Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  During the summer holiday of 1949 Kingsley, faced with a second child to support, scoured The Times Educational Supplement for any university jobs in English, anywhere. Prague and Buenos Aires turned him down, as did Bristol, King’s College, London, Manchester and Durham. Then, on 23 September he was invited for interview at University College, Swansea and subsequently offered an Assistant Lectureship with the salary of £300 per year. He left Oxford within a week, alone, to begin work and search for accommodation while Hilly, Philip and Martin stayed with his parents. Impatient and anxious Hilly joined him, with Martin, in mid-November and found a flat within two days of her arrival. On 16 December she set off in a rented van with all of their possessions and two noisy infants to join her husband in the cramped second-floor flat of 82 Vivian Road, Swansea.

  It is significant to note that Kingsley played hardly any part in the move having spent two months searching unsuccessfully for a suitable residence. He commented to Larkin that ‘I need all the time I can get for house hunting, and thinking about house hunting’. The placing of this activity in italics, and the droll coda in which he admits to giving as much time to contemplating the task as executing it are revealing. Hilly stated to Zachary Leader that he was ‘totally impractical’; a somewhat generous abridgement to what in truth was a predilection for selfishness. It was not that he did not love his wife and children, simply that for the time being he took every opportunity to postpone the tiresome responsibilities that came with them. Kingsley’s salary was pitiable and Hilly, as well as looking after the children, worked part-time five days a week in the local cinema and later at a fish and chip shop in the Mumbles, whose leftovers were frequently brought home for family suppers. Nevertheless, Hilly later recalled the period as probably the most blissful of their marriage. ‘We were perfectly happy. We saw the funny side of it.’

  The death of Hilly’s mother followed by an endowment in her will enabled the Amises to move from the cramped flat in Vivian Road – where the two baby boys were bathed in the kitchen sink, recorded in the first ever photograph of Martin – to a house, 24 The Grove, for which they paid £2,400.

  Even before Lucky Jim brought him fame Kingsley was treated at Swansea as a minor celebrity: still in his twenties, a first from Oxford, handsome and as a lecturer like no one that his students, colleagues or, to their unease, his seniors had previously encountered. He taught the canon but encouraged his students to question the apparently inviolable qualities of great authors. One of his first students, Mavis Nicholson, remembers his disparaging remarks on Keats – ‘self-indulgent and impenetrable’ – along with his dashing appearance at his first lecture, when he strolled on stage with his ‘chic’ overcoat hung over his shoulders and a lock of hair falling distractedly across his forehead. ‘There’s talent,’ she commented to a friend.

  Although he was not conscious of the parallels Kingsley was during this period becoming an almost exact simulacrum of the man who in 1954 would cause a minor earthquake in the otherwise torpid zone of English domestic fiction, Jim Dixon. The feature of Jim and indeed his quiet accomplice the narrator that made him so popular, particularly for those looking for something both unorthodox and selfishly optimistic in the still gloomy aftermath of 1945, was the fact that he was a magnificent fraud. He was an academic who loathed the pretensions of academia and most of all he was much more clever, and indeed cunning, than he pretended to be. The subtle alliance between Jim’s sardonic, cutting private ruminations and the merciless orchestrations of the narrator was a kind of revenge against fate. He detested the provincial world in which the need to earn a living had placed him, treated those similarly grounded with a mixture of pity and scorn and dreaded the prospect of ending up in a long-term relationship, marriage, with the leech-like Margaret – a thinly disguised version of Monica Jones, with whom Larkin had recently begun a relationship in Leicester. The novel’s conclusion was for some of its more scrupulous admirers its only weakness; even John Betjeman, hardly an advocate of harsh realism, found it slightly implausible. Suddenly, Jim’s dismal existence is exchanged for the realization of his fantasies. He is offered a job in London by a wealthy entrepreneur – well paid but with no onerous duties – and the girl of his dreams, the magnificently busty Christine, leaves with him arm in arm on the train for the capital. His loathsome Head of Department and his son – based respectively upon Hilly’s father and her brother with some swipes at academic posturing and aggrandizement thrown in – are left standing, enraged and humiliated, on the platform.

  Christine was a compromise. In part she was Hilly, the innocent but outstandingly sexy girl he had come across in Oxford, and married. She was also a fantasy endemic to maleness, the kind of woman that men long for but with whom they don’t necessarily wish to have children and spend the rest of their lives.

  He wrote to Larkin only six months after his arrival in Swansea to report on the weekend he had spent in London with his friend James Michie ‘where I drank a lot, and talked to sweet ladies, and smoked a lot of cigarettes, and spent some money on myself’.1 Already, it seems, the exercise in wish fulfilment so brilliantly realized in the novel four years hence was being played out in Amis’s sullen frustrated disclosures to Larkin. He goes on:

  As I came back on the train on Sunday evening, sinking as I did so into a curious trance-like state of depression, some ideas began clarifying in my mind:

  (a) The proportion of attractive women in London and Swansea is 100:1 or more – this is a sober estimate;

  (b) Nobody in Swansea really amuses me;

  (c) Children are not worth the trouble;

  (d) I would rather live in London, than I would live in Swansea;

  (e) Consequently the best thing I can do in Swansea is to keep on shutting myself up on my own and writing poems and a novel . . .

  A more exact moment of gestation for his first novel cannot be located. Jim’s constant sense of inhibition and infuriation, his irritation at having to spend his time in a place and with people he dislikes and the prevailing mood of having failed to secure the lifestyle and career he genuinely wished for; all are present in Kingsley’s list. Just as significantly he betrays, no doubt unwittingly, a key aspect of himself post-Lucky Jim. There is no evidence that he disliked his children nor even resented their intrusion upon his battles against thwarted ambition, quite the contrary, yet at the same time he rationed the time he felt it necessary to spend with them. His university job was moderately demanding, though by today’s standards it seems as much a salaried hobby as a profession, and the rest of his days involved the realization of his 1950 objective to ‘[shut] myself up on my own . . . writing poems and a novel’.

  Martin recalls the mid-1950s in Swansea as a happy time. When he was not at school Hilly would during summer evenings and weekends take the children to the beach or the cinema or just for rides in the Morris 1000 Traveller. Nothing was planned or well organized and that, wittingly or not, suited the two young boys, Martin and Philip, very well indeed. There seemed something suitably child-friendly in Hilly’s carefree extemporized routine. Often, she would allow them to ride on the roof-rack of the car, apparently oblivious of the dangers involved. She wasn’t negligent, simply as innocent as her wards, according to Martin. What occurred to him later was that his father appeared biddably yet only partially present. ‘She [Hilly] let us do anything . . . everything . . . he wouldn’t need to be consulted about a matter to do with the open air. He was in his study. He was always in his study.’ The parallels between Martin’s recollection and Kingsley’s letter to Larkin, particularly involving points (c) and (e), are striking and slightly eerie.

  Kingsley’s friends from Oxford – Michie, Larkin and Bruce Montgomery in particular – provided him pre-1954 with some relief, albeit experienced temporarily or vicariously, from his life in Swansea. After Lucky Jim the Amis house became a magnet for visitors both from the Home Counties literary circuit and those based locally who were fascinated by the prospect of socializing with an of
ficially designated danger to public morality (Somerset Maugham in a famous article on Amis in the Sunday Times had cited Lucky Jim as a licence for mass degeneracy).

  Kingsley and Hilly held parties in which they seemed intent on reclaiming the opportunities for youthful irresponsibility which pregnancy had denied them at Oxford almost a decade earlier. Hilly’s endowment and Kingsley’s new source of income, boosted by an advance for That Uncertain Feeling (1955), enabled them to take on regular domestic help in the form of Eva Garcia, a woman of mixed Celtic/Iberian stock married to the similarly provenanced Joe, a solidly built hard-drinking steel-rigger. Eva’s principal duties involved repairing the post-party damage – according to Philip the house smelt for most of the time ‘like a pub’ – but she also took over tasks routinely undertaken by the woman of the house. She looked after the children, who now included Sally, born in 1954. The Garcias were genuinely and unapologetically working-class, unawed by and indifferent to the mannerisms and cultural prestige of their employers. Kingsley was amused and there is evidence that he drew upon them as sources for the thread of South Wales kitchen-sink realism detectable in That Uncertain Feeling.

  ‘It was,’ recalls Martin, ‘incredibly dissolute, at least by the standards of middle-class Swansea.’ Following all-night parties good-natured but otherwise bleary guests could be found recovering among the debris of ashtrays, bottles, half-empty glasses and records. ‘Sometimes we’d be dragged along to Kingsley’s colleagues’ houses, to have tea, cakes, jelly. I’d go to theirs and sometimes they’d come to me and there was a huge contrast . . . Children are so conventional, and I could see they were surprised and I couldn’t see that mine was about 10,000 times nicer than theirs, but it was. When I brought friends home Mum would be there with her feet on the table, shoes off and music in the background, probably jazz. And my friends thought it was so great. Phil said once, “Ah breakfast in the wine shop.” Mum might greet us, or guests, slightly hung-over and as we sat down to our cornflakes . . . well the milk jug would be surrounded by half-empty wine bottles . . . Far more boho than everybody else.’ They began to wonder if anyone else lived in quite the way they did. Esmond Cleary, one of Kingsley’s colleagues and recently married to Jean, sometimes looked after the children at their house or visited the Amises for parties. Cleary: ‘Everyone seemed to look on The Grove with a mixture of envy and bafflement. The children were happy, bright, quite well behaved but the place was wonderfully disorganized, an endless cocktail party. A strange combination. You have to remember that this was provincial Britain in the fifties, everything seemed hopelessly dreary, but Kingsley, Hilly and the children were determined to enjoy themselves. Don’t misunderstand me, they weren’t irresponsible hedonists. The children were loved and cared for . . . yet there was an energy and optimism about the house that was at odds with the time and the area.’

  The Garcias provided a further unaccountable twist to their already peculiar journey towards adolescence. In April 1956 the Amises moved from The Grove to 53 Glanmore Road, Uplands, the latter a spacious, handsome Edwardian house retaining most of its original features. Kingsley would now have a study, to which he could constantly retire, which was roughly the same size as their previous sitting room. Each of the children had a bedroom to themselves and the rear garden was private and mature. Instead of selling 24 The Grove they arranged to let it to the Garcias, who had two children, Michael and Hilary. The precise reason for this is lost in the mists of rumour that surround the Amis family of the mid-1950s. The rent would barely cover the upkeep of the property, but one begins to intuit Hilly’s and Kingsley’s motive from subsequent events. For long weekends or mid-week evenings when one or both of their parents were mysteriously elsewhere the children would go to the Garcias, and each year for five years Martin, Philip and Sally spent four to five weeks with Eva and Joe as their unofficial foster children.

  The effect of this upon the two brothers can be gleaned from their contrasting accounts. Martin describes Joe as ‘a cuboid, semi-literate grafter who seemed actually taller sitting down than standing up. To adults he would probably have appeared as menacing . . . For us he was a fascinating addition to our extended family of curiosities . . . Eva was terrible and great . . . one of the divinities of my childhood.’ He recalls her as a mixture of striking and rather grotesque images, singing as she made the tea, with ‘delight in her Hispanic eyes’ the romance of her red bandana and shiny black hair undone by the ‘slab’ of the orthopaedic boot on which she was obliged to swivel. He fixes also upon a particular incident when the family with Eva and Sally in the back seat of the car passed the scene of an apparently fatal accident. Eva seemed to feel it her duty to have her charge, then barely three, behold the sight of a man lying on the pavement, soaked in blood and twitching either from terrible pain or as a last concession to mortal existence. She announced, rather in the manner of the Satanic nanny in The Omen, ‘Look at him, Sal. Writhing in agony he is.’ According to Philip their periods with the Garcias were ‘bloody awful . . . I hated it. But we were forced to do it because Kingsley and Hilly were having such a wild time.’ He remembers Joe as far more gigantic and intimidating than any adult he had previously encountered and the prospect of having to share bedrooms with the Garcias’ children, plus the experience of Joe’s regular drunkenness, and ingrained habits of a family unused to routines of personal or domestic hygiene struck him as ‘horrible . . . incredibly primitive’. Surely, he thought, Kingsley’s and Hilly’s commitments, whatever they were, did not merit them being put through something so apparently punitive as this. Sally, he recalls, was even more upset, having no understanding of why she seemed to have been abandoned by her mother and father and on one occasion having to endure several weeks in the much more rough and even less familiar council house of friends of the Garcias, an exigency that Eva and Joe did not bother to explain to Kingsley and Hilly.

  Martin again: ‘Joe. He was illiterate too. He’d get out his packet of ten Player’s and with great concentration he’d write on it the names of the horses he’d want to bet on. And the “c”s and the “d”s would be the wrong way round. It was amazing, I thought, that a man couldn’t write.

  ‘It was egg and chips every night, meat on Sundays, and every evening ended with a huge plate of buttered toast and mugs of tea.

  ‘Eva could be terrifying. She said, “You ’ave six stars in ’eaven and ev’ry time you tell a lie, one a’ them goes out. And when they’re all gone out – you die.” That one had me sobbing with terror. And once, I asked for a glass of milk with my lunch. She couldn’t be bothered to get it, so she fixed me with a stare and said, “I knew a man used to drink milk with his lunch . . . He died.” I didn’t drink milk for about five years after that.’

  In terms purely of facts Martin and Philip do not diverge greatly but what is most striking is the enormous disparity between the apparent effects of these experiences upon each of them. We could of course contend that Martin’s account is more mature and indulgent than his brother’s given that he bestows upon Eva and Joe an energy, even a uniqueness that belies their status as a class beneath the Amises. But let us also remember that both men were recalling events that occurred virtually half a century earlier. Recovered or even personal memories are notoriously partial but I would aver that Philip comes closest to if not the objective truth then at least unalloyed candour. Philip’s recollections are unmalicious, he is not attempting some vengeful recompense for childhood maltreatment and indeed his occasional inconsistencies – he is terrified and appalled by people who also, he states, had ‘hearts of gold’ – testify to his honesty: he seems to have carried into middle age the sense of confusion and indecision that beset much of his childhood. Martin, however, takes a more positive view. ‘I suppose,’ he reflects, ‘the difference between Phil and me is that I always thought of it [their time with the Garcias] as enriching in some ways. It was a new world, completely different from anything I’d experienced before.’ The Garcias do indeed bear a close re
semblance to the assembly of mostly working-class grotesques who populate much of his fiction. Did his time with them instigate this fascination? ‘Probably.’

  Becoming a full-time novelist has no predictable effect upon one’s psyche but it is not too absurd to contend that since we elect to spend much of our conscious existence filtering perception and reality through an oblique variant upon language, a good deal of what we routinely apprehend and recollect is touched by our stock in trade of conceits and distortions. Martin was certainly not being dishonest regarding his presentation of the Garcias but as all great writers are aware, honesty is as much a device as a principle.

  ‘What are your prevailing memories of the Swansea years?’ I ask him. ‘Was it a happy childhood?’

  ‘Happy? Yes, I think it was, yes certainly. The stories told by Zach [in the 2006 biography] are true enough . . . the fights, the parties, the occasional sense of imminent catastrophe, that is, of break-up. We were aware of it all but it didn’t register as anything very important. For all we knew every family was like that and it didn’t seem to affect Hilly and Kingsley. It was part of their routine and that’s how we saw it too. Nothing to be particularly concerned about.’

  From Experience and other accounts one gets the impression that the family existed in something of a cocoon. Apart from the faintly bizarre experiences of living with the Garcias the children didn’t seem to mix with others in the locality.

  ‘Actually we did. We’d have cricket matches in the garden at Glanmore Road and the whole place would be full of kids of about the same age. Hilly would provide sweets and pop but we were otherwise unsupervised. And of course the house and garden were full of dogs, which Hilly loved. She’d take in strays or abandoned litters of puppies and put them up in the garage. Ten, sometimes twenty dogs of various ages and shapes would be wandering round the house at any given time. They weren’t quite pets; lodgers I suppose. Hilly would always find homes for them.’