by Martin Amis
I quite agree. What an asshole.
Gal's right. Nothing ever happens to novelists. Except-this.
They are born. They get sick, they get well, they hang around the inkwell. They leave home, with their stuff in a hired van. They learn to drive, unlike poets (poets don't drive. Never trust a poet who can drive. Never trust a poet at the wheel. If he can drive, distrust the poems). They get married in registry offices. They have children in hospitals-the ordinary miracle. Their parents die-the ordinary disaster. They get divorced or they don't. Their children leave home, learn to drive, get married, have children. They grow old. So nothing ever happens to them, except the universal.
With so many literary biographies down him, Richard knew this perfectly well. Confirmation came seasonally, every April and September, when he sneered his way through the color supplements and met the novelists' tremulous stares-sitting on their sofas or their garden benches. And doing fuck-all.
Although they don't or can't drive, poets get around more. William Davenant certainly took his chances: "He got a terrible clap of a black handsome wench that lay in Axe-yard . . . which cost him his nose." And Johnson's Life of Savage-bastardy, adultery, the fatal tavern brawl, the sentence of execution-describes a savage life: it reads like a revenger's tragedy that really happened. In mitigation, it should be said that an asshole is not the same thing as an arsehole. An Atlantic divides them. Weare all assholes some of the time, but an arsehole is an arsehole all of the time. What was Richard? He was a revenger, in what was probably intended to be a comedy.
When Gwyn said, of the Profundity Requital, that the money was "ridiculous," Richard took him to mean that the money was derisory. But it wasn't derisory. It was ridiculous. And you got it every year.
Richard, unsurprisingly, was to be found at his desk, on which, along with pp. 1-432 of Untitledand many sloping stacks of assorted trex, three items were prominently displayed: a minutes-style letter from Gal Aplanalp; a bourgeois tabloid, staked open on the Rory Plantagenet page; and a third scrawled note from "Darko"-Belladonna's backer or abettor. Richard was making a connection.
He reread:
To recap: the itinerary is New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, New York.
Denver. Why Denver? He reread:
. . . awarded annually, in perpetuity. The three judges are Lucy Cabretti, the Washington-based feminist critic, poet and novelist, Elsa Oughton, who lives and works in Boston, and Stanwyck Mills, author and Sue and Ron L. Summerdale Professor of Law at the University of Denver.
Richard sat back, nodding. He reread:
Whats the secret. Come on. Or is it all just the hipe. Belladonna is good at secrets. She can get any thing out of anyone, that one. Thats' why Gwyn Loves Belladonna. Its not too late for that "jar."
What interested Richard here, naturally, was the bit about Gwyn loving Belladonna. Even in Darko's world-with its sense of futile toil-love might mean something. It might mean vulnerability. Gwyn Loves Belladonna would look pretty interesting even if you saw it carved on the trunk of a lumpen evergreen in Dogshit Park or smeared in spray paint on the gray flank of the flyover. But given who Gwyn was and whoever the hell Belladonna might be: this was a matter of broad-of tabloid- interest. Gwyn Loves Belladonna would look even better as a headline, positioned directly beneath the compromised and epicene features of Rory Plantagenet. Undermining or destroying Gwyn's marriage seemed broadly attractive but also clumsily wide of the mark, just as a physicalattack on his person would surely never rise above the gruesomely approximate. Richard didn't want to single out Gwyn's life, which came a poor second to what he really hated. Still, if he had to make do with Gwyn's marriage, he would make do with Gwyn's marriage. If he had to make do with Gwyn's life, he would make do with Gwyn's life.
"Hello. Is Darko there please? Sure. Yes, this is uh, Richard Tull." Richard was Richard's name and there was nothing you could do to it: Rich and Richie were out for obvious reasons, and he had never liked Rick, and bad things had happened to Dick. "No, I'll wait … Darko? Hi. This is Richard Tull."
There was a silence. Then the voice said, "Who?"
"Richard Tull. The writer."
"… What's the name again?"
"Christ. You're Darko, right? You wrote to me. Three times. Richard Tall."
"Got it. Got it. Sorry uh, Richard. I'm half asleep."
"I know the feeling."
"Still in a daze. I got to get myself sorted out," said the voice, as if suddenly and worriedly considering something more long-term.
"Happens to the best of us."
"… Anyway: what you want?"
"What do / want? I want to hang up. But let's go another half-mile. I want to have a word with this girl you mentioned. Belladonna."
"She can't come to the phone."
"No, not now."
"Belladonna, she does what she fucking well likes. Yep. She pleases herself, I reckon."
"Why don't the three of us get together some time?"
"… Nothing simpler."
When that was over he rang Anstice and did his hour with her. When that was over, he went to the boys' room and fished Marco out from under his GI Joes and clothed him. Sitting on the twin bed, he looked out of the window and saw the lightest swirl of thinning cloud, way out there, like a wiped table in the last few seconds before it dries …
The day was heating up and so in the end he took Marco out into it, into Dogshit and into park culture, which is something to see. Queueing at the snack stall with all the other weight problems and skin conditions, among the multiple single mothers in crayon-color beachwear, the splat and splotch of English skin, beneath treated hair, and all the sticky children each needing its tin of drink, Richard watched the joggers pounding the outer track in scissoring shellsuits of magenta, turquoise,of lime or sherwood green. Marco stood there with his upper teeth warily bared to the press of sense data.
With their papercupfuls of Slushpuppy, they walked past the flat-roofed park toilets where a boy younger than Marco had recently been raped while his mother tapped her foot on this same patch of asphalt. One man and his dog went by the other way, man as thin as a fuse, dog as cocked and spherical as a rocket. The sloping green was mud, churned and studded, beige and dun, half soil, half shit. On the bench, Marco faced the prospect with the candid bewilderment of his gaze, turning and lifting his head, every few seconds, to his father's stunned profile. The boy might have looked at the hospital smokestacks, and then at the loners, the ranters, the post-pub staggerers, all those born to be the haunters of parks, and then looked again at his father, with the six or seven immediate difficulties pulling on the skin around his eyes, each with its own nervous tic, and wondered what the difference was.
For Richard was thinking, if thinking is quite the word we want (and we now do the usual business of extracting those thoughts from the furious and unceasing babble that surrounds and drowns them): you cannot demonstrate, prove, establish-you cannot know if a book is good. A sentence, a line, a phrase: nobody knows. The literary philosophers of Cambridge spent a century saying otherwise, and said nothing. Is "When all at once I saw a crowd" worse than "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears"? (Yes. But it was the better line that contained the identifiable flaw: that do, brought in to make up the numbers.) I. A. Richards reanatomized the human mind so that it might be capable of such divination. William Empson offered a quantity theory of value, of what was ambiguous, what was complex, and therefore good. Leavis said that while you can't judge literature, you can judge life, so for the purposes of judgment life and literature are the same! But life and literature were not the same. Ask Richard. Ask Demi or Gina. (Ask Scozzy, Crash, Link, 13.) Ask the man with the rocket dog. Ask the rocket dog . . . Gwyn was no good. Clearly, but not demonstrably. Richard's neck did an 8 of pain. So: a sandwich man on Oxford Street (GWYN BARRY IS NO GOOD), a tub-thumper under the arrow of Eros ("Gwyn Barry is no good!"), a frontier preacher in the wind and rain of Ongar, Upminster, Stan
more, Morden, spreading the word: that Gwyn was no good. Speakers' Corner (men on inverted milk crates, looking like schoolmasters but quietly madder than any rat)-Speakers' Corner was no longer to be found on the south side of Marble Arch. It was now to be found on all the other corners: every corner of London Town. Thus the voices raised and reedy, Natural Law, cosmopolitan finance, Moral Rearmament, anAmerican angel called Moroni, the infernal nature of electricity; and Richard Tull, deploying apt quotation and close reading, proving beyond any reasonable doubt to his three or four strangely attentive listeners that Gwyn Barry was no good.
In the local sublunary sphere, your taste in literature was like your taste in sex: there was nothing you could do about it. Once, in bed, fifteen years ago, someone had asked him, "What's your favorite?" He told her. His favorite turned out to be her favorite too. So it all worked out. Gwyn, or Amelior, was everybody's favorite. Or nobody's aversion. Amelior was something like the missionary position plus simultaneous orgasm. Whereas Richard's stuff, Richard's prose, was clearly minority-interest to a disgusting degree: if the police ever found out about it, Richard's stuff would be instantly illegalized-if, that is, the police could bring themselves to believe there were people around who went in for anything so contorted and laborious . .. Richard had married his sexual obsession. His sexual obsession she had now ceased to be. Gina had been supplanted, as his sexual obsession, by every other woman on earth between the ages of twelve and sixty. The park-Dogshit Park- pullulated with his sexual obsessions. These hopeless clamorings, he knew (from books), were just the final or penultimate yodels of his DNA: of his selfish genes, craving propagation before they died. It was to do with getting old, he knew. But it made him feel like a prototypical adolescent: a reeking gloom of zits and tit mags. He wanted everyone. He wanted anyone. Richard wanted Gina but his body and his mind were not permitting it. How long could this go on? I will arise- I will arise . . .
Marco finished his Slushpuppy, and then finished Richard's (whose skull ached to the crushed ice). Hand in hand they did their tour of the urban pastoral, the sward beneath the heavenly luminary, its human figures brightly half-clad at rest and play. How did people ever get the idea that white skin was any good at all, let alone the best? White skin was so obviously the worst: carved from the purest trex. Walking here, he felt the pluralism and the pretty promiscuity and, for now, the freedom from group hostilities. If they were here, these hostilities, then Richard didn't smell their hormones; he was white and middle-class and Labour and he was growing old. It sometimes seemed that he had spent his whole life avoiding getting beaten up (teds, mods, rockers, skinheads, punks, blacks) but his land was gangland no longer: violence would come, if it came, from the individual, from left field, denuded of motive. The urban pastoral was all left field. There was no right field. And violence wouldn't come for Richard. It would come for Marco.
The northern gates were chained shut so Richard unsurely, quiver-ingly, scaled the spikes and then hoisted Marco over. To their left, to their left field, itself spike-cordoned, lay the cleanest patch of grass in all Dogshit, the showpiece of the park (staunch those tears of pride). This of course was the dog toilet, where the dogs were meant to shit, and never did.
There was much speculation about where Gwyn Barry would "go" after Amelior-in literary circles, anyway, wherever those may be. (In literary circles, which are, perhaps, themselves a polite fiction.) There was certainly much speculation at 49E Calchalk Street. In what "direction" would Gwyn now "turn"? Humbly local, abjectly autobiographical, Summertown was a prentice work. Amelior was a freak best-seller. Then what? The question was soon answered, at least to Richard's satisfaction: the day after he delivered the Los Angeles Times, Richard received, also by special messenger, a sample first chapter of novel number three. It came in a green pouch designed to resemble an expensive rucksack; in addition it featured a picture of Gwyn and some quotes, not from the critics but from the balance sheets. Richard tore the thing open and examined its contents with a spartan sigh. Jesus Christ. Gwyn's third novel was called Amelior Regained. Not Summertown Regained, you notice. Oh no. Amelior Regained. And why did they need to regain it? They never even lost it.
In Amelior itself twelve youngish human beings forgathered in an unnamed and perhaps imaginary but certainly very temperate hinterland some time in the near future. No holocaust or meteorite or convulsing dystopia brought them there. They just showed up. To find a better way . .. Every racial group was represented, the usual rainbow plus a couple of superexotic extras-an Eskimo, an Amerindian, even a taciturn Aborigine. Each of them boasted a serious but non-disfiguring affliction: Piotr had hemophilia, Conchita endometriosis, Sachine colitis, Eagle Woman diabetes. Of this twelve, naturally, six were men and six were women; but the sexual characteristics were deliberately hazed. The women were broad-shouldered and thin-hipped. The men tended to be comfortably plump. In the place called Amelior, where they had come to dwell, there was no beauty, no humor and no incident; there was no hate and there was no love.
And that was all. Richard would tell you that that was all: honestly. Apart from a very great deal of talk about agriculture, horticulture, jurisprudence, religion (not advised), astrology, hut-construction and diet. When he first read Amelior Richard kept forgetting what he wasdoing and kept turning abstractedly to the back flap and the biographical note, expecting to see something like Despite mutism and blindness, or Although diagnosed with Down's syndrome, or Shrugging off the effects of a full lobotomy .. . Amelior would only be remarkable if Gwyn had written it with his foot. Why was Amelior so popular? Who knew? Gwyn didn't do it. The world did it.
All that week, as he sat on the can each morning, Richard read a few more pages of Gwyn's teaser-accurately so called. The first chapter of Amelior Regained consisted of a discussion between one of the men and one of the women, in a forest, about social justice. In other words, here was some Narnian waterbaby or other and some titless Hobbit or other, with her foot on a log, talking freedom. The only real departure came in the prose. While it was pretty simple stuff, Amelior every now and then attempted a night-school literary cadence. Amelior Regained was barbari-cally plain. Richard kept looking at the back flap. It just said that Gwyn lived in London, not Borneo, and that his wife's dad was the Earl of Rie-veaulx.
It was Sunday afternoon, and Richard was going over there, as he sometimes did on Sunday afternoon.
Down on Calchalk Street he climbed into the Maestro with a sense of prospective novelty. Six nights earlier, at 3:30 A.M., as he drove back from Holland Park Avenue after delivering the Los Angeles Times to Gwyn's doorstep, Richard had been successfully charged with drunken driving. This was not a complicated case. He had in fact crashed the car into a police station. Others of us might find so thorough a solecism embarrassing, but Richard was pleased about that part of it because at least it speeded the whole thing up. No hanging around while they radioed in for the Breathalyzer. No being asked to accompany them to the police station . .. Nor for the moment did he particularly regret being so bounteously far over the limit. At least he couldn't remember anything- except the sudden contrast: there you are comfortably driving along, a little lost, perhaps, and with your left hand over your left eye; then the next thing you know you're bouncing up the steps to the police station. And smashing into its half-glass doors. As he drove, now, down Lad-broke Grove toward Holland Park, feeling self-consciously sober and clandestine, Richard remembered what he said, when the three rozzers came crunching out to greet him. No, this was not a complicated case. He rolled down the window and said, "I'm very sorry, Officer, but the thing is I'm incredibly drunk." That, too, got things moving. His appearance in court was scheduled for late November. And the car looked noworse (though it certainly smelled worse, for some reason). And at least it hadn't happened on the way there. "What were you doing, driving around at all hours?" said Gina. Richard gave her a three-quarters profile and said, "Oh. You know. Thinking about things. The new book. And what it might be like. Not being
a writer …" Yeah, it would be tough, not being a writer. He wouldn't be able to spin Gina any more lines like that one …
In the octagonal library, seated on a French armchair, Gwyn Barry frowned down at the chessboard. Frowned down at it, as if some gangly photographer had just said, "Could you like frown down at it? Like you're really concentrating?" Actually there were no photographers present. Only Richard, who, seated opposite, and playing black, made a move, N(QB5)-K6 in the old notation, N(c4)-e5 in the new, and let his peripheral vision feast on the Sunday Los Angeles Times, which lay on a nearby sofa in encouraging disarray. The room was tall and narrow, something of a miniature folly; it felt like the chamber of a beautiful gun or antique missile-the six facets of inlaid bookcases, and then the two facing windows, like blanks. Now Richard gave Gwyn's hair an exasperated glance (so thick, so uniform, so accurately barbered-the hair of a video vicar) before his eyes returned, in brief innocence, to the board. He was a pawn up.
"Do you take the Los Angeles Times?" he said wonderingly.
Gwyn seemed to lose the tempo, or the opposition: he paused awkwardly before replying. Richard's last move was of the kind that presents the adversary with a strictly local, and eventually soluble, problem. An adequate-a more than adequate-response was available. Richard had seen it as his fingers retreated from the piece. Gwyn would see it, too, in time.
"No," said Gwyn. "Some stupid bugger sent it to me."
"Why?"
"With a note saying, 'Something here to interest you.' No page number, mind. No marks or anything. And look at it. It's like a bloody knapsack."
"How ridiculous. Who?"
"I don't know. Signed 'John.' Big help that is. I know loads of people called John."
"I always thought it must be quite handy being called John."
"Why?"
