{"id":589,"date":"2010-03-19T16:02:07","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T16:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2010\/03\/19\/books-april-2010-we-ve-been-here-before-martin-amis-the-pregnant-widow\/"},"modified":"2010-03-19T16:02:07","modified_gmt":"2010-03-19T16:02:07","slug":"books-april-2010-we-ve-been-here-before-martin-amis-the-pregnant-widow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2010\/03\/19\/books-april-2010-we-ve-been-here-before-martin-amis-the-pregnant-widow\/","title":{"rendered":"We’ve Been Here Before"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Metamorphoses \u2014 <\/em>one of the crowd of tutelary presences which throng the margins of The Pregnant Widow \u2014 <\/em>Ovid\u2019s tales tend to be aetia<\/em>, that is to say fables which explain how something came about \u2014 for instance, how echo became a disembodied voice, or how mulberries acquired their deep red colour, or why magpies are such chatterers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Pregnant Widow<\/em> is also an aetion<\/em>, and \u2014 in the first instance \u2014 the metamorphosis whose cause it narrates is the shift when \u201csex divorced itself from feeling\u201d. Keith Nearing and his on\/off girlfriend, Lily, are spending the summer of 1970 in Italy, in the castle of a friend of a friend. On to this well-defined stage enter a cast of miscellaneous young adults \u2014 Scheherazade, with her improbably large breasts, Gloria with her voluptuous rear, the exuberantly common Rita, Kenrik the Olympian alcoholic in training, Adriano the dwarfish embodiment of Italian machismo, Jorquil the comedy upper-class Englishman. As the sentimental entanglements of their summer unravel and reravel, Keith \u2014 who has been transparently lusting after Scheherazade \u2014 is initiated into the sexual future, as he thinks he wishes it to be. But his introduction to that future happens by an unexpected hand, and in an act of deep but disguised violence: \u201cIt was the opposite of torture, yet it twisted. It ruined him for twenty-five years.\u201d Keith falls victim to the secret clauses in the manifesto of sexual modernity, those \u201cwritten in fine print or invisible ink\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Pregnant Widow<\/em> stands apart from Amis\u2019s earlier fiction in the thickness and insistence of its literary reference (one can easily imagine a future doctoral project: \u2018An Annotated Edition of Martin Amis\u2019s The Pregnant Widow<\/em>\u2018). Ovid, as we have seen: but also Shakespeare (Tempest<\/em>, King Lear<\/em>, Much Ado<\/em>), Kafka, the Arabian Nights<\/em>, Jane Austen (especially that favourite for modern retelling, Emma<\/em>, but also Mansfield Park<\/em> and Pride and Prejudice<\/em>), Milton, Keats, Hardy, George Eliot \u2014 the novel is a literary whispering gallery. Partly this results from the fact that Keith is studying for a degree in English, and seems to have brought to Italy a copy of every major pre-20th-century English novel, through which he is ploughing his way with incredible speed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The speed is explained by the fact that poor desire-addled Keith is clambering up the towering summits of English literature with his eyes fixed on a very limited range of issues: \u201cIt sometimes seemed to Keith that the English novel, at least in its first two or three centuries, asked only one question. Will she fall? Will she fall, this woman?\u201d So, when he is debriefed by Lily at the end of each novel, Keith\u2019s executive summary focuses single-mindedly on the timing and frequency of the fictional sex acts. Clarissa<\/em> had been, as you might imagine, a particularly trying read for Keith, especially coming as it did in this chronologically-organised grand tour of the English novel after the (in Keith\u2019s scale of value) encouragingly incident-rich Tom Jones<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u2026Clarissa<\/em>\u2018s a nightmare. You won\u2019t believe this, Lily,\u201d he said (and he had, incidentally, decided to swear more), \u201cbut it\u2019s taking him two thousand pages to fuck her.\u201d
\u201cChrist.\u201d
\u201cI know.\u201d
\u201cBut honestly, listen to you. Usually, when you read a novel, you go on about things like, I don\u2019t know, the level of perception. Or the depth of the moral order. Now it\u2019s just fucks.\u201d
\u201cIt\u2019s not just<\/em> fucks, Lily. One fuck in two thousand pages. That\u2019s not just<\/em> fucks.\u201d
\u201cNo, but it\u2019s all you go on about.\u201d<\/p>\n

In The Pregnant Widow<\/em>, great literature is the language of a world we have lost. Scheherazade having been rude to Gloria, Keith (having just finished Emma<\/em>) maps the language of Austen on to the sensibility of the 1970s. How, Keith muses, would Mr Knightley, having seen how badly Emma treats Miss Bates during the picnic to Box Hill, chide Scheherazade?<\/p>\n

Were she your equal in situation \u2014 but, Scheherazade, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed!<\/em> But Keith didn\u2019t say that. He said,
\u201cHates you? Not at all.\u201d
\u201cEveryone hates me. And I deserve it.\u201d
If Keith paraphrased Mr Knightley, would Scheherazade realise, at last, that she was in love with him? No, because things were different now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The difference of now is that the flexible, plural, capacious language bequeathed to us is embarrassed by the fewness and coarseness of our objects. We are the inheritors of linguistic, and therefore conceptual and moral, riches which we finger with barbaric stupor and cupidity.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time that Amis has used the idea of a failure of powers of reading as a proxy for what is more generally wrong with modern culture. In Money,<\/em> the chastened, beaten-up, John Self resorts to the public library once the self-defeating nullity of his high-octane media life has literally smacked him in the face, and as a direct result of his inability to read his own experience:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying. I read quite a bit. It\u2019s the only diversion I can still afford. Reading\u2019s cheap, I\u2019ll give it that. I\u2019ve read all the financio-sexual thrillers on Georgina\u2019s shelves. I hang out in the Library. The Library is a good place when you\u2019re unemployed. It\u2019s warm and free. There is shelter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In this novel of what went wrong in the Seventies, Amis is repeatedly obliged to revisit his own earlier fiction as a partial stranger, since in those early novels Amis was as much the celebrant as satirist of his own generation. Of course, that generation had all the obvious failings: vain, vicious, cruel, cowardly, etc. But at least (so Amis\u2019s line seemed at moments then to be) they weren\u2019t in thrall to some exploded, oldster set of values. If the rising generation was bad, that was because there was nothing better that one could authentically be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But as Amis returns to his earlier work in The Pregnant Widow<\/em>, it seems that his stance is shifting. A few examples. Here is Keith Nearing preparing for a hot date:<\/p>\n

At six o\u2019clock he climbed out of a hot bath, did ten press-ups, and stepped into a cold shower. He shaved, and brushed his teeth and tongue. He clipped and filed his nails, upper and nether. Maintaining a stern expression, he blow-dried and \u2014 with formidably steady fingers \u2014 tonged his pubic hair.<\/p>\n

And here, 37 years ago, is Charles Highway preparing for his own hot date in The Rachel Papers<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Press-ups, knee-bends, and further sexual callisthenics. Complete body-service (sorry about all this): pits clipped, toes manicured, pubic hair permed and styled, each tooth brushed, tongue scraped, nose pruned.<\/p>\n

Sometimes one can hear the rhythm and timing of an earlier Amis riff now organising different words but in a similar dramatic situation. Here is Keith Nearing teasing Gloria on the subject of religion, and unable to stop himself from going just a bit too far:<\/p>\n

\u201cTell me, Gloria, do you happen to believe in Father Christmas? No. Of course you don\u2019t. You grew out of it. Of course you did. You know, it\u2019s a pity Father Christmas isn\u2019t featured in your holy book. Because you could\u2019ve grown out of scripture too. Yes, a great shame Santa wasn\u2019t at least foretold<\/em> in the New Testament.\u201d<\/p>\n

And here is Charles Highway being unadvisedly candid with Derek, a student at the same Oxbridge crammer, on the sensitive subject of facial hygiene, and unable to resist stepping over the line of self-preservation:<\/p>\n

\u201cYes. Why don\u2019t you give washing a whirl one of these days? It can\u2019t be much fun walking around with all that crap, all the greaze<\/em>, all over your face. But \u2014 got to keep the spots fed, I suppose. Tell me, Mr Sebum, tell me, Monsieur T\u00eates-noires, how does it go down with the girls? I bet they\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Here is Keith on the eradication of chastity from the modern world:<\/p>\n

What\u2019ll they write about, he wondered, when all<\/em> women fall? Well, there\u2019ll be new ways of falling\u2026<\/p>\n

And here are the more repletely euphuistic, yet parallel, thoughts of Terence in Success <\/em>as he riffles through the top shelf at his local newsagent, and ponders the ruinous rate of consumption implicit in industrialised pornography:<\/p>\n

I flicked through six or seven magazines, all of which were evidently still in the business of showing men what the insides of women\u2019s vaginas and anuses look like. There are hundreds of these girls in every magazine, and there are hundreds of these magazines in every shop, and there are hundreds and hundreds of shops. Where do these girls come from and how do they get hold of them and make them show us what the insides of their vaginas and anuses look like? They must have asked every girl in the world to do it by now. Have they asked Jan yet, or Ursula, or Phyllis at Dino\u2019s? Pretty soon they\u2019ll run out of girls who will do it. Then they\u2019ll have to find ways of making the girls who won\u2019t do it do it. Then we\u2019ll know what the insides of every girl\u2019s vagina and anus look like. That\u2019ll be good too.<\/p>\n

Is there an element of recantation here, a sense of penitential return to subjects previously explored with too light a heart? One of the most vivid clashes of perspective in The Tempest<\/em>, a play Amis explicitly positions in a significant relationship to The Pregnant Widow<\/em>, comes when Miranda, enthralled by the men shipwrecked on the island, memorably exclaims: \u201cO brave new world\/That has such people in\u2019t!\u201d To which Prospero \u2014 jaded? saddened? resigned? envious? \u2014 replies: \u201c\u2018Tis new to thee.\u201d The sober correction of youthful enthrallment is the dominant theme of Amis\u2019s novel, as well as of Shakespeare\u2019s play, and the final metamorphosis to which they both glance forward is the ultimate metamorphosis of life into death.<\/p>\n

The Pregnant Widow<\/em> is artfully constructed, then. But, to pose a more radical, or perhaps just more flat-footedly factual, question, is its basic premise true? Did the 1970s really<\/em> see the first female rakes? One thinks of the antics of the Empress Theodora in the theatre of Byzantium, or the activities that we are told went on the precincts of the temple of Diana at Ephesus. Was Amis\u2019s generation really the first who had to cope with, as Keith puts it, girls who are cocks? Whatever the qualifications suggested by a longer historical perspective, the sexual metamorphosis of the 1970s was no doubt felt as a great change, and The Pregnant Widow<\/em> gives that experience a satisfying literary shape, as the cockiest, rangiest author of the 1970s exchanges Scotch for Sanatogen, and Quaaludes for glucosamine.<\/p>\n

<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n


\n\"\"A maestro of detail long before Leonardo<\/a>
\n
\n\"\"The divisions of the human league<\/a>
\n
\n\"\"An ordinary killing<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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