Sapphist named Muriel Belcher. Renowned to this day for its committed members, from Peter O’Toole to Francis Bacon, the joint at that epoch gave off an atmosphere of inspissated gloom, punctuated by moments of high insobriety and low camp. Muriel, arguably the rudest person in England (“shut up cunty and order some more champagne”), almost never left her perch at the corner of the bar and was committed to that form of humor that insists on referring to all gentlemen as ladies. Occasionally this routine was still funny. “Yes,” she would screech if someone mentioned the London Blitz, “that was when we were all fighting that nasty Mrs. Hitler.” O’Toole’s favorite was a rejoinder she made when he’d described some ancient and absent member as a bit of a bore. “He was a very brave lady,” insisted Muriel, “in the First World War!” This Pythonesque drag queenery was all very well in its way, and it was nice to have a boozy hideaway in the afternoons and late evenings, but there were times when it all felt a bit thin and sketchy, and as with some pubs in Fleet Street there seemed to be too many people who were perhaps forty and looked perhaps sixty: awful warnings in fact, splashing their lives up against the porcelain. In time I took heed and mainly confined my drinking to mealtimes, which was at least a start.
Driberg developed a fondness for me which I don’t think was especially sexual. He would “try” any male person at least once, on the principle that you never know your luck, but he preferred working-class tough guys (policemen and soldiers an especial treat) and all he really wished was to offer them his version of lip service. I once had to cancel a dinner engagement with him and, being asked rather querulously why this was, replied that my girlfriend was in hospital for some tests and that I wanted to visit her after work. “Ah yes,” said Tom with every apparent effort at solicitude, “there’s a lot to go wrong with them, isn’t there? I do so hope that it isn’t her clitoris or anything ghastly like that.” Not all of this was by any means affectation. For Tom, the entire notion of heterosexual intercourse was gruesome to the last degree. (“That awful wound, my dear Christopher. I just don’t see how you can.” Forced into a marriage of convenience as the price of his early political ambitions, he was said to have accused his bride of attempting to rape him on their wedding night.) In this, he was like Noel Coward, who was once asked by Gore Vidal if he had ever even attempted anything with a woman. “Certainly not,” replied The Master. “Not even with Gertrude Lawrence?” Gore inquired. “Particularly not with Miss Lawrence,” was Coward’s return-serve to that. (In something of the same manner, Chester Kallman would sometimes taunt Auden, during domestic disputes, with the fact that Wystan had admittedly slept with Erika Mann. “At least I’m pure, dear,” he would intone.) Through Tom I was eventually to meet Gore Vidal, and also to learn how when in Rome the two of them would hunt together and organize a proper division of labor. Rugged young men recruited from the Via Veneto would be taken from the rear by Gore and then thrust, with any luck semi-erect, into the next-door room where Tom would suck them dry. It shows what few people understand even now, which is the variety of homosexual conduct. “I do not want a penis anywhere near me,” as Gore would put it in that terse and memorable way he had. Incidentally, this double act also emphasized another distinction: Tom adored to give pleasure while Gore has always liked to boast that he has never knowingly or intentionally gratified any of his partners. Not even a sighing reach-around by the sound of it.
I am necessarily telling the next story very slightly out of order, but there came a time when Kingsley Amis asked me if by any chance I could introduce him to Tom Driberg. He understood that the old cocksucker had a trove of unpublished filthy poetry from W.H. Auden, Constant Lambert, and others, and he (Kingsley) had been commissioned to edit the new Oxford Book of Light Verse. Might Tom, in exchange for a good dinner, be induced to share his collection? If so, Kingsley handsomely offered to make a foursome of it at a good restaurant and invite myself and Martin along for the fun. I telephoned Tom and asked him if he would say yes. “I’d be most interested to meet the senior Amis,” he murmured. “But do tell me, is he by chance as attractive as his lovely young son?” To this absurd query, from the ever-hopeful old cruiser, the best reply I could improvise was, “Well, Tom, Kingsley is old enough to be his father.”
Martin
My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.
—Martin Amis: The Independent, 15 January 2007 [as cited in the National Portrait Gallery catalogue that reported my death] EVENTS ONLY ELICITED the above tribute from Martin when in our real lives it was mid-September and when the press had been making the very most of a disagreement we had been having in print about Stalin and Trotsky in the summer of 2001. Looking back, though, I am inclined to date the burgeoning refulgence of our love to something more like the calendar equivalent of April. Still, it was actually in the gloomy autumn of 1973, around the time of the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War between Israel and Egypt, that we actually and properly met. To anchor the moment in time: Salvador Allende had just been murdered by Pinochet in Chile, W.H. Auden had died, James Fenton (the author of the most beautiful poems to come out of the Indochina War) had won the Eric Gregory Award for poetry and used the money to go off and live in Vietnam and Cambodia, and at the age of twenty-four I had been hired to fill at least some of the void that he left behind at the New Statesman. Peter Ackroyd, literary editor of the rival and raffishly Tory Spectator, was giving me a drink one evening after returning from a trip of his own to the Middle East, and he said in that inimitable quacking and croaking and mirthful voice of his: “I’ve got someone I think you should meet.” When he told me the name, I rather off-handedly said that I believed we’d once met already, with Fenton at Oxford. Anyway, it was agreed that we would make up a threesome on the following evening, at the same sawdust-infested wine bar called the Bung Hole where my New Statesman career had begun.
Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try and conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday. I can remember it all very well: Ackroyd doing his best to be a good host (it’s a fearsome responsibility to promise two acquaintances that they will be sure to get along well with one another) and Martin rather languid and understated. He did not, for example, even pretend to remember when I said we had met before with our other mutual friend Fenton. [29] A verse letter to him from Clive James, published in Encounter at about this period, described Martin as resembling “a stubby Jagger,” and I remember this because of how very exact it seemed. He was more blond than Jagger and indeed rather shorter, but his sensuous lower lip was a crucial feature (I didn’t then know that he thought he was most vulnerable in the mouth) and there was no doubt that you would always know when he had come into the room.
His office performed, Ackroyd withdrew and the remaining pair of us later played some desultory pinball in another bar. I noticed that Martin had the gift of mimicry: he could drop or raise his voice and alter his features and just simply “be” the person we were talking about (I cannot now remember who). He asked me which novelists I enjoyed and I first mentioned Graham Greene: this answer palpably did not excite him with its adventurousness. In answer to my reciprocal question he said he thought that one had to look for something between the twin peaks of Dickens and Nabokov, and it came back to me that Fenton had said to me how almost frighteningly “assured” all Martin’s literary essays were turning out to be. I don’t recollect how the evening ended.
But some kind of mutuality had been stirred, and we soon enough had dinner with our respective girlfriends in some Cypriot taverna in Camden Town, where things went with a swing and I can remember making him laugh. Then Yvonne died and I vanished from London and from life for a bit, to discover on my return that Martin had taken the trouble to write me a brief, well-phrased, memorable note of condolence. (A lesson for life: always when in doubt please do send letters of commiseration; at the very least they will be appreciated and at the best they may even succeed in their apparently futile ambition of lightening the burden of bereavement.) The next I knew, I was invited to a small party to celebrate the publication of Martin’s first novel, The Rachel Papers.
Chat about this literary debut had been in the wind for a while, and Martin had an editorial position at the
