Times Literary Supplement as well as a mounting reputation as a reviewer and (which of course could be made to irk him) the same surname as one of the most famous novelists writing in English. Thus it seemed rather odd that he should be throwing his own book party, in his own small and shared flat, at his own expense. But I am glad of it, because those of us who had the good luck and good taste to attend were later able to reminisce rather triumphantly.
The 1973/74 apparel was absurd of course: cowboy boots and flared trousers for some of the men (those ill-advised cross-hatched blue jeans, designed to resemble armor, for me in particular) and Christ knows what for the girls. Sobriety and corduroy were supplied, however, by Amis senior and by his friend Robert Conquest, the great poet and even greater historian of Stalinism. In the International Socialists we made his book on The Great Terror required reading, but that didn’t mean I didn’t suspect him—and Kingsley too—of pronounced reactionary tendencies. This was mainly because of the reprehensible line they had both taken over Vietnam. Yet I was queasily aware that Kingsley’s Girl, 20, with its ridiculing of “Sixties” morality and mentality, was rather hard to laugh off. Then there was Clive James, dressed as usual like someone who had assembled his wardrobe in the pitch dark, but always “on” and always awash in cross- references and apt allusions. The presence of these few but gravity-donating figures, plus the climb up the stairs from Pont Street on the fringes of Chelsea, made me conserve my breath for a time. I had in fact met both Kingers and Conkers—as they were sometimes known—before, but I was very aware that my roadworthiness (Martin prefers the term “seaworthiness”) in real grown-up company was not to be assumed: at any rate not by me.
The main event of my evening turned out in any case to take place at the opposite end of the age and gender scale. It suddenly seemed to me that Martin’s sister Sally did not perhaps find me entirely repulsive. As the evening gently evaporated I found myself taking her arm in the street and seeing—through quite a lot of fog, I now remember—the looming bulk of the Cadogan Hotel. Perhaps a little flown with wine, I suddenly and confusedly felt that it might be a fine thing to take her to the very place where Oscar Wilde had been arrested. I couldn’t possibly afford it but then, as I thought about it, I couldn’t possibly afford not to do it once I had thought about it. The Wilde suite itself was not available but we did procure a decent room and things proceeded happily enough. Ghost of Oscar or no ghost of Oscar, I did briefly allow myself to wonder if there was anything remotely subliminal or oblique in what I was doing: Sally had rather the same coloring as the brother I was beginning to adore though not at all the same face (it was years until it was established that she was not Kingsley’s daughter, but that’s another tale altogether).
I find now that I can more or less acquit myself on any charge of having desired Martin carnally. (My looks by then had in any case declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.) What eventuated instead was the most heterosexual relationship that one young man could conceivably have with another. As the days became weeks, and the months became seasons, and as we fell happily into the habit of lunching and dining and party going a deux, there began an inexhaustible conversation, about womanhood in all its forms and varieties and permutations, that saw us through several episodes of sexual drought as well as through some periods of embarrassment of riches.
It was not, or not by any means all, the locker-room talk that you may imagine (though any reader of Martin’s novels will know how brilliantly inventive is his capacity for bawdry: I refuse to say “obscenity” because the obscene is too easy and besides, it is always either quite humorless or too dependent for its humor on the knowledge that mere infants have of the human anatomy).[30] It might have been anyone—actually I am sure it was our poet friend Craig Raine—who came up with the appalling yet unforgettable idea that there is a design flaw in the female form, and that the breasts and the buttocks really ought to be on the same side. But it was Martin who went to all the trouble, with dead-pan and dead-on acuity, of arguing the respective merits of which side that ought to be. (One doesn’t necessarily want to see both features walking toward one, for example, but then again it might be dispiriting to see them both simultaneously marching away…) As for metaphors, everybody has at one point seen men standing in front of the pornography section, in either a magazine store or a video emporium, but it was Martin who observed these swaying and muttering figures pulling out and then replacing the contents and compared it to “the Wailing Wall.” He had an instinctive understanding of the relationship between Eros and Thanatos: one winter he was suffering quite badly from flu and left the New Statesman office early to go home. I agreed to walk an abnormally subdued and mufflered Martin down the gelid street to Holborn tube station: as we trudged along there was a girl in front of us who looked as if she was walking on beautifully fluted stilts. “How might it be…?” he murmured thoughtfully with absolutely no leer or salacity. At once, it seemed, he had brightened and straightened and ceased to snuffle.
This was a tiny aspect of an elaborate and detailed investigation of the feminine mystique: a scrupulous weighing of evidence and comparing of notes. I would love to be able to give the impression that it was a relationship between equals but, if represented in cartoon form, the true picture would be closer to one of those great white sharks that evolution has fitted out with an accompanying but rather smaller fish.[31] I would turn up at parties with Martin, to be sure, but with a rather resigned attitude. At one soiree in Holland Park, he was introduced to a young woman with a result that was as close as made no difference to witnessing a lightning strike or a thunderbolt. His then-girlfriend was present at the party, as I think was the other young lady’s husband, but what then happened in the adjoining room was unstoppable and seemed somehow foreordained. We both knew that the subsequent pregnancy was almost certainly also a consequent one, but so gentlemanly was the husband in the case that it was not until two decades later that Martin received the letter from his missing daughter, the lovely Delilah Seale, his “bonding” with whom— there doesn’t seem to be another word for it—is one of the most affecting things I have ever chanced to see. (And she, the offspring of that thunderbolt moment, has now become the mother of Martin’s first grandchild: another thought that gives me a reflective but piercingly sweet pang. Pasternak was perhaps not such a fool when he wrote in Dr. Zhivago that all conceptions are immaculate.)[32]
I could tell that Martin was fitted for glory in work as well as life and, when The Rachel Papers was a huge critical and commercial grand slam, I sent him a long telegram. It was a stave from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Early Success. Of course in some ways this was inappropriate —“Scottie” burned out and died at forty-four and is buried, along with poor mad Zelda, not far from me in Rockville, Maryland—but to us then, the age of forty lay well over the horizon. It wasn’t really true of Martin, as Fitzgerald had put it, that “premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power—at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.” However, there was a paragraph that did seem to meet the case and this I sent him:
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I can’t honestly say I regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea.
Over the course of the next several years, we were still able to indulge in creative time-wasting by talking— always with ardent respect, but always exhaustively and until there was absolutely nothing left to say—about women, different women, and sometimes the same woman. I remember being rather relieved when, of one of those women, it could be said that it was I who had featured with her, so to speak, first. It seemed only fair… And then the talk would turn to other things. Martin never let friendship take precedence over his first love, which was and is the English language. If one employed a lazy or stale phrase, it would be rubbed in (there, I have done it again), no, it would be incisively emphasized, with a curl of that mighty lip and an ironic gesture. If one committed the offense in print—I remember once saying “no mean achievement” in an article—the rebuke might come in note form, or by one’s being handed a copy of the article with a penciled underlining. He could take this vigilance to almost parodic lengths. The words “ruggedly handsome features” appear on the first page of Nineteen Eighty-four and for a while Martin declined to go any further into the book. (“The man can’t write worth a damn.”) He was later to admit that the novel did improve a trifle after that. Years later, when I gave him the manuscript of my book on Orwell, he brought it to our next rendezvous at a Manhattan bistro and wordlessly handed it back. He had gone through it page by page, painstakingly correcting my pepper- shaker punctuation.
