The Mess occupied a Belgian provincial hotel and this was its lounge, a square room lined with burst leather-padded benches. Officers sat on them reading magazines. Only the fact that two or three or them were also drinking stopped the place looking like a barber’s waiting-room. Outside it was raining a little.
(‘Court of Inquiry’)
And of course the astringent of humour, cutting and re-cutting the description as though in the (unfounded) fear that it might be found over-rich, or worse, over-serious:
The part of Frank that could be seen above the back of the pew seemed to Alec to offer a good deal of information. The thick black hair was heavily greased; the neck bulged in a way that promised a roll of fat there in due course; the snowily white shirt-collar and the charcoal-grey suit material did somehow or other manage to suggest, not lack of taste exactly, but the attitude that money was more interesting.
(‘All the Blood Within Me’)
These stories, spanning Amis’s career, also of course span his interests and preoccupations, his choices and changes of subject matter, his formal experiments, his writerly moods and declensions, his tics and trademarks. There are army stories, literary genre stories (sci-fi, plus a Sherlock Holmes spoof from which Sherlock Holmes is absent), as well as stories about literature (in ‘Mr Barrett’s Secret’, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father discloses his reasons for his estrangement from his daughter after her marriage to the poet); and then there are stories that are more than chips from the work-bench, stories in which Amis’s piquancy as an artist, his essence, can be experienced, such as ‘Moral Fibre’, ‘All the Blood Within Me’ and ‘Dear Illusion’.
This essence, composed as it is of social frustration, fleshly appetite, critical disquiet and the sometimes painful bridling of personal emotional power, is most detectable in Amis’s portrayals of relationships, where his hilarious, faintly misanthropic grasp of human character (‘The first person he saw on entering the dining-car was Bob Anthony, wearing a suit that looked like woven vegetable soup and reading a newspaper with awful concentration’) creates scenes whose bristling surface activity conceals undercurrents of profound desolation, of alienation and loneliness, of despair at the meagreness of the world’s offerings. Amis’s characters, generally speaking, aren’t glamorous or liberated or even particularly empowered; mostly they are entrapped at the local level of British life in the second half of the twentieth century, subject to the grating irritations of the ordinary. Few writers of Amis’s calibre observe their world from such a level today; and it is for his accounts of human pettiness and smallmindedness, of small-scale tyranny, of big emotions felt in exigent places, of the tensions of local shop and street and flat, that we should continue to read him.
In ‘Moral Fibre’, a domineering social worker encounters one of her charges in the narrator’s kitchen:
‘Ah, good morning, Betty,’ Mair said bluffly. ‘How are you getting on? Do you like working for Mrs Lewis?’
‘Aw, all right.’
Mair’s lion-like face took on the aspect of the king of beasts trying to outstare its tamer. ‘I think you know my name, don’t you Betty? It’s polite to use it, you know.’
At this I went out into the kitchen again, but not quickly enough to avoid hearing Betty saying, ‘Sorry, Mrs Webster’, and, as I shut the door behind me, Mair saying, ‘That’s more like it, isn’t it, Betty?’
In ‘All the Blood Within Me’, a man attends the funeral of a woman he has loved and for decades conducted an affair with, an affair accepted within her marriage, to the extent that the two men are friends and may even live together now that she’s gone. With admirable delicacy Amis evokes the muted pain of this arrangement, and the confining suburban world in which it has occurred:
A handful of earth was thrown on to the coffin. Alec realized that he had been very afraid of the hollow noise this might make, but it was all right, the soil was dry and chalky, without noticeable clods, and when the spades got to work it could, from the sound, have been anything at all being buried. There were the beginnings of movement away from the graveside; Alec sighed and raised his head, and the whole scene shone brightly in his eyes: the people with their varied complexions and hair, the grass, the privet hedges, the vases of red and blue flowers on the graves, the great pair of cypresses by the entrance, all slightly over-coloured like a picture postcard.
What today’s reader, and indeed today’s writer, can learn from Amis is the value of the particular; a value that is higher now than ever, as the choices and possibilities for living become ever more homogeneous. It grows harder to represent by means of the particular — the perceptible detail — what makes people and places distinct from one another, what will signify their individuality. It may be old-fashioned to fear the decline of individuality; the writerly means of halting this decline may well be old-fashioned too. In the best of these stories Amis does so, constructing a solid surface of well-observed concrete fact, upon which the play of character through dialogue and voice can occur. One feels at such moments the presence of the novelist’s workbench, in all its utilitarian beauty.
Rachel Cusk, 2011
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
These stories were first published as follows:
‘My Enemy’s Enemy’ in Encounter, 1955
‘Court of Inquiry’ in the Spectator, 1956
‘I Spy Strangers’ in the collection My Enemy’s Enemy, Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1962
‘Moral Fibre’ in Esquire, 1958
‘All the Blood Within Me’ in the Spectator, 1962
‘Dear Illusion’ as Covent Garden Stories no. 1, Covent Garden Press Ltd, 1972
‘Something Strange’ in the Spectator, 1960
‘The 2003 Claret’ in The Complete Imbiber, vol. 2, Putman & Co., 1958
‘The Friends of Plonk’ in Town, 1964
‘Too Much Trouble’ in Penguin Modern Stories II, 1972
‘Investing in Futures’ in The Complete Imbiber, Cyril Ray, 1986
‘Hemingway in Space’ in Punch, 1960
‘Who or What Was It?’ in Playboy, 1972
‘The Darkwater Hall Mystery’ in Playboy, 1978
‘The House on the Headland’ in The Times, 1979
‘Affairs of Death’ in Shakespeare’s Stories, Hamish Hamilton, 1982
‘Mason’s Life’ in The Sunday Times, 1972
‘To See the Sun’ in Collected Short Stories, Hutchinson, 1980
All the stories listed above were published together for the first time in Collected Short Stories, Hutchinson, 1980.
‘Mr Barrett’s Secret’, ‘Boris and the Colonel’, ‘A Twitch on the Thread’, ‘Toil and Trouble’, ‘Captain Nolan’s Chance’ and ‘1941/A’ were first published in Mr Barrett’s Secret and Other Stories, Hutchinson, 1993
DEAR ILLUSION
MY ENEMY’S ENEMY
I
‘Yes, I know all about that, Tom,’ the Adjutant said through a mouthful of stew. ‘But technical qualifications aren’t everything. There’s other sides to a Signals officer’s job, you know, especially while we’re still pretty well static. The communications are running themselves and we don’t want to start getting complacent. My personal view is and has been from the word go that your friend Dally’s a standing bloody reproach to this unit, never mind how much he knows about the six-channel and the other boxes of tricks. That’s a lineman-mechanic’s job, anyway, not an officer’s. And I can tell you for a fact I mean to do something about it, do you see?’ He laid down his knife, though not his fork, and took three or four swallows of wine.