by
Martin Amis
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‘It’s nothing bad. It’s good…Very early on this year I had a kind of…I wasn’t at my desk. I was reading on the sofa. I closed my eyes and imagined a visitor had come to the house. Entirely benign. A gentle ghost – a gentle reader, in fact. And guess who it was. My much younger self, come to me with questions. Only I felt more like a girl this time round. It was like receiving a child of mine. Kind of Nat plus Bobbie.’
‘Jesus Christ. Were you having one of your episodes d’you think?’
‘Probably. Anyway, then I wrote ten pages – fast. Something became undammed. It was me at eighteen, when I used to say to myself, I don’t want to be a writer (or not yet). I want to be a reader. I just want to be a part of it. Humbly resolved, Elena. Devotional. I just wanted to be a part of it.’
‘…Okay. Bye now. D’you realise how early we’ve got to get up? In about half an hour!’ She yawned. ‘Well if you do go crazy, I’ll stand by you. Up to a point.’
‘I know you will, my dearest. Up to a point.’
Martin was eighteen, and he was walking just after dark through a distant and neglected suburb of North London when he saw a lit window on the second-lowest floor of a council medium-rise. All it showed were the dark-blue shoulders of an unoccupied armchair. And he thought (this is word for word),
That would be enough. Even if I never write, complete, publish anything at all, ever, that would be enough. A padded seat and a standard lamp (and of course an open book). That would be enough. Then I’d be a part of it.
sweet
‘Okay. Carlton had your dress hoicked up over your ribcage!’
With quiet matter-of-factness, taking rightful warmth from her cup with both palms, Phoebe said, ‘He wanted to see it. So I showed him.’
‘Yes, completely straightforward. And logical. Carlton wanted to see it, so you hoicked up your dress and showed Carlton your…?’
‘My mandala. Luckily these pants are see-through so I didn’t have to take them down. I’ll explain,’ she said. ‘Now Carlton’s a corporate raider, but you have to understand that he finds himself drawn, he finds himself increasingly drawn, Martin, to Buddha.’
this is amazing. the pacing of the last sentence
He had no reason to invoke that very congenial episode, up north. But he kept thinking of it while they ate. After the public event, the dinner, and the nightcaps in the hotel lounge, they went to her room and followed the dictates of muscle memory. Being faithful won’t do a damn thing for me (he’d briefly reasoned): I’ll be punished anyway…
oof. good example of self-serving thinking
Jed Slot was in the hotel bar – being interviewed. Himself a teetotaller, Jed did all his interviews in the hotel bar, and I’d arranged to do all my interviews in there too; but whereas Slot’s sessions lasted all day long and well into the night, mine only accounted for teatime (so I often went in early and came out late, just to listen). The truth was that I had taken up Jed like a new hobby. I had even read him.
‘Eh bien. Now tell me, if you would,’ began the questioner (a shrivelled sage with a briar pipe), ‘what is the difference between the novel and the short story – I mean compositionally, in terms of praxis?’
‘Well, sir,’ said Jed, ‘the novel is more expansive. By contrast, the short story is more succinct.’
chuckled at this
[...] Nabokov has elsewhere made the point that all writers who are any good are funny. Not funny all the time – but funny. All the lasting British novelists are funny; the same is true of the Russians (Gogol, Dostoevsky, and, yes, Tolstoy are funny); and this became true of the Americans. Franz Kafka, whatever your professor might have told you, is funny. Writers are funny because life is funny. [...]
Slot pounced. ‘The story is less comprehensive than the novel. In a short story you’re more aware of limitations of space. So the story provides fewer…’
I paid the extras on the bill and went upstairs for the bag, into which Elena was forcing stray pairs of shoes. I said,
‘It’s a good job Jed brought his thesaurus with him from Buffalo. He might get through the whole six weeks without saying shorter or longer.’
petty but fun
‘He can’t…’ Her eyes were downcast, directed at her shoes or the silky traces of April frost on the blades of grass. My stepmother lowered her head when she spoke. It was her dyed and parted hair I had to interpret (from The Bellarosa Connection). Except Rosamund’s parted hair was undyed and grew with tangly force. She was forty-four, I was fifty-three, Saul was eighty-seven. ‘He can’t read any more.’
‘What?’ And I took a step away from her, to keep my balance.
She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Each time he gets to the end of a sentence,’ she said, or mouthed, ‘he’s forgotten how the sentence began…’
A line from Herzog: Life couldn’t be as indecent as that. Could it?
And I thought incoherently of the times I’d found myself on the London tube without a book, or, worse, with a book but without glasses, or, worse still, with book and glasses but no light (power out) – but the book and the glasses will be found and the light will come back on, and I won’t be sitting in the dark with a book on my lap for the rest of my life.
‘Has anyone noticed? On planes, they’ve started calling passengers customers.’
Blue, at least, had certainly noticed it, and thought it comical; and for a while we found some diversion in a word-replacement game of the kind we often played…
‘ “The passenger is always right.” “Michelangelo Antonioni’s sensitive study of alienation, The Customer”. “He’s an ugly passenger.” “Only fools and customers drink at sea.” “When you are –” ’
‘This won’t work,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s not subversive enough.’
I said, ‘Mm. Insufficiently subversive. But why’re they doing it? Who benefits?’
He said, ‘Americans – that’s who. You take it as an insult, Mart, but for an American it’s a compliment. It’s an upgrade.’
‘How d’you work that one out? Jesus, I don’t understand this goddamned country.’
‘Well, here in the US, passengers might be freeloaders, you know, lying hippies and scrounging sleazebags. Whereas customers, with that discretionary income of theirs, are the lifeblood of the nation.’
‘…All right. But doesn’t it go against the grain of American euphemism? And uh, false gentility? Even in supermarkets they call us guests. Well here’s one thing nobody’ll ever say. The plane crashed into Mount Fuji, with the loss of sixteen crew and just over three hundred customers.’
‘The customers died instantly. No. That would be subversive. If it kills you, I’d say – I’d say that once you’re dead, you go back to being a passenger.’
lol
Norman’s answer was that his heterosexuality was so intense and impregnable that he was ideally placed to interpret its obverse. The story doesn’t end there, of course, and Norman would strike back, saying in an interview that literary England was controlled by a gay cabal headed by Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and Ian Hamilton. ‘I think that’s very unfair’, said Christopher, ‘to Ian Hamilton.’
chuckled at this
In general, Christopher chose not to avail himself of the new carnal freedoms of his era. The promiscuity that most of us were going in for he found…somehow not serious enough. There was I think a further scruple, less paradoxical than it at first seems, because he was someone in whom many cultural and historical strands combined. And one of those strands had to do with religion – or its residue.
speaks to me