Martin Amis is Alive and Well and Living in London Fields
All writers die twice — except for Martin Amis.
Gore Vidal described his approach to criticism as standing between two gongs with a mallet in hand, striking each in a raging crescendo. I must say, I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about, but I do find the image a perfect depiction of how I approached Martin Amis’s body of work. In 2018, I planted my hindlegs equidistant between the gongs with Time’s Arrow—that prosebed of diabolically dewy flowers—and began swinging between the book ends of his corpus with my own mallet: a red ballpoint pen. Though that novel urged me backward, I read The Information next, having to first raise my hand, you see, to gain the necessary momentum to swing at his debut, The Rachel Papers. The unexpected punch of that book—so much more youthful and unconscionably promising than anything I’d read by a contemporary—was followed by a ricochet of near chronological neatness: Dead Babies (nascently abandoned, I admit), Other People and Success, at which point I found the gong on my right had suddenly shimmied a few feet outside my wingspan with Inside Story, deckled out of the blue in 2020. I lunged eagerly and elicited its tremulous, unrecognizable melody—that alien resonance of what we could not yet know were closing chords—and my arm fell hypnotically backwards, my hand opening in the shape of a snout, toward the distant barking of his Yellow Dog.
I don’t know what kind of racket I made, but the music of Inside Story always stuck with me—written as it was for me. “We all have more or less shameful fantasies about our best-loved writers,” said Amis. “We meet them in our heads—and everything works out fine.” Inside Story shows Amis making good on this maxim—the reader gets to meet Martin in his head and the two get along Amisly. But the novel, a semi-fictional memoir really, is the conclusive evidence1 of another Amisism: a great writer is a great host. Joyce moons you out in the boonies as you sip his diabolically mulled wine, Amis explains, while Nabokov gives you the best seat by the fire and a vintage red after dinner. Though, this particular squaring off of Joyce against Nabokov is second only to Amis’s matching them up on the tennis court, a real howler:
“Although of course Joyce and Nabokov never met in competition, it seems to me that Nabokov was the more ‘complete’ player… Losing early in the French (say), Joyce would be off playing exhibitions in Casablanca with various arthritic legends, and working on his inside-out between-the-legs forehand dink; whereas Nabokov and his entourage would quit the rusty dust of Roland Garros for somewhere like Hull or Nalisea, to prepare for Wimbledon on our spurned and sodden grass.”
In Inside Story, Amis never gets around to laying out the tennis whites on the guest bed, but enters his own host analogy instead. Indomitably charitable—as opposed to, say, “eloquently aloof,” as his spurned biographer Richard Bradford once yearningly described him from a rigorous distance—he invites the young reader, a burgeoning writer in need of some counsel, into his Brooklyn brownstone to smack their lips at his dinner table, a daydream I’d been enjoying long before Amis seemingly read my mind and the minds of his next generation of fans. His swan song was not for the critics who, in their contemporaneity, predictably missed this most unexpected of chess moves in the corner of the board—it was written directly to the readers and writers of the future instead who would be analyzing the grand master’s game long afterwards. Martin had some writing advice, and like his father Kingsley before him, he wanted to pass down the craft before departing. A wise castling indeed.
The Younger Amis was a loyalist, and after the death of “the King” (as the Elder Amis let close friends call him) and Saul Bellow’s accepting the flat of the sword as Martin Amis’s Honorary Father, the famous Amis Bellow-Nabokov axis tilted Bellow. The nth rehashing of the nympholeptical theme in Nabokov’s unfinished The Original of Laura (2009) did not help that axis’s wobble, and it led Amis to declare an artistic defect—by no means defining—in his great Russian hero. In Vladimir Nabokov and the Problem from Hell, Amis tabulated every instance of the “despoliation of young girls” in the Nabokovian corpus (while charitably missing a few quasi’s, demi’s and para’s), including Nabokov’s prototypical autofiction, Look at the Harlequins! But of course, Inside Story is a “novel” that operates loyally under the same concept as Nabokov’s final harlequinade work: it is an experimental play with one’s own life, replete with the built-in echoes of Amis’s own twin flames and flaws: sexual amour propre and an obsession with Saul Bellow.
It is truffled, too, with vignettish pen-portraits of his best friend Christopher Hitchens, the writer who, before dying of stage four esophageal cancer in 2011, insisted between his own covers that I read Amis. I did. As Hitchens noted, and as Amis discovered himself this year, there is no stage five esophageal cancer.
But there is a stage two to a writer’s death. “Most writers do not know whether they are good or not,” Amis told the late critic Clive James, who was not late to get his point (though was much earlier to die from smoking like a chimney): “The argument begins in the obituaries.” And so they start now for Amis, moments too soon by several magnitudes, one, namely, that he violated one of his other seemingly unbreachable maxims: “Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.”
You see, contrary to popular opinion, Amis’s talent never went belly up. It merely underwent a midlife crisis.
Alive She Cried
Amisian. Repeat after me: ay-mee-zhin. Beginning my tryst with the Amisian corpus in 2018, I had the privilege (and the pleasure, I don’t mind rubbing in) to begin Amis at any point I liked. I came at him obliquely, that is with a view from the unfettered future. Unlike his most petulant critics (whom Amis’s sudden posterity compels us to begin categorizing: irate non-entities, irked mediocrities, and the helplessly subpar—in other words, the types of characters Amis studded fifteen novels, a memoir, and hundreds of essays with), I did not have to experience Amis linearly. I did not follow his rise, the unexpected pinnacles of Money, London Fields, and The Information, nor the jumbled rooftops, half-glistening, half-squalid, of the proceeding novels. I was not compelled by contemporaneity to envy him, judge his “controversies” (that word will be needing the quotational escort) or his “decline” (if there was a way to emphasize quotations, I would). In other words, it was with the novels, not the novelist, that I had delicious lie-ins, marginating his pages with the fond fronds of my pen. I was never spurned, nor did I once have the bedroom blues—I winked at his prose from the future.
Everyone knows of the Amisian success, as well as the sucés. Historically speaking, writers have not even made it to their midlife crises—another Amisian observation. Shakespeare’s corpus therefore does not include a Yellow Merchant, Austen’s does not bear a Mansfield Night Train. Amis’s corpus does, however, for the simple fact that he did not die in the mid-90s—he lived to see another day.
Following the supposedly controversial effort to be well paid for the anti-bromance The Information—his most Nabokovian novel, and Russian Nabokovian at that—Amis put out the first work of his novelistic ex-prime: Night Train, a straight-to-screenplay novel and the only one I myself might urge into desuetude. (And if absolutely forced to couplet his errata, parting with Dead Babies would not be a long protracted goodbye.) Besides film rights, one suspects it was written to show he could write in the lowest possible gear, a feat no one was daring him to prove.
Amis was often called the Mick Jagger of literature—what we see in the Amis of the mid to late 90s is Mick the businessman fresh off the riotous Decco deal and tax exile coming out to secure a deservedly comfortable livelihood for himself and his brood. The memoir Experience was certainly no drop-off, even if it comes off at times as an experiment in how many Gallicisms could be fit into a single heroic footnote. On the contrary, more than any other of Amis’s works it forever cemented his stylistic supremity and officially established a linguistic hereditary line: he was the final heir to Joyce via the succession line of Nabokov and Bellow, on the scale of the word. How many commonplace nouns go round sporting new, stretchy little tails; how many sentences coil in on themselves in impossible pleasure? One can smell Experience in their nostrils long after holding its prose to the face. Wantonly sunny, unforgivably mid-day bright, it was the last flash of Amis’s initial excessive talent—talent a favorite Amisian word; pleasurable talent Amisian genius; language his legacy.
Though the Amisian talent soon lost its innocence.
Yellow Dog came next and was hardly trotted round the pound before critics put it indulgently to sleep with in front of children and gaping customers. Not looking at reviews, Norman Mailer said, was like not looking at a naked woman suddenly alighting in a doorway when you were out for a stroll with the dog. For Amis’s bow-wow, it was like walking down the red light district without looking in a single window. The mut has its flashes of brilliance: the unearthly colors of Experience shine scantily on some patches of fur; the scenes with King Henry are hilarious if not pressingly diverting; and one witnesses some virgin ground Amis could have been more heavily rewarded by literary posterity for trespassing further: it could have simply been a porn novel, the late 20th century’s Love Among the Ruins.
But it is not a porn novel, despite its cliche and stiff lowbrow, and it succumbs fatally to the bluelight and the digital lessness of its pub date: Yellow Dog is strictly 2003 (eegads). And its bite was much worse than its bark. The subsequent reviews announcing the death of Amis’s talent—which one suspects were written, like many obituaries, far in advance—caused Amis to abandon early drafts of Inside Story and conclude, privately, that his talent had croaked. After walking that dog, as Mick Jagger sang, Amis broke his needle and couldn’t sew.
Yet, there was still an Amisian (remember: ay-mee-zhin) pulse, and there soon flashed the wan glimmer of a dawning and endurable Silver Age—a silver, once again, of the knife, not the bauble. In fact, three of Amis’s last five novels come sporting silvery jackets. House of Meetings was the first—a crocheted effort instead of a thread and needle affair, with plenty of holes. One sensed Amis back on his own two feet with a lingering fear of any pyrotechnics, any shenanigans, hiding from public view a limp that might come out if he tried for top speed too soon. He took the time to announce, too, in the promotional interviews of which he never experienced a decline, that after the midlife point, stylistic pyrotechnics in great writers wane. Well, he said it.
House of Meetings is therefore straightforward and couched in the safety of history and politics. The prose is simply the dialectical transposition of an Englishman’s sensibilities onto Soviet Gulags, and though it is a much better read than his previous two novels, it does not work. Its macro flaw can be seen under the microscope as well: the nameless, evil protagonist gaily rapes and murders his way through World War II and Siberian servitude, stopping only to pause and ponder the illogic of anti-semitism—not Amis’s most convincing seedy character by a long shot, making a poor tributary to the novel’s underwhelming rills and ripples.
But with the Arab Spring in the air, the writing, the talent, the Amisian perennials showed promise of blooming. The Pregnant Widow is a clumsy flower, prettily petaled and best examined by the “runny candlelight”2 of Italian villae. And it is not without its Act Four dip, typical of the Amis plot proper. It goes with the vase. However, it wasn’t until after Lionel Asbo, a product of inherited Kingsleyan industriousness and jaunty comedy3 that the purdah ended (a favorite post-9/11 Amis word, rivaling his “jackknifed” nouns of the 90s). That initial bloom, now dangling, now straightening, now bobbing its head in a violet bed of smothered pansies, did not come off the corpus but sniffed the air of a new day in little upward jerks of its head. I am speaking, of course, of The Zone of Interest.
Amis is never more confident than dealing with the holocaust, never more gorgeously at ease than with the Shoah, but The Zone of Interest is more than just poise—it is a stylistic tour de force replete with savage Amisian brilliancies. With it, and this may have been missed, Amis recovered his footing on the flowered rim of his corpus. From this altitude he could again see his grasslands, his countryseats and bosquets, the shadowfuls of might-have-been’s as well as his final spring, the Amisian muse still at play in the lake “with dipping face, kissing her own reflection.” Ah, the close of his Silver Age—and the familiar tinkle of knife on trinket.
It was not a long hike up—the old strut flashing, working confidently back into the gait—to crown his final clime with Inside Story, the novel he abandoned twenty years earlier in the sallow bloodbath of Yellow Dog. Like Bellow’s Ravelstein, which Amis deemed the greatest late-life novel, Inside Story can now be seen as an Amisian achievement without analogue. The staves of the 21st century will never again hold such intrastrophic music: ex-prime; inemulous.
The Bellowing Fourth Estate
Popular opinion (and popular critical conduct) on Amis has been too long regnant. Discussing a novel as great as The Adventures of Augie March, Amis noted the critic feels no urge to interpose themselves or their rote “glossarial jig-saw.” With Amis, this seems like all critics have wanted to do: dramatize the inferiority-complex that unites them in an ectoplasmic band. We can see, however, why they are so tempted for the jugular when we read Amis on Vidal, the once-reigning heavyweight of talented elitism and the pre-eminent American genius of snobbery. Like a young lion, Amis strides forth to give Vidal a taste of his own medicine in innovative splurges of high style and iconoclastic wit. Sparring with Vidal for Amis is like sparring with his own protagonists, his own id. Here are a few magnified Vidalian resemblances, seen through the warp of a funhouse mirror: “towering immodesty,” “the enjoyable superbity of his self-love,” “amused disdain,” “expertly decadent taunts,” “his tone is that of a superevolved stellar sage gazing down on the globe in pitying hilarity,” “the gleeful iconoclasm has the conviction of satirical truth,” “‘Vidal,’ Mailer said, ‘lacks the wound,’” and finally, “[his] imagination founders in puerile vivacity.”
Sound familiar?
Vidal, at the time, was Amis’s equal in criticism, but Amis had a crucial advantage: he was a much better novelist, and so took his crown. It is not odd for a younger writer to coup. There is often a sense of vendetta, ambush, complication and counterploy in literary criticism that would not subsist if something about the art and its heritage did not so often indulge it. For criticism is different than the novel: the i’s can be dotted with the author’s head, which it is the thrill of some critics to sever from the body. And there is something about the particular confidence of Amis’s beheading voice, so deliciously annihilating and pleasurably culling that makes it so he can only be confronted, somehow, in the first person, sword in hand. Amis’s uncoupable authority and near-impossible talent invited such quixotic challenges. But Amis was not Vidal, and his critics were not Amis: no one ever quite met him I to I.
Amis continued his observation on Bellow. Rather than blunder into the middle of a major work of art like Augie March, the critic’s job is, instead, “to work [their] way round to the bits [they] want to quote.” Writing about Amis invites the epigram, it invites posterity’s glossary—it invites Martin Amis. When the right word is not on my tongue, it is often fingertip—that is, in times of need I do not turn to thesauruses or dictionaries but to the violet underlines of my Amis collection. Glancing back I find, beside Amis’s declaration about the writer’s two deaths, my own amendment, which I now dare to propose outside the safety and privacy of my ivied margins. Yes, a writer dies twice: once when the body dies, again when the talent dies. But there is also a third time a writer keels over: when the name fades.
Which dovetails quite nicely, I think, with Nabokov:
“I don’t have a 35-year plan or program, but I have a fair inkling of my literary afterlife. I have sensed certain hints, I have felt the breeze of certain promises. No doubt there will be ups and down, long periods of slump. With the Devil’s connivance, I open a newspaper of 2063 and in some article on the books page I find: ‘Nobody reads Nabokov or Fulmerford today.’ Awful question: Who is this unfortunate Fulmerford?”
As far as my calculations are concerned, Amis is still a few tallies this side of the three strikes. And like Fulmerford before him—er, I mean Nabokov—his name shall not fade for me. So too, if writers on the burgeon are wise, if Literature ever hopes to reclaim itself from the deservedly lowercase “literary fiction,” (which is publishingese for, “These works shall not endure,”) they’ll not ignore his ample shelf which, anyways, is hard to miss—the literary alphabet begins with Amis.
Exeunt
But there is also this advice from Nabokov’s Cornell lectern, “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” Of this truism I am a skiddish adherent. Covetous of my most adored-writers, I save some of their books for last. I cannot bear to face a future, for instance, in which a new Amis, or Nabokov, or Cormac McCarthy does not await me, and so hide a select few books from my devouring gaze. Perhaps it has something to do with being young yet, that I still want to read, and am not yet ready to reread. So in all my Amisian gong clanging there is one I did not bash. In fact, in my reticence I splurged: I left two famous Amis novels for myself.
Let’s not split hairs: a favorite writer is an honorary parent. Before we learn to write we must learn to read, and it is the writer who holds our hands for our first steps. Even when we think we can walk just fine, one foot in front of the other and all that, we can always learn from another’s flow, another’s footwork. By chance, I had Inside Story open when I heard the news about Amis’s death. And so now, after a long day of watching him strut around his Brooklyn brownstone, Amis has put out the lights of the house and closed the guest room door behind him. I think the dinner went well, but I shouldn’t have made that remark about Bellow. I should have offered to make him another tea. Maybe I still can. There is a thin white light below the bedroom door, taut like a string. I could almost pluck it.
But it is too late. And I have made enough racket as is with those unwieldy gongs he was gracious enough to let me bring along (what was I thinking?). Leave me then, my red pen flying forth from its scabbard, curling up with my final Amises. For you see, to me, Martin Amis is alive and well and living in London Fields.
Addendum: The “Scheherazade Problem”
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