by Martin Amis
* My sister.
† My mother had her own rules, or grades, of attraction. Members of both sexes were ranked as one of the following: a dud, a possible, a smasher. I once asked her where Larkin stood on this scale. She surprised me by saying, ‘Oh, a definite possible’ — but then the fact that she quite fancied him was on record in an earlier Amis-to-Larkin letter. She knew his qualities.
* To turn a fuss into a storm the press must procure the censure of at least one peer. Two is better, but one will do. So you work the switchboard until you find a writer who happens to be in a lousy mood. This time they got A. S. Byatt, justly famous for her novels, her short stories, and her inability to get off the telephone. While conceding that I might need money (there was the divorce, and the costs involved in having my ‘teeth fixed’), she said she didn’t see why she should ‘subsidise’ my greed. Later, in her note of apology, she said she’d had a toothache when the journalist rang.
* The most that will happen here, I suppose, is that one or two journalists will take the friendship stuff out the shithead factfile devoted to me and put it into the shithead factfile devoted to Julian.
Letter from College
Exeter College. Oxford
Monday, [sic. Summer 1971]
Dearest Jane,*
Here are my Battels. I’ve arranged to stay up about six weeks (until 1st August) and I’ll probably come back a couple of weeks early (in September) if we’ve got somewhere to live by then. I’m applying for a vacation grant which will be handy since I’ll have to eat out and so on. I want to come down for some of the weekends, but this is going to be my last chance to do any really thorough reading, so it’s going to be like a 14 week term. I hope my tutor will still take the trouble to bully me a bit.
I still haven’t been able to bring myself to tell Gully that I don’t think our living together will work and it’s getting to be pretty worrying since we’re supposed to be looking for suitable places to live. I think she knows I’m not happy about [it] but I suppose she’s just hoping for the best. It’s such an awful responsibility. A friend of mine here is getting married on Friday (I’m being best man) — I haven’t said anything to him but the whole thing makes me increasingly convinced that I’m not going to get married until I’m about 70. It’s all too harrowing.
I hope things are O.K. at home — Rob and Olivia said you were all very jolly when they came up for the day. I want to come down the week-end after next, but I’ll let you know for sure before then. Give my love to everyone inc. K. (I saw two stunning Blenheims the other day — Rosie should definitely have one for her 2nd husband).
Lots of Love,
Mart XX
P.S. Could I also have a cheque for £8 — £3 — 10 for the tip for my scout (extra because I’m staying up, Dry Cleaning 30/-, [writing?] Pads 10/-, Coffee 10/-, and Dinner Credits £2-
See you soon.
* So Dad has dropped out, rather hurtfully in retrospect, now that I know how many letters he wrote to everyone else. The only other time we corresponded at all regularly was during the fiscal year 1979-80, when I was abroad. That was his climacteric, and I’m sorry I wasn’t around. But Philip was. Philip also came to see me in Paris where, in seven months, I wrote the novel of mine that annoyed Kingsley most, Other People.
Thinking with the Blood
— So you won in the end, said my mother, in mid-January, 1995.
— Have you really been following all this, Mum?
— Not at first. Until they started attacking you. Then I thought: où … Anyway you won in the end, dear.
— Did I? I suppose I did.
I flew to Boston and then I flew to Los Angeles and checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. This is the hotel showcased in Pretty Woman. Pretty Woman, if you remember, tells the story of an LA hooker (Julia Roberts) redeemed by a handsome businessman (Richard Gere). There is a scene, set in one of the very best rooms of the Beverly Wilshire, that features strawberries, champagne and (if I remember rightly) oral sex. Under the auspices of a vigorously postmodern PR move, each newly arrived guest now finds in his room a bowl of strawberries and a (half) bottle of champagne. Which might prompt the literalminded to ring room service and ask after the whereabouts of Julia Roberts or, at least, an LA hooker … Luridly Kinch prepared for his tender dinners with Travolta. On the first night John’s wife, Kelly Preston, appeared with their two-year-old son: little Jett (‘Jett’s eyelashes’, I would write, ‘are an inch long’). Jett Travolta, the life of Jett Travolta: this is a tremendously good idea for a novel … The New Yorker’s Caroline Graham came to see me poolside at the Wilshire. She was slightly dismayed, I think, by the condition of my face. ‘But you won,’ she said. Did I? What did I beat? A few days later Caroline improvised a black bowtie for me in the carpark beneath the venue for the Golden Globes, where I would be rooting for my boy John (Best Actor, Pulp Fiction). We entered the building, preceded by Sharon Stone, a circus horse of blonde stardom, fiercely cheered by the cordoned crowd. Inside I was immediately and humblingly face to face with Sophia Loren (a ‘proud’ beauty whose habitual expression suggests that she is always an instant away from imperial indignation). Over by the door was the slouching, sidling figure of Quentin Tarantino. He won (Best Screenplay). Travolta lost. Who beat him? Tom Hanks? Jessica Lange won (Best Actress, Blue Sky). In her speech she thanked absolutely everyone. ‘Lastly but not leastly’. Open widely. What nextly? … John Travolta is one of the sanest men I have ever met. He wastes no time pretending not to be a movie star. Even the Scientology stuff (depicted, in the clippings, as a cross between yoga and satanism) turns out to be almost shockingly hardnosed: life as a duty-roster. I have never felt uglier than when I dined with Travolta (or poorer: me with my VW Golf, him with his three aeroplanes). He gave no sign that he noticed my difficulty: the absence, the loss, in the middle of my face. And on the set of Get Shorty, on the last day, after pizza in his trailer (like a deluxe mobile home), he embraced me as I left — the man whose androgynous beauty was praised by Truffaut … I went to New York and wrote the piece in a hotel room. ‘You won,’ an American journalist would soon be saying to me, ‘but it wasn’t a clear victory, was it?’ And I said, ‘Over what?’ …
One day ten months later, when I hailed a cab outside St Pancras’s Hospital, where my father lay, the driver said,
— Notting Hill? I thought you lived in Camden Town.
— Not yet.
— I was reading somewhere you lived in Camden Town.
— I’m moving next month.
Into my father’s street. Half a mile from his house — but my father’s street.
— Ah! So they’re one step ahead of you now. They’re dictating to you now.
When I returned from New York (after more dentistry: much more dentistry) my new publishers told me that they were going to rush my novel out to exploit ‘all the publicity’. But hang on, I thought: all the publicity was bad publicity. Shouldn’t we, rather, be waiting for it to wear off?*
They were dictating to me. And I lost, because I felt for my novel. It was a disinterested use of words but it didn’t look like that, arriving noisily and as it were triumphantly, and creating a cognitive dissonance about itself. Because the book was about losing, not winning, about failure, my failure.
This only happened here, of course. I was being dictated to. I was being directed in a film about England.
The Hitch: New England, 1989
Ravelstein threw his head back at this. Shutting his eyes he flung himself bodily back into laughter. In my own way I did the same thing. As I’ve said before it was our sense of what was funny that brought us together, but that would have been a thin, anemic way to put it. A joyful noise — immenso giubilo, an outsize joint agreement picked us up together, and it would get you nowhere to try to formulate it.
I said in the car, the hired Chevrolet Celebrity,
— Now no sinister balls, okay?
— … No sinister balls.
— Promise
?
— Promise.
My passenger was Christopher Hitchens and I was taking him to Vermont to meet Saul Bellow. We would have dinner and stay the night and drive back to Cape Cod the following morning. Cape Cod was where I spent eight or nine summers with my first wife, and with the boys, on Horseleech Pond, south of Wellfleet … The trope sinister balls went back to our days at the New Statesman. In 1978 the incumbent editor, Anthony Howard, bowed to historical forces and honourably stepped down. I and the Hitch were part of the complicated, two-tier, six-member committee that would decide on his successor. During an interview Neal Ascherson, one of the three candidates on the final shortlist,* came up with the following: ‘Anyone who resists the closed shop is going to get the biggest bloody nose of all time.’ I said afterwards that this was sinister balls, and Christopher, whether or not he agreed (he was, of course, much more pro-union than I was), certainly seemed to be taken by the phrase. So ‘no sinister balls’ meant no vehement assertions of a left-wing tendency. In 1989 temporary fluctuations — going under the name of Political Correctness — had rigged up Saul Bellow as a figure of the right; he was under frequent attack, and I felt that he deserved a peaceful evening in his own house. As it happens I now believe that Bellow and Hitchens are not dissimilar in their political intuitions — especially in their sense of how America is managed or carved up. When I read Christopher’s book on Clinton, No One Left to Lie To (1999), I was physiologically reminded of an hour I spent with Saul, in 1988. I was on my way down to New Orleans to cover the Republican Convention (where Bush unleashed Dan Quayle), and I requested a political tutorial to prepare me for it. Bellow’s illusionless vision of Beltway jobbery and pelf caused the hairs on the back of my head to tingle … As the Chevrolet Celebrity moved boldly down Route 6, I was pretty confident that the evening would go well. There would be no sinister balls.
A drive of five or six hours, but the buddy-movie, radio-on feel of the journey was part of the treat. Stops were made for the huge uneaten meals and many powerful drinks desiderated by the Hitch. At this time my friend was still attached by one boot to the steer of his mid-life crisis, which began in earnest at the end of 1987. As Commander Eric Hitchens was going about the business of dying, Christopher’s younger brother Peter revealed some family news:
My brother’s account was simple, but very surprising. Our mother had died tragically and young in 1973,* but her mother still lived, enjoying a very spry tenth decade. When my brother had married, he had taken his wife to be presented to her. The old lady later complimented him on his choice, adding rather alarmingly, ‘She’s Jewish, isn’t she?’ Peter, who had not said as much, agreed rather guardedly that this was so. ‘Well,’ said the woman we had known all our lives as ‘Dodo’, ‘I’ve got something to tell you. So are you.’†
This information provoked a complicated sort of pleasure, and was certainly a stimulus. But it had all come hard upon: realignment of mother, death of father (the two imagos now transfigured), end of first marriage, separation from children; and here he was, turning forty as a member of a different race. I will always regret that I was a lesser friend to Christopher in his climacteric than he was to me in mine, when it came. True, he already knew the ground: he had experienced the main events, including divorce, while I was still a few years behind … In filling out the pain schedule ‘the hardest items of all have to do with love’. Christopher and I, in leaving home, did what we did ‘for love’. But how does it look, the love ledger, by the time you’re done? Because you are also the enemy of love and — for your children — its despoiler. ‘I hate love,’ said my son Louis at the age of five or six (he was complaining about the love-interest in a book we were reading). He didn’t mean that, but he could now say, ‘I no longer trust it.’ When Dryden retold the story of Antony and Cleopatra he called his tragedy All for Love (or ‘The World Well Lost’). Those stupendous sweethearts sacrificed empires, but they were certain that love, the primary value, was being exalted even in their defeats and their suicides. I envy them the flourish. We who absent ourselves from the daily company of our children must reckon it differently. Love comes out of it with gains but also with losses. And whenever love is losing, the force of death makes gains. Divorce: the incredibly violent thing. What parent, involved in it, has not wished for the death of the once-loved one? This is universal. And this is why your heart feels gangrenous inside your chest. This is why (as I put it to myself) you want men in white to come and take you away and wash your blood.
The cream Celebrity moved softly on, through the high-morale farmlands and pastures of New Hampshire and into the unsculpted landscapes of Vermont. When the roads got darker and twistier and we paused again, in a high tunnel of orange foliage, to buy the several bottles of wine nominated by the Hitch (and seconded by me: the Bellows are generous hosts, and Saul knew John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz, but they could have no conception of what they faced here), plus plenty of honey and maple syrup to take back to Cape Cod. Signalling left, the Celebrity turned off the main road and down into the valley. The Bellows were waiting in their garden.
I want to say here that when I returned from Jerusalem in 1987 my faith in my father’s artistic health — and that means everything I saw as vital to the state of his spirit — was once again fervent. A year earlier he had published the book he will be remembered for: The Old Devils.* It is his longest novel, and his most unflagging. In my view it stands comparison with any English novel of the century (except of course Ulysses, which is Shakespearean). It fears no man — no, nor woman either. And what mattered to me most at the time was that it announced a surrender of intransigence. I had hoped for this, as ardently as you hope for the cessation of an infant’s crying-fit, of a child’s marathon sulk, of a lover’s disaffection. The Old Devils marked the end of his willed solitude. He backed off, he climbed down. And we all have to do this, at some point; we all have to come out of the room we have sent ourselves to. My father emerged with a novel about forgiveness. He hadn’t forgiven Jane, and never would, but he had forgiven women, he had forgiven love; he had returned to the supreme value (and would go on returning to it, in five more novels). ‘I hate love,’ said my son. I hate love: not a credo you ought to want to go on propounding. At the time my relief was purely instinctive, a voice saying, Your dad is okay again. Now I see that Kingsley’s snarl of disappointment had finally run out of breath. And I know why … Anyway, there was of course no father-vacancy to be filled, just as Saul Bellow, with three of his own, had no opening for a son.*
At about 11.15 a silence slowly elongated itself over the dinner table. Christopher, utterly sober but with his eyes lowered, was crushing in his hands an empty packet of Benson & Hedges. The Bellows, too, had their gazes downcast. I sat with my head in my palms, staring at the aftermath of the dinner — that evening’s road smash, with its buckled headlights, its yawing hinges, its still-oscillating hubcap. My right foot was injured because I had kicked the shins of the Hitch so much with it.†
It would be a simplification to say that Christopher had spent the last ninety minutes talking up a blue streak of sinister balls. But let us not run in fear of simplification. Simplification is sometimes exactly what you want … The theme of discord was, of course, Israel. Christopher was already on record with a piece called ‘Holy Land Heretic’ (Raritan, Spring 1987), where he had adduced ‘the generalised idealisations of Israel commonly offered by Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel, and others’. Much of Christopher’s discourse, at the dinner table in Vermont, can be found in this 8,000-word essay, which he wrote, so to speak, as a gentile. And the rest of his discourse can be found in ‘On Not Knowing the Half of It: Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs’ (Grand Street, Summer 1988), which he wrote as a Jew. Needless to say, it was a point of fundamental, of elementary intellectual honour that Christopher’s changed ethnicity should have no effect whatever on questions of political science and political morality. Grandmother Dodo’s disclosure had not rendered Israel any less messianic or expa
nsionist or quasi-democratic. Christopher would do no thinking with his blood, neither at the desk nor at the dinner table. Emotions, atavisms, would be set aside, while reason — the nabob of all the faculties — went about its work.
Saul was on record too, at book length in To Jerusalem and Back, in his journalism, his essays. And Jewishness is close to the hub of the wheel of his fiction, which is another way of saying that it pervades his unconscious mind. (Whereas Christopher’s soul, I am suggesting, is essentially gentile. He doesn’t have a Jewish unconscious — though his beautiful premonitory dream, stirringly described in the piece of 1988, suggests that there are traces of it in him.) It would be pointless to deny that on the question of Israel Bellow to some extent thinks with the blood: the unconscious always thinks with the blood. If the writer is made up of three different beings — littérateur, innocent, everyman — then the innocent is very strong in Saul Bellow, despite great learning, experience, and nous. This is how he does it as a writer: he runs everything past his innocence, his nethermind, his first soul. He runs everything past his soul. The blood thinks, and Israel, therefore, is bound to him by consanguinity — ‘Jewish consanguinity, an archaism of which the Jews, until the present century stopped them, were in the course of divesting themselves’. Israel is consanguineous with Exodus* and Diaspora, with Pogrom, Ghetto and Holocaust. I once heard him say that the Jews would have been ‘finished’ without Israel, ‘after the beating they’d taken’. The next chapter would be Assimilation; and that would be the end of it. That would be the end of the connection to all the significant dead.
