Martin Amis - Koba the Dread

At St Dominic’s Priory Church in Kentish Town my wife and I discussed the service with Father John Farrell (Sally had converted some years earlier). The music (Bach), the readings (Romans 8, Matthew 11), the hymns (‘To Be a Pilgrim’, ‘Jerusalem’ – Blake, with his burning utopianism: ‘I will not cease from mental fight, / Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, / Till we have built Jerusalem / In England’s green and pleasant land.’). It was also agreed that I should recite the poem written for Sally by Philip Larkin (‘Tightly-folded bud, / I have wished you something / None of the others would…’), ‘Born Yesterday’, which bears the shockingly recent date of 20 January 1954.

We moved into the church proper, where my wife (who did it all, really) talked on with Father Farrell while I stood, susceptibly, by the door. My thoughts were already returning to the consolations of habit (the study, the desk) when I noticed the plaque to the war dead of the parish, and the poetry, the war poetry, of their names (Bellord, Cody, Gubbins, Lawless, Notherway, Scrimshaw). Beneath was a stanza of verse etched in stone:

As these lines heaved their way through me, I naturally thought first of their connection to my sister. But again the sudden nod, and the thought that, yes, this would about answer to the Twenty Million.

I had recently come across this poem in one of my father’s anthologies, and I looked it up that evening: ‘For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon. The fallen are the British dead of World War I. [16] The poem’s ‘tone may give it the appearance of a commentary after the event [reads my father’s note]; in fact Binyon wrote it within the first few weeks of war’. Like Kipling at the same stage, he seemed to grasp the dimensions of what was about to unfold. And it is not inappropriate, it is not indecorous, that war poetry should resonate with our thoughts about the Twenty Million. A war was prosecuted against them and against human nature – by their own people. War poetry , which is summarized in a single line of Wilfred Owen’s – from ‘Strange Meeting’, where the dead poet meets his dead opposite or double from the other side, who says: ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend…’

Binyon was a distinguished scholar and translator (he did The Divine Comedy in the 1930s), and a good, affable, yet unarguably minor poet. But here something happened: an uncovenanted expansion. Despite its opening sonorities, ‘The Fallen’ is not a glorification of war; it is an attempt at maximum consolation , in the high style; and it answers to our theme:

Dearest Dad,

I experimented with ‘Dearest Kingsley’, in recognition of your changed status; but I spend a lot of time in your mental company – and why break the habit of half a lifetime?

If you could so much as glance at the dedication page of my last book you would know at once that the thing you greatly feared is come upon you, and that which you were afraid of is come unto you. The dedication page reads:

For these are my Amis dead. She survived you by half a decade. Her last years were quiet, and quietly comfortable (she managed your legacy with care). There was no sudden precipitant. Her last days were peaceful, and there was no pain. Don’t despair: the story has a happier ending. I suppose, too, that there is one chance in a googolplex that she is now at your side. Supposing she isn’t, and yet also supposing that you actually get my news, I suggest that you spend a few years of your eternity recuperating from it – and then come back to this letter. Rest, rest, perturbed spirit.

I will return to the happier ending. But before we get there… ‘I do not want to be personal,’ wrote Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, before going on, very gently, to analyse his friend’s forgivable, even likeable, but in the end fatally woolly utopianism. I do not want to be personal either (you didn’t like people who were personal), but I do want to talk briefly about a couple of differences between you and me. As father and son we have an unusual thing in common: ‘we are both English novelists’, as you once put it, ‘who are some good’. But you were a poet, too. And that accounts for the main dissimilarity between my prose and yours. The other dissimilarities may be almost entirely generational. If our birthdates had been transposed, then I might have written your novels and you might have written mine. Remember the rule (truer in our case than in most): you are your dad and your dad is you. Just to round this off: you wrote, very largely, about the bourgeoisie in your fiction, i.e., the middle classes – a category seldom seen in mine, where I make do with the aristocracy, the intelligentsia, the lumpenproletariat, and the urkas .

You are your dad and your… But not quite. The other difference is political, and basic. You were ideological and I am not. Of course, you believed, and believed in, Soviet Communism for fifteen years. There were, as Bob says, no rational justifications for doing so. But I can give you some good excuses: middle-class guilt; ‘an unfocused dissatisfaction with the way things are’ (as you described it), or unusual hatred of the status quo; a desire to scandalize parental, or paternal, conservatism; and the not quite entirely delusional sense that you were involving yourself directly in world affairs. It was also a symmetrical convenience – for Stalin – that a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander of the Soviet Union. As the admirable and pitiable Viktor Kravchenko wrote, in his I Chose Freedom (1946: N.B.): ‘This scene outside the [Cheka building, where the families of the arrested wept and screamed] I shall never be able to expunge from my memory. A great theatrical genius, hoping to convey mass despair, macabre and boundless sorrow, could not have invented anything more terrifying’… But I don’t want to reproach you for credulity – you were not alone in believing. It’s the ‘believing in ’ bit that interests me.

In your essay ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’, written when you were forty-five, you said, explaining your earlier affiliation:

We are dealing with a conflict of feeling and intelligence, a form of wilful self-deception whereby a part of the mind knows full well that its overall belief is false or wicked, but the emotional need to believe is so strong that that knowledge remains, as it were, encysted, isolated, powerless to influence word or deed.

This is well said. But what is the basis of the ‘emotional need’? I will now juxtapose two sentences from the last two paragraphs of the piece: