Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Gully Wells recalls that during the eighteen months before their relationship officially ended her weekends at Lemmons were ‘. . . outstanding. A more hospitable household would be impossible to imagine; everyone was made welcome and guaranteed a wonderful time with limitless supplies of excellent food and drink. But with Kingsley and Jane the cracks were beginning to show. There were no dreadful public arguments but it was evident to all that something was wrong.’ She does not remember if she and Martin spoke of this or whether he seemed alert to the tension between his father and stepmother sensed by others. ‘What was clear, was that Kingsley enjoyed Martin’s company immensely, they got on well and one could detect a feeling of pride in his [Kingsley’s] dealing with him.’ Martin had, since going up to Oxford, been admitted cautiously to the coterie of friends with whom Kingsley shared confidences, albeit sometimes tactically, and he could match their wry misanthropy with something similarly sharp and unindulgent. When guests such as Conquest, Larkin, Paul Fussell, Theo Richmond or George Gale joined Kingsley for after-dinner drinks – or to be more accurate a continuation of pre- and concurrent dinner drinks – the temper of the exchanges would be clubbish but with a competitive edge. Martin was by 1970 a respected contributor to these sessions and he also began to spend more time talking to his father one-to-one, something that neither of them felt inclined to do before he gained his place at Exeter. ‘He was of course the same man with whom I’d spent most of my life but it was only then [at the end of the 1960s] that I started to get to know him . . .’ Of all the dissonant autobiographical echoes that run through The Rachel Papers the only one that is entirely smothered involves The Father. The description of Gordon Highway at the beginning of the novel reads like a ceremony of exorcism. Highway senior ‘gets fitter as he gets older’. Following his fairly recent acquisition of abundant wealth, source undisclosed, he has taken to playing tennis at weekends and squash three times a week at Hurlingham. Moreover, he gives up smoking and forswears strong drink. Kingsley had avoided any form of exercise since leaving the army and at the time that Martin was writing the novel he was conducting what he called, gleefully and sardonically, ‘research’ for his next piece of non-fiction, On Drink (1972). The book is a magnificent culturally diverse invitation to cirrhosis of the liver. In preparing his recipes for devastating cocktails Kingsley never relied upon hypothesis and Martin recalls that Lemmons during 1970–71 became a test of endurance for even the most hardened drinker, with Kingsley holding court as chief experimenter. It sounds delightful but one suspects that Kingsley’s encounters with these monstrous concoctions were touched with a sense of despair, a humorous pretext for simply getting drunk. The bizarre Dorian Gray figure of The Rachel Papers who seems to be magically regaining his youth obliterates any parallels with a very real man now approaching fifty for whom his wild past is irrecoverable.

  The Rachel Papers took Martin approximately a year to write. He began in late summer 1971 after his return from Spain and completed the first draft in September 1972. Before leaving for another short visit to Spain, again with Gully, he placed the proof on the desk of his father’s study with a note asking him what he thought of it. But surely he knew you were writing it? ‘Yes of course he did. But we didn’t speak of it when it was in progress.’ What did he say when you returned from holiday? ‘He said it was good, and funny.’ When did he, Martin, first read Girl, 20; before or after he had completed The Rachel Papers? (Kingsley’s novel came out approximately four months beforehand.) ‘Afterwards, yes certainly afterwards.’

  In the novel which launched Kingsley’s career, Jim and the narrator reflect both versions of Kingsley, the one he allowed himself to be when off the leash, perhaps writing and talking with Philip Larkin and the one burdened with obligations to family, job and so on, and not quite able to say, or do, as he wished. This technique of shared dissimulation, with two versions of Kingsley’s personality cooperating yet remaining autonomous would become his trademark, a feature of all of his fiction. It emerges in the split perspective provided by Yandell the narrator and Vandervane his principal subject. It is painstakingly avoided in all of Martin’s and here we begin to recognize the true significance of Charles’s ‘Letter to My Father’. We learn nothing of its content because in truth the letter cautiously assembled by Charles and the novel written by Martin are the same thing. It was not that Martin had to dispense with key aspects of his own personality to step out of his father’s shadow. Rather, he was politely moving Kingsley out of the picture – and the wry inversions of each aspect of his character indicate this – as a statement of intent. Charles is as much an extension of Martin as Jim was of Kingsley. The difference is that while Dixon and his narrator set a precedent for Kingsley’s habit of infiltrating his work in order to remake himself Charles was an experiment in untrammelled self-scrutiny.

  Colin Howard remembers Martin at various stages of his development from shiftless teenager to prodigious young novelist. ‘Obviously the youth left with us [he and Sargy Mann] when Kingsley and Jane went to the States and the man with three dazzling novels to his name had undergone transformations, but the intervening period was barely ten years. And leaving aside the fact that he had succeeded, become famous, it was remarkable how many aspects of his personality endured. In the memoir in My Oxford he presents himself as a guileless unaffected sort, intellectually and as far as girls are concerned; this is very far from the truth.’ Does he, I ask, recognize Martin in Charles Highway? ‘Oh yes. But the effect is curious because Charles speaks mainly to the reader. In Maida Vale and later in Lemmons Martin was generous with his drollery, not cruel you understand but everyone felt slightly guarded when talking with him. He was like Kingsley in that respect. You felt you had to monitor anything you said in case you ended up as the butt of a witticism.’ This, presumably, was the confident post-Oxford Martin? ‘More so, yes, but even as a seventeen-year-old he was dangerously sharp.’

  I ask Colin Howard and Sargy Mann if the figure in My Oxford, ingenuously loitering in Blackwell’s in the hope of striking up a conversation with a girl evokes memories. They find this hilarious. Mann: ‘In a way, but not as you might expect. I can imagine it as one of his strategies, presenting himself as diffident to gain the poor creature’s confidence; a conceit if you like.’ Colin Howard adds: ‘During the couple of years before he went to Oxford there was a procession of girls through the house. You get to feel that even the title, The Rachel Papers, involves something close to modest self-deprecation given that I doubt if he could recall the names of his numerous conquests – Abigail, Jenny, Petra, Clarissa, Joan – I’m probably making them up – there were so many, but it’s amusing to contrast Martin’s busy lifestyle with Charles’s apparent preoccupation with a particular girl.’ Howard’s use of ‘apparent’ is perceptive. Certainly Charles does not present himself as a rake, obsessed with Rachel only because she is the one female who appears immune to his charm, but this is more a matter of omission than probability. Rachel presents an oblique, arbitrary challenge and his desire for her is fed as much by confidence in his own ability to command and persuade as by such vagaries as sex or affection. Martin finds in Nabokov ‘a certain Parnassian triumphalism’ with the coda that this is a failing he greatly admires. Charles, like Nabokov, is unapologetic.

  The parallels between Martin’s and Kingsley’s first novels are tempting and misleading. Dixon finds himself among a cabal of figures who are by equal degrees loathsome and farcical. We feel they are fully deserving of punishment by satire and that Jim’s vituperative aspect will subside once he is among friends, notably Christine and someone like the reader who has laughed along with him and shared his fantasies for the duration of the novel. To admit that we like Charles, perhaps even envy his manipulative hypocrisy, is something that most of us would do only in private. Equally, few of us would dare articulate our abhorrence for him to anyone but ourselves for fear of seeming naïve or sanctimonious; he is, after all, only an invention.

  Did Martin fe
el that Jim Dixon was sitting at his shoulder as he created Charles Highway? ‘Obviously both were “coming of age” novels, and there was some of us in each of them [Charles and Jim].’

  John Gross, then editor of the TLS, and guest at one of the numerous, informal gatherings at Lemmons, asked Martin if he had any interest in a full-time junior post. He did but asked if the appointment could be deferred for about six months. Did you explain why? ‘No, I didn’t. I don’t think I was asked.’ He was finishing his novel, still living at Lemmons and making occasional contributions to household expenses by putting in part-time hours first at an exclusive art gallery in Mayfair (‘Very exclusive. On average one customer per day.’), next as a trainee copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency (‘I was only there for a month or two’) and occasionally in Colin Howard’s electrical repair shop in Rickmansworth. Colin Howard: ‘Oh yes. He did at least one day per month. He appeared busy with other things but he was simply taking time off from his real, if unofficial, occupation in the room above Kingsley. He spoke rarely of what he was doing but everyone knew and he was relentless, dedicated.’ He began work officially at the TLS in March 1972 but he had already reviewed books for the Daily Telegraph, the Observer and the Spectator. A contract for The Rachel Papers had been drawn up with Cape a month later after Kingsley’s agent, Pat Kavanagh and Cape’s chief commissioning editor Tom Maschler had dined at Lemmons. Both asked when he was likely to finish his novel, which he claims to find puzzling since he had not mentioned it to either of them. Of the jokes which circulated during Martin’s period at the New Statesman the most widely recalled involved the answer to a competition on who could come up with the unlikeliest book title. The winner, unanimously, was Martin Amis: My Struggle.

  He left Lemmons in December 1972 shortly after delivering the final draft of The Rachel Papers and beginning work at the TLS. He shared a maisonette just off Pont Street, Belgravia with his old friend Rob Henderson and Rob’s girlfriend Olivia. Rob had come into a modest inheritance, all of which he spent on the lease for the property (‘he couldn’t begin to afford to live there’ says Martin). Rob had now become Trainee Film Editor and Apprentice Set Manager but his salary was largely unchanged. Rob and Martin would remain in close contact for the next two to three years, but the brief period in Belgravia marked something of a crossroads in their friendship. On the surface both appeared to have prospects, Martin among the literati with a contracted novel and a full-time job and Rob in film. But during Martin’s period in Oxford those aspects of their temperaments that had secured the early friendship had evolved very differently. Unaccountability and irrational misbehaviour had for Martin become subordinate to a taste for control; matters he could by equal degrees contemplate and relish were no longer his animus or mood. Colin Howard remembers Rob at this stage as both unnerving and tragic. ‘He and Martin both misbehaved when they used to hang around together during the Maida Vale years, but for Rob this gradually became more like dependency which, plus alcohol and drugs, could have unpleasant effects. He was once arrested for attacking his mother and although he was too slight of build to do anyone serious damage he could be alarming. I didn’t know him that well but it was evident that he and Martin were growing apart, not that they quarrelled, as far as I know. I suspect that for his own sake, though, Martin began to keep him at arm’s length.’

  He was also, by now, beginning to mix with a very different set. His most enduring friendship has been with Christopher Hitchens, aka Hitch, and although they had overlapped at Oxford they first began to socialize regularly when Martin was completing The Rachel Papers.

  Hitchens: ‘You could tell that there was a shimmer of danger about him [Rob]. He got drunk quickly and very menacingly. I knew that he behaved badly to at least two girls who wouldn’t sleep with him – this was when he was still with Olivia. Not nice at all. You could say that he was Martin’s “low life guy”, he always liked to keep in touch with someone or something nasty and downmarket, and by the time I got to know Martin, Rob was in steep descent. And I think I deposed him as Mart’s intimate – we’d talk about everything from the quality of women to our families. What cemented our friendship was the death of my mother. Martin didn’t know her but the letter he sent me was far more sincere than anything else I received at the time. I wish I still had it.’

  Martin: ‘We didn’t “first meet” at a particular place or time, but in my couple of years at the TLS, three or four men began to spend time together.’ Clive James, apparently, gave the impression of having lived. He dressed in standard early-seventies gear – low-slung denims and leathers, notably – and looked like an extra from Easy Rider. He had only been in London for three years, but he seemed a generation ahead of the rest. ‘He could be the funniest’ recalls Martin. ‘I’d met Hitchens and James Fenton in Oxford but got to know them properly in 1972 or 73. I also met Julian [Barnes]. Most worked on the Staggers [New Statesman].’

  The contrast between his new associates and Rob, who was frequently coming to remind him of the state of hapless inertia to which barely four years earlier they had both consigned themselves, influenced his decision to leave the Belgravia maisonette after less than a year. Shortly before he moved there was, however, time for a party. Martin explains the ‘launch’ of The Rachel Papers: ‘That’s the way it was in those days. A minority-interest field. All quiet. This was the 1970s – no readings, no interviews, no parties. I gave the launch party myself.’ Odd then that he should also recall, barely a fortnight later, a man of about his own age on the tube, holding a copy of his novel and shaking with ill-suppressed laughter; not to mention the avalanche of reviews which had praised the emergence of a new unsparing satirist. ‘Well,’ he adds, ‘it sold only fifteen hundred copies.’ He does, in Experience, refer to one review, his worst, ironically by Peter Prince in the New Statesman, in which he is accused of indulging a tasteless schoolboyish brand of humour. The rest were unflinchingly complimentary, and it is a credit to the fair-mindedness of contemporary reviewers that none dwelt upon his family connection. Even Peter Ackroyd, tireless scourge of anything vaguely conventional, enjoyed this piece of mordant readability. Aside from Martin himself, eleven people attended the launch party: the Amis siblings, Philip and Sally, Martin’s newest and soon to be most regular acquaintances, Hitchens and Clive James, Pat Kavanagh, the other residents Rob and Olivia, and Kingsley, accompanied by his old friend and mentor Bob Conquest.

  Hitchens: ‘God, yes, the launch. The flat, Belgravia somewhere, was comfortable enough, a little drab – though the places I kept at the time were probably much, much worse. There was some champagne, malt whisky from Kingsley I think, all manner of other poisons. Everyone was drunk very quickly. Martin said a few words and I chatted up his sister. We then slept together. No one felt this worth commenting upon. In retrospect, and given Sally’s fate, there was something tragic about her. We were the last to leave the flat and I think that if it hadn’t been me she would have gone with absolutely anyone. Very sad. I think it was company, even protection, she was looking for, not sex.’

  Of the revellers as a whole it would be difficult to imagine a more unlikely combination of affinities and inclinations. Conquest in works such as The Great Terror was responsible for exposing to the liberal intelligentsia of Europe and the US the tyranny of Communism in practice and the gigantic scale of Stalin’s genocide while Kingsley, in his Conservative Party pamphlet Lucky Jim’s Politics (1968) had declared similarly that left-wing ideology was by its nature authoritarian. Hitchens was an unapologetic disciple of Trotsky avowing that the drawbacks of Socialism in one country could be rectified only by global revolution and Communism for all. Clive James was his raffishly liberal associate, rather like Kingsley to Conquest. Martin was, at this point, enthusiastically indifferent but if pressed would probably have confessed to being centre-left.

  Clive James: ‘At the time of the launch I was spending a fair amount of time with Ian Hamilton of the New Review, as well as doing some wo
rk for the Statesman. It was a small group of people who in other circumstances would have had little reason to spend time together drinking, but that was Martin for you. It would be wrong to say he was the cause of unlikely friendships, but, well, perhaps he was. It was difficult to imagine how Hitch, Fenton, even Clive James, could have ended up as mates of Kingsley and his fellow Tories. Martin was the common factor. If you enjoy wit, sharpness, you forget divisions. So maybe that night launched more than the novel.’ By midnight everyone was too drunk to recall how the evening ended. Most took breakfast and lunch together and the fact that Hitchens and Sally had shared a bed at the nearby Cadogan Hotel was treated by her brother (‘he only told me’ says Martin) with polite amusement; he had almost been admitted to the family. Martin recalls the evening with distracted affection – ‘Well, of course, I was happy about the novel. And the next day we got together for lunch’ – and there is a prescient similarity between the launch party and Martin’s journey through the rest of what he calls ‘the joke decade’. He was usually at the centre of everything, emerging largely unaltered, the cause of the event but not really there.

  Little more than a fortnight later he moved west from Belgravia to what was called a ‘mansion flat’ in one of the once grand, late-Victorian terraces between Earl’s Court and Cromwell Road. ‘Which’, he adds, ‘I shared with seven or eight others. I had one room.’ The £250 advance from Cape for The Rachel Papers seems modest by today’s standards but in the early 1970s it was generous for a debut novel. Maschler’s estimation of his own critical acumen was grossly inflated but he was an adept literary impresario. He could spot a marketable product and Pat Kavanagh, now Martin’s agent, had no difficulty in negotiating the advance, plus a favourable deal on royalties and a contract with Cape for his second novel prior to his first going into print. In the light of his relative financial security his choice of a flat, indeed a street – called appropriately Hogarth Road – that seemed to conserve aspects of London from Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square is intriguing.