Inside a Pearl Read online

  Nigella Lawson has become such a symbol of glamour, the domestic goddess of television, that it feels presumptuous to claim friendship with her. When I met her, she worked as an editor for the Spectator. I was enough older than her and her friends that I played the role of an eccentric uncle. Nigella was very extravagant. I always stayed in Durrants Hotel behind the Wallace Collection off Marylebone High Street, and Nigella (who was named after her father, Nigel Lawson, Mrs. Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer) once filled my room at Durrants with a giant bouquet of blue nigellas, a flower sometimes called “love in a mist.”

  Later she was the deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times. I remember writing a review for her comparing Joe Orton to Oscar Wilde, both of them living out their homosexuality in North Africa. Of course I recognized there were differences—Orton was working class and Wilde, I said, was upper class. Nigella called me in Paris and asked if I’d change upper class to upper middle class. I’d forgotten that these nuances meant so much to Brits.

  Her mother, a famous beauty, divorced her father and married the philosopher A. J. Ayer, the popular author of Language, Truth and Logic. He had been married previously to a woman called Dee Wells, someone I met once at a dinner party given by Natasha Spender, shortly after Stephen Spender’s death. After the early death from cancer of Nigella’s mother, Ayer remarried Dee Wells.

  Nigella has sold hundreds of thousands of cookbooks, which contain her airy, lighthearted remarks. She has always rejected the term “professional cook.” She’s had her share of tragedy. Her mother died in her forties, her sister, Thomasina, died in her thirties of breast cancer, and her husband, John Diamond, a journalist, died of throat cancer. I can remember eating with them in Nobu in New York. His meal had to be ground into a liquid he could ingest through his tracheotomy. Nigella said that given the amount of cancer in her family, she was virtually placing a curse on her two children. Once John, who was reduced to writing everything he wanted to say in conversation, heard a maddening voice chattering away on the radio—and he realized it was his own voice in a rebroadcast of an old program. Now he said he regretted the years of what he called wasting his words. Nigella once invited my partner Michael and me over for a lamb roast in her kitchen, where the star guests were Stephen Fry and Salman Rushdie. Before publishing his second novel, Midnight’s Children, Salman had worked in advertising at Ogilvy & Mather as a copywriter and he told us that his great triumph at the firm had been a slogan for a cream cake: “Naughty but Nice.”

  Fry wasted no time in rejoindering, “You could launch a slimming product: ‘Cut-wah Out-wah the Fatwa.’”

  We all looked around to see if Salman would laugh at this impudence—and he did.

  It was especially dramatic since Salman was still in hiding.

  I was spending a lot of time going back and forth between Paris and London in 1989, the year I was a judge for the Booker Prize—when we crowned Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Nigella was my date for the dinner, and her father had resigned from Thatcher’s Tory government that very day. Nigella had earlier created a scandal by revealing she voted Socialist. The Anglo-French journalist and literary biographer Olivier Todd was seated next to Nigella and he grilled her for a quote about her father for L’Express.

  To keep Todd from harassing her, I said, “We have much bigger news—we’re getting married.” I was happy that night because not only did Ishiguro win but Sybille Bedford, the only gay writer in the competition (and the author of the sterling A Legacy, a much earlier book), was on the Booker shortlist for her latest, Jigsaw—and I got to meet her. She was already seventy-eight and had her arm in a sling.

  A decade and a half later, when my book My Lives came out in London, Nigella attended the launch party and created a giant stir. By that time John Diamond was dead; she had moved in with Charles Saatchi nine months after John died, and eventually married him. Though she was criticized for her “haste,” I defended her. I’d taken up with someone new a year after the death of my French lover, Hubert Sorin. In each case, Nigella and I had been a caregiver during a long illness. We’d had plenty of time to say our farewells during an illness that was inevitably fatal. And I, at least, was lonely and terrified and in need of affection.

  Alan Jenkins, an agile poet who wrote beautiful verses about unhappy loves and about his nautical father, was the deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement and a dear friend. MC adored him for his good humor and excellent French. He was always a star at my dinner parties. And he visited me more than once in Paris. I was always careful to have a bottle of J&B Scotch around, which did not go untouched, but Alan was the kind of drinker who blossomed conversationally and became a lot of fun, like so many of the English. When I’d been a drinker, I was an alcoholic.

  Alan was just a bit of a drunk, which seemed appropriate for a poet. I felt that his poetry was underrecognized, partly because he was a powerful editor—a fate shared by Howard Moss, the poetry editor of the New Yorker, whose work was also neglected because people were afraid of looking as though they were currying favor.

  I stayed with Alan more than once in London. People were always speculating about which lovely, intelligent girl he’d marry, but he kept hesitating and then, exhausted, the various girls would move on—which would provoke a new storm of his lovelorn poetry. When I broke up with the younger writer Christopher Cox, the composer Virgil Thomson (his friend and boss), told him that I’d always be restless and unhappy in love. It’s what I wrote about. Was Alan also a perennial bachelor because he wrote about love?

  Alan had a winning Harry Potter schoolboy look, his eyeglasses smudged and crooked, his longish curls confused into a great mop, his preppy clothes rumpled. The one thing that didn’t go with this nerdy collegiate image was his beautiful tenor speaking voice, a poet’s arresting tones as persuasive as a good cello. Where one might have expected a high squeak or sudden adolescent crack, one got instead this lyrical instrument, ideal for reading his kind of verse, which was at once social and deeply felt—a lesser version of James Merrill’s poetry and voice without Merrill’s sham mysticism.

  And although he was often genuinely unhappy in love (it wasn’t a pose), Alan was always gallant and plucky. Some days, it seemed, he’d turn sour with disappointment and grief, all the more striking in such a resolutely cheerful man. He was quick to express his agreement, nodding furiously at anything one said. An utterance felt delightfully collaborative with Alan. His years of working at the TLS had given him a familiarity with every domain of intellectual endeavor, but he was never professorial, possessing an urbanity usually missing among American intellectuals and artists. I remember an elegant luncheon in Paris that the TLS gave in the late 1990s to celebrate its French connection at Drouant (where the Goncourt jury holds its annual luncheon)—hallowed ground for literary people. There I met the very suave and elegant essayist Marc Fumaroli, the author of Trois Institutions Littéraires and a star of the Academie Française.

  One evening in London, Alan invited Michael and me to dinner with Marie Colvin, the well-respected war reporter and Alan’s best friend and confidante. She wore a black patch over the eye she’d lost in Sri Lanka. Marie worked for the Sunday Times of London, but was an American from Long Island. She and Michael talked about Yemen, where he’d been stationed in the Peace Corps. He’d been a teacher there and although he’d enjoyed his year there, it was dull, basically bureaucratic stuff. Marie had once slipped into Yemen, as she told us, by dhow (a small sailing vessel) across the Red Sea from the Horn of Africa. In the next moment she was talking about Proust, training her cool good eye on each of us. And indeed her memory was Proustian, full of adventures and assignments in many exotic locales, and held together by a network of rich associations. Nor did she for one moment seem cynical. She hadn’t happened onto her career, according to any of the flood of obituaries and accounts in the press by her colleagues and admirers following her death—she’d chosen it, and though she’d seen terrible things and repor
ted on them soberly, she laughed and had the kind of optimism that I suppose all journalists witnessing daily horrors need to keep going. She was credited with saving the lives of fifteen hundred women and children in a compound in East Timor. Later, after the start of the events known collectively as the Arab Spring, she was killed in the crossfire when the Syrian government began pushing back against its rebels.

  Alan’s friend and former TLS colleague Alan Hollinghurst was another person who’d once negatively reviewed my work before we met, which didn’t keep me from reviewing his first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, in the Sunday Times, calling it the best gay book yet written by an Englishman.

  When I finally met Alan, he struck me as someone rather dignified, but with a slyly frivolous side. Alan’s favorite writer was and is Ronald Firbank, a taste we share. Alan had written his Oxford thesis on Firbank.

  Alan knows everything about architecture, one of his specialties at the TLS, and he’s one of the few people I know who thinks London is more beautiful than Paris—it certainly has more varied extant architecture from more different periods. It’s true that what gives Paris its unity—the uniform look of Haussmann’s apartment buildings, the orientation of streets radiating out from monuments like the Arc de Triomphe, and the repetition of its street furniture and Wallace fountains—can make it dull to the historical connoisseur. As anyone who’s read his novels knows, Alan has a Proustian fascination with titles and stately homes, although, like Proust, he is also critical of snobbism. I envy him his flat in Hampstead; everything in it peaceful, beautiful, and neatly organized. Now the definition of the professional novelist (especially since he won the Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty), he’s arranged his life so that he has to do nothing but write his next perfectly phrased and carefully considered narrative—usually over the course of five or six years. Perhaps he’s the most consistently polished writer in the UK today. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t travel much.

  And yet like so many Englishmen, he’s intrigued by France and its literary classics. He’s translated several of Racine’s plays.

  Although most educated French people say they prefer “English” to “American English,” they can rarely understand Brits, who gargle and swallow their words and let their sentences trail off. Alan is a great mumbler and quietly and drily camp (there’s no reliable French equivalent to “camp”). One time Alan and I gave a reading together in Brighton. He was hoarse and said, “I’m terribly sorry, but I seem to have done something facetious to my uvula.”

  No French person would understand why that was funny.

  Once I was invited to give a talk for Amnesty International at the Sheldonian Theatre. I was so nervous about speaking at Oxford that I asked to be accompanied by my English editor at the time, Jonathan Burnham, the same Jonathan who couldn’t bear overly disciplined French gardens and who was my handsome, clever, well-dressed, and ambitious sometime boyfriend. The man who was supposed to introduce me was an Oxford don of French language who years before had been Jonathan’s “moral tutor” at Oriel College. Because Jonathan kept sobbing over boys, he’d been sent down for a year by this moral tutor—who was flanked in his office by portraits of his wife and daughters.

  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 fr
om 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.