Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Earl’s Court at the turn of the 1960s was made up of mostly white arrivistes from the Commonwealth, particularly Australians, and a bathetic scattering of the ailing bourgeoisie now obliged to share their century-old terraces with bohemians, bankrupts and others who had known or hoped for better times. Socially and culturally the area was exquisitely baroque. The semi-retired general practitioner on the ground floor was, thinks Martin, the only occupant with some familial link with the building. They shared little more than the occasional greeting or brief exchange but the thought that this individual still dealt with patients somewhere else in London conjured up images both macabre and engrossing. He spent most of his hours doing little beyond carrying around half-empty bottles of fortified wines and spirits while dressed only in his filthy unbelted dressing gown and billowing grey Y-fronts. Tramps, also with bottles, repaired frequently to the foot of the basement steps but appeared only marginally less dishevelled than the other tenants.

  The term ‘sock’ was Tina Brown’s invention (though often, wrongly, attributed to Hitchens) but its inspiration came from Martin’s room in Earl’s Court where he would live for almost two years. Francis Wheen, who worked both with Martin and Hitchens on the New Statesman reflects: ‘There was probably a slight hint of raillery in this. Hitch’s own places in the mid-1970s were pretty dire but they suited his habits and his politics. With Martin, well he seemed to take a certain morbid pleasure in hanging around among those who would most likely appear in his work as grotesques. Slumming I suppose.’ Whatever private indulgences were served by his fascination with living testaments to failure and degradation, their effects on his fiction are self-evident. The work that would eventually become Dead Babies was begun in Oxford, alongside his early drafts of The Rachel Papers. The latter subsequently occupied his attention for the simple reason that much of the narrative could be picked from experience; it was his obvious first novel. The former, however, was made up of a series of ghostly vignettes. Some were based on people he knew but in Martin’s version the constitutional constraints, which tempered their more distressing or ghastly features, had been removed, revealing a cast of figures in various stages of nihilistic self-destruction. He states in Experience that the idea for the novel germinated in the anarchic assembly of the individuals with whom he shared a house in his third year at Oxford, but there is evidence that it drew inspiration from periods before that, partly Madingley Road but sometimes also from his shady London experiences. Colin Howard provides a vivid account of Martin’s friends and associates from his profligate pre-Oxford years. ‘Si was without doubt the most peculiar of that set. I only ever met him on one or two occasions and for a long period we supposed that he didn’t really exist, a running practical joke by Mart. He would tell us long deadpan stories of what Si had got up to that day, or rather failed to get up to since he seemed hardly sentient, having taken or smoked anything available. The phone calls were, we thought, too hilarious to be true, brilliantly choreographed cameos. The phone would ring and he’d ask Martin for the address of Vanessa or someone. Martin would go to the address book and begin to read it out very slowly: “It’s 38, yes 38, Crox . . . ton Road” – he’d enunciate every syllable carefully – “Just off . . .” Then we’d hear the dialtone and a couple of minutes later the phone would ring again and Martin would answer, “Vanessa, yes. Yes, she does live at 38 Croxton Road . . . But Si why are you telling me this. You asked for her address.” It was excellent entertainment but we assumed that someone so raddled with drugs was too bizarre to be credible. Until we met him, of course. It was curious because via Martin poor old Si was superbly entertaining. In person he was sad, tragic.’ Martin describes him slightly differently. ‘Well off. Very languid. He’s a painter now. And clean.’

  This was prior to Martin’s conversion to literature, prompted by Jane Howard and Jane Austen, so we must therefore assume that some good novelists are born to the craft. Turn to Chapter 9 of Dead Babies in which the gin-soaked Giles Coldstream receives a phone call from his mother:

  ‘Ah, no, now, today isn’t a good day, actually. Oh, I’ve got lots of things I must do. Jolly busy indeed. And tomorrow, do you see, is Sunday, and one can’t very well – If it were Saturday tomorrow then nothing would be simpler than to . . . Are you sure?’ Giles muffled the receiver and looked up groggily at Celia. ‘Today wouldn’t be Friday, would it? Oh dear.’ He contemplated the telephone unhappily. ‘What? Yes, mother, you were right.’3

  ‘Yes,’ says Colin Howard, ‘that is most certainly Si.’ Giles also incorporates a hint of authorial self-caricature, given that when he does find it possible to marshal his disintegrating faculties he is preoccupied exclusively with one subject, the state of his teeth.

  Sargy Mann recalls that Rob Henderson often outdid even Martin as a ferocious poseur. ‘They all wore the most fashionable clothes available. Purple velvet trousers, flowered shirts with enormous collars, dandified cowboy boots come to mind, but Rob carried himself with a kind of arrogant disdain, masculine but self-consciously pretty also. I know the comparison might not seem apt but he reminded me of the Great Gatsby, albeit a teenage, drugged version. He was incredibly amusing, and he had a reckless disregard for anything formal and conventional – I think this was fed by contempt for his prep school and public school background – but when you were with him you always suspected that something terrible and precipitate was about to occur.’ Colin Howard agrees and adds, ‘Gatsby, yes. Plus Jekyll and Hyde. He was self-destructive and dangerous, violent, to others. He could swing from being affable to psychotic for no evident reason.’ When I first spoke to Sargy and Colin neither knew that Rob was dead. Both were saddened, but not at all surprised by the news. ‘I suppose he epitomized the worst aspects of that period, uninhibited, hedonistic but not really content. Disaster was always not far from Rob.’

  The characters in Dead Babies are hybridized versions of their actual counterparts. It would indeed be an insult to Martin’s guileful sleight of hand to expect otherwise. Yet with the more enthralling of them a particular imprint predominates and Rob finds his way into the book via Andy Adorno. As his surname indicates Andy is a magnificent specimen of highly sexed manhood, a living Adonis. He is also given to casual acts of violence, which for the women further enhances his attraction. I ask Martin if Rob was on his mind as the figure of Andy evolved. ‘Rob came from a déclassé, establishment family, Andy is, was, working-class but makes himself classless by force of personality. And while Andy is sculptural, forbidding, Rob was about five foot seven and very slight. But let’s put it this way, Andy was what Rob might have wanted to be.’ Martin adds, ‘You have to remember that it takes a long time, a very long time for a [fictional] character to mature. They might pick up things from one, two real people but once they reach the novel they have a life of their own.’

  By the time he was writing regularly for the New Statesman Martin had begun to evolve in his non-fictional prose a stylistic temper that both reflected his personality and provided an intriguing counterpoint to his novels. But in the intervening period when he was preparing Dead Babies the contrast between him as creator of such grotesques as Keith and Andy and the demands of his day job at the TLS was notable and faintly amusing.

  One of his earliest TLS reviews was of a selection of Coleridge’s verse edited by William Empson and David Pirie, which included a monograph-length introduction by Empson. To his credit Martin includes it in The War Against Cliché along with a footnote confessing that following Empson’s letter to his editor (Arthur Crook), he, as ‘Our Reviewer’ had replied in print, apologetically. In the review he had accused Empson of transgressing the dated mantra of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s 1946 essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, which derided the assumption that a poem, like a letter or an essay, contains a particular message. He adds, ‘The apology was, principally, for a serious factual error.’ He had his First, but he had yet to test his abilities in the world where ideas were no substitutes for insight. It would
be four months before The Rachel Papers went into print, and Sargy Mann offers a very shrewd observation on Martin during these transformative years. ‘What you have to remember is that unlike his father, who’d had a very orthodox, classical education, virtually from infancy, Martin became an autodidact and went from nowhere to an Oxford First in little more than three years. It was an extraordinary achievement, and reflected his natural intelligence and determination. At the same time I sometimes sensed that he felt slightly nervous, especially when his own set, Hitch, Fenton, sometimes Clive James and Julian Barnes, would come over to Lemmons. Kingsley himself was actually a shy man but once he started talking about matters he knew well he was in his element, he held court. When they were all together it was frighteningly competitive and Martin was as sharp and erudite as anyone. But still – and maybe I’m wrong – you sensed that he was trying just a bit harder than the rest, perhaps conscious of the fact that, well, in simple terms, he’d started later than all of them, had a lot to make up for.’

  His confidence was boosted when in autumn 1973 The Rachel Papers won him the Somerset Maugham Prize, which his father had been awarded for Lucky Jim. Colin Howard: ‘Kingsley was delighted, and amused. I can’t recall his exact words, but something like “Good that it’s back in the family. It should keep the old prig turning in his grave.”’ Maugham, the award’s patron, was alive in 1954 but an impartial panel of judges decided on its recipient. Kingsley’s reference is to a Sunday Times article published several months after the panel’s decision in which Maugham treated Lucky Jim as symptomatic of an imminent social and moral apocalypse.

  The reviews were largely appreciative but unlike Lucky Jim the novel did not generate newspaper profiles of its author. Nonetheless, Martin was now shifting from a point in the literary in-crowd granted chiefly by association to one touched by genuine promise. It was this that earned him the attention of Tina Brown, an undergraduate at Oxford.

  Debs’ balls, weekends at the estate, Ascot and so on had since the 1950s become defunct or anachronistic as routes to social or sexual advancement but the golden triangle of London and Oxbridge retained some magnetism even for scions of the conscience-ridden, Labour-voting middle classes. In Experience Martin presents Tina Brown as a late-twentieth century Zuleika Dobson.

  As an undergraduate Tina was already famous (and this at a time when no one was famous): fringe playwright, journalist, looker, prodigy. To get to her room in college I would have to step over waiting TV crews, interviewers, profilists.4

  In the summer of 1973 when The Rachel Papers came out Tina was nineteen, a second year at St Anne’s, and Martin’s description of her is certainly not hyperbole. That autumn, at the beginning of her third year, she won The Sunday Times Drama Award for her one-act Under the Bamboo Tree and the Peckenham Award for Best Young Female Journalist. As well as contributing to Isis she had already written articles for the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, which would employ her on a freelance basis as soon as she graduated in 1974. Her father, George Hambley Brown, had made a small fortune from producing popular British films in the 1950s and 1960s, including the Miss Marple series starring Margaret Rutherford, and her mother had been Laurence Olivier’s confidante and press agent. George’s first marriage, in 1939, to Maureen O’Hara, had been brief and well publicized. Martin, understandably, is guarded about the exact nature of their affair, which lasted slightly less than a year, but his description of its effect is revealing. ‘Before I met her I was beginning to understand what it must have been like to be Philip Larkin. A sense of grubbiness and exclusion, a combination of desire and resigned failure that women intuit and stay away from. Tina got that scent off me, gave me confidence. She banished that spell.’

  While the comparison between him and Larkin sounds absurd – Martin was already a practised and effective seducer – Tina represented both a special challenge and an alluring prospect. Her background, combined with her wholesome good looks – ‘compelling’ is the term most of her acquaintances reach for – and precocious self-confidence were impressive enough but they alone do not account for the effect she had on, mostly male, denizens of Oxford and London in the early 1970s. Zuleika, by comparison, was predictable. At the beginning of her second year Dudley Moore’s chauffeur-driven limousine drew up outside St Anne’s and Moore asked the porter to deliver a message to Miss Brown. Moore had never even seen a photograph of her but she had already achieved legendary status among the London social and cultural circuit. They began an affair the same day. Next in line was Auberon ‘Bron’ Waugh. Like Moore, Waugh arrived in Oxford unannounced, with no previous introduction and their relationship too began almost instantaneously. The weekend after they first met he invited her down to the Somerset manor house, Combe Florey, where his father Evelyn had held court and where Bron now resided, with his wife. How exactly he accounted for his ‘guest’ goes unrecorded but the fact that she inspired such acts in otherwise conservative figures testifies to her potency.

  She first met Martin during her second year at a party in London. They got on, but their relationship did not begin properly until 1973 after Martin had published The Rachel Papers. Although he would not be taken on as a full-time salaried correspondent for the New Statesman until the end of that year he was already doing reviews and filing articles, notably as the pseudonymous researcher into pornography, Bruno Holbrook. Waugh, who according to Anthony Howard was ‘still besotted with her despite her now being with Martin’, also did occasional pieces for the New Statesman, though he was better known for his savage caricatures of the great and flamboyant in Private Eye. He persuaded Howard, then literary editor, to consider some articles by a ‘brilliant’ Oxford student (she would in fact get a very ordinary second). Howard, when first approached was one of the few people in London never to have heard of her. He consulted Martin who still had contacts in the university, and did indeed know Miss Brown, rather well, and had dined once or twice at her parents’ charming sixteenth-century house in Little Marlow. Howard’s concern about her abilities as a journalist were quickly sidelined by Martin’s portrait of her quixotic character and magnetism, which he provided without disclosing his personal involvement. ‘It seemed’, recalled Howard, ‘like something from Tony Richardson’s film of Moll Flanders.’ So he commissioned her, first to do a piece on the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race (‘On the River’, 8 June 1973), followed by an account of the festival of vulgar hedonism that had allegedly become a feature of the once select resorts on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The result was ‘On the Beach’ (17 August 1973). Martin plays up his anxious unsuitability and Tina’s magic because he is reluctant to admit that both of them, when they met, felt an equal sense of egotistic gratification. The ‘grubbiness’ had nothing to do with him but it was an accurate description of the state of England in the early 1970s, a country in a state of social, political and cultural inertia. ‘Yes,’ reflects Colin Howard, ‘they did seem to come across as sublime alternatives to widespread drabness. Mind you Mart treated it all with customary irony. Kingsley too. He [Kingsley] was most impressed by Tina. He liked her but I don’t think he could quite take her seriously. She had insisted that Martin should be formally introduced to her parents, at tea at a rather grand hotel, and she was one of the few female visitors to Lemmons who felt confident enough to join in with the generally male-only exchanges, with Kingsley and Mart holding court. She was indulged, let us say, with amused fascination. She could indeed be unintentionally humorous. She telephoned once after a weekend at the house. I was alone there, answered and without asking who I was she said, “Is Martin there?” I replied he was not. “Well, what about Kingsley?” Sadly no. “Jane?” No, not Jane. There was a long pause. “Is anybody there?” We had met on a couple of occasions but I replied the house was empty, I was merely a disembodied presence, and I replaced the receiver. Her manner could be stentorian, especially for a twenty-year-old. Martin loved the story.’

  One cannot help but note some resemblances between Tina
and Diana Parry of Dead Babies. ‘Diana’s background may not in itself be illustrious, but it has an unquestionable lustre. Always she has mingled with the great.’5 Like Tina’s, Diana’s experience of wealth and high celebrity is built as much upon proxy and association as upon direct involvement. Their respective fathers work in the film industry, Tina’s as a Producer – the financier rather than the artist – and Diana’s as Assistant Chief Casting Director of Magnum Cinematic Promotions Ltd. Eleanor, Diana’s mother, functions as an intermediary between the lives of the fashionably rich and those who wish to read about them, filing copy for ‘Nell’s Notebook’ in the distinguished glossy Euroscene, an occupation not unlike that of Bettina Bohr, who skilfully choreographed media representations of Olivier and his set. Diana had a troubled school career – not unlike Tina who was expelled from two prestigious girls’ schools – and on one occasion Eleanor feels it necessary to apologize to the parents of a fellow pupil: ‘Then Bettina’s your child. Oh dear. I’m afraid Diana must pester her dreadfully.’6 The clues are proffered and playfully refashioned as a tentative, prescient signal of what would soon become his literary trademark.