Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  * ‘Mistress’ (with overtones, here, of vulgarity, superficiality, etc); cf: fancy man.

  † In the novel Night Train. The Welsh character was called Rhiannon, in deference to the heroine of The Old Devils.

  * ‘Eva, can I have a glass of milk with my lunch?’ She was wedged into her chair by the Rayburn (a squat black Aga) and I saw her legs swing up for purchase and then relax again. She had been going to say yes but now she said no. ‘Gnaw,’ she said firmly. ‘Oh. Why not?’ ‘Because I knew a man who had a glass of milk with his lunch … and he died.’ I was sure this was nonsense, and perfunctory nonsense too: she was just generally succumbing to a rare attack of laziness. All the same, until I was an adult I avoided glasses of milk at lunchtime, in case I died; and once I was an adult the question of having a glass of milk with my lunch simply stopped coming up.

  Letter from Home

  108 Maida vale,

  W.9.*

  Dearest Dad and Jane,

  My last letter appears to have rendered you speechless, so I am going to try, rather nervously, to resolve the controversial matter of my immediate future. I hope I can now dispense with the stirring rhetoric and unrelenting dialectic to which you must by now have grown accustomed. That Goblin rang up various schools all of which were busy requiring masters conversant with the new mathematics. That worthy then suggested that I get a job at a bookshop, and he is going to look around during the holidays. He says I’ll probably learn more that way, and I’m inclined to agree-he also says that he and I could do some Anglo-Saxon next year. How does that strike you?

  I went for my interview at Durham and it all went quite well. The chap who interviewed me at the Eng. Dept. turned out to be an ex-pupil of Dad’s (SWAN) and claims to have met me several times. I didn’t get his name but he was an odd looking little chap with lots of dark wavy hair. I’ve also procured an interview at Exeter* in January. Which is the better university? I thought Durham was a beautiful town I must say, and the college looked very comfortable from all points of view.† But let’s hope I am accepted at either Oxford or Bristol.

  There are only 4 days to go until the Oxford interviews and, since I haven’t received a telegram, it seems that I’ve passed the first hurdle. There are now about three serious candidates for every place. I am rather dreading the interview:shall I be refreshingly different, stolidly middle-brow, engagingly naïve, candidly matter-of-fact, contemptuously sophisticated, incorruptibly sincere, sonorously pedantic, curiously fickle, youthfully wide-eyed? Should I bow my head in solemn appreciation of the hallowed atmosphere of learning? Should I play the profound truth-seeker, the seedy anti-hero, the crusty society-observer, the all-discerning beauty-appreciator.? No, I suppose I shall end up … just … being.…. myself.

  Your letter (Jane) came in the middle of this one, so I will just say a few words about it. You must see that what was fixed up for me is the sort of thing that is usually acompanied [sic] by some form of coercion. I thought the sole aim of the operation was to do me good. I accepted this-with certain qualifications-but when I saw just how much good this was going to turn out to be, I began to question the worth of the project. I fully see now that it wasn’t intended in quite that way. I’m sure that the Goblin (devil that he is) will come up with something more interesting, and I hope that our trans-atlantic battles-of-wits may go no farther.

  I now have unusually short hair. Although my seering [sic] jaw-line is more meaningfully described, I think I look like a particularly nasty and petulant Baboon.

  (Changing to pen + ink after 11 hours at the typewriter).

  On to the arts. I think Dad is being very silly about Donne, who is surely not as ‘cold’ as your Marvell, who is too immaculate to supply the passion you seem to expect. Marvell, I think, does all his feeling before he does his writing, while Donne, I always feel, is gritting his teeth as he writes. Read ‘S. Lucies Day’ + ‘The Apparition’, and then ‘The Definition of Love’ or even ‘To His Coy Mistress’, and I think you’ll see some of what I mean.

  First Impressions:

  Conrad: Great romantic-power bore.

  James: Eloquent + rather funny + polished.

  I read ‘War + Peace’, and thought it was bloody good — Forster’s ‘great chords’ strumming away like mad.

  By the way, what would you have me do about your presents — I’ll send them on before very long and you’ll be getting them in due course.

  Lots of Love, Mart XXXXX

  * I was now going back and forth from Brighton to London (on an obsolescent train called the Brighton Belle). Already I seem to have formed the bad habit of not dating letters. And I have also started typing. Over the years I have become incredibly good at typing (novelists, particularly those who write long novels, should get prizes, not for writing, but for typing), and seldom make more than three mistakes per line; but I wasn’t any good at it in December, 1967. Here I preserve the eccentricities. This young man has ceased, on the whole, to repel me. He is no longer quite Osric: that flirtatious valetudinarian. But he and I are becoming wordier.

  * In 1973 Lucy Partington was in her last year at Exeter University, reading English.

  † The poverty and defeatism of this sentence reinforces my suspicion that I would have settled for Durham around now. Around now Bristol seemed unlikely and Oxford grandiose.

  Him Who Is, Him Who Was!

  Weak-toothed Osric talked about John Donne ‘gritting his teeth’ as he wrote ‘S. Lucies Day’. This is an erroneous view of Donne, and an erroneous view of how poetry gets written. Fourteen years later I would grandly scold John Carey (q.v.) for promoting it in his book John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. The conjunction of the names caused me to look again at ‘S. Lucies Day’, or ‘A Nocturnall upon St. Lucies day, Being the shortest day’. Although, as a critic, Professor Carey knows that lyric poems are ‘works of the imagination’, the biographical helmet is a heavy one: ‘Wordsworth, after all, needed no actual death to mourn his Lucy. But if Donne’s Lucy poem is about a real dead woman, then his wife is the only candidate worth considering.’ He describes ‘S. Lucies Day’, which rhymes and scans, as ‘suicidal’. Suicides write notes, not elegies. The last lines are unforgettable, but the sentiment they express is a commonplace of the elegiac form:

  Since shee enjoyes her long nights festivall,

  Let mee prepare towards her, and let mee call

  This hour her Vigill, and her Eve, since this

  Both the yeares, and the dayes deep midnight is.*

  The Encyclopaedia Britannica is skimpy and the OED silent on the identity of St Lucy, or St Lucia. Brewer’s Dictionary of Names has the following: ‘The Caribbean island was named by Christopher Columbus for the day on which he discovered it, Tuesday 13 December 1502, the feast of St Lucy, Sicilian virgin martyr.’ December 23 is now established as the shortest day — the year’s midnight. Lucy Partington disappeared on December 27. There was an energy crisis that winter, and no street illumination that night. The year was 1973 but the darkness was seventeenth-century.

  Gritting my teeth was something I couldn’t do, in November 1994. A mystical notion: the sound of one jaw gritting.

  I knew that all Sikhs bore the same surname, but I was getting what comfort I could from the idea that a great fraternity of Singhs was tenderly driving me around New York during this difficult time. My daydream didn’t deserve to last very long: Inderjid Singh drove me in from the airport; and promptly had a crash.* And again it was Charon Singh, eerily, who drove me to my first appointment with Todd J. Berman, DMD, Diplomate of the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. Todd it was who faced the professional challenge of my lower jaw: a series of extractions, the removal of the tumour, the rebuilding of the chin with cow bone pre-tested for AIDS, and the bedding down of the implants.

  But it fell, appropriately, to Charjit Singh to take me on an eleven-dollar ride uptown for the eleven-hundred-dollar CAT scan. My friend Chris, the one who wished that Salman Rushdie had offered him out
, recently had a CAT scan, or tried to have one. ‘I found out something about myself,’ he told me. ‘I’ve got claustrophobia. I didn’t know they put your whole head in there. I went berserk.’

  They do put your whole head in there. With an emery board between my jaws, a blue showercap on my head, with straps over my brow and chin, I was sucked backwards into a kind of cyclotron where I remained for ten minutes. The confinement, or internment, made me think helplessly about Lucy Partington. Shaw was wrong. Suffering is relative.

  … In my late twenties I started having panic attacks on the underground. And for a while I thought I would inherit my father’s lavish array of phobias: aerophobia (he flew once, as a child: a five-shilling ‘flip’ at the seaside. That did it), acrophobia (when he took his children to the top floor of the Empire State, in 1959, it was only our presence, he said, that stopped him from screaming), and nyctophobia, or fear of the night.* Nyctophobia overlapped with partial monophobia. There were many things he couldn’t do alone. When he paid his visits to Swansea, my sister escorted him there and went back to fetch him. Once, stranded in Newcastle, he took a taxi to London. Most crucially, though, he couldn’t be alone in a house after dark. He just couldn’t do it … My panic attacks were cured by a single sentence of advice, delivered in a pub, by one of Kingsley’s close friends, the psychiatrist Jim Durham. He said, ‘Just remember that the worst thing that can happen to you is that you might make a fool of yourself.’ It worked then, and it worked in the cyclotron. My spirit settled down for ten minutes of quiet durance.

  When I emerged, the piped music was sympathetically featuring ‘Candle in the Wind’. Waiting to pay, I sat around with two elderly ladies. One of them was engrossed in a magazine called Modern Maturity, with the usual couple of great-shape oldsters on its cover. The ladies were drinking from Barium Dispenser Cups, nonchalantly and congenially, as if enjoying their morning coffee. The piped music switched from Tchaikovsky’s First to ‘Let It Be’ … I paid and went outside. The Singh brothers, rather hurtfully considering my recent ordeal, were all elsewhere, and I resorted to Jorge Palomino to get me back downtown.

  Immediately after my rendezvous with the hands of Mike Szabatura, Isabel very cannily took me to lunch on the Lower East Side. While I paused to spit blood into the gutter she said,

  — Remember, this is freak city. Look around. Nobody’s going to notice you.

  I looked around. It was true. It was great. Babblers, brown-bag artists, panhandlers, all with astounding distributions of biomass, saturated fatsoes, human pool cues; and wheelchair riders and walking-frame wielders, trashcan prospectors, addicts, hookers, crazed vets. This corner was a drug corner and today’s salesmen were standing there, leaning at an angle without visible means of support,* like a diagonal stroke: /. And rubbish everywhere, ankle-deep and everywhere. On the auriferous arcades of midtown I would constitute an embarrassment to the social scene. But down here on Second Avenue I walked with my head high, unregarded and unremarked. There even seemed to be room for significant deterioration.

  Excellent company, then, here on the street. Excellent company across the lunch table, too, as Isabel, like a flight controller in an airport movie, talked me through my chicken soup. And I had excellent company elsewhere: in the mind.

  Question: How many of these three noted stylists — James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov and Martin Amis — suffered catastrophic tooth-loss in their early-to-middle forties? Answer: All three.

  Touts serve as living billboards — walking, talking advertisements for the chemicals coursing through their bodies. A tout who staggers to his post and simply stands there — vacant-eyed, at a thirty-degree junkie lean, telling passersby that the Spider Bags are a bomb — is earning his keep.

  From The Corner (Broadway Books, 1997), by David Simon and Edward Burns. This is a truly redoubtable piece of work, as is David Simon’s earlier book, Homicide (1991), an epic of egregious futility and hilarity, recounted in impeccable prose.

  ‘My teeth are very bad,’ muses Stephen, in the first chapter of Ulysses, and goes on to ask the great and useless question: ‘Why?’

  Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I to go to a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch, the superman. Why is that, I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?

  Why? Heredity? Celtic tapwater? A noxious introversion? Even in his early twenties Joyce would squirm with pain while eating warm soup. In 1907 he wrote to his brother Stanislaus from Marseille: ‘My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.’ Joyce was born in 1882. His teeth lasted until 1923. He spent two weeks recovering from the extractions in a sanatorium, but according to Richard Ellman’s (near-transcendent) biography, James Joyce (1959), the loss ‘did not greatly bother him’. As he told his son Giorgio, with wonderful simplicity, ‘They were no good anyway.’

  Joyce suffered a greater haunting: the Miltonic (and perhaps Homeric) wraith of blindness. By 1922 he had finished Ulysses; and his teeth, after all, weren’t going to help him write Finnegans Wake. ‘I always have the impression that it is evening,’ he told his friend Philippe Soupault in the same year. The dental operations were slipped in during a three-stage optical sphincterectomy (preparations for the latter included the application of ‘five leeches to drain the blood from the eye’). Emerging from these violences to his face, his head, his mind, Joyce wrote his first poem for over half a decade: ‘A Prayer’. ‘The speaker’s attitude’, glosses Ellman (biography is always heavy work), ‘confuses desire and pain, [pain] because his mind associates his subjection to his beloved with other subjections — to eye trouble and to death.’ And to toothlessness. ‘A Prayer’ (from Pomes Penyeach) is generally assumed to be ‘addressed’ to Nora Joyce. But in my universe it is addressed to Mike Szabatura. The second of the three stanzas runs (beautifully and, to me, unbearably):

  I dare not withstand the cold touch that I dread,

  Draw from me still

  My slow life! Bend deeper on me, threatening head,

  Proud by my downfall, remembering, pitying

  Him who is, him who was!

  I first read this poem in 1992 or 1993. I see that I have written in the margin here — ‘the inevitability of submission’. And I wasn’t thinking about a woman.

  On 23 November 1943, Vladimir Nabokov (b. 1899) began a letter to Edmund Wilson without preamble:

  Dear Bunny,

  some of them had little red cherries — abscesses — and the man in white was pleased when they came out whole, together with the crimson ivory. My tongue feels like somebody coming home and finding his furniture gone. The plate will only be ready next week — and I am orally a cripple …

  When my face is reflected by some spherical surface, I have often noticed a curious resemblance with the Angel (you know — the wrestler); but now an ordinary mirror produces this effect.*

  The experience waited a while, as experience usually does, before distilling itself into fiction. In Pnin, published in 1957, the ‘heroic’ Timofey eventually trudges off to his rendezvous with the man in white. Afterwards:

  A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth … His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate.

  This desolation soon bleeds into another, when Pnin’s fiercely anticipated reunion with his ex-wife (the terrible Liza) comes to nothing — to nothing. His gentle American landlady, Joan, finds him in the kitchen:

  Pnin’s unnecessarily robust shoulders continued to shake …

  ‘Doesn’t she want to come back?’ asked Joan softly.

&n
bsp; Pnin, his head on his arm, started to beat the table with his loosely clenched fist.

  ‘I haf nofing,’ wailed Pnin between loud, damp sniffs. ‘I haf nofing left, nofing, nofing!’

  What else did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism.* A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired: the omnicompetent and artistic Véra Slonim (she translated Pale Fire into Russian), the sublimely unliterary Nora Barnacle (‘He’s on another book again,’ she said, referring with some exasperation to Finnegans Wake). More than that, they both lived their lives ‘beautifully’ — not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been a prerequisite), but in the droll fortitude of their perseverance. They got the work done, with style. You could say that Joyce overdid his elder-brotherish frigidity towards Stanislaus, and preferred Ibsen’s dramas to Shakespeare’s;* and you could say that Nabokov was sometimes guilty of a certain Parnassian triumphalism: but the lives they led were unfaltering. When I reflect that D.H. Lawrence, perhaps the most foul-tempered writer of all time (beater of women and animals, racist, anti-Semite, etc., etc.),† was also, perhaps, the most extravagantly slapdash exponent of language, I feel the lure of some immense generalisation about probity and prose. But the fit reader, the ideal reader, regards a writer’s life as just an interesting extra. On good days, when you have the sense that you are a mere instrument of the work you were sent here to do, this is what a writer’s life actually feels like: an interesting extra. And there is no value correlation between the life and the work. Some writers will be relieved to hear this said.