Inside a Pearl (28 page)

Now the don greeted us in a sleeveless, low-necked, black leather T-shirt with gold bars through his nipples; in the intervening years, he'd come out.

Oxford continued to intimidate me. When I was asked years later to give the prestigious Clarendon lectures, I backed out at the last moment. Every general idea I had seemed either wrong or banal. I pled to the organizers, “I knew Calvino, and he worried so much over the lectures he was supposed to give at Harvard, it killed him. He had a stroke. I'm not going to die over
this
assignment.” They said I was the first person to back out in a hundred years. A lecture, where there's no given topic, is torture for me.

Isabel Fonseca and her husband Martin Amis became great friends. Just by coincidence, the evening Tony Blair was elected they gave me a book party for the last volume in my trilogy,
The Farewell Symphony,
in their new house in Primrose Gardens. The atmosphere everywhere in London was festive, and I was reminded of the night a decade and half before when Mitterrand had been elected and Paris lit up.

People made the rounds from party to party. Everyone from literary London was at mine, including Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt, Hermione
Lee, Will Self, and Salman Rushdie. In France writers were so lavishly hosted by “society” that they seldom clustered in one another's company except in small bunches of two or three friends. But in England the aristocrats were interested only in other aristocrats. It was one of the great differences between the British landed gentry and the French aristocracy of the court, where wit and culture had always played an important part and writers were treasured. After all, in France Rousseau and Voltaire had brought down the monarchy.

Isabel was a true beauty, with olive skin and long lustrous black hair. On her father's side she was Uruguayan (he was a sculptor, just as two of her brothers and her American mother were painters). Brought up in America but an Oxford graduate who'd worked for a time at the
TLS,
Isabel was intelligent and terribly funny and warm; she wrote fiction and an excellent study of the gypsies called
Bury Me Standing,
which had required her to live for weeks on end among her impoverished subjects in Romania. She'd lived in a single room with twenty other people to get her story, learning the language and observing her subjects with great determination. Later she and Martin and their two little daughters moved to Uruguay because she was hoping to write about her father's extremely large family. Martin was happy there and according to Isabel every morning would go out of the house, stretch, and gaze at the beautiful scenery, exclaiming, “The northern hemisphere is fucked!” Now they've moved and are raising their girls in Brooklyn to be closer to Isabel's mother, though he is not so sure he approves of New York's “transectional” society.

I'd known both Isabel and Martin before they ever met and married. I'd lent my apartment to Isabel once when she was having an affair with a handsome young poet. Martin visited me in Paris with his first wife, who was rather haughty. Perhaps no serious English writer has been as maligned and scrutinized and dragged through the mud by the press as Martin, from his divorces to his book advances to his expensive American dental work—all of it shocking to me, since novelists in America are almost never mentioned in the media. Of course, we are much less famous but also less often hounded. Martin's every move was (often erroneously) reported on the front page, as were his feuds. In
America the only writers making the news were those who, like Norman Mailer, had stabbed their wives. Nor did anyone in America know or care what any writers looked like. In Britain, “literary” writers were treated like stars.

Of course Martin was aware that he was part of a great dynasty. He once showed me all of his father's books on the shelf of a Waterstones bookstore, pointed to his own, and indicated where his son's books would go.

Although famously heterosexual, Martin always treated me with a certain gentleness bred out of respect for my age, perhaps, or my friendship with Isabel, as if he were a polite schoolboy. His dearest friend, Christopher Hitchens, also treated me that way. I would have preferred to be more of a buddy to Martin, but I didn't know him that well and anyway I always felt insufficiently well read to have a really exhilarating conversation with him about literature—a subject he could discuss with a leaping jester's wit and a scholar's ability to recite at will. He knew that my first novel,
Forgetting Elena
, had been singled out by Vladimir Nabokov as his favorite American work of fiction by a contemporary author—and Nabokov was one of his major enthusiasms.

Martin was compelling with his smoker-drinker's chuckle, boyish curiosity, and disabused world-weariness—a fascinating combination. He seemed remote, as if entirely self-sufficient, a bit like a friendly emissary from another planet. And yet, all these years later, with only the East River separating us in New York, after I had my first stroke, Isabel made me about a dozen meals from scratch and froze them, and she and Martin were the first to visit me when I came out of the hospital. We sat at the dining table eating Isabel's food and opening wine while one of their girls sat on the sofa in her PJs across the room from us amusing herself with her laptop.

Martin has always been a good, concerned family man, and prolific (with two sons from an earlier marriage and the two adorable daughters with Isabel, as well as an illegitimate daughter, the fruit of a brief youthful adventure whom Martin welcomed warmly into his domestic circle)—but in a way, he seemed more like a wise, retiring grandfather, benign but always slightly disengaged.

In the country, on Isabel's mother's Long Island property, Martin and Isabel knew how to entertain like Victorian gentry—they left you alone all day to read and write and take long walks and got together with you in the evening for drinks and dinner, a perfect rhythm for writers. You were given your own little house with a refrigerator Isabel had stocked herself and a library. But Martin, no matter how many people were around him, seemed a bit isolated, like that Hungarian queen who was also a saint and went through all the court ceremonies but moved about inside an invisible nun's cell that traveled with her everywhere.

He also had his impish side and became fascinated by the detritus of twenty-first-century American and English life—and he was laddish enough to relish certain aspects of it. During the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections, for instance, he'd mastered his impersonation of Texas governor Rick Perry—whom one could count on to flub his lines hilariously at the debates.

“Now Rick's my boy,” he said, sliding into a twang; “don't you say nothin' about Rick.”

Some of his finest writings are profiles of American figures from the eighties collected in his first book of essays,
The Moronic Inferno
. Observant and perspicacious but never completely arch or mean-spirited, he gave us subtly gimlet-eyed views of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Gore Vidal, and Ronald Reagan—Martin is uncannily at home with born-agains, Cold Warriors, and their equally flawed critics. In person, Martin could make a perhaps rehearsed observation sound off-the-cuff and fresh in his plummy Oxford rasp. He'd hoard a few gems from the common junk pile of the news and then spring them on you. He'd obviously been rubbing his hands over these gleaming observations knowing they'd delight just the right connoisseur. He had a faintly satirical view of gay life, but no more than his hero Nabokov does in his funniest novel,
Pale Fire.

I accompanied Martin when we were each invited to a big party for the queen's golden jubilee at the Royal Academy of Art. Mrs. Thatcher was there, already half gaga, dressed in a shocking cyclamen-colored suit. Martin was in the inner circle and was presented to the queen. He
reminded her that she'd knighted his father, and she said, “I have no memory of that.” I was in the bigger group of those who wouldn't be presented, but at least I got a chance to talk to the stork-skinny tenor Ian Bostridge, who came with his young son, and tell him that his music had meant more to me than that of any other singer's.

When I was a Booker judge the year of
London Fields
, I tried to get this masterpiece of Martin's on the short list because I was sure it was the one recently published novel that people would be talking about fifty years later. The two women on the jury, while admitting the book's superiority, threatened to resign if the novel was nominated because of its supposedly politically incorrect view of women. David Lodge, our chairman, caved. I tried to no avail to argue that the violently misused heroine was an allegory for Mother Earth, who was being ravaged—and that it was an ecological parable.

At the same time, I wasn't abreast of the rising volleys in political correctness in English-speaking and particularly American culture. I'd been in France too long. When I was asked to speak on the air about this “amusing” new fad of political correctness at the Maison de la Radio in Paris, I had to admit I was completely out of touch. So much so that when I edited
The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction
, I was criticized in the United States for just including the stories I liked and only one by a minority, James Baldwin. Not in England. There I was criticized for being too sex-obsessed. Still, I had to admire the frankness of English reviewers; one English woman critic wrote, “I've always wondered what gay men said and did when alone. And now I know and it's completely boring.” No one would have dared to write that in PC America.

Lucretia Stewart was another friend who managed to endear herself to me by attacking me in print. I met her in the London house of my publisher Sonny Mehta, who gave me a memorable drinks party for
A Boy's Own Story.
This was 1983. The waiters were all sniffing cocaine and trying to keep a straight face with whitened nostrils; a beautiful Weimaraner was dashing about wearing a pearl necklace. Sonny's wife, Gita, wearing a sari, showed up late. She'd just parachuted out of an airplane with Princess Margaret's son, David Linley (a furniture maker,
and the only talented one of the royals), to celebrate her fortieth birthday, and pled breezily, “I wanted to do something I'd never done.”

Those were such heady days. I'd never had a successful novel before and I was forty-two. Nor had
A Boy's Own Story
had an easy time of it finding a home in print in England. The publisher of my previous books there, André Deutsch, had turned it down, saying it wasn't up to my first two experimental novels. Now in the confusion and unexpected glare, I hadn't noticed that Lucretia's article about me—a Page Six–type column—had ended by addressing me personally (“Well, Mr. White …”), saying that though I said I was so pleased to be in England, I might be a bit less welcome when everyone turned against American gays for spreading AIDS. And here I'd thought Lucretia and I had had a very nice moment chatting together before Sonny's party. She telephoned me the day of the publication of her article and told me in tears that her editor had added that sentence and that she would never have said anything so gratuitously cruel. But already I was catching on that all Brits in the public eye came in for their drubbings in their naughty but nice press, and all of them seemed to take it on the chin. After all,
Harpers & Queen
had paid me the compliment of calling me “the most maligned man in America” for writing gay fiction and for my militancy.

I was being praised enough that it was easy for me to forgive her. Lucretia became one of my best friends, since she, like Marie-Claude, has always had a true gift for friendship. Not only is Lucretia attentive and tender, but she's also
persistent
, which is a crucial trait with someone as socially passive as I am.

When I first knew her she was married. When her husband found out that I knew Italo Calvino and his tiny, spunky Argentine wife, Chichita, he wanted me to invite him to dinner with them. The dinner in Paris was very nearly a disaster, since the husband plied Calvino with lots of annoying questions about his “process.” Luckily I had seated Lucretia next to Calvino, who was enamored of her lovely, fair features, as cleanly drawn as those on a freshly minted dime, and her luxuriant blonde hair. Calvino had a childlike side and became intoxicated with her hair, which he kept touching, like a Nepalese seeing his first Swede and mistaking her for an angel.

Lucretia was spiky and full of contempt for my American gaucheness. She was certain I didn't know how to refer to aristocrats or use their correct honorifics: “Oh you saw him, did you, the
Lord
Rock Savage?” She complained bitterly about her mother's cruelty: “She actually said at my father's funeral, ‘Do you know why he was ashamed of you? It's because you'd become so horribly fat.'” Lucretia was a natural, graceful writer, was very tender with animals, and at a surprisingly early age claimed that she'd given up sex (she was barely in her fifties). All the more surprising because she'd been known, sometimes in the pages of the London tabloids and broadsheets, for her high-flown affairs. In the settlement for their unusually civil divorce, her husband set her up in a flat in Camden Square.

There she was raped by a marauding stranger. Luckily she wriggled out of her ropes and hit the panic button installed above her bed. The rapist was rooting through her valuables and he immediately dropped her credit cards, then fled. She wrote a shockingly honest article about the whole experience (she said she worried that when the rapist pushed her legs back he'd notice they were winter-white), and soon enough she sold her flat and moved to Greece, into a centuries-old house high up in the walled hilltop district of Naxos, the Kastro. Since then, Lucretia had been finding ways to beautify already superbly simple interiors, and whenever I visited she was always leaping up in the midst of one's monologue and shouting at her cats: “Dido! I told you not to run away! Dido, get down from there! Yes, you!”