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
