‘All right, deal with this mess!’ the foreman said, and they buried the fasting-artist together with the straw. Into the cage they now put a young panther. It was a palpable relief even to the most stolid to see this savage animal thrashing about in the cage that had been bleakly lifeless for so long. He lacked nothing. The food he liked was brought to him by his keepers without a second thought; even freedom he did not appear to miss; that noble body, endowed almost to bursting-point with all it required, seemed to carry its very freedom around with it — somewhere in the teeth, apparently; and sheer delight at being alive made such a torch of the beast’s breath that the spectators had difficulty in holding their ground against it.
Perhaps it was Bruno’s example that shored up my sense of proportion, but all that weekend I was, as the saying has it, a model of calm. That cliché is actually very telling and descriptive (like many other clichés: ‘beside yourself’, for instance); I felt modelled, moulded — and selfconscious and semi-paralysed; and yet I was calm. Calmly I walked on the beach. Calmly I played tennis. Calmly I watched the Canadian geese as they gathered for migration. Calmly I smoked and drank and took tranquillisers. Calmly I cleaned my teeth. The lowers only, of course, because the uppers would be in a dustbin before ten o’clock on Monday morning. Cleaning my teeth used to be a big part of my life. Fifteen years on a hygiene regime meant that I had used up something like eight thousand hours cleaning my teeth: the picks, of wood and water, the interproximal, the floss, the electric brush. I switched on the TV for something to watch while I cleaned my teeth and what do I get? An ad for dental implants. Look at them go: crunching into carrots and apples, attacking corn cobs in a way that put you in mind of electric typewriters, getting through the drumsticks and throwing them over their shoulders like Henry VIII — and kissing. Forcefully kissing. ‘Doing all the things they used to do. Dial 88-TOOTH’ … The ad gave the impression that these people had suddenly been readmitted to a party — an orgiastic banquet of immortality and joy. Seeing the pain of their exclusion now turned into such happiness, I found I had tears in my eyes. Then I realised that these people were just actors who had had perfectly good teeth all along.
This was the physical climax of my life. Or better say that it was the third-act climax. Next would come the fourth act (conventionally a quiet act). And then the fifth act. Two weeks ago I had straightened up from the last pages of The Information and gone into the bathroom and looked at a face containing three or four toothaches and TV-shaped with swellings and said out loud, ‘You’re not prepared for this. The master plan didn’t work. You’re not prepared.’ But I was prepared. Or at least I was ready. The master plan had always been as follows. Persist until you can persist no longer. Persist until it cannot be borne. Persist until anything could be borne more easily. It was a bad plan. A good plan would have been to keep on going to the dentist. It was a bad plan, but it had worked. My respect for the unconscious continues to grow. My unconscious mind might not have thought much of the plan either, but it worked round that and made its preparations. Really, the conscious mind can afford to give itself a rest. The big jobs are done by the unconscious. The unconscious does it all.
I was calm, I claim, but the Canadian geese were not calm. They had turned the whole back field into the departures section of an American airport — though any Americans, any humans, seeing a concourse as busy as this, would have turned on their heels and got back into the cab, adjusting their schedules with resignation and relief. The Canadian geese were thrilled, exalted, ecstatically communicative. For them, no check-in and seat-allocation. They waited in throbbing wedges and trembling phalanxes, their energy growing in an eagerness free from all impatience; they would choose when to go, needing no clearance from the tower. Their time was coming. And so was mine. I too was going to another place … Then, yes, now: they were away, not as one body but in peeling teams and relays, volleys, salvos, forming every shape a blade could make, swordpoint, arrowhead, smooth or jagged. At each vertex the alpha bird, powerfully yet subtly responsive, ducked and shouldered its way through the thermals — off to Boca Raton, to Terceira, to Santa Cruz, to Barcelona.
Were the birds auspicious (auspice: ‘the observation of bird-flight in divination’)? Tomorrow would mean the end of my mouth as I knew it, so there was some comfort to be had from the following line of thought. My mouth has done wrong, and deserves chastisement. My mouth has bad habits — it drinks and it smokes and it swears. Like the hands of Humbert Humbert, my mouth has hurt too much too many people. It has lied and falsely promised. It has kissed insincerely, incautiously, intemperately … At the party where I first exchanged whispers with Lamorna Seale the attraction was so immediate that we disappeared into some unattended shadows; and when I emerged into the light my girlfriend* burst into tears. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked, with defiant innocence — and with that mouth of mine, which was smothered in lipstick. (This was one of the few occasions when I rivalled my father, whose sexual recklessness, as we shall see, often approached the psychotic.) … My mouth talks too much. Only a week earlier my mouth had soured a New Yorker dinner at the Caprice in London by indulging in this ‘exchange’ with Salman Rushdie:
— So you like Beckett’s prose, do you? You like Beckett’s prose.
Having established earlier that he did like Beckett’s prose, Salman neglected to answer.
— Okay. Quote me some. Oh I see. You can’t.
No answer: only the extreme hooded-eye treatment. Richard Avedon would need a studio’s worth of lights and reflectors to rig up this expression on an unsuspecting Salman. At that moment, though, a passing waiter with an Instamatic could have easily bettered it. Nobody spoke. Not even Christopher Hitchens. And I really do hate Beckett’s prose: every sentence is an assault on my ear. So I said,
— Well I’ll do it for you. All you need is maximum ugliness and a lot of negatives. ‘Nor it the nothing never is.’ ‘Neither nowhere the nothing is not.’ ‘Non-nothing the never —’
Feeling my father in me now (as well as the couple of hundred glasses of wine consumed at the party we had all come on from), I settled down for a concerted goad and wheedle. By this stage Salman looked like a falcon staring through a venetian blind.
— ‘No neither nor never none not no —’
— Do you want to come outside?
End of evening.* My mouth wasn’t any good at knowing when to stop. And tomorrow the matter would be taken out of its hands. It didn’t have a choice.
That last weekend every meal was an awful adventure. Each time the uppers met the lowers they experienced a kind of electrical repulsion that made my head jolt. And sometimes, as I chewed, the whole top rank would shiver and shift, and give a resilient twang. Like when you’re driving round a corner and engage the indicator at the exact point where it is calibrated to self-correct, and the stick resists, and bristles with its own will.
I missed my boys.
The Tunnel
Monday morning on Madison Avenue. Before me on the coffee shop table: my notebook, and a pensive cappuccino. I was saying goodbye to my upper jaw, but my upper jaw wouldn’t have thanked me for any kind of farewell treat. A salami sub, perhaps. Or a steak sandwich. One for the road. Another thing I was declining to do with my teeth was to grit them. I was all through with gritting them, and it hurt too much anyway. The next hour was nothing: I was going to sail through it. How? Because I could look into my soul and see the courage, the strength, the simple heroism of a man who has taken a tremendous amount of Valium.* Oh, let other pens dwell on the symptoms of fear. And yet … and yet there was no hiding from the deeper moment of it. Really, I was saying goodbye to myself. I would be different hereafter. How different, I didn’t know. But different: a changed proposition.
I looked at my watch. One more sip of coffee, and a final cigarette in the street while I cautiously sucked on a spearmint Lifesaver. I gathered my things. As I headed for the door a svelte young man emerged from my peripheral vision and
tremulously asked,
— Are you Martin Amis?
Yes, I answered. And I thought that this would not feel strictly true for very much longer.
— Love your writing. Keep it up!
— Thank you very much.
If he has this book open before him, that gentle reader in the coffee-shop will now know how close I was to collapsing into his arms. But he did his bit: he did his bit to help me to the other side. In the significant elevator, my launch pad (press the button marked Barcelona), I said to myself: Yes, there is that: the writing. I am not an opera singer or a trombonist or an actor. My writing doesn’t need my mouth. And that part of me, which is the best of me — that won’t change. Eating will change, and so will smiling, talking and kissing (kissing), but writing won’t change … Here we are: the fifteenth floor … Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair.
Goodbye, I subvocalised as I climbed quickly into the moulded chaise longue.
Millie stands by with her secondary implements. The smocked shoulders of Mike Szabatura bend into their work. First the sour tweakings and piercings of the jabs, one after the other (twelve, fifteen?), until my eyes seem to be brimming with them. Next Mike Szabatura produces the deep plastic horseshoe and starts lining it with the potent adhesive. A civilised pause as we wait for things to solidify, things to liquefy.
Goodbye. Goodbye. This is goodbye. You hated me. I hated you. I loved you. Be gone. Stay! Goodbye. I love you, I hate you, I love you, I hate you. Goodbye.
The hands of Mike Szabatura, with the horseshoe now wedged against my palate, bear down, and tug. In the rhythmical creaking something gives and something catches. My right forefinger flickers up to indicate the right canine: unwilling to abjure its talent for pain, this tooth will fight to the very end. Another trio of injections. And Millie is close, with her rinser, her vacuum-cleaner, her masked face. A further San Andreas of wrenching and tearing — of ecstatic sundering.
— Wait. Your teeth are still there.
I cannot control my tongue which dances up to meet the dangling bridge. Something light drops on to it — a piece of severed root — and slithers off sideways. The aromatic hands of Mike Szabatura are now exerting decisive force. And it is gone — the gory remnant whisked from my sight like some terrible misadventure from the Delivery Room.
Clearly and firmly I said,
— I find I can talk.
Now (finally) the writer proposes to invite the reader into the bathroom. I have just received a backclap from the hand of Mike Szabatura, and I am still drowning in the sorrowful solicitude of Millie’s soft brown gaze, but I am also gliding and staggering through the office and past the reception desk and down a passage, where a mirror awaits me. I lock the door behind me and stand there in the dark. What would it be? ‘Nutcrackerish’, like Dorothy Wordsworth? Or the squidgy compression of an Albert Steptoe? Or just a lot more age, all at once? I torch the light.
The bathroom mirror, over recent years, had familiarised me with spectacles of convexity. It could happen without warning — without pain. On my way out to dinner I would step into the bathroom to brush my hair and be met by a face like a chaotic potato. I knew about the convex. But here was the concave. Nothing too dramatic: the face does not altogether collapse. I looked gormlessly lantern-jawed, as if I had an underbite (an underbite under what?). I recited the alphabet: all okay except f (a letter I badly needed). And I looked all right as I talked, so heavy and pendulous was my upper lip — from decades of not smiling. But now I opened my mouth to its full extent. The realisation, the recognition, was instantaneous.
I claim that a writer is three things: literary being, innocent, everyman. Well, this thought was all everyman. Not every man will have to see what I saw; but every man will think this if he does … Four or five years ago I overheard my mother saying to an old friend, ‘Oh I’ve lost all mine.’ And adding, very straight: ‘I know what I’m going to look like when I’m dead.’
This was not yet my case. Hopelessly compromised and contingent, my lower teeth were still there. But in the new space above them, impossible to misidentify, was a darkness, a void, a tunnel that led all the way to my extinction.
* Translated by James E. Irby.
* Translated by J. A. Underwood.
* The dedicatee of my second novel, Julie Kavanagh. I’m sorry, Julie; and I still owe you that letter.
* We didn’t go outside. The next afternoon (Salman and I had briskly made up over the phone that morning) I was to be found at Paddington Sports Club, working out on the quiz machine with my friends Steve and Chris. On the screen the following question appeared: Who wrote ‘The Old Devils’? The multiple-choice answers were: A: Kingsley Amis; B: William Golding; C: Salman Rushdie. Pressing the A, I pointed to the C and said, ‘I had a row with him last night. He offered me out.’ Steve said, ‘Did he? Well I hope you took him outside and gave him a fucking good hiding.’ Now now, I began, resuming the usual debate, though in more colloquial terms than I had recently used while arguing the point with George Steiner (who was inexplicably obtuse on this question). ‘What is it? “Taxpayers’ money”?’ (E.M. Forster said that ‘women and children’ was the ‘phrase that exempts the [English] male from sanity’. Now it’s ‘taxpayers’ money’.) ‘That’s money well spent. Or you’d like to see your country rolling over for a load of towelheads in …’ I noticed Chris: his silence, his immobility. He was tensely hunkered forward, giving me his shocked stare. Self-made tycoon, onetime national judo champ, ex-bouncer: a great cube of muscular mass. Over the years I have worked on Chris and the Rushdie question, telling him to abandon his stock response and live up to his own IQ. I think I have nearly succeeded. But what he said then was: ‘Offered you out? I wish he’d fucking offered me out.’
* Advice. Take a near-fatal dose on rising, of course. But take a near-fatal dose the night before, in addition. Then numbness descends on numbness. Then you are two distances away from your reality.
Letter from Home
108, Maida Vale,
W.9.
Maida Vale 7474,
12.2.68.
Dearest Dad and Jane,
Thanks for your letter, Jane: I must say that Acapulco sounds eminently nasty — did you hire a crack squad of experts to map out a visit abroad which would embrace as many horrible places as possible? What I can’t understand, you see, is why you didn’t come straight back when the term ended. Did you for one minute fancy that Mexico was going to be nice? I’m afraid that hearing about Nashville in all its horror has indoctrinated me with a virulent xenophobia of which even the exacting Monkey would be proud.
It’s good about the Latin,* is it not? Another thing that cheeky little goblin got right — he told me three weeks before the exams to do nothing else but Latin, so, the syllabus having been completed within this period of time, I passed. A pleasing extra is that the awful little Hun called Schicht, with whom I took the Latin exam, who got up after three quarters of an hour saying ‘Interesting … interesting’, failed. The Hobbiegobbie himself has fixed me up with lessons once a week in Brighton. I go to an old shag called Mr Bethell who, I should say, is experiencing puberty for the second, or possibly the third time. This old dullard can speak seventeen languages fluently, including Latin, Ancient Greek, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, Romney [sic], and the language of the tinkers. He says things like ‘There are 140 first conjugation deponent verbs’: I say ‘Well I never’ and he says ‘They are Venor, Conor’ and so on and on and on. He is also a high-priest of B.O. well versed in its most secret arts, and master of the most esoteric precepts of his craft. He still enjoys frequent use of his limbs although they taper off, after the second joint, to gangrenous suppurating threads. But we do get through a large amount of work each week.
Working for Col is great fun — one of my more demanding duties is winning money off him at backgammon. We play an average of about 10 games every day and are fairly evenly matched so there are no vast sums of money changing hands. However there
was a game, wrought with much splendour, which was an eight shilling game in which I scored a backgammon. Col was so depressed that, after putting a lightbulb down the wastemaster,* he went to bed (6 p.m.). But 108 life is largely tragedy-free at the moment apart from the fact that Sarg† is being [given] a dull time by a girl he seems to be rather keen on.
On to the literary syndrome (yawn). I’ve decided that translations really must be a good idea after reading ‘Exile’s Letter’ by Ezra Pound, who, I admit, isn’t often awfully edifying. The poem itself is so very fine that it doesn’t matter what Rhaiku meant, although, on the other hand, I don’t purport to know anything about the original poem itself. Of course there are a myriad modes of appreciating Art.
Well, see you in five weeks then. Alright? Right. Goodnight. (Alan Freeman’s Catch Phrase).*
Lots of love then, and write soon,
Mart.
By the way, I am reading ‘The Outsider’ by Albert Camus (pronounced: Albong Camwow).
* Osric surprisingly and narrowly passed the necessary O-level. But Latin would be needed again if he got into Oxford, so Osric thought he had better defend it.
* My editor at Cape, Dan Franklin, has queried this point. ‘Is “putting a lightbulb down the wastemaster” slang for having a stiff drink?’ Which made me think of that bit in KA’s The Green Man (1969), where a character who really is about to visit the Bishop makes another character wonder if visiting the bishop is ‘a family euphemism for excretion’. Dan took the lightbulb stuff ‘literally’. But then so did Colin. Putting a lightbulb down the wastemaster was his most dependable pick-me-up.
† Sargy Mann, the painter, who lived with the Amis/Howards for many years.
* Freeman was the wall-eyed DJ on Thank Your Lucky Stars.
Failures of Tolerance
Jacob, aged six, said reflectively,