Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  He seemed to find this genuinely enlightening. But then he closed his eyes and his head dropped sideways: a nearby infant was crying.

  — Formerly, he said, she’d have to take it off and deal with it. Formerly, they’d be lucky to be taken out at all.

  — Well then. A clear improvement.

  — A change, anyway, he said, now raising his chin.

  I had never understood his anti-baby shtick, or Larkin’s, or anybody else’s. At least I wasn’t responsible for the sentiment, because it antedated both me and my brother. ‘It is the single-minded intensity,’ he wrote to Larkin, ‘even more than the brutish self-interest, of babies’ crying that angers me most; it is as if they feared that by omitting to yell for a second or two, they might be deprived of a drop of milk.’ That was Easter Monday, 1948 — when my father was twenty-five. To this sort of thing one simply answers: Hark at the pot calling the kettle black. Or: So the raven chides blackness. Because Kingsley was a baby too. And (my mother would argue) sometimes behaves like one now, seventy years on.

  The baby continued to cry and Kingsley continued to be melodramatically long-suffering about it. I didn’t want to provoke him (I wanted to provoke him later), but I never wanted to roll over for him either. I said,

  — That sort of stuff is funny in the books* but it’s a complete non-starter otherwise. What’s that mad poem of yours? ‘Women and queers and babies/Cry when things go wrong.’

  — ‘Women and queers and children …’

  — And when do you come in? When do the good chaps come in? ‘But other kinds of men …’

  — ‘The usual sort of men/Who hold the world together/Manage to face their front/In any sort of weather.’†— Like you. Quiet heroes like you.

  And I imitated him — Kingsley with crenellated lips, looking quietly heroic. He liked being imitated by his sons so much that he would nearly always ask for encores (‘Do that again. Do that one last time’). He didn’t ask for an encore — and anyway the waiter reappeared to showcase the wine bottle, sending my father into another saturnalia of ogreish sighs and scowls. That night I had been wondering where to position him on his personal scale of inebriation. Seven-point-five? Eight? For I intended to revive a political argument with him, begun the week before, and I was trying to gauge his tolerance. Kingsley had never been a Jekyll-Hyde kind of drinker, but alcohol could create, in his discourse, certain dead ends and forbidden zones — undebatable lands.

  I wondered how he would take to being put in his place about Nelson Mandela.

  Symposium is a word that has strayed, or lurched, a fair distance from its classical derivation. When F. R. Leavis died in 1978 I assembled a valuation of his career, by various hands, in the New Statesman, and called the thing ‘F. R. Leavis: A Symposium’. Consisting as it did of sober and discrete contributions put together over several months, the heading could hardly have been a greater affront to etymology. Because symposium means, or meant, ‘a drinking party’, ‘a convivial discussion’: from syn- ‘together’ + potes ‘drinker’.

  And that is what Kingsley liked, above all things. Well, he probably liked adultery even better, in his manly noon;* but the symposium was a far more durable and unambivalent pleasure — a love whose month was ever May. The prospect of that was what made him rub his hands together so fast that you thought they might take fire. Argument, anecdote (not gossip), imitations, set-pieces, quotes, recitations … Recitations. When the two of us were up late at night I would sometimes think, ‘My God. He knows all English poetry.’ Ten lines here, twenty lines there, of Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Rochester, Pope, Gray, Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Housman, Owen, Kipling, Auden, Graves, and of course Larkin. Drunkenness is in some sense the opposite of the composition of poetry (drunkenness is nonsense verse), but at the other end of the business there is a clear connection.

  I used to think that Kingsley’s review of Larkin’s High Windows (1974) was slightly hearty or perfunctory or bathetic. It began: ‘When everyone else has gone to bed, how many poets compete successfully with a new recording of the Tchaikovsky B flat minor as accompaniment to the final Scotch?’ He goes on to list some but not all of the poets mentioned above (inserting Betjeman, the Macaulay of ‘Horatius’, and the early R. S. Thomas). ‘The quality they share,’ he continues, ‘is immediacy, density, strength in a sense analogous to that in which the Scotch is strong.’ I objected to this as an indecorum, partly because High Windows was so clearly Larkin’s greatest book and partly because it was so clearly his last. But I now accept it, just as Larkin would have accepted it, probably, if the drink in question had been gin. One day a decade later, in the early months of the ménage, Kingsley told me,

  — I had a strange experience with Byron the other night. There was an hour to kill before a dinner party in Chelsea and I went into a pub and started reading Don Juan. After half an hour I couldn’t believe how absolutely marvellous it was. I knew I liked Don Juan but this was oh, something of a completely different order. By the time I had to go I was looking round the pub wanting to say, ‘Has anyone here got any idea how wonderful Don Juan is?’

  — So you really, I said uncertainly, you really revised your opinion.

  — No, he said. I was drunk. They were the first drinks of the day and what was happening was that I was getting drunk.

  — And Don Juan being pretty useful anyway.

  — Well yes.

  Getting drunk: there was no doubt that that was always the quest. Being drunk had its points, but getting drunk was the good bit. Kingsley has written often and poignantly about that moment when getting drunk suddenly turns into being drunk; and he is, of course, the laureate of the hangover. Still, there was never anything namby-pamby about his admission that getting drunk, or, failing that, being drunk, was what he had in mind. Take these cheerful sentences from I Like It Here (where the word ‘property’ is laudably precise):

  [Bowen] had added to Barbara [his wife] that beer was cheaper while sharing with gin and Burgundy the property of making him drunk. This last factor had received insufficient acclaim. He thought to himself now that if he ever went into the brewing business his posters would have written across the top ‘Bowen’s Beer’, and then underneath that in the middle a picture of [his mother-in-law] drinking a lot of it and falling about, and then across the bottom in bold or salient lettering the words ‘Makes You Drunk’.

  Why then? Why did he want to go and get himself into that state? A writer’s life is all anxiety and ambition — and ambition, here, is not readily distinguishable from anxiety; it is a part of your desire to do right by what talent you have. So some of us will be wanting a break from that, if we can manageably get it. In the Preface to his Memoirs Kingsley observes: ‘I have already written an account of myself in twenty or more volumes, most of them called novels’. These novels are ‘firmly unautobiographical, but at the same time every word of them inevitably says something about the kind of person I am. “In vino veritas — I don’t know,” Anthony Powell once said to me, “but in scribendo veritas — a certainty.” ’ And that’s another connection. In vino and in scribendo alike, the conscious mind steps back and the unconscious mind steps forward. They both need a change of scene. There’s just the usual trouble: age, and the only end of age.

  Kingsley’s fish cakes have arrived. Every Thursday, he goes with the fish cakes. When he found something he liked (or could get down without bother) he tended to stick with it. In Indian restaurants it was rogan josh. Always the rogan. ‘You can’t go far wrong with rogan josh,’ he would say, ritually. I now say:

  — You can’t go far wrong with fish cakes.

  — Exac —

  But now Kingsley is going far wrong with fish cakes. He reaches into his mouth and removes a section of his lower dental plate. This device will spend the rest of the evening in open view beside his wine glass, a faithful reminder of what will soon be happening to me. When my novel is done I must fly to America and submit to the hand
s of Mike Szabatura. I am flying to America next week anyway: to see Bruno Fonseca before he dies … The waiter appears and I can sense him eyeing the prosthesis. For a moment I fear that he will mistake it for a fallen strip of prosciutto and briskly sweep it from the table. But Kingsley’s furious writhings are in themselves enough to daunt him, and he backs away. I begin measuredly:

  — Last week I asked you whether you were excited by the events in South Africa and you looked at me as if I was nuts. You said Mandela was a terrorist who had murdered women and children and never denied it.

  — Yeah, that’s right.

  — Well you’re … wrong. You’d have trouble finding an Afrikaner extremist who agreed with you. Your views would get you chucked out of a bar called the Kaffir-Flogger. The only people who feel the way you do are a few hundred-year-olds called Viernicht.

  Then I hit him with chapter and verse.

  When I was young my father gave me a tip about lunchtime drinking and the shadow it cast over dinnertime drinking. Take everything you had at lunch (he said), double it, and imagine you swallowed it in one at 5.55 pm. I was reminded of that rule when, an hour later, Kingsley finished his grappa and climbed wonderingly to his feet. He had taken my Mandela defence in fairly good part, merely rolling around in his seat and saying ‘You don’t understand. You don’t understand. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND’ until, finally and unprecedentedly, he clamped his hands over his ears and stared at his plate. I fell silent. He paused and said,

  — Let’s change the subject.

  — Okay. Just one thing. Get some new dirt on Mandela while I’m in America. Because your old dirt is hopeless. Let’s change the subject. Let’s go back to women and queers and children.

  — Agreed. Just one thing. You’re a leaf in the wind of trend.

  Sealed with the fiery liqueurs, the dinner ended amicably, as it always did. But Kingsley’s face, now rising from the table, registered real alarm. What I was seeing was an exponential alcoholic kick-in of trouncing efficacy. I reached out towards him.

  On a traffic island in the middle of the Edgware Road (that eternally disreputable thoroughfare, with its northwestward trek from mammonic Marble Arch, past the pubs and offies and slot-arcades beneath the Westway, past Little Venice, until it subsides into Maida Vale, where we lived in a house with Philip and Jane, thirty years ago), Kingsley fell over. And this was no brisk trip or tumble. It was a work of colossal administration. First came a kind of slow-leak effect, giving me the immediate worry that Kingsley, when fully deflated, would spread out into the street on both sides of the island, where there were cars, trucks, sneezing buses. Next, as I grabbed and tugged, he felt like a great ship settling on its side: would it right itself, or go under? Then came an impression of overall dissolution and the loss of basic physical coherence. I groped around him, looking for places to shore him up, but every bit of him was falling, dropping, seeking the lowest level, like a mudslide.

  I got him home in the end. He found some balance, some elevation; I wedged my shoulder in his armpit, and slowly hauled. The incident never stopped being about 3 per cent comic. Even with his face at knee height, and his eyes stark with apprehension, like a man disappearing into a swamp, he never lost that glimmer of astonished amusement at what was happening to him — at the weight he carried, at the greed of gravity, at the wheel of years. Dad, you’re too old for this shit, I might have said to him. But why bother? Do you think he didn’t know? You’re too old for this, Dad — this kind of lark, this kind of caper. You’re too old for this.

  The Corner

  Thursday, 12 October. Kingsley has been moved to St Pancras’s, behind King’s Cross: the Phoenix Ward. I am at his bedside, pressing on with Flash for Freedom (we are now nearing the Dahomey Coast). I don’t honestly know how much Dad is getting out of this. His head is thrown back (the eyes open moistly for a while and then close again). But I’m glad that he isn’t turned over on his side, away from me.

  The biographer later wrote (rather implausibly — I must check this) that my mother expected me to be appalled by the Phoenix Ward, so much so that I would insist on Kingsley being moved. Anyway, this is not the case. I am not appalled by the Phoenix Ward.

  This ward is a hospice ward. This ward is what prison inmates call death row: the Corner.

  Eric Shorter, a good egg from the Garrick, pays a visit. The biographer, a clubmate of Shorter’s, has already been in. After a word or two with me the visitor leans over the bed and says, very affectionately, rather formally,

  ‘How are you then, Kingsley?’

  My father has hardly said a word to me for days. So he impresses me a great deal, and makes me laugh, when he turns his face up to Eric Shorter, and says with full clarity,

  ‘Absolutely fucking awful, mate!’

  After a pause Eric talks speculatively of further visits by himself, of subsequent visits by others …

  ‘I don’t want to see anyone … Anyone,’ my father says, and turns emphatically on his side.

  As Eric prepares to go he looks round about himself, shakes his head, and shudders. This shudder utterly rejects what he contemplates.

  I don’t want to see anyone. This can’t be literally true. He certainly wants to see his most faithful visitor: Sally.

  Eric walks off, through it all.

  This is death on what some Londoners call the National Elf. From now on there is no messing about with all that stuff in Club World, the room service, the cleaning-lady with her indifferent vacuum chute. This is the Corner and this is public transport: one-class.

  The men are upright in their beds with the censorious stares of schoolmasters, of indignant motorists in ancient cars, the women are more clustered, huddled, grouped round small tables or lined up in front of the TV in the day room. On the floor there is a cancer-sufferer so shrunken and wasted that he crawls up his mattress towards his pillow, the size of a two-year-old.

  But this is all right and I would like to die here. Pritchett has a bit about hospitals making the body ‘feel important’ because you are bringing your ‘talent of pain’ to the total. I very much like talent of pain.

  What surrounds me now, though, and fills me with awe, is talent of love. Or supererogatory love. That’s what the nurses here, who are of all colours, suffer from: supererogatory love. It overflows in them and so they have to come here and do all this.*

  There seems to be a film, a fine rain of dust or vapour, but everything and everyone is clean. Kingsley is very clean, and starting, unaccountably, to be handsome again.

  Now he jolts me by sitting up in bed and saying something incomprehensible. He repeats it, but it still makes no sense.

  He seems to be saying, ‘— Borges.’

  Bore-hess, as in Jorge Luis Borges. I think he is trying to swear at me. Philip has been sworn at, and I have had my share of Christs as I encroach on his vision. He may have been trying to swear at Eric Shorter, conceivably, or at Bernard, the ward wag. Buggers. Bastard. Maybe ‘Bernard’. Bore-hess … What Kingsley was very definitely not trying to say (as a suggestion for further reading) was ‘Borges’ — another of my gods — whom he was instinctively suspicious of and had no time for and never got started on.

  But that’s all right too. Mum was just being accurate: ‘You’ve done all your work.’ You’ve done everything you needed to do. You’ve done all your work.

  His perturbation lasted less than half a minute. Then he turned on to his side, away from me.

  All Flash

  ‘Dad’s coming back. Dad’s coming back from hospital,’ said Philip. ‘All flash.’

  This had nothing to do with Flashman, who had in any case been abandoned a day or two earlier. It was Philip and I, in fact, who were coming back from hospital, where Kingsley lay. My brother was telling me about a dream. I said,

  ‘Coming back all flash?’

  ‘He only went to hospital to detox and slim down. But now he’s coming back — all flash.’

  All flash. When we were about sixteen and
seventeen Philip and I, at that chaotic crammer in Notting Hill, shared an eighty-year-old maths master called Flash Crunch. We called him Flash Crunch. The ‘Crunch’ part is easily explained: he used to crunch his false teeth together. Under the name of Mr Greenchurch the old boy features in The Rachel Papers: there is something about him letting the coltish dentures slurp halfway down his chin before drinking them back into place. The ‘Flash’ bit is harder to justify. Anybody might have reached for the sobriquet ‘Crunch’. But how could this wizened, quivering relic — who once scythed his head open on the door jamb of his Morris 1000 without noticing — come by the epithet ‘Flash’? Because on two occasions he had subjected my brother and me to unlofty censure on a point of punctuality. It just seemed odd, coming from him. And that was all it took. So, thereafter: ‘I got extra homework.’ ‘Who from?’ ‘Flash Crunch.’ Or: ‘I’m late for a lesson.’ ‘Who with?’ ‘Flash Crunch.’

  ‘His hair was flash,’ said Philip, continuing to describe his dream about Kingsley’s return. ‘He had a car. And he was back with Jane. All flash.’

  On Regent’s Park Road we climbed from the cab and rang the front doorbell. Alastair let us in. My mother was standing on the stairs.

  ‘He’s coming back, Mum,’ we called out to her.

  She peered cautiously over the banisters.

  ‘He looks great. He’s wearing that gold-coloured overcoat.’

  My mother peered on. She wasn’t convinced one way or the other.

  ‘And he’s driving his own car.’

  ‘All flash.’

  Such moments of comic reprieve are the least of it. I am now faced, in my notebook, with some embarrassing achievements on the tennis court.

  I beat Zach 6-2, 6-2. I beat the tireless David 6-2, 2–6, 6-4. I beat George 6-3, 6-3. I beat Ray — him who runs to Wales — 6-3, 6-1. I even beat Chris, technically. The score was 4–6, 4-3. At this point he broke two new rackets and walked off the court.