Getting the Hang of Martin Amis

In his recent memoir, Confessions, the English writer A.N. Wilson recalls going to Chelsea Harbour for the group portrait which accompanied Granta’s Spring 1983 issue, «Best of Young British Novelists». Lingering after the session, Wilson was approached by his contemporary Martin Amis – louche, compact, almost certainly smoking – with Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, and Ian McEwan «huddling behind him like schoolboys.» It was all too clear, Wilson recalled, that Amis was «capo di tutti capi», «the Boss», and the rest of the Granta honorees – 19 in all – mere «wannabes».

For many readers, too, Amis, who died last month, from cancer, at the age of 73, was the main man, a phrase-making phenomenon, the perpetual boy wonder of English letters. As things played out in the decade or so following the Granta list, the guy who said he didn’t want to write a sentence «any guy could have written» became the most widely imitated English writer of his day, with admirers including stars of later Granta lists like Alan Hollinghurst, Will Self, Zadie Smith, Philip Hensher, Adam Thirwell, Toby Litt, and Nicola Barker, along with Gordon Burn, Geoff Dyer, and James Wood.

At a time when English writing could seem pale or listless and American writing zany, Amis seemed to hit on an ideal mid-Atlantic compromise – the fluent euphony and illusionless sanity of the English comic novel and the street-smart idiom of the post-war American tradition, of whom Saul Bellow was the most eminent representative, and the most important to Amis. If the American influence served to relax and modernise Amis’s English formality – he was a star pupil at Oxford, steeped in the canon – then his mode of complaint mitigated the danger of hysterical good cheer. It was a mixed style, formed during the 1970s by an immersion in Iris Murdoch and Joseph Heller, Dickens and Nabokov, Austen and Vonnegut, George Eliot and Philip Roth, plus Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics, Donne, Auden, Larkin – a style at once lofty and insolent, defined by resourceful seediness and rhetorical flair, as displayed in the opening of Money (1984), which appeared (at a slightly earlier stage of evolution) in the Granta issue:

As my cab pulled of FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and sloped in fast right across our bows. We banked, and hit a deep welt or grapple-ridge in the road: to the sound of a rifle-shot the cab roof ducked down and smacked me on the core of my head. I really didn’t need that, I tell you, with my head and face and back and heart hurting a lot all the time anyway, and still drunk and crazed and ghosted from the plane.‘Oh man,’ I said.‘Yeah,’ said the cabbie from behind the shattered plastic of his screen. ‘Fuckin A.’My cabbie was fortyish, lean, balding. Such hair as remained scurried long and damp down his neck and shoulders. To the passenger, that’s all city cabbies are – mad necks, mad rugs. This mad neck was explosively pocked and mottled, with a flicker of adolescent virulence in the crimson underhang of the ears.