Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  Please write soon, I miss you both terribly,

  All my love,

  Mart x x x

  P.S. Convey my cordial regards to Karen — there are no doleful regrets there because, as far as I can remember, she should be about 9′ 6″ tall by now.

  P.P.S. On [sic] retrospect I consider ‘Middlemarch’ to be FUCKING good — Jane Austen + passion + dimension. Very fine. Love Mart.

  * The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard: my stepmother from 1965 to 1983. My half of this embarrassing correspondence is to be found at the Huntington Library.

  * Kingsley was at this time a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville (‘known, unironically I suppose to some, as the Athens of the South’), Tennessee.

  † ‘Bruce’ was the nickname that, for some reason, my brother and I assigned to Jane’s brother, Colin — a member of the household for many years.

  Rank

  The point about Karen and her being nine-foot-six was that I was then about five-foot-two (and had only another four inches to go). Everyone kept saying to me, ‘You’ll suddenly shoot up’, and, after a while, I kept saying to everyone, ‘What’s all this about me suddenly shooting up? It hasn’t happened.’ I minded being short chiefly because it seemed that about half of womankind was thereby rendered unapproachable. When I was even younger and even shorter I had a girlfriend who was over six-foot-one. We had an unspoken agreement. We never stood upright at the same time. And we never went out. Apart from that it was like a normal relationship, with one other peculiarity: when we lay down on the bed we never quite got into, my feet seemed to be level with Alison’s waist.

  It would be nice to say that I ‘make no apologies’ for my early letters, which will punctuate the first part of this book. But I do: I make fervent apologies for them. And they get worse. It all gets worse. I really am very sorry. The toiling periphrases, the tally-ho facetiousness: this I can forgive. My dismissal of Kafka is ridiculous,* and is only partly counterbalanced by the approximate justice of the PPS — and what was it with me and the word fine? But at least, here, I can recognise myself. Elsewhere this letter seems to have been written by a stranger: I mean its tone of pampered intolerance, its political stupidity; I am repelled by the thought-clichés and unexamined formulations, herd formulations. And there’s also something else. Which I suppose I’ll get to.

  When I arrived at Sussex Tutors, late in 1967, I was just eighteen and coming out of a bottomless adolescent cafard. You remember how it was: it could take you an entire day to transport a single sock from one end of your bedroom to the other. And that day would be a good day. The torpor wasn’t merely physical. I was eighteen and averaging one O-level every other year. The comforting thing was supposed to be that I had a knack for English. I took the A-level, rather precociously, at the age of fifteen or sixteen. And despite the fact that I fell down the stairs in plain view of three hundred young people, half of them girls, as I approached the examination room, I came out of there full of confidence. The difficulties associated with this A-level lark, I said to myself, had been much exaggerated. ‘Martin!’ my mother shouted up the stairs as I lay reeking in bed one morning in a house on the Fulham Road. My mother usually called me Mart. The full Martin was always a … ‘You failed.’ Not even an E. An F.

  The trouble was that I didn’t like working because I had no powers of concentration. Concentration was a fortress it never occurred to me to scale; and I remember gaping through hours of tuition without a thought in my head. I didn’t like working. What I liked was bunking off school and hanging out with my friend Rob and betting in betting shops (not the horses: the dogs) and mincing up and down the King’s Road in skintight velves and grimy silk scarves and haunting a coffee bar called the Picasso, and smoking hash (then £8 an ounce) and trying to pick up girls. One time I said,

  — Let’s go down King’s.

  Rob turned away. I should point out here that Rob was and is about my height.

  — Come on. What’s the matter? We’ll pick up girls.

  — Where? In the Picasso?

  — In the Picasso.

  — I can’t cope with the Picasso. I can hardly cope with being in my room.

  As usual we had smoked ourselves into a state of clinical paranoia.

  — What’s wrong with the Picasso? Okay, we won’t go to the Picasso. We’ll pick up girls somewhere else.

  — Where?

  — Uh, that other place. Beyond the Picasso.

  — But we’ll end up in the Picasso.

  — We won’t go to the Picasso.

  — I always feel such a short-arse in the Picasso.

  — Me too. That’s why we won’t try and pick up girls in the Picasso. Come on.

  — Okay. But I don’t want to end up short-arseing round the Picasso trying to pick up girls.

  But that’s what we would end up doing. Whole school terms went by like this: wondering whether to go to the Picasso. A while later, and very briefly, Rob and I hit the deb scene. It looked good at first but here we faced the giantesses of the gentry. The women were all elongated by centuries of huge meals, and so were all the men, and we felt, we admitted, as if we were walking around between everybody else’s legs.

  Sussex Tutors was the end of the road: my last-gasp saloon. Even I knew that. My secondary education was in tatters. In the course of it I had attended Bishopgore Grammar, in Swansea, Cambridgeshire High School for Boys in the capital of that county, the International School in Palma, Majorca, and Sir Walter St John’s in South London — and then, after the grammars, the crammers, private establishments that allegedly specialised in rescuing the academic careers of public-school dropouts and others, the children of peripatetic, disorganised but always solvent parents. Sussex Tutors was a boarding crammer, intended for extreme cases. I needed four or five more O-levels (including Latin more or less from scratch) and three A-levels with good enough grades to enable me to sit the Oxford Entrance papers in December. I had a year.

  And it had worked, so far. I had worked. The town was arranged like rows of seats around a stage — the sea; and Sussex Tutors, a ramshackle warren that seemed to be all attic, stood on an urban cliff above the pier and the pebbly beach where the breakers flopped and trawled. It was said that the building had once been a nursing home, and it was adjacent to a nursing home and surrounded by other nursing homes. Brighton itself was a nursing home; and on warm days the elderly would be helped or wheeled out on to the terraces and fenced rooftops, tier after tier of candyfloss hair and vague, freckled, upturned faces enjoying the sun and the unvaryingly barbarous wind. I felt like a convalescent, too, after the obscure and wholly passive exertions of adolescence: the headaches, the dizziness, the aching bones. When I arrived in Brighton I was in love — first love. It came, then stayed, then went; having filled me, it then emptied me. I wanted to be in love again, and, of course, every last non-working man-hour was dedicated to the attempt to bring this about, wandering, staring, blushing, longing, waiting. But now at least I was in love with literature — particularly with poetry. I read poetry for days and days. Look out of the window: there are gulls in the sky and I feel sad. I read poetry and I wrote poetry. I was being edified. Was I thereby being improved?

  The nineteen-year-old hero of my first novel was described in one review as ‘both a gilded and a repulsive creature’. I accept this description, for my hero and for myself. I was an Osric. (‘Hamlet: … [Aside to Horatio] Dost know this water-fly?’)* What elicits my hoarsest moan of shame was the plumed and crested manner I vainly tried to cultivate. Private schooling had given me unwonted contact with the children of the rich and grand (one of my fellow pupils at Brighton was the Earl of Caithness, a gangling, gawping figure, and certainly no great ad for the aristocracy). It gave me ideas — which couldn’t and didn’t last long. Martin was the forename of half the England football team; and when I looked up Amis in a dictionary of surnames I was confronted by the following: ‘Of the lower classes, esp. slaves.’


  And after that brief conversation with Kingsley, I knew I had to call the whole thing off.

  — Dad.

  — Yes?

  — Are we nouveau riche?

  1966. We were in the kitchen of 108 Maida Vale, where Kingsley and Jane had set up together. I and my brother were recent additions to the household. We had stopped living with our mother and started living with our father. It was Jane’s initiative. She could see we were both heading for the street … The kitchen was a prosperous one, goodlooking but also potently stocked, it seemed to me, and continually replenished by men in white topcoats. Jane was quite posh, after all, and I felt I had gone up in the world. Naturally I knew that nouveau riche was a bad thing to be, and I complacently awaited my father’s assurance that we were a little bit better than that.

  — Well, he said. Very nouveau. And not at all riche.

  — Dad.

  Thirty years later: the car again, Louis again.

  — Yes?

  — What class are we?

  From the wheel I said ruggedly,

  — We aren’t. We don’t buy that stuff.

  — Then what are we?

  — We’re outside all that. We’re the intelligentsia.

  — Oh, he said, and added in deliberate falsetto: Am I an intellectual?

  — Dad.

  This was number-two son, Jacob, then aged nine.

  — Yes?

  — Why do you say Fridee and Mondee and Thursdee?

  — What do you say? Fri-day and Mon-day?

  — It’s bound to sound stupid if you say it in that voice. And do you say birthdee?

  — Yes. Birthday. Birth-day is what your grandfather would call a spelling pronunciation. Or I suppose you say pronounciation.

  — What’s it mean?

  — A spelling pronunciation is when you follow the spelling and go against the rhythm of the spoken language. Like saying offten instead of offn.

  — Do you say yesterdee? asked Louis.

  — Yes.

  — But you don’t say todee, do you.

  — No. Of course not.

  — And you don’t say dee. What a lovely dee it is.

  — Early the next dee, said Jacob.

  — What dee would suit you?

  — No of course I don’t.

  — Then why do you say Mondee and Fridee and Sundee?

  — Jesus. I trained myself to do it in my teens because I thought it sounded posh.

  — Why d’you do that? asked Louis with sincere puzzlement.

  — Because it used to be cool to be posh.

  His head snapped round.

  — Did it? … Christ…

  Over in Tennessee interesting things were happening to my father, in 1967; but it was of course grimly typical of Osric that he failed to take notice of this. Flip ahead a page or two and see the first paragraph of the next Letter from School: a prose poem of stupefied incuriosity. And how listlessly I shrugged off the chance to visit Nashville during the holiday. I was working, true, and there might have been interviews to attend. And I didn’t want to lose a whole fortnight’s worth of wondering whether to go to the Picasso.

  My father arrived in the South to find the usual streetscape: ‘To evoke it you need not a description but a list, or the mere start of a list, and one that everybody knows.’ He found too that ‘liquor by the drink’ was still state-banned. You brought your own bottle to the bar and ordered a setup: a glass with ice in it. Kingsley goes on: ‘The same rules applied to restaurants, of which there seemed to be only two (in a town of nearly half a million), one providing bad, the other very bad food and service, but united in accepting no bookings.’ Elsewhere, as an Englishman, he was treated like an aristocratic curiosity: ‘ “We have another gentleman from Britain with us tonight,” [said the chairman], displaying the modest pride of a provincial zoo official who reveals its possession of not one but two Arabian oryxes.’ More saliently, he found himself involved in conversations such as the following (the woman is the wife of the Professor of Iberian Languages):

  ‘Did you happen to see,’ she said in her no more than averagely unbelievable tones, ‘the movie Surr Laurence Oh-livyay made of Shakespeare’s Oh-thello? … And what did you think of it? — I don’t mean the movie so much, I mean him.’

  ‘Well … I thought he was very good.’

  ‘But they made him look like a black mayun!’

  ‘Yes, they did, didn’t they?’

  ‘But he even toked like a black mayun!’

  ‘Yes, perhaps a bit —’

  ‘But he even woked like a black mayun! … But how could a real lady fall in love with a man like that?’*

  More saliently still, Kingsley found himself in an English Department where a fellow professor, and a fellow novelist, could turn to him and say, ‘(verbatim), “I can’t find it in my heart to give a Negro [pron. nigra] or a Jew an A.” ’

  Gilded, repulsive (and never built to last), Osric would have dismantled himself after ten minutes in Nashville. So it used to be cool to be posh, did it? Yes, Louis, I quite agree: Christ…

  * I should have been directed to the stories, which are of course immortal. Kafka’s dream-shaped novels are brilliant — but they are nightmares. He couldn’t finish them either.

  * I was recently reminded that Kingsley played Osric in a college production at Swansea in 1953. Now I recall his Osric routine, very flirtatious, all eyelash and limp wrist. As Osric says of Laertes: ‘an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, of very soft society and great showing.’ That was me, in 1967.

  * This reminds one of the fact that in certain cultures Othello is regarded as a tragedy in which Iago is the hero. These quotes are from KA’s Memoirs (1991).

  Letter from School

  Sussex Tutors

  55 Marine Parade,

  Brighton.

  4/11/67

  Dearest Dad + Jane,

  I received your letters simultaneously — and very fine they were too. Sorry to hear that you’re not getting on too well with the colonials — are they all crappy? And you’re working hard too. Still, you’ll be back before you know it. Yes, that’s when you’ll be back.

  That little goblin Mr Ardagh has pretty well definitely got me a job at Rottingdean. I’ll be taking the little sods for games. How can this be? They’re going to spend all their time beating me up and composing ingeniously wounding nick-names for me. Still, its [sic] a challenge etc.

  B.H.Q. [Bastards’ Headquarters] is now based at Brighton. We have had ten days of torrential rain punctuated with blizzards, hurricanes, whirlwinds, earth-quakes, and like upheavals. My only comfort is indulgence in gruelling, man-of-the-elements walks through the blinding rain. I have also been known to look out of my window and silently determine, with haggard stoicism, that I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.

  I have a snippet of ego-nourishing news for each of you.

  First, Jane’s: I met a fine girl called Charlotte a couple of weeks ago and I went round to her flat in Hamilton Terrace to take her out. I was introduced solemnly to her mother who, after asking if she could offer me a drink, expressed a desire to know where I lived. I told her and she exclaimed ecstatically: ‘Oh! You must live near Elizabeth Jane Howard!’ I calmly told her just how near Jane Howard I lived. She was suitably impressed and went on to eulogise ‘After Julius’. As it happens, I went on to make Charlotte mine; a complement to an enjoyable evening.* And a conquest in which Jane may well have played no inconsiderable part.

  Next, my distinguished father. A friend of mine asked dutifully what book of yours I recommended. ‘Lucky Jim’ I told him. He promptly bought it and, one evening, I went into his room and he was retching into his sink, with tears streaming down his face, recovering from a laughing fit induced by a passage in the said novel.† Jolly good for you.

  By the way, I hope and trust that you won’t begrudge me the opportunity of getting some books on the bill — all respectable volumes, I may add.
I know [sic] have a hallowed library of about 25 books (mostly paperbacks), which will do me proud when I go to university.

  Another thing that veritable little hobgoblin Mr Ardagh has done is put a burning queer in the room next to mine. He rushes in without knocking every night between 12 and 1, with eyes aflame, hoping to catch me at some stage of undress. He wants to bugger me you see, but, somehow, it doesn’t help knowing this. I’ve considered retaliation — putting bogies [nose-pickings] in his coffee, spitting on his toothbrush, stealing his shampoo, soiling his pyjamas etc., but I don’t see how this would help. In the end I suppose I’ll have to outline my reasons for being unable to see why he doesn’t fuck off.

  I saw poor old Peter Yates’ new film ‘Robbery’ tonight. Its [sic] trendy — i.e. consciously bad — you know, 30 minute scenes in total darkness — that sort of thing.

  Off I go to bed then, miss you both, write soon.

  All my love,

  Mart. X X X X X

  By the way Jane, I did Lawrence’s ‘The Rainbore’ for A level so I feel qualified to say why he’s no good. I shall read the others before the interview and, I fancy, ‘War and Peace’, and — at that arch-hobgoblin’s suggestion ‘Daniel Deronda’. More lighting [sic] opinions —

  Ezra Pound — Trendy little ponce.

  Auden — Good, but I feel he must be an awful old crap.

  Hopkins — Great fun to read, but doesn’t stand up to any analysis.

  Donne — Very Splendid.

  Marvell — “ ”

  Keats — All right when he’s not saying ‘I’m a poet. Got that?’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ — almost my favourite poem.

  more soon — M.

  * This is an empty boast as well as an outright lie. I thought Charlotte beautiful and intelligent (and posh, and short). I tried my hardest and got nowhere with her.