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Johann Hari savages Koba
HEADLINE: 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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