Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  The practicalities of their return were but trifles compared with the storm of collective condemnation, verging upon loathing, that awaited Martin in response to his recent writings on contemporary politics, in particular 9/11 and Islam.

  Terry Eagleton, in the Introduction to his reissued Ideology, proffered what he claimed as a verbatim quote from an article in which Martin allegedly observed that ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’ and suggested that we should strip-search people who look like they’re ‘from the Middle East or Pakistan’. Eagleton goes on to comment that these are ‘not the ramblings of a British National Party thug . . . but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world’. Having dealt with the son he lines up Amis senior as his next target, describing Kingsley as ‘a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals’, adding triumphantly that ‘Amis fils has clearly learnt more from him how to turn a shapely phrase’.22

  ‘For one thing,’ says Martin, ‘he was slovenly in his use of quotations. Those quotes were in any event misrepresentations of what I’d said, by interviewers. They did not come from an essay – in fact he cited, incorrectly, the “Age of Horrorism” as their source in his later Guardian piece.23 He had cobbled together phrases from interviews I’d given on the consequences of the tube bombings in 2005,24 probably from the Internet. I said in one interview that I felt a definite urge to say that the Muslim community should get its house in order. I made it clear on every occasion that I did not advocate such measures, but that most people felt this visceral response. Which would very quickly be tempered by reason. Eagleton botched the context of what were impromptu responses to the bombings – for which I make no apology, it was how I felt at the time – or he failed to check his sources.’

  Eagleton’s accusations prompted a melee of earnest dudgeon lasting through October and early November. Several well-practised advocates of post-colonial repentance came out against Martin (notably Ronan Bennett, in the Guardian, 19 November and Yasmin Alibhai Brown, in the Independent, 8 October) while a greater number spoke in defence of him and his father. John Sutherland (Guardian, 4 October) played the safe, sardonic card by keeping clear of the particulars of the case and presenting Eagleton as a throwback to days when intellectuals took Marxism seriously. Philip Hensher (Independent, 9 October) focused mainly upon Eagleton’s accusation that Kingsley was homophobic, which he found bizarre and entirely groundless. Geoffrey Levy (Daily Mail, 11 October) dismantled the rumour of Kingsley as anti-Semitic, and Michael Henderson (Daily Telegraph, 6 October) mounted an assault on Eagleton’s coercive populism, his implicit assumption that since Thatcher everything even moderately conservative, be it aesthetic or political, must be open to unshackled abuse. Jane Howard and her brother Colin wrote to the Telegraph on the same day (9 October) with rebuttals, from personal experience, of every charge that Eagleton made against Kingsley. Colin wrote of how Kingsley had helped him feel more confident about his homosexuality and added that ‘calling him anti-Semitic would be actionable were it not so absurd’. However, as Sutherland had sagely observed, the dead cannot pursue libel actions; hence the virulence of Eagleton’s attack on Kingsley. Eagleton himself re-entered the debate on 10 October in the Guardian. The article occludes any opinion based upon observation or intelligence and favours ideology. Typically: ‘There is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilization that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures . . .’ By an astonishing act of teleology Martin is transformed into the spokesman for a creed, a military-political grouping and he finds this sleight of hand by parts hilarious and unsettling. ‘I am unaffiliated, whereas Eagleton can’t get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx.’

  A late contribution to the exchange was made by Christopher Hitchens (Guardian, 21 November 2007). ‘You don’t have to know him [Martin], or for that matter be an expert on Jonathan Swift to see that the harshness Amis was canvassing was not in the least a recommendation, but rather an experiment in the limits of permissible thought.’ By ‘permissible’ Hitchens does not refer to thoughts which merely allow for justifiable outrage or disgust. He means that a consensus now governs public debate, and that one of its implicit regulations forbids pronouncements based upon moral or ethical absolutes. Hence, Martin’s attack upon Islamic extremism as an evil doctrine based upon fanaticism and theocratic inflexibility is presented by Eagleton and Bennett as a purblind fixation, allowing for no recognition of the allegedly morally superior democracies as perpetrators of genocide and injustice in Iraq, Afghanistan and according to Bennett, Ireland. In the same issue as this article the Guardian’s letters page contained a letter from Ian McEwan, summed up by his statement: ‘I’ve known [him] for almost thirty-five years, and he’s no racist.’ Four other correspondents on the same page found him beyond redemption or rehabilitation.

  Hitchens, to his credit, does not offer unqualified support for Martin’s declared positions on these matters. Instead, he endorses his courage as someone willing to think and write beyond the stifling confines of moral relativism. With this in mind we should consult a lengthy article published on 11 September shortly before the news broke of Eagleton’s assault on the Amises. Obviously, Eagleton had not read it when he prepared the preface to Ideology and Martin when he wrote it had no intimation of the imminent furore to be caused by Eagleton’s book. A prize for prescience should, however, go to Martin given that he foreshadows, pre-empts and provokes virtually every accusation soon to be laid against him. Memorably he tells of how shortly after his return from Uruguay, he was invited on to the panel of BBC’s Question Time and asked about ‘our progress in what was now being called the Long War’. His answer was, he claims, ‘almost tediously centrist’, arguing that the West had got its priorities wrong, that instead of first attacking Iraq it should have spent the preceding five years constructing a pluralistic, democratic society in the then still tractable Afghanistan while containing Iraq through tough sanctions and if necessary military blockades. Instead of provoking the standard motley chorus of responses Martin was treated by the audience as though he had advertised the benefits of legalised child prostitution. One woman ‘in a voice near-tearful with passionate self-righteousness’ stated that since the Americans had incited the widespread hostility in Muslim countries which contributed to 9/11 they should in atonement ‘be dropping bombs on themselves’! His attempts to visualize this faintly deranged hypothesis were, he recalls, ‘scattered by the sound of unanimous applause’. He reflects, ‘We are drowsily accustomed, by now, to the fetishization of “balance”, the ground rule of “moral equivalence” in all conflicts between West and East, the 100-per-cent and 360-degree inability to pass judgement on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel). And yet the handclappers of Question Time had moved beyond the old formula of pious paralysis. This was not equivalence; this was hemispherical abjection.’

  Certain facts testify to the astuteness of Martin’s assessment, most significantly the startling similarity between the response of the audience to his reply and Eagleton’s rampage through a digest of questionably sourced quotations. Both resemble, paradoxically, the reflexive intolerance of fundamentalist Islam, recalling eerily the Rushdie affair in which transgression of doctrine was greeted with inflexible condemnation. Bizarrely, as Martin points out, the doctrine he had transgressed involved a degree of bitter self loathing that would have stretched the credulity of even the most resolute nihilist of a century earlier. To repeat Martin’s own coinage, ‘This was not equivalence; this was hemispherical abjection.’

  I have dwelt upon this issue because from it Martin has emerged as the only figure since the mid-twentieth century to have proved equally controversial in his literary and political writings. ‘I took a great deal of flak after Koba fr
om political writers and historians. They are intensely territorial. You know. “Listen, stick to novels and a bit of journalism, leave the heavy-duty stuff to us”.’ Thankfully he chose to ignore their advice.

  His post 1990s political essays, along with two short stories on related themes, were collected as The Second Plane (2008) and by far the most engrossing is ‘Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind’, which draws together material from several pieces published in the Observer and at almost fifty pages in length constitutes a short polemical monograph. It also deposes the belief that literary writers are inherently impaired as serious commentators on the world, reversing the tenet on which the myth is based: in this piece Martin’s experience as a novelist provides him with a special perspective on the so-called ‘Age of Terror’. He tells of how recently he had completely abandoned a ‘thriving’ short novel. This had happened before but previously the cause had been the routine problems of apathy leading to creative disaffiliation. Now it was different:

  [The] reasons were wholly extraneous . . . And I had discovered something. Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer.25

  The novel centred upon Ayed, an Islamic terrorist, or more accurately a contemporary manifestation of Sayyid Qutb whose book Milestones is widely known as ‘the Mein Kampf of modern Islamism’. Ayed, operating in Afghanistan, is astute enough to realize that paradigm shifts such as 9/11 demand further assaults on the previously insuperable, so he formulates a plan to scour all of the prisons and madhouses in Afghanistan for compulsive murderous rapists and unleash them on Greeley, Colorado. It was there, in 1949, that Qutb became convinced that the US, and by implication all non-Islamic states, was populated entirely by idolatrous, wanton, depraved individuals – women in particular – who in the Qur’an are described as embodiments of Satan, intent upon drawing every Muslim away from his strict doctrinal path. Greeley, in 1949, was a relatively innocent location. The dance, which Qutb records in Milestones as exemplifying the US as a pullulating hell house of debauchery was sponsored by the local Presbyterian Church and at that time, throughout Greeley, alcohol was forbidden. This had, Martin concedes, all the makings of a very black comedy, except that Qutb became celebrated as an ‘awakener’, with the barbarous heathens of pre-Islamic Arabia now exchanged for the promiscuous infidels of the West, by parts Satanic and subhuman. Thus it was but a short step from his researches into the life, works and influence of Qutb to the creation of Ayed, planning to visit upon small-town Greeley an appropriately hellish brand of vengeance. The same logic, involving a theology-based concept of proportionate vengeance, had inspired the attacks on the Twin Towers. It was at this point, Martin confesses, that he found he could no longer proceed with the novel. It was not that it had become an absurdist exercise in hyperbole; rather, he abandoned the book because its horrifically implausible scenario was so closely allied to the recorded recent history of Islamism. He had, of course, written before in fiction about hideous occurrences and their perpetrators, notably in Time’s Arrow, but then he felt that few if any of his readers would dispute the verifiable nature of the events or the state of moral turpitude they invoked. But not now. ‘The opening argument we reach for now, in explaining any conflict, is the argument of moral equivalence. No value can be allowed to stand in stone, so we begin to question our ability to identify even what is malum per se.’26 Or, evil in itself. He felt he was writing about something very real yet almost too terrible to comprehend and which most of his readers would be conditioned to misinterpret as hyperbole.

  The Eagleton controversy rumbled on in websites and the margins of letters pages until the end of the year. Then a mischievous caller informed the Manchester Evening News that contractual details of staff at the city’s university could be made available if a sufficiently assiduous enquirer invoked the Freedom of Information Act. On 25 January 2008, the Evening News ran a front-page article announcing that the recent celebrity appointment at Manchester University was being paid £3,000 per hour, ‘the same as a professional footballer’, which for local readers would evoke such presences as Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. They reached this figure by dividing his £60,000 salary by the minimum number of hours he would teach per academic year – based on their inaccurate surmise – and assumed, correctly, that his contract exempted him from such drab activities as devising questions and marking exams and written assignments.

  Technically, the information published was partially correct, but the impression of Martin as a spoilt opportunist was misleading, especially for readers unfamiliar with the Machiavellian world of contemporary higher education. What the newspaper did not explain – and its story was soon recycled in the London dailies – were the circumstances of Martin’s appointment. The university created the job and approached Martin in early 2006 when he was still in Uruguay. They already employed eminences such as Will Self and John Banville on a part-time pro-rata basis as so-called Visiting Professors, mainly to add kudos to their postgraduate programme in creative writing. Ostensibly, Martin’s appointment as a full-time Professor was designed to substantiate their claim to have the most significant contemporary authors on hand to instruct those who wished to further their own literary ambitions, fees paid. In truth, however, the university’s motives and priorities lay elsewhere. The Research Assessment Exercise occurs on average every seven years and each university department in the UK is evaluated and graded according to its research performance, pre-eminently its publications over a specified period. The deadline for submission for the 2007–08 exercise was 31 December 2007 when publications by all permanently employed staff would be forwarded for scrutiny. The rewards for achieving a score within the top 5 per cent of a given discipline went far beyond recognition and eminence. Only the very highest-scoring departments would receive major boosts in government funding. As a consequence during the two-year period prior to the 2007 deadline a procedure which did indeed resemble the activities of Premier League football clubs was undertaken by universities powerful and rich enough to do so: head-hunting. Eminent academics would be poached from other institutions to beef up the research profile of their new employers. For English, novels could be submitted alongside groundbreaking critical monographs, so Martin – arguably the most controversial and influential novelist of his generation – was bought.

  He and his proactive agent Andrew Wylie had been successful over the previous ten years in securing lucrative deals with publishers and the most recent had been in 1999, involving the newly formed Miramax organization, a multi-media enterprise committed as much to film production as it was to the printed word. The contract which Wylie negotiated with Miramax’s Chief Executive involved generous advances for his subsequent three books – US rights only – a number of articles for Talk magazine, edited by Tina Brown, and a film screenplay, his first since the disastrous Saturn 3. The film was an adaptation of Northanger Abbey and he wrote two pieces for Talk. Martin needed the money because he had generously committed himself to paying for many of the day-to-day costs of his sons’ permanent home in Chesterton Road, and their private education. When he signed the deal with Miramax Louis was about to enter the sixth form, having gained spectacular grades at GCSE. Encouraged by Antonia and Martin, Louis and Jacob aimed to go to university, which would be far more costly than school. Fees had now been brought in by the Labour Government. And if his sons were to be spared the burden of debt after graduation a substantial amount would have to be invested for the next few years. Martin had, moreover, underwritten a mortgage of several hundred thousand pounds to cover the purchase of land and building costs for the Uruguay house. So although the Miramax contract was generous it involved payment only on production of material and in 2006, little more than two years before his sixtieth birthday and with his daughters about to begin the same expensive journey through the financially dema
nding education system, the regular salary offered by Manchester appeared an attractive prospect. He recalls that after agreeing to take up the university post he was reminded of a conversation with Philip Larkin. The latter had taken him to dinner in All Souls, Oxford where he was Visiting Fellow, editing the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Martin was in the second year of his degree. ‘He glanced towards the collection of eminences and commented that academia had always reminded him of the Church in the eighteenth century, comfortable undemanding sinecures to be filled by bright second sons from the minor gentry, now of course the middle-classes.’ There was, he thinks, a hint of bitterness and envy in these observations. While Manchester was a top-of-the-range redbrick, it had come up with a contractual package very similar to an All Souls Fellowship (which involves very little, if any, teaching) and he was at first, he admits, both flattered and a little puzzled. It was not until 2007, when he was asked for copies of his publications since 2001, that Larkin’s analogy of the eighteenth century Church of England began to make way for a less charming business-oriented image. In one sense he had been bought to bring in prestigious publications, which would ensure a generous government grant for the next six years, while his designation as Professor of Creative Writing, allegedly a forcing house for undiscovered literary talent, carried something of an air of pedlar of religious indulgences and miracle cures. His mere presence as a great writer promised inspiration for those willing to cough up the fees for a postgraduate course, or so the website and promotional material implies. Martin has put as much effort into teaching as he previously reserved for literary criticism and he is realistic enough to accept that Creative Writing cannot be taught in a way that is remotely comparable to the discussion of literature from the outside as an informed reader, theorist, literary historian or whatever. His approach was tangential, subtly nuanced.