But let us return to Saturday. His arrangement was to return the boys to London, but not to stay overnight in his flat. He would collect Hilly and Philip from Primrose Hill and drive them with Louis and Jacob back to Oxford where the boys were to be deposited with Antonia, who was spending the weekend with acquaintances of her first, late husband. Within twenty-four hours Martin had spent an evening with one of his oldest friends, retired to the same bedroom in which another had spent his first days in flight from any number of figures with a religious sanction to kill him, accompanied by the two individuals about whom he cared more than anyone else, but only by a narrow margin. He had said hello and goodbye to his father and was now heading back to the same house with his mother and elder brother. All of this was accompanied by an unremitting, indescribably painful deformity of his cheek and jaw, and a suspicion that a special circle of hell had been devised by someone of even greater sophistication than Dante. It was as though sequences of his life were being lifted from the private vault of recollection and played forwards and backwards, recklessly, and by Sunday the experience would become even more troubling.
His mother and Philip had joined him so that the three of them could attend the memorial service held in Cheltenham on Sunday, just over the Cotswolds, for his cousin, his mother’s sister’s daughter, Lucy Katherine Partington. Lucy Partington had been a missing person since 1972, the year Martin returned to Lemmons from Oxford. Posters carrying her photograph were displayed throughout the West Country and pleas for help by her mother and brother broadcast on national TV and radio during the subsequent twelve months, when Martin was completing the novel that would transform him from bright undergraduate to burgeoning literary superstar. He knew of these events, partly through media coverage, and on occasion via telephone exchanges with Hilly, then in Spain. But as he later confessed he was at the time too preoccupied with his work to give much conscious attention to his cousin’s disappearance. They had met on numerous occasions, as children. He did not know her as an adult and assumed she had ‘disappeared’ of her own volition. She was in fact one of the many victims of the mass murderer Fred West, her fate disclosed only when the police began analyses of remains in the cellar of West’s Gloucester house in 1994.
Lucy Partington features in Experience as a figure whom Martin feels that he knows well – she has, for example, five more entries in the index than his sister Sally. He comments: ‘I spent several summers with them, throughout my childhood. David was my closest confidant for many years. I spent months in their house, and went on holidays with them. David came often to Swansea and Cambridge. Much later, he came to stay with us in Uruguay.’ The following passage is engrossing and goes some way to explain why her absence played such a part in the coalescence, for Martin, of more tangible feelings of grief and confusion. He is at the memorial.
Very soon it was clear to me that something extraordinary was happening. As I wept I glanced at my weeping brother and thought: how badly we need this. How very badly my body needs this, as it needs food and sleep and air. Thoughts and feelings that had been trapped for twenty years were now being released [. . .] Formulaically, perhaps, but without mysticism, I can assert that I felt bathed in her presence (and felt unrecognizably the better for it). This is where we really go when we die: into the hearts of those who remember us. And all our hearts were bursting with her.1
This, for many, is the most disquieting moment of Experience, in that there is a sense that he is intruding upon the private grief of others, and at the end, in the letter he writes to his cousin’s mother, Miggy, he appears to acknowledge that some sort of explanation is due. But the impression he sometimes gives in Experience of being an emotional interloper is contrary to the truth. His cousins, David and Lucy, and his aunt Miggy were almost as important to him during his childhood as Kingsley and Hilly and his siblings. He tells us in his memoir of what, genuinely, he feels about their tragedy but as individuals he lends them a respectful distance. Only on a few occasions does he allow us to see how close they were. ‘David was one of the requited loves of my childhood . . . My brother is, of course, irreplaceable, and so is my half-brother, Jaime. But for much of my childhood I earnestly wanted David to be my brother, and he wanted it too, and the affinity is still there’ (p. 61).
There were other events he preferred to exclude from his public accounts of this period but which undoubtedly had a considerable impact upon everything else. Hitchens: ‘Martin was obliged to play diplomat and choreographer, difficult with confused eight- and nine-year-olds, and apart from the practical problems he was divided emotionally. I’ve no idea what he actually said to the boys, about the break-up, but what troubled him privately was the fact that he was the cause of this.’ Isabel Fonseca: ‘They [his sons] were very small. Martin and I agreed that it would be better for the boys if we didn’t cohabit – give everyone time. We didn’t for two years after he left.’ Less than nine months after the events of 1994 something equally shocking occurred.
In May 1995 Martin returned to London after a three-week tour of the US, promoting The Information. Among his mail he found a letter from Patrick Seale, legal father of his daughter Delilah, whose mother had committed suicide twenty years earlier. Seale put it to Martin that since Delilah was now twenty-one, it would be best that she become acquainted with her natural father and proposed that they meet to discuss an introduction. Martin had, much earlier, told Isabel that he had a daughter little more than fifteen years younger than her. She accepted the news of their forthcoming meeting, which she would attend, with mature sensitivity. Next he told Louis and Jacob. They were spending Saturday in his flat and two days earlier rumours about the ‘lost child’ of the celebrity novelist – the ink was hardly dry on the most recent comments regarding his avarice and alleged resort to cosmetic surgery – had reached the Daily Express. The question of when it would be best to disclose to a nine- and ten-year-old that they had a much older sister was, Martin admitted, one that had troubled him only briefly. The group of journalists constantly ringing the bell of the house they had recently moved into in Regents Park Road throughout Saturday afternoon saw to that, despite his repeated suggestions through the intercom that they should ‘go away’. The boys, he proudly recalls, were as guilelessly solicitous as Isabel – they sympathized with Delilah’s tragic loss of her mother at such an age – and showed no reservations about getting to know the adult half-sister suddenly conjured into existence. Two days after learning of his new sibling Louis answered the doorbell and admitted Delilah to the house where Jacob was waiting. None, according to Martin, seemed to feel even the slightest sense of unease.
‘That year, 1995,’ recalls Martin, ‘was extraordinary. While lives altered around me I seemed . . . in a vacuum. Lucy and Delilah . . . David. Without me there was no connection, except in the equally profound sense of affect.’
I ask again about David Partington and Isabel states, ‘they spent almost every summer together in Gloucestershire. Martin was very close with Marian and David, and his aunt Miggy.’ Martin continues: ‘He seemed like a kind of rural version of someone not unlike me. They’d lived a very rural life, in Gloucestershire, and I sometimes wondered how growing up outside the city would have changed me. Life there was innocent . . . If there is a single value that stands in your mind and your work . . . For Kingsley it was decency . . . but in me, what I value is innocence. And he [David] and his family were that.’ Though cynics have accused him of appropriating another family’s tragedy there is a great deal of sincerity in this disclosure, albeit artlessly deflected. I asked him what he meant by ‘innocence’. ‘The Bardwells [the maternal grandparents he shared with the Partingtons] were innocent. Leonard Bardwell, “Daddy B” and his wife Margery were benign eccentrics. Quite rich, but altruistic. They gave enormous amounts to charity. And I think that the Partingtons inherited more of those genes than we did. My childhood was idyllic, theirs was . . . arcadian, unsullied. Innocence can never really coexist with its opposite, experience
, which was why Kingsley was so contemptuous of the Bardwells. Their enthusiasm for morris dancing, folk culture . . . all endearing, harmless, but Kingsley loathed it and got his revenge [with the Welches in Lucky Jim]. And innocence attracts its other opposite, guilt.’ I wonder still about what he means by guilt. The obvious interpretation would be the specifics of culpability, the committing of an injustice, specifically that of West who ruined the Partingtons’ arcadia. But I wonder if he also had in mind something closer to his own sense of experience, the painful burden of conscience. Referring to Kingsley’s resentment towards the Bardwells, ‘He was irritated in particular by Daddy B, his innocence. But more than that he was irritated by innocence in general . . . My mother inherited their innocence.’ And you? ‘Maybe not so much.’ He admits by implication to be heir to Kingsley’s rogue gene, a hybrid of experience and guilt. Louis and Jacob, Antonia, Delilah, David, the departed Lucy and Lamorna made up a fabric in which a sense of loss, if not of innocence then at least of a hoped-for idyll, was a unifying feature. Martin himself felt, with a misplaced notion of guilt, as though he had moved between them like a virus. One of the most beautiful passages in Experience is in the letter to his Aunt Miggy recalling the day he had visited her to talk about his treatment of the murder of Lucy in his memoir. In the end they did not mention it, and later Miggy wrote to tell him that her doubts had been replaced by feelings of peace. From the letter one senses in Martin the need for a comparable sense of release. ‘The village, the lane, the circular drive with its millstone, your lawn, your ponds, your Michaelmas daisies. I recalled covering this garden in a series of desperately ardent sprints, moving from clue to clue (those were your rhymes, I think) in a hunt for Easter eggs, nearly forty years ago. The village seems sanitised now . . . Yet the place still transports me, and I am back in an unfallen world.’ (p. 384). But such moments, as he knew, are transient.
Later that same year Kingsley would re-enter Martin’s emotional vortex, accompanied by Eric Jacobs.
Jacobs was a talented journalist and ghost writer who had become friends with Kingsley at the Garrick in the early 1990s. They got on well, being of similar temperament and sharing opinions on such essential matters as politics, behaviour and drink. No written record exists of who suggested an authorized biography but when I interviewed Jacobs for my own literary biography of Kingsley he stated that they began discussing the project, at Kingsley’s instigation, soon after the publication of the latter’s Memoirs in 1991. He also stated that from the start he felt a palpable antipathy from certain members of the family and its broader circle. ‘Hilly I got on with rather well, not Ali (Kilmarnock). Martin clearly disliked me.’ I suspect him here of using the past tense rather tactically. After Kingsley’s death and the quarrel over Jacob’s deal with the Sunday Times to publish his private diary of meetings with Kingsley, including confidences, as a supplement to the biography Martin did indeed feel aggrieved, though to his credit he ranked him more as misguided than contemptible. Martin’s description of his dealings with Jacobs, in an appendix to Experience, is by equal degrees candid and tolerant yet it is also incomplete. It involves only the moment when their relationship, such as it was, effectively ended. Martin had known him, though not well, for three years prior to that. Jacobs’s biography is much like Boswell’s life of Johnson, with the subject if not quite dictating the book to his faithful amanuensis then certainly presiding over its shape and temper. The most obvious instance of this was Kingsley’s insistence, which Jacobs did not have the tenacity to doubt let alone question, that none of his fiction was even remotely based on actual events and individuals. Kingsley also specified which of his friends and relatives Jacobs could approach for interview, and was equally implacable on those who must be excluded. Most of the Amis family, with the notable exception of Hilly, were in the latter category. As a result we are offered an account of Kingsley’s life that appears unhindered by censorship – he was selectively honest to Jacobs about his infidelities before the break-up with Hilly for example – but sufficiently skewed and provocative to raise questions. When he agreed to take on Jacobs and throughout their three years of lengthy alcohol-fuelled exchanges Kingsley had no forewarning of his imminent death. His health was troublesome, but aside from his various stomach complaints there was no evidence that his distinctly incautious lifestyle – he was at least three stone overweight and he consumed inordinate amounts of beer, wine and, his preference, malt whisky – was doing serious damage to his heart. There is then at least circumstantial evidence that he acted as ghost writer in all but name in order to effect a carefully choreographed relaunch of Kingsley Amis, the testily resourceful thinker, writer and seducer, very much alive.
Martin witnessed this with a mixture of concern and unease. The biography would tell a story he assumed he knew as well as anyone, yet he had been neither consulted nor interviewed. Moreover he was becoming aware of the fact that Jacobs had unique access to material that disclosed aspects of his father’s life that he knew only sketchily, notably the correspondence between Kingsley and Larkin. The letters were part of Larkin’s archive in the Bodleian Library, Oxford and had been sold to the library on condition that access would be closed until all correspondents were dead. Kingsley intervened on Jacobs’s behalf, stating that while still alive he was happy for any potentially embarrassing disclosures to enter the public realm.
The biography was published barely three months before Kingsley’s death and Hilly, previously happy to cooperate with Jacobs, found herself obliged to deal with yet another aspect of her ex-husband’s chameleonesque personality. The affairs had been consigned to the past but she was shocked by the use of her father, mother and brothers as a cunning joke in Kingsley’s letters to Larkin. The caricature of the Bardwells was the inspiration for the hideous Welch family in Lucky Jim, a literary curiosity which certainly did not amuse Hilly.
She did not read the biography until the parts of it involving her family were pointed out to her and by that time Kingsley was dead. Martin, however, witnessed its subsequent effect on his mother. This, plus Jacobs’s decision to publish his diary so soon after the death, caused him to invoke his prerogative as executor to his father’s literary estate and exclude Jacobs from any further access to manuscripts or correspondence. Jacobs paused during his exchange with me to reflect on what had happened. ‘I probably should not have taken the diaries to the Sunday Times. But I am freelance, I make money by selling what I write and my adviser in all this was Gillon Aitken [partner at the time in the same firm as Martin’s new agent Andrew Wylie]. Martin was, I suppose, justified in his anger but there was another agenda. You see Kingsley and I were part of the same set. Drinkers, generally conservative – though I far less so than him – and sceptical about the world we were asked to put up with. I think Martin resented the fact that his father had chosen one of his own as his biographer and then as the editor of his letters. But of course he made sure I was not allowed to do that – better an academic, the sort who would display clinical detachment.’
Martin had known Zachary Leader since the 1980s and it was at the Paddington Sports Club in 1996 that he raised the possibility of him replacing Jacobs as editor of his father’s collected Letters. Leader was a respected scholar and critic whose reputation was grounded in his previous work on worthy if somewhat recondite aspects of Romanticism. The letters, as both he and Martin were rapidly discovering, would involve far more tendentious newsworthy issues. Anthony Thwaite’s edition of Larkin’s Selected Letters, followed shortly afterwards by Motion’s authorized biography of the poet,2 were still, barely three years later, causing arguments and prompting accusations among academics and members of the literary intelligentsia and the reading public. Larkin was, it turned out, far more jaundiced and misanthropic than his official profile had indicated. Even worse, he had indulged a life-long taste for pornography which, allied with his misogynistic brand of lechery for the real thing, placed him beyond the pale in that period of post-feminist male contritio
n. Finally, and indefensibly, he had, in at least three letters, used the term ‘Paki’ and ‘nigger’ in reference to British-based individuals of Asian or Afro-Carribean origin. The following, by Tom Paulin, typified the response to the letters: ‘a distressing and in many ways revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals and conceals the sewer under the national monument Larkin became.’3.
Martin’s response to what seemed to many a literary witch-hunt appeared in the New Yorker in July 1993. It is not so much a defence of his father’s friend as an impatient critique of what Motion had done. Thwaite to his credit had not left out any letters that were notably more controversial than those he included; as an editor he had provided a dry unprovocative commentary on places, times and people. But Motion, at least in Martin’s view, had assumed the role of sanctimonious bystander, treating many of the finest poems as symptomatic of the poor man’s pitiable state of mind.
In 1996 Martin and Leader were becoming increasingly aware of the other half of Larkin’s story, the part involving the ebullient presence of Kingsley Amis. It was clear that Larkin’s letters to Kingsley were not simply disclosures of his state of mind but one element of a partnership, that for much of their respective lives they had shared a world unique to the two of them.
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