Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  The Booker panel mirrored the reviewers in its dealings with the novel, which reached the long list but went no further. The chair that year was John Carey, who judges it ‘an immensely complex, disturbing book. I am not a great fan of experiment for its own sake but this was outstanding because it made you question the routines of detachment and aloofness that are generally taken for granted. It is difficult to find a proper compass for a response. I thought it superb but the rest of the panel were unanimous in their disdain.’ D. J. Taylor included? ‘Yes he too would not countenance it as a potential winner.’ Did he get the impression that the inclination to moralize was inhibiting critical scrutiny? ‘To an extent, yes.’

  Rumours about Martin and Isabel’s plans for Uruguay were circulating between tabloid hacks six months before Yellow Dog went into print. As early as February 2002 the Mail on Sunday stated that they had ‘tracked down Martin Amis who has moved to the remote Uruguayan village of José Ignacio to overcome writers’ block’. The following day, Monday, the literary editor of the Independent, anxious to secure Martin for a forthcoming review, had his assistant call the house to see if the phone rang out. Isabel, who had not seen the Mail’s article, was puzzled though not entirely surprised. No, Amis did not have writers’ block; no their life in Uruguay had nothing to do with post-9/11 trauma; no they were not completely abandoning life in Britain, she stated to an Independent junior reporter despatched to see what exactly was going on.19 ‘I told the reporter all this,’ repeated Isabel, ‘but I could see from her eyes she wasn’t listening.’ And so it continued until late March 2004 ‘when we finally moved into the house, which was not ready when we arrived’. Isabel and a friend spent a week furnishing the Uruguayan house from antique and junk shops and reclamation yards in Buenos Aires, and then rented a van to deliver by ferry the eclectic mixture of items. ‘There is’, she points out, ‘no Ikea in Uruguay. There is almost nothing to buy – you have furniture made or you get stuff from auctions. Buenos Aires was cheaper – it had just crashed – and there was more stuff to buy.’ Was it purely coincidental that their move in autumn 2003 came almost immediately after the reviews of Yellow Dog? ‘Yes,’ answers Martin. ‘We had arranged for the girls to start at a very easy-going primary school and they had to be there by mid-March. That’s all.’

  During the period between their first visit to the Uraguay in 2000 and their arrival four years later, the media had now encroached upon the modest exclusivity of the country. Earlier that same summer Naomi Campbell and Giuseppe Cipriani had rented properties there, much to the excitement of the London and US press. Nevertheless, the region chosen by Martin and Isabel remained immune from the attention of celebrities and the press. ‘It was’, says Martin, ‘fashionable for about two to three weeks per year, and mainly for Latinos. We lived there all year round. It could be very cold and windy.’ He continues: ‘When the girls arrived at school their teachers would welcome them with a kiss, and kiss them goodbye when they left for home. It was perfectly natural, but of course in a London school such physical contact would seem scandalous.’ His study overlooked the beach and Atlantic. He had never before worked in such an environment and felt the difference immediately. ‘The sound of the sea is good for the soul.’ Which made writing difficult. ‘I had read Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History, and the novel would eventually take its title from the three pages in which she described the House of Meetings, where inmates would be allowed conjugal visits. The contrast between this magical location and the one that I was forcing on to the page caused difficulties. How could I write about victims of the Gulag when I was here? It was too stressless a place. I kept thinking; this piece of work is begging me to abandon it.’ He did not, of course, and House of Meetings was published shortly after the Amis family returned to London in August 2006.

  ‘I had written a novel about the Holocaust, but from the point of view of the perpetrator. I don’t think I could have envisioned the experience of a victim. But this one was about a victim, and told by a victim. Lev and [the unnamed narrator] were freezing to death on the Arctic circle and I was here with my daughters and wife, in a society that seemed flawless; everyone looked happy and fit, the routines of manners and civility could have come from a 1950s film, and their attitude to children was wonderful, a combination of affection and benign authority. Very few cars, so you could park anywhere. Isabel and the girls spoke Spanish but I didn’t. Many people were bilingual and indulgent but often I would spend days alone with my own thoughts, in English, and that helped with the novel.’ The narrator addresses his black stepdaughter, who edits the text, with a few footnotes, but in a way he is talking to himself.

  House of Meetings counters the charge, perennial since the 1970s, that Martin is a magnificent stylist but nothing more. The narrator on several occasions (notably p. 57) mentions Conrad and Dostoevsky as the West’s favourite Slavic writers. They were, he contends, united in their difference, with ‘old Dusty’s’ characters ‘fucked up on purpose’ while Conrad exposes his to a more authentic, unwanted experience of pain. There is a much deeper implication here in that both writers, at least for Westerners, were dislocated from their linguistic roots; Conrad because he adopted a foreign language for his profession, Dostoevsky as a figure who fascinates many outside Russia, very few of whom have read his work in its original form. In this respect, they influenced Martin’s work. He was writing a novel based upon stories gleaned from works such as Applebaum’s while alienating himself from his own stylistic homeland. He was doing a translation of Martin Amis. Translators are confronted by two often divergent trajectories: re-create mood and tone or move towards the undeviating subject. Martin chose the latter while leaving traces of the former in his wake.

  Sometimes the narrator seems to be a withdrawn etiolated version of his creator, with fragments from the heyday of Money still scattered through the prose. But such flourishes are rare. The novel rests upon an attendance to fact, experiences far too dreadful for linguistic ostentation, even of the ghoulish Dostoevskian kind.

  It would of course be absurd to suggest there were creative parallels between Martin’s new life and the subject of his novel: the former was seamlessly benign, wholesome, often luxurious. Nevertheless, the fact that he felt in his own words ‘marginalized’, albeit voluntarily, from ‘the city, and modernity, always my environment and my subject’ is intriguing. The newly fashionable Atlantic coast of Uruguay might have had little in common with Siberia yet alienation from his routines provided some impetus for the gargantuan task of writing prose completely incompatible with his literary temperament.

  ‘My allocated daily task was watering and tending the garden which separated the house from the unpaved dirt road.’ This was the Martin Amis who previously had treated making tea as the summit of his practical achievements. ‘I learnt the names and requirements of plants and eventually felt familiar with the personality of the garden.’ He sometimes moved from his ground-floor study and worked at a table on a terrace in the garden. Isabel: ‘The house was not on the beach. It was in the village but you could see the sea from upstairs, which is why I put the living rooms there and the sleeping below.’

  Martin was able to sustain his long-established addiction to tennis. In East Hampton the Fonsecas had a court where he would play with family members and friends during the summer, and in José Ignacio he made use of the excellent clay courts. There was no club and the courts were available to anyone in the vicinity who could find an opponent.

  The lack of regular poker games also caused some withdrawal symptoms, mediated slightly by his setting up of a game, initially about once a month, in the restaurant run, though, not owned, by Isabel’s cousin Martin Pittaluga and Guzman Antagaveytia, who became Martin’s good friends. Soon, a number of local residents became enthusiastic participants, despite the fact that many had never played before. Martin taught them.

  This experience of disconnection influenced one of Martin’s best novels so far. London Fields, Time’s Arrow and
Yellow Dog are exceptional partly because of their intransigent refusal to conform to the predominant tenor of his own fiction or to discernible precedents elsewhere. House of Meetings is similarly out of key, and even more demanding.

  First-person narrators present difficulties for writers because the better they are at telling their story, the more the edifice that sustains their credibility is likely to crumble. Martin, convincingly, overcomes this with a simple device: the novel is a 200-page email written by the narrator to his stepdaughter during the days before his prearranged assisted suicide. He can therefore be excused the occasional digression, or prophetic reflection on a life about to close. More significantly, given that this is a private exchange we, as interlopers, will always be attempting to resolve ambiguities, make sense of omissions or nuances. There are some things that Venus, the recipient, might intuit that will always be lost to us and aspects of her stepfather’s temperament and personal history that will always beguile us: does he take it for granted that she will be able to fill in the gaps or is he practising a strategy of evasion with her too? The effect is by turns infuriating and addictive. In his unnamed narrator Martin creates a perfect vehicle for his exploration of several interwoven themes. Predominantly the novel is about life in the gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, but it also begs questions about the extent to which inmates can be trusted as witnesses to their own suffering and that of others. Notably, do they (and by implication would we) protect ourselves from a combination of guilt and a pain too horrible for full recollection by refashioning the truth?

  The speaker is honest about the less appealing aspects of his past. He did during 1944–45 ‘rape [his] way across what became East Germany’, like most of his Red Army comrades, and later in the camp he commits acts that the ‘pigs’ [guards] reward with privileges such as food. He kills three informers. He does not apologize for his record and we respect him all the more for this because although he never states this explicitly we detect that for him contrition, even explanation, would be strategies of avoidance. Yet his honesty is itself perplexing. The two other individuals caught in his narrative thread are his brother, Lev, sent to the same camp, and Zoya, a Jewish beauty who entrances them both. While the speaker tells of his brutal deals with unhesitating candour his account of this triangle of love and rejection is mischievously costive. He infers persistently but begrudges transparency. What, we wonder, actually occurred in the House of Meetings when Lev was allowed access to his wife, Zoya? It affects the lives thereafter of all three but the speaker never explains what we suspect that he knows. Similarly his own relationship with Zoya is presented tangentially, as though only curious moments can be preserved, not their resonance. He dwells, for example, on how she seemed to dislike the taste of his kiss, and does not explain why their relationship was apparently so brief and catastrophic. The contours and exigencies of a private world are obscured, deleted, while brutality is offered without caution. He is being selectively honest, telling of matters that most would wish to forget or suppress while protecting emotional intimacies. The resultant work is the closest that anyone has come to a fictional version of Browning’s dramatic monologues, in which the speakers are as convincing as their counterparts in contemporary novels, and more horribly enchanting – figures who by their very presence cause us to ask questions about the events that made them what they are.

  The reviews were on the whole excellent but while each found something to praise none appeared able to decide on what exactly Martin was attempting to do. Typically, in the Guardian, M. John Harrison wondered if it was ‘the history of a love-triangle relationship’ since it was, he felt, ‘too novelized to be quite the history of a state’, and went on to ask ‘what is it?’20 His perplexity is an unwitting testament to Martin’s achievement in walking a very narrow tightrope. On the one hand his research was based on non-fiction, with only Solzhenitsyn allowing his experiences to seep into novels and even then with pathological detachment. At the same time Martin was fascinated by the verbatim testimonies of survivors in books such as Applebaum’s. Each was by parts horrifying, gripping yet curiously incomplete. Ex-inmates offered accounts of the terrorizing minutiae of camp life and routines for survival but, Martin admits, ‘I wanted to follow them out of the book, to where they live now – if they lived at all – learn more about what had happened to them after their release.’ Thus his storyteller weaves an authentic account of tyranny into private portraits, his involuntary memories of love and his unfixed relationship with his brother.

  His background reading, based on his work for Koba, was thorough but coldly vicarious. He had never visited Russia and had met only one individual with personal experience of the Stalinist purges, his father’s friend Tibor Szamuely, and that had been more than twenty years earlier when his interest in politics was peripheral at best. As a consequence he searched elsewhere for filaments of the stoyteller’s personality, whose manner is that of an erudite autodidact – he has spent the last twenty years in the US – switching between reflection, self-directed irony and caustic aphorisms. Resignation, cynicism and a hint of despair wrestle for attention and throughout we detect an echo of Martin’s recently deceased hero. Bellow died in 2005 and Martin tells of how during his last days, in bed at his home, he was visited by his friend Gene, who asked, wryly, ‘Well, what have you got to say for yourself, Bellow?’ ‘Saul answered,’ reports Martin, ‘“I’ve been thinking. Now, which is it? Is it, there goes a man? Or is it, there goes a jerk?” Gene replied, unemphatically, “There goes a man,” and Saul said, “I’ll take your word for it.”’ Laconic, self-deprecating, boisterous, this was Bellow’s style even on his deathbed. Open House of Meetings at any page and you will encounter its facsimile.

  For the relationship between the brothers he went again to his personal history, and Philip. ‘When Sally was young we were competitively protective of her. We used to say: “If anyone fucks her we’ll kill them.” Well, gradually, I moved aside. Philip was the elder brother and at the end he was there far more than I was. During the worst times he was trying constantly to protect her. And when she died Philip and Hilly went a little crazy for a few months. I didn’t, but I suffered for that. Not at the time, several years later.’ There is no sister in the novel, but the storyteller recalls his brother, falteringly, as a man he admires, and for whose fate he feels contrite responsibility. Martin’s own inclination to revisit points in his past was augmented by his life in Uruguay. ‘I felt unencumbered by the usual demands of the present, able to move freely through my earlier experiences. Women – mistakes, admissions, things that didn’t work – became weirdly omnipresent, more important than anything else – children excepted – and I would ask, “Did I have a good time with women?” and answer, “Yes, I did.” It all went well. And I would compare this with a conversation I’d had with an old friend. “It wasn’t like that for me,” he said, “I suffered, was heartbroken and knew that I’d caused pain to others.”’ The friend was Rob Henderson who had died of cancer in 2001. The conversation had taken place a few months before his death but a version of it resurfaces at the end of the storyteller’s account.

  . . . Women can die gently, as your mother did, as my mother did. Men always die in torment. Why? Towards the end, men break the habit of a lifetime, and start blaming themselves, with full male severity. Women break a habit too, and start blaming themselves no longer. They forgive. We don’t do that. And I mean all men, not just old violators like me – great thinkers, greater souls, even they have to do it. The work of who did what, and to whom.

  What was the matter with me and women?21

  Martin and Isabel knew that Uruguay would be a temporary excursion, but as Martin states it was an undertaking they chose. They were certainly not influenced, as some gossip columnists claimed, by media pressure. ‘You have to believe that the media don’t much bother me. I care, some, about what they say about my work, but not about my character.’

  House of Meetings was planned for publication in late 2
006 and they decided that they would leave Uruguay that same year. But if they left for good in the autumn where would they go? Primrose Hill was rented out until 2007 but even if they elected to stay for a further twelve months they had then to decide on where Clio and Fernanda would grow up, and most significantly receive their education. For a while the US seemed the more attractive option. New York was expensive but if they sold the London house they could find something, perhaps a brownstone in Brooklyn. New York appealed to Isabel because her mother, brother and sister lived there. ‘But,’ she says, ‘we could never afford a house in the West Village – properties there now go for ten- to fourteen-million dollars, and my mother has lived there since 1956.’

  Martin had since the early 1980s come to regard the States as his second home, a vibrant exhibition of what in London was generally reserved for imaginative hyperbole. But could he deal with it as his first? The matter was undecided when in March 2006 he received a letter from Manchester University. He had been offered a job, on very attractive terms, including a generous salary, the rank of Professor, and very little hindrance to his commitments as a full-time writer. The prospect was attractive but was not the decisive factor in their choice to stay in London. ‘We chose London’, insists Martin, ‘because my three other children lived there.’ They would, they agreed, remain in Primrose Hill at least until the girls were into their teens and through the crucial years between primary school and precipitate examinations. And it was not until 2011 that they made the move to Brooklyn. There was still a year to run on the Primrose Hill rental agreement and they decided to buy a flat in Westbourne Gardens for the interim.