Let Me Count the Times

21/07/2023

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    Martin Amis’s 'Let Me Count the Times' might wish to work chiefly as a provocative account of an onanist. But we will put aside for the moment its explicit subject matter and attend to its no less explicit style. Here is a story that doesn’t just fret over a man’s sexual desires; it also calculates them as Amis explores the permutational. Calculation and permutation aren’t quite the same thing, but they can usefully be utilised in conjunction to comprehend literature as more than a literary form. It can also be, just a little, a mathematical one. Amis may have said that “I really do hate Beckett's prose: every sentence is an assault on my ear” (Experience). But whatever is good about ‘Let Me Count the Times’ probably owes a debt to the Irish writer, even if it is a loan taken out in a literary derivative where the original debtor would be hard to trace. We can at least try. 

    Beckett along with other writers of the inter and post-war years was interested in using mathematical and ludic principles to escape from literary cliches. A movement formed in 1960 called Oulipo (whose acronym translates as the workshop of potential literature). It was created by novelist Raymon Queneau and chemical engineer Francois Le Lionnais. As Lamprini Papathanasi proposes, “the Oulipian philosophy follows a system of mathematic techniques that create this amusing self-imposed challenge, based on cryptograms, constraints, algorithms, and other strict rules, that as Georges Perec, renowned OuLiPo member and novelist wrote: ‘I set myself rules in order to be free.’” (Arcadia) Beckett, never part of the group, had for many years been interested in the intricacies of the numerically possible. When in one short story, ‘The Lost Ones’, someone noticed an error in the dimensions of a cylinder characters exist within, Beckett replied, “after all, you can’t play fast and loose with pi.” (Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose) Writing on Beckett’s work, Gilles Deleuze saw the mathematical in Beckett, saying that “the combinatorial is the art or science of exhausting the possible through inclusive disjunctions. But only an exhausted person can exhaust the possible because he has renounced all need, preference, goal or signification. Only the exhausted person is sufficiently disinterested, sufficiently scrupulous. Indeed, he is obliged to replace his plans with tables and diagrams that are devoid of all meaning.” (‘The Exhausted’) If Deleuze talks about the combinatorial in Beckett as a condition of exhaustion, Amis’s Vernon arrives at it.

   At the beginning of ‘Let Me Counts the Times’, Vernon is all calculation, a businessman devoting a bit of time at work to divvying up how often and in what ways he has been having sex with his wife over the years. “Vernon made love to his wife three and a half times a week and that was all right. For some reason, making love always averaged out that way. Normally - though by no means invariably — they made love every second night.” He then starts working on more specific sexual activities and arrives at numbers like 60.8333 times a year and 1.11698717. Amis, who’s never been shy with a thesaurus, here spends much time with the calculator. If he uses a wordfinder chiefly to explore rhythm, saying when “you’re unhappy with the word you’ve chosen not because of its meaning, but because of its rhythm. You may want a monosyllable for this concept, or you may want a trisyllable,” then we may ask what purpose does the calculator serve. Chiefly, it works as a comedic function: it shows Vernon as a man who has a head for figures but they are usually inclined to take numerical rather than bodily form. What happens when the figures become bodily and yet abstract, when he starts becoming interested in the imaginary body first of his wife and then moves on to his wife’s friends and family? He then sleeps with the great heroines of literature, working through the Shakespearian, Cordelia, Ophelia, Desdemona and Lady Macbeth, then devotes time to the 18th and 19th-century novel — whacking the bishop over Becky Sharp, Clarissa and Pamela. 

    Oulipo's Italo Calvino wrote a book called The Uses of Literature but he didn’t quite have this in mind and much of the story’s appeal, such as it is, rests on its facetiousness. When in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint the central character reckons a slice of liver needn’t only be a great source of iron, he gave that humble organ a place alongside another that scandalised the public. As Jacqueline Susann famously said: “Roth is a good novelist but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.” The book’s use of the liver was as controversial an example of defamiliarision as literature had yet provided. While the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky saw that vital to good prose was how a writer made images anew, who took common objects and made them surprising, it seems very unlikely indeed that he could have imagined a slice of liver sexualised would serve this defamiliarising purpose many years later.

     Amis seeks to do something similar by taking the literary canon and making it fodder for fantasy in a determined rejection of the Kantian. Kant’s point about aesthetics was that it was disinterested: that “according to Kant’s “surface” account of pleasure in beauty, it is not mere sensuous gratification, as in the pleasure of sensation, or of eating and drinking. Unlike such pleasures, pleasure in beauty is occasioned by the perceptual representation of a thing.” (Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy) Amis wonders what happens when you take that disinterest and make it very interested indeed. If Vernon were merely getting excited over magazines to be found on the top shelf of a newsagent, there wouldn’t be much provocation. But to get worked up over material to be found in that most august place, serious literature, is to suggest, as with Roth’s liver, nothing is sacred. Everything is up for grabs, so to speak.  

     What we have then is defamiliarisation, an insistent sensitisation making pleasurable what should be merely comprehended rather than coveted, meeting the calculative and the permutational. The purpose of the story is to make us think anew the limits of pleasure and the vastness of fantasy. It appears that Vernon has to exhaust the possibilities available to his imagination before he can return to the very body that had for years given him all the pleasure he needed. The narrator tells us that Vernon’s wife [who remains unnamed] was the only woman Vernon had ever known” and, instead of seeking pleasure in adultery, he finds it in the accumulation of virtual lovers where he needn’t entertain the logistics of a clandestine encounter for two. Yet Amis nevertheless plays with the tropes of adulterous romance all the better to generate that facetious comedic effect. Vernon starts pleasuring himself during that most likely avenue for an affair — a business trip. When he returns home after “having done it an incredible 18 times in 36 hours”, his wife asks him how the trip went. He tells her it was tiring but successful. “Yes, you do look a bit whacked. We’d better get you home and tuck you up in bed for a while.” This may be the knowing humour of Benny Hill and Carry-On movies since we know the whacked-ness has come from whacking off. The last thing he needs is to be tucked into a bed when he has all too rarely left the one in the hotel. 

    However, Amis would no doubt see it as taking tired tropes and making them novel by tweaking the expectation. When Vernon gets home he realises he needn’t seek solipsistic pleasure in the conservatism of the bedroom. He could do it anywhere: “with scandalous laughter he dragged himself out protesting to the garden shed and did it there. He did it lying on the kitchen table. For a while he took to doing it in the open air; in windy parks, behind hoardings in the town…” Amis doesn’t expect us to believe a moment of it; what he wants to do is to take convention and make it pliable not plausible, making it comedically contrary rather dramatically dreary. All those novels by James Salter, John Updike and John Cheever about loveless marriages energised by the thrill of an affair that creates chaos in a bourgeois life is passe — 60s adultery that gave way to 70s free love means that a short story written in 1980 ought to be doing something fresh.  

    However, this is perhaps where Amis’s techniques are flatter than the tropes they seek to replace, where the defamiliarisation becomes too quickly a refamiliarisation, and where the combinatory elements, the calculative and the permutational, all arrive at the tidy. If TS Elliot can say in Little Gidding “we shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time”, this is where Vernon arrives, after his Odyssean journey through the various sirens of family, friends, Hollywood actresses and literary heroines. He is back making love to his wife after DH Lawrence’s adventurousness was too much for him, and where premature ejaculation and impotence threatened. But this isn’t a return to the consolations of the marital bed. It seems the wife is as keen to do all the really mucky things that Vernon would very occasionally do with her in the past, and could do with whoever he liked in his imagination.  

   When after this session he wakes up the next morning before his wife, he quietly makes breakfast and wonders what state she will be in when she surfaces. “He had an image of his wife coming into the kitchen — on crutches, her face black and blue.” But no, there she is, saying the night before was lovely. They discuss the previous evening in coy terms and accept that pleasure like that shouldn’t be indulged too often. “It would take the fun out of it.” The story ends with Vernon and his wife back in the bedroom: “he’d had his kicks: it was only right that the loved one should now have hers.”

      There is something amusing about a story that turns the messy reality of an affair into a whimsical account of solitary pleasure, just as there is fun too in turning complex permutations of a Perec into the casually combinatory account of exhausting the possibilities the mind can come up with, sexually, before returning to the marital fold. But we might muse for a moment over the Lawrentian that allows Vernon to realise that perversion has its limits. Benjamin Kunkel quotes Amis saying: “when I reflect that D. H. Lawrence, perhaps the most foul-tempered writer of all time (beater of women and animals, racist, anti-Semite, etc., etc.), was also, perhaps, the most extravagantly slapdash exponent of language, I feel the lure of some immense generalisation about probity and prose.” (New Yorker) Here we have Amis taking a writer whose sensibility is much richer and deeper than his own, and domesticating him with a few lines about morality and good writing. 

    It is as if Amis was more interested in the play on probity and prose than on the ideas that might be explored in utilising them. More than any other British writer Lawrence wasn’t too concerned with assumed values of propriety and the prosaic but it seems Amis very much is, even if he writes a story that may initially appear a work of great provocation. It is instead one that absorbs the exploratory elements of literature in the 20th century and concludes by saying what a man needs is a woman who knows her way around the bedroom and not just the kitchen. She might not even need a name. It wouldn’t be fair to add that the story originally found itself in a smut magazine but it does some oddly apt that it was published initially in Penthouse, where Amis’s prose would have sat next to the very figures Vernon couldn’t quite countenance. “Why should pretty young girls take their clothes off for money like that, like that?” Vernon muses, before finding more appropriate fantasies amongst those who could be accessed without shame and with the aid of a library card. It is an amusing irony that Amis’s story ended up in the pages of a magazine his central character is too embarrassed to buy, but that is the nature of Amis’s calculation: that we need to see Vernon as a one-woman man and that while Desdemona and Becky Sharp are acceptable dalliances, the reader might baulk at too degenerate a manifestation.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

Let Me Count the Times

Martin Amis's 'Let Me Count the Times' might wish to work chiefly as a provocative account of an onanist. But we will put aside for the moment its explicit subject matter and attend to its no less explicit style. Here is a story that doesn't just fret over a man's sexual desires; it also calculates them as Amis explores the permutational. Calculation and permutation aren't quite the same thing, but they can usefully be utilised in conjunction to comprehend literature as more than a literary form. It can also be, just a little, a mathematical one. Amis may have said that "I really do hate Beckett's prose: every sentence is an assault on my ear" (Experience). But whatever is good about 'Let Me Count the Times' probably owes a debt to the Irish writer, even if it is a loan taken out in a literary derivative where the original debtor would be hard to trace. We can at least try.

Beckett along with other writers of the inter and post-war years was interested in using mathematical and ludic principles to escape from literary cliches. A movement formed in 1960 called Oulipo (whose acronym translates as the workshop of potential literature). It was created by novelist Raymon Queneau and chemical engineer Francois Le Lionnais. As Lamprini Papathanasi proposes, "the Oulipian philosophy follows a system of mathematic techniques that create this amusing self-imposed challenge, based on cryptograms, constraints, algorithms, and other strict rules, that as Georges Perec, renowned OuLiPo member and novelist wrote: 'I set myself rules in order to be free.'" (Arcadia) Beckett, never part of the group, had for many years been interested in the intricacies of the numerically possible. When in one short story, 'The Lost Ones', someone noticed an error in the dimensions of a cylinder characters exist within, Beckett replied, "after all, you can't play fast and loose with pi." (Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose) Writing on Beckett's work, Gilles Deleuze saw the mathematical in Beckett, saying that "the combinatorial is the art or science of exhausting the possible through inclusive disjunctions. But only an exhausted person can exhaust the possible because he has renounced all need, preference, goal or signification. Only the exhausted person is sufficiently disinterested, sufficiently scrupulous. Indeed, he is obliged to replace his plans with tables and diagrams that are devoid of all meaning." ('The Exhausted') If Deleuze talks about the combinatorial in Beckett as a condition of exhaustion, Amis's Vernon arrives at it.

At the beginning of 'Let Me Counts the Times', Vernon is all calculation, a businessman devoting a bit of time at work to divvying up how often and in what ways he has been having sex with his wife over the years. "Vernon made love to his wife three and a half times a week and that was all right. For some reason, making love always averaged out that way. Normally - though by no means invariably they made love every second night." He then starts working on more specific sexual activities and arrives at numbers like 60.8333 times a year and 1.11698717. Amis, who's never been shy with a thesaurus, here spends much time with the calculator. If he uses a wordfinder chiefly to explore rhythm, saying when "you're unhappy with the word you've chosen not because of its meaning, but because of its rhythm. You may want a monosyllable for this concept, or you may want a trisyllable," then we may ask what purpose does the calculator serve. Chiefly, it works as a comedic function: it shows Vernon as a man who has a head for figures but they are usually inclined to take numerical rather than bodily form. What happens when the figures become bodily and yet abstract, when he starts becoming interested in the imaginary body first of his wife and then moves on to his wife's friends and family? He then sleeps with the great heroines of literature, working through the Shakespearian, Cordelia, Ophelia, Desdemona and Lady Macbeth, then devotes time to the 18th and 19th-century novel whacking the bishop over Becky Sharp, Clarissa and Pamela.

Oulipo's Italo Calvino wrote a book called The Uses of Literature but he didn't quite have this in mind and much of the story's appeal, such as it is, rests on its facetiousness. When in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint the central character reckons a slice of liver needn't only be a great source of iron, he gave that humble organ a place alongside another that scandalised the public. As Jacqueline Susann famously said: "Roth is a good novelist but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him." The book's use of the liver was as controversial an example of defamiliarision as literature had yet provided. While the Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky saw that vital to good prose was how a writer made images anew, who took common objects and made them surprising, it seems very unlikely indeed that he could have imagined a slice of liver sexualised would serve this defamiliarising purpose many years later.

Amis seeks to do something similar by taking the literary canon and making it fodder for fantasy in a determined rejection of the Kantian. Kant's point about aesthetics was that it was disinterested: that "according to Kant's "surface" account of pleasure in beauty, it is not mere sensuous gratification, as in the pleasure of sensation, or of eating and drinking. Unlike such pleasures, pleasure in beauty is occasioned by the perceptual representation of a thing." (Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy) Amis wonders what happens when you take that disinterest and make it very interested indeed. If Vernon were merely getting excited over magazines to be found on the top shelf of a newsagent, there wouldn't be much provocation. But to get worked up over material to be found in that most august place, serious literature, is to suggest, as with Roth's liver, nothing is sacred. Everything is up for grabs, so to speak.

What we have then is defamiliarisation, an insistent sensitisation making pleasurable what should be merely comprehended rather than coveted, meeting the calculative and the permutational. The purpose of the story is to make us think anew the limits of pleasure and the vastness of fantasy. It appears that Vernon has to exhaust the possibilities available to his imagination before he can return to the very body that had for years given him all the pleasure he needed. The narrator tells us that Vernon's wife [who remains unnamed] was the only woman Vernon had ever known" and, instead of seeking pleasure in adultery, he finds it in the accumulation of virtual lovers where he needn't entertain the logistics of a clandestine encounter for two. Yet Amis nevertheless plays with the tropes of adulterous romance all the better to generate that facetious comedic effect. Vernon starts pleasuring himself during that most likely avenue for an affair a business trip. When he returns home after "having done it an incredible 18 times in 36 hours", his wife asks him how the trip went. He tells her it was tiring but successful. "Yes, you do look a bit whacked. We'd better get you home and tuck you up in bed for a while." This may be the knowing humour of Benny Hill and Carry-On movies since we know the whacked-ness has come from whacking off. The last thing he needs is to be tucked into a bed when he has all too rarely left the one in the hotel.

However, Amis would no doubt see it as taking tired tropes and making them novel by tweaking the expectation. When Vernon gets home he realises he needn't seek solipsistic pleasure in the conservatism of the bedroom. He could do it anywhere: "with scandalous laughter he dragged himself out protesting to the garden shed and did it there. He did it lying on the kitchen table. For a while he took to doing it in the open air; in windy parks, behind hoardings in the town..." Amis doesn't expect us to believe a moment of it; what he wants to do is to take convention and make it pliable not plausible, making it comedically contrary rather dramatically dreary. All those novels by James Salter, John Updike and John Cheever about loveless marriages energised by the thrill of an affair that creates chaos in a bourgeois life is passe 60s adultery that gave way to 70s free love means that a short story written in 1980 ought to be doing something fresh.

However, this is perhaps where Amis's techniques are flatter than the tropes they seek to replace, where the defamiliarisation becomes too quickly a refamiliarisation, and where the combinatory elements, the calculative and the permutational, all arrive at the tidy. If TS Elliot can say in Little Gidding "we shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time", this is where Vernon arrives, after his Odyssean journey through the various sirens of family, friends, Hollywood actresses and literary heroines. He is back making love to his wife after DH Lawrence's adventurousness was too much for him, and where premature ejaculation and impotence threatened. But this isn't a return to the consolations of the marital bed. It seems the wife is as keen to do all the really mucky things that Vernon would very occasionally do with her in the past, and could do with whoever he liked in his imagination.

When after this session he wakes up the next morning before his wife, he quietly makes breakfast and wonders what state she will be in when she surfaces. "He had an image of his wife coming into the kitchen on crutches, her face black and blue." But no, there she is, saying the night before was lovely. They discuss the previous evening in coy terms and accept that pleasure like that shouldn't be indulged too often. "It would take the fun out of it." The story ends with Vernon and his wife back in the bedroom: "he'd had his kicks: it was only right that the loved one should now have hers."

There is something amusing about a story that turns the messy reality of an affair into a whimsical account of solitary pleasure, just as there is fun too in turning complex permutations of a Perec into the casually combinatory account of exhausting the possibilities the mind can come up with, sexually, before returning to the marital fold. But we might muse for a moment over the Lawrentian that allows Vernon to realise that perversion has its limits. Benjamin Kunkel quotes Amis saying: "when I reflect that D. H. Lawrence, perhaps the most foul-tempered writer of all time (beater of women and animals, racist, anti-Semite, etc., etc.), was also, perhaps, the most extravagantly slapdash exponent of language, I feel the lure of some immense generalisation about probity and prose." (New Yorker) Here we have Amis taking a writer whose sensibility is much richer and deeper than his own, and domesticating him with a few lines about morality and good writing.

It is as if Amis was more interested in the play on probity and prose than on the ideas that might be explored in utilising them. More than any other British writer Lawrence wasn't too concerned with assumed values of propriety and the prosaic but it seems Amis very much is, even if he writes a story that may initially appear a work of great provocation. It is instead one that absorbs the exploratory elements of literature in the 20th century and concludes by saying what a man needs is a woman who knows her way around the bedroom and not just the kitchen. She might not even need a name. It wouldn't be fair to add that the story originally found itself in a smut magazine but it does some oddly apt that it was published initially in Penthouse, where Amis's prose would have sat next to the very figures Vernon couldn't quite countenance. "Why should pretty young girls take their clothes off for money like that, like that?" Vernon muses, before finding more appropriate fantasies amongst those who could be accessed without shame and with the aid of a library card. It is an amusing irony that Amis's story ended up in the pages of a magazine his central character is too embarrassed to buy, but that is the nature of Amis's calculation: that we need to see Vernon as a one-woman man and that while Desdemona and Becky Sharp are acceptable dalliances, the reader might baulk at too degenerate a manifestation.


© Tony McKibbin