by Martin Amis
Also, of course, you will go to a chemist’s you have never visited before, in the present case a dank little joint which I enter to the tinkle of a bell. True, the cashier is a woman, a milky-haired old dear, but otherwise the place is perfect for me. Outside on the pavement, like a poem of poverty, stands a senior citizen in warped gymshoes and flared trousers; and inside it just gets better and better, unreconstructed, practically pre-war, all coughdrops and corncutters and flesh-toned gauze, and the air thick with the smell of decaying penicillin. No sunglasses or beachbags to attract the young and healthy. Only the desperate necessities of lumpen self-maintenance — plus a Prescriptions counter for those customers who, in that fearful phrase, find themselves ‘under the doctor’. To the side, entirely dominating the dental-care section, stands a shrine of Steradent, which is represented in three flavours.
The shop stayed empty as I picked out a few manly items — razor blades, an elbow support — and moved to the till, pocketing my list. In a few seconds this would be over. Now I faced the old lady. And noticed that something strange was happening to her eyes: delighted dilation.
— You’re Martin Amis! Oh. Oh. My nephew. My nephew thinks you’re just … Jim! Jim!
Jim was the jovial old soul in the stall behind Prescriptions. I wrote out and autographed an encouraging note for the nephew (an aspiring writer — and, again, good luck to you) on the back of an order form. Then I came out on to the street with my face in flames. But the old pair had been sweetness itself, and I was laughing, too, at fate’s casual brilliance. That never happened in the old days of the condom. I wondered how, say, child star Macaulay Culkin managed, in these ever more condom-conscious times. Perhaps he got his dad to buy them for him. As Kingsley once did for my brother and me, and with a broad hand.
That night I plopped a tab of Steradent into the glass, and, too elderly itself, perhaps, it didn’t work. But the next one did, causing the Clamp, still within me at the end of a long day, to give a brief and enfeebled leer.
Both my parents kept an unvaryingly impeccable distance from the love lives of their children. My mother did so instinctively, but with my father I felt it was also a result of considered policy. At the house in Maida Vale a girlfriend of mine, searching for the bathroom, stumbled in on Kingsley and Jane, waking them in the early hours. The next morning I gingerly picked up the note that was waiting for me outside my door. Written in my father’s hand, it said: ‘Your friend is very welcome to stay for breakfast. Just be discreet with Mrs Lewsey.’* In fact my girlfriend had been anxious about spending the night, and I was uncertain too, and she hadn’t stayed. So I wasn’t just being excused: I was being sympathetically notified of a new freedom. This was clarifying.
— What’s so funny?
— I’ve just come to the bit about masturbation.
The year is now 1995, and I am lying, for a brief moment, on a patch of grass in a London park, looking again at Kingsley’s Memoirs, while my sons, perched on rollerblades, totter past, and now pause.
— And?
— When Kingsley was your age his father told him that it ‘thinned the blood and the victim eventually fell into helpless insanity’.
— Did he?
— Yes. And by the way, it doesn’t.
— Good.
That was the only sex tip (‘which he topped up every so often’) Kingsley ever got from William Robert Amis. And before ‘you start grinning, reader, if that is what you feel like doing,’ KA goes on, ‘… a chum told me how at his school each class as it approached puberty was taken on a little tour of the supposed masturbation-mania ward of the local mental hospital’, where real schizophrenics and manic-depressives were passed off as average veterans of self-abuse. My father claims, in his memoir, that he was ‘sensible enough’ not to believe such warnings, and I think he really did survive the prevailing conspiracy of hypocritical deception and menace, a phenomenon that today we can only interpret as hatred of youth. Or maybe the whole thing was an awful game played by disappointed mediocrities, my grandfather somehow persuading himself that if he had ‘left himself alone’ in his youth he might have aspired to more than a senior clerkship in the City, and of course he would be wanting better for his boy … It seems fair to say that the relationship between father and son never recovered from the former’s aggressive mystification on sexual matters. It wasn’t that Kingsley needed hard information on the birds and the bees. ‘Sex instruction in the home’, as he says, ‘… is not instruction but a formal permit’; and ‘it must be given’.
Kingsley would go on to tell the following birds-and-bees joke to his sons, and I would duly pass it on to mine … The farmer’s wife says to the farmer: ‘The time has come for you to tell our George about the birds and the bees.’ The farmer drags his feet: ‘Ah come on, love. I mean, it’s a bit embarrassing for a bloke …’ But finally he accedes. The hot afternoon, father and son alone in the glade, the twisting coils of birdsong, the murmur of innumerable bees. ‘George. The time has come for your dad to tell you about the birds and the bees.’ ‘Yes, Dad.’ ‘You know what you and me did to them girls in the ditch last Friday night?’ ‘Yes, Dad.’ ‘Well the birds and the bees do it too.’ … My opinion of this joke, as a joke, fluctuates, I find. But I won’t forget my younger boy’s response to it: a full three seconds of stunned assimilation before his first voluptuous shriek.
In 1943, by which point Kingsley was a 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate and a lieutenant in the army, William discovered that his son was having an affair with a married woman.* It is depressing work, trying to imagine the ‘explosion’ this caused in the Amises’ straitened suburban cottage. And six years later came William’s prideful boycott of the wedding of my parents. On that occasion Mummy A., Rosa (in my memory she is just a dark presence, richly embroidered, aromatic, calorific), managed to talk him round. But she herself was hardly a free spirit — scowling over the garden wall, for instance, when a neighbour used the word ‘honeymoon’ in front of her child, who was then fourteen. In general William and Rosa couldn’t have ‘restricted my choice of friends,’ Kingsley writes, ‘or my chances of seeing them, more unflaggingly if there had been a long family history of male prostitution or juvenile dipsomania’. My father loved his mother without much complication, as things turned out; but I never saw him altogether easy in the company of my grandfather.
Whom I remember as a sallowly handsome man, and conventionally dapper — though the sallowness may be just a back-formation from my memory of his last hours, when he glowed dull orange with jaundice. He spent a good part of his widowhood (1957–63) as a member of our household — to Kingsley’s vast inconvenience, I now realise — and a considerable fraction of that time keenly and inventively and rather sternly playing with my brother and me. I admit without reservation that he was one of the grand passions of my childhood — so much so that he once reduced me to a tantrum of misery when he found himself maintaining that it was ‘natural’ to have ‘more feeling as a grandfather’ for the first-born son. As far as I was concerned it wasn’t a question of what was natural. This was a question of love: of insufficiently requited love. He tried to soften it but he wouldn’t unsay it; he wouldn’t bend to the severity of my distress … After the year in America he grew restive and moved back to London. And on his frequent and still yearned-for visits he would puzzlingly bring along a garish and garrulous ladyfriend.
Then it ended. I mean love ended: my love. I didn’t feel it leave, but I remember the instant when I knew it to be gone. All that day, in Cambridge, my mother had been putting it about that a secret treat awaited me: a treat of the first echelon. Late in the afternoon we drove to a mystery destination (in fact Peterhouse, my father’s college), and there, at the gates, stood the suddenly and hopelessly and utterly inadequate figure of Daddy A. I missed only half a beat before I leapt out of the car and embraced him. But in that single pulse of time I experienced a physical thud of disappointment and surprise. Daddy A. used to be a treat of the first ec
helon. He just wasn’t any longer. I was thirteen, unlucky thirteen; and grandparents, at thirteen, are (alas) among the childish things you have to put aside … A year later he died of cancer, a couple of months before Kingsley left* and Cambridge turned into a morgue of dead or departing animals. Philip and I were taken to the nearby nursing home for what was clearly a final visit. I am glad, now, that I was out of love. The awful rictus of his attempted smile, the eyes bright against the kippering jaundice, like a backlit pumpkin on Halloween. In private my brother and I were nervously callous about the experience — about Gramps. Or about death. Perhaps, too, my young heart still hurt from that day when I felt my love was scorned.
And when I felt, moreover, the fantastic obduracy of the man. He tried to soften it but he wouldn’t unsay it. He wouldn’t bend. He wouldn’t tell a salutary white lie to calm a sobbing, squealing, supplicating child.
‘You’re like Kingsley,’ I said to my son (the elder) as I drove him somewhere or other in the car. I continued,
— You’re one of those people who can never admit they’re wrong.
— Yes and you’re one of those people too.*
Yes and Kingsley was one of those people and William was one of those people. ‘As I came to sense the image in which my father was trying to mould my character and future,’ says the memoir, ‘I began to resist him, and we quarrelled violently at least every week or two for years.’ And I can see it, I can hear it, like a bad marriage, Gramps, who wielded so little power in the external world, attempting by mere iteration to impose his will, and Kingsley, cleverer by many magnitudes, coming to learn that he could dominate the dance. In the end my grandfather simply persecuted my father with boredom (and what other novelist, since Dickens, is so mesmerised and then energised by ‘the burning sincerity of all boredom’?). I think love was there on Kingsley’s part but it was forced underground. Eventually it surfaced in a poem, a modest elegy straightforwardly called ‘In Memoriam W.R.A.’ and subtitled ‘ob. April 18th, 1963’. When I read it and became more fully aware of it, I felt that something misaligned, something corrugated had been straightened out between my grandfather and me, too. But I don’t think I caught the self-criticism, amounting to a delicate self-disgust, in the poem’s last lines (having to do with emotional indolence, with resentment and obstinacy, and with the Amis paralysis). The long argument was finally won — by mortality. The poet finds such an outcome banal, and the slightly perfunctory air he assumes is an acknowledgement of that. ‘In Memoriam W.R.A.’ ends with the ‘I’ of the poem imagining
The on-and-on of your talk,
My gradually formal response
That I could never defend
But never would soften enough,
Leading to silence,
And separate ways.
Forgive me if I have
To see it as it happened:
Even your pride and your love
Have taken this time to become
Clear, to arouse my love.
I’m sorry you had to die
To make me sorry
You’re not here now.
Over dinner at Biagi’s in the summer of 1965 Kingsley established that both his sons were sexually launched. He did this cheerfully and encouragingly and almost gloatingly. A day or two later he took us out to lunch in Soho and it was one of those times when he was comically extravagant while also being continuously subversive. ‘Dad’s great,’ my brother and I said to each other, as we always did and still do. But I remember saying (or merely thinking), He’s just thrilled we’re not queer.* I was wrong, I think. A promiscuous man, and a promiscuous man in the days when it took a lot of energy to be a promiscuous man, Kingsley was excited by his contiguousness to yet more promiscuity. And he was feeling the justified warmth of the man who does not do what his father did, and, instead, becomes for his sons the exact opposite of boredom.
After lunch he led us to an ambiguous little outlet in a side street north of Piccadilly. Some will consider it appropriate that he bought for us there, among the Brylcreem jars and the jockstraps and the hernia supports, a gross of condoms: 144. But you have to think about the boys. Like the celebrants in the famous Larkin poem, we had never known success so huge or wholly farcical.* Of course the gift was largely symbolic: it represented the all-clear. But it also represented a saving of £14 12s., and spared us a total of 48 visits to the chemist’s.
Kingsley used to tell the following anecdote about sibling rivalry — how he found me, when I was four or five, lying on the stairs in an ecstasy of grief, how he worriedly knelt at my side and, after several minutes, managed to quell my hiccuppy gaspings, my heaving chest. Then he said, ‘Easy now … What is it?’ When at last I could find and shape the words, I said, ‘Philip had a biscuit.’ … In another version I reply, ‘Philip had one more biscuit than me.’ And that was the variant I kept thinking of in the summer of 1965. I couldn’t lie down and weep on the stairs: I was turning sixteen. In any event, soon after the day with Dad — surreally soon, it seemed to me — I was back outside the chemist’s, palely waiting for my moment, with my three shillings and my three pence.
It belatedly occurs to me that the signpost saying DUNKER CASTLE was not intended to direct you to a castle. It was intended to direct you to a chemist’s. That’s what chemists are to the young purchaser, scaling this particular rampart: dunker castles. To shore up this theory we need to establish the existence of a sister castle, or rather a sister signpost (with the arrow pointing the other way), directing you to Castle Steradent.
Dental trial two, on Reentry Day One, sounds straightforward enough. I went to see the boys.
Even light things get heavy over time, and heavy things get heavier, and the Clamp was heavy in my jaw, after a heavy day.
There they were and I blustered on, but there seemed to be nowhere good to put my head, no bearable angle, no sustainable elevation.
The boys didn’t look at me so much as watch me, their parody father. That father has gone; this father has come. Their faces appeared to be flickering. ‘Dad. Something’s happened to your face.’ And I said, Yes, I know. But it is temporary. The change is only temporary.
As is the retraction of your love, I wanted to tell them — which was palpable and could not be evaded. But I couldn’t say that. I could only try to imitate myself for a while, to imitate myself, then wish them goodbye and hurry down the steps scratching my hair with both hands.
The Fact of Wounds
Here is KA’s ‘A.E.H.’, the poem I memorised at eighteen and still have by heart. It is a reverent pastiche of A. E. Housman, and it duplicates one of his characteristic effects. Normally better suited to light verse or doggerel, the trochaic meter — tum-ti, as opposed to the iamb’s more stately ti-tum — is cast against type, in the service of solemnity.* The first line of the poem is also the personal mnemonic I seem to need for where the sun rises and where it sets.
A.E.H.
Flame the westward sky adorning
Leaves no like on holt or hill;
Sounds of battle joined at morning
Wane and wander and are still.
Past the standards rent and muddied,
Past the careless heaps of slain,
Stalks a redcoat who, unbloodied,
Weeps with fury, not from pain.
Wounded lads, when to renew them
Death and surgeons cross the shade,
Still their cries, hug darkness to them;
All at last in sleep are laid.
All save one who nightlong curses
Wounds imagined more than seen,
Who in level tones rehearses
What the fact of wounds must mean.
And what the fact of wounds must mean, of course, is that God is absent, or immoral, or impotent.
Lucy Partington converted to Roman Catholicism three months before her death, and in my view this raises questions of theodicy. It is naïve of me, no doubt, but very often I find myself reflexively wondering how the Vat
ican has the gall to go on standing after the events following the Christmas of 1973. The kind of convolution attempted in the closing lines of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (‘You cannot understand, my child, nor can I, nor can anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’) has always been eloquent but inadequate, because it asks us, here, to regard Lucy Partington’s murderer as in some sense a divine instrument,* and this is clearly an impossible notion. On the other hand, there was the feeling, expressed by more than one voice at the memorial service in Cheltenham, that her recent conversion fortified my cousin, so that (as Jane Kamar movingly put it), ‘when she went she went with the full power of faith behind her’. And we must try passionately to believe that, just as we try passionately to believe that it was over very quickly: very quickly.
Another speaker at the service, Christina Kiernan, essayed a more ambitious consolation (broadly Buddhist/Hindu in tendency). She explored the intuition that Lucy’s ‘was a culmination of many lives’: ‘some people get the chance to … clear a lot of debris of lifetimes away, leaving them free to forge ahead next time, or in another layer of life’. We can respond to the poetic boldness of this inkling; and we could adduce an increasingly respectable philosophical theory (many worlds, many minds; or the relative-state interpretation of quantum mechanics), according to which there is a constant proliferation of universes — and, therefore, of other Earths where, perhaps, on the night of 27 December 1973, Lucy Partington safely (no: casually) returned to her mother’s house in Gretton. ‘I think we should see her life as a life completed,’ said Christina Kiernan, ‘not as a life disrupted and cut off too soon.’ But here I could not follow. There we were, the congregants, so many of us Lucy’s contemporaries; and we were all grown up, far advanced along our histories and worldlines. And where were Lucy’s years?
