The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump Read online

  Also by Martin Amis

  FICTION

  The Rachel Papers

  Dead Babies

  Success

  Other People

  Money

  Einstein’s Monsters

  London Fields

  Time’s Arrow

  The Information

  Night Train

  Heavy Water and Other Stories

  Yellow Dog

  House of Meetings

  The Pregnant Widow

  Lionel Asbo

  The Zone of Interest

  NONFICTION

  Invasion of the Space Invaders

  The Moronic Inferno

  Visiting Mrs. Nabokov

  Experience

  The War Against Cliché

  Koba the Dread

  The Second Plane

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Martin Amis

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2017.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This page constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Amis, Martin.

  Title: The rub of time : Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: essays and reportage, 1994–2017 / by Martin Amis.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. | “This is a Borzoi book” | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017017321 | ISBN 9781400044535 (hardcover) ISBN 9780525520252 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Reportage literature, American. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading.

  Classification: LCC PR6051.M5 A6 2018 | DDC 824/.914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017017321

  Ebook ISBN 9780525520252

  Cover photograph by Ekko von Schwichow

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v5.2

  ep

  To my grandchildren Isaac and Eleanor

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Martin Amis

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  By Way of an Introduction

  He’s Leaving Home

  Twin Peaks 1

  Vladimir Nabokov and the Problem from Hell

  Saul Bellow, as Opposed to Henry James

  Politics 1

  The Republican Party in 2011: Iowa

  The Republican Party in 2012: Tampa, Florida

  The Republican Party in 2016: Trump

  Literature 1

  Philip Larkin: His Work and Life

  Larkin’s Letters to Monica

  Iris Murdoch: Age Will Win

  The House of Windsor

  Princess Diana: A Mirror, Not a Lamp

  The Queen’s Speech, the Queen’s Heart

  More Personal 1

  You Ask the Questions 1

  The Fourth Estate and the Puzzle of Heredity

  On the Road: The Multicity Book Tour

  The King’s English

  Twin Peaks 2

  Bellow’s Lettres

  Nabokov’s Natural Selection

  Americana (Stepping Westward)

  Losing in Las Vegas

  Travolta’s Second Act

  In Pornoland: Pussies Are Bullshit

  Literature 2

  Don DeLillo: Laureate of Terror

  J. G. Ballard: From Outer Space to Inner Space

  Early Ballard: The Drowned World

  The Shock of the New: A Clockwork Orange Turns Fifty

  Sport

  Three Stabs at Tennis

  The Champions League Final, 1999

  In Search of Dieguito Maradona

  On the Court: My Beautiful Game

  More Personal 2

  Deciding to Write Time’s Arrow

  Marty and Nick Jr. Sail to America

  You Ask the Questions 2

  Politics 2

  Ivan Is Introduced to the USSR: All Together Now

  Is Terrorism “About Religion”?

  In Memory of Neda Soltan, 1983–2009: Iran

  The Crippled Murderers of Cali, Colombia

  Literature 3

  Philip Roth Finds Himself

  Roth the Elder: A Moralistic Investigation

  John Updike’s Farewell Notes

  Rabbit Angstrom Confronts Obamacare

  Jane Austen and the Dream Factory

  More Personal 3

  Christopher Hitchens

  Politics 3

  On Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition

  President Trump Orates in Ohio

  Twin Peaks 3

  Bellow: Avoiding the Void

  Véra and Vladimir: Letters to Véra

  Permissions

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  THE NATURAL SIN OF LANGUAGE

  In the process of its composition, a lyric poem or a very short short story can reach the point where it ceases to be capable of improvement. Anything longer than a couple of pages—as John Updike will later remind us, in a phrase of T. S. Eliot’s—will soon succumb to “the natural sin of language,” and will demand much concentrated work. By the natural “sin” of language I take it that Eliot is referring (a) to its indocility (how it constantly and writhingly resists even the most practiced hands) and (b) to its promiscuity: in nearly all of its dealings language is as indiscriminate as currency, and gathers much incidental grit and lint and sweat.

  Poets are familiar with the sudden surmise that their revisions had better be discontinued (and quickly, too), that their so-called improvements are starting to do real harm. Even the novelist shares this fear: you are nervously tampering with an inspiration that is going dead on you. Northrop Frye, a literary philosopher-king to whom I owe fealty, said that the begetter of a poem or a novel is more like a midwife than a mother: the aim is to get the child into the world with as little damage as possible—and if the creature is alive it will scream to be liberated from “the navel strings and feeding tubes of the ego.”

  Discursive prose, on the other hand (essays and reportage of the kind represented between these covers), cannot be cleansed of the ego, and is in any case limitlessly improvable. So I have done some cutting, quite a bit of adding (footnotes, postscripts), a lot of elaborating, and a great deal of polishing. Very often I am simply trying to make myself clearer, less ambiguous, and more precise—but not more prescient (I haven’t massaged my political prophecies, which tend, as is usual with such things, to be instantly dismayed by events). There are some repetitions and duplications; I have let them stand, because I assume that most readers will pick and choose along the way in accordance with their own enthusiasms (only the reviewer, the proofreader, and of course the author will ever be obliged to read the whole thing straight through). Also, rather to my surprise, I have done some bowdlerizing, making war not against the “improper or offensive” so much as against the overcolloquial: those turns of phrase that seem shop-soiled almost as soon as they are committed to paper. The natural sin of language is cumulative and unavoidable; but we can at least expel the frailties of mere transience.

  AND MY THANKS TO…

  First, to my friend of forty-five years, Tina Brow
n, who edited me at The New Yorker, Talk, and Newsweek (at The New Yorker I also relied on Bill Buford, Deborah Treisman, and Giles Harvey). To Craig Raine, my pal and onetime tutor, at Arete. To Sam Tannenhaus and Pamela Paul at The New York Times Book Review. To Eric Chotiner at The New Republic, and to Giles Harvey, again, after he moved to Harper’s. To Lisa Allardice and also Ian Katz at The Guardian. To David Horspool and Oliver Ready at the TLS. To Eben Shapiro and Lisa Kalis at The Wall Street Journal. To Aimée Bell and Walter Owen at Vanity Fair. I have always been very lucky in my editorial helpmates, including the fact-checkers, grammarians, spelling inspectors, redactors, and subredactors. Not reflexively impatient with advice, I have never been tempted to use Clive James’s (in fact unspoken) rebuke: “Listen. If I wrote like that, I’d be you.” And of course salutations to my hardback editor-publishers, Dan Franklin at Cape and Gary Fisketjon at Knopf. My thanks to you all.

  I would like to pay special tribute to Bobby Baird, the freelance editor (currently at Esquire, in which capacity he squired me to Youngstown, Ohio) who took a mass of clippings, typescripts, attachments, and cyber-litter and turned it into a book. I am as low-tech as it is possible to be, and Bobby loomed in my eyes like the Creator—like him who fashioned a world out of chaos. In the lines of Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid, Bobby “forbade the winds / To use the air as they pleased” and “educated” the “rivers / To observe their banks.”

  Brooklyn, October 2016

  By Way of an Introduction

  He’s Leaving Home

  Once upon a time, in a kingdom called England, literary fiction was an obscure and blameless pursuit. It was more respectable than angelology, true, and more esteemed than the study of phosphorescent mold; but it was without question a minority-interest pursuit.

  In 1972, I submitted my first novel: I typed it out on a secondhand Olivetti and sent it in from the subeditorial office I shared at The Times Literary Supplement. The print run was one thousand (and the advance was £250). It was published, and reviewed, and that was that. There was no launch party and no book tour; there were no interviews, no profiles, no photo shoots, no signings, no readings, no panels, no onstage conversations, no Woodstocks of the Mind in Hay-on-Wye, in Toledo, in Mantova, in Parati, in Cartagena, in Jaipur, in Dubai; and there was no radio and no television. The same went for my second novel (1975) and my third (1978). By the time of my fourth novel (1981), nearly all the collateral activities were in place, and writers, in effect, had been transferred from vanity press to Vanity Fair.

  What happened in the interim? We can safely say that as the 1970s became the 1980s there was no spontaneous flowering of enthusiasm for the psychological nuance, the artful simile, and the curlicued sentence. The phenomenon, as I now see it, was entirely media-borne. To put it crudely, the newspapers had been getting fatter and fatter (first the Sundays, then the Saturdays, then all the days in between), and what filled these extra pages was not additional news but additional features. And the featurists were running out of people to write about—running out of alcoholic actors, ne’er-do-well royals, depressive comedians, jailed rock stars, defecting ballet dancers, reclusive film directors, hysterical fashion models, indigent marquises, adulterous golfers, wife-beating footballers, and rapist boxers. The dragnet went on widening until journalists, often to their patent dismay, were writing about writers: literary writers.

  This modest and perhaps temporary change in status involved a number of costs and benefits. A storyteller is nothing without a listener, and the novelists started getting what they can’t help but covet: not more sales necessarily, but more readers. And it was gratifying to find that many people were indeed quite intrigued by the business of creating fiction: to prove the point, one need only adduce the fact that every last acre of the planet is now the scene of a boisterous literary festival. With its interplay of the conscious and the unconscious, the novel involves a process that no writers, and no critics, really understand. Nor can they quite see why it arouses such curiosity. (“Do you write in longhand?” “How hard do you press on the paper?”) All the same, as J. G. Ballard once said, readers and listeners “are your supporters—urging on this one-man team.” They release you from your habitual solitude, and they give you heart. So far, so good: these are the benefits. Now we come to the costs, which, I suppose, are the usual costs of conspicuousness.

  Needless to say, the enlarging and emboldening of the mass-communications sector was not confined to the United Kingdom. And “visibility,” as Americans call it, was no doubt granted to writers in all the advanced democracies—with variations determined by national character. In my home country, the situation is, as always, paradoxical. Despite the existence of a literary tradition of unparalleled magnificence (presided over by the world’s only obvious authorial divinity), writers are regarded with a studied skepticism—not by the English public, but by the English commentariat. It sometimes seems that a curious circularity is at work. If it is true that writers owe their ascendancy to the media, then the media has promoted the very people that irritate them most: a crowd of pretentious—and by now quite prosperous—egomaniacs. When writers complain about this, or about anything else, they are accused of self-pity (“celebrity whinge”). But the unspoken gravamen is not self-pity. It is ingratitude.

  Nor should we neglect a profound peculiarity of fiction and the column inches that attend it: a fortuitous consanguinity. The appraisal of an exhibition does not involve the use of an easel and a palette; the appraisal of a ballet does not involve the use of a pair of slippers and a tutu. And the same goes for all but one of the written arts: you don’t review poetry by writing verse (unless you’re a jerk), and you don’t review plays by writing dialogue (unless you’re a jerk); novels, though, come in the form of prose narrative—and so does journalism. This odd affinity causes no great tension in other countries, but it sits less well, perhaps, with certain traits of the Albionic Fourth Estate—emulousness, a kind of cruising belligerence, and an instinctive proprietoriality.

  Conspicuous persons, in my motherland, are most seriously advised to lead private lives denuded of all color and complication. They should also, if they are prudent, have as little as possible to do with America—seen as the world HQ of arrogance and glitz. When I and my wife, who is a New Yorker, entrained the epic project of moving house, from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, I took every public opportunity to make it clear that our reasons for doing so were exclusively personal and familial, and had nothing to do with any supposed dissatisfaction with England or the English people (whom, as I truthfully stressed, I have always admired for their tolerance, generosity, and wit). Backed up by lavish misquotes together with satirical impersonations (sham interviews and the like), the impression given was that I was leaving because of a vicious hatred of my native land and because I could no longer endure the well-aimed barbs of patriotic journalists.

  “I wish I weren’t English”: of all the fake tags affixed to my name, this is the one I greet with the deepest moan of inanition. I suggest that the remark—and its equivalent in any language or any alphabet—is unutterable by anyone whose IQ reaches double figures. “I wish I weren’t North Korean” might make a bit of sense, assuming the existence of a North Korean sufficiently well informed and intrepid to give voice to it. Otherwise and elsewhere, the sentiment is inconceivably null. And for a writer to say it of England—the country of Dickens, George Eliot, Blake, Milton, and, yes, William Shakespeare—isn’t even perverse. It is merely twee.

  The term “American exceptionalism” was coined in 1929 by none other than Josef Stalin, who condemned it as a “heresy” (he meant that America, like everywhere else, was subject to the iron laws of Karl Marx). If that much-mocked notion still means anything, we should apply it to America’s exceptionally hospitable attitude to outsiders (and America has certainly been exceptionally hospitable to me and my family). All friends of the Stars and Stripes are pained to see that this unique and noble tradition is now under thre
at, and from all sides; but America remains, definingly, an immigrant society, vast and formless; writers have always occupied an unresented place in it, because everyone subliminally understood that writers would play a part in construing its protean immensity. Remarkably, the “American Century” (to take another semi-wowserism) is due to last exactly that long—with China scheduled for prepotence in about 2045. The role of the writers, for the time being, is at least clear enough. They will be taking America’s temperature, and tenderly checking its pulse, as the New World follows the old country down the long road of decline.

  The New Republic 2012

  Twin Peaks 1

  Vladimir Nabokov and the Problem from Hell

  Vladimir Nabokov The Original of Laura

  Language leads a double life—and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you negotiate the public prints, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs (LOOK LEFT), and so on and so forth. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form—as the stuff of patterned artifice. Most writers, I think, would want to go along with Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) when he reminisced in 1974: