Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  8

  Self, Marriage, Children

  John Self, producer of self-evidently crass TV commercials, is a literary paradox – one of the best ever created. He is definitely not the kind of person with whom most readers of intelligent fiction, indeed any kind of fiction, would wish to spend time. For John Self’s life is composed mainly of sordid excess, whether involving sex (pornographically witnessed, purchased or forcibly obtained), cigarettes (a sixty-a-day habit), alcohol consumed by the gallon, drugs selected and self-administered with impressive versatility, or artery-clogging junk food disposed of with fantastic speed. He has a grudging acquaintance with Orwell’s 1984, but this is the totality of his literary, indeed his cultural, experience. The paradox is that the more we learn of this apparently odious individual, and of the equally repellent world he inhabits, the more we become transfixed by him; he even, on some occasions, seems able to procure sympathy. We face this dilemma because as a first-person narrator he is a genius. Like his anonymous predecessor in Dead Babies he is able to invest the vile, the grotesque, with something that resembles artistic shape. His account, for example, of his brief excursion to a New York live pornography emporium is symphonic in the way that levels of humiliation and degradation are segued towards an apogee:

  Finally I devoted twenty-eight tokens’ worth of my time to a relatively straight item, in which a slack-jawed cowboy got the lot, everything from soup to nuts, at the expense of the talented Juanita del Pablo. Just before the male’s climax the couple separated with jittery haste. Then she knelt in front of him. One thing was clear: the cowboy must have spent at least six chaste months on a yoghurt ranch eating nothing but ice-cream and buttermilk. By the time he was through, Juanita looked like the patsy in the custard-pie joke, which I suppose is what she was. The camera proudly lingered as she spat and blinked and coughed . . . Hard to tell, really, who was the biggest loser in this complicated transaction – her, him, them, me.1

  Reviewers and subsequent academic commentators have been unsettled by Self, mainly because he is an overreacher. Bad, abhorrent people had of course been written about before – though none of them was quite as unapologetically monstrous as Self – and as a narrator he is more unsettling than Humbert. Self takes charge, and despite his indifference to anything vaguely literary he does so with skill and verve.

  Late in the novel he meets Martin Amis and hires the novelist to help him out with the screenplay for a film. Amis gets on reasonably well with Self and often appears concerned with his personal problems, but he never seems able to prevent himself from discoursing on the nature of contemporary fiction and artistic representation per se. For example:

  The distance between the author and narrator corresponds to the degree to which the author finds the narrator wicked, deluded, pitiful or ridiculous [. . .] the further down the scale he is, the more liberties you can take with him. You can do what you like with him really. This creates an appetite for punishment. The author is not free of sadistic impulses. I suppose it’s the—2

  At this point he is interrupted by Self (who is bored and more concerned with his toothache), but Amis has made his point, which for the reader is deliberately, mischievously, confusing. Self is obviously well ‘down the scale’ but Amis’s implication that the more uncultivated and unpleasant the narrator the more the author can take ‘liberties’ should not be regarded as licence for the author to appear superior to his subject. Self, while not sharing his creator’s sophisticated frame of reference, can write as well as Martin Amis. What, then, should be made of the strange contrast between Self’s proud loutishness, and his stylistic abilities? Self and Amis consider this.

  ‘Do you have this problem with novels, Martin?’ I asked him. ‘I mean is there a big deal about bad behaviour and everything?’

  ‘No. It’s not a problem. You get complaints, of course, but we’re pretty much agreed that the twentieth century is an ironic age – downward looking. Even realism, rock bottom realism, is considered a bit grand for the twentieth century.’3

  As creative manifestoes go this one seems enigmatic, almost self-contradictory, at least until one looks at the novel that contains it. Money involves matchless, consummate irony in which repulsive activities and states of mind are made crisply, horribly amusing. It outdoes the most transparent realism by causing the reader to feel a kind of complicit involvement with Self and his world.

  Shortly after Money was published Martin wrote an essay for Atlantic Monthly on Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March which he ranks as ‘the Great American Novel. Search no further. All the trails went cold forty-two years ago.’ What he admires most about Bellow’s achievement is Augie himself.

  Augie is heading to the point where he will become the author of his own story. He will not necessarily be capable of writing it. He will be capable of thinking it. This is what the convention of the first person amounts to. The narrator expresses his thoughts, and the novelist gives them written shape.4

  To give an uneducated working man command of a novel without seeming patronizing, reductive or anomalous was in Martin’s view the literary version of the American Dream, and Bellow had made it come true. He would attempt something slightly different with Self.

  Martin too ‘turns himself inside out’. But he becomes a monstrous exaggeration of all the features of his life during the 1970s – some affected, some innate and feral – when he cultivated the contrast between Amis the artist and intellectual and the laddish sexual predator with louche downmarket tastes. If our credulity is challenged by the presence of someone so bestial and uncouth possessed of such a capacity for brilliant prose we should look no further for reassurance than to the performances of Martin Amis during the first decade of his literary career. Martin did not invent Self any more than Bellow invented March: both were variations upon undesired doppelgängers.

  Martin offers a fascinating account of the parallels between Bellow’s career and his own. ‘Saul said to me that his first two novels were well-behaved, apprentice novels. [After they came out] he was in Paris on the GI Bill trying to write a novel about two old intellectuals in a hospice having a series of knotty conversations. He said he was hating it, writing that novel and bridling under the recent memory of the war and France’s part in it. Eighty thousand Jews deported, most killed, Fascism enthusiastically embraced and not just in Vichy. And this, Paris, was supposed to be the city of light, of the Enlightenment. His landlord hated him, probably, he thought, because he was American and Jewish. Then one day he saw the gutters being sluiced, a brilliant stream of water, and that day he began The Adventures of Augie March. What was it like, I asked? He said it was like bringing in the buckets, an incredible sense of release.’ He pauses. ‘I was at a similar point. I’d written four novels, served my apprenticeship. Then [with Money] I really began to enjoy the flow, the loss of inhibition. It was very enjoyable. But when I read it through before handing it to my agent Pat Kavanagh . . . It wasn’t the indelicacies, no. It was that this was a voice novel. No plot to speak of. Just a voice and the voice sounded . . . well, I’d never heard anything like it before. And I spent three terrible days reading it and feeling sick to my stomach. Then I sent it to Pat.’

  Another factor influenced the compositional tempo of Money and a clue can be found in his emphasis on Paris as the turning point for Bellow. It was there too that Martin completed the last of his ‘apprenticeship’ novels and where his relationship, engagement, with Angela Gorgas reached an equally precipitate stage. ‘As far as I know’, says Hitchens, ‘nothing happened there to cause either of them to have second thoughts. In fact it seemed to cement things, the engagement and so on. But I suppose it was as if they had taken a holiday from the real world. In some respects he appeared content but in others . . . I suspect he wanted out.’ Remember that during this period he was indeed elsewhere, spending a good deal of his time with his less than respectable creation, Self, a man who, like Augie, first drew breath in Paris.

  Explanations di
ffer on the exact cause of the break-up of Amis’s relationship with Angela Gorgas at the end of 1981. Most assume that it drew to a sad but inevitable conclusion: his new role as roving cultural correspondent, particular to the US, meant that he spent less time in London and as a consequence the tentative plans they had made for their return from Paris – on a date for the wedding and the purchase of a property in London – seemed to have become permanently provisional and hypothetical. Martin: ‘Technically, we were still engaged. We had been for three years. But how exactly do you become “unengaged” – put another announcement in The Times? I didn’t force the issue but things, well, came to a close.’

  The woman he met shortly after this captured his attention for a number of reasons but the fact that he would pursue her so assiduously, almost maniacally for the subsequent two years gives cause to suspect that he hoped that someone so unlike his previous girlfriends would provide an antidote to the manic but ultimately disappointing previous decade.

  Antonia Phillips was roughly the same age as him – actually a year older – and outstandingly beautiful. But she also, for someone so young, had a personal history that seemed very much at odds with the confection of transience, trivia and conspicuous hedonism that marked the 1970s and early 1980s. She came from a once-wealthy, East Coast WASP family, but spent most of her childhood in Europe, attending boarding schools in Florence and Paris, going on to read Philosophy at University College, London. Some summers would be spent in America and it was there she met Gareth Evans when he was in the States on a Visiting Scholarship in 1970. Evans had been elected to a Fellowship in University College, Oxford, only a year after he gained his Starred First. He became a tenured don just as Martin was entering his second year as an undergraduate, and the age difference was only two and a half years. He was judged to be a worthy successor to his tutor at University College, Peter Strawson, and during the 1970s his work on the philosophy of language and the mind earned him the reputation as one of the most influential new figures in his discipline. In 1974 Antonia Phillips began postgraduate work in her own field, aesthetics, under the tutelage of Richard Wollheim at UCL. Her MPhil dissertation on Wollheim’s groundbreaking concept of the twofold thesis is unpublished but still referred to in academic studies as an important contribution to the field of aesthetics and evaluation. In 1977 when she received her degree she and Evans set out in a hired car from Texas to see the real Mexico, specifically to visit Hugo Margain, now Head of Philosophy in the University of Mexico and previously Evans’s student in Oxford. In an attempt to kidnap Margain – whose father was Mexican Ambassador to the US – terrorists shot and fatally injured him. Evans and Phillips were with him in the car and while she survived uninjured he received a gunshot wound to the leg. After their return to England Evans and Phillips became engaged, he was elected to the prestigious Wilde Readership in Mental Philosophy at Oxford in 1979 and six months later diagnosed as suffering from terminal cancer. They married in University College Hospital, London in June 1980 and in early August Evans died there, aged thirty-four.

  Phillips had herself considered an academic career and was assured by Wollheim that her Masters thesis was sufficiently original and groundbreaking to become the basis for a doctorate. While considering her options she taught part-time at UCL and took up a post as junior editor on the TLS. Her boss was Adolf Wood, who ran an amiable collegiate annex to the main paper comprising Phillips, Blake Morrison, Galen Strawson and John Ryle. It had no strict generic focus but reflected an indulgent breadth of recondite interests, mainly in philosophy, the visual arts and literary history.

  Martin still did the occasional piece for the TLS and he and Antonia first met at a drinks party in late 1981. They began a relationship shortly afterwards at the same time that Martin was pondering the likely consequences of allowing his grotesque alter ego to write his next novel. The experience of writing Money was he recalls like nothing he had previously experienced, nor quite like anything since. ‘It would be ridiculous to say I was in a trance. It was not automatic writing, every sentence had to be battered into shape, polished. Yet the book seemed to have acquired a momentum and identity of its own. I was writing it, it was extremely hard work, far more demanding than anything I’d done so far, yet I had this feeling of light-headedness, as though I were watching myself at work.’ This is beautifully evocative of the phenomenon of John Self, a figure who appropriates and embodies the story. He is more than a narrator. That allocates him a subsidiary role in an intricate design; Self is the book but he is obliged to share his demented raucous accounts with two people who unsettle him because he can’t properly make sense of who they are and why they are there. The first is the man who created him, in a ‘trance-like’ bout of ‘automatic writing’, Martin Amis. The second is the woman to whom the book is dedicated and who appears in it as Martina Twain, Antonia Phillips.

  Hitchens describes his own introduction to Antonia. ‘I was waiting for Martin at JFK and he came through Customs, beaming, wearing an oddly coloured velour hat. He didn’t bother with the standard greetings and enquiries and instead nodded back towards a woman who was about to join us in Departures. His first words were, “She’s called Antonia Phillips and I’m really in love with her.” Smitten is an understatement. I had never seen him like this before. I spoke to her only briefly at that point and she was, of course, charming, beautiful. She set off for the family summer home in Wellfleet on the Cape [Cod] and when Martin and I drove into the city he told me about her. Her tragic recent past, and her family . . . Mother’s first husband was one of the most outstanding abstract painters of the mid-century – killed himself – her half sister, like her mother, was also a painter and had married Matthew Spender, son of the poet, now a sculptor. They lived in a big house somewhere in Tuscany. Pure bohemian aristocracy. He was entranced, and while they were already having some sort of relationship he wanted to take it further, to make commitments. He’d previously made two abortive marriage proposals, one rejected [Furness] and the other atrophied, but now he was determined. You see the attraction of Antonia, aside from the fact that she was good-looking, was that she did not seem in the slightest awed by his reputation or his manner. He’d never come across that before. Well, perhaps with Mary [Furness], but Antonia enthralled him.’

  Martina Twain ‘is a real boss chick by anyone’s standards. Pal she’s class, with a terrific education on her, plus one of those jackpot body deals . . . American, but English raised. I’ve always had a remote and hopeless thing for her.’5

  Hitchens laughs. ‘Yes that’s how Martin’s pursuit of her often seemed at the time . . . “remote and hopeless”. I think she was a little unnerved by his dedication.’ Alan Jenkins, Antonia’s colleague at the TLS, concurs. ‘The environment in the office at that time was somewhat raucous and competitive. The place seemed to be crowded with youngish men with ambitions. Antonia was about the same age yet she conveyed a sense of great poise, intellectual ice. Don’t get me wrong, she was not aloof, she was amusing, friendly. But at the same time she knew what she was about, was more mature than her, male, peers. Inevitably, everyone was attracted to her and she dealt with this politely, indulgently, but she was clearly not too impressed.’ I ask if she could be seen as the model for Martina. ‘You know, even twenty-five years ago when I first read Money, I saw the parallels. It isn’t a roman-à-clef but one has a vivid sense of Martina as the character who does not so much attempt to transform John Self but who Self, despite himself, treats as his only route to stability and contentment.’

  The thing about Martina is – the thing about Martina is that I can’t find a voice to summon her with . . . My tongue moves in search of patterns and grids that simply are not there. Then I shout . . .6

  The ‘shout’ is the voice of John Self, Martin’s alter ego, a combined caricature, distillation and exaggeration of those aspects of Martin’s life and career that had defined him during the 1970s and which for Antonia who according to Hitchens ‘he besieged relentlessly�
�� in the early 1980s, might have seemed by turns fascinating and slightly abominable. Martina treats John Self with kindness, indulgence, even affection. But we know there is something else, something that Self desires, but can hardly marshal the words to articulate, and which she seems reluctant to approve. She has a husband who never actually speaks in the book and is acknowledged only as some nebulous presence to whom she owes at least respect if nothing else, which bears a close resemblance to the effect of the recently departed Gareth Evans upon Martin’s pursuit of his widow.

  It goes without saying that his ongoing, uncertain relationship with Antonia preoccupied Martin during the writing of Money. He and his beloved both feature in the novel but Martin’s appearance in it has nothing to do with the solemn pretensions of ‘postmodernism’ and related formulae cultivated by academia. It is part of a love story. He enters the novel as the detached saturnine witness to his own pursuit of the woman who would soon be his wife. Certainly the exercise in self-scrutiny involved some exaggerations. Martin was not generally accustomed to consuming a pint of tax-exempt whisky at one go, via his tooth mug, before setting out in pursuit of four Wallies, three Blastfurters and an American Way washed down with a nine-pack of beer. Nor did he routinely purchase handjobs and casual sex from whosoever might provision these services. ‘Actually,’ Hitchens corrects me, ‘he did. Not routinely, no, he didn’t need to, but on one occasion he did so, purely for the sake of research of course. He was in New York doing a piece for the Observer I think, and working on the novel. He came round to my office at the Nation and announced “I’m going to this handjob parlour and you’re coming with me.” He insisted that since he’d taken care of dinner two nights earlier the handjobs would be on me, so to speak, and having checked out the most interesting locations he’d decided on our destination. We must leave immediately, he said, for a place called The Tahitia in the lower part of Lexington Avenue. I was hung over and incapable of challenging him, so we took a cab to a place unlike anything I had previously experienced, indescribably sordid. But when I read the passage in Money . . . superbly funny and, unnervingly accurate too.’