Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  My father has turned away, on his side. He is showing me how you do it. You turn away, on your side, and do the dying.

  Sunday.

  During one of the very last Thursday dinners Kingsley told me that in his most defenceless insomnias he tended to worry about Sally and what it would be like for her when he was dead. The diminution of general support, he said — and the diminution of purpose, too … An intuition, a ‘funny feeling’, woke Sally at two o’clock in the morning (‘I felt he needed me’). She got dressed and gathered her things and went quickly to the hospital.

  The clocks were changed that night (spring forward, fall back) and we found ourselves in the new time, where dusk would come early. By arrangement I met up with Philip outside the hospital gates. It was noon. Under my arm was the Sunday paper containing my review of Gore Vidal … I suggested that we linger for a smoke; we sat and talked for ten minutes, and it was quite easy for us, because although there was dread there was no regret. And that isn’t universal. When you read writers on the death of the father, when you read Kingsley on the death of the father, what you are mostly told about is regret. My brother and I felt regret in that we wanted him to live for ever. But we had had our say with him and had our time with him. And while we smoked our cigarettes, sitting on the ledge of a circular flowerbed, in patchy sunlight, under rapid clouds, our father died.

  Absolutely right, absolutely right that it was Sally who was with him. She had been with him for ten hours … When we pressed in there the white screens were being drawn, and Sally stood, as if electrified, as if italicised — as if so many urgent tasks awaited her that she couldn’t for the life of her think where to begin. Philip flinched away from seeing the body and I said but you must, you must; and as we moved forward I felt his fingers clutching my arm, the way we had clutched each other a thousand times, in childhood, when there was a reckoning to be faced. Next came a moment of outlandish horror. In Kingsley’s bed a sheeted figure thrashed (they’re killing him!) — but this was someone different, someone else, a new arrival being battened down into his blankets. Our father lay further in, on the other side of the screens, which I now parted. Instant chemistry of death, already changing him from alkaline to acid. And the death colours, greens and indigos, like dyes of caste, so much more garish than the colours of life. As if to ward something off, his right hand was raised (contorted, mottled), with the plastic nametag on its wrist.

  I walked the ward. There were things to be done (Sall to be comforted, Mum to be called, nurses to be thanked, forms to be signed), and then I walked the ward. The trolleys and Zimmer-frames and wheelchairs; This Hamper for Linen, This Hamper for Soiled; the ‘day room’ with its jigsaws, boardgames, prewar paperbacks, and a film in black and white on the raised TV. Bernard was always there, just off to the side. I contemplated him — how? I contemplated him defeatedly. Defeatedly. Bernard was as blasé and insouciant as ever, resting on his laurels. It would take more than the death of a writer, we may be sure, to discountenance Bernard. You would have to get up much earlier in the morning to put one over on Bernard … The new arrival, Kingsley’s replacement, had stopped struggling. He repeatedly summoned me towards him with an authoritative frown. I remember that frown. When I ran out into the street and caused a portly car to swerve or break, then I would see that frown, through the windscreen, on a frozen face. Such authority, now, is lapsed or dwindling in the brows of the old headmasters. This is school (this redbrick pile), this is Swansea, this is childhood: everything is half a century out of date. The clock with its sloping shoulders, the Monopoly board, the black-and-white TV. Here are my brother and sister; my mother will be coming; my father is absent but near by, in his study, probably, getting down to some work.

  Sally, I’m sorry, but no urgent tasks await you. He has finished his work and you have finished yours. There is nothing left to be done.

  * From The Biographer’s Moustache, published earlier in the year (Gordon is the biographer, Jimmie the subject):

  Gordon likewise rose. ‘I will. I’ll also send you my c.v.’

  ‘Send me your what?’

  ‘My c.v. My curriculum vitae.’ He pronounced the first word like curriculum and the second like vee-tye.

  ‘Your what?’

  Gordon said it again …

  ‘Oh, presumably you mean a curriculum vitae,’ said Jimmie, pronouncing the first word like curriculum and the second like vie-tee. The author’s sympathy is here with Gordon; but Kingsley, you may be sure, would have pronounced per se like per-see and not like per-say. He was energetically old-school on this question. If you pronounced sine qua non sinny-qua-non he would yodel it back to you in music-hall Italian. It had to be sigh-nee-kway-non. My favourite was his treatment of pace. No pah-kay for him, and certainly not pah-chay (more of the music-hall Italian). He said pay-see, as if describing a car or a fast bowler.

  * The Old Devils, which is set in South Wales, tells of a lunch ‘firmly washed down with aquavit and Special Brew and tamped in place with Irish Cream. By a step of doubtful legitimacy the men thinned their glasses of the heavy liqueur with Scotch’. Special Brew is a beer especially popular with hooligans and heroin-addicts. Kingsley wrote a whole piece about it, if not two — about how the Danes had brewed it as a tribute to Winston Churchill and how incredibly strong it was. Rob argues, with deference, with fear, that Special Brew has restorative powers and virtues rivalled by no other drink — indeed, by no other substance.

  * My father proposed that illit. should be a standard dictionary abbreviation. Vulg. was something else entirely. Even his COD, on occasion, cried out for illit. How he loved that dictionary — as I too love it. My current edition has just snapped in half and will have to be replaced. When it was near by and he was praising it (‘This, this is the one’), he would sometimes pat and even stroke the squat black book, as if it were one of his cats.

  † Eric Jacobs. The biography was out. See Appendix. But don’t see it now.

  * Minutes before meeting Kingsley for the first time, Carol Blue (the second Mrs Christopher Hitchens) sought my guidance. ‘Don’t say anything left-wing,’ I said. ‘Okay,’ she said eagerly. ‘Don’t say much of anything,’ I said. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘In fact, don’t say anything at all,’ I said. ‘Okay,’ she said. After shaking his hand Carol found herself embarked on a long speech in praise of the high literacy-rate in Cuba. It was a coup de théâtre of counter-suggestibility. Perhaps Kingsley sensed this. Anyway he liked Carol fine, describing her, afterwards, as a good kid.

  † Cementing the distinction in The King’s English, he quotes Fowler: ‘That the sun moves round the earth was once a delusion, and is still an illusion.’

  * Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957).

  * I too have my phobias. ‘[Doctors]: intimates of bacilli and trichinae, of trauma and mortification, with their disgusting vocabulary and their disgusting furniture … They are life’s gatekeepers. And why would anyone want to be that?’ From the first page of Time’s Arrow (1991), which, admittedly, describes an extreme case: it is narrated by the soul of one of Mengele’s lesser assistants at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  * Alun Weaver in The Old Devils: ‘While he ate [his breakfast] he worked animatedly at the Times crossword. “You fiend,” he said, writing in a solution. “Oh, you … you swine.” ’

  † Mr Slang, a.k.a. Jonathon Green, in his great Dictionary (Cassell), fails to intuit the derivation of wonk. Surely (my father and I agreed) it’s backslang, like yob, only wittier. ‘Know backwards’: a crossword clue in itself.

  * The method: you wrote out visiting-cards, with your name and number, and distributed them, by the tens of thousands, to every girl you could find on the London Underground; then you hurried home to wait, often in vain, for your one or two calls.

  † I hallucinated Scrabble boards; Scrabble boards stayed with me like the sun’s imprint or logo; I would stare into the lavatory bowl, at three in the morning, and see a Scrabble board, its diagonals of pink
, its corners of red.

  ‡ I gave Philip fifty. He told me what he was going to do with it. He was going to hail a taxi (we only used taxis in emergencies) and say, ‘Carnaby Street.’

  * 1929. I didn’t know it then but this is a thrillingly good book: an historical novel (the setting is Victorian) about children running wild. As a visit to this theme it is more continuously sinuous and inward (and enjoyable) than the Golding. Hughes came to the set at Pinewood. Otiosely tall, Gravesian in cast and colouring and background (they both went to Charterhouse, a public school of louche reputation), accompanied by his wife and perhaps a grown child (Hughes was in his sixties), he was pleased, impressed, tickled (they might have been making Thunderball in the next lot along). His dress was like my costume: oatmeal trousers, oatmeal jacket, straw hat … I keep meaning to read more of him but something prevents me. In that year of 1963, I learn from my Companion, he was one novel into a silence-breaking multivolume sequence unwisely entitled ‘The Human Predicament’ … These potted lives are often sinister in their adumbrations. The Fox in the Attic had appeared in 1961. Volume 2, The Wooden Shepherdess, published in 1973 (and so joining The Rachel Papers on that year’s fiction lists), was ill-received (meeting ‘with little critical enthusiasm’). And then, in 1976, he died.

  * It was years until I steeled myself to see it — and then only on the small screen, where my adolescent panic would, I thought, look more contained. And that wasn’t all. During the filming my voice had finally broken: I had been dubbed (this was standard practice) by an old lady. The other anxiety concerned my physique. I was pleased when I heard, the other day, that someone had written a whole novel called Does My Bum Look Big in This? I might have asked the same question of A High Wind in Jamaica. The answer would have been yes. Now picture it in CinemaScope.

  * But no drink. We considered alcohol barbaric — surprisingly, perhaps. Was this rebellion? One morning in Swansea Philip risked the anger of my underslept mother as he sat down at the table in his school uniform. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Breakfast in the wine shop.’ We were both about twenty when we began to see the point.

  † Such a claim, at such an age, may be near-universal, as articulate self-communion dawns. The writers are supposedly the ones who ‘move on’ from this, but you could say that the writers are the ones who never leave — that part of them just doesn’t grow up.

  * Kingsley’s own approach to breakfast actually bears closer resemblances to that of Peter, the fattest of the old devils. Here he is with his grapefruit: ‘Some [segments] clung tenaciously to their compartments after being to all appearance cut free, others came only halfway out, still joined on by a band of pith. He dealt with such cases by lifting the whole works into the air by the segment and waggling the main body of the fruit in circles until the bond parted and it crashed back on to or near its plate.’

  * This was the physician Kingsley seemed closest to. He used to ring him up practically every time he used the bathroom. In his sixties my father became a martyr to IBS, or Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The condition was aggravated in him by mild but undeniable paranoia. Sometimes I had to drive him around because he feared having a mishap in a taxi. His condition and his paranoia were at their worst when he was summoned to Buckingham Palace to receive his knighthood from the Queen. KA had his doctor lay down a firewall of Imodium, and there was some doubt, afterwards, whether he would ever again go to the toilet. When the crisis was over I told him that he would have been remembered as the prick who died for a Sir. He laughed at this, to my surprise, because he was as sensitive about IBS as he was about HRH.

  † Connie Basil, the co-proprietress, while it lasted, of Lucky Jim’s fish-and-chip shop in Ann Arbor.

  * Where he also openly peed into a mop-bucket. I would have spared my father this detail, but it is already in print (see Appendix).

  † It is in fact Stephen and not Rosemary West who does so very well here with ‘fuck off’ (‘Childhood’, Inside 25 Cromwell Street): ‘I didn’t have many friends for the simple reason Mum told them to fuck off when they came to the door.’ I will promiscuously mention in this note that my father once told Christopher Hitchens and me to fuck off after we took him to Leicester Square to see Beverly Hills Cop. No: he liked it and we didn’t. And I think we must have curled our lips at him. Most uncharacteristically he walked away on his own and had to be coaxed into the next pub or cab.

  * I have since read these 106 pages. The unfinished work is called Black and White, and it is about the development of an attraction between a white homosexual man and a black heterosexual girl. Rather slow, and perhaps rather weakly focused, the half-novel nonetheless sets about its tasks with acuity. The Sherlock Holmes stuff is a digression, but it makes perfect sense.

  * Family and friends usually referred to my two-room apartment in Kensington Gardens Square as ‘the sock’, and the term gained wider currency after Money. Its etymology begins with Tina Brown, who, in a piece in the Tatler (I think), wrote that some young man’s flat was ‘like a sock’. Christopher Hitchens then promoted the simile to a common noun (he was also responsible for ‘rug-rethink’: haircut). At this time — 1980 — the Hitch had just spent a year in the sock, while I travelled. My cleaning-lady, Ana, who continued to come every week, told me: ‘I only see him once. In the middle of the afternoon. This terrible groan come from the bedroom. And, Miss Tramis, I RUN.’

  * I mean all the psychological and sexual therapy described in Jake’s Thing. What really impresses me now is how much boredom he put up with. ‘[The shrink] had also … stated a major theme of the Workshop’s activities, namely that every single one of them without any exception whatsoever lasted for very much longer than you would ever have thought possible’; ‘There followed [from another patient] a passage in praise of women so intense, categorical and of course long that a confession of hyperactive homosexuality seemed almost boringly inevitable’; ‘To limit the danger of cardiac arrest from indignation and incredulity Jake had made an agreement with himself not to look at his watch …’ Elsewhere KA wrote of ‘the burning sincerity of all boredom’. What sustained him here? The burning sincerity of not wanting to be left.

  † Kingsley’s malicious glee is admirably controlled in his article on ‘Sexist language’ in the much later (indeed posthumous) book, The King’s English. The language does it all for him: English, ‘which regularly includes some less than respectful affix meaning man in its words for female. The word female itself, from femella, diminutive of Latin femina, assimilates its second syllable to male, thus implying that a female is a mere appendage or subsection of a male … The almost archaic term lady is free from any linguistically built-in put-down or sneer, though perhaps none was felt to be necessary in a word originally signifying nothing more than loaf-kneader (hlafdige) beside a lord who at any rate was guard or warden of that loaf (hlafweard).’

  * I think he was more or less faithful in his second marriage. He did tell me about an inconclusive but pretty graphic incident in the sitting-room at Lemmons. ‘Where was Jane?’ I asked. ‘In bed.’ ‘In bed? Christ. I thought you were going to say, “In Greece.” ’

  † It appears that I was already complaining about this, or rebelling against it, when I wrote The Rachel Papers. On the last page the narrator notes that the (rejected) heroine leaves the house ‘without telling me a thing or two about myself, without asking if I knew what my trouble was, without providing any sort of comeuppance at all’.

  * ‘A snarl of disappointment’, maybe, but also a snarl of something else. Here is the violence of the defeated: delegated violence, surrogate violence. ‘ “According to some bloke on the telly the other night,” he said, “twenty-five per cent of violent crimes in England and Wales is husbands assaulting wives. Amazing figure that, don’t you think? You’d expect it to be more like eighty per cent. Just goes to show what an easy-going lot English husbands are …” ’ The speaker, a gruff ‘medical johnny’ named Cliff, delivers these lines in a savage pub called the Admiral Byro
n (‘’Tis women’s whole existence’). Another character, a high-ranking police officer, observes that the Arab nations ‘do seem to have got the woman problem sorted out nice and neat. Whether you like it or not’.

  * Girl, 20. Earlier in this chapter the narrator has gone to a wrestling-match and watched a contestant called the Thing from Borneo. ‘In-nuh the redduh cornah, at eighteen-nuh stoh-oon-nuh five-vuh pounds … the Thing-nguh … from-muh Borneo-oo-uh!’

  * ‘Why did I like women’s breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?’

  * Joyce does this, of set purpose, in the Cabman’s Shelter in Ulysses.

  † Kingsley once saw Berger, who stood for many of the things he hated, gesturing with violent extravagance — in a restaurant. My father said he thought a fight was about to break out but all Berger was doing was confirming his reservation. His hands, Kingsley said, looked like two warplanes in mid dogfight.

  * The old folks are sharing their impressions of an emergent African dictator. George says, ‘Well, anyway, to start with he must have a, a thing, you know, you go about in it, it’s got, er, they turn round. A very expensive one, you can be sure … Probably gold, gold on the outside. Like that other chap. A bar — no. And probably a gold, er, going to sleep on it … And eating off a gold — eating off it, you know. Not to speak of a private, um, uses it whenever he wants to go somewhere special … Engine. No. With a fellow to fly it for him. A plate. No, but you know what I mean.’

  † ‘I was reading where a chap wrote this morning … about those four young swine who broke into the place to rob it, but there was hardly any money in where they keep the money … so they hit him with a tightening-up affair and the iron business for the fire and so on, and took the money in what he was wearing and how you tell the time and even his smoking stuff. What can you do about people like that?’ (‘I suppose you rush them to hospital,’ replies Adela, his saintly but ever-vague interlocutor.)