It happened one summer

For those unfamiliar with Martin Amis’s short story, ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’, written for The New Yorker in 1997, it was a purist exercise in autobiographical fiction; not even the names were changed.

For those unfamiliar with Martin Amis’s short story, ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’, written for The New Yorker in 1997, it was a purist exercise in autobiographical fiction; not even the names were changed.

The Pregnant Widow is a far more complex, troubling piece of work. Amis did indeed spend much of the summer after his second year at Oxford in a castle near the Mediterranean, though not in Tuscany; that would come later. In the novel, the grand residence belongs to an acquaintance of an acquaintance of Lily, Keith Nearing’s girlfriend, and in the real world the château on the Côte d’Azur to which Amis and Gully Wells repaired was owned by a distant member of the Wells family.

Gully and Lily. How do I know? I’ll be honest; Martin told me. But for anyone even remotely apprised of his life, the parallels between fact and fiction are glaring and abundant.

Rob Henderson, Amis’s anarchic, self-destructive best friend from the late Sixties and early Seventies appears as Kenrik. Nicholas, Keith’s brother, is without doubt Philip, Martin’s elder sibling, and Violet, their sister, is a tragically undisguised portrait of the late Sally Amis. The poet and editor Neil Darlington, frequently referred to but never actually encountered, stands in for the famously elusive Ian Hamilton, while Tina Brown enters as Gloria Beautyman. According to the author, Brown rescued him from a period of sexual self-abasement, which he terms his ‘Larkinland’, and Gloria performs a similar service for Keith, involving one episode where she disports herself as an erotically charged version of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet.

Keith, like his author, is reading for a degree in English and muses:

Would he one day open his copy of Critical Quarterly and see the article entitled ‘A Reassessment of Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth Bennet Considered as a Cock’ by Gloria Beautyman and (or perhaps with, or possibly as told to) Keith Nearing?


Perhaps as a droll incitement to gimcrack Freudianism the ‘Tina’ of the novel is Keith’s mum.