It’s three years since Martin Amis died. I don’t know his work very well. Yet here’s me, an ignoramus, writing a column about the man. Distance though has its benefits: to see the whole, you can’t get too close. Some are close indeed.
As a Scotsman in London, I’m mere witness to this intimacy between Amis Jr and Englishmen of a certain age and class. Most writers have readers. Amis had followers. Reading Money in my 20s, I got it. Imagine precocious but impressionable teenage boys opening it and feeling the hit. From all the smut. From characters that lacked depth but oozed angst. From dialogue that sounded like the best chats they’d never had. What Tarantino would do to cinema in the ’90s, Amis did to the novel a decade or so before. It was a flight away from the set texts of these boys’ English classes. It was also their first love. Rather, he was.
Vindication has that effect. It was said of Amis’s best friend, Christopher Hitchens, that if he hadn’t existed, “we wouldn’t have been able to invent him”. But for Amis, the invention came first — in the prayers of nerds in ’70s and ’80s England. And then — he answered them. In pale flesh and skinny bone. All 5ft 6 of him. Yet slicker than oil. There was more to height than inches. The one who knew all the books backwards and his way around women. Lots of them. A sorcerer with privilege and edge. How did he do it? Forget the prose and plots. For this horny lot, it was about the man who penned them. “Favourite novelist” isn’t right. It’s not enough. Martin — for they surely assumed first-name terms — was their hero.
A man famous for his love of style, and idolised for his own, was in fact guilty of crimes against it
Their pedestals rose with the publishing events of London Fields and The Information, parts two and three of Amis’s London trilogy. They came back down with his later novels and forays into geopolitics after 9/11. The imperial phase, America’s and Martin’s, was over. By now, fanboys had become high-yet-under-achieving men confronted by an MA diagnosis. Not ME. Not MS. Something more exquisite and with no cure. Middle age. A fall that great calls for time to rethink. Not all symptoms of MA are disgraces. Some are embarrassments. Like pangs of doubt, or the shoogle of a pedestal.
It was loud and clear on My Martin Amis — note that title — a podcast series of interviews with some of his followers. Must say, I licked it up. The pop lit crit. The weave of social and personal histories. And a collective realisation among the guests that sounded like the screech of a backpedal. They still adore Amis — you can’t disavow what you loved as a teenager — but they admit that he isn’t the great novelist they once believed.
There was less agreement about why. The familiar reasons — overwritten lines, underwritten characters — won’t do. Not because they’re wrong. Just that they’re symptoms. But what lurks beneath them? How to account for Amis’s ultimate failure as an artist? It wasn’t lack of intellect. As one anecdote from the podcast alleged, Amis arrived at Oxford 19-years-old with nothing to do: he’d already seen off every book on the undergrad reading list. No surprise when three years later he was awarded a congratulatory first. That’s the one where your tutors gather round to tell you how marvellous you are.
Talent then wasn’t Amis’s problem. But it is one of ours. In a culture that celebrates meritocracy without (of course) achieving it, we love to go on about art and genius and destiny. We’ve less to say about taste: the oil that makes the talent whirr, or not. It’s why John Mayer, a guitarist with skills to rival Clapton, has never written a good song. He doesn’t know what one is. Then there’s Rick Rubin, a man who can’t play the triangle yet is one of the great music producers of his time. In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, he was asked about his musical ability and admitted that he has none. “So what are you being paid for?” quizzed the journalist. “The confidence that I have,” said Rubin, “in my taste.”
So what about Amis’s? As prose stylist soi-disant, he had a lot to say about taste. Which makes it awkward to question his. Three years ago, Janan Ganesh came close in a column that imagined Amis’s career as a reply to Orwell’s. A reply that went something like: “Your writing was dull. I’ll be damned if the same will ever be said of mine.” While Amis shared Orwell’s scorn for cliché, he had no time for his predecessor’s commitment to substance before style. For Amis, a literary cakeist, “style is substance”: an aesthetic good and a moral one. Amis’s cry chimed with classical views of beauty but grated on 20th century ears. They’d heard too much, grown too wary.
No one though could accuse Amis of dull prose. In this way, his anti-Orwellian mission was accomplished. But at what cost? Yes, he was never boring — in the sense of uneventfulness. But that was the problem. Must every sentence feel like an event? After four, five, ten of them on the same page, events start to feel, and read, like ordeals. Amis’s dullness then was of a worse kind than Orwell’s. Verbosity. Has there ever been a more chronic case of Big Word Tourette’s than his? Yes, Fitzgerald loved an “orgastic” here, a “languidly” there. Though it helped that each one contributed, like every word he put down in Gatsby, to that novel’s perfection. Dickens was a sucker for an — ly suffix too. Why have a character “whisper”, when she can “speak quietly”? But his plots — at once archetypes and originals — are a good excuse. The case against Amis is more clearcut. Take this, chosen at random, from Money:
I took Selina out for an expensive dinner. We had a vicious row about money. Back home, there followed a detailed bout of valedictory lovemaking, with Selina game and longsuffering, and me as effusively carnal as ever.
Tourette’s strikes again in Einstein’s Monsters:
… but in the end Keithette was pretty well won over to the little puppy’s presence, a presence that was understood to be temporary, contingent, multiprovisoed. Naturally, the ruling could be reversed at a single snap of Keithette’s brawny red fingers. Ah, but what could you do when it came to a little puppy like this one, with his ridiculous frown and his beseeching eyes?
So on and so forth and so many adverbs and adjectives. In service of what? It’s worth recalling Conrad’s view of the job of the writer, if only as a corrective. “It is, before all,” he said, “to make you see.” In the middle of one of Amis’s fits, you can’t see anything. It might be fun to read but it’s hard to care about. What an entertainer. Only an entertainer.
A man famous for his love of style, and idolised for his own, was in fact guilty of crimes against it. His thousand delicious turns of phrase and snaps of dialogue are real and redeeming. But they’re a part of a whole for which the words “too far” don’t go far enough. At risk of flirting with the talent myth, it had once seemed that the logical conclusion to Amis’s gifts was greatness. At least to his followers. They didn’t know then what they can’t unsee now: the oil was dry all along.
