by Amis, Martin
‘Come on, I’ve said nice things before.’
With her head up she took his arm and said sensibly, ‘I know you have, Mart. I know you have.’
Under the archway they waited in the light rain for Phoebe’s car, her courtesy car (this sometimes happened).
‘Will you call me later? Of course you will, you always do. Oh dear. Oh dear. We’ve been together for twenty months, Martin. It’s the longest I’ve…It’s ridiculous. What do I have to do to put you off?’
He said, ‘I know. Let me make love to you every night.’
‘Oh, and betray my deepest convictions? No. Time for the new regime. Sorry!’
She gave him a kiss on the lips, in consolation; he nodded fatalistically and bowed as her delicate legs, clenched together, slid smoothly into the back seat. They waved.
* * *
—————
He already knew a fair amount about the new regime, which she called the Next Thing (the two words had long been fearfully capitalised in his mind).
Would it be sudden, the next thing? No. It’s not one big idea. It’s more like a package of measures. How’ll I know when the next thing’s begun? You’ll know after a bit, Martin. The realisation will steal up on you…. Is there another thing after the next thing? Yes, but I’ve never had to use it. The next thing has always been enough. Actually the first thing has always been enough. Except with you.
The thought of being an exception flattered his vanity. So did her otherness, with its weird cinema (the atrium at TFS, the business trips to Prague and Budapest, the courtesy car). So did the evident fact that he had the gravitational weight to attract someone from such a distant system, to draw someone in through so many voids from so very far away.
She’s also got a wound, I think, Jane had said. Martin thought that too; and it made him vulnerable to the fantasies of rescue and redemption – fantasies of honour – that had been part of his imaginative life since the age of five or six. Redeem her how? Through love. He wanted her to love him. If he could achieve it, he knew, then he was ready to take the enormous risk – commit to the outlandish gamble – of loving and honouring Phoebe Phelps.
‘What is honour?’ asks the inglorious Falstaff. ‘He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No.’ Can honour ‘take away the grief of a wound? No.’
Where was that wound? Where was that grief?
*1 Hence all the anxiety about social class. Which is no more than period verisimilitude, like all the smoking.
*2 A couple of years later, I read (or heard) somewhere that there were essentially two types of human being, the organised and the disorganised, and you could tell which was which from their ‘work stations’. So I went on a fact-finding tour of the New Statesman. The desk of Julian Barnes (literary auxiliary and novelist) was bare except for a fountain pen; the desk of James Fenton (parliamentary correspondent and poet) was bare except for a lone paperclip. Christopher’s desk, like my own, was an action sculpture entitled ‘Haystack’. This was somehow very bonding.
*3 There’s no help for it: I find that I can’t, after all, avoid explaining about Little Keith. Little Keith, Keith Whitehead, is an ensemble player in my second novel (1975), and the most programmatically repellent character I have ever tried to create. He is four foot eleven, and fat with it, and very nasty (scowling away under his pizza of acne)…Little Keith Whitehead made me realise how much human sympathy readers bring to fiction, because quite a few of them were saddened by his unpleasant fate. Sorry for Keith? I used to think – Who cares about Keith? But readers do care…Quite a few people called me Little Keith, including girls. To this day Eleni Meleagrou, the first Mrs Hitchens, calls me Leedell Keith.
*4 Red Rosa (1871–1919), imprisoned many times by Kaiser Wilhelm II, was eventually beaten, tortured, and shot dead by a gang of Freikorps (monarchist bitter-enders and proto-Brownshirts). Christopher would sometimes define himself as a Luxemburgist – meaning, I now suppose, a revolutionary who rejects violence (on the whole) and embraces freedom of speech. He never relinquished Luxemburg (similarly and far more controversially, he never relinquished Trotsky). ‘To me, the most brilliant – and the most engaging – of these Marxist intellectuals was Rosa Luxemburg,’ Christopher wrote in June 2011, six months before he died.
*5 In the second half of 1972 I paid regular calls on a gentle and grateful fifty-year-old called Marybeth, who happened to be a proletarian demi-mondaine (‘half-worlder’). Vividly scalene individuals passed through or hid out in Marybeth’s loftlike apartment in Earls Court: burglars, blaggers, madams, molls. One night I spent several hours making myself as unobjectionable as I possibly could to two savage and rancorous young Scots – who were on the run from a celebrated borstal in Newcastle. The half-world, I already knew, was only half sane. The point being, I suppose, that none of this ever came close to putting me off.
*6 From Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010): ‘ “Care to meet the new Leader?” Who could refuse? Within moments, Margaret Thatcher and I were face to face.’ Christopher goes on: ‘I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it chances) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly…“No,” she said. “Bow lower.” Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. “No, no,” she trilled. “Much lower!”…Stepping around behind me, she…smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order-paper she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back…As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words: “Naughty boy!” ’…Under Thatcher, as one commentator put it, Britan felt ‘the smack of firm government’. And it is on le vice anglais (and the deliciously tingling bottom) that her erotic allure, such as it was, entirely relied. Christopher was susceptible to it, and so was Kingsley, and so was Philip Larkin.
*7 I was writing a colour-mag feature about the Cannes Film Festival. All the attendees and all the locals looked rich (even the innumerable beggars); and beyond La Croisette, where the sky met the sea, each and every female (child, teen, starlet, young mother, grand-maman, arrière-grand-mère) swam and sunbathed topless – except Phoebe, who loftily retained her racing one-piece.
*8 She bet on the horses, on athletics, cricket, and football, but it was mainly on the dogs (accumulators and reversible forecasts). Phoebe said that now she was in administration (Personnel), and no longer ‘on the floor’ (actually trading), she missed the physical sensation of risk (‘That’s why they call a bet a flutter, Mart’). Her stakes were substantial, twenty quid, thirty, sometimes forty – which was my net weekly wage. The betting shops she ducked into during our Saturday strolls reminded me of the commissaries and common rooms of London prisons (fresh in my mind from recent visits to my self-tormenting old friend Robinson – at Pentonville, at Brixton, at Wormwood Scrubs): sullen men, sullen, stubborn men who, not unlike Phoebe in a way, bloodymindedly moved against the social flow, like the ragged bore of a river…In this setting Phoebe mingled with burly male shapes filling in forms on the wall-side ledges or grimly queuing in front of the meshed till; their common aim was to predict the future. Phoebe also had an account somewhere and dealt with a certain bookie (Noel) by phone.
*9 Phoebe’s interest in Larkin – mainly human interest – had been stirred by a TV rerun of an interview, in black and white, with John Betjeman. I watched it at Hereford Road, with Phoebe looking doubtfully over my shoulder.
*10 And Phoebe, philosophically, saw eye to eye with this poem. ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ describes a ‘frail travelling coincidence’. The poet is taking the train from the north of England to the capital on Whit Sunday, the Christian festival of early summer, traditionally a propitious time for marriage. And ‘[a]ll down the line / Fresh couples climbed aboar
d’. The eighth and final stanza ends when the train is approaching a London ‘spread out in the sun, / Its postal districts stacked like squares of wheat’. And here it comes: ‘We slowed again, / And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled / A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.’ That isolating scepticism about love and marriage, in the face of time, was part of an inner argument that Larkin often gave voice to, but never as tellingly as here: the arrows of desire, as the poet sees it, are doomed to deliquesce in impotence and tedium – becoming as dull as rain. Phoebe was in profound sympathy with such a view. So it wasn’t the paraphrasable content of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ that provoked Phoebe’s humph; it must have been the form itself, he thought – the poetic form…The actual practitioners they were always running into socially (James Fenton, Craig Raine, Peter Porter, Ian Hamilton) she regarded quizzically, suspiciously; and whenever I talked about poetry she looked at me as if I was nuts. This would be explained, or roughly accounted for, in 1978.
*11 Bob was Robert Conquest (1917–2015), poet, critic, and historian – specifically a Sovietologist, best known for The Great Terror (on the purges of 1937–8) and The Harvest of Sorrow (on Collectivisation, and the terror-famine of 1932–3).
Guideline
The Novel Moves On
What’s the difference between a story and a plot? you ask.
According to E. M. Forster (whom Jane used to refer to by his middle name, as did everyone who knew him), ‘the king died and then the queen died’ is a story, but ‘the king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. Not so, Edward, not so, Morgan! ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is still a story. To mutate into a plot, a story needs a further element – easily supplied, here, by a comma and an adverb.
The king died, and then the queen died, ostensibly of grief is a plot. Or a hook. Plots demand constant attention, but a good hook can stand alone and untouched, like an anchor, and keep things fixed and stable in any weather. Plots and hooks yield the same desideratum: they set the reader a question, with the implicit assurance that the question will be answered.
Those amiably vague remarks about the king and the queen come from Forster’s stimulating little book, Aspects of the Novel, which appeared in 1927. At that time it went without saying, in polite society, that plots – and hooks – were beneath the dignity of serious writers, and that the Great Tradition consisted of stories: long stories. ‘Yes – oh dear, yes – the novel tells a story,’ wrote Forster; and it is probably his most-quoted line (apart from ‘Only connect!’)…He died, aged ninety-one, in 1970, when the novel, the Forsterian novel, so sane, so orderly, was in quiet retreat. Because the literary vanguard was starting to say, No – oh God, no – the novel doesn’t tell a story. Because times have changed.
As early as 1973 Anthony Burgess was floating the notion that there are, in fact, two types of novelist, which he called type ‘A’ and type ‘B’. ‘A’ novelists were interested in narrative, character, motivation, and psychological insight, said Burgess, while ‘B’ novelists were interested above all in language – in the play of words.
That statement seemed precipitate back then, but within a few years it was no more than a fair description of the status quo. While the ‘A’ novelists were carrying on as normal, the ‘B’ novelists (who had long been hazy presences on the fringe) were suddenly everywhere, composing novels as structureless as alphabet soup and as wayward as schizophrenia.
We saw novels that did without paragraph breaks or punctuation, or did without monosyllables, or polysyllables, or common nouns or verbs or adjectives; one assiduous daredevil thought it worth putting together a prose epic that did without the letter e. There was also much stream of consciousness, much self-referential friskiness, and – in a broad variety of styles and registers – much overwriting.
The surge in experimentalism ran alongside the sexual revolution, and sprang from the same collective eureka: the unsuspected flimsiness of certain venerable prohibitions. As it turned out, the ‘language’ novelists slowly peaked and then slowly plunged, and the whole thrust was over in two generations…So the stream of consciousness – to take the least attractive innovation – raved and mumbled on for sixty years; looking back, reading back, one is amazed it lasted sixty minutes. Nowadays, anyway, the ‘B’ novel is dead.*1
Detectable too has been a reordering of the relationship between writer and reader (in the plainest of times a relationship of inexhaustible complexity and depth). ‘We like difficult books,’ littérateurs used to claim; and this supposed preference turned into a rallying-cry for the cause of High Modernism. Perhaps we did indeed once like difficult books. But we don’t like them any more. Difficult novels are dead.
We no longer court difficulty partly because the reader–writer relationship has ceased to be even remotely cooperative. Whatever you do, don’t expect the reader to deduce anything. I learnt that the hard way with my eleventh novel (2006): one of its protagonists, an American girl called Venus, is black, and her ethnicity is shored up by so much internal evidence that somehow I felt it would be ham-handed to spell it out (surely Venus Williams was doing the job for me). The result? Not a single reader I’m aware of has ever doubted for a moment that Venus is white.*2
Mark my words: every piece of vital information has to be clearly stated in plain English; when it comes to inferring and surmising, readers have downed tools. The unreliable narrator (once a popular and often very fruitful device) has given way to the era of the unreliable receptor. The unreliable narrator is dead; the ‘deductive’ novel is dead.
There used to be a sub-genre of long, plotless, digressive, and essayistic novels (fairly) indulgently known as ‘baggy monsters’. Humboldt’s Gift, with its extended asides on such things as theosophy and angelology, is a classic baggy monster; and when it was published in 1975 (before Bellow’s Nobel) it spent eight months on the bestseller list. Forty years on, the audience for such a book has dwindled, I would say, by 80 or 90 per cent. The readers are no longer there – their patience, their goodwill, their autodidactic enthusiasm are no longer there. For self-interested reasons I like to think this sub-genre retains a viable pulse; but broadly speaking the baggy monster is dead.
In brutal summary, then, the ‘B’ novel died, the deductive novel died, and the sprawl novel, the baggy monster, died. They are fondly remembered, at least by novelists, who by definition revere all diversity.
Still, tucked away among these literary obituaries we glimpse the proud announcement of a birth. Actually the new arrival has been with us for some time – since around the turn of the century – and the child has steadily thrived. I mean the aerodynamic, the streamlined, the accelerated novel. More in a moment.
* * *
—————
You know, it was only when I was revising the two chapters devoted to her (‘The Business’ and also ‘The Night of Shame’, which is forthcoming) – only then did I realise how ‘novelistic’ Phoebe was: a being of strong lines. If she ever woke up and found herself in a roman-fleuve, say, or a comedy of manners, she would effortlessly find her place and hold her own. Because in her person she contained themes and patterns, and she had the necessary energy, the binding energy, and the vehemence (and the mystery – the ever-present question mark). These were all qualities she was destined to lose, over the course of a single season in 1980…
As a character she did what so few of us do: she cohered. Consider the following item in her CV (dramatic enough but comprehensively dwarfed, at the time, by three far more startling disclosures). It concerned itself with the apparently blameless sphere of poetry; and you need that wilfulness, that self-exaggeration – if you’re going to combine poetry and prison.
Aged fifteen, a class-topping pupil at Spelthorne High School for Girls (It was good, too, she often stressed. A proper grammar), Phoebe had an affair with her English master – her
poetry master (his name, misleadingly, was Timmy). And before that got going she became a terrific memoriser of verse. I did it to please him, naturally. But I could do it. And I liked doing it.
Their half-year affair included orgies of quoting and reciting. And he fancied himself as a poet, too. He wrote me love poems, Martin, that were quite frankly obscene…Timmy was thirty-six and had a wife and two toddler daughters. One spring Sunday he and Phoebe were spotted – by the deputy principal – as they frolicked together on Richmond Common. Timmy had a blind panic. And he ended it.
Now Phoebe, in shirt and tie and bobby socks, though shattered, completely choked and gutted, did manage to accept this loss – out of love for her Timmy. Ah, but then the following term he began to move in on one of my classmates! Not at all pretty and an utter hick. Well of course I went straight to the headmistress. I made a detailed statement and the next day I handed over all the rhymed filth he’d sent me. Timmy was first sacked (and instantly banned from the family home), then arrested. He got thirteen years. Serve him bloody well right. Moving in on another one like that. I ask you. I mean the nerve…
All this happened in 1957. Category A – for his own protection. Yeah, they banged him up with all the other nonces, she said, adding (with some licence), and they only let him out the other day. Serve him bloody well right. Phoebe then, as an addendum, punished the yokel classmate. How? Oh, nothing much. I just made her have a crush on me. And then I dropped her cold. In public, mind – in the yard during break.
1957. In Swansea, South Wales, clad in short trousers, I celebrated my eighth birthday. And fifteen-year-old Phoebe Phelps, school-uniformed in the Home Counties, banged up Timmy, her pastor of poetry…
Vengeance was hers – vengeance was always hers. Phoebe prosecuted her feuds to the point, perhaps, where the average Corsican cut-throat would throw up his hands, roll his eyes, and call it quits. Or so I came to believe when she took her revenge on me: September 12, 2001. And to be fair, Phoebe had another reason for blowing the whistle on Tim – and a very terrifying reason…
