by Amis, Martin
As for poetry, Phoebe renounced it: not so much as a single word, a single iamb or trochee, for two decades – till she opened The Whitsun Weddings in my bedroom.
‘You see how it’d go. If I let you have your way. It’d be like that poem. Your desire would be sent out of sight. Yes, Martin. Somewhere becoming rain.’
* * *
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The accelerated novel is a literary response to the accelerated world.
September 11 verified what many had already sensed: the world was speeding up, history was accelerating, time was flying faster and faster. An accelerated world: no human being in history had experienced even a murmur of this feeling until, say, 1914 – and in 1614 (to paraphrase something of Saul’s) it was an idea that would be as likely to occur to you as it would to the dog sleeping at your feet. The other accelerant is of course technology.*3
Serious fiction could respond to the accelerated world; but serious poetry couldn’t. Naturally it couldn’t. A poem, a non-narrative poem, a lyric poem – the first thing it does is stop the clock. It stops the clock while whispering, Let us go then, you and I, let us go and examine an epiphany, a pregnant moment, and afterwards we’ll have a think about that epiphany, and we’ll…But the speeded-up world doesn’t have time for stopped clocks.
Meanwhile the novelists subliminally realised that in their pages the arrow of development, purpose, furtherance, had to be sharpened. And they sharpened it. This wasn’t and isn’t a fad or a fashion (far less a bandwagon). Novelists aren’t mere observers of the speeded-up world; they inhabit it and feel its rhythms and breathe its air. So they adapted; they evolved.
The world won’t be slowing down, either, and so poetry will give ground (as the literary novel may sooner or later do), becoming a minority-interest field – more shadowy and more secluded…We can if we like fondly imagine Phoebe, in a cheap hotel, on a certain half-deserted street, in a sawdust restaurant with oyster shells: Phoebe reviewing the discomfiture of poetry – serve it right – and giving a contented smack of the lips before showing the ferocious finish of her teeth.
* * *
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What doomed them, the unreliable narrator, the stream of consciousness, and all the other dead strains? What was the morbidity they shared?
A rational form, a secular form, and a moral form, the novel is in addition a social form. That’s why social realism, always the dominant genre, is now the unquestioned hegemon. A social form – you might even say a sociable form. And the fatal character flaw of experimentalists? They’re introverts, they keep themselves to themselves, they prefer their own company. They’re antisocial, in a word.
I don’t want to sound too alchemical here – but did you know that ‘guest’ and ‘host’ have the same root? Though ‘reader’ and ‘writer’ are less tangibly interconnected, the affinity is there and it is both strong and strange. Now you’re a naturally sensitive reader, and a naturally sensitive guest…So while you’re away I want you to imagine novelists as hosts, as people who answer the door and let you in.
And I want you to think about the desperate importance of the opening pages. That’s your greeting to the reader, that’s your generous welcome to the reader. And remember the warning a wise friend put to Christopher Hitchens in 2003. It was during a talk they had about the failing occupation of Iraq. He said,
You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.
*1 And leaves behind it, so far as I can ascertain, only one long-term survivor (apart from Ulysses): Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. This is a language novel, written in a futurised farrago of Romani, rhyming slang, and Russian; and it can still be read with steady engagement and admiration. It is, in addition, appropriately short…The most iconic ‘B’ novel by far is Finnegans Wake (1939). Nabokov hailed Ulysses as the novel of the century, but called the Wake ‘a tragic failure’, ‘dull and formless’ – ‘a snore in the next room’ (that last phrase captures not only its tedium but also its extraordinary indifference to any likely concern of the reader’s). Finnegans Wake, which famously took seventeen years to write, resembles a cryptic crossword clue that goes on for more than 600 pages. And the pithiest thing ever said about it, satisfyingly, appeared in a cryptic crossword clue: ‘Something wrong with Finnegan’s Wake? Perhaps too complicated (10)’. The solution is an anagram (signalled by ‘complicated’) of ‘perhaps too’: apostrophe. This clue involves general knowledge (which slightly diminishes it) but remains almost as perfect as ‘Meaningful power of attorney (11)’, whose solution is significant: sign-if-i-cant.
*2 I fixed this in the paperback edition, where I spelt it out (almost in italic capitals) on page 3. And I did so rather resentfully – and rather furtively, I admit. Venus’s ethnicity was structurally cruciaI. I’d done wrong (how could I be so out of touch?), and now I was ham-handedly covering my tracks.
*3 ‘Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips…Today, that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas; and it would cost four cents…’ Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late (2016).
Chapter 3
Jerusalem
Seeing is believing
Without Israel, Saul Bellow said to me (in Israel), Jewish manhood would’ve been finished. I could get his drift, but it took me a while to get his meaning.
He said it in Jerusalem – Jerusalem, ‘the terrestrial gateway to the divine world’ (Sari Nusseibeh), ‘the shortest path between heaven and earth’ (Nizar Qabbani)…
Jerusalem would come later. First, though, Saul and I (and a couple of hundred others) had to do our duty in humble Haifa, a merely temporal city ninety-five miles to the north-north-west. It was the spring of 1987. I was nearly thirty-eight, and Saul was nearly seventy-two; I would be there with my first wife, and Saul would be there with his fifth.
But wait. Were she and Saul actually married? Was she his wife or was she his fiancée, his cohabitee, his ‘friend’? And who was she, anyway? As the journey to Jerusalem took shape, I had meetings in London with an Israeli novelist and an Israeli academic, and none of us knew anything about her. Just two semi-verified facts emerged: her name was Rosamund and she was younger than he was. So she was younger than seventy-one…Of course I wished them well with all my heart, but at that stage I was still innocent of curiosity about Saul’s private life (it was his private life. It happened somewhere else).*1 What attracted me was his prose – to be exact, the weight of his words on the page)…And you could argue that Bellow’s fiction was in any case abrim with his private life; and you’d be right. He wrote about other things, but he wrote short stories, novellas, short novels, novels, and long novels about people he knew and things that had actually happened.
* * *
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England came into being, as a unified polity, in 937 CE, whereas Israel was barely a year older than I was (and eight months younger than Pakistan).
‘Well I’m basically on their side,’ he said to Julia as they were packing their bags. ‘Why? Because they’re surrounded by countries that want them dead.’
‘Then why’d they go there? Couldn’t they see? And it’s not just the surrounding countries, is it. What about the country they’re actually in? Palestine. Why there?’
‘Religion. It was religion, Julia, that led them to the Promised Land.’
She made a nauseated face. ‘Promised by who.’
Of course he had other reasons for sympathising with Israel, namely lifelong predispositions, and Rachel – his first love…Love, in Martin’s experience, greeted you head-on and face to face, and so it had been with Julia; but now, after three years of marriage, he felt something misaligned, aslant, athwart…He said,
‘In my opinion you’re too English about
Israel. Arabophile and easily annoyed. You should be more American about it.’
‘Like an evangelical. Thinking we need it for a proper Judgment Day.’
‘…Oh come on, Julia. You’ll love it once you’re there. I did.’
Twelve months earlier, along with four other British writers (Marina Warner, Hermione Lee, Melvyn Bragg, and Julian Barnes), I was a guest of the Friends of Israel Educational Trust. And so we visited the Knesset, lunched overlooking the Lake of Galilee, had audiences with rabbis and diplomats, played ping-pong in a kibbutz on ‘the Golan’, floundered about in the Dead Sea, and – like novitiates in the Israel Defense Forces – circled Herodion and climbed Masada.
The only Arab I knowingly said hello to was a showpiece Bedouin in whose tent we drank tea and whose camel we all in turn clambered up on. Marina, certainly, and perhaps Hermione had semi-clandestine meetings with Palestinian activists, and the Palestinian ‘question’ was on everyone’s lips (there is no small talk in Israel); but back then I was still politically incurious, and didn’t really see the Palestinians.*2
Was there a special difficulty in seeing the Palestinians?
This question isn’t faux naïf and it isn’t rhetorical; it is non-figurative and it expects or at least hopes for an answer.
An answer to an enquiry about the condition of Israeli eyesight.
* * *
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I had this idea that people were like countries and countries were like people.
Do you remember the literary convention whereby countries were feminised? ‘England’s might depended on her navy’, and so on. That convention – always a quavering false gallantry – was silently abandoned during the first half of the twentieth century. Historians and politicians started calling countries it.
…If Israel were a person, what kind of person would Israel be? Well, male, anyway – male, for a start.
‘She’ was never any good; ‘it’ is a tenable compromise; really, though, it should have been ‘he’, all along. Without exception, countries are men. That’s the trouble.
Getting to the other planet
‘And is your father still a Communist?’
‘No. He stopped about thirty years ago.’
‘Why did he stop?’
‘Hungary, 1957. And general disillusionment.’
‘…Was his father a Communist?’
El Al, even then, long before the days of shoe bombs and toothpaste bombs and Y-front bombs, distinguished itself from other carriers. Instead of showing up at the airport, a trifle flustered perhaps, forty-five minutes before take-off, you had to be there three hours early. What came next was a solemnly detailed interrogation. James Fenton, in his formidable poem ‘Jerusalem’ (1988), does this with it:
Who packed your bag?
I packed my bag.
Where was your uncle’s mother’s sister born?
Have you ever met an Arab?
By the time my cross-examination was over (it was polite and not without a certain warmth, but softly intense and hypnotically eye to eye), I wondered whether anybody in my entire life had ever been quite so interested in me.*3
Approved for transfer by El Al, you feel shriven and cleansed. And also surprisingly well-qualified in rectitude and high seriousness (eligible, say, for a key role in the priming of Israel’s nuclear warheads)…Julia and I, two travellers of stainless reputation, took our seats. Her in-flight reading would be Daniel Deronda. Mine would be To Jerusalem and Back (Bellow, 1976). Some reviewers of Saul’s memoir/travelogue complained that the author hadn’t ‘seen’ any Palestinians (‘seen’ in the journalistic sense, and not in the sense I am trying to define). There were other books on Israel in my luggage. I was beginning my trek along the foothills of Mount Zion – or Mount Improbable.
The Amises had been together for six years, three of them as husband and wife. And there was a pair of Millennials back in Ladbroke Grove, W11: Nat (two and a half) and Gus (one). But now, like a tide, the marriage was beginning to turn.
Dangling men
The two-hour quiz, the five-hour flight, the late arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport, the three-hour drive, the business hotel, the extraction of a tomato and an apple from the closed kitchens, the wholly wakeful night under the panting AC, the unsolicited wake-up call telling me that, even now, the conference minibus was revving in the forecourt. Dinnerless, sleepless, and breakfastless, I climbed aboard and was ferried with others to the University of Haifa…The campus, perched on Mount Carmel, seemed to consist of mammoth bomb shelters and pillboxes and watchtowers, reminding some visitors of the illegal Israeli settlements (whose ‘new concrete buildings have a grim Maginot Line look about them’*4). After a smoke in the sun I went inside and wandered along the strip-lit corridors, and finally succeeded in dozing my way through two or three fifty-minute dissertations.
In the common room I at once linked up with the novelist Jonathan Wilson (a Jewish Londoner whose academic base was now in Boston). His expression as he surveyed the crowd was almost succulently ironic, brimming with guarded, hoarded amusement. The mayors and ministers, the duo of famous Israeli novelists, the many escorts and facilitators, plus local and national journalists and a radio team and perhaps a TV team, and there through the windows the sky-god blue of the Levant; but Jonathan was gripped in particular by the huddled delegates and dons, crouched over their coffees and stolidly dealing out inch-thick typescripts to one another…In a tone that presupposed the answer No, I said,
‘Any sign of Saul?’
‘Yes. In fact he looked in on the opening ceremony. With his girlfriend. She’s uh, younger than he is.’
I nodded. ‘I assumed she’d be younger than he is.’
‘She’s appreciably younger than he is.’ Jonathan paused. ‘Oh, look at the crazy professors…You know, Bellow calls himself a comic novelist. And this isn’t the setting for a comic novelist, is it. They’re all stucturalists and semiologists and neo-Marxists. And dogged careerists. And they haven’t forced a smile in years.’
Apparently Saul the day before had writhed his way through a paper called something like ‘The Encaged Cash Register: Tensions Between Existentialism and Materialism in Dangling Man’. Now I already knew that this was the kind of literary pedagogy, or one of the kinds of literary pedagogy, that Saul despised with every neutrino of his being. Jonathan continued,
‘Oh, he was suffering. Somebody heard him whisper, If I have to listen to another word of this, I think I’ll actually die.’
‘Mm. The last thing he ever wants to be told is what Ahab’s harpoon symbolises.’
‘Well, here he’ll be told what Herzog’s hat symbolises…Did you hear about Oz?’
I had been to Israel before so I knew the process (as inexorable as having your passport stamped): the immediate baptism in a riptide of urgencies…That day the multinational Bellow buffs, the Israeli scholars, and all the others were still recuperating from Amos Oz’s introductory address, entitled ‘Mr Sammler and Hannah Arendt’s Notion of Banality’.*5 Israel’s most celebrated novelist had opened up three controversies, two of them familiar and digestible enough, the other disconcertingly arcane.
‘He was in a weird mood, all driven and defiant,’ said Jonathan. ‘To begin with, he asked, he demanded to know – first in Hebrew, then in English – why the conference wasn’t bilingual. He said English-only, in an Israeli university, was a disgrace.’ And Oz somehow went on from there to suggest that Jewish ‘passivity’, in the face of Auschwitz, had something to do with the showers; subconsciously the Jews themselves craved ablution, Oz argued, to wash away the calumnies of millennia. ‘I know – very odd. And all this was said scathingly.’
‘And metaphorically.’
‘Hard to tell. He’s an impressive man and it was all quite compelling. Anyway, the showers weren’t banal either, according
to Oz. They were the manifestation of a devilish insight.’
‘Will this stir things up?’
‘For a while. What writers say here really matters. Writers have power.’
We frowned at each other. Only English writers, perhaps, would find this notion quite so bizarre. I said,
‘Maybe it goes to their heads. It’d go to mine.’
‘In Israel writers aren’t just entertainers. They’re prophets. This isn’t the diaspora. This is the pointed end.’
…I moved around the common room looking for the door to the open air and the minibus. By now the tabletalk had moved on from Amos Oz – to Bellow’s ‘muse’ (as she herself, in the papers, spiritedly called herself); the speculations were indulgent and mildly and enviously salacious; they found it reassuring that Saul was cleaving to type, that of the sensual intellectual. Somebody claimed that the muse was Bellow’s junior by half a century.
Sheen
Julia and I mingled and explored, and at some point Jonathan drove us to Tiberias, where we sat on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and ate St Peter’s fish…
But I still had to complete my essay or lecture, and I had a raw throat and a dry cough. So Julia sat in the garden with George Eliot, and I sat in our room and wrote and smoked and read while, in my peripheral vision, an attaché case quietly gleamed on the glass table; it was complimentary (issued to all delegates); it was made of soft matting and Naugahyde; and it seemed to embody the surface of Israel and its pseudo-normality – the business-class interiors of the modern state, the market state, the business state. And here we were in this business hotel, a business hotel like any other, in a port city like any other on the northerly littoral of the Mediterranean. Haifa seemed innocent, in 1987, to my innocent eye.*6
