Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  By this point Martin and Angela Gorgas were already in ‘exile’, in Paris, and seven months earlier, on 28 October 1978, the following notice had appeared in the Court and Social page of The Times: ‘The engagement is announced between Martin, younger son of Kingsley Amis of Hampstead, London and Lady Kilmarnock of Ronda, Spain and Angela, younger daughter of Mr and Mrs Richard Gorgas of Farnborough, Kent.’ Hitchens: ‘There wasn’t an engagement party, as such, but I remember an informal lunch at Flask Walk about a week after the announcement, six or seven guests. Kingsley was on good form but something had changed. Angela was in raptures, giggling, helping Jane with the food – daughter-in-law-in-waiting I suppose – and Martin seemed quite odd. He was content, apparently, but he appeared to have aged about two decades in as many weeks, sitting in an armchair reading the Sunday papers with a glass of brandy. Looked like he was already married, well not just married but middle-aged. With benefit of hindsight it’s probably just as well it was all called off.’

  During the six months before the move to Paris Martin and Angela lived as well-heeled bohemians. Gorgas: ‘Most weekends were spent in London, going to parties, dinner parties or meeting up with friends in restaurants. We often visited his dad and Jane for Sunday lunch at their home in Hampstead. We occasionally drove in Martin’s beaten up Mini, affectionately known as ‘The Ashtray’, to spend the weekend at Ammy’s [Amschel Rothschild’s] estate in Suffolk; Ammy was a charming and generous host and other friends would gather there, Christopher Hitchens and Adam Shand Kydd amongst them. A friend of ours, the artist Anthony Palliser, who had lived and worked in Paris, told us about a flat that had become available to rent. We both thought it would be fun to get away from London . . . and Paris, well, who wouldn’t want to live in Paris for a while?’

  The flat was in rue Mouffetard which Angela describes as ‘ordinary nineteenth century Paris – the street had a permanent market selling groceries, live rabbits, chickens and so on – which was becoming a trendy area favoured by artists and intellectuals.’ ‘The flat’, says Martin, ‘was rented to us from Ugo Tognazzi’s ex-wife.’ Tognazzi, Italian film director and actor, was at the time they moved in busy completing and then promoting one of the most successful non-US films of all time, La Cage aux Folles, in which he starred as the gay owner of a St Tropez nightclub. ‘Externally,’ Angela recalls, ‘the building was maybe a hundred and fifty years old and shabby-chic, but the flat itself was pure late 1970s. The décor was incredible. The wallpaper had a swirling purple and silver pattern – and the carpets were brightly coloured with geometric patterns too, quite a combination! The furniture was leather, aluminium and glass.’

  Hitchens, now back at the New Statesman and desperately attempting to reconcile his hedonistic Trotskyism with Page’s schoolmasterish regime, took over the lease on Martin’s ‘sock’. His own residence had become not so much downmarket as uninhabitable. Martin might often play the role of feckless reprobate; his friend lived it with enthusiasm.

  A few of Martin’s relationships had endured but this was his first experience of full-time cohabitation. Domesticity and its attendant mundanities were largely avoided. Despite the fact that it came by arrangement with a friend the flat was, according to Martin ‘expensive’ but neither he nor Angela was inclined to change their habit of eating out in cafés and restaurants. ‘Workmen’s cafés’, so-called in Paris, were of course rather different from the greasy spoon joints that Martin and the rest enjoyed in London. There were no proper menus but plenty of bread, cheese, meats, salad and carafes of ordinary wine, and Martin felt a little bereft. It was difficult to ‘slum’ even in the poorer parts of Paris. Poverty-stricken Parisians still maintained a certain amount of class. ‘We quickly found a “favourite bar” which, most importantly, had a Space Invader machine; Martin found this a good way to unwind in the evenings and would sometimes spend hours in front of it.’ When not entertaining friends, Martin and Angela settled into an agreed routine: ‘As I have already said, he was immensely disciplined. We would usually have breakfast together at a local café but by about 9 a.m. at the very latest he was at his desk, writing. He did first drafts in longhand. He would work all day, perhaps with a break at lunchtime – we lived on a market street and I would buy fresh bread and cheeses and we would eat lunch together if I was around. I worked in a studio nearby, completing commissioned portraits and paintings. I also attended life-drawing classes at a local art school. I don’t know if it’s the same now but then you didn’t have to enrol as a student, you could simply walk in off the street, pay 2 francs and draw a model. It was fantastic’.

  ‘Angela came back one afternoon and Martin was sitting in the salle d’attente talking and laughing. He and the other man stood up and he said, “Angela, let me introduce Roman. Roman Polanski.” They were doing an interview. All very relaxed. I sat down and joined them and Polanski was as funny as Martin.’

  The new novel, begun when he resigned from the New Statesman, would he decided take his literary ambitions and his reputation in a different direction.

  His reviews so far had been enthusiastic yet ambivalent. Clearly he was unconventional in that many of his characters challenged established limits of credibility and his dystopian miniatures veered between the arbitrary and the prophetic. At the same time there was the nagging implication that in Dead Babies and Success the long shadow of his famous father was still just visible. On Success Blake Morrison in the TLS gives the impression of being sympathetic and slightly apologetic. Clearly he likes the novel but wants desperately to avoid the admission that his enjoyment derives only from Martin’s stylistic bravado: it ‘contains’, he declares, ‘elements of social allegory’, and is sometimes ‘imbued with political significance’.2 Paul Ableman in the Spectator was less charitable. The occasional ‘plod through Beckettland [and] meander through Kafka country’ is a sop to the avant-garde, somewhat at odds with ‘the reader’s growing perception that the book is a parable about the old order in England and the new raj of the yobs . . .’3 No one seemed certain if he was adapting the techniques of the post-war 1950s generation to a more openly degenerate environment or showing signs of incipient radicalism.

  The broader literary world – to whose moods Martin was professionally but unapprehensively alert – was at the end of the 1970s entering one of its periodic bouts of discontent with regard to the lack of adventure in British writing.

  In 1976 Peter Ackroyd set the tone in his Notes for a New Culture.4 He argued that England – though by implication not necessarily Britain – had ‘insulated itself’ from the benefits of modernism and maintained the ‘false context’ and ‘false aesthetic’ of realism. His ideal was the French noveau roman, the kind of fiction writing which constantly uses the genre to re-examine its own precarious fabric. The closing issue of the New Review in 1978 comprised a colloquium of writers and critics summoned to pronounce on the state of the novel. The general view was that the British were by varying degrees self-absorbed, unambitious, complacent and reactionary in what they produced, at least compared with American, French and Third World writers. The fact that Martin and the editor of the New Review, Ian Hamilton, once close friends, had recently fallen out over Mary Furness had nothing to do with the issue’s rather unkind view of the state of fiction, or so one assumes. Weightier academic assessments were equally pessimistic, with John Sutherland in Fiction and the Fiction Industry5 proposing that the relationship between writers and major publishers stifled originality; the latter were concerned only with reliably saleable goods and the former, who needed either to get published or to sustain their income, complied. Bernard Bergonzi updated his 1970 The Situation of the Novel6 in 1979. Both editions, particularly the second, remind one of an angry headmaster’s extended report on yet another decade’s group of recalcitrant idlers. The English novel was now stultifyingly, almost irrevocably ‘parochial’ in its range. In Bergonzi’s opinion little had changed since the nineteenth century and, lamentably, the crystallization of liberal ideas
and actions that made the classic realist novel valuable had now been replaced by a nugatory conservatism; traditional techniques and reactionary values appeared to be working hand in hand. The most famous contribution to this growing caterwaul of disgruntlement came from Bill Buford, who in the third issue of Granta in 1980 voiced his concerns in an essay entitled ‘The End of the English Novel’. He was prompted to do so, he claimed, by an article in the trade journal the Bookseller by Robert McCrum ‘a young editor at Faber’ (twenty-five years later a major presence in the literary establishment; among other things literary editor of the Observer). McCrum had claimed, from first-hand experience, that Sutherland’s thesis was valid, and worse that the publishing houses and established writers were perpetuating bad writing.

  Neither Martin, nor for that matter Ian McEwan, were thought worthy of mention in any of these. Instead praise was heaped upon the genuine standard bearers of experiment: Christine Brooke-Rose, Gabriel Josipovici, Ann Quin, Alan Burns and the redoubtable double act of B. S. Johnson and John Berger. The one newcomer cited as a promising heir to Joyce and Beckett was a young man called Salman Rushdie whose single novel then in print, Grimus, had appeared in 1975. But at the time Rushdie was on the margins of the circuit patronized by Martin, McEwan, Hitchens, Fenton and Barnes.

  D. J. Taylor: ‘With hindsight we can find remarkable and original qualities in those early novels [by Martin], but they were treated then as raffish sops to contemporary taste, eccentric, faintly morbid – very funny of course – but still rather orthodox.’ In truth, they were the foundations for a remarkable achievement, notably a previously inconceivable hybrid involving the purist strain of modernism, the kind of writing that revels in its own elegant vividness and a capacity to reduce the most sombre, mirthless readers to guilty laughter. Such a combination had never before even been conjectured upon let alone encountered so it is not entirely surprising that the literary establishment took some time to acknowledge its arrival. However, the delay is one of the reasons why Martin himself decided to renounce the stifling inhibitions of readability and attempt something that might attract the attention of those guardians of high culture, the advocates of experiment. The result, eventually, would be Other People: A Mystery Story (1981). Angela was his constant companion during the period of the novel’s gestation. He explained to her his persistent interest in the minutiae of a woman’s day-to-day life. He was not interested exclusively in this. Martin was continually alert to people’s habits and movements, and of course their verbal idiosyncrasies. He was hunting all the time, picking up evidence, material for his portraits, his pictures in language. Now, though, he was giving special attention to the ordinary demands of life as a woman, so being there all the time Angela was his main source. He was interested in practicalities. Why do you choose that kind of make-up, what do you do with your hair and so on? And he was concerned also with things that might seem to have nothing to do with gender – crossing the road, opening a door, pouring from a bottle, acts you don’t plan or think about. But all the time he was comparing, looking for differences and contrasts. The novel was clearly going to focus upon the experiences of a woman, and might even be a story told by a woman? ‘Yes, he said so, but he was more guarded about what exactly he intended to do with all this.’

  Martin claims only to have a first draft of Other People: A Mystery Story and while conceding that he did, as Angela recalls, make copious notes while preparing it they appear to have been lost. ‘Actually,’ he states ‘I started the novel before I left the New Statesman.’ Before the appointment of Bruce? ‘Around the same time, but the events weren’t related. The animus was the question of being someone else and the most obvious difference between my world, my experience and another was sex, gender.’

  Other People focuses upon a brief period in the life of Mary Lamb who might, prior to her unexplained state of amnesia, have once been Amy Hide. Parallels between them are inferred, and the principal difference is that Amy exists as a memory, an echo of someone socially privileged, who enjoyed a hedonistic amoral lifestyle, while Mary seems in a state of atrophy with no clearly defined background or prospects.

  An attempt to reconstruct the mental territory occupied by the opposite sex might have been the animus for the project but as it developed something else, something far more private and unsettling, began to intrude upon his creative process. Mary Lamb is one of the most elusive figures in fiction. She provides the momentum for the novel, everything that occurs between its opening page and its macabre close is about her, she is the subject of everyone else’s attention – pastoral, envious, sexual, malevolent, the list is monumental – yet we have no proper sense of who she is or what she endures. We feel for her, we want to know more of the dreadfulness that seems to attend her permanent state of confusion, but throughout the book she remains as little more than an enigma, a human being shaped by a chiaroscuro of other people’s ambitions and failings.

  She is, therefore, the perfect vehicle for the adaptation of Raine’s and Reid’s poetry to the more intricate fabric of fiction. Raine introduced his technique through the whimsical conceit of the Martian, an anomalous figure possessed of all the cultural resources of his inventor yet untutored in the routines of association and recognition that make up our daily lives.

  Mary is a credible embodiment of the Martian poems. The mental condition which prefigures the latter – seeing everything as if for the first time – is a feature of her amnesia. But instead of having her sound like a shambolic uncorrected version of Raine’s and Reid’s drafts, Martin turns her into a mute record of confusion and rediscovery. We learn of her state of mind not from what she says but from the narrator, a presence whose prose equivalent of Martian verse comes close to translation. Raine famously inverted the standard perception of a car journey:

  a key is turned to free the world

  for movement, so quick there is a film

  to watch for anything missed.

  Similarly Mary as a passenger ‘watched the . . . warehouses that marched past slowly on either side and seemed to glance back over their shoulders at the car’ (p. 114). In Raine’s universe the telephone is ‘a haunted apparatus’ which ‘sleeps’ and

  snores when you pick it up

  If the ghost cries, they carry it

  to their lips and soothe it to sleep

  with sounds.

  Mary could easily have walked into the poem, albeit with a little more confidence on how to unravel these defamiliarized images:

  The bandy, glistening dumb-bell was heavier than she had expected.

  ‘Yes?’ said Mary.

  A thin voice started talking. Telephones were clearly less efficient instruments of communication than people let on. For instance, you could hardly hear the other person and they could hardly hear you.

  ‘I can’t hear. What?’ said Mary.

  Then she heard, in an angry whine, ‘I said turn it the other way up.’

  Mary blushed, and did as she was told. (p. 106)

  Raine’s amanuensis wanders along the most unremarkable vistas, always altering the ordinary and casting curious glances towards the mundane. The butcher ‘duels with himself and woos his woman customers/offering thin coiled coral necklaces of mince/heart loaned from the fridge, a leg of pork/like a nasty bouquet, pound notes printed with blood’. Mary’s excursion to the market involves similarly macabre images.

  Mary shopped among the blood-boltered marble, inspecting murdered chickens. She walked the terraces of the vegetable stalls, watched by the scarred toothless louts who swung like lewd monkeys from their wooden supports. She presided over the icy offal of the fishmongers’ slabs, where the bug-eyed prawns all faced the same direction, as imploring as the Faithful. (pp. 18–20)

  Rather than attempting to explain what Martin might have been up to most of the reviewers sought shelter behind such makeshift adjectival substitutes for evaluation as ‘powerful’, ‘obsessive’, ‘dazzling’, ‘scintillating’, ‘enthralling’ and ‘distu
rbing’. While one is equally reluctant to treat the novel like a crossword puzzle several elementary questions trouble even the most indulgent reader. First, what is the relationship between Mary and Amy? Second, who is the figure referred to only as ‘Prince’?

  In 1977 Martin was contacted by a woman he had known very briefly almost three years earlier during his first summer as a literary celebrity. Julie Kavanagh had been with him for a matter of weeks when they and Hitchens attended an event in a spacious Mayfair maisonette, their host now lost to the memories of all concerned. Martin began a conversation with Lamorna Seale which would result during the subsequent weeks in a brief but by no means trivial affair. Martin would have continued with the relationship but it was brought to a close largely at Lamorna’s behest. She felt reluctant to give up completely on her marriage to Patrick Seale with whom she already had a three-year-old son, Orlando. Seale was almost fifteen years her senior, a journalist specializing in the Middle East who in the 1960s had written several celebrated books on the region and its crises. When Lamorna met Martin at the party she and Patrick were involved in a mutually agreed trial separation, hoping that time apart might give them the opportunity to reflect upon and perhaps later resolve their marital problems. It was for this reason, when they resumed contact approximately three months later, that both were certain that the child she was carrying was not his. They agreed, however, that for the sake of Delilah, as she was to be named, it would be best for Patrick’s name to appear on the birth certificate and that the truth about her biological paternity should be kept from her. Lamorna stated truthfully that during their time apart she had had sex with only one person and that Delilah’s father was Martin Amis. They also agreed that Martin need not be informed, but two years later Lamorna decided to call him at the New Statesman to ask him to meet her for lunch where she showed him a recent photograph of Delilah and announced that she was his daughter. Martin is still unclear about her reason for doing so; she certainly had no wish for him to assume any kind of legal or financial responsibility. He states in Experience that when they met she had ‘impressed me with her general bearing and burnish – her beauty, her sanity’. Despite this, as he would later learn, she was suffering from severe manic depression. They said they would meet again, though neither broached the delicate question of whether he would be introduced to his infant daughter. Lamorna did state that she had just completed her first novel, to be called Candida Rising, which would be published by Michael Joseph the following year, 1978.