was 19. Martin was 23. I was still at Oxford. Martin had just finished, but not yet published, The Rachel Papers. We started chatting at a book party about our favourite magazine, the New Statesman. The byline I most admired was that of someone called Bruno Holbrooke. Who was he, did Martin know? There was a pause and a sly smile. Then Martin grandly pronounced: “I. Am. Bruno Holbrooke.”
It was part of Martin’s comic traction to cast himself as a sexual flop in his youth. Opening his memoir-novel, I was startled to read that, quote, “Tina rode into town and rescued me from Larkinland. If she hadn’t, I might still be there.”Gallant, but it’s not what I recall. When I met him, he had already broken a heart or two at Oxford. There was also the daunting glamour of his literary parentage.
At every one of the magazines I edited myself for the next four decades, the goal was to get Martin to write for me. And, loyally, he did. Whenever his copy arrived, it was Christmas Day in the office: so eagerly awaited, never a disappointment. Remember his unforgettable profile of Truman Capote? It appeared in one of my first issues of Tatler. “Never mind the interview. Let’s call an ambulance,” Martin wrote, on first sighting the ruined literary genius.
Last February Isabel arranged for me to visit Martin at their home in Brooklyn. They loved each other devotedly, to the death. It hurt to see him so frail, but he was still Martin, undiminished: “I went in to have this special chemo treatment,” he said. “The doctor’s office was full of posters of happy cured people,” The italics dripped with the delighted disgust that Martin reserved for that wishful – and peculiarly American – fraudulence.