Blind, feeble gropings
One of Paris's many summer festivals is on this weekend, a literary festival organised by the legendary left-bank bookshop Shakespeare & Co. Hannah and I cycled over this morning to see if we could get a seat to hear Martin Amis in conversation with Will Self. It was a bit chaotic - there's no tickets, it's first come, first served and consequently a bit of a free-for-all - but we got a decent position in the wings and stood there, sipping coffees from a little espresso stall and watching the sun come out behind Notre Dame, me reminiscing with mixed feelings about the tiny apartment I stayed in before Hannah came out to Paris, literally a stone's throw away - and indeed I saw Shayne, my former septuagenarian landlord and flatmate, ambling around the marquee with his camera round his neck and a bemused expression on his face.
The two writers were in typically good form, chatting away to each other and full of reciprocal compliments. Amis tried to explain Self to any French attendees who didn't know of him, by saying that ‘if Jorge Luis Borges and JG Ballard had met and fallen in love, the son they produced would have been this man’.
‘I'm cursed,’ Self intoned slowly, looking pained, ‘with a very visual imagination, and I'm now going to spend the rest of this session imagining the blind, feeble gropings of the great Argentine while a helpless Jim Ballard cowers in the corner...’
It is always nice to see Will live and watch him unroll, off the cuff, the kind of strange and elaborate sentences which also appear, apparently long thought-out, in his written work.
But Self, with his long mule-like face, was just there as question-master; Martin Amis was the real guest. As always, he was wonderfully articulate and intelligent, and likeable; but as always I found myself strongly disagreeing with his ideas. He began by talking about his theory that countries are like people, and how ironic he had always found it that states were traditionally referred to as being female: ‘France has defended her interests...’ and suchlike. Suggesting that it makes more sense to think of them as men, he went on to espouse a strange kind of female empowerment which was based on the idea that women should stop trying to be like men to get ahead, but rather get into positions of power using more ‘feminine qualities’. ‘Because we all know,’ he concluded, ‘that women are kinder, gentler, less close to violence than men are.’
This got a spattering of applause from the audience, but I was bristling with some kind of vague fury. It seems to me that this kind of ‘feminism’ - which is what he called it - is just the other side of the coin from the idea that women are all about skipping through fields of daisies, and knitting bunny-rabbits - and, frankly, it's all just a sugar-coated corollary of the basic underlying belief (which is what I sense in his fiction) that what women are really good at is looking pretty and taking their knickers off. It suddenly brought back to me my visceral reaction when I read London Fields, which is the woman-phobic novel par excellence - and underneath his strange 1950s view of women's superiority (the gentler sex, ah how they inspire us poor laborious men who are forced to do all the serious work), I sense some weird inability to deal with the fact that he finds women sexually attractive.
A couple of years ago I wrote a review of London Fields here, and the conclusion - ‘a great book, written by a twat’ - is something I stand by, and it sums up how I feel about him. He's smart, he's always interesting, but there's something very objectionable about where he's coming from - perhaps it's just a generational thing, but I find that he's always discussing solutions to problems which I simply don't believe exist for me and my friends.
Anyway, what with me getting irritable, us not having a seat, and Hannah being frankly rather bored by the whole event - we slipped away early to have a beer, and avoid listening to questions from the audience, who, like the audiences at most literary festivals, were all middle-class women with angular spectacles and Guardian-readers with hiking socks and sandals. In front of us was a particularly irritating guy in his 50s who was making little notes in a notebook - I peered over and he'd written ‘Borhez + Ballard = Self; countries = people’ and other garbled minutes of that sort. When Will Self said that British politics was ‘vermiculated from within’ he gave a loud and knowing guffaw, although when I next looked over his shoulder I saw that he'd scribbled ‘vernicurated??’
Anyway, I am giving Amis one last chance and have bought a copy of Money to make up for the fact I missed the Nick Frost incarnation on telly recently.
On a completely tangential, or tangental, either is acceptable, note - six months ago, Hannah and I were in Scotland getting married. So much has happened since then it seems in some ways like years ago. The last six months have come with a lot of rather difficult personal news from our families, which I've avoided blogging about, but as far as we're concerned I'm happy to report that, if anything, we're more deliriously in love with each other now than we were then, and to celebrate this almost inconceivable stroke of luck, we're going for a celebratory dinner up at the top of the Tour Montparnasse ce soir - so cheers to all of you, and may you all find your own pieces of romance tonight.