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

by Martin Amis

  The author’s original title for Hannibal was, apparently, The Morbidity of the Soul. Well, somebody must have had a word with him about that, and they whittled it down (probably via stuff like Hannibal and the Soul’s Morbidity and Morbidity, the Soul and Hannibal) to Hannibal, under the cover strap line (in the English edition), THE RETURN OF HANNIBAL LECTER. Now, it was an appealing notion that the serial-killer subculture – that fraternity of sweating mutes and blood-spattered inverts – should boast a lone highbrow: Hannibal, the rogue shrink, the Camus of carnage, who, I repeat, rips people up for the hell of it. But there has been a reckless reconfiguration here. A minor character in Red Dragon and an ensemble player in The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal owns Hannibal. And the consequences, of which Harris seems only dimly aware, are seismic. They force our fuddled novelist into a change of tone, a change of style, and a change of genre.

  As Hannibal opens Lecter is at large, and we catch up with him in Florence, where, ridiculously (and also boringly, therefore), he is ‘translator and curator of the Capponi Library’. And shouldn’t that ‘of’ be ‘at’? Or does Lecter translate the library as well as look after it? It’s possible: although Lecter created the vacancy by murdering the incumbent, ‘once the way was clear he won the job fairly, demonstrating to the Belle Arti Committee an extraordinary linguistic capability, sight-translating medieval Italian and Latin from the densest Gothic black-letter manuscripts’. We see him wowing an audience of world-class scholars with a lecture that has taken him ‘a little more than three minutes to organize’. Sample brilliancy: ‘Avarice and hanging, then, linked since antiquity, the image appearing again and again in art.’ The infallible Hannibal, by the way, thinks that the plural of ‘imago’ is ‘imagi’. He’s only human. Or is he? Meanwhile, with much heaving and clanking, the plot is preparing Lecter’s ‘reception committee’ (the man-eating hogs) on the island of Sardinia. Drunk on the tears of African-American orphans, and bent on revenge for an earlier maiming at Lecter’s hands, Mason Verger will want ‘a ringside seat’ when Hannibal is thrown to the reception committee.

  Back in Florence, Hannibal goes about his business. You might glimpse him in the Teatro Piccolomini (‘a baroque jewel box of gilt and plush’), looking down ‘from a high box, alone, immaculate in white tie, his face and shirtfront seeming to float in the dark box framed by gilt baroque carving’. At home, wearing ‘a quilted silk dressing gown’, ‘elegant, straight-backed’, he sits at an ‘ornate clavier’: ‘He plays with his eyes closed. He has no need of the sheet music.’ The melody ‘vibrates to silence in the great room’. ‘Crossing the great hall he has no need of light. A puff of air as Dr Hannibal Lecter passes us. The great door creaks …’ The Capponi Library’s unique collection of ancient documents gives Lecter the chance to investigate his genealogy; noted forebears include Bevisangue and Machiavelli. ‘While he had a certain abstract curiosity about the matter, it was not ego-related.’ Everyone else’s ego, of course, is measurable by conventional means, but Lecter’s ‘ego, like his intelligence quota, and the degree of his rationality; is not measurable by conventional means’.

  A couple of murders later, the plot puts Lecter on a jumbo jet to Detroit. Harris draws our attention to the poor quality of airline food – particularly bad in economy, where our felon is compelled to ride. Lecter cannot and will not eat ‘this sorry fare’, ‘this airline swill’. From beneath the seat in front of him he produces a lunchbox acquired from Fauchon, the Paris caterers, containing ‘wonderfully aromatic truffled pâté de foie gras, and Anatolian figs still weeping from their severed stems’. He also has ‘a half-bottle of a St Estephe he favors. The silk bow yields with a whisper …’ After landing in Detroit, Lecter heads south and promptly equips himself with a nice house, a black Jag, a gourmet pantry, an arsenal, and a late-eighteenth-century Flemish harpsichord. We can tell he is settling in: ‘Late in the night, his lips stained by the red Château Pétrus, a small crystal glass of honey-colored Château d’Yquem on his candle stand, Dr Lecter plays Bach.’

  By now, I think, it should be clear that Lecter is of that stratospheric breed of men to whom the world is but a gout of pulp, infinitely pliable to their wants and whims. He is (in other words) that awesome presence, a European aristocrat. Supercapable, he has ‘no need’ of this and ‘no need’ of that. In fact, he has no need of ‘need’: Given the choice, he – and Harris – prefer to say ‘require’. Dr Lecter doesn’t really care how aristocratic he is because ‘Dr Lecter does not require conventional reinforcement’. Out buying weapons – or rather, out ‘purchasing’ weapons – he tells the knife salesman, ‘I only require one.’ Why, I haven’t felt such a frisson of sheer class since I last heard room service say ‘How may I assist you?’ And when Lecter is guilty of forgetfulness he says ‘Bother!’ – not ‘Shit’ or ‘Fuck’ like the rest of us. It’s all in the details.

  Lecter’s pedigree is unscrolled about halfway through. His mother, although ‘highborn’ (Italian, ‘a Visconti’), belongs to a line that sprang out of nowhere in the twelfth century. But Lecter’s father was a Lithuanian count, ‘title dating from the tenth century’. That’s 900 and something: only a millennium ago. Why not the third century? Why not the tenth century BC? In any case the back story turns out to be a useful prop-shifter in Harris’s morality play. ‘Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened,’ Lecter told Clarice, bracingly, in The Silence of the Lambs: ‘You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.’ Clarice can’t – but Harris can. Lecter, it transpires, was traumatized as a child. German panzers retreating from Russia shelled the Lecter estate, killing ‘both parents and most of the servants’. Then young Hannibal’s sibling, Mischa, was dragged off by starving soldiers. That will cut you some slack, won’t it, having your little sister eaten by Nazis? And Harris craves our indulgence for this troubled blueblood, killer (by my reckoning) of eighteen, in his journey from villain to hero. Lecter, after all, has to deserve to get the girl.

  The bloating of the Lecter figure entails, or is at any rate accompanied by, the shrivelling of Clarice Starling. Throughout, Harris writes about her without the faintest quickening of authorial love; having gone gay for Hannibal, the author has palpably wearied of Clarice, whose main function in this novel is one of humble plot-furtherance. Look at the chores he gives her (‘A chrome padlock and chain secured the gate. No sweat there. Starling looked up and down the road. Nobody coming. A little illegal entry here’), look at the perceptions he coarsely saddles her with (‘[The woman’s] cornsilk hair had receded enough to make Starling wonder if she took steroids and had to tape her clitoris down’), look at the jokes he has her crack (‘Paul, I have to tell you, the Apostle Paul … hated women too. He should have been named Appal’). Following the riot of paceless implausibilities that serves as the book’s climax, Hannibal and Clarice ecstatically elide. What is the more incredible, at this point: that Clarice should actually go off with the murdering bastard or that Hannibal would cross the street for such a charmless little rube? (It’s hard to think what woman would be capable of diverting Hannibal for more than five seconds. Mata Hari? Baroness Orczy? Catherine the Great?) By exchanging a few platitudes, the two orphans succeed in ‘curing’ each other. Then comes the moment with the firelight ‘dancing in the golden wine’ – and the sub-Faulkner high style of a strong man quaking over his ThinkPad. Let’s see if I can bear to type this out (note, towards the end, the Joycean word-ordering)

  ‘Hannibal Lecter, did your mother feed you at her breast?’ … Clarice Starling reached her cupped hand into the deep neckline of her gown and freed her breast, quickly peaky in the open air. ‘You don’t have to give up this one,’ she said. Looking always into his eyes with her trigger finger she took warm Château d’Yquem from her mouth and a thick sweet drop suspended from her nipple like a golden cabochon [some kind of gem] and trembled with her breathing.

  He came swiftly from his chair to her, went on a knee before her chair, and bent to her coral and cream in the firel
ight his dark sleek head.

  We last glimpse the ‘handsome couple’ three years later, in Buenos Aires. Handel’s Tamerlane is playing at the Teatro Colón. Jewels ‘winked’. A Mercedes Maybach ‘whispered to the curb’. You’ll have to stop minding about the tenses here, because Harris switches freely from past to present, sometimes in the same paragraph. During intermission in their ‘ornate box’, ‘the gentleman took a champagne flute from a waiter’s tray and handed it to the lady …’ And after the show the Mercedes ‘purrs’ off and ‘disappears into the courtyard of an exquisite Beaux Arts building near the French Embassy’. How does it go for them – for Count and Countess Lecter? Us scum, of course, are given only a few tantalizing glimpses. Clarice often talks Italian at mealtimes (‘She finds a curious freedom in the visual nuances of the language’). Hannibal is committed to the daily ‘penetration of Clarice Starling, which she avidly welcomes and encourages’. Ah, but now Harris tastefully withdraws, murmuring in gnomic valediction, ‘We can only learn so much and live.’ In The Silence of the Lambs, when Clarice began her interviews with the caged cannibal, the National Tattler, that vicious slur-sheet, called her the ‘BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN!!’ It is a symmetry, of a sort, that Harris should work himself around to giving that headline flesh.

  ‘Beautifully written … the webs of imagery that Harris has so carefully woven … contains writing of which our best writers would be proud … there is not a single ugly or dead sentence …’ – or so sang the critics. Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences – unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as ‘Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler’ or ‘Eric Pickford answered’ or ‘Pazzi worked like a man possessed’ or ‘Margot laughed in spite of herself’ or ‘Bob Sneed broke the silence’. What these commentators and literary ed must be thinking of, I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre), or when, with a fugitive poeticism, he swoons us into a dying fall: ‘Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever and composed herself …’ ‘It seemed forever ago …’ ‘He looked deep, deep into her eyes …’ ‘His dark eyes held her whole …’ Needless to say, Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose.

  With the change of genre, from procedural thriller to gothic fantasy, all internal coherence is lost. That this loss has been widely indulged and even welcomed by the critics is perhaps not very surprising, because vanished coherence is also a feature of the world of the literary middleman. There is a levelling impulse at work. To put it simply, the book-chat mediocrities have had it with the hierarchy of the talents. In promoting the genre novelist (Tom Wolfe is another candidate, though a much worthier one), they demote his mainstream counterpart, and doing this has long been their pleasure and solace. Meanwhile, the general reader can I think be trusted to tire of the new Lecter and sense the tawdriness of the snobbo sadist with his smoking jacket, his ascot, and his sneer of cold command.

  It is additionally intriguing to see Harris touted as a populist, championing the honest demand for a good read. Because in Hannibal he severs himself from the commonalty, and it is precisely this severance that has demolished his talent. Moving through the crowd, Lecter ‘presses a scented handkerchief to his face’, and so, these days, does Harris. Lecter squirms in the purgatory of the 747, and so does Harris, grossed out by the snarling tourist, the whining child, the reeking baby. ‘Look at this crowd,’ he writes (the scene is ‘The Mid-Atlantic Regional Gun and Knife Show’): ‘scruffy, squinty, angry, egg-bound, truly of the resinous heart’. (Vintage Harris: what does ‘of the resinous heart’ mean, truly, and what does ‘egg-bound’ even think it means?) The author of Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs would have looked at that crowd and told us interesting things about it. Harris has relinquished the connection – the line that connects him and us and Clarice Starling and the girl on the porcelain slab. So maybe it all works out in the end. Only by turning his back on the vulgar could Thomas Harris write a novel of such profound and virtuoso vulgarity.

  Talk September 1999

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Life

  Nabokov: His Life in Part by Andrew Field

  Writers are now accorded their biographies whether or not anything ever happened to them, on the principle – and surely it is a long-exploded one – that such studies help explain why they wrote what they wrote. E.M. Forster, for instance, whose ninety-one years were chiefly remarkable for being utterly devoid of incident, is the current beneficiary of a two-volume life – and a life that will no doubt be rewritten many times.

  But things did happen to Vladimir Nabokov, and this fact is among the pleasing eccentricities of the present book. His was a life of quixotic, almost novelettish, glamour, often farcical, often tragic, often (and this is a genre more appropriate to his fiction) sublime. Nabokov, of course, regarded cliché as the key to bad art, yet it is an attractive irony that bad art is what his life so frequently resembles. His first biographer frequently abets this impression – though the bad art Mr Field aspires to is not the cheap romance so much as the expensive psychological ‘dialogue’.

  Nabokov’s family was one of the most opulent in pre-revolutnary Russia: wealthy, ancient, aristocratic (Mr Field goes on at surreal length about all this), and so talented that anything short of national celebrity would have classified any Nabokov as a dunce and a sluggard. The author’s grandfather was Minister of Justice under tsars Alexander II and III. His household was cultured, serious, enlightened: ‘it was French at the table, English in the nursery, and Russian elsewhere’. Nabokov’s father, a prominent liberal in the Provisional Government (and especially disliked by Trotsky), was so ‘European’ that he sent his shirts to London to be laundered.

  Count Tolstoy tousled the young Vladimir’s hair. Mandelstam gave readings at his school. While in his teens, Nabokov inherited an independent fortune of one million roubles. He had some poems privately printed and began to chase girls, becoming something of a man about St Petersburg. His older hussar-poet friends were already eagerly getting killed in the White Army.

  Bolshevik troops fired at the boat in which Nabokov and family fled the Crimea in 1919. They never returned. From the affluence of unfallen Russia, the Nabokovs uncomplainingly accepted the trite privations of exile. Vladimir had three years, and several more romances, at Trinity College, Cambridge (Mr Field is desperately uncertain of his tone in this chapter), before leaving for the émigré mecca, Berlin. It was here that Nabokov’s father was shot dead at a meeting, as he attempted to shield his political rival from an anarchist’s bullet.

  Here, too, Nabokov set about writing his Russian novels, earning a living as a tutor: his subjects, characteristically, were English, French, boxing, tennis and prosody. He married a Russian Jewess, Vera Evseevna, the dedicatee of all his novels, who now survives him in Montreux. They lived as quietly as one could in Weimar Germany (the world of Herr Issyvoo et al. Nabokov describes as ‘the acme of vulgarity’). Jews were being terrorized and beaten up in the streets by the time the Nabokovs moved on, in disgust and some fear, to Paris in 1937. Nabokov’s brother Sergei, a homosexual, later died in a Nazi concentration camp.

  In Paris Nabokov’s reputation started to grow beyond émigré cliques, which were anyway dispersing by this time. There was much insecurity and bickering, and if people behaved badly Nabokov tended to challenge them to duels. Joyce heard him give a talk, and they had an inconclusive meeting. The Wehrmacht, however, had followed them from Germany. It was only an unsolicited ‘loan’ from Rachmaninov that allowed the Nabokovs to flee, yet again, as France fell. They sailed to America on the last Jewish-organized relief ship; the name of Nabokov’s father (he was a famous foe of anti-Semitism) probably secured their berths. In America, the émigrés became mere immigrants, and they struggled. Academic and literary success accrued gradually. After the somewhat hesitant appearance of Lolita (its English publication wa
s evidently discussed in Cabinet), the Nabokovs repaired to their luxurious twilight in a hotel on Lac Léman – where the book ends.

  It begins there too, for this is no tamely sequential biography. Mr Field opens with a longish, first-hand evocation of the aged Nabokovs ensconced in their Montreux hotel. The sketch is raffishly new-journalistic in style, tricked out in bold type, with Field trying hard to be elliptical and sly and generally Nabokovian. But the chapter has a genuine if fortuitous charm. Nabokov himself comes over engagingly enough – affectionate, mercurial, a compulsive tipper of the hotel staff, powerfully anxious about ‘how things will look’ in Mr Field’s probing opus.

  The real fun, though, resides in the spectacle of Field being shoved round the board by the old Grandmaster. Every now and then Field realizes Nabokov is twitting him, and sulkily admits that he sulked about it at the time. On other occasions, however, he is simply the chronicler of his own obtuseness. My favourite example involves the discussion of a rumour (later discredited in the text) that Nabokov’s father was the product of a grand-maternal fling with Tsar Alexander II. ‘Yes, sometimes I feel the blood of Peter the Great in me,’ says Nabokov, as the biographer’s Grundig whirrs credulously on.

  ‘Do you know this man now?’ Field asks in his cute ‘Conclusion’. No, not really. But it’s a start: you certainly get more of the man from Mr Field’s pages than you get from Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s deliberately oblique and stylized autobiography. At one point in Chapter 1 Nabokov mildly insults Mr Field over some aspect of his procedure. Field then observes: ‘There are ways (and I am not thinking now of his many virtues and attributes) in which I am too much like Vladimir Nabokov to judge him.’ Perhaps it’s just as well that Nabokov had this brooding, self-satisfied presence as the receptacle for his official confidences. Anyone else would have been a nervous wreck within half an hour. Nabokov: His Life in Part performs a service, if only as a pre-emptive strike. It is bold and enthusiastic, and, despite Field’s best efforts, seldom very boring.