Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Mary Furness was in part the inspiration for Nicola and there was something of Lucretia there too. Wheen: ‘I never had sex with Lucretia but one night I slept over at her flat. She greeted me cheerily next morning and offered me coffee and so on – I was a bit groggy – but she was busy at the kitchen table with an enormous elegantly bound diary, had been writing for an hour, she said. You see Lucretia knew everyone and, if they were male, slept with many of them. The diary was, she explained, “my pension”. It hasn’t been published of course but God it would be gold-dust.’ There is an intriguing passage close to the beginning of London Fields, the point at which Nicola decides that her fate as murderee is sealed. She has found her assassin:

  When at last she returned to the flat Nicola laid out her diaries on the round table. She made an entry, unusually crisp and detailed: the final entry. The notebooks she used were Italian, their covers embellished with Latin script . . . Now they had served their purpose and she wondered how to dispose of them. The story wasn’t over, but the life was. She stacked the books and reached for a ribbon . . . ‘I’ve found him. On the Portobello Road, in a place called the Black Cross, I found him.’10

  It seems from Wheen’s account that Lucretia was not particularly secretive regarding the diaries. ‘No, she wasn’t,’ he says. ‘She didn’t go on about them but for anyone who stayed at the flat she was honest enough about what she was doing, could hardly be otherwise given the amount of time she gave over to them.’ And Martin stayed there as well? ‘His fling with her was brief, low-key, but he would have stayed.’

  Hitchens adds: ‘She was restless and conspiratorial. And to an extent a femme fatale. A bit like [Anthony Powell’s character] Pamela Widmerpool, beautiful, difficult, moody. You finally find out in Books Do Furnish a Room that she is frigid, and frigidity is often the symptom of nymphomania. She wants to do it all the time, but she doesn’t enjoy it.’ Which brings to mind Nicola Six? ‘I’m not sure but Mary [Furness] supplied Nicola’s sublime, captivating dimension.’

  In October 1977 Martin attended a party in Holland Park hosted by Tobias Rodgers. Playboys tend to be the products of popular fiction and the media, but Rodgers was the genuine article, an antiquarian bookseller who practised a patrician brand of hedonism. Qualification for his abundant hospitality required either a comparable amount of wealth and good looks, or proven artistic flair. Martin and Hitchens were present, as were Angela Gorgas and her then flatmate, later to become novelist, Candia McWilliam. Both, from Hitchens’s recollection, were ‘stunningly attractive’ but it was Gorgas who found herself the subject of Martin’s well-rehearsed charm and wit. ‘Although we mixed in similar circles, I’d never actually met Martin before. I’d seen pictures of him in the press so I recognised him and we got chatting pretty quickly. He made me laugh. I mean, I’d known him only a few minutes but I was weeping with laughter. He was funny but he listened too. He seemed totally enthralled by my conversation, which was obviously immensely flattering. It goes without saying that he was very attractive but the photographs I’d seen previously did not do him justice. I knew, as a photographer, that I could do much better. I wanted to photograph him myself and indeed I went on to do just that; I kept a visual diary of our time together. It was just a personal record – at the time I was totally unaware of the importance of those images. I was not to know that over thirty years later those photographs would form a large part of my exhibition, “Martin Amis and Friends” at The National Portrait Gallery.’

  In the first few months of their relationship Martin and Angela would stay over in each other’s flats. Martin had recently exchanged the rooms in Earl’s Court for a rather more agreeable, though certainly not upmarket, flat in Kensington Garden Square. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘arranged by Pat [Kavanagh] and the lease belonged to a friend of hers, Jim Durham. Off Queensway and Westbourne Grove, two rooms, a kitchen and bathroom. Not bad for twelve pounds a week.’ Angela remembers it as ‘a bachelor pad. It was sparse – there were a few framed silk screen prints on the walls by his artist brother Philip, but Martin had little interest in the visual arts really. The flat was always very neat and tidy, mainly due to his cleaner, Ana, who came twice a week. There was little for her to do as the flat was small with one bedroom and there was never any washing up – Martin never cooked and I rarely did. The fridge was practically empty as we ate out most of the time, often at Bertorelli’s, a popular local restaurant in Westbourne Grove. Martin was very disciplined and would be at his desk working from 8.30 a.m., no matter how late he went to bed the night before. At lunchtime he would break off from writing and relax, either reading or playing his guitar, usually just improvising.’ He played the guitar? ‘Yes. Very well too, but he rather kept that to himself.’ John Walsh has a similar memory of the place from when as a cub reporter he was sent to interview Martin. ‘I’d already heard about it, from Craig Raine actually, who had remarked on the empty fridge. “People usually bring their own,” said Martin, “I drink mine after opening.” He was joking, partly. But what about food? asked Raine. And Martin found this terribly amusing. I thought the place was slightly unnerving. Cell-like. It was as though he was determined to leave no evidence of his presence, let alone his passing. And although he was accommodating enough the flat made interviewers feel like they were in an interrogation cell. Most effective.’

  Angela shared a spacious house in the fashionable and, even in the 1970s, outrageously expensive Warwick Avenue with Candia McWilliam and its owner Amschel Rothschild. The house had gained a reputation as a salon for those who had either earned some status as incipient stars in the arts and those who, mostly by virtue of inherited wealth, borrowed a layer of bohemian glamour from the former. The assemblies were affected, upmarket and lacked the infectious blend of self-caricature and intellectual point-scoring of the New Statesman gatherings. Hitchens, fascinated, went along as did on several occasions Clive James; and one suspects that the mood of pretentiousness that informs his first novel Brilliant Creatures (1983) reflected some of his experiences there.

  At around the same time that Martin met Angela, Kingsley and Jane began what on the surface seemed a tactical alteration in their lifestyle but was in truth a symptom of the decline of their relationship, which would end barely three years hence. They moved from Lemmons to Flask Walk, to another impressive Georgian house but one more convenient for Kingsley who now lunched regularly at the Garrick. Hitchens: ‘On the surface little had changed. Kingsley was still a brilliant host. “If your glass isn’t full it’s your own fault.” And he would point to a table and cabinet of drinks from which all there were told to help themselves.’ But it was clear also that he and Jane were not the same couple they’d been even when he first got to know them, no more than five years earlier. ‘Ian [McEwan], Clive [James] and James [Fenton] were still regulars and the banter was as lively as ever but the politics was touched with something a little edgier. The atmosphere in the house reflected a much broader mood. When we all first went to Lemmons, and when Kingsley and Conkers sometimes came out with us, that was 1974 when a minority Labour Government had brought down Edward Heath, and national politics seemed comedic, like musical chairs. But there was, towards the end of the seventies, something far more precipitate . . . change was imminent.’

  Tony Howard, then in his final year as editor of the New Statesman recalls that from 1977 onwards the lunchtime sessions in Theobald’s Road were ‘comparable to the final gatherings in the first-class dining room of the Titanic. We had not quite reached the so-called winter of discontent [1978–79] but there were sufficient warnings of social and economic stagnation. I mean that the unions, particularly the public service unions, held the levers of power; they could effectively bring the country to a halt. They never went so far as to spell out in detail how they would do so but the threat and its consequences were evident to all. Some saw it as the Marxist prophecy about to be fulfilled, Capitalism finally brought to its knees by the proletariat, with factors such as the Middle East oil c
risis as confirmation that these symptoms reached further than the provincial economy of the UK.’ Hitchens? ‘Yes, indeed. He took that view, advocating a proactive role for the New Statesman as an organ of the revolution. I am not sure who he thought our readers were.’ Kingsley was greatly amused, and in his caustic manner raised such questions as to when it was likely he would be required to hand over Flask Walk as HQ for the Hampstead branch of the Young Communist League. Martin neither apologized for his father – who in any event would have resented this – nor did he intervene on behalf of his peers. He was, according to Francis Wheen, ‘dispassionately amused. But I think, on the whole, he was rather impressed.’ Kingsley commented to Conquest: ‘You’ll have heard by now that Bruce Page has got the Statesman. Everybody there seems too stunned to say anything. Consenus is that he’s either off his head or a colonel in the KGB or both and that he’s a frightful shit . . .’11

  The contrast between Page and the supposed or professed advocates of the genuine left already at the magazine offers an intriguing insight into the unique culture of the New Statesman during the 1970s. In Page’s view: ‘I took over a flaccid middle-ground magazine being dragged towards the territory of what would become the Liberal Democrats. I restored it to its original, traditional readership, those who wanted articles on the pragmatics of politics, from a predominantly Socialist perspective. And it began to make money again.’ Irrespective of this closing comment, not many would deny Page’s claim to have turned the New Statesman into an organ for serious left-wing discourse. But at the same time he brought to an end what had become an unofficial colloquium which had both indulged the joky amorality of the time and more significantly evolved into a farce for change in British literary history. The Theobald’s Road lunches and drinking sessions were certainly not occasions for debate on what each felt about the agonies of the postmodern condition. Triviality, facetious intellectual one-upmanshipand sexist wordplay predominated, all of which horrified Page. Howard: ‘Obviously, I had “left the building”. But I was in regular contact with those still there. By all accounts editorial conferences were like wakes, with everyone, Editor excepted, mourning the death of humour. Page felt that the jokiness of the place was symptomatic of its political impotence.’ In fact it was the glue that held together something far less easy to classify.

  Martin and Page clashed almost immediately, the latter regarding his Literary Editor as chief perpetrator of the clubbish bohemian atmosphere that had, in Page’s view, infected the most significant part of the journal, the front half. Page’s literary tastes were eclectic but governed largely by the mantra that writing of any sort should be accessible to all comers, a British version of Eastern bloc Socialist Realism. ‘To show his cultural credentials,’ recalls Wheen, ‘he would sometimes state at meetings “as . . . observed in . . .” probably a play by Shaw, or even quote from a piece of verse. I don’t remember exactly his favourites but few would have been particularly fashionable after about 1920.’

  Craig Raine had tutored Martin at Oxford and occasionally attended sessions with the New Statesman set. Although his verse was valued by all at the New Statesman in its own right, the decision to award ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ the Prudence Farmer Award for best single poem of the year in 1978 was influenced also by the knowledge of all concerned that it would infuriate Page. Fenton, chair of the judges, commented pointedly that ‘the Martian . . . insists on presenting the familiar at its most strange’, that the governing principle of composition is ‘free contemplation, without ulterior motive, eager if anything for the most improbable discoveries’.12 Hardly the kind of writing suitable for an engagement with the burgeoning winter of discontent. As if to leave Page in no doubt regarding the commitment of the back-end staff to poetry at its most ostentatiously poetic, second prize was awarded to Christopher Reid for his ‘Baldanders’. Thus the two most prominent members of what would become known as the Martian school of poetry were given public prominence for the first time thanks, in part, to the new regime of Puritanism at the New Statesman.

  Martin resigned his post as Literary Editor two months later and his parting shot was to publish ‘Point of View’.13 McGonagall left an embarrassing stain upon the distinguished legacy of the ballad and E. J. Thribb did something comparable to free verse. It would be unjust to treat Martin’s contribution to Martianism as a similar aberration – it is a competent piece – but it none the less invites comparison with both by allowing an apparent duty to precedent to eclipse singularity of purpose.

  Some of us look at the sunset and can

  See only blood in the vampiric sky.

  I’ve got a clock that turns its back on me.

  In disdain. A watch wouldn’t dare do that.

  If you don’t feel a little mad sometimes

  Then I think you must be out of your mind.

  No one knows what to do. Clichés are true.

  Everything depends on your point of view.

  Briefly, it is worth dwelling upon the immediate consequences of his departure. Page appointed as his replacement David Caute, a figure he judged to be his ideological mirror image, a man who would ‘clean up’ the shoddy arts sections of the magazine. The appointment was seen by most as a personal snub to Julian Barnes, Martin’s deputy, who had applied for the post, and as a general reprimand to those whom Page deemed to have fallen under Martin’s cosmopolitan bohemian spell. Fenton left the magazine and Hitchens was already at the Express. An era had ended and it seemed to some as though Martin’s departure epitomized its closure. Had he provided its momentum? Anthony Howard: ‘I think he did in a way. Now that most of the group and many of its occasional members are established figures we tend to forget that at the time Martin was really the only one who was a “star” both as a writer and someone who featured in William Hickey’s gossip column as one of the most eligible bachelors in London.’

  While Barnes was working out his notice he and Wheen devised the most potentially obscene Comp. ever, as a memorial to the good times. During the war and later when men were on National Service it was common to include in letters home lurid anagrams alongside signatures. The most famous were ‘Norwich’ (Nikkers Off Ready When I Come Home) and ‘Burma’ (Be Upstairs Ready My Angel). Barnes asked readers to bridge the gap between this naughty-postcard tradition and the liberated post-sixties decade. The entries made up the largest ‘Comp.’ ever, two columns, including ‘Nice’ (Nine Inches Coiled Expectantly), ‘Lyons’ (Let Your Organ Naturally Seep), ‘Oslo’ (Oh, Such Lovely Orifices) and ‘Hamburg’ (Have A Monstrous Bratwurst Unwrapped, Ready, Gretchen). Did Martin have anything to do with this? I ask Wheen. ‘I think he played a part.’ It was now Caute’s job to deliver the proofs to Southend and he took the opportunity to scrutinize the material only shortly before he left the office. Wheen remembers him addressing Page. ‘Filth, disgusting. They’ve been turning out schoolboy obscenities like this for years. That’s it.’ The Comp. was not formally closed but it would never again reflect the raucous, dissident aspect of the 1970s era. Wheen: ‘After that Page imposed statutory rules and timetables. No more ping-pong in the basement, no extended lunches in the likes of Theobald’s Road. Not that it mattered much because the people who had been part of all that had left.’

  6

  Paris

  During 1977 Martin’s agent Pat Kavanagh had negotiated a contract for him with Lew Grade’s ITC Entertainment to write the screenplay for their forthcoming film to be called Saturn 3, a project which combined the enduring appeal of science fiction with a spurious attempt at realism, the latter involving the ongoing Apollo space programme. Martin’s script is at once heroic and pitiable, his various attempts at wit, rhetorical bravado, even elegance, being shoe-horned into a directorial enterprise as boorish as The Vikings. ‘My script’, adds Martin, ‘wasn’t used. The final version was by Frederic Raphael.’ Even before he learnt of the fate of his contribution he was aware that the whole project would end in catastrophe. The narrative, so called, by
John Barry involved scenes of seduction by lonely astronauts and robots, the latter supplementing their incongruous sexuality with a tendency to dismantle themselves. But Martin continued for the simple reason that Kavanagh had settled a fee that went far beyond any advance even the most popular novelist could hope for: £30,000. Alongside this, and as the project at Pinewood became more fractious and unfocused, Martin was offered the job as script consultant, at £1,000 per week. Taking into account the gigantic increase in the cost of that most basic of human aspirations, house ownership, this would today be the equivalent of more than a quarter of a million (in 1978 Kingsley and Jane sold Lemmons, a prestigious Home Counties mansion, for £105,000). Alongside his salary from the New Statesman, royalties from other books and occasional payments for journalism elsewhere Saturn 3 brought Martin’s taxable income for the financial year 1978–79 to more than £38,000. This prompted the much-quoted, notorious remark in Kingsley’s letter to Larkin in May 1979: ‘Did I tell you Martin is spending a year abroad as a TAX EXILE? Last year he earned £38,000. Little shit. 29, he is. Little shit.’1 Anthony Thwaite, editor of Larkin’s letters and friend of both Kingsley and Larkin, commented to me that: ‘Of course Kingsley loved masquerade. He was pleased and very proud that Martin was doing so well but he knew that one day the letters would be read by those ignorant of the games he and Philip played [in them]. Performing from the grave I suppose.’ Rosie Boycott backs this up. ‘More than ten years later, he would still grin at the recollection, the year Martin became richer than him. He joked about it but above all he was proud of him.’