Amis is a Larkinholic

    God dag from Sveden, yah for sure. Greetings from The Holy Grove of Uppsala. Where I'm practicing my inside-out between-the-legs forehand dink shots in the eerie glow of the Great White Night. How considerate of Julie Clinch to leave Martin's misspelled word in its intact original form. Martinian prose is indeed sacrosanct. I pity the fool who would deign to correct Martin's misspellings. Here's one of my fave Martinisms: *herd evil*. I can dig it. Do I detect the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche hovering around the margins of Martin's book-tour notes? Well screw Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a blond-beast wannabe. But I'm the real McCoy, yah for sure. (Really. I truly *am* blond. I just wear a brown wig to distinguish myself from the Scandinavian herd.)

    Hey listen---let me put this as delicately as I can: Martin Amis is a monomaniacal goonybird. I'm serious. The guy is nuts. Amis is a frigging Philip Larkin junkie. He can't stop quoting & rephrasing & inverting Philip Larkin's stuff. Me & Stefan Edberg & the rest of the Swedish Larkin-Spotting Team just discovered two more of Martin's Larkin references:

    FROM *TIME'S ARROW*: "The figure in the white coat and the black boots. In his wake, a blizzard of wind and sleet, like a storm of human souls." FROM *NEXT, PLEASE* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "Only one ship is seeking us, a black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back a huge and birdless silence. In her wake no waters breed or break."

    FROM *TIME'S ARROW*: "The moon I actually like looking at. Its face, at this time of the month, is especially craven and chinless, like the earth's exiled or demoted soul." *THE MOON IS FULL TONIGHT* BY PHILIP LARKIN: "The moon is full tonight and hurts the eyes, it is so definite and bright. What if it has drawn up all quietness and certitude of worth wherewith to fill its cup, or mint a second moon, a paradise?---for they are gone from earth."

    Oonska skoonska poonska foonska, yah for sure. Goddag, Martniks. Hello to all of you swarthy sub-humanoids down there in Brunette-Trash Country. I bring you greetings from The Holy Grove at Uppsala. The blond-beast smackball-gods are back in town. And each one of us happens to be His Own Ideal. Can you say the same for yourself? Please don't hate me because I'm beautiful. If you must hate me, then hate me for being A Stud For All Seasons. (I can serve. I can volley. And I can deconstruct Ezra Pound and then put him back together again as Rod McKuen.)

    My name is Björn Borg and I'm an Amisholic. I freely admit it. Heck, there's nothing else to do up here except to practice your dink shots and draw little circles above the letter *a* and lapse into 5-hour fugue-states of catatonic despair in the eerie glow of the Great White Night. No wonder half the Scandinavian population is chug-a-lugging pitchers of barbituate-flavored margaritas. Life stinks. And up here in Sveden it stinks on ice. In fact, I could kill myself for not killing myself years ago. I'd like to thank Martin Amis for providing us Svenskaroonies with a fine new role model in the form of Jennifer Rockwell. No sissy Seconal for Jennifer. What a gal.

    Tim Liebler (alias "the canard from Canarsie") gave me the idea of doing a Philip Larkin sweep on *Success*. Tim said: "Was this the story that was partly inspired by *Aubade*?" James Diedrick said: "Amis's treatment of the damage Terry suffers at the hands of his father, and Terry's own oft-repeated lament that he is 'fucked up', constitute a narrative excursion into the nihilistic territory Larkin explored in his 1971 poem *This Be The Verse*."

    Well, I came up with a buttload of additional Larkin references. And by the way, I fully realize how coy & pedantic & emeticable it is for Amis to be wanking away with all of this literary referentialism. In fact, that's the very reason why Larkin begrudged T.S. Eliot. Because of Eliot's lit-ref wankerism. (Eliot's *The Waste Land* came complete with explanatory footnotes that were conveniently provided by the author himself. What a hodad.) By the way, did I ever tell you about the time that I contacted Philip Larkin thru a ouija board? Ya know what he said to me? He said: "Jesus H. Christ. I'm *dead*---and I *still* don't have any fucking answers. What the hell IS this crap?" For your entertainment pleasure, here is a doubtlessly incomplete compilation of the Philip Larkin allusions in *Success*. And I'm the first to admit that half of these connections are probably coincidental non-connections. (Half of what I say is meaningless. But I say it just to reach you, Anna Kournikova.):

    TERRY: "I had parents of my own but they got fucked up." LARKIN: "But they were fucked up in their turn." [From *This Be The Verse*.] TERRY: "The ones who aren't queer or whatever invariably have kids ('what for?' I think again and again, seeing the extra they suffer)." LARKIN: "Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself." [From *This Be The Verse*.]

    TERRY: "I'm not sure I can bear to describe what he was wearing: that vampiric crimson-lined black opera cape, a waistcoat of his father's, harem trousers---were they?---apparently clasped at the ankles by costly bicycle clips." LARKIN: "I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence." [From *Church Going*.]

    TERRY: "Something's coming. What could it be?" GREGORY: "Something's coming. I pause as a smart blue train streams by." GREGORY: "Something's coming. Oh, go *away*." LARKIN: "Something is always approaching...a black-sailed unfamiliar". [From *Next, Please*.] LARKIN: "There is an evening coming in across the fields, one never seen before, that lights no lamps." [From *Going*.]

    TERRY: "a place of dangling black pans, sooty cisterns and something I've never seen before". LARKIN: "There is an evening coming in across the fields, one never seen before, that lights no lamps." [From *Going*.]

    TERRY: "The train bombed on, through fields wedged by advancing shadows." LARKIN: "There is an evening coming in across the fields, one never seen before, that lights no lamps." [From *Going*.] LARKIN: "wedge-shadowed gardens lie under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky". [From *Sad Steps*.]

    TERRY: "as I sit here slumped in the middle of what appears to be my life, with its days and days". GREGORY: "slumped where he is now in his days and days". LARKIN: "Where can we live but days?" [From *Days*.]

    TERRY: "I see myself from behind, my craven tread, my hair, and beyond me, through the blue window, I glimpse that second figure up in the streets of the sky, that familiar, shuffling, grubby, mackintoshed caricature, Terry the Tramp." GREGORY: "It was a glorious mid-April evening and a burgundy dusk was slowly decanting itself through the high windows." GREGORY: "A blue light was shooting round my room like a spectral boomerang...The blue light boomeranged above my head, coming closer, getting brighter, turning black." LARKIN: "Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: the sun-comprehending glass, and beyond it, the deep blue air". [From *High Windows*.]

    GREGORY: "this, just this, was soon to push me to one side of my cloudless childhood days". LARKIN: "Something is pushing them to the side of their own lives." [From *Afternoons*.]

    TERRY: "From her dark flower-patterned dress (clean, unironed, shapeless, not a dress for winter) now protruded thin stockingless legs and thin forearms whose shade of fluff caught the light." LARKIN: "Moustached in flowered frocks they shake". [From *Faith Healing*.]

    GREGORY: "It's hardly a 'job' at all really, in the sense of trading one's days for cash." LARKIN: "the money he gets for wasting his life on work". [From *Self's the Man*.]

    GREGORY: "By the same convention that he got my expensive clothes when I soared out of them, so he got the rejects, the table-droppings, the leave-offs, which he guiltily exhumed as if from a forbidden attic drawer." LARKIN: "All the unhurried day your mind lay open like a drawer of knives...For you would hardly care that you were less deceived, out on that bed, than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic." [From *Deceptions*.]

    GREGORY: "Why do I let him roost on my life?" LARKIN: "Why should I let the toad *work* squat on my life?" [From *Toads*.]

    GREGORY: "I see you kneeling on the curved lawn, your body bent over with the strain of the past and your own colossal efforts to expunge it, the grass rippling scarily all about you, the trees wringing their hands behind your back, the clouds scudding away above your head, scudding away from you and all the terrors of childhood and hell." GREGORY: "I climbed to the colourful surface and stood scratching my hair in the mad motion sculpture of Marble Arch, the traffic going on and on, the clouds scudding away above my head." LARKIN: "And that high-builded cloud moving at summer's pace." [From *Cut Grass*.]

    TERRY: "In the evenings I sit and read and drink at my desk until the dregs of the day have been tapped from the room." LARKIN: "Sinking like sediment through the day, to leave it cleaner, onto the floor of the flask (vast summer vessel) settles a bitter carpet---horror of life." [From *Sinking like sediment through the day*.]

    GREGORY: "It was two o'clock before I managed to boot the sobbing husk out into the night." LARKIN: "Back now to autumn, leaving the ended husk of summer that brought them here for Show Saturday". [From *Show Saturday*.]

    TERRY: "Even the rush-hour streets look purposeful nowadays; everyone willingly connives at this seasonal trick the world has of seeming to start all over again." LARKIN: "Their yearly trick of looking new is written down in rings of grain." [From *The Trees*.]

    GREGORY: "Fresh careers fan out at me like a conjuror's playing cards." LARKIN: "Choice of you shuts up that peacock-fan the future was." [From *To My Wife*.]

    TERRY: "I felt like an animal, I felt like a god, I felt like the ghost of summer thunder." LARKIN: "My mother, who hates thunderstorms, holds up each summer day and shakes it out suspiciously, lest swarms of grape-dark clouds are lurking there". [From *Mother, Summer, I*.]

    GREGORY: "the house lay suspended and still, a great brick ship basking in the afternoon". LARKIN: "A white steamer stuck in the afternoon". [From *To the Sea*.]

    GREGORY: "You wanted to be smothered, joined up, plugged, to stop the bits of you from flying apart for ever." GREGORY: "All the bits that were me had been reshuffled yet again." LARKIN: "At death, you break up: the bits that were you start speeding away from each other". [From *The Old Fools*.]

    GREGORY: "The very entrance to the Underground makes me want to pee with dread." GREGORY: "I descended the endless steel staircase, my hair scattered by dirty winds from the earth's core." GREGORY: "I turned, repurchased a ticket, and stood like a doll on the descending staircase as the hammers pounded louder and the dark air swirled and my body (the sweat, the tremor, the heart) again picked up its rhythms." TERRY: "as I rode the descending staircase into the grey vault I felt as if a large and watchful creature were welcoming me to its deep preserve". LARKIN: "In this dream that dogs me I am part of a silent crowd walking under a wall, leaving a football match, perhaps, or a pit, all moving the same way. After a while a second wall closes on our right, pressing us tighter. We are now shut in like pigs down a concrete passage. When I lift my head, I see the walls have killed the sun, and light is cold. Now a giant whitewashed D comes on the second wall, but much too high for them to recognize: I await the E, watch it approach and pass." [From *Träumerei*.]

    GREGORY: "Occasionally I would wake during her actual visits to my flat (she has her own key, the darling), and I would be unable to tell if she was really there and talk nonsensically---the words all in the letter A of dreams---until she hurried to my side." GREGORY: "They scuttled off to their beds downstairs, to the calm cycles of their calm lives, while I, with the help of some pills and that liquor, searched for the letter A in the random alphabet of sleep." LARKIN: "By now we have ceased walking and travel like water through sewers, steeply, despite the tread that goes on ringing like an anvil under the striding A. I crook my arm to shield my face, for we must pass beneath the huge, decapitated cross, white on the wall, the T, and I cannot halt the tread, the beat of it, it is my own heart, the walls of my room rise, it is still night, I have woken again before the word was spelt." [From *Träumerei*.]

    Okay. Here we go. Here's the big one. *Success* contains a recurrent master-motif which is yet another reference to another Larkin poem. The dominant motif in *Success* is the image of a person staring thru a window at the sky. That's the *Mr Bleaney* motif. And it gets the Björn Borg Seal of Approval because it represents catatonic depression in its finest flowering. I can dig it. For your entertainment pleasure, here's *Mr Bleaney*. Followed by the *Mr Bleaney* allusions in *Success*:

    'This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed the whole time he was at the Bodies, till they moved him.' Flowered curtains, thin and frayed, fall to within five inches of the sill, whose window shows a strip of building land, tussocky, littered. 'Mr Bleaney took my bit of garden properly in hand.' Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook behind the door, no room for books or bags---'I'll take it.' So it happens that I lie where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags on the same saucer-souvenir, and try stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown the jabbering set he egged her on to buy. I know his habits---what time he came down, his preference for sauce to gravy, why he kept on plugging at the four aways---likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk who put him up for summer holidays, and Christmas at his sister's house in Stoke. But if he stood and watched the frigid wind tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed telling himself that this was home, and grinned, and shivered, without shaking off the dread that how we live measures our own nature, and at his age having no more to show than one hired box should make him pretty sure he warranted no better, I don't know.

    GREGORY: "you deserve to be what you are if you could bear to get that way". TERRY: "I stood on the landing outside our flat. There is a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling window there that creaks and bends when the air gets turbulent. It wobbles in the wind. It shivers in the cold." GREGORY: "The stairwell of my block has a glass wall fronting the street, thin bendy glass---it shudders when the wind is up. On the top floor, outside my penthouse, his body pressing on the rainy window, stood the squat martyred figure of my foster-brother. I halted. Slowly Terence spread his arms. He looked like an eager child, his face pushed flat against the shopfronts of night. What does he see out there? How is his life taking shape?" TERRY: "I paused in the square, friendly leaves hurrying across my feet, and watched the bedsitter lights start to come on." TERRY: "It was a spotless evening, and many aeroplanes strained cheerfully through the empty sky." GREGORY: "For the rest of these slow spring days, however, it is just me and the windows, a pale, affectless world of ceilings, skies, and my heartbeat." GREGORY: "I am finished with any dozing that the afternoon might have let slip, and now stare moonily out of the penthouse window. At ninety-second intervals, tinselly aeroplanes wobble upwards through the bland air." TERRY: "I'm standing by the tall bendy window outside our flat, the one that hates stormy weather." GREGORY: "I don't think it's really on---is it?---that my sister should be permitted to slum in Terence's world of cheap eateries and drab bedsitterdom, that world of contingency and failure." TERRY: "I paused for two whole minutes to watch a high-flying, string-trailing jet, no more than a glinting crucifix in the deep blue above the thin salty clouds." GREGORY: "I was sitting by my window, staring out at the aeroplanes that wafted through the grey clouds." TERRY: "He looks so pathetically at-a-loss, staring out of windows all day long, as if the rooftops might suddenly realign and make themselves new for him again." TERRY: "When I returned from the office, at about six-thirty, I found him sitting at my desk, staring dully at the sky." TERRY: "Greg was staring boyishly out of the window."

    Exhibit A in the Terry Service/Philip Larkin continuum. Here's what Gregory says about Terry: "All the spirit, all the *licence* of childhood, seemed to have been confiscated from his imagination before he knew what childhood was, before he saw it couldn't last." Here's what Martin Amis says about Philip Larkin: "You feel that the very notion of childhood, with all its agitation and enchantment, was simply too sexy for Larkin."

    Exhibit B in the Terry Service/Philip Larkin continuum. Here's what Gregory says about Terry: "His humour was, from the start, always ironic. Ironic---never gay, fantastic, mirthful, relieved, outrageous: but ironic. (Not that he was ever actually *funny*, mind you.)" Here's what Martin Amis says about Philip Larkin: "Everything about Larkin rests on irony, that English specialty and vice."

    Exhibit C in the Terry Service/Philip Larkin continuum. Here's what Gregory says about Terry: "And what is my flat cluttered up with? *Beer*, disgustingly cheap plonk, 'barley wines', domestic sherry, cut-price spirits---and Terence himself, boring, burping, blundering, baying." Here's what Martin Amis says about Philip Larkin: "He was, by the way, a genuine miser. In his last weeks, he lived off 'cheap red wine and Complan'. He left over a quarter of a million pounds."

    Exhibit D in the Terry Service/Philip Larkin continuum: Terry is prematurely bald and so was Larkin.

    William, dear fellow, that kept me going through a two-hour workshop on refrigerated marine containerisation, and I cannot give any thanks more fulsome. I'm even flattering myself to think that your reference to 'coincidental non-connections' plus a little Beatles reference was a teeny tiny nod to little old pedantic me. What a sad old groupie I've become.

    Even where they were not strictly references, though, Larkin's weighty, brainy, melancholic weltanschauung clearly 'informs' Success. (I hate that literary critterary phrase, 'informs' such-and-such. Just like I hate that over-used 'with a nod to someone or other'. And the way the French use the verb 'proposer' not to mean 'propose' or 'offer' but 'to have'. Le chef vous propose'. Fuckers. But, hell, I'm critting my own crit, and that winds Bill up something rotten.)

    To pick up on the window image, which I agree is the central one to Success. It's not so much Bleaney, I feel, but another poem you mention which embodies Amis's use of the motif- er, that'd be 'High Windows'. I think it's the central poem to the whole collected meisterwerks. It's like Larkin's challenging his gift to soar from as the lowest demotic he can get away with to the most exalted. When the climax to the poem comes, it's the reverse of a Joycean epiphany: those moments when Stephen (yes, Bill, Step-hen) Daedalus gets all florid and everything shines with significance. To Larkin, and Terence Service, everything on the other side of the window suddenly becomes apart, and vast, and shamefully meaningless. I don't think it's catatonic depression (but then I've never been to Sweden, or Lithuania), but negative revelation (or something). And we've all had one of those, haven't we?

    I'd be interested to know how Larkin goes down in the US. We've banged on on the past about how the Septics have taken little Marty to their big brassy bosom. Larkin is always portrayed here though as extremely British, nay, English. A lineage from Hardy (who I despise for beating up his wife and then whingeing incessantly when she had the decency to kark it, and for contriving despicably vile destinies for honest Westcountryfolk like me) to Betjemen (underrated, obv) to miserable old Philpott. All very English, cricketers coming up to bowl and moaning about the weather. Do you lot like him?

    I have to take bold issue with Bjorn on one thing: Borg can volley? Bollocks. Borg couldn't volley, to use one of your most charming leitmotifs, a frozen turd. (All these Germanicisms. Scheisse.)

    Anyway, I've gotta go and source some containers in, funnily enough, Lithuania. Come, friendly toad, and squat on StephenP.

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