Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  So there was happiness for me in Israel; and happiness, I keep finding, contains a strong admixture of paranoia. Now that you’re happy (you suspect), an aeroplane will come and crash on your head. Later that year Bellow published More Die of Heartbreak, I published Einstein’s Monsters, and Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind.* And among all this productivity and vigour I can now only see a sneer of eventual calamity. Let us move seven years on. I am being let off lightest, with my convulsion of middle age. Whereas Allan Bloom is dying of AIDS. And that red snapper in St-Martin is feeding off the reef, turning itself into a cyanide capsule, ready for the Bellows. Of the others at that table in Jerusalem, Teddy Kolleck would by then have lost his mayoralty to Likud; and his life’s work, the city, which in the mid-1980s was a bazaar of febrile ecumenicism, would become something much more monolithic, conservative and orthodox. The last time I saw Amschel Rothschild was at a party in London in 1996. As we talked, I picked his brains about firearms for my suicide novel Night Train. Three months later he hanged himself in a Paris hotel room.†

  There is no bringing Amschel back, although he still half-exists, in each of his three children. Others did come back. After twenty-five days in the waiting-room of death Saul Bellow came back. Then he undertook another retrieval. Allan Bloom ‘is’ Ravelstein. I use inverted commas but I feel that I am soon going to have to discard them — along with much other critical punctilia. Of course, only a semiliterate would say that Harold Skimpole is Leigh Hunt or that Rupert Birkin is D.H. Lawrence; of course, even the most precisely recreated character is nonetheless re-created, transfigured; of course, autobiographical fiction is still fiction — an autonomous construct; and, of course, the roman-à-clef is the lowest form of wit. I know Bellow’s novel far, far better than I ever knew Bellow’s friend. Yet Ravelstein comes close to persuading me otherwise. This book is numinous. It constitutes an act of resuscitation, and in its pages Bloom lives.

  Climacteric

  — I want to put Rob in a novel, said Kingsley.

  The time was 1982 (post-Jane); the place was the sitting-room of the pokey, wonky little corner house in Kentish Town. My brother Philip was also present … We had recently had a visit from Philip’s namesake: Larkin. I was getting out of my car on the appointed evening when I saw Philip L. and his girlfriend, the virile Monica, as they moved questingly up Leighton Road. They had been to the cricket, at Lord’s,* and were now slightly lost; they looked apologetic and provincial, Larkin reminding me of one of his own self-deprecations (an imaginary headline, to accompany an unfortunate photograph: Faith-Healer, Or Heartless Fraud?). I approached them slowly and obliquely, not wishing to cause alarm, and got them safely indoors. Where my brother, to my surprise, crossed the room and embraced his godfather. Larkin’s response surprised me too (because I knew his poems better than I knew their author); it exactly corroborated a remark that Kingsley would make in December 1985, in Hull, at Larkin’s funeral:

  it was impossible to meet him without being aware in the first few seconds of his impeccable attentive courtesy: grave but at the same time sunlit, always ready to respond to a gleam of humour or warmth.

  And of course he and Hilly always took delight in each other … This was the last time I saw Larkin. A bad time was coming for our household poets. And what a luxury it is, to have these poets in your past. John Betjeman† went in 1984. We had seen a fair bit of Betjeman in the Seventies: he was (ominously, for the marriage) one of the very few friends whom Jane and Kingsley equally liked. In a late letter KA passes on a posthumous rumour about ‘Betch’ reducing a secretary to tears, adding something like: And he’ll be remembered as the sweetie, while the real teddybear (KA) will be remembered as just another old swine. I never saw anything but the party-animal side of Betjeman (once a summer lunch that went on till dark) and the sweetie side of Betjeman (whenever he came to the house on Hadley Common, even late on, he would always insist on climbing however many stairs it took to visit you if you were sick).

  I said,

  — Rob?

  — Yeah. I thought I’d put him in a book. You know, just a minor character.

  — What sort of thing?

  — A drinker who’s trying to produce films.

  — Rob never tried to produce films. He was an assistant director.

  — There you are then. Would he mind?

  — I shouldn’t think so. I won’t tell him about it.

  — What shall I call him?

  There was a silence. Then my brother said,

  — Call him Rob.

  Quite a while later, in 1990, Kingsley published The Folks That Live on the Hill. Among the minor characters is a heavy-drinking would-be film producer called Rob. But ‘Rob’ isn’t Rob. The truth is that you can’t put real people into a novel, because a novel, if it is alive, will inexorably distort them, will tug them all out of shape, to fulfil its own designs. Accordingly, The Folks That Live on the Hill is very broadly about kindness, and the main point about ‘Rob’ is that he is indifferent to kindness, or takes kindness as no more than his due — an entirely unRoblike trait. In this regard Rob makes me think of Aziz’s plangent but puzzling lines (they are spoken ‘gravely’) in A Passage to India: ‘Mr Fielding, no one can ever realise how much kindness we Indians need, we do not even realise it ourselves. But we know when it has been given.’ And being mildly and casually generous to Rob is its own reward, or I probably wouldn’t do it … In his essay of 1973, ‘Real and Made-up People’,* KA wrote: ‘By what is either a paradox or a truism, the closer the likeness of the real … person, the less interesting he will be in the novel.’ This was something that my father and I had always agreed about: until 1978. Calling the minor character ‘Rob’, though, was no more than Kingsley’s continuation of an amusing moment with his sons.

  In the same essay he wrote the sentence I quoted early on: ‘I did once, out of laziness or sagging imagination, try to put real people on paper and produced what is by common consent my worst novel, I Like It Here.’ In my view KA’s worst, or least-good, novel is the alternate-world fantasy Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980),† which is flanked by the problematic Jake’s Thing (1978) and, after the longest gap in his career, the superproblematic Stanley and the Women (1984). This period was climacteric — and how brutally the COD defines that word: ‘a. constituting a crisis, critical; (Med.) occurring at period of life (45–60) at which vital force begins to decline.’ Kingsley’s fiction would recover, and triumphantly. But from my vantage it seemed that he was somehow adrift in art and life. Russian Hide-and-Seek was a depressed book. He didn’t have the energy to travel so far from his own concerns. Jake and Stanley, on the other hand, were asphyxiatingly close to the pain schedule. In Kingsley I sensed lost equilibrium. His life, obviously and demonstrably, had (half) survived a tormenta, a raging sea. But what had happened to the work? Only other writers, perhaps, will believe me when I say that this question felt just as serious.

  The day I finished Jake’s Thing I went over to the house in Hampstead. When Jane left the room I said,

  — All that sex-therapy stuff. Did you really do any of that?

  I knew something about my father’s sex life. One source was Jane, who even in 1975 was telling me more about my father’s growing remissness in that area than I really wanted to know. Another source was Jake’s Thing.

  — Yes!

  — Christ! That genital-focusing stuff and going to bed with a ring round your cock?

  — Yes! Some of it.

  — Christ!

  — Well, in a case like this you have to show willing …

  — Yeah, but the novel didn’t show willing, did it?

  And he gave me that look again. Incapacitated: gently incapacitated. Jane came back into the room. We changed the subject.

  In happier times the two writers used to end the working day by reading out to each other, over evening drinks, the results of their labours. I don’t think they did that with Jake’s Thing. And they certainly didn�
��t do it with Stanley and the Women.

  He was a man who couldn’t be alone in a house after dark. I had no idea what action to take but I expected the call and at once knew my brother’s meaning when he said,

  — Mart. It’s happened.

  * As far as I am concerned she is, with Iris Murdoch, the most interesting woman writer of her generation. An instinctivist, but an elegant one (like Muriel Spark), she has a freakish and poetic eye, and penetrating sanity … Now I remember an incident from the later days at the house on Hadley Common: Kingsley regretfully yet rather dourly correcting a short story of Jane’s (this would have been for the collection Mr Wrong, 1975, and one of her best books). He was correcting it in typescript, for grammar, and there were several marks on each page. When I later settled down to read it I thought that my father might have been captious, or carried away, or borne along by some parallel momentum (the two of them were already hoarding grievances against each other). But no. All the regularisations seemed conscientious and non-pedantic. There was only one that bothered me. The sentence, describing a suburban street, went approximately: ‘The windows all had their curtains drawn, like houses asleep.’ And Kingsley had crossed out like and inserted as of. I thought: You’re right, but you’ve killed the poeticism, and crippled the rhythm. Jane, an autodidact (exercised about my education, perhaps, because hers had been threadbare and homebound), accepted the corrections with some meekness — and, as I remember, incorporated them all. Kingsley’s expression said: What could I do? I didn’t disapprove of what he had done, but I felt for her. And for him. He didn’t have one marriage riding on this marriage. He had two.

  * Earlier on I called Jacobs’s book ‘mysteriously repetitive’. The quote above is from p. 313. On p. 314 we get: ‘One cause of change may be simple exhaustion, like an art form running out of steam.’ And on page 315 we get: ‘Exhaustion, like that of a literary genre running out of steam, played its part.’ The proofreader must have been mysteriously repetitive too. See Appendix.

  † Kingsley might have had this disappointment in mind when he wrote p. 31 of Jake’s Thing (1978). In this scene Jake stays up late to watch ‘Redezvous with Terror: The Brass Golem’. ‘Despite everything the background bass clarinet could do, and it did indeed get a lot done in quantity, terror as expected failed altogether to turn up at the prearranged spot.’ He might have taken a pasting over Psycho, but Kingsley really did like terror, particularly antique terror (The Mask dates from 1932). I warm to the tone of youthful and unvalorous excitement in his essay ‘Dracula, Frankenstein, Sons & Co.’: ‘Apart from the adventures of the incredibly shrunken man, I recall chiefly The Fly (1958) and its successors. Here, the hastiest of mumbo-jumbo was run through with the palpable design of proceeding to the disagreeable activities and physical appearance of a fly with a chap’s head and a chap with a fly’s head — especially him’ (What Became of Jane Austen?).

  * Because that’s what novels are (among other things): not almanacs of your waking life but messages from your unconscious history. They come from the back of your mind, not from its forefront. This would eventually be made very clear to me.

  * A rare occurrence, and it should be added that Kingsley could be a pretty pathetic chastiser of his children. During a party, one night hereabouts, Philip and I kept going downstairs and hiding behind the furniture. It got out of hand. Kingsley eventually took a hairbrush to us, but so limply that we giggled about it for an hour after he had gone downstairs. Hysterical anyway, we disguised these giggles as wails of anguish, and that, too, got funnier and funnier. Meanwhile, downstairs, our father’s tears were unfeigned, and later I was sorry that we had deceived him.

  * Bloom considered nuclear weapons to be a heavy-handed but effective means of deterring conventional war. I said that it was indefensible to gamble the future on an arrangement that, somehow or other (and so far and no further), has succeeded in containing the present. Et cetera. Bloom, I now know, had an immensely capacious intellect; but I felt at times that I was arguing with my father, who on this subject was often capable of ‘thinking with the blood’, in Kipling’s phrase (instead of about the blood, as you ought soberly to do). With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the erosion of deterrence, the planet has ‘become safe for war’ (in Don DeLillo’s phrase). The bloodbaths and ethnic cleansings — ethnic foulings — in the Balkans would never have been allowed to destabilise an era of continued Mutual Assured Destruction. But the moral case against MAD remains watertight. Therefore: down. 1987 was a time (SDI, space shields) when many voices were still saying up.

  * I was of course aware that Bellow’s situation had changed since our first meeting in 1983. He was no longer living with his fourth wife, Alexandra … But I couldn’t claim to be aware of what all this meant for the heart, because it hadn’t yet happened to mine. I had watched my father, and read him; I had read Bellow, and many others. This remains the great deficiency of literature: its imitation of nature cannot prepare you for the main events. For the main events, only experience will answer. ‘If love cuts them up so much … why not be sensible and sign off early?’ My father had taken that advice. In 1987 he was sixty-five; Bellow was seventy-two, and by no means done.

  * John Updike has written about the young men who come to see him, with their questions and their shaking hands. My hands would shake for Updike, in the summer of that same year. As I loaded the tea tray (me milk, him … camomile?) in the cafeteria of Massachusetts General Hospital, he noticed this and said smoothly, ‘Why don’t I carry that?’ I learned from the experience. When young men come to see me, with their questions and their shaking hands (only the true fans tremble), I place their drinks on the table before them and avert my gaze while they take their first sip or splash.

  † A three-draft man myself, I was shocked to learn that Bellow had dictated certain passages in Humboldt’s Gift. (Then again, I know he can be an obsessional reworker.) Most writers have at least this in common with Nabokov: ‘I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child’ (Strong Opinions).

  * The deserved popularity of this freak bestseller almost unhinged its thesis, because the unregarded morbidity of the American soul turned out to be something that millions of Americans wanted to read about. Bloom’s book is gripping, funny and bruisingly erudite; all the same (and I mustn’t go into italics here), it is consistently obtuse on the subject of nuclear weapons. These weapons irritate Bloom, but only inasmuch as they provide a pretext for undergraduate self-pity. Strange to say, he didn’t think hard enough — he didn’t think philosophically — about the question and the way it affects some of the propositions he takes for granted. ‘Concern for the safety of one’s family’, writes Bloom (he is summarising Hobbes and Locke), ‘is a powerful reason for loyalty to the state, which protects them.’ A nuclearised world, where the state puts one’s family in the front line, entirely undoes this apparent verity.

  † Suicide is the most sombre of all human outcomes; it really is the saddest story. My novel was about a suicide that seemed inexplicable, but Amschel’s suicide was far more dumbfounding, because it was real and because it was near. Some probable precipitants did emerge (death of mother; pressure of work). But perhaps the most striking disclosure, a mere detail at first glance, was to be found in the statement of the chambermaid who, that afternoon, delivered some towels to his room. She described his manner towards her as impatient and abrupt. And the idea of Amschel behaving overweeningly seemed so unrecognisable, so impossible … Generally suicide comes about at the moment when the pain schedule suddenly contains no air and no prospect of it. But the literature tells us that it can also be triggered by ungovernable impulse, by a kind of mental spasm. I back away, as you must do, believing that Amschel’s felo de se was involuntary. He is part of my fundamental trinity of significant suicides, along with Susannah Tomalin (daughter of Claire and Nicolas) and Lamorna Seale, the mother of my daughter Delilah. Whatever else it did, the other suicide recently mention
ed in these pages, that of Frederick West, was entirely intelligible and caused not a flicker in the moral cosmos.

  * Monica berated me for underestimating the skills of legspinner Abdul Qadir, of Pakistan. It was a browse through my younger son’s Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack (touchingly to be found on his bedside table) that gave me the date for this meeting.

  † Cecil Day Lewis was Poet Laureate from 1968 to 1972 (he succeeded the antique figure of John Masefield, who filled the post for thirty-seven years). Betjeman was Poet Laureate from 1972 to 1984. Larkin, the obvious successor, let it be known that he would turn the job down. I wrote an obituary of Larkin, and almost a decade later I would write about him at much greater length — to protect him from his biographer, Andrew Motion, who the other week (5/99) was appointed Poet Laureate.

  * Reprinted in The Amis Collection (1990). The autobiographical writer, he goes on, is peculiar to this century: ‘… D. H. Lawrence started writing about himself, people he knew and what there was of what had actually happened to him, and his knowing or unknowing heirs are all around us today. They have raised the ghosts of long-dead Philistines who thought the poet a liar and history the only truth, and Katherine Mansfield is called “the most autobiographical of writers” in unadorned commendation …’ Lawrence regularly faced legal pressure not just for obscenity but also for libel. If he were writing today, he would also have to moderate such sentiments as the following, from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, when Connie questions the value of her loyalty to Clifford: ‘What was she serving, after all? A cold spirit of vanity, that had no warm human contacts, and that was as corrupt as any low-born Jew, in craving for prostitution to the bitch-goddess, Success.’ I quoted this passage to Saul Bellow, who calmly agreed that it belonged on the debit side of the ledger. I remain less tolerant. The anti-Semitism of the comically despicable ‘citizen’ in Ulysses is more subtle than this. Lawrence’s slur is a double commonplace: a cliché of the head and a cliché of the heart.