by Martin Amis
He helped her off with her coat and when she turned to face him he thought for a moment that both her eyes had been blackened or bruised. But now her eyes widened, contradicting him, and she said abruptly,
"Gwyn seems to think you're going to say something about me in your piece. Something mean. Are you??
"No. I don't think so. I'm just going to say what you said about his stuff. That he can't write for toffee."
"Well that's a relief. He shouldn't mind that."
And Richard wondered for the first time how Demi could tell that Gwyn couldn't write for toffee. But all he said was, "Let's go on up. I've got a speech to make. Wish me luck."
They went up the stairs to where all the noise was coming from. Except there wasn't any noise, not anymore. Side by side they moved down the corridor to the conference room. He reached for the handle and pushed. The door gave an inch or two. He leaned on it but it gave no further. All he could hear was a single anguished sigh. All he could see was a single sandy suede shoe, which quivered for an instant, then twitched, then stretched and straightened in death or repose: the olden Hush-Puppy of R. C. Squires.
Meanwhile, Richard had "finished" Amelior-in the novelist's sense. He hadn't finished reading it. He had finished writing it. Had he become Gwyn Barry? Was this the information?
Having written it, Richard was now obliged to christen it. What he really wanted to call it was Dogshit Park. Another possibility was Idylland-his rather slapdash substitute for that sylvan Utopia, that newer, better world. In the end he settled on a nice plump phrase from Andrew Marvell's "The Garden." Stumbling on Melons.
Having named the book, he now had to name the writer. It might be cute, he thought, to anagrammatize "Andrew Marvell." And make it a woman. With his crossword skills, it shouldn't… Ella something looked promising. Ella Rumwarden, Ravella Drew, M.D. No. Velma . .. Jesus. Drew la Malvern. Wanda Merverl. Leandra Wrelmv. This is pathetic. Marvella Drewn …
Having tried and failed to anagrammatize "Andrew Marvell," he now tried to anagrammatize "The Garden." And make it a man. There was no sex in Amelior, and there was no gender either. Gwyn didn't write like a man. Gwyn didn't write like a woman. It wasn't personal: he wrote like something in between. "The Garden" . . . Gren Death? Grant Heed? Garth Dene?
Stumbling on Melons. By Thad Green. Yes.
The business of writing Amelior had of course involved reading it, again, and with rare attention. It was, in Richard's view, without merit. A straightforward armpit-igniter. You could come home, after a full day at the Tantalus Press, and Amelior could still gnarl your toes. But at last he thought he knew what Gwyn had done and how he had done it.
Plagiarism was good. Plagiarism was just punishment. Richard Tull was going to make it look as though Gwyn Barry had stolen Amelior. And Gwyn had stolen it. Not from Thad Green. From Richard Tull. And Richard, as he typed, had been stealing it back.
There were witnesses. It all originated, as so much literature originated, from an incident featuring conversation and alcohol. It all originated from a symposium, which means "drinking party": sym (with, together), plus potes (drinker). It all went back to a pub. Present also were Gina and Gilda. Richard was summarizing his latest project, a big bold book he never wrote called The History of Increasing Humiliation. In that same evening they spent almost half the advance.
"Literature," Richard said (and it would be nice to write something like "wiping the foam from his lips with his sleeve as the company fell silent." But he was drinking cheap red wine and eating pork scratchings and Gina and Gilda were talking about something else)-literature, Richard said, describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mercantile dreams. Then it was about you-Gina, Gilda: social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age. And he was saying, Richard was saying: Now what? Literature, for a while, can be about us (nodding resignedly at Gwyn): about writers. But that won't last long. How do we burst clear of all this? And he asked them: Whither the novel?
This was already more than enough, surely. Oh, it was pitifully plain what Gwyn had done. He had gone back to his bedsit and gathered his Brit.-Con. textbooks and his gardening manuals and sat down and written Amelior. But it went further. That wasn't really the key…
Supposing, Richard went on, flown with cheap red wine and an audience of three-supposing that the progress of literature (downward) was forced in that direction by the progress of cosmology (upward-up, up). For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation. Always hysterically but less and less fiercely resisted, as one illusion after another fell away. You can say this for increasing humiliation: at least it was gradual.
Homer thought the starry heavens were made of bronze-a shield or dome, supported by pillars. Homer was over long before the first suggestion that the world was anything but flat.
Virgil knew the earth was round. But he thought it was the center of the universe, and that the sun and the stars revolved around it. And he thought it was fixed.
Dante did too. Virgil was his guide, in purgatory, in hell: becausenothing had changed. Dante knew about eclipses and epicycles and retrogradation. But he had no idea where he was and how fast he was moving.
Shakespeare thought that the sun was the center of the universe.
Wordsworth did too, and thought it was made of coal.
Eliot knew that the sun was not at the center of the universe; that it was not at the center of the galaxy; and that the galaxy was not at the center of the universe.
From geocentric to heliocentric to galactocentric to plain eccentric. And getting bigger all the time: not at its steady rate of expansion but with sickening leaps of the human mind.
And prepare yourself for another blow, another facer: the multiplicity-the infinity, perhaps-of other universes.
So that's what you'd have to do. That's what you'd have to do, to make it all new again. You'd have to make the universe feel smaller.
Which is what Gwyn had done, Richard realized, as he typed out Amelior. Quietly, uninsistently, reassuringly. It provided the novel's only memorable phrase: "the naked-eye universe/' That's what Amelior was the center of: the naked-eye universe.
Of course, in Gwyn's novels, there wasn't much talk of astronomy. There was talk of astrology. And what was astrology? Astrology was the consecration of the homocentric universe. Astrology went further than saying that the stars were all about us. Astrology said that the stars were all about me.
Richard wanted to know how Gwyn was feeling these days. He called him and said, "How's your elbow?"
"Still bad," said Gwyn.
"So no tennis. And no snooker, I suppose. But why no chess? I know. It's that nagging brain injury of yours. That niggle in the brain. Better rest it. Rub some Deep Heat into your hair when you go to bed."
"Hang on a minute."
Gwyn was sitting on the armchair near the window in his study. He was between interviews. He had fixed it with Publicity that they all came to him now. All he needed was a tennis court in the basement, and a couple of restaurants, and he'd never have to go out. Pamela knocked and entered. She named a monthly magazine and said that its people were here.
"Photographer?" he asked.
"Photographer.?
"They're early. Have them wait . . . Interviews," he explained. "Where were we?"
Richard said, "We were talking about your brain."
"Look, I'd better tell you that I've been deceiving you these past couple of years."
"In what way?"
"I'm actually much better than you at games. Much better than you at tennis and snooker. Even chess. This sometimes happens, you know, after a great worldly success. There's a power rush. It overflows. Particularly into the, into the sexual and competitive spheres."
"But you always lose."
"That's right. I didn't want to win. I thought, you know, what with everything else, it might be
more than you could handle. Losing at all games too."
"Oh dear. It's happened. I always knew you had a rogue maggot loose in your brain. Twanging its way from chamber to chamber. Well. It's happened."
"What's happened?"
"The maggot's had kids. Demi said you weren't yourself anymore. Not yourself. Whatever that might have been."
"Listen. Clear a day for it. We'll have a triathlon. Bring a change of clothes. We'll play tennis. Then go and play snooker. Then I'll give you dinner here and we'll finish up with a couple of games of chess."
"I can't wait. No excuses now. No checking into Intensive Care."
"Listen. What was it exactly Demi said to you? About my work?"
"I've got it written down. On my typewriter. Gwyn can't write for toffee comma you know full stop."
"You're sure she was talking about me."
"I ran it by her the next morning. She said, 'Well he can't, can he?' And I said-"
"Clear a day."
Gwyn stood up and walked toward the window and stared out. The world loved him, but the world loved him not. Poor Gwyn, and all this cognitive dis.
Outside, now, he didn't know where or how to look. The world said it loved him. So why was it stinging him in the corners of his eyes? He was the unrequited. The pink lips of the cherry blossoms were kissing him and mouthing his name, and whispering, and showing him the papillae of their tongues. Mother Earth was blowing hot and cold, as hot as Venus with its trapped gas and ceaseless lightning, as cold as Pluto and its frozen rock.
In truth, Gwyn's interests didn't extend very far above ground level. Up to the troposphere, because weather came from it, and even as far as the stratosphere, sometimes, if he happened to be flying in it. He knew the earth went round the sun-he knew this twice a year, when he adjusted his watch because of it. The cosmology of Amelior owed nothing to Richard Tull. What Gwyn had been trying to provide, as usual, in that book and its successor, was the reassurance of honest practicality. He sought to represent the universe only to the extent that a sensible person (himself, for instance) had any use for it. There was a sun, made of whatever it was made of, which went in and went out, which rose and set, which helped grow things and gave you a tan if you lay in it. There was a moon with a man in it. There was a backdrop of stars, if you looked at it, which could guide you at sea, if you needed it. And beyond all that-don't worry about it.
He lingered by the window while the new photographer deployed his lights, his tripods, his white umbrellas. The new interviewer was a girl (unattractive). With nonspecific hostility Gwyn noticed that Pamela had at some point deposited a fresh stack of weeklies onto the round table by his armchair. Next to last week's weeklies. And he hadn't even . . . An avid reader, Barry always. He felt it was his duty to keep up with as many. Here as elsewhere, Barry was committed to the spirit of serendipity: everything was grist to his-
"Do you mind if I use a tape? .. . Could you say something? What you had for breakfast?"
"Let me think. I had half a grapefruit. And some tea."
"You once said, 'Nobody seems to like my books. Except the public.' Would you still say that?"
Beyond the window the cherry blossoms rolled. London went on from there, spreading out in all directions.
"How, then, do you account for your universal appeal?"
London went on from there, spreading out in all directions. The world was like a lover that loved you only sometimes. Sometimes, when you touched her, she went mmmm and enveloped you with all her warmth.
"Is Amelior a kind of promised land? Does it play on that myth and on that appeal?"
Sometimes when you touched her she went mmmm and enveloped you with all her warmth. But sometimes she was hair-trigger, was fingertip, in her hate. And she twisted to your touch.
"Are the two books formal Utopias?"
She twisted to your touch. And this you could live with, could even understand. Only: all her brothers were out there.
"Could they be described as pastorals?"
All her brothers were out there. All her brothers were out there, waiting to break your face.
"Do you see the reinvention of society as one of the novelist's responsibilities?"
One last interview after this interview. He hoped the last interview would be easier than this interview. He wanted an interview with more questions like Did he set himself a time to write every day? or Did he use a word processor? or (come to think of it) How much money did he earn? or Who was he fucking? These days he was being taken far more seriously. Because it worked the other way round now: the literature-and-society people came in through the back door, to investigate an incidence of mass appeal. Gwyn liked being taken seriously and wanted-and expected-much much more of it. He felt strongly attracted to the idea that his work was deceptively simple. But he wished they'd make their questions easier. Now, as he traipsed through his answers, Gwyn checked the schedule to see who was coming next. Someone from the in-flight magazine of a charter firm based in Liverpool. Good.
After that, the great Abdumomunov was expected: to teach him chess. Gwyn used to go to the great Abdumomunov (up on some crag in Kensal Green) but now the great Abdumomunov came to him. He supposed that the old grandmaster must relish these visits. And he was wrong. These visits pained the great Abdumomunov; they pained him in the chess sense, which was more or less the only sense he had. He was used to teaching pampered but owlish ten-year-olds in whom you encountered a riotously burgeoning vocabulary of the thirty-two pieces and the sixty-four squares. Gwyn was hospitable enough, and paid the carfare, and his house was pornographically luxurious; but he never learned anything. It was like teaching poetics to someone who could only say bus, hot and floor. Currently they were working on stonewall openings where a pawn-infested center gave drawing chances to Black.
It seemed to the great Abdumomunov that Gwyn wanted to learn how to cheat at chess. Cheating at chess, or wanting to cheat at chess, had a long and illustrious history. Seat your opponent with the sun in his eyes was a maxim that went back to the indolent nawabs and the reclining caliphs of sixth-century Asia. Of course, you couldn't cheat at chess: with cheating, all you could do, at the chessboard, was think you were being cheated. Like many old grandmasters the great Abdumomunov could still teach the game but he couldn't bear playing it. Forced stalematesgave him some pleasure. Agreed draws left him more or less undisqui-eted. He couldn't bear losing. He couldn't bear winning.
Gal Aplanalp said, "Wait. You're not asking me to fire him."
Gwyn was out of the house. This was his weekly meeting with his agent, something he didn't want to skip, so near to publication day. He said,
"He's fired himself. He has cast his staff into the cold waters. His wife goes out to work. He stays home and minds the kids."
"I'm going to go to hell for placing him with Bold Agenda. Who knew they were that Mickey Mouse? He didn't even call me and bawl me out. Why?"
"Shame," said Gwyn.
".. . It is sad. Kind of."
"Kind of. Anyway. Now: foreign rights. I see from my statement that I'm paying one and sometimes two extra chunks of five percent to various intermediaries. These intermediaries are probably very good at sending and receiving faxes. But what other services do they do me? And why is it twenty percent in Japan?"
Gal told Gwyn that this was how it had always been. Gwyn told Gal to find a new and better way. Then he said,
"What time is it?"
"Uh-oh."
He got out of bed and began the business of locating the socks and Y-fronts he had hurled here and there forty minutes earlier-in an imitation of heedlessness which he now found overdone. Then, too, Gal's bedroom was disappointingly unkempt. From somewhere in his digestive tract came a cluck of quiet confirmation: the impeccable career-woman led you from her impeccable office, and you followed her stocking seams and their impeccable perpendiculars, upstairs-into an arena of neurotic disarray .. . Actually, Gwyn felt wonderful. Nothing had happened to him on his way to St. Jam
es's. And he had a hunch that nothing would happen to him on his way back to Holland Park. It was like being back on C after a month of the sweats. Wishing to express his confidence, wishing to give that confidence expression, Gwyn turned and said,
"Don't fire Richard. He lends a kind of respectability to your client list. Otherwise it's pretty cheesy stuff, isn't it. Novels by weather forecasters. And darts players and royal chauffeurs … You ought to go on a diet, love."
Gal waited. She then said, "You think I'm not on a diet already??
"Seriously though, love. I don't see myself with a fat agent. It wouldn't do. I'd have to go elsewhere: to Mercedes Soroya at IPT. Can you believe those eyes? And those ankles!"
Patiently Gwyn went on standing there with his Y-fronts hanging from his hand. Gal, who was half out of bed, now rolled back into it, saying,
"It's not fair. You're a world-famous novelist. And you have the body of a young boy."
"Thanks, love."
For a moment he stopped thinking about Mercedes Soroya and started thinking about Audra Christenberry, who would shortly be in town. Then he thought about Demeter: indulgently.
"About next week. Demi's dad has taken a turn for the worse. Yeah. She wants us to go up there for a few days. So I can't make it next week."
"Boo-hoo," said Gal.
"Now what was that look all about?"
"Nothing. You know I always smile when I watch you getting dressed."
He stood upright, in his socks, his Y-fronts, beneath the inlets-the lagoon-of his male-pattern baldness, and said,
"Thanks, love."
This time it was like walking into a lamppost. He always dipped his eyes, discreetly, as he came out of Gal's and took a sapless little hop off the last step to generate a turn of speed . . . "You're ready, mate." The black guy cast out of black iron flattened him up against the railings and leant forward holding the pads of his thumbs-so warm, so firm, so aromatic even, like a doctor's touch-over Gwyn's closed lids, saying, "What can I tell you. We've all heard it all on the TV. I'm your worst nightmare. I'm going to put your lights out. We've all heard it all. On the TV. You're ready, mate. Look at the way you drop your head. You're ready.?
