Martin Amis's Blog, page 3

Martin Amis: rereading The Drowned World by JG Ballard

The sun is so close it's noisy, and London is under water – welcome to JG Ballard's vision of the future, written 50 years ago. Martin Amis pays tribute to a bold, hypnotic novel, by an author with a genius for the perverse

Is prescience a literary virtue? And should the work of JG Ballard be particularly prized (as some critics maintain) for the "uncanny" accuracy of its forecasts? The answer to both these questions, I suggest, is a cheerful no.

In The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) Ballard famously tapped Ronald Reagan for president. His Hello America (1981), on the other hand, surmised that the United States in its entirety would be evacuated by 1990. The meteorological cataclysms envisaged by his first four novels still look plausible. But the social crisis envisaged by his last four novels – violent and widespread anomie brought about by a glut of leisure and wealth – now looks vanishingly remote.

So here's a prophecy: fictional divination will always be hopelessly haphazard. The unfolding of world-historical events is itself haphazard (and therefore unaesthetic), and "the future" is in a sense defined by its messy inscrutability. Besides, the art of fiction owes allegiance to a muse, a goddess as pure as her nine sisters, and not to some bustling Madame Sosostris (Eliot's "famous clairvoyant", with her "wicked pack of cards"). Nevertheless there are certain writers whose visionary power is indifferent to the corroboration of mere upshots – writers who seem to be able to feel, and use, the "world hum" of the "near-after". That first quote is from Don DeLillo, who is one such; the second quote is from James Graham Ballard (1930-2009), who is another.

Ballard foresaw manmade climate change, not in The Drowned World (1962), but in The Drought (1964). In The Drought (originally entitled The Burning World), industrial waste has thickened the mantle of the oceans and destroyed the precipitation cycle, transforming the planet into a wilderness of dust and fire. In The Drowned World, ecological catastrophe has a quite different set of causes. The median temperature at the Equator is 180 degrees and rising, the polar icecaps and the permafrost have melted, Europe is "a system of giant lagoons", the American Midwest is "an enormous gulf opening into the Hudson Bay", and the global population (down to five million) huddles within the Arctic and Antarctic circles (where the thermometers, for now, record a "pleasant" 85). And how did all this come about? Solar instability, pure and simple, with no help whatever from Homo sapiens. So, on the basis of this one novel, Ballard could unobtrusively add his voice to the current Republican debate on global warming – slightly to the left of Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, true, but slightly to the right of Mitt Romney.

This is an irony we need not fear: indeed, it speeds us on our way to more central questions. As a man (and as a good Green), Ballard was naturally on the side of the angels; but as an artist he is unconditionally of the Devil's party. He loves the glutinous jungles of The Drowned World and the tindery deserts of The Drought – just as he loves the superhurricane, or express avalanche, of The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and the mineralised multiplicities of The Crystal World (1966). It is the measure of his creative radicalism that he welcomes these desperate dystopias with every atom of his being. When he turned away from hardcore SF in the 1950s, Ballard rejected "outer space" in favour of its opposite: "inner space". Accordingly, he merges with his conjured futures, internalising them in a kind of imaginative martyrdom. The fusion of mood and setting, the mapping of a landscape of the troubled mind – this is what really matters in Ballard. It gives the novels their tight clench of waywardness and fixity.

"Soon it would be too hot" is the laconic first sentence of The Drowned World. Its hero, the marine biologist Robert Kerans, is staring out from the balcony of his suite at the Ritz; he is the only (mammalian) occupant of the hotel; the rising water is 10 storeys from his feet.

"Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders … The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield."

The sun is alarmingly distended. It is also alarmingly noisy; it "thuds" and "booms"; we hear "the volcanic pounding" of its flares.

There are mosquitoes the size of dragon flies, hammer-nosed bats, wolf spiders. There are iguanas and basilisks – at one point a large caiman sees Kerans "waist-deep among the horse-tails" and veers towards him, "its eyes steadying" (that "steadying" is awfully good). The water gives off an unendurable reek, "the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation and rotting animal carcases". Kerans watches the "countless reflections of the sun move across the surface in huge sheets of fire, like the blazing facetted eyes of gigantic insects". Beneath the lagoon is a city: "Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original". The city is London.

Kerans is nominally engaged with a team of scientists on a waterborne testing station, but the work has become pointlessly routine. Fauna and flora are faithfully following "the emergent lines anticipated twenty years earlier", namely an accelerated counter-evolution, a retrogression into a world of lizards and rainforests under a Triassic sun. The human actors have embarked on a parallel process – within the diameter of their own skulls. Early on we learn that something has gone wrong with sleep: at night, the protagonists enter the "time jungles" of uterine dreams, descending into their amniotic past and also into the past of the species, experiencing the "archaic memories" (the "organic memories" of danger and terror) encrypted in their spinal cords. Some fear these dreams. Kerans, of course, embraces them, and yearningly submits to their domination of his waking mind:

"Guided by his dreams, he was moving backwards through the emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes, centred upon the lagoon … At times the circle of water was spectral and vibrant, at others slack and murky, the shore apparently formed of shale, like the dull metallic skin of a reptile. Yet again the soft beaches would glow invitingly with a glossy carmine sheen, the sky warm and limpid, the emptiness of the long stretches of sand total and absolute, filling him with an exquisite and tender anguish."

Ballard gives The Drowned World the trappings of a conventional novel (hero, heroine, authority figure, villain), and equips it with a plot (jeopardy, climax, resolution, coda); but all this feels dutiful and perfunctory, as if conventionality simply bores him. Thus the novel's backdrop is boldly futuristic while its mechanics seem antique (with something of the boys'-own innocence we find in John Buchan and CS Forester). In addition, Ballard's strikingly "square" dialogue remains a serious lacuna. Here as elsewhere, his dramatis personae – supposedly so gaunt and ghostly – talk like a troupe of British schoolteachers hoisted out of the 1930s: "Damn' shame about old Bodkin", "Capital!", "Touché, Alan". (Cf DeLillo, whose dialogue is always fluidly otherworldly.) We conclude that Ballard is quite unstimulated by human interaction – unless it takes the form of something inherently weird, like mob atavism or mass hysteria. What excites him is human isolation.

The "otherness" of Ballard, his mesmeric glazedness, is always attributed to the two years he spent in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai (1943-45). That experience, I think, should be seen in combination, or in synergy, with the two years he spent dissecting cadavers as a medical student in Cambridge (1949-51). Again the dichotomy: as a man he was ebulliently social (and humorous), but as an artist he is fiercely solitary (and humourless). The outcome, in any event, is a genius for the perverse and the obsessional, realised in a prose style of hypnotically varied vowel sounds (its diction enriched by a wide range of technical vocabularies). In the end, the tensile strength of The Drowned World derives not from its action but from its poetry.

"Soon it would be too hot." Yes, and soon it will be time to abandon the lagoon and the drowned city; they will evacuate north, to one of the last human redoubts, Camp Byrd, in Arctic Greenland. There are, after all, pressing reasons to go: the mutating mosquitoes and mutating malarias, the new skin cancers caused by the evaporating cloud cover, the increasingly brazen encroachments of the reptiles, the coming of the Equatorial rain belts and the Equatorial heat. Kerans is, inevitably, the last to leave. He does so on foot (on foot singular, with an infected leg wound and a crutch). And which way is he heading, as the novel closes? Even a reader quite new to Ballard will by this stage consent to the logic of it. "There isn't any other direction." He is heading south.

JG BallardScience fictionFictionMartin Amis
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Martin Amis: My father's English language

How should 'controversy' be pronounced? How are 'refute' and 'decimate' misused? Kingsley Amis's guide, The King's English, revealed all. Martin Amis celebrates his father's interest in language

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist – in other words, my mother did it all. It should be noted, though, that if I did come across him (before he slipped back into his study), he always said something that made me laugh or smile. This went a long way. And the humour usually derived from the originality of his phrasing. When I was 16 or 17, and started reading books for grown-ups, I became, in his eyes, worth talking to. And when, six or seven years later, I started using the English language in the literary pages of the newspapers, I became worth correcting. I was in my early-middle 20s; my father was still amiable, but he was lenient no longer.

"Has your enormity in the Observer been pointed out to you?" he asked with enthusiasm over breakfast one Sunday morning (I had left home by then, but I still spent about every other weekend at his house). "My enormity?" I knew he was applying the word in its proper sense – "something very bad", and not "something very big in size". And my mistake was certainly atrocious: I had used martial as a verb. Later, while continuing to avoid hopefully (a favourite with politicians, as he insists), I pooh-poohed his reprimand about my harmless use of the dangling thankfully. I also took it in good part when, to dramatise my discipleship, as he saw it, of Clive James (a very striking new voice in the 1970s), Kingsley started reading out my reviews in an Australian accent. But there was one conversation that I still recall with a sincere moan of shame: it concerned the word infamous. In a piece about the "Two Cultures" debate, I referred to FR Leavis's "infamous crucifixion of CP Snow". "You leave us in no doubt," said Kingsley watchfully, "that you disapproved of it." I remained silent. I didn't say, "Actually, Dad, I thought infamous was just a cool new way of saying controversial."

Infamous will in fact now serve as the reigning shibboleth (or "test word", or giveaway). Anyone who uses it loosely, as I did, is making the following announcement: I write without much care and without much feeling. I just write like other people write. As Kingsley puts it in The King's English (and "the King", by the way, was a nickname he tolerated):

Both adjective and noun [infamous and infamy] used to be terms of extreme moral disapproval, equivalent in depth of feeling to 'abominable' and 'wickedness'. Then quite recently . . . the adjective weakened in severity to something on the level of 'notorious' [or, he might have added, simply 'famous'] . . . The noun infamy, although seemingly out of use, retains its former meaning, but infamous is now unusable through ambiguity.

Kingsley gives some good examples (so-and-so's undergraduate life in the 1920s is "now infamous"). But I wish he were alive to savour what must surely be the final profanation of this blameless adjective. A Guardian sportswriter recently referred to Steve McLaren – the sacked manager of the national football team – and "his infamous umbrella". All McLaren had done with his umbrella was stand on the touchline under it, during a downpour (which was considered a little unmanly). With infamous, we see linguistic incuriosity in its most damaging form. A supposedly smart addition to the language becomes an inadvertent subtraction. "Unusable through ambiguity": the same can be said of brutalise, decimate, crescendo, dilemma, alibi, avid, oblivious, optimistic, eke out and refute, among many others.

Such a tendency is nowhere better caught in The King's English than in the entry under Déjà vu, an uncanny sense of:

Its original application was to a transient psychological state, not uncommon among those under about forty, in which the subject feels that he has seen before some place where he has provably never been in this life (thus providing fanciful evidence for reincarnation). The journalistic contribution has been to apply this feeling to some event or situation a person has witnessed before . . .

The journalistic contribution thus obscures the old meaning, while providing "the needy with a useful and quite posh-looking alternative to 'this is where I/we came in' and other tattered phrases". Similarly with jejune. On its journey from meaning "scanty, arid" to meaning "immature, callow", jejune has acquired an extra vowel and an acute accent, plus italicisation as a Gallicism. Kingsley quotes the following beauty: "Although the actual arguments are a little jéjeune, the staging of mass scenes are [sic] impressive." We watch such developments (in this case the gradual "deportation of an English word into French") as we would watch the progress of a virus; like babesiosis and fog fever, such viruses afflict cattle and buffalo and wildebeest; they are the maladies of the herd.

Kingsley's favourite dictionary was the Concise Oxford. "It's all you really need," he used to say, patting it or even stroking it. And the COD, I see, has come to toe the line on infamous, déjà vu and jejune, giving the new meanings pride of place. Kingsley would have offered no objection (though he did secretly pine for an extra dictionary "label": namely, illit., to go with colloq. and derog. and the rest). Usage is irreversible. Once the integrity of a word is lost, no amount of grumbling and harrumphing can possibly restore it. The battle against illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms, is not a public battle. It takes place within the soul of every individual who minds about words.

Rather bluffly, perhaps, Kingsley draws up the battle lines as a conflict between Berks and Wankers:

Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one's own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops, and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.

Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one's own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.

These are richly symmetrical paragraphs. Still, they need a little renovation. The class system, nowadays, has been more or less replaced by the age system (with the young and youngish as the aristocrats); and I for one can't help seeing the slipshod/pedantic opposition in generational terms. So for berks and wankers I would substitute something like punks and fogeys. Amis was in his 70s when he completed The King's English (which was published posthumously). But those who remember him as a reactionary – or, if you prefer, as an apoplectic diehard – will be astonished to discover how unfogeyish he is. With remarkably few exceptions, he takes the sensible and centrist course. He is also deeply but unobtrusively learned. As a result, this is not a confining book but a liberating one. All users of the language – no matter how green, no matter how grey – will be palpably strengthened by The King's English.

Let us get the fogey stuff out of the way, because there isn't much of it. For instance, Amis is surely fighting a losing battle on the five-syllable homogeneous (the population at large is quite happy with the "incorrect" homogenous); no one rhymes the closing syllable, or syllables, of Perseus and Odysseus with Zeus; no one says alas with a long second a, and to pronounce medieval "medd-eeval" (he prefers "meddy-eeval") is hardly "an infallible sign of fundamental illiteracy"; no one stresses peremptory on the first syllable, and few of us do the same for controversy ("only a berk stresses the second"); on the question of using nouns as verbs, authored and critiqued are regrettable, true, but only a wanker would now object, as Amis does, to funded.

Elsewhere, he is a pragmatist, and not infrequently an iconoclast. The split-infinitive taboo is ridiculed as a "superstition", an "imaginary rule"; similarly, you may end a sentence with a preposition (and you may start a sentence with Arabic numerals). Amis is being rather more radical when he bluntly states that "the gerund" – a verbal noun with a possessive attached to it – "is on the way out", so that excuse my butting in has been supplanted by excuse me butting in. This contravenes strict grammar, but a rule "serves no purpose if nobody obeys it". More broadly, "the aim of language is to ensure that the speaker [or the writer] is understood, and all ideas of correctness or authenticity must be subordinate to it."

The battle – the internal campaign – is in essence directed against the false quantity, in its non-technical sense. I mean those rhymes, chimes, repetitions, obscurities, dishonesties, vaguenesses, clichés, "shreds of battered facetiousness" and "shopworn novelties" (past its sell-by date, Marxism lite, no-brainer, and all other herd words and herd phrases): anything, in brief, that makes the careful reader "pause without profit". Naturally the other side of this circumspection is the acceptance, indeed the embrace, of positive linguistic change. Perhaps the most stirring passage in the book is the article on the word Gay:

The use of this word as an adjective or noun applied to a homosexual has received unusually prolonged execration. The "new" meaning has been generally current for years. Gay lib had made the revised Roget by 1987 and the word itself was listed in the 1988 COD under sense 5 as a homosexual . . . And yet in this very spring of 1995 some old curmudgeon is still frothing on about it in the public print and demanding the word "back" for proper heterosexual use . . . [O]nce a word is not only current but accepted . . . no power on earth can throw it out . . . The word gay is cheerful and hopeful, half a world away from the dismal clinical and punitive associations of homosexual.

An "old curmudgeon": towards the end of his life, Kingsley was monotonously so described. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines curmudgeon as "a grasping and miserly churl". Whereas all careful readers of The King's English (and of his novels) will find themselves responding to a spirit of reckless generosity.

My 1998 paperback of this book is festooned with praise from various pens. These snippets have a warmed and excitable quality; they are also unusually perceptive. Candia McWilliam says that The King's English is a work of reference that "may be read like a novel, from start to finish". And David Sexton accurately recognises "a late flowering of Amis's greatest gift as a novelist, his ability to draw out the implications of a whole life from a tiny detail of speech or behaviour". Both these writers have identified the unique charm of this "Guide to Modern Usage": its satirical expansiveness.

All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on defamatory. And here is an example from Pidgin Latin:

In origin . . . the French language is a simplified and corrupt form of Latin once current between Roman troops or colonists or traders on the one hand and the local peasantry on the other . . . One easily imagines dialogues between a scrounging legionary, perhaps a Vandal or a Parthian by origin, and a willing but benighted yokel.

LEGIONARY (in vile Latin): I want
water. Bring me water. Aquam.
YOKEL: Ugh?
L: Aquam! Say aquam, you bloody
fool. Go on – aquam.
Y: O? (To be spelt eau when they get
to the writing stage centuries
later.)
L: Bring it to the high cliff. The high
cliff. Altum.
Y: Ugh?
L: Altum! Say altum, you bumpkin.
Go on – altum.
Y: O? (To be spelt haut when, etc.)

"A terrific book," wrote another reviewer, Sebastian Faulks. The prose "has that tense, sly quality of his very best fiction . . . a marvellous and quite unexpected bonus from beyond the grave". Mr Faulks couldn't be expected to know how true this was. Two months before he died, Kingsley had a heavy fall after a good lunch ("At my age," as he used to say, "lunch is dinner") and banged his head on a stone step. Thereafter, by degrees, he became a pitiable and painfully disconcerting madcap. He kept trying, he tried and he tried, but he couldn't write; he couldn't read, or be read to; and his speech was like a mixture of The Cat in the Hat and Finnegans Wake. Aged 73, he had just finished a book on the King's English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.

Plans for Kingsley's memorial service were quite far advanced when the typescript of the present book (then hardly more than a family rumour) was delivered to my door. I picked it up with a trepidation that the first few pages briskly dispersed. Here it was again, my father's voice – funny, resilient, erudite, with touches of very delicate feeling (see the entries under Brave and Gender), and, throughout, sublimely articulate. In truth, The King's English contains more concentrated artistic thrust than any of the five novels that followed his masterpiece of 1986, The Old Devils. The reason for this is, I think, clear enough. Love of life, like all human talents, weakens with age. But love of language, in his case, never did begin to fade.

• The following clarification was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday 2 June 2011. The Saturday Review ran an extract from the introduction, by Martin Amis, to The King's English, written by his father, Kingsley. The Review article contained this sentence: "We watch such developments (in this case the gradual "deportation of an English word into French") as we would watch the progress of a virus; like babesiosis and fog fever, such viruses afflict cattle and buffalo and wildebeest; they are the maladies of the herd." While the structure of this sentence is strictly accurate it has led several readers to point out that neither affliction results from a virus – babesia is a protozoan and fog fever is caused by the toxin 3-methylindole. However, like some viruses, they produce illnesses that affect herds.

Kingsley AmisReference and languagesLiterary criticismMartin Amis
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Martin Amis on Philip Larkin's women

When it comes to women, I give you up, Kingsley Amis wrote to Philip Larkin. Although the poet – bald, peevish and apathetic – had several romantic relationships, most enduringly with the indomitable academic Monica Jones, his private life was ultimately a failure, reflects Martin Amis

The age of the literary correspondence is dying, slowly but surely electrocuted by the superconductors of high modernity. This expiration was locked into a certainty about 20 years ago; and although William Trevor and VS Naipaul, say, may yet reward us, it already sounds fogeyish to reiterate that, no, we won't be seeing, and we won't be wanting to see, the selected faxes and emails, the selected texts and tweets of their successors. Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica, published by Faber, covers the period 1945-70, and passively evokes it: digs and lodgings ("I have put in for a flatlet!!!"), pre-decimal currency ("I owe you 21/1d I think – 24/11 plus 1/2 minus 5/-"), The Archers, Pickford's Movers and myxomatosis; its settings are remorselessly provincial, mainly Leicester and Hull (and Belfast, true), with so-called holidays in York, Sark, Lincoln, Poolewe, Bournemouth ("I hope you got my card from Pocklington"). The volume will be of vital interest to all admirers of Larkin's work, and to all students of the abysmal mystery of Larkin's life, with its singularly crippled eros. Much of the time, though, readers will be thinking that the "literary correspondence" is something we're well shot of – a postwar embarrassment, like child labour, meat rationing and outdoor toilets.

Sexual intercourse, as everyone knows, began in 1963 (which "was rather late for me"). But what preceded it?

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Larkin got to know Monica Jones in the late 1940s, at which stage he was wrangling over a ring with Ruth Bowman, who was a 16-year-old sixth-former when they met. The wrangle with Ruth lasted eight years; the wrangle with Monica would last for 35, leading to the same outcome. Ruth's frail yet defiant homeliness can only be described as quite extraordinarily dated. Monica was a robust and comparatively worldly blonde, with well-shaped bones (but ogreish teeth). A lecturer in English at Leicester, she was a small-community "character": she wore tartan when she discussed Macbeth, and in general favoured dirndl skirts, low-cut tops and markedly cumbrous jewellery. But her defining characteristic was her voice – or, rather, her overpowering idiolect.

This is an extract from the most memorable letter in the book (October 1952): "Dear, I must sound very pompous & huffy . . . It's simply that in my view you would do much better to revise, drastically, the amount you say and the intensity with which you say it . . . I do want to urge you, with all love & kindness, to think about how much you say & how you say it. I'd even go so far as to make 3 rules: One, Never say more than two sentences, or very rarely three, without waiting for an answer or comment from whoever you're talking to; Two, abandon altogether your harsh didactic voice, & use only the soft musical one (except in special cases); & Three, don't do more than glance at your interlocutor (wrong word?) once or twice while speaking. You're getting a habit of boring your face up or round into the features of your listener – don't do it! It's most trying."

Larkin's tone is wholly unmalicious; it is affectionately, even pleadingly protective. And he at once retreats, explaining that those "3 rules" are merely "simple points of technique". We may take it as significant that the word "boring" is used here in an unexpected application – as a verb rather than a naked adjective. The person this letter describes is not just an individual but a familiar and fearsome type: the congenital, and unstoppable, windbag.

This collection qualifies as inside information; so it is not indecorous, I hope, to add some inside information of my own. Although the trajectory of Larkin's relationship with Kingsley Amis was already evident in the 1992 Selected Letters (edited, as is the current volume, by Anthony Thwaite), Letters to Monica adds substance and detail: undergraduate infatuation, measured disaffection, growing irritation, unregulated envy (envy being best understood as empathy gone wrong), a bourgeois distaste for bohemianism ("Patsy says [so-and-so's] house is filthy. I pressed her: 'As filthy as Kingsley's?'"), and finally a settled ill-will, occasionally tempered by nostalgia. Kingsley's feelings were more constant. But there was a Larkinian peculiarity that filled him with almost lifelong incredulity and dismay: Philip and the women. And, most especially, Philip and Monica.

In 1948 or 1949 Kingsley spoke slightingly of – or quite possibly to – Bowman. What followed was an alarming froideur. ("Kingsley was petrified," my mother later told me. "He thought he'd never see Philip again.") But Larkin extended no such chivalric shielding to Monica Jones. This is from an Amis-Larkin letter of the same period: "It doesn't surprise me in the least that Monica is [studying George Crabbe, 1754-1832, poet and parson]; he's exactly the sort of priggish, boring, featureless (especially that; there isn't anything about him, is there?), long-winded, inessential man she'd go for; if she can see beauty in a derelict shit-house, she must have more [sensibility] than you. Talking of [shit-houses] . . ."

In addition, as is well-known, Larkin acquiesced and indeed connived in Amis's merciless portrait of Monica (as Margaret Peel) in Lucky Jim (1954). Margaret is not only plain, theatrical, garrulous and of course boring; she is also a lying manipulator bent on entrapment. And Larkin would continue to regale Kingsley with grimly jovial asides about Monica's affectations – and, for instance, about her facial resemblance to Stan Laurel (an improvement, one supposes, on Oliver Hardy).

Ruth and Monica shared a certain trait: a restless self-importance unaccompanied by the slightest distinction (Monica, for all her strong opinions, published not a single word in her entire career). Two of the other three women in Larkin's life were similarly "superior": the aggressively "permissive" Patsy Strang (who drank herself to death at the age of 48); and the virginal, religious and implausibly naive Maeve Brennan (who claimed, in her maturity, not to know the meaning of the word "wank"). Only Betty Mackereth, Larkin's "loaf-haired secretary", seemed cheerfully content in her being. When it comes to women, as Kingsley wrote (in a style not to everyone's taste), "I fucking give you up". My mother, who revered Larkin, used to say, "Well, don't forget he went bald in his 20s. And he had a stutter. I think women frightened him." Then why, one wonders, were the women he chose so frightening?

And why was it Monica he always ended up with – Monica, the most frightening of them all? To describe Larkin's half of it as "love-hate" is perhaps too bold. On the positive side we register an urgent warmth, a snug intimacy of jokes and whimsies, and Monica's courageous acceptance of Larkin's intense melancholia – melancholia not as a mood or a susceptibility, but as a besetting Jonsonian humour ("black bile"). Larkin could be frightening too (and without much provocation): "No, I really can't do anything at all – it really is disgusting, I feel tearful with rage – why must [the landlady] leave her door open so that her filthy radio floods the whole house? . . . It really affects me strongly: a kind of spiritual claustrophobia – I can't get out, & can't get away, there's no way out, I can't stand it! Oh hell. How long will this go on, wasted time, wasted wasted wasted . . ." All this Monica shouldered and palliated. Still, on the negative side, we register Larkin's solemn exasperation, and his suppressed hostility and contempt. As early as 1953 Larkin told Strang why he was abandoning The New World Symphony (his third novel and his last attempt at fiction): "You know, I can't write this book: if it is to be written at all it should be largely an attack on Monica, & I can't do that, not while we are still on friendly terms, and I'm not sure it even interests me sufficiently to go on."

It is hard to construe this singular blend of animus and apathy. Even the "attack" on her bores him. So why did he cleave to Monica for another 32 years – till death did them part? He knew why. The reasons he gives Monica for not marrying her (often rehearsed) are the same reasons he surely gave himself for not leaving her. Failures of energy and courage, and a vast inertia.

Well, there was sex, too. Or was there? No indication is given, in the early letters, of the transition from friendship to romance. Turning to Andrew Motion's biography, we learn that Larkin "had come to me", as Monica quaintly put it, by the summer of 1950. (What would be the male equivalent of this phrase? "It was in August that I first took her"?) But such brooding cadences seem inapposite. "If it were announced that all sex would cease on 31 December," writes the hot 32-year-old on 15 December 1954, "my way of life wouldn't change at all." Evidently, though, they fumbled along. "[O]ften I'm quite uncertain whether you are feeling anything . . . you rarely seem to like anything more than anything else"; "I'm sorry our lovemaking fizzled out . . . I'm sorry to have failed you!" Larkin seeks a kind of safety in portraying himself as the omega male. Anyway, "taking care of business" (to paraphrase Aretha Franklin) was definitely not this man's game.

But these are turbid waters, thick with suspended matter, and go far deeper than Larkin's admittedly preternatural indolence. I defy any man – even the most self-sufficient poodlefaker – to read the following without a twinge: "I think . . . someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what's more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn't. And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can't enjoy it at all. It's like rugby football: either you like kicking & being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There's no way of quietly enjoying rugby football."

"In bed," the poet Ian Hamilton once told me, "you don't want to be too clear-headed about what you're doing." Larkin's clarity, his almost clinical over-sensitivity (naturally vital to his genius), could not be muted or muffled. This was his curse.

Or one of them. In Dostoevsky's Demons (1872) Varvara Petrovna accuses a portly valetudinarian bachelor of being "an old woman" – a verdict she promptly refines to "an old bag". Larkin, in his daily dealings (haircut, train ticket, utilities bill, new pullover, salaried employment), had a fair bit of the old bag in him ("I think there's a lot of infection about these days," he typically quavers, "upsetting one's insides: with all these foreigners about [in Hull, in 1966], one is never completely well, as when abroad"). There was, of course, a prominent old woman in his life – his mother, whose solitary widowhood lasted 30 years: "For her the daily round is hideous with traps, and dangerous with hidden ambush, and calamity: it is all she can do to creep through it unscathed. She . . . spends the time thinking about next summer's thunder-storms, gas taps, electricity switches, dark clouds, and I don't know what." Eva Larkin, then, in combination with the long-deceased Sydney (clever, cynical, despotic and pro-Nazi even after the outbreak of the second world war), might be expected to leave her son a heavy legacy.

"[M]y mother seems to be resuming her normal whining panicky grumbling maddening manner," he writes, perhaps self-revealingly. On the whole, though, Larkin tries to resist Freudian entendres and psychological determinisms: "[I]f one starts blaming one's parents, well, one would never stop! Butler said that anyone who was still worrying about his parents at 35 was a fool, but he certainly didn't forget them himself, and I think the influence they exert is enormous . . . I never remember my parents making a single spontaneous gesture of affection towards each other, for instance."

And the instance certainly hurts and connects. In an unpublished memoir (quoted in Motion's biography), Larkin wrote: "When I try to tune into my childhood, the dominant emotions I pick up are, overwhelmingly, fear and boredom . . . I never left the house without the sense of walking into a cooler, cleaner, saner and pleasanter atmosphere." Feelings of guilt, and possibly a desire for utter self-immolation, subjected Larkin to a recurrent temptation: that of setting up house with Eva. On this question Monica was impressively firm: "don't be robbed! don't be robbed of your soul!"

Monica Jones had many other virtues, chief among them her kindness and gentleness; she was stoical and unshockable, and could stand her ground under the awful searchlight of Larkin's candour and truthfulness. Thwaite quotes sparingly but tellingly from her letters (some of which were two or three times the length of this review), in which she also emerges as a tenacious literary critic, and an exceptionally close reader of Larkin's works in progress: it is startling to see how hard and how gingerly he struggled with poems that we now regard as etched in flint ("Church Going", say, or "The Whitsun Weddings"). From Larkin's viewpoint, of course, her main strength was her toleration of meagre rewards: "I accept, don't I, & without private reservation or grudge," she wrote in 1962, "that you don't like me enough to marry me." She accepted much else: his emotional sluggishness, and his morbid dread of effort in any sphere except poetry.

The fact that Larkin made little effort with Monica is everywhere apparent in these pages. His Selected Letters constitutes a literary event of the first order (alongside, for example, the imminent Saul Bellow: Letters). But the present book will remain a literary curiosity. Here, Larkin's prose is habitually perfunctory and pressureless: "Sun still shining here, but 'not for long' I fear"; "Of course, I might have been peevish anyway. More than likely!"; "Sheldon [the new sub-librarian] has started: seems all right, but nothing to write home about"; "Oh dear. I don't seem to be able to write you the interesting sort of letter I should like to . . ."

"Aren't I writing badly," he writes – and quite rightly. "The day didn't get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by 'Flannery O'Connor' in the bath – horribly depressing American South things." American South "things"? Larkin would never have written so exhaustedly to Amis, or to Thwaite, or to Barbara Pym, or to Robert Conquest (the world-famous historian whom he monotonously belittles: "a cheerful idiot", "the feeblewit", "what an old bore Bob is"). An old bore is what Larkin becomes, all too often, when he writes to Monica. But this too was no doubt salutary: a regular collapse into the unadorned everyday.

"It seems to me that what we have is a kind of homosexual relationship, disguised . . . Don't you think yourself there's something fishy about it?" What I take this to mean is that Larkin wasn't very masculine and that Monica wasn't very feminine. They lived, or subsisted, in middlesex. The process was far advanced, if not complete, by 1982, when I spent a long evening in their company. Larkin was demurely diffident (though he retained his "impeccable attentive courtesy: grave, but at the same time sunlit," as Kingsley would say in his funeral address, four years later). As for Monica – well, despite her clothes (brown trousers of crushed velvet, wifebeater blouse, plus earrings the size of hula hoops), she resembled an all-in wrestler renowned for an indifference to the norms of fair play. She also dominated the evening, despite the presence of my father, as host. Larkin had clearly ceased to urge her to revise, drastically, the amount she said and the intensity with which she said it.

Still, one way or another, Monica enabled Larkin to cherish his crucial essences – and to turn them into immortal poetry. "I am sure you are the one of this generation!" she wrote in 1955. "I like your poetry better than any that I ever see – oh, I am sure you will make yr name! yr mark, do I mean – really be a real poet, I feel more sure of it than ever before, it is you who are the one . . ."

Many a muse, no doubt, has murmured these words to many a poet. But Monica happened to be right. Larkin's life was a failure; his work was a triumph. That is all that matters. Because the work, unlike the life, lives on.

Philip LarkinMartin Amis
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Martin Amis: for my Money, the BBC got it right

Martin Amis on why the BBC dramatisation of his novel Money is great television

Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy Money very quickly, and then I relaxed.

It's a voice novel, and they're the hardest to film – you've got to use some voiceover to get the voice. But I think the BBC adaptation was really pretty close to my voice – just the feel of it, the slightly hysterical feel of it, which I like. It's a pity one line wasn't used. Speculating about whether Charles slept with Diana, in the book the barman says, "He's the heir to the frone. I mean, he's got to know what he's getting, hasn't he?" I was waiting for it and it didn't come. But that's just a tiny lost opportunity. You sort of let it go and think it's not going to be the book, it's someone else's idea of the book, the basic difference being that a novel is about interior life and a film about exterior life, and you accept that.

The Martin Amis character isn't in it and I'm relaxed about that – I don't think self-referential stuff works on the screen. They did want me to sit on the plane but I thought it would be disgusting to have a 60-year-old me, and said, "Why don't you get a nice, handsome young actor who might look a bit like me?"

There was a time when Money was going to be made in the late 80s and we'd lined up Gary Oldman for John Self. It was a great missed opportunity. Nick Frost, though, is remarkable. I found him a joy to watch. He brought a lot of pain to the role, undemonstratively, holding it in, with not a hint of self pity. In my imagination Self was not long-haired and he didn't have a moustache, but Frost has taken over from that.

I never thought of Money as a book about the 80s, except for the royal wedding and the rioting, the bunting and the barricade – that was very expressive of the time. But greed doesn't go away. And it was lovely to see Self drinking himself senseless on an aeroplane. As he's about to fall asleep, the stewardess very tenderly puts out his cigarette. It made me feel so nostalgic – you fully expected to be able to smoke on an aeroplane. That's very true to the time.

As told to Alison Flood. Money concludes tonight at 9pm on BBC2.

TelevisionMartin AmisMartin Amis
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Letters: Martin Amis: a response

Dear Anna Ford, Your surprise attack at least has the virtue of simplicity (Letters, 20 February). You argue that I should accept the sternest possible treatment from the press, ­because 1) I was and am a poor godfather to your daughter Claire, and 2) I paid a visit to your husband Mark Boxer's sickroom, with Christopher Hitchens (you say we were "filling in time" before going on to Heathrow), and we stayed too long, smoked cigarettes "over his bed", and then I trumped up a memoir where I lyingly claimed to have left the house in distress.

Your first point is well taken. Your second is an unworthy farrago.

It is true that I am a useless godfather, as Nina Raine and Antonia Hitchens can grimly confirm. And I now recognise a lost opportunity: unlike Nina and Antonia, Claire was abruptly fatherless. And when I met her as a young adult, on the occasion you describe, she expressively and warmingly reminded me of Mark (and I told her so). I will be writing to her to offer my apologies and regrets.

As for point 2, you are conflating two separate visits (and I made several such, not only to your house but also to that Tudorbethan hospital in Maida Vale). The visit described in the memoir I wrote about Mark was my final visit. The next morning I was scheduled to fly out with my family for our usual holiday in the US – where, days later, I read Mark's obituary in the New York Times. (Perhaps this is how the "plane to catch" business comes in.) On that occasion I said my last words to him and he said his last words to me, and I remember very clearly what they were. Then I left, and managed to reach my car before I was overwhelmed. (And, for the record, I never smoked a cigarette in Mark's bedroom.)

So I hope you can delete these items, at least, from your overall roster of grievances. And I wonder how it serves Mark's memory, or warms his ghost, to suggest that his two devoted friends (I and Christopher) behaved with such implausible callousness. What sane person "fills in time" at a deathbed? We both loved him, and still mourn him Many did, and many do. He was a powerfully delightful man. As ever,

Martin Amis

London

Martin AmisNewspapersMartin Amis
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Martin Amis muses on the fourth estate

'I'm not turning into Kingsley. I'm already Kingsley'

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday 16 February 2010

"In truth this is easily the most unusual thing about me," wrote Martin Amis in the column below: "I am the only hereditary novelist in the anglophone literary corpus." A reader points to at least one other, Anthony Trollope, following from his mother Frances.

I was born in Clapham in 1922. My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, Lucky Jim. This was followed by That Uncertain Feeling and Take a Girl Like You, among others; but my really productive period began in 1973, when I published both The Riverside Villas Murder and The Rachel Papers. 1978 saw the appearance of Jake's Thing and Success; in 1984 it was Stanley and the Women and Money; in 1991 it was The Russian Girl and Time's Arrow. This last was shortlisted for the Booker prize; but I had already been a winner with The Old Devils in 1986. I am, incidentally, the only writer to have received the Somerset Maugham award twice – the first time for my first first novel, the second time for my second first novel.

That period, alas, came to an end in 1995. Since then, though, I have been far from sluggardly. This year, for instance, at the age of 88, I publish my 37th work of fiction, The Pregnant Widow, and next year will see another novel, State of England – my 67th book, which nicely sets the scene for my 90th birthday. I have written five volumes' worth of journalism; I have taught at Princeton, Cambridge and Manchester. May I quote Anthony ­Burgess? "Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now." I have been married four times (two of my wives are novelists), and I have eight children and seven grandchildren – so far. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention my Collected Poems (1979).

❦

The creature described above is of course imaginary. But such a phantasm, such a monster of longevity and industriousness, seems to exist in the minds, or in the anxiety dreams, of a tiny stratum: British – no, English – feature-writers who occasionally address themselves to literary affairs. Incidentally, this is what they're groping to express when they say I'm "turning into Kingsley". They should relax: I'm already Kingsley. In truth, this is easily the most unusual thing about me: I am the only hereditary novelist in the ­anglophone literary corpus. Thus I am the workaholic and hypermanic, and by now very elderly, Prince Charles of English letters. I have overstayed my welcome. I have been about the place for much too long.

About 90% of the coverage has passed me by, but some new tendencies are clear enough. What's different, this time round, is that the writer, or this writer, gets blamed for all the slanders he incites in the press. Some quite serious commentators (DJ Taylor, for one) have said that I'm controversial-on-purpose whenever I have a book coming out. Haven't they noticed that the papers pick up on my remarks whether I have a book coming out or not? And how can you be ­controversial- on-purpose without ceasing to care what you say? The Telegraph, on its front page, offers the following: "Martin Amis: 'Women have too much power for their own good'." This is the equivalent of "Rowan Williams: 'Christianity is a vulgar fraud'." I suppose the Telegraph was trying to make me sound "provocative". Well, they messed that up too. I don't sound ­provocative. I sound like a much-feared pub bore in Hove.

And yet experienced journalists will look me in the eye and solemnly ask, "Why do you do it?" They are not asking me why I say things in public (which is an increasingly pertinent question). They are asking me why I deliberately stir up the newspapers. How can they have such a slender understanding of their own trade? Getting taken up (and recklessly distorted) in the newspapers is not something I do. It's something the news- ­ papers do. The only person in England who can manipulate the fourth estate is, appropriately, Katie Price. But there I go again. No, the vow of silence looks more and more attractive. That would be a story too, but it would only be a story once. Wouldn't it?

❦

To return briefly to the longevity theme – and all the stuff about street-corner suicide parlours, and the "silver tsunami" (which is the demogaphers' shorthand for what has been described as "the most profound population shift in history"). The press reacted to my remarks with righteous dismay; but I saw no recent headlines saying "Terry Pratchet is mad", by way of commentary on his resonant statement about euthanasia. In addition, it turns out that 75% of Britons (but none of the political parties) agree with him and agree with me. Thus the euthanasia question, eerily, is the reverse image of capital punishment at the time of its abolition. The people wanted judicial killing, but the government, highmindedly and quite rightly in this case, said no.

Of course, Sir Terry's dignified ­remarks were taken from a public ­lecture; mine were a mishmash of half-quotes from a satirical novel. For the interested, the passage reads (I am ­referring to Europe's distorted age structures): "Hoi polloi: the many. And, oh, we will be many (he meant the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers). And we will be hated, too. Governance, for at least a generation, he read, will be a matter of transferring wealth from the young to the old. And they won't like that, the young. They won't like the silver tsunami, with the old hogging the social services and stinking up the clinics and the hospitals, like an ­inundation of monstrous immigrants. There will be age wars, and chrono­logical cleansing . . ."

Then, too, Sir Terry has Alzheimer's – a condition made yet more tragic by the liveliness of the mind it here afflicts (I am thinking also of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow). And Sir Terry is older than me. Or is he? Well, yes and no. I am 88 – but I am also 24. Look at the photographs. A 60-year-old grandfather, I am still the "bad boy" (not even the bad man) of English letters. Who could possibly "manipulate" ­perceptions as chaotic as these?

NewspapersMartin AmisMartin Amis
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Guardian book club: Martin Amis on writing Time's Arrow

Week three: The author explains what led him to write this novel, and why it wasn't 'a decision'

"Why did you decide to write a novel about the Holocaust?" This challenge, which I still sometimes hear, can only be answered as follows: "But I never did." Similarly, I never decided to wite a novel about teenage sexuality, or Thatcher's England, or millennial London, or, indeed, about the Gulag (which I nonetheless completed in 2006). With its hopelessly inapposite verb, and presumptuous preposition, the question reveals an understandable naivety about the way that fictions are made. For the novel, as Norman Mailer put it, is "the spooky art".

Deciding to write a novel about something – as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something – sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block. No matter what its length (vignette, novella, epic), a work of fiction begins with an inkling: a ­notion that is also a physical sensation. It is hard to improve on Nabokov, who variously described it as a "shiver" and a "throb". The throb can come from anywhere, a newspaper report (very common), the remnants of a dream, a half-remembered quote. The crucial, the enabling fermentation lies in this: the shiver must connect to something already present in the subconscious.

Time's Arrow depended on a co­incidence, or a confluence. In the mid-1980s I started spending the summers in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where I made friends with the distinguished "psychohistorian" Robert Jay Lifton. Bob was and is the author of a succession of books on the political horrors of the 20th century: books on thought reform in China, on Hiroshima, on Vietnam. And in 1987 he gave me a copy of his latest (and perhaps most celebrated) work, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.

Here, Lifton's historiographical ­mission is to establish nazism as an essentially biomedical ideology. It is there in Mein Kampf: "Anyone who wants to cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first of all summon up the courage to make clear the causes of this disease." The Jew was the agent of "racial pollution" and "racial tuberculosis": the "eternal bloodsucker", "germ-carrier", the "maggot in a rotting corpse". Accordingly, the doctor must become a "biological soldier"; the healer must become a killer. In the camps, all the non-random murders were supervised by doctors (and so were the crematoria). As one of their number put it: "Out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind."

That year, too, I already had it in my head that I might attempt a short story about a life lived backwards in time. This tenuous proposition appealed to me as a poetic possibility – but it seemed fatally frictionless. I could find no application for a life so lived. Which life? As I began The Nazi Doctors, I found myself thinking, most disconcertingly, this life. The life of a Nazi doctor. "Born" in New England, as an old man; "dying" in Austria, in the 1920s, as a baby boy . . .

After more than a year of further reading, and of daily struggles with a sense of profanity and panic (by what entitlement could I address this ­sepulchral subject, and from such an apparently "playful" vantage?), I began to write. And at once I made an emboldening discovery: the arrow of time turns out to be the arrow of ­reason or logic, expectably enough; but it is also the arrow of morality. Set the cinema of life in reverse ­motion, and (for example) Hiroshima is created in a single moment; violence is benign; killing becomes healing, healing killing; the hospital is a torture chamber, the death camp a fount of life. Reverse the arrow of time, and the Nazi project becomes what Hitler said it was: the means to make ­Germany whole. Which still strikes me as some kind of measure of this terminal and ­diametrical atrocity: it asked for the ­arrow of time to point the other way.

We often ask ourselves who was worse: the little moustache or the big moustache, Hitler or Stalin? Well, 15 years later I wrote a novel about the Russian holocaust, too (House of ­Meetings); and the latter, incidentally, was the more difficult to write, because it focused on the victims and not the perpetrators. But that is by the way. In our hierarchy of evil, we instinctively promote Hitler. And we are right.

The Gulag – and this is not widely grasped – was first and foremost a system of state slavery. The goal, never achieved, was to make money. Still, this is a motive we can recognise. The German idea, with its "dreams of omnipotence and sadism" (Lifton), was utterly inhuman, or "counter-human", in Primo Levi's judgment, like a ­counter-clock world. The Nazis were on the intellectual level of the supermarket tabloid. It should not surprise us to learn that there was a government department, in Berlin, set up to prove that the Aryans were not descended from the apes; no, they came from the lost continent of Atlantis, in the heavens, where they were preserved in ice from the beginning of time.

Join John Mullan and Martin Amis for a discussion about Time's Arrow on Monday 25 January at 7pm, Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG. Tickets are £9.50 online (www.kingsplace.co.uk) or £11.50 from the box office: 020 7520 1490.

Time's ArrowMartin Amis
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Martin Amis interviews Roman Polanski

In September Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland. He faces extradition to the US, having fled the States in 1978 to avoid being sentenced for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. The debate about the case has raged ever since. Martin Amis was the first writer to interview Polanski after his flight, meeting him in Paris in 1979 for a magazine article. Here, we publish the encounter in full

When I was being driven to the police station from the hotel, the car radio was already talking about it. The newsmen were calling the police before I was arrested to see whether they can break the news. I couldn't believe… I thought, you know, I was going to wake up from it. I realise, if I have killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls – everyone wants to fuck young girls! No, I knew then, this is going to be another big, big thing."

"It could never happen to me" is the sort of remark that Roman Polanski will never have cause to utter. If strange things are going to happen, he is the kind of man they will happen to. Despite his reputation as a fixer, an ecstatic, thick-skinned bully-boy, he has, in many respects, always been fortune's fool. When he talks enthusiastically, and perhaps a little sentimentally, about all the promise, flair and freedom of the 1960s, it strikes you that there is no more conspicuous victim of the abysmal ironies of that decade. For him the 1960s were years of high energy and achievement, ending (as, in a sense, they ended for everybody else) on 9 August 1969, with the bloody murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate. His period of recovery was then marked by constant, and hatefully insulting, stories in the press, explaining how Mr and Mrs Polanski had opened the door to their own nemesis (by experimenting with drugs, decadence, weird rituals, etc). It wasn't his first experience of inordinate suffering and inordinate humiliation. And now, 10 years later, he finds himself in an altogether different kind of mess.

I went first to his airy, Hockneyesque, definitively bijou flat, between the Champs-Elysées and the Seine. There can be few smarter apartment blocks in Paris: Marlene Dietrich used to have a floor of it, and so does some deserving member or other of the Pahlavi family [the dynasty that ruled Iran until 1979]. I waited for a few minutes in the bookless drawing-room, Polanski's agile manservant asking me if I would prefer my glass of beer with or without a head of foam. I went with the foam, and never regretted it. Then Polanski strolled promptly out of his bedroom, wearing tailored jeans and a monogrammed blue shirt. At five foot four, and with great liveliness of gait and gesture, he seems to be about 16 years old. This impression didn't go away, even after several hours in his company. It occurred to me that his considerable and well-documented success with women has a lot to do with that fact. Contemplating little Roman, women wouldn't so much sense the appeal of being worked over by a priapic, trouble-shooting film director; they would just want to take the poor waif upstairs and have him sob himself to sleep in their arms.

Looking 16, of course, does not entitle you to go to bed with adolescents. Despite what Polanski says – contra Polanski – not everyone wants to fuck young girls. One cannot hide behind a false universality: one cannot seek safety in numbers. Most people who do want to fuck young girls, moreover, don't fuck young girls. Not fucking apparently willing young girls is clearly more of a challenge. But even Humbert Humbert realised that young girls don't really know whether they are willing or not. The active paedophile is stealing childhoods. Polanski, you sense, has never even tried to understand this.

"You drinking beer?" he asked with routine incredulity. His voice is vaulting, declamatory, not only accented but heavily accentual in style.

"That's right," I said. "In his piece about you Kenneth Tynan says that you hardly drink at all. Is that…?"

"Ah Ken Tynan full of shit," he said, turning and pacing round the room. "I drink a lot of wine last night, as a matter of fact… But now I'm very hungry."

We had lunch in a noisy German restaurant round the corner. Polanski eats as hectically as he talks. "Here, have some harring – no harring, herring… This is lovely – you want some?… Here, I prepare you good little portion, some onion on top – there!" He is pointed at and murmured about by the other diners, and affectionately fawned on by the immaculate waiters. He is one of those people who can shout for service without giving offence: if he hollers for a beer it is because he must have that beer, and must have it now.

According to press reports, Polanski met with a cool reception in Paris after his escape from America in early 1978 ("I have not contacted him – and I'm not going to," said Joseph Losey. "A coward's way out. The ranks are closing against him," said Robert Stack). Well aware of his catastrophe-prone nature, he is finding Paris a good place to keep out of harm's way. "It's very grown-up here," he says, adding, in one of the bursts of mangled eloquence that occasionally escape his rusty, staccato, always endearing English: "I'm trying to extenuate those contrasts in my character that make me stick out as a sore thumb from my surroundings." (Love that "as".) He is determined to return to America, despite the remote possibility of a 50-year jail sentence, for the alleged drugging and raping of the 13-year-old girl. "But they have made me very welcome in Paris and I'm going to stay for some while. Unless something happens."

After all, he was born here, in 1933.

The first few years of his life were relatively free of disaster. In 1936 his family returned to Cracow. As a child, Polanski saw barricades being erected at the end of the street: the Nazis were closing off the ghetto. In 1941 both his parents were taken into concentration camps. Just before the ghetto was finally overrun, Polanski escaped through a gap in the barbed wire. "One day, outside the ghetto, I saw people marching in a column, guarded by Germans. My father was among them. I walked alongside for a while but he gestured for me to run away. He survived four years in a camp – but that was the last time I saw him." His mother died in Auschwitz.

Polanski's youth continued to be marked by near misses. He was brought up by Catholic peasants in the remote Polish countryside. Out blackberrying one day, he was casually shot at by German soldiers – "like I am a squirrel or something". Back in liberated Cracow in 1945, the only bomb dropped during one of the last German air-raids blew him through a lavatory door, injuring his left arm. At the age of 16, as an art student in Cracow, he was led into an underground bunker by a friend of a friend who proposed to sell the young Roman a racing bicycle. "I always wanted a racing bicycle." He described what followed very vividly, in his thoughtful anapaests, leaning forward and parting his hair to show you the scars on his crown.

"I was walking in the tunnel, you know. He was behind me. He was behind me. I kept saying, 'But where is the bicycle, sir?' Then I thought I get a sudden electric shock, thought I touch a cable or something – or I thought there was some other attacker down there. I couldn't believe the man was hitting me on the head." But he was, with a rock, five times. Polanski's assailant, apprehended that day, had already committed three murders. When he staggered out of the bunker, Polanski had so much blood pouring from him that he still feels a tremor of dread every time he steps under a shower.

And, despite his multinational successes, Polanski's life has never shaken free of the grotesque and calamitous. Over the years at least half a dozen of his close friends and associates have met with violent and unlikely deaths – suicides, strange illnesses, a freak train accident. It is by now a cliche to say of Polanski that his films, with their emphasis on terror, isolation and madness, seem no more than a demonic commentary on his life. But such an impression is unavoidable in the light of the atrocious events at Cielo Drive in 1969. Polanski, you'd have thought, has endured enough for 20 lifetimes.

"Of course, my life has been very strange, full of strange things. But it does not look like that to me, you know – from my side. My life is just something I live, you see. Only when I stand back do I see how strange it has been."

At one ironic remove, this is the character Polanski plays in his infrequent appearances in his own films. He has low regard for actors ("The intelligent actor is a rarity, almost a paradox") and has few pretensions about his own abilities in front of the camera: "I only use me because I'm cheap and give no trouble. I'm so nice to work with, you know? I always do what I tell me to." In fact, he is an actor of narrow range but perfect pitch: he has an unwavering feel for the comedy and pathos of vulnerability. In his two most memorable roles – as the jittery vampire-hunter in Dance of the Vampires and as the effaced, wide-open Polish clerk in The Tenant – Polanski portrays, with authentic sympathy, the little man to whom strange things happen. In those films the little man half-expects strange things to happen to him, and responds to them with obedient, uncomplaining horror as long as they last. He seems to believe that if these strange things weren't happening to him, then other strange things would be happening to him instead.

I was reminded of this persona several times during lunch, most particularly when Polanski described his recent prison term in connection with the "rape" case in Los Angeles. Reluctantly at first, later in a spirit of great hilarity, with painful whimpers of delighted recollection, he told me how his six-week incarceration began.

"When I arrived in the middle of the night, I couldn't get in to the goddamn prison! There were too many journalists and cameras there! And all the prisoners in yard because they hear it on the news, saying, 'Hey, how y'doing, Planski!' But it was like a vacation, a sanctuary. It was terrific. I wouldn't mind to go back now, now I know what it's like. It is interesting to go on the other side, where bad people are. Full of incredible murderers! There was someone who kill 16 people." He nods, adding more quietly, and with resignation: "That is the trouble – you never know when people going to stab you, you know? That's the only problem, is that you can just get killed any time."

The quality of resignation, of stretched stoicism, was perhaps what drew Polanski to the character of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Called simply Tess, the latest Polanski offering opened in France late last year, with encouraging critical and commercial success. It is a respectful, perhaps over-faithful, certainly over-long and generally flawed piece of work. The difficulty of the film (as in another sense it is the difficulty of the book) concerns the character of Angel Clare, the supposedly adorable foil to Tess's swinish seducer, Alec d'Urberville. The point is that Hardy plays on these melodramatic contrasts (Angel strumming his harp in the attic, Alec glimpsed through flames carrying a pitchfork), while making it clear that Angel is more subtly despicable than Alec could ever be. Polanski was aware of the ambiguity, though I don't think he ever resolved it.

"Yes, let's talk about films. Films are my sector, my 'cup of tea', as they say in England." He looks up in wonder.

"I think I'm going to have a cigar. You want one?… What drew me to the character of Tess was her incredible integrity combined with her – submission? No, submissiveness – and her fatalism. She never complains. All these very… unfair things happen to her, and she never complains until the end. The book is more morally complicated than you at first think. Alec had a cold, materialistic approach to life, but he is not too bad by today's standards."

"And what do you think of Angel?"

"Oh, Angel to me is a complete shit. He represents to me very much the young man full of revolutionary ideals, but as soon as it affects him personally he turns out to be as hypocritical as everyone else."

I was obliged to say at this point that the casting of Peter Firth as Angel seemed to be questionable. In fact it is disastrous. Angel must appear to have the attributes of a romantic lead. The vulgar truth is that Peter Firth would be fine if he looked more like Robert Redford and less like Jimmy Carter. Polanski shrugged and disagreed, showing no more than mild disappointment. But it was with shared relief that we went on to praise Nastassja Kinski's wonderfully steady performance as Tess. Polanski spoke of her with affectionate admiration – and with a little self-consequence: she is a protege of his and, naturally, also an ex.

I asked him which of his films he liked most. "Films are like women," I was informed (Polanski thinks quite a few things are like women). "You always love the last most until the next one comes along.

"But of course there are films for which you have a special feeling. Some of my most praised films – Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion, The Tenant – were largely matters of convenience, done because of time or money or to accommodate a certain producer. I wouldn't have choosen them, you know? But my head tells me that Cul-de-sac is my best film — it is the film that is the most self-contained. It only has meaning as a movie, as itself. My heart tells me that The Vampire Killers [an early title for Dance of the Vampires] is my favourite. I get more fond of that film every year. I suppose I am reliving my happiness at the time of making it. It was towards the end of the 1960s. Everyone was full of hope and good spirits. I was making a comedy with people I liked, and of course with Sharon… But Tess is very dear to me now.'

It would be rash to try to make up your mind about someone like Polanski. He is something of a ranter, his speech dotted with showbiz cliches ("Jack Nicholson – he is a great professional") and self-consciously quotable tags ("I like food, I like women, and best of all I like women who like food" etc, etc). But there is a great deal that is generous, natural, even transparent, about him. His confidence, for example, is a real thing, and not the grinning shambles that often passes for confidence in the film world. Clearly he has sometimes gone too far into the gratifications that his fast-lane milieu offers him, as the case in California amply demonstrates. But he has survived an extraordinary life, and is still himself.

After lunch he invited me to his cutting-room on the Champs-Elysées, where he is preparing Tess for the English and American versions. It was a gloomy flat, full of gloomy, Gitane-smoking Frenchmen. Polanski spent 20 minutes cutting half a second out of a reaction-shot to a fresh stage in Tess's doleful decline. I asked him if he was worried that the film might be mistakenly regarded as a blow for women's liberation.

"What? Tess responds appropriately to events, and as an individual. Women's lib is an absurdity! A few just postulates do not make a movement just. How can one half of the species organise against the other half? There's not anyone who said at certain time, 'That's the way women behave.' Things are the way they are because of evolution! This is the way it is between monkeys, between dogs and between butterflies!"

"What about spiders?"

"Spiders, mm," he said, nodding and looking serious. "No, male spiders don't have a good time. Maybe they should get together and do something about it. I don't know."

Polanski vs. the law - 1979-2009

It was on 26 September 26, as he travelled from France to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich film festival, that Roman Polanski was detained by Swiss police at Zurich airport.France refused to extradite Polanski With dual French-Polish citizenship, Polanski had settled in Paris and lived and worked there, unhampered, for the last 31 years. He travelled freely in European countries where he felt safe, including Switzerland, where he has a home. He made eight more films, including The Pianist, which won him an Oscar for best director (he accepted it via satellite) and was finishing The Ghost, an adaptation of the Robert Harris novel, at the time of his arrest.

Although he felt secure living in France, the case had continued to haunt him. In 1988, Samantha Geimer sued Polanski for the assault. They settled out of court in 1993 and she forgave him publicly 10 years later. Last year, the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired unearthed evidence suggesting the judge in the original criminal case had acted illegally.

The Zurich arrest, which was requested by the US, created international controversy. France's culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, was especially condemnatory, citing Polanski's "difficult life" as an extenuating factor. Hollywood rallied to the director's defence, with Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Natalie Portman signing petitions for his release. Those in favour of Polanski's extradition include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Foxx and Chris Rock. Whoopi Goldberg provoked criticism when she said: "Whatever Polanski was guilty of, it wasn't rape-rape." Gore Vidal added fuel to the fire, saying: "Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she's been taken advantage of?"

On 20 October, an application for bail was rejected by the Swiss authorities. Six days later, Geimer repeated her request for the charges to be dropped. But Polanski, now 76, remains in a Zurich prison facing the prospect of extradition and sentencing, 30 years after the fact, in Los Angeles.

The best of Polanski

Repulsion (1965)

Starring Catherine Deneuve.

Sexually troubled manicurist Carole (Deneuve) is repelled by the sounds of her sister (Yvonne Furneaux) in bed with her married lover. Left alone when they go on holiday, she starts to hallucinate as she loses her mind, culminating in her bludgeoning her own boyfriend to death.

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

Starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes.

Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse move into an apartment where their's neighbours are kooky even by New York standards: they're a coven. Rosemary suffers a troublesome pregnancy, hardly surprising as the natural father of her child is the devil. Not recommended for mothers-to-be.

Chinatown (1974)

Starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway.

Murder and murky waters in LA, where private eye JJ 'Jake' Gittes (Nicholson) is hired to expose a philandering husband and ends up mired in a tangle of state and municipal corruption centred round the city's water supply. Robert Towne won an Oscar for the best original screenplay.

The Tenant (1976)

Starring Roman Polanski and Isabelle Adjani. Polanski stars as Trelkovsky, a reclusive Pole living in Paris, who rents a flat only to discover that the previous tenant (Adjani) has thrown herself out of the window and lies in a coma. He gradually becomes convinced that his new neighbours want the same fate to befall him.

Frantic (1988)

Starring Harrison Ford.

'A reminder of how absorbing a thriller can be,' said Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times. The wife of Dr Richard Walker (Ford) is kidnapped while they are in Paris for a medical conference. Linguistically challenged, he has to enter the city's punk/drug culture to discover why.

The Pianist (2002)

Starring Adrien Brody.

Polanski won the best director Oscar for this film based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, who was playing Chopin on the radio when German bombs first fell on Warsaw. It allowed Polanski, a Holocaust survivor, to explore a place he said he'd never go – his own dark past.

Roman PolanskiMartin AmisMartin Amis
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov's work

Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished novella, The Original of Laura, is being published despite the author's instructions that it be destroyed after his death. Martin Amis confronts the tortuous questions posed by a genius in decline

Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs (LOOK LEFT), and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice. Most writers, I think, would want to go along with Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), when he reminisced in 1974:

". . . I regarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the coloured phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home."

Well, the creative joy is authentic; and yet it isn't faithful (in common with pretty well the entire cast of Nabokov's fictional women, creative joy, in the end, is sadistically fickle). Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or "fat Fate", as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature's dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.

Nabokov composed The Original of Laura, or what we have of it, against the clock of doom (a series of sickening falls, then hospital infections, then bronchial collapse). It is not "A novel in fragments", as the cover states; it is immediately recognisable as a longish short story struggling to become a novella. In this palatial edition, every left-hand page is blank, and every right-hand page reproduces Nabokov's manuscript (with its robust handwriting and fragile spelling – "bycycle", "stomack", "suprize"), plus the text in typed print (and infested with square brackets). It is nice, I dare say, to see those world-famous index cards up close; but in truth there is little in Laura that reverberates in the mind. "Auroral rumbles and bangs had begun jolting the cold misty city": in this we hear an echo of the Nabokovian music. And in the following we glimpse the funny and fearless Nabokovian disdain for our "abject physicality":

"I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it – the wrong food, heartburn, constipation's leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet . . ."

Otherwise and in general Laura is somewhere between larva and pupa (to use a lepidopteral metaphor), and very far from the finished imago.

Apart from a welcome flurry of interest in the work, the only thing this relic will effect, I fear, is the slight exacerbation of what is already a problem from hell. It is infernal, for me, because I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius. And yet Nabokov, in his decline, imposes on even the keenest reader a horrible brew of piety, literal-mindedness, vulgarity and philistinism. Nothing much, in Laura, qualifies as a theme (ie, as a structural or at least a recurring motif). But we do notice the appearance of a certain Hubert H Hubert (a reeking Englishman who slobbers over a pre-teen's bed), we do notice the 24-year-old vamp with 12-year-old breasts ("pale squinty nipples and firm form"), and we do notice the fevered dream about a juvenile love ("her little bottom, so smooth, so moonlit"). In other words, Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoiliation of very young girls.

Six fictions: six fictions, two or perhaps three of which are spectacular masterpieces. You will, I hope, admit that the hellish problem is at least Nabokovian in its complexity and ticklishness. For no human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime. The problem, which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, has to do with the intimate malice of age.

❦

The word we want is not the legalistic "paedophilia", which in any case deceitfully translates as "fondness for children". The word we want is "nympholepsy", which doesn't quite mean what you think it means. It means "frenzy caused by desire for the unattainable", and is rightly characterised by my COD as literary. As such, nympholepsy is a legitimate, indeed an almost inevitable subject for this very singular talent. "Nabokov's is really an amorous style," John Updike lucidly observed: "It yearns to clasp diaphonous exactitude into its hairy arms." With the later Nabokov, though, nympholepsy crumbles into its etymology – "from Gk numpholeptos 'caught by nymphs', on the pattern of EPILEPSY"; "from Gk epilepsia, from epilambanein 'seize, attack'".

Dreamed up in 1930s Berlin (with Hitler's voice spluttering out from the rooftop loudspeakers), and written in Paris (post-Kristallnacht, at the start of the Nabokovs' frenetic flight from Europe), The Enchanter is a vicious triumph, brilliantly and almost osmotically translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov in 1987, 10 years after his father's death. As a narrative it is logistically identical to the first half of Lolita: the rapist will marry – and perhaps murder – the mother, and then negotiate the child. Unlike the redoubtable Charlotte Haze ("she of the noble nipple and massive thigh"), the nameless widow in The Enchanter is already promisingly frail, her large body warped out of symmetry by hospitalisations and surgeons' knives. And this is why her suitor reluctantly rejects the idea of poison: "Besides, they'll inevitably open her up, out of sheer habit."

The wedding takes place, and so does the wedding night: ". . . and it was perfectly clear that he (little Gulliver)" would be physically unable to tackle "those multiple caverns" and "the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous pelvis". But "in the middle of his farewell speeches about his migraine", things take an unexpected turn,

"so that, after the fact, it was with astonishment that he discovered the corpse of the miraculously vanquished giantess and gazed at the moiré girdle that almost totally concealed her scar."

Soon the mother is dead for real, and the enchanter is alone with his 12-year-old. "The lone wolf was getting ready to don Granny's nightcap."

In Lolita, Humbert has "strenuous sexual intercourse" with his nymphet at least twice a day for two years. In The Enchanter there is a single delectation – non-invasive, voyeuristic, masturbatory. In the hotel room the girl is asleep, and naked; "he began passing his magic wand above her body", measuring her "with an enchanted yardstick". She awakes, she looks at "his rearing nudity", and she screams. With his obsession now reduced to a cooling smear on the raincoat he throws on, our enchanter runs out into the street, seeking to rid himself, by any means, of a world "already-looked-at" and "no-longer-needed". A tramcar grinds into sight, and under

"this growing, grinning, megathundering mass, this instantaneous cinema of dismemberment – that's it, drag me under, tear at my frailty – I'm travelling flattened, on my smacked-down face . . . don't rip me to pieces – you're shredding me, I've had enough . . . Zigzag gymnastics of lightning, spectogram of a thunderbolt's split seconds – and the film of life had burst."

❦

In moral terms The Enchanter is sulphurously direct. Lolita, by contrast, is delicately cumulative; but in its judgment of Humbert's abomination it is, if anything, the more severe. To establish this it is necessary to adduce only two key points. First, the fate of its tragic heroine. No unprepared reader could be expected to notice that Lolita meets a terrible end on page two of the novel that bears her name: "Mrs 'Richard F Schiller' died in childbed", says the "editor" in his Foreword, "giving birth to a still-born girl . . . in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest"; and the novel is almost over by the time Mrs Richard F Schiller (ie, Lo) briefly appears. Thus we note, with a parenthetical gasp, the size of Nabokov's gamble on greatness. "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book," he once announced (at the lectern), "one can only reread it." Nabokov knew that Lolita would be reread, and re-reread. He knew that we would eventually absorb Lolita's fate – her stolen childhood, her stolen womanhood. Gray Star, he wrote, is "the capital town of the book". The shifting half-tone – gray star, pale fire, torpid smoke: this is the Nabokovian crux.

The second fundamental point is the description of a recurring dream that shadows Humbert after Lolita has flown (she absconds with the cynically carnal Quilty). It is also proof of the fact that style, that prose itself, can control morality. Who would want to do something that gave them dreams like these?

". . . she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte [his ex-wives], or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball's bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly misplaced, in horrible chambres garnies, where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed."

That final phrase, with its clear allusion, reminds us of the painful and tender diffidence with which Nabokov wrote about the century's terminal crime. His father, the distinguished liberal statesman (whom Trotsky loathed), was shot dead by a fascist thug in Berlin; and Nabokov's homosexual brother, Sergey, was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp ("What a joy you are well, alive, in good spirits," Nabokov wrote to his sister Elena, from the US to the USSR, in November 1945. "Poor, poor Seryozha . . . !"). Nabokov's wife, Véra, was Jewish, and so, therefore, was their son (born in 1934); and there is a strong likelihood that if the Nabokovs had failed to escape from France when they did (in May 1940, with the Wehrmacht 70 miles from Paris), they would have joined the scores of thousands of undesirables delivered by Vichy to the Reich.

In his fiction, to my knowledge, Nabokov wrote about the Holocaust at paragraph length only once – in the incomparable Pnin (1957). Other references, as in Lolita, are glancing. Take, for example, this one-sentence demonstration of genius from the insanely inspired six-page short story "Signs and Symbols" (it is a description of a Jewish matriarch):

"Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about."

Pnin goes further. At an émigré houseparty in rural America a Madam Shpolyanski mentions her cousin, Mira, and asks Timofey Pnin if he has heard of her "terrible end". "Indeed, I have," Pnin answers. Gentle Timofey sits on alone in the twilight. Then Nabokov gives us this:

"What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself . . . never to remember Mira Belochkin – not because . . . the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind . . . but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget – because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past."

How resonantly this passage chimes with Primo Levi's crucial observation that we cannot, we must not, "understand what happened". Because to "understand" it would be to "contain" it. "What happened" was "non-human", or "counter-human", and remains incomprehensible to human beings.

By linking Humbert Humbert's crime to the Shoah, and to "those whom the wind of death has scattered" (Paul Celan), Nabokov pushes out to the very limits of the moral universe. Like The Enchanter, Lolita is airtight, intact and entire. The frenzy of the unattainable desire is confronted, and framed, with stupendous courage and cunning. And so matters might have rested. But then came the meltdown of artistic self-possession – tumultuously announced, in 1970, by the arrival of Ada. When a writer starts to come off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident.

❦

I have read at least half a dozen Nabokov novels at least half a dozen times. And at least half a dozen times I have tried, and promptly failed, to read Ada ("Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle"). My first attempt took place about three decades ago. I put it down after the first chapter, with a curious sensation, a kind of negative tingle. Every five years or so (this became the pattern), I picked it up again; and after a while I began to articulate the difficulty: "But this is dead," I said to myself. The curious sensation, the negative tingle, is of course miserably familiar to me now: it is the reader's response to what seems to happen to all writers as they overstep the biblical span. The radiance, the life-giving power, begins to fade. Last summer I went away with Ada and locked myself up with it. And I was right. At 600 pages, two or three times Nabokov's usual fighting-weight, the novel is what homicide detectives call "a burster". It is a waterlogged corpse at the stage of maximal bloat.

When Finnegans Wake appeared, in 1939, it was greeted with wary respect – or with "terror-stricken praise", in the words of Jorge Luis Borges. Ada garnered plenty of terror-stricken praise; and the similarities between the two magna opera are in fact profound. Nabokov nominated Ulysses as his novel of the century, but he described Finnegans Wake as, variously, "formless and dull", "a cold pudding of a book", "a tragic failure" and "a frightful bore". Both novels seek to make a virtue of unbounded self-indulgence; they turn away, so to speak, and fold in on themselves. Literary talent has several ways of dying. With Joyce and Nabokov, we see a decisive loss of love for the reader – a loss of comity, of courtesy. The pleasures of writing, Nabokov said, "correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading"; and the two activities are in some sense indivisible. In Ada, that bond loosens and frays.

There is a weakness in Nabokov for "partricianism", as Saul Bellow called it (Nabokov the classic émigré, Bellow the classic immigrant). In the former's purely "Russian" novels (I mean the novels written in Russian that Nabokov did not himself translate), the male characters, in particular, have a self-magnifying quality: they are larger and louder than life. They don't walk – they "march" or "stride"; they don't eat and drink – they "munch" and "gulp"; they don't laugh – they "roar". They are very far from being the furtive, hesitant neurasthenics of mainstream anglophone fiction: they are brawny (and gifted) heart-throbs, who win all the fights and win all the girls. Pride, for them, is not a deadly sin but a cardinal virtue. Of course, we cannot do without this vein in Nabokov: it gives us, elsewhere, his magnificently comic hauteur. In Lolita, the superbity is meant to be funny; elsewhere, it is a trait that irony does not protect.

In Ada nabobism disastrously combines with a nympholepsy that is lavishly, monotonously, and frictionlessly gratified. Ada herself, at the outset, is 12; and Van Veen, her cousin (and half-sibling) is 14. As Ada starts to age, in adolescence, her tiny sister Lucette is also on hand to enliven their "strenuous trysts". On top of this, there is a running quasi-fantasy about an international chain of elite bordellos where girls as young as 11 can be "fondled and fouled". And Van's 60-year-old father (incidentally but typically) has a mistress who is barely out of single figures: she is 10. This interminable book is written in dense, erudite, alliterative, punsome, pore-clogging prose; and every character, without exception, sounds like late Henry James.

In common with Finnegans Wake, Ada probably does "work out" and "measure up" – the multilingual decoder, given enough time and nothing better to do, might eventually disentangle its toiling systems and symmetries, its lonely and comfortless labyrinths, and its glutinous nostalgies. What both novels signally lack, however, is any hint of narrative traction: they slip and they slide; they just can't hold the road. And then, too, with Ada, there is something altogether alien – a sense of monstrous entitlement, of unbridled, head-in-air seigneurism. Morally, this is the world for which the twisted Humbert thirsts: a world where "nothing matters", and "everything is allowed".

❦

This leaves us with Transparent Things (to which we will uneasily return) and Look at the Harlequins! – as well as the more or less negligible volume under review. "LATH!", as the author called it, just as he called The Original of Laura "TOOL", is the Nabokov swansong. It has some wonderful rumbles, and glimmers of unearthly colour, but it is hard-of-hearing and rheumy-eyed; and the little-girl theme is by now hardly more than a logo – part of the Nabokovian furniture, like mirrors, doubles, chess, butterflies. There is a visit to a motel called Lolita Lodge; there is a brief impersonation of Dumbert Dumbert. More centrally, the narrator, Vadim Vadimovich, suddenly finds himself in sole charge of his seldom-seen daughter, Bel, who, inexorably, is 12 years old.

Now, where does this thread lead?

". . . I was still deliriously happy, still seeing nothing wrong or dangerous, or absurd or downright cretinous, in the relationship between my daughter and me. Save for a few insignificant lapses – a few hot drops of overflowing tenderness, a gasp masked by a cough and that sort of stuff – my relations with her remained essentially innocent."

Well, the dismaying answer is that this thread leads nowhere. The only repurcussion, thematic or otherwise, is that Vadim ends up marrying one of Bel's classmates, who is 43 years his junior. And that is all.

Between the hysterical Ada and the doddery Look at the Harlequins! comes the mysterious, sinister and beautifully melancholic novella, Transparent Things: Nabokov's remission. Our hero, Hugh Person, a middle-grade American publisher, is an endearing misfit and sexual loser, like Timofey Pnin (Pnin regularly dines at a shabby little restaurant called The Egg and We, which he frequents out of "sheer sympathy with failure"). Four visits to Switzerland provide the cornerstones of this expert little piece, as Hugh shyly courts the exasperating flirt, Armande, and also monitors an aged, portly, decadent, and forbiddingly highbrow novelist called "Mr R".

Mr R is said to have debauched his stepdaughter (a friend of Armande's) when she was a child or at any rate a minor. The nympholeptic theme thus hovers over the story, and is reinforced, in one extraordinary scene, by the disclosure of Hugh's latent yearnings. A pitiful bumbler, with a treacherous libido (wiltings and premature ejaculations mark his "mediocre potency"), Hugh calls on Armande's villa, and her mother diverts him, while he waits, with some family snapshots. He comes across a photo of a naked Armande, aged 10:

"The visitor constucted a pile of albums to screen the flame of his interest . . . and returned several times to the pictures of little Armande in her bath, pressing a proboscidate rubber toy to her shiny stomach or standing up, dimple-bottomed, to be lathered. Another revelation of impuberal softness (its middle line just distinguishable from the less vertical grass-blade next to it) was afforded by a photo of her in which she sat in the buff on the grass, combing her sun-shot hair and spreading wide, in false perspective, the lovely legs of a giantess.

"He heard a toilet flush upstairs and with a guilty wince slapped the thick book shut. His retractile heart moodily withdrew, its throbs quietened . . ."

At first this passage seems shockingly anomalous. But then we reflect that Hugh's unconscious thoughts, his dreams, his insomnias ("night is always a giant"), are saturated with inarticulate dreads:

"He could not believe that decent people had the sort of obscene and absurd nightmares which shattered his night and continued to tingle throughout the day. Neither the incidental accounts of bad dreams reported by friends nor the case histories in Freudian dream books, with their hilarious elucidations, presented anything like the complicated vileness of his almost nightly experience."

Hugh marries Armande and then, years later, strangles her in his sleep. So it may be that Nabokov identifies the paedophiliac prompting as an urge towards violence and self-obliteration. Hugh Person's subliminal churning extracts a terrible revenge, in pathos and isolation (prison, madhouse), and demands the ultimate purgation: he is burnt to death in one of the most ravishing conflagrations in all literature. The torched hotel:

"Now flames were mounting the stairs, in pairs, in trios, in redskin file, hand in hand, tongue after tongue, conversing and humming happily. It was not, though, the heat of their flicker, but the acrid dark smoke that caused Person to retreat back into the room; excuse me, said a polite flamelet holding open the door he was vainly trying to close. The window banged with such force that its panes broke into a torrent of rubies . . . At last suffocation made him try to get out by climbing out and down, but there were no ledges or balconies on that side of the roaring house. As he reached the window a long lavender-tipped flame danced up to stop him with a graceful gesture of its gloved hand. Crumbling partitions of plaster and wood allowed human cries to reach him, and one of his last wrong ideas was that those were the shouts of people anxious to help him, and not the howls of fellow men."

❦

Left to themselves, The Enchanter, Lolita, and Transparent Things might have formed a lustrous and utterly unnerving trilogy. But they are not left to themselves; by sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can from them; and yet . . . Where else in the canon do we find such wayward fixity? In the awful itch of Lawrence, maybe, or in the murky sexual transpositions of Proust? No: you would need to venture to the very fringes of literature – Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade – to find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we rightly and eternally hold to be unforgivable.

In fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt; the flaw, as I said, is not moral but aesthetic. And I intend no innnuendo by pointing out that Nabokov's obsession with nymphets has a parallel: the ponderous intrusiveness of his obsession with Freud – "the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world" of "the Viennese quack", with "its bitter little embryos, spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents". Nabokov cherished the anarchy of the inner life, and Freud is excoriated because he sought to systematise it. Is there something rivalrous in this hatred? Well, in the end it is Nabokov, and not Freud, who emerges as our supreme poet of dreams (with Kafka), and our supreme poet of madness.

One commonsensical caveat persists, for all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov's mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus.

❦

"Now, soyons raisonnable," says Quilty, staring down the barrel of Humbert's revolver. "You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setting." All right, let us be reasonable. In his book about Updike, Nicholson Baker refers to an order of literary achievement that he calls "Prousto-Nabokovian". Yes, Prousto-Nabokovian, or Joyceo-Borgesian, or, for the Americans, Jameso-Bellovian. And it is at the highest table that Vladimir Nabokov coolly takes his place.

Lolita, Pnin, Despair (1936; translated by the author in 1966), and four or five short stories are immortal. King, Queen, Knave (1928, 1968), Laughter in the Dark (1932, 1936), The Enchanter, The Eye (1930), Bend Sinister (1947), Pale Fire (1962), and Transparent Things are ferociously accomplished; and little Mary (1925), his first novel, is a little beauty. Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983), together with Strong Opinions (1973), constitute the shining record of a pre-eminent artist-critic. And the Selected Letters (1989), the Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979), and that marshlight of an autobiography, Speak, Memory (1967), give us a four-dimensional portrait of a delightful and honourable man. The vice Nabokov most frequently reviled was "cruelty". And his gentleness of nature is most clearly seen in the loving attentiveness with which, in his fiction, he writes about animals. A minute's thought gives me the cat in King, Queen, Knave (washing itself with one hindleg raised "like a shouldered club"), the charming dogs and monkeys in Lolita, the shadow-tailed squirrel and the unforgettable ant in Pnin, and the sick bat in Pale Fire – creeping past "like a cripple with a broken umbrella".

They call it a "shimmer" – a glint, a glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden versts of longing and terror. From Lolita, as the fateful cohabitation begins (nous connûmes, a Flaubertian intonation, means "we came to know"):

"Nous connûmes the various types of motor court operators, the reformed criminal, the retired teacher, and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream."

Vladimir NabokovDramaFictionMartin Amis
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Martin Amis on the beginning of the end for Iran's ayatollahs

In 1979, the return to Iran of an exiled cleric marked the start of the Islamic Republic. The death in June of Neda Soltan may herald the long-overdue fall of this moribund regime

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday 20 July 2009

An essay exploring whether Iran's Islamic republic is in its death throes – referred to President Jimmy Carter's "failed Entebbe raid of April 1980" to rescue US hostages in Iran. The failed 1980 mission was Operation Eagle Claw. The rescue of airline passengers at Entebbe, Uganda, was carried out with almost complete success by the Israeli military in July 1976.

The writer Jason Elliot called his recent and resonant Iranian travelogue Mirrors of the Unseen; and I am aware of the usual dangers associated with writing about the future. But what we seem to be witnessing in Iran is the first spasm of the death agony of the Islamic Republic. In this process, which will be very long and very ugly, Mir Hossein Mousavi is likely to play a lesser role than Neda Agha Soltan, whose transformation (from youth, hope, and beauty, in a matter of seconds, to muddy death) unforgettably crystallised the core Iranian idea – the Shia tragedy and passion – of martyrdom in the face of barbaric injustice. Neda Soltan personified something else, too: the modern.

Elliot's title should again be borne in mind as we consider the June Events, which are open to two interpretations. Quite possibly, things are more or less as they appear: the results of a fraudulent election were presented to the people with indecent haste and laughable incompetence (with, in other words, implicit contempt for democracy); civil unrest was then followed by the application of state violence. Now consider. If, after the usual interval, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had soberly announced a 51% win for President Ahmadinejad, then Iran, and the world, might well have bowed its head and moved on. Just as possibly (the Islamic Republic being what it is), the landslide was rigged, and ostentatiously vaunted, to bring on the terror and the crackdown.

In 1997, the regime felt confident enough to sanction the surprise victory of President Muhammad Khatami, who won by the same landslide margin of 69% in a joyous election that no one disputed. Khatami, a cleric, had nonetheless far stronger liberal credentials than the technocrat Mousavi (who, during the Iran-Iraq war, was well to the right of Khamenei). Lovingly hailed as "Ayatollah Gorbachev", Khatami was soon talking about the "thoughtful dialogue" he hoped to open with America. It seemed possible that international isolation, which so parches and de-oxygenates the Iranian air, was about to be eased.

Everyone understood that this process would take time. In June 2001, Khatami was re-elected with a majority of 78%. Seven months later came George W Bush's "axis of evil" speech (one of the most destructive in American history), and the Tehran Spring was at an end. In truth, Bush was heaven-sent for the Iranian right; he blindly enhanced its regional power (with the adventurist, indeed experimental, war with Iraq), while remaining adequately "arrogant" (the most detested of all attributes in the Shia-Iranian sensorium). Now, the mullahs are aware that Barack Obama is far cannier than that. Had Mousavi won, Obama would have rewarded Iran, and in a way palpable to all Iranians. Such a "linkage" – liberalisation equals benefits – would have fatal consequences for the mullahs. The earth has already stirred beneath them, with the pro-western, anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian election in Lebanon. This, together with certain historical forces, explains the current confusion and hysteria of the armed clerisy.

For the mullahs now know that they are afloat on an ocean of illegitimacy. The great hawsers of the revolution of 1978-79 are all either snapped or fraying. Of the four foundational narratives, three are myths: the "Islamic Revolution" was not an Islamic revolution; the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), which destroyed a generation, was not the "Imposed War", as it is still called; and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was not a great man (Khomeini, as every inquisitive Iranian has long understood, was a world-historical monster). Perhaps most importantly of all, for now, the fourth narrative, or thread (anti-Americanism – "Westoxication", in the old battle cry), has been severed by the person of Obama. The Islamic Republic is also doomed by modernity (in the form of instant communications) and by demographic destiny. Persia, one of the oldest nations on earth, is getting younger and younger.

"In the history of the Iranian plateau," writes Sandra Mackey, in her stylish and magisterial classic, The Iranians: Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation, "the sun has risen and set on nearly a million days." But before we come to the Iranian soul, and the million days, let us examine the Three Lies about the Islamic Republic.

The 1979 revolution wasn't an Islamic revolution until it was over. In its origins, it was a full-spectrum mass movement, an avalanche of demonstrations and riots, and strikes so relentless that they blacked out the Peacock's palace; the military, moreover, was sustaining a thousand defections per day. The June Events of 2009 constitute a mere whisper of demurral when set against the deafening crescendo of 1978. The noise was not made for clerical rule; the noise was made because a decadent monarchy had lost the farr – the inherent aura of kingship.

It is instructive to compare the Iranian revolution with the two Russian revolutions of 1917: the February revolution, a popular revolt, and the October revolution, a Leninist coup (with an impotent Provisional Government in the interim). Trotsky said that the Bolsheviks found power lying in the street and "picked it up like a feather". And then, of course, the really warm work began – against the Whites, against the Greens (the peasantry), against the trade unions, against the church, and so on, until every alternative centre of power (and opinion) was eradicated, down to and including any gathering of three.

On 16 January 1979, Muhammad Reza Shah flew out of Tehran – to exile in Cairo. On 1 February, Ayatollah Khomeini flew into Tehran – from exile in Paris (where one of his more regrettable neighbours, I feel obliged to mention, was Brigitte Bardot). Thus the political revolution was over; now the cultural revolution began. The Provisional Government was successively eroded by the komitehs (mosque-based militias, later the Basij), by the Revolutionary Guards (later the Pasdaran, or the Iranian army), and by the revolutionary tribunals (which dealt out rough justice to survivors of the old regime, and various other undesirables). On 4 November, a group of pious students spontaneously infiltrated the US embassy and seized the 53 hostages. Khomeini manipulated this V-sign directed at the Great Satan to such effect that in the imminent referendum on the new constitution "99.5%" of a turnout of 17 million gave their blessing to Islamic autocracy.

But there was still that "0.5" to deal with. And Khomeini faced vigorous opposition from almost every quarter – most formidably from the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Established a decade and a half earlier, in opposition to the Shah, the Mujahedin (Marxist, left-Islamic, and committed to women's rights) had half a million adherents and could field a guerrilla army of 100,000 experienced fighters. When Khomeini excluded them from the new political order as "un-Islamic", they turned to terror. In 1981, if you recall, the Mujahedin were blowing up mullahs by the dozen (74 in a single strike in Tehran); and they went on to assassinate more than a thousand government officials in the latter months of that year. What followed was terroristic civil strife. By September, Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards were executing 50 people a day for "waging war against God" (the same crime, and the same punishment, now being invoked by the clerics of 2009). Fired by a zeal both revolutionary and religious, the mullahs bloodily prevailed.

Revolutions, almost by definition, are fiercely anti-clerical. As late as 1922, to take the fiercest possible example, Lenin executed 4,500 priests and monks, plus 3,500 nuns. Contrarian Iran, however, swam upstream. By December 1982, Khomeini had more or less secured the monopoly of violence, and the Iranian people found themselves living under the world's only revolutionary theocracy. The Islamic Republic was Islamic, now, but it was no longer a republic. Iranians have since enjoyed only a shadow of popular sovereignty; and by 1982, besides, they had something else to think about – the meatgrinding confrontation with Iraq.

The Iran-Iraq war can rightly be thought of as the Imposed War, but only if we understand that the war was imposed by Khomeini. It tests the historical imagination to get a sense of the horrified dismay engendered, throughout the region, by the advent of the meshuga ayatollah. Stalin, after a while, was content with "socialism in one country". Khomeini, proclaimedly, wanted Shia theocracy in every country on earth. Throughout the course of the Iran-Iraq war, Khomeini put himself about elsewhere, with bombings, assassination attempts, and armed subversion, in Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. In Mecca, the hajj became the scene of annual agitation; in 1987, a clash between Iranian militiamen and Saudi riot police left more than 400 dead.

And Iraq? In 1979 Saddam Hussein reached out a trembling hand of friendship to the new Iran, and was clearly hoping for the continuation of the detente he had established with the Shah. Iran responded by resuming support for the separatist Kurds (suspended since 1975) and for the Shia underground; there were assassination attempts on the deputy premier and the minister of information, and the successful murder of at least 20 prominent officials in April 1980 alone. Khomeini, meanwhile, withdrew his ambassador from Baghdad; in September, Iran shelled the border cities of Khanaqin and Mandali.

In The Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988, Efraim Karsh lists in his chronology eight Iraqi offers of ceasefires, the first on 5 October 1980, 12 days after the war began, the last on 13 July 1988, five weeks before it ended. Khomeini's war aim was the theocratisation, or de-Satanisation, of Iraq; thus the war became a (failed) test of Islam, and devolved, in Mackey's words, into "a daily enactment of Shia themes of sacrifice, dispossession, and mourning". So: 12-year-olds were attacking Iraqi machine gun emplacements on bicycles, and 750,000 Iranians filled the multi-acre cemeteries, and perhaps twice that number were left crippled in body or mind. Eleven months later, Khomeini himself joined the fallen in the land of the dead.

What remains, then, you might wonder, as you deplane at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport, and enter a city where no cab-driver will stop for a cleric – what remains of the legacy bequeathed by the Father of the Revolution, or alternatively by "that fucking asshole", as he is reflexively called, in English, by the youth of the cities of Iran? Khomeini's notion of the Velayat-e Faqih, or rule by the vice-regent of God (ie, the top mullah, ie, Khomeini), was so unhistorical that many of its angriest opponents came from the clergy. Political participation, in Shia theology, is seen as a contaminant. And with good reason: that power corrupts is not a metaphor; and absolute power, combined with absolute self-righteousness, defined the insane nightmare of Khomeini's rule.

His moral imbecilities provide a rich field. I will confine myself to two examples. After President Carter's "fiasco in the desert", the failed Entebbe raid of April 1980, Khomeini announced that God had personally thrown sand into the helicopters' engines, to protect the nation of Islam. To hear this kind of talk from an eight-year-old is one thing; to hear it from a bellicose head of state, on public radio, is another. The second example comes from Mackey (the time is 1981):

A film run on government-controlled television showed a mother denouncing her son as a Marxist. The son, sobbing and grabbing for his mother's hand, desperately tries to convince her that he has given up Marxist politics. The mother rejects his pleas saying, "You must repent in front of God and you will be executed." The picture fades to Ayatollah Khomeini telling the people of Iran, "I want to see more mothers turning in their children with such courage without shedding a tear. This is what Islam is."

Well, it may or may not be what Islam is. But it is not what Iranians are.

* * *

Iran is one of the most venerable civilisations on earth: it makes China look like an adolescent, and America look like a stripling. And its 2,500-year history is sliced almost exactly in two by the rise of Islam. Accordingly, the Iranian heart is bipolar, divided between Xerxes and Muhammad, between Persepolis and Qom, between the imperially sensuous (with its luxury and poetry) and the unsmilingly pious. You will, I think, acknowledge that dividedness when I tell you that the author of this quietly beautiful quatrain –

I am a supplicant for a goblet of wine

From the hand of a sweetheart.

In whom can I confide this secret of mine,

Where can I take this sorrow?

– is the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Not Ferdowsi, not Rumi, not Hafez, not Omar Khayyam: Khomeini. It is perhaps the most beguiling single feature of Iranian life that its people go on pilgrimages, not only to the shrines of their martyrs and imams, but also to the shrines of their poets. The Iranian-Persian soul resembles the goddess Proserpina in Ted Hughes's masterly Tales from Ovid –

Proserpina, who divides her year

Between her husband in hell, among spectres,

And her mother on earth, among flowers.

Her nature, too, is divided. One moment

Gloomy as hell's king, but the next

Bright as the sun's mass, bursting from clouds.

In 1935, Iranians found themselves living in a different country – not Persia but Iran, the specifically pre-Islamic "land of the Arians". This was the work of Reza Shah (the army strongman who seized the throne in 1925). Reza Shah was a modernist and seculariser – Iran's Ataturk or Nasser. He was also a friend of Nazi Germany (and was deposed by the Allies in 1941). In 1976, Iranians found themselves living in a different millennium, not 1355 (dated from the time of the Prophet) but 2535 (dated from the time of Cyrus the Great). This was the work of Reza Shah's son. Installed by the coup of 1953 (the west's very grave historical crime, whose disastrous consequences are still with us), Muhammad Reza Shah was a "miserable wretch", as Khomeini rightly called him; but he was quite closely attuned to Iran's divided self. Reza Shah beat women who wore the veil; Khomeini beat women who didn't; Muhammad Reza Shah beat neither.

After 1979, Iran was subjected to militant and breakneck re-Islamisation. The Zoroastrian era was declared to be jahiliyyah, a benighted slum of ignorance and idolatry, and a dire embarrassment to all good Muslims. In the mid-1990s, for example, the historian Jahangir Tafazoli was put to death simply because he was the best-known specialist on ancient Iran. We would call this "killing the messenger", and we would call the entire tendency "delusional denial". The 30-year suppression of the mixed Iranian soul – which says yes to freedom and tolerance, yes to love and life and art, yes to Islam, and yes to modernity – provided the energy and courage of the June Events, and entrained the hideous murder of Neda Soltan.

* * *

So now we have another four years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will be more purple-gummed with insecurity than ever, and another four years of troubled dreams about the Iranian bomb. I find that the one thing Ahmadinejad mandates, with full legitimacy, is a tone of ridicule – because it is impossible to write solemnly about the man who, among other absurdities, clinched the 2005 election by the simple feat of not having a Jacuzzi. And you needn't reread that sentence: the "Jacuzzi moment", or the no-Jacuzzi moment, when the candidate revealed that yes, he had no Jacuzzi, was widely credited with securing his majority. This was enough, apparently, to make him shine out in the smog of pelf and hypocrisy that passes for the Islamic Republic.

The American politician whom Ahmadinejad most closely resembles – in one vital respect – is Ronald Reagan. General similarities, I agree, are hard to spot. Ahmadinejad doesn't live on a ranch with a former starlet. Reagan didn't have a degree in traffic control. Ahmadinejad doesn't use Grecian 2000 (as his rapidly greying hair triumphantly attests). Reagan, as a young man, wasn't involved in the murder of political adversaries. And so on. But what they have in common is this: both figures are denizens of that stormlit plain where end-time theology meets nuclear weapons.

Now we can return, for a while, to dissimilarities. Ahmadinejad is not checked and balanced by democratic institutions. Reagan did not actually spend public money on civic preparations for the Second Coming, and was not the product of a culture saturated in ecstatic fantasies of morbid torment. Ahmadinejad does not have a temperament in which "simple-minded idealism" (in Eric Hobsbawm's formulation) might lead him to recognise "the sinister absurdity" of the arms race. And Reagan was not answerable to some millenarian vicar in the holy city of, say, Baltimore. Finally, whereas Reagan wielded enough firepower to kill everyone on earth several times over, Ahmadinejad does not yet have his Button.

Jesus Christ, according to both presidents, is due very shortly, but in Ahmadinejad's vision the Nazarene will merely form a part of the entourage of a much grander personage – the Hidden Imam. Who is the Hidden Imam? In the year 873, the bloodline of the Prophet came to an end when Hasan al-Askari (in Shiism, the 11th legitimate imam) died without an heir. At this point, among the believers, a classic circularity took hold. It was assumed that there must be an heir; there was no record of his existence, they reasoned, because extraordinary efforts had been made to conceal it; and extraordinary efforts had been made because this little boy was an extraordinary imam – the Mahdi, in fact, or the Lord of Time.

In Shia eschatology the Mahdi will return during a period of great tribulation (during, say, a nuclear war), will deliver the faithful from injustice and oppression, and will then supervise the Day of Judgment. Not only Ahmadinejad but members of his cabinet have been giving the Hidden Imam "about four years" – well within the president's second term. And where has the Hidden Imam dwelt since the ninth century? In "occultation", wherever that may be. The Hidden Imam is at least intelligibly called the Lord of Time: he is 1,100 years old.

Rule number one: no theocracy can ever deploy nuclear arms. And Iran, we respectfully suggest, is not yet ready for the force that drives the sun. We all know what Ahmadinejad thinks of Israel (and we remember his Islamists' conference, or his goons' rodeo, in Tehran, on the historicity of the Holocaust). Yet this is what Ali Rafsanjani thinks of Israel – Rafsanjani, the old, much-jailed revolutionary chancer, a pragmatist and reformer, hugely worldly, hugely venal: "The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything", whereas a counterstrike on Iran will merely "harm" the Islamic world; "it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality". Indeed, given the Shia commitment to martyrdom, mutual assured destruction, as one Israeli official put it, "is not a deterrent. It's an incentive."

Nuclear weapons, it seems, were sent down here to furnish mankind with a succession of excruciating dilemmas. Until recently the mullahs' quest for the H-bomb seemed partly containable: the nuclear powers could give face to Tehran, and begin to scale back their arsenals towards the zero option. But now those powers include North Korea (already the land of the living dead); and the Islamic Republic, in any case, no longer seems appeasable. Equipped with weapons of fission or fusion, the supreme leader may delegate first use to Hezbollah, or to the Call of Islam, or to the Legion of the Pure. Or he may himself become the first suicide bomber to be gauged in megatons.

* * *

Meanwhile, the memory of the June Events, and of Neda Soltan, will do its work, and add weight to the mass of unendurable humiliations meted out to the Iranian people. Meanwhile, too, the senescent regime (I again warily predict) will reach beyond crackdownism for the supposedly unifying effects of war. Not a war against someone its own size, or someone bigger. Tiny Bahrain, which is 60% Shia, looks about right.

As for apocalyptic Islamism, in all its forms, I cannot improve on the great Norman Cohn. This is from the 1995 foreword to Warrant for Genocide (1967), where the subject is the Tsarist fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and what Jewry calls the Shoa, or the Wind of Death:

"There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics [notably the lower clergy] for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."

• Martin Amis's novel The Pregnant Widow will be published by Cape next February

IranThe Iranian revolutionAyatollah Ali KhameneiMiddle East and North AfricaIslamMartin AmisMartin Amis
guardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds