Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Boyd was not the only member of the post-1960s generation of male writers who showed signs of ablative contrition on behalf of their gender. McEwan’s first two collections of short stories First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978) contain, arguably, the most repulsive team of sadists, rapists, paedophiles and pornographers ever assembled by a single author. The question of whether McEwan is pandering to some prurient super-gothic taste among his readers or apologizing for being a man is surely answered in the only story where the mood lightens, almost triumphantly. Called ‘Pornography’ it involves two nurses who take revenge upon a practitioner of that trade by promising him a perverse treat. Then they strap him to a bed and cut off his penis. He had it coming to him, as of course do we all (male) who indulge such tastes and practices, it seems to suggest.

  Martin’s most famous public pronouncement on how men should deal with feminism came much later in a 1991 review article which he reworked as a lecture for several US universities delivered when he was completing The Information. He takes the secure middle ground, presenting the post-1970 New Man as a well-meaning rather bathetic figure, ‘There he stands in the kitchen, a nappy in one hand, a pack of Tarot cards in the other, with his sympathetic pregnancies, his hot flushes and contact premenstrual tensions.’ (p. 4, TWAC).8 Martin reserves an equal amount of ridicule for his reactionary successor, promoted by the likes of Robert Bly; the Wild Man, the ‘deep male’ embodying ‘Zeus energy’, ‘masculine grandeur’ and ‘sun-like integrity’ capable of bestowing upon long-suppressed women their just rewards, in the bedroom.

  One could perceive this as a commendably even-handed puncturing of two equally absurd extremes, but where does Martin really stand on the matter? Let us return to The Information and to what is an undisguised caricature of Boyd’s opening passage. At a meeting attended by the two competing novelists, two newspaper columnists and an ‘Arts Minister’, Gwyn offers his writerly manifesto:

  ‘I find I never think in terms of men. In terms of women.

  I find I always think in terms of . . . People.’

  There was an immediate burble of appreciation: Gwyn, it seemed had douched the entire company in common sense and plain humanity. (p. 30)

  All apart from Richard, who offers an inventive hypothesis

  It must make you feel nice and young to say that being a man means nothing and being a woman means nothing and what matters is being a . . . person. How about being a spider Gwyn? Let’s imagine you’re a spider. You’re a spider and you’ve just had your first serious date. You’re limping away from that now, and you’re looking over your shoulder, and there’s your girlfriend, eating one of your legs like it was a chicken drumstick. What would you say? I know. You’d say: I find I never think in terms of male spiders. Or in terms of female spiders. I find I always think in terms of . . . spiders. (p. 31)

  As the novel proceeds Gwyn’s felicitous concern for equality of representation becomes part of a game played between them with Gwyn as languid tormentor and Richard as hapless victim, whose only palliatives are his own acid comments. When Gwyn informs him: ‘Guess what. We had an intruder last night,’ Richard, almost instinctively, replies,

  ‘Really? Did she take anything?’

  ‘We’re not really sure.’

  ‘How did she get in? Was she armed, do you know?’

  Gwyn closed his eyes and inclined his head, acknowledging the satire. He had a habit, in his prose, of following a neuter antecedent with a feminine pronoun. From Amelior: ‘While pruning roses, any gardener knows that if she . . .’ Or, from the days when he still wrote book reviews: ‘No reader could finish this haunting scene without feeling the hairs on the back of her . . .’ Richard clucked away to himself, but these days he often opted for an impersonal construction, or simply used the plural, seeking safety in numbers.

  ‘Through the front door.’

  ‘She didn’t turn violent, did she?’

  ‘Come on, don’t be a tit. It’s very upsetting actually.’ (pp. 238–9)

  Shortly after their exchange on the ‘intruder’ Gwyn accompanies Richard to a pub, his refuge from his work at Tantalus Press and indeed from his cramped flat, the latter bearing a close resemblance to Martin’s in Leamington Road Villas. The Warlock is recognizable to everyone who used the Paddington Sports Club as its slightly grotesque facsimile. Among such invented regulars as Hal, Mal, Del, Pel, Bal, Gel and Lol, Martin distributes very real figures from his time there in the early 1990s, notably Dave [Papineau], Steve [Michel] and Chris [Mitas] (p. 240). When not on court or discussing matters variously abstruse or ephemeral Martin and friends would divert themselves with the so-called quiz machine, a cross between pinball – given that the subject of the question would be randomly selected – and the multiple-choice formula of University Challenge. Richard is perceived by the regulars with a combination of grudging respect and pity. Not only can he be relied upon to answer every question, he even offers unprompted reflections on their context, which earns him the nickname ‘Cedric’ after the affected old slob who presents an afternoon quiz show about words. ‘Well,’ observes Chris Mitas, ‘Mart didn’t have a nickname but he was seen by a few members as an eccentric. It was not that he was the only writer in the club but he was the only one who treated the quiz machine as if his life depended on answering every question.’

  In the novel the real Chris and Steve exchange first names, with the former featuring as Steve Cousins. Like Chris Mitas, Cousins is an enigma. Papineau describes Mitas as ‘a thoughtful yet a rather forbidding, presence. The club was a peculiar place, drawing in figures from all professions and backgrounds but “our set”, academics, media people, artists, writers and so on, were fascinated by Chris. He was easy tempered – but it was more than that. We feared that he could outrank us, us the careerist thinkers. His mind was uncluttered and efficient.’ And so it is with Steve. At one point he describes to Richard how to kill someone, the preparation involving a gradual depletion of the victim’s resistance to fear so that when the final act occurs they accept it almost with gratitude.

  ‘It’s like the world has—’

  ‘Turned against them.’

  ‘Like the world hates them.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Richard limply.

  ‘So that by the time it happened, by then, they just – they just hang their heads. They’re ready. It’s the end of the story. They’ve felt it coming. They’re ready. They just hang their heads.’

  ‘This is magical. This is poetry.’ (p. 252)

  It is also a near exact transcription of Chris Mitas’s account to Martin of how, in judo, he had evolved a method of reducing his opponent to an acceptance of defeat.

  The Information seems at first to nod towards the postmodern trend of choosing titles capriciously irrelevant to the content of the book, but the opposite is the case. When he wrote it Martin was experiencing the most troubling, problematic period of his life, a condition made all the more implacable by his knowledge that the entire sequence of events had been volitional. He had no one to blame but himself. He had made his choice without external pressure, was determined that it was the right one and found himself having to deal with the consequences – most notably the effect upon his sons – by engaging in lengthy tortured exercises in self-scrutiny – evidenced by the uncharacteristic air of quietness noted by his friends. He is searching for the information, some predictable trait in his character or personal history, perhaps a persistent behavioural handicap that might at least serve to placate his dilemma with an explanation. His search is fruitless but out of it is born Richard Tull, or to be more accurate the uncomfortable relationship between Richard and everything else, especially the people who surround him.

  Richard accompanies Demi to her family’s ancestral pile, ostensibly to conduct an interview with the celebrity wife of the famous novelist (pp. 261–9) and the episode is nightmarish, far more so than the scenes of murder and mayhem enacted in a similar location in Dead Babies, with which it
invites comparison. Byland Court is rather like Brideshead but this branch of the aristocracy is not destined for tragic self-lacerating decline; no, they are, mid-1990s, still comfortably installed and obviously insane. Demi’s sisters Lady Amaryllis, Lady Callisto, Lady Urania and Lady Persephone sit breast-feeding babies and behaving as if extraneous matter – from dog faeces in the library to their cognizance of other human beings – is superfluous and unwarranted. Her brothers shoot ducks with visceral abandon and seem equally immune from what might heedlessly be termed the real world. The inhabitants of this privileged demesne are content and it is Richard who feels as though he has been despatched to a lunatic asylum – an impression assisted by an overdose of cocaine and his night-time raid upon the wardrobe-sized drinks cabinet.

  Twenty years earlier Martin had been the regular guest at the Soameses residence in Hampshire, Castle Mill House. ‘He was’, recalls Nicholas Soames, ‘marvellously entertaining and to his credit he indulged the banter regarding his height and leftish associations. They were amusing weekends and I think he enjoyed his role as misfit. Sundays would begin with the pantomime of church. First Martin politely excused himself but we played on this, pretending that he was offending family lore, as our guest.’

  I can’t believe they’re doing this to me, he said to himself, in the van with Urania and Callisto and Persephone. He felt he was pleading – with whom? With the Labrador’s puppies, blind, burrowing, and wet with their new-born varnish. Oh, Christ, how can they do this? To me, me, so lost, so reduced, and snivelling for sustenance. A soul so sick of sin, so weary of the world’s shadows and figments. Jesus, they’re not really going to do this, are they? They are. They’re taking me to fucking church.

  In the village square the van opened up, and let him out. (p. 294)

  There is no particular psychological condition which demands horror-struck revisitations of otherwise innocuous episodes from our past, at least as far as I am aware. ‘Oh yes,’ adds Soames ‘his trousers were frequently the subject of fascinated attention, particularly by my father who was intrigued by the various bright shades of velvet sported by Mart. Never quite seen anything like them before.’

  After introducing himself to the Earl of Rievaulx – with a suitably unctuous ‘How do you do’ – Richard is subjected to an interrogation that could have come from Pinter. ‘What are you?’ begins the Earl, and, before Richard can properly explain the nature of his profession, indeed his vocation, follows up with: ‘So! You grace us with a second visit. We thank you for your condescension. Tell me – what keeps you away? Is it that you are happier in the town? Is it the lack of “hygienic facilities”? Is it all the children and babies, is it the progeny you abhor?’ As the exchange reaches its apogee Pinter seems to have been exchanged for a Carry On scriptwriter.

  ‘Get them off.’

  Richard stopped breathing . . .

  ‘Get them off,’ he said, one rising scale, with that final whoof of dogged rage. ‘Get them off. Get them off.’

  Did he want them, did he covet them? . . .

  Demeter re-entered the room . . .

  ‘I’m afraid your father’, said Richard, ‘has been bearding me about these trousers.’ (pp. 278–9)

  The novel is sewn from fragments of Martin’s previous and contemporaneous existence but is not in a purist sense autobiographical. Martin invokes his affair with Emma Soames and his weekends at Castle Mill House neither as a caricature of himself, or them, nor as some contritional revisitation of social climbing. His only guiding principle is arbitrary distortion, which also begets the recasting of the Paddington Sports Club as the Warlock and his ransacking of his and his friends’ attitudes towards feminism in Richard’s taunting of Gwyn. The novel is about its author but this is Martin Amis dismantled and chaotically reassembled, the constituent parts all recognizable but no longer quite where they used to be or working as they should.

  ‘The literary world’, comments Andy Hislop, ‘is made up of people with adhesive memories and those with no retentive care for the past at all. Martin is the supreme example of the former, but for him memory is like an allergy. Moments from which others might be immune become for Martin the cause of irrational neurosis or complaint. You see he lives by observation, always retaining and remaking the stuff of his world and frequently the past becomes disease-ridden, malignant.’ Richard, on Martin’s behalf, becomes preoccupied with The Information, the possibility that something immutable can protect him from what seems to be a torrent of delusions and misrepresentations – from the desperate clients of the Tantalus Press to the world of Gal Aplanalp and Gwyn in which authenticity has long since given way to image-making. We, the readers, accompany him through this apparently hopeless spiral of despair, until we encounter the one element of the novel where unalloyed pain and fear steady his progress, though with little consolation. Richard’s children are the only people, indeed the only features of his existence, who inspire in him untainted emotion.

  The two most poignant passages of The Information and Experience are, if not exactly accounts of the same event – one is ostensibly fictional – then certainly provoked by a single cause. In Experience Martin recalls an episode in 1993 when he drove away from Antonia’s house in Wellfleet where the two of them and their sons had holidayed every summer for the previous nine years. He would return, he knew, but nothing would be quite the same again; he would still be their father, biologically – legally – but a change had taken place. Towards the close of the novel following Richard’s break-up with Gina he sees his eldest son in the street and something is wrong, peculiar and inexplicable.

  Richard saw his son Marco – Marco a long way away, and on the far side of the street, but with Marco’s unmistakably brittle and defeatist stride. There was something terribly wrong with Marco: there was nobody at his side. And yet the child’s solitude, his isolation, unlike the father’s, was due to an unforgivable error not his own. There was always somebody at Marco’s side. In all his seven years there had always been somebody at his side . . .

  Father and son started hurrying towards each other. Marco wasn’t crying but Richard had never seen him looking so unhappy: the unhappiness that was always made for Marco; the unhappiness that was all his own. Richard knelt, like a knight, and held him. (p. 492)

  On the first morning Jacob pushed my coffee cup an inch nearer my right hand and said, ‘Enjoying your stay so far?’ . . . Five days later, as I prepared to leave, the pond outside the house was obediently reflecting the mass of doom stacked up in the sky. My sons were constructing a miniature zoo on a patch of grass; Louis showed me the little stunt where you dropped a coin down a complicated tunnel and were then issued with your ticket of admission. But I wasn’t staying, and they knew it. They knew I was leaving. They knew the thing had failed – the whole thing had failed. I said goodbye and climbed into the rented car.

  – I just can’t stop thinking about it. I just can’t get it out of my mind.

  – There’s nothing you can do with things like that [said Kingsley]. You can only hope to coexist with them. They never go away. They’re always with you. They’re just – there . . .9

  ‘[The Information],’ says Martin, ‘was one of the few novels I nearly abandoned. And that was to do with feeling terrible because I was getting divorced. Divorce is as bad as dying. You suffer not just psychologically but physically. It’s that violent. It’s like physical pain for months, even years. The pain will come out at the time or percolate and come out much later but it’s absolutely ineradicable. When I wrote it I was feeling ragged and infested with the failure . . . of my marriage.’ The second of hesitation in that last sentence discloses the uncomfortably intimate relationship between his private state of mind and the book he often wished to abandon but never could. Compare his comments with his general reflection on morality and the novel. ‘I never judge my characters. They have lives of their own. Whatever I inherit from my father, I inherit from my mother a deep reluctance to judge. If I said to my mot
her, “I’m a junky, kleptomaniac . . . pornographer,” she’d say, “Yes, dear.” And so it is with me and my characters. I am very interested in where my characters stand morally. But at the same time I don’t feel the urge to convert them, or punish them, because that doesn’t square with how I write fiction.’ In this he is the complete antithesis of his father. Kingsley was certainly not a moralist, yet he cautiously manipulated the balance between our perspectives and those of his characters. Even if the latter managed to blind themselves to the consequences of their actions or hid from anything resembling contrition he made sure that we would experience both on their behalf. His reasons for doing so were complicated but his wish to displace private unease into his writing certainly came into it. Martin, in The Information, is far less calculating. He does not, as he stated, attempt to ‘convert’ or ‘judge’ his characters and here he faced a dilemma because nor could he allow them absolute autonomy. He is the kind of writer to whom cold objectivity is anathema and the imprint of the physical and psychological ‘pain’ he experienced during the novel’s composition is detectable in his characters and their spectrum of weird experiences, ranging from the surreal to the distressingly moving. The result might not have been what he intended at the beginning but despite that it is a novel of extraordinary complexity, and outstanding quality.

  11

  A Gallery of Traumas

  The Information was the fictional preamble to Experience, but while the former drew its momentum primarily from Martin’s marriage break-up, the two-year period prior to and following the publication of the novel involved equally traumatic and less fathomable occurrences. Consider the weekend of 8 (Friday) to 10 (Sunday) July 1994. He had picked up his sons from school on the Friday and driven them to a village just north of Oxford to stay as guests of Ian McEwan in the same house that had been one of Rushdie’s first refuges following the issue of the fatwa six years earlier. That night the ‘toothache’ that had troubled him persistently for the previous twelve months returned with a vengeance. His right-side wisdom teeth, already in a precarious state, had acquired an infection causing his face overnight to resemble that of someone auditioning for the part of the elephant man. His right cheek and jaw became swollen to the extent that his nose, lips and eye sockets were pushed into garishly asymmetrical shapes. When he saw Isabel again on the Tuesday she took charge and contacted a dental surgeon in New York regarded by her family as peerless, an event that three months later was seized upon by the press as evidence of his egotistical vainglorious squandering of advances.