The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
Life consists of waiting to fuck, fucking, and then remembering when you fucked. When you die, you think about how the fucks went. When you grow old and stare vacantly into the mirror, your ‘bald patch receding into infinity’, you say to yourself, ‘Fuck, I rememember when I used to fuck, what happened to all those fucks.’
This is the impression of life I get from The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis’ latest novel. The book was originally planned to be an autobiographical account of Amis’ sex life, but Amis canned that concept as he found the prospect ‘sort of disgusting, really… icky’. Instead Amis bent the truth a bit, and told us the story of Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old trying to come to grips with the sexual revolution, where girls are trying to act like boys, while boys are trying to get into the ‘cool pants’ of the girls.
Unusually for a 20-year-old … Keith was aware that he was going to die. More than that, he knew that when the process began, the only thing that would matter was how it had gone with women. As he lies dying, the man will search his past for love and life.
The Pregnant Widow is Martin Amis’ search through his past for ‘love and life’ and what it all meant. It can read at times like the gruff memories of an ageing man, with the ‘when I was young’ stories.
When I was young, old people looked like old people, slowly growing into their masks of bark and walnut. People aged differently now. They looked like young people who had been around for too long. Time moved past them but they dreamed they stayed the same.
The story itself can neatly be separated by a fuck. There is before the fuck, and after the fuck. The ‘before-the-fuck’ occurs in the confines of a castle in Italy in 1970, while the ‘after-the-fuck’ meanders slowly (and awkwardly) through a couple of decades in London and into the present day, or at least 2009.
The ‘before-the-fuck’ period reads like an old English novel (Amis references Austen, Bronte, Lawrence, Dickens and others throughout the novel). According to Keith Nearing, who is an aspiring critic, the English novel consists of the ‘anticipation’ of waiting for the woman to fall. In Amis’ retake of the English the novel, we are waiting for the man to fall, and then during the ‘after-the-fuck’ period we see the consequences of that fall, and exactly how far he fell.
Amis posits that the sexual revolution has left us detached from ourselves and the other. During the featured fuck of the novel, Keith Nearing describes the sensation of experience as unreal, where the colours were ‘wrong – all Day-Glo and wax museum,’ with hopeless acoustics and hopeless continuity.
One moment the thunder felt no louder than a plastic dustbin being dragged across the courtyard; the next, it was all over you like a detonation. And the human figures – him, her? She was much better at it than he was, naturally (she played the lead); but he kept having his doubts about the quality of the acting.
Keith watched the whole fuck take place in the mirror, and it ‘seemed to make sense only when you watched it in the mirror. Something had been separated out. He did know that.’
Yes, it was good in the mirror, realer in the mirror. You could see what was happening very clearly. Uncluttered, unsullied by the other dimensions, which were those of depth and time.
The revolution of the fuck sought to smooth things over. Things being depth and time. The glossy images of pornographic magazine. Still. Depth and time are relegated to the place of bookends, the before-the-fuck and the after-the-fuck.
The future Keith, the ‘after-the-fuck’ Keith, reflects on this new condition. where ‘something’ had been separated out.
Surface will start tending to supersede essence. As the self becomes postmodern, how things look will become at least as important as how things are. Essences are hearts, surfaces are sensations.
Was post-modernism born then out of the fuck, out of the sexual revolution? Post-modernism is the condition of the pregnant widow, the real bastard child of the revolution has yet to be born.
What do you do in a revolution? This. You grieve for what goes, you grant what stays, and greet what comes.
So we shoud greet this surface, this detachment, this separation. Amis writes that in the 17th century poets lost the ability to both think and feel, he says that during the sexual revolution we lost the ability to both feel and fuck. This is what is left. The unfeeling fuck. Greet it, but grieve for what is gone, grieve for the poets who could both feel and fuck, because Amis cannot.
Last Words to Miriam
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Yours is the shame and sorrow
But the disgrace is mine;
Your love was dark and thorough,
Mine was the love of the sun for a flower
He creates with his shine.I was diligent to explore you,
Blossom you stalk by stalk,
Till my fire of creation bore you
Shrivelling down in the final dour
Anguish–then I suffered a balk.I knew your pain, and it broke
My fine, craftsman’s nerve;
Your body quailed at my stroke,
And my courage failed to give you the last
Fine torture you did deserve.You are shapely, you are adorned,
But opaque and dull in the flesh,
Who, had I but pierced with the thorned
Fire-threshing anguish, were fused and cast
In a lovely illumined mesh.Like a painted window: the best
Suffering burnt through your flesh,
Undrossed it and left it blest
With a quivering sweet wisdom of grace: but now
Who shall take you afresh?Now who will burn you free
From your body’s terrors and dross,
Since the fire has failed in me?
What man will stoop in your flesh to plough
The shrieking cross?A mute, nearly beautiful thing
Is your face, that fills me with shame
As I see it hardening,
Warping the perfect image of God,
And darkening my eternal fame.