by Martin Amis
Enough. Nabokov, I fear, would have found this particular biographer too slow-moving for his purposes. And the schemers and shafters of Balzac, say, would have immediately frogmarched him from their pages — on the grounds of sheer naïveté. Anyway, Eric is too British. I now think that V. S. Pritchett would have read him in an instant. And there’s another writer who, had he heard the whole story, might have made a pretty good fist of him: Kingsley Amis.
* In October, 1996, Eric Jacobs and Christopher Hitchens had this exchange. EJ: ‘I suppose you think I’ve been a bit of a shit.’ CH: ‘Yes I do. What could possibly have come over you? And how did you imagine you’d get away with it?’ EJ: ‘All right. I know I’ve been a bit of a shit.’ And, as we shall see, Eric went further in his expression of remorse.
* Everybody assumed that part of what he was doing was sending a smoke signal to Andrew Wylie. Aitken’s second approach to the Sunday Times entrained the dissolution of their partnership. I gave a low whistle when Aitken later described his part in the negotiations for The Information as ‘unedifying’. How edifying were his negotiations with the Sunday Times?
* Here’s a florid example of Kinbote’s talent for missing the point: ‘[T]here was at least one evil practical joker; I knew it ever since the time I came home … and found in my coat pocket a brutal anonymous note saying: “You have hal- - - - -s real bad, chum,” meaning evidently “hallucinations” …’
* 1999 saw another centenary: that of Jorge Luis Borges. Ian McEwan and I paid tribute to him at the London Library. The event, which passed off in a spirit of warm celebration, was written up with almost Leninine corrosiveness in a quality broadsheet. This example is supertrivial but illustrative. The writer said that I was wearing an ‘unfashionable’ suit. Well, a ‘fashionable’ suit, you may be sure, wouldn’t have been any good either.
† The only trouble is that Thersites, being Shakespearean, remains irresistible. My favourite bit is not very typical of him, showing us, rather, another key facet of his character. During a battle:
Enter Hector.
Hector. What art thou, Greek? Art thou for Hector’s match?
Art thou of blood and honour?
Thersites: No, no, I am a rascal, a scurvy railing knave, a very filthy rogue.
Hector. I do believe thee; live. [Exit.]
Thersites: God-a-mercy, that thou wilt believe me; but a plague break thy neck — for frighting me.
Addendum: Letter to my Aunt
November 8, 1999
Dear Miggy,
This is a letter I will never send, in a book you will never read. Still, I couldn’t conclude without addressing some words to you, however briefly and tentatively.
In the spring Isabel and I took Fernanda and the boys to Spain — to see your sister. I know you visited the house in Ronda, twenty-five years ago, because I was there too; but I don’t know if you ever saw their casita in the campo, just outside town, which is where she and Ali live now (Jaime, based in Seville, is always coming and going). It’s pretty basic down there. In the cold months, Mum says, it takes her at least an hour to get dressed for bed — layer upon layer. Her new knee is a great success and she says she is pain-free for the first time in many years. But it’s not just the knee. She’s a country girl, and she now has what we all wanted for her: a life after Kingsley. She has chickens and dogs. (She no longer has the two goats who could jump up on each other’s backs and stay put.) It reminded me of your courtyard when I was ten — anarchically alive, with a cluck-cluck here and a whoof-whoof there, and crisscrossed by the busiest children you ever saw. Fernanda wrenched her clothes off and disappeared into the coop to ‘collect’ the eggs. She was quick to annex this word — quick to collect ‘collect’.
I knew from Marian that you had had doubts about my attempting to memorialise your other daughter, Lucy. Then we exchanged letters and you elaborated in your own hand — your hand, so strong and upright, but still reminiscent of my mother’s (minus the famous phoneticisms). And your doubts remained. I had already begun the book but I found I couldn’t proceed with it. When I sat down to write I felt the physical absence of your blessing. Then it came to me with an unfamiliar kind of certainty. I knew there was only one person who could secure it: your blessing.
We drove up for lunch, remember? It wasn’t the first time I had revisited the Mill as an adult. The village, the lane, the circular drive with its millstone, your lawn, your ponds, your Michaelmas daisies. I recalled covering this garden in a series of desperately ardent sprints, moving from clue to clue (those were your rhymes, I think) in a hunt for Easter eggs, nearly forty years ago. The village seems sanitised now. No longer do the cattle come steaming down the lane (‘The cays are coming!’). And your garden is no longer the finite but boundless universe that I made of it as a boy. ‘How small it’s all!’ Yet the place still transports me, and I am back in an unfallen world. I could feel the fascinated excitement it awakened in my daughter: then not quite two. Today is her third birthday. The party has just ended and the house is still full of balloons.
That afternoon you and I were supposedly going to talk about Lucy, and the propriety of my writing about her. But we both knew that we were never going to do that. To do that, we would have to be alone together for, I would say, about six months. Besides, it would have been pointless to try to change your mind. A change of mind wasn’t what was needed; something more than that was needed. I couldn’t bring it about. Only my daughter could bring it about.
Soon after that visit you wrote to me. You said that one day you woke up to find that your doubts had been replaced by a feeling of peace. And you gave me your blessing. You also added your impression of Fernanda … I pulled your letter out of the box on the front gate and read it as I walked to Camden Town. On my return I handed the envelope to Isabel and said, not at all triumphantly but with sober respect, ‘The power of Fernanda.’ I never doubted it, but it is still extraordinary: the power of these girls.
I didn’t predict that she would remind you of Lucy, although you said that she had. All I knew for certain was that she would leave you with something, she would impart something. She was not sent here just to come and go. As with Lucy, Fernanda always leaves you with something. You cannot be in her company without something being imparted. Lucy had that, entire: she had the magics. And when the time came to go Fernanda refused to leave the courtyard and reached out to you as her deliverer.
Enclosed are some more pictures of Fernanda, and a couple of her older sister, Delilah (whom I wrote to you about — discoursing on the unconscious, and silent anxiety), and a couple of her younger sister: tiny Clio.
And Louis and Jacob are there too.
With love as always from your nephew,
The editors and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to reprint copyright material:
Jonathan Clowes Ltd., London, on behalf of the Literary Estate of Sir Kingsley Amis for permission to reprint material from Stanley And The Women © 1984; I Want It Now © 1968; Ending Up © 1974; The Amis Collection © 1991; The Old Devils © 1986; Girl, 20 © 1971; Memoirs © 1991; I Like It Here © 1958; Take A Girl Like You © 1960; The Anti-Death League © 1966; One Fat Englishman © 1963; The Biographer’s Moustache © 1995; The King’s English © 1997; Something Does Not Work in My Car © 1962; Real and Made-Up People © 1973; What Became of Jane Austen? © 1970 and from the following poems “A Bookshop Idyll” © 1956; “In Memoriam” © 1967; “A.E.H.” © 1967; “A Chromatic Passing-Note” © 1967; “Ode To Me” © 1979; “The Huge Artifice” © 1967; “Wasted” © 1979; “A Dream of Fair Women” © 1956; “Ye Wearie Wayfarer” © 2000; Jonathan Clowes Ltd., London and Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., for permission to reprint material from Jake’s Thing, by Kingsley Amis © 1978 by Kingsley Amis; Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint material from Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis copyright 1954 by Kingsley Amis; The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov for permission to reprint material from “Dear B
unny, Dear Volodya” from The Nabokov Wilson Letters, 1940–1971 (editor: Simon Karlinksy), all rights reserved; New Directions Publishing Company for permission to reprint material from “The Circular Ruins” from Labyrinths by Jorge Louis Borges, translated by James E. Irby © 1962, 1964 New Directions Publishing Corporation; The Wylie Agency for permission to reprint material from “On Not Knowing The Half of It” by Christopher Hitchens from Prepared For the Worst © 1988; Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint material from Speak Memory, Strong Opinions, The Eye, Pale Fire, Lolita, and Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov; Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster for permission to reprint material from Underworld by Don DeLillo © 1997 by Don DeLillo; St. Martin’s Press, LLC for permission to reprint material from Kingsley Amis: A Biography by Eric Jacobs © 1998 by Eric Jacobs; J.A. Underwood for permission to reprint material from “A Fasting Artist”, from Stories 1904–1924 by Frank Kafka, translated by J.A. Underwood; Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc. and Saul Bellow for permission to reprint material from Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow © 2000 by Saul Bellow; Sinclair-Stevenson and the Estate of C. Day Lewis for permission to reprint material from “At Lemmons” from C. Day Lewis: The Complete Poems, by C. Day Lewis (1992) © 1992; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC and the Estate of Philip Larkin for permission to reprint material from Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin © 1988, 1989 by The Estate of Philip Larkin and material from “To Kingsley Amis — 21 November 1985 from tape” from Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985 by Philip Larkin © 1992 The Estate of Philip Larkin; The Estate of James Joyce for permission to reprint material from “A Prayer” from Pomes Penyeach, by James Joyce; Marian Partington: “Salvaging the Sacred,” by kind permission of the author; Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., for permission to reprint material from “Everyone Sang” copyright 1920 by E. P. Dutton, copyright renewed 1948 by Siegfried Sassoon from Collected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon by Siegfried Sassoon.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, and the publishers will be happy to correct mistakes or omissions in future editions.
