Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  I accompanied Martin to a book party for environmental causes. He picked me up in a taxi around 6 p.m., clutching a furled copy of Tennis magazine. His hair neatly combed, he was dressed almost as smartly in a Prince of Wales plaid suit and dark coat [. . .] It was a rare, beautiful evening, and Amis was in a relaxed mood. South Kensington’s facades flowed regally past the taxi window, transformed by sunlight. Kensington Gardens were overflowing with fresh summer foliage. London looked startlingly clean.4

  The droll subtext is clear enough: your London does not seem terribly dire and apocalyptic to me. Stout’s presentation of West London, or at least its more ostentatious residents, enjoying the benefits of affluence is accurate enough but we should treat with caution her suggestion that Martin has buried his head in the luxurious sand. The novel with which London Fields invites comparison is Justin Cartwright’s Look At It This Way (1990), a wry treatment of the allegedly endemic contemporary mood of greed and narcissism. Cartwright’s is a morality tale shot through with touches of the surreal and would even today be treated, particularly by those who loathe Thatcher, as an example of Flaubertian social realism. But truth is a multifaceted thing and I would contend that in years to come Martin’s novel will be recognized as a far more challenging engagement with its era. Nicola, Keith, Guy, even Young himself are weird presences, not the kind of people we routinely encounter in the real world, yet they also seize our attention, ignite fears, fantasies and delusions. Their state is untraceable to a particular cause but each carries a trace of the novel’s terrifying aura of blind impulse and flux.

  Within months of the publication of London Fields intemperate reality would trample across this reverie of nuances. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) has much in common with Martin’s novel. The two figures, Gibreel and Saladin, come to London by an unusual though symbolically resonant route; they plummet into the city from an airliner blown up by terrorists. Certainly the arrival of Sam Young is rather more conventional – his plane does manage to land – but all three act as witnesses to the absence of anything remotely reassuring in the fragmented, poisonous landscape of late-1980s Britain. Section V of Rushdie’s novel offers a harrowing portrait of urban London, a place where greed and exploitative nihilism have replaced anything resembling compassion or integrity. This rampant disdain for principle is embodied in a figure referred to as ‘Mrs Torture’ (pronounce it rapidly and connect with ‘Margaret’). Saladin is sombre witness to all this while at the same time he is visited in dreams by a spectral presence called Mahound, a derogatory version of the name of the prophet Mohammed. Mahound is a troubled figure, uncertain of his own faith and distracted, lubriciously, by three female goddesses, Hal, Uzza and Manat.

  Critics have, with learned solemnity, treated the work as a late-twentieth-century revival of the true ideology of modernism, as a dynamic leviathan that both bemoans and magnificently represents the state of humanity – a dream of lost faith mired in heartless consumerism. This postmodern rite of self-congratulation was, however, accompanied by a formidably literalist sequence of interpretations of the book, with consequences. It was banned in India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Sudan, Sri Lanka and Pakistan and on 14 February 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa sentencing Rushdie to death under Islamic law. Rushdie became a state-protected fugitive, accompanied by members of Special Branch, and moved between MI5-approved safe houses for the subsequent ten years.

  Rushdie’s second marriage was ruined by the bizarre regime of attempting to maintain a public profile – he continued to produce fiction, do interviews and write for the press – while remaining invisible. His friends from the literary world publicly condemned the fatwa while in private offered Rushdie a version of the social life he had enjoyed before 1989. They too were advised by the security services that any disclosure that they had offered more than private support might invite acts of maniacal zealotry similar to the murder of the book’s Danish translator but despite this they continued to speak publically on his behalf. Martin appeared on TV to express his abhorrence of the fatwa and interviewed Rushdie for Vanity Fair as a token of solidarity (see VMN) . It was not until February 2009, almost two decades after the issuing of the fatwa, that Ian McEwan felt confident enough to tell of how he and his friend had shared a feeling of shock and disbelief as Rushdie spent one of his first nights in hiding at McEwan’s house in Oxford. Fenton too had a house outside Oxford where Rushdie would stay over as a relief from the stifling environment of London. Martin’s contributions to a precarious state of normality in the city were many, including small parties – close trusted acquaintances only – and male poker nights in Chesterton Road. Antonia’s insistence that the media profiles of Martin must not include the location of the family home – usually no more than a vague reference to the sprawling ill-defined district of Notting Hill – was fortunate in this regard. Even if a determined maniac or cell had attempted to trace Rushdie’s contacts with his friends they would have no idea where this one lived. Still to this day Papineau recalls the poker nights with a residue of anxiety. ‘Five years ago, maybe even two, I wouldn’t have admitted this, on record, to anyone. “This” being the fact that I spent evenings playing poker with Martin, Salman and others.’ He means of course that fundamentalist Muslims tend to treat association as condonement, and each as a justification for punitive action in the name of Allah. ‘The evenings’, Papineau recalls, ‘were a mixture of the routine and the mildly surreal. Once when I arrived before Salman I witnessed the full ritual. The doorbell would be rung by a plain-clothes policeman and two of them would come in first, not to search the place, just to make sure that other parties had not arrived earlier and taken control. Martin would offer them a beer or wine which they would politely decline and instead have tea or coffee in one of the adjoining rooms and watch TV. It must have been a dreadful job, tedious I mean. But they seemed cheerful enough. I come from South Africa, but well, playing poker in a comfortable middle-class part of London with two men next door, Heckler and Koch automatics at the ready, did seem odd to say the least.’ How did Rushdie seem, I ask. What was his demeanour? ‘I didn’t really know him before the fatwa, but he didn’t seem anxious. Convivial and up-beat would describe him best I suppose, yet with knowledge of what was happening I suppose you could say he was positive, resigned.’ Who were the other regular attenders? ‘Ian McEwan once or twice, me. Hitchens when he was in London. Hitchens was one of the first to go into print with an unhesitating defence of Rushdie and the novel.’ According to Papineau, ‘Martin provided the conversational sparkle, the animus.’ No subject was allowed a seminar-like predominance and an undercurrent of humour endured. Did they talk about Rushdie’s predicament? ‘Oh yes. That was the cause of a good deal of black repartee.’ Once things wound down the two policemen would go out first to check the street, having summoned the driver by radio, and Rushdie would leave before the others. Andy Hislop recalls an evening that was even more surreal. ‘The sitting room was at street level, as was a study next door and for some reason no one thought of closing the curtains. One evening I arrived late and the spectacle was that of the instantly recognizable profile of the world’s most wanted man – most wanted by fanatics anyway – faced across the card table by that of probably Britain’s best-known novelist [Amis]. There was a bottle of whisky, half-empty wine bottles, glasses, thick clouds of smoke. The next window, equally well lit, showed two bulky plain-clothes policemen watching TV, also smoking, drinking mugs of tea. But they were also nursing sub-machine guns. I suppose they might have deterred passing Islamist terrorists, but what struck me was the contrast, boozy conviviality, defended by the realm.’

  Given Rushdie’s oft-expressed contempt for Mrs Thatcher and her regime, connoisseurs of black comedy would indeed – if this were a piece of fiction – be suitably amused and impressed. I asked Papineau and Martin if anyone present was caused to feel slightly compromised, perhaps even contrite, by this incongruous situation. Neither of them recalls a partic
ular exchange on this matter, though they concede that, especially with hindsight, it was for both the subject for reflection. ‘Implicitly acknowledged, yes,’ says Papineau. The one exception to this was the running commentary offered to Martin by Chris Mitas. Mitas knew that Martin and Rushdie were friends and when news broke of the fatwa, the riots in the subcontinent and orchestrated street protests in the Middle East, he began to raise questions, to which Martin alludes in Experience in a cryptic and misleading story about a dinner at the Caprice restaurant in London attended by himself, Hitchens and Rushdie. The subject of Martin’s anecdote is not, however, Rushdie’s status as a fugitive, but rather their divergent opinions on the qualities of Samuel Beckett’s prose. The evening ended with Martin caricaturing a short passage by Beckett and Rushdie asking, ‘Do you want to come outside?’ Next afternoon Martin was at the Sports Club amusing Chris and his friend Steve Michel with his account of the night before. ‘Steve said, “Did he? Well I hope you took him outside and gave him a fucking good hiding.” Now, now, I began, resuming the usual debate . . .’ The ‘usual debate’ was usually addressed by Martin and Chris who on this occasion postponed his contribution, sitting in ‘silence [. . .] tensely hunkered forward, giving me his shocked stare’. In due course he ventured, ‘Offered you out? I wish he’d fucking offered me out.’5 Needless to say the subject was no longer Beckettian syntax.

  Chris Mitas never liked Salman Rushdie, principally because he never publically expressed any gratitude to the government. This was the ‘usual debate’ to which Martin refers. Mitas offered Martin a counterbalance to the smug left-liberal consensus beneath which a great number of uncomfortable inconsistencies were concealed.

  The birth of Martin’s sons occasioned his sudden preoccupation with the nuclear apocalypse, but despite the zealous mood of ‘Thinkability’ the stories of Einstein’s Monsters fall somewhere between his previous state of detachment from moral absolutes and a sense of precipitate concern. By the time the boys had reached nursery-school age, that intermediary period between pure innocence and early adulthood, Martin had decided to immerse himself further in the more shameful aspects of supposedly civilized humanity in the twentieth century. According to Hitchens, ‘He was clear enough about his anti-nuclear stance but he talked much more in this period about the ways in which evil had deepened incrementally with political, ideological advances of various sorts. He was still politically uncommitted, and his interests were not morbidly self-absorbed. It was clear that he was, well, concerned with the relationship between the fairly recent past and the imminent future. The latter, of course, meant his concern for Louis and Jacob. It was as though he had now discovered something frightful, a rationale for acts of mass murder. Nazism. What lay behind this, still, was his terrified image of a world into which he would eventually have to release Louis and Jacob. We, Martin, the rest of us, had been born within a few years of the end of the war. So while we knew it only vicariously, there was a stench of something quite terrible that stayed with us, the children of the 1940s. It is still there.’

  Time’s Arrow is a novel not merely about the Holocaust but the only one so far that obliges us for its entirety to share the mind and perceptions of a Nazi war criminal. The book’s origins belie its afflicting content. Wellfleet is arguably the most languid, agreeable and expensive town in Cape Cod. There the Phillipses kept a house, which Hitchens describes. ‘There was the town itself, which incorporated a fair number of classy colonial-style places, the best backing on to the beach. But further inland the landscape was wooded, and while driving down already narrow lanes you’d come across a sign nailed to a tree calling you to the gravelled drive of somewhere hidden behind the trees. The names would often have mythopoeic resonance – “Mrs Roosevelt The Elder’s Residence” – that sort of thing. Well, the Phillipses’ place was against type. It originated as a group of farm buildings, a low-slung barn and some sties, none habitable, never in fact having been inhabited by human beings at all. But Antonia’s father either inherited them, plus the land, or bought them from a distant relative for practically nothing. Anyway he converted them into an extremely quirky dwelling, unostentatious and rustic to say the least. But they were wonderfully homely too and eventually of course, given the locality, probably worth a great deal of money.’

  Martin, Antonia and the boys would spend on average three to four weeks there each year, usually in late July or August. Hitchens: ‘I sometimes visited, and the place, not only Antonia’s house but the whole town, seemed like the summer retreat of the crowned heads of US intelligentsia. Chomsky was a neighbour and regular visitor, likewise Tom Wolfe and the majordomos from the Ivy League faculties and political think-tanks in DC were scattered around. A close family friend was the historian and psychologist Robert Jay Lifton who also lived close by. He and Martin got on very well.’ During the 1960s Lifton had presided over radical, groundbreaking seminars, based mostly at his house in Wellfleet town and conducted during the summer, outside the conventions and restrictions of the academic schedule; at the time he taught at Columbia University. The prevailing topics were war and violence and his book The Nazi Doctors (1986), which Martin acknowledges as the most significant influence on his novel, reflects his preoccupation with the extent to which those involved in crimes against humanity experienced or avoided contrition and guilt. Lifton was at the end of the 1980s almost sixty and nearly twenty years older than Martin, ‘but’, recalls the latter, ‘he was exceptionally fit. He was addicted to tennis. The summer I got to know him properly we played every other day. And we talked a lot, mostly about the Holocaust and people he had met who had actually been involved in its implementation. Killers as brutal and repulsive as any in recorded history but who seemed to have drawn down a curtain between what they had done – few if any denied involvement – and what anyone might have expected them to feel. His accounts were compulsive. And as an individual – not merely an extraordinary intellectual; that goes without saying – but as a man, he was astonishing. You see he was Jewish. He did not attempt to deny his feelings. But to remain composed, to deal with these things and these people took a lot of courage and self-control. A good deal of the thematic momentum for the novel comes from Lifton but Martin omits to mention a less tangible but equally significant tributary of influence. In Experience he writes of his shock at Bellow’s reluctance, despite his goadings, to condemn outright the US preoccupation with the death penalty. While avoiding comment on its implementation in his home country Bellow states, ‘Well. Look at . . . Eichmann. What are you supposed to do with a son of a bitch like that?’6 Lifton’s work was of enormous practical assistance, as was Martin Gilbert’s mammoth study of The Holocaust, but it was Bellow’s comment which provided a visceral counterbalance to both, a touch of what Martin calls ‘thinking with the blood’.

  In the concluding chapter of Time’s Arrow, Unverdorben appears to enter a state of reflective resignation, perhaps because he has reached the point at which his birth and beyond that oblivion is imminent (the novel goes backwards in time). We learn from him that he was born and brought up in the town of Solingen, ‘famous for its knives its scissors and its surgical instruments’.

  In addition, modest Solingen harbours a proud secret. I’m the only one who happens to know what that secret is. It’s this: Solingen is the birthplace of Adolf Eichmann. Schh . . . Hush now. I’ll never tell. And if I did, who would believe me?7

  No one, because as he writes this Eichmann is ten years old and Nazism does not yet exist. The allusion seems at first gratuitous, until we begin to consider the parallels between the very real mass murderer and Martin’s invented version. Eichmann, like Unverdorben, would systematically erase his past, by almost identical means; both for example made use of sympathetic members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Italy to obtain false documents. Eichmann, however, was kidnapped in Argentina by agents of the Israeli Secret Service Mossad, tried in Jerusalem and obliged by a variety of witnesses to revisit his acts of gross inhumanity. Is
rael is the only country with no history of capital punishment: it was not abolished, but rather prohibited at the foundation of the state in 1948. For Eichmann, however, the irrevocable prohibition was suspended. As Bellow put it, ‘What are you supposed to do with a son of a bitch like that?’ The reason for his execution was not righteous vengeance, but something far more elemental. Martin: ‘During his trial he rarely if ever disputed the validity of the evidence against him – particularly his executive role in the deportation to the extermination camps of vast numbers of Jews – yet he seemed genuinely puzzled by why his acts should be deemed criminal; in his view he was no more than a bureaucrat.’ To allow him to exist would be to indulge a cognizant, rational legitimization of the Holocaust: that, at least in Bellow’s opinion, legitimized Israel’s single use of a constitutionally forbidden act.

  For The Nazi Doctors Lifton interviewed a large number of medical practitioners who had either escaped with light sentences or gone unpunished for their activities in the extermination camps. Eichmann features only marginally but Martin was engrossed by the link between him and a figure who dominates Lifton’s book, despite his absence as an interviewee, Josef Mengele. Mengele was by far the most influential doctor to have worked in Auschwitz, and he appears in Time’s Arrow as ‘Uncle Pepi’, a figure of authority held in awe by every other doctor at the camp but whose presence in the narrative is evanescent, ghostlike. Mengele also disappeared into the shadows. Like Eichmann he found his way to Argentina, but Mossad failed to track him down and he died in his bed. Martin kidnaps Unverdorben at the point where his equally agreeable post-Holocaust existence is about to close peacefully and, like Mossad with Eichmann, obliges him to relive his past.