Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Lifton’s book revealed the part played by medical practitioners in the Holocaust but its genuine claim to originality was the identification of an endemic feature, which he calls doubling, exhibited by all those who took part in the mass exterminations, and which was evident also in Eichmann’s behaviour at his trial.

  [N]one of them – not a single Nazi doctor I spoke to – arrived at a clear ethical evaluation of what he had done, and what he had been part of. They could examine events in considerable detail, even look at feelings and speak generally with surprising candour, but almost in the manner of a third person. The narrator, morally speaking, was not quite present.8

  Despite his lifetime of experience as a psychologist – he was sixty when the book as published – Lifton admits to there being no formulaic explanation for doubling. It is not a straightforward case of denial or psychological self-protection – none of them disputed what they had done. Nor had they numbed themselves to the moral and ethical values of more civilized societies. (One, suspecting Lifton’s Jewishness, referred to their shared ‘tragic inheritance’.) The only conclusion was terribly simple: they had consciously, enthusiastically committed evil acts and now preferred not to reflect upon their nature. This was the inspiration for Martin’s daring experiment with the reversal of narrative time. All of those involved in the Holocaust recalled what had happened but neither they nor anyone else could alter the past. Martin: ‘The book [The Nazi Doctors] was riveting, forbidding, but I think it was Lifton’s private account of how he still felt incapable of fully grasping the mechanisms of denial of these men that engrossed me most of all.’ Lifton’s interviewees no longer feared retribution and those who had gone into exile with false identities felt equally exempt from responsibility for irrevocable occurrences.

  Technically it would have been possible to create a contrast between two points in the narrative, one involving Unverdorben’s activities in the camps and another his existence closer to the present as Dr Tod Friendly, but this would have demanded solutions to questions that were, as Lifton showed, inexplicable. As Martin explained, cause-and-effect teleology would have been imposed upon ‘a figure who was too evil to be permitted the indulgence of an explanation’. Unverdorben witnesses, in reverse sequence, all of the events that precede his imminent death in suburban USA. When he explains how he removes the gas canisters from the chambers so that the prisoners can be allowed to return to the point of selection on the ramps and then board the train we know that he is neither denying nor seeking some form of exculpation for what really happened. The effect, however, is almost identical to Lifton’s description of his interviewees.

  Some part of these men wished to be heard: they had things to say that most of them had never said before, least of all to people around them – but the narrator morally speaking was not quite present.9

  The other figure who influenced him considerably in the planning of the novel was David Papineau, with whom he had discussed, when writing London Fields, the distinction between our experience of time and our attempts in language to represent its passage. ‘There are standard models in the teaching of philosophy for illustrating the multifaceted problem of time. One, used most frequently and which interested Martin, is the film played backwards. The exercise involves a selection of events on the film that might, plausibly, occur in real life, walking backwards, cars always apparently in reverse gear, the contents of our stomachs seemingly vomited into glasses and on to plates. Even recorded conversations played backwards to sound like an unfamiliar linguistic exchange. Many of these occur at the beginning of Time’s Arrow. They were padding mainly, very effectively deployed to prepare the reader for far more difficult tasks.’ In the opening pages Tod Unverdorben asks, ‘Why am I walking backwards into the house?’ and wonders why the woman in the pharmacy says ‘Dug. Dug’, instead of ‘Good. Good’, in reply to his casual enquiry on her health (p. 14). He is conscious of the difference between progressive and regressive time. However, in Auschwitz he either ignores or forgets the distinction. To remain conscious of it would also involve an acceptance of volition, not of time as a sequence that contains us but as a series of causally related acts and events – such as the placing, rather than the removal of the gas canisters. Papineau: ‘What would happen in a film if a vase of flowers were to be deliberately pushed from a table? If the glass smashes on the floor the fragments, water, flowers disperse and none of this is reversible. We could of course play it back on film, but this has nothing to do with the reversal of time.’ We witness something that is entirely implausible, literally impossible beyond the artifice of film. It is the manufacturing of an effect.

  In this new lab of his [Uncle Pepi] he can knock together a human being out of the unlikeliest odds and ends. On his desk he had a box full of eyes. It was not uncommon to see him slipping out of his darkroom carrying a head partly wrapped in old newspaper. The next thing you knew, there’d be, oh I don’t know, a fifteen-year-old Pole sliding off the table and rubbing his eyes and sauntering back to work, accompanied by an orderly and his understanding smile.10

  Unverdorben is fully aware that this too is a manufactured effect, that just as it is impossible for a vase to be reassembled, its contents returned to it and the whole assembly replaced on the table, without even the assistance of an outside agency, so too the mutilated, murdered fifteen-year-old Pole can never be restored to life and led back to work. He knows this but he will not concede that he is witnessing events in which he participated, played backwards. Like Lifton’s interlocutors he becomes ‘not quite present’. Martin’s considerable achievement exists not in the ostentatious use of narrative experiment but in the gradual mutation and development of a character never previously represented in fiction. In Part 1, set in the US, Unverdorben refers to Tod in the third person while implicitly acknowledging he is fully aware of a shared legacy.

  Tod and I can feel the dream just waiting to happen, gathering its energies from somewhere on the other side. We’re fatalistic. We lie there with the lamp burning, while dawn fades. Tepid sweats form, and shine, and instantly evaporate. Then our heart rate climbs, steadily, until our ears are gulping on the new blood. Now we don’t know who we are. I have to be ready for when Tod makes his lunge for the lightswitch. And then the darkness with a shout that gives a fierce twist to his jaw – we’re in it. The enormous figure in the white coat, his black boots straddling many acres. Somewhere down there, between his legs, the queue of souls. I wish I had power, just power enough to avert my eyes.11

  He, they, know what awaits them as they stumble towards their collective past. They cannot ‘avert their eyes’ because they and their experiences are coterminous. In Part 2, however, Unverdorben goes against Lifton’s report on his interviewees and opts for a first-person account. But he does so not in acceptance of responsibility – and here Martin interweaves his borrowings from Lifton and Papineau – but by becoming part of the film in reverse, with his hand receiving the magically reassembled vase, or guiding the living prisoners from the gas chamber back to the train. He becomes even less ‘quite present’ than Lifton’s interlocutors. He does not deny participation but he exempts himself from the standard rules of intent, cause and, ultimately, culpability.

  The novel was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, but was beaten by Ben Okri’s Famished Road. This time, no doubt heeding the publicity generated by London Fields, the committee remained tight-lipped on the nature of their decision. In his TLS ‘Books of the Year’ entry the conservative philosopher and commentator Roger Scruton – not one of Martin’s natural allies nor a personal friend – wrote that ‘we have witnessed the slovenly butchery of Martin Amis’ to the benefit of ‘the fey and pseudo-sensitive Ben Okri’.12 In Scruton’s opinion the decision was made ‘on the grounds of immorality, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that Time’s Arrow is the first Martin Amis novel to contain the faintest hint of a moral idea. It is also, in my view, brilliant.’ With that closing sentiment most other reviewers agreed, b
ut a notably loud and tiny minority would, one suspects, have influenced the Booker Committee. In the US Rhoda Koenig in ‘Holocaust Chic’, argued that Martin’s display of technical genius was an affront to the memory of the six million Holocaust dead13 while in London James Buchan in the Spectator stated outright that he had made use of Auschwitz ‘for profit’.14 It is extremely unlikely that a contributor to the Spectator had knowledge of, let alone respect for, the opinions of the Marxist academic Theodor Adorno. Nevertheless Adorno’s comment on literature and the Holocaust exposes and explains an endemic feeling of unease among writers. He said, in 1951, in Cultural Criticism and Society, that ‘after Auschwitz no more poetry can be written’. The claim is hyperbolical but Adorno’s essential thesis is that poetry and all literature is a trivial, frivolous mode of representation unsuited by its nature to deal with a post-Holocaust state of mind.

  In the light of this one can detect another reason for Martin’s failure to take the Booker Prize. Nine years earlier in 1982 Thomas Keneally won with Schindler’s Ark, undoubtedly the most popular, serious fictional treatment of Auschwitz, subsequently filmed by Steven Spielberg as Schindler’s List (the title change being an outrageous example of dumbing down, made on the assumption that many filmgoers would be puzzled by the Old Testament resonance). There is no rule, written or unwritten, which forbids repetitions of subject in the awarding of major literary prizes but one will search in vain for two novels in the Booker or Pulitzer list in which the same overarching theme appears within a four-to five-year period. Given the controversial tendentious nature of writing fiction on the Holocaust, the Booker judges would have been glancing anxiously over their shoulders and what they saw, with Keneally, was an inspired but essentially cautious work. Schindler’s Ark is a documentary account reassembled as a novel. Every significant fact and character is drawn from verifiable sources and Keneally intervenes only to provide perspective, narrative pacing and dialogue, and even then he does his best to mould the principal characters according to reports of the manner and speech habits of their real counterparts. Again there is no evidence that Keneally was responding consciously to Adorno’s dictum but he was certainly attending to it in spirit, in that the vulgarizing presence of literature is reduced to an absolute minimum. While Keneally sidelines the figures who were directly responsible for the atrocities, concentrating instead on the quixotic, humane Schindler and the victims, Martin for the first time in fiction focuses directly upon the personal history, albeit in reverse, and mental condition of one of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The only serious writer to have previously attempted anything comparable was George Steiner in The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. (1979). The novel, which Martin discussed with Steiner when the latter was Visiting Professor at Oxford in the mid-1980s, offers us the thoughts and reflections of Adolf Hitler, thirty years after his survival of the bombing of his Berlin bunker. The hypothesis is daring but what we actually experience is Steiner’s complex historical explanation for the Holocaust (that the Jews, via intellectual assimilation with and sometimes dominance over prevailing Christian post-Enlightenment thought, provoked their own destruction) voiced by a suspiciously erudite ‘A.H.’. No writer had attempted a naturalistic, psychologically transparent portrait of a Nazi mass murderer and the reason for their reluctance is self-evident. Once a character becomes the centrepiece of a literary work, irrespective of their foul proclivities (cf. Humbert Humbert), they are possessed of a charismatic vibrancy. Three decades before Time’s Arrow was published Hannah Arendt produced an account of Eichmann at his trial.15 Like Lifton’s interviewers Eichmann in person was disarmingly commonplace: only the proven fact that he was responsible for one of the most atrocious acts in history overturned the impression of banality. Thus Martin faced an outstandingly difficult task: could he use the uniquely untransparent devices of fiction to create a bridge between the impression of the commonplace – displayed by all of the post-war Nazis – and their unimaginable capacities for evil? He has often been accused of lacking the talent or inclination for endurance, relying instead on a chiaroscuro of brief performances. In Time’s Arrow he turns this criticism on its head, sustaining an immensely complex, original conceit for 180 pages, and in doing so he achieves far more than a display of skill. He shows, contra Adorno, that literature is uniquely capable of making us face the actuality of the Holocaust and the irredeemable vileness of its perpetrators.

  10

  The Break-Up and The Information

  Depicting Martin Amis as a feckless replica of his father is a reproachful enterprise, and as I write this sentence I feel the presence of a qualifier. During the period following the publication of Time’s Arrow the parallels between father and son are so abundant that one is reminded of the film Groundhog Day where every morning Bill Murray’s character awakes in full knowledge of what fate has in store for him for the next twenty-four hours. The events will be exactly the same as those of the previous day, beyond his control; except in Martin’s case he is being handed this premonitory menu by Kingsley, and for hours substitute years.

  Kingsley was forty when he was introduced to Jane Howard at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, and Martin exactly the same age when he first met Isabel Fonseca. Both men were at roughly the same stage in their careers with five and six novels, respectively, in print and each procuring a reputation as having altered the literary mood and temper of their time. Their ongoing marriages had begun after pregnancies, with another son for each born shortly afterwards. For both of them, life was becoming more settled and routine, until Kingsley’s affair with Jane became something more than a secret.

  Christopher Hitchens: ‘Isabel [Fonseca] was in some ways a composite of Martin’s previous most glamorous girlfriends. I think they [Martin and Isabel] met through the TLS. They mixed in the same circles but it was at one of the dinners for Salman that Isabel had helped organize that they really got to know each other, in 1989 or thereabouts. He had just despatched Nicola Six to the reading public and then he meets a version that outdoes his creation. She was being hotly pursued by Salman, among others, but Martin . . . well let’s say he moved quite rapidly to the head of a long queue.

  ‘I remember, it was 1992. Five of us had gone from Nigella Lawson and John Diamond’s wedding reception at the Groucho to dinner in the West End. There was Martin, Antonia, myself, Isabel, and . . . I can’t recall the others. Anyway we were walking towards the restaurant, I was talking to Antonia, and Martin and Isabel were alongside us and . . . I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this but I sensed a frisson. Nothing in particular but he and Antonia seemed oddly detached from each other. I don’t think Isabel was the cause, at that point anyway.’

  Will Self got to know Martin at this time. ‘He is exceptionally good at what he does, as a writer, but sometimes his desire to be taken seriously as a commentator on immutable ethical and philosophic issues is at odds with his talent. He treats intellectualism as an observance, a necessary ritual, I mean as a writer. And this has also had an effect on his private life. I know he has been, still is, presented in the press as egotist, hedonist, even dilettante, but actually he worries immensely about the consequences of what he does and says. In print, particularly as a critic, he can be pretty frightening, yet the individual is quietly taking stock, worrying about causing distress, trying to improve things and so on. For his work this was problematic, but at least . . . Well Scott Fitzgerald said only writers can hold two intrinsically opposed views simultaneously, or something like that . . . But his personal life suffered as a consequence. Those close to him suffered, though this was certainly not due to a nefarious or malicious element of his character. When his marriage broke up he was trying to be honest without causing distress. Unfortunately, this had the opposite effect.’

  Hitchens clarifies: ‘He left Antonia in May 1993. That is to say he moved to the flat. He didn’t have much to take with him. I can’t testify to exactly what was said but I gathered from conversations with him shortly afterw
ards that he’d been selectively honest. He informed Antonia that it would be better for both of them if he went, but left her to surmise that their marriage, troubled anyway, ought to be brought to something like a conclusion.’

  ‘In spring 1992,’ Andy Hislop remembers, ‘Martin called and asked if I was free, short notice, and would I like to spend a few weeks in Tuscany. Tuscany? Anyway, Antonia’s half-sister was married to Matthew Spender and they had a house there. It sounded superb, agreeable weather two months before the miserable English summer and so on. But, God, it was a dire experience. I sometimes felt I was there as protection for Martin. He wanted to play chess continually and the weather was the worst on record in that part of Italy, freezing. The atmosphere in the house was colder by far. Martin and Antonia went through the motions. He was introverted, she . . . she seemed unsettled, sad.’

  Zachary Leader offers an intriguing picture of Martin in the period after he had left Chesterton Road, and shortly before the story appeared in the press. ‘I had just returned to London after about six months on a Huntington Library Fellowship in California and when we met at the club for a game it was clear that there was something odd about him. He was affable, yes, but it was an effort. He was not withdrawn or evasive. Displaced would be a better way to put it. Hilly, his mother, described it well when she said that there is in father and son an “Amis passivity”, a tendency to retreat from the less agreeable windfalls of fate or consequences of your own actions. But she qualified this. For Kingsley it involved retreat and obfuscation. Martin’s version was a lot more penitential. He was willing to take full responsibility for everything he did, and said. In this case though he appeared to be suffering the physical effects.’ Did he tell you what was troubling him? ‘Yes, he did, eventually. And again that was before the press got their hands on it. It was his life and not my business to pry but he was straight about what was happening. He did not attempt to excuse himself or play down the effects of what had happened on those closest to him.’