Martin Amis by Visiting Mrs. Nabokov & Other Excursions

Author:Visiting Mrs. Nabokov & Other Excursions [Nabokov, Visiting Mrs. & Excursions, Other]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-05-31T14:12:30+00:00

Kenneth is the younger by a couple of decades but he is by far the more worldly, with his Parisian, UNESCO, Euroculture background. On the other hand, everyone is more worldly than Benn. Kenneth has long hair, a ‘Jesusy’ look, like ‘a figure in a sketch, somewhere between Cruik-shank and Rembrandt - skinny, long-faced, sallow and greenish (reflections from a Dutch canal). Modern life, if you take it to heart, wears you out …’ Benn, for his part, has ‘cobalt-blue’ eyes and ‘a face like the moon before we landed on it’. For Kenneth, Benn has ‘the magics’, a charismatic soul, purity, innocence; and it is these qualities that Kenneth has come to America to protect, ‘to preserve Benn in his valuable oddity’. He has also come to America because America is ‘where the action is’, the real modern action; it is where modernity is.

This is Benn’s trouble. After fifteen years as a widower-bachelor he has remarried. The second wife is ‘more beautiful, more difficult, more of a torment’. What was he after? ‘Two human beings bound together in love and kindness’ — a universal human aim, as Kenneth concedes: ‘In the West, anyway, people are still trying to do it, rounding off the multitude of benefits they enjoy.’ Benn’s attitude is of course not so brisk. He is, or was, infatuated, ‘carried away by unreasoning passion’ (that is the second dictionary definition of infatuation, the first being ‘made foolish’). Kenneth is doubly sceptical. Benn got married on the sly, while Kenneth was away; he hadn’t cleared it with Kenneth, and he damn well should have done. Benn ‘had the magics, but as a mainstream manager he was nowhere’. Kenneth has always aspired to be Benn’s mainstream manager, his modernity intermediary. And he has always felt that Benn had the love potential, ‘he actually could fall in love’, he was a strong candidate for love in ‘a classic form’. To put it at its lowest (which is still pretty high these days), ‘he was a man who really did have something to do — other than trouble others, which seems to be what so many of us are here for, exclusively.’

As the veteran Bellow-reader would by now expect, the full picture takes some time to emerge; it is a case of one step forward two steps back, with each sortie into the present demanding elaborate legitimisation from the past. While omens gather, we first review Benn’s erotic career, and the usual modern spectacle: ‘the best people are always knee-deep in the garbage of “personal life”, to the gratification of the vulgar’. Or again: ‘the private life is almost always a bouquet of sores with a garnish of trivialities or downright trash.’ And here is Ben, ‘dredged in floury relationships by ladies who could fry him like a fish if they had a mind to’. There was Caroline Bunge, the department-store heiress, the Valium queen, who, when Benn rushes to meet her at the airport, walks straight past him without blinking: ‘Being on mood pills was 100 per cent contemporary.

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