Inside Story Read online

  ALSO BY MARTIN AMIS

  FICTION

  The Rachel Papers

  Dead Babies

  Success

  Other People

  Money

  Einstein’s Monsters: Stories

  London Fields

  Time’s Arrow

  The Information

  Night Train

  Heavy Water: 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

  The Rub of Time

  EDITOR

  Philip Larkin: Selected Poems

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2020 by Martin Amis

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2020.

  www.aaknopf.com

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

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

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Curtis Brown, Ltd.: Excerpt from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” and “September 1, 1939” from Another Time by W.H. Auden, copyright © 1940 by W.H. Auden, copyright renewed 1967 by W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  Faber & Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “Jerusalem” from Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968-2011 by James Fenton, copyright © James Fenton. Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

  Faber & Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Excerpts from “Aubade,” “Annus Mirabilis,” “This Be the Verse,” “The Trees,” “To the Sea,” “Vers de Société,” “Next, Please,” “Going, Going,” “Love Again,” “High Windows,” “Self’s the Man,” “Dockery and Son,” “The Mower,” and “The View” from The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin, copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

  Ebook ISBN 9780593318300

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Amis, Martin, author.

  Title: Inside story : a novel / Martin Amis.

  Description: First American edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020021012 (print) | LCCN 2020021013 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780593318294 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593318300 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Autobiographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6051.M5 I57 2020 (print) | LCC PR6051.M5 (ebook) |

  DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021012

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021013

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Inside story / Martin Amis.

  Names: Amis, Martin, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200228269 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200229834 | ISBN 9780735281301 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735281318 (EPUB)

  Subjects: LCSH: Amis, Martin—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6051.M58 I57 2020 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph by Geraint Lewis /Alamy

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  To Isabel Elena Fonseca

  Contents

  Preludial

  PART I

  1 | Ethics and Morals…The American eagle

  Guideline: Things Fiction Can’t Do

  2 | Phoebe: The Business…So I went round there

  Guideline: The Novel Moves On

  3 | Jerusalem…Bitter furies of complexity

  Guideline: Literature and Violence

  4 | The Night of Shame…She’s scaring me, Hitch

  Transitional: The Sources of the Being

  PART II

  1 | France in the Time of Iraq 1: Anti-américain

  2 | September 11 1: The day after

  3 | September 11 2: The day before the day after

  4 | September 11 3: The days after the day after

  5 | France in the Time of Iraq 2: Shock and Awe

  Interludial: Memos to my reader, and ‘Oktober’

  PART III—DISSOLUTIONS: ANTEPENULTIMATE

  1 | The Shadow-Line…Nobodaddy

  2 | Hitchens Goes to Houston…He’s an ox

  3 | Politics and the Bedroom…Not left wing enough

  4 | Hitchens Stays On in Houston…The synchrotron

  5 | And say why it never worked for me…Invidia

  PART IV—PENULTIMATE

  Preamble: The Fire on New Year’s Eve

  1 | Christopher: Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day

  How to Write: The Mind’s Ear

  2 | Saul: Idlewild

  How to Write: Decorum

  3 | Philip: The Love of His Life

  How to Write: Impersonal Forces

  4 | Beelzebub

  How to Write: The Uses of Variety

  5 | London: Phoebe at Seventy-Five

  PART V—ULTIMATE: DOING THE DYING

  ‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped’

  The Poet: December 1985

  The Novelist: April 2005

  The Essayist: December 2011

  Postludial

  Afterthought: Masada and the Dead Sea

  Addendum: Elizabeth Jane Howard

  Illustration Credits

  Preludial

  Welcome! Do step on in – this is a pleasure and a privilege. Let me help you with that. I’ll just take your coat and hang it up here (oh, and incidentally that’s the way to the bathroom). Sit on the sofa, why don’t you – then you can control your distance from the fire.

  Now what would you like? Whisky? Common sense, in this weather. And I anticipated, I divined your needs…A blend or a malt? Macallan’s? The 12 Years Old or the 18? How do you like it – with soda, with ice? And I’ll bring in a tray of snacks. To keep you going until dinner.

  …There. Happy 2016!

  My wife Elena will be back around seven-thirty. And Inez will be joining us. That’s right – stressed on the second syllable. She’ll turn seventeen in June. We’ve been pared down to just the one child for now. Eliza, her slightly older sister – Eliza’s been doing her gap year in London, which after all is her home town (she was born there. As was Inez). Anyway, it so happens that Eliza was planning a visit – and she’s just touched down at JFK. So it’ll be the five of us.

  Elena and I, we’re not there yet, but the next phase in our lives is already in plain view. I mean Empty Nest…Ther
e are only about half a dozen real turning points in an average span, and Empty Nest looks to me like one of them. And you know, I’m not sure how worried I ought to be about it.

  Several contemporaries of ours, having watched their last fledgling flutter off into the distance, succumbed within minutes to passionate nervous breakdowns. And at the very least my wife and I will start to feel like that couple in Pnin, all alone in a big and draughty old house that ‘now seemed to hang about them like the flabby skin and flapping clothes of some fool who had gone and lost a third of his weight’…That’s Nabokov (one of my heroes), writing in 1953.

  * * *

  ∗

  Now Vladimir Nabokov – he had every right and warrant to attempt an autobiographical novel. His life was not ‘stranger than fiction’ (that phrase is very close to meaningless), but it was wildly eventful, and shot through with geohistorical glamour. You escape from Bolshevik Russia, and seek sanctuary in Weimar Berlin; you escape from Nazi Germany, and seek sanctuary in France, which Hitler promptly invades and occupies; you escape from the Wehrmacht, and seek – and find – sanctuary in America (‘sanctuary’ in those days being part of the American definition). No, Nabokov was a very rare case: a writer to whom things actually happened.

  By the way I warn you that I’ll have a few things to say about Hitler in these pages, and about Stalin. When I was born, in 1949, the Little Moustache had been dead for four years and the Big Moustache (still called ‘Uncle Joe’ in our household Daily Mirror) had four years to live. I’ve written two books about Hitler and two books about Stalin, so I’ve already spent about eight years in their company. But there’s no escaping from either of them, I find.

  * * *

  —————

  I never had the – no doubt terrifying – pleasure of meeting VN himself, but I had a memorable day with his widow, Véra, beautiful, goldenskinned, and Jewish, it is relevant to add; and I got to know his son, Dmitri Vladimirovich (a flamboyant prodigy and prodigal). It was a double sadness to me when Dmitri died, without issue, three or four years ago. Dmitri was the Nabokovs’ only child – born in Berlin in 1934, and officially a Mischling, or ‘half-breed’…At lunch, in Montreux, Switzerland, Véra and Dmitri were very fond and sweet with one another. There’ll be more about them later, in the section called ‘Oktober’ (it starts on this page). I sent Véra a photo of my first son, and received a charming reply which of course I’ve lost…

  In general? Oh, I’m a ridiculously lax and indulgent parent – as my children have had occasion to point out to me. ‘You’re a very good father, Daddy,’ Eliza confided at the age of eight or nine, on a day when I was in sole charge: ‘Mummy’s a very good mother too. Though sometimes she can be just a little bit strict.’

  Her meaning was clear. I’m incapable of embodying strictness, let alone enforcing it. You need genuine anger for that, and anger is something I almost never feel. I tried being an angry father, but just once and only for six or seven seconds. Not with my daughters but with my sons, Nat and Gus (who are now about thirty). One day – when they too were eight or nine – their mother, my first wife, Julia, came to my study in despair and said, ‘They’re being unusually impossible. I’ve tried everything. Now you go in there!’ Now you go in there, the suggestion was, and apply some masculine fire.

  So I dutifully shouldered my way into their room and said in a raised voice,

  ‘Right. What the hell is all this?’

  ‘…Oh,’ said Nat, with a languid lift of his eyebrows. ‘Taste the wrath of Daddy.’

  And that was that as far as anger was concerned.

  The thing is I just don’t hold with it – anger. The Seven Deadly Sins ought to be revised and updated, but for now we should always remember that Anger rightly belongs in the classic septet. With anger – cui bono? Pity anger; pity those who radiate it as well as those on the other end of it. Anger: from Old Norse, angre ‘vex’, angr ‘grief’. Yes – grief. Anger is almost as transparently self-punitive as Envy.

  In the parenting sphere I am innocent of anger, but the deadly sin I do own up to is Sloth – moral sloth. Giving the mother more to do…I warned Elena about this, slightly pleadingly (after all I was fifty by the time Inez was born). I said, ‘I’m going to be an emeritus parent’ (i.e., ‘retired but allowed to retain the title as an honour’). So in general a slothful father, though I’m quick – and eager and grateful – to accept the honour of it.

  Three years ago I gave a talk at my middle daughter’s school, here in Brooklyn, at St Ann’s (where Inez also goes). Eliza was fifteen.

  ‘This could be embarrassing, Dad,’ said Gus (son number two), as I prepared to describe the occasion, and his older brother Nat said, ‘Definitely. Plenty of room for embarrassment here.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘But it wasn’t embarrassing. Eliza wasn’t embarrassed. And I can prove it. Listen.’

  The auditorium the school chose was an adjacent or maybe an adjoining house of worship – a real church (Protestant), with polished hardwood and stained glass. I stood at the pulpit facing a large congregation of humid young faces (I think attendance was compulsory for all in the ninth grade); these faces had an air of ‘sensitive expectancy’ (as Lawrence says of Gudrun and Ursula in the opening pages of Women in Love) when I tapped the microphone and greeted them and introduced myself, and asked: ‘Now. How many of you have ever thought of being a writer?’ And I’ll tell you the number of hands that went up in just a minute. I continued,

  ‘Well it so happens that you of all people know almost exactly what it’s like – to be a writer. You’re in your early-middle teens. The age when you come into a new level of self-awareness. Or a new level of self-communion. It’s as if you hear a voice, which is you but doesn’t sound like you. Not quite – it isn’t what you’ve been used to, it sounds more articulate and discerning, more thoughtful and also more playful, more critical (and self-critical) and also more generous and forgiving. You like this advanced voice, and to maintain it you find yourself writing poems, you keep a diary perhaps, you start to fill a notebook. In welcome solitude you moon over your thoughts and feelings, and sometimes you moon over the thoughts and feelings of others. In solitude.

  ‘That’s the writer’s life. The aspiration starts now, at around fifteen, and if you become a writer your life never really changes. I’m still doing it half a century later, all day long. Writers are stalled adolescents, but contentedly stalled; they enjoy their house arrest…To you the world seems strange: the adult world that you’re now contemplating, with inevitable anxiety but still from a fairly safe distance. Like the stories Othello tells Desdemona, the stories that won her heart, the adult world seems “strange, passing strange”; it also seems “pitiful, wondrous pitiful”. A writer never moves on from that premise. Don’t forget that the adolescent is still a child; and a child sees things without presuppositions, and unreassured by experience.’

  In closing I suggested that literature essentially concerned itself with love and with death. I didn’t elaborate. At fifteen, what do you know about love, about erotic love? At fifteen, what do you know about death? You know that it happens to gerbils and budgies; maybe you know already that it happens to older relatives, including your parents’ parents. But you don’t yet know that it’s going to happen to you, too, and you won’t know for another thirty years. And not for another thirty will you personally face the really hard problem; only then will you be required to assume the most difficult position…

  ‘And why are you sure’, asked Nat in due course, ‘that Eliza wasn’t embarrassed?’

  ‘Yeah, Dad,’ asked Gus, ‘and how can you prove it?’

  I said, ‘Because when it came to question time, Eliza wasn’t the first to speak but she wasn’t the last. She did speak, clearly and sensibly…So she didn’t disown me. She owned me, I’m proud to say. She claimed me, I’m proud to say, as her own.’

  Oh, and when
I asked my listeners how many of them had ever thought about being a writer? What proportion raised their hands? At least two-thirds. Making me suspect, for the first time ever, that the urge to write is almost universal. As it would be, wouldn’t it, don’t you think? How else can you begin to come to terms with the fact of your existence on Earth?

  * * *

  —————

  Now you’re a close reader, and you’re still very young. That in itself would mean that you too have thought about being a writer. And perhaps you have a work in progress? It’s a sensitive subject, and it deserves to be sensitive. Novels, especially, are sensitive, because you’re exposing who you really are. No other written form does this, not even a Collected Poems and certainly not an autobiography or even an impressionistic memoir like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. If you’ve read my novels, you already know absolutely everything about me. So this book is just another instalment, and detail is often welcome…

  My father Kingsley had a nice introductory formula on sensitive subjects. It was: ‘Talk about it as much as you like or as little as you like.’ Very civilised, that, and yes, very sensitive. Perhaps you’ll want to talk about your stuff, perhaps you won’t. But you needn’t feel shy. You said in your remarkably pithy note, I don’t want this to be about me. Well I don’t want this to be about me either; but that’s my task.

  In any case I’ll be giving you some good tips about technique – for instance, about how to compose a sentence that will please the reader’s ear. But you should take any advice I might give you very lightly. Take all advice about writing very lightly. It’s expected of you. Writers must find their own way to their own voice.

  * * *

  —————

  I attempted this book more than a decade ago. And I failed. At that point it was provisionally and pretentiously entitled Life (and coyly subtitled A Novel). One weekend, in Uruguay in 2005, I strong-armed myself into reading the whole thing, from the first word to the last: there were about 100,000 of them. And Life was dead.