Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Martin baulks at the idea that real people find their way unaltered into his fiction. ‘From The Rachel Papers on I’ve never really written a naïve novel in the sense that the action is presented as actually happening, there’s always a playful element, or a more than usually animated narrator hovering around.’ By this he means that a second filter is always present, ensuring that anything that might be mistaken for a naturalistic, even autobiographical frame is distorted. Nevertheless, he does not wholly reject the notion of the playful, animated narrator being stimulated by raw material from the world of Martin Amis. Hitchens describes him as a ‘meticulous observer’, a ‘collector’ of foibles and minutiae. Martin adds, ‘It’s serendipitous. Phrases, images, anything that hangs around in my memory for a while can get in [to fiction].’ But how does he select it for refashioning by the playful narrator? ‘It must resonate with some experience. It has to make me ask, “What’s it still doing in my mind?”’ It therefore seems not unreasonable to assume that fragments of his experience with Rob and Tina, among others, will resurface in Dead Babies. Martin was not, of course, invoking parallels between the lifestyle and dreadful fate of the Appleseeders and those of people he knew. Fiction writing is not as straightforward as that.

  Academic critics have routinely described Martin as a postmodernist, a writer who fidgets self-consciously with the processes of writing fiction, the most obvious example of this being the appearance of the somewhat gnomic writer Martin Amis in Money. This classification, like most of the tireless routines of academe, is lazy and misleading. Martin is not accountable to an ‘ism’. His novels, indeed the very act of writing novels, unsettle him as much as they do the reader and in this respect he has more in common with Kingsley’s closest friend Larkin than he does with his father. Larkin’s verse contains kernels of self-loathing, depression, nihilism that, elsewhere, would be taken as evidence of imminent nervous collapse or at least the signs of an anti-social saturnine temperament. But his genius is affirmed by an ability to make beautiful poems from fragments of his personality. So too with Martin. Except that the novel is a mechanism quite different from the poem. For one thing fiction is crowded with characters who, like us, seem to have pasts, irritable and deniable compulsions, distracted ambitions. People Martin knew, knew well, fascinated him in a manner that was humane and sympathetic, yet at the same time he speculated on how they privately felt and perceived themselves. He borrowed from them and left notes in the fabric of his work, but later he would begin to contemplate a far more complex and disturbing dilemma, one that involved the prospect of accountability; the writer as God-like master of the characters’ fate, yet, unlike any deity so far known, hesitant even regretful in his actions.

  A condition of the Somerset Maugham Award is that the prize money should be spent on a substantial period abroad. Its eponymous sponsor believed that all British writers, like himself, coveted the imaginative enlightenment promised by foreign parts. The farce visited upon Kingsley by this is recorded in his novel I Like It Here, an undisguised act of vengeance against his experience of a summer with his family in Portugal. Martin elected to visit a region once cherished by British and US bohemians and now attracting more profitable if less culturally ambitious visitors, southern Spain. He was fascinated by the anomalous combination of a military dictatorship which predated the Second World War and Blackpool-on-the-Mediterranean and he intended to spend much of the summer of 1974 with his mother and her new partner, Ali Boyd.

  The language school which Hilly and Boyd hoped would provide a regular and respectable income had been an ambitious project, involving the leasing of property for classes in Seville, and had effectively gone bankrupt in 1971. They concentrated their remaining resources in Ronda, opening their handsome townhouse to paying guests and running art classes there. This lasted less than six months and by the time Martin arrived they had converted their basement into a bar and tapas restaurant.

  Indulged by a relaxed hierarchy at the TLS Martin was allowed to draw his salary during his Maugham-sponsored sabbatical and Hilly persuaded Boyd to let him have, rent-free, a self-contained studio in the palacio adjacent to the main house with an airy sitting room overlooking the courtyard. Here he would spend two months working full-time on finishing Dead Babies and have the novel ready for submission to Cape on his return to London in the autumn. When he arrived in Ronda the book was made up of a series of vignettes, individuals in settings that contemporary readers would find both familiar and nightmarish. His problem was of how to come up with a shaping trajectory or theme; without either, these miniatures would proceed with little purpose, an arbitrary patchwork of short stories. Spain, to his surprise, indicated a solution.

  Martin recalls his visit as sepia-tinted and mildly surreal. He knew something of his mother and father’s life in Marriner’s Cottage, outside Oxford, but only vicariously through family lore. He, then, had been the same age as his new half-brother Jaime, born the year before his arrival, in 1973. Although in early middle age Hilly and Ali seemed to have taken on the busy, chaotic lifestyle of newlyweds (they would not actually marry for two years), lavishing attention upon the newborn and struggling with chaotic finances. ‘Obviously’ muses Martin. ‘I felt as though I was being shown a revised version of the past, events that had already shaped the lives of quite a few people, my own included.’ His most enduring memory of his time there was when he and Hilly encountered Rafael, a convivial cripple, ‘a spastic’, in the main square. They were evidently on first-name terms. ‘After he’d hobbled away, she turned to me and said, “I’m at home here. I love living in Spain. I now regard him as completely normal.” She was forty-five but seemed like someone my age.’ Was she happy, I ask him. ‘With Ali, yes. He was the other love of her life. She sometimes worried a little about Jaime. Largely though, she was euphoric.’

  Although neither Hilly nor Ali Boyd is even remotely connected with the characters in Dead Babies, the dreadful momentum of the narrative drew its impetus from Martin’s period in Ronda. Seeing his mother projected back a quarter of a century prompted questions. Mainly, what would happen next? Of course he knew exactly what had happened in the first version. That had reached some kind of conclusion, involving Madingley Road. Could one person be held responsible for what happens to the others caught in the same web of events? Martin certainly does not and did not then think of his father as wicked. ‘Weak, vulnerable, capricious, but he meant no one any harm.’ The fact was, however, that the people in his personal orbit were harmed. It is only in Part Three of Dead Babies, barely fifteen hundred words in length, that we learn that Johnny and The Hon. Quentin Villiers are the same person. The disclosure is as beguiling as a skilfully executed card trick: what once seemed an assembly of coincidences suddenly becomes atavistically predetermined. The question which the novel leaves unanswered, indeed unaddressed, is how and why seemingly the most humane cultivated figure in the book should turn out to be its most terrifying. Colin Howard: ‘Kingsley was a lovely man, extraordinarily hospitable. Yes, certainly. But on occasions he could be cruel, very cruel. Even to those closest to him.’ Which, I enquire, was closer to the real Kingsley Amis? ‘That was the point. Both aspects of him were the real Kingsley Amis.’

  5

  The Seventies

  While the 1960s are recollected by most with nostalgia or indifference, the 1970s tend to provoke embarrassment. Political and economic mismanagement, seemingly endless strikes, football hooliganism, crass popular culture – particularly in music and fashion – and the rise of the package tour all come to mind. As a decade it is by consensus a medley of the tasteless, the shambolic and clumsily hedonistic. Martin’s experiences after The Rachel Papers were, however, enviable and would leave an indelible imprint upon his work.

  Within a year of beginning his salaried junior post at the TLS he was filing copy for the New Statesman. John Gross, who moved from the New Statesman to the TLS in 1974, invited him to submit some irreverent pieces on anything he wished. Gross and th
e New Statesman Deputy Editor Anthony Howard were almost a generation older than Martin and they detected in him the same sort of energy that had prompted them to appoint Hitchens and Fenton, his near contemporaries at Oxford, something that would improve on the rather stern puritanical image of the magazine as the conscience of post-war Fabianism. Howard: ‘We had asked Martin to think about a series of articles on what it was like to do jobs in central London, the sort of manual work that went on beneath the surface of the West End. I suppose the suggestion, inadvertently, contributed to the birth of a legend, given that “Coming in Handy” [14 December 1973] was his best-known piece.’ Martin had stuck to the remit of his commission, but only just. The workers were those who serviced the booming pornography industry of Soho and the West End, and ‘Coming in Handy’ is a laconic survey of the new sub-genre of monthlies dedicated exclusively to photographs of naked women, perused, generally in solitude, by men. His title, of course, requires no elucidation. Martin produced three pieces, including accounts of strip clubs and call-girl agencies (see ‘Fleshpots’, 14 September 1973), under the pseudonym of Bruno Holbrook. This was carefully chosen. David Holbrook, poet and guardian of public morality, had contributed a vigorous anti-pornography chapter to Pornography: The Longford Report (1972), berating the New Statesman and similar left-leaning publications for conniving in the growth of the filth industry. To add authenticity Martin included a note beneath his byline: ‘Bruno Holbrook is at present engaged in a study of Wayland Young’ (author of Eros Denied: Sex in Western Society, 1964). Soon, speculation was rife as to the identity of the mysterious Bruno. Was he a relative of David, pornography being by implication a family interest? If Martin’s creation had come across as a ranting puritan or even a louche apologist for men’s magazines and strip clubs, he could have been dismissed as a spoof – the first wave of anti-establishment satire driven by Private Eye and That Was The Week That Was had after all only recently broken – but Bruno was much more effective, and for David Holbrook and those similarly inclined, infuriating. He is a figure who treats his subject with a certain amount of rueful distaste but more powerful than this is a sense of sexual connoisseurship: he assesses the relative quality of the material on offer and treats the customers as far more pitiable than the strippers and nude models. I, he implies, am content with an abundance of the real thing. And how prescient, for Bruno’s creator, this would prove to be.

  Before examining the literary and intellectual controversies that beset Martin during the 1970s it would perhaps be best to first offer a brief summary of his love life. The two narratives are so fascinatingly intertwined that an appreciation of the former can only benefit from a preliminary account of the latter.

  In a gloriously sardonic review of a book by Robert Bly1 Martin ponders Bly’s enthusiasm for ‘male grandeur’, for a revival of the seigniorial dominance that women love so much and which feminism, freakishly in Bly’s opinion, had taken against. Martin does not need to undo Bly’s thesis, rather he patrols its salient features and allows it to expose its preposterousness without his assistance. Nevertheless his piece does raise a question. Given that men have now been exposed as by turns unflinchingly repressive, predatory and self-absorbed how should the more thoughtful members of this gender be best advised to behave in the continued dance to the music of sex? Such abstract hypotheses are of course difficult to take seriously without giving some consideration to particulars. If the male in question is an outstandingly ugly, tongue-tied dwarf then it does not really matter too much about how he behaves towards women with whom he might recently have become, or wish to be, acquainted. Most of them simply would not want to know. (This, I should add, is not an image conjured from my morbid imagination. Rather it derives from Gully Wells’s witheringly vivid evocation of ‘Z’, the most pitiable tenant at ‘The Old Forge’ who stood as she puts it ‘in cruel contrast to the handsome double act of Martin and Rob, as they never tired of reminding him’.) And so to Martin who, despite his faux-modest claims to the contrary, was possessed of effortless charm, even in his pre-Oxford years. Like most he did not live according to a conscious ordinance, but during the 1970s there is remarkable consistency in his behaviour, at least with regard to the women with whom he had relationships. Tamasin Day-Lewis was eighteen when her father, terminally ill, and mother moved into Lemmons in 1970. Jane Howard, despite having had an affair with C. Day-Lewis in the 1950s, remained a close friend of the poet and his wife Jill and offered the spacious house as a peaceful setting for his imminent demise. When Tamasin first met Martin he was still seeing Gully Wells but Gully was an occasional visitor, not always present when Tamasin stayed over at weekends. Colin Howard and Sargy Mann recall the liaison with wry amusement. Howard: ‘Tammy was a terrific flirt but we didn’t know anything was actually going on, at least at the time. I think Martin dropped a hint after it was all over. He probably kept it quiet because he was juggling trysts with Tammy against Gully’s weekend visits. Such energy.’ Frances Mann adds: ‘Of course, the slightly macabre cameo in Experience where Martin describes them [himself and Tamasin] standing in the room with [Colin’s] mother’s body was wrong. It must have been Day-Lewis himself, since your mother outlived him by a couple of years.’ ‘Yes,’ adds Howard, ‘I wonder why he did that?’

  During the week she divided her time between a pre-university London crammer and modelling assignments. Her combination of girlish innocence and sexual allure was the trademark of the late-sixties/early-seventies media and advertising agency woman, quintessentially Twiggy. According to Colin Howard she, at least in 1970, ‘made the advances’. Martin responded as would most twenty-one-year-old men, but postponed a proper, albeit brief, relationship until after he had separated from Gully and his affair with Tamasin took place as he was finishing The Rachel Papers in Lemmons during 1972. According to Gully, ‘He had his cake and ate it’, but she does not intend this as a rebuke. He did, but he also tried to ensure that the untidy overlaps between his various encounters caused minimal discomfort for all involved. ‘Even before he became a literary celebrity,’ adds Colin Howard, ‘women wanted him.’ Few males would have behaved otherwise, and fewer, as we shall see, would have been so thoughtful regarding the consequences of their unsolicited gains.

  In mid-June 1974 Tina Brown hosted a graduation party – for her own graduation – at her college’s boathouse, involving a generous spread of expensive canapés, champagne, gin- and vodka-based cocktails, plus a small band. Martin was present, and from the London circuit Anthony Howard, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Holden, Hitchens and several other figures were also in attendance. Martin and Tina were still involved albeit informally but he did not mention to her that three months earlier he had begun an affair with Julie Kavanagh, twenty-one-year-old London editor of the US Women’s Wear Daily; not the most prestigious publication and one whose title brings to mind the interests of male magazine purchasers depicted by Holbrook. She did, however, persuade her bosses that the readership, women of course, would be interested in a piece on London’s newest novelist who bore a remarkable resemblance to Mick Jagger. She wrote the article without an interview but Martin and Julie met soon afterwards at one of the parties where, according to Hitch, ‘I held the coats while Mart paired himself off with whoever was available, or on some occasions available while attached to someone else. Don’t get me wrong, all this on his part involved no sense of industry or exertion. They came to him. So my task was not at all time-consuming.’ He impressed Ms Kavanagh with meals in Knightsbridge brasseries followed by brief encounters in a nearby but less fashionable part of West London, specifically the flat in Pont Street still occupied by Rob and Olivia, and their first full night together was spent in an agreeable Cotswold hotel, the Sign of the Angel in Lacock, Wiltshire. In late 1974 Julie took a flat in Hugon Road. Martin had virtually completed the final draft of Dead Babies during his period in Ronda that summer and had invited Julie over for a week to meet his mother and Ali Kilmarnock. Hilly got on well with her – she was, inde
ed, well disposed to every girlfriend of Martin’s she encountered.

  The Hugon Road flat proved useful in several ways. He completed the last revisions to the novel there in a state of relative comfort; he enjoyed the solitary life but he was averse to anything that involved cleaning or cooking, another trait he shared with his father. From November 1974 he became a semi-permanent co-resident and his occasional overnight absences were accounted for as visits to Lemmons. In truth, they just as frequently involved excursions to Earl’s Court, where, almost a year after meeting Julie, he would begin assignations with his boss at the New Statesman, Claire Tomalin, the then Literary Editor. Tomalin was recently widowed. Her husband Nick was a journalist who was killed in 1973 by a Syrian shell while reporting the conflict in the Golan Heights. They kept a house in North London and one in Kent but her busy schedule of literary parties and book launches often meant that she stayed over in London. Anthony Howard: ‘Well Martin was certainly epicurean in his tastes, also eclectic. He seemed to enjoy the companionship of mature women as much as those just out of their teens. There was Claire [Tomalin] of course, but, well, I recall a garden party at someone’s house in London. Paul Johnson [a regular contributor to the New Statesman] and his wife were there and she and Martin were clearly involved in an exchange of confidences. Of course I can’t say for certain if they were having an affair but everyone assumed they were.’ Martin adds: ‘They were wrong.’ ‘But what you must remember,’ comments Howard, ‘was that Martin was never – well as far as I could gather – never the initiator, at least when he began affairs with married women, often of course when he himself was going out with someone. This does not make a saint of him of course, but any male who claims he would refuse such unsolicited opportunities is a liar.’ Howard remembers one day in the New Statesman office when Tomalin pleaded with him to find a way to ‘have Martin sent on some roving reporter assignment or moved to another part of the building’. It was not, he explains, that they could no longer work together – the affair had recently concluded, and both were ‘sanguine, civilized enough about that’ – but rather that she now felt particularly, ‘embarrassed by the fact that she had started it’.