There are obvious differences, of course; principally Martin is either too in awe of the canon or lacking in confidence to turn intuition into vilification. Either way his inhibitions would soon be dispersed. It is astonishing that within four years of his having first properly encountered literature per se Martin would be writing pieces for the TLS, the New Statesman and Observer that caused great trepidation among the most established writers with books out for review.
Aside from their shared tastes and literary predispositions one other parallel is striking. This was the first time that Martin had written letters to anyone. In Experience he calls the exercise ‘my half of this embarrassing correspondence’,7 (p9), which is part honest self-deprecation, part false modesty. Composing a letter to an intimate friend, a lover or a relative is the closest in real life that we come to writing fiction. In both instances we concern ourselves with marshalling our untidy wealth of activities, information and emotions into a coherent narrative, one that will by degrees convince, engage or entertain the reader. Some letter writers are embarrassingly or shamelessly ingenuous and one could find counterparts in fiction in Mr Pooter or Bridget Jones. The Amises, however, like to amuse their correspondents and, to an extent, indulge themselves, with admirably wrought tales. They don’t dispense with authenticity – what they write is based principally on what they feel – but both enjoy the opportunity to fabricate, to create worlds in miniature from the raw material of otherwise dreary existence.
In his letters, particularly to Larkin and Robert Conquest, Kingsley freed himself from the confining routines of what could or could not be said. He confessed to everything, especially his extra-marital activities, but he also allowed the letter to become a conceit, a juggling act between report and ostentation. Imagine him as an eager novice. ‘Sorry to hear you’re not getting on too well with the colonials – are they all crappy. And you’re working hard too. Still, you’ll be back before you know it. Yes, that’s when you’ll be back.’ This is the son, and there is something about the closing sentences – a self-conscious impatience with platitudes – that recall the father perfectly. Within six months Martin was trying out virtuoso intolerance, setting up targets from his catalogue of peers and tutors.
A pleasing extra is that the awful little Hun called Schicht, with whom I took the Latin exam, who got up after three quarters of an hour saying ‘Interesting . . . interesting’, failed. The Hobbiegobbie [Ardagh] himself has fixed me up with lessons once a week in Brighton. I go to an old shag called Mr Bethell who, I should say, is experiencing puberty for the second, or possibly the third time. This old dullard can speak seventeen languages fluently, including Latin, Ancient Greek, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, Romney [sic], and the language of the tinkers. He says things like ‘There are 140 first conjugation deponent verbs’: I say ‘Well I never’ and he says ‘They are Venor, Conor’ and so on and on and on. He is also a high-priest of B.O. well versed in its most secret arts, and master of the most esoteric precepts of his craft. He still enjoys frequent use of his limbs although they taper off, after the second joint, to gangrenous supporating threads.8
In 1946 Kingsley explained to Larkin why he enjoyed writing to him . . . ‘because I never feel I am giving myself away and so can admit to shady, dishonest, crawling, cowardly, brutal, unjust, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, perverted and generally shameful feelings that I don’t want anyone else to know about; but most of all because I am always on the verge of violent laughter’.9 Kingsley and Jane were not Martin’s confessors to the extent that Larkin was for Kingsley but they had unwittingly encouraged him to invest in letter writing that curious mixture of disclosure and performance that is the trademark of good fiction. Here is Kingsley:
This is not going to be very long I am afraid as I have got to go out to tea with a young lady; so charming (‘Like a picture, Herr Issyvoo’), whom I met this morning at her mother’s instigation. Somehow I don’t feel we are going to get along all that well: it was betrayed that I had literary ambitions, to which she remarked: ‘I love arty people’ er awr – ah-eeh mmm ooooh er-beeeeeeeee.10
And Martin:
I met a fine girl called Charlotte a couple of weeks ago and I went round to her flat in Hamilton Terrance to take her out. I was introduced solemnly to her mother who, after asking if she could offer me a drink, expressed a desire to know where I lived. I told her and she exclaimed ecstatically: ‘Oh! You must live near Elizabeth Jane Howard!’ I calmly told her just how near Jane Howard I lived. She was suitably impressed and went on to eulogize ‘After Julius’. As it happens, I went on to make Charlotte mine; a complement to an enjoyable evening.11
Kingsley, whatever he really felt about the arty young lady, was confiding to Larkin an early example of unfaithfulness; he was at the time going out with Hilly. Martin’s ‘fine girl called Charlotte’ was real enough, though he did not have sex with her. Pretending that he had done, to Jane and his father, belonged in the same class of thrill as Kingsley’s confidential story for his friend: for each of them truth was something to be manipulated and controlled.
The presence evoked by the Brighton letters would re-emerge, more polished and ruthless but essentially intact, as Charles Highway narrator of Martin’s first novel The Rachel Papers. See if you can detect which the two pairs of passages below comes from the novel and which from the letters. They even evolved exclusive, self-deprecating codes for their correspondents. Kingsley, after sending his regards to Larkin (‘Yours etc. . . .’) always finds space for ‘bum’, while Martin, more decorously, renames himself ‘Osric’ for all letters to his father and Jane.
Don’t I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Bayswater Road . . . Is that all it fucking is, I thought. For the question that interested me about this feeling was not ‘What is it?’ so much as ‘Does it matter? Is it worth anything?’ Because if there isn’t a grain of genuine humility there, it’s the electrodes for me.
We have had ten days of torrential rain punctuated with blizzards, hurricanes, whirlwinds, earthquakes, and like upheavals. My only comfort is indulgence in gruelling, man-of-the-elements walks through the blinding rain. I have also been known to look out of my window and silently determine, with haggard stoicism, that I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.
‘Brighton’, recalls Martin, ‘was exhausting but also satisfying in a way. Very little happened. There was a calendar of deadlines for examinations and interview dates for university entrance. I went to Bristol and Durham, was accepted by both, but the Oxford Entrance seemed impossible. Ardagh fixed me up with a job at a prep school just outside Brighton where I taught everything that I wasn’t studying, largely mathematics, and I was placed in charge of rugby training. I was rather good at that. I needed some money to show that I could look after myself, in the hope that Kingsley would chip in and help me rent a flat, well a bedsit, on Marine Parade away from the hostel. So yes I take your point. There is a remarkable contrast between the letters and my memories of that year.’
Were you amusing yourself, or trying to entertain or impress Jane and Kingsley?
‘Both. Of course both.’
3
Oxford
Martin was interviewed at Oxford by John Carey, then Fellow in English at St John’s and by Jonathan Wordsworth, the English don at Exeter, and accounts of what went on differ considerably, depending on their source. St John’s was Martin’s preferred college. His father and Philip Larkin had met and become friends there and according to Kingsley St John’s, along with Balliol, Magdalen and Merton, maintained a special intellectual esteem. Undergraduates who went to these four were effortlessly clever. Everywhere else was full of strivers and throwbacks from Waugh’s Brideshead, the latter again crowded conspicuously into Christ Church and Oriel. According to D. J. Taylor, St John’s folklore has it that John Carey, a man of great probity and fairness, suffered something close to a crisis of conscience. ‘He was determined not to
allow the Amis lineage to affect the interview or his decision, yet he soon found himself doing battle with a precocious version of Martin’s famously disputatious father.’ Carey disliked the class-bound laziness of Oxford, the tendency to substitute rote-based intellectual conventions for thinking, but even he was unnerved by Martin who in the examination had been daring and unorthodox. In Martin’s letter to Jane and his father he claims that Carey had turned him down for St John’s because ‘he was embarrassed by the state of my Latin’. Carey concurs. ‘Yes. Well, it was more than forty years ago but I think that his second-language competence caused our only reservations – he was offering Latin. In any event neither of us doubted his suitability as an Oxford entrant. His exam papers on English poetry were extraordinary.’ Did it not, I ask, seem odd that the son of a St John’s alumnus should be sent somewhere else? Even during the sixties it was still a widely observed convention for sons to follow their distinguished fathers into the same college. ‘Was it? Well perhaps. But we [St John’s] certainly didn’t turn him down because he wasn’t good enough. I think we had reached our quota for English entrants that year.’
The most amusing account of his three days in Oxford is his rewriting of it for The Rachel Papers. Highway’s experience seems very different from Martin’s in that he is interviewed by a single tutor who, physically and temperamentally, precludes resemblances with Carey or Wordsworth. Knowd looks like a caricature of the radical late-sixties don: ‘In urban-guerrilla dress; variegated, camouflage-conscious green and khaki canvas suit; beetle crusher, pig stomper boots; beret. Jack-Christ face and hair.’1 Neither Carey nor Wordsworth dressed in this arch-revolutionary manner but the latter’s interview technique – and indeed his routines as tutor for the subsequent three years – caused Martin to feel that he might have done. ‘He was charmingly aloof, by which I mean that by instinct or design he gave the impression that what you said to him was acceptable but not quite up to his mandarin expectations. I suspect that for most of the time he just didn’t care very much.’ Carey on the other hand was chillingly erudite, encouraging Martin to revisit the attacks on orthodoxy of his exam papers but not as a reprimand; rather to remind him that if he did intend to maintain assaults upon the heavyweights of the canon he should at least protect himself with consistency. This is Knowd:
For example. In the Literature paper you complain that Yeats and Eliot . . . ‘In their later phases opted for the cold certainties that can work only outside the messiness of life. They prudently repaired to the artifice of eternity, etc., etc.’ This then gives you a grand-sounding line on the ‘faked inhumanity’ of the seduction of the typists in The Waste Land – a point you owe to W. W. Clarke – which, it seems, is just a bit too messy all of a sudden.2
This figure combines the casual demeanour of Wordsworth with the intellectual acuity of Carey. As an undergraduate Martin only ever encountered Carey again as a lecturer, never on a one-to-one basis in tutorials and seminars, but the contrast between the figure who showed him how far he would really have to push himself to close the gap between his aspirations and a good degree and the languid individual with whom he would have to spend most of his tutorials in Exeter College seemed striking and faintly absurd. By the time he went up to Exeter Kingsley had begun to tell him stories about his own experiences in Oxford. He admired most of all his undergraduate tutor at St John’s, J. B. Leishman, one of the greatest mid-twentieth-century critics on Metaphysical Verse, which Amis enjoyed; when he began his thesis he was equally enthralled by encounters with F. W. Bateson, non-doctrinaire left-winger and founder of the then radical critical journal Essays in Criticism. At the other end of the spectrum was his first supervisor Lord David Cecil, whose lectures were musters of fatuity disguised as Wildean insights. Kingsley remembers him best for his absence; when sought for consultation Lord David was always apparently engaged with other undisclosed activities. Soon after his arrival in College Martin had confirmation of what his interview caused him to suspect: Jonathan Wordsworth was a late-twentieth-century version of Cecil. His habits – unfeigned or precious, no one could tell – included greeting his pre-luncheon tutees in his silk dressing gown, conducting part of the tutorial while he shaved in the adjoining bedroom and very often spending much of it discoursing on matters resolutely irrelevant to the designated topic, particularly the vintage and quality of the sherry and whisky he would dispense to all.
It is doubtful that Martin was confident or arrogant enough to foresee his Oxford years as the beginning of his ascent to success, but it is none the less intriguing that he elected to spend his last summer before going up revisiting the state of aimlessness that had stymied much of his adolescence and teens. It was as though he had decided to say goodbye to the fool he might have become, a fate that he had begun to suspect some of his peers, Rob Henderson in particular, would find difficult to avoid. He and Rob decided to drive through Europe to Spain and then take the ferry to Majorca to join Si and Fran (whom Martin still declines to identify) at Si’s father’s house near Soller. Martin had spent six weeks working in Colin Howard’s hi-fi and record shop in Rickmansworth and had saved what he thought would be enough for food and occasional overnight accommodation. In any event the pound had recently been devalued and currency restrictions specified that a maximum of £50 could be taken abroad. Rob had attempted to raise cash for the trip by recklessly confident bouts of spread-betting on horses and greyhounds. Neither he nor Martin had made any profit from their exchanges with bookmakers and the difference between their preparations for the journey exemplifies the radical change that had occurred in Martin’s approach to life in general. While he still regarded Rob as his closest friend there is evidence that he had begun to treat him also as a curiosity, a figure as endearingly capricious as ever but whose habits he now viewed with amusement and detachment by turns.
They decided to drive. ‘Rob’s mum had a Mini and we borrowed that. We got the boat to Calais, drove through France and reached Spain without any problems. At Si’s house there was a Mini Moke and the four of us used that for much of the stay.’ Designed by British Leyland in a moment of cultural frivolity the Moke had a windscreen and a removable canvas top. It had four poorly upholstered seats and seemed by its nature to prefigure an endless summer through which lightly clad individuals would pass at little more than 30 mph. The 500 cc engine would by today’s standards be the sort found on a ride-on lawnmower.
Martin had promised his companions an audience with England’s most distinguished and hospitable expatriate writer, Robert Graves. He had first met him six years before when Kingsley and Hilly, still together and planning a shared future, had stayed with the Graveses and sought their advice on what it would be like to live permanently in either the Balearics or on the Spanish mainland. The Graveses, Robert and Beryl and their daughter Lucía, the latter roughly the same age as Martin, were used to often unsolicited visits by writers, and the man himself had evolved a routine for dealing with petitioners. He would read their poetry and short extracts from their prose and offer honest advice. It was an immensely generous, altruistic regime but the arrival of Martin, Rob, Si and Fran perplexed Graves somewhat. Kingsley had asked Martin to pass on his regards – but he was used to studious, attentive would-be writers, not four nineteen-year-olds. The hilarious exchange between him and Rob, reported in Experience,3 is according to Martin authentic. Rob was respectfully knowledgeable of Graves’s reputation as a poet but by the time he and Martin engaged him in conversation the boundary between figurative excess and reality had dissolved. Martin: ‘I said [to Rob] “Pretend he’s a god” so Rob asked Graves to “Turn that mountain into a volcano, make that mountain open up, make the cloud go away, summon a tidal wave”.’
Martin closes his description of the mildly surreal episode with ‘Robert got hold of Rob and roughly tickled him’ and follows up with an account of how they drove slowly down the steep hill from the Graveses house in the Moke with the seventy-three-year-old writer following them on foot, arms l
oaded with freshly baked bread and home-made pickles and jam. It is a vintage example of dissolute yet respectful youth making contact with a figure from an almost lost generation, but it is more still than that. Martin shows an equal amount of affection both for Graves and Rob, dispensing to the former humble respect and the latter companionable amusement. It is impossible to say for certain if the power relations that inform the prose accurately reflect what really went on thirty years earlier but we have no reason to assume that they do not. He remembered Graves from 1962, particularly an evening when Hilly and Kingsley had gone out for a meal and he and Philip had been looked after by Robert and Beryl. Jollities involved a culturally enriching game where the children would each contribute a line to a collective improvised poem. The contrast between this and soirées in the Amis literary household were striking even for a thirteen-year-old. There was, however, something about his father’s visit to Graves that carried an air of deference about it, as if the new boy was paying his dues to one of the patriarchs of the establishment of which he was now a member. Kingsley’s inspiration as a novelist came from his existence in a carefully constructed hall of mirrors, each reflector telling an engaging version of the truth but none making anything close to an ultimate claim upon candour. If there is any validity in the tempting thesis that the Amises father and son testify to a rare circumstance of genetic literary inheritance then it is here that the link between them is most telling. The expedition to Europe was like the Osric letters, an experiment in control, a testament to his ability to be at once the hapless participant in a sequence of events and their detached observer, to make himself both the subject of the story and its choreographer.
Rob’s mum’s Mini broke down on the French side of the Pyrenees during their return journey, a wry echo of what had happened to Kingsley and family as they took the same route back from their visit to Majorca in 1962. Si and Fran remained in Spain. Martin and Rob had sufficient money to have the Mini towed a little closer to Perpignon but nowhere near enough to have the cylinder head gasket replaced. Martin was the first to telephone London to ask if Colin would be able to send them an international money order. Kingsley and Jane were in Nashville and Colin advised him to try to find a job, a prospect that seemed to him perplexing and faintly surreal. What form of labour could a nineteen-year-old Oxford entrance scholar expect to find in the still rather primitive region of south-west France? He and Rob were informed by forbiddingly confident, and enormous, Scandinavian backpackers that the docks in Barcelona had changed little since the Civil War and were always ready to employ manual labourers. Martin and his friend were roughly equal in height and they entertained only briefly the prospect of pitching in with hardened Catalans in an unmechanized dockyard. Rob decided to telephone his mother and ask her for help. There is no evidence that she had ever even met Colin Howard but her reply was identical: get a job. For several days they slept rough in parks and, briefly, in a rather sinister charity hostel. Eventually Colin telegraphed money to them – he admits now that he had always intended to do so yet delayed the draft as his personal contribution to Martin’s ‘coming of age’. Rob drove most of the way back through France after Martin’s unfortunate experience of dropping a lit cigarette into the top of his hipster jeans which caused him to swerve into the path of an oncoming articulated lorry. Despite presenting himself and Rob as equally feckless in the episode of the broken-down Mini his coda in Experience discloses something closer to the truth
Martin Amis Page 8
