Oh, and how we are up in arms here in England (by ‘we’ I am naturally referring to ‘the very small group of people worried about the hijinks of literary people in their 1970s heyday’) over Julie Kavanagh’s piece in Intelligent Life about her love affair with Martin Amis. It’s a deeply satisfying article, but not satisfying because of the gossip, and not even satisfying because of the writing (although it is lovely writing, model writing).
No. I don’t care about the revelations about Amis (he’s a philanderer! Often, whilst in his twenties, he got drunk with friends at the pub and talked shite!) but I am pleased and heartened by the confirmation that, as I suspected in my capacity as a relationship expert, despite their facility with words and thoughts and expression, the love lives of the literati can be just as difficult and mean and ultimately tedious to the observer as the love lives of anyone else.
Kavanagh describes Amis’ cutting way of introducing her to his ‘intellectual circle’; how he was ‘contemptuous about the social and fashion aspect of [her] world’. And thus I was most touched by the passage where Kavanagh describes them on holiday together:
He even remembered the book I was reading that first summer in Spain. It was his father’s novel “Girl 20”, which has one of the most heart-rending last lines in fiction: “We’re all free now.” “You were about ten pages from the end, and I looked up and saw that your face was a mask of tears.”
Who would go on holiday to read their boyfriend’s father’s novel? Oh, that’s right: we all would. It’s such a poignant and classic young-love mistake that almost everyone ends up making at some point. When you are with someone and you have managed to convince yourself that he is so wonderful that you are not quite adequate, it seems sensible for you try to engage with and love the things that he loves most of all, to demonstrate that your passion for it matches and possibly even outstrips his; to convince him of your worthwhileness.
And it never works. Because if you are with someone who makes you feel a even a little bit inadequate in that way, it invariably means that things are over before they’ve started, does it not? It does.
