Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Kingsley was invited by R. P. Blackmur to become Lecturer and Resident Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University for the 1958–59 academic year. The family were booked to sail for New York on the Queen Elizabeth – Kingsley would not countenance the thought of flying across the Channel let alone the Atlantic – but only Kingsley, his father and the two boys boarded the ship. Hilly followed several weeks later with Sally who had been diagnosed with a benign tumour in her thigh which required surgery.

  Their house was in a characteristically middle-class suburban avenue called Edgerstone Road, two miles from the Princeton campus and within commuting distance by train to Manhattan where most of the residents worked. For various reasons each of the Amises felt they had gone quite suddenly from stagnation to nirvana. The houses were copies of the inauthentic ‘ranches’ in which Hollywood frontiersmen spent their lives. These however were fitted with every modern convenience – kitchens with formica and stainless-steel units, spacious bathrooms plus walk-in shower cubicles, sitting rooms which gave on to the quarter-acre lawn via windows that stretched from floor or ceiling. Almost all the families on Edgerstone Road were close to the Amises’ age, some were academics and the rest earned comfortable livings from the law, journalism, advertising or management. Their lifestyle bore no relation whatsoever to the existence of even the comfortably off residents of Swansea. When the men were not at work the entire area seemed committed to a round of barbecues, cocktail parties, relaxed open-invitation dinners or games of baseball accompanied by chilled beer and wine. The spacious gardens were bordered by woodland in which deer could often be glimpsed and the children of the road – calculated to be sixty in number aged between six and sixteen – roamed around, happily unsupervised in what seemed like a giant playground. Martin: ‘I think my mother felt she’d come home. I have vivid memories of Swansea when she would pick up Phil and me from primary school. The rest of the mothers would be dressed as you’d expect from films of the 1950s; smart but rather dull skirts and jackets, nice shoes and usually, hats, with miniature flower and fruit arrangements attached. Hilly would turn up for us in jeans, flipflops in good weather, an open-necked shirt and blond hair all over the place. The other mothers would whisper things about her being a “beatnik”, and if there were men around, well they just stared longingly. There, she was a misfit but in Princeton she fitted in perfectly.’

  The famously dissolute parties hosted by the Amises in Swansea, provoking by degrees outrage, envy and gratitude among Kingsley’s colleagues, now found concord in this world of US middle-class hedonism. Martin and Philip spent their time with children very much like themselves, inured to the relaxed open manner of the way their parents lived. The Amises’ closest friends in the locality were the McAndrews, who lived two doors down. John McAndrew worked in advertising and Jean, like Hilly, took care of the house and the children; the McAndrews had six girls aged between four and sixteen. ‘We [he and Philip] renamed ourselves Marty and Nick Jr and the girls in the US were a lot more outgoing and well, classy, than their Swansea counterparts. Nothing happened, of course.’ Within months of their arrival Kingsley was having an affair with Jean McAndrew. It lasted for the duration of the visit and Hilly was caused to wonder yet again about trusting her husband’s promise to at least try to forgo further extra-marital excursions. He supplemented his fling with Jean with a sequence of poorly concealed affairs with wives of Faculty members, students and anyone else who came within range at Princeton or his guest lectures in Chicago, New York, Washington DC, Harvard and Yale.

  ‘There was a gruesome irony in all this,’ observes Martin, ‘because while we knew very little of what was happening with our mother and father, I was provided with a foul introduction to sex by two guests from one of the late-night parties.’ A man and woman entered his bedroom; the former claimed to be a doctor and asked if he could ‘examine’ Martin, which he did, though in a manner he had never previously envisioned. Did it, I ask him, leave any sort of psychological scar? ‘No, I don’t think so. It was unpleasant, I knew that, but I didn’t really understand why. That would come later.’ This goes some way to explain the character of the passage in Experience. He wraps the episode in prose that is fastidiously detailed – he seems to recall exactly the posture, dress and demeanour of the two people – yet elegant and impersonal. It is a horrible incident, beautifully transposed. Nabokov comes to mind, but not Lolita; rather the more disturbing The Enchanter where the paedophile narrator cannot cite precocious sexuality as an excuse for his behaviour. This one is unapologetically evil and calculating, and he fascinates Martin.5 The US – its authors, its sheer exhausting excess – has for some time been a cynosure for Martin’s fiction. One suspects that his preoccupation with the place predates his emergence as a writer. ‘It was as though we were being given remission from ordinary life. School in Princeton was a form of relaxation. At Bryn-Mawr in Swansea we were taught by rote, the distinction between verbs, nouns and adjectives, long division and multiplication, equations. American schools at that level are unbelievably far behind British schools. Probably more then than now. I went from doing long division of pounds, shillings and pence when I was eight to doing eight plus six equals fourteen a year later. In America we weren’t obliged to do anything much, add up figures in columns, draw pictures . . . It was very enjoyable but had disastrous consequences when we got home. I was ten so I had a year to catch up for the eleven-plus but Phil took the exam soon after we got back – and failed it. Being in the American system was the equivalent of taking a year off. The country itself offered me a flavour of what I’d want more of ten, fifteen years later but at the time the school system was disastrous.’

  He pauses. ‘Back then, of course, it seemed of no great importance but America was my first real experience of a different world, where people behaved differently, and the way they spoke, talked, was part of that. I imitated US speech, but something stayed with me. I learned another language.’ Does he mean that his famed ability to bridge the Atlantic in a single novel originated during his first, childhood visit? ‘Yeah, it did. It’s an odd thing. Brits and US writers should, you’d imagine, be able to think themselves into each other’s idioms. But it’s not as straightforward as that. Habits of speech are part of our disposition. It is difficult to borrow someone else’s, and even Philip Roth, with his superlative ear, can’t do ordinary spoken English, London English, in his novels. But I learnt “American” as a child. It was easy.’

  Martin passed the eleven-plus. ‘I went to grammar school but Phil went to a secondary modern, which meant that while I was faced with academic streaming for O-levels he was expected to leave at fifteen or possibly sixteen with CSEs, exams for the trades or manual labour.’ Was he resentful? ‘It was a horrible moment. They divided the boys in the playground. Passes to the right, fails to the left. It was traumatic, for him.’

  At grammar school Martin was caned, twice by the headmaster, once for writing obscenities in the margin of his classmate’s pocket diary and again for an act of truancy. He had played and greatly enjoyed rugby union at primary school. ‘Saturday mornings, in Swansea, it was rugby. Yeah, I wasn’t really up to snuff by Welsh standards. I rarely made the first fifteen and it was a thrill when I did. But in Cambridge [where they moved to after Swansea] I was considered really quite good, mainly because the standard was so much lower than in Wales. I played wing forward for a while and then became half back. Then came the moment . . . interesting moment, wonder how many people have gone through it . . . when you look into the ruck and everyone’s gouging, punching, elbowing. There was nothing I liked more than diving in and coming out covered in blood. Now I looked into it and thought, “don’t fancy that.” There’s a line in Kafka, I can’t remember where it’s from. Talking about a certain point in your life when you realize that everything is needed and nothing is renewed. And thinking about it later, that was boys’ stuff. And, by Cambridge I was getting more interested in girls’ stuff. I went on playing till I was fiftee
n or sixteen but with much less bottle from fourteen onwards.’

  One element of Martin’s childhood in Swansea that went unrecorded before his nuanced references to it in Experience was his relationship with the Partingtons, specifically Hilly’s sister Margaret (‘Miggy’), her husband Roger and their son David, who was close to Martin’s age. The Partington house in Gloucestershire often served as an idyllic alternative to the Garcias’. It was rural England in the 1950s much as the country presented itself in contemporary cinema. Have a look at The Titfield Thunderbolt and you will see what I mean. Martin loved it, but it was only much later, in the 1990s, that he came to fully appreciate the rarity and value of such experiences of unsullied innocence.

  The journalist George Gale had become one of the Amises London friends in the early 1950s. Gale had contacts in Peterhouse, Cambridge, and when in early 1961 a new post of Fellow and Tutor in English was created by the college he orchestrated contacts between Amis and Peterhouse’s Master, Herbert Butterfield. Butterfield was fully aware of Peterhouse’s reputation as the most conservative, anachronistic of the Cambridge colleges – Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue was comprised partly of stories, many accurate, of the bizarre, ritualistic archaisms of the place. Amis was interviewed for the Fellowship in March 1961. Some fellows had never previously heard of him, and others were unsettled by the prospect of bringing in someone who was as much a celebrity as a scholar. But Butterfield wanted to modernize the college, and his preference for Amis held sway. He was elected and would take up the appointment of Official Fellow and Tutor in English in October 1961, Peterhouse’s first. Amis resigned from Swansea and Peterhouse provided the family with a quaint converted mill cottage in West Wratting. Soon after that they purchased a spacious, mid-Victorian house in Madingley Road, Cambridge. Kingsley and Hilly would turn this into a version of Glanmore Road, Swansea, with regular, now more convenient visits from friends in London.

  If Swansea had seemed charmingly dissolute Cambridge had an air of self-destructive decadence about it. Hilly maintained her tenderness for stray dogs and these were now supplemented by Debbie the donkey who lived in a shed outside the back door. Guests would be encouraged to ride her around the lawn or, as Martin recalls, through the kitchen and sitting room. The house had eight bedrooms, one bathroom and three reception rooms, each the size of the ground floor at Swansea. The only other permanent resident was Nickie who, recalls Martin, ‘was a non-paying guest originally brought in to deal with the forbidding proportions of the house.’

  She was, by consensus, very attractive, seemingly in her early thirties with a young child ‘being looked after’ by unspecified benefactors and if her accent, manner and general demeanour were anything to go by, insouciantly upper-class. Philip, with a hint of pity and unease, casts her as ‘a sort of posh slave’ while Martin’s recollection differs somewhat. ‘She seemed to spend most of her time as a louche social secretary, telephoning those coming up for weekend parties, fixing cocktails at dos, chatting to everyone without actually doing anything. My mother would be responsible for most of the day-to-day jobs, cooking, cleaning and clearing up the after-party debris.’ Nickie also felt it her responsibility to set the moral tone for life at No. 8. She had sex with Bill Rukeyser, a Princeton student now in Cambridge at whose recent marriage Kingsley had been best man, several other of Kingsley’s friends and the occasional undergraduate reading English at Peterhouse. Showing no bias for age or experience she also slept with Kingsley himself and would eventually relieve Philip, aged fourteen, of his virginity. Nickie’s long-term admirer was ‘Bummer’ Scott, who would arrive regularly in a decrepit saloon, perhaps take part in whatever jollities might be occurring at the time or disappear with Nickie for no more than an evening. He appeared at least three decades older than his paramour and, by the way he spoke and disported himself, was of the same quintessentially English class. Kingsley recommended Bummer to his sons as an exemplar of good spoken English, even when drunk, which he seemed to be for most of his waking existence. The well-callused saloon acquired fresh dents after his every departure.

  On the margins of the household was the part-time barmaid at the nearby Merton Arms to which the Amises and guests would repair for a hair of the dog, following an arduous evening at home; the landlord, an indulgent sort, observed no regulated opening hours for thirsty regulars. Kingsley began a daylight-only affair with the barmaid, conducted in one of the empty back rooms of the pub. Rarely was she admitted to Madingley Road despite her habit, in drink, of standing beneath what she believed to be the Amises’ bedroom window and keening for another encounter with ‘Billy’, Kingsley’s middle name, a relic his army days. Apparently she never learned his given name and was happily indifferent to his eminence. Martin, now in his early teens, was still only half aware of what was going on around him. ‘It did not seem’, he reflects, ‘all that different from Swansea. But there was more of it, pursued with apparently greater energy.’

  It is difficult to conceive of a more dissipated milieu than Madingley Road but such imaginings are superfluous thanks to George and Pat Gale, occasional visitors at Swansea and now regulars at Cambridge. Gale, staunch Tory and then at the Daily Express, lived in Staines. Despite being extremely well paid his baronial ambitions were constrained by the punitive tax regime of the then Labour government and he had to make do with one half of a gigantic Victorian-Gothic pile, albeit the part which, to his great satisfaction, included an absurdly vast ballroom. There was a regular, indeed incessant, counter flow of revellers between Staines and Cambridge, attendant guests at both locations playing the double role of participant and scrutineer, assessing the relative levels of excess achieved by each. In truth there was no competition with Gale able to outdo the Amises financially and offer a limitless supply of expensive drink and food. The Gales’ house also had three more bedrooms, the ballroom was frequently the site for hand-to-hand combat – males only – and the Gales’ non-paying guest, Ronnie, was the equal of Nickie as the house’s faintly debauched social secretary.

  Philip was absent for much of the Cambridge period, his precipitate encounter with Nickie taking place in Majorca. Kingsley and Hilly, despite their other failings, were conscientious parents and recognized that their elder son’s time at secondary school in Swansea would frustrate any ambitions he might have beyond blue-collar work so they enrolled him as a boarder at the fee-paying Friends’ School in Saffron Walden. Sally, aged eight when they moved to Cambridge, went to a local primary school, and infancy rendered her largely oblivious to the curiosities of her environment. Martin, however, arrived with the family aged twelve and was sent to the nearby grammar, Cambridgeshire High School for Boys. He was thus the only person – and I use the term with caution, given that the beginning of his teens involved the doorway to adulthood – who observed the Cambridge years without being a participant. According to Zachary Leader ‘Martin liked talking to his father’s students and friends and never seemed disturbed by the household’s unconventional comings and goings’.6 Which seems somewhat evasive and non-committal, given that it is difficult to imagine any precocious twelve- or thirteen-year-old remaining oblivious to a routine of Rabelaisianism. He had, for example, accompanied the family on excursions to the Gales’ mansion. Had he, I ask him now, at least some sense of living in a world completely detached, say, from that of his peers at Cambridgeshire High School? ‘Children can be very censorial, by which I mean that even if they are aware of everything happening around them they instinctively edit out parts of it that seem, well, unsuitable. Then, at Cambridge, I knew about sex and I knew that the adults around me were probably having sex. But it would be a year or two before Philip and I became coarsely energetic about it. So, since we had no experience of the real thing, it didn’t matter much to us what others got up to.’

  So you were by turns aware of what was happening at Cambridge and wilfully ignorant of it?

  ‘Well I suppose so. By the time I was in my early twenties and talking to Hilly and Kin
gsley about their marriage I wasn’t particularly surprised by what they had to say. And I remember during my first visit to the US in the 1970s I stayed with Bill Rukeyser who was very candid about Cambridge, he was part of it all of course. I was fascinated, shocked, to hear a detailed account but at the same time it seemed as though I already knew what he was telling me.’ In Experience Martin reports a conversation with Sir Richard Eyre, when the latter was Director of the National Theatre. Three decades earlier he had been one of Kingsley’s tutorial students at Peterhouse and a regular visitor at Madingley Road. ‘We must have come across each other back then,’ observes Martin.

  ‘Oh yes. You were so unhappy.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘You were so unhappy.’7

  Martin claims to have no recollection of what Eyre perceived as a state of desolation. ‘Was I? I was unlucky thirteen, overweight and undersized.’ One student showed him his recently purchased Burton’s black velvet suit – very Beatles-era, early-1960s couture, apparently. Martin bought one and was informed by the student: ‘You’re too fat for that suit, Mart,’ and he found an entry in Philip’s diary which read, ‘Mum told me she found Mart crying in the night about the size of his bum. I do feel sorry for him but (a) it is enormous, and (b) it’s not going to go away.’