The Revolt of the Pendulum (8 page)

For Jake’s creator, the consequences of blaming himself for that indignity would have been drastic. He would have had to admit that he had come to such a pass all for the sake of a passing
fancy. The answer was to blame her, a message he wrapped up by blaming women in general. In the strict sense, this was a turn-up for the books. Attacking one of his own best qualities, he produced,
in the later novels from
Stanley and the Women
onwards, passages that made you wonder whether he was the same man who wrote the earlier ones. Surely the answer was that he wasn’t. In
matters of love, the man who goes out of his mind says that he is being true to his heart. Love having vanished, Amis was left with memories of folly, and no feelings left to steer by, except the
one that underlay most of his life and all of his art. What could be more boring than marriage? A wrecked marriage. What could be more boring than a wrecked marriage? Another wrecked marriage. Time
for a drink. Long after the husk became impossible to live with, Jane walked out on him. She had been noble to stay.

The book ends with the resurrection that preceded death. It was a blow when Jane left him, but also the end of an agony, because now he could go back home. Home has been defined as the place
where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in, but Leader’s closing account is here to remind us that it wasn’t a case of Hilly, now Lady Kilmarnock, graciously allowing
the washed-up ex-husband to crawl in through the cat-flap of her castle. Those who need reminding, or telling for the first time, will have swallowed the impression put about by the media that
Hilly was exercising retributive generosity. The facts say that there was a lot of generosity on the part of Amis. Lady Kilmarnock and her husband were broke. Amis, now Sir Kingsley, with an
earning power that not even he could convert entirely into alcohol, was in a position to help.

There was a lot in it for him – fearing the lonely dark above all other things, he was able to end his days in the crowded light – but he could distribute the seigneurial largesse
only because of his commanding position. In his last phase he was no less the grand figure, and to underline the fact he produced a book that brought much of his subtlety back into play.
The Old
Devils
marks an artistic recovery not just because the humour is funny again but because something of his tenderness returns – the quality with which he is seldom credited, but which
underlay all his literary powers, humour not excepted. In the cast of aged characters, the lovable woman has lost the bloom of Christine or Jenny. In fact she has gained a complete set of false
teeth. But Rhiannon is still, or once again, the authentic Amisian love object. She is the proof that while lust might once have mattered too much, it was always love that mattered most. In life,
even in his terminal misogyny, the one thing that never bored him was romance: the adventure that was still there at the end, in his mind if nowhere else. What was true for Larkin was equally true
for Amis: the love of beauty was high on the list of all the things that made death so terrible. Both men had been sustained all their lives by the ideal of love, and when they spoke coarsely,
either separately or together, it was to stave off fear of the oblivion that would take all that beauty from them.

In the journalistic aftermath of both these important lives, evidence of their inner torments is viewed as the sure sign of their defeat. Viewing it as part of their triumph will take time, but
it is bound to happen, because finally art wins out. If it hadn’t already won out, there wouldn’t be any journalistic aftermath anyway: such a fuss is never about nothing. The typical
purveyor of Ted-and-Sylvia arts stories to the broadsheets must be excused for trafficking in the marketable theme of reputations unravelling, but the only reason such a journeyman can’t hear
the all-pervasive voice of Larkin and Amis is that he is speaking with it. Together, the two men gave the next generation the schooled yet bewitchingly conversational tone with which to talk about
art as an everyday event, and about artiness as its enemy.

Their combined effect is omnipresent, and of the two it is a nice question which one resounds the most. Quantitatively it has to be Amis: not just because novels reach more people than poems
can, but because he was so funny. The last step, and the hardest to take, in assessing any comic writer, is to assert what should be an obvious truth, but one which always shyly hides: humour is
not an overlay to seriousness. Humour is the actual thing, compressed and intensified into a civil code. The reason that Amis, when he failed, failed so catastrophically, was the same reason that a
jet pilot stunting close to the ground has no negligible version of getting things wrong. Comedy has to be astonishing or nothing, and Amis was astonishing often enough to make even the obtuse
momentarily realise that there are truths which only comedy can clarify.

Unless we laugh at nothing, we laugh at truth to life: life in all its complexity, where people, even created people, are not just characters, but individuals. In the full flight of his comic
depiction of Margaret Peel in
Lucky Jim
, Amis still paused to remind us, at the moment of her true tears, that all the false tears were products of her neurosis, and that she was a figure of
sympathy even though she drove everybody nuts. She was alive, and people are alive one at a time. At which point it is time to revisit all those academic wives at Princeton who threw themselves
beneath the visiting Englishman in the splendour and promise of his energy and invention. They weren’t nine-pins. They were individual women, and they fell for him because they knew he knew
they were.

TLS
, February 2, 2007

Postscript

After the death of Philip Larkin I began asking myself just how valuable even the most thorough biography was, if it encouraged the dunces in their victory dance of small
radius with pointed toe. A suitably knowledgeable literary journalist could do something to head off the false impressions, but wouldn’t it usefully shorten the circuit if the biography were
not published at all? I knew it was an obscurantist position but couldn’t help flirting with it. Enlightenment came when I read Sara Wheeler’s biographies of Denys Finch Hatton (
Too
Close to the Sun
) and Apsley Cherry-Gerard (
Cherry
). Those two men weren’t literary figures, they were adventurers, but her biography of each was so well written, and so full of
pertinent social detail, that there could be nothing wrong with the genre, even though her avowed model was Michael Holroyd, the man who started the craze for the biography a block long. (Actually
it had started with the biographies of the composers, pioneered by Ernest Newman’s admittedly magnificent four volumes on Wagner, but Holroyd was the first to transfer the overkill to the
literary field.) Since then I have been catching up with a neglected cairn of literary biographies and have often felt grateful. Anthony Cronin’s
Samuel Beckett
, for example, is full
of things that I would never have figured out for myself. It can always be contended that a complete artist should need no explaining, but the answer is obvious: no artist is that complete. One can
hope, however, that the actual bulk of the biography might be kept within reasonable limits. My own rule of thumb is that a book is of a decent length if I can remember how it started when I get to
the end. Ideally, though, one can’t help wanting less than that. Lytton Strachey, unwitting subject of a Holroyd
opus
so excessively
magnum
, got himself on the front end of a
paradox when he wrote biographies not much bigger than articles. His
Eminent Victorians
was a meretricious book but it was in a meritorious tradition. One doesn’t say that
Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
set the desirable measure, but it always helps to remember how much got said by Johnson in his
Lives of the Poets
, any one of which is the first thing to
read on the poet in question. Not, of course, the only thing: but surely our aim, like Johnson’s, should be to get abreast of the essentials first.

CANETTI, MAN OF MYSTERY

As a literary type after World War Two, the German-speaking International Man of Mystery found Britain a more comfortable land of exile than America, where he was always under
pressure to explain himself in public, thereby dissipating the mystery. The chief mystery was about his reason for not going back to German-speaking Europe. Before the mysterious W. G. Sebald there
was the even more mysterious Elias Canetti. While the Nazis were in power, Canetti had excellent reasons to be in London. But now that the Nazis were gone, why was he still there?

Like Sebald later on, Canetti might have found Britain a suitable context for pulling off the trick of becoming a famous name without very many people knowing precisely who he was. Canetti even
got the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, and people still didn’t know who he was. He was a Viennese Swiss Bulgarian Jewish refugee with an impressively virile moustache; he was Iris
Murdoch’s lover; he was a mystery. Apart from a sociological treatise called
Crowds and Power
which advanced a thesis no more gripping than its title, his solitary pre-war novel
Die
Blendung,
known in English as
Auto da Fe,
was the only book by Canetti that anybody had ever heard of. Hardly anybody had read it, but everybody meant to. Those who had read it said it
was about a mysterious man in a house full of books, and that the house, in a symbolic enactment of the collapse of a civilisation, fell down, or almost did, or creaked a lot, or something.

While living in Britain, Canetti wrote three books of memoirs about his life in pre-war Europe. He wrote them in German. (All three volumes are now available in English, although readers are
warned that the translations lose some of the effortless pomposity of the original.) They were full of literary gossip: hard material to make dull, even for a writer with Canetti’s knack for
colourless reportage. He proved, however, that he had a long memory for the frailties of his colleagues. He had a good story about Robert Musil, author of
The Man Without Qualities.
In the
circumscribed world of the Vienna cafe´s, Musil reigned unapproachably as the resident genius. But Musil was eaten up by resentment of the international recognition accorded to Thomas Mann.
When, in 1935, Canetti published
Die Blendung
to some acclaim in the press, he entered the cafe´ to find Musil, who had previously barely noticed his existence, rising to meet him with
a congratulatory speech. Canetti was able to say that he had a letter in his pocket from Thomas Mann, praising him in exactly the same terms. Musil sank back into his chair and never acknowledged
Canetti again.

The story shows how Canetti could recognise self-obsession in others. But there is no account of his ever recognising the same failing in himself. His memoirs not only take him to be the centre
of events – a standard strategy in autobiographical writing, and often an entertaining one – they proceed on the assumption that no events matter except those centred on him. Hitler
scarcely gets a mention. The story is all about Canetti, a man with good reason, we are led to assume, for holding himself in high esteem.

Canetti spent the last part of his life in Zurich. In his last year he was at work on his memoir about London. (Now, in Elysium, he is probably working on his memoir about Zurich.) The
unfinished book,
Party in the Blitz
, is the story of his years in and around Hampstead during the war and just after. We are fortunate that there is no more of it, lest we start wondering
whether Canetti should not have received another Nobel Prize, for being the biggest twerp of the twentieth century. But a twerp must be at least partly stupid, and Canetti wasn’t even a
little bit that. Instead, he was a particularly bright egomaniac, and this book, written when his governing mechanisms were falling to bits, simply shows the limitless reserves of envy and
recrimination that had always powered his aloofness. The mystery blows apart, and spatters the reader with scraps and tatters of an artificial superiority. Witnessing, from Hampstead Heath, the
Battle of Britain taking place above him – the completeness with which he fails to evoke the scene is breathtaking – Canetti, unlike many another German-speaking refugee, managed to
take no part whatever in the war against Hitler. He had his own war to fight, against, among others, T. S. Eliot. Canetti’s loathing of Eliot is practically the book’s leitmotiv: you
have to imagine a version of
Die Meistersinger
in which Beckmesser keeps coming back on stage a few minutes after he goes off. ‘I was living in England as its intellect decayed,’
Canetti recalls. ‘I was a witness to the fame of T. S. Eliot... a libertine of the void, a foothill of Hegel, a desecrator of Dante ... thin lipped, cold hearted, prematurely old ... armed
with critical points instead of teeth, tormented by a nymphomaniac of a wife ... tormented to such a degree that my
Auto da Fe
would have shrivelled up if he had gone near it...’

The problem, of course, was that Eliot couldn’t have gone near it, because before 1946, when
Auto da Fe
was finally translated, scarcely anybody in London had read it. This might
have been one of several practical reasons why Canetti was not accorded the automatic respect he felt due to him, but there was a supreme, spiritual reason which only he, the profound analyst of
crowds and power, could detect: English arrogance. The English intellectuals, his antennae told him, were being arrogant even when they strove to seem tolerant. Tolerance, in fact, was the surest
sign of their arrogance. ‘Arrogance is such an integral part of the English, one often fails to notice it. They take arrogance to new, unsuspected levels.’ Eliot, for example, was such
a master of arrogance that he could conceal it completely. ‘There he sat, the very famous man among all those others, amidst whom there were certainly many bad poets whom he must despise from
the depths of his being, and he gave no indication of the fact...’ Always keen to seem at home in British polite society, where zeal is rarely worn on the sleeve, Canetti found it politic to
forget his earlier history as a Brechtian radical, but passages like this remind you that he was a born Vyshinskyite prosecutor, forever taking the ability of the accused to defend himself as proof
of guilt, and the ostensible absence of a fault as a sure sign of its lurking presence.