Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  — I’ve never seen Kingsley move.

  — What do you mean?

  — I don’t think I’ve ever once seen Kingsley move.

  — Move?

  — Move.

  — Bullshit. Every time we have lunch there he moves. He goes to the toilet at least once.

  — That’s true, Jacob allowed.

  — And what about the time you knighted him? He moved then, didn’t he?

  — … That’s true.

  Kingsley had said nothing about his knighthood and was no doubt planning to announce it at dinner: he was expected at seven. But the news had come through on the radio, and we were ready for him … It was 1990. My life, around then, now seems surreally uncomplicated. I had married late. I was forty, and living with my wife and two sons (six and four) in a tall narrow house off Ladbroke Grove. The long novel London Fields lay behind me; the short novel Time’s Arrow lay ahead of me. My father came to dinner one night every week.

  The bell rang on the stroke of seven — for Kingsley was a man of Naipaulian punctuality. I let the door swing open to reveal the boys, promiscuously accoutred in various plastic breastplates, gauntlets and Viking moose antlers, and slowly raising their grey plastic swords. In silence Kingsley went down on one knee (no trivial undertaking), there on the doormat, and the boys, also silent, and unblinking, dubbed him in turn with a touch of the blade on either shoulder.

  A minute later Kingsley was being led downstairs by Antonia for his first drink: chilled gin and cocktail onions. Jacob followed, still with some show of pomp (a raised spear, perhaps), but Louis lingered, impatiently throwing off the thighpieces, the shinguards. This stuff had come out of a very old trunk. Even the boys had had to dig back deep for it.

  — Why is he a Sir?

  — Why?

  — Because they don’t need … knoights any more. There’s nothing for them to do.

  I was delighted for my father (he would have his visit to the Palace, and his tender, dream-fuelling moment with Corky),* but I must admit that I agreed with my son.

  At the time I automatically assumed that Kingsley was fiercely gratified by his KBE, but I can remember little evidence of that now. When writers crave honours, they usually crave them very thoroughly: one hears of novelists who can name the cats and dogs of every bureaucrat in Stockholm. He never talked about the knighthood (and we never talked about prizes, or advances or sales). And once, when I brought up the example of Ferdinand Mount,† who had effectively dispensed with his title as an encumbrance and a thing of the past, Kingsley just shrugged and nodded. It wasn’t too little but it was too late.‡ I hope he got some pleasure out of it in his last five years. Becoming a Sir must have satisfied any vestigial aspirations formed by his upbringing (lower-middle-class, lapsed Baptist, work-ethic), and surely must have silenced for ever the sound of his father’s voice, which never quite stopped saying, ‘This writing game is all very fine and large, but one day, you know, you’ll have to pull yourself together and get a proper …’ The newly elevated Kingsley probably walked that much taller at his club. And at last he could hold his head up at home, in the ménage he maintained with my step-father (Lord Kilmarnock) and my mother (Lady Kilmarnock).* It was only because of a technicality that the teenage Jaime remained untitled: he was born out of wedlock and so had to struggle on without his honorary ‘Honourable’.

  Edward Upward said that he felt the aging process at work in him when he experienced ‘little failures of tolerance’. Well, Kingsley was never much of a tolerance-cultivator; and his failures were big failures. As his sixties settled on him, as heavy as a bathyscope, and as his seventies loomed, my father underwent a fluctuating series of inner ravages. His articulation was sometimes amorphous; he tilted himself, with that inconvenienced grimace of his, like a smile of pain, and pointed his good ear towards you; he had lost all trust and ease in his body (he would book a cab for a journey of a hundred yards: his legs hurt). Kingsley never mentioned these cerebral ruptures and blockages, these little coups de vieux, and you weren’t supposed to mention (or notice) them either. When they happened they had the tendency of making him turn away from the world. To him, at sixty-eight, in certain moods, revealed creation looked worthless: and, therefore (because he trusted his instinct and thought himself never wrong), it was worthless, and could be wholly repudiated. In a completely central way Kingsley always declined to make allowances, for himself or for anybody else.

  There was another consideration. This is from The Old Devils (1986):

  William set the car in motion. ‘Seat-belt, Dad.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I can see you’d like to get out of it if you could. You know you’re enormously fat, do you? Fatter than ever? No-joke fat? Well of course you do. You could hardly not. The booze I suppose mostly, is it? I’m not saying I blame you, mind.’

  ‘That and the eats … I’m sitting on my arse with the telly finished and I start stuffing myself. Cakes mostly. Profiteroles. Brandy-snaps. Anything with cream or jam or chocolate.’

  My father didn’t expect us not to notice that his weight had practically doubled over the past few years. When I was twenty-five Clive James said hauntingly to me: ‘It’s not that you get fat. One day your whole body just turns into fat.’ But that wasn’t how it happened with Kingsley. With him, getting fat was more like a project, grimly inaugurated on the day Jane left him in the winter of 1980. This would become the era of the late-night carbofests, the two-hour supersnacks with which Kingsley would start the process of soothing and numbing himself into sleep. His gustatory style now strikes me as manifestly bizarre, like something that ought to be done in solitude; but my reaction, then, was unreflectively filial — you just accepted the new reality. As if in the interests of successful hibernation he would load up his cheeks with confectionery at about twice the rate that he ingested it. ‘Jesus, Dad,’ I once said, ‘what’s going on in there? Your face is the size of a basketball.’ It took him about ten minutes of disciplined mastication before he could reply. ‘Seems to calm me down,’ he said, and started loading up again. He ate for comfort; the tranquillising effects of starch and glucose helped to allay fear. But I now see that his nocturnal gorging was a complex symptom, regressive, self-isolating. It cancelled him out sexually. It seemed to say that it was over: the quest for love, and the belief in its primacy.

  Soon after Stanley and the Women was published, in 1984, he said to me,

  — I’ve finally worked out why I don’t like Americans.

  I waited.

  — Because everyone there is either a Jew or a hick.

  — … What’s it like being mildly anti-Semitic?

  — It’s all right.

  — No. What’s it feel like being mildly anti-Semitic. Describe it.

  Stanley, or rather Stanley, had been accused of anti-Semitism (and, with more reason, of misogyny) on the basis of first-person asides like the following: ‘I went out and picked up a taxi on its way back from dropping somebody at one of the Jewboys’ houses in the Bishop’s Avenue.’ But anti-Semitism, in Stan, is structural: the narrator’s inherited and unexamined prejudice is contrasted with the violent babblings and scribblings (‘EVIL LIVE VILE LEVI’) of his son Steve, who has succumbed to the miserably trite belief-system of schizophrenia. And it is a system, a wretched little rhombus: Jews, spies, aliens, electricity …

  — What’s it feel like? Well. Very mild, as you say. If I’m watching the end of some new arts programme I might notice the Jewish names in the credits and think, Ah, there’s another one. Or: Oh I see. There’s another one.

  — And that’s all?

  — More or less. You just notice them. You wouldn’t want anyone to do anything about it. You’d be horrified by that.

  — Fascinating. Did you see John Updike’s review of Jake’s Thing in the New Yorker?

  — No.

  — He said that all your objections to women could be summed up by Professor Higgins’s line in My Fair Lady: ‘Oh, why can’t
a woman be like us?’

  — Yeah, said Kingsley with slow emphasis. That’s right.

  A Sunday lunchtime, eight years later, in 1992, and Kingsley was expected: expected without great enthusiasm, I have to admit … More than once, in general chat, he and I had reached a modest conclusion about social and familial behaviour. There is a moral duty to be cheerful. There is a solemn duty to be cheerful. And, just recently, this was a duty that Kingsley had been failing to discharge. His low spirits took aggressive form: having cast me as a dutiful plaything of multicultural correctness, he would then attempt to scandalise me with the ruggedness of his heresies. I found this routine easier to deal with at the end of the day — numbed by alcohol and exhaustion. The fact that Kingsley was coming for lunch and not dinner was itself a minor victory for the old school. We had wearily squabbled about it: ‘I hate lunches,’ I said. ‘Nonsense.’ ‘I hate all lunches. I hate drinking in the middle of the day.’ ‘How can anyone hate lunches?’ ‘You sound as if you don’t believe me.’ ‘I love lunches.’ ‘I don’t believe you.’ ‘You’re mad.’ ‘I love dinner. I hate lunch.’ ‘Well, at my age, lunch is dinner.’ Yes, and at my age lunch is still lunch, and three hours of you, mate, without a few stiff ones and the comforting prospect of that minicab at 9.45 …

  The doorbell rang. I was downstairs in the kitchen — but the boys would let him in. Putting my book aside I assembled the doings for Kingsley’s cocktail and made sure that his chilled tankard was in the icebox next to his giant can of vandal-strength lager: Carlsberg Special Brew. Then I heard the cautious creak at the top of the stairs.

  — Hi, Dad, I said, and we embraced.

  — … What’s that you’re reading? Some Jew?

  I turned my back on him and kept it turned. The book referred to was If This Is a Man, by Primo Levi … Not many months earlier my novel about the Holocaust, Time’s Arrow, had appeared, and I had been accused of anti-Semitism.* What I didn’t want was another syllable of loose talk on this subject. So as I fixed my father’s drink, the gin, the white onions, I kept my head down and said something like:

  Actually I was going to tell you about it. A really clinching thing about sex difference. When the Fascist Militia rounded him up he was taken to a huge detention camp, in Italy, in the north, I think. Then the Jews were singled out and told that they would be deported to Auschwitz the next day. The men all spent that last night drinking and fucking and fighting. The women all spent it washing their children and their children’s clothes and preparing meals. And, he writes, something like — when the sun came up, like an ally of our enemy, the barbed wire around the camp was full of children’s washing hung out in the wind to dry.

  At last I turned with the drink in my hand. And my first thought was to reach for a kitchen towel. How had he had time to cry so much? His motionless face was a mask of unattended tears. He said steadily,

  — That’s one thing I feel more and more as I get older. Let’s not round up the women and the children. Let’s not go over the hill and fuck up the people in the next town along. Let’s not do any of that ever again.

  Despite his failures of tolerance, Kingsley liked coming to the house off Ladbroke Grove: ‘One of the few places’, he said, ‘where I can be sure of good.’ Then, in the spring of 1993, after ten years there, I moved out of that house — a development (an upheaval, a terrible failure) that Kingsley could hardly have welcomed as he turned seventy-two. But he cleaved unquestioningly to the new reality, as did my mother. All our marriages kept falling apart; and here was another second-generation collapse … I still took the boys to lunch at Kingsley’s place on Sundays — at the ménage in Primrose Hill; for our midweek meetings, though, we relied on a restaurant, an Italian place called Biagi’s near Marble Arch, where, on and off and in various configurations, we had been coming for thirty years.

  It was here, in 1966, surrounded by flasks and fishing-nets, by six-foot peppergrinders and bottles of Chianti in their wickerwork cradles (the place is more streamlined now), that I closed out one of the strangest nights of my youth — awed, and sumptuously relieved, to find myself in a restaurant rather than a jailhouse: in Biagi’s, not Brixton. It was seven o’clock in the evening when I crept home ‘from school’. In fact I had spent the day in unstinting truancy, accompanied by Rob: first, the betting shop (where, with our accumulators and reverse forecasts, we had actually won something); next the pub (where we had tried, and as usual failed, to drink alcohol: even a half of shandy would give us immobilising backaches); and then a hugely promising afternoon listening to records with two worldly girls who had their own flat and, moreover, their own dope. When I came through that front door I was already wholly unmanned by hashish.* My intention was to go down to the kitchen for a supersnack of starch and glucose. But then a deep-voiced summons drew me into the sitting-room, where my father, my step-mother and my step-uncle were unmistakably arrayed against my freedom … Kingsley did have the power to make me frightened of him, though it was a card he played only when roused by a co-parent (anger was effortful: it was too much like work). Here he was doing his stuff, frowning and glowering; but I sensed Howard knowhow in this triumvirate of adult unanimity. I was busted, in short. Not for drugged truancy: just for drugs. Busted, and grounded. Much more stunningly, my brother Philip (only 375 days my senior),* as a result of this night’s work, had already left home. Drugs had been found in one of his clothes drawers. It was no great feat of detection, finding Phil’s drugs, because they were kept in a box with PHIL’S DRUGS written on it in eyecatching multicoloured capitals. And my brother, always more rebellious than me, more headlong than me, would not be grounded. ‘We know you’re on drugs,’ Kingsley intoned. ‘Phil claimed you weren’t,’ said Jane, ‘and tried to defend you. But he’s not very good at that kind of thing. And it came out.’ Then we had a talk about the legal position and the possibility of ‘calling the police’ … When he went to see President Nixon and offered himself as a figurehead in the war on drugs, Elvis Presley was not at his best: already a heroin-addict, the King, at this presidential audience on drugs, was on drugs. I too was far from clear-headed, as I blabbed, feigned contrition, and gaped with paranoia. But then the evening descended, or rose, into inconsequentiality and magical realism. I was taken out to dinner at Biagi’s, where Kingsley (drunkenly, I now realise) tried to persuade me that the international traffic in marijuana and hashish was ‘a Communist plot’ designed ‘to weaken men in the field’ — more specifically, the American forces fighting in Vietnam. All these views, in broad daylight and full consciousness, he would later defend and elaborate. At the time I just kept my head down, over the prawn cocktail, the steak and chips. When I went to bed that night I rolled back the covers and found a note from my brother which said something like: They know I do but they don’t know (you know). I had been deceived: this was experience. But the far larger fact was that the identical bedroom next to mine was now empty: this was existential.

  I thought of Philip with disquiet, with wonder, with envy. He wouldn’t be on the street. He would be at Rob’s, in the arms of Rob’s glamorous and neurotic elder sister, Jane, and calmly smoking one of the foot-long, three-pronged joints that Rob then specialised in rolling. But I was full of anxiety. Phil had done something that I wouldn’t do for another five years. And he never came back. He came back in a different way, as an adult, but he never came back as a child of the house. He was gone.

  Kingsley was forty-four then, in 1966.

  But I was forty-four now, in 1993, and I had left the house — a different house.

  And he was seventy-one. The Vietnam War had ended twenty years ago. If the traffic in hashish was once a plot to promote Communism, then that plot failed, and so did Communism. And for a long time now, too, Philip and I had routinely smoked joints in front of our father. He lurked back from it slightly, with a superstitious air about him, but the disapproval he expressed was also routine. Once I came into the room and Philip said, by way of greeting (a common form
between us), ‘Got any dope, Mart?’ I told him that I certainly had. ‘Yes,’ said Kingsley, ‘I could tell there was something wrong with you when you came in here.’ We laughed. It went no further. Geopolitically, on the other hand, he seemed sincerely antic. What was it with him? He could still bring himself close to tears when rehearsing the ‘tragedy’ of the American collapse in Indochina; he owed his humblest gratitude to nuclear weapons for getting us so safely through the Cold War; true, the velvet revolutions of 1989 had left him a bit short of obvious villains and hate-figures — until, incredibly, he settled on Nelson Mandela. Having read the Letters I am tempted to conclude that most of the time he was just winding me up, because his correspondence is largely free of obviously provocative folly. Still, we continued to argue about all this, and viciously. But not now: not in 1993. What compelled us, every week, for months, for years, was something that lay much closer to home.

  ‘Stopping being married to someone,’ he had written, ten years earlier,* ‘is an incredibly violent thing to happen to you, not easy to take in completely, ever.’ He knew I was now absorbing the truth and the force of this. And he knew also that the process could not be softened or hastened. All you could do was survive it. That surviving was a possibility he showed me, by example. But he did more. He roused himself and did more. ‘Talk as much as you want about it or as little as you want’: these words sounded like civilization to me, in my barbarous state, so dishevelled in body and mind. Talk as much or as little … I talked much. Only to him could I confess how terrible I felt, how physically terrible, bemused, subnormalised, stupefied from within, and always about to flinch or tremble from the effort of making my face look honest, kind, sane. Only to him could I talk about what I was doing to my children. Because he had done it to me.

  And he responded, and he closed that circle: his last fatherly duty.

  His ‘allography’ (writing about others), entitled Memoirs,† was two years behind him. The book ends with a poem (‘Instead of an Epilogue’), and here are its first and last stanzas: