Visiting mrs nabokov, p.1
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, page 1
Acclaim for MARTIN AMIS’S
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
and Other Excursions
“The collection as a whole establishes Martin Amis as a penetrating critic. He evinces an anthropologic flair for catching the poses and jargon of a self-contained community.… He has access to the intimate, unguarded moment, the easy confidence … fascinating.”
—Wall Street Journal
“[Amis’s] journalism really rocks.… His essays are like well-thrown darts missiling through the triple-20: deadly and cool.”
—Washington Times
“[His] subject, seen in the round and read brilliantly, comes to the foreground, and the journalist recedes in the magician’s final trick, making himself disappear.… These are clear, sound and honest pieces.”
—Milwaukee Journal
“[Amis] brings to [Visiting Mrs. Nabokov] the same qualities that distinguish his fiction … an abiding respect for the writer and his craft.”
—Washington Post
“Exceptionally charming.… [Amis] gives his enthusiasm free reign.… He is a bright fellow with a rare sparkle in his prose.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Novelist, critic, boulevardier, tilting at the icons of power, Amis is ebullient when writing about who and what he admires.”
—Elle
“[Amis is] incandescent, dazzling and any other half-dozen adjectives for ‘incomparably brilliant’.… This is bold, bravura journalism.”
—St. Petersburg Times
Books by MARTIN AMIS
FICTION
The Rachel Papers
Dead Babies
Success
Other People
Money
Einstein’s Monsters
London Fields
Time’s Arrow
NONFICTION
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions
MARTIN AMIS
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
and Other Excursions
Martin Amis is well known on both sides of the Atlantic as the author of Time’s Arrow, London Fields, Einstein’s Monsters, Money, Other People, Success, Dead Babies, and The Rachel Papers. He has contributed to such periodicals as Vanity Fair, The Observer and The New Statesman. He lives in London.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1995
Copyright © 1993 by Martin Amis
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain in hardcover by Jonathan Cape Limited, London, in 1993. First published in the United States in hardcover by Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, in 1994.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Harmony Books edition as follows:
Amis, Martin.
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions / Martin Amis.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PR6051.M5V57 1994
824’.914 – DC20 93-26673
eISBN: 978-0-307-77779-9
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction and Acknowledgments
Graham Greene
Emergency Landing
Nuclear City: the Megadeath Intellectuals
Watford in China
John Updike
Tennis: the Women’s Game
St Lucia
J.G. Ballard
Chess: Kasparov v. Karpov
The Rolling Stones at Earls Court
Phantom of the Opera: The Republicans in 1988
Visiting Mrs Nabokov
V.S. Naipaul’s India
‘Frankfurt’
More Die of Heartbreak
Snooker with Julian Barnes
RoboCop II
Salman Rushdie
Poker Night
John Lennon
Expelled
Nicholson Baker
Short Stories, From Scratch
Philip Larkin, 1922-1985
Cannes
Isaac Asimov
Darts: Gutted for Keith
John Braine
Carnival
Anthony Burgess
Roman Polanski
Madonna
V.S. Pritchett’s Century
INTRODUCTION AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Warily looking back through these pieces, I glimpse a series of altered or vanished worlds, including those of my younger and much younger selves. Things change. Graham Greene is dead. Véra Nabokov is dead. Salman Rushdie is still alive, and still in hiding: if writing fiction is, among other things, an act of spiritual freedom, then Rushdie is a man who has been imprisoned for the crime of being free. Graham Taylor, one-time manager of Watford Football Club, is now manager of England: for the time being. Monica Seles, whose professional debut I witnessed (she was fourteen), has since won eight Slams; as I write, she is in hospital, recovering from a knife attack at a tournament in Hamburg (her East German assailant was a Steffi Graf fan, and his intention was to pave the way for Steffi’s return to the number-one spot). Nuclear deterrence is dead. Or at least Mutually Assured Destruction is dead: this extraordinary edifice – at once massive and notional, and, it appeared, impregnably self-sufficient – was unseamed by three words of diplomacy, from Mikhail Gorbachev (the three words were: ‘This isn’t serious.’ As a planetary arrangement, four tons of TNT per human being wasn’t only uncomic. It wasn’t serious). The nuclear age has survived its Deterrence period and is entering a new phase, one which we can confidently – though not safely – call Proliferation. John Braine is dead: as a writer, his dream was to make a great deal of money; but he died in penury. George Bush and Dan Quayle are dead, politically. The star interview is dead, as a form. Sent to New York to interview Madonna, I felt no significant disruption in my plans when Madonna refused to see me. The great post modern celebrities are a part of their publicity machines, and that is all you are ever going to get to write about: their publicity machines. You review the publicity machine. Even the humble literary interview is dying, or growing old: ‘It was with dread/detachment/high hopes that I approached X’s townhouse/office/potting shed. The door opened. He is fatter/smaller/taller/balder than I expected. Pityingly/perfunctorily/politely he offered me instant coffee/a cigarette/dinner. Everyone told me how modest/craven/suave/vain/charming I would find him, so I was naturally unsurprised/taken aback by his obvious charm/vanity, etc., etc.’ Darts is dead. Its decline followed an opposite course to that of nuclear deterrence. It tried to sanitise or detoxify itself (no alcohol, no tobacco, no obesity); but then it transpired that the prospect of messy self-destruction was the only thing anyone liked about it. Isaac Asimov is dead. Topless sunbathing is no longer remarkable. Roman Polanski no longer makes interesting films. V.S. Pritchett isn’t ninety any more: he will soon be ninety-three. I have now been doing this sort of thing for more than twenty years. I don’t get around as much as I used to.
Not long ago I saw a book of this kind described by a reviewer as ‘a garage sale’: the writer was selling off his literary junk, in informal surroundings. Certainly it is considered a nice gesture if, in introducing such a book, the writer abases himself for having assembled it. Actually the authorial motive – or vice or weakness – we are examining here is, I think, dully clerical: an attempt at order and completion. John Updike, an obvious hero of the genre, took this tendency too far, perhaps, when in Picked-Up Pieces he reprinted a sixty-word citation to Thornton Wilder, together with a fifty-word footnote doggedly justifying its inclusion. All I can safely promise the reader is that, though much has been left in, much has been left out.
After university I worked in an art gallery (for three months), then in advertising (for three weeks), then at the Times Literary Supplement (for three years), and then (for four more) at the New Statesman. In 1980 I quit going to an office and became a full-time writer. The main characteristic of this way of life, it seemed to me, was that nothing ever happened to you. Being a novelist, in those days, was not in itself a distraction, as it can be now. Now, if you’re not careful, you can spend half your life being interviewed or photographed or answering questions posed by the press, on the telephone, about Fergie or Maastricht or your favourite colour. Nothing ever happened to you – except journalism: the kind of journalism that got you out of the house. Getting out of the house is the only thing that unites the pieces in the present book – an unrigorous arrangement, which I didn’t quite stick to anyway. Not getting out of the house will be the controlling theme of a subsequent volume, one devoted to the lowest and noblest literary form: the book review. Novels, of course, are all about not getting out of the house.
And so, equipped with some kind of assignment, you get out of the house! This might mean a fifteen-hour flight or a ten-minute drive to the other side of Regents Park. Things can go well or they can go badly. When things go badly, you are simply an embarra
I am grateful to all the journalists who commissioned, retrieved, subbed, improved, bowdlerised or fact-checked these pieces, but I am especially grateful to the late Terence Kilmartin, of the Observer. I think of him as my first and last editor. He started me off and made it easy for me to keep going. Now he too is dead, and I miss his guidance and his friendship; but I will never finish a piece without mentally sending it past his desk.
Special thanks are also due to George Brennan, Emily Read, Pascal Cariss and Chaim Tannenbaum.
GRAHAM GREENE
‘All my friends … are dead. One finds that one’s acquaintances die at the rate of nineteen or twenty a year. That would include only about four that one has known well. I keep a rather morbid list. Yes, with a cross against the ones I knew really well.’
‘How do you feel when another one goes? Does it leave the life that remains feeling thinner?’
‘I think it does a bit. Evelyn – I was shocked by his death. One is shocked when a bit of one’s life disappears. I felt that with Omar Torríjos [the Panamanian leader]. I think that’s why, in the case of Torríjos, I embarked on what I hoped would be a memoir but turned into a rather unsatisfactory blend of things.* I felt that a whole segment of my life had been cut out.’
‘That list of yours. It must be quite a long list by now.’
‘Oh yes.’
It is, I believe, fairly common to feel a tremor of intimate recognition on your first glimpse of Graham Greene. Like most literate residents of the planet, you have known this presence (cool, fugitive, slightly sinister) all your reading life – and now here he is. He stands at the entrance to his Paris apartment, erect and inquisitive. The pale, headmasterly face is impassively well-preserved and, in its outlines, seems no different from the photographs on the three-shilling Penguins of the Fifties: long upper lip, frowning forehead, the moistly clouded stare. His clothes, too, are the expected mixture of greens and browns, the lank tie heavily knotted (with the thin end out-dangling the thick). The only obvious infirmity he suffers is an arthritic little finger; his handshake is gently, and appropriately, masonic.
‘Do you have any particular feelings about turning eighty?’
‘No, except annoyance at all this fuss and halloo. That business in The Times … One thing I did enjoy was going up to Bury St Edmunds to the Greene King Brewery and doing a mash – the first stage of brewing. By October there will be 100,000 bottles with a special label with my signature on it. It’s their strongest beer. They’re very good, Greene King. Now that I liked … Otherwise, well, I get tired more easily, I begin to forget names. I’m in rather better health than I was five years ago, when I had a cancer and an operation. I’m on a plateau. I’m not as manic and I’m not as depressive.’
The flat is spacious but not airy. Through the closed second-floor windows come the usual sounds (triumphant and hysterical) of mobilettes on the Boulevard Malesherbes. The English Sunday newspapers are fanned on the table, along with a copy of the Spectator, open at the correspondence page. Greene’s accent is now thoroughly European, and the rs are candidly Gallic; when he says, ‘Belief is rational and faith is irrational’, the stressed words sound exactly the same. He has the demeanour and habitat of a retired civil servant or (just possibly) an exiled spy – a quiet Englishman, a confidential agent, a third man.
Veteran interviewees have a repertoire, and to begin with Greene relied fairly heavily on his anecdotal store. The time he joined the Communist Party with Claud Cockburn ‘in hopes of getting a free trip to Moscow’, the time he requested electric-shock treatment from a psychiatrist friend, the time he was deported from Puerto Rico by the American authorities, his experiments with benzedrine while writing The Confidential Agent (in the mornings) and The Power and the Glory (in the afternoons) before the war. Sensing my familiarity with these stories (I had just read the collected essays and the two volumes of autobiography), Greene said:
‘As you see, I’ve got nothing new to say. One’s said it all in one’s work. It was embarrassing at the National Film Theatre the other day. I’d just received Quentin Falk’s book about my experiences with film and films, and I had time to read it beforehand. Luckily it had been published only the day before. Because every word that I uttered in response to questions at the NFT had been taken from this book. I’d got absolutely nothing further to contribute.’
‘You certainly get about a good deal.’
‘I haven’t much this year,’ said Greene, who has visited Switzerland, England, Italy, Spain, Antibes and now Paris, all in the last couple of months. ‘I’ve resisted the temptation of Panama, at least. I love long plane journeys, especially if I’m being paid for and I’m travelling first class. I used to go to Panama via Amsterdam to avoid going to the United States – a fifteen-hour journey, which I loved. I drank a lot of Bols gin, and I read. And there were no telephones and no letters. It’s like being in a hospital. I’m very happy in a hospital. Nobody can really get at you.’
The telephone rang. ‘Another professor,’ sighed Greene.
‘You say you avoid going to the United States …’
‘Well, I don’t like the United States. And I don’t like New York. I don’t like the electricity – I don’t like getting an electric shock whenever I touch a door handle. I don’t like the dirt, and on the whole – with many exceptions – I don’t like Americans. They strike me rather as the English abroad strike me: noisy, and incredibly ignorant of the world. I had a woman who came to see me from Houston the other day, and she was the most incredibly stupid woman I’ve ever known. And she was a graduate. We talked about the Central-American situation. She’d never heard of it. She’d never heard of any troubles down there. Later she wrote to me saying that she’d talked to her colleagues about what I’d said and she found, to her astonishment, that a lot of them agreed with me.
‘Reagan is a menace. I’m very disappointed by the death of Andropov. I had great hopes of him. I preached for some years that any reform in Russia could only come – not from the old men or the army – but from the KGB. A Polish film-director told me that the KGB let the army go to Afghanistan in order to get their feet in the mud … Despite the obvious noises Reagan has been making he’s as extreme as anyone in the Kremlin. I’m amused and interested by the fact that he’s meeting Gromyko, but I have a feeling that Gromyko will not be helping the re-election. He will have a clever move to damage it. I don’t think he will allow Reagan to pass himself off as a peacemaker.
‘I felt the shadow darken when Reagan came to power. But perhaps we’re all getting used to the idea. Perhaps the next generation will live under this shadow even more equably than your own. I’ve got a secret dream that Colonel Gadaffi will get hold of a couple of nuclear bombs and drop them somewhere. America and Russia will come together to extinguish the danger, and might never entirely separate.’
At one o’clock we tiptoed through the merde de chien and lunched in moderate bourgeois splendour at a Right Bank brasserie. ‘We’re stinging the Observer for this, are we? Good.’ The lordly waiters seated Monsieur Greene with some reverence and listened shrewdly to his request for a ‘martini-dry. Sec! Très, très sec.’ He added, ‘I never do what the doctors tell me. I think the body knows better than the doctor. I never eat vegetables. Castro was shocked. He said – what regime do you have? His was very strict, you see. I said, I don’t have one. I eat and drink what I like.’
‘So if the body says – have a drink …’
‘Then I drink.’
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