The only breaks from this schedule would involve either an afternoon playing tennis at the Paddington Sports Club in Castellain Road, less than twenty minutes’ walk from the flat and which he joined in 1984, or sessions playing snooker. For the latter he might sometimes visit the Oxford and Cambridge Club but although the place was less ritualistic than Kingsley’s Garrick it none the less made him uneasy, as if along with his other sudden shifts towards stability he was stumbling blindfold into middle age. Consequently he became a regular of a far less salubrious snooker hall beneath the Westway, whose other denizens appeared to have income without regular employment, all of which would of course be harvested for the bottom-end milieu of London Fields.
He still mixed with members of the New Statesman set but most had either married and settled down in London or, like Hitchens, gone abroad. Dinner and drinks parties in their respective houses, including partners and sometimes children, replaced hedonistic meanderings. On some occasions Clive James, Ian McEwan, and the relative newcomer Salman Rushdie would meet for a meal. Most seemed to have more responsibilities now, some professional but mainly domestic.
Paddington Sports Club offered a release from working in isolation in the flat, but certainly not so that he could exchange the pressures of writing for casual conversation and exercise; quite the opposite. He made use of the games and his new group of friends and acquaintances as a laboratory for his competing ideas and inventions. He had developed a passion for tennis when he lived with Colin Howard and Sargy Mann, who effectively introduced him to the game. Neither of his parents had much interest in sport of any kind. Mann: ‘He was a very fast learner, quite a natural talent too, but what was most noticeable was his enormous desire to win. I don’t think there was anything cut-throat about it, in that he was not concerned with getting the better of a particular opponent. He was playing against himself. He would fly into a rage if his shot was out or in the net, swear and fling the racket down.’ Zach Leader, partner and opponent at the Sports Club agrees. ‘He is not a casual player. A great deal of mental and physical concentration goes into his game. It might sound flippant, maybe, but I sometimes had the impression that games were the gym work and basic training for the intellectual grind. He put a similar amount of effort into chess, even snooker and poker. He writes about them in an ironic self-parodic manner but in actuality he was a very cerebral player, exhausting even to watch.’
His two most regular fellow players at the club were Papineau and Leader, shortly to be joined by Andy Hislop who had known Antonia at the TLS and was now branching out as a freelance screenwriter. Steve Foster, the club manager, would chat with him in the bar and was responsible for introducing him to Chris Mitas, who features as a humorous presence in Experience referred to only by his forename. He owned properties and restaurants, and drove a Bentley. Zach Leader: ‘Of course he knew what Martin did for a living and he glanced at his novels, though certainly not to impress him. I remember once he said, I think of London Fields: “Martin, have you ever tried to read one of your books?” Martin thought that was very funny. Chris was and is a clever man.’
Violence features in Martin’s novels in much the same way that Updike’s autobiographical heroes seem restlessly preoccupied with sex. One begins to suspect that in both instances obsession is a mask for perplexity. Aside from being waylaid by two ten-year-olds in Swansea, and rescued by his mother, physical confrontation was something that Martin had never personally experienced and the episodes in Experience where verbal combat with Rushdie and Hitchens involves the threat to ‘take things outside’ are largely grandstanding. In this respect Chris was his education.
‘Chris is a fascinating man. He lives in Spain now. He had an exotic past. He was a Judo champion, and represented Britain. We had and still have a very warm relationship. I’d see him four to five times a week. He told me what it was like to be tough, tough. Not villainy or aggression as a state of mind. He was concerned more with the crunch moments, what actually went on in a fight, what you had to do. I’d sometimes feel that when I’m writing about bad people – not that Chris is a bad person – extreme people . . . there are certain things you can’t actually do, describe – because you don’t have knowledge, don’t have a way into it. Chris did give me a way into it. If I’m to put it into a sentence, when you go into a fight you have to insulate yourself, become a machine. He was outstandingly instructive, through him I was able to stretch myself, to use expressive language that before I couldn’t attach to experience.’ Chris embodied a world and a way of thinking that his intellectual pals at the Sports Club knew only vicariously.
There are no replicas of Chris in Martin’s novels but his absence as an individual should not blind us to his significance. Martin: ‘I can’t overstate the influence of Chris on my work. He has given me at least two or three hundred pages. He is charismatic and expressive, but it wasn’t Chris’s character that inspired me. It was the stories he told, the places he took me to, the people he brought me into contact with. I ought to dedicate a book to him.
‘Martin’, according to Hislop, ‘is eclectic and licentious in the use of people and places for his writing – anything goes – but he does tend towards a preoccupation with things that he cannot fathom, that sadden him personally or that appear frightening, outrageous or grotesque. Chris fell into none of these categories. He is what he is, implacable and transparent. I think Martin viewed him as, well, heroic. Which disqualified him from inclusion, as a character, in the books. Keith [Talent of London Fields] was created soon after they met but there is no resemblance whatsoever between them. If anything the presence of Chris as a testament to real London – particularly the parts viewed from the outside by the intelligentsia – guaranteed that Keith would be pure hyperbole.’
‘You see,’ he adds, ‘Martin at the time, late 1980s, was undergoing a period of transition. He felt quietly ashamed by the absence of a “big idea”. He was a wonderful impresario, great at recycling the more outrageous features of contemporaneity, but he wanted gravity. Two things played some part in his search. In a small degree Chris helped to wean him away from the – let’s be honest, slightly prurient – preoccupation with grotesquery; Chris was the real thing. More significant were his children. I lived a few houses away in the same road, with kids of my own, slightly younger, and we’d talk, play football with them sometimes. It was mainly the usual stuff about infant school, their idiosyncrasies and it goes without saying that we worried about their health and so on. But Martin went further. He seemed to feel that having children meant that he was not only responsible for them but entrusted with the destiny of the rest of humanity.’
Papineau concurs. ‘It would be unfair, wrong, to say that he used the boys [his sons] as tropes for a new visionary enterprise, in his writing I mean. No, but one was aware that he had become not just protective of them – we all are – but righteously. They were the future which, in his view, we were treating irresponsibly.’ Martin: ‘After Ian [McEwan] wrote his Oratorio [Or Shall We Die?, on nuclear weapons] I just thought . . . it wasn’t for me. I was reminded that I wasn’t that kind of writer. I was perversely and proudly non-political, especially in my twenties, and I was ridiculed continually by Hitchens at the New Statesman for being so quietist. I even refused to join the NUJ, not for specific reasons, I didn’t want to be part of anything. Politics seemed to me to involve a joining, an encroachment upon individuality . . . and that was inimical to me, then.’ It was not that the acquisition of a family suddenly politicized Martin. He continued to treat ideological commitment as an abridgement to truth and experience. But he became alert to something other than the untroubled, even jaunty fatalism he had once shared with his father.
Einstein’s Monsters contains five short stories written during the three-year period between Martin’s marriage and the book’s publication in 1987. While there is no enduring narrative a persistent theme draws the pieces together – apocalypse; anticipated or experienced and caused in all likelihood b
y nuclear war. It is without doubt one of his most curious works, by turns accomplished and didactic.
Before considering the exact nature of its awkward condition let us first examine the cause, evident in the opening paragraph of ‘Thinkability’, the Introduction:
I was born on 25 August 1949: four days later, the Russians successfully tested their first atom bomb, and deterrence was in place. So I had those four carefree days, which is more than my juniors ever had. I didn’t really make the most of them. I spent half the time under a bubble. Even as things stood, I was born in a state of acute shock. My mother says I looked like Orson Welles in a black rage. By the fourth day I had recovered, but the world had taken a turn for the worse. It was a nuclear world. To tell you the truth, I didn’t feel very well at all. I was terribly sleepy and feverish. I kept throwing up.
Astonishingly no reviewers noticed or felt courageous enough to comment on this act of ablative deference. Read the first page of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and you will see what I mean. Martin borrows the prevailing conceit from Rushdie’s novel: an ability to transport oneself into a pre-infantile state and reflect sagelike on what was going on at the time. Rushdie’s narrator, Saleem Sinai, is born at midnight on the eve of India’s day of independence. His chaotic story reflects the unfocused, potentially disastrous condition of India as an emerging nation and every British reviewer and indeed Booker Prize panellist felt suitably chastened by a writer who could play such beguiling games with their own shameful legacy. In ‘Thinkability’ Martin, like Rushdie, attempts to project himself backwards to the moment of his birth, at which the Cold War began, almost: ‘four days later, the Russians successfully tested their first atom bomb’. This seems extraordinarily narcissistic, as if through some solemn ordinance he, born to be a writer, has been elected to declaim on our apocalyptic inheritance thirty-eight years on. His considerable literary skills are then deployed with the conviction of a zealot. He even goes so far as to claim that while his previous work had been random in its approach to less agreeable parts of the prevailing zeitgeist, he was in truth cultivating a private agenda.
Soon after I realized I was writing about nuclear weapons (and the realization took quite a while: roughly half of what follows in this book was written in innocence of its common theme), I further realized that in a sense I had been writing about them all along. Our time is different. All times are different, but our time is different. A new fall, an infinite fall, underlies the usual – indeed traditional – presentiments of decline.
This is not so much Apocalypse Now as Genesis Again. The Old Testament holds that an endemic flaw in human nature would condemn us to an irrevocable state of misery and loss. In Martin’s view the next Fall, the Nuclear Catastrophe, will be even worse.
David Papineau, when he first got to know Martin, was also the father of two infant sons. He recalls that when Martin spoke of Louis and Jacob his manner changed. ‘Obviously there was the usual amount of pride, and anxiety; we all felt that, as parents. But once Martin lighted upon the subject of his sons he seemed suffused with a mixture of guilt and responsibility, as if everything that our generation did . . . well, we should be held accountable to the next one for our actions.’ This is commendable both in terms of parental duty and a conjugate sense of responsibility for the fate of the rest of the human race. The question remains, however, as to whether the reader of fiction should be subjected to what amounts to sermonizing. The worst example of this is ‘Bujak and the Strong Force or God’s Dice’. Sam, the narrator, tells us of his acquaintance with Bujak, whose ‘life went deep into the century’. He fought in the Polish army against the Germans in 1939 and thereafter as a member of the Resistance. After imprisonment by the Nazis he survived for ten years in the Soviet Union before fleeing to the United States, there to be widowed by a hospital bug. A figure of almost superhuman strength – he lifts a car without the assistance of a jack – who has in the past visited unspeakable reprisals upon Nazi collaborators in Poland and struck fear into a group of north London yobs, one of whom had mistreated his daughter. Now he lives in the same street as Sam in Notting Hill.
The vortex of the story, the reason for Sam’s telling of it – he confesses that he has abandoned his writerly ambitions and is offering this account simply because of its compulsive gravity, a clumsy hint on Martin’s part that he too is now involved in something more solemn than literary licence – is Bujak’s discovery of the bodies of his granddaughter, daughter and mother, raped and murdered by two Glaswegians who are unconscious, drunk, in the next room. ‘But, why didn’t you kill them?’ asks Sam, adding that any jury would have exempted him from guilt.
‘I had no wish to add to what I found. I thought of my dead wife Monika. I thought – they’re all dead now. I couldn’t add to what I saw there. Really the hardest thing was to touch them at all. You know the wet tails of rats? Snakes? Because I saw that they weren’t human beings at all. They had no idea what human life was. No idea! Terrible mutations, a disgrace to their human moulding. An eternal disgrace. If I had killed them then I would still be strong. But you must start somewhere. You must make a start.’11
This, hardly disguised, is Martin’s argument for disarmament. Only those who commend the doctrines of deterrence and retribution – monstrous extrapolations of Bujak’s physical potency – have the power to suspend and dismantle them; if only they had the wisdom of Bujak.
Through the story intriguing facts are disclosed. Sam’s Jewishness, the fact that many of his family died in the Holocaust, his partner Mishima’s past – she lost family in the second atom bomb attack on Nagasaki – all of these improbably assorted and less than plausible details are brought to the surface in response to Bujak’s enquiries about Sam’s and Mishima’s backgrounds. It is almost as though his personal history of suffering the worst that the twentieth century has to offer makes him a magnet for a similar heritage in others. Gradually he evolves as a figure of post-Enlightenment moral authority. Of course he is not perfect – he makes a number of politically incorrect comments on the West Indian residents of Notting Hill – but he has witnessed, perhaps even understands, the most terrible deeds that human beings can visit upon each other and is thus spared from the petty rules of address dreamed up by a liberal intelligentsia who deal exclusively with hypothesis and abstraction.
It is a lamentable piece of work, and not because it is poorly written – Martin’s creation of a shrewd but hesitant narrator is a small naturalistic masterpiece – but because it preaches. It is literature suborned to promote a creed, as a means of converting the reader to its author’s convictions. Evelyn Waugh was bad enough but his dedication to Roman Catholicism, in fiction and life, was more an exercise in snobbish triumphalism than an attempt to bring others to the Holy See. Martin appears to believe that a story which does not explicitly address nuclear weapons and disarmament might none the less cultivate subliminal parallels for the reader, at least if that reader is as sensitive and intelligent as he is. So irrespective of our opinion on the use of literature as polemic we can certainly add patronizing to the charge sheet. Kingsley wrote to Conquest of his son’s evangelical dedication to disarmament:
Talking of Martin, he has as I said gone all lefty and of the crappiest neutralist kind, challenging me to guess how many times over the world can destroy itself, writing two incredible bits of ban-it bullshit in the Obs (of course), one a ‘paperback round up’ (of books about the nuclear winter etc.), the other a TV review (of programmes saying Reagan wants to blow up the world), in fact going on like H Pinter does these days I hear. Luckily having now a 2nd baby has given him (M) other things to think about.12
Obviously during their exchanges on this matter Martin had been circumspect regarding the cause of his sudden almost neurotic preoccupation with nuclear weapons. The birth of Jacob, little more than a year after Louis, did not give him ‘other things to think about’. Instead, it reinforced his vigour and feelings of guilt. Alongside the spectre of a nuclear
apocalypse, which plods through the stories in various nuances and cumbersome allegories, the image of childhood, particularly our duty to the coming generation, resurfaces constantly. Pre-empting any speculation on how his father might respond to his stance he offers in ‘Thinkability’ an indulgent caricature.
I am reliably ruder to my father on the subject of nuclear weapons than on any other. I usually end by saying something like, ‘Well, we’ll just have to wait until you old bastards die off one by one.’ He usually ends by saying something like, ‘Think of it. Just by closing down the Arts Council we could significantly augment our arsenal. The grants to poets could service a nuclear submarine for a year.’13
The piece is driven by the kind of hysteria that we associate more with the grotesque creations of literature than writers themselves. He brands all supporters of nuclear deterrence as ‘subhuman’, a term previously used with conviction only by the Nazis and the White Supremists of the Southern USA. ‘For Jastrow [an advocate of the Strategic Defence Initiative], the unthinkable is thinkable. He is wrong, and in this respect he is also, I contend, subhuman, like all the nuclear-war fighters, like all the “prevailers”’ (p. 8). He describes also how he often sits for long periods in the flat/studio where he writes wondering if one of the whines that pierce the London soundscape is signalling an imminent nuclear attack. If he survives the first blast ‘then – God willing, if I still have the strength, and, of course, if they are still alive – I must find my wife and children and I must kill them’. Which is not the kind of note on domestic assignments usually found posted to the fridge door.
Will Self: ‘Martin has a tendency to project personal paranoia into abstract universals, an ugly miscegenation of instincts with a need for profundity. This need drove his preoccupation with an imminent nuclear apocalypse, AIDs, global warming. Really it is the little guy in a big, nasty, frightening world looking for meaning and purpose. He’s still at it, with Islamism. I’m not being patronizing. In fact I think it’s rather endearing. The impulse that makes him the finest prose writer of his generation causes him also to be the worst political writer. He is the little man walking down the dark street, a terrific prose poet of fear and anxiety. Also one sees in him the desire of the tragic farceur to be taken seriously. Sometimes, sometimes, he achieves this.’
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