first task the next morning, I heard, was to hire someone to mind the kids for three months. This childish spectacle at the Superdome provided a new twist on a familiar image: here were politicians kissing their own babies.

  Earlier that evening I was in the Media Lounge eating complimentary popcorn and watching the TV monitor. One half of the screen was occupied by a white-haired lady wearing four tiers of pearls and an expression of wry indulgence: the other half showed schoolchildren in slow motion, raising their hands to teacher.

  A journalist came up behind me and said, 'What's this?'

  'It's an ad for Barbara Bush.'

  'Jesus Christ, what's going on around here?'

  Where has he been? Reagan's is a style-setting administration, and there has been trickle-down. Nowadays, when Chris Evert gets a regular boyfriend, the first thing she does is make an ad about it. On The Dating Game the dude will report that his new friend is 'open' and 'communicative' - 'and I admire those skills'. Who is the role model of the nascent media-coaching industry? Forces are working on the American self. Thirty-five-year-olds have spent half their adult lives in the Reagan Era. This has gone on long enough.

  'George Bush,' Barbara confided to the camera, and to the cameramen and lighting men and sound men and media consultants who were crouched around her at the time, was 'as strong, decent, and caring as America herself. She had loved 'this extraordinarily special man', she went on, 'from the moment I laid eyes on him'. Early in the election year the Vice-President had decided that the time was right to tell the public about the death of his first daughter. Now here was Barbara with her side of it, revealing how George's strength ('He held me in his arms') had eventually sustained her. It all seemed to shore up the claim of the Texas delegation which hailed George Bush as 'the best father in America'.

  Of course, you feel a bit of a brute going on about all this stuff. But journalists are brutalised by modern Conventions - by these four-day ads for the Party. 'This isn't a very interesting Convention so far. It is so well run that there aren't even any lost kids.' That was John Steinbeck in 1956. Dressed in eye-hurting orange blazers, Uncle Sam suits, and baseball outfits, the pink elephants of the GOP talk about shopping and eating and how the Giants did against the Dodgers. At this corporate outing there was no danger of any politics coming your way, though there was always the possibility of scandal. In fact the media was in for a nice surprise: it would soon be propitiated by the blood of J. Danforth Quayle. But until that story broke — and Quayle broke with it — we took our cue from the piety on display and lapsed into a mood of ghoulish cynicism.

  First you inspect the concourse leading to the burger-shaped Super dome and all the conventional Convention junk, with its air of commercial passion and improvisational verve. GO Pork Rinds — They're Republickin' Good. A blizzard of T-shirts and badges and bumper stickers. Don't Du-Ca-Ca on the USA. At one table someone is hawking Oliver North videos. Across the way are life-size cutouts of Reagan and Bush, and beyond them, an outsize mannequin of Reagan as Rambo (or 'Ronbo', as the British tabloids have it): the seventy-seven-year-old sex object is stripped to the waist, a cartridge belt athwart his slabbed chest, and with a giant weapon in his fists. Ronbo is eight feet tall. The slogans and buzz-phrases cruelly harp on the stature gap. Beware of Greeks Wearing Lifts. His Only Platform Is Down in His Shoes. Where oh where is the Democrat with Reagan's inches, his Grecian hair, his Mitchum chest?

  Next, one was obliged to traipse around the fringe meetings in a wistful search for repulsive policies. Although I was sad to have missed Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum reception, which featured Robert Bork and Jeane Kirkpatrick ('It was great,' said one journalist, 'Jeane was nuts.'), I reposed considerable hope in Pat Robertson, the one-time TV pastor and tithe mogul. Might Pat tal
k about Armageddon and Rapture? Might he denounce credit cards for harbouring the Mark of the Beast? Might he heal my jet lag?

  At the hotel a phalanx of news-parched media was pressing at the doors of the Robertson reception. No entry until 6:00, said one of Pat's people, because 'everybody in there has waited a year and a half' to hobnob with the great man. 'Please don't turn this into a press conference.' The media was as good as its word. There was no press conference. Instead, Robertson was instantly engulfed by a squirming centipede of mikes and camera tackle; he emerged fifteen minutes later, with an almost audible pop, and was dragged off through a side door by his bodyguard. Still newsless, the newspeople took a few disgusted sips of French cider and trooped off to the Superdome to cover Ronnie Night.

  I lingered among the believers, with their fine hair, their thick skins, and their low blink-rates. Many of the women were still shivering from the post-Pat frisson. Their man hadn't won, but they had the feeling that the GOP was gathering him — and them — into its bosom. Clearly Pat hadn't told them what he must know to be the case: that he's finished. The next night, true, he would get his prime-time speech (largely ignored by the cameras) and would thrill the faithful, and the media, with his talk of 'disease carriers' who place the healthy 'at great risk'. But Pat's had it: his valedictory press conference was an ill-attended freak show. He'll just have to go back to his old job, serving God with his miracle-service TV spot and stiffing the fuddled and elderly out of their rent cheques and disability allowances.

  Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions. To Bush, if not to Reagan, the evangelicals were probably never much more than a useful joke, to be kept happy with promises that can't possibly get past the Senate (like the guff about recriminalising abortion). Anyway, the video vicarage is now in tatters. Yet another institution in Reagan's dream city comes crashing to the ground - and the National Security Council, and Wall Street, and the Attorney General's office, and the Pentagon. Is it over?