by
Martin Amis
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Eight twenty-five. After some neck-ricking soixante-neuf and a short period inside her unsheathed, I clawed at the little pink holder and took its final trojan. — Not to worry, because this is my equivalent of a flash cigarette-case; the real supply is elsewhere.
The condom case was empty, of course, so I looked out the box of Sharpshooters. Who needs it, I thought. You'll be coming blood, if anything.
It, too, was empty.
'Damn. None left.'
'No,' said Rachel. There was one. I saw it this afternoon. There were two there.'
In a voice that could have been my younger brother's, I asked: 'Are you sure ?'
'Positive.'
I turned my back and pretended to fumble in the drawer. 'Ah yes. Here we are. - Whoops! Dropped it in the waste-paper basket! ... damn ...' My fingers curled round the Gloria-moistened trojan, flicked it aside, and burrowed deeper into the pool of tissue, banana skin and cigarette ash, until it found the one used that afternoon on Rachel herself. I have my standards, thank you. Excuse me, but I do have my principles. True, Gloria's would have been nicer, because Rachel's was much dirtier and danker and colder than hers. All the same, that would have been, well, vulgar - and an insult to a fine girl.
crying
So I am nineteen years old and don't usually know what I'm doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn't mind seeing a beggar kicked or a little girl run over because it's all experience, dislike myself and sneer at a world less nice and less intelligent than me. I take it this is fairly routine?
'Have you, have you ever fucked a tart who's had a kid?'
'No.' He didn't hear and turned to me, mouth ajar. I shook my head.
'Well I—' he zig-zagged crazily, squeezed between a taxi and a newspaper van, and drifted two-wheeled up Queensway - 'well I fucking have. And it's no joke. Don't know you're there.'
Norman squalled to a roasted halt broadside a zebra-crossing, allowed a dumpy blonde to swank past, and whipped the car forward again, snicking the overcoat buttons and ironing the toecaps of two Siamese dotards.
'Like waving a flag in space.'
More lights. I wanted to ask Norman if he had read Swinburne, but he continued: Their guts flop too. Jen'll be okay for one, maybe more. No, fuck, I said she could adopt some, but - tarts like having babies! Their cunts', he flicked off the heater, 'turn to mush. Tits' - we pulled away - 'smell of bad milk. And they hang. Pancake tits.'
christ
'All right. Now. I want you to do a great deal of hard thinking in the next nine or ten months - I'm going to take you anyway; if I don't, somebody else will and you'll only get worse. Stop reading critics, and for Christ's sake stop reading all this structuralist stuff. Just read the poems and work out whether you like them, and why. Okay ? The rest comes later - hopefully. You'll get the letter in a few days. Tell Leigh to come in, would you?'
This may be bluffing, but I think that one of the dowdiest things about being young is the vague pressure you feel to be constantly subversive, to sneer at oldster evasions, to shun compromise, to seek the hard way out, etc., when really you know that idealism is worse than useless without example, and that you're no better. The teenager can normally detach his own behaviour from his views on the behaviour of others; but I had no moral energy left.
[...] The Recognitions needed devotees who would keep its existence known until such time as it could be accepted as a classic; but a cult following is not the finest one to have, suggesting something, at best, beloved only by special tastes—in this case, the worry was, a wacko book with wacko fans. In fact, a cult did form, a cult in the best old sense, for it was made of readers whose consciousness had been altered by their encounter with this book; who had experienced more than its obvious artistic excellence, and responded to its neglect not merely with the resigned outrage customarily felt by those who read well and widely and wish that justice be accorded good books; it was composed of those who had felt to the centers of themselves how much this novel was indeed a recognition and could produce that famous shock: how it revealed the inner workings of the social world as though that world were a nickel watch; how it combined the pessimisms of its perceptions with the affirmations of the art it, at the same time, altered and advanced; more, how its author, though new to the game, had cared enough about himself, his aims, his skill, to create greatness against the grain, and, of course, against the odds.
Well, it was ambitious certainly, dense, lengthy, complex. Its author is a romantic in that regard, clearly concerned to create a masterpiece; for how else, but by aiming, is excellence to be attained? It’s not often one begins a sand castle on a lazy summer morning—pattybaking by the blue lagoon—only to—by gosh!—achieve—thanks to a series of sandy serendipities—an Alhambra with all its pools by afternoon. The book was about bamboozlers, the slowest wits could see that, and therein saw themselves, and therewith withdrew. This was not to be a slow evening’s soporific entertainment, it was to be their indecent exposure.
They cribbed from the dustjacket. They stole from any review appearing earlier. They got things (by the thousands!) wrong. They condemned the subject, although they didn’t know what it was; they loathed its learning, which they said was show-off; they objected to its tone, though they failed to catch it; they rejected with fury its point of view, whose criminal intent they somehow suspected. They fell all over one another praising Joyce, a writer who, they said, was the real McCoy, whereas . . . yet had they been transported to that earlier time, they would have been first in line to shower Ireland’s author with deaf Dublin’s stones.
ugh i love this
Silence became his mode, exile (in effect) his status, cunning in scraping by his strategy, while compiling data and constructing other people’s niggling or nefarious plots, building another long book out of our business world’s obsession with money, manipulation, and deception, composing a hymn to Horatio Alger, music made of inane, conniving, sly, deceitful speech. J R did ok at the store for a time, and gathered in the National Book Award, but I think it was less read than The Recognitions, less enjoyed, and could not produce, of course, the same surprise. Furthermore, although clearly created by a similar sensibility, and expressing a common point of view, J R was as different from the earlier novel as Joyce from James. But do not put down what you have to go to J R yet, even if it is almost as musical as Finnegans Wake, a torrent of talk and Tower of Babble, a slumgullion of broken phrases and incomplete—let’s call them—thoughts; because there is plenty to listen to here; because we must always listen to the language; it is our first sign of the presence of a master’s hand; and when we do that, when we listen, it is because we have first pronounced the words and performed the text, so when we listen we hear, hear ourselves singing the saying, and now we are real readers, we are participating in the making, we are moving the tune along the line, because no one who loves literature can follow these motions, these sentences, half sentences, of William Gaddis, very far without halting and holding up their arms and outcrying hallelujah there is something good in this gosh awful god empty world.
Which is almost the whole point of what we do.
AHH
Too often we bring to literature the bias for “realism” we were normally brought up with, and consequently we find a work like The Recognitions too fanciful, obscure, and riddling; but is reality always clear and unambiguous? is reality simple and not complex? does it unfold like the pages of a newspaper, or is the unfolding more like that of a road map—difficult to get spread out, difficult to read, difficult to redo? and is everything remembered precisely, and nothing repeated, and are people we know inexplicably lost from sight for long periods, only to pop up when we least expect them? Of course; the traditional realist’s well-scrubbed world where motives are known and actions are unambiguous, where you can believe what you are told and where the paths of good and evil are as clearly marked as highways, that world is as contrived as a can opener; for all their frequent brilliance, and all the fondness we have for these artificial figures, their clever conversations and fancy parties, the plots they circle in like carousel’d horses, to call them and the world they decorate “real” is to embrace a beloved illusion. The pages of The Recognitions are more nearly the real right thing than any of Zola’s or Balzac’s.