Experience: A Memoir

  ‡ ‘ “I’ve yet to come across an object I can’t name … Door, knob, hinge, lintel, jamb, panel, window, frame, catch, pane, sash, cord, glass, dressing-table … drawer, handle, mirror, clothes-brush, hair-brush, comb, dressing-gown, cord, pocket, table, lamp, bulb, switch, flex, plug, socket …” By saying slowly and continuously and more and more loudly that it was very interesting and quite remarkable and most extraordinary, Dr Mainwaring brought about silence at last.’

  * The Flashman books purport to be the memoirs of Harry Flashman, the notorious bully in Tom Brown’s School Days. A great cad and coward, he goes on to win fame, in uniform, as a bester of Her Majesty’s enemies.

  * Disraeli’s novel Coningsby was published in 1844.

  * States is singular. The s is there for phonetic effect. The cabby was overarticulating the terminal t, having perhaps willed himself, over the years, to stop saying stay-plus-glottal-stop. We first noticed this tendency in a Seventies TV ad. It was an ad for drink, too. A genial fellow says to camera, against a festive and hugely populous background: ‘My wife and I like to have a few friends over in the evening. It gives you a chance to get the ports outs.’ It was Kingsley who instantly hit upon this simple but unobvious means of transcription. After getting an okay I used it for my Stanley — Stanley Veale in Success.

  † I always thought that Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, should have been called ‘Saturday Night and Monday Morning’. It is about self-gratification versus work, whereas the Saturday night/Sunday morning axis does in fact set the rhythm for a great deal of my father’s stuff: self-gratification versus self-examination and self-reproach and (often) self-hatred.

  * Cf. The Old Devils: ‘It’s quite a problem for retired people, I do see. All of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast. All those hours with nothing to stay sober for. Or nothing to naturally stay sober during …’

  * The food, too, had to be honestly tailored to the clientele. From a review of a book about British eating-habits: ‘ “A Hong Kong meal … is a statement to which customers are secondary.” I know that sort of meal, and the statement is Fuck You, and you haven’t got to go to Hong Kong for it. Soho is far enough.’

  * For instance, I do like this from One Fat Englishman, the most persistently anti-child novel (we were fourteen, thirteen and nine when it was published): ‘Joe had something of the child in him, a grave demerit, but he was … [we now hear about his better points].’ And there is something invigoratingly unsympathetic about ‘mess’ in this good bit from I Want It Now. The hero, Ronnie, surrounded by rich people, is wondering about the forename of an American called Student Mansfield: ‘As a nickname it could hardly have been appropriate at any stage of Mansfield’s career, unless on the lucus a non lucendo principle that had got bony Upshot called Tubby. But this was British, and Mansfield was not. The same applied to another possibility, whereby you had made a roughly reproducible mess of saying your name as a child and “somehow it had stuck” — hence many a rich/upper-class Oggie and Ayya and Brumber and Ploof and Jawp of Ronnie’s acquaintance.’

  † This poem, his last, was never published. The third and final stanza, ridiculously to my ear, goes: ‘With rueful grins and curses/They push the world along;/But women and queers and children/Cry when things go wrong.’

  * My father once took my mother to dinner at the house of his married mistress. Another husband was present, accompanied by his wife; and that night Kingsley made a date with her.

  * I checked. My mother expected me to be ‘appalled’ that Kingsley’s illness had reached hospice-point. ‘I was actually more apalled by the U.C.H. private bit,’ she writes (16/11/99). ‘[T]he nursing staff knocked U.C.H. out of the picture for care respect & gentleness. So really I should change apalled to sad, & loss of Father & the realisation of it actually happening.’

  * At her trial Rosemary West had nothing to tell us about Lucy’s death — probably because she was innocent of it (see Brian Masters’s ‘She Must Have Known’). Anyway, she had nothing to tell us. Another writer, Geoffrey Wansell, in his disgraceful book, An Evil Love: The Life of Frederick West, permits himself to concoct a decathlon of torments for my cousin (‘The possibility must be that … there must be a suspicion that … there must at least be every possibility that … may have … may have … almost certainly … It seems only too probable that … It seems only too possible that … It seems only too possible that … The only possible conclusion is that …’). But the fact is that we don’t know — and almost certainly never will. A section of packing-tape was found with Lucy’s body (along with a length of rope, several strands of hair, and two hairgrips), circumstantially suggesting that she was at some point gagged. Another victim, fifteen-year-old Shirley Hubbard, was found with her face almost entirely engulfed in packing-tape. Plastic tubes, of the kind West used for siphoning petrol, had been inserted through the mask and into her nostrils. Did he walk around Shirley Hubbard, holding the tape by its quoit? I find myself thinking of Kingsley’s words about the significance of the female face … It was over quickly with Lucy. I feel I can say I do now believe this. Stephen West, a perceptive young man, observed that his father, when faced with determined opposition, invariably cowered. And Lucy, Lucy’s presence, was very powerful. Fear, that night, travelled in more than one direction, and West was intensely susceptible to fear. This is the essence of it. The quality of that fear would not excite him. He would want to get the thing over quickly.

  3: The Magics

  November 1996

  — Now there is a man, said my opponent [Zachary Leader], who is going to have a baby.

  He had gone to the clubhouse bathroom in the break between sets. When he returned to the court he expected to see me smoking a cigarette on the bench.

  I was doing pressups on the baseline.

  I was a man who was going to have a baby.

  The week before I had MC’d Kingsley’s memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, before a large audience rich in novelists, among them Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Piers Paul Read, A. N. Wilson, William Boyd, David Lodge, V. S. Naipaul* and Iris Murdoch.* Hilly was there and Jane was there. Delilah was there, of course, as were Louis and Jacob, as was my niece Jessica, Philip’s daughter. And there was a further grandchild present, but one not yet abroad in the outside world. Kingsley never met his eldest grandchild. And of course he would never meet his youngest. He had been dead a year to the day.

  The main events are these ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters.

  When I told Salman Rushdie about Delilah he said,

  — So she’s at Oxford now. She’s already at Oxford.

  — Reading History. Second year.

  — Quite an interesting way of doing it. Skip the nappy stage and go straight to gowns and mortar-boards.

  — Exactly.

  I calmed myself (I was forty-seven) by whimsically elaborating on this way of doing it. The Oxford alternative, the emeritus alternative (in which the father’s title is merely honorary), accounted for the fact that we were having the baby at St Mary’s — so convenient for Paddington Station. As soon as the baby was born I would pack it off to Oxford. I knew the plan contained a flaw. I didn’t expect to be all that surprised when the call came through, saying that the baby was unable to read or write, or walk or talk, and was permanently in tears. And so would be sent down or sent back … The truth was that I was ready for another child (I was in training for another child), but I made no secret of my longing for a girl. Although I now had Delilah, I had not raised Delilah. And I wanted to raise a girl. I was desperate to see how the other half lived.

  At this stage, though, I had to admit that the baby was doing an excellent imitation of a boy. It rode high in its mother’s womb, as boys are said to do, and was putting itself about in there with suspiciously masculine violence. You didn’t need to ‘feel the baby move’. You could watch the baby move: it seemed to be trying to punch its way out. We could
have settled the matter with a telephone call — but that was a modern convenience I wanted to do without; that was a modern temptation I wanted to resist. You shouldn’t know. And the moment of birth confirms this. As labour nears its end, you stop thinking ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ and start thinking baby. Baby, baby, baby. At the moment of birth, nature seems to obliterate the question of sex; it isn’t even a detail. You shouldn’t know. If you do, the experience is, moreover, deuniversalised. You isolate yourself from your ancestors and from all past humanity.

  Of course I was ready. The main events are these ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters. In the ordinary miracle, two people go into that room and three come out. In the ordinary disaster, well, I was going to say that two people go into that room and only one comes out. But in fact only one person goes into that room and none comes out.

  The Day the Clocks Go Back

  I called Rob and I told him, ‘The King is dead.’ And he said, ‘Well I think that’s very sad …’ And that’s what I thought too. I thought it was very sad … ‘It’s like losing a part of yourself, isn’t it?’ said Chris, at the club. Yes, that is exactly what it was like. And you know you’re dealing with experience, with main-event experience, when a cliché grips you with all its original power. Other words and acts of condolence stay in my mind: the gentleness of the nurses at the hospital; the long and impassioned message from Dmitri Nabokov;* the letter from Pat Kavanagh; the letter from Gore Vidal. And yet the Curse of Gore didn’t really work this time; it was punctual, but somehow missed its mark.

  The day my father died I took my two boys and their two lifelong friends (also brothers) for pizza in Shepherd’s Bush, and then to Wormwood Scrubs, the vast and desolately moor-like recreation ground in White City, overlooked by its tutelary institutions: hospital, prison (where Rob once served and I once read from London Fields). All four of these boys I had seen on the breast, and here they were now, like half a football team … The incredulity my children excite in me never diminishes. I contemplate a child of mine, and I can’t believe that a creation in which I shared has gone on to gain such contour and quiddity and mass. Watch the way they fill up a car, a room. In the bath — look at all the water they displace.

  Later, sitting motionless in the kitchen, I seemed to be positioned at the centre of a great circular vacancy. When a child is born you reel in the apparent emptiness of the street, because the world has shoved up, making way for the new one, and the world has overdone it, and there is all this space to reel in. Death does not act symmetrically here. Death too creates space but isolates you and cuts you off within it. How like Kingsley to die on a Sunday. How uncompromising of him: to die on the Sunday when the clocks go back.

  In the plastic light of the bathroom, for a full minute as I stood susceptibly before the mirror: a kind of half-willed hallucination came and daubed the death colours on me, the yellows and greens I had witnessed in the Phoenix Ward. Death is supposed to give nothing back (nothing!), but it probably does do that much for the son. In my case death was forthcoming, and literal, showing — screening — my own death in the colours of my father’s corpse. Now the clocks had already changed and I had never faced a dusk so gigantic. ‘The King is dead,’ I told the telephone. ‘Well I think that’s very sad …’ And, having phoned Rob, I phoned Saul. Whom I am usually most reluctant to disturb. For selfish reasons, I never want to disturb or distract him. I want him to get on with what he is writing so that I can read it when he’s finished. But I made the call; I made the call, without scruple, without forethought. I said in a dull voice, ‘My father died today.’ And he told me what I badly needed to hear.

  Dusk did indeed come early, as was to be expected in the new time.

  — You’ve changed since your father died, he said.

  — In what way?

  — More gravitas. Not the kid any more.

  — God, no. The kid?

  This was much later: 1997. We sat, with Janis, in the booth of a Boston diner. Around us a TV crew was cumbrously packing its things; they had just shot the last scenes of a ‘Bookmark’ programme called Saul Bellow’s Gift (I had argued for ‘Saul Bellow and the Actual’). The artificiality, the controlled environment, of the last couple of days (the staged conversations, the innocent harassments of background noise and curious passersby) was now receding, and we were approximately ourselves again. I was turning forty-eight. He was turning eighty-two. In the course of our talks I had asked him about death, about ‘the more or less pleasant lucidity at this end of the line’, and he had surprised me by saying, ‘I sometimes think I am dead.’ That seemed to adumbrate a new and unsuspected struggle: the struggle to believe you’re alive.

  In the diner I had said, as I had been meaning to say,

  — Do you remember I called you on the day my father died? And you were great. You said the only thing that could have possibly been of any use to me. The only thing that would help me through to the other side.* And I said dully, ‘You’ll have to be my father now.’ It worked, and still works. As long as you’re alive I’ll never feel entirely fatherless.

  It is still working, in 1999. But I mustn’t encroach on the territory occupied by Gregory, Adam and Daniel — and by a fourth child, expected at the end of the millennium. I feel it is okay to quote from a letter I wrote Janis, when I heard, because I am only quoting my father:* ‘The greatest difficulty is believing in the baby’s resilience. But they are resilient, fanatically resilient … You do know this, don’t you, about Saul? You will have a bit of him, half of him, for ever.’

  Envoy

  My life, it seems to me, is ridiculously shapeless. I know what makes a good narrative, and lives don’t have much of that — pattern and balance, form, completion, commensurateness. It is often the case that a Life, at least to start with, will resemble a success story; but the only shape that life dependably exhibits is that of tragedy — minus all the grand stuff about nemesis, fortune’s wheel, and the fatal flaw. Tragedy follows the line of the mouth on the tragic mask (and the equivalent is true of comedy). You rise to the crest and then you curve down to a further point along the same latitude. That’s the only real shape lives usually have — and, again, forget about coherence of imagery and the Uniting Theme.†

  I had a cigarette in my mouth. It pleaded, it yelped to be torched. We were waiting on words that had to be handed down from the people upstairs … It was early April, 1996, in New York, and I was coming to the end of a brief book-tour. I now sat in the dressing-room at the TV studios with my lighter cocked. Then the message from above came through: ‘The talent can smoke.’ And I did smoke. And the talent found it good.

  The next day, as I staggered into the hotel foyer, I was greeted by an old friend.

  — Again? he said.

  — Again, I said.

  ‘Again’ had two applications. The first followed up on certain hints given by my appearance: the bloodstained paper tissue pressed to a swollen mouth with bits of gauze sticking out of it. The second application, the second ‘again’, had to do with the Affair of KA’s Biographer (or the affair of KA’s ‘wishes’),* a storm that was still feebly raging in the newspapers back home.

  — It won’t ever be over, I said. There’ll always be another again.

  Todd Berman had just yanked out a molar in my underjaw: open widely. The tooth had announced itself as finished down in Nashville, the Athens of the South; but it had hung on, practically at right angles to the gum, through Miami and Philadelphia. Nor was the extraction a formality: three jabs, two stitches, and a sanguinary interlude in the recovery room.† I was then the subject of a ‘panoramic’ X-ray: wearing the lead vest, you sit clamped into a chair while the camera sluggishly but sedulously patrols your face. Claustrophobia, as usual, presented itself with a muted cough of polite introduction. You can’t turn away from it because there is nowhere to turn away to. I spent those minutes with my cousin, secure in the knowledge that suffering (contra Bernard Shaw) is relative. There’s a scale of it, going
from zero to the googolplex.

  That night my father came to me in a dream. He was all business. He came not as shade but as envoy.

  I fell asleep and it seemed that he was already there, waiting patiently, although his time was far from limitless. He was about sixty; he looked respectable to the point of mild dowdiness, and more self-sufficient and obviously benign than he ever was in life. And sexless — crucially sexless: free of gender or desire.

  In dreams of the dead you always want to say: Clever you. You fooled everyone, you outmanoeuvred everyone …

  Well, Dad, I said, how do you want things to go, now you’re back?

  And I didn’t mean back from the dead. I meant back in the neighbourhood. But then, too, there was a countervailing sense that he would now have no need to involve himself in these surface concerns, stiflingly human, perhaps, which had no power to distress or fascinate him now.

  He said nothing (and I felt he didn’t want to be touched). With gestures only, with looks, with pauses, he gave me to understand that I had all his trust — in the prosecution of his wishes, and in everything else. Because my wishes were his wishes and the other way around. Then he left, he briskly absented himself, returning not to death but to an intermediate vantage. He was resolute. This dream was all business. He came not as shade but as messenger.

  A messenger from my own unconscious, naturally. But that’s all right. Because my mind is his mind and the other way around.