Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

Afterword: Letter to My Father’s Ghost

Dearest Dad,

I experimented with ‘Dearest Kingsley’, in recognition of your changed status; but I spend a lot of time in your mental company – and why break the habit of half a lifetime?

If you could so much as glance at the dedication page of my last book you would know at once that the thing you greatly feared is come upon you, and that which you were afraid of is come unto you. The dedication page reads:

For these are my Amis dead. She survived you by half a decade. Her last years were quiet, and quietly comfortable (she managed your legacy with care). There was no sudden precipitant. Her last days were peaceful, and there was no pain. Don’t despair: the story has a happier ending. I suppose, too, that there is one chance in a googolplex that she is now at your side. Supposing she isn’t, and yet also supposing that you actually get my news, I suggest that you spend a few years of your eternity recuperating from it – and then come back to this letter. Rest, rest, perturbed spirit.

I will return to the happier ending. But before we get there… ‘I do not want to be personal,’ wrote Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, before going on, very gently, to analyse his friend’s forgivable, even likeable, but in the end fatally woolly utopianism. I do not want to be personal either (you didn’t like people who were personal), but I do want to talk briefly about a couple of differences between you and me. As father and son we have an unusual thing in common: ‘we are both English novelists’, as you once put it, ‘who are some good’. But you were a poet, too. And that accounts for the main dissimilarity between my prose and yours. The other dissimilarities may be almost entirely generational. If our birthdates had been transposed, then I might have written your novels and you might have written mine. Remember the rule (truer in our case than in most): you are your dad and your dad is you. Just to round this off: you wrote, very largely, about the bourgeoisie in your fiction, i.e., the middle classes – a category seldom seen in mine, where I make do with the aristocracy, the intelligentsia, the lumpenproletariat, and the urkas.

You are your dad and your… But not quite. The other difference is political, and basic. You were ideological and I am not. Of course, you believed, and believed in, Soviet Communism for fifteen years. There were, as Bob says, no rational justifications for doing so. But I can give you some good excuses: middle-class guilt; ‘an unfocused dissatisfaction with the way things are’ (as you described it), or unusual hatred of the status quo; a desire to scandalize parental, or paternal, conservatism; and the not quite entirely delusional sense that you were involving yourself directly in world affairs. It was also a symmetrical convenience – for Stalin – that a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander of the Soviet Union. As the admirable and pitiable Viktor Kravchenko wrote, in his I Chose Freedom (1946: N.B.): ‘This scene outside the [Cheka building, where the families of the arrested wept and screamed] I shall never be able to expunge from my memory. A great theatrical genius, hoping to convey mass despair, macabre and boundless sorrow, could not have invented anything more terrifying’… But I don’t want to reproach you for credulity – you were not alone in believing. It’s the ‘believing in’ bit that interests me.

In your essay ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’, written when you were forty-five, you said, explaining your earlier affiliation:

This is well said. But what is the basis of the ‘emotional need’? I will now juxtapose two sentences from the last two paragraphs of the piece:

And:

Sentence one seems to me so obvious, and so elementary, that sentence two has no meaning – indeed, no content. Just what is this Just City? What would it look like? What would its citizens be saying to each other and doing all day? What would laughter be like, in the Just City? (And what would you find to write about in it?) This is the time to start asking why. Zachto? Why? What for? To what end? Your ‘emotional need’ was not a positive but a negative force. Not romantic. Not idealistic. The ‘very nobility’ of that ideal, you say, ‘makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying’. But the breakdown, the ignobility, is inherent in the ideal. This is the joke, isn’t it? And it’s a joke about human nature: the absurd assiduity, the droll dispatch, with which utopia becomes dystopia, with which heaven becomes hell… The ‘conflict’ you describe is, in the end, not a conflict between ‘feeling and intelligence’. It is, funnily enough, a conflict between hope and despair.

I quote the following with only token complacency (it is not merely ‘derivative’, as claimed; it is kleptomaniacal):

When I wrote that I was about twenty-two; and my student narrator was nineteen – the same age as you were when you ‘joined’. And so, Dad, probably to my detriment, I never felt the call of political faith (and probably one should feel it, one should be zealous, for a while). Nobody can be ‘against’ the Just City. This is among the reasons people feel entitled to kill people who get in the way of it. But when you threw in your lot with the agnostics, the gradualists (and also found another ideology: anti-Communism), you aligned yourself with those who have more faith in human nature than the believers. More faith in – and more affection for. Enough. And now the happier ending.

Anonymously present at Sally’s funeral was Sail’s daughter. Remember, you and I saw her when she was a baby (in the summer of 1979), just before her adoption. The baby, who was perfect, was called Heidi, named after Sally’s very unencouraging new mentor. She is not called Heidi any longer. Sally, then, was twenty-four. Catherine, now, is twenty-two.

She had never met her mother. The funeral was supposed to be a goodbye to her birth identity. As we reconstructed it later, though, she saw our clan at the church and thought – that’s my clan too. She wrote to ‘The Amis Family’ via the undertaker (and what a sinister word that turns out to be). I wrote back: we would meet. A little later, when it was all becoming very much worse for me (the cud in my throat tasted like a decisive diminution of love of life), I wrote again. I said that soon I would be going for three months to the other side of the world; and before I could do that I needed to see the semblance of my sister. She came (with her foster-parents), and she was perfect. You will have to imagine the strange precision of the way she physically occupied the space that Sally had vacated – the same weight of presence, and then a certain smile, a certain glance.

Last spring we took her to Spain to meet her grandmother, and her step-grandfather, and her uncles Philip and Jaime. Catherine was also accompanied by four cousins: my Louis and Jacob, whom you will admiringly remember, and my Fernanda and Clio, two of the three granddaughters you never met. So all your grandchildren were there bar two: my Delilah Seale, and Philip’s Jessica. The clan suffers its losses but continues to expand. There have been four additions in the last six years. Mum said that if we spring too many more grandchildren on her she’s going to have to start strangling them like kittens. Catherine said afterwards, ‘It was like a dream.’ I know you would have taken to her very much, and especially and instantly for this proof of both her nature and her nurture: she’s one of the last thirty or forty people in the English-speaking world who doesn’t say ‘between you and I’.

Last winter, over in Uruguay, as we were about to begin our evening game of catch, Fernanda, who had just turned four, seized the ball with a look of demure triumph on her face. The ball was an inflated globe; and on its surface a dead bee had alighted. The bees were dying in their hundreds as the southern summer ended. They would fizz greedily around the lamps on the veranda, then drop. This was the thing they wanted to do before they died… Of course, a dead bee can still sting. Fernanda’s smile abruptly disappeared and she said in a strong, proud, declarative voice (before shedding the necessary tears), ‘Something just hurt me very much.’ Well, that was exactly how I was feeling about Sally’s death. Remembering her, and you, and you and her, has filled me with an exhaustion that no amount of sleep can seem to reach. But the exhaustion is not onerous. It is appropriate. It feels like decorum. Naturally, it feels like self-pity, too. But pity and self-pity can sometimes be the selfsame thing. Death does that. Don’t you find?

Stalin (whom, incredibly, you served for twelve years, inconspicuously, infinitesimally – but still incredibly) once said that, while every death is a tragedy, the death of a million is a mere statistic. The second half of the aphorism is of course wholly false: a million deaths are, at the very least, a million tragedies. The first half of the aphorism is perfectly sound – but only as far as it goes. In fact, every life is a tragedy, too. Every life cleaves to the tragic curve.

This letter comes at the end of a book subtitled ‘Laughter and the Twenty Million’. You might consider it an odd conclusion. Sally, of course, has nothing whatever in common with the Twenty Million. Nothing but death, and perhaps a semblance of reawakening.

Your middle child hails you and embraces you.