Long Live Hitch

  He seemed to have read everything and he had the rare faculty of being able to quote longish staves of prose from memory. A passage about Sir Leicester Dedlock and gout from Bleak House; a spine-tingling rendition of Humbert Humbert’s last verbal duel with Quilty; a pararaph or two about Alexander Portnoy’s mother (the latter perhaps not so astonishing now I think about it: in his work as well as in his life, Martin has done the really hard thinking about handjobs, and put us all very sincerely and gratefully in his debt). In this area, too, I felt myself the junior. It was he who got me to read Nabokov and to do so with care as well as with awe, if only because I knew I would be asked questions. However, I was able to return the favor in a way which was to help change his life in turn, by pressing on him a copy of Humboldt’s Gift.*

  Loved by women while also being adored by men — shall I say “no mean achievement”? — Martin also has a way of attracting fathers. He once went to meet John Updike at the Massachusetts General Hospital and told me that, when he’d said goodbye, had felt oddly as if waving farewell to a male parent. I happened to be interviewing John Updike a year or so later and mentioned that I knew his great admirer the younger Amis. With an extraordinarily gentle expression on his face, Updike recalled the meeting at “Mass Gen” and said: “It was the strangest thing watching him walk away — almost as if he were my son.” And nobody who has read Martin on Saul Bellow, let alone seen him in the company of the old man, can doubt for a second that his combination of admiring and protective feelings had eventually become fiercely filial. He said indignantly to me, when I gave Bellow’s Ravelstein a slightly disobliging review, “Don’t cheek your elders.” I waited for something else — some hint of the ironic, perhaps — but with perfectly emphatic gravity he repeated the admonition. This from the one-time enfant terrible could mean only one thing.**

  But I was also lucky in meeting Martin when his relationship with his true father was at its absolute best. I remember envying the way in which the two of them could tell jokes without inhibition, discuss matters sexual, and compete only over minor differences about literature or politics. There had once been a bad time when Martin and his siblings (and his mother) had been abandoned by the old man, and there was to come a moment when that same old man metamorphosed into an elderly man, querulous and paranoid and devoid of wit. But in between there was a wonderful golden late summer. “Dad, will you make some of your noises?” It was easy to see, when this invitation was taken up, where Martin had acquired his own gift for mimicry. Kingsley could “do” the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the Metropolitan line train entering Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus shelter (this was very demanding and once led to heart palpitations). To create the hiss and crackle of a wartime radio broadcast delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was for him scant problem (a tape of it, indeed, was played at his memorial meeting, where I was hugely honored to be among the speakers). The pièce de résistance, an attempt by British soldiers to start up a frozen two-ton truck on a windy morning “somewhere in Germany,” was for special occasions only. One held one’s breath as Kingsley emitted the first screech of the busted starting-key. His only slightly lesser vocal achievement — of a motor-bike yelling in mechanical agony — once caused a man who had just parked his own machine in the street to turn back anxiously and take a look. The old boy’s imitatation of an angry dog barking the words “fuck off” was note-perfect.*

  Evenings at his home in Flask Walk (the perfect address) were of Falstaffian proportions, with bulging sacks of takeaway food and continual raids on the rightly vaunted arsenal of his cellar. “Hitch,” he said to me once. “You have been here before and you know the rule of the house. If you don’t have a drink in your hand it’s your own fault.” Noises might or might not be part of the entertainment: he had a tendency to the gross and evidently thought that a belch (say) was a terrible thing to waste. I remember his unscripted trombonings and trumpetings, his cigars and his Macallan single malt, his limericks and his charades, just as I remember sitting quietly while he talked with authority about why Jane Austen was not all that good. The word “good,” in all its variations (see the blues in the footnote preceding), was almost all that this man of immense vocabulary required as a shorthand critical tool. I don’t know whether the concept hailed from the “Newspeak” dictionary in Nineteen Eighty-four, where the choices range from “plusgood” to “doubleplusungood,” but “bloody good” from Kingsley was authoritatively affirmative, “good” was really pretty good, “some good” wasn’t at all bad, “no good” was applied very scathingly indeed and a three-sentence six-word pronouncement which I heard him render upon Graham Greene’s then-latest novel The Human Factor (“Absolutely no. Bloody good. AT ALL!”) was conclusive.*

  I shall try and be brief about the sorry way in which things “ended up.” After I had left for America, Kingsley wrote a novel called Stanley and the Women. This failed to get itself published in New York, and word reached me that objections from feminists had prevented it from getting adopted by any major house. (There were also those who claimed to find it anti-Semitic, though the only “offensive” remarks in its pages were made by a young man who was clearly out of his mind.) I launched a campaign in my column in the Times Literary Supplement, against what was just then becoming widely known as “political correctness.” I kept on being boring about this, until eventually I received a letter from an editor — a Jewish woman as it happened — who said in effect, Okay, you win, we’ll save the honor of publishing by “doing” Stanley.

  Kingsley, whom I hadn’t seen for years, invited me to a celebration of this small victory on my next visit to London. We were to meet at the Garrick Club, be joined by Martin, see a movie, and then have a lavish dinner. I still shrink from recalling it: as soon as I arrived at the Garrick’s bar he told me a joke I’d heard before and could obviously see that it hadn’t “worked.” His choice of film was an Eddie Murphy insult that seemed to contradict his increasing contempt for American culture: he appeared genuinely offended that we thought so little of it. Martin and I kept nervously behaving as if he must somehow be joking — “flawless masterpiece,” he kept energetically insisting — and this was a mistake. Not only was he not joking, he was in every other way failing to be amusing. In an alarming reversal of his earlier Falstaffianism, he also managed to look both corpulent and resentful: “surfeit swell’d” to be sure, but quite without mirth. I think he may have managed one of his riffs about Nelson Mandela being a terrorist. Most painful of all, and somehow rendering rather pointless the original “point” of the evening, he had abandoned his old liking of the United States and passed the test of the true reactionary by becoming a sulphurous anti-American. (Every modern American novelist, he ended up by telling Martin once, and subverting my defense of him, “is either a Jew or a hick.”) I was never to see “Kingers” again and, when I was almost the only person given kindly treatment in his notorious Memoirs, felt oddly discriminated against. That last evening of ours was the very definition of having no fun: we were no longer drawing on a common store of comic gags and literary allusions.

  I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, these can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second. Martin was — is — a genius at this sort of thing. It arose — arises — from his willingness to devote real time to the pitiless search for the apt resonance. I don’t know quite why this lodges in my mind, but we once went to some grand black-tie ball that had been slightly overadvertised and proved disappointing. The following morning he rang me. “I’ve found the way to describe the men at that horror-show last evening . . . Tuxed fucks.” As this will illustrate, he did not scorn the demotic or the American: in fact he remains almost unique in the way that he can blend pub-talk and mid-Atlantic idiom into paragraphs and pag
es that are also fully aware of Milton and Shakespeare. I am morally certain that it’s this combination of the classical with the wised-up and street-smart, most conspicuously with Augie March, that made it a sure thing that he and Saul Bellow would one day take each other’s hands. Martin had a period of relishing the Boston thug-writer George V. Higgins, author of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Higgins’s characters had an infectious way of saying “inna” and “onna,” so Martin would say, for example, “I think this lunch should be onna Hitch” or “I heard he wasn’t that useful inna sack.” Simple pleasures you may say, but linguistic sinew is acquired in this fashion and he would not dump a trope until he had chewed all the flesh and pulp of it and was left only with pith and pips. Thus there arrived a day when Park Lane played host to a fancy new American hotel with the no less fancy name of “The Inn on The Park” and he suggested a high-priced cocktail there for no better reason than that he could instruct the cab driver to “park inna Inn onna Park.” This near-palindrome (as I now think of it) gave us much innocent pleasure.

  Not all of our pleasures were innocent. There came the day when we were both in New York, and both beginning to feel the long, strong gravitational pull of the great American planet, but where a slight chore meanwhile required itself to be performed. In the midterm churnings of what was to become his breakout novel Money, Martin required his character to visit a brothel or bordello. He even had one all picked out: its front-name was the “Tahitia,” a dire Polynesian-themed massage parlor, on lower Lexington Avenue. “And you,” he informed me, “are fucking well coming with me.”* I wanted to say something girlish like “Have I ever refused you anything?” but instead settled for something rather more masculine like “Do we know the form at this joint?” I could not possibly have felt less like any such expedition: I had a paint-stripping hangover and a sour mouth, but he had that look of set purpose on his face that I well knew, and also knew could not be gainsaid. How bad could it be?

  Pretty damn bad as it turned out. Of the numerous regrettable elements that go to make up the unlawful carnal-knowledge industry, I should single out for distinction the look of undisguised contempt that is often worn on the faces of its female staff. Some of the working “hostesses” may have to simulate delight or even interest — itself a pretty cock-shriveling thought — but when these same ladies do the negotiating, they can shrug off the fake charm as a snake discards an unwanted skin. I suppose they know, or presume, that they have already got the despised male client exactly where they want him. As it happens, this wasn’t true in our case — I would gladly have paid not to have sex at this point, and Martin needed only to snap his fingers in order to enjoy female company — but the cynical little witches at the “Tahitia” were not to know that they were being conscripted into the service of literature. It was well said — by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think — that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one’s awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being “waterboarded” and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable. But not even the lapse of time between then and now has numbed my recollection of how truly horrible it was to be faking interest in someone who was being paid — and paid rather more, incidentally, than I could afford — to feign a contemptuous interest in me. The multiplier effect of this mutual degradation gave me dry-heaves and flop-sweats and, I began to fear, conveyed the entirely misleading impression of my being a customer who was convulsed by the hectic sickness of lust. The seconds went limping and dragging by on absolutely leaden feet.

  It was the cash question, though, that saved me. With some presence of mind, I had for once pre-empted Martin in the “bar” of the dump, where the gruesome selection process began, by swiftly pointing to the prettiest and slenderest of those available (who also possessed one of the most vicious-looking smiles I have ever seen on a human face). Once removed to her sinister cubicle, we commenced to bargain. Or rather, in a sort of squalid reverse-haggle, every time I agreed to the price she added some tax or impost or surcharge and bid me higher. Clad by now only in some sort of exiguous sarong, and equipped only with a dank Ziploc bag containing my credit cards and money (one was obliged to “check” everything else before entering the humid “bar”) I wearily started to count out the ever-steepening fee, which was the only thing in the room that showed any sign of enlarging itself. It turned out that, what with tips and percentages and what-not, the avaricious bitch had contrived a figure that was not just more than I could afford, but more than I had on me. I was down to the quarters and nickels, and it showed. She had, I will say for her, more pride than that. A handful of change thrown in . . . No. No one can be expected to take this. So I took her cue of rage and stood up with about as much self-esteem as I could wrap around myself. Here was a two-faced coin of luck: I not only didn’t have to go through with it, but I didn’t have to shell out the dough, either.

  I lurked torpidly in the recovery room or whatever they call it, and was eventually joined by a rather reduced and chastened Martin. If you want to know what happened to him, the whole experience enriched and enhanced by what I confessed to him of what had happened to me, you must read pages 98–104 of the Penguin edition of Money, where John Self tries to get laid for pay “under the bam, under the boo,” at a perfectly foul establishment named “The Happy Isles.” There are many, many reasons why Money is the Great English Novel of the 1980s, to which I am able to add this ensuing insight. Out of our grim little encounter (where he, poor bastard, actually had to part with the cash and endure a sexual fiasco) came several paragraphs of pure reality-based fantasy that make me twist and snarl with laughter every time. And no, you most definitely did not have to have been there. We went off to recuperate at a lunch with Jane Bonham Carter and Ian LeFresnais, at which I remember using hot Japanese sake, by no means for the first time, as an expedient solvent for my still-clinging hangover. Seldom can a midmorning have been so ill spent, yet (which perhaps goes to show) seldom can such rank dissipation have yielded so many dividends on the page.

  In all of Martin’s fiction one finds this same keen relish for, and appreciation of, the multiple uses of embarrassment. The bite of his wit redeems this from being mere farce or humiliation. When fused with his high seriousness about language, the effect is truly formidable. He once rebuked some pedantic antagonist by saying that the man lacked any sense of humor, but added that by this accusation he really intended to impugn his want of seriousness. In a completely other incarnation, I have often thought that he would have made a terrifying barrister. Once decided on mastering a brief, whether it be in his work on nuclear weapons, the Final Solution, or the Gulag, he would go off and positively saturate himself in the literature, and you could always tell there was a work in progress when all his conversation began to orient itself to the master-theme. (In this he strangely resembled Perry Anderson, the theoretician of New Left Review, with whom I also became friendly at about this time. Perry’s encyclopedism extended well beyond ideology: he introduced me to the great social comedy of Anthony Powell’s Dance sequence, of which he possesses a matchless understanding.) Like Perry, Martin contrived to do this without becoming monomaniacal or Ancient Mariner–like. There was a time when he wouldn’t have known the difference between Bukharin and Bakunin, and his later writing on Marxism gets quite a few things wrong, including some things about me, and about James Fenton. Uncharacteristically for Martin, his labor on the great subject of Communism is also highly deficient in lacking a tragic sense, but he still passed the greatest of all tests in being a pleasure to argue with.

  Back to my point about shared language: this gradual thickening of mutual experience became its own patois, as Money shows. Only recently, I found myself smirking in a foolish manner as a New York Times profile of Martin referred to the words “rug” (for hair-do) and “sock” (for loathsomely inadequate bachelor accommodations), that he
had popularized for a generation. I played my own small part in this, with “sock” as I recall, as also with the then-overused word “re-think” to describe any wearisomely necessary and repetitive activity (such as a haircut or a bathroom trip). But it was not until Martin had put it into circulation that a coinage of this sort could hope to acquire any real currency.*

  Something of the same was true of the “Friday lunch” that has now become the potential stuff of a new “Bloomsbury” legend. I find I want to try to limit myself on this subject, because the temptation to be “in” ought be resisted, and also because in this instance you probably did indeed have to “be there.” I also bear in mind what Fenton once told me about the first Bloomsbury: in the early days of tape-recording it was decided to make a secret tape of the brilliant conversation of Raymond Mortimer and others. All who were “in” on the plan were later agreed that Mortimer and the others had been at their most scintillating on the afternoon concerned. But when replayed, the tape was as dull as rain. So the first thing to say about this luncheon circle was that, like Topsy in the old folk-story, it “just growed.” There was never the intention or design that it become a “set” or a “circle,” and of course if there had been any such intention, the thing would have been abortive. The Friday lunch began to simply “occur” in the mid-1970s, and persisted into the early 1980s, and is now cemented in place in several memoirs and biographies. Let me try and tell you something of how it was.