An excerpt from John Walsh's 15
August 2003 Independent feature on the demonization of Martin Amis
("Twilight of the Idol?," Features, pp. 2,3)
When a footballer launches a savage, unprovoked
attack on another player, it's sometimes graciously called "getting your
retaliation in first". Martin Amis must be feeling pretty
comprehensively retaliated of late, without having done anything wrong. Three
weeks before the publication of his new book, Yellow Dog
-- a 340-page novel yoking together incest,
pornography, the Royal Family, gangland heroes and funny Chinese names
-- he's been mugged, sledged and bloodied in a
number of newspaper articles and made the victim of a viperish whispering
campaign, suggesting, sotto voce, that the book is rubbish and that Amis is,
frankly, washed up. Hardly anybody has actually read the work (it's been sent
to literary editors and selected reviewers under tight embargo conditions),
but, somehow, everyone just knows that it's the summer's literary equivalent
of Gigli.
In The Daily Telegraph, Amis's fellow novelist,
Tibor Fischer, called the new book "terrible" and said he would be
embarrassed to be found reading it on the Tube in case anyone thought he might
be enjoying it. . . . The Sunday papers swung with
relish into the fray. In a gloating page- three piece (headlined "Amis out of
Booker with dog of novel"), The Sunday Times revealed that one of this
year's Booker prize judges found Yellow Dog "patchy", dated and even
"ridiculous". The newspaper's Iago-like arts editor pretended sympathy. Amis
was in for "fresh humiliation"; being left off the list would be a "huge
blow"... This, despite the fact that Amis has never shown the least concern
about the Booker (although Time's Arrow was nominated in 1991).
What, though, are we to make of the miasma of dislike and disapprobation that
surrounds the name of Amis at this point in his career? . .
. Press your ear to the wall of any writerly salon or publishing party
and you'll hear them saying: "Poor Mart. Once so talented... There was a time
we thought he was pretty much a genius... I can remember, for a brief period,
actually writing a bit like him... Went off the rails... Took himself too
seriously... Busted flush... No market any more for verbal pyrotechnics...
World's moved on... Zadie Smith... Monica Ali..." It's rare to find such a
chorus of proxy assassins surrounding a serious, successful artist, willing
him to fail, longing to stick a knife in.
There is, perhaps, a feeling that Amis has been Julius Caesar for too long.
For Amis has dominated the British book world like a pocket colossus for more
than two decades. In 1983, when Granta produced its first "Best of
Young British Novelists" promotion, Amis emerged as the obvious boss. If the
generation of striking talents that came together in the early Eighties needed
a leader, he seemed to be it. It was his prose style - so charged, so slangy,
so poetic, a perfect model of the "middle style" admired by Edmund Wilson and
Clive James, flexible enough to accommodate the blackest humour and most
serious subject matter. For an aspiring young hack on the Stow on the World
Gazette, let alone an aspiring novelist, he was the Man. He was the
leader. Like Cromwell, he was our chief of men.
We read everything he wrote - a review in The Observer, a
science-fiction fantasy in Mayfair, even a one-off poem in the TLS. He
was sooooo cool. He turned up on TV, confident, perma-smoking, talking in that
curiously slouchy, mid-Atlantic drawl. Women claimed to reach spontaneous
orgasm just by gazing at his sulky expression, his voluptuous mouth. Thank God
(we said) he's so short, or he'd be unbearable.
His early books were triumphs of style over content. The Rachel Papers
was a hilarious despatch from Planet Nineteen-Year-Old, all spots, johnnies,
sexual disgust with girls and the apotheosis of a literary smartarse. Dead
Babies was essentially Ten Little Niggers crossed with The Old
Devils and given a thrilling soundtrack of sex, drugs and street visions.
Success began with a typical Amis pairing of repulsive low-life and sneery
aristocratic achiever, and watched them swap roles in the heartless city. With
Other People: A Mystery Story, he stopped being funny; instead, his
writing was out to unsettle you, make your flesh creep. For the first time in
his work, but not the last, the ending made no sense.
In 1984 came Money, in which Amis took on America, Hollywood, stardom,
gigantic egos, massive cash and heavy debauchery in the persona of John Self,
OD-ing on the 20th century. Some critics thought it went on a bit, and for the
first time we registered that Amis loved a good riff: his uniquely zippy style
("As fast and efficient as a flick knife" - John Carey) now tending towards
grandiloquence, repetition, adjectival profusion. His fans didn't care; they
memorised, or read each other, whole paragraphs of Money, the image of
John Self's carious mouth with its own Upper East and West sides, the movie
negotiations with a beefcake star called Spunk...
With London Fields more cracks began to show in his fans' hitherto
unqualified admiration. Behind its nonsensical plot about a darts-playing
numbskull, a feckless posh git and a glacial, death-obsessed "murderee" called
Nicola Six who all meet, a little implausibly, in a Bayswater pub, Amis spun
huge word-pictures of the sickliness of planet Earth, the ulceration of the
ozone layer. Descriptive riffs about darts matches, or the homicidal baby
Marmaduke, came around and around, but many readers gave up 100 pages before
the end, weary of the vaudeville-turn characters, sated with the special
effects. Had they persevered, they'd have found the ending mystifying.
Time's Arrow followed in 1991, a bold experiment to write about the
Holocaust from the point of view of a Nazi doctor, who copes with his memories
by running his life backwards, so that terrible things can seem ameliorative.
It was brilliant, but many of the back-to-front conceits didn't work. The face
behind the writing was too grimly obsessed with the horror of his subject to
find the right satirical voice.
"His apocalyptic imagination is a constant feature," says James Walton, the
critic and a long-term fan. "For a while he was big on nuclear weapons, and
when they let him down by not causing the world to end, he turned to the
weather in London Fields; then he went more metaphysical and wrote about the
humiliation of finding out how puny we are in the universe - it was all a bit
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy..."
After a hiatus, filled with family trauma, divorce and expensive teeth
problems, he returned with The Information, a novel of literary
jealousy, backlit by awful knowledge - the 46-year-old Amis informing his
generation that we're all going to die. Suddenly, despite some wonderful
passages, his writing seemed both slack and portentous, his subject too
obvious, his special effects old hat. His fans had to concede that, while he
was clearly the finest writer in the country, he was by no means the finest
novelist.
This was the lowest period of Amis's life, and it coincided with the lowest
period of his public esteem. He was slated in the press for his
half-million-pound advance, his bust-ups with his wife, his agent Pat Kavanagh,
and her husband, Amis's best friend Julian Barnes. Everything he did was
suddenly wrong. He'd had it his own way too long. He'd been too brilliant, too
effing smart. He'd bitched about England and praised America. He was a
faithless, money-spinning, kids-abandoning nonce and everyone hated themselves
for salaaming before him for so long.
He wrote about it all in Experience, his 2000 memoir, concentrating on
the ghastly events of 1995, the death of his father Kingsley two years later,
and the revelation that his cousin Lucy Partington had been one of Fred West's
victims. The book was rapturously received, partly out of sympathy for the
trouble-prone maestro, partly to make up for being so horrible, and partly in
recognition that Amis seemed at last to have connected with his emotional
side. A new, quivering, tearful, sensitive Martin appeared in these pages,
alive to every hint of the lachrymae rerum, aghast at the fragility and
vulnerability of human, especially young human, life.
Unfortunately, he overdid it when Koba the Dread came out last summer.
A study of Stalin, and an enquiry into why veteran adherents of the old
communist regime aren't reviled, it represented the grim-visaged, brow-
furrowed serious Amis of Time's Arrow and Einstein's Monsters,
struggling to engage with a mammoth subject, with epic cruelty, with tyranny
and its dumb followers. But he chose to thread through the book mentions of
the death of his sister, Sally, and the birth of his new daughter Clio. The
reborn emotionalist made the mistake of dragging his new family into it,
explicitly comparing the two-year-old's night-time crying with the cries "in
the deepest cellars of the Butyrki prison in Moscow during the Great Terror".
There was consternation. Those unequipped to condemn his history as
cack-handed and full of mistakes went for him on grounds of insensitivity.
Connoisseurs of Amis's ability to fall out with his nearest and dearest
watched with glee as he and Christopher Hitchens (to whom much of the book's
argument is addressed) went for each other's throats.
Several subtexts run through this chronicle of the Amis years. One is the love
and subsequent dislike of his former fans. Soon it will be the 30th
anniversary of his debut novel, The Rachel Papers, published in 1974.
For three decades, male reviewers have been, first, celebrating his every
move, and then (for hate is just love flipped over) trashing him for not being
as good as their Amis-wannabe selves would wish. After years of losing sleep
over what Harold Bloom called "the anxiety of influence" ("Is he always going
to be better than me? Do I have to write like him?"), young writers can, at
last, write Amis off.
There's a dislike of both his new-found sentimentality and his seriousness.
Since Amis emerged from his late-Nineties traumas - teeth, divorce, family
deaths, coming to terms with murder - he has embraced the role of family man
with gusto. As a critic friend explained to me: "The factors that have made
him a nicer person to meet might be responsible for his not being able to
write good fiction any more."
It's a trait of British fiction readers, ever wary of pretension, to distrust
a writer who takes on a big subject, whether it's nuclear winter or the fate
of the world. They doubt his sincerity, his commitment, his true sympathy.
What they fail to appreciate about Amis is that his central interest is
language. On the scale of what's important in writing, he has always put words
- the making of sentences, the cumulative force of a pressurised paragraph -
higher than plot or complex characterisation. Perhaps more than any writer
living, he sees good prose as a mark of decency, as a register of morality.
Bad writing, to Amis, is the result of something worse than idleness,
fecklessness or ignorance; it's an emblem of sin. In Experience he compares a
poem written by his cousin, Lucy, to a letter written by Fred West to his
daughter, to illustrate how it sounds "when the false meets the true, when
utter godlessness meets purity of spirit".
You might say: it's not a crime to write badly, not necessarily a sign of
moral bankruptcy. But Oscar Wilde would not agree and nor, I think, would Amis.
No writer venerates the creative process more than he, the working of thoughts
into prose. And that's one reason why he's parted company with the new
literary universe. The generation now in the ascendant - the Zadie Smith
generation - don't venerate language in the same way. They venerate
storytelling, personal testimony, plausible characters, understandable
endings. Beside him, Monica Ali sounds frankly middlebrow, and Adam Thirlwell,
the current media "one to watch", frankly infantile.
But the knives are out for Amis because his time is deemed to have come and
gone. He's been at the top, commanding our sympathy for every turn of his
thoughts, for too long. His enemies thought he'd been buried in the row over
Stalin (how dare he write about Stalin?), but he's back, and the anxiety of
influence can be felt all over town. He just can't be allowed to be our chief
of men once more. He must be rubbished. How dare he invent a fictional Royal
Family? How dare he wonder, in prose, what it feels like to want to have sex
with your daughter?
"He is still our boy, though, isn't he?" asks Walton plaintively. "He's still
the best writer around. Only now something's changed. Amis used to say that
each generation wants to tell the previous generation that the world, and
therefore the novel, isn't like that any more. Now, younger writers seem to be
saying to him, You're wrong, writing isn't like this any more. It isn't about
sentences'..."
"The new generation are more proper novelists than Amis, in terms of plot and
character," says Suzi Feay, "but then, so what if he's an improper novelist?
He's still full of crazy energy. I'd much rather read him falling all over the
place than read someone more correct and cautious." And so say... most of us.
