Gregory and Terry describe a twelve-month period, taking turns, month by month, to speak directly to the reader, as if to camera, but it would be wrong to treat their accounts as monologues because the events that animate them are taking place as they speak. Each monthly report involves the blend of puzzlement, bitterness, reflection, self-justification that one would expect if they were addressing each other in dialogue. The fact that their accounts are at once interdependent and isolated, addressed only to an unknown listener creates a special degree of anxiety and candour; they hold nothing back but they can depend on no one but themselves for a response, be it conciliatory or discordant. This device in itself promotes the novel as a small masterpiece. Technically no one had attempted this before and the tense disquiet that accompanies a reading testifies to Martin’s achievement. (The technique would later be borrowed by Julian Barnes in Talking It Over, 1991, and Love etc., 2000.)
While Gregory’s confidence is fed by the ‘gloriously wavy hair’ and bone structure of an aristocrat, plus intimidating height, Terry is short, fat, ugly and balding. Sargy Mann: ‘Mart and Phil could, facially, have been twins, and they were of largely similar build, except that Phil seemed to be a stretched version of Martin. He wasn’t all that tall but the fact that he was much taller emphasized the contrast.’
It was not that Martin perceived himself as a version either of Gregory or Terry but the difference between them was symptomatic of his fabric of anxieties. Colin Howard: ‘He was preoccupied with the size of his backside along with his concern about his height. And even in his twenties the thought of losing his hair filled him with terror, Christopher Hitchens too. Their obsession with the term “rug” testified to this, as much displaced anxiety as a joke.’
Terry’s life with his natural father concludes in Dawkin Street, Cambridge, a place that he finds difficult to describe in detail, except that it ‘was full of crappy things’ and of course Madingley Road again emerges as a sore that Martin seems unable to leave alone. It is here that Terry’s father Ronnie destroys the family for good, leaving him to the benign philanthropic auspices of Mr Riding, apparently scion of minor gentry but of whom we learn little. The dissolute, irresponsible Ronnie Service and the admirably cultivated Riding appear to have little in common, yet they could for some represent aspects of Martin’s father before and after his elopement with Jane Howard. Up to the point when Kingsley left Cambridge to join, in Eva’s words, his ‘fancy woman’ he still traded upon his image as a member of the fifties generation: working- or lower-middle-class reprobates, constantly tilting at Establishment mores. In private, he was even worse, seeming determined to test the patience and forbearance even of those similarly inclined. The notorious party in Swansea where he escorted three of the women guests into the garden for sex while the other diners looked askance and sometimes pitiably at Hilly had by the mid-1970s become part of the gruesome family legend. Musing on their respective histories Gregory comments: ‘It was conjectured that Service Sr had an intimate say in the death of his wife.’4 Hilly’s apparent attempt at suicide failed, of course, but no one questioned its cause.
To this day Martin professes amazement at how a feckless truant had in little more than four years gained a Starred First at Oxford and completed a prize-winning debut novel. Jane Howard, as he acknowledges, played a significant part in this and in Success Mrs Riding, referred to mainly as Mama, is the only character treated with tactful generosity. Kingsley himself, particularly at Lemmons, rejoiced in his role as Country Gentleman yet there was, according to Colin Howard, a hint of self-caricature involved. ‘He would sometimes announce, usually from the bathroom, that he was “taking a look around the estate” [archly echoing the title of his 1967 volume of poems]. In truth he was unconcerned with the place’s Georgian grandeur and he had no interest in gardens but he enjoyed the contrast between what he’d always been and what he now appeared to be.’ A similar contrast fascinates Riding Sr.
Evidently, too, he was intrigued in a quirky way by certain parallels between our families, parallels at once so fortuitous and insistent that for a while I longingly suspected that some Fieldingesque parentage mystery would one day resolve our destinies. Mr Riding and my father were the same age, and Greg’s and my birthdays were only twenty-four hours apart; Ursula, Greg’s sister, and mine were both seven at the time, and were alike the survivors of abbreviated twins – and so on . . . As the scandal about my displacement grew, so did Mr Riding’s wayward but intense anxiety. He let it obsess him, for all the irritated now-nowing of his wife and the confusion and unease of his children.5
Henry Riding’s preoccupation makes explicit the troubling animus of the book which Martin himself describes eloquently in an essay, written shortly after the novel’s publication, on Vladimir Nabokov. The plot of Nabokov’s first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is almost identical to that of Success. It is narrated by Sebastian’s half-brother, who is obsessed by their differences and similarities, and by the end of the book he feels that they have become virtually the same person. Martin claims that Nabokov’s notion of the sublime involves a perverse exchange of exaltation for an equally compulsive absorption with ‘squalor, absurdity and talentlessness’.6 This catches perfectly the inverted narcissism of Greg and Terry’s perceptions of themselves and each other. Each emotive register – predominantly envy on Terry’s part and patrician contempt on Greg’s – is touched also with a fear of transience, that to maintain a stable sense of who they are they must fear or resent what they are not. The novel concludes horrifyingly. Terry recollects in detail the killing of his sister by his father and in the subsequent passage we learn that he and Greg had contributed to the suicide of Ursula. They have, finally, acted as one, found space for cooperation and equality.
As a piece of contemporary existential gothic Success outranks Nabokov’s novel but Martin was not simply struggling with the presence of his hero. Nabokov’s life was as fantastic and unsettling as his fiction and while Martin, then still in his late twenties, could only claim experiences that seemed mundane by comparison he nevertheless found in the former’s work grotesque portraits and inclinations that both defied the standard conventions of the novel and seemed profoundly familiar.
When he began the novel Martin’s sister Sally was working at a wine bar in the Edgware Road, which seemed to all concerned a guaranteed recipe for disaster. She was at twenty-two already in an advanced stage of alcohol dependency. Sally had suffered worst from the various family upheavals of the 1950s. Unlike Philip and Martin she was far too young to marshal standard teenage responses – notably resentment and nonconformity – as protection against a disintegrating home life. Hilly during that period cared for her already confused slightly traumatized daughter as well as she could and later she and Kingsley witnessed her decline into alcoholism in her late teens, worsened by occasional bouts of drug abuse. The parallels between the tragic fate of Rosie, Terry’s sister, and Ursula, Greg’s – both like their respective neo-siblings born on the same day – and the life of Sally Amis are striking. In February 1976 Sally married the owner of the wine bar, twenty years her senior, a wine merchant by trade and minor gentry by lineage. The marriage lasted less than a year. Kingsley, according to Martin, witnessed all of this ‘as you might a car crash, stunned, not really involved’. Several days before the ceremony Sally had arrived drunk at Lemmons and collapsed on the staircase landing. Kingsley, on his way to the bathroom, had stepped over her, pausing only to remark, ‘You fucking wreck.’ His report, three months later to Martin on the register office proceedings and the state of the relationship was similar: ‘A complete fucking disaster.’ And the name of Sally’s husband? Nigel Service.
Sargy Mann’s percipient observation on the Martin of the early 1970s is intriguing: that his strenuous command of an intellectual exchange or put-down carried a faint but detectable whiff of anxiety, that signs of mediocrity might begin to expose his previous self. Of his two creations Greg seems the more poli
shed stylist but by around March – the book begins in January – his glissando verbal flourishes become suspect, his self-confidence gradually displaced by self-delusion. He is preoccupied with his class, both as an elevated state into which he was born and as a deserved token of his innate intellectual superiority. Even though Greg must, to preserve his sanity, try to sustain the fantasy we, by the summer of the narrative’s progress, are watching its disintegration.
As Greg moves towards the precipice of reality and failure, Terry uncoils as his deviant and in many ways superior alter ego. Terry is, incontestably, the more distinguished stylist. He was indeed Martin’s most accomplished literary creation to date. Unlike Greg he uses language unselfconsciously, never once disclosing an inclination to combine his talents with a career or a project that will lift him above his masochistically resigned condition as a ‘yob’. He is drawn with rhapsodic self-disgust to everything that Greg fears – particularly the sweaty, inarticulate, morose corpus of beings who appear to have swamped the city – yet he depicts them and his alternately disgusted and fascinated relationship with them in the manner of Larkin in, say, ‘Mr Bleaney’; the foul and unwholesome become the material of brilliant stylistic craftsmanship.
‘There was’, observes Wheen, ‘something compulsive about Martin’s preoccupation with “yobbism”. He might slip into the idiom, the accent, without warning or purpose. “Snot royt issit. Arlav six more sossige widdat – yer carn’t cull dat a fackin brekfist.” He was very good but his middle-class drawl was still there.’
‘The thing is,’ he adds, ‘he didn’t really appreciate the unintended absurdity of the contrast. The authentic Amis idiom, accent, was almost, almost, as preposterous as the ones he assumed. He would never have attempted to disguise the voice that was his but at the same time he sought refuge in chameleonesque performances, slipping in and out of roles.’ This provides an exceptionally astute insight into what caused the fascinating, seemingly arbitrary battle between Greg and Terry, who at various points in the novel vie for prominence and exchange aspects of their respective personae and rankings in the class system. My mention of this to Wheen prompts an anecdote. ‘Yes, one winter I was sent down with him to the Southend printers to deal with the proofs. It was snowing heavily and by the time we’d finished the roads were blocked. So we looked for a B&B. There were all sorts, and our expenses would have been paid in any event, but he spent about an hour toiling up and down until he’d found a place that seemed like part of the set from Brighton Rock. It reeked of hopelessness and it was difficult to imagine that anyone other than benefit recipients would use it. But there was a snooker hall next door, with a bar. Equally dreadful in atmosphere. Martin enjoyed himself immensely but every time he opened his mouth everyone else there stared. It must have seemed as if a previously unimaginable alien had arrived.’ The peculiar dynamic between Terry and Greg is again evoked.
Wheen and Tony Howard share a perception of Martin as largely indifferent to the political climate of the late 1970s. Howard recalls a sequence of Friday-lunchtime meetings in the New Statesman offices, each attended by a major political figure. ‘Callaghan, Ted Heath, even Wilson – though slightly out of the loop by then – they all came, as did Michael Foot and Tony Benn, even some of Thatcher’s pre-1979 acolytes, Carrington certainly. Hitch, Fenton, Clive James when he could, they would crowd in as though it was Prime Minister’s Question Time, pitching in with energetic queries, and they were by far to the left of any guest.’ Martin? ‘Well, he had to be “persuaded” to turn up. He viewed the whole thing with a mixture of benign amusement and apathy.’
The seventies was, in Britain, the decade of persistently imminent catastrophe. The extreme left, to which many of Martin’s friends belonged, sensed that at last Marx’s long-deferred diagnosis would soon be proved: capitalism would bring about its own collapse. In this respect, Hitchens’s, Fenton’s, even James’s and sometimes Craig Raine’s attendance at the Friday meetings, could be taken as cases of celebrants anticipating the wake. The politicians who had sustained the rather flimsy post-war consensus between the Conservatives and Labour – which Hitchens calls ‘the Weimar Republic without the sex’ – seemed about to have their delusions exposed: the economic and political infrastructure was in a state of accelerating terminal decline. Howard continues: ‘Martin’s novels of the seventies are curious pieces. They evoke the period in a rather skewed, selective manner. I mean, we recognize the characters, their behaviour, mannerisms and so on, and a certain mood is detectable. But if asked to discern the social and political atmosphere of the period in Martin’s novels one would come up with . . . nihilism. Or perhaps insouciance.’ Again Success is brought to mind. It could be perceived as a macabre, minutely observed picture of the mid-1970s, a confection of hedonism, despair, ambition and failure, but at the same time it lacks a specific context: aside from the occasional references to fashion, music, idiomatic traces and so on it could just as easily be ‘about’ the 1950s. Contemporary society, let alone politics, is present by implication only, brought in by virtue of the reader’s recognition of familiar triggers. However, the novel’s apparently questionable value as a record of its period should not be taken as a mark of failure. Martin was evolving an unconventional technique of catching the atmosphere of an era in the behaviour of unaffiliated curiosities and in robustly fantastic scenarios. Like most novelists he skimmed source material from his own experience, and for Martin this was sometimes richly rewarding.
According to Wheen Martin’s only memorable contribution to the ongoing political debates was ‘a peculiar selection of mantras, apocalyptic and cryptic at the same time. “They’re taking over, you know.” “It’s all collapsing, we’re close to the end.” “The yobs will be in charge soon.” In one sense he seemed to be invoking the ill-defined but subnormal state he loved to imitate; he certainly had a fetish for the appurtenances of yobbishness. At the same time he baffled people such as Hitch, who had absorbed every formula for the collapse of Capitalism, from left-Hegelianism through post-Trotskyism. He would ask Martin, “WHO is taking over?” “What do you mean by yobs? Radical proletarians or converts to the National Front?” It was hilarious really, because Hitch, and others, admired Martin immensely as an intellectual presence and as a consequence they assumed he was addressing the same challenging leftist agenda as they were. He wasn’t. He was revelling in the opportunity to slum, a mixture of ghoulish fascination and distaste.’
Wheen captures perfectly the one thing that unites Greg and Terry, their mixture of revulsion for and addiction to the ghastly network of beings who share their urban space. Terry seems unable to avoid the presence of a ‘stinking hippy’ and an older even more odious figure he calls ‘Terry the Tramp’ – a wonderful blend of recognition and terror; I also, he implies, might be susceptible to foul decline (and we should note here a resemblance to the GP who lived in the ground floor of Martin’s Earl’s Court flat). Greg too – at least when he has cast off his pretensions to significance – perceives his environment as horribly polluted with a lesser form of mankind.
It has become a habit of critics to treat Success as a diagnosis of British society on the brink of transformation. Graham Fuller described it as a parody of England’s class war, with Gregory and Terry symbolizing ‘the spiritual decay of the landed gentry and the greedy self-betterment of the “yobs”, each appraising the other’s position with eloquent disgust or shameless envy’.7 This insightful Marxian assessment was however made, circa 1987, with the benefit of hindsight, or to be more specific the spectacle of ‘greedy self-betterment’ offered by Thatcher’s Conservatives, who came to power a year after the novel’s publication. In truth the strange relationship between Terry and Greg and its slipstream of sociocultural debris had as much to do with Martin’s personal life as his ambitions as novelist cum political oracle. Consider the following accounts by Tony Howard and the Rt Hon. Nicholas Soames.
Howard remembers a party at Tina Brown’s flat, two years after she
had come down from Oxford and was creating currents of envy and star-struck admiration among the London literati. ‘She and Martin had stopped seeing each other – nothing acrimonious, simply a mutual agreement that they had other routes to follow. Well, they seemed to have done so, each apparently being with someone else. Anyway, one of the beds had been pushed into the hall to make room for a drinks table in one of the bedrooms. Martin, in mid-conversation, looked down, patted the mattress and said, “Well, hello again old friend.” Everyone smiled, indulgently; no one was surprised or mildly offended. Martin by then (around 1975) was treated as the unpretentious Lothario-in-chief. Women went for him and he was permitted as many self-lionizing remarks as he wished, all fully deserved. But’, he adds, ‘it was a double-edged sword. He was envied, sometimes vindictively. On another occasion, this time I think at Julie Kavanagh’s flat when he lived at least some of the time with her, a man, a writer – I won’t name him but he is now reasonably well known – emerged proudly from the bathroom and announced that, heedful of Martin’s ill-deserved fame and allure, he’d crapped in the bath.’ Nicholas Soames remembers Martin’s first visits to Castle Mill House in Hampshire as Brideshead in reverse. He, his brother Jeremy, his father Sir Christopher and mother Mary, were in awe of this star from London. ‘Father and Mother loved him. He made them laugh and of course he made Emma happy, after a string of bloody unsuitable boyfriends. He’d stand there on the lawn, croquet mallet swung over his shoulder, rolled fag in mouth and very large drink in hand. He was small and ridiculously handsome. The rest of us would be keeling over with laughter at everything he said. God he held court and everyone relished it.’
Martin Amis Page 16