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.

The Norwegian edition of Inside Story (På innsiden, published by Pelikanen Forlag, May 2023).

In this context, it might seem odd to note that Amis’s work – specifically, his final book Inside Story – is only now appearing in Norwegian for the first time. Yet he was also an eccentric figure – if not quite marginal, then working at an angle to his contemporaries. His relationship to the group sometimes known as «the Amis Generation» was a little like Godard’s with the New Wave. He was the most charismatic and distinctive, the most cited and imitated, but his work failed to offer traditional kinds of edification. Many of the figures on the Granta list – the trio Wilson identified, plus Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Pat Barker among others – proceeded to have more conventionally successful careers as novelists. All of them won the Booker Prize, for which Amis, the author of fifteen novels, was shortlisted only once. It seems telling that while he is the hero of John Walsh’s recent book Circus of Dreams, the reminiscences of a one-time literary editor of the Sunday Times, Peter Kemp, the paper’s longtime fiction reviewer, finds scant occasion to discuss his work in his forthcoming guide to modern fiction in English, Retroland. As A.N. Wilson puts it, a little hyperbolically, «if you’d never read him, you could recite the name of his girlfriends.» Ian Jack erred perhaps on the side of harshness when he wrote (even before the Granta list): «A lot of people seem not to like Martin Amis. When they speak of him, envy crackles in their phrases, or loathing seeps into their voice. The envy comes usually from young men uglier, or less successfully in the same game; the loathing from some of the many who have read his novels.»

What, then, was Amis up to – if not delivering conventional pleasures? A good place to start is Anthony Burgess’s distinction – from a book on Joyce – between A and B writers, those interested in story, character (or psychology), social context and commentary, and those who, in Amis’s own paraphrase, offer «the autonomous play of wit, ideas and language.» His own inclinations skewed B-wards. He specialised in meta-fictional and intra-fictional flourishes, author’s notes, chapter titles, epigraphs, reflection on etymology, puckish jokes, macro-structural conceits, essayistic riffs. The Rachel Papers (1973), published when he was 23, concerns a bookish young man – and aspiring English literature student – working on a manuscript of sorts. In the author’s note for Dead Babies (1975) he says that not only the characters and scenes are «fictitious», but the technical and medical data too. Success (1978) offers conflicting narratives from a pair of adoptive brothers, on a calendrical scheme («April is the coolest month», a play on The Waste Land, is how one section begins). Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) portrays the world through the eyes of an amnesiac, a scenario indebted to Borges’s story «Funes the Memorious», but conducted in a manner associated with Craig Raine’s instantly famous poem «A Martian Sends a Postcard Home», so that clouds become «fat, sleepy things … the trolleys of the sky.» («Martianism», people enjoyed pointing out, was an anagram of Martin Amis.) Time’s Arrow (1991), drawing on a passage from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, moves backwards through the life of a Nazi doctor, with the Vonnegut-like name of Tod T. Friendly.

His most routinely invoked novels, Money and London Fields (1989), appear to be, respectively, a satire about greed and a nuclear-age crime thriller, but within a few pages it’s clear that topical commentary – a portrait of the times – is not the aim. They are driven by their prose, and concerned with acts of writing. Money is the manic suicide note of its narrator John Self, while London Fields concerns a blocked American novelist who comes upon a real-life noir plot as soon as he touches down at Heathrow. When Tom Wolfe, author of a novel genuinely concerned with the 1980s, Bonfire of the Vanities, wrote «Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast», his 1989 manifesto for a kind of reported novel of metropolitan life – the subject of a section in Retroland – he invoked as the enemy exactly the sort of remote, recondite, hyper-literary and fantastical habits in which Amis avidly indulged. Even when he aimed for the tour de force – as he increasingly did – his work retained the flavour of the jeu d’esprit. You might say that what made him addictive and fascinating also limited his popularity and his centrality.

In his reviews and essays, Amis was keen to emphasise the B-ness of the writers he admired. He noted Borges’s «purity of conception, as if originating from some super-evolved plane of the intellect», and complained that V. S. Pritchett, writing about The Aleph and Other Stories in the New York Review of Books, had tried to explain or «humanise» his work. In one of many responses to J. G. Ballard, he said there was no point speculating whether High-Rise is «prescient, admonitory or sobering.» Ballard's characters, he asserted, were merely roles, the scenarios just context. He «has nothing coherent to ‘say’.» He is «abstract.» (The italic was one of Amis’s trustiest tools.) The point of Ballard’s visions was to provide him «with imagery, with opportunities to write well», adding that this was «the only intelligible way of getting the hang of his fiction.» What mattered in a writer, he argued in a 1980 article on plagiarism, was «perceptual manner.»

It was a concertedly non-realist aesthetic. To borrow the distinction from M. H. Abrams’s book about the Romantic theory of literature – a work that Amis at one point knew well – he aspired to be a ‘lamp,’ not a ‘mirror.’ Perhaps his most revealing piece of writing in this regard was a review in November 1973 of The Violent Effigy by the leading Oxford academic John Carey, a book that slams the «solemn parts» of Charles Dickens’s work in favour of his «imaginative habits», a phrase Amis later re-used. (I suspect that Amis got the title of his second novel from Carey’s claim that «once Dickens starts laughing nothing is safe, from Christianity to dead babies.») It stood to reason, Amis argued, that Dickens’s treatment of things like underprivileged children was inconsistent because «social issues» are more or less irrelevant to «works of the fancy.» (This, it later emerged, was the version of Dickens that one of Amis’s favourite writers, Vladimir Nabokov, peddled to his students when teaching Bleak House.) Amis also quotes an essay by Northrop Frye, the legendary Canadian critic who briefly taught him at Oxford, which presented Dickens’s novels as staging broad, even timeless dichotomies: congeniality and corruption, «the hidden, elemental worlds of Good and Bad», dream and death. When Mary in Other People reads a Dickens Omnibus, she finds that in each story a nice young couple confront a gallery of villains and live happily ever after. A version of this «abstract» narrative logic underpins a number of Amis’s novels.

The B approach, though funkier and spikier and capable of revelations, came with its costs, as Amis knew. You might be adored but not taken seriously. A difficulty for Dickens’s reputation, for instance, was that he «insists on being romantic, melodramatic, unrepresentational» (i.e. B) and «will not be adult, introspective, mimetic» (i.e. A) like other Victorian novelists (George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell). Most of the criticism that tried to elevate Dickens’s work in the post-war era «urged him back into what we invidiously imagine to be ‘the tradition’ – i.e., the social-realist tradition» – in other words, by presenting him as an A writer. On the other hand, you might be taken very seriously but in a narrow way. In an essay about Joyce, Amis notes that he «could have been the most popular boy in the school» but ended up «with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet.» Victoria Glendinning summed things up in 1981, on the publication of Other People, when she said that «you could be a deal less intelligent and aware» than Amis was and «be a better novelist.» If ‘better’ is taken to mean more insightful/moving/gripping, a number of the Granta wannabes showed that this was the case. His body of work lacks its counterpart to Atonement or The Remains of the Day, its Waterland or Midnight’s Children, an acknowledged classic that established Amis as something more palatable than, in his description of Ballard, a «one-man genre.»

In a typical generalisation, Amis said that «ambitious novelists tend to get more B and less A», and though this might be true of Joyce, Nabokov, Henry James, Burgess – Amis's exhibits – it wouldn't prove to be the case for him. (Nor for his most like-minded – and B-leaning – contemporary, Julian Barnes.) He never became an efficient storyteller, a social realist, a mirror. But, prompted in part by fatherhood, by an increasing interest in fact, and by his reading of Saul Bellow – a relationship that turned from admiration to awe at some point in the mid-1980s – he talked less about «shape» (and «symmetry») and more about «life», a concept he had once mocked F. R. Leavis for celebrating («almost as if the rest of us had no time for the stuff»). He also started writing ‘about’ things, having things to ‘say’ – about physics (Einstein’s Monsters 1987, Night Train 1998), totalitarianism (Time’s Arrow 1991, House of Meetings 2008, Zone of Interest 2014), English society (Yellow Dog 2003, The Pregnant Widow 2010, Lionel Asbo 2012). In his later work, the subject did not merely provide opportunities to write well – sometimes, one might add, not even. And though his «novelised autobiography» Inside Story is far from Amis’s best book – an accolade that goes to Success, or Money, or Time’s Arrow, or his earlier autobiographical exercise Experience, or the essay collection The War Against Cliche – it serves as an introduction not just to where he ended up, but to his world and his habits: the belief in stylistic dos and don’ts (the subtitle of the UK version is «How to Write»); his relationships with his father the novelist Kingsley Amis, his hero Bellow and best friend Christopher Hitchens, and his second wife Isabel Fonseca; the love of conceptual distinctions and structural impedimenta ... And, of course, it couldn’t have been written by anyone else.

Looking again at the Granta portrait after almost forty years, A.N. Wilson claimed to see only a group of Salieris, «not a Mozart among them.» Leaving aside the claims of some of the other sitters – one of them, after all, a Nobel Prize winner – this seems an unnecessary and not altogether convincing slight on a radiantly gifted and unabashedly ornery writer who Wilson has elsewhere identified as a heroic figure, envied, worshipped, copied. It's a status that Martin Amis, whatever his idiosyncrasies and incapacities, will retain for a long time to come.

This is an extended version of an article originally published in Norwegian («Å få taket på Martin Amis») on June 6, 2023.