There’s a memorable scene in Experience during which Amis kicks Hitchens’s shins under the table to get him to stop grilling Saul and Janis Bellow about Israeli atrocities. Amis’s capacity for ancestor-worship was boundless: (at least) 8 articles on Bellow, 9 on Nabokov. But I wonder if he might have benefitted more from reading less of them. From Bellow he took the street-wise tough guys (already often unpersuasive in the original) and made them even more street-wise until many of them simply became vessels of Translatlantic Amis-speak, while from Nabokov Amis cribbed a kind of cliff-notes postmodernism, furnishing pointless doppelgängers for his plots, and making his narrators pick up a toilet brush and see a ‘moustachioed sceptre’ (a parody of Nabokov, even in the mouth of a character). With the exception of Inside Story, an unexpectedly moving coda to his career, the first half of his output outshines the second by some distance. High-flown English
Thomas Meaney offer a link to this essay by James Wolcott of 2012:
Marti Amis has reached that not entirely enviable plateau in an eminent literary career where he (and we) might be better off if he gave up writing novels and just granted interviews from now on. He could air his observations on issues throbbingly relevant in the republic of letters, then retire to his den for a nip or a nap. Giving up fiction would lighten his workload considerably, and take the pressure off having to re-prove himself to the growing sector of the literary punditry that treats him with such jaded familiarity.
Since London Fields or so, I find myself anticipating the profiles, chat sessions, and drink visits promoting the novels more than I do the results themselves—reminiscent of the patch in Mel Brooks’s career when his guest spots on “The Tonight Show” plugging his latest self-wallow were funnier, jazzier, and more turned-on to the audience than the actual releases, as any bleary survivor of Spaceballs or Robin Hood: Men in Tights can attest. The Q&A format seems to smoke out more reverie from Amis, unclenching his clam-tight control. Not that he puts on a command performance for the journalists who gingerly approach, fretful of running afoul of a verbal scowl, however graciously he offers them a suitable beverage. Nearly every Amis interview expresses the wary, battle-weary tone of a veteran interviewee hiking Boot Hill again. But within this monochromatic range he is far more engaging, perceptive, interesting, and adept at cultural landscaping than he is in the novels themselves, the forced labors of Night Train, Yellow Dog, House of Meetings.
And perhaps it really is so, with some novelists. But Martin’s talent wasn’t like that. Those reviewers had made the most basic category error. His style was his vision; or rather, that vision expanded, deepened and darkened, took on life sentence by sentence, coterminously with the growing richness and inventiveness of his verbal gifts, his linguistic imagination – his voice. So, he was content to let plot take care of itself, while his novels proceeded according to a recurring set of patterns or obsessions (his “doublings” and pairings, his characters unsure of their parentage, his rivalries among siblings and friends, his patch of west London), and his creative energies went into the sentences, thus into unforgettable human grotesques and exorbitantly funny exchanges, crescendos, laments … His was a Dickensian talent, and one – at its best – of Dickensian amplitude. It remade the world, not as we knew it but in the image of whatever the English language – his English language – could accommodate.
Martin achieved what he did, not through talent alone but also dedication – and crucial to that was appreciation, of writers he himself loved and admired: beyond all others, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow in prose, Shakespeare and Milton in verse. Love and admiration came naturally to him, just as naturally as sharp reproof of anything that struck him as inauthentic or incompetent. His was a wonderfully witty, warm and responsive presence (his launch parties were, appropriately, bacchanals): that much I knew from experience. From Experience I learnt that he was, too, a loving father and son, unabashedly affectionate with family and close friends. Those who were much closer to him than I was will have more to say about all these qualities in the coming days. But I mourn his loss, which is a loss to us all, British or American, who care about art, about sentences and the novels and essays built from them, about talent, and about Martin’s great abiding instinct, the belief on which he built his life: “Writing is freedom”.
On the questions of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov see the long quote from Thomas Meaney, above.
Literary Apprentice
P.S. For some further insights into Martin Amis, this from The New York Times of March 9, 2008
Headline: Amis and Islam
By Rachel Donadio
…
In England’s left-leaning intellectual culture, traditionally somewhat hostile toward Israel and the United States, Amis has emerged as sympathetic to the two countries’ situation. Although he opposed the Iraq war and is skeptical of American power, “The Second Plane” draws admiringly on books often dismissed by some on the left: Paul Berman’s “Terror and Liberalism,” Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong?” and Mark Steyn’s “America Alone.” (He also draws on the neo-atheist Sam Harris.)
On the phone last month, Amis talked about the transAtlantic divide. “The anti-Americanism is really toxic in this country, and the anti-Zionism,” he said, attributing the sentiments to empire envy. “I think we ceased to be a world power just as America was unignorably taking on that role.” The dominant ideology “told us that we don’t like empires, we’re ashamed of ever having one.” In England, he continued, “we’ve infantilized ourselves, stupefied ourselves, through a kind of sentimental multiculturalism,” Amis said. He called for open discussion “without self-righteous cries of racism. It’s not about race, it’s about ideology.”
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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