Martin Amis

by Richard Bradford

  He commuted between London and Manchester during term-time and prepared rigorously for each seminar, teaching two classes per fortnight in the autumn term. As for the accusation that he was an overpaid celebrity it should be noted that the contract was devised and proposed by Manchester and that its seemingly disproportionate generosity regarding minimum hours on campus is the routine formula for the employment of high-profile academics. Sutherland, in his wry piece on the dispute with Eagleton presented the amusing scenario of two distinguished littérateurs exchanging blows in the Senior Common Room, Eagleton too being a Professor in the Manchester English Department. Eagleton replied, in stern Marxian manner, that a serious debate on racism was being trivialized, adding ‘not that we have anything as posh as a senior common room at Manchester’ (Guardian, 10 October 2007). Actually, they do. Which brings us to a wonderful irony unwittingly disclosed by Sutherland in his portrait of brawling intellectuals. They were indeed unlikely to meet in the admittedly modest SCR given that Eagleton was employed on the same basis as Martin, head-hunted from Oxford to boost the Manchester RAE rating and on minimum teaching hours. He retired in 2009 but before that he had visited Manchester far less frequently than Martin, ‘commuting’ from his home in Ireland.

  ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’ was a purist exercise in autobiographical fiction; not even the names were changed. The Pregnant Widow is a far more complex, troubling piece of work. Martin did indeed spend much of the summer after his second year at Oxford in a castle near the Mediterranean, near Rome. In the novel, the grand residence belongs to an acquaintance of Lily, Keith Nearing’s girlfriend, and in the real world the holidaymakers were Martin himself and Gully Wells.

  Rob Henderson, Martin’s anarchic, self-destructive best friend from the late 1960s and early 1970s appears as Kenrik. Nicholas, Keith’s brother, carries traces of Philip but more closely resembles Hitchens, and Violet, their sister, is a tragically undisguised portrait of the late Sally Amis. The poet and editor Neil Darlington, frequently referred to but never actually encountered, stands in for the famously elusive Ian Hamilton. According to the author, Tina Brown rescued him from a period of sexual self-abasement, which he terms his ‘Larkinland’, and Gloria Beautyman performs a similar service for Keith, but beyond that there is no resemblance between Tina and Gloria.

  And who, we wonder, is the beguiling Sheherazade, whose presence distracts Keith from everything, and whose memory haunts him throughout the book? In all probability she is Serena North who was there throughout the summer and was according to Hitchens ‘superbly built’.

  A question arises. Does Martin’s decision to write what he has admitted as a ‘blindingly autobiographical’ novel diminish its quality as a literary work? The short answer is no; quite the contrary.

  Martin’s readers are divided between fans and begrudgers by the simple fact that he is the most expansively gifted prose stylist of his generation. His father once paid him the backhanded compliment of finding a ‘terrible compulsive vividness in his style’, the subtext being that performance had replaced substance or plot. The extent to which he has overindulged his abundant talent will remain a matter for debate, and in my view his detractors are in truth motivated by a blend of prudishness and envy.

  In The Pregnant Widow he retains his stylistic signature, which many have attempted to replicate, none with any success, yet by turns modulates and remodels it. Its closest counterpart is his most significant non-fictional work, Experience, a beautiful book which had frightful consequences: it spawned a decade of misery memoirs by the intelligentsia. But it did something else too. It prompted a hypothesis. What would a novel by Martin be like if written in the manner of his memoirs? Now we have it.

  For the first time in his writing career he treats all of his creations with a combination of respect, altruism and kindness. We forget that they are inventions, and wonder about the causes of their variously endearing, troubled, despondent states. Perhaps, then, we can detect a rationale for his otherwise gratuitous display of autobiographical links. It is his mantra. The linking of each of his creations to individuals for whom he personally feels a degree of attachment, even affection, guarantees in the novel a concomitant demand for care and responsibility. Perhaps he has even invented a new sub-genre: beneficent autofiction.

  Despite the absence of much resembling a plot, it is an addictive read. We live with the characters, follow them in and out of focus, and wonder continually about Keith, our companion in this experience. There are some shrewd digressions, on the much-debated sexual revolution, and more intriguingly on the contrast between those parts of Europe that have ‘just come staggering out of the Middle Ages’ and their young, hedonistic invaders. All these reflections are amusing and insightful enough, but we return continually to the enigma of Keith.

  The name itself evinces the wound-scratching, sometimes contrite, temper of the book: Keith, or more frequently Little Keith, was one of Martin’s many pseudonyms for contributions to the New Statesman’s literary competitions of the 1970s, the nickname used by friends and family during the same period and the forewarning of many of his most pitiable inventions. The narrative, such as it is, never releases us from his presence, and he is a curious figure – shy, self-conscious, perplexed – and via him we apprehend a summer which will stalk the future lives of all with whom he shared it.

  Later, in a ‘Coda’ in which we follow him through his subsequent life, and leave him aged sixty, we also encounter an accumulation of great sadness and regret. In 2003 we join him in a pub near his home. He hates the place, but has neither the energy to leave it nor any inclination to explain why he is wasting his day there, alone. It is, however, an appropriate location for the mood of despair and weary resignation that accompanies his reflections on friends and family.

  By 2009, he has still not detached himself from the night, ten years previously, when he witnessed his sister’s death. Amis can reduce even his most sombre, mirthless readers to guilty laughter, but he has not hitherto shown a capacity to provoke tears:

  Yes, Violet looked forceful. For the first time in her life, she seemed to be someone it would be foolish to treat lightly or underestimate, ridge-faced, totemic, like a squaw queen with orange hair.

  ‘She’s gone,’ said the doctor and pointed with her hand. The wavering line had levelled out. ‘She’s still breathing,’ said Keith. But of course it was the machine that was still breathing. He stood over a breathless corpse, the chest filling, heaving, and he thought of her running and running, flying over the fields.27

  In these closing sequences Keith is the most grievous, heartbreaking individual so far created by his author. If, as is implied, he speaks for him, then one can only feel something akin to heedful pity. But it is only a novel, is it not? Near the end the narrator raises a similar question: ‘Yes, we’re close again, he and I . . . I? Well, I’m the voice of conscience . . .’

  This book is a unique, sometimes exquisite experience that begs to be returned to after a first encounter. If there is an enduring theme it is age. Despite the fact that virtually 70 per cent of the narrative is an account of Keith’s youth, his twenties and thirties, there is within this a troubling persistent sense of impatience. The unanswered, perhaps unanswerable questions that attend the 1970s generation are less moral and existential conundrums as prerequisites to a point at which they will simply be redundant; not forgotten but despatched to an irrecoverable past. There is a quite outstanding passage at the conclusion of the novel, like nothing he has written before and in that regard a testament to his range and versatility. Keith is alone in his shed preparing to return to the house for a quiet dinner party with family and close friends. It will mark his sixtieth birthday. It was completed shortly before Martin’s sixtieth in 2009 when the final draft of the novel was sent to Cape. Keith’s mood is difficult to ascertain; he is by parts distracted and uneasy but the prevailing temper of the piece is that of eloquent resignation. The prose absorbs the edgy bafflement of its s
ubject and confers upon him and the scene – a scene that we too are about to leave – a sense of contentment. It is a beautiful moment, an ending that we would be more accustomed to expect from the masters of nineteenth-century fiction than a giant of the twenty-first.

  Sixty is for some a landmark and the most enduring record of Kingsley’s thoughts on this are in his letter to Larkin, congratulating his friend on his and reflecting on his own, just passed. The two men were born in the same year. As usual the mood is deadpan, mordant, self-lacerating. ‘. . . all over bar the shiting [. . .] Well of course a lot of things make sense now that didn’t at the time. Hurtful things. Sad things, lonely things look quite different from INSIDE THE LAVATORY PAN.’28 This brings to mind Martin’s comments on how their respective attitude to the nuclear apocalypse highlighted to him, for the first time, intrinsic constitutional differences between them: nihilism with hilarious commentary (Kingsley) versus solicitous contemplation (Martin).

  Outside The Pregnant Widow Martin contemplated sixty in a way that was a little more Kingsleyesque. Andy Hislop recalls in 2009 a tennis match involving him, Martin, Papineau and Leader – all little more than a year apart in age – as a combination of black comedy and ill-repressed frustration. All appeared to be suffering from strains, chest complaints and problems with posture. ‘Probably, merely a coincidence. Four men in their forties might well have turned up with similar recipe of aliments, but since we had arranged this as a kind of wry tribute to our past it all seemed like a miserable joke played by someone else, as we slouched and shuffled round the court.’ Martin was, apparently, amused. Tennis was beginning to feature much less frequently in his weekly routine. Strains were becoming abundant and he had since 2002 been an occasional member of a fashionable West London Pilates club. His associates were mainly ballet dancers.

  Thereafter, every time he appeared in public, ageing and its effects appeared to exercise a prurient fascination. At his interview with Robert McCrum at the Writers’ Centre, Norwich, on 11 May 2009, he returned continually to the ‘tremendous humiliation’ of physical decay. He and Clive James, at Manchester University on 7 December 2009, combined their droll improvisational skills to create a double act far more depressing and hilarious than Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir in a session called ‘Literature and Ageing’. He and Craig Raine were equally deadpan but less amusing at the Oxford Literary Festival on 30 March, 2010. At the Hay Literary Festival on 6 June 2010 he paused during a general excursus on his sense of dread to comment that ‘being a grandfather is like getting a telegram from the mortuary’. His daughter Delilah reported that when she informed him by phone shortly afterwards that she was pregnant (with Isaac, now three) and commented, ‘That obviously means you’re old, now, Grandpops,’ he had been amused.29

  All of this was mere froth compared with the Sunday Times (24 January 2010) interview which preceded the serialization of The Pregnant Widow. In this he foresaw a ‘population of demented old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking up the cafés, restaurants and shops. I can imagine a sort of civil war between old and young in ten or fifteen years’ time.’ His solution was to have ‘Euthanasia booths on street corners where they can end their lives with a martini and a medal’. Predictably, outrage and disgust came forth from everyone: religious bodies opposed to assisted deaths, pensioners’ groups and even supporters of voluntary euthanasia who felt that his rather lurid image, including martinis, cheapened their cause. Since the end of the 1990s Martin has become so attuned to a cultural ideology of ill-considered reflex that his own rhetoric is now often gratuitously provocative. Beneath the play, however, was a more thoughtful, candid observation. ‘Medical science has again over-vaulted itself so most of us have to live through the death of our talent. Novelists tend to go off at seventy, and I’m in a funk about it, I’ve got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.’ This might sound a little elitist, even narcissistic. What about people who don’t write novels, one might ask; surely they don’t resent the ‘over-vaulting’ achievements of medical science in allowing them to live longer?

  There is a certain amount of self-abnegating deception in Martin’s performance as an artist in fear of losing his dynamism. Behind this is a man quietly content with one of the endowments of age. His family is expanding, and throughout his life the enduring feature of his personality is his love and commitment to those closest to him. He has become a benign patriarch.

  Before sending this book to the publisher my last meeting with Martin was in autumn 2010. He was, as usual, obliging and cryptic in equal parts. Tuesday or Wednesday would be fine, but which or when was left open for speculation. I arrived at the time that had become almost our routine; he’d have finished work and it would be an hour or two before he joined his family. Six o’clock, and I stood outside the Amis residence, disconcerted. The house was unlit, the shutters – usually closed to ensure privacy – open. It looked empty and an estate agent’s sign seemed to confirm my impression. Tales of subjects holding their biographers in contempt, particularly close to the end of things, were rife but moving house seemed a little extreme. Eventually the cleaner answered the bell and ushered me to Martin’s shed at the back of the house. A photograph of Hilly – stunning and happy – was prominent on his desk. She had died only three months before. Yes, he replied, they were moving, in Summer 2011. To the US. Schools had been arranged for the girls but he is not quite ready to cut his ties with the country where he grew up and made his name as a writer. Family has always meant a great deal to Martin. His two sons remain in London, as do Delilah and his grandchildren. The flat they bought in Westbourne Gardens is still theirs. It is presently let but after the move they will keep it as their, occasional, London base. Attention has shifted to Isabel’s relatives in New York, some of them ailing and ageing and the place that was Martin’s experiment with elsewhere, his existential surrogate, will now be his home.

  13

  Significance: Is He a Great Writer?

  The short answer to this question is yes. He is the most important British novelist of his generation. How might I justify this claim? For one thing Martin Amis has changed the direction and the culture of British fiction.

  The history of the novel, at least prior to the 1980s, involved to a great extent a struggle between those authors who could not help but incorporate into a story a self-conscious reminder of how peculiar and unusual it is to write stories – a founding principle of modernism – and those who treated the re-creation of the world in a book as a thoroughly guileless act of craftsmanship. Numerically and in terms of mid-to-low cultural popularity the latter were by far the more predominant, and while extreme embodiments of both still exist the sense of there being a bipolar conflict between them has ceased. Competition for aesthetic and intellectual pre-eminence has segued into a middle ground where techniques that once secured difference are now part of a shared taxonomy of devices, all infinitely adaptable and acceptable. In short, the history of the novel, in so far as it was sustained by a bifurcation of radical versus conservative, postmodern versus counter-modernist, is over. Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson, David Mitchell, Nicola Barker, Iain Sinclair et al. are still heirs to the likes of Joyce, Woolf, Beckett and B. S. Johnson but their techniques have become as domesticated as that cosy monument to modernism, affectionately termed ‘the Gherkin’, that is now as agreeably familiar a part of the London skyline as the dome of St Paul’s. The author-in-the-text, that gesture which was once the badge of avant-gardism and warned of serious questions regarding the nature of representation, is now a hoary routine, a version of which occurs even in the diaries of Bridget Jones. Martin blunts its groundbreaking edge and uses it instead as a foil for his stylistic versatility and addiction to black comedy – radicalism has been suborned to populist exigency. When Ali Smith has her swimming champion describe her final suicidal dive into oblivion in the lift shaft in Hotel World we are back again with that old reliable, the interior monologu
e, the linguistic record of that which never would, never could, be spoken, patented by Joyce. In the hands of Smith, however, it is a little more polished and reader-friendly. As the character’s chest collapses and its contents plunge into her throat, she reflects: ‘For the first time (too late) I knew how my heart tasted’ (p. 6). Joyce, radical purist as he was, would never have allowed Molly Bloom such a wonderfully grotesque, well-crafted conceit, but Smith has one eye on the market, on the reader who wants to be impressed and entertained rather than merely confounded.

  And then there is the more extravagant version of the author-in-the-text conceit, the book that toys with our registers and expectations and continually raises the question: am I or am I not a novel? Andrew O’Hagan, Nicola Barker and Iain Sinclair are all practitioners but while the method still evinces an echo of fearless unorthodoxy – once again returning us to the apparently vexed issue of whether fiction and truth may be interchangeable – its cultivated clubbability makes it as shocking as the maze in the country-house garden is frightening. Magic realism returns faithfully and comfortably in the fiction of Salman Rushdie in much the same way that Kingsley Amis’s penchant for droll bitterness was always a signatory feature of his; in each case it is not so much a sense of surprise that accompanies its discovery in the novel as that of familiar reassurance. The battle between counter-modernists and postmodernists is over, the former have become more flexible and the latter more market-orientated.

  It would of course be absurd to claim that Martin Amis is solely and exclusively responsible for this enormous and so far rarely acknowledged shift in the literary landscape. But the more closely one scrutinizes the nature of the change the more evident it becomes that precedents for this curious hybridization of experimental and conventional fiction can be traced principally to his writing.