Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  The image that remains is perplexing and multilayered. Is the unawed self-caricature only a version of the truth? Even then might it also be intended to blur a more vivid portrait of a household consumed by hedonism, and to which despite himself he was a more observant witness than he cares to admit?

  The question might remain unanswered were it not for the striking parallels between Madingley Road and his most unrelentingly morbid novel. Dead Babies (1975) is his second work of fiction, written little more than a decade after the Cambridge house had broken up and during the period when his teenage memories, his ‘inklings, intuitions and subconscious imaginings’ came face to face with personal experience. Martin claims that the raw material for the work – the casual sex, the post-1960s cynicism and lazy self-interest – originated from the year in Oxford when he moved out of college and shared a house. The figures who drift through Appleseed Rectory are, he points out, variously more feral, sadistic, pitiable and irredeemable than anyone he had actually met and what he did, in his own words, was to ‘blend the image of Charles Manson and his acolytes with supine Englishness’. The novel does indeed appear to be a confection of mid-1970s archetypes that are too grotesque to be true. Read it alongside what we know of Madingley Road, however, and we suspect that its genesis predates the 1970s and is far more private. In terms of concrete events – notably the fact that each participant is murdered by the soulless, aloof Quentin Villiers – fiction certainly displaces muted recollection but there is something about the temper of the novel that captures perfectly and unnervingly the atmosphere of that period between 1961 and 1963. He begins the book with a list of its principal characters, including a précis of their physical characteristics and inclinations, rather as might be found in an early seventeenth century Revenge Tragedy in which fate and temperament conspire to visit ruination on all involved. Each has features that recommend them to the other – wealth, good looks, intelligence – and flaws that elicit vengeful or sadistic inclinations among their peers. All except Keith Whitehead, the feckless victim of the piece, introduced as ‘very tiny, very fat – court dwarf to Appleseed Rectory’. Martin’s account of his alleged teenage fatness is an exaggeration. ‘Well, I was called “Fatboy” at school. Once.’ All photographs of the period, however, show him to be unremarkably normal in stature. He did feel like an outsider, but for other reasons. He watched, fascinated but faintly baffled.

  Reviewing Dead Babies Elaine Feinstein remarked that ‘I hope for society that this is no true prophecy, I hope for Martin Amis that the nightmare of this vision will rapidly become part of his past.’ Unintended irony can be the most arresting and in this instance Martin was darkly amused. When he put it into words the ‘vision’ was already part of his past.

  Everyone is always blacking out . . . and they can’t remember farther back than a few days . . . Everything is out of whack . . . Appleseed Rectory is a place of shifting outlines and imploding vacuums; it is a place of lagging time and false memory, a place of street sadness, night fatigue and cancelled sex.8

  There are of course obvious differences between the Rectory and Cambridge: heroin and other hard drugs were not part of the latter and Martin, unlike poor Whitehead, was never ‘fist fucked’ by one of the athletic undergraduates who treated the house as a licence for unrestraint. Yet the feature of the novel, indeed the engine of its narrative, that would one assumes disqualify it completely as a personal allegory is also that which binds it to Martin’s unique, very private experience as a boy on the precarious brink of adulthood. The Appleseeders are, one by one, murdered – or at least their demise is meticulously assisted – by an undisclosed presence who eventually turns out to be their aloof, dispassionate host, the Hon. Quentin Villiers. No motive is ever indicated but throughout the book Martin sews into the dialogue and third-person narrative moments which blend resignation and disquiet. Everyone is at some point alert to a premonitory feeling of grim and ineluctable closure. They know it will end, in all likelihood unpleasantly, but none seems inclined to arrest this descent to oblivion.

  The disintegration of Madingley Road was brought about not by homicide but, for the central characters involved, something comparably shocking and intemperate. Kingsley Amis met Elizabeth Jane Howard at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in October 1962. She was, that year, director of the event. Its theme was ‘Sex in Literature’, drawing in such luminaries as Joseph Heller and Carson McCullers and encouraging flirtatious banter between all involved. Kingsley and Jane Howard had met, briefly, on several occasions before but during the three days he spent at Cheltenham their mutual attraction progressed to discreet promises; there would be phone calls – involving purely literary matters if anyone enquired – and clandestine assignations arranged for London. Within a month of the festival they were having an affair but this one was unlike the earlier serial infidelities that had attended Kingsley’s fifteen years of marriage with Hilly. Previously he had wished to sate his desire for gloriously uncommitted sex while remaining with his beloved family. Now, suddenly, he was writing ruefully candid letters to Jane which could have come from a precocious fifteen-year-old, desperately in love. Hilly found one of Jane’s equally consummate replies in his jacket pocket and although the discovery was not exactly shocking, given that she was fully aware of his limitless taste for adultery, something about the temper of the letter unsettled her. It was the beginning of the end of their marriage. Villiers ends everything at the Rectory, despatching all its personnel to oblivion, his family included, without explanation. For those who treated the equally anarchic set-up at Madingley Road as an extension of its host, Kingsley – and here you can include his family – his act of dispersal, obliteration, would have seemed very similar.

  A year earlier the family had visited Majorca, stayed with Robert Graves and his family, and Kingsley had decided to give up academia for good. He could exist comfortably on his advances and royalties, particularly in a place where the cost of living was approximately one-third that of the UK. By spring 1963 he was behaving like someone whose grasp upon reality had been displaced by wild prevarication. On the one hand he was promising Jane that their relationship would endure while at the same time pressing forward with plans made a year earlier, including his resignation from Peterhouse and arrangements for the rental of a property in Soller, Majorca, for himself, Hilly and the three children. No one involved is certain of when the final break-up occurred; there seemed to be a sequence of equally precipitate moments of disintegration until suddenly it was all over. Leader’s biography lays out all accounts by living participants, plus circumstantial details from Kingsley’s unpublished letters, but any attempt to pick through this evidence and recover a chronology results in sometimes absurd contradictions and anomalies. It is almost certain that he left Madingley Road, with a suitcase, either on 20 or 21 July and took a taxi for the station. Later, and again no one is certain of when, he met Jane in London and they took the boat train to Paris and then on to Barcelona. They stayed in Spain for at least three weeks, perhaps as long as seven, and the uncertainty here might just be explained by the fact that when Kingsley eventually returned to Madingley Road the house was empty, with only furniture remaining. He had a notorious fear of staying in empty houses and this, plus the shocking discovery that his wife, with their children, had left him, accounts for there being no record made by Kingsley of these events, and thus no dates. Also, no one is clear about how exactly Hilly learned that Kingsley and Jane had gone to Sitges. A Daily Express reporter had discovered their location but the story was, apparently, spiked following orders from the editor George Gale. Whether Gale was prevailed upon to do so or whether he took matters into his own hands to spare his friends from vulgar public exposure is another mystery. It seems likely, however, that he was responsible for informing Hilly that her husband was involved in something other than one of his habitual flings.

  For the facts go to Leader,9 but even more fascinating and puzzling is the absence of any comment by Leader or
the participants on a quite bizarre occurrence. The latter agree that Kingsley left, with a suitcase, to spend a number of weeks away but no one seems to recall, or felt it necessary to recall, an account by him of where, supposedly, he was going for such a length of time. It was not, as Hilly later insisted, ‘an open marriage’ in that she never indulged his continuous adulteries; to get away with them he had to cover them up. So we can rule out completely a confession-before-the-event on his part. It would have ended the marriage and this was not his intention. When he eventually returned to Cambridge he expected to find his family waiting for him. Moreover, the sale of the house was in the hands of the solicitors, travel arrangements were arranged and paid for, as were plans for a school in Palma which took the children of English-speaking expatriates. The more one reflects upon this series of occurrences the more peculiar they become. For a man so neurotic about travel and being left for long periods on his own Kingsley must surely have supplied elaborate and plausible details of his planned absence – irrespective of his reason for going – including phone numbers. He left for an unspecified destination, the purpose of his visit was not volunteered by him or apparently enquired into by his family and the duration of his departure was equally vague.

  According to Martin it was only with the arrival of Eva Garcia ‘for a visit’ from Swansea that the children learned something of what was happening. Eva announced across the breakfast table that Kingsley had ‘a fancy woman’ in London and was living with her. Had Eva been appointed by Hilly as the grim messenger or was it simply that she had found a suitable topic for her delight in the sharing of morbid facts? Martin has never been certain, but her description of the then unnamed Jane stuck in his mind because it seemed ridiculously archaic: ‘It brought to mind the image of a louche chorus girl from a film about the underside of Victoriana or the Folies-Bergère.’ Did Hilly, I ask him, talk to them about what had happened? ‘She didn’t talk about it. She told me about it. We were driving to school and she said – I can’t remember her words exactly – that she and Kingsley were breaking up. She was smoking a Consulate and she left me at the school gates.’

  The weird inconsistencies and gaping lacunae that attend the different versions of the break-up again bring to mind the eerie temper of Dead Babies. It is as though the inhabitants of Madingley Road, like Martin’s creations, are sleepwalking towards a predetermined fate. Cause and effect, attention to detail, appear to have been abandoned in favour of a wilful disinclination to notice what is happening.

  In Experience the most memorable passage tells us as much through what it does not say as what it does. Martin recalls how his father ‘left the house in Madingley Road, Cambridge. He was carrying a suitcase. A taxi waited . . . I am a good three or four inches shorter than my father, but our bodies are similarly disproportionate, with a low centre of gravity [. . .] Such legs are made for scuttling. He was en route from one reality to another; that taxi was part of a tunnel to a different world.’10

  Throughout, Martin dwells on the term ‘scuttling’, a memory it seems of something guilty and secretive about his father’s departure; the sound of his feet on the gravel drive emphasizes this impression. Can we believe that a thirteen-year-old could intuit all of this, sense that his father was ‘en route from one reality to another’? No, because memory works gradually by augmentation. We don’t change the original image but what we learn later of its potential significance becomes part of it. Martin did not, as he watched his father walk down the path, know even where he was going but within a matter of weeks the moment would begin to resonate with significance. Weeks later, as Martin would eventually learn, his father would walk back down the same path to find the house empty. This moment, which Martin could only imagine, bears remarkable resemblance to the description of Keith’s return to Appleseed Rectory, the closing passage of Dead Babies. It reads rather like the account in Experience of Kingsley’s departure played backwards.

  Keith limped steadily over the bridge. He paused at the opening of the drive. Appleseed Rectory stole out from under the morning shadows. Keith blinked. Was it really there? For an agitated moment he thought of turning back, of running away. But then he smiled at his own foreboding. It’s all over now, he thought, stepping on the damp gravel.11

  Keith and Kingsley have nothing in common of course, except that they seem to share the sense of absence and loneliness that accompanies a transition to the unknown. Later in Experience Martin joins them, telling of how he felt after his mother ‘deliver[ed] the news’.

  It took me only a few seconds to leave the weightlessness, the zero gravity of childhood and feel the true mass of the world. Thinking something like, ‘Yes, the easy bit’s over. I’ve done the easy bit.’ I moved into the yard with my satchel and cap.12

  The imagination, deployed both for fiction and memoirs, preys partly upon events and partly upon the residue of emotion and trauma that stay with us long afterwards.

  ‘We left, as planned, for Majorca – I think in August – and it was all extremely bizarre because we were following a schedule that had been shaped entirely by my father’s decision to leave academia and England, but he was no longer there.’ The journey to Majorca was an eerie experience. Hilly drove, as she always did, and Martin and Philip exchanged roles as front-seat passenger, where Kingsley should have been. Aged only eight, Sally remained largely immune from the strangeness of these events and indeed the atmosphere. ‘It is difficult to remember exactly what happened,’ Martin reflects. ‘Hilly was calm but it was as though she had no idea what to do without him.’

  2

  Wild Times

  In other circumstances Majorca would have been an idyll. Their house was in Soller, the island’s second-largest town, but still untouched by its burgeoning tourist economy. Philip and Martin would take a daily train from Soller to the International School in Palma. ‘It was a forty- or fifty-minute journey, twice a day. It was a beautiful little train, lovely countryside. The school was full of enviable curiosities, kids of the sort we’d never met before. They were the sons and daughters of wealthy expatriates, the girls were confident and mostly very attractive. On the whole they treated us as interlopers.’ What did your mother do, I ask? ‘Nothing. Looking back she was in a state of limbo. Nickie [of Madingley Road] had come over too. (She lived with us.) She and Phil had an affair. I was very shocked and very envious.’ Martin and Philip also had access to a pair of 1950s motor scooters which they would ride to the station in Soller to meet the train. No one seemed concerned about their age and if licences to ride these machines were required, such regulations appeared to obtain only in cities on the mainland. ‘I don’t know what we’d have done without the bikes,’ Martin recalls. ‘We really had no idea about how to ride safely and we could probably have killed ourselves, but when we had the time we would just take off, sometimes to the coast. None of us spoke of how we felt but we would all become unusually alert to the sound of the postman’s motorbike. We waited every day. We were waiting for something from Kingsley. He sent money for Hilly, certainly, but we wanted words, a postcard, anything.’ Did they arrive? ‘Not often. Anyone (particularly if they lived in Britain) would have envied our situation. We could do what we liked, go where we wanted. We seemed magically detached from the demands of ordinary life. Except that we were confused and depressed. We didn’t talk about what had happened, but it was becoming clear to us that we were deluding ourselves. It was wonderful, yet it was also, we knew, temporary and pointless.’

  Hilly returned with the children to London in January 1964, having arranged to rent a flat in Ovington Gardens, Knightsbridge. They stayed there for only six months and then moved on to a rented house, 128 Fulham Road, Chelsea. Accounts of what occurred there vary, but only in terms of the specifics of the indulgences allowed and practised. Martin enrolled at Battersea Grammar School – ‘certainly the roughest school I’d ever been to’ – and immediately began a regime of truancy. ‘I would attend three or perhaps four days a week.’ Philip
had returned to his boarding school and although Sally was now the only one of the children who needed her mother’s help and attention – Martin having opted for feckless independence – Hilly seemed to lapse into a state of depressed inertia. ‘The only time she seemed to revive,’ recalls Martin, ‘was after she got in touch with Henry Fairlie again. He became a regular visitor for, maybe a month to six weeks, at Ovington Gardens, and they restarted their relationship. Henry was concerned for her and they appeared happy. I liked him, got on with him. We would play chess in the evenings and sometimes he’d talk about politics. We got on. I don’t know why it cooled off but it did, and soon after that Mum went even further downhill. I’d been out but I saw her being taken away, to hospital.’ He is referring to a night in June 1964 when she telephoned her friend Mavis Nicholson, repeating the phrase ‘we’re all disposable darling’ and sounding to Mavis close to collapse. Everything else she said was slurred and incoherent. Mavis called back and was eventually answered by a hysterical Sally. Her mother, she screamed, would not wake up. Mavis knew of how Sally had spent a day alone with the body of Kingsley’s mother, attempting to restore to her some vestige of life with make-up and lipstick. Sally was now ten and the parallels would have been terrifying. That night Sally went to the Nicholsons’ and because of her distressed state Mavis insisted on staying with her in the spare room. Sally did not sleep and would fly into a state of panic when Mavis, succumbing to exhaustion, closed her eyes.

  Hilly had been drinking earlier that evening with a friend, had continued when her guest left and by the time she telephoned Mavis had supplemented alcohol with a dangerous amount of sleeping tablets. Martin thinks it likely that she had indeed attempted suicide, yet she was allowed to leave hospital the following day.