“Oh there you are,” he says, opening the door before we knock. “Did you get my note?” No. It has fallen off the mail box, which is why we had not known how to open the front door. “The door is open” read the note.
Inside the flat is dark. Suitcases, books, and bottles of whisky are carefully spread out on the floor. Martin’s girlfriend July (the British representative of Woman’s Wear) is kneeling on the floor with a telephone arranging cocktail dates. It’s three thirty and just as cold inside the flat as on the street.
“It’s cold. You’ve managed to bring England to New York.”
“Yes, it’s just that temperature in here. And there’s no TV, no stereo, no radio, no heating and no lights,” Martin nods, satisfied.
“I was looking for a heater and I didn’t see any.”
“Isn’t that some unit over there?”
“No, that’s the air-conditioning unit.”
“Would you like a blanket?”
Straw chairs perch around a glass coffee table in the middle of a starkly furnished lounge. Sitting in the fading light and fighting off the cold with the Haig, I asked the 26-year-old son of Kingsley Amis these questions.
BOCKRIS: When your book appears are you very keen to do as much as you can to [publicise it].
AMIS: I’m very unpushy with my publishers – I don’t hustle the publicity department, I don’t ring them up and ask how’s it going every ten minutes – it’s embarrassing to be too interested, especially financially.
BOCKRIS: That’s a very English attitude. In America, it’s “Are we making money right now?”
AMIS: They can’t believe how casual I am about it. They say “We might have another review in this morning, why don’t you ring up and check.” And I say, “Just send it to me in due course. I don’t want you to make any effort.” But I’m sure if I said – “I think this is the greatest book written since Hamlet, I happen to believe it sums up the modern human condition,” – I would get a couple of hundred sales out of it. Because in America you say you’re great and you’re great. In England it’s the reverse.
BOCKRIS: You say you’re great and everyone says …
AMIS: You’re a loudmouth. And you say you’re lousy and people say you’re great because they’re discovering you.
BOCKRIS: So you’re not coming to America like Oscar Wilde who made a very carefully planned trip to release his personality on the country?
AMIS: Yeah, but he was Irish.
BOCKRIS: Speaking of Oscar, do you ever get scared that as a writer you’ll get out of shape and fat?
AMIS: Well, actually, if you look around the writers in England, they all never do any exercise.
BOCKRIS: But they’re all so poor …
AMIS: They’re poor, they don’t eat right …
BOCKRIS: But you probably won’t be that poor …
AMIS: Well I’ve got a job.
BOCKRIS:… being successful.
AMIS: I think I’m a pretty athletic figure compared to most of the English writers. It is a worry, but they all seem quite fit. They live a life of such anxiety that it keeps them in some kind of shape.
BOCKRIS: Do you do any exercise at all?
AMIS: Yeah, I play tennis, swim a bit, walk up and down the stairs and everything.
BOCKRIS: Did Dead Babies actually come from an experience you had?
AMIS: It was based on a weekend I went through before I’d written my first book, where a lot of people were drunk, screwing, stoned, lying, and for about half an hour it seemed like hell. I thought there was a book there. Then it got stylised in my imagination and two years later I wrote the novel. Throughout writing my first novel I was thinking about it all the time. In fact, everyone agrees that part of writing is subconscious and that does a lot of the work for you. You can have terrible problems in a novel – you just don’t know how you’re going to get from A–B – then don’t think about it for a few months and it’s all ready without your being aware of having attacked it.
BOCKRIS: How long a period was there between your finishing the first novel and getting started on the second?
AMIS: I began the next day. And after finishing Dead Babies I began the next day on my third. It’s the only defense against a terrible post-natal depression and tristesse.
BOCKRIS: Do you feel much more confident and sure of your powers and abilities now that you’ve done two books?
AMIS: No, I don’t think one grows in that way at all. I may worry about different things, but I do the same amount of worrying. I never feel I can relax. It’s not that I want to get on or anything, but I feel uncertain about how good I am, how much talent I’ve got. I’m more aware now of just how likely I am to be second rate rather than first rate. A sort of sadness enters your work at this point. When you’re writing your first book, it could be anything; it could be King Lear or it could be nonsense. And then you get an idea of how good it is and it’s quite good, but it’s not very good, and will you improve at all? You hope you’re learning, but you also hope you’re not getting more timid and that you won’t try for bold risky effects. So you’ve got to fight against caution as well.
BOCKRIS: Do you think Dead Babies is going to be very successful?
AMIS: I shouldn’t think so, no. I can see reviewers playing it cool about the decadence. “We don’t want anymore bad news.” I told my publisher that my next book would be about a puppy that won the love of the village. He was very keen and said, “That’s the sort of book people in America want.”
BOCKRIS: What is an average day in your London life?
AMIS: I live with my girlfriend in Pimlico in a flat. Three days a week I go to the office of the New Statesman about ten, do what needs to be done there and meet friends for lunch, work through the afternoon and come home, perhaps go out to a party, or dinner, or stay in and write. So, quietish but with a fair amount of incidents. I’m talking to writers a lot, which is sometimes exciting. I’m throwing ideas around all the time, and that’s good, and actually having, as far as I can see, a fucking marvellous time compared with everybody else. I’m aware a hundred times a day what a horrible life everyone has compared with me, although, of course, no one’s perfect. But it’s buzzing a bit in London and actually I find it quite stimulating the way everyone is re-examining life from the point of view of not making enough money and the mild danger you live through every day. It’s not a bad decade to be in London.
BOCKRIS: Do you still have a job for economic reasons or do you want to keep having a job?
AMIS: I like the idea of two bases; a home and an office.
BOCKRIS: Why not rent an office and go write in it?
AMIS: I need company. It’s a very nice office, there are a lot of people there I like, and there’s gossip.
BOCKRIS: Would you say perhaps the major reason you live in London is because it’s a good place for you to work?
AMIS: It’s more natural caution. The idea of movement seems like a wrench to me, a frightening prospect.
BOCKRIS: Do you think it would throw you off your rhythm to move to New York for a year and write here?
AMIS: Yes, it might do. I’m very conscious, in spite of the subject matter in my book, of working in a tradition, and the British is a more sedentary tradition than you have in New York where I keep getting electric shocks.
BOCKRIS: Do you make more money from your books in the States or in England?
AMIS: If your book gets to number fifty on the American bestseller list, it’s selling twice as well as the number one book in England. So I sort of can’t help but make more from here. I think it’s about three or four times as much actually.
BOCKRIS: Can you make enough money from your novels to live on if you want to?
AMIS: Just about, but I would never like to try and do that because then writing becomes work and not a mixture of work and play which is the way I want to keep it. You could imagine yourself rushing through a book just to get the advance and I don’t want to go in that direction. No doubt I’m going
to end up that way.
BOCKRIS: Have you ever met anyone else whose father was a writer?
AMIS: Auberon Waugh. Evelyn Waugh’s son.
BOCKRIS: Do you talk about that much between yourselves?
AMIS: We would both be embarrassed to talk about it. I always knew I was going to be a writer, that’s what I always wanted to be. I think from the age of twelve I would start looking at life as possible novel fodder.
BOCKRIS: Do you feel a lot of pressure on yourself because people are obviously expecting a third book?
AMIS: Only pressure from inside. I have an image of myself as middle-aged and people say “He wrote two novels in his early twenties and look at him now.” You don’t want that to happen to you. But I think people are actually rather wary of talking about it. My father, for instance, never gave me a word of encouragement, bless him, you know, from that point of view. When I told him I was writing a novel he just said “Oh really?” And he didn’t see it until it was published. People treat me with a bit of reserve in that way, which I’m grateful for. It’s probably not the same in America where everyone is much more concerned with what’s going on and it’s not a private business, as it is in London, until publication.
BOCKRIS: What’s your vision of yourself in the next 5–10 years?
AMIS: I think I’d only stop writing novels if I dried up or if I was very short of money or something like that. Then you get into the Norman Mailer circuit of having to write more crap than good books. I think you should tap your central energy first which for me is fiction. That’s the stuff that falls upon you and there’s no one else involved. If you get tired of that perhaps write some other sort of books. When I’m old and fucked up and can’t write anymore and no one wants to see me and I’ve been rejected by all my friends, I’ll write those other books.
BOCKRIS: What do you do if you desperately need to relax?
AMIS: Drink. Do you want some more Scotch?
High Times sent me to Berlin in 1978 to pick up on the vibe in that strange, alienated city. My visit coincided with a Patti Smith concert and the opening of a German film on punk rock. After London, it was the punkest city in Europe.
23
Berlin Rocks
It’s easy to get there.
This is a daily diary I wrote up each night during four days investigating the structure of Berlin for High Times, 1978.
Friday
Friends in London had warned me not to take drugs into West Berlin under any circumstances: “The customs agents will undoubtedly search you because they are so uptight about terrorists and you look like one. Just give your stash”, they said, “to us.” So before I flew to Berlin from London on a Dan-Air Charter ($120 round trip) last night, I had cleaned out my pockets and cases.
Squeezing down the aisle of the aircraft, I wondered who would be in the next seat for the one-hour-fifty-minute flight into Germany, but she was more than I could have expected: a Berlin teenager returning from an English boarding school to join her parents for a skiing vacation in Innsbruck. Not only did she (16) speak excellent English, but – to my surprise and delight – her father was the eminent low-temperature German physicist Professor Klipping. Christine reported that Berlin “is full of drugs and I am very shocked even to find my schoolfriends now are all drugs taking, yes even LSD. Of course, they all are hash smoking, you see.” She loves Berlin where “there is no poverty and everyone is very happy because it is a beautiful city full of parks and benches to sit on and admire the views.” She gave me a list of places to visit and said she would like to invite me over for a drink with her famous Dad, but was unfortunately departing at 7 am the following morning for the skiing. I accepted the hospitality of this beautiful girl as a good omen.
Passing through German Customs: a large German with a flat face asked me if I had anything to declare, I said “No”, he said “You can go.” Cursing my London connections, I took a cab to the Savigny Hotel on the Brandenburrgerstrasse, checked in with the nightclerk, and went to bed (hadn’t slept the previous night doing London drug scene).
This morning, after getting up too late for breakfast, I hurried down the Kurfurstendam (abbreviation: Kudam – the famous major thoroughfare) toward the Autoren Buchhandlung at 10 Carmerstrasse, a centre for poets and writers, whose address Allen Ginsberg had given with a recommendation to make contact with a certain man who spoke English and would fit me into the picture.
As I crossed a vast street I noticed a huge yellow sign saying Deutsches Commerzbank. One thing about travelling is to always make a careful cockpit check before exiting your hotel room and entering the new atmosphere. You should always, for example, carry your passport, because it is the only proof that you exist since nobody knows you, and also if you want to cash any traveller’s checks you will need it. I did not have my passport on me and it was midday on Friday (when, nobody had told me yet, the banks close at 1 pm) and I suddenly realised I better get some cash for the weekend. I walked in:
“Cashen sie die …?”
“Ja.”
I rapidly signed four and laid them out on the table.
“Passport, bitte.” I knew this was going to happen, but my American Immigration card is a fine-looking technical document full of serial numbers and a photo, so I laid it down and said “Take this, it is good.” I was not at all upset when she replied negatively, because, in the process of digging the immigration card out of the depths of my wallet I had found one big fat joint of very good grass I’d rolled up and forgotten to discard in London. I managed to cash my cheques further down the Kudam at the seminal Kempinski Hotel and reached the Autoren Buchhandlung around 12:30. A helpful lady, who actually didn’t speak much English, gave me the phone number of a man she said would be able to help me, and suggested I visit a bar this evening called the Zweigelfisch on Grollmanstrasse.
I walked from the Autoren Buchhandlung along the Kantstrasse and stopped in a small cafe for lunch. I told the patron to recommend something because he could speak English. I find it hard to understand the Germans when they talk. You look at them and go “WHAT!” And they look at you like you’re being rude. So he brought me an oval-shaped glass of beer with a three-inch head on it, and a plate of cold potato salad plus an order of sliced potatoes and a piece of meat covered in potatoes ($5).
Further down the Kantstrasse I stopped outside a movie house that said THE GERMAN VERSION OF PUNK ROCK This is obviously the hip cinema and here it is in a good central location. Further on down the Kantstrasse the lights on the stupendous Cafe Mohring are blinking on and off. I bought a copy of The Paris Herald Tribune and went in for coffee. Everybody looked at me. The clientelle was made up of content, rich young people dressed in expensive Italian or German (undefinable as yet) clothes, and old homosexual couples. At one table, an elegant fifty-year-old son was discussing a financial problem with his dowager seventy-year-old mother. Across the street Hot Tuna, Patti Smith and Ritchie Havens are advertised for upcoming performances. A headline in the informative weekly ZITTY magazine proclaims BERLIN HAS A BABY AND ITS NAME IS ROCK AND ROLL.
It’s funny to come to a city where you know no one simply to look at it. The people seem at first to be living in another world. They can see you but they don’t recognise you, so there isn’t much feeling of connection to others on the street. One experiences the isolation of the man in the single room. But Berlin feels like the right place to do this study, because I believe the best way to look at it is suddenly by surprise. As I walked back to the hotel, having read a disappointing Herald Tribune, smoking the joint down a quiet street on the way helped. In Room 93, I looked at myself in the mirror and said “You’re in Berlin.” On intuition, and because many people had said “Berlin seems interesting.” Also, while Samuel Beckett and David Bowie have both moved here in the Seventies, the big guns of current German Lit, Gunter Grass and Max Frisch, both keep apartments in Berlin. I.e. a lot of hip people live here.
My room is a high-ceilinged white box with light grey V
ictorian wallpaper. At 4.45 this afternoon, I decided to imagine what it would be like to have sex in Berlin and jerked off on the cold grey and white bathroom floor. Outside, I could hear the birds, and it was more exciting because it was in Berlin. I think if you actually had sex with someone here you’d lie there afterwards thinking “I did it in Berlin” and feel more fulfilled.
Next to my bed there is a sign that shouts:
HERE YOU GET BEST TELEPHONE SERVICE.
USE IT.
The telephones are very modern, so I picked one up and made a few calls. On the phone it’s actually easier to speak a foreign language because the person can’t see you. I made an appointment to meet Herr Herbach at the bookshop 11.30 tomorrow morning. (THE PHONES WORK PRETTY WELL! – stoned note scrawled on back of book.)
Around 5.30 I went to the Kant Kine for Wolfgang Busch’s Punk in London, to see how it was being presented to the Germans. It’s a fairly straightforward documentation of British punk but almost totally lacking in humor, except for an excellent film of The Clash playing Munich. They said they hated Germany because the police had thrown them out of a hotel. Rodent, when asked about Germany, said “Lots of money, isn’t it? Lots of Deutschmarks” (which sums up the English attitude). But I find it very hard to criticise a country when I’m alone in it because someone might arrest you and you don’t know anybody so you’re fucked. So far I have not seen any policemen but Berlin is an extremely law-abiding city: everyone is rich. But when I looked in the shop windows this morning, there were big pictures of BERTOLT BRECHT and big books about CHAIRMAN MAO. Berlin is “the cradle of electricity” but I haven’t felt any in the air. Evidently the people are not dedicated to the sound of punk rock, but they take a rather studious content view. There were ten in the audience, twelve waiting for the next show – no punks.
It quickly becomes evident that Berlin has a very good supply of everything, no over-crowding, comfortable accoutrements and virtually no street-crime. So if you lived here you might be content too. “But not bored,” argue Berliners because Berlin does have an edge about it. After all, it’s an international centre and has had an extreme recent history. According to Baedeker “On 3rd February 1945 1,000 acres in central Berlin were turned into a sea of flames in less than one hour.” And: “80,000,000 cubic metres of rubble covered Berlin on May 2nd 1945 when the Russian guns ceased bombardment, after two weeks of fighting hand to hand, door to door, street to street.” Yet today, while tweedy Londoners still offer “I had Jerry in my sights when …” stories, Berliners have clearly put the war behind them and their city is now one of the most luxurious and modern in Europe.
Beat Punks Page 21