Experiencing Amis's career

© August 2000 by James Diedrick

Although he has long resisted the lure of the Internet ("I prefer the supple technology of books," he sniffed at an Ann Arbor reading in 1996), Martin Amis’s remarkable new memoir often reads like the print equivalent of a state-of-the-art web site – multi-layered, open-ended, graphically dense, imbued with the poetry of recurrence and return. Describing the structure of Experience, Amis evokes spatial metaphors and the language of the hyperlink: "My organizational principles...derive from an inner urgency, and from the novelist's addiction to seeing parallels and making connections. The method, plus the use of footnotes (to preserve the collateral thought), should give a clear view of the geography of a writer's mind" (7).

Does this talk of "collateral thought" suggest any deeper correspondences between Amis’s writing and the culture of the Internet? Clearly Amis’s life and career are amply represented in cyberspace; he is one of a handful of literary novelists to have achieved international celebrity status, so his personal life, literary opinions, critical reputation, and prolific non-fictional output (essays, book and film reviews, profiles, elegies, soccer and tennis reportage) are just a click away on the web. Yet this in itself measures little more than the opportunistic nature of the journalistic enterprise. What about his widely admired style and its ability to convey the rhythms and preoccupations of contemporary life – is this related to the technological Zeitgeist? The publication of Experience affords an opportunity to explore this question within a broader assessment of Amis at mid-career.

Experience grew out of a surfeit of experiences during the years 1993-95. Amis’s ten-year marriage to Antonia Phillips broke up, in part because of his relationship with Isabel Fonseca (now his wife); he discovered that his cousin Lucy Partington, missing since Christmas 1973, was a victim of the serial murderer Frederick West; he met his first daughter, Delilah (now aged 20), who had only been told of his relation to her at age 19; he parted from his long-time agent Pat Kavanaugh over the much-publicized negotiations for a large advance on his novel The Information (which also resulted in the dissolution of his close friendship with Kavanagh’s husband, the novelist Julian Barnes); he underwent a series of protracted and painful dental treatments and oral surgeries; his father Kingsley died following a slow and painful decline; his literary hero and mentor Saul Bellow contracted a nearly fatal illness.

The freighted grammar of the preceding sentence is meant to approximate the cumulative toll these events exacted. Leaving his wife, he confessed to his father, left him feeling "physically terrible, bemused, subnormalised, stupefied from within, and always about to flinch or tremble from the effort of making my face look honest, kind, sane" (99). One of the central themes of Experience is the struggle to preserve or recapture in adulthood some version of one’s childhood innocence (the poet William Blake, whose spirit presides over this memoir, called it "organized innocence") in the face of inevitable loss, pain, betrayal. Including betrayal of one’s family. Amis left his first wife and family "for love," but he unsparingly asks "how does it look, the love ledger, by the time you’re done? Because you are also the enemy of love and – for your children – its despoiler" (256). Among other things, these passages reveal the emotional candor and emotional vulnerability that characterize Experience as a whole.

One of many surprises of Experience is that both book and writer do achieve "organized innocence" - through repeated moments and acts of commemoration, intimacy, and love. Readers familiar only with the corrosive fires of Amis’s novels will experience a different kind of baptism here. And those who only knew of their public disagreements about novels, novelists, and novel writing will be struck by Martin Amis’s generosity toward and abiding love for his father, who repeatedly dismissed his son’s novels as unreadable and referred to him in his letters to the poet Philip Larkin as "the little shit."

Experience reveals that Kingsley’s public rivalry with his son obscured a deep filial affection and loyalty, which Martin repays here by reclaiming his father from the mere caricature of reactionary opinions he became – or posed as - in his last decade. He does so without ever resorting to the airbrush. Kingsley’s phobias, compulsions, and failures of tolerance are all made manifest, but sympathetic understanding replaces rancor. At the same time, the reader gains insight into the psychic wellsprings of Martin’s imaginative preoccupations. Both the intimate knowledge of masculine compulsion that informs his novels and the paternal anxieties that have increasingly marked them, for instance, can be traced to primal scenes such as this one:

When I was a child I would sometimes hear my father in the night – his horrified gasps, steadily climbing in pitch and power. My mother would lead him to my room. The light came on. My parents approached and sat. I was asked to talk about my day, school, the games I had played. He listened feebly but lovingly, admiringly, his mouth open and tremulous, as if contemplating a smile. In the morning I talked to my mother and she was very straight. "It calms him down because he knows he can’t be frightened in front of you." Frightened of what"? "He dreams he is leaving his body." It made me feel important – up late, holding the floor, curing a grown man: my father. It bonded us. But I always know how it went with him and death, how personally he took it, how viscerally he feared and hated it." (180)

This was only one side of Kingsley, of course; the author of Lucky Jim and The Old Devils was also, as Martin observes, an "engine of comedy" presiding over a household whose daylight hours thrummed with humor and high spirits - until, that is, Kingsley left his first wife Hilly for the novelist Jane Howard, when Martin was twelve. As Experience makes clear, this event was an emotional watershed in Martin’s life, as decisive for the future novelist as Charles Dickens’s consignment to the Blacking Warehouse at age 13.

Because Kingsley loomed so large in Martin’s life, he looms large in Experience. Yet the book is more than a record of their relationship. Reviewing Experience for The Guardian, James Wood noted that

Experience is not quite a memoir, nor is it quite a portrait of his father, nor is it really an autobiography. It is an escape from memoir; indeed, an escape into privacy. In the very book which might, at first glance, seem most exhibitionist, most shamelessly metropolitan, Amis has softly retreated to the provinces of himself. His book often reads like a letter to his family and closest friends. It is sometimes embarrassing to read; the ordinary reader feels voyeuristic, at times almost uninvited, but very moved ("The Young Turk").

The first time I experienced embarrassment while reading Martin Amis, I was on the first page of The Information, and encountered this opening sentence: "Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing" (3). It is now clear where the unexpected bathos in this novel originated. As all future studies of Amis will note, Experience shares uncanny resemblances with The Information, a novel written in the midst of the very experiences the latter book records. The Information is of course "shamelessly metropolitan," and most successful when it transmutes its author’s private experience into broad literary and cultural satire. But it too features weeping husbands, vengeful writers, estranged children, murderous psychopaths, and fathers compelled by private demons. It inaugurated a new stage of Amis’s career, marked by a willing embrace of what he calls in Experience the "Higher Autobiography."

Despite the many autobiographical elements in his earlier fiction, Amis long criticized and resisted this mode. The best novels of his early period, Success (1978) and Money: A Suicide Note (1984), achieve their brilliant effects by means of the same "rigorous dramatic monologue" Amis praises in his essay on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita ("Lolita Reconsidered" 111). Money is Amis’s masterpiece to date and one of the great satirical novels of the century (a judgment recently reinforced by its inclusion in the Penguin Classics series)- in part because of its triumphantly realized protagonist John Self, one of the greatest rogues in all of English fiction.

Following the publication of Money, Amis became increasingly preoccupied with the fate of the planet, and as a result embraced another fictional mode he had earlier criticized. In 1981 he charged that Norman Mailer "had fallen prey to the novelist’s fatal disease: ideas" (The Moronic Inferno 60). But in 1987 Amis published Einstein’s Monsters, a collection of short stories on the nuclear threat (prefaced by a long polemic against the arms race), and followed this up with the apocalyptic satire London Fields (1989). Neither book wholly succeeds either as art or politics, which makes Time’s Arrow (1991) all the more surprising. This short, haunting novel about the Holocaust, narrated in reverse chronology, achieves a sublime synthesis of idea and affect (although the writer John Buchan, among other critics, took offense at the novel, earning Amis’s wrath on pages 94-95 of Experience).

Since Time’s Arrow, Amis has stepped back from the world stage. He remains a master of urban satire, as demonstrated by the long middle section of The Information and the Zeitgeist-capturing short stories "The State of England" and "The Coincidence of the Arts" (collected in Heavy Water), but he has also often descended from the lofty perch of the satirist to explore emotionally intimate territory nearer at hand. This has resulted in the densely autobiographical short story "What Happened to Me on My Holiday" (also collected in Heavy Water), as well as the noirish novella Night Train, an existential meditation on causation, motive, and suicide that derives in large measure from the personal experiences recounted in Experience.

Experience gives full expression to this intimate impulse, and it strikes a great many emotional chords. In addition to the grief, guilt, and anxiety already alluded to, the book encompasses awe, lyrical revery, existential terror, pathos, farce, even slapstick (his account of hefting his father home following an epic drinking binge is unforgettable). Despite Amis’s assertion of artlessness ("I want...to speak, for once, without artifice" [7]), Experience is an extremely artful book – a prose poem on the theme of innocence lost and "organized innocence" won. I half-wish Amis had eschewed the postscript, appendix, and addendum (one of them intent on settling scores with the British press in general and Kingsley Amis’s biographer Eric Jacobs in particular), but even these additions seem a necessary part of the restorative process that was clearly one impetus for the book.

Moreover, these additions in lieu of an ending, which revisit and amplify earlier themes (appropriate to a narrative that is more circular than linear), highlight the digressive impulse that has always been one of the distinctive features of Amis’s fictional style. Like those of George Eliot or Herman Melville a century before him, Amis’s digressions express his wide and philosophical engagement. Compared to the grand nineteenth-century masters, however--who didn’t need to compete against an ever-expanding menu of electronic offerings--Amis’s digressions are those of the hyperactive hipster and raconteur, blending high and low, comic riffs and existential asides. In their rapid shifts of register and reference, they often limn the experience of channel- or web-surfing. Take this example from The Information:

Now here is something very sad to think about. The sun will die prematurely, in the prime of life, cut down at the age of fifty-three! One can imagine a few phrases from the obituaries. After a long struggle. Its brilliant career. This tragic loss. The world will seem a duller. . . Looking on the bright side, though (and Satan, when he visited it, found the sun ‘beyond all description bright’), we mean solar years here, not terrestrial years. A solar year is the time it takes for the sun to complete an orbit of the Milky Way. And this is a good long while. (148)

Amis has always sought forms of representation adequate to the flux of contemporary life. In London Fields, his semi-surrogate Samson Young laments that "writers always lag behind the contemporary formlessness. They write about an old reality, in a language that's even older. It's not the words: it's the rhythms of thought. In this sense all novels are historical novels" (237). Fiction itself imposes a kind of coherence on character and experience belied by the distraction and fragmentation characteristic of mass-mediated life; in a formulation worthy of Beckett, Samson insists that "people are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought-experiment" (240).

Substitute the word "desire" for "grudge" in this passage and you have a remarkably apt characterization of individuals as constituted by commodity capitalism. The deformities spawned by this system have always been the source of Amis’s best fiction; this description of hyper-self-conscious seduction from The Rachel Papers demonstrates that commodity fetishism has penetrated Charles Highway's deepest thought processes:

Only her little brown head was visible. I kissed that for a while, knowing from a variety of sources that this will do more for you than any occult caress. The result was satisfactory. My hands, however, were still behaving like prototype hands, marketed before certain snags had been dealt with. So when I introduced one beneath the blankets, I gave it time to warm and settle before sending it down her stomach. (158)

Now that the utopian space of egalitarian communion envisioned by early proponents of the Internet is being colonized by commercial interests, individuals are increasingly urged to isolate themselves within well-appointed cells of personal taste and desire ("My Yahoo," "My Excite," even "My New York Times"). Amis’s satire has always been adept at mapping this landscape, and his current novel-in-progress, about the royal family and the pornography industry, promises to chart additional territory.

Experience demonstrates that unlike Samson Young, Martin Amis himself - despite the price of fame and the wages of experience–resists this alienation, cleaving to a world of human fellowship, forgiveness, and renewal. If the worlds his fictional characters inhabit often resemble the gaudiest and most onanistic pay-per-view channels or web sites, Experience opens the door to an entirely different realm: an intimate domestic sphere where relationships are messy, primal, and indispensable. In this most visceral of memoirs, the reader feels the power of these relationships in the blood, and along the heart.

Works Cited

Amis, Martin. Experience. New York: Talk Miramax, 2000.

---. "Norman Mailer." The Moronic Inferno. London: Penguin, 1987.

---. The Information. New York: Harmony, 1995.

---. The Rachel Papers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973.

---. "Lolita Reconsidered." The Atlantic, September 1992, v. 270: 109-120; reprinted under the title "Low Hum & Little Lo" in The Independent on Sunday, 25 October 1992, 24-5; reprinted in an expanded version as the Introduction to the Vintage edition of Lolita [this version incorporates passages added for the Introduction].

Wood, James. "The Young Turk." Books Unlimited, The Observer/Guardian Weekly, 20 May 2000.

Blacker, Terence. "Rolling Back the Years." The Times (London), 21 May 2000.

Handler, Daniel. "Famous Amis." The Voice Literary Supplement, June 2000.

McCartle, Kevin. "Author Strikes Back with a Song of Experience." The Sunday Herald (Scotland), 23 May 2000.

Miller, Karl. "A Feast at the Amis Table." The Sunday Herald (Scotland), 25 May 2000.

Tonkin, Boyd. "The Man Who Fell to Earth." The Independent (London), 13 May 2000.

Wiggins, Marianne. "The Young Man Feels His Age." The Times (London), 18 May 2000.

Grice, Elizabeth. "The New Amis." The Electronic Telegraph, 13 May 2000.

Williams, Zoe. "My Memorable Meeting with Amis." The Independent, 18 May 2000.

Bernhard, Brendan. "Experiencing Martin Amis." The LA Weekly, 30 June-6 July, 2000.

Saunders, Doug. "Punk No More." Toronto Globe and Mail, 6 May 2000.

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