Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  There was a later and less anatomical induction. That night, I remember, I was engrossed, with maximum pleasure and concentration, in a pinball machine — so the locale changes to Spain, and my age is upped to twelve. Gripped though I was, I fell into line without hesitation when my brother approached and said simply: ‘Quick, Mart. Dad’s telling us the lot.’ We sat before him at the restaurant table and mutely listened … In a sodden schoolyard, at the age of five, I had heard a friend explain the facts of life. And my reaction was, I should say, universal: my mother would never let my father — the bastard! — do that to her. But in Spain, in 1962, I came away with all the very best thoughts and feelings: my father and my mother loved each other, and I and my brother and my sister were somehow the creation of that … The family was returning, by car and boat, from a ten-day trip to Majorca, where we had stayed at the posada, or guesthouse, of Robert Graves. As we drove north from Barcelona something very fundamental started going wrong with the car: I spent my thirteenth birthday helping, quite happily, to push it up the Pyrenees. Six weeks later, Kingsley met Elizabeth Jane Howard.* And by the following summer his marriage was at an end. My father never had and never did stop loving my mother. Still, as the Letters clearly show, Jane Howard was a coup de foudre.

  ‘It’s an exceptionally smart man,’ writes Saul Bellow in ‘A Silver Dish’ (one of the greatest short stories of all time), ‘who isn’t marked forever by the sexual theories he hears from his father …’ During our mid-teens Kingsley continued to beguile my brother and me with apothegms of romantic promise. ‘The most attractive part of a naked woman,’ he said, ‘is her face.’ Which sounded very good. But what really put the cat among the pigeons was the following: ‘The physical sensations of sex are hugely magnified by love.’ So that’s why you went after love: for the sex. No. Philip and I were as coarsely energetic as most boys our age; but we wouldn’t be our father’s sons if we had shown no impatience to experience the real thing. When I was sixteen I read The Anti-Death League (1966) in typescript. I was mesmerised by the two brief questions which the (previously unloved) heroine asks herself as she feels the first surge of attraction towards the hero: ‘Is it now? Is it you?’ And then, a little later, the two brief subvocalised answers: ‘It is now. It is you.’ I was always asking myself those two questions, and always hoping to hear those two answers.

  So how was I otherwise, in November 1973?

  My life looked good on paper — where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

  That first novel had been such a long time coming that I was already halfway through its successor. I had a fulltime editorial job at the Times Literary Supplement.* I was writing reviews and articles, for the TLS and elsewhere. In the November 23 issue of the New Statesman the Books section opened with my 1,500-word review of John Carey’s study of Dickens, The Violent Effigy. A week previously, and a week prematurely, the Books section had closed with the novelist Peter Prince’s 500-word review (last in a batch of three) of The Rachel Papers. I have the review before me now† and I only intermittently disagree with it.

  A young first novelist is condemned to write about his own consciousness, but Mr Prince saw no irony, no stylisation — no difference at all between me and my narrator, with his ‘cheesy little bon mots’ and ‘dingy little aperçus.’ He is halfway there, though, on the Osric factor (‘the Early Bloomer, the Sixth Form Sneerer, that combination of middle-class privilege and A-level meritocracy’) and the herd-instinct sexism. This was the worst review that came my way. Everyone else showed leniency, and some showed indulgence.* They seemed to think that it must have been extra difficult for me, coming out from behind my father, but it wasn’t; his shadow served as a kind of protection. And I felt no particular sense of achievement, either. It’s a strange surprise, becoming a writer, but nothing is more ordinary to you than what your dad does all day. The pains, and perhaps some of the pleasures, of authorship were therefore dulled to me. It was business as usual. I was working very hard, I was full of endeavour, but it seemed to be the least I could do.

  And I still felt like a student. The TLS felt like a library, the sessions with the literary editors felt like tutorials, and my articles felt like weekly essays. My large, carpetless, dust-whorled room in the mansion flat in Earls Court made me feel like a student. My clothes, particularly my donkeyjacket-like jacket, made me feel like a student. My lone dinners, my interminable instant coffees, made me feel like a student. My headaches and faceaches (and my vestigially sebum-rich complexion)† made me feel like a student. The high principles, or essential indifference, of the girl I was futilely orbiting (kisses, nothing more) made me feel like a student. At the same time, although I was edging forward into it, the adult world of promotion and preferment still looked alien and menacing to me. There was still the suspicion, despite all the current evidence, that you would not only fail but actually go under. Perhaps everybody has this. Christopher Hitchens had it: we called it ‘tramp dread’. Earls Court was certainly very fully furnished with tramps, drunks, beggars, babblers. And in the mansion flat itself there was an old doctor, close to retirement, who sometimes showed up for the night; I would see him slumped over a sherry bottle in the lino-draped kitchen, or staggering and flailing around in a beltless bathrobe and unbelievable Y-fronts (shapelessly swilling, and mackerel-grey) …

  I was twenty-four, and this is the condition: pretending to know everything, while knowing nothing; pretending to be sure, while being always uncertain. I felt like a student and I was not in love. But there was another world, one I felt I could control and order — which was fiction. And I have always been in love with that.

  Over the Christmas of 1973, experience — in the form, as I now see it, of an acquaintance with infinite fear — entered my life and took up residence in my unconscious mind. This happenstance has shown me, through long retrospect, that even fiction is uncontrollable. You may think you control it. You may feel you control it. You don’t.

  But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.

  * The family commitment to anecdote inclines me to reveal that the ex-girlfriend was Emma Soames. The present girlfriend was Mary Furness, later to be persecuted by the press as the outgoing Countess of Waldegrave. Kingsley loved Emma Soames, who had been at my side for two years, because she was loveable; but there was, I suspected, ancillary admiration having to do with the fact that she was Winston Churchill’s granddaughter. His admiration was historical, not social. Only once did my father encounter Emma’s parents. Jane drove him down to the Soameses’ country place for lunch, where I was spending one of many weekends. While serving drinks Sir Christopher (as he then was), with that gentle, concerned, passionately solicitous frown he had (inherited by all of three of his sons), asked Kingsley: ‘Would you like to wash your hands before we go in?’ And Kingsley said, ‘No thanks. I washed them behind a bush on the way down.’ Lunch was an unqualified success — a wall of sound from start to finish (present, too, were Emma’s imperial-sized senior brothers, Nicholas and Jeremy). But, lor, how much stuff there was about class in those days. Whatever else she did, Margaret Thatcher helped weaken all that. Mrs Thatcher, with her Cecils, with her Normans, with her Keiths.

  * Unless you count the following exchange. At some point in our late teens Kingsley asked my brother and me what we wanted to do in life. ‘A painter,’ said my brother, who became one. ‘A novelist,’ I said. ‘Good,’ said Kingsley, rubbing his hands together rapidly, even noisily, in that way he had. ‘That means the Amises are branching out into the other arts while keeping their stranglehold on fiction.’ He meant Jane, too.

  † The single print run was so tiny that an individual copy of the novel is now worth twice the original advance. For the record: my agent, Pat Kavanagh, and my chief publisher, Tom Maschler, also handled my father, and I had known both of them since youth. So, yes, the whole thing was tacitly nepotistic. Any London house would have published my first novel out o
f vulgar curiosity.

  ‡ KA’s calligraphy was more regular and upright than mine, but sometimes our hands exactly correspond. That anyway, in my manuscript, could have been his: an exact forgery.

  * Here we go back to 1973 and a piece called ‘Rondo for my Funeral’: ‘… I should state that, since starting to find it in my early teens, music has given me more pleasure, and more intense pleasure, than any other art … Further yet: only a world without love strikes me as instantly and decisively more terrible than one without music.’

  * When told of the death of a friend (I am again paraphrasing Northrop Frye) a man can burst into tears; but he can never burst into song. Women’s fiction and poetry, it seems to me, has a bit more ‘song’ in it. Over this we can argue … Kingsley loved Elizabeth Barrett Browning; he had not much time for Jane Austen, rather more for George Eliot, and none at all for Virginia Woolf. Of Woolf he said he found her created world wholly contrived: when reading her he found that he kept interpolating hostile negatives, murmuring ‘Oh no she didn’t’ or ‘Oh no he hadn’t’ or ‘Oh no it wasn’t’ after each and every authorial proposition. Despite his real admiration for Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Jane Howard, my father, I think, regarded women’s writing as essentially occult — not a genre so much as a movement, like Vorticism. Nabokov (no soulmate of Kingsley’s) also confessed to being exclusively ‘homosexual’ in his literary tastes. He said, too, that a good translator must be (a) reasonably competent in the ‘out of’ language, (b) hugely skilled in the ‘into’ language, and (c) a man.

  * At the Cheltenham Literary Festival. The panel discussion which Jane had organised and which Kingsley attended was on ‘Sex and Literature’: one of God’s dud jokes.

  * I got this job quickly but not immediately. For four months I worked in a small art gallery in Mayfair, showing the punters around the place, dusting frames in the basement, making the tea and coffee, hand-addressing the invitations to the private views, and reading about a book a day. Then I got taken on as a trainee copywriter at an ad agency, J. Walter Thompson, just up the road in Berkeley Square. The ad world used to be something of a refuge for literary types. But I feared for myself at J.W.T. It seemed to be entirely peopled by blocked dramatists, likeably shambling poets, and one-off novelists. The whole place felt like a club-world sunset home for literary talent. I resigned after a week (but only because I had somewhere else to go), serving two more before starting at the TLS, at that time located in an annex of the old Times building in Blackfriars — above a pools firm monitored by tublike turnkeys with whiskers of formidable wingspan.

  † Not in some paranoiac’s scrapbook (and there won’t be much, hereafter, about reviews) but in a bound volume of the magazine. Six years’ worth of bound volumes formed part of my leaving present, in 1979. If I may speak elegiacally: the old Staggers was for many years a very great thing (my contemporaries there, for instance, were James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens and Julian Barnes). Its front half, the political half, started to die with the conscience of the Labour Party. The back half had the cohesion available only to a minority-interest field, and lasted a little longer.

  * Auberon Waugh, son of Evelyn, was very generous. Nobody — literally nobody — was in a position to be more sympathetic. And he wrote his first novel when he was nineteen.

  † The popularity of the Beatles haircut owed a lot to the fact that it covered the top third of your face. ‘What’s under that fringe of yours? A galaxy of acne, no doubt.’ This was Kingsley’s accurate surmise, some years earlier. The haircut was gone. The galaxy took much longer to fade.

  Letter from School

  55 Marine Parade,

  Brighton, Sussex.

  7/11/67.

  Dearest Dad and Jane,

  Another letter so soon, you see, because I want to ask some rather delicate questions which I hope will not alarm you too much. Strange as it may well seem, I’ve forgotten what plans we made re my accomodation [sic] from Jan—Jun/July. I think we agreed on a boarding house, did we not? Also, I vaguely remember suggesting a flat, and Jane said I wouldn’t like that and I agreed. Well it has just struck me that I rather would like that: but it is more than grandiose caprice. What would a boarding-house cost per week? About £3–£4? Well a flat in Brighton (bedroom, sitting-room, bathroom, and kitchen) would cost £6 to £7. I would gladly pay the difference. You see I’m anxious to have a bit of independence during my last days of independence, as it were. At any rate I don’t see why this period should introduce extra restrictions. Independence does not entail riot, insurrection, disregard of personal health, and general wanton behaviour. I just want to be comfortable, to have a sense of establishing my own discipline by doing certain things for myself, and to fuck girls (a litotes I couldn’t resist and not to be given unfair emphasis).*

  As for washing-up, cooking, laundry etc. I could probably continue to use the school facilities: I would have lunch at Rottingdean or wherever, and supper at Marine Parade.

  I think this would really make all the difference as to whether I am to look forward to an enjoyable but disciplined 9 months or start settling down to reaping ‘the rewards which courage beings’. I hasten to add that I’m quite confident that I will be saying this after 3 mths of running a flat by myself.

  Somehow sitting in one room, of a weekend, marking papers is a sorry prospect. I have far more space here. Also, the idea of sharing a bathroom with 13 or 14 lorry-drivers is daunting. I know it’s not relevant, but having shared a bathroom with you two, I couldn’t imagine you joining in a baleful queue in a draughty corridor every morning …

  You know that if you say I cannot have a flat then I won’t make too much fuss, and you know that I’m not going to refuse to stay in Brighton if I don’t get my own way. But haven’t I earned the right to make something of my stay here in the way of having a nicer life as well as doing my stuff so far, so please don’t dismiss the idea, and please don’t assume that I won’t be able to handle it. If it doesn’t work then I could always leave the flat + get digs — there would be no lease-complications as with Phil’s flat.

  Anyway, sorry to have been so boring, but I think you’ll see that it is a seriously conceived suggestion — ‘not a present thought but by duty ruminated’ — and I hope that you will consider it as such. On that heavy note,

  Lots of love

  Mart x x x x x x

  P.S. Could you give me a cursory reply as soon as poss. Because I’d like to get the whole ugly business resolved quickly. — M.

  On rereading this I feel I must emphasise that I am not contemplating orgies and parties as I write, but comfortable surroundings for stuff-doing. I wouldn’t know how to go about falling into bad company or anything like that — and anyway that goblin Mr Ardagh can keep his beady eye on me.

  * Litotes (‘ironical understatement’)? No, this is just a clunking attempt at bathos. More generally, I ask my male readers to remember what they were like at eighteen. And I ask my female readers to remember the kind of boys they were having to deal with then, and what they were like.

  Learning About Time

  In the gap between school and university English men and women are traditionally expected to hike to the Philippines or care for the sick in Madagascar. I can account hardly at all for my ‘9 months’ — except for the three weeks I spent sitting behind the till in my step-uncle’s record shop in Rickmansworth. But some travel happened. This happened.

  There were four of us in the Mini Moke, me, Rob, and Si and Fran (who were a couple). Attired in the usual chaos of flowered scarves and crushed velvet, unsolicited and unheralded (and reasonably stoned on hashish), we were about to disturb the peace of one of the world’s greatest living poets, Robert Graves.

  — Will he remember you? someone asked me.

  — Not by sight.

  But I said I thought he would, probably, after I’d lengthily explained. I certainly remembered him.

  This is my father doing Lord David Cecil, the handsom
e, theatrical, effortlessly affected and above all aristocratic English don (who among other distinctions failed Kingsley’s B. Litt. at Oxford):

  ‘Laze … laze and gentlemen, when we say a man looks like a poet … dough mean … looks like Chauthah … dough mean … looks like Dvyden … dough mean … looks like Theckthpyum [or something else barely recognisable as ‘Shakespeare’] … Mean looks like Shelley [pronounced ‘Thellem’ or thereabouts]. Matthew Arnold [then prestissimo] called Shelley beautiful ineffectual angel. Matthew Arnold had face [rallentando] like a horth. But my subject this morning is not the poet Shelley. Jane … Austen …’

  Square brackets in the original (Memoirs). I am surprised to see ‘Austen’ there in straight roman: in Kingsley’s spoken rendering the first syllable — Auth — was always viciously stressed.

  When I say a man looks like a poet, I mean he looks like Robert Graves. Tall, angular, the lips sullen-sensual, the crushed but still diagrammatically aquiline nose, the rheumy eyes and their thousand-mile stare — and, with all this, a loose-limbed physicality, large, gestural: I remember him scaling the rocks that leaned up from the sandless shore — and bounding over them as he came back the other way and leapt flailing into the water. Here indeed was the warrior-poet. And yet I knew him to possess a forgiving soul. One night, back in 1962, he had had the Amis children over for dinner while my mother and father went out on their own. Graves’s wife Beryl was there (surprisingly manly, straitlaced and countified, and always flanked by her two giant poodles), as well as members of his own progeny and entourage. Towards the end of the meal Graves proposed a party game: the oral composition of a poem, with everyone round the table contributing a line in turn. Philip and I sat there, slightly enfeebled by several hours of best behaviour. And when Graves said, ‘Philip. Why don’t you begin?’, my feared, revered and much-adored brother instantly and typically reached for the most subversive — and above all the nearest — thing to hand. He said: ‘There was an old farmer who sat on a rick …’ My ears hummed: we’re for it now, I thought. Because this ‘poem’, taught us that morning by our father, continued: ‘Laughing and waving his big hairy fist/ At the sailors who …’ And so on.* Graves smiled and, glancing downwards, said lightly, ‘You’re not meant to know that poem.’ I think it was Beryl who got us going on something about domestic animals. The only line I remember was one of Graves’s: ‘The cat was grey, and Siamese …’ A perfectly understated iambic octosyllable — as I would come to realise, years later.