Experience by Martin Amis

Author:Martin Amis [Amis, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-36825-6
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2001-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Existence Still Is the Job

1995 did not stand on ceremony. It announced itself, on the first of January, with the prison suicide of Frederick West. (And in death, as it were, he drifts up from the footnotes and into the text.) … The act had been long premeditated. He volunteered for the shirt-mending detail at Winson Green, Birmingham. This gave him access to cotton tapes, which he eked out with the hems of his own bedding. He waited for the reduced invigilation of the public holiday. In the morning he played pool, used the exercise yard, and collected his lunch of soup and chops. There was a chair in his cell but it was the laundry basket that he kicked away from under him. A clattering chair might have brought the guards running. The laundry basket would have fallen with an unemphatic crackle.

There has been much speculation about the ‘motive’ for West’s suicide. Was he unable to face his forthcoming trial? Did he despair when Rosemary spurned him after his arrest? One writer has suggested that West’s felo de se might have been his final ‘lust murder’, the apotheosis of his addiction to death. But surely the circumstances and details point to a timorous departure. Two of West’s children, Stephen and Mae, offer something much simpler and more credible. Mae: ‘I always knew he would kill himself in jail. He was terrified, and forever watching his back in case someone had a go at him.’ Stephen: ‘Dad told me that if he didn’t do it, someone in there was going to … He was in tears, crying his eyes out … [His suicide] was very selfish.’* It is necessary for me to believe it, but I think these comments shore up the view that West was unusually susceptible to fear. He crept towards his death. He cringed out of existence.

When I heard about the suicide I felt shock and some reflexive pity (because suicide sends you a message from ultimate human collapse), but I felt no surprise: nil. Suicide and Frederick West were wholly congruent. Why did he kill himself? It would be much harder to come up with a ‘motive’ for his going on living. And I also thought something like: to Hell with him and his stark beseeching face. Excise it from the planet.

On the other hand, truth had taken a beating. That was immediately clear, and I could sense the deficit. All his life he had been a colossus of mendacity, the enemy and the opposite of truth.* And he would slander my cousin — from his grave. Suicide constituted his final evasion. Frederick West’s brother, John, took his share of the truth with him when he, too, killed himself, in November 1996.* He used the same means as Frederick. He even used the same knot on the noose — taught to the brothers, perhaps, when they were growing up in the Herefordshire village of Much Marcle, by their parents, Walter and Daisy, who also taught them physical and sexual brutality, as they were taught by their parents, in their turn.

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