Dead Babies by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page B

his deterioration with a potent joy. He suffers appallingly also from gout, of course—a great Villiers infirmity, gout, an attractive complaint on the whole, though one that I have so far been spared. His blood pressure is alarmingly high; his heart capricious; I hourly await news of his death." (At this point Quentin usually takes Celia's hand or glances at her silkily.) "I shall inherit, then, in the none too distant future. At least—thank God—Neville had the gumption to wrest my father's money from him a decade before his timely death. I don't imagine for a moment that my brother will see out another decade, so these ghastly death duties are sure to be levied this time. The estate should nevertheless be enough to keep us in tolerable comfort for the rest of our lives, and a title still helps. I wonder if I shan't fight to reverse this pernicious ten-year ruling when I come to sit in the Lords. . . . But until then I shall continue to live, firstly, off my wife— who has some money of her own, thank heaven—and, secondly, off my own modest salary, which, as everyone here knows, I never tire of finding means to supplement. Cheers!"
    Obviously Quentin was an adept at character stylization, a master of pastiche, a connoisseur of verbal self-dramatization —and he needed to be. Although affiliated with London University Quentin was the only member of the household who wasn't supposed to be taking a degree there. Instead, he ran— more or less singlehanded—the university newspaper, a satirico-politico-literary magazine called Yes. Acquiring the editorship had been a singularly painless business. Quentin went along to the interview carrying a portfolio of anonymous learned articles which he hadn't written, a stack of laboriously forged references, and a mawkish panegyric from the homosexual literary editor of a Sunday newspaper. He needn't have bothered: the reviews were never checked, the references never taken up. When Quentin walked into the board room, a silver Lycidas in a clinging white chamois suit, a sigh of longing was heaved in unison by the entire committee. While Quentin outlined his editorial plans the delegates could only gaze meltingly into his champagne eyes; when he finished, a languid exchange of nods and smiles took place and Quentin was offered thanks for his attendance. No further candidates were seen.
And Quentin's editorial work was a jeu d'esprit, a personal tour de force.
To begin with he wrote most of the book reviews himself. He would allow a cooling-off period after publication, collate and synthesize the notices of rival journals, find the points on which they agreed, and rewrite them in the inimitable Yes style. Hence, the unanimous verdict that the prose of a novel was ornate and self-conscious would lead Quentin to write;
    So-and-so's sentences read like a frenzied collage of George Eliot at her most sententious and James Joyce at his most abstruse.
    : And when drunk:
So-and-so's book reads like a drunken compositor's rendering of the maddened yelps of Henry James and Gertrude Stein locked in verbal soixante-neuf.
Or, if a biographer were generally held to have been insensitive in the handling of his subject's private life, Quentin would remark:
So-and-so's dirty little fingers rifle through his subject's private life like a hick detective investigating a pimp's account book.
When stoned:
So-and-so cavorts through the dignified hideaway of his subject's private life with all the tact and discretion of a lobotomized orang-utan which has just sat on a hedgehog.
Or, if a literary critic were widely felt to have been over-generous to his chosen author, Quentin would note:
If so-and-so were anyone to go by, Shakespeare would be reduced to an imitator of McGonagall when compared to the writer on whom he so shamelessly fawns.
And on speed?
So-and-so's drooling idolatry of his author makes Tennyson's praise of Wellington look like a neck-scissors and body-slam followed by a forearm-smash.
And so