Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  Dadsitting was what we called it. It was what he called it too. Being with Dad, keeping him company, had over the years become an activity or experience of increasingly frank torpor. He read his paper. You read yours. Usually he would offer the odd complaint about illiteracies, barbarisms, punning headlines with their single entendres. Not today. Old age, for him, was like privacy, thickening and deepening around him.

  — Here, Dad. Help me with this.

  I handed him my copy of the Independent, folded in four to isolate the Prize Crossword. Kingsley was of course very well-equipped for crosswords but lost interest over the years, saying he felt ‘buggered about’ by the setters.* Another objection was that crosswords were ‘too much like work’. He said the same about chess. Once, in Princeton (making me nine), he contrived to lose a game in four moves. It wasn’t the classic Fool’s Mate, which demands the informed cooperation of your opponent. Fool’s Mate lasts two moves. In the more protracted version Black has only to ignore an unignorable — and shamefully corny — pincer threat to his King’s Bishop’s pawn. (1. P-K4 … 2. Q-KB3 … 3. B-B4). ‘Mate,’ I said with astonishment, thinking, for a moment, that he would be sure to grant me a rematch. But there he was, ruefully climbing to his feet (and going back to his study). No, he really doesn’t like chess, I thought. It was the last time we played … Up on the Empire State (that day was famous also for its unprecedented costliness: $100) I stared out and down at Manhattan with a sense of boundless privilege and achievement. That this glittering immensity inspired only terror in my father seemed to me painfully discrepant. I was sorry for him, and also generally bewildered, because I thought all adults lived beyond the reach of fear.

  Lying in his hospital bed he accepted delivery of the Independent and its Prize Crossword (the prize was an Oxford reference-book: surely a worthy grail). I watched him: the compression of the lips, slightly vexed and put-upon; the emphatic exhalation through the nose; the preparatory wag of the head, as it settled down to reluctant concentration. And I understood the gravamen: more words, more dealings with words. And pointless dealings, because some crossword wonk† would get there before you (somebody who did nothing else) and you would never win that Companion to English Literature or that Dictionary of Quotations. And he already had them. And he was already in them … All the same, Kingsley would usually help me out, on Sunday lunchtimes, filling in the last half-dozen clues of the Saturday puzzle I brought along — while the boys watched Tom and Jerry or the tape of Aliens — with irritation and imposing ease.

  He returned the Independent to me (he would have no more of it), saying,

  — Eight across is stop.

  I think it was stop. It was a four-letter answer involving two abbreviations and a tactical synonym. The clue might have been: ‘Prevent roadwork (4)’ (road=st. work=op., prevent=stop).

  — Thanks, Dad.

  Very soon I would be looking back on this moment with veneration, like an apostate remembering the unction and ardour of faith.

  He stayed a week and, although it was my mother he really wanted and needed, the children, too, worked to a rough rota, and I was a good deal back and forth.

  Larkin, long dead it now seemed, began his monumental hospital poem, ‘The Building’ (1972), as follows:

  Higher than the handsomest hotel

  The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,

  All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall

  Like a great sigh out of the last century.

  Fulham Road didn’t feel like a great sigh out of the last century. It felt like a great sigh out of the next century — no, not a sigh, a ditty, a jingle. The area was undergoing plutocratic Italianisation (Milan being the model, not Florence or Rome), deriving its character from Chelsea Football Club — from Roberto Di Matteo, from Gianfranco Zola, from Gianluca Vialli. On the street everybody is impeccably groomed, beautifully shod, wasp-waisted, leather-jacketed. They all look as though they earn thirty thousand pounds a week and eat pasta three times a day. Their hearts, in repose, beat once an hour.

  We used to live here, just a couple of blocks east, 128 Fulham Road: me, brother, sister, mother. This was in the early 1960s, after the dissolution of the marriage, after the fatherless interlude in Soller, Majorca. I enrolled at a grammar in Battersea, over the river (where my mother worked, later, at Battersea Zoo; she had been a kennel-maid in her youth, and groomed many horses). Philip had gone back to his Cambridge-axis boarding-school. During the vacations, with various friends, in various combinations, we cruised all day* and played Scrabble all night.† In 1963 my mother had a form of breakdown. Hilly went away to recover and, unaccountably, for several days, maybe a week, maybe more, the children ran wild. One afternoon George Gale rang the doorbell. He went from room to room in solemn consternation. Every cupboard he opened had a fourteen-year-old girl in it. Kingsley and Jane came to stay. Jane took the house in hand, transforming it from low- to middle-Bohemian (until then the front door had been seldom locked). A friend of Jane’s stopped by for a drink, Alexander Mackendrick, the director (Whisky Galore, The Ladykillers, Sweet Smell of Success), and a few weeks later I was taking my mother — first-class, BOAC — on a highly paid as well as complimentary two-month holiday in the West Indies. I got fifty quid a week and she, as my Chaperone, got twenty (the rent on our four-floor house in South Kensington was forty-eight a month).‡ I talentlessly played one of the children in Mackendrick’s version of the Richard Hughes novel A High Wind in Jamaica.* Sally came out and was a busy extra. I played chess with my co-star, the consistently avuncular Anthony Quinn, and the divinely pretty daughter — Lisa Coburn — of my other co-star, genial James, was in love with me and followed me everywhere, even down into the deep end of the pool of the hotel on Runaway Bay. I loved her too but I wanted moments of reprieve. She was seven. The film’s central character was an extraordinary girl called Deborah Baxter, who played my younger sister. I had eyes (but no lips, no hands) for her older sister: Beverly Baxter. My smallest sister (there were three, the middle one, Roberta Tovey, going on to star in Dr Who and the Daleks) was called Karen Flack, who was even younger than Lisa Coburn. Hilly and I told each other again and again that Karen was destined to be a star. Once or twice I babysat for her when our mothers went out on the town with the feature actors and the stuntmen. Karen was asleep by the time they left. ‘Go in the big bed with Karen,’ said my mother. ‘Then when you’re older you can say that you’ve slept with Karen Flack.’ This was unlike my mother, more like my father; but we both knew it was funny. In Jamaica I laughed a lot with my mother and ceased to play host to anxieties about her breakdown. (That night in London I had been restrained from entering the room where she lay.) When she trod on a spiked sea-anenome in the rocks, towards the end of the trip, I expected her to be courageous, and she was: as indifferent to self-pity as to self-dramatisation. My acting duties were light compared to those of the other children, because I died just over halfway through; bloodthirstily watching a cockfight in the square below, I fell from a window of the bordello run by Lila Kedrova … We flew back to England (second-class: my mother cashed in the tickets) and the summer was spent going back and forth to Pinewood until the film was done.* Wearing a brand-new blazer I returned to the grammar in Battersea, on the first day of the academic year — and was instantly expelled (for chronic truancy). This was stunning and also laughable. Sir Walter St John’s was a violent school, with violent pupils and violent staff. It seemed to me that you could do anything there and expect just an hour’s detention. I enrolled at a chaotic crammer in Notting Hill, and went back to cruising all day and playing Scrabble all night. ‘Do they sleep with these girls?’ my aunt Miggy, visiting, asked my mother. ‘No,’ said Hilly. Well, Philip did, and I didn’t. Then after an aeon of petting and pleading I suddenly lost my virginity to a girl I met in a Wimpy Bar earlier the same day. I was fifteen. My amatory career was launched. My cinematic career immediately disappeared. And my academic career, as mentioned earlier, started
to fall into a pattern: one O-level every other year. I didn’t have much time for reading but when I did read I read comics and, after I’d done that, I reread them. Quietly, patiently, unobtrusively reeking, I lay there on the bed as my mother yelled my A-level English result up the stairs: ‘You failed.’ I arose, and spent the rest of the day transferring a sock from one end of the room to the other. This had to end. My brother and I moved in with Kingsley and Jane, and my mother remarried and went to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Sally went too.

  On my visits to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital I didn’t bother to go along to the old house. Because I pass it all the time. It is now a choice, a bijou residence. I find it hard to believe that so much guileless disorder played itself out behind that pearly, Belgravian façade. Tellies and trannies, cats and lodgers, fires and floods — and dope, and speed.* It seems now that my faculties were entirely inert. I knew there were higher inklings out there, and they had to do with the soul. Soul was a quality much discussed, or rather referred to as understood, by my brother and me, and was the first attribute you looked for in everyone and everything (and especially girls). In addition, I did claim to myself that I wanted to be a writer.† So what did I do all the time? Did I dream and doodle, did I read, did I pray? No. I was groping my way back across the bedroom, looking for the other sock.

  My mother’s breakdown, in 1963, culminated in an accidental overdose: sleeping-pills. She lay in a curtained room. I looked in and could see the bedside light and its pink lampshade. Someone, an adult, barred my entry. Her recovery was swift and total. When she talked to me about it afterwards she said she had been depressed because she was still in love with my father.

  I cannot overemphasise how thoroughly this was not the case, in 1995. All was reversed. By this stage my mother still contemplated death as an escape from her feelings about Kingsley — but an escape in the opposite direction. ‘I’ve been dying for a heart attack for years,’ she told me. Still, there were days, there were weeks, when she really meant it. Always difficult, and more recently impossible, Kingsley was now proceeding towards the unbelievable. ‘Courage … means not scaring others.’ My father did a fair job of not frightening his children: the Empire State Effect. But he didn’t think to spare my mother. Because she was everything to him now: the full imago. It had always struck me, concerned me, that for as long as I can remember Dad called her what we called her. He called her Mum.

  On 6 September, just over a week after his fall, Hilly and Sally went in to get him and bring him home.

  Seagulls

  First I wanted to know what was happening on his side of the desk. All else would follow from this.

  I was with my mother in her sitting-room downstairs. It opened on to the asymmetrical little garden, in past summers the scene of al fresco lunches and hosed-down grandchildren. Kingsley was upstairs, with friends.

  — He sits in the red chair.

  This was said ominously. The tomato-red leather armchair lived in Kingsley’s study. Its significance lay in the fact that it wasn’t the chair on the business side of the desk. The red chair was where he sat when he wasn’t writing.

  — Reading?

  — Yes, or trying to …

  The diagnosis, as it came down to me (or got diffused in my direction), was still a string of contented clichés. Kingsley had (a) been up against it and gone through it, this bad patch, and was still out of sorts and one degree under, out of kilter and a bit green around the gills, but if he (b) looked after himself and took it easy and had some peace and quiet and drew the line and kept within bounds, then, he would (c) yes, he would soon be his old self again. His old self.

  Upstairs, the sound of voices — the laughter of the biographer.

  — Dad’s drinking, is he?

  — Of course he is. He was desperate to get back to the Garrick. Desperate.

  It was the first thing he did. He went to the Garrick for an all-day lunch.

  — Was he drunk?

  — Oh, paralytic … I like the sound of a typewriter. It seems to me like a natural background noise.

  And she missed it. As you would, after nearly half a century (with one interregnum, 1963-81; but my mother’s other husbands were writers too). All those novels, poems, essays, letters. Kingsley was a brisk two-finger typist; some of the more often-used keys bore a deep lateral cleft from his nails. My mother was unsettled by the silence of the typewriter; it was like vanished traffic or birdsong.

  Hilly had been saving this up. She said,

  — He keeps typing the word seagulls.

  — Seagulls?

  — Seagulls.

  This seemed much stranger to me then than it does now. Now I live on my father’s street, and seagulls, in the temperate months, are part of my daily life. Attracted by the nearby canals, they fill the sky above Regent’s Park Road. Plump, cumbersome and pompous, they flock to the shitlashed terrace outside my study. All day they honk and shriek, practising on their ten-pee harmonicas, their warped kazoos. A mother seagull has a nest in the chimney. She knocks on the glass of the terrace door with her questing yellow beak. She once strode into the room: the size of an ostrich.

  — He types i’s and o’s.

  — What?

  — He gets up at five in the morning and types i’s and o’s.

  A week later. I hadn’t seen Kingsley for three days and suddenly he was shorter than me. What happened to those four inches? Gravity ate them. It would be another week before I took this in.

  He looked as though he had gone halfway through a carcompactor: the vertical compression had taken place, but they had yet to attempt the horizontal. I went and lay on his bed while he crouched opposite in a low armchair. The expression he wore seemed unfamiliar, and at first I took it for anger. I said experimentally, knowing that this was just the kind of thing my father liked,

  — If we were all Icelandic, you would be called Kingsley Williamson. I would be called Martin Kingsleyson and Louis would be called Louis Martinson. Sally would be called Sally Kingsleysdottir and Jessica would be called Jessica Philipsdottir.

  — Mm, he said, unamused.

  Now I hoped he was angry with me. I hoped it … And Delilah, what would she be called? Delilah Patricksdottir or Delilah Martinsdottir? The former, surely. She calls him Daddy, and that’s as it should be. I did the nature but he did the nurture. He did the hours … I had just returned from a two-night trip to Iceland (and I hoped that that was what Kingsley was angry about). There I saw a rainbow entire, bandily bestriding a fjord in austere isolation. Round-topped mountains loomed on the horizon, like planets. Now I was back in the small world, the sickroom, with my father using whisky to swallow his pills, and with that look on his face. What was that look? Not anger. More defiance: a defiant self-neglect.

  As we changed guard my brother and I had a few words in the hall. Philip said,

  — He’s poisoning himself.

  — Those pills are all jumbled up in the shoebox.

  — I see him sitting there really sweating …

  Downstairs. I sensed, now, that my mother too had changed, had contracted. It was no longer a question of rolling your eyes and blowing the fringe off your brow. This was going to be warm human work from here on in. I said, uselessly (do we ever need to be told this, beyond the age of about thirty?),

  — You look tired.

  — He screams for his Nurofen at five in the morning. I mean screams …

  The doorbell rang.

  — He waits all day for people to visit. And when they come he switches the TV on. Then he asks, ‘What’s for dinner? What’s for dinner?’ But he’s had dinner.

  But he hasn’t had dinner. He eats nothing at all.

  Upstairs. There was a good showing that night: me, Philip, Moira and Percy Lubbock, Dick Hough. And the ever-dependable biographer. Saying little, his eyes lowered, Kingsley was established in his chair, with the Macallan and the Evian water on the side table. But he seemed to me to be miming his congeniality, as if
saying to himself — This is what I like. Drink, talk, friends, family. This is what I’m supposed to like. Then why …? Suddenly he lifted his head and professed an opinion. His novel The Biographer’s Moustache had recently appeared. And the reviews, on the whole, were eagerly unfavourable. I found the notices and interviews more onerous than anything that had been written about me that year, and I hoped that my father (on this subject at least) was past caring. Never one to go on for long about such things, he spoke up now about a detail, saying, out of the blue,

  — Someone complained that I put a ‘real’ restaurant into it. But once it’s in the novel, even if it’s a real place, it isn’t real any more. Not quite.

  I thought I understood him and I thought I agreed with him. Perhaps this is all that needs to be said on the subject. The real/made-up question is for biographers and memoir-writers and other literalists. Anyway, I would hear no more critical theory from my father. Amusement would return, but that was his last attempt at anything abstract. Over the following weeks I would look back on it as a summit, along with the crossword clue.

  Next door in his study there were sheets of paper covered with i’s and o’s and seagulls.

  Fuck Off — 2

  Here are some glimpses of the morning routine of an old devil, Charlie, in The Old Devils:

  When Charlie Norris noticed that the smallest man in the submarine railway-carriage had a face made out of carpeting he decided it was time to be off.

  He wakes, and tormentedly dozes. It is just after 5 a.m. Several hours later:

  He rolled over and fixed his eye on the stout timber that framed the quilted bed-head, counted a hundred, then, with a convulsive overarm bowling movement, got a hand to it, gripped it, counted another hundred and hauled with all his strength, thus pulling himself half upright.