The shock of Martin’s death provoked a confusion of memories, some vivid, some blurred, and seeming too few for me to regain a sense of the times spent with him over close on 30 years, albeit with gaps. I had known him in London and Berlin, even Paris – where we travelled together to a meeting, a first time on the Eurostar for both of us. Listening to the stories of others close to him as we gathered in Berlin for the funeral helped to make him present again, added a little more substance to what I remembered, and has helped to give form to my fragmentary thoughts about our friendship.
In the 80s I saw Martin most often at events such as book launches or in the company of other friends. I got to know him through Malcolm Imrie, with whom I lived at the time. We all reviewed for City Limits and the New Statesman. By the early 90s a lot of things had changed and in those days Martin and I would meet for a drink at the Rose and Crown on the corner of Church Street and Albion Road. We talked about music and films and politics. My student experience at Glasgow University was of a conservative environment, although I knew there had been pockets of dissent invisible to me, so it was cheering to discover that in his years there (overlapping with mine, though we never met) Martin had been an activist, and that his political sympathies lay with the anarchist collectivism that is much more marginal in Britain than on the continent. He maintained his anti-hierarchical values, and he didn’t set store by bourgeois trappings of property ownership or material success. Politics was for him a way of life as well as an object of study. He knew a great deal about German political history in the wake of the First World War, since that was his area of scholarly research.
Invariably, we talked about writers. There was one conversation we had about George Eliot, whom he’d never read; in answer to his questions I recommended Middlemarch, though I don’t know whether he ever got round to reading it. He introduced me to the poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, for which I will always remain grateful (for a long time, until he insisted on its return, I held onto the copy he had lent me of Bachmann’s In the Storm of Roses – a book that was hard to come by in those days of pre-Internet shopping). The Glasgow writers who had made their mark on the London scene interested us both, though our preferences differed: James Kelman was the one Martin most admired, whereas I argued for Alasdair Gray. Maybe Martin thought Gray tended to the whimsical; he liked Kelman’s inventive toughness with language, thought there was more to him, more depth. As for the Edinburgh contingent, I remember him on the phone reading out what is probably the most insalubrious passage from Trainspotting, and relishing it. This was before the wider world had heard of Irving Welsh, for Martin knew about significant authors when they were still obscure. He brought German-language writers to the attention of publishers in London, and it was thanks to the quality of his judgement that Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Muller appeared in translation long before they became Nobel laureates. They were his translations.
The labour of literary translation is demanding, of time and creative energy, and has no corresponding financial reward. We often talked about this, comparing notes on what publishers paid us. The strength of Martin’s commitment to literature, to other writers, and to intellectual integrity, made it hard to earn a living, even though he had solid principles about standing up for the worth of translation as a skill and an art in the face of its widespread undervaluing. Once we were both invited to speak at a translation conference at the UEA in Norwich. We shared a table and the result was a kind of double act. My contribution was anecdotal and inclined towards the lighter side, while Martin offered a strenuously serious view of the translator’s task. Martin’s seriousness was about weighing ideas and experience, being precise in his judgements. Scepticism he conveyed by the mildest of quizzical looks, mere sardonic flickerings, his disagreements lightly offered. He always thought things through, rarely answering in haste. You could find yourself literally hanging on his words. He was serious but never humourless. He had a dry wit; I can’t remember any of those bons mots, but I can still hear his voice.
And Martin himself was a writer, a very good one. I always knew he could turn out a fine essay, an insightful introduction to a book he had translated, but it was a revelation to read the personal pieces he posted on his website in recent years: his memoir in the making. Martin, so reserved and discriminating about what was private, yet exploring his Glasgow childhood and youth with such honesty and grace, writing about his mother and his Berlin granny, confronting himself and his body in the early phases of his illness. These personal prose pieces stand out for their literary qualities, the shaping and subtlety that give Martin’s very particular experiences a wider meditative resonance. Their fearless self-scrutiny should have come as no surprise, for Martin was courageous as well as gifted. He did everything that mattered with a whole heart.
I thought of this aspect of Martin when I came across a poem by Alastair Reid about the virtues of risk-taking and wholeheartedness. Its title is ‘Curiosity’, and it credits cats (as opposed to incurious dogs) with being the great risk-takers, their nine brushes with death paralleled by human capacities to embrace life whatever the cost. Of course, Martin was a great cat lover. Here are the closing lines of Reid’s poem:
A cat-minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth and what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who never
know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.
Martin didn’t proclaim himself. In that, too, he was cat-like.
I remember him at his most serene in the late 90s over many Friday night dinners at Esther’s in West Hampstead and Kentish Town, and whenever he talked about Hanna and, later, his grandchildren. I remember how he liked to drink, and occasionally, to get drunk. He saw the release of intoxication not as regrettable but as the Dyonisiac aspect of being: another one of those things that help us to be fully ourselves.
Some of my most vivid memories are from Berlin: my first visit there, in August 2005, when, with typical kindness, Martin came to meet me at Schoenefeld and we travelled through the rain into what seemed a rather dismal and grey city (with time Berlin grew on me); that first evening, eating at the Prater in Prenzlauer Berg (to which I have since returned more than once), and, on another wet day, visiting the graves of Brecht and Hegel in the Dorotheenstädtische cemetery, with Martin impervious to the downpour. It was wonderful to discover the city with the benefit of his erudition and love for it – even though the deep-fried pasta specialty of a Thuringian restaurant Martin enthused about was not to my liking.
Clearest of all is July 2013, the memory of sitting on the veranda of the house opposite the stork tower in Ringenwalde, with Kalman wandering among the flowers and vegetable plants and the flight of a stork overhead. In between lunch and high tea Martin, suntanned and amazingly energetic after more than a year of repeated surgery and exhausting treatments, took us on a circular walk that skirted vast rolling fields along a path lined with fruit trees, from which he plucked berries or small unripe plums and offered them to us. These long fields had been collective farms in the GDR and were now farmers’ co-ops. From the walk’s furthest point we could see Poland just across the ridge. This entire landscape had a deep atmosphere, it felt saturated with history. Through it, I later discovered, Russian tanks had converged on Berlin in 1945. Remembering it leaves me with a strong sense of Martin’s affinities to place. It also makes me think of how much our intimate histories have their source in History, prior to our entry into the world. From across that ridge in May 1945, in what was then East Prussia, my own father made his way from a German POW camp to the American lines, all the time afraid of running into Russian troops unfamiliar with Allied uniforms. He may even have walked that same terrain we walked that day.
It’s in the nature of memory that it’s fractured and elusive. As Martin did, I love the musical films of Jacques Demy. We probably talked about them on one of our pub meetings; I’m sure we must have, for it struck a chord when, in an email at the end of May this year, Martin told me he was looking forward to seeing Demy’s Une Chambre en ville (about a dockers’ strike in Nantes). I’m also sure I once knew which was his favourite Demy film, yet of this I have no memory. Perhaps someone else will know and I’ll eventually find out; I suspect it’s different from mine: Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. I remember him telling me that his favourite opera was Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. I wonder now whether he knew the music from childhood, or whether his fondness for it was primarily connected to the Brothers Grimm. More likely is some intricate relation between the two.
Whenever someone dies a whole unique world of memory, emotion, intellect, imagining and dream he carried with him also disappears; a universe of mind and perception. But it can live on in other ways. The life Martin shared with us, his friends and family, as well as what he wrote, will keep his remarkable spirit alive – for a very long time, I hope. I wish I could return to those conversations of which my memory is now so ragged. Even more, I wish it were still possible to continue them.
Liz Heron, November 2014
Category >> Tributes