Remembering Martin Amis
Also: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s papers, the search for the Giant Palouse Earthworm, and more.
Martin Amis has died. He was 73 years old. He died at his home in Florida on Friday from cancer of the esophagus. Boyd Tonkin writes in The Guardian that until his later years Amis “combined fertility and versatility with a reluctant role as a writer-celebrity who epitomised literary fame in an age of glitz, hype and frenzied prurience. Keystone novels of the 1980s and 90s such as Money, London Fields and The Information channel the raucous urges of their time, and kick against them in dismay.” More:
To a degree, he played the celebrity game: he dissected showbiz phenomena in witty articles, often for the Observer. But he found, in his case, that others played with laxer rules or none at all. For decades, the life, loves and family of a gossip-fed tabloid entity known as “Martin Amis” ran in parallel with the career of the hard-working author of that name. His fiction abounds in games of doubles, pairs and twins. In his own life, too, Amis struggled to negotiate the gap between the mask forged by fame and the true face of a serious writer.
Lisa Allardice remembers his “chutzpah”:
Back in 2009, I called Amis – as editors all over the world would have been calling or emailing leading writers on Saturday night – to ask if he might write a tribute to the American novelist John Updike, who had just died. Time was tight and we were aiming high, but as with every major (and not so major) event at that time, Amis was the writer everyone was after. And on Updike, the last postwar American literary giant? It had to be him. Happily, he felt a duty to contribute to what Gore Vidal called “book chat”.
“Call me back in 10 minutes,” he said in his unmistakable transatlantic drawl (he hadn’t yet made America his permanent home). Had he said he would do it? Would he file in time for tomorrow’s front page? I wasn’t sure, but duly called him back 10 minutes later, hiding in a cupboard in the bowels of the Guardian, where we went to make private calls.
“Ready?” he said. And – I may have imagined this bit – lighting a cigarette, he proceeded to dictate a whole piece, replete with semi-colons, quotation and his hallmark neologisms (not for Amis the correspondent’s punctuation-less cablese). He spoke and I typed. “There aren’t supposed to be extremes of uniqueness – either you are or you’re not – but he was exceptionally sui generis,” he drawled.
We repeated the exercise barely three months later when another of his great heroes and friends, JG Ballard, died. This time we made it to over 1,000 words. “Very few Ballardians (who are almost all male) were foolish enough to emulate him. He was sui generis,” Amis enunciated with verbal italics. “What was influential, though, was the marvellous creaminess of his prose, and the weird and sudden expansions of his imagery,” he continued. “Marvellous creaminess”, “weird and sudden expansions” – how did he do that?
OK, so he had written at length about both Updike and Ballard before. And he was routinely invoked as a successor to both. But still. Of all the writers I’d worked with during many years as a literary editor, Amis was the only one I knew who could pull that off. The sheer smarts and chutzpah of composing a piece off the cuff, without even going to the bother of turning on the computer, was quintessential Amis.
Salman Rushdie writes about his literary influences:
From Kingsley, he inherited comedy . . . From Nabokov, he learned a kind of high intellectualism, and would explain, Nabokov-fashion, that it was less important for readers to see themselves in characters than for them to identify with the author as he struggled to create his art.
And from Bellow he gained a reverence for style—beginning with the sentence, which, for Bellow as for Amis, is the level at which literature is born—and also for the riff. Moses Herzog’s tirades are reborn in Martin’s brilliant paragraph-long, sometimes page-long, rants.
And Ian McEwan remembers him for his generosity, wit, and tenderness:
Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, McEwan said he has lost a 49-year-old friendship, describing Amis as “very tender, very sweet and very generous”.
The 74-year-old said: “He was very funny. From my very first meeting I encountered a kind of conversational wit and liveliness that I had never known in my life.”
Asked if Amis was “fearsome” in real life, McEwan said: “Martin had the knack, often in a crowded room, (of) making for the most vulnerable person because he had heard of some misfortune. He was wonderful with my own family. He made marvellous relationships with them as children.
“There is a great tenderness about Martin that never really reached public press. He was always the Mick Jagger of literature, which was just foolish.”
May he rest in peace.
In other news, Stefan Beck reviews Claire Dederer’s much-discussed Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, and his take is the best so far: “Is it news . . . that human beings are shamelessly inconsistent in their application of moral and ethical standards? Identity itself is constructed, often shoddily, out of just such inconsistency. Do you vote? Watch sports? Drive a Volkswagen? Use products or medications tested on animals? Spend all day on a phone assembled by Chinese slaves in a factory festooned with suicide netting? Maybe worrying about your favorite artists isn’t a noble act of self-criticism. Maybe, just maybe, it’s a bit of misdirection or scapegoating, a means of pretending that you aren’t compromised down to the soles of your sweatshop sneakers. As Garth Greenwell wrote in a brilliant piece defending Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, ‘People who commit sexual crimes should be locked up forever, some of my friends believe, who also believe that prisons should be abolished.’ Art can remind us how often the human condition is to make no sense at all.”
Dominic Green praises D. J. Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life: “Expertly told and subtle in judgment, ‘The New Life’ will not be the last word in the ever-growing field of Orwelliana, but it will become its central monument.”
Adam Kirsch writes about discovering opera as a teenager in California: “I first discovered opera in 1991, when my tenth-grade English teacher killed a couple of class periods by showing the movie Amadeus. The bits it contained of The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni were seductive enough to send me to the nearest outpost of the Wherehouse, a California record-store chain, where the classical and opera section was an afterthought. When I compare it to the contemporary infinity of Spotify, however, the limited selection now seems a kind of blessing: with so little to choose from, it was impossible to feel overwhelmed. It was also an advantage not to have anyone telling me which operas were great and which were passé. Not until much later, for instance, would I learn that by the nineties, Gounod’s Faust was already a century past its prime . . . When it came to love and seduction, at fifteen I was as inexperienced as May Welland. Still, as I listened and followed along in the libretto, I think I understood what was going on in Gounod’s music. In fact, adolescence may have been the right time to encounter it, since really Faust is about the power of adolescent emotion.”
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