Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  To H.

  I

  In 1932 when I was ten

  In my grandmother’s garden in Camberwell

  I saw a Camberwell Beauty butterfly

  Sitting on a clump of Michaelmas daisies.

  I recognised it because I’d seen a picture

  Showing its brownish wings with creamy edges

  In a boy’s paper or on a cigarette card

  Earlier that week. And I remember thinking,

  What else would you expect? Everyone knows

  Camberwell Beauties come from Camberwell;

  That’s why they’re called that. Yes, I was ten.

  III

  In ’46 when I was twenty-four

  I met someone harmless, someone defenceless,

  But till then whole, unadapted within;

  Awkward, gentle, healthy, straight-backed,

  Who spoke to say something, laughed when amused;

  If things went wrong, feared she might be at fault,

  Whose eyes I could have met for ever then,

  Oh yes, and who was also beautiful.

  Well, that was much as women were meant to be,

  I thought, and set about looking further.

  How can we tell, with nothing to compare?

  Fancy Woman

  On the last page of his memoir about V. S. Naipaul,* Sir Vidia’s Shadow, Paul Theroux — rather tendentiously, some may feel — depicts the senior writer as ‘scuttling’ away from him down a London street. Well, I know a scuttle when I see one, and my father definitely scuttled down that gravel drive on the day he left the house in Madingley Road, Cambridge, in the summer of 1963. He was carrying a suitcase. A taxi waited … I am a good three or four inches shorter than my father, but our bodies are similarly disproportionate, with a low centre of gravity: ‘almost the same height standing up as sitting down,’ as Kingsley put it in That Uncertain Feeling (1955), adding that this kind of physique is not untypically Welsh.* Such legs are made for scuttling. He was en route from one reality to another; that taxi was part of a tunnel to a different world. I didn’t know, then, as I watched him through the window, that I would inherit his body type (minus the self-inflicted corpulence, so far); nor, of course, that I was destined to do some scuttling of my own.

  Not long ago (early December, 1998) I ran into another theatrical knight, Sir Richard Eyre, at a good party given by yet another theatrical knight, Sir Tom Stoppard, in honour of the Czech philosopher-king, Vaclav Havel.† Sir Richard and I left in a group of four with our wives. We recalled that he had been a student of Kingsley’s at Cambridge. The house on Madingley Road differed from every other don’s house in the city: students could be found in it, regularly. They stayed the night. They drove the car. They read or dozed in the garden. They made some of my meals. I enjoyed their presence. Three of them were real friends to me, and one of them, Bill Rukeyser,* was an exceptional friend to me. They were all men, these friends; Kingsley’s students were all men. There were young women around too: I can remember generous and aromatic female entities but I can’t individualise any of them: clear proof of my unawakened state. When we saw something of each other again, fifteen years later in America, Bill Rukeyser gave me to understand that 9, Madingley Road was the locus of considerable sexual activity, 1961—63, but I witnessed, or noticed, little of that. Certainly the atmosphere was lawlessly, and in some way innocently, convivial. It was no big thing (for example) to watch my mother and our family friend Theo Richmond,† both of them exhausted by laughter, riding through one of the sitting-rooms on Debbie, our pet donkey, who, every morning, would stick her head through the kitchen window and neigh along with Radio Caroline.

  As we approached our cars I said to Richard,

  — We must have come across each other back then.

  — Oh yes. You were so unhappy.

  — … Was I?

  — You were so unhappy.

  Was I? I was unlucky thirteen, overweight and undersized: I had reached that clogged point in youth, where childhood (in my case happy, even idyllic) was obviously running out, and yet no alternative mode of existence seemed available or even possible. This is the time of the bathroom and the mirror, of eyes transfixed and then averted in the school showers, the time of odious comparisons, dire predictions. The little voice is still caught inside the body, which mutinously burgeons … ‘You’re too fat for that suit, Mart,’ said a student, with shattering justice, in the summer of 1963. Until that year I had got by without sartorial ambition, without sartorial self-awareness, content, even proud, to make do with my brother’s cast-offs. But now Osricisation was well entrained. In the hall of the house in Madingley Road I had just slipped off my shorty mackintosh to show the household my new made-to-measure from Burton’s. The design specifications were my own, and thus the suit was a genuine dog’s dinner, the trousers as tight as tights, the jacket a blunt denial of the human shape, with two gold buttons, no lapels, and no collar except for a hank of black velvet at the back of the neck (soon to become a trough of sparkling dandruff). Another thing about the jacket was that it only went down as far as my waist: a crucial demerit. For at that time I had a complex about something very simple. Returning from his boarding-school for the Easter holidays, my brother (who was tall and slim, who was through, who had made it to the other side) composed the following entry in his diary:

  Mum told me she found Mart crying in the night about the size of his bum. I do feel sorry for him, but a) it is enormous, and b) it’s not going to go away.

  I was particularly impressed by clause b).*

  So, yes, averagely unhappy for my age, perhaps. But essentially secure. My parents’ marriage, I believed, loomed like a translucent horizon — a belief memorably reaffirmed by my father the summer before, in Deya, Majorca, where (late at night, admittedly) he had said to my brother and me: Never doubt that I love your mother. Never doubt that we will always be together … And I didn’t doubt it.

  Maybe Richard Eyre remembers me from my last weeks in Madingley Road: some time after the following exchange around its kitchen table:

  — You know your father’s got this fancy woman* up in London, don’t you?

  — No. I didn’t know.

  My informant was Eva Garcia (pronounced Gahcia). And Eva Garcia was Welsh, classic Celt-Iberian, as was her husband, Joe, a kind, cubiform, semiliterate, longsuffering grafter who was actually taller sitting down than standing up. Eva was terrible and great; she was one of the divinities of my childhood, and so it was quite right, I suppose, that she should be the one to end it, at a stroke, with that sinister sentence … Eva the great: some days, in Swansea, I would return from school to find her belting out a song as she made my tea, and elegantly swivelling on the slab of her orthopedic boot (early polio) with a shake of her hair and real delight in her Hispanic eyes. Eva the terrible: on other days you would find her leaning palely against the kitchen wall with a hand to her cheek and a red bandanna knotted tight around her brow, and your childish spirits would brace themselves for an evening of silence and even tranced immobility, such a martyr was Eva to her migraines. At such times, as the day dimmed, she would talk in a gradually strengthening voice about the various disasters that had befallen her peers. Nothing brought Eva round more quickly than the contemplation of the sufferings of others.

  It was Eva I was thinking of, thirty-odd years later,† when I suggested that the word Schadenfreude was not German but Welsh. Once, down on the Mumbles road along the coast, the family encountered a traffic jam caused by a serious accident. In the car there was a murmur of anxiety that Sally — then two or three — might see something frightening. Finally we approached the crossroads, and there on the verge was a twitching, blood-bespattered figure half covered by an old overcoat. We seemed to be safely past when Eva propped Sally up on the back seat and said, ‘Look at him, Sall. Writhing in agony he is.’*— No. I didn’t know.

  Eva had come down from Swansea alone, for a visit, and to put herself about at this painf
ul time. Now I met her gaze across the kitchen table. It was clear to me even then that she couldn’t possibly have been given the authority to tell me this. I knew, too, that for Eva the dissemination of bad news was no short-straw occasion but a privilege to be vied for. Was she, in her zeal, overstating the case? I said,

  — Has he really?

  She addressed me with the narrowed stare and flat smile of reckoning I remembered from my childhood in the valleys. She said gauntly,

  — Ooh aye.

  The next morning, or perhaps the morning after that, my mother and I made our usual run to Cambridgeshire High School for Boys. As we approached the final crossroads she told me matter-of-factly that she and my father were going to separate (there was no mention of the fancy woman). My mother kept her eyes on the road ahead; she was driving, after all, and smoking one of her menthol cigarettes: a Consulate. Mum has stayed with it, but she was never a serious smoker, in my view: she takes a drag and then puffs out quickly, as if to get it gone. Even at thirteen I reckoned I was twice the smoker that Mum ever was … Still, she needed her Consulate, this morning. I did see that. She asked me if I understood, and I think I said I did. I climbed out of the car and paused before the gates in the sunshine.

  My mother’s plan, she later told me, was to deliver the news at a moment when I couldn’t brood on it. And the plan was a good one as far as it went. There stood the school and all its chalk-opera, duties, games, trials, friends, fears. It only took a few seconds to leave the weightlessness, the zero-gravity of childhood and feel the true mass of the world. Thinking something like, ‘Yes, the easy bit’s over. I’ve done the easy bit,’ I moved into the yard with my satchel and cap.

  It was November when I next saw my father: a winter midnight, in London. His astonished form, pyjama-clad, moved back from the doorway.

  — You know I’m not alone …

  In the background, wearing a white bathrobe, was the fancy woman with her waist-long hair.

  — You don’t even know what sophisticated means!

  My mother turned on me sharply. I should repeat that she was twenty-one when I was born. I have never been much younger than her and she has never been much older than me. Another school run: Swansea, in the late Fifties.

  — Ooh I do know what sophisticated means!

  — No you don’t. Not what it really means.

  — Yes I do.

  — Go on then. What does it mean?

  I now see my mother’s profiled face, lightly frowning in concentration as she listed some of the more attractive attributes that went hand in hand with being sophisticated — all of them worth the aspiration of a bashful country-girl from Berkshire. I said,

  — That’s not what it really means.

  — All right then. What does it really mean?

  — Corrupt.

  My mother was innocent. Then experience came, and she experienced it. And then she got her innocence back again. I have always wondered how she did that.

  * Kingsley’s dreams about the Queen were themselves pretty reverential and almost entirely chaste. K: I had another dream about Corky last night. M: What happens in these Corky dreams of yours? (We tended to call her Corky, once a widely used sobriquet, I thought, but I can’t find it in Brewer or Jonathon Green.) K: Oh nothing much. I kiss her a bit and say something like. ‘Come on, let’s go off somewhere.’ And she just says things like ‘Kingsley, I can’t’ or ‘No, Kingsley, we mustn’t’ … That was as far as it went with Corky. Kingsley always got much further with Margaret Thatcher.

  † Novelist, baronet and editor of the TLS.

  ‡ It is curious how seldom and how tardily novelists receive this honour; and they usually get it not for their novels but for something else. Services to PEN (V. S. Pritchett), for instance, or to the London Zoo (Angus Wilson). I suppose Kingsley got it partly for being audibly and visibly rightwing, or conservative/monarchist. It is equally curious how soon and often playwrights get it. Whenever I run into my contemporary Sir David Hare, he amuses me so much that I can’t think why he isn’t more amused by being called Sir David Hare — a ridiculous appellation, like Sir Johnny Rotten or Lord Vicious. Why would such a fiery excoriator of the establishment suddenly want to be a Knight of the British Empire? But maybe the dramatists are getting it for something else too: services to the tourist industry, perhaps, or to the union that looks out for drivers of minibuses and charabancs. I apologise for my tone (and I don’t want a knighthood), but I will now take the chance to repeat my contention that the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and — who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality. I agree that it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God’s best jokes.

  * My mother has never cut a very ladylike figure, and she said she felt fraudulent, like a thieving baglady, whenever she used her chequebook at the supermarket. But she surprised me, and made me laugh, when I once complacently asked her: ‘That wasn’t a big attraction for you, was it, Mum? Alastair being a lord and all that.’ She frowned deeply and said, ‘Ooh yes.’

  * It began with a review (saying I had looked to Auschwitz for ‘profit’) in the Spectator, which then printed my letter of rebuttal. The reviewer was James Buchan, a fellow novelist, and a humourless worthy. And by calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo. (Incidentally: I don’t know if Mr Buchan is a parent, but I often wonder how the humourless raise their children. How does it get done without humour?) Anyway this was enough to entrain a minor controversy in the British press, where a tradition of ‘neutrality’ sees to it that opposed views are given equal play. When the novel was published in America I expected more animus: mistakenly. There was none; nor would there be any in Germany, or Israel. In England, though, the slur of anti-Semitism is evidently not that serious, and can be reached for along with anything else that lies to hand. Soothingly sprinkled with octogenarian exclamation marks, Buchan’s replies to my personal letters sought in effect to reassure me about this.

  * Hashish has never done anything for my courage (and I question the suggested etymology of ‘assassin’: oblique plural of hassas — hashish-eater). This drug had recently denied me the control of my sphincter: that prince of all the muscles. I was walking down Gloucester Road, blearily singing a Beatles song, when the pavement turned viscid beneath my feet. The workman whose wet cement I had just disfigured (there was, I now saw, a sign saying WET CEMENT) reared into my face. ‘You long-aired little cunt,’ he said, and swung his pickaxe above his head. I raised my stoned arms in propitiation or self-defence. But the mano-a-mano situation had already been clarified by a single hot jet in my black flares. My black flares, with the special sewn-on creases. I was eventually allowed to stumble off in them.

  * For quite a long period as a child I used to torment Kingsley with the following exchange about Philip and me. ‘Dad.’ ‘… Yes?’ ‘Are we twins?’ ‘… No.’ I saw this drive for enhanced consanguinity repeated in my half-brother Jaime. He always refused to call the Spanish boys he grew up with (they were no relation) his ‘cousins’. They were his brothers: mis hermanos, he would insist.

  * In Stanley (1984). I was mildly surprised to see, when checking the date, that the novel is dedicated to my mother: To Hilly. Money (dedicated to my wife) came out the same year. ‘I bought your book today,’ said Hylan Booker (Louis’s godfather, and a black American). ‘I bought your daddy’s book too.’ Kingsley loved this, adding: ‘That sentence will only get said once in the history of the world.’

  † Dedicated to Hilly and also to Philip, Martin, Sally, Jaime and Ali.

  * My own dealings with the great man have been remote but pleasingly symmetrical. I outline them on page 356.

  * Despite tenacious inaccuracies in the press, and despite my sister
Sally’s birthplace (Swansea) and middle name (Myfanwy), and despite the ridicule of my sons (‘A Welshman through and through, born in the heart of Wales to wholly Welsh parents who can trace their Welsh lineage back to …’), and despite the legs, I can lay no claim to a single drop of Welsh blood. Kingsley was sensitive on the legs issue. This is Jenny and Patrick at the cricket match in Take a Girl Like You (1960): ‘ “Oh, I am wild at missing you wearing your pads.” “… What? Why did you want to see me in my pads?” “It’d be a new view of the little legs, in the little pads. Have you got special short ones made? Or do you get a lend from one of the juniors?” ’ Patrick does not take this well (‘Why, you cheeky little bitch’), and humourlessly defends his legs for more than half a page.

  † Looking slightly lopsided from long confinement, broken health and waning power, Havel was, I thought, an impressively sympathetic figure. And I liked his controversial new wife: Helga. Much younger, blonde, round-faced, round-haired, she looked as though she used to spin the clock on one of the early TV gameshows. She also attended to her husband with what Saul Bellow has called ‘a TV brightness’ in her manner. You wanted the very best for them, but you could see how all this might be looking in the Czech Republic, as Havel’s presence edged towards the margin.

  * Now the well-known broadcaster and financial analyst, and sometime editor of the magazine Money.

  † The author of that formidable monument of Jewish remembrance, Konin (1995).

  * But it did go away. I felt the moment of its passing: six years later. A big teen crowd had gathered at my mother’s house in Ronda. And as we walked into town that evening the rank of girls trailed behind the rank of boys on the wide street above the gorge. When we reached the bar in the main square a female voice (whose? whose?) said in my ear: ‘We were comparing all of you on the way in, and we voted. You won best bum.’ With a final shriek my complex evaporated into the Spanish night.