One day in 1978, in another car, Rob said to me as I dropped him off,
– Sorry, Mart, but could you spare a tenner?
I could, and usually I did. But this time I wouldn’t.
– A fiver. Okay a quid.
– Okay. A quid.
That week in Perpignan was my only experience of privation, of hunger. It would happen differently for Rob, who was no mere trier-out of hard times, and proved to have a genius for adversity.4
For Martin the ‘privation’, as he called it, of Perpignon was a brief digression from otherwise very promising forecasts: he was aware that there was no real danger of dying of exposure or starvation in a public park and that in a few months’ time he would become a freshman and Exhibitioner at Exeter College, Oxford.
Exeter is one of the so-called ‘Turl’ Colleges, reached from the medieval street, or to be more accurate lane, of that name. Unlike grander houses it has no room for luxuriant expansive gardens and its vistas are limited to pockets of sky littered with spires, domes and battlements belonging to somewhere else. It is ancient, twelfth-century by record, but unlike many other colleges of that vintage it is not generously endowed with income from the post-Reformation estates of dissolved monastic orders. It has some distinction and eminence but not a great deal of room and thus Martin found himself in early October 1968, having been driven from London by Colin, with quarters that were spacious, at least compared with Brighton. The scout helped him upstairs with his luggage and his small but high-quality stereo. ‘This’, said the scout, ‘is your study.’ It was also apparently his living room and it would not even be his. ‘Mr Marzys’, the scout informed him, ‘will be arriving later today.’ ‘It was’, says Martin, ‘a big comfortable room, with two small adjoining bedrooms.’ There was a two-bar electric fire in what might once have been an ancient fireplace, now plastered over, and apart from a sofa and armchair the only pieces of furniture were adjoining desks and chairs beneath a large mullioned window which gave on to another roof.
Marzys was an Old Harrovian and well accustomed to the indignities of communal living but Martin disliked the prospect of sharing. Within a fortnight he had made friends with a freshman Classicist who had been allocated a study and bedroom to himself on a distant staircase. ‘I didn’t need to persuade him. He wanted to share. It would earn him a second year rooming in college.’
‘Then I started to look around’,5 a moment he attempts to pass off as ingenuous but in truth he was not so much beguiled by his new environment as hungry for its opportunities. His tutor Jonathan Wordsworth was the poet’s great, great, great, great nephew and in case anyone suspected otherwise his rooms were generously distributed with ‘family’ memorabilia – prints, extracts from manuscripts, discreetly labelled items of clothing and pottery. He dressed, says Martin, ‘casually and elegantly. Striking, shoulder-length dark hair.’ He is best remembered for his manner in tutorials, frequently, indeed predictably, digressing from the alleged topic to matters not even of spurious relevance: including, for example, his puzzled reflections on the fact that his father, brother and mother were all ‘queer’. He would disabuse tutees of their rapt solemnity, particularly when it came to Blake. For those who had unquestioningly accepted that everything the latter produced was redolent of symbolism he declared: ‘The burning tree [in Songs of Experience] is a burning tree, not an organ of procreation. Does your cock look like that?’ Though the question was invalid for those from St Hilda’s with which Exeter had a reciprocal teaching arrangement he continued to address it, eyebrow raised. ‘It was’, says Martin, ‘an act. He was a good tutor. By the third year we had become friends.’
Mods were effectively a second entrance examination – without succeeding in them students could not proceed to the second and third years – and were comprised of ostentatiously difficult subjects. Old English Grammar and the Latin paper were the worst, the first involving the parsing of sentences from the likes of Aelfric and the latter translations from books of The Aeneid. Wordsworth was not a specialist in either but Martin was aware that their twice-weekly meetings were a vital investment. He had some basic Latin from his year at Brighton but he was nowhere near as familiar with the language as the public school peers who made up 60 per cent of the undergraduate intake and whose elite training the Oxford curriculum was designed to reflect. He needed Wordsworth and, despite his natural inclination towards caricature, indulged his, often ludicrous, affectations.
‘Once you were used to his Country Squire drawl, and the rest, Wordsworth could be wonderful. Best of all he refused to allow the paraphernalia of criticism to get in the way of a direct response. He would sometimes say the unsayable, even on Shakespeare.’ He was superb on Shakespeare and he hated critical jargon. ‘On that we certainly agreed.’ There is one quote from Knowd in The Rachel Papers that might be treated as a thank-you note to Wordsworth from his erstwhile pupil: ‘Stop reading critics, and for Christ’s sake stop reading all this Structuralist stuff. Just read the poems and work out whether you like them, and why. Okay? The rest comes later – hopefully.’6
Martin claims, in My Oxford:
[M]ost of my life [at Oxford] was to consist of me alone in a study, reading books pressed calmly out on the blotting paper, or writing malarial, pageant-like, all-night essays, or listening to records, or playing moronically simple forms of patience, or having soul-sessions, or having crying jags. And however self-pitying I was about it at the time, this segment of my life I regret not at all: a relative late-comer to literature, I was a contrite pilgrim on the path towards its discovery.7
He allowed himself lengthy excursions to Blackwell’s, where Jane had opened an account for him. He did so in the hope that if he loitered at the relevant shelves for long enough he might find a respectable pretext for beginning a conversation with someone, female, who had attended the same lectures. The experience was memorable enough for use in The Rachel Papers apparently.
She came on me from behind and poked me too hard in the ribs.
‘Hello then. Wotcher reading?’
‘Oh, hello,’ I said, surprise borne out by the falsetto croak in my voice. But then I was off. ‘Oh, you know, some tired old hack reproducing boiled-up earlier articles and pretending they form a unit.’ I paused and made (three) impatient gestures with my hand. ‘He says they’re all about “the problem of words”.’ I pointed to the subtitle on the cover, rich in adrenalin as a phrase from a novel took shape at the back of my mind. ‘But what they’re really about is him – his taste, his poise, and how much he likes money. Just look at the price.’8
The contrast is intriguing and of course raises the question of which comes closer to the real Martin: the ‘crying jag’ neurotic or a far more confident rather louche presence? John Walsh: ‘I was at Exeter and tutored by Jonathan Wordsworth, three or four years after Martin completed his degree, and he had bequeathed a small legend to the college, irrespective of the fact that he was already becoming known in London. Stories about “Mart” circulated, the girlishly handsome chap who shagged all night and spent all day in the library. I remember there was a copy of The Rachel Papers on Jonathan’s desk, displayed more prominently than the family memorabilia and left open at the inscribed title page. “To Jonathan, My Star Tutor, With Thanks and Love, From Martin”. Jonathan explained that even by the end of his first year there was a sense that Martin was part of the Elect, those who are inevitably destined for a First, prominence, esteem. Jonathan knew that Martin “belonged” and by his second year they had done a deal: if, a year after Finals, he had not completed a publishable novel he would come back and begin a doctorate on Shakespeare. In college people even talked about his lethargic coolness, as if he’d been there only a few days before. He stayed on in anecdotes. For example, there was the story of the mock Mods exam set up by Jonathan and a part-time tutor as a rehearsal for the real thing. Exeter freshers were confined to a seminar room in College in exam conditions and asked to do a version of Old English. Apparently
Martin sat staring at the paper, wrote three pages very rapidly, stretched and announced to everyone that he needed the loo, where was it? He was shown to a bathroom next door, came back ten minutes later and announced, “That room is an utter disgrace, there are pubic hairs as thick as pencil lead in the bath and the sink.” The image was so vivid that no one else was able to finish the exam.’
During his first year he made friends with Tim Healey, who had just gone up to Balliol. They shared their respective fathers’ inclinations towards wry cynicism. Denis Healey was a Labour Cabinet Minister and the fact that Martin and Tim had first met in London raises some doubts regarding the former’s presentation of himself as detached from the various coteries that made up Oxford undergraduate life in the late sixties. In truth he did belong, but to an assembly that as yet had no defining features. Their parents would probably be seen as bourgeois but they themselves treated the conventions of the foregoing generation with indifference; they were unostentatious hedonists and they were ambitious. In much of Martin’s fiction of the 1970s and 1980s they would occupy centre ground; in the real world, to their embarrassment, the Thatcher decade would provide them with a sympathetic milieu.
Tim Healey introduced Martin to Rosalind (‘Ros’) Hewer who became his regular girlfriend. She had a flat outside college where Martin would stay, Exeter still being monitored by scouts who relished the discovery of proscribed ‘guests’. Martin now had his own car. ‘A white Mini Cooper. I bought it with the money earned – £800 – from acting in the film in the Carribbean.’ ‘The Ashtray’, as it would be dubbed by Philip, allowed Martin and Ros to graduate from occasional excursions to Cotswold pubs to weekends at 108 Maida Vale and the grander ‘Lemmons’ in Barnet to which the Amis entourage moved in March 1969. As Martin recalls there was no need for formal introductions or discreet enquiries regarding their sharing of a room and a bed. Ros was greeted in the congenial welcoming manner offered to all occasional visitors, irrespective of the nature of their relationship with the permanent residents, then consisting of Jane, Kingsley, Colin and Colin’s friend, Sargy Mann. Martin also notes that his father was consistently engaging and companionable with all of his girlfriends, getting on with some more than others but doing his best to display no preference. ‘There was no effort. He was like that. What lay behind it was the memory of what he had gone through with his own father, and of my grandfather’s staid morality which drove them [Kingsley and his father] apart from the mid-1940s onwards.’
The relationship with Ros lasted just over a year until late in Michaelmas term, November 1969. Martin claims to recall no particular cause for the break-up and although Alexandra ‘Gully’ Wells arrived at St Hilda’s in October 1969 they did not begin a relationship until December. Gully and Martin had met three years earlier. Her mother, a friend of Jane’s, was Dee Wells, American journalist and novelist, then married to the philosopher A. J. ‘Freddie’ Ayer, Gully’s stepfather. Despite his presentation of himself as a recluse, Martin had by the end of his first year attained a certain degree of fame by association. Kingsley’s 1950s reputation as a cultural reprobate had been exchanged for respectability and glamour, given his outspoken, conservative opinions on the arts and education and the media attention – some coat-trailed and much unbidden – which followed his affair with and then marriage to Jane. Martin refers in My Oxford to the ‘cool people . . . a recent type . . . the aloof, slightly moneyed, London-based, car-driving, party-throwing, even vaguely intellectual butterfly elite.’9 Try as he might to make himself sound like the unassuming observer, by the end of his first year he had become part of that set. For example, when Edmund Blunden resigned as Oxford Professor of Poetry Yevgeny Yevtushenko was promoted by the leftist literary intelligentsia as his potential successor. Kingsley had been advised by Robert Conquest that despite the airbrushed profiles of Yevtushenko in the Western media as a dissident he was in fact a Kremlin puppet, cooperating with the Soviet authorities to sell the image of Moscow as tolerant of outspoken artists. Kingsley began a campaign in support of Roy Fuller who would eventually win the post – Professors of Poetry are elected by Oxford MAs – and in 1969 he set up headquarters at the house of Fuller’s son John, then Fellow in English at Magdalen. On several occasions Kingsley, Jane and other London-based literary celebrities attended convivial meetings, including lunch and drinks, at John Fuller’s house. The only undergraduates in attendance were Martin and Ros and James Fenton, then in his third year at Magdalen, son of the Canon of Christ Church and already a published poet. Fenton’s acquaintanceship with Martin led to another introduction. Christopher Hitchens: ‘I was walking down the Turl with James and he pointed out to me a couple coming towards us, the guy was small, blond, quite colourfully dressed, and James introduced us. “Son of . . . ?” I said. Yes, yes . . . That was all treated lightly. I was at my extreme SWP [Socialist Workers Party] stage and had little concern with Kingsley as a novelist; I was more interested in his support for the Vietnam War. Anyway the meeting with Martin was brief but we both recalled it a year or two later when we got to know each other properly in London.’ Aside from the family association was he known in Oxford as a figure, a personality? ‘James informed me that he was marked for a Starred First, and that he had a forbidding reputation for wit and hard work. One term, apparently, he’d never once signed out for lunch. Anything more than ten minutes between the library and hall would have disrupted his strict nine-hour daily routine. And the word was about that he wished to write, though no one was quite sure if he had designs upon a future as a poet or a novelist.’
During visits to London Martin would spend whole afternoons in the company of Gully’s stepfather A. J. Ayer. They went to White Hart Lane to see Spurs and when Ayer was not watching football he would talk of philosophy ‘casually but not patronizingly or exclusively, in the way that most of us discuss films, books, food or the weather’ and they would play chess. Martin had become part of the cultural aristocracy. He and Gully met neither by accident nor through a more polished version of Martin’s bookshop strategy. Their respective families, specifically Jane and Dee, arranged for them to get in touch at the beginning of the academic year. Martin remarked that his relationship with Gully ‘lasted in its intermittent way about as long as the average marriage. Ten years?’ The question mark is rhetorical and misleading. How long does the average marriage last, even ‘intermittently’ he might well be asking. He also concedes that ‘we continued to spend – between our affairs with others – the occasional weekend together’ – and obviously Hilly and Kingsley here come to mind – until Martin’s engagement to Angela Gorgas in 1978.
Gully Wells herself has some interesting things to say about their time together. ‘It was “arranged”. Jane and my mother were friends and in a way conspired to make a couple of us. Martin at Oxford was much as he presents himself in that essay [My Oxford]. He didn’t go to many parties, spend all night drinking or indulge in particularly bad behaviour, he worked. So did I, but I was fascinated and infuriated by him. I liked, enjoyed an active social life, but Martin didn’t want to join in. He seemed to be pursuing an agenda. Commendable but a little sad. And yes we did continue to see each other after the official break-up, not merely socially. Even if he was going out with someone else, or if I was, we’d just have sex for old times’ sake. Ten years? Yes, from when we met in sixty-nine, about that.’
At the beginning of the summer holiday of 1970 Gully announced she had recently been in contact with a friend Serena North whose father owned a castle in Tuscany. Martin had made no plans for the vacation, apart from a rather desultory agreement with Rob to meet up in London for weekends of shiftless behaviour. He would, he anticipated, spend most of his time at Lemmons and the prospect of six weeks in what Gully promised would be luxurious, ancient surroundings, plus guaranteed sunshine, brooked no hesitation. They flew to the castle via Florence and the place was, he recalls, even more preposterously grand than either of them had imagined, with their bedroom occupying the uppe
r storey of a tower and other parts of the rambling building, dating from the twelfth to the nineteenth century, involving an enormous library, a ballroom and a dining room the size of most houses served by an appropriately gigantic kitchen. There was also a well-kept terraced garden and a swimming pool where as far as Martin remembers he and Gully spent most of their holiday. ‘Nothing happened,’ he muses ‘nothing at all. We shared the place, sometimes, with other people, mostly friends of the family, people from the village, plus the ones who looked after the property would come up when necessary. Serena was there throughout. The visitors’, he adds, ‘came much, much later.’ He refers here to The Pregnant Widow (2010), three-quarters of which is inspired by his 1970 summer with Gully. In the novel most of the ‘visitors’ are picked solicitously from the subsequent ten years of Martin’s life and placed in a scenario that invites comparison with Dead Babies except that the host does not murder his guests. Keith keeps his promise to read every major novel in English from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and so did his creator. Gully, according to Martin, was by turns astonished and irritated by his dedication. ‘She was’, he says, ‘her stepfather’s daughter, unpersuaded by the vulgar attractions of fantasy and imagination. Truth was her compass.’ All of this is beguilingly disclosed in the novel.
Martin Amis Page 9