The Fiction of Martin Amis
Page 3
There is one aspect of Charles’s manipulation of his personality which is not mentioned by Hawkes, or by Ackroyd or Prince, and is only alluded to very briefly by Diedrick: this is his attitude to the USA. But The Rachel Papers does invoke the USA to some extent and marks the beginning of an engagement in fiction with America that will develop significantly in subsequent novels, as Richard Brown points out in ‘Postmodern Americas’ (1994):
■ Charles Highway, who fast-talks, writes and womanizes his way through cramming college into Rachel and Oxford in The Rachel Papers, is a Londoner. The smooth, wealthy De Forest Hoeniger, principal rival for Rachel’s affection is an American: a stereotypical one (Charles’s imagination is full of satirical grotesques) before whom he is at first embarrassed and over whom he eventually triumphs, only to sicken with disgust at the achievements of his predatory sexual acquisition. When Charles’s shadowy natural father appears with Vanessa ‘just flown in from New York’ (p. 105), he can give full vent to a construction of American identity that justifies his hatred:
‘Because they’re violent. Because they only like extremes. Even the rural people, the old reactionaries in the farms, go out blowing niggers’ heads off, roast a Jew or two, disembowel a Puerto Rican. Even the hippies are all eating and mass-murdering each other.’ (p. 107)
Much of Highway’s sex-life and mind-life are a reflection of Anglo-American semiotics. Being clever about the English literary tradition of Milton and Blake is a potential means of advancement for Charles but ‘the most violent and tuneless of all [his] American LPs, Heroin by the Velvet Underground’ (p. 55) is his best strategic tool for casual seduction. The copulation and disgusted sex-fantasy that emerges in the souring of his relationship with Rachel in the tenth chapter is justified in the context that he has ‘been reading a lot of American fiction’ (p. 184, evidently a reference to the scene from [Norman Mailer’s novel] An American Dream (1965) that Amis describes in The Moronic Inferno (p. 63)).
It might be said of Charles Highway that he becomes or nearly becomes the symbolic America that he hates. Indeed the narrative of his personal development may be another version of the flawed Eden-cum-Utopia which he describes in one of his own more inspired passages of student literary criticism (p. 112). Ironically what may save Charles is the academic canon of English Literature, the safe classics his adolescent brilliance can engage, evade or subvert but which can still (as is shown in the put-down/acceptance he receives from the Oxford don who examines him for University entrance at the close) show him to himself for what he is.29 □
It is interesting that, in all the extracts quoted so far, including those from Amis himself, the words of the Oxford don are held to comprise an authoritative judgement on Charles, rather than as themselves open to question. This perhaps says something about the prestige of Oxford dons, (even when they look like ‘hippies’ (p. 208)) and about the tendency of present-day critics to identify with teachers of literature. But might not the view that ‘literature has a kind of life of its own’ be seen as a cliché of the conventional literary criticism of the time, which reflects adversely on the don’s supposed commitment to new American writing?
Doubtless, however, the sentiment helped to reinforce Amis’s reputation as a promising young novelist who could both vividly portray adolescence but showed reassuring signs of incipient maturity. With The Rachel Papers, he was safely launched; indeed it seems to have become a model of the kind of work a budding young novelist should produce, for the first novel of American author Jacob Epstein, Wild Oats (1980), allegedly plagiarised phrases from The Rachel Papers.30 But now the second novel, usually regarded as a dangerous obstacle in a writer’s progress, lay ahead for Amis - most people with any acquaintance with modern literature have heard of Lucky Jim, but how many could easily recall the title of Kingsley Amis’s second novel?31 Martin Amis had proved that he could produce a first novel to set alongside his father’s, but what would he do next? The second chapter of this Guide answers that question.
CHAPTER TWO
Country-House Carnage: Dead Babies (1975)
AMIS SOON followed up his first novel with a second, in 1975, whose very title seemed designed to shock - Dead Babies (it was temporarily retitled Dark Secrets for a paperback edition).32 Shock effects continued throughout the novel, as reviewers observed. But John Mellors, in a perceptive notice in The Listener, also detected a conventional theme, and a central sentimentality absent from The Rachel Papers:
■ Everyone in Martin Amis’s sad, savage and (at times) extremely funny satire ‘tends to be either drunk or stoned or hungover or sick’ (p.31). Living mainly on a diet of drugs, gin, strong champagne cocktails, ‘para-natural Whiski’ (p. 107) and hardly any food, the degenerates in Dead Babies are constantly retching, vomiting and ejecting burps … like [‘]mouth farts’ (p. 114). But it is mental sickness from which they suffer most acutely: ‘cancelled sex’ (pp. 31, 148, 192, 199, 201), ‘lagging time’ (pp.31, 133, 134), ‘false memory’ (pp.31, 57, 148, 169, 177, 178, 179, 201) and ‘street sadness’ (pp.31, 57, 111, 169, 179, 201). Their lives are cancelled very nastily in the Mansonian mayhem at the end [‘Mansonian’ here alludes to Charles Manson, the leader of a group of hippies who savagely murdered the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and her three guests in California in August 1969].
The title-phrase is used by Amis’s characters to pour scorn on outmoded concepts like jealousy, faithfulness and love, and by Amis himself to describe his cast, the six ‘Appleseeders’ living in Appleseed Rectory in Hertfordshire and their four guests, a golden-hearted whore and a ‘triad’ or ‘troy’ of Americans. The time is the future, into which the dead babies have grown up through a period when ‘sexual lassitude and disgust seemed to be everywhere among the young, and two-night stands were becoming a rarity’ (p. 82); but the business of the satirist, as Amis points out in a quotation from Menippus [which serves as the epigraph of the novel], ‘is not prophecy, just as his subject is not tomorrow … it is today’ (p. 10). [Menippus, who lived in the first half of the third century BC, originated the Menippean satire, a mixture of prose and verse, which influenced later satirists such as Petronius, author of the Satyricon, and Lucian.33] Yet Amis’s theme is a conventional one - that relationships without affection are boring, meaningless and sterile …
Martin Amis is obsessed by bodily functions and dwells with loving distaste on the digestive processes and on ‘gaping vaginas, rhubarb penises and gouged behinds’ (p. 181). He is witty: ‘“a cooked breakfast - it would be like going to bed in pyjamas or reading an English novel”’ (p. 21). His dialogue is brilliant, particularly the conversations between the biases Appleseeders and Marvell, the earnest American; when the cynical Quentin teases him by making remarks in favour of getting married ‘“to keep sex emotional”’, Marvell is horrified, and protests that ’”[t]he iconography of desire’s too pervasive now”’ (p. 137). The description of the obese Whitehead family packing their grotesque limbs into a small car (pp. 144-6) is quite Rabelaisian [Rabelaisian means ‘of or like Francois Rabelais (14947-1553?) in his writings; marked by exuberant imagination and language and coarse humour and satire’.]. But beneath the skilfully presented shock-effects of Dead Babies, there is a sentimentally sweet and squelchy centre - a flavour I did not detect in Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers.34 □
Sentimentality was not a flavour that the novelist and poet Elaine Feinstein tasted in Dead Babies, but she went further than Mellors in affirming its difference from The Rachel Papers. It seemed clear to her that Martin Amis did not mean to try to clear the hurdle of the second novel by attempting to imitate his first triumphant leap:
■ Second novels are difficult; following success is difficult; one thing Martin Amis ensures: Dead Babies offers no repetition of the joyous hilarity of The Rachel Papers. It is more like a declaration of war on the assumptions that made the first book possible. And it is not for the squeamish. To give what seems to me a most telling example of the games Amis now plays with la
nguage, the title [a] rises out of a piece of invented and ambiguous slang: don’t give me … all this [’ “]dead babies’” (pp.56, 95, 137, 169). His purpose in pushing the stylishly foul-mouthed to this point is similar to his intention in throwing his privileged and corrupt adolescents into a future where the really cool can enjoy the last reaches of the technology of sex and violence, while the rest of humanity hangs about raggedly under the stanchions of some overhead bypass. This poor distorted generation, full of hatred for their parents, and terrified of any form of compassion or gallantry, is described with a total ferocity which is nevertheless frequently comic. Giles’s opening dream of losing his teeth, one by one, into the mouthpiece of the telephone, echoes through the book to the point where he cannot bring himself to articulate the word ‘dentist’ [In fact, it seems to be the word ‘teeth’ that gives Giles particular trouble - see p.211]. A sexual encounter intended to evoke Story of 0 eroticism collapses with Andy’s penis caught in his zip (p. 85). Nevertheless, the book is a long way from a romp. Rather as I hope for society that this is no true prophecy, I hope for Martin Amis that the nightmare of this vision will rapidly become part of his past. In the meanwhile, it is a remarkable fantasy.35 □
Feinstein’s definition of Dead Babies as a ‘fantasy’ was echoed by Peter Ackroyd in his Spectator review: he also found ‘farce, and melodrama’ in the novel; but he resisted the invitation of its epigraph to classify Dead Babies as a satire, as John Mellors had done. Ackroyd was, however, akin to Mellors in bringing a charge of sentimentality against the novel though he redefined sentimentality as an excessive devotion to one reality at the expense of all others which was evident, for him, in the novel’s ‘obscenity’.
■ At first sight Dead Babies might be, as a fetching quote from Menippus … suggests, a ‘satire’. It is set in an indefinite future, and it chronicles the amphetamine highs and venereal lows of a group of the liberated young, so liberated in fact that they have lost even themselves in the process. But sex and drugs have already been abandoned as stimulants by serious hedonists, and at this late date [1975] any satire on them would be misdirected. Also, Martin Amis’s characters are so singular and so quirky that they would be crushed out of recognition by the engines of conventional satire. Dead Babies is if anything a fantasy since Amis has turned some familiar neuroses and some conventional dreams into the healing patterns of violence and comedy. The rest is farce, and melodrama.
Having got these little matters of definition sorted out, it is as well to say at the beginning that Dead Babies can be an extremely funny book, all the more comic for squeezing the lemons of ‘taste’ and ‘seriousness’ for all they’re worth. It is an inverted, and often perverted, image of mannered country-house comedy. Appleseed Rectory, where the gang all meet, is ‘a place of shifting outlines and imploded vacuums; it is a place of lagging time and false memory, a place of street sadness, night fatigue and cancelled sex’ (p. 31). The murky background of Martin Amis’s victims is sketched in, onanistic [masturbatory] nightmares are introduced with trumpet and fanfare, rainbow drugs are dispensed, and everyone sits back for the fun to begin. It doesn’t, of course.
Mr Amis doesn’t create a particularly complex story, nor does he take his plots very far or very fast, and the brunt of his comedy lies in the clever manipulation of language and the general sharpness of his descriptions. All human aspirations, all of Man’s little decencies, the dignity of our procreative functions, the life of our souls, the wealth of inter-personal relations, the facilities of human expression, all of them come under Amis’s hammer. By no stretch of the mind is this a life-enhancing vision, but his writing has all the horrified perceptiveness of someone wrinkling up his nose - or worse - at something nasty … In fact, Dead Babies is a comedy at the expense of everybody in its pages. And although a sharp vision can sometimes give Amis’s prose a perfect pitch, it becomes not so much sharp as narrow and eventually threatens to shrink the book down altogether. The general messiness and the futuristic shock become too messy and too shocking, and the sentimentality which hovers around all obscenity (which is, after all, an excessive devotion to one reality at the expense of all others) suffocates some of the preceding wit and humour.36 □
One aspect of Dead Babies not raised by Ackroyd and Feinstein, but briefly alluded to in John Mellors’s description of Buzhardt Marvell as ‘the earnest American’, is the representation of characters from the USA in Dead Babies. In his contribution to Forked Tongues, Richard Brown finds that the portraits of Americans, in Amis’s second novel, as in his first (see p. 21), are ‘stereotypes’:37
■ One group of the party of sick hedonists whose wild debauch at the Appleseed Rectory leads them to well-deserved destruction is classified, in the cast list that prefaces the novel, as ‘The Americans’ (p. 11). During the stylized introductions to the suave, cynical and/or grotesque sex-and-drug crazed Brits, what we first hear of the trio of Americans is that they are involved in a sexual grouping described as a ‘“troy”’ (p. 21). They enter as an absurd version of Rabelaisian erotic dystopia from the country of the unrestrained self. Roxeanne (at least from Keith’s point of view) is: ‘one of those terrifying, genetics-experiment, gate-fold American girls - well over six foot in her platforms, a bonfire of lambent red hair, breasts like zeppelins, large firm high backside, endless legs’ (p. 54). And the leading figure in the American group Marvell Buzhardt (counterpart to the British host Quentin Villiers) offers up the philosophy that justifies their deeds: ‘“Fuck all this dead babies abo[ut] love, understanding, compassion - use drugs to kind of … cushion the consciousness, guide it, protect it, stimulate it’” (p.56).
American literature comes in for its usual roasting in the book. To ‘Mailer’ (p. 40) is part of the group’s porno-taxonomy [that is, its classification of sexual acts], and there is some clever comedy where the English and American languages clash in dialogue. Andy Adorno’s memorable definition of the British team as ‘“ecstatic materialists’” who ‘“grab whatever the fuck’s going”’ (p. 155) suggests that they are as bad, if not worse, themselves. It may or may not be significant that it is when the English and American characters are fully merged in their transatlantic meeting of competitive self-destruction that their own death wish drives them to destruction, just as their worst nightmare, the mysterious Johnny, had turned out to be none other than an ‘other self of Quentin Villiers.38 □
Neil Powell, discussing Dead Babies in his survey of Amis’s first three novels, finds the characterisation of the Americans even more grotesque than that of the English characters, but points out that the Americans are finally less destructive than the apparent English gentleman. In the extract from his essay which follows, Powell also usefully suggests some of the literary allusions in the novel:
■ [Dead Babies] is full of literary and other allusions: a novel of Iris Murdoch’s is mentioned ([The Black Prince (1972)] pp.45, 45-46), reminding us that this enclosed country-house plot is a development or a perversion of a typically Murdochian world; Quentin’s magazine Yes has ‘won outspoken praise from William Burroughs, Gore Vidal, Angus Wilson’ (p. 53) - writers evidently among Amis’s influences and his targets. On a different level, the idea of flower-power gone to seed is plainly suggested by ‘Appleseed’ (Apple was of course the Beatles’ company) while it is no coincidence that the diabolical drug-mixer, Marvell Buzhardt, shares a name with [the seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell,] author of ‘The Garden’.
The Appleseeders are a grotesque bunch. The sanest of them is probably Diana Parry, who ‘spends a lot of the time wondering what the hell she’s doing in Appleseed Rectory’ (p. 78) and who, before the final catastrophe[,] asks: “‘Don’t you think we must have made a mistake a long time ago to end up like this. That something went wrong and that’s why we’re all so dead now … Baby?”’ (p. 169). Her boyfriend, Andy Adorno, is a pastiche of trendy machismo: keen on drinking, fighting and swearing, but sexually disappointing and the only character to respond in a co
nventionally ‘sentimental’ way to the bizarre death of The Mandarin, Celia’s cat, which goes berserk after Marvell has drugged its food: