Martin Amis - stylist extraordinaire

Martin Amis’ unexpected death has produced an outpouring of admiration bordering on love. One of the rare exceptions was Terry Eagleton whose reflections drew attention to the liberalism underpinning the clique to which he belonged

English culture has produced a number of cliques and coteries in its day, from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Bloomsbury Group to Macspaunday (otherwise known as the Thirties poets Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis). The Angry Young Men of the Fifties weren’t exactly a clique since they scarcely knew each other, and apart from being young they shared almost nothing in common, least of all anger. Several of them ended up as curmudgeonly old buffers with dubious views about women and ethnicity. Among the latter was Kingsley Amis, father of the novelist Martin Amis, who died last week. Amis Senior moved from the high-spirited iconoclasm of Lucky Jim to a Right-wing clubman’s view of the world, and we shall see later that in one respect at least, Amis Junior followed suit.

Amis’s own clique — Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Clive James — were a formidably talented bunch of wits and whiz kids, almost all of them products of Oxbridge in an era of intense cultural creativity, the Sixties and Seventies. Between them they have produced superlative fiction, caustic satire, and devastating humour. Hitchens, who wrote that the life of the “poxed and suppurating” John F. Kennedy was remarkable not for being cut short but for lasting so long, described Prince Charles (as he was then) as a “morose, bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts”. Ian Fleming was “a heavy sadist and narcissist and all-round pervert” with a particular penchant for the human bottom.

Most commentaries, however, have drawn attention to his style and the sheer originality of his sentences. Writing on Saul Bellow’sThe Adventures of Augie March, he provided the most succinct description of his literary credo:

“Style, of course, is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception. We are fond of separating style and content (for the purposes of analysis, and so on), but they aren’t separable: they come from the same place. And style is morality.”

Amis always considered himself a satirist, which is to say a moralist, and his war against immorality revealed itself in another war in The War Against Cliché - Michael Crichton’s dinosaur epic “The Lost World” is for him a “strange terrain of one-page chapters, one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences” in which the reader encounters “herds of clichés, roaming free. You will listen in ‘stunned silence’ to an ‘unearthly cry’ or a ‘deafening roar’. Raptors are ‘rapacious’. Reptiles are ‘reptilian’. Pain is ‘searing’.”

Amis’s aversion to this kind of writing was almost pathological, and it is no coincidence that one of the hallmarks of his own style was his use of modifiers, which he unmoors from their usual contexts. So we get “gentle coma” and “grim approval” and “glare of congeniality.” He forced the reader to rethink first principles.

He does this because he understood that the dangers of bad prose are not merely aesthetic. “Cliché spreads inwards from the language of the book to its heart,” he wrote in an essay on Fay Weldon. “Cliché always does.” It is a mental rot that, like poison ivy, eventually smothers and poisons the body it is attached to. When you flick through “The Lost World”, you realise that you are not reading a novel in any real sense of the word (especially if you boil down the term “novel” to its first principles). What you are reading are strings of clichés held together by coordinating conjunctions and laughable dialogue.

In “Politics and the English language”, Orwell described the act of “throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you… and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.” It is at this point, Orwell wrote, that “the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear”. For Orwell, “political chaos is connected with the decay of language”.

Amis never liked Orwell, throwing away 1984 after reading an unpardonable cliché — “ruggedly handsome” — on the first page. “The man can’t write worth a damn,” was his verdict. But I think the two men shared an understanding of what happens when, as Orwell wrote, language is reduced to thoughtless phrases bolted together “like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house”. Clichéd language is the perfect vessel in which to transmit an ideology that resists scrutiny and relies on obfuscation to promulgate. For both Amis and Orwell, bad writing is a form of unthinking that can end in a callousness to human cruelty and the horror it wreaks.

I have to confess that I wasn’t a fan of his novels – but I loved his non-fiction, starting with The Moronic Inferno in which he collected the assessments he had written of the various American authors he had grown to respect in what ultimately became his home

And it was James Wood, the UK born New Yorker’s literary critic whose tribute superbly captures the reasons for Martin Amis’ power

He combined many of the classic elements of English literary comedy: exaggeration, and its dry parent, understatement; picaresque farce; caustic authorial intervention; caricature and grotesquerie; a wonderful ear for ironic registration. Take that phrase, “a work of colossal administration.” Sterne, Fielding, Austen—above all, Jane Austen—might have recognized its mixture of cruelty and mercy. The Austen of “Emma,” the satirist who describes the irritating Mrs. Elton’s large bonnet and basket as her “apparatus of happiness,” would have seen exactly what Amis is doing here. To fall to the ground massively, slowly, with great difficulty, is an act of labor that wins from the writer that cumbersome word “administration.” And the cool Latinate tease of it is funny. But it also hints, more tenderly, at what will be needed of us—our administration, as we struggle to lift the almost deadweight up off the street. The entire drawling phrase ironically distances something that’s unbearably painful and intimate.

The Englishman’s adoration of the foreignness of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, the comedian’s yearning for seriousness and soul, the borrowing of deep “themes” (nuclear disarmament, the Holocaust, Stalinist terror, Islamic extremism)—these obsessions were all surplus to his true literary vitality, which was comic and farcical. Like a number of postwar English writers, he chased after the things he flagrantly lacked, idealizing the qualities he found most difficult, or was simply unwilling, to enact in his own literary practice. (Iris Murdoch’s admiration for the vital and utterly free characterization of Tolstoy and Shakespeare might be another example of this odd English questing.)

The Guardian tribute also puts it nicely

It is often said that this generation of writers was the closest the books world gets to having rock stars, then Amis was Mick Jagger. Those 70s photographs (The Rachel Papers years) of him pouting extravagantly at the camera, cigarette dangling – you can almost smell the smoke and ambition – announced a changing of the guard. His pose, like his prose, poised somewhere between provocation and seduction. Where the literary world had been grey and tweedy, presided over by ageing grandees (Amis Sr, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Iris Murdoch), now it was young and outrageously brash, and Amis was the frontman.

The insolence, the silliness, the seriousness, the grotesqueness, the erudition and audacity were all swept up in those inimitable sentences and corralled into order by his cleverness with form. As Enright summed up in her review: “Damn, that fool can write.” And, like an imposing building slightly worn with time, Amis changed the landscape of literature so dramatically that it is hard to remember what it looked like before. And for all the macho-ness of his writing, his influence can be seen in writers of the generation that followed, for instance his friend Zadie Smith.

“He was a talismanic figure for my generation of novelists, and an inspiration to me personally,” says another friend, Kazuo Ishiguro. “He was famous, notorious even, for his biting satire and swaggering prose, but there was always a surprising tenderness not far beneath that surface. His characters were always yearning for love and connection. I believe ultimately his work will age well, growing over the years.” We will be reading him for decades, weather permitting.

But to go back to 2009 and Amis’s closing words on Updike: “His style was one of compulsive and unstoppable vividness and musicality. Several times a day you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself, ‘How would Updike have done it?’ This is a very cold day for literature.” And so it is today. Younger writers will ask: “How would Amis have done it?” He was exceptionally sui generis.

Another author recounts the impact Amis made on him when he was only an aspiring author – once more emphasising the generosity of the man

By way of unpacking for the newly Amis-curious what pleasure his best work brings to those who admire it, here are three great generosities that are as alive in the style as they were in the man.

The first is to do with straightforward abundance. There’s a ravishing luxuriousness to all his writing. You get to revel and recline in the great opulent apparel of our language as if it were yours to drape yourself in all along. Which, of course, it is. In this way, he generously returns to you what you feel you have lost by hair-shirting your way through other writers of various pinch, beef and earnest. You feel more subtle in his company, you feel your own vocabulary expand, your sensibility for words is reconjured, your vow of love for the English language is remade; in the moment of reading his best work, you fee  richer.

The second is to do with his scrupulousness and precision. Leaving aside macro concerns, you can as a reader always rest assured that there is no other British prose writer who has taken quite so much care over the word-by-word selection that goes into making a sentence. His status as a novelist is mercurial but his paragraphs are still the best in recent English. Most of this hand-to-hand stuff is intuitive for him (as was apparent when he spoke), but he also checked and double checked and read and reread his work until its sound and rhythm and timbre was (as he felt it) perfect. For many readers this assiduousness is strangely relaxing. Relaxing because you know you can trust him; because you never have the feeling of being let down on the sentence level by a cliché, or a repetition, or some other infelicity that breaks the all-important spell of authorial command. 

The third generosity is to do with exuberance – an intoxicating joy, a pleasure, a live kinetic vitality that lives word to word in his work. As your author-guide, he is forever delighting you with unexpected phrase-making, with freshness, with ingenuity, with invention and ingeniousness. In his other masterpiece, "Money" you laugh, you gasp, you shake your head, you rush towards the next sentence at the same time as you back up to marvel at the last. Think again about the meaning of this word, he seems to urge the reader, and then look at this word next to that word. I never wholly bought his Nabokovian style-is-morality schtick. But I do believe that his work is existentially incandescent only because it is stylistically incandescent. 

This last quality – of exuberance and spirit; the incandescent style – is more in the tradition of the poets than the novelists; it is also much more in the tradition of the 18th century – Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding and the gang – than the writers he is often compared to – Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse. If you combine these thoughts, the figure who comes to mind is the great 18th-century poet Alexander Pope. And, indeed, I have always thought that Amis has a great deal in common with Pope’s sensibility. The way Pope is a flat-out genius with words and in such Bach-like musical control; the way he is unsurpassable as a compassionate-but-mighty-and-scathing satirist; the way he is unable to write about matters of the heart organically; the way he is endlessly funny and arch and sly and collusive and playful; most of all, the way he loves and takes care of his readers. From the opening of Pope’s “An Essay on Man”:

Let us (since life can little more supply  
Than just to look about us and to die)  
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;  
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;  
A wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot;  
Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.  
Together let us beat this ample field,  
Try what the open, what the covert yield;  
The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore  
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;  
Eye Nature’s walks, shoot folly as it flies,  
And catch the manners living as they rise;  
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can…

Martin would love that invitational “Together let us…” and the way all those different meanings are simultaneously alive in the single line as it runs – beckoning us – forward: “Together let us beat this ample field.” Come on in. Come on in.

Taken altogether these three qualities represent what, I think, is at the heart of Amis’s work: a delighted, forensic, monumental and epic commitment to language itself. That’s the quiddity. That’s the core reason so many writers and journalists enjoy reading him. And that’s the reason I don’t think the distinction between the non-fiction and the fiction holds. Because all his writing is like that. Sure, the non-fiction feels more anchored because of its ostensible subject. And, yes, the bad fiction feels worse than it is because its subject is so obviously ostensible. But really the subject in either case was not the subject; the true subject was always the language – its meaning and its music. And – about this – Amis is never anything other than serious, devout, sincere, interesting, sublime.

On the way out the second time, I was fixed. I picked up Experience again from the side table and this time boldly asked him to sign it. I’m chary of overstatement and – thinking about that day – I’m still not sure if this is a failing or a virtue. But in those few hours, he restored my faith. Writing fiction, publishing, editing, magazines, poetry – they’re all such fragile businesses and yet he was absolutely certain that they mattered, that their power was not only purposeful but transcendent. I soon began again on another novel. And this – my “third”, the next thing I wrote – became my debut. It wasn’t until a couple of days later, though, that I opened up Experience. Only then did I read what he had written. “To Ed, keep going, Martin Amis.” Such a kind and generous thing to say. The same thing he had been saying to me all afternoon. I have the inscription in front of me now.

update

Even the NEw Left Review for into the act https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/high-flown-english