The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  These are minor follies, perhaps, pitiable but innocuous. Try this, though, for authentic hatred of the common age: ‘These men [Lady Marchmain’s brothers] must die to make a world for Hooper … so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince nez, his fat wet handshake, his grinning dentures.’ Or this, after the disclosure that Rex is a divorcee: ‘Round the argument circled and swooped like a gull, now out to sea … now right on the patch where the offal floated.’ Offal, eh? But then Rex (or ‘people of Rex’s sort’) is someone ‘that only this ghastly age could produce’, in Julia Mottram’s ringing phrase.

  Waugh’s snobbery is revealed here as a failure of imagination, an artistic failure; it is stock-response, like sentimentality. This brings us to the second main objection to the book, one that is closely connected, in my view, with the vulgarly romantic version of Catholicism which Waugh chooses to celebrate. There is something barefaced, even aggressive, in the programmatic way that the novel arranges for its three most unregenerate characters – Sebastian, Lord Marchmain and Julia – to claim the highest spiritual honours. Sebastian, whose life has been impartially dedicated to shiftlessness, whimsy and drink, becomes a holy fool, shuffling among lepers and sleeping in his ‘monk’s cell’. Lord Marchmain, who likewise has done nothing in his seventy years but follow his own hackneyed inclinations, snatches salvation in the last seconds of his existence. ‘I’ve known worse cases make beautiful deaths,’ says the priest, rubbing his hands after Marchmain has jeered him from the sick room. And Julia …’

  For the first two-thirds of the book, Julia doesn’t constitute much of a departure from the standard vamp/heartbreaker/scatterbrain of Waugh’s fictional women, who are presented as embodiments of philistinism, will and appetite, cynical in the heart, above all. Quite what qualifies Julia for her moral jackpot in Book 3 remains unclear. Her rollcall of worldly infamies is unflinchingly stressed – she has her ‘vicious’ escapade in New York, she ‘lives in sin’ with Ryder. And yet here is her curious epiphany, a two-page ‘tumult of sorrow!’ complete with semi-colons and telltale adjectives:

  … never the cool sepulchre and the grave cloths spread on the stone slab, never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.

  Ryder’s love for the Marchmains, it would seem, is aroused not only by their noble blood but by their congenital holiness. Whether the reader feels much uplift during Julia’s voluble trance is more open to doubt. What the reader senses, I suspect, is the fat wet handshake and grinning dentures of bad art.

  Bad art is of course a major theme in Brideshead Revisited. The book would be without much of its staying power if Waugh hadn’t hedged his bets in this way. Ryder’s artistic talent is seen in terms of his infatuation with Brideshead itself – in terms of connoisseurship, of English ‘charm’. ‘It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls,’ says Ryder. ‘This was my conversion to the Baroque.’ It was Waugh’s conversion too, but to the Baroque in its decadent, bastardized literary form. ‘I have been here before’: the opening refrain is from Rossetti, and much of the novel reads like a golden treasury of neo-classical clichés: phantoms, soft airs, enchanted gardens, winged hosts – the liturgical rhythms, the epic similes, the wooziness. Waugh’s conversion was a temporary one, and never again did he attempt the grand style. Certainly the prose sits oddly with the coldness and contempt at the heart of the novel, and contributes crucially to its central imbalance.

  ‘Most of the reviews have been adulatory except where they were embittered by class resentment,’ said Waugh in his Diaries (written while drunk). In his Letters (written while hungover), Waugh refers to Brideshead repeatedly as his ‘magnum opus’ – ‘a very beautiful book’, ‘my first important book’. In a touching letter to his wife Waugh tenderly scolds Laura for not taking the ‘Mag. Op.’ seriously enough; it is almost a whimper of neglect. Later he confessed himself ‘greatly shaken by its popularity in USA’. ‘I re-read Brideshead Revisited,’ he wrote to Graham Greene in 1950, ‘and was appalled.’

  Perhaps Waugh would regard this review as a product of class resentment, the complaint of a Hooper who doesn’t know which fork to use, and who says Rightyoh’ and ‘Okeydoke’. I think it unlikely. Waugh wrote Brideshead with great speed, unfamiliar excitement, and a deep conviction of its excellence. Lasting schlock, the really good bad book, cannot be written otherwise. ‘The languor of Youth … How quickly, how irrevocably lost!’ The novel had its origins in this regret, the more keenly and confusedly felt by someone ‘beginning to be old’. But then all this had somehow to be turned into art, that is where the real trouble started.

  Observer October 1981

  Sunset at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse. With Notes and Appendices by Richard Usborne

  P.G. Wodehouse was the exponent of a form that no intelligent writer has been able to take seriously for several hundred years: the comic pastoral. You would have to go back to the enchanted forests of Shakespearean comedy to find even a fleeting analogy with his fiction – to the suspended green worlds of Arden and Illyria, where love-knots are festively disentangled, parentage mysteries advantageously resolved and fortunes miraculously accumulated, all without pain. And when we note that Wodehouse’s green world tolerantly includes twentieth-century London and New York, as well as the forgiving lawns of rural England, we begin to see his true cloudlessness as an author.

  It is a world devoid of all the baser energies. The greatest terrors its denizens face are mild social embarrassment, the pecuniary delinquencies of friends, the occasional unrequited crush and the prospect of being bullied by an aunt into marrying a bossy cousin. The fact that these pitfalls, when translated to the burly contingencies of real life, can cause genuine hurts and fears merely strengthens the glow of innocuousness. Wodehouse loved to play on the genial insensitivity to suffering that centuries of thoughtless privilege produce. The only moment of anomie I can recall in his fiction occurs in an early short story, when Jeeves, prompt as ever, brings Bertie Wooster his usual whisky-and-soda at six o’clock. ‘It’s the bally monotony of it all’, complains the alienated Bertie, ‘that makes everything seem so perfectly bally.’ Bally, by the way, is a public-school diminutive of ‘bloody’. Even here, you see, things aren’t that desperate.

  I quote from memory – something that will doubtless oblige Richard Usborne, our premier Wodehouse scholar, to reach for his index cards. Mr Usborne spearheads the clique of British belletrists who, in the pantheon of world literature, would place Wodehouse somewhere between Homer and Dante. In editing this uncompleted novel for publication (the title, incidentally, is the handiwork of the British publisher), Mr Usborne has managed to give full vent to his fanaticism: the 100-odd pages of Wodehouse text are bulked out with sixty pages of the author’s drafts and scribblings, Mr Usborne’s footlingly digressive textual notes, a topology of Blandings Castle (with sketch-maps), a breakdown of the rail service between Paddington and Market Blandings (with timetables), and such like. Clearly this enthusiasm is not to do with literature. It must then, I assume, be to do with something else, Together with the clip-clop of the hobbyhorse, one senses a kind of innocent, wistful snobbery – as if the Wodehouse world were really locatable in time and space. Anthony Powell, who also chronicles the upper crust, is the only other modern writer to win this unfathomably obsessive treatment. One awaits equivalent studies of the Nottingham of Alan Sillitoe, the Northern Slums of Stan Barstow. It won’t happen.

  The rescue operation itself, however, was well worth undertaking, and the quality of the Wodehouse text makes additional nonsense of Mr Usborne’s twinkly rubrics. As with all the best Wodehouse, the pleasures of the Blandings books are totally reliable and undisconcerting. There are the usual bust-ups, alarms, duplicities and misapprehensions, but even a newcomer to Wodehouse would quickly see that this world is quite static and accessible, its arms ever open to receive its guests. There is almost something sub-literary in the deri
sory demands Wodehouse makes on his audience; his ghost hovers over the book like the solicitous Jeeves, only wishing he could turn the pages for you. It is quite unlike any other sort of writing. But then Wodehouse was unique in every way: he had boundless comic genius and a laughably limited range.

  He only made it look easy, though. It appears from the worksheets appended to the novel that Wodehouse had some ticklish difficulties in the plotting of Sunset at Blandings. That tiny, tortured hand experiments with dozens of variations before fixing the one presented to us here (the most frequent scribble is an introductory ‘Try this’; ‘Fix’, ‘Okay’, ‘Good’, ‘Very Good’ and ‘Very Good XX’ are also popular). The hesitance is surprising. Whereas Wodehouse’s prose was obviously the result of fond and obsessive labour, his plotting always seemed the most perfunctory thing about his work: the Blandings novels, including this one, are all permutations of the peaceable oldster / troublesome aunt / lovelorn youngster setup, with the usual machinery of letters, thefts, coincidence and dramatic irony. Mr Usborne explains that Wodehouse lost some of his impetus as he grew older; he found the business of moving action forward increasingly irksome. When he died, P.G. Wodehouse had been Sir Pelham Wodehouse for forty-six days. He was ninety-three and had a sunny farce still warm on his typewriter. Right to the end, that green world of his never began to lose its vernal brilliance.

  New York Times Book Review December 1978

  Lowry: In the Volcano

  Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry by Gordon Bowker

  Dipsomaniacs are either born that way, or they just end up that way. Vastly distinguished in the sphere of dipsomania, Malcolm Lowry, it seems, actually planned to be that way, from childhood. The gift was not inherited. In an early short story the narrator records his (Methodist) father’s disapproval of a local lawyer, who lacked ‘self-discipline’. ‘He did not know’, Lowry wrote, ‘that secretly I had decided that I would be a drunkard when I grew up.’ While most schoolboys dreamt of becoming engine-drivers or cattle-punchers, little Malcolm dreamt of becoming an alcoholic. And the dream came true. Excluding a few dry-outs, in hospitals and prisons, and the very occasional self-imposed prohibition, Malcolm Lowry was shitfaced for thirty-five years.

  How much do we need to know about a writer, personally? The answer is that it doesn’t matter. Nothing or everything is equally satisfactory. Who cares, in the end? As Northrop Frye has said, the only evidence we have of Shakespeare’s existence, apart from the poems and plays, is the portrait of a man who was clearly an idiot. Biography is there for the curious; and curiosity gives out where boredom begins. Certainly we think that scholarly investigation has gone too far when it starts offering us monographs on, say, the laundry lists of Shackerley Marmion or the tram tickets of Lascelles Abercrombie. But the author of Under the Volcano is a special case. His addiction becomes our addiction. Anyway, The Bar Tabs of Malcolm Lowry would tell most of the story, and it would be no shorter than Gordon Bowker’s 600 pages. The biography is thorough, and thoroughly engaged; it is both gripped and gripping. It won’t have to be done again.

  To make a real success of being an alcoholic, to go all the way with it, you need to be other things too: shifty, unfastidious, solipsistic, insecure and indefatigable. Lowry was additionally equipped with an extra-small penis, which really seemed to help. He was of course a prodigious self-mythologizer, or a braggart and a liar, if you prefer. A playground scar on his knee he passed off as a bullet-wound sustained in crossfire during the Chinese Civil War. Jailed for one of his solo riots in Mexico, he listed his torments in a letter to a friend: ‘They tried to castrate me too, one fine night, unsuccessfully I regret (sometimes) to report.’ That hardy ‘one fine night’ acts as a kind of semaphore of mendacity. In 1939 he used the outbreak of war, and his own entirely hollow vow of immediate enlistment, in a number of self-interested ways, including this bold strophe in a letter to his sweetheart: ‘If you truly love me as I love you greet me as one come back from a long journey & who must go again, as I must.’ That last heroic cadence bespeaks both congenital insincerity and a delighted self-loathing. Lowry was a world-class liar. Even his commas and colons were lies.

  Like Isherwood and others, Lowry was the kind of Englishman who had to get out of England, and sooner rather than later. His parents were ordinary products of their time and place but it was their very ovinity that haunted him. When imagination comes up against no-imagination, then no-imagination wins every time. So you have to get out. At seventeen he sailed east to China, as a deckhand; a year later he sailed west to America, as a passenger, on a literary pilgrimage. North and south, though, turned out to be the significant points on his personal compass. The south meant Mexico, the scene of his most shameful rampages. The north started out meaning Scandinavia but ended up meaning Vancouver and a two-room shack in the frozen wilds; here, and here only, he could write; everywhere else he just went on word-binges, or word-blinders. Lowry was the kind of man the Russians call a walrus: he responded to the asceticism of long winters, sub-zero swims, the cobalt-blue skies. He tried very hard, but he couldn’t make it as one of nature’s geckoes, able to wallow in the ooze and booze beneath Popocatepetl.

  Before his long exile could begin (nothing would tempt him back to England except free health care) Lowry had to lurch and bail his way through university and then spend a couple of years crashing around Fitzrovia with a succession of manqué poets and brawling book-reviewers. His erotic interests, like his literary interests, were vital to his sense of himself to the internal romance – but nothing deflected him from his dedication to alcohol. Of a make-out session with a famous Cambridge vamp, Lowry wrote: ‘Charlotte … has offered me her body … I drank a lot of whisky … and was nearly sick into her mouth when I was kissing her. She says she loves me.’

  His talent was a precocious one: even in his early twenties, not content with the usual debauches and disappearances, he was already experimenting with paranoid hallucinations involving salamanders and male nurses. By the time he got to Mexico (aged twenty-six) he was downing any liquid that came his way on the off-chance that it might contain alcohol: he once drank ‘a whole bottle of olive oil thinking it was hair tonic’.

  So the years of Lowry’s maturity unfold: binnings, bannings, arrests, ejections, screams in the night, expired visas and lost passports, together with a lengthening rap sheet of domestic arson, larceny and GBH. In 1938 his first wife Jan ‘rationed’ him to a quart of liquor a day, but he hoarded his allowance to buy ‘fortified wines costing only fifty cents a gallon’. In 1947 his second wife, Margerie, noticed that Lowry, after a period of abstinence, had started enjoying a cocktail before lunch – ‘and pre-dinner cocktails started as early as 3pm’. In 1949 he was averaging three litres of red wine per day topped up by two litres of rum. His varicose veins stretched from groin to ankle. One morning he collapsed and started ‘vomiting black blood’. We then duly witness the straitjacket, the padded cell, and the serious discussion, with wife and doctors present, on the pros and cons of lobotomy.

  Towards the end, even Lowry’s freak accidents and cluster catastrophes are assuming an air of the dankest monotony. An average hour, it seems, would include a jeroboam of Windowlene or Optrex, a sanguinary mishap with a chainsaw or a cement-mixer, and a routinely bungled attempt to guillotine his wife. Around Malcolm and Margerie, everything that could go wrong would go wrong. He falls in the bath and breaks a blood-vessel: ‘She tried calling the hospital but the phone was out of order; she rushed out into the elevator and got stuck between floors.’ He falls on a country path and shatters his leg: she runs to the local store and is ‘severely mauled’ by the neighbour’s dog. Certain friends of theirs always kept packed suitcases by the front door so that they could claim to be off on vacation if the Lowrys horribly appeared, hoping to stay. Her psychology was one of self-immolation in the dread face of genius CI feared he’d hurt me badly and feel so awful the next day’). As for Malcolm, he was plain incorrigible, resolved – unto dea
th – on making the same old mistakes.

  The biographical context, as usual, turns out to be the least congenial setting for any consideration of the work. Of course we learn a thing or two about Lowry’s ‘working habits’, which included habitual plagiarism on a surprising scale. Plagiarism is the perfect crime for the masochist: dross can change hands freely, but anything worth stealing carries its own guarantee of detection and exposure. Lowry was exposed, many times. The book is called Pursued by Furies, but Lowry’s path, in fact, was smoothed by mercies: a small private income, devoted women, talent. It was all laid out before him. Nevertheless you would not wish for a sharpening of Mr Bowker’s appalled, but generally lenient, tone. The furies were internal. There was nothing to be done about them.

  What of the fiction – i.e., what of Under the Volcano, which is pretty well all it amounted to? Writing both compelled and mortified Lowry. Peering back through the viscous shards of his life, you wonder how he ever wrote anything – how he ever signed a cheque or left a note for the milkman. The only thing that worked was the shack on the water, and its extreme simplicities. Drunkenness recollected in sobriety: surrounded by the celestial clarity of the north, he could recreate the sweat and corruption of the south. I remember Under the Volcano as chaotically confessional, as a torrent of consciousness. Now it feels formal, literary, even mandarin in its intonations (the word ‘pub’ is daintily sequestered by inverted commas). It is what Lowry could never be: it is lucid and logical; it is well-behaved.