Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Although I tarried in the Happy Isles for well over an hour, the actual handjob was the work of a moment – forty-five seconds, I’d say. I had to rack my brains to remember a worse one. ‘You must have been really excited,’ said She-She quietly, as she started plucking tissues from the box. Yes and no. Between ourselves, it was one of those handjobs where you go straight from limpness to orgasm, skipping the hard-on stage. I think She-She must have activated some secret glandular gimmick, to wrap it up quickly. She then attempted a drowsy recap on the Royal Family but I shouldered my way out of there as soon as I could. The trouble with all this is – it’s so unsatisfactory. Regular handjobs are unsatisfactory too, but they don’t cost five bucks a second. Overheads are generally low. Say what you like about handjobs, they don’t cost eighty-five quid.7

  ‘You see,’ adds Hitchens, ‘Martin was going through a period of atonement and candour. I thought, did he really need to go to this handjob parlour? Couldn’t he make things up? As soon as we got back to my office he phoned Antonia in England – it would have been mid-morning then – and said, “Hi. I’ve just been for a handjob with the Hitch.” He gave her an outstandingly detailed, deadpan account of the whole thing. There were other episodes, similar to this. He busied himself with the underbelly of US life, far more exaggerated than his taste for slumming in London. Porn arcades, strip clubs, the sort of bars which seem waiting rooms for oblivion. He examined them all, an industrious researcher.’ More like ‘Lower’ than ‘Higher Autobiography’. ‘Oh yes. He created a version of Self and communicated it to Antonia. I think she was amused.’ John Self was the hinterland where Martin and Antonia might, often to her amusement, find grounds for mutual exchange. Hitchens again: ‘Comedy is Martin’s ultimate resource and with Antonia, add charm. He was attempting to renegotiate or rather refashion somewhat forbidding gossip, for her, about his past.’ That series of negotiations is re-enacted in the novel, with Self taking the lead while Martin in a rather gnomic obtuse manner looks on and Martina/Antonia occasionally steps from the margins to offer wry comments on the whirlwind of absurdity created by Self, from which she alone seems immune. At one point Self comments:

  I was just wondering, I’m in hell somehow, and yet why is it hell? Covered by heaven, with its girls and deceptions and mad-acts, what is the meaning of this white tent? I keep looking at the sky and saying, Yeah, I’m like that, so blue, so deeply blue. How come? I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again. There are no police to stop you doing it. I know that people are watching me, and you aren’t exempt or innocent, I think, but now someone else is watching me too. Another woman. It’s the damnedest thing. Martina Twain. She’s in my head. How did she get in there? She’s in my head, along with all the crackle and traffic. She is watching me. There is her face, right there, watching. The watcher watched, the watched watcher – and this second pathos, where I am watched by her and yet she watches me unknowingly. Does she like what she is seeing? Dah! Oh, I must fight that, I must resist it, whatever it is. I’m in no kind of shape for the love police.8

  The notions of the ‘watcher watched’, the ‘watched watcher’ and the ‘second pathos’ are borrowed, by turns respectfully and somewhat light-heartedly, from Richard Wollheim’s theory of aesthetics, propounded in his Art and Its Objects which was the principal subject of Antonia’s Master’s thesis. At the heart of Wollheim’s model of aesthetic appreciation is his idea of the relationship between the observer and the work of art and he was particularly intrigued by how paintings could almost be made to seem real, to transcend their status as objects, if the perceived could become sufficiently absorbed by their subject. Martin recalls that Wollheim and his wife were the two friends of Antonia he first got to know during what Hitchens refers to as their ‘courtship’. ‘I remember’, says Martin, ‘that Wollheim explained to me, very patiently, how he had refined his theories through personal experience, how he would stand for hours in a gallery in front of a painting until he almost became part of it. Fascinating, though I must say rather curious, or so it seemed to me at the time.’

  There are two watchers in Money, Martin and Martina/Antonia, and the object of their scrutiny is the fantastic, absurd extrapolation of the former who rampages through his own narrative. Hitchens once more. ‘When he wrote the novel Martin was making full use of his considerable resources of charm, diplomacy and calculation. He would listen to Antonia and her friends, absorb and pay respectful attention to their interests – he is and always has been a magnificent listener – then he would play versions of himself back to her. A very amusing and, for her, enchanting contrast.’ She was particularly amused by his accounts of his involvement with the film of Saturn 3, barely three years earlier. This was the point at which the real Martin Amis, his dubious reputation and John Self seemed to coalesce.

  ‘After I’d had time to reflect on that [Saturn 3] it seemed hardly believable. The assortment of lunatics and egotists involved was far more fantastic, actually more hilarious, than anything I’d come across in fiction,’ says Martin. John Barry had earned a considerable reputation in Hollywood and the UK as a production designer, notably for his work on A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars and Superman. The idea for Saturn 3 was his and he persuaded Lew Grade to fund it by drawing upon the marketability of his three previous projects: this film, he argued, would be by varying degrees bizarre, escapist and slightly risqué. In the novel his name is shared between Self junior, John, and his father, Barry, but this might well have been to deflect the attention of Barry’s friends and relatives (he had died shortly after abandoning Saturn 3) from the character he most closely resembles, Fielding Goodney. Goodney is the impresario behind the similarly gaudy and eventually disastrous film, alternately titled Good Money and Bad Money. The three principal actors in Saturn 3, Kirk Douglas, Farah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel, reappear in Goodney’s feature as, respectively, Lorne Guyland, Butch Beausoleil and Spunk Davis. Guyland is a late-middle-aged sex-obsessed narcissist who continually announces details of his enduring libidinal prowess and magnificently preserved physique. Martin recalls that Douglas would usurp Barry and address the entire crew on his sex scenes with Farah Fawcett, which he believed should be the thematic centrepiece of the film. As he issued orders he would strike poses emphasizing his muscularity, and on one occasion did press-ups while reflecting upon his achievements as a sexual athlete. ‘Once, as if by explanation, he said, “The thing is, John, I’m unbelievably insecure.” He was naked at the time.’ Keitel was equally outlandish in his routines. Martin dined with him alone one evening in his suite at Claridge’s Hotel and found it difficult to concentrate on the actor’s elaborate suggestions as to how his character, Benson, should be played: Keitel answered the door, took drinks and sat down for dinner while stripped to the waist and wearing a pair of groin-hugging denims. ‘It was a hot evening,’ recalls Martin, ‘but none the less . . .’ Farah Fawcett, the cynosure of male fantasies in the late 1970s – her appearances in Charlie’s Angels and her famous swimsuit poster amounted to respectable pornography – was by Martin’s account ‘outstandingly attractive but curiously absent, depersonalized’.

  The conflicting demands of these figures, particularly Douglas’s attempts to appropriate the film as a vehicle for his raddled ego, eventually caused Barry to abandon the project. He was replaced by Stanley Donen, who exercised a little more control, mainly through his well-practised technique of appearing to indulge the demands of the cast while ignoring them in practice.

  Martin had worked closely with Barry on the script and was now obliged by the new regime to do rewrites. ‘I was chauffeured to Pinewood, perhaps twice a week to try to rescue the script. Kirk and Harvey appeared to be writing their own lines. My efforts were largely ignored but I was paid £1,000 a week.’

  The novel offers no examples of Self’s efforts as a screenwriter but Martin’s sense of being stranded in a circle of hell reserved for Popular Culture is played out when Fielding Goodney is revealed as a charlatan complicit in the financ
ial ruination of John Self, who in turn recruits Martin Amis to rescue a script and screenplay that have taken on a grotesque momentum of their own. By the end of the novel John Self is bankrupt, attempts suicide but survives, at least for several pages of reflective penury, his most impressive, elegiac piece of writing. If one harbours any doubts as to the cause of this mood of rumination consider Self’s suicide note, which is addressed to his cleaning lady; an odd choice given that she features nowhere else in the novel. It begins: ‘Dear Antonia . . .’

  Kingsley’s only recorded comments on Martin’s relationship come in a letter to Larkin:

  Don’t know whether you saw but young Martin has rung the bell. Put his girl in the pod. Wedding bells to come but no hurry it seems, so it may be in every sense a little bastard that appears around Yuletide. Girl nice but we are not quite grand enough for her.9

  The pregnancy was not planned exactly but nor did either of them greet the news with apprehension or disquiet; as Kingsley put it, ‘no hurry it seems’. During his lunches with Rosie Boycott Kingsley would sometimes reflect upon episodes from his past and in 1993 the imminent break-up of Martin’s marriage prompted him to recall a conversation with his son of almost exactly ten years earlier. Boycott: ‘He, Kingsley, had been introduced to Antonia. He got on well with all of Martin’s girlfriends but he found her both striking and slightly forbidding.’ I read out to her the piece from his letter to Larkin, emphasizing, ‘Girl nice but we are not quite grand enough for her’ and she laughs. ‘Well, that sounds like a mixture of self-caricature and involuntary laddishness. I got the feeling that he was as much impressed as intimidated, though she was certainly different from her predecessors. What he remembered most vividly was Martin speaking to him when they were alone. Apparently he had for once lost his rather droll sportive manner, and seemed instead almost “born again”. He kept insisting, “She is most certainly the one for me. I’m convinced.”’

  When they first met Martin was living in the flat. The house owned by Antonia, intended as a London base for herself and Evans, was less than a mile away in Chesterton Road and though both buildings could claim an almost identical legacy – neoclassical with a hint of the baroque favoured by the mid-Victorian bourgeoisie – there the similarities ended. Chesterton Road stood at the border of moneyed, respectable Kensington and Notting Hill, which was then experiencing an infusion of chic glamour thanks to the upwardly mobile chattering classes. Antonia had bought the house at the end of the 1970s, with her family endowment. (In Amis’s letter to Larkin, mentioning his soon-to-be daughter-in-law, he adds a note in the margin: ‘Also rich.’) In autumn 1983 Martin left his (rented) flat and moved in with her but, cautiously, he did not give up the lease. Their pre-marital relationship was not entirely untroubled. As Martin wrote in a letter to Julian Barnes during their much-publicized squabble over his change of agent, ‘Twelve years ago you rang me up and said, “Mart, tell me to fuck off and everything if you want – but have you left Antonia?” As it happened I went back to Antonia, that time, twelve years ago.’10 ‘That time’ was late 1982–83 and as Hitchens explains, ‘It was not as simple as Martin leaving Antonia. To be more accurate, you could say that he sometimes came close to giving up on his arduous pursuit of her. For quite a while after the death of her husband she was reluctant to begin any sort of relationship. It was a very long courtship, shall we say. As far as I recall it was almost two years between him introducing me to her at JFK before their relationship became permanent, and in the interim he pursued her incessantly. It would be wrong to say that his previous girlfriends were his intellectual inferiors – they were far too varied to merit such a classification – but it’s true that Martin saw in Antonia a unique mixture of sexual attraction – she had an aloof pre-Raphaelite model look about her – and an intellectual challenge. I suspect that she sensed something of the latter in his endearments, and was wary as a consequence. Anyway, it looked for a long time a precarious on-off arrangement, with the breaks usually instigated by Antonia and with Martin charging back again seemingly undeterred. In the end he got more than he’d expected.’ It must have been like being an undergraduate again, dropping English and electing to do philosophy. Francis Wheen speculates. ‘Well, I hardly knew her well but you have to remember that the group Martin had mixed with since Oxford, journos and literary writers to a large extent, were secure enough in their own company, but even figures such as Hitchens and Fenton, who saw themselves as intellectual virtuosos, felt a little uneasy when up against a trained philosopher. You see the borderlines between serious literary writing, journalism and humour are porous and Martin enjoyed this. It was not quite the same with philosophy.’ Anthony Blond, who knew the London literary scene as well as anyone in the early 1980s, adds, ‘It [Martin and Antonia] seemed to most like a match made in fiction. I mean that it was difficult to imagine that two individuals so temperamentally ill-suited could put up with each other at a dinner party, let alone settle down together. She was charming and indulgent even but she would not countenance verbal alchemy as a replacement for intellectual weight. Martin was clever yet he was also essentially a performer, as a writer and a man. He flirted with ideas. She, or so the word abroad had it, was the dominatrix, with Mart having to curb his extravagances.’

  Marriage and children did not so much change Martin’s lifestyle as spring-clean his most enduring habits. Within six months he had finally given up his last token of bachelorhood, his flat, and become husband, householder and father. David Papineau, Professor of Philosophy of Science at King’s College London, mixed in the same circles as Antonia in the late 1970s and early 1980s after she and Evans had bought the house. ‘Martin’, he observes, ‘has never had a great deal of time with things like answering letters, paying bills and so on. Add to that rates, grinding banalities such as central heating oil, shopping for things – from loo roll to bread – and well, forget it. Antonia took care of everything, uncomplainingly. She knew what she was getting, with Martin I mean.’ Martin had not previously cohabited, apart from his time in Paris with Angela when for much of the day she would be out practising her skills as a visual artist. Much as he was enraptured by the presence of Antonia and more noisily, Louis, he was finding it difficult to maintain his routine of almost a decade and a half; social life, meals included, would generally be enjoyed elsewhere and aside from occasional night-time visits from his ongoing girlfriend his home was his office. Chesterton Road was spacious, with five floors. He took one of the first-floor bedrooms as his study and almost immediately found that his custom of compartmentalizing writing from everything else no longer obtained. Antonia had given up her full-time job at the TLS after the birth of Louis and even though he claimed that the latter’s various pre-linguistic explosions were comforting he none the less found that his powers of concentration were being eroded, simply because he was no longer operating in a space that was exclusively his own. When Antonia became pregnant again in 1985 they decided that it would be in all their interests if he could find a compromise between his earlier professional habits and married life. He began to visit local estate agents in search of a flat within fifteen minutes’ walk of the family home and eventually purchased one that was described by an interviewer as part of ‘a solid and gabled Victorian edifice’ – accurate and evocative enough yet sufficiently vague to deter literary celebrity hunters. It was in fact a studio in a converted garishly late-Gothic Victorian priory house, at the corner of Leamington Road Villas. This was the opposite side of Ladbroke Grove from Chesterton Road. Portobello Market nearby was frequented by the middle-class families who were gradually gentrifying the district but few of them actually lived very close to the network of streets surrounding the market itself. These were the last outposts of Notting Hill shabbiness, many of the terraces unmodernized since the riot-torn Rachmanesque 1950s.

  Hitchens recalls Martin’s life in Chesterton Road as a blend of contrasts and compromises. ‘There was, of course, an enormous sense of joy and fulfilment on his pa
rt; after spending so long trying to persuade Antonia that a permanent relationship with him was the right thing for her he had, within two years, marriage and two children. But one sensed that he was also experiencing difficulties within an unfamiliar context. I don’t mean domestic chores and so on – he avoided those anyway. No, very often the house seemed like a philosophy symposium; Wollheim and his wife were regular guests, as were Strawson and quite a number of others from the UCL philosophy department. Martin got on with them all, he gets on with anyone, but, well, they were not really his sort of people temperamentally. Intellectually he could hold his own but I suspect he didn’t particularly enjoy the experience.’

  Martin himself remembers Wollheim with respect, some affection and, one cannot help but note, a slight hint of resignation. ‘We spent quite a lot of time with the Wollheims, at their house and ours. He was certainly her mentor. A very . . . appealing man. He explained to me his ideas on art and I talked with Antonia about this. Well no, I tried to talk with her about it . . . And I once looked at one of Gareth’s books. It was rather like attempting to understand quadratic equations, as a nine-year-old.’

  Martin would breakfast with his family and be at his ‘working flat’ by 8.30 a.m. There was a small kitchen where he would make coffee but when he was writing he did not take lunch. He would be back at Chesterton Road by six at the latest, and these nine-hour shifts often included Saturdays.