Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Even before they meet, Young sees her from the window of Asprey’s flat, a figure dressed in black, despatching a parcel to a rubbish bin on the other side of the road. I ask Martin: did characters in his fiction begin life in that way, as figures seen from a distance, maybe never to be encountered again, but provoking speculations on what kind of personal history lay behind their observed habits and actions? ‘Some, yes. This kind of speculation is not just the preserve of the novelist. When we see people on the tube, sitting opposite us, or alone at the other side of a bar we inevitably speculate on what they’ve been doing minutes, hours, days, decades, before this moment, and where they will go afterwards.’ Certainly, but Young has a special advantage. He retrieves the package from the bin and discovers the memoirs of Nicola Six, the springboard for a mixture of detective work – he believes what she writes – and reverie: he wants to know even more.

  Hitchens provides an invaluable insight. ‘Very little that has happened to him is wasted, in his fiction. He does not borrow exchanges word for word or transplant idiosyncrasies, without adjustment, but if you’ve shared some of the same experiences and then encounter them in the novels the effect is very unnerving. You recognize things – in the same way that you recognize a familiar face or tone of voice – but at the same time you marvel at how he has transformed them. Not simply disguised them, no, Martin is an artist. He improves on the original, even if his creation is far, far worse as an individual.

  ‘Nicola Six is a classic example. For anyone who knew Mary [Furness] in the 1970s and then during her relationship with [James, 13th Earl] Waldegrave, the resemblances were electrifying. Her parents were not killed in an air crash but that passage where Nicola goes to the airport, ask anyone and they’ll know who he had in mind. “In the midst of life . . .” Her version would be, “In the midst of death we are in sex.”’ Nicola drives to the airport VIP lounge in which relatives are provided with free drinks and live television coverage of the crash site, scattered wreckage and body bags included. ‘Coldly Nicola drank more brandy, wondering how death could take people so unprepared. That night she had acrobatic sex with some unforgivable pilot’ (p. 16).

  Zachary Leader and David Papineau both noted that when Martin was planning or in the middle of a work of fiction his conversation was often a release from the preoccupations of his hours alone in the Leamington Road Villas flat. ‘He never attempted to take over a conversation,’ says Leader, ‘instead he would ensure that his particular concerns were appetizing. Whoever he was talking to would want to join in.’ He told David Papineau how he had experienced an emergency landing, when flying to Spain to join Antonia and the boys for a holiday. No one was hurt but he was plagued for months afterwards by vivid moments of recollection which appeared to follow no obvious sequence. He explained to Papineau that what puzzled him most was the part played by time in the fabric of occurrences and emotions. ‘He asked me about philosophical theses on time, not to build some model for a fictional experiment,’ recalls Papineau, ‘that would come later with Time’s Arrow. No, what concerned him were the ways in which the mind – memory, cognition, perception, ratiocination and so on – operates in relation to time. Specifically are our mental activities subject to the independent progression of time or is the latter conditioned in part by perception. He was fascinated most of all by the so-called “causation solution”, which involves the distinction between the past and the future. The present is an illusion, or rather a trick of language. Basically we can affect the future by acts which will determine events yet to occur – though the exact cause might not be predictable – but the past is immutable, nothing about it can be altered.’ Nicola Six does not have the power to alter the future – as Papineau explains it is impossible to change what has yet to take place – but she has an anarchic effect upon anything that falls within her orbit of desires and emotions. Clive James remembers Mary Furness as ‘a woman who made men behave immoderately. The usual assembly of caution, reason and restraint went straight out of the window. Yes, Martin captures that well in the book [London Fields] with Nicola driving everyone completely mad. Like Mary she procured a blend of raging desire and trepidation. She didn’t intend to dominate – she was too impetuous and good-natured for that – but she certainly caused them to lose control.’ All except Young who acts as witness to this sexual frenzy rather than victim or participant. He it was who had watched Nicola disposing of her diaries outside the flat. He rescues them from the bin and has unique access to her past, her life of provocation and usurpation. Martin, through Young, was revisiting his past. Mary was the only woman who had caused him a feeling of heedless dereliction. He could remember this just as he could recall Lucretia Stewart’s obsessive concern with her diary, her record of a London lifestyle that could, if published, make the eighteenth-century city seem virtuous by comparison and cast shadows upon the spotless profiles of many of its now eminent figures. Wheen called the diary her ‘pension plan’ and one wonders if a sense of caution, allied to fear, caused her to decide against cashing it in with a publisher or tabloid newspaper.

  In Nicola’s diary, she announces herself to Young as a murderee, a woman who can predict the time and nature of her own death. She has chosen to bring about her own demise through her almost magical powers of enchantment and at the end of the novel it is Young who commits the act, an outcome that in turn appears to have been devised by Mark Asprey who will then publish the novel as his own. Young takes a lethal dose of pills and lies down on the bed in Asprey’s flat, leaving the manuscript in the next room. Martin: ‘London Fields is a kind of postmodernist joke, in that Sam, the narrator, is transcribing something that appears to be happening. His record as a writer confirms that he is incapable of making things up but at the same time Nicola, Keith and Guy are fantasies.’ What about Mark Asprey? ‘He is an anti-writer.’ You mean the sort of writer who, unlike Sam, is entirely undeserving of pity? ‘Yes, he is a deflected parody of what at the time was my public image, which was wholly the creation of the press. He is despicable, arrogant, calculating, undeservedly succesful. If the press were to be believed then “MA” would suit both Martin Amis and Mark Asprey very well.’ So if Mark is your media-generated alter ego is Sam a little closer to the real thing? ‘To an extent. Though of course the division is never as simple as that.’ At the time the novel was published Louis and Jacob were respectively five and three years old, not far from the ages of the two characters in the novel whose role seems somewhat gratuitous, Kim Talent and Marmaduke Clinch. Kim is a baby of cherubic mien, to whom Sam addresses the final passage of the novel in the form of a letter. Marmaduke, meanwhile, is a hulking toddler capable of visiting destruction upon anything within range and reducing his parents to a state of terrified despair. The effect is hilarious, as if a keenly accurate portrait of upper-middle-class London family life has been infiltrated by a raucous version of Damien from The Omen. It seems hardly necessary to ask. ‘Babies, toddlers,’ muses Martin ‘can be angels and demons in the same package, every parent knows that.’ Young’s letter to Kim Talent is untouched by the dark irony, grotesque images or hyperbole that battle for prominence in the rest of the book. He is about to die and his final thoughts are fixed upon the future prospects for the one individual who transcends the grisly narrative that will close with his death. ‘With fingers all oily from being rubbed together, in ingratiation, vigil, glee, fear, nerves, I cling to certain hopes in hopes of you. I hope that you are with your mother and that you two are provided for’ (p. 469). That last sentence is tinged with a slight ambiguity – is ‘you two’ mother and child or has Martin’s attention slipped momentarily from the fictional to the personal? ‘You two’ could easily be Louis and Jacob. Just as ‘Antonia’ slips ghostlike into the closing passage of Money. After the birth of Jacob it was agreed that Antonia would also take charge of the children’s schooling. She it was who enrolled both at the nearby Montessori infants’ school, having already placed them on the waiting list for the prestigious Lyndh
urst House Preparatory School in Hampstead. Lyndhurst House was, despite the left-leaning inclinations of many of its shrewd media-connected parents, the epitome of Thatcherism: meritocracy at a price. Martin now left Chesterton Road by eight at the latest, and the flat was coming more and more to resemble the places where he had lived before his marriage. When he moved in it had a cool Spartan quality, his only concession to the past being a 1970 pinball machine purchased from a café off the Fulham Road at the end of the 1970s. Rob bought him a dartboard shortly after his visit to Keith Deller. Martin hung it on the kitchen door and practised with Talent-like concentration as an attempt to organize aberrant ideas before returning to his desk. On school holidays that overlapped with his work schedule or sometimes on Saturdays the two boys would be driven, by the live-in nanny, to what became known as ‘Dad’s other house’. Antonia’s tastes were a little more conventional than Martin’s. Martin would get home by 6.15 p.m. at the latest, either to ensure that both parents were present for a family meal, or occasionally fill in for the nanny. ‘I was earning points, as everyone does. I enjoyed being with the boys but marriage involves credit and debit. Antonia was, is, a strong character. The fact that I was a writer did not mean that I was granted special privileges, quite correctly.’ His nights in would buy him nights out with the likes of McEwan, Papineau, Leader, Mitas, and Rushdie, a game of snooker followed by a meal in a carefully selected low-life restaurant – usually Greek, Italian, Chinese or Indian – and, very rarely, poker.

  The idea for Asprey as absent owner of the flat and cynosure of media gossip and fantasy came partly from the arrangement insisted upon by Antonia after the birth of Louis. Chesterton Road was open to mutual friends only, and even then casual or unprompted visits were discouraged. Anyone connected with Martin’s work who wanted a rushed meeting would have to go to the flat, and this included journalists. As a consequence all of the interviews with him during this period not conducted in studios or hotels give the impression of his as a curious bipolar existence. By the end of the 1980s the flat had acquired an air of scruffy permanence. He did not eat there but he had a TV, video, stereo, small fridge and kettle. Glasses, bottles of wine and spirits stood on a rustic sideboard. Martin did not drink when he was at work – the stock was to provision thirsty interviewers – but the place appeared lived-in, an impression substantiated by an array of jackets hung near the door. The small stack of children’s toys in the corner and photographs of Louis and Jacob on the desk were mildly disconcerting and journalists who had done the most scrupulous research on Martin had to remind themselves that he was still a family man with a wife and two children. Antonia was hardly ever mentioned in the interviews, the result of her ordinance that she and the children must be excluded from his media profile.

  John Walsh remembers interviewing Martin at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. ‘It was some time before London Fields was published but obviously Mart was promoting the book. I think he’d just sent it to the publisher. We were in the quiet lounge of a hotel and he was with Antonia and Louis and Jacob. I’d met them as a couple before but there was most certainly an air of detachment about them then. Nothing specific – I mean, I wasn’t interviewing Antonia; it was about Martin – but there was an uncomfortable, tangible sense of discomfort abroad, something that is evident beneath the surface in brief movements, positionings, body language, routine exchanges on ordering drink and so on. They communicated, as of necessity, but they did not actually look at each other.’

  Martin now found himself divided between the life he had eschewed for a permanent relationship with Antonia and an uncertain atrophied version of the latter. ‘Yes,’ adds Hitchens, ‘and from what I heard it went a little further than that. He had promised himself and her a new regime of monogamy and to an extent he kept his word but after Jacob, well, I don’t know of any significant transgressions but their marriage became a little fraught.’

  In the light of this the absence of ‘MA’ can be taken as the fictional counterpart to a very real sense of personal dislocation. At this potentially transitional point in his life and marriage Martin is unsure of where to place his allegiance. Will he soon be returned to his past? (We know that the aloof hedonist MA will arrive after the final page to reclaim both the novel and his life in London.) Or will the problems recently visited on his marriage repair themselves? Hitchens: ‘Martin certainly did not wish to end things. The intensity of feeling that drew him to Antonia was still present, and the boys . . . well I don’t need to say any more about his feelings for them. He wanted things to return to the way they were but seemed powerless to do anything other than hope that they would.’ All of this accounts for the dreadful fate of those for whom Sam Young seems, at least in part, responsible. ‘Maybe Young was Martin’s expedient conscience,’ observes Hitchens, ‘the opportunity to kill off a past – ghosts of Mary Furness, alias Nicola Six, included. But keeping the option open for it to be returned to – “MA”.’ Perhaps, but aside from its origins in Martin’s personal life the result was a remarkable, I would say brilliant, novel. It is not, however, one that should be treated as even a remotely accurate index to the state of London, and by implication, Britain, in the late 1980s.

  One of the most revealing interviews with Martin was conducted for the New York Times by Mira Stout shortly before the launch of London Fields in the US.

  ‘London is a pub,’ he declares [. . .] ‘Not the pub with the jolly butcher and the smiling grannies; it’s the pub of eight or nine alcoholics, a handful of hustlers and nutcases and a few token regular people. It’s a stew [. . .] the whole idea of the pub as a place for the working man has vanished. Who’s working? Now the pub is where you go all day. We’re in a gentle, deep decline.’

  Stout, an American writer who evidently viewed London with a somewhat less jaundiced eye, contrasted Martin’s observations with her own impressions of the city. Burlington Arcade is crammed by shoppers, the queue for tickets to the latest Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical tails down the street, the roads are gridlocked with shining BMWs, Mercedes and Porsches, the average Brit looks to her ‘Richer than they did a decade ago’ and Thatcher’s government, much cited as the cause of an ongoing catastrophe, is now in its tenth year, with a very healthy majority. ‘On the surface, all looks well indeed,’ she observes. Rather than state outright that Martin’s vision of London is slightly warped she opts very effectively for irony. ‘London’s malaise is subtle, and class-inflected . . . [the novel] floodlights the sagging underbelly of Thatcherite consumerism’. It is interesting to compare Martin’s portrait of the pub as epitomizing our decline with David Papineau’s description of the curious assembly of individuals who could be found in the bar of the Paddington Sports Club, the snooker club under the Westway and the Green Star. ‘On average we would be in the company of a couple of minicab drivers, off shift, a croupier or [card] dealer, perhaps a bouncer or two. People who worked at night but wanted to relax in the afternoon, either with a couple of drinks or playing games. The “we” includes musicians, at least one composer, academics and of course the odd writer. Various aspects of the “other” London, night workers, self-employed bohemians and whoever else was on flexitime.’ It hardly seems necessary to point out the differences between Papineau’s account and Martin’s but as to the reason why they differ, let us say that Martin was toying fashionably with the zeitgeist. Few if any writers of the late 1980s would dare to admit that Thatcher’s London was a bearable let alone agreeable place to live. So Martin adjusts the dystopian lens and instead of Papineau’s image of the gainfully employed undertaking relaxation we find Keith, Guy, Wayne, Deane, Duane, Norvis, Curly, Boden, Chick et al., shuffling through the sinister, noisome spaces of the Black Cross, the Shakespeare, the Butcher’s Arms and the Blind Pig, towards feckless oblivion. Martin informs Stout: ‘I think Thatcher has done a lot of harm. The money age we’re living through now is a short-term, futureless kind of prosperity [. . .] Money is a more democratic medium than blood, but money as a cultural
banner – you can feel the whole of society deteriorating around you because of that. Civility, civilization is falling apart.’ Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Cape’s small contribution to the ‘money age’ had been a considerable advance for London Fields this could easily have come from Sam Young, as indeed could Martin’s comment on the environment. ‘It’s as if the planet had aged four billion years in the last two centuries. If this had happened to a human being, you’d say, “Jesus, what’s he been up to? He looked like Apollo yesterday, now he looks like Methuselah!”’ Stout, without comment, tapers Martin’s declaration into a description of the close of their meeting.