— You’ve just bought the car and that’s good. Now you —
— I wish they wouldn’t keep sending me these bills.
— For the car.
— They keep sending me these bills.
— You can afford them. Now you should —
— I wish they wouldn’t keep on sending me all these bills.
He understood the inhibition perfectly, of course. And it was altogether characteristic of him (of him, of his time, of his place) that having identified the difficulty he did nothing to relieve it. Again, he just hugged it to him. These are the first and last stanzas of the sixteen-line poem ‘Money’ (1973):
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
’Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques’ …
I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.*
‘Do you feel you could have had a much happier life?’ an interviewer once asked him. And he answered, ‘Not without being someone else.’ You should spend more, Philip. He didn’t, naturally. Someone else would have had to get the goods and the sex. But Larkin did get the poems.
One morning I looked on, through the stair banisters, as Larkin readied himself to walk out into the Swansea rain. Tall beyond utility, bespectacled, prematurely and almost ideally bald, with the beginnings of heaviness in his movements, he sighingly marshalled his mack, his scarf, his hat. Everything about him expressed stoicism (he didn’t have a choice) and the opposite of ease … Famously, Larkin hated or professed to hate children† and of course never fathered any.* I used to wonder, when I began to read him, if it was my brother and me who put him off. When I was a child Larkin was mythologised for me, at home, as a mock-epic miser and misanthrope. But I trust my sense of him then. Whenever our eyes met and held for a moment he looked on me gently, and I felt, as well as pleasure and reassurance, a peculiarly childish disappointment. Because he was supposed to be a red squirrel, an exotic, and here he was being kind and grey.
So life started happening to Philip, the novelist, and to Kingsley, the poet, as they then saw themselves in 1942. The correspondence remained intense into the middle of the next decade. After Lucky Jim it starts to thin and cool. I don’t imagine that Larkin coveted his friend’s wife and three children;† but in his remote and martyred imaginings it seemed that Kingsley had disappeared, past all recall, into a carwash of goods and sex — and ‘all I never had’. From Kingsley’s end of it, I sense, there is an impatient awareness of this fantasy and a certain defiance in relishing such vulgar triumphs as come his way; and also a vaguer agenda, having to do with Larkin’s emotional parsimony, his earlier retreat from full fraternal love. As you follow the thinning, cooling trail of the letters you begin to feel that life has scored a dreary victory here, coarsely skewing an intricate alignment.
Then, eventually, life thins and cools. The children grow up, the wives leave (or reconfigure); the world is not so much with us … And Larkin is still there, up in Hull, and the neglected intimacy is still there, awaiting reconnection. When in KA’s Letters you see ‘Dear Philip’ (and when, in Larkin’s, you see ‘Dear Kingsley’), then you ready yourself for a different order of disclosure: something much closer in. It is of course delightful, as the intimacy is taken up again, to see the reappearance of familiar endearments, long-disused (Larkin: ‘Well, dalling, I cried at the end, ’cos that’s just how I feel about you’), delightful, too, to see the rejuvenation of the juvenile in their thrashed jokes and obscene misspellings and yelping capitalisations. But what stays with you is the sense that the two of them, in age, are at last transparent to each other. They are finally equal, equal before God and a godless death, and also physically and — for the first time — sexually equal.* It is now very terrible to watch Larkin falling from this plateau and accelerating towards extinction. When he dies, in 1985, the narrative of Kingsley’s Letters takes on a stunned and deafened feel. It seems like more than the loss of a friend and a poet, he writes to Robert Conquest. What? ‘A presence?’ The remaining decade of my father’s life, as seen here, could almost be considered detachable, like an addendum. As for Larkin’s Letters, the volume ends with a dictated letter signed in his absence (he is going in for ‘the big one’), which itself ends:
I must mention Sally’s* letter and photograph which arrived this morning. Of course they deserve a separate acknowledgement, and may one day get one. I am so glad to see strong resemblances in her to Hilly, who is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen without being in the least pretty (I am sure you know what I mean, and I hope she will too).†
Well, the tape draws to an end; think of me packing up my pyjamas and shaving things for today’s ordeal, and hope all goes well. I really feel this year has been more than I deserve; I suppose it’s all come at once, instead of being spread out as with most people.
You will excuse the absence of the usual valediction,
Yours ever,
Philip
Fuck Off — 1
It was said that I turned away. It was said that I took a friendship lightly — that I took friendship lightly.
I have before me Julian Barnes’s letter of 12 January 1995. Technically this piece of paper is my property, but the text is Julian’s copyright. I won’t quote from it, except to say that its last phrase is a well-known colloquialism. That phrase consists of two words. The words consist of seven letters. Three of them are fs.
The hit-him-again-Dai treatment I was getting in the press (‘Martin Amis in Greed Storm’)* over The Information, still unpublished, still unfinished, seemed to me ipso facto evidence that the negotiation had already taken the wrong turning. So finally I went all in with my American agent, Wylie, and this meant breaking with my English agent of twenty-three years, Pat Kavanagh. The second half of that process I found decisively dismal (in spite of rich and recent experience of more intimate separations), making me feel that such griefs do their work by straightforward accumulation, that a limit could be reached, and that I had suddenly reached mine. Still, years earlier my father, too, had broken with Pat’s agency, and no friendships had been lost. That professional rupture had gone unremarked, though, and mine was far more painfully public, magnifying everything, distorting everything …
Now Julian, of course, was and is married to Pat Kavanagh, and I knew him to be an uxorious man. But as I recognised his handwriting, over breakfast on the morning of the thirteenth, I found myself expecting him to say that he knew the difference between church and state, and that the two would go on being separate in his mind. Then I read the letter.
My first response was guilt that I had reduced him to writing something so blunderingly ugly. And so self-defeating, too. Christ, I thought: he never liked me anyway! The letter made me question the substance, let alone the value, of the friendship it cancelled. That may sound implausibly neat, I realise. And the feeling didn’t last. As the reader will be exhaustively aware, I had more proximate worries — and Julian listed the ones he knew about, and in no sympathetic spirit, either. January 13 was in fact a good day, an epochal day. That letter was in my pocket while I sat talking equably with my ex-wife for the first time in twenty months. Then in the evening I spent an hour with it and wrote my reply.
The last time I lost a friend was in childhood. Since then I have suffered temporary rifts but no excommunications. In this case, as is the way of such things, I was losing two friends, not one. The letter I wrote was conciliatory. And I did try to revive the friendship, about a year later, after signs of a thaw. His rebuff was civil. Its phrasing tended to confirm my feeling that all this went back a lot further than 1995.
What am I doing? Setting the record straight?* As Christopher Hitchens learned when he signed the house managers
’ affidavit (contradicting the sworn testimony of presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal), the sacrifice of a friendship is a terrible affront to the Sauls and Jonathans of the media (each to each an Achilles, a Patroclus). The slant they’ll always give it is that the sacrifice was, at once, utterly calculating and utterly blithe. And never regretted. Whereas in the real world, the world of experience, a vanished friendship leaves you with many doubts and questions; it is an amorphous absence that haunts your present, your future and, most unwelcomely, your past. I should think this is how it is for Julian, too.
That letter I wrote to Julian is his property but my copyright:
54A Leamington Road Villas,
London W11 1HT
Dear Jules
I was going to write to you and say something like:
Twelve years ago you rang me up and said, ‘Mart, tell me to fuck off and everything if you want — but have you left Antonia?’ As it happened, I went back to Antonia, that time, twelve years ago. But I liked the way you framed the question. It was characteristic.
I was then going to say something like:
Jules, tell me to fuck off and everything if you want — but try and stay my friend, and try and help me be a friend to Pat.
Now I have your answer before I asked the question. I will call you in a while — quite a long while. I’ll miss you.
Martin
For the first time in these pages I sense the twist of rancour in me, and my hands, as I write, feel loath and cold. But I had to assert it, to my readers, and also to my friends. It was said that I turned away — and I don’t do that. I won’t be the one to turn away.
* With one fascinating lacuna. He described the ‘visions’ he had experienced during deep unconsciousness (‘I was in a vault of a bank in Paris …’) as if they were real experiences, and not with the tentative air of a man reassembling a dream. He was very definite. The visions are fully dealt with in the early version of Ravelstein but most are expunged in the final draft. Bellow must have felt that they didn’t measure up structurally, or that their tendency was to deuniversalise.
* You can faintly hear it in her ow sounds, which sometimes resemble oh sounds. Linguisticians call this phenomenon ‘Canadian raising’ (the tongue lifts on the vowel). Once, while Kingsley was in the room, I watched a tennis match broadcast from Montreal, and the line-judges kept shouting ‘Oat!’ Kingsley said, ‘Do Canadians say “the Moanties”?’ The next time I saw my Canadian brother-in-law (as he was then), Chaim Tannenbaum, I said, ‘Do Canadians say “the Moanties”?’ He was uncharacteristically defensive about it. ‘Canadians do not say “the Moanties”,’ said Chaim.
* In which KA humourlessly chivvies a recusant member of the Communist Party. In Oxford in 1940/41, Kingsley was Comrade Amis. (And Comrade Murdoch was Iris.)
* ‘I read all Alan Bold today,’ he told me. ‘How many did you pick?’ ‘None,’ he said. The book would appear two years later, in 1973. I was by then at the TLS, and I remember Peter Porter, flushed and brisk with roused feeling and anxiety (because he didn’t enjoy the business of dispraise), stalking into the office with his front-page review. The anthology inspired broad debate, even controversy. Everyone seemed to be talking about it. That’s how it was, in 1973.
† From Part III (dated 21 December 1971) of the great poem ‘Livings’. Part II is perhaps the most extraordinary, with its modernist sprung-rhythm ending (the narrator is the keeper of a lighthouse): ‘Lit shelved liners/Grope like mad worlds westward.’
* Osric’s suzerainty was coming to an end. Twenty-one, and in my last year, I was living in one of the bedsits of a college annex on Iffley Road. My usual evening meal was the basis of the daily diet I served up, nearly two decades later, to Keith Talent in London Fields: a vacuum-packed Chicken Korma, say, followed by a Bramley Apple Pie. I was working so hard for my Finals — at least fifteen hours a day — that it would have been an embarrassment if I hadn’t got a first. Also, late at night, influenced by (a) one glass of whisky, and (b) my father, I was trying out my first paragraphs of fiction (scenes, descriptions) and feeling an ominous but also energising intimation of the long haul. Despite all this I was frequently as blue as a Larkin line-ending, prematurely aged by Old English, emphatically without a girlfriend (again), my face pale and breakfastless-looking as I went round the corner, in the rain, with my one-and-nine or however much it was, to buy an Escort or a Parade.
† The Chaldeans ruled Babylonia from 625 to 538BC. They were celebrated astronomers. Babylon, of course, was famous not only for its Hanging Gardens but also for its impregnable fortifications and its luxury.
‡ And so could the hot Balliol radical, Christopher Hitchens, who was a frequent dinner-guest of the Warden’s.
* I was moving, hereabouts, from foppery to overearnestness. Six or seven years later, at a regular gathering that would have typically included Clive James, Russell Davies, Julian Barnes, Terence Kilmartin, Mark Boxer, James Fenton, the Hitch and (for a while) my father, I put to the table the following question: Who would you side with, if the choice were limited to Leavis or Bloomsbury? Everyone else said Bloomsbury. I said Leavis. The loved and lamented Mark Boxer (‘cartoonist and dandy’: his own favoured description) gave a quiet whinny of incredulity. I had never been a Leavisite and I had written several attacks on his doctrines and followers. But I think I would cast the same vote, even today. What could be more antipathetic than Woolf’s dismissal of Ulysses on the grounds of Joyce’s class? No, give me F.R. and Q.D., give me Frank and Queenie, despite all the humourlessness, the hysteria, and the Soviet gloom.
* Bruce Montgomery, my godfather, and a legend of generosity. He was a minor composer who had some early success with his film scores (Doctor in the House, a Carry On or two). Bruce tipped the boys with silver, not with brass; he once caused us to rub our eyes, on the afternoon of an unforgettable Guy Fawkes’ Night, by giving us ten bob for fireworks. It was said of Bruce that when he moved about in public he always held a cocked pound note in his hand. When he needed something, he tended to need it soon and badly. His fate was of the cake-in-the-rain variety often reserved for precocious and flamboyant talents. My last, indirect memory of him is Kingsley’s elegiac sigh on being called to the telephone: Bruce was having one of his sessions with the whisky bottle and the address book.
* ‘Money’ was a favourite of mine; and when I published a novel with the same title, in 1984, I sent Larkin a copy. Unlike my father, he succeeded in finishing it. But in his reply he made it inoffensively clear that he disliked the postmodernist liberties I took with the reader, and that he found the prose too dense and worked-at. Parts of the book amused him. I haven’t kept Larkin’s letters, I’m afraid (nor any from my father, to Zachary Leader’s silent disgust), but I do remember the sentence: ‘My big shriek came on page 275 line 3.’ And I found that funny. Because Larkin seized on a moment where extravagant (and expensive) sexual temptation is greeted by the prediction of extravagant (and deflationary) disappointment. I couldn’t take much pride in Larkin’s big shriek. The joke was Ian McEwan’s; it interrupted a salacious anecdote I was passing on about a Far Eastern brothel. In the British paperback the moment comes on page 292 line 33; in the American paperback, page 271 line 3.
† ‘Children are very horrible, aren’t they? Selfish, noisy, cruel little brutes.’ As a child himself, he has said, he thought he hated everybody: ‘but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like.’ I take this to be self-stylisation. Both intellectually and emotionally null, the anti-child position is only good for a joke or two. Kingsley used to occupy it a bit, as we shall learn. But he never aspired to the genuine artistic venom of Larkin’s ‘children, with their shallow, violent eyes’.
* The concluding stanza of ‘This Be the Verse’ — ‘Man hands on misery to man. /It deepens like a coastal shelf./Get out as quickly as you can,/And don’t have any kids yourself’ — should be considered alongside the concluding stanza of what I take to be the companion poem (they
are technically near-identical), ‘The Trees’: ‘Yet still the unresting castles thresh/In fullgrown thickness every May./Last year is dead, they seem to say,/Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’
† ‘Self’s the Man’ addresses the nipper option with brilliant brutality: ‘He married a woman to stop her getting away/Now she’s there all day,/And the money he gets for wasting his life on work/She takes as her perk/To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier/And the electric fire …’ I love the perfect boredom clinched by that last rhyme. And I love the clear injustice of it: as if the eponymous Self benefits not at all from the drier, and the electric fire. Marriage, the poet foresees, would certainly make him mad; he will head for the alternative, unopposed selfhood, where madness looks to be no more than a strong probability.
* In all likelihood this question deserves more attention than the longish footnote I am going to give it. Whereas Nabokov thought the greatest human division was between those who slept well (complacent dopes, as he saw them) and the great twisting insomniacs (like himself), Graham McClintock, an ensemble character in Take a Girl Like You (1960), thinks that the greatest human division is that between ‘the attractive and the unattractive’. ‘You can have no conception,’ unattractive Graham tells attractive Jenny Bunn, ‘of the difference between the lives of those who look like you and those who look like me … unattractive men don’t want unattractive girls, you see. They want attractive girls. They merely get unattractive girls.’ The beautiful Miss Bunn doesn’t end up with Graham. She ends up with Patrick Standish (clearly attractive, and impartially described by another male character as ‘beautiful’). Now look at Larkin’s unpublished poem ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’ (1959): ‘After comparing lives with you for years/I see how I’ve been losing: all the while/I’ve met a different gauge of girl from yours./Grant that, and all the rest makes sense as well’. The titular ‘friend’ belongs to a world ‘where to want/Is straightway to be wanted’, where ‘beauty is accepted slang for yes’. In contrast to the girls whom the poet comes across: ‘They have their world, not much compared with yours,/But where they work, and age, and put off men/By being unattractive, or too shy,/Or having morals — anyhow, none give in …’ The poem makes rather a show of failing to draw the obvious conclusion: that the ‘I’ is unattractive too. Scientists of attraction tell us that what we look for, in the other, are the features of babyhood: curves of eye and brow and mouth. Which at least means that we have all been beautiful. And will all be ugly, in the end. Writing to Larkin on 14 January 1980, Kingsley tersely introduces himself to the final commonalty. ‘I am getting ugly now’, he writes, ‘because I am getting old.’