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Thursday, May 9, 2019

Martin Amis



First I read his father, Kingsley Amis; his book Lucky Jim. I don't really remember what it was about it that I liked, in fact nothing about it, except that I was living in London at the time, being a relatively happy and content young alcoholic; living with my mother, father, and sister in a nice flat in Hampstead. It was a very civilized respite for me from a life that had gone a bit off the rails do to my hanging out with a bunch of barflies and subjecting my sensitive brain to a variety of drugs in addition to too much beer and too many rum and cokes.
I was twenty years old. My sister was sixteen. Grown men were persuing her. No one was persuing me because I was painfully shy though I hid it behind a kind of don't-bother-me-I'm-busy-thinking persona. I may have fooled someone; anything's possible.    

I had just come back from a hitchhiking trip through the U.S. South and Mexico which was in plain fact a rum and pot binge. I had been notified that I was going to be drafted within the year. The idea of being drafted struck fear into my heart. I couldn't think of anything positive about it, other than I might get killed. (I had a melodramatic side.)  The day after I got back from Mexico J.F.K. was shot. The country came to a standstill. The little village of Amagansett, N.Y., which I still considered home, though I'd grown up enough to have been to two years of college and done some bumming around, likewise ground to a halt. People didn't say, "What the Fuck" yet, but that's what everyone was thinking.

My father was in London, trying to form a company that would sell second-rights of American illustrators to European Magazines. He had two British partners who were wining and dining him prior to squeezing him out. Pa, as I called him, was living on a $10,000 nest-egg. When he heard the news, he called home. He said that London was in mourning. They loved JFK. Pa said he was very depressed and he needed us, all three of us, to come to London.

We needed to be needed; by him. So, we bought three cheap tickets on The Queen Mary. Mine was the cheapest, D Level, right next to the engine room. I shared the room with two middle-weight boxers, cockney or some other lower level Englishmen, with whom I made myself scarce. My drinking aboard ship was a little excessive but I would like to share that for a separate blog post, or I'll never get to Martin, which was my original intent. (I approach this blogging thing with the idea that there is an established aesthetic which goes throw it out and see if it sticks.) 


We landed in Southampton around the first of December 1963 after a very rough crossing; swells breaking over the bow of the old Q.M. all the way. I remember seeing a hatch cover flying eastward like a bird, to the north of us, while to the south, in the middle of the Atlantic, The France passed us steaming West with the wind.

Almost as soon as we made it to Hampstead, I signed up for National Health and managed to get  a scrip for Miltown for my daily consumption. Combined with a temperate use of the Watney's Pale Ale that my father had discovered could be bought in gallon jugs that had a spigot so you could just go to the fridge and grab a cuppa, I managed to keep myself in the most tranquil state I had ever been in, in my whole life, (which is probably why I remember London so fondly), for as long as we were in the U.K., which was until sometime in the spring of '64.        


While in London I adopted the air of a cultured young Anglophilic American.  I read Penguin books; I went to the British Museum and The Tate Gallery with my father and let him share with me his enthusiasm for, in particular, Turner, and Titian. I fell in love with the Elgin Marbles, possibly with the help of that Miltown buzz....We went to the Whitechapel Gallery to see a Jasper Johns show, and I was able to follow Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orolovsky around and eves-drop on them as they raved and gesticulated over Johns's work. (That show re-kindled for awhile my desire to be an artist, which I later gave up, again.)  With my mother, I went to the ballet and saw Nuryaev[sp.] and Fontaine in Swan Lake and to the theater where we saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe with the original cast.

I read Kingsley Amis. I dug deeper into D.H. Lawrence,  re-read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; read the Scandal Magazines, kept up with The Beatles through the Telly, though we never got a record player while there, discovered a pub on Hampstead Heath, The Bull and Bush, where a very posh group of young Jewish kids hung out, though I felt too shy and inferior to make much of an impression on any of them. They really were extremely worldly, well educated and glamorous, and my timidity probably had some wisdom in it.

All of which is to say that I have a bit of London in my history, and since in my sunset years I have become a respectable reader, I knew I had to catch up with Martin, someone I'd neglected.  ...So, I read his Experience, and his book about Stalin, Koba the Dread.  I Googled him. (I Google everybody, even you..), ...I began to compare his Oedipal Resolution with mine. O.K., I suppose that's something I do reflexively and should be ashamed of...., and then I read him someplace flapping his gums about Late Capitalism, something which he greatly abhors, along with anything right of center having to do with The Western World, and I began to think I needed to get to the bottom of that; so I read Money. Gawd! It should have been called Booze!  I mean, O.K., the guy in it drinks exactly the way I did, when I was an active Dipso, except that he had more money to drink with! And he is big and fat, bigger than me or Martin, and so he won more fights. But after reading through five or ten drunks I wanted to give up on it, yes it is stylish writing, the guy is a walking Star Turn after all, but I was ready to give up, except that I figured I should keep going, see if I could find the key to, the Rosetta Stone of, the syntactical meta-language of, Late Capitalism.

Did I mention that among all the fictional characters, and the fictional names for late Capitalism's modes of transportation which is to say automobiles, and for the Hollywood Stars that his primary character comes in to contact with, there is one real character, Martin Amis, who makes an appearance! And that Martin ends up being very wise and also very good at Chess? It's nice to see that as good as he is, he's also no slouch at self-promotion.








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