Kingsley isn’t laughing at unfunny things. Thank God. He isn’t laughing at all. Because he’s no longer sane? Or because he’s in a world where there’s nothing funny to laugh at? That would be another end of the matter.
The Subject of Last Words
Tuesday, 3 October. ‘Martin,’ says my mother on the telephone.
The use of the full forename prepares me, and already, without addition, informs me of everything I need to know.
One Sunday, while the boys were eating their red chicken (‘the best meal of the week’) and watching a cartoon or a billion-dollar bloodbath, and Hilly was in and out of the kitchen … It must have been 1992. I was reviewing the Larkin Letters and the Larkin Life, and I said,
— And I suppose your Letters are going to be even worse. From the PC point of view. There’ll be even more fuss.
— But I won’t be around for that.
— I’ll be around for that.
— Yes you’ll be around for that.
Another Sunday, maybe the next Sunday, we talked about Larkin’s last words. I quoted:
— ‘I am going to the inevitable.’
— Not bad, said Kingsley.
Not bad: stressed as a standard spondee, like outdoors. It was hard to tell whether he was being skeptical about the whole business of Last Words or about Larkin’s contribution to it. But I sensed some approval in him — approval of these last words, their particular nature, death being inevitable because he, Larkin, could never avoid it in his thoughts. No, nor Kingsley either.
— Have you got any ready? Have you done any work on it?
I asked this question cautiously but his response was tolerant, interested.
— Yes I have. Now you mention it.
— I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what they are.
— No.
Read en masse, in anthology form, Last Words are a sorry lot, making you wonder what all the fuss was about: I mean the fuss about death, the fuss about life. Last Words, on the whole, consist of inadvertencies, non sequiturs, bet-covering pieties and pompous self-dramatisations. Henry James belongs in the last section: his high-style ‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing’ is weighty and evocative, but it reeks of the lamp. Blake is both plangent and ecstatic (asked by his wife whose songs he was singing: ‘My beloved, they are not mine, no, they are not mine’), Jane Austen terse (asked what she needed: ‘Nothing but death’), Byron resilient (‘I want to sleep now. Shall I sue for mercy? Come come, no weakness. Let me be a man to the last’). Marx is, as usual, pertinent: ‘Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough’ … D. H. Lawrence, like many another failing whisperer, believed or at least announced that he was suddenly on the mend: ‘I feel better now,’ he said.
— Your boy Hopkins had a good one.
My father, who hated Hopkins, looked up from his newspaper.
— Uh, ‘I am so happy, so happy!’
And Kingsley gave a slowly nodding sneer.
— There’s another thing about Last Words, I said. The question of whether you can get them out.
— Yes. There is that.
Earlier in the day Lawrence had hallucinated that he was leaving his body. He said to Maria Huxley: ‘Look at him in the bed there!’ Earlier still he said to Frieda: ‘Don’t cry.’ Now those are good last words. I recommend them for general use — provided you can get them out.
The fiercest in his refusal of all consolation was Kafka. Demanding that his papers should be destroyed in their entirety, he said, ‘There will be no proof that I ever was a writer.’ Because if you are a writer your books — all your books — are your last words.
— Martin.
— Yes, Mum.
Words are leaving Kingsley, they are fleeing him. But he too will have his last words.
— Your father is going to die very soon.
And that feeling again: one of impending levitation.
Close That Naughty Eye Now
Saturday, 7 October.
Under this date my notebook yields the following:
I beat Zach 6-1, 6-0 in 55 minutes, so nothing wrong with my constitution. I mean my concentration.
Which was the day I played five sets — just to stop thinking?
That night I said to my mother, in a voice that struck my inner ear as distinctly childlike (baffled, wondering), ‘What’s he dying of, Mum?’
— Drink, she said.
We were sitting, over drinks, of course, in the Jeremy Bentham … Jeremy Bentham, like Kingsley Amis, was a man who addicted himself to the endorsement of unattractive opinions. He championed usury, and was opposed to the French Revolution and the ‘Declaration of Human Rights’ (‘nonsense on stilts’). In his ethical system — which promoted ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ — pains and pleasures were quantified according to four considerations: intensity, duration, certainty and propinquity. As we sat in the Jeremy Bentham that night, all four considerations obtained.
A day or two earlier my mother had said that there needed to be ‘a terrible meeting’ — about nurses and sunset homes — but duration, now, is giving way to certainty. And as well as drink there is also cerebrovascular accident to be taken into account. When I visited, that day, he sat sleeping (I felt a cur’s relief) in his Thinker pose, but with the mouth bitterly set. A beautiful middle-aged woman of Persian cast was hoovering his room. She buffeted about beneath his chair as if its occupant were not only non-human but also inorganic: a refrigerator or an old X-ray machine. This was the private wing. We were still enjoying the benefits of business class.
For some days the silent work in the back of my mind has been prompting me to give in to something: my Englishness, our Englishness. I notice it most acutely in my many conversations with Isabel. Her instinct is to explore, and if necessary exhaust, all medical-remedial possibilities before thinking further. I see myself, or I don’t see myself, wheeling Kingsley on to a plane to go and see that top man in Zürich or Toronto. I see myself, or I don’t see myself, administering to Kingsley an innovative diet consisting of barium and basmati rice. Isabel comes from a place where the first thing you do about death is throw your life-savings at it. She wants, at the least, a second opinion, and I don’t even want a first opinion, and had to will myself to keep the phone near my ear while Kingsley’s case-doctor, named Croker (and no, this is not an irony that Kingsley would have ‘relished’), brayingly and yet with full professional sympathy spoke about the brain damage, the loss of motor control, and the incontinence now being visited on ‘your poor father’. I engage in my discussions with Isabel from behind a net curtain of Englishness, Old Englishness. How palpable, how commonplace it is. In England, when you see death coming, you just ask if you’ve joined the right queue.
— He always said, my mother reemphasised in the Jeremy Bentham, ‘If I ever have a turn, and get into a state, then I don’t want to be messed with. D’you understand?’
Kingsley had gone on to say: ‘Get the cheapest coffin there is and bury me without a word.’
We went back to the hospital. The patient was restive; he was pitching himself about in inarticulate protest. My mother dabbed his face with 4711. You could feel his anxiety submit to a trusted ritual as she said,
— You can go to sleep now, darling. You’ve done everything you needed to do.
His lazy left eye stayed open for a moment longer.
— Close that naughty eye now. You’ve done everything. You’ve done all your work.
The next day Kingsley’s room is again an arc-lit crucible. My stepfather Alastair is patiently helping Kingsley in his efforts with the tube of a slosh-capped bottle; and in the same spirit he is also, in effect, asking him where he wants to die.
— How do you feel about coming home? … A bad idea? … A good idea?
One of Alastair’s antecedents, William Boyd, fourth Earl of Kilmarnock — now he had some good last words, unremarkable in themselves but exalted by circumstance. He
was holding a handkerchief which he proposed to relinquish after his final prayers. He said, ‘In two minutes I will give the signal.’ A prominent Jacobite, William Boyd was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1746.
— How about coming home? … A good idea?
Dad is having trouble with his grip, trouble achieving it, trouble releasing it. His face is still his face, but his hand is unrecognisable: the hand of a Marfan.
— You could come home … Bad idea? … Good idea?
— Not particularly, he at last decided.
June I Haggle Unction
I had been reading to him earlier in the day. I suggested Chesterton — The Napoleon of Notting Hill or The Man Who Was Thursday. I suggested Anthony Powell. I suggested George Macdonald Fraser (the Flashman books),* and Kingsley gave a sudden nod.
As Flash for Freedom opens, our hero is contemplating a new career: politics. At a houseparty in Wiltshire his father-in-law introduces him to a clique of Tory bigwigs, among them a certain novelist: ‘that cocky little sheeny D’Israeli’. I read on:
‘Bad work for your lot in the Lords, hey?’ says I, and he lowered his lids at me in that smart-affected way he had. ‘You know,’ says I, ‘the Jewish Bill getting thrown out. Bellows to mend in Whitechapel, what? Bad luck all round,’ I went on, ‘what with Shylock running second at Epsom, too. I had twenty quid on him myself.’
I heard Locke mutter ‘Good God’, but friend Codlingsby* just put back his head and looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Indeed,’ says he. ‘How remarkable. And you aspire to politics, Mr Flashman?’
‘That’s my ticket,’ says I.
I looked up in (forgetful) expectation. My father was glaring at me with intense and futile concentration; and, of course, no humour … There are perhaps half a dozen descriptions, in his corpus, of grown men trying to read: drunkenly trying to read. Generally their first response is to blame the book. This is Shorty in Ending Up:
Shorty was doing his best to read a paperback book that told, it seemed to him, of some men on a wartime mission to blow something up. His state of mind, normal for him at this time of day, lent the narrative an air of deep mystery. New characters kept making unceremonious appearances, or, more exactly, he would find that he had been in a sense following their activities for several pages without having noticed their arrival, or, more exactly still, they would turn out, on consultation of the first couple of chapters, to have been about the place from the start. The prose style was tortuous, elliptic, allusive, full of strange poeticisms … Every so often he would come across some detail that nearly convinced him he had read the whole thing before, perhaps more than once.
Kingsley had read Flash for Freedom before: more than once. And now it was sounding like Finnegans Wake.
So I continued. Why not? We bring Kingsley comfort, by being here, but only one visitor has brought him any pleasure: Jaime. He enjoyed, he exulted in Jaime — because the dew is yet on him, the glamour is yet on him. Jaime brought his youth, in all its Conradian force (youth, that ‘mighty power’). I haven’t got any youth to offer my father. This year has closed my youth. I’m sorry, Dad: I haven’t got any … Sometimes I imagine that the dead are allowed to watch their children. This would be one of their privileges. But there must come a point where the dead really wouldn’t want to look. William Amis, even Rosa Amis: they wouldn’t be watching now.
Skipping a page here and there, I pressed on. Having drunkenly murdered a fellow guest at the Tory houseparty, Flashman is packed off to sea by his father-in-law. I had just reached the point where Flashman realises that the Balliol College is not a merchant ship but a slaver. Greatly alarmed (though utterly unscandalised), he reviews the attendant dangers. ‘But what was the use,’ I read,
of thinking that way in my present plight? In the end, as usual, one thought came uppermost in my mind — survive, Flashy, and let the rest wait. But I resolved to keep my spite warm in the meantime.
Abruptly Kingsley sat up in his bed and pronounced a string of words of sentence length. I couldn’t understand them.
— What? I said.
He tried again. Now he was Finnegans Wake. His drift was more or less clear, but that was incomprehensible too. In straight contravention of the book’s comic premise, Kingsley was giving me to understand that he very much disapproved of Flashman: of his selfishness, of his spite.
— I’m sorry, Dad, I don’t follow.
My father made his inconvenienced face and tried again. It was at least very like him to imply that I was simply too deaf, or too thick (or too drunk), to take his meaning.
— Sorry, I said.
— Christ!
I’ll show you what his sentence or sentences sounded like. In Take a Girl Like You Patrick Standish lurches into a London flat to be introduced to two women. He approaches one of them — Joan:
On the way he came to the edge of a rug, which he surmounted as one might step over a sleeping Great Dane …
‘Hallo, I parry stashed a nowhere hermes peck humour speech own,’ he heard himself say. ‘June I haggle unction when donned ring gone oh swear.’
‘June I haggle unction’: a good way to spend the early summer. Given some time and thought and help, I can decipher that: Hello, I’m Patrick Standish and now we’re here I expect you must be Joan. Julian and I had lunch and went on drinking elsewhere.
But I couldn’t decipher a syllable of his case against Flashman.
The themes, then, were duly convening. Although he wasn’t now drunk, he had in the past very often been drunk, so now he thought like a drunk and talked like a drunk. And his wordhoard (how viscerally he hated those compounds, with their reminder of cursing his way through Old English at Oxford — compounds, the one mannerism he balked at in Larkin) was being roughly scoured.
He had gone to sleep. Sleep: death’s brother.
‘I used to be important,’ he’d said to Jaime, apparently quite cheerfully. I used to be important. ‘But I’m not any more.’
On Drink
‘Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time,’ writes Kingsley in his Memoirs.
Drink. Yes, as he would say: there was that.
— I got home last night rather the worse for wear, he told me (one day in, I think, 1985). And I didn’t have any cash for the cab. I said, ‘Will you take a cheque?’ and he said, ‘Well I suppose I’ll have to, won’t I?’ He did a bit of complaining. Quite reasonably. I felt his eyes on me as I tried to write out a cheque on his bonnet. Halfway through my third go he said: ‘You’re obviously an educated man. Why d’you want to go and get yourself into this states.’*— Good question.
— Very good question.
Very good question. Kingsley wrote three books about alcohol, On Drink, How’s Your Glass? and Every Day Drinking (the hyphen is tellingly dropped). And alcohol infuses and even saturates his fiction.† Alcohol meant many things to Kingsley. These things included oblivion, in perhaps two senses, but there were innocent gradations along the way. Part of his enthusiasm was hobbyistic, particularly in the expansive days at Lemmons: the heated wine glass, the chilled cream poured over the back of a spoon, the mint leaves and the cucumber juice, the strips of orange peel, the rims of salt, the squeezers and strainers. It was the only time I ever saw him busy in a kitchen. And there was something boyish, owlish, about the way he cosseted his little barrel of malt, feeding it, nurturing it. Kingsley could claim, then, that he was researching his regular drink column, but of course it was more the other way around. He wrote about booze to salvage something from all the hours he devoted to it.
As well as sincere and humble esteem for the rituals, the flavours and above all the immediate effects of alcohol, there was also, in my father, compulsion — a trait that reappeared, on and off, in all three of his children. He couldn’t afford to drink anything like as much as he wanted until the appearance of Lucky Jim in 1954. After that he drank less than he could afford, but more than
he wanted — or more than he wanted to want. ‘I want a lot of it, I need a lot of it,’ Peter Porter once said to me, before going on to qualify his attachment to alcohol. Kingsley wanted a lot of it and needed a lot of it. Alcohol was ominously connected to greed, to satiety. ‘Imprisoned in every fat man’, wrote Cyril Connolly, ‘a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.’ Kingsley, in One Fat Englishman, is much truer and funnier: ‘Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.’
Biagi’s on a Thursday night in the spring of 1994. Warily I watched him enter, with weighty tread, and scan the restaurant like a man in search of the face of his enemy. I stood up. We kissed. I eased him into his seat and said,
— Big lunch?
— Mm. The trouble is … The trouble is, when you get to my age, lunch is dinner.*— You mean lunch is your shot. And everything else …
— Yeah.
He ordered a Campari and soda: his usual route to a second wind … In restaurants my father always wore an air of vigilance, as if in expectation of being patronised, stiffed, neglected, or regaled by pretension (pretension, not transparent vulgarity, which he normally enjoyed).* Even in Biagi’s, his occasional haunt for three decades, Kingsley was on permanent alert. One sure infuriant was the unbidden approach of a waiter (he felt they always timed it to ruin his anecdotes). Waiters bearing peppermills drew his special scorn.
— Would you like some pepper, sir?
— … Well I don’t know yet, do I? Because I haven’t tasted it.
When my turn came I accepted a thick coat of pepper on my unbroached starter. Kingsley stared hard at me. I said,
— If you like it you like it. It’s not the same as salt. That’s why they don’t go around with a salt cellar.