It is 1994 (but not for much longer) and we have reached that stage in the flight where the excitement of travel (or transfer), if any, has quite evaporated, along with all our internal fluids. The drink and the meal and the movie (all of them much appreciated) have come and gone, and so has the five-minute nap; now we are sourly completing our US customs and immigration forms, and excuse me, please, I must scrabble in the overhead locker for my documents, enabling me to give passport number, flight details and visa-issuance date. In my carry-on bag, I see, is that recent letter from Janis Bellow, posted from the Caribbean, and cheerfully telling me among other things that Saul turns out to have a surprisingly ‘delicate gorge’ and is being driven crazy by the smell of the neighbours’ cooking. We now know that this was an olfactory hallucination: the first symptom of a physiological catastrophe whose outcome is still unclear … The passengers are entering the seventh hour: before us lies the great task of rehydration. In Coach, where I ride, we are fully interpenetrated with each other’s breath, kiss-of-lifing each other’s yawns, giving each other blow downs of each other’s burps and sighs and sneezes. I am coming to New York for a string of dates with Mike and Todd, particularly Todd, who will perform the operation on my lower jaw. My upper jaw is in my flight bag. In fact I sported the Clamp to the airport and as far as a departure-lounge toilet, but only in case the flight bag got turned over by Security. My mouth was just a good place to hide it: even a stripsearch would have come up empty. The truth is that, un-Clamped, I look and feel (and eat) much better; it is only the haunting softness of Millie’s instruction (about oral ‘training’) that persuades me to wear the Clamp at all. ‘Your teeth look okay again now, Dad,’ said Louis, and full love returned; but I was thinking What teeth? It appears that I give nothing away. My upper lip is solidly pendulous, altogether atrophied by twenty-five years of not smiling … There is a slushy crush outside the British Airways terminal. Everyone is enlarged, fattened, baggy with impedimenta, with winter coats, padded, air-bubbled, taking up a lot of space, all Kingsleysized, and bumping into one another.
When did Horacio Martinez send me ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses and Dentistry’? I can’t remember. But the innocent reader will be wondering why he sent it. Now, Horacio hails from Argentina, from Buenos Aires. As I type out this fair copy the year is 1999, and I have already publicly celebrated, with Ian McEwan, the centenary of Jorge Luis Borges (just as, next week, I will go to New York to celebrate the centenary of Vladimir Nabokov). ‘Horacio Martinez’ … Am I, perhaps, being drawn into a Borgesian maze, a singularity or circularity? Is Martinez, in fact, the nom de plume of one of Borges’s collaborators or literary scions — for instance, his witty workmate Adolfo Bioy-Casares? The answer is no. Horacio Martinez is on the level. And I am on the mailing list of every dentist in the West.
I arrive at my future mother-in-law’s house in Greenwich Village and I call you at home. Then I call Saul Bellow’s number in Boston and speak to his mother-in-law (and junior), Sonia. The news is cautiously hopeful. He is still in intensive care but the medication has been decreased. He is struggling … Good. As Saul’s youngest son Daniel said, after his septuagenarian father had gone over the handlebars of his bike on a dirt road in Vermont: You’re a tough old guy. And that is what he is good at, struggling, fighting, working, working, working.
All the Lovely Times and Jokes
Kingsley said, one summer evening, in about 1975:
— I’m going to get a gun.
— … What for, Dad? one or other of his sons responded.
And he said it deliberately, like a poem, heavily end-stopped:
— To fuck up
Anyone who comes here
Trying to take my stuff.
He was in the three-acre garden of the house on Hadley Common. Perhaps he was actually walking round its perimeter, in the late afternoon. This was a routine of his, a physical regime, for a short time, and only when the weather was good. It could well have been his first regular exercise since World War II.
— You’re going to get a gun …
— I’m going to get a gun … to kill or otherwise fuck up … anyone who comes here … trying to take my stuff.
You would skirt the three descending lawns, which were gently staggered in size and elevation (the first and broadest had at its far end a massively self-sufficient Lebanon Cedar); then you turned left down a narrow and brambly path and came to a five-barred gate looking on to a five-acre field, also part of the property but never used by us — leased out free to two mildly and unflirtatiously lewd local girls and their two horses. Country girls, with rural accents. But this was neither the village nor the city. This was the suburbs, Barnet, a dormitory town on the tip of the Northern Line; and there it lay, beyond the horses, beyond the field, looking well-meaning and decent and sensible (or, as Kingsley put it in Girl, 20, ‘looking rather serious over the distant treetops, as if someone in particular had once been beheaded outside its church or unique glassware formerly made there’). Suburbia in the Seventies, it seemed, was assuming a strained expression, and beginning to lose its unselfconsciousness about the garden gnomes, the pebbledash semis with names like Hizanherz and Dunroamin, and the all-Aryan golf club … Having admired the townlet, we would turn up the broad avenue, walk through the officially ‘listed’ barn (‘full of empty cardboard boxes and pieces of wood shaped for some now superseded purpose’: ibid.) and head on past the conservatory into the paved courtyard — outbuildings, the gravel drive, the housekeeper’s cottage, and Lemmons itself, mainstream Georgian, with its two staircases and its twenty-odd rooms. The most plutocratic item on the whole estate was the lawnmower: it had double headlamps and a pushbutton cigarette-lighter. So, in those days of conspicuous strikes and squats and students, Kingsley felt that he had much to defend — house, wife and a vein of form that had given him I Want It Now, The Green Man, Girl, 20, The Riverside Villas Murder and Ending Up, plus a respectable clutch of poems, between 1969 and 1974.
How much did it mean to him, the high-bourgeois splendour? Quite late on in their marriage Jane wrote a magazine piece saying that her husband had less interest in money or his surroundings — ‘or, indeed, in acquisitions of any kind’ — than anyone she had ever met. I agree; but it turned out to be more complicated than that. Readers, and reviewers, of KA’s Memoirs could be forgiven for questioning such a verdict on his character. That book hauls various acquaintances out of obscurity to denounce them for unshared restaurant bills and even for unbought rounds in the pub.* ‘It can’t just be the money, can it?’ asked Ian Hamilton in the London Review of Books. No, it wasn’t the money; or, rather, it certainly wasn’t just the money. But it was something he minded about more and more. Later, much later (it was at one of our last suppers at Biagi’s in, probably, 1994), I lost patience and attacked him about it. For a couple of weeks he had been anticipating a lunch with one of his best and oldest friends who, Kingsley claimed, derived pleasure from never paying. That same night, as he came slouching into the restaurant, he had, I thought, a ragged and feral air about him. It had been building up in me and the argument was already there in my mind. I said,
— Look at you — you’re a fucking wreck. Who paid for lunch?
— I did.
— And you let it poison your whole day. Your whole week. Instead of having a nice time with your old pal. It’s not worth it, Dad. You’re the loser twice over. When I go out with Rob, I pay for everything. He says, ‘Just pretend I’m a chick.’ And I do pay for everything and I give him twenty quid for his taxi home. And I don’t mind.
— Yes but Rob couldn’t pay for anything even if he wanted to.
— So? It’s like with the Hitch when he used to say, ‘Whose turn is it to pay for me?’ Some friends do get pleasure from dodging a bill. What you should do is indulge them. Anything’s better than the suffering you go in for. Look at you. Christ. In its own way your attitude to money is as sick as your friend’s.
Head quivering, voice quivering, th
e forefingernail of either hand seeking the cuticle of the thumb, he said, with genuine contempt,
— … That’s exactly what I EXPECTED you to say.
Because, by his lights, I was young, modern, ignorant, corrupt; because I didn’t revere or even recognise the values that he had been shaped by (values that were now recrudescing, in old age). Kingsley was a child of the low-church work ethic.* Dodging your share made you an idler or a niggard. More than this, though, it was secular sacrilege. And it rendered you unmanly.
That night we made peace, symbolically, over the bill. (We always made peace.) Kingsley tried to pay, although it wasn’t his turn. My credit card firmly but gently prevailed.
It now seems to me that my father was lucky to survive that lunch of his. In the climactic scene of The Old Devils, the hero, Alun Weaver, is socialising with others at the house of a friend, Garth Pumphrey. The first drinks are handed out, and then the host produces a pocket calculator. Alun speaks up sarcastically:
‘Mind you don’t forget to add on the cost of the first round.’
At this Garth moved the calculator aside, though not far. ‘I regard that as distinctly uncalled for, Alun,’ he said in a sorrowful tone. ‘If not downright gratuitous. Those first drinks were not a round in any sense of the word. They were my freely offered hospitality. Good God, man, do you take me for some kind of Scrooge?’
Instantly Alun choked on his first large sip of whisky and water. Coughing with marked violence he shakily clunked his glass back on the sideboard, strolled a pace or two and went down sprawling with most of his top half across one of the sofas and his legs spread out on the thin carpet. This seemed even for him an unusually thorough imitation of a man collapsing with rage or revulsion.…
Alun was breathing loudly and deeply through his mouth in the guttural equivalent of a snore. His eyes were wide open and to all appearance focusing, though not on Charlie or Peter, nor on Garth when he too bent over him. In a low voice but quite succinctly he said a couple of meaningless words and his mouth moved. Then his eyelids drooped and he stopped doing anything at all.
For many years I thought that Kingsley dishonoured Jane — and himself — when he turned revisionist about the strength of his feelings for her. He tried to rewrite the past, to unperson, to unlove; and you can’t do that, or so I believed. His early letters to Jane, which I have now seen, are, in at least two senses, enviably eloquent on the power of the initial attraction.* It was the sort of thunderbolt that fills the world with sudden colour. The evocations of the physiology of love in The Anti-Death League (1966) and I Want It Now (1969) caused at least one reader to murmur, with generalised humility and respect, ‘God. Dad really has it bad.’* And for a long time the household had the confidence and humorous liberality that gathers itself around a dynamic marriage. In Maida Vale we all used to have breakfast together in the master bedroom (where, in addition, you could smoke). Sometimes I or my brother looked in too early. Philip used to do a very good imitation of our father being surprised in the act of making love: the lips were of course crenellated in concentration, but the voice was perfectly calm — ‘Just hang on a while, would you, old boy?’
I once wrote, and still believe, that love has two opposites. One is hate. One is death. The notion may well have been planted in me by The Anti-Death League, which aggressively confronts the fact that love re-alerts you to death, and all suffering, and all mortal injustice. This is an uneven book (too much plot, too much dialogue, too much protocol); but it is something of a coup, I think, to have a whole novel turn on a poem. The poem is anonymously and subversively sent to an army clergyman, Major Ayscue, who is stationed at a secret base committed to the deployment of biological weapons. Its title is ‘To a Baby Born Without Limbs’, and its narrator is God:
This is just to show you whose boss around here.
It’ll keep you on your toes, so to speak,
Make you put your best foot forward, so to speak,
And give you something to turn your hand to, so to speak.
You can face up to it like a man,
Or snivvle and blubber like a baby.
That’s up to you. Nothing to do with Me.
If you take it in the right spirit,
You can have a bloody marvelous life,
With the great rewards courage brings,
And the beauty of accepting your LOT.
And think how much good it’ll do your Mum and Dad,
And your Grans and Gramps and the rest of the shower,
To be stopped being complacent.
Make sure they baptise you, though,
In case some murdering bastard
Decides to put you away quick,
Which would send you straight to LIMB-O, ha ha ha.
But just a word in your ear, if you’ve got one.
Mind you DO take this in the right spirit,
And keep a civil tongue in your head about Me.
Because if you DON’T,
I’ve got plenty of other stuff up My sleeve,
Such as Luekemia and polio,
(Which incidentally your welcome to any time,
Whatever spirit you take this in.)
I’ve given you one love-pat, right?
You don’t want another.
So watch it, Jack.
The deliberate illiteracies (‘whose’, ‘snivvle’, that little sprain of mispunctuation shortly after ‘Luekemia’) are explained away in the novel as a smokescreen (part of the author’s attempt to disguise his identity). But I think they are also intrinsic to the style of the dramatic monologue, and make this one of Kingsley’s best poems. Here we have the voice of omnipotent evil, but also the voice of atrocity, with its brutish facetiousness, its clunking puns. Here we have the ‘murdering bastard’ who can’t even spell, who can’t even parse, who can’t even write* … Perhaps the most revealing thing my father ever said was in response to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s question (King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, 1962), ‘You atheist?’ He answered: ‘Well yes, but it’s more that I hate him.’† Kingsley could never share Saul Bellow’s aspiration, that of establishing ‘sober, decent terms with death’ (death being ‘the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything’). It wasn’t only that he feared death; he hated it, because it was the opposite and the enemy of love.
Death came to the family, not long after we moved into the house on Hadley Common. Jane’s mother Kit, who had been with us for some years, suffered a heart attack in the ground-floor bedroom to which she was by then largely confined. That night, as if for a dare (we wanted the experience, new to us), I and my girlfriend, Tamasin, stole in to look at the body. Now I had never been especially fond of old Kit. And neither, to be sure, had Kingsley. He used to do a lot of writhing and groaning and swearing to sustain himself for his daily visits to her bedside (this was called ‘doing Kit’), but make the visits he did. I thought her a snob and a grouch, and felt that she had been a harsh mother, particularly to my sweet-natured step-uncle, Colin. Kit reminded me of the governess Mademoiselle O. (a more extreme case) in Speak, Memory, of whom Nabokov writes, in valediction:
She had spent her whole life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone gave her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.
Kit had, I suppose, been all right on earth. And her permanent soul, if it existed, was now certainly absent. She looked utterly emptied … Death is the complex symbol, and ours was a complex reaction to it. Tamasin and I laughed, we giggled, we reached out to each other with trembling hands. Even then I felt a judgement hanging over us. And it came: soon afterwards Tamasin’s father, Cecil Day Lewis, then Poet Laureate, would die in this room, would die in this bed.
This room knew all about death and was well-equipped for it (I remember the elaborate and alarming
handholds in the adjoining bathroom). Outside was the courtyard and the garden, but this room knew all about death. Day Lewis and his wife, Jill Balcon, went to the house as to a hospice: no other possible outcome. In April 1972 Kingsley wrote to Larkin:* ‘Poor old Cecil D L is very ill, dying, in fact, and he will stay with us here until he dies. He’s very weak but totally compos and cheerful (Christ) … Nobody can tell, of course, but somewhere between a week and a month seems probable.’ It was a month. ‘I do want to die well,’ says a character in Iris Murdoch’s Nuns and Soldiers: ‘But how is it done?’ Contra Dylan Thomas, it is done by going gently. Cecil went gently. As an admirer (and at one point an imitator) of his earlier, more romantic poems (‘Short, short is the time’) and, more recently, of his drolly colloquial verse translation of the Aeneid — and as a known lover of his daughter — I skirted round the dying Day Lewis. But his equanimity, his stillness, drew me in closer. It was an extraordinary demonstration. He was showing you how you could keep your self-possession, right to the end; you still had your permanent soul. Tamasin came. Daniel came. And the dying got done. These are the last lines of his last poem, ‘At Lemmons’:
a bloom of
Magnolia uttering its requiems,