Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  As we have seen, the period between 1994 and 1996 involved for Martin continuous and confounding reminders of his past and his relationship with those closest to him; some like Delilah emergent and others, particularly his father, soon to depart. Leader: ‘Editing the Letters was in itself fascinating and demanding of course, but Martin and I were in regular contact. We would arrange meetings and tennis matches at the club, sometimes he came here [to Leader’s house in North-West London], less frequently I might go to his flat. When he and Isabel bought their house in Primrose Hill we [he and his wife] would go to dinner. We talked about a lot of things but in the end we would be drawn towards Kingsley. I’d ask about people and events in the correspondence, which were not documented elsewhere, and Martin would sometimes rely on his memory or advise me on who to contact for details. Conversely, Martin would use the letters as landmarks for his own memories, not just of the family. Something that Kingsley had mentioned in a letter to Larkin or Conquest would serve as a trigger for recollections of seemingly unrelated moments in his own life.’ This would provide much of the raw material for Experience.

  He was divorced from Antonia in July 1996, a legal procedure demanding the presence of neither party and uncontested without grounds by both, but which earned coverage in the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. Isabel was five months pregnant at the time and their first child, a daughter (Fernanda), would be born in November 1996. In January 1995 they had purchased, jointly, the house in Primrose Hill. The divorce had cost him a great deal, including his entire inheritance from his late father, his flat in Leamington Road Villas and almost all of his bank savings. After splitting the cost of the new house with Isabel he was broke.

  When I interviewed Andy Hislop he asked me a curious, and I assumed rhetorical, question. ‘Why do you think that Martin married Antonia and then left her for Isabel?’ Having worked with both women at the TLS and known each as Martin’s partners surely he would be better able to explain this. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I suppose I should. But, you see, I have at least to pretend that I and everyone else are puzzled by his choices and decisions, when in fact all who know the three are fully aware of what prompted him to act as he did. But no one actually speaks of it.’ I urge him to continue. ‘They are both [Antonia and Isabel] outstandingly beautiful, yet in different ways. Antonia one can imagine as a figure who would stir the attentions of a portraitist or professional photographer. Hers is the kind of beauty we generally associate with art – appropriate enough given her preoccupation with aesthetics – and I don’t wish to give the wrong impression of her because she is an amusing energetic presence, but, well, she exhibits an abundance of rationalism. I’m sure others have said the same but she was strikingly different from any of the rather brash impulsive women Martin seemed to prefer during the seventies. In practical terms this suited him perfectly, because he hated having to deal with jobs. Everything from the electricity bill to the school fees for Jacob and Louis were Antonia’s province.

  ‘Well Martin certainly did not fall out of love with her. More that he grew up, by which I mean that he became aware, more aware, of the kind of individual he is. I think the contrast between them contributed to that. You know, often he does not conceive of a novel at all. He might simply begin with writing no more than a paragraph, prompted by an enduring question or an image. It could turn into a short story or 500 pages later a book like The Information. He is an enormously careful inventive writer but he hates making plans that might inhibit what could be seen as the natural evolution of the story. And that really is an extrapolation of his personality. There is the old cliché that opposites attract and maybe that was the case with Mart and Antonia. Perhaps the contrast in their personalities could have been dealt with if he had not met Isabel.

  ‘Isabel, as I’ve said, is more or less the equal of Antonia in terms of their attractiveness but in other respects they could not be more different. Isabel exudes sexuality. You could marvel at Antonia’s graceful beauty but Isabel encourages in others an openness and spontaneity. Why? Because she is a weird combination, clever but completely uninhibited and transparent. Martin was always caught between his anxieties and the public image of the literary celebrity. Antonia enabled him to sideline this tension but Isabel caused him to release and face it. When he met Isabel he simultaneously gave in to irrational impulse and found himself, if that makes sense.’

  Hislop’s account is perceptive. At the same time his remarks on Martin’s assignment of the practicalities of life to Antonia, echoed by other friends, would benefit from some clarification. While Antonia may have written the cheques, Martin paid all school fees before and, after the break-up, underwrote the building costs for the fifth floor added to the house. Following the divorce settlement he maintained generous child support and later still funded his sons through university.

  It is intriguing that the circumstances which prompted him to buy this private workplace in Leamington Road Villas were almost identical to the ones of his first years with Isabel; Antonia had just given birth to their first child and the house in which they all lived as a family was, he found, unsuitable to his other vocation as a writer. Now, however, he, Isabel and Fernanda existed in a house of roughly the same proportions and age as Chesterton Road but where he felt able to work, according to his strict daily routine, in an attic converted to a study. It was not that Fernanda, followed two-and-a-half years later by Clio, was less noisy or demanding than his sons or that Isabel was in some way less ubiquitous than Antonia – in fact quite the opposite – but he had suddenly found a means of reconciling two aspects of his life that had previously demanded separation.

  The first full-length novel to emerge from this new regime was a heroic failure, but no less intriguing for that. Night Train (1997) is Martin’s only attempt at what is known condescendingly as ‘genre’ fiction, in this case the crime novel. Genre fiction is perceived as by its nature inferior to mainstream literature. It relies more upon formulae and undisguised escapism than upon pure aesthetic principle, at least in the view of the literary establishment. Nevertheless, many mainstream novelists like to test their versatility upon such enterprises. Kingsley in The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) fashioned an impressively seamless story from personal recollections of 1930s suburbia and the contemporaneous manner of the murder mystery, and Julian Barnes during his early career as a fiction writer adopted the nom de plume Dan Kavanagh whose creation, the bisexual private eye Duffy, endured for four profitable novels.

  Martin’s downmarket excursion began, like many of his full-length pieces, as a short story and he completed it with uncommon speed in just over twelve months. Its flaws, however, derive from the fact that it matured rapidly, ad lib, alongside his early drafts for Experience in 1995. Martin’s favourite crime novelist, indeed the only one he has ever rated as a serious writer, is Elmore Leonard (and it is no coincidence that he did a lengthy review of Leonard’s Riding the Rap for the New York Times in May 1995). Leonard has a talent for superbly authentic dialogue which is also the engine for his stories. His narrators often appear superfluous with each character becoming a convincing embodiment of their words and the novel’s uniquely American context. Only in the US can a novel draw upon such a combination of idiomatic languor and menace. Martin’s creation, the police detective Mike Hoolihan, is an honourable though unsatisfactory attempt to borrow from and refashion Leonard’s technique. The idea of a woman cop who not only carries a male first name but also sounds like a man when she speaks and narrates her novel was doomed from the start. It bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the contritionally correct strategies ridiculed in The Information, and derided by Martin in essays on maleness and masculinity. I asked him why, when this was self-evidently a blind alley, he had persevered with the novel about Mike. ‘She was I think the least connected person I had ever invented.’

  Mike Hoolihan is involved almost exclusively with the inexplicable suicide of the scientist Jennifer Rockwell, a woman of supreme intelligence wi
th no obvious reason for killing herself. Her counterparts in Martin’s life, which seemed similarly lacking in motive or explanation, were numerous and included the mother of Delilah, Lamorna Seale. Already in Other People he had marshalled the potential of fiction as a means of exploring her mindset. Now, however, the act of suicide seemed to have followed him into his private, contemplative zone where the present blended with the past. Amschel Rothschild presided over the house party in Holland Park where almost twenty years earlier Martin met Angela Gorgas. Gorgas had been part of the dreamily privileged Rothschild set, and she and Martin would spend long weekends at Amschel’s family state in Suffolk. The estate was large, included enough game birds and stags for the licensing of both shotguns and rifles, and Martin at another party in 1996, this time in Primrose Hill, quizzed Amschel on the technicalities of firearms as part of his research for Night Train. Three months later Amschel hanged himself in a Paris Hotel room, having displayed no previous signs of depression or distress. Amschel at the party was, according to Martin, as energized and animated as the figure he remembered from the 1970s and this curious blend of time travel and termination reminded him of another equally horrible, inexplicable event from those years. His affair with Claire Tomalin did not affect his continued and platonic friendship with her daughter Susannah. Her suicide, again by hanging, caused him especial distress. Tony Howard remembers him at the funeral ‘weeping uncontrollably’.

  Paradoxically he began to see parallels between what he called his ‘personal trinity’ of suicides and the death of Lucy Partington. The discovery of her body provided something of a solution to the terrible twenty-year-long sense of anxiety that followed her disappearance, but beyond the fact that she was murdered her death was still enveloped by questions, some grotesque but unavoidable – how? when? – and others broaching such issues as the nature of Frederick West. Martin, like the rest of the country, awaited the trial of West with impatience and anxiety. At some point West would have to confront his condition as a human being, someone who shared essentially the same characteristics as the rest of his species. If this apparently rational, albeit abhorrent, individual was capable of such unmotivated brutality what did such acts say about humanity per se? The question was never addressed because West killed himself in prison while on remand, awaiting trial. I ask Martin now, what did he feel? Relief? Even frustration? ‘I suppose contempt would be the most accurate description of my feelings. Not because he had denied us an explanation for the death of Lucy and others, more for the way he took his life. He was calculating and ingenious, gradually secreting threads and cotton tapes from the work room which he bound together with otherwise insubstantial strips of fabric from his bedding and mattress. He even planned the date with care, a bank holiday when cell monitoring was at a minimum, and he made certain that the laundry basket he kicked away was the one object in his cell – unlike the chair or table – that made no sound as it overturned.’ So there is a bizarre and stark contrast between his self-inflicted demise – even his motive if the testimony of his children is to be believed was transparent: fear of what would happen to him after conviction – and the horrors he inflicted upon his victims.

  Mike Hoolihan has to deal with only one suicide, but the ferment of potential solutions prompted by the death of Jennifer Rockwell mirrors Martin’s own confrontation with events united by an enduring feature: they were incomprehensible. He admits now that this feeling of mystification, of being unable to move forward to a point of coherence in his perceptions of the world or back to a memory of stability or solace, is what prompted him to abandon chronology as the structural principle for Experience. As a consequence the memoir reads rather like Proust without the boredom, a jagged momentous tour of the most amusing and troubling episodes of Martin’s life. It is assembled apparently at random but, looked at more closely, a symphonic arrangement surfaces in which hilarity is always waiting to assuage despair, and loss is ever in pursuit of elation. Just to ensure that we do not suspect him of grandiloquence the shifts in tone are persistently accompanied by vast, digressive footnotes, often more intimate or engrossing than the main text and, appropriately, more transient.

  Experience works beautifully because of its refusal to impose shape upon events variously terrible, nebulous or intimately profound; it is one of the best literary autobiographies ever produced. Night Train, which grew out of the same nexus of trauma and loss, fails for the same reason. ‘I was’, recalls Martin, ‘working in a house again, for the first time in more than a decade. I had a study upstairs and the experience of being so close to my place of work emphasized the curious transformative undertaking of being Mike Hoolihan. I would shave, have coffee and I was at the same time preparing myself for an exchange that was about to take place. I had to become a woman, start thinking and sounding like a woman, who was a police [Hoolihan refuses to use a gendered noun to describe her job], plus a recovering alcoholic.’ But, I remind him, you had already explored this territory before, in Paris in the late 1970s, with the assistance of his then fiancée Angela Gorgas. Why was he doing it again? ‘Hoolihan was my least affiliated character. I wanted a novel with no author-surrogate, but at the same time I was frequently moved by her plight, which is why the ending felt so terrible. She writes the last paragraph drunk.’

  David Papineau recalls that when he was writing the book Martin became inordinately preoccupied with ‘overarching explanations for cause and existence, everything from Chaos Theory to the clash between inherent significance and moral relativism’, and Chris Mitas fixes upon a particular evening when their excursion from a snooker club to a bar and restaurant was attended by an exchange, prompted by Martin, on the limits or otherwise of the known universe. ‘He seemed to have done a great deal of reading.’ On what? ‘Everything . . . Were we on our own . . . in the universe? It was a question that bothered him. This was his bad period . . . everything, including the death of his father, came so soon after the break-up of his marriage.’

  The death of Kingsley features prominently in the index to Experience yet Martin says little about how he felt. He tells of how he phoned Saul Bellow and simply told him that his father was dead, and of how soon after his death Kingsley appeared to him in a dream – silent, benign, seemingly content – and he returns compulsively, movingly, to events in the hospital that seem like a terribly slow countdown to Kingsley’s last moments. But the recollection that stays most poignantly in the mind is: ‘I hated it, in the Phoenix Ward, when he turned away from me – when he turned away.’4 The words are vividly resonant for me too because much later in 2010, three months after the death of his mother, he used almost the same phrase, ‘. . . she turned away’. And he spoke for the first time about his state of mind during the weeks and months after Kingsley’s death. ‘I felt a sense of . . . release’ and he goes on to insist that this had nothing to do with palliation or ease. ‘I couldn’t stop writing, obsessively. The opposite of my usual routine. I couldn’t stop.’ He does not comment on the quality of his output, simply that he and it would not stop. There are many differences between Kingsley and Martin, but they share a respect for the stylistic beauty of writing and a commitment to their own vocation as its exemplars. Maybe as an unwitting memorial to the presence he felt even more tellingly after its loss he let go, dismissed himself from something that epitomized their closeness.

  By the time Night Train was published, Martin seemed again to have reached a plateau of stability. Isabel and Martin were married in June 1998 and Clio would be born on 10 June 1999. The marriage ceremony took place in Westminster Register Office, with Christopher Hitchens and his and Isabel’s close friend, the writer Kate Bucknell as witnesses. ‘Then’, says Hitchens, ‘we went to a Greek restaurant in Primrose Hill, to be joined by at least a dozen others. Martin knew that the gossip-hungry tabloids – especially the middle-brow papers such as the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard – employed researchers to monitor the posting of civil marriage banns so even if hacks or cameramen were despatche
d all that could be recorded was the confirmation of what was already known; Martin and Isabel were married in the presence of his oldest friend, with no other celebrity guests. The event would hardly be worth reporting, reasoned Martin, and he was almost correct. The Mail on Sunday, in desperation, asked at the registrar’s reception for the standard price of a ceremony and triumphantly compared the assumed £87 spent on the wedding with the half-million-pound advance of three years earlier.

  In August Heavy Water was published, dedicated to Delilah and Fernanda. It is a curious collection, with three of the nine short stories dating from the 1970s, one from 1981, and the rest written in the tumultuous years between 1992 and 1997. One might view the selection sympathetically as a reflection of Martin’s ongoing preoccupation with his life history, or an honest invitation to compare the wary apprentice – one piece, ‘Denton’s Death’, was written shortly after The Rachel Papers – with the literary elder statesman. Some reviewers, however, took a more cynical view, as indicated by the title of Elspeth Barker’s piece in the Independent of 27 September, ‘Barrel. Bottom. Scraping. Innit?’ In her opinion this ‘dismal volume’ displayed a contempt for the intelligence of the reader, being simply an assembly of anything previously unpublished in a single volume, irrespective of its quality. There is evidence to substantiate Barker’s accusation, given that one wonders why none of the material which predates Einstein’s Monsters was at the time deemed worthy of inclusion in it. ‘Denton’s Death’ was first published in 1976 in Encounter. The editor was Anthony Thwaite, whom Martin had known well since Oxford. When the story arrived did Thwaite suspect that Martin was invoking the unacknowledged but ever present culture of favouritism that had guaranteed the publication of his first novel? ‘Oh certainly, of course.’ Did it affect his decision to publish? ‘Yes and no. It was not a substandard piece but at the same time it carried an air of overwrought ambition, the sort of thing produced by a brilliant recent graduate still relying upon the protection of grand exemplars.’ In this case the old master is probably Kafka, with extra flourishes of nihilism and horror. We do not learn anything of Denton beyond his being subjected to a prolonged overture to his death by three unnamed persons and a machine.