The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  I also knew the Faust legend, because of Gounod and Busoni, and could read Cyrillic, having studied … the original score of Sacre du Printemps … In school essays I would refer to the Mozartian limpidity of Addison’s prose or the Wagnerian rashness of Thomas de Quincey’s, always to find these similitudes questioned by the teacher and derided by the class.

  Derided? One is surprised that he remained unlynched.

  But little Jack’s eye-catching precocities must be seen against a background of deep terror and isolation. In early 1919 Wilson Sr, not yet demobbed, came on a furlough to Carisbrook Street, Manchester, to find his infant son gurgling in his cot – and his wife and daughter lying dead in the same room.

  The Spanish influenza pandemic had struck Harpurbey. There was no doubt of the existence of a God: only the supreme being could contrive so brilliant an afterpiece to four years of unprecedented suffering and devastation.

  Jack grew up ‘weak and unmuscular through having no proper mother’, ‘persecuted or ignored’, ‘a lone walker-home’ from school, ‘a mere household animal’, with a distant stepmother and ‘a mostly absent drunk who called himself a father’. Burgess claims to ‘resent nothing’ and to ‘feel no self-pity’, but there is an intelligible bitterness in his iterations. The key moment, perhaps, comes very early on, with recurring nightmares that were never adequately comforted, never assuaged. ‘After so much public horror, what was a mere child’s nightmare?’

  The childhood, then, was emotionally sparse or lopsided, yet it was also crammed with anarchical life. Twenties Manchester, as evoked in these early pages, is even more exotic than Fifties Malaya and Brunei (where the book ends). This is the world of Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, and tobacco ‘called Baby’s Bottom (smooth as a)’, the world of five-course breakfasts, tenpenny bottles of Médoc, forty-year courtships and everyday incest, rape and murder.

  Throughout his education Jack Wilson was always wondering what to do with his impossible intelligence, his impossible energy and will. Huge autodidactic projects are routinely undertaken in the ragged margins of daily life. As a private in the army he boldly encounters many a thug and brute, and somehow manages to avoid getting his head kicked off – perhaps because his bedside copy of Finnegans Wake was ‘generally supposed to be a codebook’. ‘I had composed one Sunday, in the intervals of reading Hemingway’s Fiesta in German, a setting of a song by Lorca …’ The reader is himself reduced to the status of a scowling squaddy, as Burgess swans imperturbably on, with his panoptic suavity, his chuckling insouciance, his word-perfect putdowns. Even fist-fights (frequent occurrences, one imagines) ‘bored’ him, what with his mind being on higher things. This is autobiography of the total-recall school; and Burgess’s war, while reasonably soft, was unbelievably long.

  All work and no play would have made Jack a dull boy. But Jack played hard too: an epic drinker, ‘an eighty-a-day man’ on the snout, and, it would seem, a remorseless puller of the women. In this last activity he was assisted by a seigneurial attitude towards domestics, traditional female generosity in wartime, a first wife who espoused and practised free love, and a typically recondite ploy for delaying climax: ‘it was a matter of reciting Milton inly – “High on a throne of royal state …” (Paradise Lost, Book Two).’

  One would hesitate to connect Burgess’s erotic prowess with his literary heft, but the two appear to be intimately linked. When he goes out to teach at ‘the Eton of the East’, he busily compares the bedroom skills of the Chinese as against the Malayans; but his insatiability, here as elsewhere, is an attempt at synthesis, at topology. His women are pillow dictionaries. And in between sessions he is composing his Sinfoni Melayu (‘which tried to combine the musical elements of the country into a synthetic language which called on native drums and xylophones’) or translating Eliot (‘Bulan April ia-lah bulan yang dzalim sa-kali’). Burgess may swank exasperatingly at times, but his book’s only real boast is in its subtitle, with its hi to Rousseau. Even this might be allowed as a necessary elevation in an age when the autobiography, as a form, has become little more than the pension-book of politicians and actors.

  Jack Wilson’s greatest project was Anthony Burgess. Like all writers he had to systematize a self; he had to cobble something together out of his admitted shortcomings (coldness, coarseness, sharp appetites) as well as his manifest and superabundant natural gifts. The man who emerges is a composite glued together by energy – or ‘holding energy’, as physicists say. His eyesight has always been rocky CI once entered a bank in Stratford-on-Avon and ordered a drink’); his grip on Newtonian reality has always been contingent (‘occasionally I see the impossibility of walking and have to stumble to a bench’); and his spiritual dreads have been lifelong and omnipresent. But he has built many mansions with this peculiar house of cards:

  I am poised till I die between fear of the cardboard darkness of the stockroom and the terror of space. I wanted the free limitations of my own skull and a world I could build with a pencil. I have not changed much since 1925.

  Observer February 1987

  Shorter Shrift

  The Malcontents by C.P. Snow

  Authors ought generally to be praised for writing about people who are remote from their own lives. Such transsexual novels as Angus Wilson’s Late Call and Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net, for instance, show us what the imagination can do without the corroboration of experience. The factual-autobiographical basis of C.P. Snow’s eleven-book sequence, Strangers and Brothers, has long been recognized, and it is often hinted – sometimes petulantly – that this must tend to make the work less literary, more historical. In his latest novel, however, Snow has gone and written about the young – the dissident, relevant young – and without Lewis Eliot’s helpfully conjunctivitic eyes to see them through.

  The story is brisk enough, and Snow tells it in his effortful but competent style. Seven provincial subversives, who call themselves the ‘core’, manage to frame a Shadow Minister via a local case of Rachmanism. But there’s a leak (a traitor in their midst, etc.), one of them dies misadventurously, prosecution looms, their plans and aspirations disintegrate.

  This is all very well, and doubtless The Malcontents will be noticed quite generously by reviewers as old, or nearly as old, or possibly even older, than Snow himself. But the younger reader is sure to be embarrassed by Snow’s cluelessness. This is not invidious. Any teenager who wrote a supposedly naturalistic novel about an old-people’s home that had jukeboxes and pinball machines flanking its aisles would also have to steel himself for a fairly cool press.

  For example: when the core convenes there are ‘Greetings, hallo and hi: some used the American style by now.’ In all fairness, ‘now’ is January 1970, so Snow isn’t more than a couple of decades out. Nor is it just a question of surface; the pacing gets tripped up, too. During a party in which LSD is being doled out, one of the boys, Bernard, wanders out of a fifth-floor window. The protagonists spend a lot of time musing about whether someone might have spiked his beer with acid (thus perhaps giving Bernard the impression that he could fly), but finally dismiss the idea as too fantastic to be true. Unless they had spent their university lives entirely behind drawn blinds they’d have dismissed it instantly as far, far too corny to be true. If the publicity were anything to go by, you would barely be able to step into the street nowadays without seeing some drug-crazed youngster being hosed off the pavement.

  Two of the core are girls; one is caricatured, the other idealized. Also, there’s Neil, the very personification of a class-embittered Angry; Lance, the very personification of a druggy, foppish dabbler in revolt; and poor Bernard, the very personification of an austere Jewish intellectual. Snow’s main concern, though, is with Stephen and Mark, especially Stephen. (These young gentlemen, of course, are not at the local university, but on vac from Cambridge.) They’re not interested in demonstrations and unworkable ideologies so much as in trying genuinely to improve the quality of life – not unlike the young Snow, one imagines. As
people they are about as real as the polo-necked smoothies who pout at you from the book’s cover, but it must be said that through them Snow manages to locate and examine a suggestive assortment of motives and dialectic.

  Mark describes Stephen’s social concern as follows: It’s a kind of love.’ Probably, Snow’s portrait of Stephen is based on the raffish view that no decent social democrat wasn’t a bit of a revolutionary in his youth. Towards the end, however, when Stephen realizes that he has been saved from prosecution by the very worst aspects of the system and has to choose whether to reincriminate himself by giving evidence for the victimized Neil – then rationalizes his motives for doing so – all this is compassionately and intelligently observed. And, despite the howlers, one can only continue to admire Snow’s tolerance and honesty, and his eloquence when writing about the possibilities of doing good and the difficulties of behaving well.

  The book ends up telling us more about growing old than it tells us about being young. ‘Neither he nor the others could project themselves into their middle age. They couldn’t predict the nostalgias, the regressions, even the pathos, that might be waiting for them.’ This is well said, and it is a pity when the projection doesn’t work the other way either.

  Observer July 1972

  The Malacia Tapestry by Brian Aldiss

  Established science-fiction writers have a habit of getting bored with their genre – sometimes out of frank debility, more often out of ambition and a sense of critical neglect. One defector, Kurt Vonnegut, says that until critics learn to differentiate between SF and a WC he ‘wants out’. Brian Aldiss has been wanting out for some years now: apart from his priapic autobiographical sequence (The Hand-Reared Boy and A Soldier Erect – with more to come), he has recently produced a critical history of SF (Billion-Year Spree) and two uneasily upmarket fantasies, Frankenstein Unbound and The 80-Minute Hour. The Malacia Tapestry is Aldiss’s longest watertread in the mainstream to date, and by now, I’m afraid, the lifeguards are getting nervous.

  Malacia is a Byzantine city-state in a suspended, never-never pre-Renaissance resembling in flavour – with its mountebanks, hucksters and soothsayers – the Venice of Jonson’s Volpone. Mind you, it is not an historical world but an alternate one, certain SF aspects being ornamentally retained in the form of fabulous beasts and nude girls who can fly about in the air. All this, strictly, is lumber, since everything ‘new’ in the book could simply be retranslated into standard historical-novel terms: calling elephants ‘mangonels’, for instance, is not that much eerier than calling them elephants. The only things about Malacian society that turn out to matter to the action are its repressiveness and its decadence, which, as well as dramatizing ‘the conflicts and contradictions of our own day’ (true, 0 blurb), allows Mr Aldiss to offer what he wouldn’t dare conventionally attempt: not just an historical romance but a romantic historical romance.

  Stripped of its intermittently vivid background, the book is a sentimental study of the education of its hero, Perian de Chirolo – and, if I may lean on Perian’s punning style, The Malacia Tapestry could unfussily be retitled Tom Cojones and left at that. De Chirolo, a raffish scaramouche, is a terrible ‘one’ for the girls; and, although morals are quite exacting in Malacia, his battery of racy quibbles, oniony innuendoes, lugubrious quatrains (Dear Bedalar, of all the girls I have laid, Yours is the music …’, etc.) and energetic feelings-up seldom misses.

  Perian’s tragedy, however, is that he subscribes to such modern ills as the double standard, socio-sexual self-betterment, male chauvinism and indifference to the plight of the working-class sex object. On these points Mr Aldiss sorts Perim out as thoroughly as his fondness for the character will permit, and we leave the young actor in an adulterous embrace, as he resolves to join the ‘Progressive’ movement mañana.

  Bewilderingly trite though all this is, the book might have been rescued by some non-trite prose – something to which Mr Aldiss is not a stranger. But you don’t evoke a sense of other-worldliness by having people say ‘mayhap’ every so often, or by such exotic remarks as Perian’s ‘I was without a single denario to my name.’ Similarly, the book’s nagging bawdy is not sensitized by phrases like ‘reaching for the scrumptious mounds of her breasts’ and ‘my eyes stood out like her nipples’. Genre fiction is, very broadly, idea fiction, and what distinguishes it from the mainstream is for the most part a question of pace. To make the switch you must, first of all, slow down. Mr Aldiss did not slow down for The Malaria Tapestry. It shows.

  Observer July 1976

  The Rock Pool by Cyril Connolly

  Cyril Connolly had powerful disqualifications for writing a good novel. A bored hedonist, francophile in his literary tastes, Latinate in his style (a seeker of wisdom, a brooder on greatness): here was a man, you would think, who had every incentive to stick to book chat, belles-lettres and Sunday journalism. And yet The Rock Pool (1936), Connolly’s first book and his one and only novel, is full of low human comedy and pretty well free of pretension. More remarkably still, it has not dated. Genially aware of his own infirmities, Connolly cast himself in an anti-heroic mould, and made his aspirations the stuff of weary, regretful satire.

  Edgar Naylor, 26, with a tiny private income, snobbish, defensive and cautiously lustful, arrives in Trou-sur-Mer, a low-bohemian shanty town on the Cote d’Azur peopled by drunken artistes manqués, rapacious caterers and cosmopolitan lesbians with names like Toni, Dicky and Duff. Cruising into town with an air of anthropological detachment, Naylor gradually and helplessly finds his own level in Trou’s murky rock pool.

  During the early pages, Connolly is doing what all novelists have to do: he is finding a voice, and a way to interpret the voices of other people. Still, it is a shaky start by any standards, with many a reflexive cliché (‘moody silence’, ‘a grip of iron’) and factotum adjective (‘charming’, ‘pleasant’). Connolly also reveals what appears to be an anti-knack for catching human speech. Americans say ‘gee’ and ‘swell’ all the time. Did yu raow? Did you reide?’ asks an English poseur. And to render Naylor’s nervous pomposity Connolly hits upon the laborious trick of stringing his words together, like so: ‘it’s one of the rudest things that’s ever happened to me in my life’. This mannerism is abandoned more or less for good after the first chapter; it is evidence, perhaps, of Connolly’s well-attested indolence that he never went back and tidied up. From here on, following Naylor’s first hangover, the novel steadies, and goes on to chart with grisly verve Naylor’s thoroughly merited decline. Connolly says at the outset that his hero is ‘neither very intelligent nor especially likeable’ – a dud, in fact, who might pass himself off as a ‘character’ in Trou. It is a precise irony, well caught by Connolly, that communities of this kind, supposedly full of outrageous dropouts and bohos, are packed with variegated bores who show nothing but a fierce and brilliant talent for self-preservation.

  Yet Naylor fails to shine even here. Rooked, duped and dumped, he finds that his unattractiveness, like his Englishness, hangs on him like damp clothing: ‘Sonia took one look at his long empty face. She felt for the first time the proximity of some ancient enemy of youth and spirit, and moved quietly away.’ His popularity – his pitiable notoriety, even – lasts as long as his money. Thereafter Naylor teams up with the only comparably unattractive personage in Trou – Ruby, a deluded American drunk of exemplary squalor. In the last pages, trying to make friends over a free drink, Naylor is taken for just another’ English bum. But then he was that all along.

  The Rock Pool is a short, slight, funny novel, altogether an agreeable surprise. Connolly’s rather cumbrous erudition is held in check most of the time, with only occasional signs of strain: feathery reeds are as ‘sad and insubstantial as a Chinese poem’, Nice is ‘dowdy and romantic, like Offenbach’, a girl has the pagan aura of ‘a verse of Meleager’ – and so on. These perceptions are half-attributed to Naylor, but there are many passages which are too elaborate, too aphoristic, too good to be shrugged off in this w
ay. The Rock Pool was originally intended as part of a triptych, three studies of English snobbery and hopelessness, and this might account for the odd twinge of ironic imbalance.

  Why only the one novel? What was the enemy of Connolly’s promise? Peter Quennell, in his introduction, echoes Connolly’s apprehension that he was ruined by too much fiction-reviewing: he knew all the larks, and he knew them all too well. Such truth as there is in this theory relates only to Connolly’s limited store of intellectual energy or creative brashness. Pointed nearer the truth, I think, is the precept that a novelist needs to be unsophisticated, childish, even rather obtuse and naive. Connolly was, in his criticism, in his tremulous pensées, in his editorializing for Horizon, often transparent, foppish and vague. But no one could have accused him of innocence.

  Observer November 1981

  Words of Advice by Fay Weldon

  Success is well known to be a risky business for writers: sometimes the mere fact of social mobility is enough to maroon a talent. In America, of course, acclaimed novelists can repair to fortresses girdled by moats and electric fences. In England, they don’t have the cash – but they get to know people who do. Fay Weldon’s novels have so far moved pretty confidently up the social scale. From the girls-together scruffiness of The Fat Woman’s Joke and Down Among the Women, she has progressed via the TV-executive and career-person stratum of Female Friends to the stockbroker suburbia of Remember Me. In this, her fifth novel, Miss Weldon finally strikes it rich, and is ushered into the presence of her first millionaire.

  Her first millionairess, too, naturally. Miss Weldon’s world has always been assertively, almost parodistically, matriarchal; she writes as if men had the pretty little heads: when things happen, you may be sure that the women are the puppeteers. Hamish is our puppet millionaire: an aged plant-tub tycoon, ensconced in a country house of sprawling vulgarity, he remains the befuddled pawn of his wife, Gemma, a sterile but artful empress who has long been crippled by psychosomatic paraplegia. Their principal houseguest is handsome, forty-ish Victor. A go-getting antique dealer, he too remains the venal, guilt-soaked plaything of his abandoned wife on the one hand and, on the other, of his buxom ingenue mistress, eighteen-year-old Elsa, who accompanies him on his acquisitive visit to the Hamish mansion. As is the case with most fictional millionaire’s houseparties, the weekend features a good deal of intrigue, social humiliation and exhaustive sexual interplay. Everyone, more or less, insults, betrays and sleeps with everyone else.