Martin Amis (1949-2023)
May 21, 2023
I GOT up at around 5 to tend to my hangover. In the bathroom, I found myself thinking about Kingsley Amis and his famous discipline, able every morning without fail to shrug off the previous night’s carousing and devote four hours to the typewriter. I then click on the Guardian and learn that his son, Martin Amis, has died of oesophagal cancer, the same affliction that killed his great friend Christopher Hitchens. Amis was 73, the same age that Kingsley died.
I am unashamed to say that I loved Martin Amis unconditionally. For me, this is one of those devastating celebrity deaths, like Bowie. I was often disheartened by how great he was, and how precisely he was able to vivify his thoughts, but looking back through my diaries, I notice that my writing actually improved whenever I read him. It was as if I felt compelled to try to impress him whenever I was in the proximity of his prose. After completing what turned out to be his final work, Inside Story, back in 2020, I wrote with brio about Trump’s bout with COVID-19.
It is nearly three years since Inside Story was published. This strange, uneven but utterly mesmerising semi-memoir demonstrated how Amis was immersed and enmeshed and imbricated in literature his entire life. It was clearly valedictory, and served as a final tribute to his friendships, particularly with Hitchens and Saul Bellow. Above all else, beyond the prodigious descriptive skills, Amis was blessed with a preternatural talent for friendship, which is no small thing. “Love gets put in the writing, and love gets taken out,” he wrote.
On Twitter, many admirers are also sharing an excellent line from his spellbinding Experience, perhaps one of the finest autobiographies ever written:
The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending.
He returns to this theme in Inside Story. “Life is artistically lifeless, and its only unifying theme is death.” Art, always, is the redeemer. Despite all the cynical streetwise secularism in his writing, Amis sought the “universal”. It was the underlying theme of The Information, played out in a battle between two novelists who were both worthless in diametrically different ways.
This is what happens when someone I admire dies: I don’t know what to do with myself. The world seems unsettled, knocked out of its equilibrium. Over the years, many of my own thoughts were second-hand and pilfered from Martin Amis. I could quote bits of The Information at length. A lot of my literary enthusiasms were borrowed from him, including Elmore Leonard but also (when I could spare the effort required) Saul Bellow.
I still cherish my broken-spined old hardback copy of The War Against Cliché. I don’t think there is a book that I have consulted more often over the years, and I sometimes catch myself emulating some of its perfectly weighted sentence structures. One famous line springs to mind:
Norman Mailer’s new book bears all the signs - all the watermarks, all the heraldry - of a writer faced with an alimony bill of $500,000 a year.
And there’s another, in the same Mailer review, that I have used in one way or another on many an occasion:
He isn’t frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn’t frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn’t frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses. Perhaps he ought to be a little less frightened of being frightened.
In his essays and reviews and travelogues and interviews, it feels that everything I have ever wanted to say has already been said more trenchantly by Amis. I come across the following, from an interview he gave to Word magazine in 2012:
Until you’re 45 or so, you still think you’re going to live forever. You look in the mirror and think, ‘Well, most people die, but in your case… clever you. Lucky you!’ And then, you pass 60, and you think, ‘Hang on, this’ll end in tears.’ But ageing isn’t the steady accumulation of wisdom or knowledge. It’s constantly improvising to meet new circumstances. We’re like children all our lives, because every 10 years we have to acquaint ourselves with a new set of rules.
ON Twitter, I come across an old interview with Martin Amis where he talks fluently and elegantly about his lifelong war against cliché:
Whenever you write ‘the heat was stifling’ or ‘she rummaged through her handbag’, this is dead freight. And by the way, the war is extended into another sphere. People who use these moldering novelties - like ‘seen it, done it, got the T-shirt,’ ‘he went ballistic’, ‘I don’t think so’, ‘hello’ - all that: these are dead words. They are herd words. What cliché is, is herd writing, herd thinking and herd feeling. And the writer has got to look for weight of voice and freshness and make it your own.
I recall the stock responses that irk me so much. The single word “this” on social media posts to convey agreement. “It is what it is.” The phrase “you ok hun” still sends me reeling in delirious rage to the nearest sickbag.
Meanwhile, Terry Eagleton, who had a famous run-in with Amis a few years ago, writes in Unherd that Amis was part of a coterie of writers who didn’t really have much to say, however well they were able to say it. The likes of Amis, McEwan, Barnes, and even Rushdie had given up on the notion of the artist as visionary, Eagleton claims in a column entitled “The liberal complacency of Martin Amis”. They “portray a late-capitalist world which shows up the bankruptcy of liberal values, yet they have no real alternative to such values themselves.” Repeating a common charge against Amis, Eagleton accuses him of elevating style over substance, though at least the style was undeniable:
Style in Amis is what rises triumphantly above the squalor of his material. Its shapeliness, equipoise and finesse constitute an implicit critique of contemporary culture, which saved him from anything as uncool as having to pass explicit moral judgements on it.
There is actually something in this. Amis himself often brooded about the downsizing of the “vision thing” in literature, writing in The Information about the way the natural protagonists of the novel had been downgraded from heroes - kings, soldiers, spies - to lumpenproletarian nobodies like his own Keith Talent. He was clearly scratching an itch to be more serious, more world-historical, when he chose nuclear weapons, the gulag and the Holocaust as the subjects of some of his fiction.
