After their return to Oxford Martin discovered – through gossip from others who belonged to the ‘cool’ set – that Gully had begun to see someone else. In My Oxford he refers to this man as ‘someone who everybody agreed was much nastier, thicker and uglier than me’. He was a journalist and political commentator, a man more suited in 1970 to Gully’s taste for rationalism over art. The fact that they resumed their relationship as if nothing much had happened sheds some light on how they also managed to sustain an amicable sex-without-commitment arrangement for much of the subsequent decade.
Martin spent much of the remainder of the summer with Rob in London in pursuit of any available female and on his return to Oxford he and Gully stuck with the agreement made before the previous June, to rent a cottage in the Cotswold village of Shilton, forty minutes’ drive from the city. The Old Forge seemed in appearance to be unnervingly similar to Marriner’s Cottage where Hilly and Kingsley had lived when Martin was born, but there the resemblance swiftly faded. The other residents – referred to as X, Y and Z in Experience and still unnameable for fear of causing offence or a possible libel action – spent most of the shortened six-week period of the rental in states that varied between fratricidal hostility and despair, involving two genuine attempts at suicide and one epileptic seizure induced by a drug overdose. Add to this a call by the police following an attempt by one of them to smash every piece of glass and pottery in the house, plus weekly visits from the unofficial lodger from London, Rob Henderson – who managed to seduce Z’s girlfriend, in the house – and one had as Martin put it ‘novel fodder’ but not an environment in which one would actually wish to exist.
Gully: ‘Martin’s letter10 does not do proper justice to the insanity of the place. “Z” who ended up sectioned was the victim of the piece, probably the originator of poor little Keith in Dead Babies. He slept under the stairs and his rather unbecoming appearance, he was squat and ugly, ensured that he never managed to persuade women to spend too much time in his company. He lacked self-confidence and had an ostentatiously regional accent, working-class I suppose. Martin, Rob and the other [unnamed male] teased him cruelly about all of this. I can see parallels with the novel, at least in terms of particular characters, but there are enormous differences too.’
Shortly before the end of term Martin and Gully left the the Old Forge in the Mini at approximately 1 a.m. having earlier secretly cached their clothes and belongings in the car. His claim that the darkly comic experiences in the Old Forge were the genesis for Dead Babies is credible but only partially. Certainly the personnel of the Forge are of roughly the same age and status as those in the book, with grotesquely exaggerated inclinations in the latter towards narcissism, self-loathing and murder. The novel’s animus, however, comes from the carefully evoked sense of dread and resignation which each character seems to share. It is a community which for no apparent reason is obsessively preoccupied with staying together while being horribly alert to its collective demise, and Martin’s cue for this came in part from his memories of Madingley Road, Cambridge.
Gully states that ‘it was close to the Christmas break when we left the cottage and we agreed that for the remainder of the academic year, until he would finish his degree, we would live together in a small flat in the city. I found a place and busily acquired extra pots and pans and other less practical items. I can’t remember exactly how Martin informed me that it was off, but it was not in person, and I took the train out to Lemmons where he explained to me, apologetically I suppose, that he had decided that his degree and whatever came after must be given priority. That there would be no distractions, such as relationships. I was very upset, and I recall vividly the fatherly, consoling presence of Kingsley. He took me into one of the sitting rooms, without Martin, gave me a hug and an enormous whisky and said . . . well I don’t remember but he did his best to make me feel better. He was a very lovely man. As I say we “broke up” but not quite, hopping into bed together on occasions during the next decade. Freddie [A. J. Ayer], however, never forgave him. They had got on well, played chess, gone to see Spurs together, but Freddie refused to speak to him after that.’
In the second and third terms of his last year, after failing to obtain rooms in College, Martin moved into a dreary Edwardian terrace in Iffley Road, kept by Exeter to house its undergraduate overspill. The locality inspires rigour, being over the bridge from Madgalen and carrying the unforgiving trademarks of the real world. Keep walking and you will reach the British Leyland car plant in five minutes, turn around and the beckoning sandstone languor of the university seems to fade into the distance. This suited Martin perfectly. He had decided that the remaining twelve weeks of his undergraduate career would be dedicated exclusively to obtaining a First.
Wordsworth had already stated that this was well within his grasp. Earlier he had nominated Martin as Exeter’s representative at a year-long seminar run by a then Visiting Professor, Northrop Frye. Frye was an awesome figure, bestriding the chasm of quixotic impressionistic criticism and the rigours of the academy. Only thirty undergraduates, one from each college, were allowed to attend his seminars, a choice based partly on inter-collegiate etiquette and partly upon the meritocratic principle that of the three hundred or so reading for English only the top 10 per cent should benefit, and Martin certainly did. Like most major writers he rarely if ever admits to anything so compromising as influence but Frye can be claimed as the first literary critic to hold his attention. Frye’s trademark as teacher and critic was his wit and boldness. Allusions to and quotations from Frye feature like brief talismans in his own writing. Indeed the title itself of his controversial post-9/11 diatribe against organized religion ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’ is borrowed from Frye and the phrase epitomizes Martin’s affiliation to this distinguished, very unorthodox Canadian academic. Frye liked the intellectual challenge of systems but distrusted ideologies that claimed to either explain or incorporate their subject, be this literature or the meaning of life. The lonely crowd was comprised of those who sought in collective theses abridgements of independent thought and individual responsibility.
For the time being, however, Martin knew that alarming bursts of conjecture or iconoclasm must be qualified by caution. His examiners would tolerate individuality only when grounded in a discernible accumulation of knowledge, so around the middle of his penultimate term he instituted a strict daily regime. Up by 7 a.m. at the latest he walked to Exeter for breakfast and spent at least four hours in the college library followed by lunch, again at Exeter. He was back in the library no later than 2 p.m. and would return to Iffley Road at around 7 p.m. He prepared his own supper in the shared kitchen – ‘Vesta curries or pasta’ – and then returned to work in his room until a saturation of literary material caused him to lose any clear sense of focus or purpose. He would usually go to sleep at around 1 a.m. The routine would be broken only occasionally by tutorials with Wordsworth; the latter knew that this last lap before Finals would best be undertaken by someone like Martin with as little attendance to schedule as possible. ‘He was available when I needed to talk with him,’ says Martin, who had long since ceased to attend lectures. Some weekends would be spent at Lemmons, but he kept a diplomatic distance from Rob. He was still working as a studio-hand and general dogsbody in Soho, making low-budget films of limited quality. The friendship would be rekindled after Martin completed his degree but for the time being he had decided to forgo all potential temptations and indulgences and dedicate himself exclusively to a comprehensive mastery of English Literature from the twelfth to the twentieth century. The nine three-hour examinations were interleaved with at best no more than two half-day breaks, an Oxford convention that tests the endurance and psychological composure of students as much as their learning and intellect. He was called for a Viva, which could mean that he stood at the borderline between degree classifications and would be subjected to an interrogation to confirm either his promise or liabilities. Instead, however, this turned out to be
the type where the dons simply congratulated him on achieving one of the most impressive Firsts of his year. In terms of the marks themselves he had come third. Did he, I ask him, think about an academic career, given that acceptance as a doctoral student at Oxford, including a reasonably generous government grant, would now be little more than a formality? ‘Yes, and Jonathan Wordsworth had encouraged me to do so. We talked about a thesis on Shakespeare. Jonathan and I came to an agreement. If I hadn’t finished a novel in a year – first draft – I’d come back and try for an academic career.’ So if it were not for Rachel [real name Cynthia] Martin, like Kingsley might have begun his literary life as a don.
4
The Novelist
His mother’s and father’s circumstances had altered since he went up to Oxford. In 1968 Hilly had moved with her husband Shackleton Bailey to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he had been appointed to a full professorship. Married only a year and remaining fond of Bailey, Hilly was beginning to recognize that she had been drawn to him mainly as an antidote to the exuberant, unpredictable and charming types – notably Fairlie and Amis – who had turned out to be too bad to be true. He was everything that they were not, studious, withdrawn and prudent, and as a somewhat futile attempt to revive their relationship Bailey and Hilly had decided to tour the Mediterranean coast from Rome to Spain. By the time they reached Ronda, inland from the Costa del Sol, Hilly had decided it was all over. Or to be more accurate her intuitions had been confirmed. She had become a close friend of Bailey’s colleague Milton Cohen, sixty years old but refreshingly mischievous enough to remind her of the life and company she preferred. Cohen, at her request, had secretly arranged the rental for a flat in the town and when the time came for her to return to the US with Bailey she refused and moved into her new accommodation, followed shortly afterwards by Sally. Whether her friendship with Cohen would have developed into a relationship will remain a matter for speculation because within a week of Bailey’s departure she had met Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron of Kilmarnock. If Bailey had appeared in a novel as the stereotypical bumbling don, Boyd could have joined him as a biddable down-at-heel aristocrat. All that was left of an impressive ancestry was the title. The baronetcy had once been an earldom which had been suspended completely in 1745, following the Earl of Kilmarnock’s participation in the Jacobite rebellion and subsequent beheading. It was revived in 1831, and Boyd was Seventh Baron of the demoted line. In 1970 he was running the Palacio de Mondragon Language School in Ronda, servicing both the sons and daughters of wealthy expatriate Britons and the children of middle-class locals. Hilly and Sally called in one day to see if work was available and Boyd was struck by Hilly’s ageless vivacity. At forty-four she looked a decade younger and she was wearing a bright orange dress given to her by Gully Wells. Martin and Gully had flown to Ronda to spend a week with Hilly and the two women recognized traits in each other that ensured from the start an unforced mutual affability. Both approached life with an intrepid casualness that could lead either to comedy or disaster. As soon as Hilly met Alastair Boyd something more than a working relationship was immediately intimated. Within a week they had begun an affair and by the end of the summer were living together.
For eight years from the beginning of 1969 Lemmons was a commune comprising Kingsley and Jane, Colin Howard and Sargy Mann. It was also Martin’s permanent base until he moved into a flat in Belgravia with Rob in 1972 but even after that he used Lemmons as a reliable retreat from central London. When Kingsley and Jane purchased the property it was called Gladsmuir but Jane discovered its original name from the deeds and also that it had once been owned by Frances Trollope, mother of the more famous Anthony and herself a prodigious writer and literary hostess. It was a large detached Georgian house and to its front were the semi-rural vistas of Hertfordshire; at its back was London, and a twenty-minute walk would take you to a tube station. Its past association with two literary figures, one male and one female, seemed to Kingsley a good omen and his sense of optimism is reflected in a letter to Larkin: ‘This is a bloody great mansion, in the depths of the country though only 15 miles from the centre, and with lots of room for you to come and spend the night.’1 Jane had a study on the first floor, Kingsley’s was on the floor below and Martin’s spacious bedroom was directly above Kingsley’s study. He too would work there when up from Oxford. I mention this otherwise unremarkable proximity of private spaces because there is something intriguing, even eerie about what happened there in 1970–71.
Following his graduation in late June 1971 Martin spent a month in Ronda with his mother and Boyd, accompanied for a week by Gully. Hilly was now working full-time with Boyd at his language school, an enterprise that remained in profit but only just enough to support their modest lifestyle in a country that had one of the lowest costs of living in Europe. Martin relaxed, cleared his head of the abundant desiccated material from his Finals and began to think about a project which he had nursed, privately, for a year but had set aside until after graduation: the novel. Its nature and temper were as he now concedes predetermined. Most writers begin their first attempts at fiction with the postulate that novels should be works of the imagination and not disguised autobiography but Martin – ‘just feeling my way’, as he puts it – spent his second and third years in Oxford making rough notes for a novel that would certainly reflect key aspects of his ongoing life. He began the first draft in July 1970 in the room above where his father had just completed Girl, 20 featuring Sir Roy Vandervane, a fifty-three-year-old composer and conductor and his friend and confidant Douglas Yandell, a music critic more than twenty years his junior, who tells the story. Their age difference functions as an autobiographical trick of the light because Kingsley carries forward to Vandervane many of the temperamental and behavioural features of himself from the mid-1950s: he is an irresponsible, egotistical lecher. Hence the manic, selfish determination of Vandervane to behave like a twenty something libertine: he is no longer so much driven by lust as terrified by the prospect of what he might become without it. Yandell is a figure for whom hedonism, sex in particular, is a matter for dry contemplation and as a first-person narrator he is ill suited to his task, a detached saturnine presence, uncomfortable with the messy, visceral material of his account. Vandervane was Kingsley’s non-literary reflection, a man whose epic libido might be restored by pills, psychology or sheer force of will, but with Yandell he raised a more troubling question: what will I be like as a writer if I lose interest in sex?
In a letter to Robert Conquest in 1991 Kingsley reflects on his separation from Jane ‘8 years last Nov’: ‘Now I wish it had happened in – well I suppose about 1970 would be right.’ Martin in Experience comments, ‘1970? Surely not. But how would I know?’2 His declared ignorance of his father’s state of mind at that time is, he now admits, slightly feigned.
The most intriguing if not particularly conspicuous character of Girl, 20 is Christopher, Vandervane’s son. He is the only one of the Vandervane family who has attained a sufficient degree of independence and self-sufficiency to feel confident enough to rebuke the patriarch. He acts as Vandervane’s quiet conscience while the rest of his children have become feckless, sometimes tragic supplicants to his hedonistic example. Philip at this point was pursuing a career as a professional artist, an ambition he nurtured when he and Martin were occasional truants during the mid-1960s. According to Sargy Mann, himself a painter, Kingsley followed up his disparaging comments on Philip’s decision to study art with equally dismissive opinions on what was now his profession. ‘He thought the visual arts, painting particularly, should be classed as a recreation.’ Philip responded with a mixture of distress and bitterness. Sally came to live in Lemmons in 1970 after a brief troubled period with her mother and Bailey in Michigan. She was sixteen but already had serious drink problems. Martin adds, ‘She also took some drugs in the US, but stopped when she returned.’ Penny, Vandervane’s daughter, finds solace from her disjointed world in heroin and Ashley, his other son, frequently tells me
mbers of the family and visitors to ‘fuck off’, refuses to go to school and urinates regularly on the bathroom floor. Christopher, while remaining on good terms with his father – at least nominally, until he shops him to the papers – maintains a studied detachment from the maelstrom of despair and perplexity into which Vandervane seems to have dragged everyone close to him, his wife included. The Vandervane household was not a direct reflection of Kingsley Amis’s family, but there is none the less a mixture of echoes and distortions. Christopher might have been Martin, except that the antagonism between him and Vandervane is the complete opposite of the growing sense of shared interests and mutual affection that many noted in the relationship between Martin and his father. Penny and Ashley also are grisly hypotheses; aspects of Sally and Philip are detectable in both but blurred by terrible speculations of what they might, but did not, become. Although Girl, 20 and The Rachel Papers were written almost simultaneously neither author had any knowledge of the other’s ongoing work. I dwell on the former because when compared with Martin’s novel it illustrates an essential difference between them as writers. Both draw upon their own experiences for raw material but while Kingsley played continual games of hide and seek, remaking the world, and indeed himself, as he preferred them to be or feared they might become – a policy of self-protection – Martin is far more authentic, often alarmingly so.
Martin Amis Page 10