Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Martin’s memories of those weekends are similarly rhapsodic. ‘Kingsley makes it sound like Blenheim Palace but it was a converted mill house, rambling and beautiful but not a mansion. I’d go trout fishing. I’d never attempted this before but it was as though the fish were trained. Aim a fly at a thread of bubbles and a large brown trout would rise and make the reel whir. It all seemed – perfect yet unforced. Kingsley and Jane once came down and I remember a whole afternoon spent over the lunch table, a complete wall of sound, predominantly laughter. I loved Emma’s mother. We’d play games, class games. “Mart are you really from the suburbs? You sound like us. Really, dear, are you putting it on?” She’d say things like “That fuckpig of a car is refusing to start again.” I’d pretend to be aghast with something like “Mary, how do you know that word? You’re a lady.” “Oh fuck off Martin dear, the aristocracy are the connoisseurs of obscenity.” Jeremy would stare at me with a glass in his hand, mustering his thoughts and then ask, “So, what’s it like, being a yob?” and I’d answer, “Fine. What’s it like being a pig?” both of us determined not to laugh and going through versions of the same exchange every weekend.’

  Nicholas Soames: ‘You know, I think Martin in some way provided the energy for those weekends. We weren’t a terribly unhappy bunch before he arrived nor too distraught at the end of it all but . . . the Martin period was memorable indeed.’ He adds urbanely, ‘And he and Emma had a raucously good sex life.’

  Greg’s fantasy unravels because it has to. His life would not have been countenanced by even the most desperately sex-crazed Walter Mitty. Martin’s problem was that he was actually experiencing what in the novel appears as unrealistic wish-fulfilment. It is all very well for a novelist to stretch the credulity of his reader, to toy with the inconceivable; more problematic was to live a fantasy and suffer concomitant doubts about whether it was deserved or appropriate. Nicholas Soames: ‘Martin would come down perhaps every other weekend and sometimes he would bring Hitch, who became almost as much part of the family as Martin. After he and Emma broke up I’d bump into the two of them fairly often in London. The fact that they both worked on the New Statesman and Hitchens was an ardent Communist seems, now, slightly preposterous but not at the time.’ He pauses. ‘The sort of parties they attended were very often thrown by the monstrously wealthy. Nothing wrong with being rich, of course, but it was more than evident that this pair of radical bohemians loved being courted by the upper classes, grandees and new money included. They were closely connected with at least two branches of the Rothschild family for example. And then there was Mary Furness, Emma’s immediate successor, or at least one of them. She was a character.’

  Kingsley disapproved of none of Martin’s girlfriends, though he often confided observations to his son on their various qualities. Mary Furness was of the same gentrified stock as Emma Soames but while the latter, for Kingsley, called to mind the delicious hypothesis of Jane Howard in her mid-twenties – Jane was nearing her forties when he met her – Mary was a composite of his more disparate memories. More than his first and his present wife, she was as intellectually combative as any of the men with whom she associated. Kingsley referred to her in letters to Conquest as ‘Soup Thrower’, a reference to an incident in a restaurant involving a bowl of the starter that Martin had told him about.

  Martin’s previous girlfriends had been indulged by the clubbish, predominantly male gatherings at the Bursa, the Pillars of Hercules and, as Hitchens puts it, similarly ‘villainous’ establishments. Furness, however, laid claim to full membership. When the Friday-lunch club began she was working as a junior editor at the TLS and no one questioned her regular presence at Motherunch’s. When Ian Hamilton founded the New Review in 1974 she expressed a genuine interest in this disestablished unit, and took a job as Hamilton’s assistant in the Greek Street offices, joining the extended editorial meetings next door in the smoking room of the Pillars. Hitchens remembers her well from this period. ‘She was forbiddingly clever, and quite unbelievably beautiful. Also, she had a nuclear effect upon men, they were besotted and cowed at the same time, a ferocious drinker – in fact she could drink many of her male associates under the table. And Mary loved arguing, put on a fantastic dramatic display, often ending in terrible scenes.’ Men wanted her terribly but she frightened them too. ‘I’d known Martin since his time with Gully and then Tina but he was entranced with Mary. No, obsessed would be a better way to put it. The thing was that he couldn’t deal with her volatility. He loved it but he tried to overcome it.’ She was the first woman to whom he proposed marriage. ‘I think 1977. She didn’t turn him down. Prevaricated I suppose. I think this ended their relationship. Martin certainly wanted her, and I think she loved him. Maybe she was the more astute. It might well have been a disastrous combination.’ Clive James: ‘Let us say that Mary Furness was the sort of woman that men fall out about. A few years ago they would have done so with swords and pistols, and you’d want to be certain that your rival was dead.’ Alan Jenkins, who worked with Mary at the TLS, which she joined when the New Review closed in 1979, offers a more measured portrait. ‘Yes, there was a raffish glamour about her but what was particularly attractive to men like Martin was her intellectual sharpness, and indeed her literary heritage. Certainly her father was minor nobility but he was also a legendary figure in Edwardian culture. He was in the Egyptian Service, a friend of E. M. Forster in Alexandria and was responsible for introducing Forster to Cavafy. Mary’s parents were quite old when she was born but she carried a trace of Bloomsbury about her. Her own degree was in Philosophy and she was outstandingly, and often for men unnervingly, discerning . . . sagacious.’

  ‘Martin’, according to Hitchens, ‘decided that it was all or nothing. Again that was the effect she had. He didn’t exactly end their relationship, more that he kept a distance.’ Kingsley’s comment, in a letter to Robert Conquest that ‘soup thrower has been dropped finally, I gather’8 was a misreading of the situation. Although Martin was candid with his father he could be selective with his confidences and in this instance, at least in Hitchens’s view, ‘He felt wretched and kept himself largely to himself. He preferred his father to think it was all over rather than admit to hoping that it was not.’

  ‘It would all get much worse,’ adds Hitchens. ‘We were at lunch, Mart, James [Fenton] and me, and he [Fenton] said, quite innocently, to Martin something like, “Oh, I saw your ex-girlfriend earlier this week, leaving the train at Oxford. Very happy they seemed, obviously spending a few days away.” Martin was only slightly taken aback because he assumed James was referring to, I don’t know, Gully or even Emma, so he asked, “Who?” “Mary,” said James, “and Ian.” Even then Martin couldn’t quite believe it. He didn’t ask “Which Ian?” because he didn’t have to.’ Aside from his considerable achievements as a writer and editor Ian Hamilton provoked awe as the period’s most incautious rake, drinker and financial delinquent. Hitchens: ‘He always carried an enormous ring of keys, each to some equally suspect bolthole where he might be entertaining his current inamorata or sequestering himself against solicitors’ letters following his most recent divorce. He was the only person I knew who was sued by his own solicitor.’ Wheen recalls a young ambitious poet, just down from Oxford, who visited Hamilton in the hope of having some of his verses included in the New Review. ‘Hamilton took him next door [to the Pillars] and ordered two large scotches. The young man looked nervously at his watch and said, “Well, I don’t normally like to take spirits before 11.30.” Ian turned to him and said in a tone of part rage, part shock, “Good God man! None of us likes it!”.’ ‘Ian’, Hitchens adds, ‘could drink prodigiously but he never appeared pathetic or dissolute. Slightly mad perhaps. Women absolutely loved him. He was handsome, if reckless, outrageous. In fact he was to women what Mary was to men. They lasted barely a month as far as I recall. But the effect on Martin was deep and enduring. You see Ian was at this time one of Martin’s closest friends. Like Terry Kilmartin he was almost a gen
eration ahead of us – well fifteen years – but Ian wasn’t Martin’s mentor, never wanted to be. It was a friendship made up of mutual admiration, cooperative rivalry. They thrived on each other’s cleverness. And Martin explained to me that Ian was one of the few to whom he had spoken at length about his feelings for Mary, when their relationship had become attritional. Told him all about her fascinating addictive qualities. So when James reported that he’d seen them at Oxford Station his response was more than the standard “Well if I can’t have her I don’t want anyone else to.” No, he realized that Ian had pumped him for information on the woman who, let us be honest, everyone fancied, and then moved in. Martin didn’t speak to him for about two years after that.’

  I asked Martin about this and he sighed. ‘I’m sure Christopher remembers it all as well as I can. Yes, he deceived me. Much later I was asked to contribute to a Festschrift in honour of Ian and I sat there with a blank page. And it occurred to me that every other male, heterosexual contributor would have thought about the same opening sentence. “He fucked me over with a woman!”’ She would be resurrected ten years later in London Fields.

  During Martin’s period as Literary Editor at the New Statesman Hitchens was effectively second-in-command of news (comment and political features) at the front end, first under the indulgent Tony Howard and then, briefly, with the less obliging reformist Bruce Page, who took over in 1978. Howard: ‘Christopher was a seamless opportunist. By which I mean that he did his job exceedingly well but made sure he reaped potential benefits. For a while he even had his own PA,’ a young lady called Lucretia Stewart who in background and presence merited comparison with Mary Furness, with a hint of the preposterous thrown in. According to Wheen, ‘She never held the official title as Hitch’s PA but in truth she was his social secretary, well his and Martin’s. Her father had been Ambassador to somewhere, and she was well-connected. She had a private income and she hosted parties regularly. More significantly she knew exactly which to attend and which formal or informal gatherings were the places to be seen. For a while I had an office next door to Hitchens and on a typical morning he would shamble in and Lucretia would be waiting at his desk with a meticulously prepared menu of options.’ She was, according to Wheen, inadvertently responsible for Martin’s promotion from literary newcomer to a place in the newly expanding galaxy of media celebrity. ‘The events attended by Martin and Hitchens also drew the likes of Peter McKay and Adrian Wood-house, who shared the pen name of the Daily Mail’s diarist William Hickey; whoever was in charge of the Evening Standard’s “Londoner’s Diary” would also be around.’ Martin and Mary and later Angela were the Becks and Posh of their day. All of the photographs of him striking that faintly absurd saturnine facial expression, the Mick Jagger style, came from that time, Wheen laughs. ‘It was all really rather absurd, especially when those two years, pre-Mrs T [Thatcher] are now perceived as the nadir of the post-war political and economic consensus. You know, the Labour minority government, streets filled with uncollected rubbish, power cuts, unburied bodies – even the council cemetery workers went on strike. When Bruce [Page] took over from Tony in 1978 Hitchens was disappointed because the only other candidate was James [Fenton], but there was a brief six-month period when he, and Martin, though less volubly, saw Bruce as symbolic of imminent radical change in the broader political landscape. I remember, vividly, one evening in the Casa Alpina, Hitchens was animated, pointing his finger peremptorily. He said “What Bruce brings is the new order. We, all of us, must realize that Radical Socialism is urgently necessary. It is vital and its time has arrived.” Odd, really because a year before that he had taken a job at the Express. He came back to the New Statesman after about six months but, still, Martin was appalled.’ Did Martin share his views on the forthcoming revolution? ‘You know I think he did . . . if Martin bothered at all about politics. Hitchens was his compass which, of course, makes it all the more absurd that during this same period the two of them kept company with what was left of the aristocracy.’ Perhaps the most amusing example of the latter was Lord Jamie Neidpath who had, famously, been seduced and promptly discarded by Tina Brown almost a decade before at Oxford. He was the same age as Martin, a hereditary peer, heir to the earldom of the enormous Scottish estate of Wemyss and with a property in Mayfair. His county pile was Stanway House – or Strangeway’s, as it was known at the time, according to Hitchens – a superb Jacobean manor in Gloucestershire. On encountering such a figure as a pal of Wooster, fans of Wodehouse would recoil in disbelief. Eccentric is an understatement. He would, in the 1980s, practise and advocate the benefits of trepanning, which involves the drilling of holes in one’s head as a relief for depression and a stimulus for creativity. In the late 1970s he professed himself a sculptor and his attractions for ambitious young ladies were abundant; he was guileless, vulnerable and outstandingly rich. Guy Clinch, of London Fields, can claim a little more common sense and pragmatism, but only a little. Hitchens recalls visiting Stanway two or three times. And Martin? ‘Perhaps once. Though of course he knew him [Neidpath] . . . everyone did, or of him.’ But the two of them found more time for excursions to the Rothschild estate in Suffolk, and, until Martin’s break with Emma, the Soameses in Hampshire. Hitchens remembers the Heathcoat-Amory house, Ditchley, in Oxfordshire as the most hospitable, boozy location. ‘Bridget was almost our age and a superb hostess, as well as providing us with hilarious gossip, stories, about everyone from the Cabinet downwards. The family was High Tory. We, Martin and I, looked forward most of all to the train – we always took the train to Ditchley for some reason – on Friday evening.’ As an avid Trotskyist did he not feel that this was a somewhat curious way to spend their time? He muses, ‘Yes, we did a fair amount of country-housing at the time. I’d like to think of us fiddling while Rome burned, witnessing the demise of an epoch. But I won’t. We were shameless hedonists.’

  ‘There was’, recalls Hitchens, ‘a bar called the Zanzibar, in Covent Garden. I think Martin recreates at least aspects of it in Money. Anyway at the time [the late 1970s] it seemed the magnet for . . . well debs, even though that subspecies was supposed to have died out. It hadn’t. I’d go with Martin and frequently Mark Boxer would be with us. They were a curious bunch. Probably from the same class as Lucretia and Mary but less concerned with work. The Guinness sisters, we got on particularly well with them. Very sharp, and of course they found Martin very amusing. Sabrina was superb, great fun. She was then being touted for Prince Charles. We called her “Queen Sabreen”. Told us hilarious stories of their “arranged” courtship. Said she would have been bored to death and I suppose her dumping of him was the beginning of the legend of Saint Diana. She and Martin were on good terms, a similar sense of humour.’

  The most dreaded part of the year for the New Statesman set was the end of summer Party Conference Season. Tedious and entirely predictable speeches would be followed by evenings of excess during which bitterness and sycophancy competed for prominence, but at the time off-camera sessions were largely unreportable. Martin, normally concerned only with the arts, was despatched as Chief Correspondent for the Blackpool Conservative Conference of 1977. His report9 is remarkably prescient. His friends on the magazine, Hitchens and Fenton in particular, were implacable in their perceptions of Toryism and its personnel, but Martin, albeit showing little sympathy for their politics, wandered among the Conservatives for a week with an open-mindedness vouchsafed by his true vocation as novelist. His report captures the image of a party in a state of transition, reframing its core principles, but adapting, looking for ways to appeal to those traditionally affiliated to its left-wing antagonists. Martin senses a new energy among mostly younger members of the party but implies that the source for this is the so far untested leader, whom he does not bother to name but who would in eighteen months become the first woman prime minister of the UK.

  Before leaving the New Statesman Hitchens was sent by his new employers to cover the 1978 Labour Conference in Blackpool and persuaded L
ucretia Stewart to accompany him in some hastily contrived official capacity. Her comments on returning to London became part of the New Statesman legend of the 1970s. ‘It was’, observes Wheen, ‘like some bizarre, comic social experiment. Lucretia had never met people like this before. She said later, “Those trade union chaps are deliciously charming and amusing. One came up to me, pointed to the ‘Press’ badge on my lapel and said ‘Aye lass. Ahd luv to.’ Another told me that ‘last night ah ’ad fifteen red ’ot onion bajees and me bum’s on fire’. What on earth did he mean?” ’

  Lucretia was for approximately two years Hitchens’s occasional girlfriend. ‘It was not that they were unfaithful or undecided,’ says Wheen. ‘No. Each of them would sleep with anyone and, perhaps for convenience, very often each other. Martin too had a fling with her. A brief one at which Hitchens took no offence of course. Anyway it was shortly after Martin’s time with Mary.’ The trio would re-emerge in Ian McEwan’s screenplay for Richard Eyre’s cinematic take on the early years of Thatcherism, A Ploughman’s Lunch (1983). For research Wheen took McEwan to a couple of party conferences in the early 1980s but the true inspiration for the script came from accounts of the years just before Thatcher by Hitchens, Martin and Lucretia. Wheen: ‘Lucretia was most certainly Susan Barrington the rather snooty journalist played by Charlie Dore, Hitchens was the model for Tim Curry’s character [Jeremy Hancock] and I suppose there are slight traces of Martin in James Penfield [played by Jonathan Pryce].’

  Just as intriguing was Lucretia’s contribution to a fictional scenario that would not surface in Martin’s work until London Fields almost ten years later. Part of this involves the mildly absurd Jamie Neidpath, with whom Mary Furness had a short affair after her equally brief liaison with Ian Hamilton. Hitchens sees her as fascinated by Neidpath, but certainly not in awe of him. ‘I think she treated him as an eccentric, much as an anthropologist might deal with a tribal luminary. Odd really. She was from the squirearchy herself but thought Jamie was thoroughly peculiar.’ All of which would be echoed with ink-black humour in London Fields as Guy Clinch, hopelessly ingenuous aristocrat, tests the patience and credulity of Nicola Six.