by Martin Amis
Appendix: The Biographer
and the Fourth Estate
I was once walking down the Portobello Road, slowly (there was an elderly woman in my path), and in enforced single file (there were roadworks on this market street), when I felt a pair of powerful hands seize me round the base of the neck. Startled, I turned; but in that half-second I had decided that this was a friend, not an assailant. I even had time to think: Redmond! Redmond O’Hanlon. The bearish (and affectionate) Redmond is always doing this kind of thing. I recalled that moment in his first travel book, when he deliberately visited mortal fear on his companion, James Fenton. But that was in Borneo, a more frightening place than Portobello, on a Saturday morning. So I turned, with the words ‘Fuck off, Redsi!’ forming in the back of my throat. It wasn’t Redsi. It was a young, black, grinning stranger, who moved me to one side and stepped past me with his girlfriend, saying, ‘No, man. You don’t walk on the street like that.’ Meaning: so slowly. Just then the obstruction, the elderly woman, turned left, and the couple walked out into the crossroads with a flourish of freedom. The girl, who was white, took her boyfriend’s arm and said approvingly, ‘Did you see him? He was shit nisself!’ I felt … I felt intense weariness; I almost sank back against the wall under the weight of it. No, I wasn’t choosing to walk slowly and, no, you don’t seize strangers round the back of the neck and, no, I wasn’t shitting myself and, no, I … The sense of compound injustice, and compound futility, the conviction that the universe was without reason or redress: this reminded me of something.
It was like being in the newspapers.
If these pages have so far been free of a sense of grievance, it is not because I have been trying to keep it out. It is because it isn’t there. But we now find ourselves in an appendix, a realm of separable matter, and I am going to put the record straight. What follows should not be taken as an attack on an erring individual so much as an attack on the Fourth Estate. This Fourth Estate is at a peculiar stage in its evolution. It is, on the one hand, ever more contented with the power that corrupts it; and it is, on the other, heading towards an elephantine impotence on all the questions that really matter.
Three days after my father died I got a call from the Biographer, Eric Jacobs. He said he had kept some ‘jottings’ on Kingsley — notes for a second book he was intending to write about him. As if putting in their claim for an exclamation mark at the end of this sentence, surprise and amusement joined in his voice as he told me that the Sunday Times considered these jottings publishable. I said something like,
— Well that probably sounds okay.
— It seemed right that you should see it first.
And I felt no apprehension. I was grateful to Eric. With his energy and congeniality he had lightened the load of Kingsley’s death. Or the load of his dying. And that stands. I expected these jottings to be affectionate and anodyne. I parenthetically liked the idea of the hard-up biographer making some money as he added to the general glow of the obituaries. At a certain stage, towards the end, I had thought that even the obituaries would be hostile …
I went on working. The package arrived and I went on working. At 2.15 I started to take a look at Eric’s piece and at 2.45 I remembered I had a tennis match, which I turned up for. But after a couple of games I had to concede, and apologise (my opponent, again, was Zachary Leader, and he understood, quickly) and go back and start to deal with it all.
The jottings consisted of about thirty pages of typescript and included an episodic chronicle of Kingsley’s last days written from the viewpoint of an insider. And into our china shop of familial sensitivities Eric had come lurching and bucking and blundering. Every time he bent over to inspect a shattered vase he would clear another shelf with the sweep of his backside. What was he doing in here? And what was he doing in here now? Agonising violation was inflicted on the immediate family (and on peripheral figures too: my sons, for example), and the central event, the rite of passage, was unbearably demeaned. It was quite something, like a visit to a world without affect, to see my father, at his most helpless, and literally naked, described without a particle of decorum. He had been dead for seventy-two hours.
When I finished the piece I shed tears of pure misery; and in this state I began making all the calls.
— So … rude, said my mother.
She always got a lot of mileage out of this word. She meant: so abrupt, so rough, so coarse.
— Get your man on it, she said. What’s his name? That’s right: Sly.
— His name is Wylie, Mum. And he’s already on it.
Eric immediately agreed to withdraw the piece (and I have his letter of apology somewhere). He then confessed that he had shown his jottings not only to the Sunday Times but also to the Daily Mail. So that day, and the next, were spent trying to expunge Eric’s delineations from the journalistic bloodstream. I had some leverage at the Sunday Times, where I was Chief Book Reviewer or some such designation. And I spoke to Gillon Aitken, Andrew Wylie’s partner, who, bafflingly, was representing Eric. Gillon had long been Eric’s agent; but the effect, for me, was still baffling. This wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, with my father not yet in his coffin and the funeral only days away.
The family, of course, wanted no further dealings with Eric. This meant, or entailed, firing him from the job, not yet begun, of editing Kingsley’s Letters. The word was passed to Eric that he would not be welcome at St Mark’s on 31 October. Later I wrote Eric a sorrowfully worded letter. I felt sorry for him — and gratitude lingered.
Four and a half months later the jottings were published in three instalments by the Sunday Times. The first I heard of it was when a biker appeared on the Saturday evening with a copy of the next day’s paper and a note from the section editor: something about the bark being worse than the bite. On the cover of the Book Review was my piece about Hillary Clinton. On the cover of another section was the first of Eric’s three pieces about Kingsley.
My father’s biographer, in my newspaper, the deal having been brokered by my co-agent, Gillon Aitken. For a moment I was back on the Portobello Road.
What tipped Eric over? My mentioning, in an interview, that somebody else was going to edit the Letters: my friend Zachary Leader. Eric typically assumed that it was mere propinquity and cronyism that led me to toss the job to my ‘tennis partner’, whom he later stigmatised, in a letter to one of KA’s correspondents, as being ‘curiously named’. Yes, I wanted to say, and Zachary Leader has a curious title, too: Professor.
As before, Eric’s move involved me in various exertions and contortions. He also obliged me to behave dishonestly, for which I do not forgive him. To maintain any influence at the Sunday Times I had to tell the literary editor, Geordie Greig, that I might be persuaded to continue in his employ — whereas my connection with that paper had ended in the couple of seconds it took me to open the relevant envelope at the door, with the biker looking on; Greig behaved throughout with sympathy and a despairing decency, and it was a humiliation to mislead him. More taxingly still, I had to keep talking in a calm voice to Eric on the telephone, urging this or that cut or emendation on him. These conversations were among the strangest I have ever participated in. Example:
— I see you’ve added an account of the funeral.
— Well, yes.
— Which you describe as a perfunctory affair. You end your description of it with the following: ‘Only Sally cried.’ If I were you, Eric, I would take that out. Because it isn’t true.
— Oh really?
— And there were many people present who can confirm that it isn’t true.
— Oh.
— You weren’t there, were you, Eric. Who told you only Sally cried?
— Someone who was … who was there.
— Whoever it was was mistaken.
— Oh. Then I … Then I’ll …
— Everybody cried.
Now the whole business was going public. You will smile pityingly, O my reader, when I tell you that I
expected press opinion to be firmly on the side of the family. If Eric had done what he had done in Italy, say, he would now be in jail. But so would half the journalists in the UK. Newspapers reveal things and print things, so they will always take the side of those that reveal things and print things. Journalist will always fall in with journalist, and Eric was a journalist who was just being a journalist. There were other forces at work, or at play. The existence of several established broadsheets in the capital is often assumed to be a sign of diversity and health. What you end up getting, though, is a relativists’ echo chamber — what Kingsley called pernicious neutrality. Every ‘public feud’ or ‘literary dogfight’ or ‘undignified scrap’ must have two sides to it, mustn’t it, or how will it run? Over the next couple of weeks I looked on with fascination as the press came out and then shadowboxed its way back into the vacuum.
Because this was zero-rudimentary, a no-brainer. You didn’t need a brain for it. All you needed was a reasonable heart. It came down to what Eric did to us and what we did to him. The effect of his actions was to assail us in our grief. We did what all families known to me would have done and severed all connections with him. The ‘painful revenge’ we allegedly took — firing him from the Letters — was just another severed connection. I blush for Eric, now, when I see him talking about Kingsley’s ‘wishes’. ‘I thought executors were supposed to follow the wishes of the person they represent,’ he told the Sunday Times, ‘but this is the exact opposite of what Kingsley wanted.’ (Eric being the exact opposite of somebody called Zachary, I suppose.) If he hereby convinces you that my father — or indeed any conceivable being — would posthumously endorse the man who hurt his family, while they grieved for him, then the day is his.
It says it in the Bible. It says it on the column in the churchyard behind St Pancras’s, where my father lay: Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. What Eric did was not only wrong but wrong in itself. And what was wrong in October was still wrong in March. It is very much to Eric’s credit that he, at least, came to realise this.*
On the second Saturday after Kingsley died I found myself alone in the flat, unable to work or even to read. The only thing I seemed to be any good at was staring at my shoe. I didn’t feel ill so much as deafeningly medicated; we were all like this, we were all on the antibiotics of grief. The weekend had been boyless: the camp beds were stowed, the flat stood unlittered by yoghurt cartons and crisp packets and monstrous toys; no spent teabag lay slumped against the toothpaste tube. I decided that I wanted to see my sons, and sued for an hour or two with them. And it felt like a mistake, with the rain, the cars, the visit to the miserable mall in the worst kind of Sunday light … Our mission was to buy Louis a pair of trainers. The young salesman opened a lot of boxes and did a lot of staring at their contents. Eventually he held up two shoes and said,
— Them’s the same size innit.
I contemplated them dully. Showing a failure of tolerance, perhaps, I felt that shoe-sizing lay at his end of the operation, not mine. I said,
— No. Clearly not.
One shoe was handily larger than the other. It was also a slightly different colour. The assistant went on staring and said,
— Them’s a pair.
The outing must have been partly successful, because my notebook reads: ‘But Louis sweetly grateful, and more sympathetic. And lots of pats from Jacob.’ Comforting pats being Jacob’s speciality …
As for the shoe-seller: I now think that this kid was in the wrong job. He had no kind of future in the footwear business. He should have been writing for a quality newspaper, where it is quite customary to stare at a jackboot and a glass slipper and mumble, Them’s a pair …
Everybody cried.
‘Only Sally cried.’ No, everybody cried. Sally cried the hardest (‘I wish I had a Valium,’ she said, and Rob instantly produced one, like a slot machine), but everybody cried. It was a contagion. Throughout Jacob held my hand or comfortingly patted my shaking shoulders. The boys had seen me crying before, but not out in the open; and they hadn’t seen Sally crying and Isabel crying and Hilly crying and Philip crying. And their own mother, too, was crying. So the boys cried. Afterwards, in the street: Louis, normally so gracefully self-sufficient, looked as baffled and crumpled in his uniform as he sometimes did when he was four or five. Poor him. He had thought of this ceremony as just an hour out of school. He hadn’t reckoned on a main event.
The senior Amises (all smoking, all coughing) rode the Daimler to Golders Green, and then returned in it, all smoking, all coughing. At the wake the first person I talked to was the first person I ever kissed on the lips: my cousin Marian Partington, who had been attending the trial of Rosemary West.
— When you pronounce the name Jacobs, said Jacob repeatedly at this time, could you please stress the s. I keep thinking you’re talking about me.
Yes of course, Jake. We can’t have that. But how do things rest with your near-namesake? What in the end are we to make of him?
The night that the final instalment of the jottings was put to bed at the Sunday Times I rang Eric and violently denounced him: ‘And go to sleep wondering what Kingsley would think of you now.’ I wonder what I think of him now. I find him far less unsympathetic in the memory than I find his agent and adviser, Gillon Aitken. Eric’s behaviour was foolish and chaotic and, perhaps, disorganised by grief. And I charitably assume that he needed the money. But what did Aitken think he was doing?* If he had advised his client differently, Eric would have gone on to edit the Letters. He would have done the job controversially, no doubt; but he would have done it with a clear conscience.
And Eric does have a conscience. This we know.
At Kingsley’s memorial service, held a year after his death, Karl Miller talked about the fiction and Blake Morrison talked about the poems; Mavis Nicholson talked about Kingsley as a teacher; Richard Hough and Eric Shorter evoked Kingsley as a social being; and Christopher Hitchens touched on all these aspects. I talked about Kingsley’s last days and about his attitude towards God; and I said that now we would begin to see him differently, and not just as the old devil; we would begin to see the whole man. The service ended with a tape of one of KA’s imitations: Franklin Roosevelt vying with a brass band on a short-wave radio in the darkest days of World War II. There was laughter, there was applause, there was jazz; we came out into Trafalgar Square and made our way to the Garrick, where we talked and drank in Kingsley’s cenotaph. It was, for most of us, a happy day.
Only Eric cried, I am tempted to type. Only Eric cried. But the words have a journalistic feel, and are therefore unlikely to be true.
Marigold Johnson also cried, while her husband, Paul, stalked off with his nose in the air, claiming that Kingsley had been ‘body-snatched by the Left’.
I cannot rid myself of some vestigial gratitude to Eric. But you can only forgive what you can claim to understand, and he remains a mystery to me. Even if he stepped into a novel of mine I wouldn’t know what to do with him. Eric often struck me as a character out of fiction. So the question is: whose?
Looking through the ‘jottings’ again, I was reminded of the great modernist convention of the Unreliable Narrator — the ‘I’ whose version of events is not to be taken at face value. If the trick is to work, the unreliable narrator must in fact be very reliable indeed: reliably partial, reliably unaware of his own egotism. It occurred to me that Eric might have been a distant cousin of Kinbote, the devouring ‘editor’ in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, who thinks, wrongly, that the poem he sets out to annotate is an admiring version of his own life story.* Listen to Eric on KA’s last novel, The Biographer’s Moustache:
I said: ‘Kingsley, this sounds rather like me — a Scotsman writing about a writer.’ Oh yes, said he quickly, but ‘he’s not like you’ … I wondered — did he choose the name Cedric, with which he’s rather pleased, because it contains the name Eric? … I am beginning to wonder whether the novel, which seems so much closer to the story of his ow
n life, has been brought on by the fact of my writing his biography.
The Cedric/Eric stuff (the character’s name was subsequently changed to Gordon), and that ‘said he quickly’, might have come from Kinbote — admittedly on a very quiet day. And, incidentally, Gordon does not resemble Eric, and the novel is, unlike many others, wholly unautobiographical … I keep thinking about that sentence — ‘Only Sally cried’ — with which, in their unamended form, the extracts tollingly concluded. Eric’s surrogate at the funeral (by any standards a remarkably lachrymose occasion) was presumably sentient. Maybe Eric just needed to imagine it this way, with himself tragically barred from adding his tears to Sally’s. He loved Kingsley, as best he could, just as Kinbote loved his poet, John Shade.
L’affaire Jacobs, of course, showed us the crème de la crème of the culture pundits at their very, very best, impossibly stretched towards the absolute zenith of their game. They failed miserably, but at least they were trying to be serious. Even Eric was trying to be serious … As for the others, all those toiling smallholders of the Fourth Estate: to their world-famous attributes of intrusiveness, negligence, vulgarity and dipsomania we may add what Kingsley called their ‘non-committal superiority of manner’, their habit of ‘pervasive unspecific irony’ and their ‘cruising hostility’.* After a short search we found an archetype for Eric Jacobs. But it is the work of a moment to find the archetype for an average journo on an average day. We find him in the primary source, Shakespeare, where everybody is to be found, sooner or later. He is Thersites: a one-speech phenomenon in the Iliad, but a fully developed argument in Troilus and Cressida. ‘Thou crusty batch of nature’, as the (here) despicable Achilles calls him. ‘[T]hou core of envy.’ Thersites — ‘A slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint.’ He is the ‘deformed and scurrilous Greek’, compelled by his own baseness to see deformity everywhere.†
