From: Joey Bishop
Category: Amis
Date: 8/1/99
Time: 9:14:42 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.6
Dear lousy stinking rotten cruel world: By the time you read this, I will have bored myself unto death by subjecting myself to a lethal mixture of Jane Austen & Henry James. I had originally planned to chuggalug a pitcher of barbituate-flavored margaritas, but that degenerate sonuvabitch Peter Lawford cleaned out my entire stash. I am killing myself to protest man's inhumanity to man, the slaughter of the whales, and the fact that Julie Andrews got passed over for the movie version of *My Fair Lady*. But before I croak I'd like to take this opportunity to exhume Kingsley Amis's corpse for the purpose of kicking his face inside out.
Did you know that Kingsley Amis was a James Bond fan? He wrote *The James Bond Dossier*. He also wrote *The Book of Bond* (subtitled *Every Man His Own 007*), a reference guide for Bond imitators. Kingsley even wrote his very own James Bond novel (*Colonel Sun*). But did you also know that Kingsley was sexually attracted to Margaret Thatcher? I shit you not. Kingsley said that Thatcher looked like "a science-fiction illustration of some time ago showing the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2220". Kingsley was so pussywhipped by Mistress Maggie that he was reduced to sputtering gibberish along the lines of: "The fact that it is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty". Whatever the fuck *that* means. Kingsley even dreamed in his sleep about that turd-sucking termagant. He said: "My devotion to Mrs T retains something of that initial physical bowling-over, in fact she has replaced the Queen as my dream-girl, using this phrase in its more literal sense of the female who, more than any other, tends to recur in my dreams."
Okay. Now look---I don't mind the fact that Kingsley played frisbee with Martin's books. I don't care if Kingsley dumped on *Lolita*. And I really don't give a crap about the blazing mediocrity of Kingsley's own novels. But when Kingsley makes a proud confession about his sexual attraction to Margaret Thatcher---goddammit, that's where I draw the line. I don't dig that. It offends me on about 7 different aesthetic levels. And needless to say, that sorta crap should NOT be tolerated by any sane society. There oughta be a law against it. That sorta thing should be a capital offense. The way I see it is: anybody who brags about his horniness for Margaret Thatcher deserves to be automatically subjected to a James Bondian demise. If Kingsley Amis employs Margaret Thatcher as an object of masturbatory fantasy, I should just be able to press a button and watch Kingsley fall thru a trap-door and into a pool of hungry sharks. It should be that simple. If Kingsley strips down to his diaper and begs to be spanked by his favorite Stern Taskmistress, then I should be legally entitled to strap Kingsley to a table and bisect his crotch with a laser beam. It seems only fair. What can you say about a penis that rises in salute to Margaret Thatcher? What kind of sick society are we living in that would tolerate bonerized bestiality of that magnitude. This world is going to heck in a handbasket and nobody seems to give a darn except me & Ann Landers & the Dalai Lama.
Well---be that as it may---at least Kingsley was right about one thing. Kingsley was dead-right about the suffocating influence of Vladimir Nabokov upon Martin Amis, for good or ill. Because it's gotta be Nabokov's influence that causes Martin to excrete all of those obnoxious knee-jerk alliterations that drive me up the wall. Welcome, my friends, to the shit-storm that never ends: *Frankophile fatsoes*. *Fat fuck of a fly*. *Emblazoned with eczema*. *Brill in the bag*. *Nuts in the nose*. *Sunday-best batman BO*. *Gormless ghoul*. *Mach 2 morons*. *Ned von Newton*. *Tony de Taunton*. *Sheridan Sick*. *Silvery Scandinavian sheen*. *Superfat stowaway*. *Pantwetting pips of the public telephone*. *A prostitute, a policeman, and a purulent mackerel*. *Pocked with the crud and curds and queries that tarnish tired eyes*. *Damaged darting digit*. *Taunting tureens*. *Tuxed torturers*. *Toilet tang*. Blah blah blobbity blah, and so on and so forth until the goddam frigging end of time. Or *spacetime*, in Amis's case. Excuse me while I vomit myself hollow. Excuse me while I vomit on Vladimir Nabokov's shoes---since Kingsley was right to lay the blame at Nabokov's feet.
Here's what Michael Wood said about Vlad the Alliterator: "Humbert's dandyish taste for alliteration is so thoroughly indulged that he becomes almost unreadable at times. He is a prodigious stylist, capable of wonders. But he is also a fussy aesthete, capable of driving us crazy, and both aspects of his performance are important. Some of the alliteration is briskly comic, sardonically overwrought: 'garrulous, garlicky', 'tuberculosis in the tundra', 'hideous hieroglyphics', 'maroon morons', 'maudlin murals', 'bridge and bourbon', 'desire and dyspepsia', and the spectacular 'connubial catch-as-catch-can'. Other instances are parodies of a style which listens too fondly to itself: 'I spend my doleful days in dumps and dolours'; 'January was humid and warm, and February fooled the forsythia'. But then this style in turn fades easily into something which is no longer quite pastiche: 'a plethora of pain that would have hospitalized a Hercules (I should know by now)'; 'what crazy purchases were prompted by the poignant predilection Humbert had in those days'. Such lines (and there are a great many of them) are certainly fancy, but we are not, I think, invited to distance ourselves from them much. The effect is arty, but art can include artiness---only Philistines and Puritans, Nabokov would suggest, stolidly think otherwise. Lolita herself picks up the alliterating habit, although the example may indicate a heartlessness in her and in her mentor: 'Oh, a squashed squirrel', she said. 'What a shame'. "
Oh, the squashed sensibility of Martin Amis, sidetracked into suckadelic insufferability by the stylistic superstinkiness of a Slavic sack of shit. What a shame.