by Martin Amis
It started happening almost the instant he got back from America. Did America do it? Was it the Californian tan, the money-color, the aurora of American fever?
Maybe it wasn't anything. Maybe it was nothing.
Take the day before yesterday. The talented fabulist-his prose as clear as a mountain creek-is walking along Kensington Park Road, through the spring rain, after a visit to the local bookshop, when out of the flow of the street an oncoming figure distinguishes itself, by retardation, by arrest, and stands there, awaiting his approach. And as the modern myth-maker nears, this figure starts to retreat in front of him, as if, by following, Gwyn was being followed-preceded, but followed. There is no alternative: the standard-bearer of the near future must raise his eyes and confront those of his follower. A sodden youth in a track suit. Who says simply, keeping step, "Don't look at my face. Don't look at my face. Look at my hands. Look at the paint on these hands. Look at the blood on these fucking hands."
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it wasn't anything.
Take yesterday. That rarest of literary phenomena-a cult writer with a mass audience-is walking home up Holland Park Avenue with his plastic bagful of coffee. He looks down for a second and walks into a slab of black. Loose change scatters all around them. The resonant allegorist takes three steps backwards, looks down, looks up again. The dark face in dark glasses is simply saying, "You dumb cunt. Pick it up. Pick it up, you dumb cunt." And there is the one-man paradigm-shift, down on his haunches, prizing pennies from the sticky street. He offers up the gathered change and it is dashed from his hand and he's down there again, and again. "Come on, man. It was an accident." And the mouth, as vivid as fruit pulp, just said, "Yeah? I ain't your brother. You ain't my brother. Yeah?" Until he let him go.
Maybe nothing. He stood by the window, looking out, wondering what he'd done.
Gwyn had a new hobby, now, in his head. He was writing, or paraphrasing, his own biography-in his head. Not his autobiography: by no means. His biography, written by someone else. It was the official biography. Gwyn liked his new hobby so much that even he could tell that it might have deleterious-possibly disastrous-effects on his mental health. Solitary gratification didn't come much more solitary than this: even his own body was excluded from it. Here, biography was pornography. But he had managed to reach the (counterintuitive) conclusion that his new hobby somehow kept him sane. Anyway, he was hooked. He couldn't put it down.
Of course, the biography was insufficiently finished. It had no tide, for instance. Yes, it needed work. Now he left his study and went across the passage to the visitors' room, to change.
Although Barry was no. A keen. While no jock or gym rat, Barry responded to the heightened life of fierce competition. He loved games and sports. (But he hated games and sports. Because he always lost.) With his old sparring. With his old friend Richard Tull he enjoyed a healthy rivalry-on the tennis court, over the snooker table, and across the chessboard. (And he always lost. He never won.) As a novelist Tull was no. Unfavored by the muses, Tull was nevertheless. In hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness, if not in imaginative fiction, Tull was Barry's . . .
Superior? T-shirt, shorts, jockey pants, socks: all laid out for him. As usual, hereabouts, Gwyn moved on to a better chapter.
He had a reputation as a. He made no secret of his love of. To him, the fairer. In every sense he was enamored of womankind. Demeter, who would continue to love him dearly, eventually resigned herself to the fact that. Some men, she came to realize, carry with them such intensity of. In him, the lifeblood. Now that Lady Demeter, in the words of W. B. Yeats, is old and gray and full of sleep, it is with a rueful smile that she …
Wearing his new black track suit he came down into the hall and browsed about the sideboard, reviewing the invitations and looking for his car keys. He was meeting Richard at the Warlock. Things had changed: they just said hello, and played, and said good-bye. The Warlock was good because he could drive straight into the car park, eschewing all real contact with the city and the streets that suddenly hated his life.
Gwyn was looking forward to reading the Richard Tull profile: five thousand words. At least it was going to be all about Gwyn. And while he was reading it he wouldn't be reading about soil erosion or Norman architecture or curtain rails or Keir Hardie or deck chairs or treetops, or any of the other stuff he read about, just in case.
p. 1 GWYN BARRY R. Tull
Gilda Paul sits in Room 213 on the East Wing of the Gwynneth Littlejohn Care Center-or "the mental home," as they call it, down Swansea way. As in a naive poem of sorrow and rejection, the gulls of the Gower Peninsula, their famished cries weakly audible, drift and turn above the bay. Gilda is thirty-nine. Her psychological being unraveled four years ago, on an anonymous London railway platform, the day Gwyn Barry dispatched her to the past, and went his own way: to the future. He writes to Gilda-to the past- every now and then. But he hasn't been back.
Richard was sitting at his desk. His life was desks. Life had changed. But life was still desks. Always desks, there in front of him. First, school, and twenty years of that. And then jobs, and twenty years of that. And always, in the early mornings and the late evenings, more desks. Homework: forty years of that.
The horrendous surface was now strewn with sheets of foolscap, themselves strewn with his doodled dry-runs. His eye dodged over them. A useful idiot of cultural forces he only dimly. Love of fame, which Milton called the last infirmity of noble. The actress Audra Christenberry, glimpsed at the poolside, presents a redoubtable tribute to the surgeon's. Perhaps Lady Demeter puts it best: "Gwyn," she says, "can't write for." Equipped with a voluptuous wife, a huge readership, a big house, and no talent, the author of. In the annals of philandery, hucksterism, and opulent hypocrisy. . .
"Daddy?"
"Yes?"
"Daddy? I don't want to be called Marco anymore. I want to change my name."
"What to, Marco?"
"Nothing."
"What, you don't want a name? Or you want to be called 'Nothing'?"
The child raised his blunt but shapely eyebrows and nodded once.
Richard waited until Marco was on his way to the door, and then said, " 'Nothing'?"
The child paused disaffectedly-nihilistically-and said, "… Yeah?"
"Bath time."
He got to his feet and began doing the boys . . . When you've been away, and you come home again, your life re-enfolds you. And not lov-ingly. He had come home. Manually and very doubtfully assisted onto the aircraft at Kennedy, Richard had been at first wheelchaired and then eventually stretchered off it again at Heathrow. He was still amazed and impressed by this. The wheelchair, it transpired (after a confused and even quite humorous interlude on the tarmac), had been inadequate to his needs. So he came home again and his life re-enfolded him. And not lovingly. For a few days after his return, when he looked back on his torments in America, he saw himself up there among the big-league sufferers, with Job, with Griselda, with Milton's Adam, with Milton's Eve. But by now he had demoted himself to one of the squawking hopefuls on some Japanese endurance show, grinningly abasing his being in the quest for immediate gain. He also wondered if Untitled, so clearly and entirely hopeless as a novel, might have its uses as something else. A military application, perhaps. The army might like to have Untitled up its sleeve. Marie Curie's notebooks, even today, a century on, were still carcinogenic. He could imagine a copy of his novel preserved in a lab behind foot-thick glass, and occasionally leafed through by jolting robots. With that book Richard had so far earned himself, worldwide, a readership of one: Steve Cousins. He had sent him a proof in February, and the response came back almost by return post. "You're good, man," Cousins wrote (typed, touched: justified margins), and went on to make intelligent, or anyway intelligible, comparisons between the new novel and its predecessors. Between Untitled and Dreams Don't Mean Anything and Aforethought. You're good, man: the words often breathed in his ear when he sat around wondering why he wasn't good. And h
e knew why, now. He wasn't good because he wasn't innocent enough. Writers are innocent. Not guiltless-just innocent. Tolstoy was certainly innocent. Even Proust was innocent. Even Joyce was innocent. And another thing: he didn't love his readers, as you need to do. Although he had nothing against them personally, he didn't love them; and you must love them. So, to conclude. Richard was innocent (look where he was heading), but in the wrong way. He did love his readers (how he yearned for them), but in the wrong way. Look what he would put them through … He should have held a knife to Gwyn's throat and made him read aloud from Untitled until he reached page eleven. Some fantastic brain tumor would have done the rest. Gwyn wasn't good either; but Gwyn was a special case.
"Hands," said Richard. And then after a while, "Bums." Then after a while, "Necks." And so on.
Richard in America, old Richard, in the new world. It was like pulling over on the six-lane highway, that time, and clambering out of the … no, not the Maestro but its predecessor, the thirdhand off-white Prelude:clambering out to change a tire, to secure a slewing roofrack, to open the hood and assess (or contemplate) its soiled and steaming innards. Out there, in the breakdown lane (Gina rigid in the passenger seat, the tiny twins in the pantaloons of their carseats), it struck Richard that he was the only organic figure in that landscape of remorseless purpose, which sounded-Christ-like a million Band-aids being ripped off a million sections of fuzzy flesh (with accompanying whines of pain and surprise). And he thought: I'm a joke. And an old one. This place belongs not to the bare and dithering human creature but to the intent hundredweights, to the leaning machines and the howl of their anathemas.
"Teeth," said Richard. And then after a while, "Socks." Then after a while, "Slippers." And so on.
When the boys were done he squelched into the kitchen and unplugged his bottle of Norwegian Cabernet, to go with whatever bit of whatever animal he would eventually flip onto the grill. Gina would be in and out, wearing a dressing gown, a hair cap even, a mask of cream. It was all right. She was working four days a week now; they would have more money; she was resolved on a full family vacation this summer, and was already staring critically at burnished brochures. It was all right. Gina was no longer a writer's wife because he was no longer a writer. He didn't think she was going to leave him: yet. Together they had joined the great community of the exhausted.
"The boys' lips," he said. "Children's lips. They always look just a little bit sore. Like the lips of trumpeters. Halfway through the second set. They toughen up later, I suppose."
It was all right-and do you know how he could tell? Sometimes, later on, when he had finished his chump chop and she had finished her bowl of porridge or village-idiot cereal, he would go on reading Man of his Words: The Life and Times of Ingram Bywater and she would go on reading Budgeting for Belgium, as the tap dripped and the strip-light fizzed like a fat fly-and they would yawn together. Nothing too sensual or explicit, three or four each, a transient contagion of yawns. From his private culture, from his stock of inherited information (Unless The Kettle Boiling Be), Richard knew that you couldn't catch a yawn from someone you didn't like. He caught hers. She caught his. At present, this was the extent of their physical life. A shudder in the jawline answered by a widening of the nostrils; a slow gasp answered by a moan of mild surprise. Nothing too candid or throat-baring. But a definite exchange of yawns. A little epiphany of yawns.
Gina went to bed, and Richard headed for his study, availing himself of this facility, because he knew she had other plans for the room.
GWYN BARRY: R. Tull. He reread the first paragraph, his eyes itching with melancholy and pride. There'd been a bad moment that morning, when Richard had called the madhouse to fact-check the status of Gilda Paul-and been told that she was no longer a patient. But it was cool (whew): she had merely been upgraded to some kind of trusty. Gilda was still sectioned. And still considered nuts. The only other good news to come Richard's way since his return from America was that Anstice, his devoted secretary at The Little Magazine, had not taken a welcome break, alone, in the Isle of Mull, as everyone thought, but, instead, had gone home and killed herself.
Oh, this profile would tax his journalistic skills to their very limit! Let's be honest: he would be ducking and weaving all the way to the deadline. Now Richard lit a cigarette and fed a fresh piece of paper into the barrel. With a sense of afflatus, of pregnant illumination, he wristily typed-
pl. GWYN BARRY R.Tull
The airway is open-the breathing unimpaired. The patient can now squeeze the examiner's hand and resist passive motion of the extremities. Retrograde amnesia at first suggested major closed-head injury, but the patient can now maintain a consistent level of consciousness. His voice is weak, yet clear. Gone are the drips and feeding-tubes of the Emergency Room. Signs of trauma are painfully apparent-but Gwyn Barry is out of Intensive Care.
Here's what struck Steve Cousins about pornography: at last he had found something that was as interested in sex as he was.
He had found something that was all about sex. And nothing else. The bits in between were just breathers: breathers for the breathers. Pornography sometimes tried to be about other things, or to happen in other settings. But all it could ever tell you about these other things, these other settings, was that they were all about sex too. And nothing else. Freud thought that everything was about sex. That was his theory. Pornography, though, was demonstrably all about sex. Sex as a spectacle, of course. And nothing else.
Steve Cousins didn't read pornography (words were no use here), but he read everything he could find that was about pornography-that was all about the thing that was all about sex. His ludicrously eclectic library (Freud, comic books, Nietzsche, the complete works of Richard Tull) contained several yards of books that were all about pornography. Patriarchy and the Limits of. Just Push My. Commission on Obscenity and. The Traffic in. Visual Anthropology and the. I Was a. Many times he had read that many of the actors and almost all of the actresses on the pornographic screen had been abused as children. That meant that he and they formed . .. not a happy family. But a big one.
He watched them aging, the terrible stars in their terrible galaxies. The anti-stars, in their anti-galaxy. Without exception the men seemed imperishable (stupid, tireless, ever-thrusting, ever-wincing), but the women, with their limited screen-lives … Tenderly, in every sense, he monitored their facelifts and breast-implants, their tattoos, pubic hairdos, the bodies in question increasingly encrusted with cellulite and jewelry, chokers, anklets, bracelets, nipple-rings, navel-studs, tongue-clasps-heavy brooches, carbuncles, pierced into the tongue. See them in something ten years old and they looked ten years old themselves, bucktoothed with inbreeding. And wall-eyed with incest. Then they passed through a kind of lab or clinic, which reinvented them for male desire. Where did they come from? Where did they go? Some made it into mid-career, with frequent recalls to the drawing board-permanent outpatients. Others fell apart right there, in the ponderous beam of your ponderous gaze (Scozzy's gaze, with its slow-pulse blink rate, in the darkness he owned, which held the brightness of the TV screen likesomething precious in its hand-like the charm or amulet on the tarnished tongue). Identifying, with difficulty, a familiar veteran in her third or fourth incarnation-looser, frecklier, and above all suddenly and seriously older-Steve would say things like "For it now, darling" or "Downhill now, darling," or sometimes, just as typically but in a lower and slower voice, "Oh my dear .. . what have they done to you?" Toward career end, it looked to be a rite of passage: the mature Adult actress, subjected to abuse. You know. After her hours, belly-up on the bar, three speckle-faced hardhats bearing down on her. You know. As if in reenactment or commemoration of what brought her there.
So they were all children. They were all children together, in this- this big family. All children, until they weren't. Pornography was the story of his life.
He was out, now, down Wimbledon way. Not in the Cosworth, with its low racing skirt, but in the hulk of the orange v
an. With an occasional flinch he registered the scattered presence of 13 's tabloids and Ting tins. Proof of his vigils, his time-killings. There was also less palpable evidence (a hairpin, a tissue) that with one or two flinches of its own the aged van had served as a setting for the act of love-as bedroom, as bower. Scozzy had some trouble imagining this, 13 and Lizzete being too young to have their equivalents in Adult. He supposed, anyway, that it didn't last that long. 13 wouldn't want to hang about. Giving Lizzete one was illegal all right, but there was no money in it.
Apparently the wind had to blow that bit harder every year. Whatever it was the wind thought it was doing, blowing the dust off, getting the smells out-this was becoming a bigger job, every year. Each spring. Nice to think that it did have a function. Other than driving you out of your mind. Scozzy knew wind (country wind, mate): in some hut somewhere, in some field, as a wild boy he had waited out the wind, moaning to it, swaying to it, with unbearable monotony, for hour after hour. Even light, as it traveled, grew tired. But wind never tired. It had blown him clean. He was as light as air. He had told 13 and 13 had said . .. Oh yeah. He remembered. Early retirement is it.
Again, he was watching Terryterry's women, the two little girls with their stunts on the slide and the swing, the mum in the kitchen tapping on the glass above the sink, like any mum anywhere, which was probably how she saw herself, no babymamma, no hired box or Quacko test tube. He realized he had become addicted to this spectacle (the girls were called something like Diandra and Desiree); anyway he came here for no earthly professional reason, on nice days. One thing about being insidethe van: you weren't outside the van, and looking at it. That unforgivable orange, an orange you could never associate with any living fruit, an orange that belonged to plastic, kitchen dustbins, and the beaks of certain black London birds. He found the suburbs exotic and innocuous, not wild, like the country, not wild, like the city. What was this, going on around him? The leaves, the broken sunlight, the child-molester calm and fixity of the male passersby, the single craven car inching down the street on its brothel-creepers, the windswept cries of the girls in their stripes and dots.
