† Humbert’s previous wives, Valeria, ‘the brainless baban’ from his Paris period, and Charlotte, ‘she of the noble nipple and massive thigh’, the onetime Mrs Haze, Lolita’s mother. Now please go back, if you would, and start the passage again.
* Once, in 1990 or thereabouts, I challengingly read this passage out loud to my father. Thirty years earlier he had written a long, hostile and, in my view, wilfully philistine review of Lolita just before it was published here in 1959 (and it was published here very warily: the matter was discussed in Cabinet). The book, he announced, was ‘thoroughly bad in both senses: bad as a work of art, that is, and morally bad — though certainly not obscene or pornographic’. Having fulfilled the necessary condition of wholly identifying Humbert with Nabokov, Kingsley was free to land some rough punches: ‘… the many totally incidental cruelties … bring the author into consideration as well, and I really don’t care which of them is being wonderfully mature and devastating when Lolita’s mother … is run over and killed [there follows a long quotation, ending:] “a dead woman, the top of her head a porridge of bone, brains, bronze hair and blood.” That’s the boy, Humbert/Nabokov: alliterative to the last.’ Kingsley’s oblique stroke, here, is the slash of a vandal. And that ‘I really don’t care’ (where the reviewer throws off the critical shackles to pull one back for common decency) should be taken literally as a boast of indifference to literary truth … When I read the quoted paragraph out loud to him he said, ‘That’s just flimflam, diversionary stuff to make you think he cares. That’s just style.’ Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It’s not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence. To Kingsley, though, sustained euphony automatically became euphuism: always. His review of Lolita is collected in What Became of Jane Austen? (1970).
* Proviso: in astrology everything is 100 per cent false except everything about Scorpios, which is 100 per cent true.
Letter from Home
108 Maida Vale
London, W.9.
Dearest Dad and Jane,
It’s pretty fine about the Exhibition, isn’t it?* There’s still some adrenalin coursing through my veins. It’s £40 by the way. (Is that £40 per year or for the 3 yrs?). Anyway it’s not so much the money but the distinction and fame which will undoubtedly accrue and the awe that my new intellectual rank will inevitably excite. Mr Ardagh told me that [John] Carey at St. John’s was embarrassed by the state of my languages but [Jonathan] Wordsworth at Exeter, who doesn’t care about that, and, I suspect, is rather proud of the fact that he doesn’t care about that, has advised me that I have been elected to an open Exhibition.
Hope you had a good time in Mexico. Meanwhile, back in Maida Vale, everything is much the same as ever. Colin flits from long work-outs on his bed to dangerously prolonged sun-ray lamp sessions, and then buckles down to his meditation. Consequently he is dreamy, swarthy and serene. The only reason I can venture to explain his intermittent correspondence is that he has been very busy not ordering enough Weetabix. Sarg gets some hours in on the same employment. Apart from this grave negligence they are looking after me splendidly.
Catsaca, while not putting robins to the sword, staggers and dribbles, allowing us all full knowledge of her naked flesh; Princely Hugo spins away the hours in his habitual placid wonderment. Malfi has the run of the house at all times. If there are rows then Catsaca is hustled into Niger’s study — however she has not favoured any of the furniture with her urine.*
I spent Xmas with Mum. At Maida Vale the festive season was never really acknowledged. There was a sullen exchange of presents on Xmas-eve-eve and then everyone buggered off. But spirits are always high and your return is the only desired complement to the general contentment. We are thinking of coming to S/Hampton in a Lincoln Executive, which is about 40 yards long — that should do it nicely. I shall enjoy watching Col clearing the hall of his hi-fi stuff which has been growing steadily until it now constitutes an amorphous expanse of wires, cases and tubes. I am looking forward more than I can say to your return,
Lots of Love
Mart XXX
P.S. Sorry if this seems a bit of a ‘stream of consciousness’ letter but I’m still excited.
P.P.S. How does Virginia Woolf mean?
* I had been expecting to say here that this was my least favourite sentence from the Osric archive; but I thought I had written ‘rather fine’, not ‘pretty fine’, and ‘pretty fine’ is not as bad as ‘rather fine’. An exhibition (£40 per year) places you between the scholar (£60 per year) and the commoner (nothing). The admissions dons use the ‘awards’ as an intercollegiate trumping system to get the students they want. I was made a scholar in my last year and got the telltale longer gown. I was probably very pleased about that. This letter reverts to manuscript.
* These three were the house cats, all of them great beauties and exotics (though Catsaca was moulting with age). Niger, or The Niger (pronounced like the river), a fictive figure whom Kingsley would sometimes impersonate, was an uncontrollably successful black gangster who had a fleet of ‘pink Cadillacs doubleparked’ outside his house.
The City and the Village
At the memorial service for Lucy Partington one of the speakers, Sara Boas, charmingly introduced herself as follows: ‘I’m Sara and my mother is Lucy’s father … I mean Lucy’s father’s sister. Good start, isn’t it?’* Sara, in other words, is Lucy’s cousin on the father’s side. I am Lucy’s cousin on the mother’s side. We are, in that odd-looking phrase, german cousins (COD: ‘in the fullest sense of relationship’). Lucy and I shared two grandparents, Leonard and Margery Bardwell, who were themselves cousins — german cousins. When I was about ten I asked Lucy’s sister Marian to be my bride; and she accepted. Had that secret engagement come to fruition, then David (at last) would have been my brother, in a way, and Lucy would have been my sister. Not my german sister but my sister-in-law.
I once said to David, experimentally rather than jeeringly,
— You’re a country bumpkin and I’m a city slicker.
— No, he said. You’re a city bumpkin and I’m a country slicker.
And the ten-year-old David, I felt, had truth as well as wit on his side. But it remained the case: the Amises were of the town, the city, and the Partingtons were of the country, the village. They were more innocent than we were. And I partook of the Partingtonian innocence whenever I went to stay with them — in Gretton (‘Nr. Winchcombe’, I used to scrawl on my letters): quite close to the spa of Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire. It has been said that Italian cousins are closer than Irish twins. David and I were definitely Italian cousins, for many years. The intimacy came to an end, as did so much else, when Eva Garcia (‘You know your father’s got this fancy woman up in London … Ooh aye’) hoisted me out of my childhood, in Cambridge in 1963. It was the summer before, I think, that David paid his last visit to the house on Madingley Road.
During his stay he was deputed to inform me that a much-loved dog (Nancy, a gentle Alsatian) had been put down.* He knocked and entered my — our — room and said, ‘Mart, I’m sorry to have to tell you …’ And he didn’t linger; he gave me a sternly encouraging nod and left me to my grief. Nancy had recently produced a large litter — eight or nine strong. I spent the next hours with the orphaned pups in the dark outbuilding, giving and seeking consolation as they crawled over me, unaware that things had changed. So even in the city there were dogs and cats and the donkey. There was plenty of innocence. But I was not as innocent as the Partingtons.
Towards the end of the famous drunken-lecture scene in Lucky Jim, the hero starts denouncing the ethos he has been assigned to praise: the folk culture of ‘Merrie England’. These are Jim’s last words before he blacks out at the podium: ‘It’s only the home-made pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the recorder-playing crowd, the Esperanto …’ Such, more or less, was the ethos of Kingsley’s inlaw
s, the Bardwells: the grandparents I shared with Marian, David, Lucy and Mark. Margery Bardwell, like Mrs Welch in the novel, had money: the remains of a Victorian merchant fortune (she gave half of it to cancer research. Her parents went to China as missionaries). Leonard Bardwell, an ex-civil-servant, was a benign eccentric with a passion for popular art. And they were innocent, they were both innocent. My grandfather, I’m pretty sure, did not speak Esperanto, but he had gone to the trouble of mastering three languages of limited utility: Swedish, Welsh and Romansh (heard only in the Swiss canton of Grisons); and I certainly grew up believing that he knew Romany and the tongue of the tinkers. He was also an amateur musician and a morris dancer — they’re the people who caper about in formation dressed in ribbons and bells.* I loved him, and was always amazed by the amount of energy he devoted to entertaining me. He moved with a swiftness and agitation rare for a man of any age; and I would notice, as he showed me some stunt with a drawing on a folded piece of paper, that he was even more excited than I was. Daddy B.,† dressed in his trademark blue suit of janitorial serge, had wafty white hair, few teeth, and a skittishly highpitched voice. In a letter to Philip Larkin, Kingsley described him as resembling ‘a music-loving lavatory attendant’ — and I’m sorry, Mum, but the writer in me knows a bull’s-eye when he sees one. In fact Daddy B. emerges as a great comic figure in the Letters, where he survives the hostility levelled at him with cheerful self-sufficiency.‡ Kingsley cultivated an ornate resentment towards his father-in-law, but the truth is that he was irritated by Daddy B.’s innocence. My father, as we shall see, was generally irritated by innocence. And the Bardwells were so innocent. I could tell they were innocent when I was six.
My last memory of Mummy B. is now coloured by some retrospective shame — though the occasion seemed no more than an embarrassing absurdity at the time. At the time (1970) I was a drawling, velvet-suited, snakeskin-booted undergraduate: Osric on a roll (but actually getting slowly less stupid). Already widowed, Mummy B. had unwisely agreed to take me out to lunch in Oxford, at the Randolph Hotel (where, in the postwar years, Kingsley used to be wined and dined by generous friends like Bruce Montgomery* and Kenneth Tynan). It was clear from the moment Mummy B. walked in that she was overwhelmed — was utterly engulfed — by the scale of the place. She had been there at least once before. On 21 January 1948, a family tea was held at the Randolph to mark my parents’ wedding. Mummy B. had to be inveigled into joining the celebration by Mummy A. — as did Daddy B., and as did Daddy A. Well, my mother was nineteen, and pregnant with Philip; but it was Rosa Amis who had to persuade the other three to stop behaving like automata of their time … It wasn’t that the Randolph had grown since Mummy B. was last there. Mummy B. had shrunk. She seemed no taller than the tabletops, and she sensed it, too. With an expression of painful shyness and unworthiness (with flashes of undisguised fright) she accompanied her sauntering grandson into the diningroom. For the first ten minutes she ignored what I said to her and kept muttering the same sentence. The sentence was: ‘We should have gone to Debenham’s.’ Mummy B. was feeling too old to be doing this — too old, too small and too deaf. I raised my voice and had to go on raising it, as her panic attenuated into exhaustion. After a while I was about three-quarters of the way to my maximum volume. Silences fell and heads turned all over the room, throughout our lunch, as I continued to scream various questions and answers about the health and whereabouts of my parents, siblings and cousins. I should have done better. I should have taken her to Debenham’s. Mummy B. died the following year.
The Bardwells endowed their children with legacies on or around their twenty-first birthdays. My mother got enough to buy us our first house, a terraced three-floor near Cwmdonkin Park (and near the Cwmdonkin Drive that Dylan Thomas was supposedly the Rimbaud of), Swansea, for £2,400. This is either a preternaturally early memory or an often-visualised family anecdote, but I see and hear Kingsley and Hilly running around 24 The Grove, Uplands, Swansea, yelling and hooting and growling as they celebrated their new space and freedom.
Even I inherited money from the Bardwells, on or around my twenty-first birthday, as did my siblings and all my cousins: £1,000. My mother and, I believe, my aunt, and perhaps my uncles (whom I never really knew), also inherited innocence.
And the Partington children came into some of that. And the Amis children came into some of that — but maybe not so much. We had Kingsley in us too.* And they were of the village, and we were of the city.
Innocence and nakedness, like Adam and Eve, used to go hand in hand. ‘With naked honour clad / In naked majesty, seemed lords of all,’ writes Milton in Book IV of Paradise Lost.* In Book IX the serpent leads Eve to the tree of ‘knowledge forbidden’. She eats, and urges Adam to do the same (‘On my experience, Adam, freely taste’):
each the other viewing
Soon found their eyes how opened, and their minds
How darkened; innocence, that as a veil
Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone,
Just confidence, and native righteousness
And honour from about them, naked left
To guilty shame …
And inducing Adam’s terrible lament:
cover me ye pines,
Ye cedars, with innumerable boughs
Hide me …
Nuditas virtualis: virtuous, prelapsarian nakedness. Astoundingly, we still glimpse something of this in ourselves, every year. On holiday, whether in Nailsea or in some brochurish ‘paradise’, we go through the motions of feeling less ashamed of our bodies. On the first morning, as your quivering, death-grey foot broaches the sand, you think only of your shocking etiolation — the stripped creature, so pale, so parched. Then, after a while, the body becomes the focus of a cautious complacency. How one primes it with oils and unguents, how one braces it with the alerting asperities of sand and salt and solar fire … The nudity is of course only partial (as, God knows, is the virtuousness), but the connection* is still available to us in the little Eden of the seaside.
Early in our friendship David astonished me by playing naked on the beach in Swansea. It wasn’t his nakedness — it was his indifference to it. He just knelt there, building a sandcastle, digging, shaping, patting, with serious eyes. I realised that I had long lost that kind of freedom, summers ago. A thing had appeared in me that was still absent in him. He was of the village; I was of the city. Was that it? … One startling summer day in the village of Gretton, Gloucestershire, Marian performed a sensational streak: out of the house and once round the garden. The four boys there — me, David, my brother Philip, and another, much vaguer cousin or second cousin — stood and giggled. She called for the hose to be turned on her. I remember her bobbing, shrieking figure. I remember the relationship between the curve of her back and the arcs of the water. Once, very late at night, in Swansea, on the top floor of the second house we had there, 59 Glanmore Road, Marian and I took our pyjamas off and got into bed together. It was innocent, innocent.† Afterwards (that word should be wearing two epaulettes of inverted commas) we lay in the dark and for a long time busily whispered. I asked,
— Will you marry me?
— … Yes.
Yes. And I thought something like, well, it’s a bit early — but it’s sometimes good to get these things out of the way.
I have said that my childhood was idyllic (and the times I spent with the Partingtons were arcadian. The lion lay down with the lamb, and the rose grew without thorn). But I couldn’t have spent time thinking about the fate of Lucy Partington without remembering that where there was grass there would also, necessarily, be serpents.*
Innocence attracts its two main opposites: experience and guilt. Nuditas virtualis attracts its theological counterpart, nuditas criminalis. The paedophile, for example, wants more from children than their physical beauty; the paedophile is so interested in violation that only children will do. I was young, and the world was younger, almost unimaginably younger. And yet there always are these enemies, who s
ee innocence and need to do something to it.
It Im Again, Dai
I was idling away at the kind of thing that eight-year-old boys find very fascinating. A plump pebble was wedged between the bars of a drain in the gutter, and I with a sandalled foot was trying to kick it through, to stomp it down, to hear that satisfying plop as it joined the waterways of the city’s innards.
— Oi! You by there! What ewe doing with that drain?
— Nothing! I’m just … I’m just …
He was about fifteen, swarthy, curly-haired, his good looks undermined by his fraudulently bright green eyes. It was dark, it was wet — but in Swansea, in winter, an inky drizzle was the very air you breathed. ‘When the lights come on at four / At the end of another year,’ wrote Larkin, well north of us in Hull; but he needed his assonance and his monosyllable, and couldn’t say ‘half past two’. Still, memory informs me that the time was illicitly late. I shouldn’t have been tarrying with this pebble, this drain, this green-eyed boy.