Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

A climate of acceptance. Very well.

  I accept my weakness with my friends’

  Good natures sweetening every day my sick room.

  Earlier in the poem Day Lewis writes of ‘the calm a loved house breeds’. That his was a good death is a tribute to him and to Jill, Tamasin and Daniel.* And the fact that we could absorb and assimilate it so frictionlessly tells me, more clearly than anything else, that the house was strong in love.

  So my father, during those years, had much to defend. He was indifferent to his surroundings, indifferent to acquisition, but the big spread, as I say, was perhaps his clinching reply to his father, in the argument that is never over. For Kingsley, and for all the other writers I have known, prosperity attests to the health of the talent, the strength of the readership, and nothing more. It has not been sought; it can be done without.† To the best of my recollection (Kingsley would have considered that phrase a wooden Americanism, but it has been one of my principles in writing this book, and in such ways does the argument go on), only once did he attempt to be lordly or overweening: and the result was custard-pie. It is hard work describing real-life slapstick (either it makes you laugh or it doesn’t), but I will try to preserve the self-finessing quality of the moment … At a noisy lunch in the kitchen, with perhaps a dozen people present, Kingsley was experiencing an unusual difficulty: that of making himself heard. I watched him as, again and again, he questingly raised his head and, after a few seconds, theatrically let it drop. He persisted for perhaps a minute and a half. Then he reduced the company to instant silence by slamming his unopened beer can on to the table. It made the cutlery jump. Coolly, grimly, proudly, he surveyed his chastened listeners, and, before at last giving utterance, reached to free the tab of his Heineken. The torrential upsquirt caught him full in the face. And the room re-erupted, with laughter. I thought, This could go either way. But he saw the funny side of it. There was no other side of it to see. He had gone against his nature. For once in his life he had behaved humourlessly; and humour had promptly corrected him … Answering a recent query, Lady Violet Powell* said that it was a pleasure to remember these years and ‘all the lovely times and jokes’. Yes, exactly, Violet: all the lovely times and jokes. And Kingsley at the centre of everything, like an engine.

  — So how’s it go again, Dad? You’re going to …?

  — … I’m going to get a big gun.

  — Oh it’s a big gun now.

  — I’m going to get a big gun … to kill, maim or otherwise fuck up … anyone who comes here … trying to take my stuff.

  Of course he never did get that gun. And the big house disappeared anyway, and so did love.

  * The current complaint, which I have already seen a number of times, goes something like: Can we please have a moratorium on novels about science! There will be, of course, no moratorium on novels ‘about’ science. That is where the novel is now heading, to fill a vacuum created, perhaps, by the failure of the sister discipline, philosophy of science, and by the indifference or contempt in which scientists hold it. Scientists don’t care what the novel says either. But novelists will almost certainly find themselves moving in here, as the uncontrolled and sharply escalating power of technology goes on annexing more and more of the human space.

  † In the paranoid headline in Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), remember, it was an ASST HUMAN OPP’Y COMMISH, and not a WRITER, who was FOUND HEADLESS IN GO-GO GIRL’S APT. Bellow’s heroes are sometimes writers, but they write discursively, not imaginatively. They are thinkers, teachers, readers. The fact that Charlie Citrine is some kind of playwright does not seriously affect this point.

  * My novel of 1981, Other People, was written from a woman’s point of view in the third person (as was a sizeable fraction of London Fields). Night Train (1997) was written from a woman’s point of view in the first person. Immediately, from the opening word (‘I’), I felt something closing above my head. I knew I was much deeper in.

  † It seems to me almost crassly appropriate that I got married on publication day. My first son, Louis, was published four months later.

  ‡ There was a muted fuss about this at the time, with cries, or murmurs, of ‘censorship’. I of course supported Kingsley, but without any political enthusiasm. I didn’t like his new attitude to ‘females’. I should add here that I think both novels, especially Jake’s Thing, have some great pages in them.

  * He worried particularly — and in my view preposterously — about ‘what they would say’ at his club. I couldn’t believe it. That was supposed to be the point of Kingsley Amis: he didn’t care what people thought about him. ‘Let me get this straight,’ I said, gathering my argument. ‘You’re giving up a year’s work because a few old wrecks at the Garrick, who probably think you’re also a Northerner [Lucky Jim] and a Taff [That Uncertain Feeling], may suspect, wrongly, and semi-literately, and against the evidence of all the other books, that you’re queer.’ ‘… Yeah THAT’S right,’ he answered. Only the title, Difficulties with Girls, survived, serving for a later book (the sequel to Take a Girl Like You). I have since read the original fragment. It isn’t without interest or insight, but it has a stalled feel. Maybe the Bateman-cartoon fantasy was KA’s cover-story for artistic unease. In any case he would return to the homosexual theme.

  † Russian Hide-and-Seek fails, in part, because it is a bugbear novel: a fantasy that is also a ‘warning’. This particular tub-thump went back a long way. Note how the affability of the fiftieth-birthday poem, ‘Ode to Me’, is unhinged by the Russian bugbear (‘The going a good bit rougher/Within the Soviet sphere — /Which means when the bastards are here’, and so on).

  * ‘To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult challenge. You came into a fully developed and articulated reality from nowhere, from non-being or primal oblivion. You had never seen life before. In the interval of light between the darkness in which you awaited first birth and then the darkness of death that would receive you, you must make what you could of reality, which was in a state of highly advanced development. I had waited for millennia to see this.’ From the forthcoming Ravelstein. (Today — 10/6/99 — is the author’s eighty-fourth birthday. He is due a call.) Compare Larkin, in ‘The Old Fools’: ‘It’s only oblivion, true:/We had it before, but then it was going to end,/And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour/To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower/Of being here.’ But the poem continues, contra — or rather pace — the Bellovian view: ‘Next time you can’t pretend/There’ll be anything else.’

  * This footnote is for Joyceans and dentists only. ‘Curiously,’ writes Sr Martinez, ‘when Joyce refers to some not exactly likeable characters, he again points out their teeth, but as if they belonged to animals — animals that have each one of the three masticatory mechanisms of the omnivorous human being, i.e., rodents, the herbivorous, and the carnivorous … In three successive occasions we read: “With rats-teeth bared he muttered …”, “… smiling in all her herbivorous buckteeth …”, and “cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow …”.’ The page references (New American Library edition) are 249, 433 and 476.

  * For example (and I would have been sorry to lose this): ‘When the drinks came, [the novelist Andrew] Sinclair [who already owed him one] plunged his hand confidently into his top inner breast pocket. As in a dream I watched that confidence vanish in an instant, to be as quickly replaced by puzzlement, disbelief, consternation. Soon he was doing an imitation of a free-falling parachutist frenziedly trying to locate his unpulled ripcord. Finally his movements slowed, ceased, and shame possessed him. “I must have left my wallet in my other jacket,” he said.’

  * ‘I cannot claim to be more honest and responsible and thrifty and industrious than most people, but I’m pretty sure that I would be less distinguished in these fields if I had been brought up quite outside the shadow of the chapel’ (Memoirs). I have just remembered the following incident. When I was about sixteen I was seriously undercharged for a packet of cigarettes in a newsagent’s. H
earing me crowing about this, my father took me back to the shop and looked on as I returned the money. I humoured him in what I took to be a ludicrous piety. Now I marvel, not at the piety, but at the energy.

  * In one passage Kingsley describes how he silenced a room at a party in Cambridge in 1963. Everyone present was asked to list the things which, in the course of their lives, had least disappointed them. People talked of children, of work, of travel. When Kingsley’s turn came he said, ‘Love.’

  * Catharine steps out into the street: ‘She looked so beautiful in her white dress and white hair-band that Churchill had an instant of sincere puzzlement at the way the passers-by went on passing by, the farmer climbing into his estate wagon over the road failed to reverse the direction of his climb and come pounding across to cast himself at her feet, the man laying slates on the roof of the barber’s shop managed to stay aloft. Churchill put his arms round Catharine and kissed her’ (The Anti-Death League).

  * In The Anti-Death League the chaplain, Major Ayscue, turns out to be no ordinary man of God. He reveals himself as a kind of tortured Manichee, declaring, for instance, that ‘to believe at all deeply in the Christian God, in any sort of benevolent deity, is a disgrace to human decency and intelligence’. All the same, his spiritual hunger is palpable. Towards the end Ayscue offers a prayer, or a plea for leniency, on behalf of a sick friend (Catharine). ‘Whenever he had prayed before it had been like talking into an empty room, into a telephone with nobody at the other end.’ This time, though, he feels that there is somebody there on the line, ‘not saying anything, nowhere near that, but listening. It frightened him rather.’ On the last page Ayscue’s beloved Alsatian bitch slips her lead outside the church and, ‘too interested in something across the street’, fails to notice an approaching lorry. The dog is called Nancy. She is Nancy, and she is luminously rendered.

  † ‘Yevgeny Yevtushenko’, Memoirs.

  * Who wrote, rightly but wrongly, in his last great poem, ‘Aubade’ (‘Postmen like doctors go from house to house’): ‘Courage is no good:/It means not scaring others. Being brave/Lets no one off the grave./Death is no different whined at than withstood.’

  * Daniel is of course the great actor, and the great poetic actor (see, above all, The Last of the Mohicans). I often think — though not as often as I’m sure Daniel does — of the pleasure Cecil would have taken in his ascendancy. At fifteen (to my twenty-two) he reminded me of my cousin David. But Dan’s ferocious handsomeness was at this time obscured by acne. He liked sweets and sticky buns, and Tamasin, I remember, would indulgently traffic them to him.

  † And I already felt the same way. I was growing up and becoming less stupid. Osric, like Kit, like Cecil, was past and gone. In 1974 I quit my job at the TLS and went to work on the back half of the New Statesman, the organ of the Left whose most famous editor, incidentally, was called Kingsley Martin. Two of my contemporaries there, Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton, were proselytising Trotskyists. They spent their Saturday mornings selling the Socialist Worker on Kilburn High Street. I moved to the libertarian left of centre. So my father and I entered our Kingsley Martin, or Kingsley-Martin, period, reliably disagreeing on every issue along (approximately) party lines. This would never change. And I am still having that argument, here in 1999.

  * Wife of the novelist Anthony Powell. The letter was to Zachary Leader, editor of KA’s Letters.

  Letter from College

  Exeter College,

  Oxford.

  [Easter? 1970]

  Dearest Dad and Jane,

  Fucking thanks for the lunch Dad (from Ros too).*

  Did you see that I won £2 in the New Statesman competition?† The best experience of my life.

  I’m getting quite delirious about my prelims.‡ We won’t finish the course until about a week before the exams (i.e. next week) by which time I’ll have to be conversant with 2 books of Virgil, lots of Old English texts, lots of Old English grammar, and all of Milton whom we’ve only had six months on as opposed to the two terms everyone else in Oxford has had on him. It’s like Brighton all over again but with no little goblin coming round to tell me what to do.

  My only friend [Rob] came up last weekend. His arrival at Ros’ flat was heralded by increasingly panicky half-hourly telephone calls, but he got here all right. The raise he’d been angling for for so long turned out to be a cool 5 shillings a week, so he’s leaving Biographic to start at the bottom somewhere else. All very depressing.*

  How’s your novel going Jane? I know what you mean about distractions. I actually find myself wondering whether I’ve got time to make myself coffee in the morning. I’ll be fucking glad when term’s over (15th, if you didn’t know).

  My love to Col and Sarg but not to Rosy who can look forward to 6 weeks of being well-bullied for not recognising me — I’ll also do my best to see that she gets raped by a mongrel. See you in 3 weeks,

  Lots of love

  Mart.

  P.S. Here are some expenses: Coffee etc — 15 0. Dry Cleaning — 1 15 0. Stationery — 8 0. Lunch (weekends up to end of term) — 2 0 0. Tip for scout — 1 1 0† : 5 8 0. The money you declined to send me earlier this term — +3 18. The money I owe Dad from when I came down for the day — × 1 0 0. 8 6 0

  * My girlfriend, Rosalind Hewer.

  † An honourable mention for an original idea, lamely executed. At this time I was going under the name of M. L. Amis. Who started the double-initial thing? D. H. Lawrence? L. H. Myers (Lawrence’s exact contemporary, and more or less the only other twentieth-century novelist okayed by F. R. Leavis)? It’s more austere: that’s the point. It gives less away. M. L. Amis: my first, but not my second, book review appeared with this by-line.

  ‡ Preliminary Examinations, sat at the end of the second term.

  * Biographic was and perhaps still is a small film company in Greek Street, Soho. Why I should claim to be depressed by Rob’s struggles is unclear. Gore Vidal wasn’t wrong when he said that it is not enough to succeed: others must fail (especially our friends). This sounds like a vice of sophistication, but I think there’s something primitive in it. It has to do with fear of desertion. A couple of years later, Rob’s career as an assistant director would seem to me, for a while, to be horrifyingly meteoric. I thought he would project himself out of my orbit. Then he fell — too fast, too far (things started getting out of hand on The Stud, an early sex-and-shopping movie starring Joan Collins). Last night (12/5/99) I had dinner with him and experienced a twinge of atavistic disquiet when he told me that his experiments with professional picture-framing were coming along reasonably well … I paid the bill. I gave him carfare. I had not moved out of his orbit. But I might have done.

  † These are pounds, shillings and pence. Miserably predictably, Osric has tipped his staircase servant twenty-one shillings — or one ‘guinea’.

  Existence Still Is the Job

  1995 did not stand on ceremony. It announced itself, on the first of January, with the prison suicide of Frederick West. (And in death, as it were, he drifts up from the footnotes and into the text.) … The act had been long premeditated. He volunteered for the shirt-mending detail at Winson Green, Birmingham. This gave him access to cotton tapes, which he eked out with the hems of his own bedding. He waited for the reduced invigilation of the public holiday. In the morning he played pool, used the exercise yard, and collected his lunch of soup and chops. There was a chair in his cell but it was the laundry basket that he kicked away from under him. A clattering chair might have brought the guards running. The laundry basket would have fallen with an unemphatic crackle.

  There has been much speculation about the ‘motive’ for West’s suicide. Was he unable to face his forthcoming trial? Did he despair when Rosemary spurned him after his arrest? One writer has suggested that West’s felo de se might have been his final ‘lust murder’, the apotheosis of his addiction to death. But surely the circumstances and details point to a timorous departure. Two of West’s children, Stephen and Mae
, offer something much simpler and more credible. Mae: ‘I always knew he would kill himself in jail. He was terrified, and forever watching his back in case someone had a go at him.’ Stephen: ‘Dad told me that if he didn’t do it, someone in there was going to … He was in tears, crying his eyes out … [His suicide] was very selfish.’* It is necessary for me to believe it, but I think these comments shore up the view that West was unusually susceptible to fear. He crept towards his death. He cringed out of existence.

  When I heard about the suicide I felt shock and some reflexive pity (because suicide sends you a message from ultimate human collapse), but I felt no surprise: nil. Suicide and Frederick West were wholly congruent. Why did he kill himself? It would be much harder to come up with a ‘motive’ for his going on living. And I also thought something like: to Hell with him and his stark beseeching face. Excise it from the planet.

  On the other hand, truth had taken a beating. That was immediately clear, and I could sense the deficit. All his life he had been a colossus of mendacity, the enemy and the opposite of truth.* And he would slander my cousin — from his grave. Suicide constituted his final evasion. Frederick West’s brother, John, took his share of the truth with him when he, too, killed himself, in November 1996.* He used the same means as Frederick. He even used the same knot on the noose — taught to the brothers, perhaps, when they were growing up in the Herefordshire village of Much Marcle, by their parents, Walter and Daisy, who also taught them physical and sexual brutality, as they were taught by their parents, in their turn.

  I have before me a recent newspaper clipping which begins: ‘The mother of [a missing girl, aged twenty-two] said last night: “I cannot close my eyes for fear of what I might see.” ’ Her words have a fundamental eloquence. It strikes you as counterintuitive at first, when you come across it in the literature: the fact that the families of those who have been murdered usually do want to know how the victims died. But the reason is transparent. They want to retard or narrow down the swarm of horrors that will present itself for contemplation. Afterwards, at least, when you close your eyes, you know what you are going to see. This is Pnin (and Nabokov, we should remember, lost his brother Sergei in the Holocaust: his crime was homosexuality):