Martin Amis. The Rachel Papers

‘Donne is okay one minute because of his “emotional courage”, the way he seems to “stretch out his emotions in the very fabric of the verse”, and not okay the next because you detect … what is it you detect? – ah yes, a “meretricious exaltation of verbal play over real feeling, tailoring his emotion to suit his metrics”. Now which is it to be? I really wouldn’t carp, but these remarks come from the same paragraph and are about the same stanza.

‘I won’t go on … Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can’t just use it … ruthlessly, for your own ends. I’m sorry, am I being unfair?’

There was a knock at the door.

‘We’ll be just a minute,’ he called.

I hawked richly into my handkerchief and studied its contents. Knowd stood up and so I did, too.

‘Is it really as … ?’ I shrugged and looked at the floor.

He held out my papers. ‘Would you like these? I’ve included a break-down of one of your more pageant-like essays, it may interest you to see it. Would you like to take another look at them, see if you agree?’

I shook my head.

‘All right. Now. I want you to do a great deal of hard thinking in the next nine or ten months – I’m going to take you anyway; if I don’t, somebody else will and you’ll only get worse. Stop reading critics, and for Christ’s sake stop reading all this structuralist stuff. Just read the poems and work out whether you like them, and why. Okay ? The rest comes later – hopefully. You’ll get the letter in a few days. Tell Leigh to come in, would you?’

*

Oxford skylines offered spurious serenity in the form of gold stone against sharp blue, which I of course refused. I wondered what made this town think it was so different. Keep your eyes level and your feet on the ground and I don’t see how you can miss the ugly, normal, tooling, random street-life of record-shops, dry-cleaners, banks. Once you stop following the architectural lines upwards, then it’s just like anywhere else. But Oxford doesn’t think so; never known a place so full of itself. And not a single person looked at me as I walked to the station.

In George Street, though, I stopped, put down my case, and straightened my tie. Then I did what I suppose I had been intending to do all along. I turned right into Gloucester Green and asked the time of the next bus to the village. There was one in fifteen minutes. I felt hungry, something I couldn’t remember ever having felt before, so I had some liquid fudge in the cafeteria, and also a tapeworm omelette (or a ‘bacon’ omelette, to use the menu’s phrase). Then I went home.

Mother and her youngest son were in the passage by the back door. She was polishing Valentine’s shoes, while he picked his nose, with both hands, paying elaborate justice to either nostril. They greeted me as if I had nipped down to the shop and back.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’ve been for my interview – and I got in! … I’ve been accepted. To Oxford.’

It appeared to make few odds to Valentine, who was anyway nibbling on a rather complicated bogey. But mother said :

That’s rather super, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your father – Valentine, darling, don’t do that – will be pleased.’

‘When’s he coming?’

‘About six, he said. Um. Charles, there isn’t much lunch, because I’m afraid I —’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll help myself.’

Upstairs I began the Letter to Rachel. Three hours’ work and the fair copy was written out. I have the carbon before me now. It reads:

My dearest Rachel, I don’t know how anyone has ever managed to write this kind of letter – anyone who does is a coward and a shit and used to dishonesty, so I can only minimize all three of these by being as candid as possible. I got a feeling some weeks ago that what I felt for you was changing. I wasn’t sure what the feeling was, but it wouldn’t go away and it wouldn’t change into anything else. I don’t know how or why it happens; I know that it’s the saddest thing in the world when it does.

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