Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  Later, wholly upright, Charlie looks out of the bedroom window,

  … looking but not seeing. With a conviction undimmed by having survived countless previous run-offs he felt that everything he had was lost and everyone he knew was gone.

  With infinite difficulty he dresses and goes downstairs:

  After ten minutes Charlie had made it all the way from the breakfast-room table to the refrigerator in the kitchen.… The sight of a coffee-bag out in the open near an unused mug was not quite enough to make up his mind for him, but finding the electric kettle half full turned the scale … When a speck of saliva caught at the back of his throat he managed to lay the mug down before the father and mother of a coughing-fit sent him spinning about the room and landing up face to face with Mr Bridgeman [the gardener], round the back now, eighteen inches away on the other side of the window-pane.*

  Charlie has a ‘weakish’ whisky and water at 10.45 or so and climbs into a minicab. He is off to the official unveiling of a statue of the unofficial national poet, Brydan (a figure based on Dylan Thomas). At the ceremony Charlie is accosted by an American who introduces himself as Llywelyn Caswallon Pugh:

  ‘I am an official of the Cymric Companionship of the USA,’ said Pugh.

  At this point something terrible happened to Charlie’s brain. Pugh went on speaking in just the same way as before, with no change of pace or inflection, but Charlie could no longer distinguish any words, only noises. His eyes swam a little. He stepped backwards and trod heavily on someone’s foot. Then he picked out a noise he recognized and nearly fell over the other way with relief. It had not been fair to expect an old soak whose Welsh vocabulary started and stopped with yr and bach and myn to recognize the rubbish when it came at him unheralded in an American accent. ‘M’m,’ he said with feeling. ‘M’m.’

  Pugh’s wide stare widened further in a way that made Charlie wonder what he had assented to, but that was soon over and more English came …

  A capful of rain blew refreshingly into Charlie’s face and a seagull passed close enough overhead to make him flinch.

  That seagull … Charlie is now rescued by Alun, the flyest and most priapic of the old devils. As their car moves off Alun sticks his head out of the window and tells Pugh to fuck off. The two men settle back in their seats:

  ‘They do say fuck off in America, don’t they?’ asked Alun anxiously.

  ‘I’m sure they understand it.’

  … Alun laughed quietly for a short time, shaking his head in indulgent self-reproach … He lowered his voice and went on, ‘Hey — timing really was important for that. I got badly caught in Kilburn once telling a Bulgarian short-story writer … to fuck off for two or three minutes while the chap driving the open car I was sitting in turned round in the cul-de-sac I hadn’t noticed we were at the end of. Amazing how quickly the bloom fades on fuck off, you know. Say it a couple of times running and you’ve got out of it nearly all you’re going to get.’

  ‘And there’s not a lot you can go on to later,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Well exactly.’

  Sunday, 17 September I have just learned how Kingsley spent Saturday night. He was, as my mother said, ‘very active’. Whereas I can feel the essential family flaw — passivity — seeping over the rest of us. Mum is a ghost. Shouldn’t I be the strong one? Kingsley needs to go to hospital. But he doesn’t want to go to hospital. I don’t want to frighten him. I don’t want him to frighten me.

  Who is in charge? Where is the doctor? His bowel specialist will not make housecalls — he is too grand, too gastroenteritic.* We are reduced to looking in the Yellow Pages — for the jobbers and cowboys. Mum got a quote for a home visit: sixty quid … We are an articulate family but we are heading towards speechlessness. We are doing what Kingsley is doing. We are becoming speechless.

  But last night he was very active. He wanted, he said, to have a party. Then he told everybody — Mum, Ali, Connie† — to fuck off. Everybody went downstairs. He followed everybody into the basement flat* and told everybody to fuck off. Then he went upstairs. Everybody followed, with caution. Then he told everybody to fuck off.

  I heard this on Sunday. Sunday was the day I almost always brought Louis and Jacob here, for lunch; this had been going on for ten years. He was an observant, if wholly immobile, grandparent. He enjoyed them and admired them and was proud of them. Louis’s birth caused him grave happiness. He bestirred himself, accompanying my mother to the hospital. We met and had drinks at my flat. It was November; I trained a bar fire on his knees. The baby was six weeks premature (but beautiful), and the mother happy … Afterwards the three of us had a reverent lunch in a Chinese restaurant. I was, I suppose, still in clinical shock, but I felt far more warmed than stunned. Jacob, in his turn (and only four weeks early), had his name posted on the Garrick noticeboard and phoned in just in time to join Louis on the dedication page of The Old Devils (where, in the first of many editions, it is followed by a harassed-looking full stop). The boys were main events. But the only thing he ever actually did with them or about them, apart from hug them hello and goodbye, was reach out with his hand (this was when they were very small) to cover a sharp edge of low furniture as they crawled or staggered by.

  On this Sunday the boys are elsewhere, absent. As they will be next Sunday, too. He never saw them again.

  My father and I often had occasion to agree that ‘fuck off’ was very funny. One naturally admired its brutality and brevity — but it was also terribly good.†

  The best fuck off of all time had Dad at the receiving end of it. Or at least he stage-managed it so. One afternoon, in Hampstead (it must have been before 1980, when Jane was still around, because he had a lightness about his person which left him when she did), he came in through the front door after posting a letter, laughing quietly and richly to himself. I said,

  — What was so funny?

  — I saw a bloody fool of a dog just now …

  It was a genuine summer’s day, concerted and cloudless. On his walk to the letterbox my father had passed a fullgrown Alsatian apparently asleep on the boiling breast of a parked car. He looked interestedly at the dog and the dog roused itself and stared back, as if to say: I’m lying on this car — all right? On his walk back from the letterbox he looked at the dog again, and the dog stared back, adding: It may be hot but I’m still lying on this car. Before opening the garden door he turned for a final glance.

  — What did it do? I urged him, because he was laughing quietly and richly to himself.

  It lifted its head from its paws and straightened its neck and went … Kingsley did one of two things. Either he made the bark sound exactly like fuck off. Or he made fuck off sound exactly like the bark.

  When he made you laugh he sometimes made you laugh — not continuously, but punctually — for the rest of your life. This was his superhumour: the great engine of his comedy. And now the engine was winding down.

  He got up in the middle of the night and showered and dressed — and packed. He packed a suitcase. I hear this from my mother. On that night he told Hilly that he had to take a train — Kingsley, alone, in the middle of the night, taking a train? He was expected at a very important meeting. Advised against it by my mother at the doorstep, he went out into the street and approached a driverless parked car and demanded to be taken to the Garrick. He called to my mother,

  — Why won’t he take me to the Garrick?

  A brief visit. He looks comatose in his chair and I’m surprised when he speaks.

  — What time is it?

  — Two.

  — Two in the afternoon? What day are we?

  On my way out I look at the sheet of paper recurled into Kingsley’s typewriter. I see no seagulls. He is still on page 106 of his new novel. It has been page 106 ever since the fall. Something seems to have been added. The page ends with the words: ‘ “On the contrary,” countered Holmes.’*

  Another brief visit. The night before Kingsley had again been active. But now he slumbers in
his chair. With that expression on his face: the face of a boy who might have done wrong, according to some, but is definitely not yet ready to admit it — and who is anyway tired now, tired by the struggle (the fight for truth), and is turning away from the world in sleep.

  Mum reminds me of a nurse. More than this, she reminds me of a nursery: my own … Of course we keep discussing the idea of nurses, of hired professionals. But my mother says that they wouldn’t be able to stand Kingsley (arguable) and that he wouldn’t be able to stand them (certain: it has to be Mum). Hospital is different. Hospital plays on some instinct of obedience in him. And hospital is where he needs to go, at least for a while. He ought to be ‘under the doctor’, as the English say. When you’re under the weather, that’s where you ought to be: under the doctor.

  Kingsley stirs, or jolts.

  — Do you want a cardy? says my mother, stroking and patting his shoulder.

  I am still some distance from any apprehension that my father is dying. But I am closing in on the belief that I will never again see amusement in his eyes. Seeming to confirm this, my mother says,

  — All you can do is be kind to him now.

  She is in it for the duration. There is no love any more, only the memory of love, but it’s simpler than that. Her conscience would permit nothing less. Kingsley was right:

  In ’46 when I was twenty-four

  I met someone harmless, someone defenceless,

  But till then whole, unadapted within;

  Awkward, gentle, healthy, straight-backed,

  Who spoke to say something, laughed when amused;

  If things went wrong, feared she might be at fault …

  But wait a minute. In ’63 he broke her heart, and she left him.

  … Whose eye I could have met for ever then,

  Oh yes, and who was also beautiful.

  Well, that was as much as women were meant to be,

  I thought, and set about looking further.

  How can we tell, with nothing to compare?

  And now she is there for the duration, even if he lives on — persists, lasts — until the end of the century. 1963 was thirty-two years ago. How did she get into this?

  Night of the Peach

  I was sitting in my sock* in Bayswater, starting Money, when the call came through.

  — Mart.

  — Phil.

  — It’s happened.

  — What? I said. But I knew.

  — She’s left him.

  — … Jesus Christ.

  Philip felt no surprise either. That was just the way the whole thing was tending …

  We made arrangements. It wasn’t a question of two sons planning to console a father who had lost his wife. It was much more elementary. One or other of us had to be there all the time. Not round the clock but every evening, every night, every morning. He still had his housekeeper there, loyal Mrs Uniacke, and her presence would help him get through the day; but only family or thoroughly trusted friends were any good to him for the hours of darkness. It was now late afternoon. It was November. When I went over Philip was already there.

  My memory of that night has Kingsley perched on the brink of the low armchair (this was his characteristic back-favouring posture: in Philip’s imitation of it, he is attached to his seat by about a millimetre of outer coccyx), blinking more rapidly than usual, and fiercely worrying his thumb cuticles with the nails of his forefingers. And saying almost nothing. He would answer questions about the logistical end of it (Jane’s failure to return from the health farm; the note delivered by her solicitor’s office) but nothing was ventured about his feelings, about love, about broken hearts, broken vows. His needs, at that moment, seemed basic, almost animal: shelter, warmth, the heat of known beasts. My brother and I repeated what was most immediately necessary for him to hear:

  — Dad, you won’t spend a night alone. One of us will always be here.

  — Thank you both for that.

  It was solemnly said. But I can see now that he was heartsick: romantically mortified, and (in a sense) incurably so. Later, in his revisionist mode, when he had unpersoned Jane, had unloved her, he looked back on his suffering with ridicule and disbelief. Yet the suffering was there. That very night he was writing to her and about her in his head — a pleading letter, and also a poem. He had lost something that he had made enormous efforts to keep, and undergone detailed indignities to that end.* Perhaps most importantly, two marriages, not one, had been cancelled, wiped out. As he put it to Larkin in a letter of 24 June 1981, describing a meeting with an old friend: ‘She said how miserable I had made Hilly, thus (unnecessarily) reminding me that Jane’s departure has stopped me pretending to myself that my treatment of H was at least sort of worth while somehow a bit.’ ‘It’s only half a life without a woman,’ he said to me, later; the woman, the wife, the other half,† was gone — and no successor would be sought. My father never again kissed a woman with passion. This from a man who used to live for adultery.* Over the years I have worked my way towards a psychological explanation, and like all such it is zero-rudimentary. But it explains and therefore forgives a good deal. My most obliterating experience of Kingsley (soon to occur) has since been softened in its light.

  The letter to Jane got written. And replied to. There was a fruitless exchange of conditions and ultimatums. I can’t help feeling that there was something doctrinaire in Jane’s insistence that Kingsley should, in effect, join Alcoholics Anonymous. What didn’t get written was the love poem. What got written, now, was the hate novel: Stanley and the Women. There was something humanly open-ended about Jake (1978). Rather formulaically, in my view (there is simply too much of this in my father’s corpus), the outgoing woman gets all the best moral lines.† And I know several female readers who admire and partly assent to the novel’s magnificent final period. Our libidoless and now wifeless hero has just been asked by the doctor if he would like to try a course of what Girl, 20 calls ‘horn pills’ (or ur-Viagra):

  Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not the ones he had known and dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.

  So it was quite easy. ‘No thanks,’ he said.

  Stan (1984), on the other hand, is all closed up and walled off. It made my head drop, during this time, when my father, elaborately and not entirely unmordantly, started to liken women to the USSR (department of propaganda): when they do it they say this; when you do it they say that; and so on. Around now, too, he started referring to the opposite sex as ‘females’. ‘Dad, don’t say that word!’ I used to tell him; and he partly moderated this habit when I was present, in the spirit of someone doing absolutely anything for a quiet life … Stanley is in fact a mean little novel in every sense, sour, spare, and viciously well-organised. But there is an ignobility in the performance. Here the author implements — and literalises — Jake’s poetical promise: i.e., men only. There is certainly no sexual disgust in it (Kingsley was never that kind of woman-hater). The grounds are purely intellectual.

  I always thought it was suicide: artistic suicide. He didn’t kill the world. He just killed half of it.*

  Over the next few w
eeks Philip and I conferred regularly on the Kingsley question. Either he had to go somewhere (club, set of rooms, hotel?) or someone had to come to him. Whoever came to him would have to be … How to define it? It would have to be someone who understood, and so forgave, his fragility. And it would have to be someone he liked very much indeed. I was thirty-one, Philip thirty-two: a bit early, we felt, to commit our lives to Dadsitting — but we couldn’t rule it out. It seemed to me that the Kingsley question was oddly shaped. The answer, too, therefore, would have to be oddly shaped.

  In the interstices of worrying about my father I worried about my mother. Her third marriage was a complete success, but she and her husband, and little Jaime, were confined to a tiny cottage in the Midlands and couldn’t afford to move to London … Surely it would be no great feat to attempt an answer here. Philip had already reached the same conclusion. When canvassed, the principals appeared keen. An introductory dinner was scheduled. Everyone else, by the way, considered the idea both bizarre and impracticable. ‘Like an Iris Murdoch novel,’ they kept saying. Yes, and it would have been even more like an Iris Murdoch novel if Kingsley had been called Otto and Hilly had been called George. It was an unconventional proposal, true; but they were an unconventional crowd. Philip and I thought it might work for a good six months, maybe even a year.

  We all gathered at the house in Flask Walk and the inaugural dinner began.

  In later life Kingsley would deny it ever happened, deny it hotly, stoutly, despite the presence of four adult witnesses. I think my father did manage on some level to expunge the incident from his memory. It was, after all, completely unbelievable.