‘Thinkability’ was completed in February 1987 when Martin and Antonia were in Israel. He had been invited to give a paper at a conference on Saul Bellow, held in Haifa. Bellow and his wife Janis were present but neither he nor Martin had much patience for the event itself: academics in 1987 had reached a nadir of jargon-ridden inaccessibility. Their duties completed the Bellows and the Amises moved on to spend a week in Jerusalem, dining once with Teddy Kollek, mayor of the city, Amschel and Anita Rothschild and Allan Bloom, political philosopher and long-term friend of Bellow. Martin had known Amschel since the 1970s when he ran a ‘salon’ in the London maisonette he shared with Angela Gorgas and hosted lavish parties at his country house in Sussex.
Martin describes his relationship with Judaism as ‘philosemitic’, an affinity that has deepened over the past fourteen years since the birth of his quarter-Jewish daughters. Hitchens offers an insight into a state of mind, bordering upon an aspiration, that predates this by at least two decades. Hitchens and his brother Peter found out only after the deaths of their parents that they were, via their maternal line, Jewish. Christopher, then in his full-blooded Marxian phase, took this as an inconsequential accident of biology, of no greater significance than hereditary hair colouring. Martin, however, when his friend informed him, ‘sat for a moment and then said that he felt envious. It was not that he simply craved some form of tribal identity, rather he was fascinated by Judaism as something that involved a magnificent intellectual legacy and, obviously, a tragic inheritance. It forced its unasked membership to confront questions that for others would remain abstractions, sometimes peripheral. Obviously the State of Israel was of significance here.’ The Bellow conference marked one of his two visits to Israel during the 1980s, about which his comments now are intriguing if somewhat oblique: ‘The place had enormous energy. It was an exciting place to be. There was no small talk.’ While Martin does make a cursory reference to the Israeli nuclear programme in ‘Thinkability’ it is notable that in it there is no reference to the three individuals who were supporters of nuclear deterrence and with whom he had an exchange, uncompromising on both sides, as he composed the piece in Israel in 1987. Kollek did not admit formally that Israel had constructed a nuclear device but he and everyone else were aware that the Bomb existed; Mordechai Vanunu had disclosed details to the Sunday Times in 1986. Its purpose, Kollek and others believed, was self-evidently justifiable: it was an essential means of deterrence for a country surrounded by states and organizations dedicated to its annihilation. Bloom had stated in print that the existence of nuclear weapons, and the fear which effectively proscribed their use, was the factor that had preserved an ideologically divided planet from a conventional Third World War. He also believed that the same principle would secure Israel against further invasions such as that which prompted the Six Day War. Bellow, like Bloom, opposed Cold War disarmament and was committed to the necessary survival of Israel, by any means available. Bellow wrote to Leon Wieseltier that ‘still more’ the ‘survival’ of Israel ‘depends upon a technology which . . . but you know more about this than I do’. There can be little if any doubt that the elided reference is to nuclear weapons. Bellow is worried only that Israel’s emergence as a ‘mini-superpower’ would present the country ‘to American leaders, some of them, as a convenient package to be traded for this, that or the other’. He expresses no reservations about the necessity, or the morality, of the nuclear programme.14
Martin recalls from their first meeting that Bellow’s conversational manner involved shrewd though not malicious trap-laying. ‘He treated matters such as politics and the state of the nation with illusionless scepticism.’ Obviously they got on well from the beginning but one cannot help but notice, even from this brief account, a number of intriguing parallels between Bellow and another figure who featured prominently in Martin’s life. He too favoured fractious individuality above attendance upon abstract beliefs. Neither suffered fools indulgently nor did they care greatly about the sensibilities of those who might be offended by their views. And despite their self-sufficiency they each countenanced a mischievous sense of belonging, involving, respectively, nonconformist notions of Englishness and Judaism. I speak, of course, of Kingsley.
Martin observes that writers whose experience straddles ‘the evolutionary firebreak of 1945’ have failed to record in their work this apocalyptic shift in human consciousness.15 He has already mentioned his father and goes on to include Graham Greene, ‘the most prescient writer of our time’ as equally negligent. It is, he contends, up to ‘younger writers’ who have lived on the other side of the firebreak ‘to write about nuclear weapons. My impression is that the subject resists frontal assault. For myself, I feel it as a background, a background which insidiously foregrounds itself.’16 He is, implicitly, if rather clumsily, harnessing his own stylistic signature to a mission. The unaffiliated tenor of his fiction is it seems the perfect vehicle for mapping out the perilous state of mankind. How then does he deal with the anomaly that the figure with whom he has most in common, at least as a writer, is, as much as his father, the living antithesis of his convictions? ‘There was no anomaly, and that’s why. You don’t mention things that don’t occur to you.’
I have spoken to Martin about this, at length. ‘Despite my political apathy I knew, or subconsciously felt, that something had been bothering me. It had always been there in my childhood, like a shadow, particularly during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I felt physically sick for a week.
‘But when my son was born, then the idea of continuation was there. It was the time of the Reagan build-up, but it was as much a subconscious reshuffle . . . When we were in Cambridge, West Wratting, we went through the farcical exercise of getting under our school desks after the air-raid siren sounded. Worse, for me, was the TV image of the bullseye of London, surrounded by the ever-spiralling concentric circles of the blast. Eventually I couldn’t watch. I used to leave the room. I couldn’t stand it.’
Notably, it is not so much the specific recollection of these fears that preoccupies him as a sense of an uncompleted dialogue. ‘There is much in the letters between him [Kingsley] and Bob [Conquest] lampooning the idea of nuclear war being imminent. As though it were all as absurd as Dr Strangelove.’ But, I point out, he didn’t see these letters for at least ten years after Einstein’s Monsters and his 1980s arguments with his father. ‘No, but they reminded me of what I’d always felt. Kingsley, always pooh-poohed the idea of the end of everything – global catastrophe. He would have been reliably cynical about global warming.’
Despite my abiding contempt for all brands of psychoanalysis I cannot help but suspect that his father’s resolute refusal to fear for the future of humanity is in part the motive for Martin’s zealotry. His comments on the period during which Kingsley’s opinions, on everything, ossified are particularly fascinating. ‘Kingsley didn’t like the idea of disarmament because he didn’t like the people who were for it: the hippy generation, people in sandals.’ Unlike his father, Martin did not in late middle-age turn right. In The Pregnant Widow (2010) his fears and sense of horror re-emerge in the recollections of his alter-ego Keith Nearing:
Like everyone else alive during the period under review, Keith was a vet of the Nuclear Cold War (1949–91): the contest of nightmares. In 1970, a twenty-year tour lay behind him. A twenty-year tour lay ahead of him.
He was conscripted – he was impressed – on August 29, 1949, when he was ninety-six hours old. This was the date of the birth of the Russian bomb. As he lay sleeping, historical reality stole into the ward at the infirmary, and gave him the rank of private.
Growing up, he didn’t feel resentful about military service exactly, because everyone else alive was in the army too. Apart from crouching under his desk at school, when they practised for central thermonuclear exchange, he didn’t seem to have any duties. Or no conscious ones. But after the Battle of Cuba, in 1962 (for its duration, its thirteen days, his thirteen-year-old existence became a swamp of na
usea), he entered into the spirit of the contest of nightmares. In his mind – oh, the obstacle courses, the sadistic NCOs, the fatigues, the lousy chow, the twirling potato skins of kitchen patrol. In the Nuclear Cold War, you only saw action when you were sound asleep.
During this period, physical violence was somehow consigned to the Third World, where about twenty million died in about a hundred military conflicts. In the First and Second Worlds, the shaping strategy was Mutual Assured Destruction. And everyone lived. There, the violence was all in the mind.
Keith lay in his bed, trying to understand. What was the outcome of the dream war and all that silent combat? Everything could vanish, at any moment. This disseminated an unconscious but pervasive mortal fear. And mortal fear might make you want to have sexual intercourse; but it wouldn’t make you want to love. Why love anyone, when everyone could vanish? So maybe it was love that took the wound, in the Passchendaele of mad dreams.17
‘Thinkability’ is a remarkable document, the most inspired and principled produced by Martin at that time. But along with this come lacunae and fallacies. At one point he offers an all-encompassing mantra. ‘Besides it could be argued that all writing – all art, in all times – has a bearing on nuclear weapons . . . Art celebrates life and not the other thing, not the opposite of life.’18 Surely ‘all writing’, by implication literary and non-literary, is not bound by universal obligations to a single agenda? Hyperbole, certainly, but understandable if not entirely excusable in terms of the subtext of this passage. A man such as Martin was denied the opportunity to treat the notion of ‘all writing’ as an impersonal phenomenon for the simple reason that the figure he knew best, probably loved more than any man, was part of this fabric.
Papineau: ‘While there was no question about the strength of his personal convictions it sometimes seemed as though it was a private undertaking. I don’t doubt that he knew about the Cruise Missile protests, Greenham Common and so on, but they seemed peripheral to his own vision of the coming apocalypse. You see Martin has intellectual enthusiasms that often become obsessions. I think these concerns gelled in the mid-1980s, nuclear deterrence and the transformative experience of fatherhood. Perhaps London Fields was cathartic in that respect, in that all the issues are there but they wrestle themselves into a state of torpor and exhaustion.’
9
Dystopian Visions
In 1984 shortly after the birth of his first son, Louis, Martin began work on his most ambitious novel yet, eventually to be called London Fields. London Fields is real enough, five minutes by train from Liverpool Street and within the Borough of Hackney. Presently it is undergoing the process of gentrification experienced by Notting Hill around the time that Martin began the book. Then, it was a less than endearing location, its late-nineteenth-century buildings defaced by post-war attempts at renovation and overlooked by 1960s tower blocks, the sort of places in which real-life replicas of Keith Talent might spend time left over from darts, boozing and minor criminality. The blocks could at a stretch be glimpsed from the window of Martin’s studio in Leamington Road Villas. I ask him if the place had any specific associations, if he had visited it for any reason. ‘No. I used to pass it on my way to the New Statesman printers in Southend.’ The name stays in the mind, as spectacularly inappropriate. It derives from the sixteenth century when the whole area was largely uninhabited, upland pasture used by drovers to keep their cattle just before taking them to market in the City of London, and slaughter. All of the sinuous nuances of the novel are caught in this charmingly incongruous pairing of history and nomenclature: meadows cultivated for the final days of their non-human residents replaced centuries later by the crowded cityscape of concrete, traffic and takeaways.
Martin adds: ‘I remember also driving through it on my way north. I was going to Enfield to do an interview for the Observer in 1987.’ The interviewee was Keith Deller, accompanied by his wife Kim. Keith was the 1983 World Darts Champion, or as Martin puts it ‘for a while the great white hope of darts’. When he met him, Keith ‘showed that in darts it is hard to do your ageing one year at a time’.1 Martin was halfway through London Fields and it is no accident that one of its triumvirate of tragicomic characters is called Keith Talent, darts enthusiast, nor that his firstborn is named Kim.
It would have suited my preconceptions if I had found Keith half-drunk in some roadhouse, smothered in tattoos and darts magazines. On the contrary: Keith and his pretty wife, Kim, awaited me over their Perriers in the ante-room of a pleasant businessman’s restaurant. There was talk of the gym, and countryside rambles with dog Sheba. No alcohol and no nicotine. It was I who felt like the true darter of the company, with my drink, my roll-ups, my North Circular pallor.
Keith is genial, straightforward, considerate, clear-eyed. He is also charmingly uxorious, constantly deferring to Kim, who, for her part, is fully abreast of Keith’s darting hopes and fears.2
There is something slightly unctuous in this verbal portrait. I have never met Keith Deller, only witnessed him on TV, and can only take Martin’s account on trust, but even figures such as Bellow did not receive such generous patronage as this. On the one hand he did not want his readers to think that he perceived Keith (Talent) as the epitome of a very real underclass of darts-obsessed vulgarians – particularly ones he had actually met on his daring excursions into yob land for the Observer – yet at the same time in the Observer article there is clear evidence of anthropological prurience – ‘The stars do look relatively slim, but this is partly because the fans look relatively fat’ – which he then feels the need to temper with doses of equitability: ‘What draws me and many others to the sport and the spectacle, I think, is a liking for human variety, specifically a drastically primitive activity in a drastically modern setting.’3 The competition between empathy and horrified fascination seems guileless but in the novel, with the other Keith, Martin does not even attempt to cover up the sense of foul gratification that went into the creation of such a figure. He is similarly shameless in his invention of Nicola Six, the murderee. Because of her presence the novel has frequently been denounced as a condonement of sexism, or more specifically the predatory imperious role of men in society and literature. This was the cause of its failure to reach the shortlist for the 1989 Booker Prize for fiction: two women members of the panel, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, insisted on its exclusion for purely ideological reasons, irrespective of its qualities as a piece of writing. The panel chairman, David Lodge, refused to comment at the time but later admitted in a 1992 article that it was to him a ‘matter of great regret’ that the novel did not reach the shortlist, ‘due to the objection of two panel members’, which raises the question of why neither he nor anyone else felt sufficiently regretful in 1989 to defend it.
The novel itself is set in 1999, a decade after its completion and several months before the millennium. Sam Young has exchanged flats with the British author Mark Asprey, or ‘MA’, as he signs himself coquettishly, whose flat is in the same district as Martin’s, though, if we believe Sam’s account, far more luxuriously appointed. But even the ungenerous would have expected the grottier eastern side of Notting Hill to have improved considerably by the late 1990s, along with the fortunes of one of its most famous literary residents, ‘MA’.
Sam’s overriding preoccupation is with a sense of dread, and everything he perceives is informed by imminence of apocalyptic terror. On leaving his Jumbo at Heathrow the other aeroplanes strike him as harbingers of something terrifying and ineffable, ‘all the sharks with their fins erect, thrashers, baskers, great whites – killers, killers every one’ (p. 2). The absent MA is similar in many ways to the very real Martin Amis, who attends the Paddington Sports Club, helps cook his children’s dinner, plays football with them in the park in St Mark’s Road, a hundred yards from the family home, yet at the same time Martin elects Samson Young as his slightly aberrant alter ego, temperamentally as close as can be to the real thing – especially their shared feeling of imminent destruction
– but with some careful smudges and discordances. I asked Hitchens if Young bears any resemblance to Martin in the late 1980s and he laughed. ‘Very much so, yes. That was of course Martin’s first period of obsessive preoccupation. The book Young probably wants to write, aside from the one he’s in, is Einstein’s Monsters. Martin in the mid-1980s was not just convinced that a nuclear apocalypse was imminent, he also treated all of the ethical shortcomings of humanity at that point as symptoms of mass condonement of nuclear weapons. So, yes, Young’s sense of everything being in rapid terminal decline mirrored Martin’s obsession with nuclear weapons. The question is, of course, is Young a didactic instrument or an exercise in self-criticism?’ The fact that the question can never be satisfactorily answered testifies to the quality of the novel.
Sam Young is an outstanding portrait of the artist in sagacious middle age. His author is not dying but as Zach Leader puts it: ‘When I got to know him he was obsessively concerned with staying in good condition, no doubt as a hedge against his habits, smoking in particular.’ In his mid- to late thirties, he was intent on closing the door against middle age. Martin was plagued by the spectacle of his father, whose avoidance of physical exercise was a matter of principle. At that time Kingsley was in a poor state, weighing in at about sixteen stone, but even back in the sixties, when he was Martin’s age, he had become, prematurely, portly. ‘Martin in the 1980s became noticeably more competitive as a tennis player, not because now he wanted to win – he had always wanted to win – he was simply driving himself that much harder. He became extremely fit.’ Sam Young concertinas the myriad anxieties of ageing, uncertainty and declining ambition into a horribly simple predicament: he is attempting to write something significant, his first for twenty years, while suffering from a terminal disease that leaves him no more than two months to complete his task. This causes us to question the origins of Young’s moments of private introspection, when he is not living vicariously through the stories of his creations but experiencing London first-hand. Is his sense of everything as informed by impending doom an accurate account of the world in 1989, seemingly hurrying towards the brink of catastrophe, or a reflection of his own melancholic state? The mood of morbid resignation obtains throughout the novel and secures an axis of uncertainty for everything else, most significantly the nature of the three other characters, all the inventions of Young. Each of them is sufficiently electrifying, variously prepossessing, pitiable and grotesque, to guarantee our fascination, but constantly we have to check our musings against how we feel about them. Are we supposed to respond to them as literary characters in their own right or as perverse indices to Young’s state of mind? This is why it is a gross misinterpretation of a complex book to treat Nicola Six as an endorsement of sexist attitudes and fetishes. She exists, vividly, on the page but before jumping to conclusions about the preconceptions she reflects, consider instead a far more perplexing model, one in which she is created as a private remonstrance to circumspection. For Young she is indeed a fantasy and he alone is responsible for the scenarios in which she reduces both Guy Clinch and Keith to lustful delirium by her sheer presence, and of course her choice of underwear – but she is far more than that. He has created her, yet he is aware that she will have far more volition and autonomy than any previous act of authorial patronage.
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