Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  † I said to him, ‘What’s the point of the title?’ He said, ‘It’s a play on Russian roulette.’ I said, ‘People won’t get that. I didn’t get it.’ And he said, ‘Ah, but don’t forget that you’re incredibly thick.’ Set in the twenty-first century, the novel describes an England almost medievalised by fifty years of Russian rule. At a dinner on publication day Kingsley presented a copy to Margaret Thatcher. ‘What’s it about?’ she asked. He told her. ‘Get another crystal ball,’ said the Iron Lady.

  Letter from College

  Exeter College, Oxford

  [July? 1971]

  Dearest Dad and Jane,

  Sorry I haven’t written sooner — this is my first letter this term — but it’s so nice here in the summer that it’s difficult not to spend the whole time lying drunkenly in punts or in the Fellows’ garden pretending to read. Also I’m spending a lot of time looking for somewhere to live next year. I could use your advice: we want somewhere quite far out and with 3 bedrooms. The prices are around £12 and, bearing in mind that it costs £8-£9 living in college, how much should I allow for food and how much for rent.* I’m sharing with two other boys (I can’t look far enough ahead about Gully),† so that’s £4 each on rent, or thereabouts. The thing is that unless you’re incredibly lucky you have to take it for the holidays since it’s virtually‡ impossible to get a place in October. Anyway, tell me what you think.

  Things are more or less O.K. with Gully but I keep on wishing I weren’t tied down and that I’m wasting the best years of my life etc., since, as far as I’m concerned, the relationship isn’t getting any better: it just seems to consist of me trying to maintain the illusion that I’m as keen on her as ever (which I’m not). I know it’s all a question of responsibility but I keep thinking that it’s my life too. It’s at that awful stage where I think I’d be equally pissed off without her, so I’m frightened as well as squeamish about ending it.

  I had an incredible talk with Wordsworth* the other day. He said Shakespeare was probably queer, anyway disgusted with heterosexuality, and we started talking about queers generally. He said he was used to the idea since his father and brother are queer: another minute went by and he said casually that his mother had been queer too and had lived with another woman all through the war.† He said he wasn’t sure where his heterosexual genes came from and I saw what he meant. I’m doing Shakespeare all this term which is good fun, and Wordsworth is talking about all the prizes I should go in for. I don’t know about that but he agrees that I should stay up a month or so at the end of term since this is the last chance I’ll get to do some big reading before finals — a good idea don’t you think? Also this term I’m attending a series of seminars given by Prof. Northrop Frye — very high-powered, one man from each college.

  I’ve fixed it all for Sall & I’ll take her punting and so on. Write to me about Gully & the house business & I’ll see you soon (I’ll let you know if it’s for a weekend).

  Lots of Love,

  Martin

  Could you send the £50 to the Bursar by the end of the week if poss. & the following for me. Dry cleaning £1 5, coffee etc., £1. Dinner credits £2, and filing pads £1 = £5 — 5 — 0.

  Love to everyone & Miss Plush.

  * No question-mark in the original. It seems that these letters, now, were being addressed to Jane only — hence the domestic/amatory emphasis.

  † A couple of crossings-out and insertions here. It at least makes a change to find Osric enfeebled, not by getting out of bed every day, but by emotion. Gully, or Alexandra Wells, is the dedicatee of The Rachel Papers, though she was not its heroine, whom we have yet to get to. I had been introduced to Gully much earlier, in about 1965 (‘But you said you hated him! You said he had a jukebox!’: this was Gully’s confidante, Anna Haycraft — a.k.a. the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis). We started going out together when she came to St Hilda’s to read History in 1969, and it lasted in its intermittent way about as long as the average marriage. Ten years?

  ‡ ‘Virtually’: the signature tune of the idler and charlatan.

  * My tutor’s biological connection with the poet, still of interest to an Osric becoming slowly more literary, was real but nepotic. His then wife Ann sent me, three years later, the following comment on my first novel. ‘Have read your very [something] book.’ The difficult word was three letters long and took me about a week to decipher. It was: het.

  † My tutor advises me now that bisexual would have been more accurate.

  Feasts of Friends

  There was a discreet but persistent knocking on my bedroom door. I awoke.

  — May I come in?

  My younger son stood at the foot of the bed. This was during the lugubrious Christmas of 1994 when the three of us still used to camp out in the flat at weekends: there is the carton of chocolate yoghurt with a used teabag in it. The point was that the boys (then aged eight and ten) would usually wake me, of a Sunday morning, by jumping up and down on my head. Jacob now whispered,

  — Daddy, I’m sorry to disturb you.

  — Are you? Why?

  — I’m sorry to disturb you. But it’s the Jackal on the phone.

  The Jackal was my agent, Andrew Wylie. My sons had seen things in the papers and asked me some questions about them. Who, they wanted to know, was this man they were calling the Jackal? The Jackal, I explained, was called the Jackal because of his claws and his jaws and the tail-slit in the back of his pinstripe suit. They didn’t really believe it, but Jacob, here, was erring on the side of caution.

  I can’t remember the details of this particular call. But it must have been an important one and I’m sure I attended to it closely and uneasily at the time. Negotiations for my novel The Information would continue into the New Year. I have in front of me Julian Barnes’s friendship-ending letter, which arrived the day after the deal went through and is dated 12 January 1995. It is a remarkable document. It merits a reply …

  And I can’t remember the details of all those months of crucifixion in the press. ‘Why always you?’ I was asked. I’m tired of saying that I don’t understand it. I am tired of saying that I am tired of saying that I don’t understand it. When it was happening I kept murmuring to myself, Lord, I am ignorant and a stranger to my fellow man. It was chastening, it was even stimulating, to be taken aback by an entity you thought you understood: England. This wasn’t a story about me, because there was no story. ‘Where is the story here?’ foreign journalists would ask me, as they tried to grasp it: you could see their foreheads straining to grasp it. But this wasn’t a story about me. It was a story about England.

  On 16 January 1995, Kinch soared free of London’s Heathrow Airport and flew to Boston’s Logan. As I climbed from the cab I was imagining the kind of looks that Saul Bellow and I would soon exchange. He was thirty-seven years my senior, and his ordeal had been immeasurably more serious. Still, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, in the Letters: his was the harder course, but mine had to be lived by me. I outsuffered Saul only in one paltry particular: so far, he was not being widely attacked for being sick. Nobody was saying that his submission to intensive care was ‘cosmetic’. He was, as always, being attacked about other things. But not about that.

  As we cautiously embraced I said,

  — You feel a little lighter.

  — But you feel a little lighter too …

  It was a fish, a red snapper (‘clammy’ to the palate, and served with mayonnaise like ‘zinc ointment’) — it was a reef-feeding ‘pescavore’ that had almost done for him. Prying at the living coral, this fish had armed itself with a toxin exorbitantly hostile to human life …

  As I write, I keep apprehending Bellow’s ordeal through the radiance of the novel Ravelstein, in which events are given point, order and meaning — and, in this case, intimations of universal grandeur. I should remind myself of the ordinary misery of the thing, the meshugga ill luck of it. And I too stood there in the hall, clothed in the appalling quiddity of my case: modern, local, lurid.
In Seize the Day (1959) Bellow wrote that ‘a man’s griefs with his teeth’ accounted for about 2 per cent of the whole. Whereas I would revise this percentage in accordance with Clive James’s dictum, emphatically and empathetically urged on me when I was about twenty-seven: ‘Nine out of ten bad things happen at the dentist’s.’ Saul’s bad thing had happened in a paradisal setting. Not as beautiful, true, as the New Guinea rain forest and its orchid waterfall, where the nostrils of the traveller are greeted by the fragrance of fallen warriors turning on the spit. But the Caribbean (with its seascape, its sudden sunsets) was a good place to be taught a lesson about the weakness of our ‘life tenure’: the lack of cosmic support for it. When he was back in Boston, medical technology imposed itself. Machines did his living for him, and he went under for three and a half weeks. Thus consciousness was abandoned. All that was left was the subliminal mind. ‘Sub: under as regards position + L limen-inis threshold.’ That’s where he went, for twenty-five days: under the threshold.

  We all talked a storm that night: we had good stories to tell — chillers, tinglers. In those days the Bellows were living in a semi-ambassadorial residence provided by Boston University; their guestroom was in the next house along, and it must have been about five a.m., my time, when I strolled into it and took out my pen … On the table by the window, I have seen fit to record, lay a copy of Too Much Too Soon, ‘the spellbinding new novel by the bestselling author of Everything and More’. The room also contained a pair of globes. Two worlds. Everything and more? Certain people are not easily satisfied. I was satisfied. Notebook: ‘Sometimes the same light in the eyes, sometimes a different light.’ It seemed to me that he was mentally intact and entire;* Janis made it clear, though, that he was alternately desolated and infuriated by his physical shortfalls. (Ravelstein, early draft of the penultimate page: ‘[The neurologist] put me through some simple tests, all of which I failed … The degree of recovery possible could not be estimated; I would soon be eighty years of age.’) Notebook: ‘I swear he has gone from being bigger than me to being smaller than me. Confident (?) that he will renew.’ And he did renew.

  And I was satisfied. Princess Diana used to claim that her favourite poem was ‘Ye Wearie Wayfarer’ by Adam Lindsay Gordon, four lines of harmonial Victorian rubbish that go as follows:

  Life is mostly froth and bubble,

  Two things stand like stone.

  Kindness in another’s trouble,

  Courage in your own.

  For fun, Kingsley had recently rewritten ‘Ye Wearie Wayfarer’, imbueing it with something of the spirit of the times:

  Life is mainly grief and labour.

  Two things get you through.

  Chortling when it hits your neighbour,

  Whingeing when it’s you.

  Friendship, as I see it, lies at the midpoint between these two stanzas. It is a mysterious power: you show your friend your weakness, and somehow you are both the stronger …

  The next morning I demanded to be taken, for my breakfast, to a place called something like We Are Pancakes. Largely because I like the look of reproach she gives me when I do it, I often tease Janis Bellow about modern Americana — unaccountably, really, for she is Canadian.* We did in fact end up in a cafeteria called, not We Are Pancakes or Pancakes Are Us, but something like Home of the Pancake or Mike’s Pancake World. Saul, I thought, was significantly improved: overnight. When I said goodbye to him I was mildly scandalised to ascertain that he had gone back to being bigger than me. (I take no credit for this, though maybe I got smaller.) ‘He just decided to get better,’ Janis would tell me, months later, when the recovery, the remarkable recovery, was achieved. And I believe her. He did it with his head.

  I flew to Hollywood — to visit an actor who had come back from the grave: Mr John Travolta.

  He Hugged It to Him

  Readers of Kingsley’s Letters will follow the emotional arc that the book describes. We begin, after an interesting stutter,* with a massive and unbroken tranche of prose addressed to Philip Larkin — several tens of thousands of words, even after abridgement. It was love, unquestionably love, on my father’s part. He wanted to be with Larkin all the time; that this was impossible continued to irk and puzzle him. Larkin, I think, felt the same way, or rather he felt the Larkinesque equivalent. But he had less talent for love … Then life started to happen to Kingsley, beginning with war, then marriage, children, teaching, travel, divorce, remarriage, divorce. And success happened too (it had the odd effect of calming him: success cooled him down). Meanwhile, life was happening to Larkin, but he had no talent for that, remaining, to the end, single, childless and site-tenacious. He did this quietly and heroically, as I now see it. He hugged melancholy to him, in the poems — for the poems, it might even have been. It wasn’t that he cultivated misery. It was more the feeling: unhappiness is ordinary and everyday and in abundant supply; let’s see if I can make something out of mine, which is otherwise unalleviable.

  My sense of Larkin comes from my childhood. I had several good times with him as an adult or near-adult. He had Osric over to dinner at All Souls, where he was in residence while working on the Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse.* In his room before dinner he gave me, or maybe just showed me (was it a present for his niece? I already had it, anyway), a copy of the Rolling Stones’ live LP, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out. We agreed that it had clear strengths — particularly ‘Stray Cat Blues’. Then in to dinner with the Warden, John Sparrow, and others. Attired in an improvised tuxedo (black velvet suit with some black rag around the neck), I felt myself simultaneously sneered at and fancied by Sparrow and by additional pewter-haired relicts in this all-male sanctuary. Who else was there? Bowra? Rowse, the ‘biographer’ of Shakespeare? And the conversation?

  Tonight we dine without the Master

  (Nocturnal vapours do not please);

  The port goes round so much the faster,

  Topics are raised with no less ease —

  Which advowson looks the fairest,

  What the wood from Snape will fetch,

  Names for pudendum mulieris,

  Why is Judas like Jack Ketch?†

  Larkin and I, in any event, contentedly formed a lower-middle-class enclave, among all the silver and the servants and the connoisseurial punctilio. We felt solidarity, against this.* And we ate and drank to remarkable effect. Two or three months later, when the Finals results were published, Larkin wrote to me saying how relieved he was: he feared that his hospitality might have damaged my brain. ‘Every century has its cushy profession,’ he said that night in All Souls. ‘It used to be the church. Now it’s academe.’ We sat at a high-church High Table, with its salvers and chalices, its monstrances and chrismatories: academe at its most epicurean and pseudo-aristocratic. All three sections of the poem ‘Livings’ conclude with a nightscape. This is the ending of Part II, quoted above:

  The bells discuss the hour’s gradations,

  Dusty shelves hold prayers and proofs:

  Above, Chaldean constellations

  Sparkle over crowded roofs.†

  Larkin could get a mild kick out of the pompous glamour of All Souls, and so could I.‡ My education was winding up. Life was about to start happening to me. Academe, in humbler form, was something I felt I might have to fall back on. But what excited me, that night, was the company of the poet — his presence, his example, his dedication to the use of words.*

  ‘Philip, you should spend more,’ I told him, a decade or so later — dogmatically and fatuously and above all childishly. Because my sense of him begins in childhood … There was always this ritual, in Swansea, every time he came to stay: Tipping the Boys. I described the procedure in an obituary I wrote in 1985:

  At first it was sixpence for Philip and threepence for Martin; years later it was tenpence against sixpence; later still it was a shilling against ninepence: always index-linked and carefully graded.

  This account contains a grotesque exaggeration: it was fourpence for Philip and thr
eepence for Martin. The heavy, blackened coins were counted out by Larkin on the kitchen table, in two squat stacks. My brother and I exchanged uncertain glances (this was the closest we had come to a religious experience); urged on by our mother, we darted forward and made the snatch — out from under Larkin’s mournful and priestly gaze. I now see my father hanging back, with a half-suppressed smile. A smile of what? Of affectionate sadism as he forced his friend to surrender 7d.? Partly, perhaps. When I search the periphery of this memory, though, I come across an earlier scene, with Mum telling us that we would get our tips but we had to remember that this was a serious business for our miserly visitor. ‘He’s not like Bruce,’ she said, with dissimulated levity.* So it was a setup! And my brother and I, in our avarice and awe, were part of the charade. Was Larkin in on it — was Larkin the straight man? Well, whichever way you look at his life he was certainly the strait man, careful, mean, tight, close. Niggardly has many fine synonyms (including the welcome Americanism cheap, with its simplifying imputation of inadequate income), but near is the adjective for Philip Larkin. Near: holding everything to him.

  — You should spend more, Philip. He didn’t answer.