Life here at 108 with Monk and Sarg is all very well but I can’t help feeling that it would be enhanced by your presence. What’s your game? Only 2 months though.
I saw “Darling” the other day and Rob said that he fancied that Jane must have looked like Julie Christie 10 years back. Anyway, he meant it as a compliment.
See you in March,
All my love,
Mart XXXXXX
P.S. Dad: thought your poems were fucking good. Especially ‘A.E.H.’, which I know by heart. Extremely moving, and I think that the Nemo one* is very funny.
* ‘L’invitation au Voyage’, from A Look round the Estate (1967).
The Problem of Reentry
In November 1994 I lost my face. It was something I was very attached to, and we went back a long way. And it seemed to me that I was changed, transformed utterly.
The reality wasn’t as bad as I thought it looked. My face did not much resemble that of Albert Steptoe, the senior — the resoundingly senior — ragman in the early proletarian TV soap Steptoe & Son, whose characteristic expression was a kind of embittered, split-level munch. Nor had my mouth become crimplike with countless vertical nicks. I also had the choice of two impostors to impersonate. When I wore the Clamp I looked like a minor extravagance from the island of Doctor Moreau: half man, half rabbit and all geek — the male lead in Revenge of the Nerds. When I didn’t wear the Clamp I looked … My face seemed to me, not vacant (far from it), but strangely vacated. And when and if I opened my mouth before a mirror there was that void, that tunnel to oblivion. In addition, my eyes, I thought, showed the knowledge of that tunnel, and of what it meant.
With the return to London I now had to negotiate the problem of reentry. To meet everyone anew, to meet their half-averted gazes anew. There it was, and I didn’t have a choice. I had to see my sons and they had to see me: I knew what lay ahead. Experience told me this.
During the summer term of my second year at Oxford I received a visit from my mother — at the time an elusive and nomadic figure. She was recently back from a two-year stint in America, with her second husband,* and would soon be off to Spain, where she would meet her third.* Mum was, as she put it, ‘flush’, having made an entrepreneurial killing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with the fish-and-chip shop called Lucky Jim’s. She had brought my sister Sally with her and a celebratory bottle of Asti Spumante … My mother has always had eccentric taste in drinks, unable, for instance, to get through a glass of dry sherry without adding a couple of sugars to it; and her two favourites are Green Chartreuse and a really piercingly dulcet liqueur, violet in hue, called Parfait Amour …
It was a lively afternoon, and my mother was volubly proud of her Oxonian Osric. But I felt like an actor in a saddening dream. Because my mother had changed. There had been talk a while back of some sort of terminal showdown with the man she always referred to (no doubt to cheer herself up) as ‘Peter Sellers’s dentist’. And it had happened. My mother had been Kinched, then Pninned. It wasn’t the effect of the change that harrowed me (her prettiness was probably undiminished) but the fact of it. I went cold at the sight of this parody mother. And I felt my heart make a tactical withdrawal from her. Because you’d better not commit too much love to someone who has suddenly become changeable. Mothers, fathers, aren’t supposed to change, any more than they are supposed to leave, or die. They must not do that.
In New York I struggled to be obedient to the words of the gentle Millie; I tried to let my mouth adapt itself to the grotesquely prodigious intruder. I don’t want to bore the faithful and patient reader with an encyclopedic account of my sufferings, but I would be shirking my task if I failed to suggest that dental reconstruction goes on for far longer than anyone can possibly imagine.
I was in a new world but I wanted to be back in the old one, with its pitifully ineffectual dental floss, its icepacks and Water picks — and all the toothache and all the denial. Denial, I believe, has been much maligned; there were paragraphs in praise of that state in the novel I was still tinkering with, The Information. I have got a lot of time and respect for denial, and I feel the same way about toothache. Later in the year I would run into my old friend John Gross* while escorting my sons to Tower Records in the mall that takes up half of Queensway, near where I lived for most of my twenties, surrounded by fireprone hotels, in Kensington Gardens Square. This was the first time I had seen John since his successful double-bypass surgery, and, as the boys shopped or prospected or merely pollinated the shelves, he described the heart attack that introduced the crisis. ‘The pain wasn’t too bad,’ he said. ‘Bearable. I’ve had worse toothaches.’ And it seemed natural that John should place the toothache at the zenith of civilian, non-mortal pain.
Agreed. I know all about the expert musicianship of toothaches, their brass, woodwind and percussion and, most predominantly, their strings, their strings (Bach’s ‘Concerto for Cello’ struck me, when I recently heard it performed, as a faultless transcription of a toothache — the persistence, the irresistible persuasiveness). Toothaches can play it staccato, glissando, accelerando, prestissimo and above all fortissimo. They can do rock, blues and soul, they can do doowop and bebop, they can do heavy metal, rap, punk and funk. And beneath all this anarchical stridor there was a lone, soft, insistent voice, always audible to my abject imagination: the tragic keening of the castrato.
Yes, but at least the toothaches were me, and the Clamp is not me, even though it is trying to live in the middle of my head. It’s strange. I’m okay if I’m just sitting there, reading, writing. But talking, walking … all public interactions immediately exhaust me.
Today I accompanied you and your mother Betty on a shopping mission to Union Square (to buy, among other things, football shirts for the boys) and I felt the full force of gravity — I felt it wanting me down there at the centre of the earth. How can these extra few ounces, carried in the mouth, assume the weight of a full army pack (after a twelve-hour march)? The oppression can only be spiritual; it must be of the spirit.*
Everyone is being incredibly nice to me. Your sister’s smile is soft. The food your mother cooks is soft. It’s a good thing that I’ve always regarded eating as something of a chore, good training, because now every meal is a punishment, every mouthful cruel and unusual. It’s a good thing that I’ve never had a discerning palate (often kissing my bunched fingertips over a bottle of corked wine), because now I don’t have a palate at all: my mouth needs ten seconds to distinguish between sugar and salt.
But that isn’t it.
The Clamp gives me the impression that something is holding my mouth in its mouth. But that isn’t it. And never mind all the gagging and retching, as compulsive as a fit of the hiccups, nor the sudden Niagaras of drool. For several years I didn’t go to the dentist’s. Now the Clamp makes me feel that I am at the dentist’s all day long. And all evening, too. And then it sits there in the glass, confronting me with its snarl or sneer.
Soon I must go to London and show the boys my face.
Dunker Castle
I first made front-page news when my age was in single figures. The banner headline of South Wales’s premier evening paper (it was the Evening Post, I think) ran as follows: THE SAGA OF THE AMIS BOYS.
It turns out that I am a much more anxious parent than my mother ever was. I once spent half an afternoon — Spain, a picnic, I was a childless twenty-eight — standing with my arms outspread under one tree or another in case Jaime, then four or five, fell out of it. My mother looked up from her sandwich, and flicked a hand backwards through the air.
— I let him do everything. I let you do everything.
She did. She let us do everything. We spent all-day and all-night car journeys on the roof rack of the Morris 1000, the three of us, in all weathers, slithering in and out while my mother frowned into the windscreen … I don’t think we did this when our father was in the car, and he was perhaps in general rather more cautious. As for the decisions leading up to the saga of the Amis boys, well, he
wouldn’t need or want to be consulted about a matter to do with the open air. He was in his study. He was always in his study.
The Amis boys, and primarily Philip, put it to their mother that they should canoe alone from Swansea Bay to Pembroke Bay, a distance of several miles west along the (notoriously and, in that direction, increasingly unpredictable) Welsh coast. And my mother said yes. In secret I had always thought this an ambitious plan. I was not exactly emboldened when I saw the height of the sea at our starting point (Swansea Bay was usually much more docile than the others we would pass), and saw also the extreme difficulty we were having in getting the boat past the surf. Repeatedly and brutally the waves rebuffed us until, already half drowned, we were in our slots and paddling, Philip up front, towards the bay’s western limb. All went well for several minutes. Then our paddles fell silent as we assimilated an oceanic effect that remains unique in my experience. A violently confused kiloton of water was driving laterally along the bay towards us … I have seen seas disgracefully tousled and disorganised, in the epilogue of hurricanes, sick-green and crapulent after their atrocious splurge, and meaninglessly milling, flapping, cringeing. The cross-tide we now faced, while formidably muscular, had the same deracinated air as it sidled loutishly towards us. We could have turned back (this was my firm preference); but I knew that Philip would not turn back. On the whole the younger brother has an easier time of it, watching his elder not turning back — going on, into unlit territory, and not turning back. Philip was, as always, positioned ahead of me. But this time I was in the same boat. Staring straight ahead he shouted,
— Goodbye, Mart.
And we paddled at battle speed, at attack speed, at ramming speed into the advancing foam. ‘Saga’ suggests something endless and arduous (and uncomplainingly Nordic); but those few seconds, as we slapped and bounced our way through, were really the extent of our adventure. That was in any case quite enough for me. Reaping much fraternal disgust, I asked to be dropped off at the next beach along. I called home from the snackbar at Caswell Bay; then I stood on the steps leading up the cliff and watched Philip as he tried, again and again and again, to manhandle the tall canoe over the taller breakers; and each time, with his boat all over him, he came thrashing back into the shallows. His body was untiring; I couldn’t see his face but I knew it would have an implacable look on it by now.
At Pembroke Bay my mother and I spent the afternoon vainly scanning the mountainous seascape. And at this point the alarm was raised … But let’s face it. The Evening Post’s front-pager, adumbrating an ordeal of maritime endurance that would have stunned a Patrick O’Brian, was a near-total sell. Because my brother never did get the canoe past the breakers. And all the time the coastguards were unscrambling and the helicopters were clattering down the coast, Philip was drinking Tizer and trying the phone in the snackbar on Caswell Bay.
I felt more embarrassed than flattered by the headline. My position was especially fraudulent, Philip having at least tried to go on getting killed.
So the press got everything wrong. But this was the first and last time that it cast me (wrongly) as a hero.
When my parents’ marriage broke up, in the Sixties, the newspapers covered it. And when my marriage broke up, thirty years later, the newspapers covered it (with noticeable differences in the journalistic approach). When my father had his teeth fixed, in the Sixties, the newspapers didn’t cover it (his teeth weren’t in the papers but his new smile was: he had never smiled like that before). And when I had my teeth fixed, thirty years later, the newspapers covered it. My teeth made headlines. But let me tell you something about experience. It outstrips all accounts of it — all ulterior versions. A man having a fullscale epileptic fit on the street corner does not mind about the tittering of nearby children. He is involved in his own triage.
In 1993, over dinner, my father said,
— Say as little as you want or as much as you want.
And I told him about my recent visit to Cape Cod to see my children, and their mother — to whom I had become a stranger, from whom I was estranged. The boys sensed that there was a possibility of reconciliation. On the first morning Jacob pushed my coffee cup an inch nearer my right hand and said, ‘Enjoying your stay so far?’ … Five days later, as I prepared to leave, the pond outside the house was obediently reflecting the mass of doom stacked up in the sky. My sons were constructing a miniature zoo on a patch of grass; Louis showed me the little stunt where you dropped a coin down a complicated tunnel and were then issued with your ticket of admission. But I wasn’t staying, and they knew it. They knew I was leaving. They knew the thing had failed — the whole thing had failed. I said goodbye and climbed into the rented car.
— I just can’t stop thinking about it. I just can’t get it out of my mind.
— There’s nothing you can do with things like that. You can only hope to coexist with them. They never go away. They’re always with you. They’re just — there …
Yes, always available for delectation, and always undiminished in their power. On the nightflight back to London I performed what seemed to me to be the extraordinary feat of shedding tears throughout the full six hours, even during the shallow sleep I kept snapping out of. I wondered about the physiology of weeping: questions of storage and supply. In my delirium I was vexed by the parenthetical thought that there was an indicator flashing in the cockpit, something like the watering-can symbol on the dashboard of a car, telling me that I had at last used up all my spray.
Now another nightflight over the Atlantic, to see the boys. And I was Kinch, I was Pnin, I was the parody father. I was even more estranged.
A brief preamble.
The Swansea-Cardiff train slowed, and came to a contentedly sighing halt. Vaguely the passengers in our car turned to the window, and all conversation likewise halted — but on the instant, like a radio suddenly unplugged. We stared at each other and looked out again. If this was a hallucination, then the hallucination was shared. What we saw out there was a simple arrowed sign directing sightseers to a place called Dunker Castle … At the time I was eleven years old, and excitedly bound, with two schoolmates, for Cardiff Arms Park, there to watch an under-21 rugby international. I was probably meant to be too young to know that ‘dunker’, in South Wales and perhaps elsewhere, was slang for ‘condom’ … There was a young man sitting opposite me: collar and tie, curt haircut. I will never forget the serious, sorrowful frown that slowly invaded his face, and the recoil of hurt disbelief with which he said (as if registering a crucial solecism in the order of things), ‘Dunker Castle …?’ My friends and I were feigning innocence: we were trying not to burst out crying with laughter. But the young man spoke for all of us, and eloquently. Dunker Castle?
On the day of my return to London, in November 1994, I had two teeth-related chores to get through, which in a way felt about average, because throughout my most recent stretch of time in New York, when the Clamp was making me feel I was at the dentist’s all the time, I was also, in actuality, at the dentist’s all the time, being fitted and finetuned by Mike Szabatura, for the denuded upper jaw, and being scoured and scraped by Todd Berman for the dreadful sink of the lower.* I am, at this point, as I step off the plane, dry-eyed, but stunned and deafened by it all, and wraithlike, and drastically gaunt. Still, I had had some good news in a setting where so much bad news has come my way: at the dentist’s. The tumour in my chin (this will be excised next month) is almost certainly non-cancerous, and is very likely unexotic. And the costly CAT scan has revealed, in my maxillofacial surgeon’s words, that I have ‘a great lower jaw’, adequate, with the aid of a frontal bone graft, to receive the titanium implants.
Remarkably, my two dental trials, on Day One of Reentry, did not involve my being at the dentist’s. One trial was comic, the other tragic in coloration, and both were rites of passage. But there it was and I didn’t have a choice.
Put simply, the first trial featured an exchange of money for goods: the maiden acquisition of a de
ntifrice with which only my very oldest readers, I think, will be tolerably familiar. It is trade-marked Steradent and comes in tubes. The tablets, in contact with warm water, give off a festive fizz; and it is in the resulting solution that the Clamp, overnight, will sneeringly wallow … As I geared up for the job — indeed, as I circled a couple of plausible outlets — I realised that this business sharply reminded me of another business: buying condoms for the first time, thirty years ago. It was the type of connexion you initially make, not with the mind, but with the body: the same feeling, the same chemical disposition. And it made me give a groan of defeated laughter. Because the earlier initiation was one of potent arrival, prefiguring insuperable treats, whereas the second — well, the second was all travesty, and pointed in the other direction with its mottled and rigid thumb. Otherwise, though, the similarities were hard to shirk.
(1) You will try to make sure that the chemist who serves you is a man and not a woman and certainly not a young woman. (2) You will hang around for a long time staring at hairsprays and deodorants until the chemist’s is empty, but in both cases, as you commit yourself to the till, a coachload of silent eighteen-year-old girls will come through the door. (3) You will of course buy something else too, as a (ridiculous) diversionary tactic. Products altogether unrelated to the contraband you seek. No Vaseline or Philisan (which, Kingsley used to say, fiftified the over-forties). Innocent things like shampoo or vitamin C (but not E). (4) You will endeavour to give the impression that these articles are not for your own use: you are the mere errandboy of a shadowy satyromaniac or nonagenarian. You may even brandish a list, and mutter, or consider muttering, something about the indolence of your older brother or the forgetfulness (and immobility) of your poor old gran. (5) Whatever happens, you will leave the shop with your face burning.