Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Sam Dawson, two years younger than Kingsley, was his most recent colleague in the English Department. ‘Hilly was extraordinary. Sweet-natured, spirited yet in many ways more mature than Kingsley. She was of a mercurial nature . . . in a plodding world. The house was famously disorganized, but they [Hilly and Kingsley] weren’t irresponsible. She particularly wanted a good life for the kids. They never missed school, and she fretted about their health. At the same time she wanted them to be happy, free to enjoy themselves.’ Martin: ‘The more I return to the Swansea years the more I can remember. But the point is they are memories without labels, such as regret, or disappointment or relief. Everything just seemed as it was, good. Down the road there was a park, Cwmdonkin Park – yes Dylan Thomas’s house was close by but I didn’t know that then . . . and groups of us would just play there, make up games, climb trees. Sometimes there’d by fights but no one ever seemed to get hurt . . .

  ‘My primary school was like any other. I had crushes on a variety of girls but I fantasized most about my RK [Religious Knowledge] teacher . . . Miss Penellis. She was a witch. The more she preached a typically Welsh Chapel-style adherence to doctrine the more I was certain she was an agent of Satan.’

  How old were you?

  ‘Ten, nine perhaps.’

  Precocious lust, then?

  ‘No. There were teachers I fancied, but Miss Penellis was outstandingly ugly; fat, with black straw-like hair – that’s where the witch aspect came in – but she would recite passages from the Old Testament in a way that was hypnotic.

  ‘It was then that I went through my one “religious phase”.’

  Best to get rid of it early?

  ‘Yes, by the time we left Swansea for Cambridge I was a proselytizing atheist – though I’m not that now – but for a while in Swansea I went through a bizarre and very private religious phase. I had several Bibles and I wrote all sorts of things in the margins. Sometimes, I performed black masses in my bedroom. You see, we had no idea whatsoever about God or faith. Certainly, there was the feeling that we weren’t like a regular family. Most of my friends went to church or chapel, and Sunday school. I went a few times, to Sunday school, but for tea and blancmange. I liked the parables. No one cared about Sundays in the Amis house. So what I call my religious phase was actually a bout of early imaginative excess – inspired by that fact that we were a godless household and Miss Penellis was magnetically grotesque – a woman who seemed to have powers.’

  As he put it much later, ‘I was six or seven years old, and filling out a school registration form, and I came to the disquieting question, which seemed to visit me from a different world. I ran into the hall and shouted up the stairs, “Mum! What religion are we?” There was a long silence, then: “Uh . . . Church of England!” Yes, thank God for the Church of England, it didn’t commit you to anything at all. In truth, though, “Church of England” was a mortal lie. We weren’t even that.

  ‘It was only much later, in the States, that I actually entered a church with friends of the family, and I had a wafer put into my mouth. It seemed grotesque. Even as a child I felt that religion encroached upon me, and I couldn’t believe that so many others believed in it. Even during my Bible period, I was more a bibliophile than anything else. What it said was a mere curiosity. I liked the gold edging on the book. I was repelled by worship. As Kingsley said – I think someone was heckling him at an event in the sixties – you can believe what you like, “but do it in your own time, in private”, like masturbation.’ He pauses, as if about to qualify what he has said. So I ask.

  ‘No, I’m no longer a “proselytizing atheist”. Being an atheist is an irrational position. It is presumptuous, and crabbed. The right place to be is on the very brink of agnosticism, about to tumble into . . . atheism. About to but . . . We need to know more about the Universe, because to human beings the Universe is still very mysterious. I was talking recently to a friend of mine, philosopher, scientist, Colin McGinn and he said, “We don’t even know what electricity is”. We certainly don’t know how galaxies are formed, why they don’t fly apart. We’re still ten Einsteins away from even a basic understanding of the Universe.

  ‘So, to say “I am an atheist” is a bit previous isn’t it? I mean, the basic fact is that the Universe is much more intelligent than we are. So that gives you pause, I think.’ How very different, I comment, from the inflexible atheism of his closest friend Christopher Hitchens. Is Hitchens’s position ‘irrational – crabbed’? ‘We have disagreed on many things. We do still.’

  The impression Martin gives of life in Swansea is of a family who did not need faith or any other kind of doctrinal support. They just enjoyed life, and each other. There was the incident with the canoe, when Martin and Philip aged respectively nine and ten – or so he half recalls – were provided by Hilly with a rather flimsy vessel and allowed to set off from Swansea Bay west to Pembroke Bay where their mother would collect them at some vaguely estimated time. None of them had properly calculated the distance, nor indeed taken any account of weather conditions or currents. ‘The Swansea Evening Post’, says Martin, ‘eventually reported that my act of heroism, getting ashore and summoning the coastguard, had saved my brother’s life. Actually, he’d paddled back before I’d been washed up on the beach and was drinking Tango in a seafront café trying to remember our home phone number while the coastguards scoured the area.’ This is all the stuff of Famous Five adventures, the kind of licensed recklessness that many children crave and is now prohibited, with parents or ‘carers’ likely to face prosecution if they allow their wards to play conkers unsupervised. Martin recalls his mother’s carefree regime with a mixture of amused admiration and disbelief. ‘My mother is made up of extremes. She is outstandingly compassionate, kind, shrewd and in other ways she kept the sheen of guileless irresponsibility that probably attracted Kingsley to her in the first place. I remember, after Sally was born – she’d be about four or five – driving back from the beach in the dark, with the three of us, Phil and me either side and Sal in the middle, on the roof-rack. The only light came from the full moon and the headlamps. It felt as though we were flying. None of us felt nervous because at that age you don’t recognize danger – I suppose we had much in common with our mother despite the age difference.’ One suspects also that much later, when he became a father himself, the romantic tinge of his childhood recollections became the cause of an almost neurotic sense of protectiveness. As we shall see, the teleology of his children as the specific victims of an imminent nuclear apocalypse altered the trajectory of his writing.

  Around 1956–57 Martin’s parents’ marriage came close to collapse, due primarily to Hilly’s affair with the journalist Henry Fairlie. Fairlie resembled the sort of character played by Leslie Phillips or Terry-Thomas in Ealing Comedies, but while they were barely credible caricatures of the charming bounder he was a far more unsettling package of contrasts and anomalies. The Amises had got to know him during one of their trips to London and at first it seemed to Kingsley that he had come face to face with a man who was both his replica and his nemesis. Just as Kingsley regarded any of the attractive wives and girlfriends of those he knew as fair game – it was, as he saw it, their decision – so Fairlie seemed to regard himself as answerable to only one imperative, the word ‘no’. Yet beneath their predatory personae could be found two very different individuals. Kingsley, though unswervingly polite in his dealings with his girlfriends, was also a ruthless opportunist; the best they could hope for was an extended, albeit clandestine, affair, such as the one with his ex-student Mavis Nicholson. No spurious affirmations of commitment or promises of endurance would be forthcoming or expected. Fairlie, however, was a true romantic. He once had a taxi-load of flowers delivered to the flat of an inamorata and would regularly spend a week’s salary on absurdly lavish dinners at Claridge’s as part of his ostentatious campaigns of seduction. But by all accounts he was sincere, at least to the extent that he could conjure sincerity from an untidy catalogue o
f conflicted interests. He was promiscuous and unfaithful but none of his women ever doubted his kindness. He was the ideal lover, with the proviso that he might well sustain this ideal for two or even three different women simultaneously, not forgetting his wife.

  Kingsley knew of Fairlie’s reputation in advance of becoming acquainted with him personally and then he witnessed the equivalent of what he had visited upon many others; he watched his wife become gradually enraptured by the attentions of someone else. At first he suspected that this was Hilly’s act of vengeance, a suitably just experience of atonement he assumed would be brief. But to his surprise, and horror, Hilly announced that she and Fairlie had discussed a permanent relationship. As he put it to Larkin, ‘on Friday a verbal statement was made to me by my wife by which I was given to understand that, far from just having an affair with Henry Fairlie, she is in love with him and he with her. The topic of divorce from the married state was raised, and no decision reached.’ The letter deviates from the blend of backbiting, satirical glee and self-caricature with which he and Larkin routinely communicated. The performer’s mask has slipped and Kingsley cannot help but disguise a genuine sense of fear.

  I think . . . that my marriage has about one chance in four of surviving till next summer. If I do get a divorce, it means presumably that the children, about whom I feel strongly, will accompany their mother to her new home. But that isn’t the same as having them in your home all the time, you see . . . Having one’s wife fucked is one thing; having her taken away from you, plus your children, is another, I find.2

  I asked Martin now if he recalls anything of near break-up. ‘Two things come to mind. I remember Henry Fairlie because he visited Swansea several times, and we had no cause to regard him as different from the other figures who would stay for weekends. Philip [Larkin], who did his duty as Phil’s godfather, let’s say he was thrifty, Lenten, with gifts. Unlike Bruce Montgomery, my godfather, generous, bountiful, who would drive down in his Bentley. George and Pat Gale were regulars, and there was Bob [Conquest] and John Wain and the Powells. We were children and we knew their names but we had no interest in what they actually did.

  ‘I didn’t know of the affair until the 1960s when, very briefly, he [Fairlie] and Hilly got back together. She always reserved a special affection for him.

  ‘But in Swansea . . . well at that age you don’t articulate it to yourself. Subconsciously, you’re uneasy. There was one absolutely terrifying row. We were, both brothers and sister, sitting on the stairs and they were screaming at each other. And next morning, Kingsley went up with a breakfast tray and shot back down again having gym shoes and ornaments hurled at him. And we didn’t say anything to each other, but it was pretty clear something serious was wrong. But you’re thinking . . . what can that be? Probably your subconscious is coming to a conclusion but you don’t really understand that at all. When you’re told about the sexual act, told in the school yard, your first response is absolute outrage that your father could do that to your mother. I talked openly about it [sex] with Kingsley later – he made a point of this because his father and mother were obsessively secretive – but for us in Swansea, yes we knew something was wrong. It’s all inklings and intuitions and subconscious conclusions but they’re never articulated. Looking back it probably did have something to do with Fairlie.’

  In December 1956 Fairlie was summoned to appear in court on bankruptcy charges and spent a brief period in Brixton prison. He made a good living as one of the most esteemed serious journalists of the day, but his profligate habits, and generosity, ruined him financially. He was serious in his proposal to leave his wife and set up home with Hilly and her children and she, to Kingsley’s trepidation, was on the brink of a decision. His bankruptcy obviated the latter and up until her death she remained uncertain of what she would have done had fate not intervened.

  In March 1957 Kingsley’s mother died suddenly of a stroke. Kingsley helped his father with the practicalities and displayed due solemnity at the funeral but beyond that there is no evidence in correspondence or elsewhere that Rose’s departure caused him great emotional distress. The effects on the family as a whole, however, were considerable. In November of the previous year, during the Fairlie crisis, Sally had suffered a severe head injury, a fractured skull, after falling from a garden table. She was unconscious for two days and doctors in the Swansea hospital warned that although there were no immediate symptoms of brain damage such injuries to a three-year-old child could result in later psychological and neurological problems. One can, therefore, only speculate on the consequences of what happened five months later. Sally was staying with her paternal grandparents and Rose suffered her fatal stroke little more than an hour after William had departed for work. She was alone with the body of her grandmother for more than seven hours and at one point applied lipstick and face powder to her pale gaunt features in an attempt to restore to her some semblance of life. For years afterwards, and well into adolescence, Sally would exhibit an almost hysterical fear of witnessing anyone asleep, often attended by a pathological urge to wake them up.

  Sally’s unsteady childhood could well have contributed to her descent towards alcoholism in her twenties but it was significant also for its influence upon the hierarchy of the Amis siblings. Martin certainly did not seek any special role, let alone position of responsibility, but circumstances conferred both upon him. Hilly remembers that the night when Sally was born Kingsley had to rush to a callbox to telephone the midwife, a stressful yet fairly straightforward operation, but before leaving the house he rushed upstairs, grabbed the sleeping Martin and carried him with him up the street. It was not that his four-year-old son was any better equipped than he was to dial the correct number and feed the coins into the slots in the right order – or at least Martin modestly denies such precocity – but Martin had already become for his father a talisman of calm and stability. Hilly recalls that the incident of the phone call was not unusual. ‘When he was anxious [at all] he’d go for Martin because Martin was the calmest of the three . . . Philip [that night] would have been more startled at being woken up . . . Martin was far more relaxed.’ For a six-year period following Rose’s death and until his own demise William Amis became the sixth permanent member of the Amis household and Kingsley very much resented his father’s presence. In a letter to Larkin he proffers a catalogue of habits that would to most seem harmless eccentricities – a tendency to slip French or German commonplaces into conversation and in particular a predisposition to chat with Amis’s friends as if they were not a generation younger than himself – but which aroused in him an unalloyed bitterness, even loathing: ‘Why doesn’t he go away for good? Failing that, why can’t he go away for a very long time and then go away again as soon as he has come back?’3 There is no obvious explanation for this, given that William had grown used to those aspects of his son’s personality he once found unacceptable and was by all accounts a grateful, unobtrusive guest. However, there is a passage in Martin’s Experience which causes one to suspect that Kingsley’s sense of unease and resentment was fuelled in part by envy.

  He [William] spent a good part of his widowhood [. . .] keenly and inventively and rather sternly playing with my brother and me. I admit without reservation that he was one of the grand passions of my childhood – so much so that he once reduced me to a tantrum of misery when he found himself maintaining that it was ‘natural’ to have ‘more feeling as a grandfather’ for the first-born son. As far as I was concerned it wasn’t a question of what was natural. This was a question of love: of insufficiently requited love. He tried to soften it but he wouldn’t unsay it; he wouldn’t bend to the severity of my distress . . .4

  Martin’s disclosure of his affection for William is as sincere as Kingsley’s sense of displeasure, except that while the latter is nuanced and ambiguous the former is transparent. What was it about William that inspired his ‘grand passion’, his ‘love’? ‘He did seem incongruous, and pleasantly so. The Garcias came from a di
fferent world, and that distressed Phil, but Daddy A, our grandfather, was different in a way that was more benign and hospitable.’

  The whole period was full of contrasts and paradoxes. ‘In Kingsley’s relationship with Daddy A, even there some resentment was tangible but he loved him too. There was an immense amount of love in the household despite the chaos. For example, one aspect of our life in Swansea that has gone unrecorded, was the orphanage . . . Every Saturday or perhaps Sunday we would go in the car to an orphanage just down the coast towards the Mumbles peninsula. This was when I was, oh six or seven I think, and we would pick up a boy called Andrew – I can’t remember his surname, in fact I don’t think we, the children, were ever told it. He was about Philip’s age, maybe a little older and if it was summer we’d spend the afternoon on the beach or in a park where Kingsley would make his only attempts at ball games, cricket mainly, and various diversions were organized if the weather was bad and we had to drive around in the car; “I spy with my little eye” – that sort of thing. My parents did their best to make him feel part of the family but he seemed intimidated and apprehensive. Sometimes we’d go to museums or market towns, maybe the cinema. He never really relaxed. I found it slightly arduous, uneasy. I didn’t understand at the time why we were doing this, it was just part of our life.’

  The arrangement continued until the family left for Princeton in 1958 and as far as Martin can recall from later conversations his parents’ arrangement with the orphanage was unsolicited. They knew of the place and simply wanted to offer a child something of the cosy family routine enjoyed by the Amis youngsters. It seems to go against the notion of Hilly and Kingsley as rather dissolute bohemians promoted in most accounts of the period, and the image of Kingsley as solipsistic, for which he makes no excuses in his letters. Was Kingsley the more reluctant partner in this exercise in altruism? ‘No, not at all. In fact I think it was his idea. You see my parents, despite their problems, were compatible in that they matched each other in unpredictability. The orphanage visits, trips out with Andrew, I know it all sounds curious but we, the kids, didn’t think so at the time. They would have blazing rows and, as I learned later there were affairs, but the most enduring memory was of their tangible, sometimes embarrassing affection for each other.’