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

by Martin Amis

  In the second piece, ‘An Imperial Message’, a dying Emperor has dispatched a message to you – ‘to you, the humble subject, the insignificant shadow cowering in the remotest distance before the imperial sun’. The message is so important that the Emperor has it whispered back to him as he sprawls on his deathbed. ‘A powerful, an indefatigable man’, the messenger immediately sets out on his journey through the thronged anterooms. But the multitudes are illimitable, the chambers endless, and a lifetime will pass before he can escape even the innermost halls of the palace. ‘And if at last he should burst through the outermost gate – but never, never can that happen – the imperial capital would lie before him, the centre of the world, crammed to bursting …’ So the message will never reach you. ‘But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to yourself.’

  ‘Before the Law’ points fairly obviously to The Trial, ‘An Imperial Message’ to The Castle. But the two parables point further than that, and can be seen as forming the twin poles of Kafka’s world – or the double-sided coin of its currency. On the one hand, there is the sense of constriction, pointless vigil, invidious exclusion (‘The Metamorphosis’, ‘In the Penal Colony’, ‘A Report to an Academy’); on the other (in ‘The Refusal’, ‘A Little Woman’, ‘The Great Wall of China’), there is the sense of painful boundlessness, of repetition and duplication, of human worthlessness in the face of an indifferent infinity. It has been said, for instance, that The Trial is ‘about’ divine justice, that The Castle is ‘about’ divine grace. Yet every reader knows that Kafka’s art lies much closer to home.

  In Kafka, the two nightmares – one claustrophobic, one agoraphobic – are really the same nightmare; and it doesn’t end when morning comes. It has always been tempting to negotiate Kafka as an interpreter of the hidden world of dreams. Certainly no one can read him without feeling that they have already dreamed him: the freefalls and turn-arounds, the abolition of cause and effect, the excruciations of proximity and remoteness, the evanescent temptresses, the pains proliferated, the pleasures deferred. In a sense, though, we distance ourselves from Kafka if we demote him to the outback of the unconscious. The jokes and jumps of his prose have as much to tell us about the futilities of the waking consciousness, which is never more than a neurotic babble, occasionally and briefly forced into some expedient order.

  Kafka is the antic poet of everyday fear, shame and stoical yearning. The art is subversive, even playful. He deals in savage inequities that are never resented, pitiful recompenses that are tearfully cherished. Nothing is deserved and everything is accepted, with hilarious, inhuman pedantry. We tend to keep a straight face for writers who daunt us with their modernity. After the due process of assimilation, however, we can see that only the art is innovatory and that the concerns belong to the mainstream of life, to its humour and its pathos.

  Jorge Luis Borges – whose debt to the master, while often acknowledged, is increasingly manifest – recently claimed that the primacy of ‘atmosphere’ in Kafka renders the stories superior to the novels. This feels accurate. As a work of art, the short story ‘The Stoker’ is more fully evolved than the novel America, of which it forms the opening chapter. The novels are attritional – deliberately so. ‘They are epics of suspension and postponement, and could never be finished into art.’ It is in the stories that Kafka’s genius shines most unmistakably: in modulation, pacing, indirection, in the exquisite pregnancy of his endings. Take the closing lines of ‘A Hunger Artist’, the story of a circus performer whose ‘act’ consists of forty-day fasts completed alone behind the bars of a cage. Slowly the art of fasting falls out of fashion; forgotten, the hunger-artist dies unnoticed behind his bars:

  ‘All right, deal with this mess!’ the foreman said, and they buried the fasting-artist together with the straw. Into the cage they now put a young panther. It was a palpable relief even to the most stolid to see this savage animal thrashing about in the cage that had been bleakly lifeless for so long. He lacked nothing … even freedom he did not appear to miss; that noble body, endowed almost to bursting-point with all it required, seemed to carry its very freedom around with it – somewhere in the teeth, apparently; and sheer delight at being alive made such a torch of the beast’s breath that the spectators had difficulty in holding their ground against it. With a conscious effort, however, they crowded round the cage and, once there, would not budge.*

  The coda has the same violent, distorted poignancy as that of ‘The Metamorphosis’: the starved and festering beetle dies alone in his room, and the family travel to the countryside, where the parents note with pleasure that their daughter is the first to stand up, ‘stretching her young body’. Despite or because of the Jewish lineaments of his consciousness, Kafka saw the artist’s isolation as Christlike – an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, yet capable of wincing laughter. Grateful as we are for the reissues of the Diaries and the Letters, intrigued as we will doubtless be by the forthcoming picture books and pop-up albums, we need no further testimony to Kafka’s pain and how he bore it.

  Observer July 1983

  * Translated by J.A. Underwood, whose Stories 1904–1924 is often superior to the Muirs’ Complete Short Stories.

  Educated Monsters

  The Chip-Chip Gatherers by Shiva Naipaul

  In The Pleasures of Exile George Lamming scolded V.S. Naipaul, as he no doubt would his younger brother Shiva, for taking too soft a line on Trinidadian social conditions, for being smug when he ought to be angry, for writing ‘castrated satire’. This, of course, is like calling ‘The Windhover’ a castrated epic. What the Naipauls write is irony, not satire, and irony is by definition non-militant. Should they decide to give up creative prose in favour of pamphleteering, then Mr Lamming’s remarks would carry weight; as it is, Caribbean social conditions have for them, qua novelists, an imaginative significance only.

  It is true that a primitive society offers a Hobson’s choice of styles to its authors: tantrumese, noble-savagery, or a combination of irony and pathos. But like all limitations this brings special liberties. Irony and pathos are essentially downward-looking viewpoints, so a society of grotesques, fools, snobs, show-offs, martinets and ingénues who think and talk in illiterate clichés has obvious perks for a writer with as delicate a touch as Shiva Naipaul. One sentence from his first novel, Fireflies, the story of Baby Lutchman’s struggle to be free of her family and make a life of her own with her husband, illustrates the comic discrepancy between the author’s sophistication and that of his characters: ‘It was generally agreed that Mrs Lutchman was being deliberately awkward [in wanting some independence], “too big,” as Urmila had put it, “for she boots.” ’ Although Mr Naipaul must, so to speak, keep his distance, this doesn’t cut off sympathy but creates an undertow of restrained emotion (as in the almost definitive poignancy of the Lutchman marriage). The compassion is there in the sheer quality of the writing and never has to become explicit.

  Naipaul’s second novel, like his first, is predominantly concerned with one question about Trinidadian life: what happens when a backward people starts to educate itself? The most imaginatively appealing answer is that the old atavistic instincts are not transcended, merely adulterated: what used to express itself in abuse and beatings turns into inarticulate malice; worry becomes anxiety, nostalgia becomes regret, apathy becomes morbidity, vague aspiration becomes obsessive ambition. This, like so much else, can best be observed through child–parent relationships, and Naipaul again requires a broad canvas and a forty-year period in which to encompass it.

  The Chip-Chip Gatherers opens in ‘the Settlement’, a Gypsy-like community in the Trinidad sticks. Here, aggressive, Quilp-like Ramsaran and the weedier, more malleable Bholai are planning (like everyone else there) to get out of the Settlement and (like every Trinidadian) to get into the professional classes. Ramsaran goes, Bholai stays; gradually, the broader ironies develop. Ramsaran, having married ostentatiously beneath himself, produces a son whom he sets about tra
umatizing with his own repressions. Back at the Settlement, Bholai, having married obsequiously above himself, produces a son to whose emancipation he dedicates his own wasted life. The predatory Ramsaran rears the morose Wilbert; the morose Bholai rears the predatory Julian. Ramsaran does ‘his best to see that Wilbert received … a distorted life’s experience’, while Bholai, faced with the open scorn of his comparatively cultivated children, can only shrug that ‘it have nothing surprising in the way they turn out. Is how we wanted them to be after all – to be different from us. To be better.’ Wilbert duly wanders into a pleasureless marriage with the nastiest Bholai girl. Julian duly jilts his Ramsaran-ménage sweetheart to take up a scholarship abroad. The last thing we hear Bholai tell his children, finally goaded into a kind of befuddled eloquence, might serve as the book’s sententia:

  You have education – or say you have. What you do with it? Where you hiding it? Monsters. That is the only name for all-you. Educated monsters, which is the worst kind of monster it have.

  On the novel’s last page we leave the rich, doomed, loveless Wilbert watching Trinidad’s poor, the chip-chip gatherers, scavenging in the sea-beds for morsels of food, undeterred ‘by the disproportion between their labours and their gains’, ‘on this wind-swept, shimmering beach of starving dogs, chip-chip gatherers and himself’.

  If the book isn’t quite as successful as the shockingly mature Fireflies, it is because Naipaul has started to deal with the problem of focus. He is concentrating on nuance rather than ambience, shaving down his sentences, and holding his vast – perhaps Dickensian – comic talents carefully in check. But for a writer in his twenties these are further precocities, not constraints, and there can be little doubt that his next novels will establish him as one of the most accomplished, and most accessible, writers of his generation.

  New Statesman April 1973

  Black and White by Shiva Naipaul

  What was going on in Jonestown, Guyana – before that day in November 1978, when Pastor Jim Jones came on the tannoy and summoned his flock to the waiting vats of Kool-Aid and cyanide?

  While running his San Francisco ministry, Jones had been a pillar of Californian society. He won the praise not only of proven gulls like Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden but also of hard politicians like Jerry Brown and Walter Mondale (who considered Jones ‘an inspiration’). Jones cared for people whom no one cared for – the Moorlocks, the underground proletariat, the junked: exploded hippies, dropouts, addicts, sociopaths, whores, the old, the crippled, the unemployable. In 1976 the Los Angeles Herald named Jones as their Humanitarian of the Year. Fostering his (mostly black) community, Jones entertained paranoid fears of fascist-racist reprisal. But his subsequent move to Guyana was an act of hope and liberation, a move towards conscious utopianism.

  According to many reports, that utopia was brilliantly realized. In the remote jungle of South America the Jonestowners led a life of lyrical freedom and productivity. They gorged themselves on protein-rich food and sang in the fields. This was communism, and it worked. They lived in hygienic ‘cabins% education and medical care were first-rate, and Jim was always on hand to exhort and, sometimes, to heal; the elderly smiled all day and danced all night. Visitors from all over the world continued to be ‘impressed’ by the noble experiment.

  According to other reports, the horror of Jonestown was, from the start, unrelieved. By February 1978, half of the 1,000 congregants were suffering from diarrhoea and malnutrition. The town was putrefying. ‘Dark circles under one’s eyes or extreme loss of weight were considered signs of loyalty.’ Children were regularly tortured. The lowlier blacks were treated like slaves. Worst of all, perhaps, the ailing, drug-racked Jones never tired of airing his megalomania over the public-address system – often for six hours a day, sometimes much longer. When the end came, most of the Jonestowners must have been ready to go.

  Shiva Naipaul is fascinated by the contradictory nature of these reports – black and white with nothing in between. They are testimony to the hysteria that was inseparable from Jim Jones, and possessed his followers as well as his enemies. ‘Their hysteria goaded Jonestown towards extinction.’ Reciprocally, Jones did not protect and solace his marooned parishioners; he traumatized them with his own fears. In a sense the Jonestown Thousand were saying to the world what all suicides say: look what you have made me do.

  It has been argued that the People’s Temple was a tragic instance of idealism gone wrong. For Naipaul, it had never gone right, and was the efflorescence of a larger vacuity. ‘Jim Jones was a beachcomber,’ Naipaul writes, ‘picking up the flotsam and jetsam washed ashore from the Sixties shipwrecks.’ His championship of the black cause was no more than opportunism: ‘Church was nothing, a handful of old bigots, till I brought in some blacks,’ Jones privately boasted. ‘And that is how the goddamned religious career got rolling.’ In one of his most jolting paragraphs, Naipaul argues that Jones felt nothing but hatred for the blacks he had salvaged – ‘a hatred so deep-seated, so tormenting, that, in its fury, it turned itself inside out and called itself Love’.

  Black and White (and note the absence of any subtitle) is no highbrow quickie on the Jonestown disaster. It is a serious, possibly over-ambitious book about racial distortion and perversity. At the same time Naipaul is always engaging and acute. As in North of South, his travel book about Central Africa, he places himself and his neuroses at the hub of the narrative. He has the Naipaulian confidence that what he finds interesting will interest us. It is not high-energy reporting; Naipaul doesn’t probe and scurry about for information – he just hangs around with his whole sensibility on hire. The result is haphazard, all the same. Naipaul’s pacing and priorities often seem suspect. There are over-generous digressions on the South American political background and the Californian cults; and Naipaul is rather too happy to sit back with an illiterate Guyanese pamphlet, a Jonestown brochure, a hippie manifesto, and jeer his way through it.

  It is intriguing, meanwhile, to speculate on the course of Shiva Naipaul’s career. His two early novels, Fireflies (1971) and The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973), were precocious masterpieces, and they shine disturbingly in the memory. I’m sure Naipaul doesn’t need reminding that he has published no work of fiction for nearly a decade. Many writers could have tackled Jonestown, though perhaps not as ably. But only one writer can tackle the fiction of Shiva Naipaul.*

  Observer November 1980

  Observer August 1985

  * I append the following:

  Anyone who knew – or read – Shiva Naipaul will feel horribly robbed and violated by his death, last week, at the age of forty.

  The moment I finished his first novel, Fireflies, I felt delight in being alive at the same time as such a writer. I passed the book round to friends (I must have bought half-a-dozen of those Penguins), and there are many people with whom I can initiate a long train of quotation – and laughter – from that book alone: Ram Lutchman’s torments at the hands of his hobby, photography (he takes to developing his own film, under the bed: ‘There go another sonofabitch. Is like a goddamn lake in here’); his subsequent refrain, at any humbling reverse in his troubled and frustrating life: ‘Is just like that sonofabitch camera’); and the ostracism his wife Baby must endure from her family, having settled on the lowly Ram: ‘It was generally agreed that Baby was being deliberately awkward, “too big,” as Urmila had put it, “for she boots.” ’

  I quote from memory. Perhaps this is what one is always obliged to do with the dead – quote from memory. The second novel, The Chip-Chip Gatherers, fully maintained the great promise, and the great achievement. I got to know him about that time (the early Seventies), a humorous, recalcitrant and denunciatory figure. He was still not yet thirty. Many people felt impatience at the tum his career then took. His travel books, North of South and Black and White, were brilliant, and characteristically brilliant; but where were the novels?

  The novels were simmering away. Shiva’s third, A Hot Country, signalled a change of direc
tion and a toughening-up, a wheeling round of the guns. In losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, of vanished genius: the hard political intelligence, and the beautiful comedy, which dealt in the most forgiving pathos and irony, as bearish and affectionate as the man.

  With Shiva, you usually found yourself having five-hour sessions in exasperated but needy Greek restaurants. I once asked him what he thought of an editor we both knew, an editor I liked. ‘To kill such a man’, smiled Shiva, ‘could not be accounted murder.’ It turned out that this editor had once cut three lines of Shiva’s copy, or had been a day late with payment. Such vehemence was partly play, for he was a gentle presence. The other day I parped my horn as I drove past him in the street, and saw him wave and smile and level his accusing eyes. I felt more warmth for him than for people I know far better. He had a talent for warmth, as for much else. He was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room.

  No Way

  A Journey in Ladakh by Andrew Harvey

  Reviewing Joan Didion in the Sunday Times, Paul Theroux remarked that Salvador was a good book about ‘being nervous’ but not much of an account of Salvador. Travel writing remains a predominantly European genre – a genre that the New World has yet to get around to. Explanations and exceptions immediately present themselves. In To Jerusalem and Back, Saul Bellow pointed out that America is more like a world than a country; and perhaps this is why the best American travel writing is almost invariably domestic. In England, a new generation of talented tourists has recently emerged: we have Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban; and V.S. and Shiva Naipaul by adoption. In America, there is no such tradition to be maintained. (You have Theroux, true, but he lives with us in London now.) The embarrassing answer may be that the England-based traveller is emboldened by the vestiges of an imperial unreflectiveness. We aren’t nervous: we’ve done all this before. Combining intrepidity with lack of imagination, the Brit strides out into the world and brings back the story, dead or alive.