Experience (Vintage, $14) begins with Martin Amis’ cranky resignation to the limits of the genre he has chosen: memoir. He knows, of course, that fiction presents its own incorrigible limits, ditto life itself—or at least life when viewed as a structural principle. For novels, Amis points out, warp “reality experiences”—a term with particular resonance after a season of Survivor II and Temptation Island—because novelists inevitably fall prey to the “addiction to seeing parallels and making connections.” On the other hand, life, in addition to being “thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental, and ineluctably trite,” the author complains, contains bad dialogue and always uses “the same beginning; and the same ending.”
All quite true, but most sophisticated readers still insist on beginnings and endings, even as these same readers groan with irritation when the dull plod of overdetermination becomes audible. Amis sought to defeat the latter problem by preserving what he calls “collateral thought,” those swerves and interruptions that are essential to good storytelling. But, he wondered as he began Experience, how many times can a reader have a story interrupted and still preserve a sense of its track? Infinitely many, several leading fiction writers have discovered, as long as prose conventions permit the use of footnotes. The device has been used with great ingenuity and cleverness by Rick Moody and by David Foster Wallace, but they adopt the footnote largely as a means of ironic commentary on the text itself, whereas Amis views what is literally subtext as essential to any writer’s stringently examined life.
Some readers will be surprised to learn that Amis’ footnotes aren’t extrapolations on his decision to leave one agent (who happened to be the wife of his quondam friend, Julian Barnes) for the notorious, high-rolling Andrew Wylie, nor are they a public means of trashing novelist A.S. Byatt, who denounced Amis in the British Times, suggesting that the move was occasioned by his wanting money to have his crooked teeth cosmetically updated. Instead, while Experience partially springs from the author’s understandable desire to set certain records straight, far more important is Amis’ subtle insistence on memoir as a means of examining ourselves vis-à-vis the relationships that life extends to us.
One might even argue that tone, which embodies writers’ attitudes toward their subjects, becomes the most important structural aspect in Experience. Amis’ distinctive but wide-ranging tone has been deeply inflected by his historical and literary identity, an identity that makes the gap between the postwar English and American experiences seem like a galaxy-wide black hole. As any fan of Larkin—or The Beatles—knows, the ’50s in England differed from the Blitzkrieg years primarily in the absence of Hitler’s bombs. But most Americans have little sense of the privations suffered by the English when victory’s afterglow faded and they were left with the exploded ruins of buildings, a staggering debt incurred by the national defense, and a grim sense that shortages of butter, sugar, gas, and tobacco would never ease. Postwar Britain’s predominant tones imparted a sense that history is more real than psychology, that irony is ultimately classical and tragic, and that fate shapes our lives as surely as free will. As an example of the last, Amis compares the different reactions of his American wife and himself when his father becomes critically ill: We Americans rush for specialists at Hopkins or Mayo, comparative tests, and third and fourth and fifth opinions, he says, while Brits tend to accept a dire diagnosis and ask merely which queue they should join.
Amis’ sense of humor is singular and droll, and he’s hardly incapable of joy—his descriptions of his children, especially the birth of his second daughter, are rapturously smitten. Yet his refusal to dodge life’s darker truths is finally what distinguishes his memoir from the dozens of others published each year. That, and, of course, the presence of Kingsley Amis—who, some Nashvillians will remember, spent a year as a visiting writer at Vanderbilt. “I thought it very representative of your integrity,” the younger Amis graciously wrote to his father in 1967, “to warn me of the defficiencies [sic] of Nashville.” A footnote to this letter quotes directly from Kingsley’s description of Nashville—“known, unironically I suppose to some, as the Athens of the South”—and his experiences with a novel-writing Vanderbilt colleague who apparently said, more than once, “I can’t find it in my heart to give a Negro or a Jew an A.”
Summer reading list
Two current biographies make for great summer reading. First, Hermione Lee’s superb Virginia Woolf respects Woolf’s own concept of reality as fluid and subjective; thus the biogapher carefully structures her study around appropriate thematic—rather than strictly chronological— chapters. These are fittingly titled “Siblings,” “Madness,” “War,” “Anon,” etc., and the resulting texture is genuinely Woolfian, its shifting centers reminiscent of To the Lighthouse and The Waves, to which Lee’s book—like all of the very best biographies—returns us with an enlarged perspective.
Nancy Schoenberger’s Dangerous Muse chronicles the life of Lady Caroline Blackwood, the Anglo-Irish writer now remembered primarily for her unsettling beauty; her Guinness-derived fortune, which came along with a Kennedy-like family “curse”; and her famous—and famously difficult—husbands. Yet Blackwood’s marriages to painter Lucien Freud, composer Israel Citkowitz, and, most profoundly, poet Robert Lowell nonetheless comprise only part of her story, as Schoenberger’s excellent new biography makes clear.
Blackwood worked hard to add “Artist” to her title of “Muse,” and she was rewarded by seeing one of her novels short-listed for the Booker Prize. While none of Blackwood’s work is currently in print, Schoenberger’s compelling biography may well change that sad circumstance—one that seems all the sadder when one considers Blackwood’s death from alcoholism at the age of 64, having buried two husbands, her brother, and one of her daughters. Whether or not “the Guinness curse” played a part in these tragedies, they give some indication of the terrible price Blackwood paid to be—and to write—who she was.
Here’s a brief overview of some other titles that make for great reading during those hot, humid months when simply turning a page requires Herculean effort. Even if your body feels drained, these books will keep the mind engaged:
♦ Here in the World is the eerie and penetrating debut collection of stories by Nashville’s Victoria Lancelotta, whose origins in working-class Baltimore and Catholicism resonate far beyond their confines. And yet those confines provide the form by which Lancelotta’s narrators shape their siren song of a particularly female estrangement, one that can seem the only means of escaping a body objectified by its culture and viewed with deep suspicion by a religion founded, paradoxically, on the mysteries of incarnation.
♦ The brand-new Selected Poems and Letters: The Southern Review Years of Robert Penn Warren are titles that hardly need recommendation. Warren’s later poetry is sloppy and maddeningly abstract, not to mention just plain gross at times, but when read as essays or meditations that happen to be written as poetry, works like Brother to Dragons, Homage to Emerson: Night Flight to New York, and Audubon: A Vision place Warren in the company of America’s greatest and most enduring chroniclers, from de Toqueville to Jefferson to Emerson himself.
♦ As someone who freaks out when the “Instant Message” box appears on my computer screen, complete with tinny electronic chimes, Graywolf’s The Private Eye, a just published collection of essays on privacy, makes for pertinent reading indeed. Among pieces I’ve read thus far, Dorothy Allison’s “Privacy Is Not the Issue” and Janna Malamud Smith’s “Privacy and Private States” are standouts.
♦ Larry Brown’s new nonfiction collection, Billy Ray’s Farm, pulls no punches with its reader; moreover, it spares its author nothing. Which isn’t to say that this new book will put Brown alongside those memoirists who mistakenly equate their genre with verbal exhibitionism. The title piece and “The Whore in Me” are so tough, so grown-up, and so mercilessly wise that I want to punch in the noses of the lazy-ass reviewers who continue to categorize Brown as “king of the white trash.” Labels are cheap; self-knowledge is not. Someone with Brown’s phrasing, vocabulary, syntax, heart, and penetrating vision stands at God’s right hand, I’m quite sure, and when he asks how I spent my time on this earth—well, I’m rereading parts of this book and getting an answer ready.
