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Johann Hari
savages KobaHEADLINE: His
dethronement is now time-urgent
BYLINE: Johann Hari
SOURCE: The Independent on Sunday
DATE: 8 September 2002
Martin Amis has been hammered by critics into a tiny ball of bloody gunk over
the last few months. Reviewers have shown a distasteful relish as they exile
Amis's latest tome to Siberia. Yet the most prevalent criticism of Amis is
misplaced. Why bother, ask many commentators, expending moral indignation on a
totalitarian dictator who is universally despised? Why is a man who once wrote
with commendable speed and passion about nuclear weapons---at a time when they
were the most important issue on earth---now giving us 400 pages about arcane
debates between far-left intellectuals? Who, today, are the Stalinists who must
be denounced? These critics damn themselves from their own mouths. Nobody asks
why we need to be constantly reminded of the Holocaust. Nobody should ask it of
Stalin's crimes, which killed over 20 million people. The very fact that these
questions are being openly asked is a sign that public education about Stalin's
Terror is still desperately needed. Amis opens the book by quoting from Robert
Conquest's book, THE HARVEST OF SORROW, which details the Stalinist era: 'We may
perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the
actions here recorded about 20 lives were lost for, not every word, but every
letter, in this book.' Amis then tells us: 'That sentence represents 3,040
lives. The book is 411 pages long.'
And Amis does not shy away, either, from showing that the evils of Stalin stem
directly from Lenin. The dictator---still lauded by Christopher Hitchens, a fact
that depresses me beyond measure because I greatly admire the
Hitch---'bequeathed to his successors a fully functioning police state'. This is
a topic that needs to be written about by as many people as possible, and
Amis---who undeniably has been a powerful and eloquent journalistic voice in the
past, not least in THE MORONIC INFERNO---is to be congratulated. Sadly, however,
the choice of subject matter is the sole admirable aspect of this work.
Amis decides to interpret Stalin's crimes from a personal perspective. Of
course, the perspective of an individual caught up in tyranny can be the most
powerful of all: just look at Anne Frank or Jung Chang. Amis tries to affect
their sombre tone, and clearly feels that he too has tasted, personally, some of
Russia's nightmare. This is not because he was there under Stalin. Indeed, on
the evidence of this book, he hasn't even bothered to go and talk to people who
were there, nor to see the places where they were imprisoned, tortured, burned
or starved. He hasn't gone to the world's remaining Stalinist state, North Korea
(unlike Christopher Hitchens, whom he spends pages and pages excoriating).
No, Amis thinks he has participated in the last century's worst tragedy for two
reasons. Some of his family and friends were tenuously linked to the distant and
unimportant foreign support for Stalin. A bit. Oh, and he knows a few people who
have died, of natural causes, in one of the most stable states in the world. An
Englishman (Amis's father, the mediocre and now largely unread novelist
Kingsley) who sympathised with communism in the 1940s was not, even remotely,
like a member of the Cheka. A woman (Amis's sister, Sally) who died of cancer in
her forties after living as one of the wealthiest and most fortunate 1 per cent
of the world's population was not even remotely like a person who has been
murdered after a show trial. The crying of Amis's baby daughter as she rests her
head in a Primrose Hill mansion most certainly is not like the wailing in the
gulags (a comparison Amis explicitly makes).
The author's claimed emotional connections with the situations he describes are
not only flawed; they reveal a basic failure to understand the gravity of the
situation he is writing about. For all his strained and contorted language about
the Terror, Amis thinks that the emotions of Russians under Stalin are within
the spectrum of feeling that he too has known in his life.
This is an important book, then, because it exposes a lacerating flaw in one of
our most critically (but not popularly) acclaimed novelists. There is a hole at
the core of Martin Amis's personality, and his florid prose and arid
intellectualism has, for too long, prevented us from admitting it. (It feels
cruel to write so personally, but in this book, Amis dedicates barely 50 pages
in a 300-page book to anything other than his personality. It is impossible not
to respond in kind.) This book confirms something that I feared to be the case
when I read his last few books: that he equates human worth with literary worth.
In his memoir, EXPERIENCE, he talks about his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was
murdered by Fred West. He says that: 'the death of Lucy Partington represents a
fantastic collision'. Amis quotes two paragraphs by different writers. The first
is illiterate and garbled (but harmless); the second is intelligent, and about
literature. The tragedy of Lucy Partington's killing happens, he says, when the
man who wrote that first paragraph comes up against the person who wrote the
second. Fred West's lack of education, then, makes him into a savage beast; Lucy
Partington's education makes her into a vastly superior person. Fred West's evil
stems, in Amis's mind, from his literary failings. Again and again in Amis's
novels, people who do not read literature are the objects of disbelieving
contempt---and have no morality.
The same is true in KOBA THE DREAD. Stalin's murders of artists like Meyerhold
is held up by Amis as axiomatically worse than the killing of, say, a peasant
grandmother. Amis believes in natural hierarchy; and he believes that he is at
the top of that hierarchy. He has given us this book---for which he has done no
original research at all---because he thinks his own literary interpretation of
Stalin is important. He thinks that if he can craft Stalin in his own prose,
then the world will comprehend his tyranny for the first time (in fact, the
prose has been grossly overrated. Can anyone be impressed by sentences like
'Truth had at last become time-urgent'?). This is a chilling book, because
apparently without knowing it, Amis has revealed his own deformed personality.
The proper response is not the anger displayed by so many critics. The only
human response is to pity poor, preposterous Martin Amis, deluding himself that
he---or his talentless father---have more merit than toilet cleaners like my
granny, who read little but love more than he can ever know.
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