by Amis, Martin
The response to language is, as always, an ingredient of something larger. Mrs Thatcher and Mr Tebbit, when they mull over their achievements, can now congratulate themselves on the final destruction of the work ethic which they claim to admire and embody. One would expect, in the closeted thoughts of young people on the brink of adulthood, a good deal of misgiving about the adult dance of work, money, preferment, acquisition. A twinge of alienation in this area seems to me a sign of health. When you are twenty years old, society has a conspiratorial look, as if planned and put together without fair consultation; it feels indifferent, settled, impervious, Then, usually, the money-value takes over and the young person gets on with the job. Judging these stories, and judging by them, I would guess that this process is being quietly yet radically undermined.
Not surprisingly, there were dozens of stories about dossers, tramps, the dole, living on at home (with petulant or depressive parents), stories about looking for jobs and not finding them (there aren't any, seems to be the consensus). Not surprisingly, again, there were many ingenuous attempts to celebrate some notion of 'the good life', usually period pieces, with the emphasis on fine clothes, drawing-rooms, sumptuous meals. (One thinks of Brideshead Revisited, written in wartime and later denounced by Waugh when he re-read the book 'on a full stomach'). But considered en masse the stories give a more pervasive presentiment of disaffection, of wear and tear in the social contract. The idea of work, getting on, becoming adult looks not only distant and improbable; it also looks inane, hostile and accusatory.
There is another anxiety, more insidious and inclusive, and palpable even when it remains unspoken. This is the nuclear anxiety — the unclear anxiety — and it was perhaps expressed least eloquently in the stories that directly addressed it: Oval Office melodramas, superpower countdowns, sagas of life in the post-cataclysmic tundra, and so on. What stays with the reader is not a general uncertainty about future survival so much as a contingency about the present, about time itself. The real singularity or uniqueness of the post-Einsteinian age is the sudden vulnerability of the past as well as the future. Intimations of meaninglessness are consequently that much harder to ignore.
If you ask people what they feel about the Bomb they will often say that they never think about it. I believe them, but there is a sense in which the answer fails to satisfy the question. If you don't think about it, what do you do about it? The fact that the planet has a cocked gun in its mouth will inevitably be absorbed in some way - psychologically, physiologically. When we do think about the end of the world, we tell ourselves that at least it hasn't happened yet, that it is not yet a reality. But the threat is a reality; and people react to threats. Clearly there is plenty of reason to start running the damage checks, as these stories haunt-ingly demonstrate. Second-generation post-nuclear, they are habituated to fear; and the present they evoke and describe looks thin, isolated, mysteriously sapped of its essences.
Not that this foreboding was an enemy of good - and vigorous - writing. From the workmanlike to the highly competent, from the merely amiable to the charming, from the glib to the indisputably talented - nearly all the contestants had an experience to transmit and some notion of how it might be turned into art. Obvious literary influences were few, but there were glimpses of an intelligent and humorous post-modernism, a playful awareness of form. Every genre was represented, with the lone exception of the Western. If the stories were rather less literary than some notional bygone equivalent, then this says something apposite about the observed life. It doesn't look very literary out there, not just now.
For me the biggest surprise was how seldom I was bored by these fragments, how little I disliked the work, and how fixedly I followed (practically) every story to the end. Sometimes, of course, one read on out of sheer disbelief at the concerted talentlessness nestling on one's lap. And often, certainly, it was human interest, not literary relish, that compelled one. I was reminded how astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist's couch or even the lovers' bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.
Observer, 1985
PHILIP LARKIN 1922-1985
Philip Larkin was not an inescapable presence in America, as he was in England; and to some extent you can see America's point. His Englishness was so desolate and inhospitable that even the English were scandalised by it. Certainly, you won't find his work on the Personal Growth or Self-Improvement shelves in your local bookstore. 'Get out as early as you can,' as he once put it. 'And don't have any kids yourself.'
All his values and attitudes were utterly, even fanatically 'negative'. He really was 'anti-life' — a condition that many are accused of but few achieve. To put it at its harshest, you could say that there is in his ethos a vein of spiritual poverty, almost of spiritual squalor. Along with John Betjeman, he was England's best-loved postwar poet; but he didn't love postwar England, or anything else. He didn't love - end of story — because love seemed derisory when set against death. The past is past and the future neuter'; 'Life is first boredom, then fear' . . . That these elements should have produced a corpus full of truth, beauty, instruction, delight - and much wincing humour — is one of the many great retrievals wrought by irony. Everything about Larkin rests on irony, that English speciality and vice.
Anti-intellectual, incurious and reactionary ('Oh, I adore Mrs Thatcher'), Larkin was himself an anti-poet. He never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. 'I've never been to America, nor to anywhere else, for that matter.' Asked by an interviewer whether he would like to visit, say, China, he replied, 'I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.' He never read his poems in public, never lectured on poetry, and 'never taught anyone how to write it'. He lived in Hull, which is like living in Akron, Ohio, with the further advantage that it is more or less impossible to get to. His meanness was legendary, and closely connected to the solitude he built around himself. It is said that he never owned more than one kitchen chair, to make sure that no one could stop by for lunch — or, worse, come to stay. Christmas shopping was, for him, 'that annual conversion of one's indifference to others into active hatred'. Sometimes, though, he weakened:
Finding Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning in a bookshop one Christmas some years ago, I was sufficiently impressed by it to buy a number of copies for random distribution among friends. The surprise this caused them was partly, no doubt, due to the reaction that before the war led us to amend the celebrated cigarette advertisement 'If So-and-So, usually a well-known theatrical personality, offered you a cigarette it would be a Kensitas' by substituting for the brand name the words 'bloody miracle'.
His feelings about money were complicated and pleas-ureless. He pronounced the word bills as if it were a violent obscenity. (He brooded deeply about his bills.) He always had enough money and, anyway, there was nothing he wanted to spend it on.
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
'Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and SÇX, You could get them still by writing a few cheques'. ..
... I listen to money singing. It's like looking down From long french windows at a provincial town, The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
Money meant work, and there was a priestly stoicism in Larkin's devotion, or submission, to his job as University Librarian at Hull. He supervised a staff of over a hundred; typically he was a brilliant administrator, with a great talent for drudgery. Work was the 'toad' that he let 'squat on my life'. In the last decade he didn't need the job any longer, but he thought (with maximum lack of glamour), 'Well, I might as well get my pension, since I've gone so far.'
What else can I answer, When the lights come on at four At the end of another year? Give me your arm, old toad, Help me down Cemetery Road.
He never married, naturally, and made a boast of his aversion to children. 'Children are very horrible, aren't they
? Selfish, noisy, cruel, vulgar little brutes.' As a child himself, he has said, he thought he hated everybody: 'but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.' His own childhood he repeatedly dismissed as 'a forgotten boredom' ('Nothing, like something, happens anywhere'). You feel that the very notion of childhood, with all its agitation and enchantment, was simply too sexy for Larkin. He regarded married life as a terrible mystery, something that other people did (and 'Other People are Hell'), a matter for appalled — and double-edged — ridicule:
He married a woman to Stop her getting away Now she's there all day, And the money he gets for wasting his life on work She takes as her perk To pay for the kiddies' clobber and the drier And the electric fire . ..
And so on, until the inexorable revenge:
So he and I are the same, Only I'm a better hand At knowing what I can stand Without them sending a van — Or I suppose I can.
The clinching paradox may be, however, that Larkin will survive as a romantic poet, an exponent of the ironic romance of exclusion, or inversion. One review of High Windows (his last book of poems, and his best by some distance) was headed 'Don Juan in Hull'; and this says a great deal, I think, about the currents of thwarted eroticism in his work. Of the shopping-centre, the motorway cafe, the old people's home, the madman-haunted park, the ambulance, the hospital, Larkin sang. Even his own inner ugliness ('monkey-brown, fish-grey') he made beautiful:
For something sufficiently toad-like Squats in me, too; Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck, And cold as snow ...
'Do you feel you could have had a much happier life?' an interviewer once asked. 'Not without being someone else.' What we are left with is the lyricism that Larkin seemed to be shedding or throwing away as he moved towards death.
From 'The Trees':
Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
It was in my capacity as a cruel and vulgar little brute that I first met Larkin - at the age of four or five. He was my elder brother's godfather and namesake, and, to my brother and me (true to type: indeed, it might have been us who put him off), visits from godfathers meant money. My godfather was rich, generous and seldom sober when he came to stay: half-crowns and ten-shilling notes dropped from his hand into ours. But it was always a solemn moment when it came for Larkin to 'tip the boys' — almost a religious experience, as I remember it. At first it was sixpence for Philip against threepence for Martin; years later it was tenpence against sixpence; later still it was a shilling against ninepence: always index-linked and carefully graded. Other poets I came across during that time - notably Robert Graves - tended to be ebullient, excitable, candidly bardic. Larkin was simply a melancholy man, prematurely bald and with the remains of a stutter. In my later dealings with him, he was always quietly amusing, doggedly honest and (in the widest sense) exceptionally well-mannered. Larkin may have written poetry, but he spent no time 'being a poet'.
The death was as comfortless as the life. And it had its element of ironic heroism. There was no real family, of course, and visits from friends were not encouraged. All his life he had girded himself for extinction; but when it came (and this is appropriate and consistent) he was quite unprepared, resolutely helpless, having closed no deal with death. He instructed his doctors to tell him nothing - to tell him lies. It is said that Evelyn Waugh died of snobbery. Philip Larkin died of shame: mortal, corporeal shame.
He made no effort to prolong matters, In the last year of his life he used to start the day with three glasses of supermarket port ('Well,' he explained to my father, 'you've got to have some fucking reason for getting up in the morning'). In the last week he was subsisting on 'gin, Complan and cheap red wine'. 'Couldn't you at least get some expensive red wine?' my mother suggested on the telephone, three days before his death. But no. Live out the comfortlessness, in fear and bafflement — that was the strategy. Although he was Larkin's best friend, my father saw him infrequently and now wonders if he ever really knew him.
Postscript: This piece was written as an obituary. The (usually hostile) revaluation that attends a poet's death was postponed, in Larkin's case, until the recent publication of the Letters and the Life. A couple of years ago Larkin was still our best-loved postwar poet; now, for the time being, he is the most reviled. That revaluation has been unprecedentedly thorough. The Life and the Letters stand ready on my desk: I will be writing at length about them, and about him. Already I can trumpet the assurance that the present controversy will soon evaporate; nothing of importance will have been affected by it.
Vanity Fair, 1985
CANNES
This piece was written sixteen years ago and is included here as a curiosity. It is certainly a curiosity to me. I still can't understand how I was quite so thrown by the spectacle of topless sunbathing. On the other hand I have never known a woman who liked or approved of it. So the question is still vivid for me. Who are they all?
My first glimpse of the sea featured the middle-distant prospect of a girl sauntering topless along the water-line. She wore the smallest bikini-pants I had ever seriously seen on anyone, about the size of a dab of tissue with which one might staunch a shaving-cut. The girl mounted a small pier, at whose far end a fat motor-launch wallowed. No doubt some huge young filmstar stood waiting for her there on the deck (his shirt open to the last button, his restless legs planted well apart). My gaze returned to the sea, which dappled weakly in the midday sun.
When I looked again, the girl was naked. Either she had removed her bikini-pants, or they had simply been blown away in the salty wind. A man was jumping about taking photographs of her; accordingly, the girl swivelled and preened, raising her arms to flatter her breasts. I turned in alarm towards the three tyrannous gendarmes standing near by. I thought that they would at least kill her, like they do if you cross the road at the wrong moment, but they consulted one another with zestless shrugs.
I looked again. The pier now sagged with gesticulating journalists, kneeling, leaping lensmen (rolling on to their backs like puppies for the angle-shots) and random perverts and voyeurs, among whom the naked girl continued gamely to pirouette. Ten minutes later she forged her way back to shore — by this time about two hundred viewers lined the promenade — emerging from the crowd bashfully clothed in her triangular sequin.
Within seconds, the posse of photographers, torn-peepers, etc, had encircled another, hidden figure down on the beach. Must be a new superstarlet, I decided, moving down the steps to join them. This one wore bikini-pants — the lion's share of which, admittedly, seemed lost for good between her buttocks — and was moreover reclining primly on her stomach. But she was kissing a dirty pet terrier, and French-kissing it apparently, much to the guttural delight of the assembled newshounds. Every few seconds the newshounds urged the superstarlet to turn on to her back. Every few seconds the superstarlet took her tongue out of the dog's mouth and politely refused. Tickled, the newshounds snapped and gawped.
Why the bother? — I thought suddenly, scanning the beach with a blush. I had never seen so many breasts in my life, and all nonchalantly bared to the breeze — there were those two over there, and that pair there, and that row of them over there, and look at that lot over there, and . . . Compared to the other females on the beach, the harried superstarlet was an example of painful inhibition. Perhaps this was what had roused the hacks: Hold the front page — we've found a girl on the beach in Cannes who isn't showing everyone what her breasts look like.
I have never been to Cannes before, nor to any other Cote d'Azur resort, and I have never seen any girl over the age of ten half-naked on the sands. I was of course aware - first alerted, I suspect, by the vigilance of Daily Mirror cameramen - that there were topless beaches at Cannes. What I didn't know is that every beach is a topless beach at Cannes. They say it all began in the early Sixties, became a bore in the early Seventies, and has now been re-embraced quite unselfconsciously, the only way f
or women to dress for the shore, half-naked as nature intended.
Oh well, I said to myself, wringing my pinball-calloused hands - I'll just have to spend the entire week here racing up and down the strand. After all, the girls don't seem to mind you staring at them, and with as much puerile awe as you care to muster. Conscientious, album-minded perverts, indeed, wander along unhindered with their Brownies, pausing to snap at leisure while the girls stretch and yawn. Once, when I was seated comfortably on the shore, with my back to the water, a thoroughly topless girl abruptly addressed me in harsh French from her sun-couch. Now this is an arrest, I assumed - and high time too. But no: holding up her own camera, she asked if Monsieur would be kind enough to take a topless snap of her and her topless friend, so that, in the years to come, they could re-evoke the memory of this lost summer.
And up on La Croisette itself, the esplanade along which the jet-setters swank, aggressive pulchritude reigns. Here is Le Palais du Festival, the flat-topped, marble-foyered complex where, on the ground floor, all the principal entries are screened, where, on the first floor, the assorted movie-hawkers set up their lurid stalls, and where, on the second, the Press office swelters in a mess of fanned bulletins and discarded handouts.
In this warren the etiolated cineasts grope and blink about their business. Some of these men and women are seeing ten films a day, here and elsewhere. They look it. They are seeing films of the calibre of Women Behind Bars, Dynamite Girls, Kiss Me Killer and Kidnapped Coed, of Savage in the City, Axe, Viol and Rattlers, of The Crater Lake Monster and Legend of the Dinosaurs and Monster Birds, of Fun Truckin, Symphony of Love and La Principessa Nuda, of Le lunghe notti della Gestapo, L'ultima orgia del III Reich and Elsa Fraulein — SS (all postered in the first-floor booths). The cineasts' skin is numb and luminous. Their eyes are angry red holes. When they stumble late into the crowded Grande Salle, it takes them about twenty minutes to find a seat. The cinema isn't that crowded. It's just that their eyes can no longer acclimatise from the outside dazzle. Halfway through the film they are still tousling your hair and trying to sit on your lap.
