Visiting Mrs Nabokov

by Amis, Martin

  Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions

  Martin Amis

  INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Warily looking back through these pieces, I glimpse a series of altered or vanished worlds, including those of my younger and much younger selves. Things change. Graham Greene is dead. Véra Nabokov is dead. Salman Rushdie is still alive, and still in hiding: if writing fiction is, among other things, an act of spiritual freedom, then Rushdie is a man who has been imprisoned for the crime of being free. Graham Taylor, one-time manager of Watford Football Club, is now manager of England: for the time being. Monica Seles, whose professional debut I witnessed (she was fourteen), has since won eight Slams; as I write, she is in hospital, recovering from a knife attack at a tournament in Hamburg (her East German assailant was a Steffi Graf fan, and his intention was to pave the way for Steffi's return to the number-one spot). Nuclear deterrence is dead. Or at least Mutually Assured Destruction is dead: this extraordinary edifice — at once massive and notional, and, it appeared, impregnably self-sufficient -was unseamed by three words of diplomacy, from Mikhail Gorbachev (the three words were: This isn't serious.' As a planetary arrangement, four tons of TNT per human being wasn't only uncomic. It wasn't serious). The nuclear age has survived its Deterrence period and is entering a new phase, one which we can confidently - though not safely — call Proliferation. John Braine is dead: as a writer, his dream was to make a great deal of money; but he died in penury. George Bush and Dan Quayle are dead, politically. The star interview is dead, as a form. Sent to New York to interview Madonna, I felt no significant disruption in my plans when Madonna refused to se me. The great postmodern celebrities are a part of their publicity machines, and that is all you are ever going to get to write about: their publicity machines. You review the publicity machine. Even the humble literary interview is dying, or growing old: 'It was with dread/detachment/high hopes that I approached X's townhouse/office/potting shed. The door opened. He is fatter/smaller/taller/balder than I expected. Pityingly/perfunctorily/politely he offered me instant coffee/a cigarette/dinner. Everyone told me how modest/craven/suave/vain/charming I would find him, so I was naturally unsurprised/taken aback by his obvious charm/vanity, etc., etc.' Darts is dead. Its decline followed an opposite course to that of nuclear deterrence. It tried to sanitise or detoxify itself (no alcohol, no tobacco, no obesity); but then it transpired that the prospect of messy self-destruction was the only thing anyone liked about it. Isaac Asimov is dead. Topless sunbathing is no longer remarkable. Roman Polanski no longer makes interesting films. V.S. Pritchett isn't ninety any more: he will soon be ninety-three. I have now been doing this sort of thing for more than twenty years. I don't get around as much as I used to.

  Not long ago I saw a book of this kind described by a reviewer as 'a garage sale': the writer was selling off his literary junk, in informal surroundings. Certainly it is considered a nice gesture if, in introducing such a book, the writer abases himself for having assembled it. Actually the authorial motive - or vice or weakness — we are examining here is, I think, dully clerical: an attempt at order and completion. John Updike, an obvious hero of the genre, took this tendency too far, perhaps, when in Picked-Up Pieces he reprinted a sixty-word citation to Thornton Wilder, together with a fifty-word footnote doggedly justifying its inclusion. All I can safely promise the reader is that, though much has been left in, much has been left out.

  After university I worked in an art gallery (for three months), then in advertising (for three weeks), then at the Times Literary Supplement (for three years), and then (for four more) at the New Statesman. In 1980 I quit going to an office and became a full-time writer. The main characteristic of this way of life, it seemed to me, was that nothing ever happened to you. Being a novelist, in those days, was not in itself a distraction, as it can be now. Now, if you're not careful, you can spend half your life being interviewed or photographed or answering questions posed by the press, on the telephone, about Fergie or Maastricht or your favourite colour. Nothing ever happened to you — except journalism: the kind of journalism that got you out of the house. Getting out of the house is the only thing that unites the pieces in the present book — an unrigorous arrangement, which I didn't quite stick to anyway. Not getting out of the house will be the controlling theme of a subsequent volume, one devoted to the lowest and noblest literary form: the book review. Novels, of course, are all about not getting out of the house.

  And so, equipped with some kind of assignment, you get out of the house! This might mean a fifteen-hour flight or a ten-minute drive to the other side of Regents Park. Things can go well or they can go badly. When things go badly, you are simply an embarrassment to your destination. You return hours or weeks later with half a page of notes and the prospect of much cloistered contrivance. When things go well, the necessary elements come together with little or no encouragement. Writing journalism never feels like

  writing in the proper sense. It is essentially collaborative:

  both your subject and your audience are hopelessly specific.

  But the excursion itself (the solitude, the preoccupation, the solving of successive difficulties) — that sometimes feels like writing.

  I am grateful to all the journalists who commissioned, retrieved, subbed, improved, bowdlerised or fact-checked these pieces, but I am especially grateful to the late Terence Kilmartin, of the Observer. I think of him as my first and last editor. He started me off and made it easy for me to keep going. Now he too is dead, and I miss his guidance and his friendship; but I will never finish a piece without mentally sending it past his desk.

  Special thanks are also due to George Brennan, Emily Read, Pascal Cariss and Chaim Tannenbaum.

  GRAHAM GREENE

  'All my friends . . . are dead. One finds that one's acquaintances die at the rate of nineteen or twenty a year. That would include only about four that one has known well. I keep a rather morbid list. Yes, with a cross against the ones I knew really well.'

  'How do you feel when another one goes? Does it leave the life that remains feeling thinner?'

  'I think it does a bit. Evelyn - I was shocked by his death. One is shocked when a bit of one's life disappears. I felt that with Omar Torríjos [the Panamanian leader]. I think that's why, in the case of Torríjos, I embarked on what I hoped would be a memoir but turned into a rather unsatisfactory blend of things.[Getting to Know the General, The Bodley Head, 1984] I felt that a whole segment of my life had been cut out.'

  'That list of yours. It must be quite a long list by now.'

  'Oh yes.'

  It is, I believe, fairly common to feel a tremor of intimate recognition on your first glimpse of Graham Greene. Like most literate residents of the planet, you have known this presence (cool, fugitive, slightly sinister) all your reading life - and now here he is. He stands at the entrance to his Paris apartment, erect and inquisitive. The pale, headmasterly face is impassively well-preserved and, in its outlines, seems no different from the photographs on the three-shilling Penguins of the Fifties: long upper lip, frowning forehead, the moistly clouded stare. His clothes, too, are the expected mixture of greens and browns, the lank tie heavily knotted (with the thin end out-dangling the thick). The only obvious infirmity he suffers is an arthritic little finger; his handshake is gently, and appropriately, masonic.

  'Do you have any particular feelings about turning eighty?'

  'No, except annoyance at all this fuss and halloo. That business in The Times .. . One thing I did enjoy was going up to Bury St Edmunds to the Greene King Brewery and doing a mash — the first stage of brewing. By October there will be 100,000 bottles with a special label with my signature on it. It's their strongest beer. They're very good, Greene King. Now
that I liked . .. Otherwise, well, I get tired more easily, I begin to forget names. I'm in rather better health than I was five years ago, when I had a cancer and an operation. I'm on a plateau. I'm not as manic and I'm not as depressive.'

  The flat is spacious but not airy. Through the closed second-floor windows come the usual sounds (triumphant and hysterical) of mobilettes on the Boulevard Malesherbes. The English Sunday newspapers are fanned on the table, along with a copy of the Spectator, open at the correspondence page. Greene's accent is now thoroughly European, and the rs are candidly Gallic; when he says, 'Belief is rational and faith is irrational', the stressed words sound exactly the same. He has the demeanour and habitat of a retired civil servant or (just possibly) an exiled spy — a quiet Englishman, a confidential agent, a third man.

  Veteran interviewees have a repertoire, and to begin with Greene relied fairly heavily on his anecdotal store. The time he joined the Communist Party with Claud Cockburn 'in hopes of getting a free trip to Moscow', the time he requested electric-shock treatment from a psychiatrist friend, the time he was deported from Puerto Rico by the American authorities, his experiments with benzedrine while writing The Confidential Agent (in the mornings) and The Power and the Glory (in the afternoons) before the war. Sensing my familiarity with these stories (I had just read the collected essays and the two volumes of autobiography), Greene said:

  'As you see, I've got nothing new to say. One's said it all in one's work. It was embarrassing at the National Film Theatre the other day. I'd just received Quentin Falk's book about my experiences with film and films, and I had time to read it beforehand. Luckily it had been published only the day before. Because every word that I uttered in response to questions at the NFT had been taken from this book. I'd got absolutely nothing further to contribute.'

  'You certainly get about a good deal.'

  'I haven't much this year,' said Greene, who has visited Switzerland, England, Italy, Spain, Antibes and now Paris, all in the last couple of months. 'I've resisted the temptation of Panama, at least. I love long plane journeys, especially if I'm being paid for and I'm travelling first class. I used to go to Panama via Amsterdam to avoid going to the United States — a fifteen-hour journey, which I loved. I drank a lot of Bols gin, and I read. And there were no telephones and no letters. It's like being in a hospital. I'm very happy in a hospital. Nobody can really get at you.'

  The telephone rang. 'Another professor,' sighed Greene.

  'You say you avoid going to the United States . . .'

  'Well, I don't like the United States. And I don't like New York. I don't like the electricity — I don't like getting an electric shock whenever I touch a door handle. I don't like the dirt, and on the whole — with many exceptions - I don't like Americans. They strike me rather as the English abroad strike me: noisy, and incredibly ignorant of the world. I had a woman who came to see me from Houston the other day, and she was the most incredibly stupid woman I've ever known, And she was a graduate. We talked about the Central-American situation. She'd never heard of it. She'd never heard of any troubles down there. Later she wrote to me saying that she'd talked to her colleagues about what I'd said and she found, to her astonishment, that a lot of them agreed with me.

  'Reagan is a menace. I'm very disappointed by the death of Andropov. I had great hopes of him. I preached for some years that any reform in Russia could only come - not from the old men or the army - but from the KGB. A Polish film-director told me that the KGB let the army go to Afghanistan in order to get their feet in the mud ... Despite the obvious noises Reagan has been making he's as extreme as anyone in the Kremlin. I'm amused and interested by the fact that he's meeting Gromyko, but I have a feeling that Gromyko will not be helping the re-election. He will have a clever move to damage it. I don't think he will allow Reagan to pass himself off as a peacemaker.

  'I felt the shadow darken when Reagan came to power. But perhaps we're all getting used to the idea. Perhaps the next generation will live under this shadow even more equably than your own. I've got a secret dream that Colonel Gadaffi will get hold of a couple of nuclear bombs and drop them somewhere. America and Russia will come together to extinguish the danger, and might never entirely separate.'

  At one o'clock we tiptoed through the merde de chien and lunched in moderate bourgeois splendour at a Right Bank brasserie. 'We're stinging the Observer for this, are we? Good.' The lordly waiters seated Monsieur Greene with some reverence and listened shrewdly to his request for a 'martini-dry. Sec! Très, très sec.' He added, 'I never do what the doctors tell me. I think the body knows better than the doctor. I never eat vegetables. Castro was shocked. He said — what regime do you have? His was very strict, you see. I said, I don't have one. I eat and drink what I like.'

  'So if the body says — have a drink ...'

  'Then I drink.'

  *

  Greene was drinking — moderately but with relish — the following night. By a fairly extraordinary coincidence, he has befriended my best friend in Paris, a youngish (English) artist who went down to Antibes several years ago to paint Greene for the National Portrait Gallery. So a picnic dinner was arranged at the private wine-cellar of another common friend. Old friends die but new ones are born - and it is clear that Greene has something like a genius for friendship. Friendship is complicated too, however, and nothing about Graham Greene is uncomplicated. There are contrary impressions to be dealt with.

  He is an ideologue. You sense that his beliefs are embedded in past struggles and ascendancies. (In Catholic Central America, with its hot and cold wars, the old polarities are still vivid.) His life and work have been grounded on faith, and on its opposites and counterparts: loyalty and betrayal, stoicism and doubt. He is fond of quoting Browning: 'Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things./The honest thief, the tender murderer,/The superstitious atheist . . .'; and he has always been drawn to moral bandit-lands. 'Human beings are more important to believers than they are to atheists,' he has said. But they are less important too, in a sense; and we remember Bendrix's remark in The End of the Affair, that even with love we get 'to the end of other people', and must look for something else.

  'There is a certain sympathy,' he told me, 'which the present Pope doesn't seem to recognise, between the believing communist and the believing Catholic ... I don't feel as though I've changed much since I joined the CP at the age of twenty-seven. Curiously enough there's an Indian woman who's writing a book claiming that I'm the only one of the Thirties group whose beliefs remained unchanged. Orwell changed, and Auden changed. Isherwood changed. I retain this sympathy for the dream of communism anyway, though I agree that the record is very discouraging. We're all unbelievers within our own faiths.'

  I taxed him with his oft-misquoted remark that he would rather end his days in Russia than in America.

  'What I meant was that I would end my days sooner in Russia because there they pay writers the compliment of regarding them as a danger.'

  'But if it came to it?'

  'All right. Yes. I would rather end my days in the Gulag than in — than in California.'

  'That's a very typical remark, if you don't mind me saying so.'

  But he didn't seem to mind at all.

  Observer, 1984

  Postscript: Geopolitical change has made Greene's opinions and preoccupations sound rather more antique than they sounded in 1984; but I suspect that his legend will increasingly tend towards the nostalgic, the romantic, the regressive. It is, as Communists used to say, no accident that his novels work most powerfully on the adolescent. For my generation Graham Greene was inevitably the first serious writer you came across: he seemed exemplarily adult and exemplarily modern. Now he seems neither. Now he seems adolescent, though in the richest and (again) the most romantic sense. It is a commonplace to say that his novels, for all their geographical variety, did not 'develop'. Greeneland stays the same. What happened was that he got older as he wrote about it. His manner changes (the surprising poetry of
the early novels, the gaunt and sober maturity of the Forties and early Fifties, the more playful and forgiving later work), but the oppositions, the relationships, the moral trade-offs are all recognisably constant. I do not find this world 'over-schematic' so much as weirdly suspenseless. The faithbreaker must die. The policeman's pistol will tend to be phallic. The adulterer will never be redeemed . . . Greene's influence, none the less, will remain deep and formative. We happened to read him before we read anybody else. He was an awakener.

  Two additional memories survive this visit. When we exchanged the man-made earth-colours of Greene's apartment (he did look like a headmaster, and his sitting-room looked like a headmaster's study) for the bright lights and tuxed waiters of the prosperous Right Bank brasserie, there was a third person present: Greene's woman friend, whom I had agreed not to mention (and shall not name here, even though her identity is well enough known). As we were being seated by the maître d'hôtel, or some comparably exalted personage, the lunchers fell silent; then came a surge of agitated murmurs. This had nothing to do with Graham Greene. It had to do with the removal of his friend's overcoat, revealing: a woman of a certain age but still fiercely gamine, in purple angora sweater and skintight shiny black trousers. Greene enjoyed this frisson, this minor épatement, as clearly as he enjoyed his pre-lunch Martini — and his friend's conversation: we had several acquaintances in common, and she proved to be a passionate and talented gossip.

  When I returned from the Boulevard Malesherbes to my hotel in the Latin Quarter I entered a scene from one of Graham Greene's darker entertainments. In the lobby people were wielding mops and buckets with an air of resigned and weary lamentation. A member of the staff had just been decapitated in the lift-shaft.

  EMERGENCY LANDING