Now, you take your drink, and I’ll take your bag.
It’s no trouble. There’s a lift…Oh, don’t mention it – de nada. The honour is all mine. You are my guest. You are my reader.
PART I
Chapter 1 Ethics and Morals
Could you put me through to Saul Bellow?
The time was the summer of 1983, and the place was West London.
‘Durrants?’ said the hotel telephonist.
I cleared my throat – not the work of a moment – and said, ‘Sorry about that. Uh, hi. Could you put me through to Saul Bellow, please?’
‘Of course. Who shall I say is calling?’
‘Martin Amis,’ I said. ‘That’s eh em eye ess.’
A long pause, a brief return to the switchboard, and then the unmistakable ‘Hello?’
‘Saul, good afternoon, it’s me, Martin. Have you got a moment?’
‘Oh, hello, Marr-tin.’
Martin, in very early middle age, would for some reason try his hand at a polemical work entitled The Crap Generation.*1 It would be non-fiction, and arranged in short segments, including ‘Crap Music’, ‘Crap Slang’, ‘Crap TV’, ‘Crap Ideology’, ‘Crap Critics’, ‘Crap Historians’, ‘Crap Sociologists’, ‘Crap Clothes’, ‘Crap Scarifications’ – including crap body piercings and crap tattoos – and ‘Crap Names’. Well, Martin thought that ‘Martin’ was a crap name if ever there was one. It couldn’t even get itself across the Atlantic in one piece. Nowadays, true, most Americans naturally and relaxingly called him Marrtn. But those of Saul’s age, perhaps feeling the need to acknowledge his Englishness, came up with a hesitant spondee: Marr-tin. In Uruguay (where ‘Martin’ was MarrrTEEN, a resonant and manly iamb), Martin had an attractive friend called Cecil (mellifluously pronounced SayCEEL). And ‘Cecil’, similarly, was unable to ford the Rio Grande intact, and became a ridiculous trochee. ‘In America, man,’ said Cecil, ‘they call me CEEsel. Fuck that.’ Martin, on the phone, wasn’t going to say ‘Marr-tin? Fuck that’ to Saul Bellow. For the record we should additionally concede the following: ‘Martin’, in plain old English, wasn’t any good either. It was just a crap name.
I said to Saul, ‘Uh, you know the Sunday paper I wrote about you for last year?’ This was the Observer. ‘They generously said I could take you out to dinner anywhere I liked. Would you be able to fit that in?’
‘Oh, I think so.’
Bellow’s voice: he gave it to the dreamy, prosperous, but somewhat blocked and inward narrator of the spectacular fifty-page short story, ‘Cousins’. [M]y voice had deepened as I grew older. Yes. My basso profundo served no purpose except to add depth to small gallantries. When I offer a chair to a lady at a dinner party, she is enveloped in a deep syllable. Thus enveloped, I said,
‘Now I happen to know you like a nice piece of fish.’
‘That’s true. It would be idle to deny it. I am partial to a nice piece of fish.’
‘Well this place specialises in fish. It might even be fish-only. And it’s near you. Have you got a pen? Devonshire Street. Odin’s – like the Norse god.’
‘Odin’s.’
I said, ‘Would you mind if I brought my serious girlfriend?’
‘I’d be delighted. Your serious girlfriend – do you mean that she’s serious or that you’re serious?’
‘I suppose both.’ That was the point: we were both serious. ‘She’s American – Boston – though you wouldn’t know it.’
‘Anglicised.’
‘More Europeanised. American parents, but born in Paris and grew up in Italy. Adulthood in England. She’s got an English accent. She’s such an absentee that they won’t even give her an American passport.’
‘No?’
‘No. Not unless she goes and spends six months in an army camp in, I don’t know, Germany. They won’t give her one, she says, until she’s screwed enough GIs.’
‘Well she doesn’t sound too serious.’
‘She’s not. She’s just right. Her name’s Julia. Is there anyone you’d like to bring?’
‘My dear wife Alexandra is in Chicago, so, no, I’ll be alone.’
The American Eagle
It was to Chicago that Martin had flown, in December 1982, to interview the man whom even John Updike – an unusually generous critic, but unusually tightfisted, unusually near, when he dealt with his obvious living superiors – acclaimed as our most exuberant and melodious postwar novelist.*2 Much would turn out to hang on this meeting.
I checked into my hotel: big and cheap and by Midwestern standards implausibly old (it was now a Quality Inn but the more senior locals still called it the Oxford House), downtown, between the IBM Building and the El, in Chicago, ‘the contempt centre’, as Bellow called it, of the USA. I was in an exhilarated state, a state of evolutionary excitement – because my life was about to change, and as profoundly as a young life can ever change*3…The next morning I breakfasted early, and showered and spruced myself up for our lunch, and then walked boldly out into the Windy City. Risibly so named, by the way, because of its reputation for boosterism and ‘hot air’ – and not because the city was and is really fantastically windy, with a glacial blast (known as the Hawk) veering in over Lake Michigan…
Bellow was sixty-eight and I was thirty-four, exactly half his age (a conjunction that would of course not recur). But I was already an old hand at processing American writers, having done Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Truman Capote, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer. Still, this was different: when I read my first Bellow, The Victim (1949), in 1975, I thought: This writer is writing just for me. So I read him all.
The only other writer who turned out to be doing this – composing each sentence with me in mind – was Nabokov. (He and Bellow had one other thing in common: they both derived from St Petersburg.) In my immediate circle there were no convinced Nabokovians with whom I could crow and gloat. But I had a convinced Bellovian close by; at that stage he was just a journalist and a ‘meteoric Trotskyist’, and
