Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Colin’s close friend the artist Sargy Mann became a more frequent visitor and moved in full-time in 1967. Aside from Martin, only Colin remained in regular contact with Philip after he left. He introduced Philip to Sargy who encouraged his nascent interest in painting and advised him to enrol at the Camberwell School of Art. ‘I remember,’ Sargy Mann observes, ‘some time after Philip had enrolled at Camberwell, Kingsley asked him what he was doing – and I don’t know if he was feigning ignorance or really knew nothing of his son’s activities. Anyway Philip told him and he grimaced and said, “But painting, visual arts . . . it’s all very second-rate, isn’t it?” Maybe he was joking, it was difficult to tell with Kingsley, but I thought it one of the most hurtful, poisonous things I’d heard him say. He could make fun of people without being vitriolic but this upset Philip greatly.’ I ask Martin now if he thinks that Philip was the instigator of much of the hostility. ‘No, no, we were equally responsible.’ Then why, I wonder, did the household become more relaxed and untroubled after Philip chose to stay away for longer periods? ‘I was, what, coming close to seventeen and there seemed little point in continuing to make life difficult.’ His response is candid enough but it involves a half truth. He was certainly causing fewer problems in the house, but elsewhere he maintained the unaccountable lifestyle of the King’s Road hippie.

  He was in 1966 still enrolled at Davies Laing and Dick, retaking the five, failed, O-levels from his previous year. On average he would turn up for two days per week while the rest of the time he spent largely in the company of Rob Henderson, also doing resits. ‘Rob and I looked very similar, skinny and infuriatingly short. He sounded as though he came from minor nobility – he’d also been expelled, but from Westminster. We shared enthusiasms. We were both lazy. Neither of us could stand the sort of activity that involved effort and concentration, let alone mental commitment.’ It would be wrong to say that Rob took over from Philip as Martin’s mentor in insouciance but the two of them certainly enjoyed an attraction to fecklessness. They spent most of the period between autumn 1966 and summer 1967 in coffee bars on the King’s Road venturing out only in pursuit of girls who had fallen prey to their inept but cautiously planned introductions, or to nearby bookies to place bets; ‘only on the dogs’ insists Martin. Their reluctance to countenance horse racing reflected their downmarket affectations. Nevertheless they wore skin-tight velvet trousers – jeans were still at the time exclusively denim – and jackets of fashionably loud colouration. A café called The Picasso was a particular favourite. Neither of them paid heed to the high cultural register of its name – it was run apparently by an East End slum landlord – but girls from nearby offices would use it for coffee or lunch and at least two of its regular customers dealt in cannabis. Martin and Rob were more interested in the office girls. ‘Trying to get girls was all we ever did, so naturally we had some successes. I don’t know about Rob, but love was always the quest for Phil and me. I fell in love in 1967 (with “Rachel”). I wanted that to happen again.’

  Much has been written of the closing years of the 1960s, particularly 1967 when allegedly Europe and the US were seized by various states of transformative zeal, from hedonism disguised as political activism to rare examples of commitment and courage. Did he notice? I ask Martin. ‘Before the age of sixteen I had lived in the provinces. I had no reason to assume that London in the late 1960s was any different from the way it had always been. But there was an unmistakable loosening in the air. Only later did it become clear that some kind of cultural convulsion had taken place.’

  In Maida Vale the antagonism fomented by himself and Philip mutated to lazy attrition and by mid-1967 Martin had, wittingly or not, come to resemble the standard middle-class model of dutiful stepson. Kingsley and Jane had married in June 1965, with a civil ceremony in Marylebone followed by a short honeymoon in Brighton. The location was convenient for the London-based media: for the subsequent week the press was full of reports and pictures of the two photogenic literary superstars. The publicity had been orchestrated by Kingsley’s editor at Cape, Tom Maschler, who also arranged a lavish party at the Cape office for the couple on their return to London. Hilly had no illusions about a reconciliation but to witness Kingsley and Jane disporting themselves in the newspapers as a mature yet romantically besotted couple – there were accounts of their favourite restaurants, choices of wine and even on which sides of the bed they had elected to sleep – was especially distressing. They lived only two miles away and within a month Hilly had decided to remove herself and Sally from London. She enjoyed Wivenhoe, the small coastal village where she spent regular weekends at the Gales’ house, according to Peregrine Worsthorne ‘part baronial pile, part gin palace’. Within a few weeks she had found something more modest for herself and her daughter, a new semi-detached which Kingsley paid for. By early 1966 she had formed an attachment with D. R. Shackleton Bailey, occasional visitor at the Gales’ and a Cambridge don. If one were tasked to imagine an embodiment of everything that Kingsley was not Shackleton Bailey would have been it. He was a modest imbiber of alcohol and humourless observer of mankind’s various foibles which he felt largely undeserving of his comments. These he preserved for his academic interests, particularly Cicero and the language and culture of Tibet, of which he was Cambridge’s only specialist. Rumour had it that Hilly was his first ‘girlfriend’, though the term seems inappropriate for two people well into their forties. Martin remembers him with a mixture of civility and disbelief. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I think she wanted someone so unlike my father that she ended up with his polar opposite.’ They married in September 1967.

  On the surface, then, the destructive effects of the break-up had been repaired, with the two previous partners remarried and comfortably resettled forty miles apart. Philip, now living separately and enrolled for courses at Camberwell, kept in occasional touch with his mother but retained only formal contacts with Jane and his father, most specifically in relation to his allowance of £55 per month. Martin too was provided with generous funding for clothes and other unaccounted purchases and he would set off daily for further resits, now alongside A-levels, at Notting Hill. In Maida Vale, dinner parties and other civilized gatherings had replaced the raucous indulgences of Swansea and Cambridge and this seemed to have a collateral effect upon the second son whose behaviour, at least indoors, was orderly and not unlike the reformed almost decorous version of Kingsley which had evolved through his relationship with Jane.

  Once beyond an accountable distance of the front door, however, Martin spent virtually all of his time with Rob. Unsurprisingly in 1967 he failed all of his A-levels having managed over the previous two years to acquire in total six middle-grade O-levels. Kingsley had shown no particular interest in Martin’s, or for that matter Philip’s, educational prospects and Jane, grateful for the newly pacific domestic atmosphere, thought it best not to provoke further discord with too many enquiries on his progress. The question that had hovered and would now have to be addressed was that of university entrance. Martin had, he informed them with casual indifference, filled in his UCCA forms, though he did not comment on where he hoped to gain entrance let alone what he had applied to read. (Today he claims to have no clear recollection of this first attempt, nor even of having posted the form.)

  A small conference was convened involving Jane, Colin and with some reluctance Kingsley. Martin, now eighteen, had shown little interest in high culture. ‘Every now and then I read something like C. S. Forester’s Brown on Resolution. And that was all. And I studied the set texts for O- and A-level. As for Kingsley . . . Well I knew what he did for a living, that he was a writer, but I didn’t know what kind of writer he was. For all I knew he could’ve been producing Westerns.’ According to Jane she had in summer 1966 tentatively asked him what he wanted to do and he had answered, to her astonishment, ‘become a writer’. I cannot help but ask him to confirm this and he half concedes: ‘Yes, I was serious, though given my circumstances at the time it seemed absurd. A
ll adolescents want to become writers, don’t they?’ Nevertheless Jane encouraged him to read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice which he claims to have enjoyed, though this brief introduction to serious fiction had no discernible effect upon his, as he puts it, ‘lazy and easily distracted’ approach to A-level English.

  At the post-A-level (failed) meeting in 1967 Martin’s grand vocational ambitions were sidelined by more immediate questions; specifically, did he seriously intend to try for university? He replied that he did, though again without indicating preference for a particular subject. Jane said that she knew of a crammer that was far more distinguished and efficient than the Notting Hill institution. It was called Sussex Tutors, based in Brighton, and over the next few weeks she telephoned and wrote to Mr Ardagh, Senior Tutor for Arts and Humanities A-levels. She name-dropped and convinced him that Martin, despite his dismal record, had potential. Given that money was now available in abundance (it should be pointed out that Kingsley was now richer than he had ever previously been; along with solid royalties from his earlier Gollancz novels his advances from Cape were considerable) Martin was enrolled. He would begin study in Brighton in late August and in the interim Jane and Colin, suspecting that his extra-curricular activities had contributed to his dismal academic performance, arranged for him part-time office work. In his spare time and for the remainder of the summer he and Rob resumed their odyssey of dope and chasing girls.

  Martin, in Experience, presents his year in Brighton with the kind of faux embarrassment granted by fame and maturity, in which the slothful teenager toys pretentiously with intellectual aspiration. In truth, however, the period was far more transitional and formative than that. Sussex Tutors was as Jane promised, efficient and productive, assessing the intellectual capabilities of new entrants before allocating appropriate courses and modes of instruction. Mr Ardagh was in charge of English and Jane travelled to Brighton to meet him in August 1967. Kingsley, while aware of the new arrangement and prepared to cover the fees, showed no great interest in what it would actually involve; his wife went to Brighton alone. She and Ardagh agreed that Martin was gifted with a portentous natural intelligence. He was witty and linguistically far more adept than the vast majority of eighteen-year-olds. Ardagh found him slightly unnerving given that he had never before met someone so bright who had also consistently avoided any formal acquaintance with knowledge or learning. Ardagh and his colleagues had of course some vicarious notion of the Romantic idiot savant, uncorrupted by burdensome culture, but Martin was clearly not one of those. He could write sentences that turned eloquently upon their subject and he was ruthlessly articulate, able to diminish the confidence of other speakers simply by saying something.

  The agreed objective would be to turn Martin into a suitable candidate for university entry in 1968, which for someone who had spent the previous thirteen years resolutely apathetic to standard routines of memorizing anything seemed an absurd ambition. But once Martin had decided to learn by rote and assimilation he acquired two further O-levels and passed three A-levels – at grades A, B and D. One O-level was in Latin, undertaken at Ardagh’s advice as a necessary requirement for Oxbridge entrance. He was also being tutored by Ardagh for the Oxford entrance examination. Martin spoke occasionally to Jane about his aims. He had decided that he wanted to read English and mentioned that he had been thinking about Exeter and Durham universities.

  Martin’s year in Brighton was significant in another way too. I asked, ‘When did you first get to know your father, the novelist?’ ‘I was eighteen and I started with Lucky Jim. The novel was part of our lives but I didn’t actually read it until then. When I first arrived in Brighton I stayed at the school, a slight improvement upon a hostel, and the boy in the room next door asked me if I was related to the famous novelist, I said that I was and lent him my copy of Lucky Jim. I knew it was funny, and more than that, and what really, perhaps subconsciously, made me aware of what I liked about it was the sound that came from the room next door. His laughter came in painful bursts . . . he was trying to control himself but couldn’t.’

  Lucky Jim is far more than the prototype comic campus novel. It is a triumph of mischievous coercion, dividing readers initially between those who loved it and those, ridiculously, who saw it as presaging the decline of modern civilization. The novel is undoubtedly dominated by Jim’s presence and outlook, but this figure who is so resolutely set against the intelligentsia is clearly the product of an immensely intelligent literary craftsman. After reading it, I ask Martin, did he see his father differently. ‘Yes, and no. As a man he was like a novel, simultaneously functioning at different levels, each slightly at odds with the others.’

  At school and at Oxford Kingsley became famous and notorious as an imitator. He could reproduce the often eccentric locutionary habits of dons and other students and his alertness to the gap between what a person appeared to be and what they are went further than a talent for entertainment. It was the subject for his, failed, postgraduate thesis, became the engine for the novel that would launch his career and dog his reputation as a major writer: the literary establishment would never fully accept a man who seemed to perceive everything as open to caricature and ridicule. Although Martin is nowhere near as adept as his father at impersonation he had by his early teens developed a comparable talent for caricature, particularly in his ability to prey upon the guileless speech habits of others and present them as intellectual blemishes. Jane’s brother Colin Howard recalls that ‘his powers of detection were extraordinarily well developed. He could descry the subtlest weaknesses or peculiarities in people intuitively, and sometimes find a way of recreating them. It was not a vindictive quality, though rather unnerving.’ Just as Kingsley had created an interplay between his visceral disrespect for anything that made claims upon seriousness and the demands of writing fiction, so Martin in Brighton began to find a similar means which would prefigure the style of his own early novels. The most telling record of this is in the letters he wrote to Jane and his father during his twelve months on the Sussex coast. Thirty-five years later the letters between Amis senior and Philip Larkin would be published and recognized as the most outrageous epistolary novel ever, but written by very real correspondents. In the late 1960s no one apart from Kingsley and Larkin themselves had seen them, but there are quite remarkable parallels between Martin’s letters to his father and stepmother and Kingsley’s to his closest friend. Martin closes one of his first with an appraisal of authors encountered both on the A-level syllabus and recommended by Ardagh as supplements to impress interviewers. He now ‘feels qualified to say why Lawrence’s The Rainbore – is no good’. War and Peace and Daniel Deronda present him with no great misgivings and he ventures:

  More light[n]ing opinions –

  Ezra Pound

  –

  Trendy little ponce

  Auden

  –

  Good but I feel he must be an awful old crap

  Hopkins

  –

  Great fun to read, but doesn’t stand up to any analysis

  Donne

  –

  Very splendid

  Marvell

  –

  „ „

  Keats

  –

  All right when he’s not saying ‘I’m a poet. Got that?’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ – almost my favourite poem.

  His comments are unsubstantiated by argument but this is where the resemblances between him and his father, circa 1946, are all the more striking. Typically: ‘Now I must go and get some books out of the library to write an essay on “Spenser and the New Poetry”. I’M NOT INTERESTED IN THAT.’ Spenser, monarch of the Renaissance English canon, features prominently in Kingsley’s complaints simply because he is sacrosanct and compulsory, and Chaucer is subjected to caricature and derision for the same reason: the academic powers-that-be have elected a hierarchy of figures and will countenance no disfavour from those whom they are supposedly encouraging to think independently.


  When Kingsley became a lecturer he maintained his tirades against literary icons, especially those he was obliged to teach, and his antipathies, and preferences, closely resemble his son’s. In a letter to Larkin, he finds Keats ‘a boring, conceited, self-pitying, self-indulgent silly little fool . . . incompetent, uninteresting, affected, non-visualizing’.3 Martin at least thought ‘La Belle Dame’ a redeeming piece and enjoyed reading Hopkins despite the fact that under analysis he seemed incomprehensible. Kingsley, almost twenty years earlier in another letter to Larkin, had been less charitable: ‘his silly private language annoys me – “what I am in the habit of calling inscape” wellgetoutofthehabitthen . . . I find him a bad poet . . . Though I can see why people like him.’4 Pound was at the top of Martin’s list of miscreants and after teaching a class on ‘EP’ Kingsley complained to Larkin that ‘I can’t see what people mean who say he’s good. I mean, good in any way at all. Just can’t see anything in him, what?’ And what is more he had ‘said as much to the class’.5 Kingsley’s favourites, pre-twentieth century, were Donne, whose muscular lyricism his own verse recalls and Marvell. He wrote to Larkin praising a draft of his friend’s ‘If, My Darling’: ‘it has the ironic ambiguous feeling about it I admire in such as Marvell, as if you were pretending to be serious when really amused’.6 According to Martin both Donne and Marvell are ‘Very splendid’. More as confirmation than genuine enquiry, I ask if prior to then he had discussed poetry with his father. ‘Never, no. Nor with anyone else for that matter.’ What about D. H. Lawrence, for whom Kingsley reserved a lifetime of unqualified contempt? ‘No, not even Lawrence.’