Inside Story

by Martin Amis

Genres: Friendship; Black Humor; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

This extraordinary novel gives the reader the heart-to-heart testimony of one of our finest writers - a wonder of literary invention and a boisterous modern classic.

His most intimate and epic work to date, Inside Story is the portrait of Martin Amis' extraordinary life, as a man and a writer. This novel had its birth in a death - that of the author's closest friend, Christopher Hitchens. We also encounter the vibrant characters who have helped define Martin Amis, from his father Kingsley, to his hero Saul Bellow, from Philip Larkin to Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and to the person who captivated his twenties, the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps.

What begins as a thrilling tale of romantic entanglements, family and friendship, evolves into a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die? In his search for answers, Amis surveys the great horrors of the twentieth century, and the still unfolding impact of the 9/11 attacks on the twenty-first - and shares all he has learned on how to write.

The result is one of Amis' greatest achievements: a love letter to life that is at once exuberant, meditative, heartbreaking and ebullient, to be savoured and cherished for many years to come.

© Martin Amis 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Release date: October 27, 2020

Publisher: Vintage

Print pages: 560

Sample

Preludial

Welcome! Do step on in – this is a pleasure and a privilege. Let me help you with that. I’ll just take your coat and hang it up here (oh, and incidentally that’s the way to the bathroom). Sit on the sofa, why don’t you – then you can control your distance from the fire.

Now what would you like? Whisky? Common sense, in this weather. And I anticipated, I divined your needs…A blend or a malt? Macallan’s? The 12 Years Old or the 18? How do you like it – with soda, with ice? And I’ll bring in a tray of snacks. To keep you going until dinner.

…There. Happy 2016!

My wife Elena will be back around seven-thirty. And Inez will be joining us. That’s right – stressed on the second syllable. She’ll turn seventeen in June. We’ve been pared down to just the one child for now. Eliza, her slightly older sister – Eliza’s been doing her gap year in London, which after all is her home town (she was born there. As was Inez). Anyway, it so happens that Eliza was planning a visit – and she’s just touched down at JFK. So it’ll be the five of us.

Elena and I, we’re not there yet, but the next phase in our lives is already in plain view. I mean Empty Nest…There are only about half a dozen real turning points in an average span, and Empty Nest looks to me like one of them. And you know, I’m not sure how worried I ought to be about it.

Several contemporaries of ours, having watched their last fledgling flutter off into the distance, succumbed within minutes to passionate nervous breakdowns. And at the very least my wife and I will start to feel like that couple in Pnin, all alone in a big and draughty old house that ‘now seemed to hang about them like the flabby skin and flapping clothes of some fool who had gone and lost a third of his weight’…That’s Nabokov (one of my heroes), writing in 1953.

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Now Vladimir Nabokov – he had every right and warrant to attempt an autobiographical novel. His life was not ‘stranger than fiction’ (that phrase is very close to meaningless), but it was wildly eventful, and shot through with geohistorical glamour. You escape from Bolshevik Russia, and seek sanctuary in Weimar Berlin; you escape from Nazi Germany, and seek sanctuary in France, which Hitler promptly invades and occupies; you escape from the Wehrmacht, and seek – and find – sanctuary in America (‘sanctuary’ in those days being part of the American definition). No, Nabokov was a very rare case: a writer to whom things actually happened.

By the way I warn you that I’ll have a few things to say about Hitler in these pages, and about Stalin. When I was born, in 1949, the Little Moustache had been dead for four years and the Big Moustache (still called ‘Uncle Joe’ in our household Daily Mirror) had four years to live. I’ve written two books about Hitler and two books about Stalin, so I’ve already spent about eight years in their company. But there’s no escaping from either of them, I find.

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I never had the – no doubt terrifying – pleasure of meeting VN himself, but I had a memorable day with his widow, Véra, beautiful, goldenskinned, and Jewish, it is relevant to add; and I got to know his son, Dmitri Vladimirovich (a flamboyant prodigy and prodigal). It was a double sadness to me when Dmitri died, without issue, three or four years ago. Dmitri was the Nabokovs’ only child – born in Berlin in 1934, and officially a Mischling, or ‘half-breed’…At lunch, in Montreux, Switzerland, Véra and Dmitri were very fond and sweet with one another. There’ll be more about them later, in the section called ‘Oktober’ (it starts on this page). I sent Véra a photo of my first son, and received a charming reply which of course I’ve lost…

In general? Oh, I’m a ridiculously lax and indulgent parent – as my children have had occasion to point out to me. ‘You’re a very good father, Daddy,’ Eliza confided at the age of eight or nine, on a day when I was in sole charge: ‘Mummy’s a very good mother too. Though sometimes she can be just a little bit strict.’

Her meaning was clear. I’m incapable of embodying strictness, let alone enforcing it. You need genuine anger for that, and anger is something I almost never feel. I tried being an angry father, but just once and only for six or seven seconds. Not with my daughters but with my sons, Nat and Gus (who are now about thirty). One day – when they too were eight or nine – their mother, my first wife, Julia, came to my study in despair and said, ‘They’re being unusually impossible. I’ve tried everything. Now you go in there!’ Now you go in there, the suggestion was, and apply some masculine fire.

So I dutifully shouldered my way into their room and said in a raised voice,

‘Right. What the hell is all this?’

‘…Oh,’ said Nat, with a languid lift of his eyebrows. ‘Taste the wrath of Daddy.’

And that was that as far as anger was concerned.

The thing is I just don’t hold with it – anger. The Seven Deadly Sins ought to be revised and updated, but for now we should always remember that Anger rightly belongs in the classic septet. With anger – cui bono? Pity anger; pity those who radiate it as well as those on the other end of it. Anger: from Old Norse, angre ‘vex’, angr ‘grief’. Yes – grief. Anger is almost as transparently self-punitive as Envy.

In the parenting sphere I am innocent of anger, but the deadly sin I do own up to is Sloth – moral sloth. Giving the mother more to do…I warned Elena about this, slightly pleadingly (after all I was fifty by the time Inez was born). I said, ‘I’m going to be an emeritus parent’ (i.e., ‘retired but allowed to retain the title as an honour’). So in general a slothful father, though I’m quick – and eager and grateful – to accept the honour of it.

Three years ago I gave a talk at my middle daughter’s school, here in Brooklyn, at St Ann’s (where Inez also goes). Eliza was fifteen.

‘This could be embarrassing, Dad,’ said Gus (son number two), as I prepared to describe the occasion, and his older brother Nat said, ‘Definitely. Plenty of room for embarrassment here.’

‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘But it wasn’t embarrassing. Eliza wasn’t embarrassed. And I can prove it. Listen.’

The auditorium the school chose was an adjacent or maybe an adjoining house of worship – a real church (Protestant), with polished hardwood and stained glass. I stood at the pulpit facing a large congregation of humid young faces (I think attendance was compulsory for all in the ninth grade); these faces had an air of ‘sensitive expectancy’ (as Lawrence says of Gudrun and Ursula in the opening pages of Women in Love) when I tapped the microphone and greeted them and introduced myself, and asked: ‘Now. How many of you have ever thought of being a writer?’ And I’ll tell you the number of hands that went up in just a minute. I continued,

‘Well it so happens that you of all people know almost exactly what it’s like – to be a writer. You’re in your early-middle teens. The age when you come into a new level of self-awareness. Or a new level of self-communion. It’s as if you hear a voice, which is you but doesn’t sound like you. Not quite – it isn’t what you’ve been used to, it sounds more articulate and discerning, more thoughtful and also more playful, more critical (and self-critical) and also more generous and forgiving. You like this advanced voice, and to maintain it you find yourself writing poems, you keep a diary perhaps, you start to fill a notebook. In welcome solitude you moon over your thoughts and feelings, and sometimes you moon over the thoughts and feelings of others. In solitude.

‘That’s the writer’s life. The aspiration starts now, at around fifteen, and if you become a writer your life never really changes. I’m still doing it half a century later, all day long. Writers are stalled adolescents, but contentedly stalled; they enjoy their house arrest…To you the world seems strange: the adult world that you’re now contemplating, with inevitable anxiety but still from a fairly safe distance. Like the stories Othello tells Desdemona, the stories that won her heart, the adult world seems “strange, passing strange”; it also seems “pitiful, wondrous pitiful”. A writer never moves on from that premise. Don’t forget that the adolescent is still a child; and a child sees things without presuppositions, and unreassured by experience.’

In closing I suggested that literature essentially concerned itself with love and with death. I didn’t elaborate. At fifteen, what do you know about love, about erotic love? At fifteen, what do you know about death? You know that it happens to gerbils and budgies; maybe you know already that it happens to older relatives, including your parents’ parents. But you don’t yet know that it’s going to happen to you, too, and you won’t know for another thirty years. And not for another thirty will you personally face the really hard problem; only then will you be required to assume the most difficult position…

‘And why are you sure’, asked Nat in due course, ‘that Eliza wasn’t embarrassed?’

‘Yeah, Dad,’ asked Gus, ‘and how can you prove it?’

I said, ‘Because when it came to question time, Eliza wasn’t the first to speak but she wasn’t the last. She did speak, clearly and sensibly…So she didn’t disown me. She owned me, I’m proud to say. She claimed me, I’m proud to say, as her own.’

Oh, and when I asked my listeners how many of them had ever thought about being a writer? What proportion raised their hands? At least two-thirds. Making me suspect, for the first time ever, that the urge to write is almost universal. As it would be, wouldn’t it, don’t you think? How else can you begin to come to terms with the fact of your existence on Earth?

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Now you’re a close reader, and you’re still very young. That in itself would mean that you too have thought about being a writer. And perhaps you have a work in progress? It’s a sensitive subject, and it deserves to be sensitive. Novels, especially, are sensitive, because you’re exposing who you really are. No other written form does this, not even a Collected Poems and certainly not an autobiography or even an impressionistic memoir like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. If you’ve read my novels, you already know absolutely everything about me. So this book is just another instalment, and detail is often welcome…

My father Kingsley had a nice introductory formula on sensitive subjects. It was: ‘Talk about it as much as you like or as little as you like.’ Very civilised, that, and yes, very sensitive. Perhaps you’ll want to talk about your stuff, perhaps you won’t. But you needn’t feel shy. You said in your remarkably pithy note, I don’t want this to be about me. Well I don’t want this to be about me either; but that’s my task.

In any case I’ll be giving you some good tips about technique – for instance, about how to compose a sentence that will please the reader’s ear. But you should take any advice I might give you very lightly. Take all advice about writing very lightly. It’s expected of you. Writers must find their own way to their own voice.

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I attempted this book more than a decade ago. And I failed. At that point it was provisionally and pretentiously entitled Life (and coyly subtitled A Novel). One weekend, in Uruguay in 2005, I strong-armed myself into reading the whole thing, from the first word to the last: there were about 100,000 of them. And Life was dead.

That I’d apparently wasted about thirty months (thirty months spent plodding around a muddy graveyard) was the least of it. I thought I was finished. I really did. As if seeking confirmation – this was in Uruguay, in the northerly village of José Ignacio, near Maldonado, not far from the Brazilian border – I walked down to the shore and sat on a rock with my notebook, as I quite often did: the inrushing South Atlantic, the boulders the size and shape of slumbering dinosaurs, the lighthouse solid against the babyish pale blue of the sky. And I wrote not a syllable. The scene prompted nothing in me. I thought I was finished.

A horribly unfamiliar sensation, a kind of anti-afflatus. When a novel comes to you there is a familiar but always surprising sense of calorific infusion; you feel blessed, strengthened, and gorgeously reassured. But now the tide was going the other way. Something within me appeared to be subtracted; it was receding – with its hand at its lips, bidding adieu…

Naturally I confessed to Elena about the demise of Life: A Novel. But I confessed to no one about being finished. And I wasn’t finished. It was just Life I couldn’t write. Still. I’ll never forget that feeling – the outsurge of essence. Writers die twice. And on the beach I was thinking, Ah, here it comes. The first death.

Any minute now I’ll tell you about a perverse mental period I went through in early middle age. And I often wonder whether it had much to do with that nadir or climacteric, on the shore, that vertiginous plunge in self-belief. I think not. Because the perversity predated it, and went on beyond it. Yes, but these things take a long time coming, and a long time going.

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My oldest child, Bobbie. I didn’t get to know her till she was nineteen. She was already at Oxford (reading History).

‘Yes, that’s the way to go about it,’ said my pal Salman (oh, and I apologise in advance for all the name-dropping. You’ll get used to it. I had to. And it’s not name-dropping. You’re not name-dropping when, aged five, you say ‘Dad’). ‘Don’t get to know them’, said Salman, ‘until they’re already at Oxford.’

A nice remark, but that’s not the way to do it, as we were both aware. And I often feel regret, sometimes uncomfortably sharp, that I never knew Bobbie as an infant, a toddler, a child, a pre-teen, and an adolescent. But there it is. There won’t be much about her here: she already starred in a book I wrote after my father’s death in 1995, and now she’s a whole ocean away…

So I helped raise two boys, and I helped raise two girls. I know about boys and I know about girls; what I don’t know so much about is how they mingle. In recent years Bobbie has ‘presented’ me, as they say, with two grandchildren, a perfect boy and a perfect girl. So maybe I’ll learn something – at one remove, through the wrong end of the telescope.

On the other hand, I grew up as a middle child: with an older brother, a younger sister. Nicolas was and is a year and ten days my senior (my Irish twin). But Myfanwy (pron. Mivvanwee), four years my junior, died in the year 2000. That event, too, took a long time coming, and a long time going.

A word about the unnatural interest I started taking in suicide – my extended period, in fact, of what they call ‘suicidal ideation’.

It officially began on September 12, 2001. I wasn’t reacting to the suicidal events of the day before (though I suppose I was feeling unusually porous and susceptible). It was not Osama bin Laden who threw me. It was an ex-girlfriend, a woman called Phoebe Phelps (and Phoebe will not allow herself to be kept offpage much longer).

…The poet Craig Raine said of Elias Canetti that he had ‘a swarm in his bonnet’ about crowds (his best-known book was called Crowds and Power). Oh, and by the way here’s an intriguing bit of gossip: Canetti, the Nobel-winning Dichter, was a lover of the young Iris Murdoch (and you wonder about the quality of their pillow talk). Phoebe Phelps put a bee in my bonnet – but it felt like a swarm.

You won’t believe this, but turning sixty, for men, is a great relief. To start with, it’s a great relief from your fifties. Of the seven decades: the thirties constitute the prince, the fifties the pauper. I assumed that my sixties would differ from my fifties only in being much, much worse, but I’m finding the gradient unexpectedly mild; in fact it embarrasses me to say that the only time I’ve ever been happier was in childhood. True, you have to deal with an uncomfortable new thought, namely: Sixty…Mm. Now this can’t possibly turn out well. But even that thought is better than nearly all the thoughts of your fifties (an epoch to which I will bitterly return).

More recently I’ve been wondering, How exactly am I going to get out of here? By what means, by what conveyance? Not that I’m at all keen to be gone (even at the height of my suicidal-ideation period I was never keen to be gone). You just feel the exit coming closer – as you’re drawn (in the dignified phrase of an American writer we’ll be meeting very soon) towards ‘the completion of your reality’.

And coming closer with ridiculous haste. In fact you start to feel a bit of a dupe every time you open your eyes and get out of bed. The psychic clock (people have written about this) definitely accelerates…After I turned sixty my birthdays became biannual, then triannual. The Atlantic Monthly gradually became a fortnightly; and now it’s the Atlantic Weekly. Just lately, I shave, or feel as though I shave, every day (and I provably don’t shave every day). In the New York Times the op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman used to appear on Wednesdays only, but now he writes a piece every twenty-four hours (following the example of Gail Collins and Paul Krugman); and when it’s bad, I seem to be settling down to these authors, over a leisurely breakfast (fruit, cereal, softboiled egg), every forty-five minutes.

You feel a schmuck and a patsy because it’s somehow as if you’re colluding in your own demise. A certain poet, who will also appear before long, put it more sombrely, in ‘Aubade’ (aubade – a poem or piece of music appropriate to the dawn):

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now.

Time has come to feel like a runaway train, flashing through station after station. But back when I was climbing trees, playing rugby football, and giving the girls in the schoolyard an occasional game of hopscotch (and all three activities now strike me as appallingly dangerous) – the runaway train was moving no slower. Nabokov even gives the speed: 5,000 heartbeats per hour. Life moves towards death at 5,000 hph.

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You must be aware of it – and you must’ve been tempted by it: the huge sub-genre now known as ‘life-writing’. It spans everything from Proust to the personal ads, from Sons and Lovers to the travel piece, from Does My Bum Look Big in This? to…I was going say to Mystic Meg’s astrology column; but at least Mystic Meg has gone to the trouble of making it all up.

In a way I’m excited by the challenge, but the trouble with life-writing, for a novelist, is that life has a certain quality or property quite inimical to fiction. It is shapeless, it does not point to and gather round anything, it does not cohere. Artistically, it’s dead. Life’s dead.

Only artistically, that is. In down-to-earth realist and material terms, of course, life is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and has everything to be said for it. But then life ends, while art persists for at least a little while longer.

Are you worried about the Great Pretender? I mean that high-end bingo caller who occupies pole position in the GOP? Every few years the Republicans feel the need to valorise an ignoramus (you may remember Joe the Plumber). They like the fact that their new champion, that trafficker in beefsteaks and dud diplomas, has no experience and no qualifications; if he wins, the first-ever political office he will hold is the leadership of the free world. Until recently, he was no more than a reasonably good sick joke. But I’m afraid we’ll have to keep a pained and rheumy eye on him for a little while longer.

I saw Trump in the flesh just once, about fifteen years ago, and Elena and I had an excellent view. It was at a tiny airport in Long Island. He walked very slowly from plane to car (not his plane, just some open-prop shuttle), followed at a respectful distance by two beauty queens wearing sashes: Miss USA and Miss Universe. He looked put-upon and longsuffering; the limousine was inconveniently distant; and the flatland wind was having a day at the races with his hair.

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As I said, I couldn’t write this novel back in Uruguay, but I think I can write it now – because the three principals, the three writers (a poet, a novelist, and an essayist), are all dead. The poet went in 1985, the novelist in 2005, and the essayist in 2011. The essayist was my closest and longest-serving friend and my exact contemporary. Whatever else it did to me and for me (a very great deal), his death gave me my theme, and meant, too, that Life could earn its subtitle. There was more room to manoeuvre, more freedom; and fiction is freedom. Life was dead. Life is dead, artistically. Death, on the other hand, is in this respect very much alive.

I’ll show you to your room. Or to your floor. This house used to consist of separate apartments. On every landing there’s a thick door with a chunky lock and a spyhole – separating private space from public. Around here we call your floor Thugz Mansion, with a zed. Or, more simply, Thugz. It got that name when Nat and Gus were both here. You can change it if you like but that’s what it says under your bell on the doorstep – Thugz. So notify any visitors.

We’ll be eating in around half an hour, and you’ll have time to wash or lie down or unpack or just get your bearings. Thugz consists of a bedroom with an alcove study off it, a sitting room, and a kitchen. And two bathrooms. Yes, two. In Cambridge, England, I lived in an eight-bedroom house with one (cramped) bathroom just above the groundfloor boiler. But this is the United States, after all. There’ll be a fair amount to say about what it’s like living in it, this country, America.

It’s basically a female set-up here: at mealtimes I join Elena, Eliza, and Inez – and frequently Betty (mother-in-law) and Isabelita (niece). My only comrade and bro, my only home boy, is Spats, who’s the cat.

And here he is. He’s a pretty decent little guy, you’ll find. And exceptionally handsome, according to Elena. When I accuse her of spoiling Spats, she says, ‘If you’re that good-looking, being spoiled is what you get.’ We’ll return to the question of looks: a profoundly mysterious and irksome human sphere.

Here he comes…Have you noticed how entitled cats seem to be? Entitled, and coolly self-sufficient. That’s the main difference between cats and dogs. That, and the fact that cats are silent.

Oh, thank you very much, Spats!

He timed that very wittily, don’t you think? Yes, Spats, you did. He won’t bother you much. If you’re down here and we’re all somewhere else and he’s complaining, he either wants to be let out or…I’ll show you where we keep his dry food and the tins – the Fancy Feasts. And you’ll be as pleased as I am to know that he has his shits in the garden.

He’ll be gone soon, Spats. He’s retiring to the Hamptons, where he has family. Elena has family there too – a mother, a sister, and (sometimes) a brother…Now I hope you won’t find your stay here wholly unstimulating. You and I will have our sessions, and you’re always very welcome at the table, but otherwise take this place for what it is – an apartment block. Where you have your own keys.

By the way, this final draft will take an incredibly long time – at least two years, I reckon. You see, unlike poems, novels are limitlessly, indeed infinitely improvable. You can’t finish them; all you can do is put them behind you…So for now, most afternoons, there’ll be an hour or two of what Gore Vidal used to call ‘book chat’, until you move into your own place. And then, too, you’ll be off and away for long stretches, and so will I. We can do a lot of it by mail. Let’s just see how we go.

The book is about a life, my own, so it won’t read like a novel – more like a collection of linked short stories, with essayistic detours. Ideally I’d like Inside Story to be read in fitful bursts, with plenty of skipping and postponing and doubling back – and of course frequent breaks and breathers. My heart goes out to those poor dabs, the professionals (editors and reviewers), who’ll have to read the whole thing straight through, and against the clock. Of course I’ll have to do that too, sometime in 2018 or possibly 2019 – my last inspection, before pressing SEND.

Meanwhile, enjoy New York. And once again – welcome to Strong Place!

Now, you take your drink, and I’ll take your bag.

It’s no trouble. There’s a lift…Oh, don’t mention it – de nada. The honour is all mine. You are my guest. You are my reader.