Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  This, again, is Elizabeth Webster:

  … I said to her, ‘Now that you are grown up what are you going to do?’ and she said, ‘I don’t mind what I do so long as I do it absolutely to the hilt.’ — and then I said, ‘Yes that’s fine but where are you going?’ and she thought awfully hard, then she said, ‘Towards the light … Towards the light.’

  Everything about her, even her name, pointed towards the light. Given this, I cannot find order or meaning in a darkness so deep and durable.

  The death of Lucy Partington represents a fantastic collision (collide: ‘from col- “together” + laedere “to strike” ’). It is what happens when darkness meets light, when experience meets innocence, when the false meets the true, when utter godlessness meets purity of spirit, when this —

  Hi May it your Dad Writeing to you. or lette me have your telephone number … or Write to me as soon as you can, please may I have to sort out watt Mr Ogden did to me, my new solicitors are Brilliant I Read What you sead about me in News of the that was loylty you read what Scott canavan sead he had —

  — meets this:

  things are as big as you make them —

  I can fill a whole body,

  a whole day of life

  with worry

  about a few words

  on one scrap of paper;

  yet, the same evening,

  looking up,

  can frame my fingers

  to fit the sky

  in my cupped hands.

  * Professor D. R. Shackleton Bailey, a.k.a. Shack — though the former appellation is the more descriptive. Shack is still a world-class authority on Cicero. He was, moreover, I always thought, the diametrical opposite of my father: a laconic, unsmiling, dumpty-shaped tightwad. I used to say to myself: Mum’s had enough of charm. Still, Shack had an interesting head. For twenty years, before he took up the professorship at Michigan, he was the Cambridge University lecturer in Tibetan. And I was once around the place when he experimented, as they say, with LSD. To me he seemed to be on the verge of total freakout for several hours, but he later pronounced himself pleased with the exercise.

  * Ali, Alastair Boyd, a.k.a. Lord Kilmarnock: the second great love of my mother’s life. I learn from the Eric Jacobs biography of my father that Alastair’s title is of the sort I used to have sex dreams about when I was fifteen. No money or anything — but it goes back seven centuries. An earlier, treasonous Lord Kilmarnock was executed at Tower Hill for his part in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. ‘But for this blot on the family escutcheon,’ writes the biographer, ‘Alastair Boyd would now be the fourteenth Earl of Kilmarnock.’

  * John Gross was one of my two significant early editors, along with Terence Kilmartin of the Observer. He instilled a rule in me, one I still follow in fictional prose as well as journalism and book reviews. Never start consecutive paragraphs with the same word — unless (I add to myself) you begin at least three paragraphs this way and the reader can tell that you’re doing it on purpose. John is right. It looks uglily inattentive, clunking against the eye as well as the ear. I have to say at once that this rule has been ignored by many great writers. Conrad and, of course, Lawrence were insensitive to it. Forster seemed only intermittently aware of it. Nabokov observed it, on the whole and increasingly: there are no para-opening ‘reps’, as New York magazine editors call them, in Speak, Memory or Pnin; and when, on pages 107—9 of Pale Fire, we get three Hes followed by three Thes we know that something (large-scale modulation) is up. Joyce did not observe it in Dubliners and the Portrait, but places himself beyond inadvertency in the obsessive pages of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The tirelessly fastidious Henry James sometimes faltered, though his paragraphs are of sufficient obesity to muffle both ear and eye (you sometimes have quite a few pages in your left hand when you turn back to check). Early Bellow does not observe it. Later Bellow observes it. The same goes for KA.

  * It is physical, too. I have since read that nausea is itself exhausting. The body’s struggle with it is exhausting.

  * During the gluey cast-taking procedure, at Mike’s, I was obliged to sit for a few minutes with what felt like a coating of tasteless bubblegum in my mouth. Whereas Joyce and Nabokov tell me, down at the tooth club, that they had to spend half an hour, twisting and retching, under a throatful of puréed rotten eggs — the favoured flavour of such concoctions in their dental era.

  * Domestic treasure and culinary anti-talent. Even the cups of instant coffee she sometimes kindly brought round were not just undrinkable but also (the household agreed) unrecognisable.

  * And this was no casual dalliance. It was KA’s exaltedly melancholy first love. See ‘Letter to Elisabeth’, which opens his Collected Poems.

  * I wouldn’t want to venture any connection between the two events. But the death of the father (and maybe particularly the death of that father) does embolden you, among other things.

  * A couple of days later I said, ‘I let you win that argument. The one in the car.’ And he admitted it: tactically only, the argument in the car might have been a good one to lose.

  * Which is a bit early for me to be ascribing reactionary prejudices to my father. Osric tended to parrot Kingsley in those days, disgracefully (though very loyally) toeing the line, for example, on the Vietnam War. It didn’t last. And I was no longer a hawk by the time he started recommending the involvement of British troops — men unincapacitated by hashish, if any could be found. We argued about Vietnam for the next thirty years.

  * ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. The Whitsun Weddings was published the previous year, in 1964.

  * It has been suggested, by KA among others, that the preeminent war poet, Wilfred Owen, wrote with peculiar agony and tenderness about fighting men at least in part because of his homosexuality (however inert), and the same could be said of Housman. This seems entirely likely. (As a thought-experiment I tried to rescreen the opening minutes of Saving Private Ryan with a female cast, and found I couldn’t get very far with it.) Owen also insisted on seeing the adversary, not as a nation or an ideology, but as a convocation of pressed individuals. ‘Mental Cases’: ‘Snatching after us who smote them, brother, / Pawing us who dealt them war and madness’. Or ‘Strange Meeting’, with the most beautiful of Owen’s half-rhymes: ‘ “I am the enemy you killed, my friend … / I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned / Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. / I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. / Let us sleep now …” ’ Kingsley always shuddered at that: ‘my hands were loath and cold.’

  * Frederick West, childkiller, seeder of nightmares. I use the word murderer in the singular here, controversially yet advisedly. Rosemary West deserves to be in prison for ever, but a belief that she was justly convicted of murder cannot survive a reading of Brian Masters’s book, ‘She Must Have Known’ (1996).

  Letter from College

  Exeter Coll.,

  Oxford.

  Wednesday, 13. Oct. [1968]

  Dearest Dad and Jane,

  It was really incredibly good seeing you both — I’ve been feeling really elated ever since. Especially because on that very afternoon I had my tutorial in which Wordsworth didn’t say more than half a dozen words to that coy little turd I was telling you about, who, after 40 minutes of bulging his eyes and pouting his lips, tried things like curling up in a little ball, humming nursery rhymes, and gasping at the sunset over the chapel. None of these things had the desired effect — i.e. spending an hour talking about his emotions when he read ‘An Exequy”.*

  The scout† washed the stairs yesterday and the whole staircase smells as if someone has run up and down it pissing on everything having just eaten 8 or 9 lbs of asparagus‡. It’s all very boring just now because Marzipan (my room-mate [real name: Marzys]) is getting emotional about his work and I feel as though I should be on tiptoes the whole time. BUT he had a sort of attack yesterday — stabs in the liver — on account of some chocolate he had eaten. He can’t touch spice or drink. Needless to say, I’ve
littered the room with opened packets of ginger biscuits, figs, quince, turkish delight, and other delicacies. He’ll be out for a year if it comes back. Take the silly grin off his face.

  Thanks again for a fucking good lunch, Love to all, not least Miss Plush,*

  Mart XXX

  * By Henry King (lopsided inverted commas in my m.s.), and not to be confused with Peter Porter’s equally great poem, ‘An Exequy’. I am horrified to see that the above is an extremely ungenerous pen-portrait of someone I became very fond of — someone who, in addition, is now one of my dozen favourite living poets: Christopher Reid. I’m awfully sorry, Chris, but you were a rather whimsical figure in those days; and I myself (as I bet you were well aware) was a terrible little guy.

  † I.e., a college servant. At Cambridge, until very recently, they called them ‘gyps’.

  ‡ I think this is the only strophe from the Osric archive that found its way into a novel: The Rachel Papers.

  * Jane’s ruby Cavalier spaniel, usually known as Rosie. Plush was the ‘surname’ on her official pedigree. So there you had it: Plush was a posh dog. Rosie wasn’t that long out of puppyhood in 1968. She became very right-wing in her middle age, and there is a vivid portrait of her (the Furry Barrel) in KA’s Girl, 20 (1971), where she belongs to the left-wing composer and political maverick, Sir Roy Vandervane.

  Permanent Soul

  I first met Saul Bellow in the fourth week of October, 1983, when I went to Chicago to write a piece about him for the London Observer. As the piece warmed up I said, inter alia:

  This business of writing about writers is more ambivalent than the end-product normally admits. As a fan and a reader, you want your hero to be genuinely inspirational. As a journalist, you hope for lunacy, spite, deplorable indiscretions, a full-scale nervous breakdown in mid-interview. And, as a human, you yearn for the birth of a flattering friendship. All very shaming, I thought, as I crossed the dun Chicago River, my eyes streaming in the mineral wind.

  A young writer, in Belfast, asked me how I could bear to squander ‘mineral wind’ in a piece of journalism. I don’t think I confessed to the truth: it was Saul Bellow’s anyway. Now I know how pushy it looks, to quote yourself, but I did relevantly continue:

  The present phase of Western literature is inescapably one of ‘higher autobiography’, intensely self-inspecting. The phase began with the spittle of Confessionalism [in American poetry: Lowell et al.] but has steadied and persisted. No more stories: the author is increasingly committed to the private being. With all sorts of awkwardnesses and rough edges and extraordinary expansions, supremely equipped, erudite, and humorous, Bellow has made his experience resonate more memorably than any living writer.

  His experience being primarily, not a matter of divorces and literary-political feuds, but the experience of the immigrant and, more generally, of the permanent soul in its modern setting.

  Higher autobiography: I still do believe that in the development of the twentieth-century novel some such fluctuation occurred. And I was well placed to observe it … You can always tell when fiction is undergoing evolutionary change: very prolific — though not necessarily very literary — fiction reviewers start complaining about it.* A lot of people complained about the higher autobiography. I complained about it. As a reviewer, I hounded Philip Roth through his Zuckerman years. Roth was an extremist, naturally, and also a post-modernist. Writing about writers, writing about writing: his compulsive self-circlings, I felt, were stifling his energy and his comedy. Something was missing: other people.† We may note here too that Bellow was perhaps a modernist but never a post-modernist. His storytelling, as storytelling, is all earnest and no play. His only ism is realism. Meditative Realism, or Inner Realism, perhaps.

  ‘What can you reveal about me,’ Bellow once asked a prospective biographer, ‘that I haven’t already revealed about myself?’ One of the assumptions behind HA, I think, went as follows: in a world becoming more and more this and more and more that, but above all becoming more and more mediated, the direct line to your own experience was the only thing you could trust. So the focus moved inward, with that slow zoom a writer feels when he switches from the third person to the first.* In 1983 I was finishing a novel, Money, which was narrated in the first person by a character called John Self. It would be a ferocious slander of Martin Amis (who was, incidentally, a minor character in this book) if I called Money autobiographical. It certainly wasn’t the higher autobiography. But I see now that the story turned on my own preoccupations: it is about tiring of being single; it is about the fear that childlessness will condemn you to childishness.†

  I knew that HA was truly if temporarily unavoidable when I watched my father following down that road, against his inclination, against his past practice, and against his stated principles. He didn’t want to go there, but he went. And for me it was like watching him walk around naked. Saul Bellow, much to the furtherance of his spiritual insulation, writes about the self from the perspective of the soul, the permanent soul. Such a perspective was available to my father’s poetry but not to his fiction, which is firmly social, quotidian and end-stopped; his world, in a judgment of John Updike’s that I cannot get out of my head, is ‘stiflingly human’. Jake’s Thing ends with the hero’s shockingly eloquent repudiation of womankind. Stanley, the later, post-Jane novel, begins with something far more radical: the author’s cancellation of his own artistic androgyny. What followed was a book of such programmatic gynophobia that for quite a while it was unable to find any American publisher.‡ That was unprecedented. And so was this: before turning his hand to Stanley, Kingsley had abandoned a novel in mid-stream. He abandoned it, he patiently explained to me, because he feared the HA imputation: the central character was homosexual.*

  Filial anxiety, I now perceive, was metastasising within me when I went to Chicago in 1983. I wasn’t prospecting for a new father, but I was seriously worried about the incumbent. His life was now steady enough, in its external dispositions. It was the state of the talent that bothered me. I always knew, pretty much, what my father was up to at the typewriter. His year with the aborted Difficulties, he implied, had been like a trek up the Cloaca Maxima; and he had given me a fair picture of where he was heading with Stanley. He had always been a contrarian, an unpopularity-courter, in his public dealings. Now he was trying to drag his art into the forum. If his soul was unhappy (and it was), then it couldn’t be his fault. The world did it. Women did it. This was the new theocracy. There would be no more separation between church and state.

  I feared he might be finished. The poetry seemed to be on the point of evaporation, and the novels were beginning to sound like a long argument all ready to continue into the night.† It seemed to me that his strategy was to shed sentiment as he moved closer to death. The indispensable value, romantic love, would therefore have to be exposed as an illusion. ‘ “That slimy tune” I said, and got a laugh,/In the middle of old Franck’s D minor thing.’ These are the opening lines of ‘A Chromatic Passing-Note’ (written in the early 1960s). That tune, the poem goes on, had not always seemed so unctuous. In the poet’s youth it had sounded like a ‘paradigm’:

  Yes, I know better now, or different.

  Not image: buffer only, syrup, crutch.

  ‘Slimy’ was a snarl of disappointment.

  And that is what I was preparing to listen to, from here on in. The long snarl.

  Saul Bellow was sixty-eight in 1983. Three marriages, three sons, and now a fourth marriage. This marriage too would end. But that’s life. We all have lives. It was the writing that excited me. Milan Kundera has said that we go on being children, all our born days, because again and again a new set of rules is set before us, demanding decryption. At various stages you think you’ve got reality halfway straight; then suddenly that knowledge, so laboriously acquired, is of absolutely no use to you. In Bellow the sense of a child’s vision is supreme and defining. But it is the same child, not a series of improvised or expedient selves.* And in the nov
els, as they unfold, we see a man (we see a consciousness) heading towards death with his eyes open and his head high … When I was a child I would sometimes hear my father in the night — his horrified gasps, steadily climbing in pitch and power. My mother would lead him to my room. The light came on. My parents approached and sat. I was asked to talk about my day, school, the games I had played. He listened feebly but lovingly, admiringly, his mouth open and tremulous, as if contemplating a smile. In the morning I talked to my mother and she was very straight. ‘It calms him down because he knows he can’t be frightened in front of you.’ Frightened of what? ‘He dreams he is leaving his body.’ It made me feel important — up late, holding the floor, curing a grown man: my father. It bonded us. But I always knew how it went with him and death, how personally he took it, how viscerally he feared and hated it.

  Transcending the Purely Dental

  Someone — Horacio Martinez, most probably — has sent me an article from the Bulletin of the History of Dentistry called ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses and Dentistry’, by Horacio Martinez. Its subheads are, in order, Joyce Appreciated Dental Health, Joyce Abhorred Dental Disease, Joyce Advocated Prevention, Joyce Valued Dental Treatment and Joyce Observed Dental Habits. But I already feel that I am wronging Horacio Martinez, D.D.S. True, he says things like ‘it is high time to extend Joyce’s readership among members of the dental profession’ and ‘there is much in the book that transcends the purely dental’, but he is not the thunderous literalist that I am in danger of making him seem. He has clearly derived much of the right kind of pleasure from Ulysses, and his quotes, despite an undeviating quality that I suppose would be hard to avoid, are a reliable delight: ‘splendid set of teeth he had made me hungry to look at them’; ‘He took a reel of dental floss from his waistcoat pocket and, breaking off a piece, twanged it smartly between two and two of his resonant unwashed teeth’; ‘His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he’s proud of, fluted with plaintive woe’.* Bloom at the chemist’s: ‘Smell almost cures you like the dentist’s doorbell.’ To which Sr Martinez appends the remark: ‘Joyce may have been one of the many whose fear overpowers pain and rational conviction.’ I don’t think so. But all in all I applaud the responsiveness of this particular toothmeister. And I challenge Mike Szabatura, and my maxillofacial surgeon Todd Berman, to write as feelingly about the century’s key novel.