Marty!

Is literature really a "war against cliche?" And other important questions.

The War Against Cliche by Martin Amis
The Information by Martin Amis
Experience by Martin Amis

For a certain kind of person, let’s say, one prone to keeping a little-read¹ literary Substack, you run into Martin Amis and you’re done for. There he is on the cover with the just-rumpled-enough oxford shirt and the cigarette, there’s the pirouetting sentences, the easy wit, the hours of careful reading distilled into one fine, sharp, glittering point. There he is, the public man, handsome, glamorous, writerly. And there are his flaws too, big ones, one might even say tragic ones — but what’s a hero without a few of those?

I read The War Against Cliche, his collected essays and reviews from 1971-2000, a few months ago and it’s a good deal responsible for the fact that you’re reading my writing now. It picked me up, shook me, and told me to get to work. It’s 100 pages too long and revs up with some short and uninteresting attacks on some easy targets. But once it gets out on the highway, it’s unstoppable.

The dominant style of critical writing today is hedging. Because anything you publish on the Internet will ultimately, if it reaches enough people, be read in the worst possible faith, critics must engage in paroxysms of throat-clearing and to-be-sures before getting around to saying anything mildly interesting². There is no such hedging in the War Against Cliche. I don’t agree with everything he writes (how could anyone?), but it taught me an important lesson: that dashing into battle with style and self-assurance can be much more valuable and interesting than saying something from an impregnably defended fortress of argument.

Here’s a headscratcher of lazy gender stereotyping (Amis is unfortunately full of this) in the middle of an ill-drawn distinction between a literary binary of “masochists” and “imposers” in his essay on V.S. Pritchett, one of the very best in the book.

Male writers tend to be imposers, female writers masochists. Is it not remarkable that there is only one female Modern, Virginia Woolf? No wonder we're all so afraid of her.

“Huh?,” reads my marginal note. Amis is forever launching himself off the diving board and sometimes he belly flops and drenches the spectators. But then, only a page or two later in the same essay, he executes dazzling, graceful twists.

Sentences that resemble train-wrecks - 'The cook took a look at the book' etc. - are common enough in genre fiction, where simple inattention or mercenary haste must claim responsibility. And when, for instance, Anthony Powell writes a phrase like 'standing on the landing' you feel that it is the result of mandarin unconcern or high-handedness. Pritchett's prose is full of these jangles - 'Sitting behind the screen of the machine' is a random example - but the effect is entirely appropriate to his way of looking at life. Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time. Life can often be pure doggerel. Pritchett's responsiveness to the quotidian is one of the reasons his stories seem formless; they are not comic, tragic, romantic, farcical, or like anything else that has a shape. Pritchett is locked into the kinks and rhythms of what he elsewhere calls the 'native ennui'.

The subject of The War Against Cliche is nothing less than the divine, Platonic pleasure of observation. “[Philip] Roth’s sentences are dapper and sonorous, always eventful, never congested.” Why, that’s exactly right! “I reviewed Crash when it came out in 1973; and, as I remember, the critical community greeted Ballard's novel with a flurry of nervous dismay. But of course reviewers do not admit to nervous dismay. Nervous dismay is a response that never announces itself as such, and comes to the ball tricked out as Aesthetic Fastidiousness or Moral Outrage.” Of course it does. Sometimes the pleasure of good criticism is seeing a great mind rigorously systematize. But sometimes the pleasure is that of seeing a beautiful silver key slide soundlessly into a silver lock and turn with a satisfying click.

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The premise of his 1995 “midlife crisis” novel The Information is very simple and very good: it’s a Road Runner cartoon. The protagonist, Richard Tull, failed modernist novelist, scrapes out a living reviewing dull biographies for an LRB-like periodical, working at a vanity press, and dealing with fatherhood, impotence, and existential despair. He’s Wile E. Coyote. Meanwhile, his dull-witted friend Gwyn Barry has suddenly achieved chartbusting success with the sort of book that the worst people you know would recommend to you, a moony modern fable about a group of young people looking to establish a New Jerusalem, and he’s married a beautiful, wealthy noblewoman as well. He’s the Road Runner. Tull, mad with resentment, plots to ruin Barry’s life, seduce his wife, have hired thugs beat him up, all his efforts rebounding back on him while Barry glides effortlessly on. Meep, meep!

Conventional wisdom while Amis was alive said that he was a major modern novelist. The hip opinion, often seen after his death, is that he was a brilliant essayist and critic whose novels never quite cohered. I’d like to be contrarian twice over and make a case for the conventional wisdom, but I can’t. The best parts of the novel are the essayistic and aphoristic, the same as in The War Against Cliche. You’ll learn about the major genre of hangover (tragicomedy, like Murphy or The Metamorphosis), why poets make bad drivers, why autodidacts are always in pain. The sentences dance and dazzle, of course; the narrator inserts himself into scenes, digresses, pontificates, and cracks wise. The more The Information sounds like Martin Amis the man, the better it is. But it is the duty of the novelist to inhabit consciousnesses other than his own and in this Amis is not entirely successful. The B-plot in The Information follows the petty criminals that Richard gets himself mixed up with in his quest for revenge. These scenes between the lower orders are, I’m sorry to say, excruciating. Amis is virtuosic discussing book tours, agents, and awards ceremonies, but dreadfully out of tune when he traverses class boundaries. In the first scene the main thug, who, besides being a violent psychopath became an unlikely man of letters in jail, is seen lurking in a white van reading Crowds and Power. I mean, shoot me with a gun.

In a magnificent 80-page middle sequence the book takes Richard with Gwyn on his book tour in America and the B-plot is forgotten. It becomes a pathetic picaresque where Amis can write about Richard sinking ever-deeper while introducing new set pieces every few pages — Miami! Chicago! LA! He gets to do them all, drawing from Chandler, Bellow, and Elmore Leonard at will³. Throughout the book he reaches for cosmological imagery: stars, planets, galaxies. This can be corny (Oh, space is big and humans are comparatively insignificant? You’re telling me now for the first time.) but at times it achieves a genuinely haunting effect, as in the last paragraph, which takes the book from shabby comedy to something more like the diner scene in Mulholland Drive.

The Man in the Moon is getting younger every year. Your watch knows exactly what time is doing to you: tsk, tsk, it says, every second of every day. Every morning we leave more in the bed, more of ourselves, as our bodies make their own preparations for reunion with the cosmos. Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. Beware the man at the callbox, with the suitcase: this man is you. The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.

Amis often talked about dead sentences, dead ideas. It’s something that’s stuck in my mind. “The heat was stifling” — a dead sentence. “He felt his pulse quicken,” etc. There are no dead sentences in The Information. But of course, one can be a great writer and include a certain number of dead sentences, if you draw your power from other sources. And you can write a novel without a single one and still fail in matters of plot, of tone, of sympathy, and of expansiveness of consciousness. Ultimately, there is something lost in the flashing and whizzing sentences. Saul Bellow, who Amis very publicly tried to nominate as his literary forefather, had a similarly exuberant style, but his characters have an existential, Jobean nobility. After I finished The Information I couldn’t possibly imagine Amis, with his acid tongue, writing Herzog, a hymn to life.

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Life and death, life and death and mortality: this is Amis’s great subject. Specifically the latter, the knowledge that you will die (that’s the titular Information) and what it is to live with this knowledge. No, he didn’t, couldn’t have written Herzog, but he did write his memoir⁴ Experience, where the sentences relax and the acid cynicism is replaced with a mellow and touching tenderness⁵. The book ranges widely, mostly non-chronologically, covering his relationship with his famous father, the shocking murder of his cousin, his life as a writer on the make⁶, and, it should be said, altogether too much about his 1994 dental surgery. And throughout, it is suffused with his awareness of life’s transience, in his losses (death, divorce) and his gains (children, and if this doesn’t make you roll your eyes, the written word itself). By the end of The Information, I wasn’t too sure if I liked this Amis guy. By the end of Experience, I knew I did.

Though it is expertly crafted and superbly written, reading the heavily-footnoted, discursive memoir is more like a simulated conversation, like a long podcast interview or a perusal of a timeline. Reading Experience I started to realize that I enjoyed finding episodes from his life that made it into his novels more than I enjoyed reading the novels themselves. And I started to realize something else: that he is an example of someone for whom the novel is one part of a project of personality crafting that includes the critical writing, the interviews, the podcast appearances. The novels are there insofar as they are necessary to the real artistic project, which is Martin Amis: literary man. He needed to write his odd, flawed novels to write his brilliant criticism and memoir, and the world needed to go along saying they were major instead of minor works, otherwise, from whence would come his authority?

This kind of self-fashioning through fiction has its precedents— in Byron, Wilde⁷, Kerouac— but it surely sped up in the telegenic, glitzy-80s era of Amis and his contemporaries (when I picture him, I picture him on Charlie Rose). Now it has entered its full flower in our own time, in an emerging mode of argumentative, philosophical, opinionated theory-fiction by prickly online personalities (as recently and expertly taxonomized by

Julianne Werlin

) and in various cutting-edge scenesters who are engaged in making large-scale performance pieces out of their own lives (What is My First Book if not just one part of the Honor Levy Multimedia Experience?). There is perhaps a shift in the manner in which we read these figures; we read less to be transported into a new world and more to make intimate contact with another mind.

But I don’t mean to bring this up as a condemnation, merely a new development. And it doesn’t mean the fiction has to be secondary, merely that it might have been while we were fumbling towards this new role for the writer. Don’t let anyone tell you Martin Amis wasn’t serious about literature. He was as serious as your life⁸. Let’s leave him with the last words, from The War Against Cliche.

Literature is the great garden that is always there and is open to everyone twenty-four hours a day. Who tends it? The old tour guides and silviculturists, the wardens, the fuming parkies in their sweat-soaked serge: these have died off. If you do see an official, a professional, nowadays, then he's likely to be a scowl in a labcoat, come to flatten a forest or decapitate a peak. The public wanders, with its oohs and ahs, its groans and jeers, its million opinions. The wanderers feed the animals, they walk on the grass, they step in the flowerbeds. But the garden never suffers. It is, of course, Eden; it is unfallen and needs no care.

1. But highly influential!

2. Less so, I think, On Here.

3. Though a Bellow-worshipper really shouldn’t be getting some basic facts about Chicago wrong, such as stating that “no one ever used the trains” or that Wrigley Field is “sixty years older than any ballpark in America.”

4. Well, his first memoir, if you count Inside Story, which is partly fictionalized and I haven’t yet read. Perhaps in a part 2 of this post I’ll cover Money, Inside Story, and The Rachel Papers.

5. Coincidentally, one of the most cringingly funny, relatable, and eventually moving sequences in Experience is Amis’s account of bringing Christopher Hitchens on a visit to Bellow’s Vermont house, where Hitchens proceeds to ruin a dinner by haranguing Bellow and his wife about Israel, an incident that comes to mark the end of Amis’s youth. (I’ll eventually have to deal with Bellow in these pages but probably not before I’ve read everything, including To Jerusalem and Back, which waits for me, ominously, at the end.)

6. An insane detail from Experience is that, post-success, Amis’s friend Ian McEwan regularly had lunch with Thomas Pynchon. Ian McEwan???

7. For a brilliant essay revealing his secret Wildean heritage read this, probably the definitive piece on Amis, which is so irritatingly good it nearly kept me from throwing my hat in the ring.

8. The youthful letters to his family in Experience brim with hastily-rendered but charming judgements of his first encounters with the canon (If he is to be believed, he averaged a novel a day and read Middlemarch in three!).