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For The Emigre

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For The Emigre

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About mid-February last year, we were sitting around one afternoon, exchanging the usual disenchantments on the subject of St Valentine’s Day, when my best mate’s mum casually dropped into conversation the fact that in her younger days she once co-wrote a book for Mills & Boon.

Well. I was agog, I don’t mind telling you. My cup of furtive, post-adolescent imagination ranneth liberally over. Slavering and drooling may have been involved.

The rest of the room went rather quiet. “Is there, erm, any chance that I could… see it?” I asked, trying not to sound too excited. My mate (we’ll call him ‘Dominic’) was now looking decidedly uncomfortable.

His mum got up and went to fetch the volume from wherever heirlooms of inestimable value are kept hidden away from prying eyes. Returning to the living room, she placed this Holiest of Holies gently in my hands. “Enjoy yourself,” she said, in the voice of Charlotte Rampling.

I was not disappointed. Spine rent asunder, pages falling out through excessive consultation, and a familiar but unplaceable tacky residue all over the dog-eared and faded cover, the image whereon showed a young gentleman in C.18th servant’s garb, surrounded by a good many permutations of Great British flora and fauna. The jacket copy alone promised ‘girls’: ‘attractive’, ‘interesting’, ‘expensive’, and ‘repeatedly used’. Not to mention ‘evidently enjoyed’!

And inside, oh my…! It was everything that I could possibly have hoped for. 239 pages of sizzling – not to mention educational – elaborations on the finest and most ancient of arts, up to and very much including the latest hand-held technologies, comprehensively accompanied with dozens of ‘specially drawn illustrations’ (even if, rather disconcertingly, it said ‘the artist has relied for reference on diagrams’).

As befits a manual of this nature, the introduction warns of ‘disappointment’ and ‘frustration’, and cautions against being ‘too ambitious,’ or ‘making excessive demands on skill or resources’. But it hopes ‘a girl who has been shown a given method may try [X, Y or Z] with a good chance of success’. ‘Freedom to experiment’ is key, and the ‘collective teaching experience’ highly rewarding in the case of ‘girls who work enthusiastically’. ‘After a demonstration lesson,’ the reader is all-but-promised, ‘girls go eagerly to the bookshelves…’ And not just the girls, I thought! I could feel myself moving rapidly along the predicted spectrum from ‘very slow’ to ‘very hot’.

Dom’s mum had used a pseudonym, I noticed. And tended to refer to ancillary lace-wear (e.g.), rather coquettishly, as ‘doyleys’. But who can blame her? North Derbyshire in the early Seventies wasn’t exactly a hotbed of open-minded cosmopolitanism. So in general the language tends towards the blunt and technical (the narrative not being of the utmost importance in these situations, if you catch my drift), but already one can detect the signs of a pervading Continental influence – ‘in the French style’, and so forth – counterbalancing the slightly staid, Victorian English fare.

It’s a classic tale of ‘fools’ and ‘tarts’, ‘Swedes’ and ‘beef’ – an oyster-laden romp of liaisons involving maitres d’hotel and maids of honour positively dripping with ‘almond essence’. There is, it is true, no clearly identifiable heroine; but I like the sound of an evening with Bain-Marie, and Chicken Maryland seems like she ought to be a game bird. The sub-plot of Rich Short-Crust (seeks Quiche Lorraine) reads like an outré outtake from the Pilgrim’s Progress. And the delectable Chelsea Buns ends up with a nasty case of rose hip (something to do, no doubt, with overuse of her Rabbit fricassée™). She’s partial to a bit of ‘cod Portugaise’, is our Chelsea. But frankly she’ll take anything, even, asked nicely, a ‘chocolate truffle’. We get more than a few glimpses of her friend Eve’s ‘pudding’.

The dramatis personae are not all from the top end of the social spectrum, mind you (‘We have often preferred margarine to butter’, remarks a Bertoluccian sub-protagonist, unblinkingly. It makes it ‘easier to cream’) and in the seamier passages there is much otherwise unremarkable dialogue concerning ‘raw weight’ and ‘average portions’. One of the minor characters contracts, at one point, a touch of ‘small mould’ on his ‘Welsh rarebit’. (SPOILER ALERT: they make you wear an arrowroot cup.)

That said, this particular reader can now consider himself enlightened as to the ‘savoury tricorne’, one (or more) ‘toad(s) in the hole’, the ‘tossing of salad’, and the timely application of a ‘Viennese finger’. ‘Macaroni a l’Americaine’ sounds a lot like something I might want to try, and ditto the enigmatic ‘Victoria sandwich’; but trust me, you don’t want to know about ‘cheese butterflies’. The ‘Russian pie’ sounds positively non-consensual.

All animal, vegetable and mineral life is here. No two pages pass without something being either on or off ‘the bone’, the pinching of fat, or the kneading of knobs of one kind or another, and altogether too much talk of liquids on the whole. Considerable space is given over to the forms and attendant etiquettes of ‘rough puff’. I am still not sure which is more difficult on the sensibilities, the stomach-turning passage about ‘removing the skins from nuts’ (‘the nuts are immersed in cold water, then brought to the boil…’) or the frankly harrowing ‘loosen each segment from its enclosing skin with a grapefruit knife’!! And I am pretty sure the ‘Yule log’ is illegal in most UN signatory countries.

You can have things ‘plain (rubbed in)’ or ‘rich (creamed)’, and with or without a succession of ‘melting moments’, ‘roly poly’ and ‘kebabs’, or any one of about 37 different types of ‘stuffing’. There’s even a section relating to the manufacturing, and use of, ‘stuffing balls’ – though I believe those are now called something slightly different.

‘Strain’, ‘taste’, ‘refresh’, the book exhorts us. ‘Decorate with half a glacé cherry!’ ‘Suggestions for piping’… ‘Making a cream horn’ (or was it vice versa?)… But never forgetting that this is, in the end, an instructional text – to wit, the mindful, prophylactic advice: ‘Pack your joint in a polythene bag, foil or moisture-proof paper[!?]’ Well, it is an old book, and perhaps back then times were, um, hard.

Discerning readers of a certain vintage and/or persuasion will by now have twigged that the magnum opus in question is, of course, a cookbook. Specifically, The Alfreton Cookery Book (M&B: London, Sydney, Toronto, 1972) by the maidenly threesome of Gillian Crompton, Mair Boothby and Jean Smith, with drawings by Eileen Posteen: a GCSE-level collection of recipes for the edification of 15-year-old Home Economics students. And while Mills & Boon do indeed produce many themed erotic sub-genres (Historical, Intrigue, Medical Romance and so on), cookery – alas – is not yet one of them.

But too late! Once you have set off down this single track (as any schoolboy, current or retired, could tell you), pretty much everything becomes ridiculous. The index alone becomes an absolute snort-fest (not a sex-move…), from ‘cream-cheese balls’ to ‘coating’ via ‘vegetables: general methods’. There is, disappointingly, not a single mention of ‘tongue’. But the ‘Manchester tart’ comes, as it were, right before the ‘Mandarin tartlets’. Or so I’ve been told.

To tease out just one (randomly-selected but) obvious euphemistic theme: ‘clear gel’, ‘savoury jelly’, ‘apricot glaze’, ‘economical batter’, ‘barley water’, ‘stuffing marrow’, ‘lattice jam’, ‘lemon curd’, ‘shellfish cocktail’, ‘egg wash’, ‘celery soup’, ‘scotch broth’, ‘almond paste’, ‘savoury milk’, ‘American frosting’, ‘yoghurt dressing’, ‘chuck casserole’, ‘white sauce’, ‘Dutch sauce’, ‘mock Hollandaise sauce’ (obviously, anything with the word ‘sauce’ in it), and – I absolutely promise you – ‘devilled butter’, and ‘confectioner’s custard’. It’s enough to make Fanny Hill blush.

Left unmolested, of course, a typical paragraph will more usually run: ‘All the recipes have been repeatedly tested, and the 25g basic unit is the same as that recommended by the Working Party of the UK Federation for Education in Home Economics. Oven temperatures have been left in degrees F, as we understand that cookers marked in degrees C will not be available for some considerable time yet. However a conversion table is provided.’

Still. A boy can dream.

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ASH Smyth is a happily-married man. For now.

The Alfreton Cookery Book remains, tragically, out of print.

Readers interested in exploring the ‘Swedish tea ring’ are encouraged to write in for details. No perverts, please.

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I spy
You spew
He/she/Pierre Spies

We (Graf) Spee
You Spanx®
They spunk
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It is traditionally ‘not done’ to review books in terms of what they’re not. And yet: this book is not a novel. It says it is on the front cover; but it isn’t. And Martin Amis makes it clear it’s not, repeatedly, within the 500+ pages – almost as often, in fact, as he claims the opposite.

Nor is it – contra subtitle – a book on ‘how to write’. Nobody wants an Amis book on how to write (cf. his critical non-fiction [sic]); and if they did, they’d not be looking for the difference between ‘I’ and ‘me’ (I kid you not). And yet the book incorporates long memos, guidelines and what feel like half-recycled lecture notes, for which the kindest thing that can be said is that they should have all been excised some drafts ago.

Lastly, it isn’t principally about his lifelong, close relationship with Christopher Hitchens – despite the UK jacket’s clear suggestion otherwise.

No. What Inside Story is, is a rather baggy assemblage (a footnote nods approvingly to Don Quixote) of loving reminiscence, tough self-examination, hero-worship, historical enquiry, quotation, a 2015 New Yorker article on the German migrant-crisis, and, yes, some scattered writing tips. With footnotes. And a 13-page index.

Aware that he himself has not exactly lived the life of, say, a Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, or even Rushdie, Amis employs the framework of three other, personally-relevant and occasionally-connected literary lives (and deaths): Saul Bellow (d. 2005) as supplementary father figure; Philip Larkin (d. 1985) as potential actual father; and Christopher Hitchens (d. 2011) as brother in arms, in literature, and all but in the sack(?) – their stories (and all the rest of it) threaded together by the amiable conceit that Amis is chatting to some young, aspiring novelist.

Supporting roles are filled by his (de)formative, years-long para-sexual relationship with ‘Phoebe Phelps’ (a classic Amisite character name, that); his significantly more-benevolent stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard; his wayward, needy father; and then the long-familiar coterie of boozy-lunchmates (Conquest, Fenton, Clive James), influences (Nabokov is named on page one, and then a further 42 times after that), and all the Big Things Amis is apparently incapable of not dwelling on (the Holocaust; the Gulag; and – of course – now 9/11).

No doubt he’s changed a few names. And moved things round a bit to suit. Sometimes he’s written himself into the third person. But so what? In his own words, ‘At least Mystic Meg [went] to the trouble of making it all up.’ This ‘novel’ thing is a distraction – and a pity too, since, taken in isolation (which probably no Amis book can have been for years), Inside Story is for the most part a compelling, if rather florid, memoir.

That’s not the only distraction, either.

The book opens with a strange, present-tense discussion of the looming 2016 US election (feat. ‘the Great Pretender’), and of Brexit, which he is comfortable Remain will win. Whatever effect this is supposed to have (scrupulous honesty?), the eye is trained from the beginning on how much else has badly aged here. Lunches that involve ‘potted shrimps’ and ‘oatcake’. Someone being ‘a pill’. ‘Gaspers’. Talk of ‘rugby football’, and girlfriends called ‘Doris’. These days, mind, Amis attends pilates sessions, smokes e-cigarettes, and eats ‘a softboiled egg’ for breakfast. The man the critics once identified as ‘Amis fils‘, the enfant terrible of modern English letters, is – one suddenly realises – old.

Accordingly perhaps, this ‘novel’ is lighter on the more aggressive flourishes of Amis prose style. But (fans rest assured) for every diamond-tipped incision such as ‘childsong [being] like a ventilation of happiness’, there’s still ‘the lime, the gold, the rose’ of – can you guess? – traffic lights; a train ‘now slaked of motion’ (i.e. stationary); and AN Other finance bloke who at once starts using words like ‘bonce’ and ‘gaff’. Amis snorts that you wouldn’t put a janitor called ‘Art Hitman’ in a novel; but has, himself, a US thriller writer called ‘Jed Slot’. He laments that no-one, still, writes well on sex, and then describes ‘her musky, smiley, gauzy, rumpy, nipply presence’.

Despite all this, Inside Story somehow emerges as an engrossing and courageous (slice of) autobiography. And thankfully – if tragically, and via a lot of other deaths – it ultimately returns to him and Hitchens. Amis heartbrokenly extracts some positives from this great personal and public loss, almost a decade past. The reader, though, now sits through the whole thing again – that slow, appalling diminution – and hopes, quite pointlessly, that Hitch won’t die. The book is worth it for that bit alone.
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Postscript: Needless to say, Inside Story comes pre-greeted with much industry fanfare; but only the PR teams will claim that this is Martin Amis’s best work. A more laymanly bemusement as to what, specifically, it is about, may be reflected in the fact that, at time of writing, the ‘novel’ is riding high as Amazon’s #1 Best Seller… in ‘Terrorism & Freedom Fighters Biographies’.

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For – in an abbreviated form – The Oldie

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For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, November 22 1906
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In the Republic of Cameroon Guinness is thought to be an aphrodisiac.

A search for ‘fat naked German man chasing pig’ did not match any image results.

Bernard Lout was buried in a white dress.

Bookshelves are problematic.

A ‘hucklebearer’ is another term for pallbearer.

Emus are almost impossible to hit with machine-gun fire.

The England dressing room has a maximum occupancy of 18.

The order Testudines includes both extant and extinct species.

The Greek philosopher Chrysippus died from laughing at his own jokes.

In late-medieval France there was a crisis of authority.

Warren Buffett cannot buy time.

There is no Chinese takeaway in the Falkland Islands.

Other quizzes are available.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, September 6 1906
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Prince Gunarasa Casinader died in December 2018.

Poetry and buggery are twin-born brats.

Most people have no Russian friends.

Elephants chew their nails when they’re nervous.

In Istanbul, iron nails are believed to be the work of the Devil.

Diderot’s smile is a smile of complicity.

Short legs can’t climb tall walls.

Walter Benjamin couldn’t make a cup of tea.

43% of churches face the sunrise on the day of the saint for whom the church was named.

James Joyce’s grandson has died.

Sri Lankans love their exclamation marks!

You have to question a door policy which says no to trainers but a big thumbs-up t0 piss-soaked tramp shoes.

The face book need never be complete.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, September 6 1906
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Wicca is the fastest-growing religion in the UK after Islam.

The Dutch term for a sex buddy is ‘seksbuddy’.

George I and his prime minister conversed officially in dog Latin.

Irish 6th-formers know what The Communist Manifesto is called.

Right-wing New York slumlord Fred C. Trump’s middle name was ‘Christ’.

The stranded prawn is in danger of dying out.

Nations Trust Bank is now in Kalutara.

Those whose bunks are in Port Said suffer the worst.

Walter Rothschild opened his first museum when he was 10.

A garbage man is much cheaper to hire than a dirty magistrate.

Plenty of Unitarians were also Utilitarians.

There is no longer room to park a car in Harvard Yard.

Irony don’t care if you’re a fan or not.
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For The Critic