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

by Martin Amis

  Where, then, do we look for our next Motivator, the next candidate for the prime time and the valium? According to the Voice of Sport – I mean, The Sun’s Frank Clough – the ‘people’s choice’ is Brian Clough, who is no relation According to Brian Glanville on the Sunday Times, it is Jack Charlton – an extraordinary finding. Charlton, I suppose, has a head start on his rivals, in that he already suffers from onomastic aphasia, and keeps getting all the players’ names wrong. But what else has Jack got going for himself? The main thing about Charlton, as a figure, as a force, is his reputation for being one of the most ‘physical’ players ever to pull on an England jersey. This is what the people who make the people’s choice must be yearning for: a return to the ‘traditional strengths’ of the English game.

  Brian Clough, of course, is mad already, but he isn’t anything like as mad as he used to be and would perhaps enjoy a certain amount of immunity in the England job. Malcolm Allison, too, went mad some time ago now, when Crystal Palace were relegated twice in successive seasons. The most common reservation about the amiable Bobby Robson concerns one central fear: we hear talk of his ‘excitability’. And as for Mad John Bond of Norwich and Manchester City … It is tempting to conclude that being a football manager drives a man insane. But I still think that this diagnosis is too simple. It’s not being a football manager that drives them mad. It’s going on television that really does it.

  Perhaps, then, we may modestly envision a quieter role for the England manager of the future: more cloistered, more thoughtful, more bookish. Under no circumstances, however, should the Gaffer be left alone with Desmond Morris’s new work: he would almost certainly go mad, or else simply die of inanition. In The Soccer Tribe Morris maps out the connection between ‘ancient blood sports’ and ‘the modern ball game’. Nowadays, the goalmouth is ‘the prey’, the ball ‘the weapon’, and the attempt to score ‘a ritual aim at a pseudo-prey’. Is this true? Or, more important, is this interesting? Morris goes on to say that ‘in England, there are four “divisions”, presenting a parody of the social class system’. He then traces the analogies between football and religion: ‘Star players are “worshipped” by their adoring fans and looked upon as “young gods”.’ Later on, he develops a far more compelling thesis, arguing that …’

  Ah, but the sands of space are running out. That’s enough football for today. I only have time to add that Morris’s book is handsomely packaged, that the pictures are great, magic, brill, etc., and that the text is an austere, an unfaltering distillation of the obvious and the obviously false.

  London Review of Books December 1981

  Among the Thugs by Bill Buford

  Early on in The Silence of the Lambs, when the first victim has been hauled out of the river – a small-town teenage girl, naked, flayed, bloated – and is lying on the coroner’s deck, the author writes: ‘Sometimes the family of man produces, behind a human face, a mind whose pleasure is what lay on the porcelain table.’ Thomas Harris opened up that hidden mind, and made it cohere. In Among the Thugs Bill Buford realizes a similarly alien world. One transgressor acts in a crowd, the other is irreducibly alone, but the thug and the serial murderer have plenty in common: sociopathy, delirium, motivelessness, and an utter dedication to the ugly.

  Every British male, at some time or another, goes to his last football match. It may very well be his first football match. You stay home, thereafter, and watch it on TV. At my last football match, I noticed that the fans all had the complexion and body-scent of a cheese-and-onion crisp, and the eyes of pitbulls. But what I felt most conclusively, above and below and on every side, was ugliness – and a love of ugliness. One day in 1983, Buford found himself in the Shed, at Chelsea, wedged into the solid mass of swearing, sweating, retching, belching humanity. For most of us, this situation would represent a personal catastrophe, to be escaped and recovered from and never repeated. Instead of wanting less, however, Buford wanted more.

  Buford is an American; and, as the creator of Granta, he is, to put it no higher, one of the eminent literary middlemen of his time. I expected Among the Thugs to follow a formula: respectable figure pursues horrible subject in search of the bad time that will make a good book. But such an approach, honourable enough in its way, wouldn’t have worked for the thugs. A natural aversion, not to mention a natural terror, would have set in far too early. Buford was possessed by a genuine fascination, necessarily perverse, and bound up with his own susceptibilities. He began the book because he ‘wanted to know why young males in England were rioting every Saturday’. Answer: because they like it. Buford wrote the book because he liked it, too. He liked the crowd, and the power, and the loss of self.

  Being American helped, as Buford hoped it would. Among the Thugs is full of minor solecisms. (Listen, mate: the top bit’s the bar not the post, and it’s two legs not two games, and you don’t tie the score, and you might say the Fulham Road but you never say the Fulham Broadway. OK?) But as Buford starts sampling the London grounds, we start re-experiencing their squalid exoticism. ‘The Den on Cold Blow Lane opposite the Isle of Dogs.’ Now that’s really good. At first it seems that Buford is taking us nowhere we haven’t already been. But when were we last there? Aren’t we insulated by irony, weariness and disgust? Haven’t we all spent years looking the other way?

  Before you know it, Buford is flying to Turin with the lads of Man U. Abroad, of course, is the place where the football fan sheds his diffidence and starts to come alive. There he stands, in a Renaissance setting, with Union Jack underpants on his head, with the words BRYAN ROBSON tattooed across his brow, stripped to the waist, fat, pale, ankle-deep in sick, menacing the local women and children, peeing into a fountain, singing ‘Fuck the Pope’ and ‘God Save the Queen’, and blind drunk. This is before the match. This is nine o’clock in the morning.

  After the match, the whisper starts making the rounds. ‘It’s going to go off … it’s going to go off.’ Then the chant: United. United. United. United. Buford is in the middle of a tight mob of 200, walking fast but not running, hands on the shoulders of the man in front, moving in on the city. Sammy, the leader, with his personal pack of juvenile sheepdogs, runs backwards down the line intoning: ‘The energy … the energy is very high. Feel the energy.’ Then it goes off: violence, breakage, ecstatic transgression, naturally escalating with every fresh jolt of shattered glass and sickening impact, until Sammy is saying: ‘The city is ours … ours, ours, ours.’ Buford also recalls the words of another lad, as it starts to go off. He said ‘that he was very, very happy, that he could not remember ever being so happy …’

  There is, as they say, a question-mark over Buford’s fitness – his fitness to participate, and then to describe. He cops a full beer-can and a nightstick in Turin, has his head banged against a lamp-post by a National Fronter in Bury St Edmunds, and gets a thorough spanking from the riot police in Sardinia. ‘I will not describe the violence,’ he says, more than once. How much violence did Buford commit, and at whose expense? True, he isn’t in top nick for much of the action: on page 71, for instance, he is ‘very, very drunk’, whereas on page 144 he is merely resolving to get ‘very, very drunk’. And as the book wears on, and the obsession wears out, he is increasingly and understandably ‘bored’, ‘indifferent’, ‘exhausted’. We are allowed only one glimpse of his largely unexplored brutalization, when, on his return from Turin, an elderly couple impede his progress on a staircase in the Underground. He shoves them ‘forcefully’ aside, moves past, turns, and says: ‘Fuck off. Fuck off, you old cunts.’

  At the outset Buford believed that football violence had a cause, or at least an explanation. Protest/rebellion/alienation/class/unemployment/football itself. ‘It’s a religion.’ ‘We do it for England.’ ‘It’s like war.’ Buford turns to Elias Canetti (Crowds and Power) and stylistically to Hemingway, and even, one suspects, to Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now: ‘Nothingness is what you find there in a crowd. Nothingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic pu
rity.’ One by one, though, all the ‘reasons’ fall away. ‘I couldn’t believe’, writes Buford, ‘that what I saw was all there was.’ But he does come to believe it: what he sees is all there is.

  At one point in the late Alan Clarke’s remorseless and masterly TV movie, The Firm, our central football hooligans are lounging around watching a documentary about football hooligans. Why do football hooligans do what they do? ‘It’s a search for meaning,’ says the on-screen sociologist. And one of the lads – Nunky – pitches in: ‘Why don’t he just say we like ittin people?’ Then, to the tune of ‘Here We Go’, the lads start singing: ‘Wank-wank-wank, wank-wank-wank, wank-wank-wank. Wank-wank-wank, wank-wank-wank, wank-wank-wank …’ Why people like hitting people is of course an eternal mystery. Becksie, the top thug in The Firm, is asked this question by his wife: why? ‘I need the buzz,’ he whispers, almost in apology. She replies: ‘Well buy a bloody bee-yive!’ No, a beehive definitely wouldn’t do it – not for Becksie. A beehive wouldn’t help him in his violent struggle with impotence and (above all) with boredom.

  Independent on Sunday October 1991

  * ‘Revie’, in my typescript, was here misprinted as ‘Review’.

  The School of Doyle

  The Biggest Game in Town by A. Alvarez

  Anyone who started sitting down early in life will always be susceptible to the cool ostentation of poker. Stud, check, burn, raise, kick a buck, deuce, lady, freeze out, call, fold, flop: you never get a chance to sound so boastful and cinematic when playing cribbage or canasta. Money, they say, is ‘the language of poker’, but poker-talk has its own fascination too. Like drug-talk or crime-talk, poker-talk is clandestine, male-supremacist and incurably Yankophone, tending towards self-dramatization and heroic monologue. My big poker period was in my teens. Ever tell you about the time I lost my busfare at lowball?

  ‘Ungar broke Bill Smith when he flopped a flush against Smith’s pair of sixes and straight draw …’ A. Alvarez is a lifelong poker addict and a feared member of various schools in London and New York. For the purposes of this vivid little book, however, he doesn’t mess about with his own vicissitudes at the table. He goes straight to the top: to the World Series No Limit Hold ‘Em Championship in Las Vegas.

  We would all be so much better at poker – or at chess, snooker or shove-ha’penny – if we did nothing else the whole time. In Las Vegas, they do nothing else the whole time: twelve hours a day, seven days a week. ‘I feel I’m anteing myself to death,’ says one glazed dude. ‘I’ve already been playing professional for twenty years. In the same game, really. I mean, how long is a poker game?’ The spooks of the Glitter Gulch poker parlours simply play, eat, sleep and occasionally ‘grab a broad’. There are veterans of Binion’s Horseshoe who have never heard of the Vietnam War.

  Such suspension and torpor, as Alvarez explains, are built into the Las Vegas ecology. By 10 a.m., it is too hot for golf or tennis, or even for swimming. Apart from quick marriages, quick food, pornography, prostitutes and pawnshops, the sand-locked town has nothing to offer but hazardry. There are no clocks, no windows; there is no outer reality. On a certain morning in 1976, the banner headline of the Las Vegas Review Journal read ‘DEALERS LOSE TO IRS!’ In the bottom corner was a taciturn paragraph headed ‘Jimmy Carter New Pres.’

  ‘The guy who invented gambling was bright,’ the New York dicer Big Julie once observed, ‘but the guy who invented the chip was a genius.’ Chips are legal tender in Las Vegas, toy money that buys food, drink, sex and goods. By the same self-hypnotic process, bets of a ‘nickel’, a ‘dime’ and a ‘big dime’ translate as bets of $500, $1,000 and $10,000 respectively. Thus, five big-dime bets – five slivers of innocuous plastic – and you’ve lost your house.

  Of course, this conspiracy of cool is a definite plus when it comes to gulling the suckers, the losers, the ‘dogs’ – the troupes of spangled, mink-Stetsoned, blue-rinsed, Big Mac-ravaged punters who hit town every year to surrender their savings, pensions, social-security cheques and disability allowances. Yet the survivors, the million-a-year pirates of the system, are precisely those who connive most thoroughly with the prevailing unreality. As Alvarez makes clear, the true highroller has no concern for money whatever.

  Money is the language of poker, but for the pro that language has no further currency. ‘It is just an instrument, and the only time you notice it is when you run out.’ Similarly, when the highroller makes a killing he quickly blows his winnings on random and ignorant wagers. The 1981 poker champ, Stu Ungar, was asked what he would do with his purse of $375,000. ‘Lose it,’ he yawned. The highrollers exult in their freedom as outsiders, subversives, buckers of the work-and-earn establishment. But they are paralysed in their turn by the psychotic lineaments of their strange talent.

  Las Vegas is an island on the travelogue archipelago, trampled flat by pundits. Alvarez doesn’t always triumph over cliché (‘at those dizzy altitudes’, ‘a stable point in a notoriously shifting world’, ‘glanced furtively’, ‘winked meaningfully’). But The Biggest Game in Town will be scooped up by all poker-players, gamblers, gamesmen, addicts – by all observers of extremes. A man of wide interests, a poet, a scholar, Alvarez is true to his vulgar and vainglorious passion, and so remains undemeaned by it. His book has the heated quirkiness one might expect when the author of The School of Donne turns his attention to the school of Doyle Brunson, Crandall Addington, Puggy Pearson, Byron Cowboy Wolford and Crazy Mike Caro.

  Observer September 1983

  Believe It or Else

  The Guinness Book of Records

  The review notes to this, the eighteenth edition, give a preview of ‘a few items which illustrate the pace at which records seem to get broken’. These items tell us that, among other things, the pickled-onion-consumption record has been smashed, a nonagenarian golfer has holed in one, and that a celebrated Copenhagen toad probably isn’t fifty-four years old after all. Also, a world’s-fattest-goalkeeper record was set as long ago as c. 1900 and has, presumably, just come to light. I see here the beginnings of a stimulating cross-fertilizing process between the existing categories. I look forward next year to hearing about America’s tallest bungalow, London’s least-patronized restaurant, the world’s most fertile librarian, and so on.

  The GBOR is a revamped yearbook, and obviously Guinness Superlatives Ltd have urgent reasons for trying to give the impression that it’s all their staff can do to keep up. But if new records are thin on the ground there are always new fields in which fresh records can get established. The respective worlds of competitive omelette-cooking, pram-pushing, smoke-ring-blowing, pub-crawling, and face-slapping have been pretty well revolutionized since last October, and you can now get the definitive word on the biggest totem-pole, the earliest-recorded slipped disc, and the world’s most well-travelled typewriter. And this edition is much bigger than the last one. Its 320 pages are bulked out by an expanded Sports chapter (complete with the long-awaited Beagling and Gaelic Football sections), and all the facts in the book are much more conscientiously documented. There is, actually, a certain scholarly prolixity which fills out the paragraphs very nicely: a 200 IQ rating ‘has been attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) of Frankfurt-am-Main, West Germany’. They mean Goethe.

  Nevertheless, the book is nicely put together and handsomely illustrated, and it is probably worth replacing any earlier edition you might already possess, especially if it has Chester Dufort, or whoever, clocking 95 mph as the new land-speed record. Also, much of the attraction of this book consists of quite incidental information, put in irresistibly mysterious form:

  If the age of the Earth is likened to a single year, Handy Man arrived at about 8.35 p.m. on 31 December, Britain’s earliest inhabitants arrived at 11.32, the Christian era began 13 seconds before midnight.

  In Chinese, the fourth tone of ‘I’ has 84 meanings, varying as widely as ‘dress’, ‘hiccough’, and ‘licentious’.

  Furthermore, it would be dishonest to deny th
e remarkable believe-it-or-else compulsion of this durable series. Every superlative in the book does something towards increasing one’s conception (there is – unfortunately – no other way of putting it) of what being Homo sapiens entails. This applies most directly to ‘The Human Being’, the first section, which I always read with annually renewed horror and fascination. Here there are few breakthroughs, except for the recent discovery of a new world-class giantess. I see that Hopkin Hopkins (31 in.) is still the smallest UK man, and that Bob Hughes is still the world’s fattest, and his coffin, a converted piano-case, still had to be lowered by crane. I see also that the longevity record has come down two years (the compilers complain bitterly about inveterate deceit, dotard vanity, etc.) and is now a disappointing 113.

  Another virtue of this section is that it makes you feel very lithe and well-made. The grotesque regularly stops being funny and starts being sad. Consider these two cases. Max Taborsky, at the age of twenty-one, was 3 ft 10 in.; ten years later he was over seven feet; he was severely weakened and died at the age of fifty-one, having beguiled the intervening years confined to his bed. Nineteen-year-old Calvin Phillips measured twenty-six inches and weighed less than a stone with all his clothes on; he died two years later of progeria, a rare affliction, characterized by ‘dwarfism’ and teenage senility.

  Spectator December 1971

  No Laughing Matter

  The Best of Modern Humour edited by Mordecai Richler

  A sense of humour is a serious business; and it isn’t funny, not having one. Watch the humourless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter. The humourless can programme themselves to relish situations of human farce or slapstick – and that’s about it. They are handicapped in the head, or mentally ‘challenged’, as Americans say (euphemism itself being a denial of humour). The trouble is that the challenge wins, every time, hands down. The humourless have no idea what is going on and can’t make sense of anything at all.