I have difficulty thinking of Martin Amis as an old man, let alone a dead one.
The work of his middle years was so spectacular and unforgettable, such a breath-taking high-wire act, that it has somehow made what followed seem little more than a slow fade. In recent years, I have glanced at Amis’s later novels, from Yellow Dog through to Inside Story, and, to put it gently, they didn’t work for me. I rarely got beyond the first few pages, except for one grim occasion when I was trapped on a flight with only Lionel Asbo to read. Reading late Amis, I was reminded the character in The Information whose experimental novel Untitled gave any editor who read it a migraine by the time he reached page eight.
I would sometimes go back to dip into Money, or London Fields, or The Information to reassure myself that I had not been imagining the wildly exuberant riffs, the outrageous jokes, the pitiless and piercing insights into the way we lived back then, and, above all, the wonderful, playful joy of a writer who was having fun in every sentence. There was no novelist writing who made writing fiction look such a wild and enjoyable ride. Today, while the world and what is acceptable has changed, the brilliance of those novels lives on.
I was about to use the word ‘timeless’ in that sentence but in truth I wonder how time will treat Smart Mart. It seems at least possible that future generations will look at the showy pyrotechnics of his prose, the gallery of male and female grotesques that inhabit his stories, and wonder what all the fuss was about. Even now, in these prim neo-Victorian days, the cheerfully honest way he wrote about male desire, mostly ugly, invariably ridiculous, and about the objects of it (notably Nicola Six in London Fields), can feel faintly discomfiting. He was happy to offend at every turn. His characters were cartoonishly unconvincing. The world he described was a hall-of-mirrors version of reality. There was, in those great middle period novels, a certain coldness about human nature. As AN Wilson once wrote,
‘The single most depressing thing about both Amises was that neither appeared to have, what is surely the sine qua non for artists – a sense of beauty.’
But what a writer he was. No one captured the greed, the hedonism, the hypocrisy and energy of the last three decades of the twentieth century as well as Martin Amis did. ‘All novels are historical novels,’ he once wrote, and that is truer of his work than that of almost any of his contemporaries. For a generation or readers and writers, the publication of a new Martin Amis novel was a real event, comparable to the release of as Beatles or Dylan album in the 1960s. His wit, his writerly snarl, the jazzy swing of his prose influenced a generation of writers and journalists, but every Amis imitation merely proved that he was inimitable.
Then there was what he called ‘the life stuff’. In those days, it seemed to reflect the exuberance of the work almost too perfectly. Well-connected, good-looking, witty, sexually successful, surrounded by brilliant and successful friends (Hitch and Fent, Clive and Julian), he embodied the perfect, cool life of a professional writer in the way that Hemingway did for an earlier generation. With every small or big drama (The teeth! The agent! The secret daughter! The cousin who was murdered by Fred West!), the progress of his life seemed more dramatic, emotional and unexpected than anything achieved by his contemporaries who just… wrote.
And he knew it. Seeing him converse on stage with his best friend Christopher Hitchens at the Hay Festival was like watching a playlet around authorly vanity. The hauteur, the mutual admiration seemed, to me at least, boastful and faintly absurd, but the rapt, packed audience lapped it up adoringly.
Such was his dominance as a fantasy figure that, when I came to write my novel Kill Your Darlings about a frustrated, blocked writer called Gregory Keays, it seemed pointless to invent a fictional figure. So Amis became a non-speaking character in the novel, appearing only once in person – in a loo at a literary festival. Here’s Gregory’s version of what happened:
‘I was standing at a urinal when the door opened behind me and, as if I were dreaming, the small, distinguished figure of Martin was suddenly there, beside me, fishing in his underpants not more than two feet away from me. We stood, sharing that moment of forced intimacy when two men are shoulder to shoulder with their penises hanging out in a public place. It occurred to me that I might break the silence in an easy male manner (but instead of the usual banalities, I would have had to say something more literary and informed, like, ‘But what on earth possessed you, in the London novel, to equate black holes in space with an act of inverse sexuality performed with Nicola Six?’ He would have explained that he was attempting to put a spin on a banal, everyday act, to give it universal resonance, and in reply I probably would have joked, ‘Every day? You filthy bastard, Martin’ and we would both have laughed in a blokeish though literary way, buttoned ourselves up, washed our hands and left) but, when I glanced at him, he was staring ahead, chewing gum, like a boxer before a fight. I remembered that he was about to appear on stage and decided that it was possibly a touch insensitive to probe him about his work at what was, in any event, quite a vulnerable moment, that he might even have thought it slightly creepy that some guy wanted to talk about sodomy and Nicola at a urinal. A great, manly, lagerish stream issued from him. I tried to relax myself. I thought of things to distract me, listed the names of the novels I have failed to finish. Nothing happened. I had dried up. Martin had done it to me again. I stood there, in an agony of self-consciousness, feeling like an intruder, the sort of person who goes to the gents and stands there, dick hanging out, for the sheer hell of it, like someone who gets a thrill from visiting a brothel and not going to bed with any of the girls. Without so much as a glance in my direction, he finished, put himself away with that little backward thrust of the buttocks that men do and walked out, without even washing his hands.’
Looking back today, I can see that using a real writer as a foil for my fictional was not a great idea. In interviews and reviews, it was the Amis stuff that caught much of the attention, much to my irritation. Had he read it? I was asked on Radio 4. What did I think he would make of it? In vain, I tried to get the subject back to the novel I had written. Martin had done it again.
It has been interesting to see over the past few days how male writers of his generation and that coming along behind have used the news of his death to strut foolishly to the centre of the stage. Will Self boasted that he was the only younger novelist whose work Amis endorsed. Giles Coren whined about his tough it was for both of them to be compared to the writer-fathers. Terry Eagleton claimed that Amis was too afraid to enter a TV studio with him. Turkey-cocking, it seems, is contagious even beyond death.
With that in mind, let’s skip over those later novels. The work of most writers changes with the coming of age, a few actually improve as they get old, and many collapse like soufflé. Sometimes those novelists whose bounce and bravura was once so seductive become difficult to read once the bounce and bravura have gone. Their way of writing did not lend itself to the process of gentle maturity – it was an all-or-nothing game, and perhaps why we loved it so much.
Martin Amis was never dull and rarely predictable. He has produced some of the most interesting insights into writing that I have read. Here are some of the favourites I have collected down the years.
On working on a character in a novel:
‘Almost the first thing I ask about a character that I am about to get going on is “What are they like in the sack?”.’
On humour:
‘Humour can’t just be a foam on top of things. It has to be an undercurrent and emerge naturally from the situation.’
On research:
‘I keep meaning to research things, to go to prisons and child-abuse centres, but in the end I just make it up. You take a bit of experience and pass it through your psyche.’
On dialogue:
‘When characters say things “quietly”, you know it’s meant to be good stuff.’
On literary biography:
‘It allows mediocre, Second XI types to feel and act superior to the knights of the First XI.’
On material:
‘I don’t think writers need more than two or three subjects.’
On confidence:
‘Everyone fears that they are a joke which other people will one day get.’
On clichés:
‘To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not juts the clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.’
On feminism:
‘To spell this out: I am not only a feminist – I am a gynocrat. That is to say, I believe in rule by chicks.’
On the double death of the writer:
‘Medical science has condemned novelists…. We’re all going to die twice. We’re going to die as everyone dies, but before that our talent is going to die.’
On writing:
‘You have to feel playful to write fiction.’
I’m profoundly grateful to Martin Amis for giving me hours, days and weeks of reading pleasure. He was a man who captured the frantic and fretful days we have lived through better than almost anybody.
And who cares about the timeless thing?
