Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Six months after their lunch and shortly after her novel appeared, Lamorna was discovered by her son, Orlando, then five, hanging in the attic of the family home. Orlando shielded his two-year-old sister Delilah from the scene and Patrick soon afterwards hurried his two children down the stairs into the back of the house and lowered his wife’s body to the floor.

  Martin has not recorded the means by which he heard of her suicide nor his feelings following the disclosure. What is known, however, is that contact with the Seale family then ceased until he was introduced to Delilah in 1996.

  Contemporary reviewers had no reason to suspect that anything actual or private informed the various and discordant layers of the writing and were therefore united in their view that the rising star of contemporary fiction was exploring the boundaries between realism and the avant-garde. In truth, however, he was attempting to reconcile his vocation – this was, it should be remembered, his first piece of fiction written after becoming freelance – with events far more traumatic than anything he had either previously experienced or allowed his imaginative faculties to countenance. There are obvious parallels between Mary and Lamorna. The latter’s manic depression meant not that she perceived events, experiences and objects differently from everyone else but rather that they acquired associations and qualities that reflected unique aspects of her state of mind. Amnesia, or a separation from a comfortable consensus on how the otherwise harmless mundanities of existence make us feel, is a related though far less distressing condition, and its volitional, creative counterpart is of course Martian writing.

  Martin makes it impossible for the reader to discern the nature of the tripartite relationship between Amy Hide, Mary and Prince. He is Mary’s guide, the intermediary between her skewed perceptions and the elaborations of the narrator, the Martian prose-poet, and he owns the suburban house in which Amy appears to be the guest. They are not lovers yet they are curiously intimate, sharing routine tasks, discussing his tedious yet undefined work in the city. We know that their relationship is also precipitate, that he will assist her through some kind of alteration.

  ‘I am going away or a while’ he said to her at breakfast the next day.

  Amy wasn’t alarmed or even surprised. In a way she was pleased. She knew that this was a salute to something in her, and that she wouldn’t disappoint him.

  ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I’ll be all right,’ she said.

  They finished breakfast in silence. She walked out with him to the car.

  ‘Something will happen when I’ve gone,’ he said. (p. 196)

  ‘Then something did happen.’ Amy goes to the bookcase and takes out Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which among other things identified the generic symptoms of what psychotherapists would later call clinical depression. Out of the volume falls an ancient photograph, early Victorian, the period when executions still took place in public. On the scaffold stands a group of top-hatted aldermen and city fathers, along with a hooded hangman, holding the noose above the head of the condemned prisoner.

  On the back of the photograph Prince has written ‘You wait’. She does and in the interim is visited briefly by her sister called – ridiculously – Baby, who is the only balanced contented individual in the book. She has a young child, a baby girl. She is married, but she informs Amy later that ‘It’s his’ leaving the reader to wonder why a woman might need to state, gratuitously, that the child was fathered by her husband. Unless of course she was not. Soon Amy will walk through a sequence of doors and tunnels, leaving her past behind and find herself in the presence of a man wearing a ‘hood or cowl’, whom she recalls from the photograph.

  His arms enfolded her. She felt a sensation of speed so intense that her nose caught the tang of smouldering air. She saw a red beach bubbled with sandpools under a furious and unstable sun. She felt she was streaming, she felt she was undoing everywhere. Oh, father, she thought, my mouth is full of stars. Please put them out and take me home to bed.

  The sensation of speed returned for a moment, then nothing did. (p. 206)

  No one has ever offered a record of what hanging feels like but this must come close.

  After being told that Delilah was his daughter Martin showed the photograph to his mother. He relates their conversation in Experience.7

  ‘What do you think Mum?’

  She held the photograph at various distances from her eyes [. . .] Without looking up she said,

  – Definitely

  – What should I do?

  – Nothing. Don’t do anything, dear.

  Few if any novels have so successfully sustained an environment quite as malevolent as this and a group of characters so impersonally vindictive. All of them, from the yobbish Sharon and Trev to their middle-class bohemian counterparts Augusta and Jamie, bear a remarkable resemblance to the cast of Martin’s three previous works of fiction but with a slight but significant difference. Before Other People Martin never quite went as far as to exculpate his characters, yet he cleverly deflected attention from their vileness by lending them the cloak of magnificently tailored, very black comedy. Now, however, he allows them to range beyond this protective pall, and aside from their unappealing effects upon the reader, it is Mary/Amy who suffers most from encounters with them. Indeed the atmosphere of the entire text is nightmarish, an enfolding torment for its two principal characters from which they seem to be seeking release. And we know how Amy eventually succeeds in this. Of course, Martin was neither so deluded nor so presumptuous as to assume that he in any way was responsible for the world or conditions that contributed to Lamorna’s depression, and there are no direct allegorical parallels between the novel and the tragic private narrative to which he had access. At the same time it must be recognized that a quite remarkable literary document – by turns flawed and brilliant – drew its character from a unique combination of experience and creativity. The Martian poetic sub-genre was unapologetically rootless – it involved writing about writing – and Martin’s original objective was to embed its pure literariness in a novel that caught something of a world of endemic disconnectedness. He could not have predicted that an individual afflicted by what he would later call ‘the dissociation of sensibility’ of the 1970s would become so closely interwoven with the writing of the book.

  The bulk of the novel was completed during Martin’s nine-month period in Paris. Did he, I ask Angela Gorgas, suggest that there was any connection between the nature of his project and his decision to live for such a long period in a state of alienation from circumstances he knew so well.’ (And one should note that it was a decision based not upon financial contingency, as alleged facetiously in Kingsley’s remark to Larkin: the Inland Revenue had full records of his income for that financial year irrespective of his temporary absence from the UK.) ‘Martin is someone who likes to create his own familiar world around him, no matter where he is. At that time, the centre of his world was his writing and everything else fell into place around this – Paris wasn’t so different from London in that way. We had a small social circle, consisting mainly of Anthony [Pallister’s] friends, but friends from London came over too; the Hitch, James [Fenton] and Ian [McEwan] were our most frequent visitors.’ Angela also commented that in Paris Martin became more alert to the mundane features of his environment, matters that would escape his attention in more familiar circumstances. In this respect he resembled a Martian poet and indeed the murderous narrator of the novel he was writing; a predatory observer, continually collecting and then reshaping the ordinary. I asked Angela if he mentioned to her the death of Lamorna or her disclosure that he was the father of Delilah and she stated that she knew nothing of this until more than twenty years later when she read of them in Experience.’ Martin showed the photograph to his mother during a visit to Ronda in 1978 but said nothing to Kingsley, who might otherwise have suspected parallels between invention and actuality – being an adapt practitioner of this art – but after he read the
book he observed, in a letter to Robert Conquest, only: ‘Tough going I find. You see there’s this girl with amnesia shit, you know what I mean, so she’s forgotten what a lavatory is and thinks cisterns and pipes are statuary, but then how does she know what statuary is? It’s like a novel by Craig Raine, well not quite so fearful as that would be I suppose.’8 ‘You might mention’, Martin advised me, ‘the odd fact that my name is an anagram of Martianism.’

  7

  America, Kingsley and Bellow

  Martin and Angela returned to London in February 1980. They had discussed moving in together and while neither had reservations about doing so in principle – Paris had worked well and their relationship seemed in no danger of losing its original energy – practicalities meant that they decided to postpone the time-consuming process of finding a suitable leasehold flat in central London, let alone one they could afford to buy. Despite the generous windfall from Saturn 3 Martin was aware that a future based upon negotiated advances and the fickle mood of the reading public – aka royalties – would be financially precarious. He had decided, therefore, to make use of his experience as reviewer and literary feature writer to become the kind of essayist that the British press had not previously countenanced; in the US a solid tradition had been maintained by the likes of Hemingway, Mailer and Vidal. He discussed his ideas with friends and contacts in the mainstream press, going first to Terry Kilmartin who was now Deputy Editor of the Observer, and he had the ear of his boss Donald Trelford. He also received enthusiastic responses to his enquiries from the Sunday Times, whose editor Harold Evans had recently gone through a divorce in order to marry Tina Brown, now editor of the Tatler. Tina and Martin had remained on good terms since their relationship in the early 1970s and she too was intrigued by his suggestion that he could become a roving raconteur and interviewer. Tina had commissioned him to visit the US to interview Truman Capote in 1978, shortly after his departure from the New Statesman, and eighteen months later, when he was based in Paris, she sponsored his visit to California where he recorded the baroque self-absorbed lifestyle of Palm Beach residents.

  Obviously, newspapers would provide a far more regular and generous income than book publishers. An advance of £4,000 was so far his highest and given that he anticipated producing an average of one novel every two or three years, a life dedicated exclusively to the production of fiction seemed less than feasible. It was agreed, particularly with Trelford and Kilmartin, that his portfolio would comprise two main subjects: other writers, especially US writers; and abroad, predominantly the US. Hence the decision to put off permanent cohabitation. He expected to be out of the country so frequently during 1980–82 that it seemed for the time being practical to maintain Westbourne Grove as his stopover and office; Angela moved back into Warwick Road.

  His first lengthy visit to the States took place just after he had returned to London at the end of the summer of 1979, paid for partly by the Tatler but funded mainly by the Sunday Telegraph, for his coverage of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. His account of Reagan’s arrival and speech at El Paso, Texas, very much sets the standard for his subsequent treatment of America and its citizens. He is never quite awestruck, even in the presence of figures he admires or when avidly recording weird urban landscapes. Instead it is a place that by turns appals and energizes him and the enduring characteristic of his coverage is an implied question: do I wish that I were part of it all or am I relieved that I am not?

  This question would prove an abundant source of inspiration for a man whose principal affiliation is to literature. It was as though he had encountered a novel in which the personnel and the trajectories of existence were unnervingly similar to those he was obliged to call his own yet at the same time alien; they spoke and wrote largely in the same language, but not quite, and as far as tradition and identity were concerned, Europe, and for that matter everywhere else, was a shelf of dictionaries to America’s open-ended thesaurus. But rather than surrender to this alluring experience Martin requisitioned it, redefined it for the delectation of those similarly intrigued. The US was still, for most people in the UK, the product of television and film but for those who saw themselves as intellectually superior to Dallas and Dynasty, Martin, in the early 1980s, became the chronicler-in-chief of our cousins across the Atlantic; amusing, outstandingly penetrating and, it must be said, sometimes patronizing.

  His description of the Transient Terminal at El Paso Airport as Reagan’s personal jet, Free Enterprise II, comes in to land is ruthlessly hilarious. He establishes, Woody Allen-style, a feeling of anxious unbelonging.

  I strolled among the Skips and Dexters [all were obliged to wear name tags], the Lavernes and Francines, admiring all the bulging wranglers and stretched stretch-slacks. This felt like Reagan Country all right, where everything is big and fat and fine. This is where you feel slightly homosexual and left-wing if you don’t weigh twenty-five stone.1

  One has no cause to doubt the accuracy of Martin’s account – and given that America is now seen as having fomented a global epidemic of morbid obesity, how perceptive he was – but at the same time, the mammoth proportions of the El Paso residents, their slightly vulgar taste in Christian names and clothing would not in themselves strike most of us as particularly amusing or as he indicates symptomatic of the inflexible gigantism of the US political right were it not for his brilliant and wonderfully economic verbal choreography. His portrait of the president-to-be and his wife is equally fixating.

  The blue-jodhpurred Tijuana band fell silent as Reagan climbed up on to the podium. ‘Doesn’t move like an old man,’ I thought to myself; and his hair can’t be a day over forty-five. Pretty Nancy Reagan sat down beside her husband. As I was soon to learn, her adoring, damp-eyed expression never changes when she is in public. Bathed in Ronnie’s aura, she always looks like Bambi being reunited with her parents. Reagan sat in modest silence as a local Republican bigwig presented him with a pair of El Paso cowboy spurs to go with his 1976 El Paso cowboy boots.2

  Later in the piece he feeds us details from Reagan’s period as Governor of California and draws attention to inconsistencies between his record and his promises – his remit was after all political commentary – but one can sense an air of dutiful impatience in this, recalling Tony Howard’s stories of him being obliged to turn up at the New Statesman sessions with eminent figures from Parliament. He really wants to get away from policy and back to his sketch of Reagan, Nancy and the surrounding assembly of humorous grotesques. His metier is not so much writing about America as feeding upon its abundant wealth of characters and conceits. Amis the mischievous novelist is always nudging aside his tractable counterpart the journalist. This slightly unequal division in his affiliations is not of course surprising – he had always been happier with verbal chicanery than cold transparency – but what is intriguing is the contrast between the novelist manqué of these articles and the figure who actually produced the works of fiction.

  For a clearer perception of the former imagine Charles Highway about ten years after graduation or more tellingly a real, older presence, a man always ready to pounce and never willing to allow a banality to remain unmolested or a piece of dialogue or solemn proclamation of intent to get past without first puncturing its pretentiousness. The fact is that Martin’s not-quite-literary prose is both outstandingly good and almost identical in temper and manner to his father’s fictional style. In the former he has been prolific; aside from uncollected reviews and essays his published volumes of non-fiction amount to around a quarter of his total output. Here, of course, we encounter a tantalizing question. If Martin is so capable of electrifying our standard perceptions of the world, why did he choose to eschew this manner – and we can be blunt here; it is called telling stories – in his novels? The obvious answer, already mooted, is that he lived in terror of being classified as Kingsley Amis Mark II, which, he insists to me, was never the case. But if we look more closely at the relationship, in print, between the Amises father and son
there emerges a far more complex and fascinating consideration.

  Martin and Kingsley have much more in common than is first apparent. Pick up a novel by either of them, leaving to one side, if you can, the most ostentatious stylistic differences, and then compare both with a work chosen at random by any other major post-war writer. What will be immediately evident is a feature in the latter either absent or only modestly executed but which in the Amises is gloriously abundant, and made more noticeable by the comparison. The vast majority of novelists write as if they are either in awe of their material or at least prepared to give the impression that whatever they are writing about – be this another human being, a landscape, or a dinner party – is possessed of some aspect of autonomy or self-sufficiency. Many, of course, create a frisson of apprehension and uncertainty regarding the exact relationship between the controlling presence and their fictional universe but few if any maintain a mood of stylistic tyranny to match that of the Amises. This might sound like censure but it is not. Writing about the world cannot be subjected to the same ethical or behavioural criteria as living in it. All we can do is evaluate writers in terms of the quality of their product; we cannot rule upon the intrinsic virtue of their technique.