Experience

by Martin Amis

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending . . .

When I told [my father] that I was writing about nuclear weapons, he said, with a lilt, ‘Ah. I suppose you’re . . . “against them”, are you?’ épater les bien-pensants is his rule . . . I am reliably ruder to my father on the subject of nuclear weapons than on any other, ruder than I have been since my teenage years. I usually end by saying something like, ‘Well, we’ll just have to wait until you old bastards die off one by one.’ He usually ends by saying something like, ‘Think of it. Just by closing down the Arts Council we could significantly augment our arsenal. The grants to poets could service a nuclear submarine for a year. The money spent on a single performance of Rosenkavalier might buy us an extra neutron warhead. If we closed down all the hospitals in London we could . . .’ The satire is accurate in a way, for I am merely going on about nuclear weapons; I don’t know what to do about them.

In one of his most stunning utterances Nietzsche said that a joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.17 Our improvisation was violently scatological, and would not survive transcription. But feelings were being mourned: feelings about the first half of life. Youth can perhaps be defined as the illusion of your own durability. The final evaporation of this illusion parches the skin beneath the eyes and makes your hair crackle to the brush. It was over. There would be hell to pay. Dying suns of a certain size perform the alchemist’s nightmare: they turn gold into lead.

When a child is born you reel in the apparent emptiness of the street, because the world has shoved up, making way for the new one, and the world has overdone it, and there is all this space to reel in. Death does not act symmetrically here. Death too creates space but isolates you and cuts you off within it.

One has to admit that Auschwitz-Birkenau is very difficult to believe. But the unaverted heart can still feel its fierce rhythms. Auschwitz itself is disgustingly intimate (Hoess’s house nestles in behind the gallows; his wife and children used to play in the garden there), Birkenau disgustingly vast. It is easier to believe in the cruelty than it is to believe in the contempt, the unbelievable contempt. And what about the bottomless literalmindedness of the project (all the Jews in Europe? Even the Jews of Ireland were slated – all the Blooms and Herzogs)? And what about the patina of efficiency and thrift? How efficient is a work camp where the slaves last three months (it was always three months. You were killed immediately, or you organised yourself and survived. Otherwise it was always three months)? How cost-effective were those mounds of toothbrushes, those mad trains full of human hair? During the war there was a meteorology department in the Ahnenerbe dedicated to ‘proving’ that the Aryan race, untainted by evolution, had been preserved in ice from the beginning of time on the lost continent of Atlantis. Ideologically it was all on that level, tubthumping, tabloidal – the world of talking animals, resurrected celebrities, miracle panaceas, alien abductions, two-headed babies. The other end of it, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where ideology becomes action, is like a formal dystopia dramatising the mind of the babbler, the monologuist, the man on the milk-crate with the flic...