The title story ‘Heavy Water’ is appended with an intriguing and rather misleading note, ‘New Statesman, 1978; rewritten 1997’. Martin did indeed do a story for the New Statesman in 1978 very similar to the one which appears in the 1998 collection, but he fails to mention that both draw upon a third, non-fictional piece, an account of his own experience on the cruise ship Oriana. He had been commissioned by the Sunday Telegraph to do an account of the new fashion for cruise holidays. Cruises had hitherto been enjoyed mainly by mature or retired members of the middle classes, but like various parts of the Mediterranean they were of late becoming affordable to the proletariat. This was Martin’s dispensation from the Telegraph, a newspaper with a solidly bourgeois-class Tory readership: tease out the incongruities between a pursuit designed for educated, tasteful customers and the activities of these counter-jumping newcomers. In the article ‘Action at Sea’5 he offers a characteristically dry account of how individuals who for most of the year spend their leisure time in working men’s clubs or in front of the TV adapt themselves to the delights of the Mediterranean. The short story appeared less than a month earlier in the New Statesman (22 and 29 December 1978). Obviously there are differences, with the fictionalized version involving a woman called ‘Mother’, her mentally retarded son John and an odious heavy-drinking trades union leader taking time off from his work on behalf of the oppressed. His name ‘Mr Brine’ carries a dissonant echo of the Labour Party cabinet minister George Brown, an authentic member of the proletariat more notable for his drunken performances in the House of Commons than for his ideological zeal. Brine is of course the Home Counties, high-Tory pronunciation of Brown and by that measure we might also catch a fleeting reference to another working-class hero who seemed to have disowned his past, John Braine the novelist, whom Martin interviewed and presented, contemptuously, for the New Statesman in 1975.
One can see why Martin rewrote it eighteen years later. In the interim Britain had been transformed completely by Thatcherite consumerism. The economic benefits and debits of the period are still open to question but what is beyond dispute is the fact that Mrs Thatcher, albeit without premeditation, transformed the public image of the Labour Party. Tony Blair’s New Labour, which took power the year Martin revised the story, unshackled itself from the nomenclature of Socialist principles, especially the embarrassing collateral notions of class distinction and conflict. Thatcher’s governments did severe damage to areas which relied on coal and steel as their principal employers but they also alienated the standard voter from such prescriptive classifications as ‘working-class’. As a consequence the new version of the story plays down the loud vulgarity of Mr Brine, or at least his seaside-postcard chubby, cloth-capped dimension, and focuses more upon the tragic relationship between Mother and John. The original would have seemed to the reader during that first year of the Blairite new dawn as at best a dated, improvident curiosity. But this is my assessment. Martin is more succinct: ‘I rewrote it. It wasn’t good enough. That’s all.’
For a story which could be expected to strike a more sympathetic chord, especially among those who had become accustomed to perceive Thatcherism and John Major’s shambolic coda as a baleful inheritance, go to ‘State of England’ and be introduced to Big Mal and Fat Lol. They, along with their various girlfriends, wives and sons, Jet and Clint, could easily be close relatives of John Self and Keith Talent, except that John and Keith are never allowed to move too far beyond their creator’s caustic domain. True, they are monstrous but our potential for disgust or opprobrium is smothered by admiration for the craftsmanship that has made them quite so compelling. Mal and Lol, however, acquire an unprecedented degree of autonomy. The narrator never fully retires from the scene and their yobbishness is often lent a certain laughable dignity by Martin’s wry asides. But never before had Martin allowed his more horrible creations such command of the stage. The reason for this is that he did not so much invent as encounter them. It was as though his track-suited gargoyles of the 1980s had foreshadowed with commendable accuracy a very real change in the social fabric.
‘I was’, states David Papineau, ‘with Martin when “State of England” began in effect to write itself. We were at the sports day. You see our children went to the same school in Hampstead, and parents were invited to attend and indeed participate in an afternoon of races, football matches and other games.’
The story begins with Big Mal standing ‘on the running track in his crinkly linen suit, with a cigarette in one mitt and a mobile phone in the other’ (p. 35). His wife Sheilagh, ‘She’, is fifty yards away on the clubhouse steps also holding a cigarette and mobile. They are talking earnestly, to each other, and continue their exchange via their mobiles despite having moved close enough for an ordinary conversation. Martin executes this beautifully, with a collateral joke involving ‘She’s’ weary enquiry about the wound on the side of Mal’s face, acquired she assumes during the previous night’s drunken ‘rucking’ session with Fat Lol; eventually she is almost able to touch it. One could imagine how well this might have worked on film, the sketch carrying a rueful subtext regarding the ongoing, circa 1991, obsession with electronic gadgetry, particularly among the uncultured, moneyed classes: astute, amusing but a little implausible.
‘That’s the point,’ adds Papineau. ‘That part of the story actually happened. We watched it. Well, the man didn’t have a wound and we couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but this absurd performance with mobiles – and in those days they were the size of bricks – happened in front of us. It was an excellent school and the place had come with flawless recommendations, official and informal. It was I suppose a sign of the times that old-fashioned notions of class and status had been sidelined by competitive meritocracy. A fair number of the parents were rather like Big Mal. The school paid no attention to their background, what they did for a living or the fact that they might have broad East End or North London accents. So long as their children were intelligent and well motivated and the fees could be met, that was all that mattered.’
Jet’s school, St Anthony’s, was a smart one, or at least an expensive one. Mal it was who somehow met the startling fees. And showed up on days like today, as you had to do. He also wanted and expected his boy to perform well.
During his earliest visits to the parent–teacher interface, Mal had been largely speechless with peer-group hypochondrias: he kept thinking there was something terribly wrong with him. He wanted out of that peer group and into a different peer group with weaker opposition. Mal made She do the talking . . . (p. 38)
The one other part based on fact and observation occurs at the conclusion of the dads’ race. ‘Martin actually saw that,’ recalls Papineau. ‘Many of the fathers looked a little out of sorts, the Mal types.’ Mal, in a heroic attempt to impress Jet, propels his lumpy graceless body towards the finishing line. His performance is hindered also by the wounds sustained the night before, their cause disclosed in the penultimate section. Mal and Lol had been out attending to one of their many enterprises, in this case clamping the cars in a National Car Park.
Big Mal heard it first . . . A concentrated body of purposeful human conversation was moving towards them, the sopranos and contraltos of the women, the sterling trebles and barrelly baritones of the men, coming up round the corner now, like a ballroom, like civilization, uniforms of tuxedo and then streaks and plumes of turquoise, emerald, taffeta, dimity. [They turn out to be opera-goers]
‘Lol mate,’ said Mal.
Fat Lol was a couple of cars further in, doing a Range Rover and tightly swearing to himself.
‘Lol!’
You know what it was like? A revolution in reverse – that’s what it was like. Two bum-crack cowboys scragged and cudgelled by the quality. Jesus: strung up by the upper classes. (p69)
This part, of course, is pure invention but it is difficult to discern from the story where exactly Martin’s sympathies lie. He imparts to Mal and his fellow low-lifes an endearing energy, in
a fastidious Dickensian manner. These figures are acceptable company only as bizarre exaggerations, not as they really are. ‘Well that’s true,’ concedes Papineau. ‘Martin – we – knew the Mals only superficially. They provided him [Martin] with superb source material but the rest was speculation. The part involving Asian babes, with Mal’s mistress, became a running joke. He would amuse us by speculating on the lives they led beyond the sports days and parents’ evenings.’ Mal’s particular Asian babe is Linzi, whose real name is Shinsala, who has adopted an East End accent far more impenetrable than Sheilagh’s ‘with the one little exoticism, in the way she handled her pronouns. Linzi said he where an English person would say him or his.’ This is particularly distressing for Mal, given that ‘she’ crops up so frequently in conversations with Linzi, ‘like “the way she wears she skirts”. Or “I hate she”. It sometimes gave Mal a fright because he thought she was talking about She. Sheilagh’ (p. 42).
Martin’s fellow parents certainly appeared symptomatic of social transition and mutation, but questions must be asked about what he chose to do with these promptings. Mal, Lol, She, Jet are endearing, vividly realized presences, but they tell us as much about the ‘State of England’ in the early 1990s as Wodehouse’s characters do of the 1920s and 1930s.
‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’ treads an extremely fine line between elegiac candour and disingenuousness. It is narrated by Louis Amis, and Martin’s re-creation of the mindset of his eleven-year-old son is flawlessly convincing, as is the impression that he is telling his own story in an American accent. Its subject is indicated by the bracketed dedication beneath the title, ‘(for Elias Fawcett, 1978–1996)’. Elias Fawcett was the young son of Natalia Jimenez and Edmund Fawcett, political writer and journalist. The Fawcetts were close friends of Antonia and Martin and although six years older than Louis, Elias was a regular visitor to the house, his promise as a rock guitarist engaging the attention of the Amis boys. In August 1996 he overdosed on a heroin-based drug following a concert and never regained consciousness.
The story is far more meticulously autobiographical than anything that would be found in Experience. Martin and Isabel did not have a permanent residence in the US. Sometimes, during summer visits, they would stay in the guest house at Isabel’s mother’s property in East Hampton. ‘But,’ adds Martin, ‘there wasn’t always room for us. We rented a couple of houses over the years.’ The events recorded by Louis did occur during one of these years, when they rented a house barely half a mile from Isabel’s mother’s.
Louis’s cousin Pablo (‘Bablo’) is Isabel’s elder sister’s son.
Clearly Bablo does nad yed underzdand whad death is.
Bud who does?
Death was muj on my mind in the zummer – muj on my mind. Begaz of Eliaz. Eliaz died, in London Down. And zo death has been muj on my mind.
My dad zed thad early in the zummer Eliaz game round do his vlad. He game round do big ub a jagged – bud the jagged was in my dad’s gar, and the gar was elzewhere, having ids baddery vigsed, edzedera, edzedera. Dybigal Eliaz – jazing a jagged agrazz down. Zo he hung around vor the whole avdernoon, blaying the binball machine and, of gorze, the elegdrig guidar. And my dad zed thad his memory of him was really vresh: his memory of Eliaz, or Vabian, whij was his nigname, remained really vresh. Isabel also ran indo him during the early zummer, in a doob drain, on the Zendral Line, under London and ids zdreeds. Dybigal Eliaz, with all his bags and bundles, his jaggeds nad hads, gayadig, vezdive, brezzed vor dime I-and zdill darrying vor a halve-hour jad. Zo the memory is vresh. And my memory is vresh. Bud is id zo vresh zimbly begaz Eliaz was zo young – zo vresh himzelve? (pp. 227–8)
The random and seemingly insignificant incidents – Elias calling at Martin’s flat to collect a jacket (‘jagged’), staying over to play pinball and his guitar, and chatting with Isabel on the Central Line tube – are authentic, as was Martin’s brief intimation of a ghostly presence in his room. (He assured me that he had not made this up.) Not all readers of the story would be alert to every aspect of Martin’s well-publicized life during the previous five years, yet it is difficult to imagine that any would be completely ignorant of it. It is thus intriguing that Martin’s author-substitute, his son, should open his account by giving so much attention to how he and ‘Jagob’, ‘zbend the early bard of the zummer in Gabe Gad, with my mum, and the lader bard in Eazd Hambdo, with my dad’ (p. 223). They tell how ‘Ungle Desmond’, Antonia’s brother-in-law, drives them to meet Martin in New York and after ‘lunj’ they travel with their father on a ‘big goach’ – innocently praising its ‘zbadlighds to read by and a lavadory in the bag’ – to ‘my dad’s rended house in the woods. Nothing fanzy: in vagd, id good have been in Oglahoma, with a big ub drug in the driveway, an old gar zeed on the barj, and the neighbours alays guarrelling’ (p. 223).
The re-creation in an appropriately guileless manner of an eleven-year-old’s perception of death is a considerable achievement but one that begs a question. Was it intended as a memorial to a young man barely six years older than the narrator, or is a more intricate intention detectable? The absence of any unease or rancour in Louis regarding Martin’s twin affiliation to ‘Mum’ and ‘Isabel’ is notable, as is the general mood of an idyllic equilibrium between the young narrator’s account of his period in Wellfleet, the Phillipses’ house, and the weeks with Isabel and her family. Indeed, one begins to wonder about the amount of detail which Louis brings to his description of the grimly ordinary rented property.
The attention given to authenticity is extraordinary – given that only Martin and two or three others could attest to the accuracy of such minutiae – and none senses that Martin is seeking out the consolations of intimate fact as a contrast to emotional turmoil because, according to Hitchens, Martin’s son did not become entirely comfortable with his relationship with Isabel until their mid to late teens, sometime after the summer in which the story is set. In this respect it can be seen as a rehearsal for Experience, a book that would involve the same blend of confessional transparency and discretion. Martin: ‘I felt [with Experience] the burden of chronology immediately but the idea of typing out “I was born on August 25, 1949” made me feel bored almost beyond description. I knew straight away that I would have to do it thematically. In a sense it was similar to writing a novel, except, of course, that you’re constrained by the truth.’ He also states that among the competing impulses behind the book’s genesis was the overriding ‘pro bono obligation. I am the writer son of a writer father. No one else is or ever has been. I wanted to say what that was like.’
During the period when Martin was preparing Experience the most enduring influence upon the tempo of the book was his encounter with Kingsley’s letters, regular batches of which were supplied to him by Leader between 1996 and 2000. Much has been written on how Kingsley altered during the fifty years between his going up to Oxford and sclerotic old age. But dip into his letters at random and one has the unnerving impression that each might have been written within months of the others, despite an actual separation of perhaps three or four decades. Outlooks change, of course, but it is as though we are sampling variations upon a theme: the love affair between the man and his language endures and never fails to fascinate. Martin, in Experience, achieves a remarkably similar effect. Each chapter opens, perhaps with a piece of dialogue, or an event, a relationship, a conundrum – often one touched upon tangentially elsewhere in the book – and like some creature released from captivity it is allowed to chase through another ten to twenty pages, sometimes disappearing from sight, leaving behind engrossing digressions, and then take us forward again without reaching a specific destination. An impression remains, but never a conclusion and so we carry a feeling of fascinated irresolution into the next chapter, waiting for something of what first intrigued us to resurface.
Martin was taking a lesson from his father in an art that seemed to him and most of his generation redundant in the late twentieth century, the mischievou
s and misleadingly demanding skills of letter writing. He knew that the more controversial aspects of his life had already fallen prey to the scandal-hungry media and he could, of course, have answered the charges and insinuations with verifiable facts, but to do so would have involved a form of surrender. He would have been playing the media at their own game, supplying them with what they had previously been denied, and even though the truth was far more mundane than they hoped, it would amount to a victory of sorts; he had bowed to their incessant pressure to disclose. Instead, he replaced grubby detail with elegantly deflected emotion. Hunt through the book and you will find that most of Martin’s evocative moments, be they pensive, tragic or climactic, will correspond to a report in the press coverage of his life during the previous thirty years. He tells us often no more than we already know, but he intercuts this with an equally convincing sense of uncertainty: it is not that he is trying to hide facts, more that he is telling the truth about his own confused private responses to them. Most certainly he displays a variety of emotions across a spectrum from ire through regret to distress but his candour belies a magnificently honest disclosure of uncertainty. When you read his father’s letters you will be convinced that you know Kingsley Amis, and then you rationalize your empathy: you never knew him but the smoke and mirrors effect of the writing lulls you into the delusion that you did. And so it is with Experience: the sense of perplexity, albeit elegantly despatched, is authentic.
Martin Amis Page 35
