When you have quite grown tired of the Katie and Peter (non-)revelations in the tabloids, do catch up with our cultural elite and their past cock-cunting activities. In Intelligent Life magazine, writer Julie Kavangh has written a beautiful memoir of love and life with Martin Amis in the '70s. Interestingly, it's a "consensual kiss and tell" because Amis himself contributes to her disclosures. Very post-mod. He is of course working on his own "blindingly" autobiographical novel.
In the piece there's much about Martin's teeth, cleverness, literary friends - such as Clive James and Christopher Hitchens - and skinny-dipping. He signed notes to Kavanagh as LS - Lazy Shit. My favourite bit reflects unkindly on Martin's sneaky side. Kavanagh recounts his infidelities with, among others, the critic Lorna Sage and Churchill’s granddaughter, Emma Soames and her own best friend.
Kavanagh describes a dinner with Clive James and Sage as evidence of Amis’ cunning duplicity. “I thought that Martin and Lorna were doing more than just sitting side by side, and after picking up the fork I’d dropped, had my suspicions confirmed.” Was Lorna giving him a hand-job under the table? We're not told.
To read more, click here. Or if you can't be bothered, I understand the Sunday Times is publishing the piece this weekend. Oh no, I tell a lie. The Telegraph's publishing it tomorrow (Wednesday) - I do hope I've not scooped them. They outbid the ST.
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A cultural critic writes: Julie's story is an Oxbridge and cerebral Grease template: Danny -"Martin Amis" - Zuko and Julie - "Sandy Olsson" - Kavanagh are the alpha-exemplars of their gender-based tribes: Danny's T-Birds could easily be Mart's gang members Clive, Hitch and the rest. Danny impresses Sandy with the cool emblemised by his black jackets and hold over his macho followers in much the same way as Julie is awed by Mart's The Rachel Papers and his kinship with fellow harbingers of future glamour: both men are custodians of the finest sperm of their generation (within a given affordable locality). Mart/Danny finds aspects of Julie-Sandy uncool: Julie does not appear to know the difference between Keats and Yeats - the cement of his male bonds - just as Sandy is not part of Danny's cultural reference system. Perhaps the stories differ only in the way they end.
34 comments:
I'm not complaining, darling (it's all very interesting), but why do I get the felling that lately you comment more on the storytellers than on the stories?
Storytellers have always fascinated me - and their stories. Madame Arcati is a creature of the tides.
More sex. More drugs. More Rocknrolla. Oh wait that is the Observer Magazine's Christmas soiree...too early for that then.
Do tell about the Observer's Xmas do. Just take a sedative and start writing.
Dear Madame Arcati
I was suprised to see this raunchy posting of yours since I recently met Julie Kavanagh who said I should contribute to Intelligent Life. As you know there are new biographies of Maugham and Diaghilev being published in the autumn and on the spot I said 'Well, I'd like to write a piece called "Diaghilev, Maugham and the Homosexual Imagination" ' and told her about the new biogs. There was an embarrassed noise from her, and a deadly look from her co-editor (someone called Jasper who's written books on snow and football). Eventually she said 'I don't think we'd get that past the editor'. I in turn was shocked - it would I think make a great article, but they clearly thought it some kind of sick joke.
with best wishes, Duncan Fallowell
Oh I think it's been done Poppet.
Duncan, is it being suggested that Intelligent Life became loose in the bowel at the prospect of cock-cocking indiscretion as opposed to its cock-cunting equivalent? I feel quite faint at the scandal. Julie Kavanagh - tart!
A perfidious slip in standards Madame. To drag sleaze of this sort into a site dedicated to good taste is shocking. Please get back to Katie and Peter as soon as.
I see one cover of Intelligent Life has Paris Hilton reading a book.
Done where? Nothing that I can find. I'd love to read Mr Fallowell's article 'Diaghilev, Maugham and the Homosexual Imagination'.
No, well, Duncan wasn't invited to write it. I'd commission him myself but I don't have a budget.
How odd of Kavanagh re Duncan. Does the editor of this periodical - which I'd never heard of until tonight - have a problem with homosexualists? Is he some filthy hetero or she some cob-web cunted blue-stocking? I think we should be told.
All that sort of publication is GRINDINGLY straight - Economist, FT, Granta, Spectator, etc. As you open one of them you can actually HEAR the squeaking of the tight-arse.
Amis's preoccupation with teeth is misplaced. It's his eyes that needed the work!
Martin Amis isn't a very good tennis player and when he makes an unforced error he sulks and acts petulantly!
I'll have to agree with that. This is one person that is not aging gracefully - Unlike Duncan... ;-).
Prospect is cool about varieties of sexuality but that new one, Standpoint (to which your mate Susan Hill contributes), is hideously uptight about such things.
I'm beginning to think Martin Amis is the most normal literary alpha that there ever was.
As for Standpoint, if Susan writes for it then it will be sexually uptight. No reflection on Susan, but she is inclined to the didactic and the stern. Yet I'm sure she's a riot. People are odd. Fucking Aquarians.
What do you expect? Standpoint is edited by a Roman Catholic fundamentalist.
Amis is venerated by Tony Parsons. Ask Julie Burchill what that means.
Venerated? Oh darling, there's a cream you can buy from the chemist in Soho, no nasty questions, nice brown paper bag...
re: drf's proposed article "'Diaghilev, Maugham and the etc etc' as commissioned by Madame Arcati, I would be happy to contribute my experience at Maugham's nephew Robin's Brighton house where during one of his birthday parties I was unexpectantly offered up as an auction prize with the late Laurence Olivier bidding enthusistically before I fled into the night.
regards,
veritas
Really? Two of my brothers are Aquarians: one is a riot, the other didactic and the stern. What do you make of that? I thought you Gemini (or is it Geminae?) where the ones that had that double personality thing going on... then again, I'm a Moon Child and people think I'm moody.
You can't really generalise - you have to look at the individual horoscope. The sunsign, eg Aquarius, may indicate basic trais but you also must look at the Ascendant, Moon etc for indicators on personality, life purpose etc.
The Moon governs our reactions to things: where it sits in your horoscope will determine its strength and modes of expression. It also will tell you where you feel most at home or comfortable. When you say Moon Child does this mean you're a Cancerian?
Aquarians in my experience tend to be idealistic and prone to sudden mental storms; huge shifts in attitude. But this tendency will be moderated, contradicted or exacerbated by other planets. This will explain why your two brothers are different.
Yes, we who a born under the sign of Cancer are considered Moon Children and for sure, although my brothers seem like opposites, they are both very much "idealistic and prone to sudden mental storms" and have "huge shifts in attitude" each in their own way (not to their advantage, if you ask me).
I think it's great we're having this exchange on a Martin Amis posting. The price of his great talent is a fundamental stupidity on anything "irrational".
Did I tell you I've read "The Information", chéri? Amazing novel. That guy has a style of his own.
When people are that age, all of these things go on. I've dated the same types - you trade the comforts of faithfulness for excitement and charisma. I'm sure Julie knew what she was getting into.
In the end, his work will transcend of all this. It doesn't matter about dental work and kiss-and-tell tackiness.
He is better than his critics. He will outlast them all. And that is why this crude fascination and coattail-riding goes on.
It was kind of him to let her write this. It was heartfelt, at times sad, and quite well written.
He was a horrible boyfriend, but it was her choice to stay with him for so long, despite his glaring insensitivites. And it is her choice to use him to forward her career, years later.
However, her writing doesn't stand up next to his. It doesn't approach the achievements of the man himself.
I have Venus in Capricorn. Is that what makes me so attracted to cold bastards?
thanks for your kind attention to this matter.
Venus in Cap says more about YOU: you're practical in your approach to relationships and part of you approaches them with business in mind: love and empire-building tend to go hand in hand - this doesn't make you a schemer or heartless, not at all, just very aware that love alone won't pay the bills or get you that Times obit. Contact me privately if you wish. x
Thank you, Madame. Just wondering why tales of sneaky cock-cunting should bring out the beast in my soul. It seems very wrong.
I don't see why it's wrong. It's just energy in the end.
That's true. Thanks for being so nice about answering my questions.
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