Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  Martin reports their exchange in the flat sardonic manner perfectly suited to a figure caught in that strange hinterland between hilarity and incredibility. He does not need to caricature him but he does add a number of intriguing observations on the fact that Mailer regards literature as a legitimate vehicle for his advocacy of unrestraint. He does not simply indulge perverse characters but rather functions as their advocate; the history of his fiction parallels his personal record of uncontrite lunacy. Martin: ‘He stabbed his second wife several times – following a party at which he had commanded all guests to choose an opponent and beat him/her to a pulp – and then persuaded her not to press charges. Few if any writers would be capable of rendering such a weird scenario as credible fiction, let alone escape prosecution for perpetrating it.’

  The Vonneguts, Jill and Kurt, lived on the East Side of town in a residence more spacious and modest than Mailer’s – a house – and Martin’s attitude shifts from mild dismay and vexation to something close to pity. Kurt Vonnegut, he points out, is still undeniably a pillar of the US literary establishment; all his novels remain in print and feature consistently in university courses on modern American writing. But there is something about his status that invites comparison with Wilde’s homosexuality after the trial. And Martin, cautiously, guides their conversation towards it: without Slaughterhouse Five he would be at best a minor provincial author, perhaps even unpublished:

  I switched on the tape-recorder and backed myself into the Big Question [. . .] no writer likes to be asked if he has lost his way [. . .]

  ‘After Slaughterhouse Five I’d already done much more than I ever expected to do with my life [. . .] The raid [on Dresden] didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defence or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited.’

  ‘And who was that?’

  ‘Me. I got several dollars for each person killed. Imagine.’5

  Back in the city, specifically the oasis of calm that is Columbia University and its environs, Martin pays a respectful call upon Diana Trilling, widow of the critic Lionel and recorder of the incessant contraries of American existence. She had just published a book on the so-called Harris Trial, the murder case involving a WASP millionaire charged with killing her Jewish diet specialist and occasional lover. As Martin puts it: ‘It is hard work trying to dream up a home-grown equivalent of the crime – as if, say, the headmistress of Roedean had done away with Jimmy Saville.’

  Characteristically he telescopes the particulars of Mrs Trilling’s work into some general observations on America:

  The life of the American intellectual is qualitatively different from its British equivalent. In America, intellectuals are public figures (whereas over here they are taken rather less seriously than ordinary citizens – at most, they are licensed loudmouths). The intellectual life therefore has a dimension of political responsibility; the crises of modern liberalism – the race question, McCarthyism, feminism, Vietnam, Israel – are magnified but also taken personally, vitally. Spats between writers are transformed, willy-nilly, into unshirkable crusades. The Trillings lived this life together and experienced all its triumphs and wounds. Lillian Hellman, Martha’s Vineyard, 1952, 1968, Little Brown, UnAmerican Activities, the New York Review . . . it is a ceaseless, swirling litany.6

  It is intriguing to compare this piece with one he produced six months earlier, which would become the title chapter of his 1993 volume Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions. The Nabokovs had retired to Montreux some twenty years earlier and Vladimir had died in 1977. His widow and son Dmitri occupied a large suite in the Montreux Palace hotel, a monument to the city’s prevailing mood of orderly, decaying grandeur. Martin is deferential to his hosts, living reminders of the writer he has admired since university, yet throughout the piece one detects a subcurrent of frustration and puzzlement. A question lingers in the margins of his account, but unlike the beautifully choreographed exchanges with Vonnegut he addresses it during his walk to the meeting – ‘Why Montreux anyway, I wondered . . . ?’ – without asking Vera herself. It is as if he has replaced the one-to-one dynamic of his American interviews – so redolent of the place’s energetic incompleteness – with something more respectful of a quietened, almost embalmed history. He reflects,

  Strolling through the sun and mist of the lakeside, I thought of the lost and innocuous parklands of an idealized boyhood. The Swiss children are dapper and immaculate on their skates. The Swiss midges, keeping themselves to themselves, are much too civic-minded to swarm or sting.7

  Even a cursory knowledge of Nabokov’s life will enable us to intuit the subtext of Martin’s thoughts: a childhood spent in a pre-Revolutionary Russia not unlike the Switzerland of today, then a journey through the mania of Europe after the First World War, the Weimar Republic followed by Paris and a last-minute escape to the US as the Nazis invaded France. In ‘Lolita Reconsidered’8 Martin contends that Humbert Humbert is unique because he was born out of a sequence of experiences to which few if any writers could make a comparable claim. Nabokov was the ultimate European sophisticate, a minor aristocrat and playboy who wrote poetry in his early teens and watched the edifice, the continent, that had nurtured him destroy itself. In America he found a society begotten by Europe but having long spurned its parentage; a place driven by the excesses and visceral passions that on the other side of the Atlantic had been buried by millennial accretions of Taste and Culture. Thus Humbert came into being, an unapologetic sexual deviant blessed with cosmopolitan sophistication and guile.

  Martin was in the early 1980s forming an impression of America as the modern literary Empyrean, capable of dispersing the hidebound incuriosity and predictability of the Old World. Lolita was then, and remains, one of his favourite novels but he cannot declare it to be more than that, and certainly not in his view the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Humbert is an incomparably foul individual who beats his first wife regularly, rapes a schoolgirl twice a day and murders his only rival for her enforced affections, the equally gruesome pornography addict Quilty. But he is also the most mellifluously talented narrator ever created. Stylistically the book is exquisite, elegant, yet it is far more successful than any piece of modernist writing in demonstrating the uniqueness and perversity of fiction. Only in the 263-page narrative web spun by Humbert can we permit ourselves to cast aside abhorrence and simply marvel at what can be done with words. Lolita is a magnificent piece of work which, paradoxically, will never be allowed to epitomize a grand aesthetic principle. This was a problem for Martin for the simple reason that his own working mantra was indisputably Nabokovian. In each of his first four novels our attempts to consider his ostentatious command of language blur our attempts to consider the import of the subject matter.

  Among Nabokov’s near contemporaries Martin admires, with profound reservations, Philip Roth and John Updike. Roth is like Nabokov, addictive, a writer with an overabundance of talent who seems determined to waste it. Reading Roth’s novels is less a literary experience than a voyeuristic exercise in witnessing mammoth self-destruction. He writes brilliantly but he has only one subject, himself, and the more he delves into this enigma, with its hostages to guilt-ridden Judaism and rapturously specified grim habits, the more he ceases to have any obvious presence or objective as a literary artist. Updike is similarly spavined:

  Updike calls them ‘the Angstrom novels’, but we know them more familiarly as the Rabbit books. They span thirty years and 1,500 pages. And they tell the story, from youth to death, of a Pennsylvanian car salesman: averagely bigoted and chauvinistic, perhaps exceptionally gluttonous and lewd, but otherwise brutally undistinguished. It is as if a double-sized Ulysses had been narrated, not by Stephen, Bloom and Molly, but by one of the surlier underbouncers at Kiernan’s bar.9

  This morbidly detailed world of anti-hubris, combined with the sort of moral delinquency that puts the self-absorbed Europeans to shame is, according to Martin,
unique to the American novel. But it is a uniqueness bought at considerable cost. Roth’s Zuckerman and Updike’s Angstrom are extensions of their creators and although autobiography is a necessary if oft-denied contingency of all writing, its sprawling US manifestation involves characters without any apparent horizon or purpose. It is almost as though Roth and Updike have spent so long inside their own novels that they have forgotten that fiction should be informed by something that resembles a thematic direction or interest. Again, however, one cannot help but notice the similarities between Martin’s reservations regarding Roth and Updike and features of his own early work. Few if any of the characters in the first four novels are disingenuous refashionings of Martin Amis but there are without doubt parallels between the man he was during this period and the way he wrote. Examine his non-literary writings and more tellingly listen to the recollections of people who knew him and the following presence emerges: a man who was magnetically entertaining and witty, whose evaluative resources were sharp and intimidating; he was not malicious and nor was he apologetic regarding the favours – emotional, professional, social – bought for him by connections and precocious fame. He succeeded effortlessly with women but few if truth be told would have chosen restraint if offered the same opportunities. Yet at the centre of this chiaroscuro of effects and inclinations is an enigma. He could deal with ideas expertly in print, could even, on occasions, take on the role of advocate or antagonist but behind the performance there was no clear commitment to anything in particular, be this ideological, political or aesthetic. Cynicism, even nihilism, borne with an appropriate degree of accountability, is often to be admired but Martin simply appeared as though he could not find the time for ideas and beliefs. In the novels one encounters a magnificent performance, a man demonstrating his expertise in the manipulation of the reader’s emotions and expectations, but once the performance is over we are left with little but a feeling of admiration for someone who can use language so brilliantly. But I write, in part, as devil’s advocate, as a reflection of the less than sympathetic commentators on the man and his work. We should wonder: what should a novel do for us? And then we should think again: in asking this question are we not forgetting the uniquely protean status of fiction? Of late a number of historians and political commentators have attempted to isolate the essential character of the 1970s.10 It is easy enough now to treat the decade as a precipitate time, a period of political apathy that spawned the transformations of Thatcherism, but to do so is to take considerable liberties with the benefits of retrospection: few if any right-wing Conservatives foresaw let alone plotted the events of the early 1980s. And as far as the more elastic notions of culture and the social fabric are concerned these years could best be described as rudderless, a condition that most people at the time took for granted or more often treated with indifference. Popular culture had arrived in all its popular, tasteless and profitable manifestations; the memory of the horrors and deprivations of the war were being gradually marginalized by a generation for whom the actual experience was vicarious; the two principal political parties seemed to have settled into a game of musical chairs, joined annoyingly by the unions but played according to the principles laid down by the post-war Labour Government. The economy was, it seemed, lurching from one disaster to another but for most this was a distraction from what appeared to be a consensually agreed if rarely acknowledged pursuit of a good time acquired mainly via sex, consumer goods and foreign holidays. Perhaps Martin’s novels of this period will come to be recognized as a shrewd index – with some exaggerations – to a society made up of selfishness, atrophy and indifference.

  When he first met Saul Bellow in October 1983 in Chicago it was certainly not a moment of revelation. His account in the Observer is at once guileless and contrived. Privately he knew what to expect but he provides a flawless performance as someone who does not. He runs through a select recollection of his recent encounters with Capote (‘poleaxed by a hangover’), the patronizing Vidal, Mailer the hypocrite – who is laddish and amicable in person but who later goes on to denounce Martin on TV as a ‘wimp’; Heller, ‘brawny, jovial’ and self-absorbed; and Vonnegut, amiably sanguine but ‘a natural crackpot’. ‘Saul Bellow, I suspected, would speak in the voice I knew from the novels: funny, fluent and profound.’11 And so he does. From the moment they meet each is aware of an unforced mutual affinity, something that would be maintained in all of their subsequent encounters. Would you, I asked Martin, have been quite so enamoured of the man had you not already modelled your expectations upon his work? (There are some, such as his agent and PA, Harriet Wasserman, who have judged him quixotic, narcissistic and hypocritical.) ‘Saul was honest both as an individual and a novelist, or I should say transparent. He never claimed to understand or have solutions to everything and nor did he ever disguise his uncertainties. Back to your question. When I met him my preconceptions were neither confirmed nor overturned. I hardly noticed the change between reading him and talking to him.’ Much the same has been said to me by friends of Martin Amis, of Martin Amis.

  Bellow’s enduring complaint was against an insidious legacy of modernism: the displacement of the autonomous individual – full retinue of failings included – by a conveniently amorphous pretext for despair and nihilism.

  His response to this originated in his personal history and became a persistent trope in his fiction. As a child he spoke as much Yiddish as English and by the time he reached his teens, in Chicago, any clear perception of a single community to which he might belong was continually challenged by the fact that his city, indeed his nation, was a random assembly of interests, affiliations and perspectives. But rather than submit to the lazy option of relativism, Bellow bequeathed to his fiction and invested in his fictional heroes nuanced versions of a private credo, which could be termed the uncorrupted primacy of the imagination. None of his most famous figures from Augie March through Moses Herzog and Charlie Citrine to Albert Corde of The Dean’s December (1982) – a copy of which Martin brought to their first meeting – finds consolation for their various grievances in anything that resembles a doctrine, be this ideological or religious, and in this they reflect Bellow’s sceptical humanism. But what he and they also share is a faith – and there is no better word for it – in thinking and writing as an impregnable stronghold against despair. Moses Herzog (1964) for example is driven to the brink of a breakdown by his wife’s adultery. He writes long letters recording his thoughts on civilization and the plight of the individual, addresses them to living and dead correspondents and never sends them. Bellow’s other fictional representatives never quite resort to such a literal investment in writing and the imagination but in various ways each of them restores to their otherwise blighted landscape a sense of humanity, even optimism, simply by their presence as intellectual interlopers, presiding hosts for the messy unforgiving nature of their environment. Martin calls this ‘higher autobiography’ or HA. ‘One of the assumptions behind HA, I think, went as follows: in a world becoming more and more this and more and more that, but above all becoming more and more mediated, the direct line to your own experience was the only thing you could trust. So the focus moved inward, with that slow zoom a writer feels when he switches from the third person to the first.’12 Prior to this sentence he is writing exclusively about Bellow but soon after its conclusion we become aware that he is thinking about how HA become a turning point in his own career. ‘Money [. . .] certainly wasn’t the higher autobiography. But I see now that the story turned on my own preoccupations: it is about tiring of being single; it is about the fear that childlessness will condemn you to childishness.’13

  Bellow was present at the conception of Martin’s novel, not in person but as an intellectual compass, an example to be followed by a man who had no clear sense of direction. The autobiographical seam running through all of Bellow’s novels drew not only upon his private musings; his life was to say the least eventful, involving as a child and teenager daily experiences of poverty an
d gangsterism in Chicago, wartime military service, periods in Paris and Mexico, three turbulent, and failed, marriages and in the 1970s long periods reporting on the state of Israel, involving an on-the-spot account of the Six Day War. This last had obliged him to come to terms with his Judaic identity and heritage and contemplate the impulses that lay behind two millennia of anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust and the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Martin’s experiences of shock and trauma were bought vicariously, mostly from books and film. Notice, then, the lead in to his own explanation of HA ‘. . . in a world becoming more and more this and more and more that, but above all becoming more and more mediated . . .’

  Martin was aware that Bellow’s ruminations on the nature of existence were corollaries of his harsh acquaintance with life’s extremities. The question arose as to how he might distil similar profundity from three decades of cosseting. The only abnormal aspects in his otherwise unexceptional history was the effect of having a famous, unfatherly father and he had already dealt with that on several occasions. So in the absence of tangible promptings Martin considered what else might threaten his emotional and ethical sensibilities and came up with the fact that modern life was comprised largely of representations and falsifications, substitutes for actuality; as he put it the world is ‘mediated’. It was no accident then that the novel through which he would aspire to a level of gravity and profundity comparable with Bellow involves film-making.