Sunday Review: Martin Amis reviewing Jane Austen

Two for one

By Morris Dean

Today it's two for one¹, or one within another. Martin Amis's 2001 collection, The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000² is itself a two-for-one: writing that's just fun to read, plus a few dozen reviews of books that you might be glad to have read about and decide to read one or two, or a few.

The day the music died

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
in a library

I know where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news that Philip Larkin had died. I was driving to work through Durham and was on that section of road right after Duke University Rd. becomes W. Chapel Hill St. I was listening to Morning Edition on WUNC 91.5 FM. And since Larkin had died the day before, on December 2, I know from the 1985 calendar that I heard the news on a Tuesday.
    Larkin was a librarian and a poet. He was a contemporary of Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), just as Kingsley's son Martin was a contemporary of Christopher Hitchens (both born 1949). They all knew, liked, and wrote about one another.
    Hitchens introduced Larkin's main poetic theme, death, in the prologue of his memoir, Hitch-22, in the course of talking about having been prematurely "killed off" by a London magazine that contained the sentence, "Martin [Amis] was literary editor of the New Statesman, working with the late Christopher Hitchens and Julian Barnes...." [p. 12]
    Julian Barnes had titled his own meditation on death Nothing to Be Frightened Of¹. To Larkin, as with Woody Allen, it certainly was something to be frightened of. But whereas Allen didn't (and presumably still doesn't) want to be there when it happens, Larkin didn't want to be dead, and he wasn't consoled by the thought that when he was dead, he wouldn't be dead, because he wouldn't be:

Philip Larkin...observes in his imperishable "Aubade" that [not knowing that you are dead] is exactly the thing about the postmortem condition that actually does and must make one afraid:

The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true....
And specious stuff that says no rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear....[p. 14, Hitch-22]

But given that I blog daily, whether I have anything to say or not, it was because of another bit about Larkin that I'm writing this article today. (Let's not dwell on death for now.)
    As I indicated recently, I've been reading Kingsley Amis's Memoirs. It has a chapter on Philip Larkin:

[Larkin] always knew where he stood, never fooled himself or said anything he did not mean. When he told you he felt something, you could be quite sure he did feel it, a priceless asset to a poet, and a poet of feeling and mood at that.
    The same quality ensured that when he had nothing to say he said nothing, a turn of mind that helped him not to write any bad poems. [emphasis mine; at about 2 hours, 25 minutes in the digital recording I'm listening to]

    That is, I wanted to take this occasion to say something that I do have to say: I apologize for the times I've had nothing to say, and said it.
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1. A couple of quotes from Barnes's book can be found at http://moristotle.blogspot.com/2008/12/it-is-difficult-for-us-to-contemplate.html and http://moristotle.blogspot.com/2008/12/other-possibilities-beyond-brute.html.

"Have some gin instead"

Kingsley Amis taught at
Vanderbilt University
in the late 1960s

Martin Amis is a major figure in Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22. Martin's father, the English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), is also a presence in Hitchens's memoir.
    Over the past two months I've sampled as many of Martin's and Kingsley's books (about a dozen) as I could download in digitally recorded format, both fiction and not. None of them appealed to me and proved as readable as Kingsley's 1991 Memoirs. It's unputdownable, more fun than Hitchens's own memoir, which is a lot longer and weightier, discoursing seriously as it does on international politics and such matters.
    I've been tempted several times in the first two hours of listening to Memoirs to quote something here for your delectation. Here's perhaps the best so far:

John Wain [minor English poet, novelist, and critic] slotted in his three years of undergraduate residence while I had been away at the war. He had been found unfit for military service (lungs), like Philip [Larkin] (eyes), like others who, when counted in with those who had craftily evaded service elsewhere, like Dylan Thomas, made up quite a total and suggests, as part of an answer to the old question, Why were the Great War poets better than the Second War lot? Because a good half of the Second War lot managed to stay out of it.
    I digress, however....
    I found [John Wain] most attractive, lightly caustic with a voice and manner to match, knowledgeable, worldly wise, a budding academic without crap....
    ...He was full of stories, like the one about the sherry bottle that held something other than sherry. The inconvenience of his rooms in Redding had led him to pee habitually into a bottle last thing at night, emptying it first thing in the morning. Once, about to hand some guests glasses of what was meant to be Tio Pepe, he had noticed at the last moment that this was not so and deduced in the nick of time that what had gone down the pan that morning was the Tio Pepe.
    "Hold it," he had blurted, "this isn't good enough for you. It's piss, in fact. Have some gin instead".... [at about 1:45 into a 12:52 reading]

The present is unavoidable

Martin Amis is a major figure in Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22. They were friends from their twenties, with some sticky patches described in the memoir. I'm left with the impression, which I plan to double-check by re-reading Hitch-22 before the year is out, that Hitchens may have done something to alienate Amis at some point, for some passages read like attempts to get back in Amis's good graces.
    At any rate, for an example, here is a mention of Amis in Hitchens's chapter titled "Something of Myself," in which Hitchens answers "The Proust Questionnaire" that seemed to be an office fixture at Vanity Fair magazine, where Hitchens was a contributing editor starting in November 1992:

Your proudest achievement? Since I can't claim the children as solely "mine," being the dedicatee of books by Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, and poems by James Fenton and Robert Conquest. [p. 370]

    I've downloaded a half-dozen of Amis's books to listen to, or to at least try to read. I started with his 1991 novel, Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offence. Hitchens doesn't mention the book, but Sean Carroll does in From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, in which he cites the novel's telling a story in reverse. Real time can flow only forward, but must a story?
    I think it must. Or for me at least. I listened to about ten pages before growing weary of the game, but not without being impressed with how Amis's narrator dealt with recounting conversations. He learned how to "translate" language heard backward into its forward equivalent. Sort of like decoding Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks by holding them up to a mirror.
    I listened to the beginning of each of the Amis books I'd downloaded, but none of them was dedicated to Christopher Hitchens. I have yet to discover the one (or ones) that were.
    I turned next to Amis's 2001 non-fiction book, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000, which quickly provided a statement that indicted me of some recent idleness I'd engaged in:

It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality. Say whatever else you will about it, the present is unavoidable.

    The present is unavoidable. It's just the way it had to be. And the Judeo-Christian ethic could not have developed with any more inclusive affirmation of life than it did. "What if" conjectures about its (or anything else's) having been different from what it was are of mostly academic interest. Mostly idle.
    The Amis statement prompted me to revise the conclusion of Sunday's essay, "Them's the breaks":

Like Walter [Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad], we might individually resist—or become conscious that something in us seems to want to resist—but happenings both within us and around us continue to roll on just the way they individually and collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.^*

    There, less of a muddle, I hope.
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* The original paragraph:

Like Walter, we might individually resist, but happenings continue to roll on just the way they collectively always have done and always will do. According to the laws of nature.

    That paragraph wasn't literally the conclusion. It was followed by a sort of coda about the unrolling of things' being believed by some as "God's plan in action," with special favors doled out to the believers.
    That idea—that the concept of "God's plan" sprang from the sense that events just happen without our having much or any control over them—deserves an essay of its own.

In Memoriam: Hitch

As I said on Friday, Christopher Hitchens will live for a long time in the memories of his many friends. The first remembrance I read was that of Sam Harris, titled simply "Hitch":

There was simply no one like him...Hitch produced more fine work, read more books, met more interesting people, and won more arguments than most of us could in several centuries. [–The Blog]

And, this morning, reprinted in a local newspaper from The Washington Post was Kathleen Parker's "There was just one Hitch":

To say I was a friend of Hitchens would be an exaggeration, though I did enjoy the pleasure of his company on several occasions. But one needn’t have known a writer to mourn his passing or to feel profound sadness about all the silent days to come. No matter what the topic, I always wanted to know what Hitchens thought about it, and, lucky for the world, he seemed always willing to end the suspense....
    Among the many things that made Hitchens unique was his precision of thought and expression. What made him rare were his courage and tenacity. He was fearless in the field and relentless in his defense of the defenseless with that mightiest of swords—his pen. Judging from his final essays, he was also fearless in the face of death. Terrified that he might lose his ability to write and therefore his being? Well, that was something else.

And Ms. Parker referred to yet another remembrance, that in The New Yorker by whom she calls "The Other Christopher" (Christopher Buckley), "Postscript: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011. It begins thus:

We were friends for more than thirty years, which is a long time but, now that he is gone, seems not nearly long enough. I was rather nervous when I first met him, one night in London in 1977, along with his great friend Martin Amis. I had read his journalism and was already in awe of his brilliance and wit and couldn’t think what on earth I could bring to his table. I don’t know if he sensed the diffidence on my part—no, of course he did; he never missed anything—but he set me instantly at ease, and so began one of the great friendships and benisons of my life. It occurs to me that "benison" is a word I first learned from Christopher, along with so much else.

And, brought to my attention by an email just read from a friend, Robert Scheer's "Christopher Hitchens: Reason in Revolt," on Reader Supported News:

...This was a man unafraid of intellectual challenge and committed to pursuing the heart of the matter.
    That was his driving force, a seeker of truth to the end, and a deservedly legendary witness against the hypocrisy of the ever-sanctimonious establishment. What zeal this man had to eviscerate the conceits of the powerful, whether their authority derived from wealth, the state, or a claim to the ear of the divine.

Word games

Robert Conquest
(b. 1917)

So far, I've had three suggestions for the final line of Wednesday's limerick,

There once was a man of Stoke Poges,
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
    So this elderly menace
    Took steamship to Venice....
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all from my old college friend Jon:

We did it in a bed and said "Oh, yes."
And all that was required was togas.
Straight sex, rats, does not rhyme with Stoke Poges.

I like these, but I'm disapponted by Oh, yes's and togas's failing to include a rhyme for "Stoke" and "poke," and, of course, the clever third line repeats the given first line.
    Jon's first two suggestions are easy to adjust:

Where he did it in bed and said [choke] "Oh, yes!"
Where they managed the deed in bloke togas.

(I think togas came in men's and women's styles!)
    I don't expect to find "the solution" later in Hitchens's book, but in reading on I found something even better, more about word games, of which, we have to admit, writing limericks is one:

I already knew in principle that word games, like limericks and acrostics and acronyms and crosswords, are good training in and of themselves. I could not then guess at the harvest of such marvels that lay ahead....[p. 130]
    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, they can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second. Martin [Amis, son of Kingsley] 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....[p. 164]
    Something of the same was true of the "Friday lunch" that has now become the potential stuff of a new "Bloomsbury" legend...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.
    It began, largely at Martin's initiation, as a sort of end-of-the-week clearinghouse for gossip and jokes, based on the then-proximity of various literary magazines and newspapers. Reliable founding attendees included the Australian poets Clive James and Peter Porter, Craig Raine (T.S. Eliot's successor as poetry editor at Faber and Faber), the Observer's literary editor Terry Kilmartin (the re-translator of Scott Moncrieff's version of Marcel Proust, and the only man alive trusted by Gore Vidal to edit his copy without further permission), the cartoonist and rake and dandy Mark Boxer, whose illustrations then graced (for once the word is quite apt) all the best bookcovers as well as the Time's op-ed page. Among those bookcovers were the dozen volumes of Anthony Powell's masterwork [A Dance to the Music of Time] and among Mark's aesthetic and social verdicts the one I remember being delivered with the most authority was his decided and long-meditated conclusion that: "It's the height of bad manners to sleep with somebody less [sic] than three times."...The critic Russell Davies, the then-rising novelists Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Robert Conquest when they were in England, Kingsley when he wasn't otherwise engaged with yet more lavish and extensive lunches, and your humble servant help to complete this dramatis personae....[pp. 168-169]
    ...but Robert Conquest, the king of the limerick [emphasis mine]...always thought that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing well....
    Simple "versified filth"—Amis senior's crushing condemnation of most popular limericks—was not allowed.
    Indeed insistence upon the capacious subtleties of the limerick was something of a hallmark. Once again Conquest takes the palm: his condensation of the "Seven Ages of Man" shows how much force can be packed into the deceptively slight five-line frame. Thus:

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
    Then fucks, and then fights
    Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

This is not the only example of Conquest's genius for compression. The history of the Bolshevik "experiment" in five lines? Barely a problem:

There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
    That's a lot to have done in
    But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in. [pp. 173-174]

There's probably another blog entry to come of this. I see that on p. 435, the index entry for "word games" also gives reference to pp. 264-266.

I used to think that my limerick, "No End in Sight" (November 26, 2006):

Religious war burns on and beleaguers
Iraq's Sunni and Shiite besiegers,
    But it brings no relief
    From dogmatic belief
But for stone-dead dogmatic believers.

was pretty darn good, and maybe it isn't bad, but it compresses far less into itself than either of the examples from Conquest.

What was the limerick's final line?

[review]

Among the pages of Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, that I read this morning, was a passage about a limerick "appeal" that a journalist had made in the New Statesman. I've decided to borrow the appeal and pass it on to my readers.
    The original appeal provided only the first line, but I'll provide all but the last. Here's why:

Tom Driberg in the last years of his life was still a true legend on the journalistic and cultural left. In youth, he had been an original member of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead set, while also maintaining good relations with the more radical forces clustered around W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. He had, indeed, given the young Auden his first copy of The Waste Land, and joined him in reading it aloud...Anyway, he was sometimes invited to contribute the "Londoner's Diary" to the New Statesman, and one week issued an appeal to readers to help him complete an indecent limerick the first line of which ran: "There once was a man of Stoke Poges." This highly respectable town in Buckinghamshire seemed to cry out for the rhyme "poke Doges," which in turn meant that the remainder of the limerick would have to be Venetian in flavor.
    Fenton and I [poet James Fenton], assisted by our dear friend Anthony Holden, accepted the challenge and were duly invited to a lunch by old Tom held at the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street, above which Karl Marx had once kept his squalid lodgings. How we completed the task I don't entirely remember ("entirely resolved to poke Doges. So this elderly menace / Took steamship to Venice..." But what was the last line?). At all events [I continue quoting beyond what's necessary simply in able to get to Hitchens's mention of the actor who played Lawrence of Arabia; like Frank Harris, Hitchens seems to have known everybody]...

Left hand panel from
Francis Bacons' 1966 triptych
Three Studies for a Portrait
of Muriel Belcher

At all events, by the time the restaurant had finally insisted on throwing us out—this in the days when the pubs in London were not allowed to stay open in the afternoon—Tom simply took me down the street and up a flight of dingy stairs and made me a member of the infamous "Colony Room Club," an off-hours drinking establishment run by a tyrannical 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.... [pp. 151-152]

Anyway, I invite you to submit your nomination for what the final line of the limerick concocted by Mssrs. Driberg, Hitchens, Fenton, and Holden might have been:

There once was a man of Stoke Poges,
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
    So this elderly menace
    Took steamship to Venice....
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