Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Clive James recalls the 1970s with a mixture of hazy nostalgia and some pride: ‘The New Statesman crew were nearly all Oxford. I was Cambridge and anyone who’d read English there left with an enduring wound caused by Leavis, even though he’d retired in 1964. His advocates still held that the London literary circuit was lightweight, modish, elitist – based on Leavis’s hatred for Bloomsbury. So we decided that we’d create an alternative to academia, based in London, something made up of people who were writers and critics.’ Who was the ‘we’? I ask. ‘Ian Hamilton was at the centre of things, at least as far as I was concerned. He’d founded the New Review [in 1974], but his head office was next door, a pub called The Pillars of Hercules, editorial conferences took place there.’ Both were in Greek Street, Soho, two doors down from the offices of Private Eye. Shortly before Hamilton set up the New Review the younger recruits to the TLS and the Observer began the so-called Friday lunch club at Motherunch’s, which Hitchens describes as a ‘villainous wine bar, under the Arches at Blackfriars. The early patrons were Russell Davies and the elder statesman Terry Kilmartin. Martin – and this was even before he published The Rachel Papers – was brought in as a feted enormously promising man and was soon installed as chief whip. Put simply he was brilliant, and brilliantly amusing. Once James [Fenton] and I got to know Martin we would call in but by 1974 the centre of gravity moved to a place called the Bursa, a Turkish Cypriot kebab house in Theobald’s Road.’ Customers were offered shamelessly inauthentic Turkish dishes from 8 a.m. to midnight, served with flagons of red wine or whatever spirit the customer might request from the battery of cupboards and fridges. The Bursa, though not technically a wine bar, had declared independence from standard licensing regulations. Meals in haste were available at what the New Statesman staff referred to as ‘the Caff’, an establishment that changed hands so frequently as to merit anonymity. It was, however, the source of an enduring feature of New Statesman culture, the ‘Yob’s Breakfast’ or ‘YB’. In the office the declaration that ‘we’re off for a YB’ meant that a glorious raid on the arteries was imminent, traditional British fare involving principally black and white pudding, bacon, sausages, baked beans, fried bread, eggs.

  ‘There were not’, Hitchens recalls ‘two opposed groups, because in both places [the Pillars of Hercules and the Bursa] the personnel was largely the same, predominantly me, Martin, James, Julian, Clive and, a little later in the decade, Ian [McEwan], Russell [Davies], Piers Paul Read, Craig [Raine]. But the Pillars was Ian Hamilton’s head office and it has to be said Martin predominated at the Bursa.’ Clive James concurs. ‘Martin, you must understand, was not an egotist. In no sense did he attempt to impose himself on a group. It was simply a matter of natural selection. His humour was unforced, and shot through with observations that seemed casual but were much more astute than could be found in the best prose. I’ll say again, none of us felt intimidated, or second-rate. We just enjoyed listening. Fenton was brilliant, but taciturn. Julian, beyond taciturn. He made the statues on Easter Island seem garrulous, but when he spoke he was entrancing. Ian [McEwan] was hungry, hungry for material I mean. You had the impression of him hoovering up conversations, postures, atmosphere for his fiction . . . At the Pillars rules were observed. No anecdotes, no prepared jokes, long stories were forbidden. Well, Hitch was allowed stories because he told them so well, digressions included. No one had decided on these conventions. They evolved. A reflection of the mood of the place. There was much improvisation and combat by dialogue and Martin emerged as the star. Fenton said that Martin was “indispensable”. If he wasn’t there, something was missing. I would agree but qualify that. He and Ian [Hamilton] were equally impressive. Not competitively, they became very close friends, at least until they were attracted to the same woman.’ For a précis of what if anything this shifting amorphous group of writers subscribed to an observation from Hitchens will suffice. ‘Ian Hamilton was marvellously entertaining, but for our generation Terry Kilmartin was the exemplar. Once, he was dealing with Gore Vidal [on an article for the Observer] and telegraphed him, apologetically, at his villa in Italy explaining that his piece was exceptional but too long, they simply couldn’t fit it in, so he, Terry, had taken the liberty of editing it by about 150 words. Gore replied that he was powerless to overrule Kilmartin’s decision but that he allowed no one to interfere with his work and would therefore never again write for or even communicate with the Observer. He later confessed to me that when he read the article he was astonished. It was much shorter but he could not detect the changes or cuts. And, he admitted ruefully, it was better. Terry was a brilliant editor and more than that he knew how prose works. He taught us more than we ever learned in university. He gave us a feel for the effect of language on the reader, how it should be used unselfishly and eloquently. Martin respected his father unreservedly but he was indebted to Terry too.’ Each of the writers who spent their spare time in the Bursa or the Pillars assented to different generic demands and pursued varied ambitions, as reviewers, feature writers, political journalists, literary and television critics, poets, novelists et al. But if they can be said to share a collective mantra it was this: challenge, unsettle but certainly do not patronize or bore the reading public.

  It was in the Bursa that two very different writers devised a bizarre narrative worthy of Swift and the Scriblerus Club. Martin and Barnes were responsible for the competition pages at the back of the literary and arts section and quite soon began to speculate on what kind of readers spent their time toiling over their literary crossword puzzles. Occasionally entries would be published from individuals who apparently preferred to be known only by their noms de plume – most memorably the in-house duo, Spiro Keates and Fat Jeff, pseudonyms for Martin – without causing a murmur of incredulity either from other readers or editorial staff. Emboldened, Martin and Barnes began to refer to the top floor of the New Statesman office as their new headquarters in which they, and others unnamed, devised and determined the future strategy of the competition. The ‘Comp. Complex’ was born and grew in intricacy week by week, mutating from a practical annex to the rest of the building into something far more exotic and durable. They debated at length the appropriateness of copper-plated bathroom fittings, the size of the bath itself and, most troubling of all, the spa – the New Statesman was still after all an organ of Socialist principle. There was even, very briefly, discussion of a helipad for the roof, mainly to service businessmen and certain Arab and South American diplomats who had of late become devoted connoisseurs of the Competition and wished to visit the Complex. There are some references to this fantastic location in the New Statesman itself but one is engrossed by its similarities with an equally bizarre place in Part One, Section 7 of Dead Babies. Penthouse Cloudscape ‘is a top-floor Knightsbridge maisonette . . . not by any means an atypical household and we would do well to look at it closely.’ It has, we are informed, ‘luxury bathrooms’, spacious communal quarters with continually flickering TVs and the only other disturbance of the pellucid calm comes from the rumble of arriving and departing helicopters. These deliver visitors to the penthouse. Three residents, Mitzi, Serena and Lucy, are high-order prostitutes. This trio were an invention of Martin’s but as we shall see the mildly surreal subculture of the New Statesman often involved women, real and imagined, in a manner that would traumatize the most indulgent feminist.

  Hitchens believes that this curious invention was inspired by a number of Martin’s experiences at the magazine. ‘Of course the “Comp.Complex” was more a state of mind than a place but gradually it turned into something concrete and disturbing. We would all set questions, largely requests for parodies or imitations of well-known writers or politicians – you know, “write a report on Crufts in the manner of Harold Wilson”. We’d sign these requests with the nicknames we’d appended to each other. Obviously Mart was Little Keith, I was Hitch, Wheen took over as Fat Jeff, Sid (‘Sydney’) James was Clive and so on. But the trouble was that very often real contributors tu
rned in stuff that wasn’t usable, so frequently we ended up writing the answers to our own questions. But for those who did enter material we could use we’d have an end-of-year party, and, oh God, they were weirdoes, very bizarre individuals. They could sometimes be quite funny on paper but in person they were frighteningly odd. So, yes, perhaps we felt like Mitzi, Serena and Lucy, entertaining strange men. They were all men. And Martin was inordinately concerned with writing about dodgy sex. The Holbrook articles are well known but he was also writing under his own name as the reviewer of soft porn.’3 Hitchens remembers a comment by Martin that never went into print. ‘He said that in porn shops, the men standing before the racks, muttering and swaying, pulling out and replacing the mags, seemed to him like the “Wailing Wall”.’

  ‘There was’, says Wheen, ‘a competitive culture of what might be called cumulative impropriety, initiated mainly by Martin and Hitch. Someone would spin a story out of a joke or a pun and it went without saying that this was a challenge to the rest to better it. The most notorious was the Tupper family tree, started off by Conquest who came with Kingsley and Martin to boozy lunches at the Casa, or Pillars. There was Woppy Tupper, who was rather shy with girls and his second cousin Julian Fawcett-Tupper, rake and hedonist. Woppy’s brother had lost his part of the inheritance, ended up working in a sweet factory, and was thereafter known as Sticky Tupper. To take part you had to adopt a member of the family, describe their misbegotten lifestyle or dire fate and of course generate as much sexual innuendo as possible from the surnames. I remember once Martin and Hitchens sitting together and telling each other stories – and as you’ll know Martin was a fine mimic, so was Hitch – and the whole thing had spiralled to the point where neither could control themselves. If convulsive laughter can cause a heart attack both must have come close.’

  Hitchens remembers the ‘word games’ as having ‘their own momentum’. ‘Substitutions were extremely popular, that is exchanging a familiar word, usually a noun, for something utterly different, usually obscene, and seeing how unsuitable they were in titles, or routine phrases. “Cunt” for “man” for example. “A Cunt for All Seasons”, “This will make a cunt of you”, “Cuntkind”, “Cunthood”, “A Cunt’s a Cunt for All That”, “Cuntservant”, “Cuntslaughter”, “Our Cunt in Havana”, “The Cunt who Shot Liberty Valance”. Then there was the use of two verbs or adverbs with assonantal and alliterative parallels: “Angling for a mangling”, “Cruising for a bruising”, “Strolling for a rolling” – my favourite “Thirsting for a worsting”. Kingsley and Conkers [Conquest] joined in when they were there.’

  Hitchens reflects also that these adolescent pursuits could suddenly ‘within minutes’ be exchanged for discussions of poetry. ‘Yes poetry, more so than fiction, and Larkin held our attention more than any other figure. James [Fenton] loved Auden but even he conceded that Larkin was the finest post-war poet in English. High Windows (1976) had not long been out and no one questioned its inestimable brilliance. Of course all of this was long before the letters and Motion’s biography but we knew, partly from Martin and indeed Kingsley and Conkers that he loathed strikers, the left in general. Immigrants, “abroad” . . . but that seemed completely irrelevant. We all thought him a genius. His combination of an unclassifiably sombre outlook – he seemed weary of everything – with an ability to make such astonishingly beautiful verse appealed to all of us.’ Which is an appropriate lead-in to thoughts on Dead Babies, Martin’s second novel for which he had been assembling nuances and impressions from contemporary England. There are, as I have noted, borrowings from his private world but what of its aggregate qualities as a work of fiction? It could be mistaken for a late-twentieth-century version of Waugh’s Vile Bodies, incorporating an appropriately updated excess of sex, drug taking and alcohol abuse, except that Amis’s host, Villiers, murders each of his guests, wife and closest friend included. He derives no particular pleasure from this, but suggests with characteristic hauteur that it is inevitable. He is, he implies, his narrator’s and author’s avatar; the characters have served their purpose as material for superb stylistic conceits, so they are now dispensable. Try as one might it is impossible to locate a prevailing rationale for the book: it is far too grotesque to be an allegory, even of a society in a terminal dystopian state, yet at the same time the characters are possessed of an energy and unnerving authenticity. Its qualities as a piece of writing are self-evident but it will continue to puzzle, often infuriate those who expect literature to perform a given function. This testifies to its importance both as a work in its own right and as an indicator of Martin’s significance as a novelist. Dead Babies undermines the polarity between writing that is accessible and vividly evocative – the keystones of traditionalism – and that which poses and leaves unanswerable a catalogue of questions about how exactly we are supposed to deal with this spectacle. When he began as a writer the distinctions between the avant-gardists, the heirs to modernism, and the conservatives of his father’s generation were firmly established. Martin was the first to blur them, to create hybridized creations claiming lineage to both camps.

  Shortly after Martin was formally appointed Literary Editor in 1976 he began work on what would be his third novel, Success. ‘I remember’, says Anthony Howard, ‘asking him to write a major piece on Peter Porter, one of his first jobs, and he said, yes, of course he would get on with it later in the year. I told him, no, it was for this week’s issue. “But I need to conserve my energies . . . I’ve just started a new novel.” Martin, I reminded him, we are the ones who pay your salary.’ Howard has nothing but praise for him as a colleague and fellow journalist. ‘He ran the back end very well indeed, and of course he had valuable contacts. He didn’t attempt to dispel the left-wing aura that surrounded the magazine but he succeeded in making it more cosmopolitan, at least in terms of the arts. He commissioned reviews and articles from Larkin, his father, Bob Conquest and others you’d associate more with the Spectator. And he was scrupulous with the tedious, practical aspect of the job. In those days we had to go down to our printers in Southend to check largely typed copy against the plates, and Martin did this, every week. Books were his thing of course but he was also in charge of theatre, music, opera, TV. He was very good at his job.’

  There seem, then, to have been two versions of Martin Amis, the anarchic impresario who held court in the Casa Alpino, the Bursa and the Pillars and who might have walked out of Dead Babies, and the conscientious, reliable editor. Colin Howard is intriguing on this: ‘In company Martin might give the appearance of being rather careless even dissolute but it is a false impression, perhaps deliberately contrived. After Oxford he practised exemplary self-discipline. I can only speak of when he was at Lemmons or Flask Walk but he would be at his desk at 8 a.m. at the latest and he’d work for five, six hours without a break. He and Kingsley were very similar in that respect.’

  ‘There was also’, reflects Colin, ‘something slightly predatory about him – and I don’t mean this in a derogatory sense. You felt that he was always collecting material from his surroundings. He was great fun, but one had the sense that he was both taking part and recording.’ Colin Howard’s observations become particularly fascinating once we have spent time with Gregory Riding and Terence Service, co-narrators of Success, as indeed does the image of Martin as protean presence at the New Statesman.

  Gregory Riding and Terence Service are foster brothers, the latter taken in by the Riding family after his father had murdered his sister Rosie, then aged seven. Improbably Terry and Gregory were born within twenty-four hours of each other and to add further to the catalogue of coincidences Ursula, Gregory’s sister – and again his only sister – is seven years of age when Terry is fostered, and shares a birthday with the late Rosie. The obvious question is whether he and Philip and their relationship with Kingsley played any part in the invention of these two figures.

  ‘Kingsley did more than you might think, taking care of us. But – well he was probably having an a
ffair when the two of us were born. He was certainly having an affair with a student and I’ve a pretty good idea who it was – I won’t say. Phil’s grouse really was that when I was born my mother had to stay in hospital with me for at least a couple of weeks and he [Phil] was farmed off to some sort of nunnery.’ But, I point out, neither of you knew of this, either Kingsley’s extra-marital activities or Phil’s temporary placing in what amounted to foster care. ‘No of course not, but when told of it later, or when you learn of it, it leeches into your memory of other later things. Certainly for Phil – and he always seemed to have the tough breaks later – those few weeks might have seemed a premonition.’ As, no doubt, was the image, for Martin, of his father abandoning fidelity around the time he first drew breath. There are few exact correspondences but the similarities between the eerie, gothic foursome of Greg, Terry and their respective fathers and the Amises are striking.