Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Hitchens reinforces Howard’s impression of Martin as more the recipient of female attention than sexual predator. ‘Things happened to him’ according to his friend, ‘but the rest of us had to strive. Everyone was promiscuous but, for most, sex at least involved preliminaries, flattery, persuasion, rhetoric and came as part of the package that women wanted.’ Martin introduced Julie to what was becoming the most fashionable literary set since the war, based on a kernel of New Statesman writers but with no unifying aesthetic or political mantra. The mainstays were Martin, Hitchens, Fenton, Craig Raine and Clive James. Julian Barnes was a laconic occasional, to be joined later in the 1970s finally on the margins – by Ian McEwan. Anthony Holden – aka Tony Hardon – was the principal poker fetishist, nurturing Martin’s enduring fascination with the game in which he had first been coached by Colin Howard and Sargy Mann during Kingsley’s and Jane’s periods abroad. Francis Wheen arrived in 1975 and the artery-clogging food and drink sessions at the Bursa kebab house in Theobald’s Road were often attended by Kingsley and Robert Conquest. Terry Kilmartin and Anthony Howard sometimes followed the out-of-office excursions, rather as amused observers than die-hard revellers. The women included Tina Brown, at least until she began her relationship with Harold Evans of the Sunday Times, Claire Tomalin and Lorna Sage. Martin had a brief affair with Sage which took place while he was juggling his encounters with Claire Tomalin against his apparently long-term commitment to Julie Kavanagh, and still this commendable performance was not complete. His liaison with Sage occurred during the early summer of 1975 and lasted little more than a week. In January, Julie had purchased a spacious second-floor flat in fashionable Pimlico and Martin, already her occasional live-in lover, spent even longer periods there each week as co-resident. Julie would now host parties and through these he became more acquainted with another stratum of the London social circuit, one that offered an amusing contrast to the New Statesman crowd and, as he would soon find, much else too. Martin describes Julie’s set as ‘high bohemian’. They did not in the 1970s merit much media attention – the apparently imminent collapse of the economy seemed more significant – but they were none the less Sloanes before their time, made up of sons and daughters from that grey area between the gentry and the second-generation nouveaux riches, for whom the notion of ‘class’ was never actually referred to while its absence in others was self-evident. One of Julie’s pals from her teens, Emma Soames, was a regular caller at the Pimlico flat. In fact, Julie introduced her to Martin in February 1975 at a drinks party at which backgammon sessions predominated. Martin confessed to complete ignorance of the game and Emma agreed to meet him for lunch the next day to teach him the rules, which they both knew was a rather spurious pretext for a date. By the same evening he had persuaded her that they might enjoy more tactile mutual interests.

  The heightening of tension between Kingsley and Jane became the warrant for Martin’s occasional overnight absences, allegedly in Barnet. But his eventual split with Julie was not, as he had promised Emma, amicable and mutually agreed. One afternoon in the flat he was engaged in a hushed conversation, assuming Julie to be in the next room. On discovering she was standing behind him he slammed down the receiver and a moment worthy of Noël Coward’s dramaturgy followed, with them both staring at the telephone number of Emma Soames displayed on the open page of Julie’s address book. ‘Yes,’ reflects Hitchens, ‘sometimes his seeming talent for legerdemain belied a rather disorganized streak.’ He was obliged to leave the flat that same evening after also admitting that he had been having an irregular affair with one of Julie’s closest friends, Victoria Rothschild, heiress to the prodigiously wealthy banking family, and a couple of cheerily nostalgic encounters with his old flame from the Oxford years, Gully Wells. The only transgression Julie Kavanagh knew of before that was, curiously, the most brief and, for Martin, the most consequential. The circumstances were almost identical to those in which Martin had met Julie except that at this party she accompanied him as his partner and soon found herself waiting uncomfortably with Hitchens while their mutual friend seemed, as Martin now admits, to be ‘exchanging whispers’ with a woman neither of them knew. She was Lamorna Seale and while nothing occurred at the party they found a personal empathy and mutual attraction, and they agreed to meet again. Their relationship would be fleeting yet momentous; two years later he would learn of its consequences, a daughter called Delilah.

  His affair with Emma Soames lasted through 1976 and 1977, during which he enjoyed, accompanied by Hitchens and on at least three occasions his father, the antithesis of his recently acquired taste for slumming in the most unsavoury regions of the capital. Specifically he visited the Soameses’ country residence where her parents – her mother was Churchill’s daughter – indulged the epicurean loucheness of their children including their accompanying parties of associates, friends, lovers et al. More will be said on this, but rather than risk losing focus upon Martin’s Olympian endeavour I shall for the time being concentrate simply upon the figures who made up the narrative.

  Martin ended the relationship with Emma Soames in late summer 1977. Earlier that same year, in the spring, he had encountered a young woman of the same generation as Emma, Julie, Gully and Tina. He noticed her – and she was charismatically noticeable – at some social event attended by the first two in the quartet but they did not have the opportunity to speak. During the summer, however, they met in a different context, specifically a lunch party made up largely of those associated with Ian Hamilton’s recently formed weekly, the New Review. Some, like Jeremy Treglown, worked mainly for the TLS whose list of part-time female staff would by the 1980s come to resemble an antechamber for Martin’s love life: the magazine would play a bit-part in his earliest encounters with his first wife, Antonia Phillips and his present one, Isabel Fonseca.

  Mary Furness, daughter of the late Robert Furness, Bt of Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire, scion of county lower-gentry was, according to accounts from all the men who met her, the most captivating female of her generation. One has the impression that all of the women in Martin’s life so far were by turns either in awe of him or at least suborned by his combination of wit and charm, and this went back as far as Gully to his pre-Rachel Papers days. This was not the case with Mary Furness. She was beautiful, but carelessly so; if she was aware of the effect her mere physical presence had upon men then she showed no conscious recognition of this knowledge. She was dark-haired, with a magnificently sharp facial bone structure, and slightly taller than Martin. He was smitten. Their relationship predated his break-up with Emma Soames by about a month and was effectively its cause; it endured thereafter for almost a year. The collapse of his first marriage and his subsequent life with Isabel Fonseca were well publicized but were far less gripping than his largely unreported time with Mary Furness. She was, in the words of Hitchens, ‘outrageously sexual and forbidding too. She drove men mad, partly because of the way she looked and held herself and, more so, because she was their intellectual equal.’ She was not a feminist, not in the dogmatic sense, but she unmanned men, without apparent exertion caused them to want her more than anything else and this made them feel inferior.’ I put it to Hitchens that she was the model for Nicola Six in London Fields, a book written ten years later. ‘There are many striking parallels.’

  Kingsley was egalitarian in his dealings with Martin’s girlfriends but in this case he remained as Martin puts it ‘loyal to Emma’. Hitchens again: ‘She [Mary] was very often nuts, completely off the wall, prone to breaking the crockery, enraged, calamitous and at the same time very impressive in her command of language, even when completely drunk.’ Imagine Martin or Kingsley undergoing a sex change, but retaining the essentials of their personality, with an extra dose of unpredictability. That was Mary. It could not, of course, last. Opposites might attract but oppositional equals constitute an explosive mixture. ‘It was’, reports Hitchens, ‘one of those affairs made up of extremities. He hated the idea of losing her. In fact he
proposed marriage to her, the first time he ever did so to anyone. She turned him down. He was grief-stricken, then relieved. It was a fascinating spectacle.’ Curiously Martin brought their tempestuous relationship to a close, of sorts. By the end of 1977 he had begun to keep his distance, though not because he had found someone else. He felt threatened, a sensation that Martin had never previously experienced.

  We will revisit this story in due course, and consider its impact upon Martin’s career as a writer. In the meantime consider an observation from Clive James: ‘Women just adored him, and as far as I am aware they were never disappointed. He enjoyed himself, of course, but he loved the company of women, was quietly attentive to anything they said and talked with them as if no one else was present. They were, as a consequence, even more captivated. Ah, it was all a bit rough if you were outside, male, with your nose pressed to the glass. I didn’t die from envy, not quite, because I like him so much. But others? Well, it bred bitterness and resentment in some.’ As in love so in life? ‘Yes, I’d say so.’ He continues: ‘It should be said that Martin was rather chivalrous. He indulged women, even those he had never met before, and even if before this they had only vaguely fancied or admired him they’d soon take things a stage further. Just by being Martin he seduced them but it involved no industry on his part. It just happened.’

  Hitchens’s observation is equally telling. ‘The impression left thirty years thence, particularly lately in reports by some of the women, is of a rake, a young man enjoying what his father was obliged to practise surreptitiously. [Hitchens refers here to the stories sold to newspapers by three of Martin’s ex-girlfriends.]2 But this is a misrepresentation of him. The facts are authentic enough but what should not be overlooked was that Martin never wished to wound.’ He means that while Martin was not exactly an exemplar of morality, nor was he careless with the emotions of those who were in truth as much his pursuers as his prey. Hitchens: ‘He was a success, but they, the women, were just as enthusiastic. It is spurious of them to present themselves as victims.’ Gully Wells concurs. ‘He dealt with our break-up rather clumsily, that is true, but neither of us was particularly mature despite our claims to cleverness. And I remember vividly the train journey to Lemmons and the evening there. To be honest he was as upset as I was but he faced a dilemma. If he told me the truth – that he didn’t wish us to continue because he was committed to his work – he feared that I would feel cheapened, to say the least. So he had no choice but to pretend that things were simply coming to some sort of conclusion. I’d say it was confused compassion. He never wished to upset people. That’s why I kept on our occasional liaisons – yes I did that – for another ten years.’

  Throughout the 1970s he attended to an overarching principle. While distress might be an inevitable consequence of an active love life he would do his best to avoid being its cause and in a broader sense he would never compel the direction of a relationship. He preferred that events should take their natural course, where possible sparing those involved from discomfort. It was in this last that he was most often stirred to action, but only as benign choreographer of matters that he could do little to alter. The parallels between Martin the lover and Martin the novelist are so outstanding as to render comment almost superfluous. His characters, especially in the early novels, leap from the page with Dickensian vibrancy yet he seems reluctant to impose upon them the restrictions of a story or an ethical boundary. He respects them – they are after all his creations – but he is reluctant to interfere with their private inclinations or puzzling volitional urges. Those, he seems to say, are their business. Yes, it sounds absurd. How can fictional characters be granted autonomy? But his are. Or at least he creates the impression that they are. There is concern, puzzlement, sometimes morbid fascination, often regret, but not control. He reflects: ‘Gully. We went on seeing each other throughout our twenties, frequently. But there it was. We saw each other when we were between other people or when things weren’t going so well. It’s not remembered how bruising a lot of that was, that period. I’m writing about it now [in The Pregnant Widow] because it was a revolution and suddenly, suddenly behaviour was different. There were various tenets in this revolutionary manifesto. There would be sex outside and before marriage. This, for some, had happened before but its openness was completely new. So for the previous generation there was much hatred and resentment and many of my friends felt trapped between parental indignation and peer pressure. They had terrible, laboured arguments with their parents. But it was all right for me. I never had that fight with my father. He had had that fight with his and he wanted to spare me that.’ Martin insists that Kingsley had not encouraged him to be promiscuous; rather that his father, despite his own failings, had provided a point of relative stability in a period without any sort of moral compass. So, ironically, he caused Martin to be conscious of the dangerous potential in promiscuity? ‘Yes, perhaps he did.’

  ‘Another tenet was that girls had sexual appetite. They always did have, of course, but this was suddenly, openly acknowledged. And then there was the really difficult one . . . Much like the dissociation of sensibility [Eliot’s diagnosis of seventeenth-century poetry]. In the seventies sex and love, sex and emotion were dissociable. People were hurt, badly.’ He adds, ‘Charles Highway [of The Rachel Papers] seems to be able to dissociate feeling from lust, but he can’t. Highway’s cleverness is an attempt to protect himself. He is terribly susceptible to love, and gratitude, but he finds it difficult to . . .’ Difficult to accept this? ‘Yes.’

  Martin’s reflections on the 1970s as a period of emotional and intellectual disconnection go further than the much-vaunted sexual revolution. He was also part of a generation, mostly those who had come down from university at the beginning of the decade, who began to feel that they belonged to a society that was coming adrift from the social and political consensus that had endured since the post-war Labour administration. Perceptions of where this would lead, let alone whether one had a particular role to play, depended as much upon temperament as ideological outlook.

  Anthony Howard, then editor of the New Statesman: ‘Fenton and Hitch were more concerned with the front part [social and political]. Despite the fact that James [Fenton] is now best known as a poet the two of them were then, ostensibly at least, concerned with politics. In their spare time they worked for the Socialist Workers Party, distributing pamphlets to the general public on the imminent demise of capitalism and the benefits of International Socialism, Trotskyism. The newcomers at the back end [arts and literature] were Martin and Julian Barnes. I felt rather sorry for Julian. He was a few years older than the rest, had spent some time working in the OED or something, and in many ways he seemed rather more considered, mature. Yet through the seventies he was always the sidekick, or second in line to the new boys. Clive James was part of the set, as was Craig Raine. I suspect that they saw themselves as comparable to the post-war fifties generation – Kingsley, Conquest and so on. Of course the seventies bunch were far less conservative on politics and literature but it was clear that they felt they could shape trends and opinions for a few decades.’

  There are some similarities between Martin’s experiences of the 1970s and early 80s and his father’s in the 1950s and 1960s, but not quite as Howard suggests. Father and son became chameleons, they absorbed the peculiarities and absurdities of their respective worlds, charmed others – particularly women – but begrudged commitment or affiliation.

  When he first arrived at the New Statesman Martin was protective of his image as an emerging intellectual, maintaining close contact with figures such as Karl Miller and John Sturrock from the TLS and Terry Kilmartin of the Observer, but within a year he had become the fulcrum for a bizarre unprecedented transformation. ‘It was not simply a matter of writing for the New Statesman,’ reflects Francis Wheen, ‘the place and those associated with it took on a kind of clubbishness, exclusive in the sense that you had to be clever and funny to become a member.’

  Marti
n’s and Barnes’s shared interest in sport was in parts sincere and self-parodic. They set up a ping-pong table in the basement and what had once been the junk room for semi-discarded files, decrepit furniture and typewriters became the site for bi-weekly table-tennis tournaments. To compensate for the image of wholesome worthiness implied by all this it became the convention that smoking during matches, for spectators and competitors, was de rigueur, and as far as Martin was concerned a self-imposed obligation. ‘There was also’, recalls Wheen, ‘a cricket and football team. Martin didn’t play much cricket but at soccer he was rather a nippy winger. He preferred the ball delivered to him so he could make a brief, brilliantly nuanced pass rather than having to do a lot of work himself. My abiding memory is of him positioned close to the touchline viewing the progress of play with a roll-up hanging from his mouth.’ Did he take it out after he received the ball? ‘Not if he could help it, no.’

  The social life of 1970s literary London leaves one gaping with a mixture of incredulity and envy. Hitchens: ‘Just before Martin published The Rachel Papers Peter Ackroyd, then Literary Editor of the Spectator, said to me one day, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. I think the two of you will get on rather well.” He told me his name and I mentioned that we’d met before, briefly, in Oxford but he introduced us properly in a place called the Bung Hole, a bar of questionable legality near the New Statesman offices – you could cash cheques there and depart the next day. We had an excellent evening, leaving Peter in the bar and going on to several other pubs. We knew it would be good, no necessary, to meet again.’ Martin concurs, ‘Yes, Hitchens was unstoppable. I’d never met anyone quite so energetic. Politically I was . . . well, let’s say I didn’t share his enthusiasms, but he is a great conversationalist. Politics was his concern, not literature, but he was a literary presence.’ Hitchens: ‘We got on immediately and I knew soon that it was not only banter. A few months after we met my mother died, unexpectedly, and I had to leave town. I didn’t tell Martin, didn’t really know him well enough, but on my return I found a very thoughtful letter. It was consoling and, well, impressive. People . . . of our age rarely tended to do that sort of thing in those days.’ Martin knew Fenton from Oxford but at this time he was away sending in copy to the New Statesman on the spread of the Vietnam conflict into neighbouring Cambodia. ‘Oddly,’ reflects Hitchens, ‘Martin became a supplement to James, for me. How can I put it? – with Martin we shifted between in-depth conversations on writing and life and discussing sex.’