Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  In 1996, shortly after Kingsley’s memorial service, Hilly and the Amis children – Martin, Philip and Sally – put his Primrose Hill house on the market, sold it in 1997 and bought a flat in Mornington Crescent where the Kilmarnocks lived for a few years before moving back to Spain. Philip, with his new wife, followed them a year later but these acknowledgements of Kingsley’s passing were belied by the behaviour of Sally. She kept a flat in Kentish Town, five minutes’ walk from where her father and the Kilmarnocks had lived and little more than fifteen minutes north of Martin’s studio flat in Notting Hill. It became her shrine to her late father, the walls covered in memorabilia advertising talks and book launches, shelves bulging with edition of his works. Kingsley had never been the perfect father but she had always treated the open invitations to dinner and overnight stays in Primrose Hill as a redoubt against her otherwise chaotic personal life. Now, all that had disappeared. Martin would welcome her to his house when he and the family were in London, and he visited her when he could. She died in November 2000 four months after the publication of Experience.

  Hitchens: ‘Sally could be unintentionally hilarious. She was guileless, innocent, but that was the tragedy. She grew up in a world of unlicensed misbehaviour but, unlike us, she couldn’t protect herself from collateral damage.’ And she is recreated, with tender consideration, as Violet in The Pregnant Widow.

  12

  Novelist and Commentator

  The reasons for their decision to move to Uruguay were numerous and varied and, as Isabel states, ‘had nothing to do with the media or book reviews’ as some newspaper columnists would later allege. ‘It was just the fact that we realized soon our girls would be too old to be out of “proper” school. I always wanted them to learn Spanish – which they did. Martin agreed. He loved the place.’

  Every year around two months would be spent in New York or East Hampton, and Isabel would fly over to see her mother in the city four times a year on average. ‘My mother’s place in East Hampton, which she bought from my grandfather’s estate, is a series of [converted] farm out-buildings. The main house, which was my grandparents’, was left by them to The Nature Conservancy. It [her mother’s place] is very unfancy, an old slate barn converted for summer use. Not for winter.’ Uruguay would enable them to have a place of their own outside London and, being in the southern hemisphere, offer an escape from British and US winters. Isabel is, on her father’s side, half Uruguayan but had visited the country only twice, on both occasions when she was still in her teens. Her relatives had suffered greatly during the military dictatorship with several of her cousins imprisoned, one for eleven years.

  In the weeks after Sally’s death Martin and Isabel checked flights to Montevideo from Heathrow. ‘In 2000’, Martin recalls, ‘we went there [Uruguay] for three weeks over the Christmas holidays, summertime in the the Southern hemisphere. We didn’t want to be in a hot city, Montevideo, and heard about José Ignacio, not then the slightest bit chic, from a cousin of Isabel’s who runs a restaurant in the village.’ Isabel continues: ‘We rented a small house there and the following Christmas we rented the same house. But instead of three weeks we stayed three months, January to March. We decided it would be nice to skip the London winter and get the girls to start learning Spanish. Martin wrote much of Koba in the ramshackle garage of that house.’

  ‘At the end of that year we bought a plot of land in the village. I have eighteen first cousins in Uruguay. Rodolfo, one of these, is an architect and he oversaw the project, though I designed the house myself. Martin wanted it but was not involved in the house at all.’ Rodolfo’s expertise and experience proved invaluable when Isabel was dealing with the strict Uraguyan planning regulations. The house would be brick and stucco with large windows facing to the sea and exposed beams made from giant, ancient salvaged timbers from the old dockyards of Montevideo.

  It was, they agreed, perfect in the sense that the region had a magnificent quietness and beauty about it. Isabel: ‘Very flat, large Atlantic waves. Something like Long Island might have been a century earlier.’ In Maldonado, a forty-minute drive away, there was a nursery and infants school which Clio and Fernanda would attend.

  Alongside this Martin went twice a year to Ronda, usually staying for four to five days. He, Isabel and the girls took rooms at a hotel in the town and spent their days with his mother and Ali Kilmarnock in the Casa almost eight miles away in what was left of the wilderness of Andalusia. The ramshackle farmhouse was barely big enough for the Kilmarnocks themselves, but according to Martin his mother seemed more contented during that period than at any time since his childhood. From when she had worked on an animal sanctuary, before she first met Kingsley, Hilly had nurtured an affection for animals as part of her household. What the Casa lacked in space and facilities as a building was amply compensated for by five acres of land, complete with a few olive and fruit trees. Goats, sheep and chickens roamed the stone-walled campos, while a couple of affable mongrels and an ever-expanding tribe of cats slouched about the house. Clio and Fernanda were particularly enamoured of their grandmother’s carefree existence among the treasured non-humans – only the eggs were ever eaten – and Martin began to feel that Experience was less an act of completion than an opening to a new tempo of sensations. He did not become overly elated or exultant; quite the opposite. He had gone through a similar stage with Einstein’s Monsters, published when his boys were roughly the same age as Fernanda and Clio. ‘I believed in it [nuclear disarmament], and I still do irrespective of 1989 [the disintegration of the Soviet bloc] and I concede that my ideas were . . . impassioned.’ His later work on politics would also involve passion, but passion informed by a measured scrutiny of our recent history as a species.

  Koba the Dread (2002) was set in train by Experience and matured during the two years in which London changed status from Martin’s adult base to a precarious staging post for elsewhere. When Martin had pored over the copies of his father’s letters one aspect of his reintroduction to Kingsley had registered, but he had not thought it worthy of more than cursory mention in his own memoir: politics. Jacobs and Kingsley himself had been transparent and outspoken about his rightward drift during the 1960s. The weekly meetings at Bertorellis of similarly disposed writers and journalists – notably Robert Conquest, John Braine, Tibor Szamuely, Bernard Levin and Anthony Powell – were the stuff of legend and to an extent self-caricature. There was no ‘dialectic’, since all of those present were convinced of and agreed on their beliefs – good food, drink and conviviality topped the agenda. Martin had observed this as a wry spectator, occasionally playing a stand-in role as the voice of leftish youth, which neither he, nor his father nor the likes of Conquest took too seriously. Almost three decades later, however, he began to wonder if the mood of frivolity had blinded him to something much more significant. He admits that in 1968 just before going up to Oxford he had treated Robert Conquest’s recently published The Great Terror with a mixture of respect and indifference. ‘I read a page or two. I knew its thesis and its context from the controversy it stirred up but at that time its effect upon me was slight.’ What brought the book to mind once more was a trip he made in 1995 to Poland. He refers to this in a brief postscript to Experience without mentioning the tangential effect of his visit to Auschwitz. He describes being obliged to confront something that should not have been conceived and executed by sentient, rational human beings, of how as a fellow member of this species he feels ‘a sense of lousiness, like an infestation’ (p. 370). He takes it for granted that any other person would experience if not an identical sensation then at least a comparable blend of outrage and self-disgust. He was suddenly struck by the fact that Stalin’s reign of terror had taken more lives than Hitler’s, but it was not so much what Conquest’s book disclosed that horrified him, but his remembrance of how it had been received in 1968. Few, even among the most resolute leftists, disputed its accuracy as a historical document but equally no one seemed willing to fully accept the moral rep
ercussions of these facts. He considered a morbid hypothesis: what if, say, Martin Gilbert’s magisterial The Holocaust had in the mid-1960s been the first thorough documentation of how the Nazis had planned and almost succeeded in implementing the complete extermination of European Jewry? The scenario was bizarre but not entirely implausible. True, the defeat of Nazi Germany meant that its vast programmatized crime against humanity had been disclosed to the world within a year of 1945. Much of what actually went on behind the Iron Curtain and before that during Stalin’s most profligate period of mass murder was still a state secret, but vast numbers of defectors and escapees had testified to the horrors of an authoritarian regime. Martin’s friends and colleagues at the New Statesman during the 1970s had not regarded the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise but it was for them a flawed yet heroic prototype for their ideal. He respected Hitchens as his most ruthlessly intelligent peer, and he was, and would remain, his closest friend. To what extent, wondered Martin, had he deliberately blinded himself to what the regimes of Eastern Europe had done? How could he reconcile his faith in an abstraction to the foul evidence of its implementation?

  In October 1999 Martin and Isabel accompanied Robert and Liddie Conquest to a public debate in Conway Hall, Red Lion Square. Its subject – as Martin later put it ‘very boring indeed’ – was Britain’s membership of the European Union. The attraction lay in the principal participants themselves: Christopher Hitchens (pro-membership) versus his brother Peter (anti-). The former had since the 1970s reformed his inflexible Trotskyist stance – reality in the virtual disappearance of Communism from the world stage in 1989 had contributed to that – but the Hitchens brothers remained at opposing ends of the political spectrum, Peter contributing articles to the Daily Mail that made Thatcherism seem spinelessly irresolute by comparison. Despite their differences they were well matched as ferocious rhetoricians and entertainment was guaranteed. What lingered in Martin’s memory of the event, however, was an apparently innocuous aside from Christopher who reminisced about the building as one in which he had spent numerous evenings debating the future of humanity with ‘my old comrades’. His well-rehearsed self-deprecating manner – the joke being that such idealists, like their opinions, were now a trifle antique, even redundant – raised a laugh; even Conquest joined in. Martin offers his reflections on the event as a coda to Koba the Dread and wonders,

  If Christopher had referred to his many evenings with many ‘an old blackshirt’, the audience would have . . . Well, with such an affiliation in his past Christopher would not be Christopher – or anyone else of the slightest distinction whatsoever. (p. 256)

  The intellectual and political establishment is able to indulge Communists, practising and retired, for various reasons – there was the war, of course, in which the suicidal heroism of ordinary Soviet troops inflicted the first and decisive blows upon Nazi Germany. In this regard affiliation involved a degree of exculpation-by-gratitude. Just as significant was the perception of Communists and radical Socialists as essentially humane and unselfish individuals, even when the pragmatics of their vision involved a fair amount of catastrophic self-delusion. Combined, these two allowances served to protect Stalin, even after the extent of his rampant murderous authoritarianism became known, from the same demonic status as Hitler. In Koba Martin successfully, and for many discomfortingly, dismantles this gradation of evil.

  He conducted far more research for the book than he had previously undertaken for any project, reading almost eighty volumes covering everything from the memoirs of ex-political prisoners to studies in pre- and post-Glasnost Soviet history. One night in 2001 after he had spent the best part of a week pursuing further evidence on the horrors perpetrated in five prisons mentioned in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago he experienced a horrifying, shameful moment of self-revelation. He had followed Solzhenitsyn’s darkly comic prompt to construct an accurate league table for the most notorious prisons in central, non-Siberian, Russia: the Butyrki, the Lubyanka, the Lefortovo, Sukhanovka and the Taganka. The process of evaluation was pared down to the most imaginative and effective methods of torture and subjection employed in each and the consequent level of terror that their name struck in prisoners awaiting news of their first custodial destination. This might have seemed a rather ghoulish endeavour but Martin was attempting to immerse himself in what Solzhenitsyn and others had described as a mythology of terror, the condemned fearing the future in much the same way that the fallen would contemplate the various horrors offered by the circles of hell. One night – he thinks it was a Friday – he felt that Butyrki had emerged as the most troubling of the five. On the one hand it was run with brisk efficiency and carried the elitist badge as the detention centre for the most distinguished intellectuals. Equally, it seemed designed specifically to break the spirit of such figures. As part of his divorce settlement Martin had sold his flat in 1997, but as with Chesterton Road he had found it difficult to work full-time in Primrose Hill, especially after the birth of Clio. Fortunately the new house came with a one-room self-contained studio physically separated from the main building, but little more than five yards from the door to the basement kitchen. He was here, poring over accounts of Butyrki and comparable places, when from across the small garden began a screaming of the hopeless, endless, wall-penetrating kind practised particularly well by infants. It was Clio. Next morning she had acquired a nickname, ‘Butyrki’. At the moment the wailing began Martin was imagining how hundreds of prisoners had dealt with one of the most effective methods of suppression, indeed murder, employed at Butyrki; the gradual, calculatedly gradual, crowding of cells each day with more and more inmates so that those who were already there knew, and communicated to newcomers, that they were in effect being crushed to death. Martin was sure that some must have screamed, but it would not have been a scream prompted by the immediate infliction of pain; no, it would be a release of despair following a lengthy period of contemplation and dreadful resignation. A scream from nowhere; and his daughter reminded him of this. Her cries fractured the rumblings of a North London night; she became Butyrki and within days he became ashamed of what he had done.

  Nearly always, when I use it, I imagine a wall-eyed skinhead in a German high-rise (and I’m sure such a person exists) with a daughter called Treblinka. Treblinka was one of the five ad hoc death camps, with no other function (unlike Auschwitz). I am not as bad as the wall-eyed skinhead. But the Butyrki was a place of inexpressible distress. In 1937 it held 30,000 prisoners crushed together. And it isn’t right. Because my daughter’s name is Clio: muse of history. (pp. 260–61)

  Although he makes only a nuanced reference to this moment in an appendix to Koba it was in truth the book’s driving force. It laid open an implicit almost conspiratorial consensus on the Western world’s view of itself and the horrible century just closed: Stalinism was evil but not as evil as Hitler’s Nazism. In the frivolous meshing of his daughter’s crying with the name of a prison, he had connived in it. The implicit question, pursued ruthlessly through the book is, why has this happened? Eventually he reaches something of a conclusion: in their work many political theorists and historians, while certainly not apologists for Stalin, provide a rationale for moral relativism. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison1 contend that while the Holocaust ‘is the only example which history offers to date of a deliberate policy aimed at the physical destruction of every member of an ethnic group, under Stalin no ethnic group was singled out for annihilation’. Martin concedes that this is true but only partially. Lenin and Stalin had indeed not been obsessed with a single ethnic group but they had practised an egalitarian form of genocide, targeting geographical and nationalist centres, such as Georgia and the Cossacks, which they deemed a potential threat to the political predominance of the Party. Indeed, had Stalin lived a year longer his own well-planned anti-Semitic pogrom would have been well under way. Martin concludes: ‘the distinction may be that Nazi terror strove for precision, while
Stalinist terror was deliberately random. Everyone was terrorized, all the way up: everyone except Stalin’ (p. 85).

  There was also, contends Martin, a long tradition of intellectual snobbishness which, without exculpating Stalin – he had clearly presided over a disaster – at least set him apart from the uncouth ideology of Hitler. Marx, drawing upon Kant and a magnificent tradition of philosophic insurrection going back to the Enlightenment, was undeniably a great thinker, while Fascism was state-sanctioned mob rule, cultivating the base prejudices of the ill-educated with its programmes of racial purity through eugenics. Here, Martin again quotes Solzhenitsyn, who contended that both Communism and Fascism were forms of ideological enforcement. The former might have appeared more just and righteous than the latter but neither allowed for dissent; the individual was denied the opportunity to opt out of what others deemed an improvement upon his condition.

  This, he knew, would be his most contentious work yet, not because it would divide critics – he was used to that – but through its more private register for those who had remained his friends since the 1970s, particularly Christopher Hitchens. ‘I remember,’ says Hitchens, ‘we were at a Huntington Library Symposium, “British Comic Writing Since the War” I think it was called. Anyway, Martin altered the flamboyant mood and confided in those who wished to know that he was embarking on a completely new project, disclosing the truth about the Soviet Union and its evils. I confess that my heart sank. Not because we were likely to disagree on the matter, no, because I suspected he would make a hash of it. Up until then Martin wouldn’t have known the difference between Bukharin and Bakunin.

  ‘But he did that thing. You could always tell the symptoms. He became absorbed, completely, exclusively. About a year later I went with him from London to the Hay-on-Wye event. We were very well served; someone had sent a car for us. During the whole three-hour journey along the M4 he sat there completely absorbed in memoirs of survivors of the gulags. He hardly spoke. Believe me this was not Martin being rude. I’d known him for thirty years and we were content with each other’s mannerisms. There was nothing particularly odd about it, except that he seemed even more compulsively absorbed than he had been with any previous project.