Martin Amis

Thoughts on the Writer From a Decades-Long Fan

Martin Amis died a few days ago, at only 73. The son of Kingsley Amis, he outshone his father, overshadowing him in terms of talent and acclaim. (He also happened to die at the same age as his father, the type of coincidence I find strangely unsettling.) I was, in my 20s, something of an Amis extremist, not merely because he was dashing and British, but because he had style on the page. I read everything of his I could find, including The Rachel Papers, which I absolutely loved, and still do. A glorious tale of first passion, or, one might say, of a big, stupid crush. I know many women dismiss it as sexist - and some resent Amis and the group of posh male writers of which he was a part, including Hitchens, Barnes, McEwan. But as is often the case with me, I found and find myself out of step with my cohort’s line of thinking. (I also love Hemingway. Take that, Women’s Studies profs from years ago who told me I shouldn’t!)

In the post-9/11 world, he was able to shift away from being, above all, a writerly writer, to being someone who, with courage, commented on the moral bankruptcy of the many who seemed to have abandoned previously held beliefs the minute those planes hit the towers. (His The Second Plane is a collection of essays and short stories about the attack and its aftermath.) Somewhere around 2009, he gave a talk to a private audience as part of a speaker series in Toronto. My job - or one of them - at the time, was to transcribe those talks, so I was lucky enough to attend. Two comments he made, in particular, remain clear to me - the first, because I wrote it down. About the left and Islamism:

“I take my hat off to the left in that they’ve found something to defend in a movement that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitorial, imperialist and genocidal. Perhaps it is their [Islamist’s] view on usury that is attractive to the left — low interest rates, or non-existent interest rates.” 

The other was a story he told about speaking before another audience - I think in the UK - and asking anyone present who believed that they were morally superior to the Taliban to please raise their hands. As he described it, a few shy hands were shakily raised. Of course, he said, every hand in that room should have shot up, with certainty. My guess is that the polite and comfortable Toronto crowd before whom he was speaking that night would also have been reluctant to declare themselves the moral betters of the Taliban. Side note: he told some raunchy stories, as well, about his first sexual experiences. The gentle Upper Canadian listeners tittered in deep discomfort. I found him funny - but I’ve always been juvenile. Plus, I grew up with four brothers, so I have a fairly high threshold for such business.

In another challenge to the received wisdom of his circle, Amis gave an interview to The Independent in 2008, in which he said the following about Israel: “I know it’s a great tradition of the British left to support Palestine, but when you come up against this question, you can feel the intelligence and balance leaving the hall with a shriek, and people getting into this endocrinal state about Israel. I just don’t understand it. The Jews have a much, much worse history than the Palestinians, and in living memory. But there’s just no impulse of sympathy for that . . . I know we’re supposed to be grown up about it and not fling around accusations of anti-Semitism, but I don’t see any other explanation. It’s a secularised anti-Semitism.”

One novel of his I have yet to read - it is on my list - is The Zone of Interest. He talks about it and about the responsibility of writing about the Holocaust in this clip:

What a writer he was. I loved London Fields - a dark comedy and also a mystery - and I always thought Success was prescient and sexy. So many more, but I’ll finish my list with these two non-fiction works: Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, about Stalin’s dreadful historical legacy and the horrors of communism; and Inside Story, called a novel, but which is an autobiography in novel-ish form. I enjoy Amis when he writes about writing and there is an awful lot of that in there. Yes, famous friends figure prominently - Hitchens, Bellow, Larkin. One thing that touched me about the memoir was his openheartedness towards his stepmother. Others remembering a similar family drama might be stingier.

As a young writer he was heralded and then somewhat abandoned by the literary chatterers in later years. Likely for no specific motivation though perceived politics could have played a role. He was hardly a right-winger, though. He was fervently anti-Trump and I remember that night in Toronto he - quite rightly - made a point of stressing the difference between Islam and Islamism. Whatever the reasons, it is a shame. The gift is that he wrote because he wanted to write, not for prizes. I wait for someone new to come along and match him. It will be a while.

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I mentioned his father - in high school we read Lucky Jim, which is quite a fun book. But I recently read his The Old Devils - published more than thirty years after Lucky Jim - and thought it a terrific piece of writing about getting older (or just plain old). As I age, I like to see examples of creativity continuing.