This is great. I came to Amis through the Moronic Inferno (I think some of the essays from that are in the collection you're reviewing), and fucking loved him. Then I read The Information and was like, 'meh.' But I like your suggestion that he needed to write the novels to be Martin Amis, that somehow they were essential to the overall project even if they weren't as good as the criticism. Like Hitchens he got much worse toward the end; I always thought with both of them the fundamental problem was that they didn't keep growing as people.
Haha, I brought up Hitchens to my girlfriend today, she was like "the atheist neocon guy?" and I was like "No, I swear he used to be good! Read his 14,000 word LRB essay on Isaiah Berlin!" No dice, obviously.
And thanks, you can always say you were there at the start of the meteoric rise!
The weird thing about Hitchens is that the people who are now most likely to sing his praises are the ones who only started liking him when he had started to suck. It's his own fault, of course, because he alienated so many of the people who were his fans when he was at his best.
Martin Amis, whose friendship with Hitchens became one of the constants of both men’s lives, tells a story that conveys a sense of the quivering intensity of “the Hitch” toward the end of the 1980s, when Hitchens was reckoning with the death of his father and the collapse of his first marriage. It begins on a road trip the two men took in the summer of 1989 to visit Saul Bellow at his house in Vermont.
“A drive of five or six hours, but the buddy-movie, radio-on feel of the journey was part of the treat,” writes Amis in his memoir Experience. “Stops were made for the huge uneaten meals and many powerful drinks desiderated by the Hitch. At this time my friend was still attached by one boot to the steer of his mid-life crisis, which began in earnest at the end of 1987.”
Amis had agreed to take Hitchens with him to visit Bellow on the condition that there would be absolutely no “sinister balls”—a phrase they’d coined together, when writing for The New Statesman, for being stridently left-wing at the most ill-chosen moments. They were going, after all, as Bellow’s guests; they both revered Bellow as a novelist even if they disapproved of some of his politics (in particular his support for Israel); and Hitchens was simply too compulsive to be trusted to be gracious once he got going.
Hitchens held back for a short while, but as the evening went on, and his drinking presumably did as well, he let himself go, using his friendship with Edward Said as a pretext for a fight over Israel and Palestine.
Amis writes: “Saul, packed down over the table, shoulders forward, legs tensed beneath his chair, became more laconic in his contributions, steadily submitting to a cataract of pure reason, matter-of-fact chapter and verse, with its interjected historical precedents, its high-decibel statistics, its fortissimo fine distinctions—Christopher’s cerebral stampede.”
“The silence still felt like a gnat in my ear.”
“‘Well,” [Hitchens] said. ‘I’m sorry if I went on a bit. But Edward is a friend of mine. And if I hadn’t defended him … I would have felt bad.’”
The description of the aftermath of that incident (they have a huge fight which breaks into a laughing fit) is probably my favorite part of Experience, it depicts the end of young manhood in a very understated but moving way. Probably just resonated w/ where I'm at in my own life. Have you read Mortality? None of Hitchens' later stuff interests me except that. Looking back on it as a whole it's quite interesting how death-obsessed this whole generation was (thinking also of writers like Ishiguro). Obviously it's as basic a subject as it gets but there's probably something to be said about post Cold War aimlessness and spiritual vacancy etc.
I'm interested in your take on him, I'll have to read your book sometime soon! You've lived many lives as a writer.
Excellent, thought-provoking, I have little to immediately add after reading except that I would love to read your proposed part 2 (Rachel Papers/Money/Inside Story) and in case you’ve never seen it before, this hilarious (and, though I’m not a huge fan of the novel, hilariously uncharitable) review of “The Information” by none other than Iain Sinclair.
I’ve never really gotten into Amis. When he died I picked up “The Pregnant Widow” from a used bookstore and read a bit but gave up on it. I gather this is not one of his more well regarded novels so perhaps a poor choice from me, but it also confirmed some of my suspicions about him: the prose was very showy, as if he was trying to impress the reader, and I found that grating. My dad swears by him so I feel like I should give him a chance, maybe by trying his criticism or his memoirs rather than his fiction.
There definitely is a good bit of that – I suppose it depends on whether or not you're impressed. I'd try the War Against Cliche and skip the first few pieces. If you don't like the long essay on Philip Larkin then you definitely don't like him.
This is great! I've always remembered that passage you cite from The War Against Cliche, it haunts me whenever I have to revise something I've written myself. And yet—is "standing on the landing" really so bad?
iirc Henry James once wrote the phrase "I went over to Dover" in a letter and then mused that if Flaubert had had to write in English it would have made him an even greater maniac than his own language had.
Lol right, and do we really ascribe it to "mandarin unconcern" when Anthony Powell does it? In Experience he talks about how you should never start subsequent paragraphs with the same word (at this point I looked over at the draft of this essay and realized every paragraph started with "The"), but is that really a big deal? Surely tons of brilliant writers do it.
But that being said his central points about cliche were so incredibly helpful to me as a writer. Particularly in critical or essayistic writing it's so, so easy to fill sentences with received wisdom, and then suddenly you find yourself just not thinking at all, just doing a parody of thinking really, filling valuable server space with more useless cruft. It's why I admire the few people who are able to write about current events with flair (and why 99.9% of op-eds are horrible) – could you imagine trying to write something about say, the healthcare CEO assassin w/o resorting to banality and piffle? Even the Amis stuff about Mitt Romney or nukes or whatever isn't very good.
Amis's whole generation had a massive blind spot about Powell.
As to current affairs writing, it doesn't always need to be stylish, although I do like the fact that The Economist at least tries. A jazzy style can even be an impediment in nonfiction prose. As a critic and journalist Amis is always writing advertisements for himself himself. Coetzee has a more restrained style, when he wrote literary criticism for the NYRB you wouldn't necessarily guess the author without his byline. I checked an article Coetzee wrote about Mandela in the 1980s and sure enough two paragraphs in a row start with "in." Yet Coetzee is a far better writer than Amis was!
The real question is, is the cliche “War Against” employed here ironically or not. One of Amis’s flaws is how open he was to unintentional self-satire. Is this an example?
You hit on something with Bellow as forefather, or better yet, literary legal guardian. I don't think Amis the Younger ever matured out of being literary prince to "the King," Amis the Elder. When Kingsley died, according to Inside Story (and I think this is even hinted at in Experience), one of the first things Martin did was phone Bellow and lay the flat of the sword upon his shoulders. "You are my father now." Bellow accepted.
Martin could not withstand being a literary orphan. This ties in with your personality construction precis. His works immediately following Kingsley's death suffer for his. The first novel he wrote post-mortem was a genre novel, Night Train. (Kingsley had stated in his last decades that he would never read another novel again that didn't start with, "A shot rang out." I.e. genre novels. Kingsley also did not read Martin's novels. As a noir (unthrilling) thriller, Night Train is the Martin novel Kingsley WOULD have read.)
After being adopted by Bellow, he pays him too deep a debt: what is The Pregnant Widow, a long tangential social realist novel in which nothing really happens, if not Bellow at his best and worst? He also begins here his self-titled phase of "philosemitism." Nearly every novel beginning with The House of Meetings involves obsession and infatuation with a beautiful Jewish woman. This is obviously not a flaw for a single novel, but an expression of gentile writer's block when it stretches on for so long without variation. (If we believe Amis's biography, when Hitchens told Martin that he had just learned he was a quarter Jewish, Martin actually had to sit down in silence before admitting he was very jealous. I may be misremembering this, but I believe Martin also cried.) He just could not think of anything else -- just like with the "lower class" ruffians in The Information. We'd already seen them in Success, The Other People, Money, London Fields -- by The Information they're just stale and unnecessary. By Lionel Asbo they're just simply too much.
Some of his early, pre-midlife crisis novels are superb, but I don't think Amis the Younger recovered from orphanhood artistically until The Zone of Interest. The film adaptation's achievement was Amis's, solely Amis's: novelizing the actual events and evil of the concentration camp THIS side of the camp walls. It shows just how human and quotidian (and thus all the more evil and terrifying) the Holocaust truly was. It being rendered in an English dialect, though perhaps at first odd (effete Nazi officers saying, "In for a penny in for a pound"), renders the Holocaust in our language (or close to it), and hints at just how real, just how potential genocide and antisemitism is. Reading the Holocaust in English challenges the Anglo feeling, "Well, it could never have happened here" or "Something like this will NEVER happen here." I consider it a masterwork.
I suggest you reread some of his early novels, half of which are not flawed. It's not true to say his non-fiction unequivocally predominate over his fiction. The Rachel Papers is flawed only in the way that every debut ought to be -- in that sense, it is perfect. Leapfrog to Success, then to Money. London Fields is also about 75% full of perhaps his best writing ever, and works. The Information is Amis approaching his nadir, one step removed. Experience, being written about the death of his father, shows the last pure flourishes of that parental era. It's not until Inside Story, which is written to a young anonymous acolyte, literary ward, that he truly steps into being his own man.
Some of his novels are most certainly the equal of his essays.
But that's just my rambling two sense. I don't tend to psycho-analyze art, but when the artist shares so much of their personal life, it's hard not to drawn conclusions.
Yeah that episode with Bellow is in Experience too, I thought it was kind of an absurd bit of ego-stroking haha, but you're right the way his psychological needs played out in public and in his writing is part of what makes it so fascinating. The philosemitism stuff (as an american jew myself) is fascinating and something I wish I could have gotten into -- there are some... interesting passages to that effect in Experience. Thanks for your insights on the other novels! I'm sure I'll return to him soon, there's lots to wrestle with.
So good. Two lines in particular stood out for me, and I will reflect upon them some more: "The dominant style of critical writing today is hedging." and "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..." Both of which we see frequently here on Substack - people who hedge, and people who post polemics such that if you dare to disagree, you are an evil racist/homophobic/genocide supporter, etc.
I've never been a fan of Amis style of writing, opinionated, masculine, leaning into the mode, in the 80s and the 90s held up by folks who looked like Amis, undergirded by the belief in their intellectual and philosophical superiority, and now feeling threatened enough to become a neoliberal shrill. His takes on gender and race are such that his writing is simply unpleasant for me to read - Hanif Kureishi, he who ends long-term relationships with ease) ended a friendship with Amis because of Amis anti-Muslim rhetoric as well as the gender takes you included in your piece.
Thanks! Yes I happen to like that jazzy, daring style but it certainly carries the risk (particularly if you're as feted by the establishment as Amis was in his time) of believing your own bullshit.
Great essay. I don't have very much to add except for
1) a compliment: You and Victoria Moul are both unnervingly successful at making me want to read the books you endorse.
and
2) a quotation, from Borges: "Like Chesterton, like Lang, like Boswell, Wilde is one of the fortunates who can forego the approval of critics and even, at times, of the reader, because the delight we derive from his company is constant and irresistible."
Thanks! That is a brilliant quote, he is right on about both Wilde and Amis (I just bought Inside Story yesterday, with most other authors I would need a serious break). I need to read more of Borges' nonfiction.
This is great. I came to Amis through the Moronic Inferno (I think some of the essays from that are in the collection you're reviewing), and fucking loved him. Then I read The Information and was like, 'meh.' But I like your suggestion that he needed to write the novels to be Martin Amis, that somehow they were essential to the overall project even if they weren't as good as the criticism. Like Hitchens he got much worse toward the end; I always thought with both of them the fundamental problem was that they didn't keep growing as people.
p.s. you'll always be bp to me
Haha, I brought up Hitchens to my girlfriend today, she was like "the atheist neocon guy?" and I was like "No, I swear he used to be good! Read his 14,000 word LRB essay on Isaiah Berlin!" No dice, obviously.
And thanks, you can always say you were there at the start of the meteoric rise!
The weird thing about Hitchens is that the people who are now most likely to sing his praises are the ones who only started liking him when he had started to suck. It's his own fault, of course, because he alienated so many of the people who were his fans when he was at his best.
From my chapter on Hitchens:
Martin Amis, whose friendship with Hitchens became one of the constants of both men’s lives, tells a story that conveys a sense of the quivering intensity of “the Hitch” toward the end of the 1980s, when Hitchens was reckoning with the death of his father and the collapse of his first marriage. It begins on a road trip the two men took in the summer of 1989 to visit Saul Bellow at his house in Vermont.
“A drive of five or six hours, but the buddy-movie, radio-on feel of the journey was part of the treat,” writes Amis in his memoir Experience. “Stops were made for the huge uneaten meals and many powerful drinks desiderated by the Hitch. At this time my friend was still attached by one boot to the steer of his mid-life crisis, which began in earnest at the end of 1987.”
Amis had agreed to take Hitchens with him to visit Bellow on the condition that there would be absolutely no “sinister balls”—a phrase they’d coined together, when writing for The New Statesman, for being stridently left-wing at the most ill-chosen moments. They were going, after all, as Bellow’s guests; they both revered Bellow as a novelist even if they disapproved of some of his politics (in particular his support for Israel); and Hitchens was simply too compulsive to be trusted to be gracious once he got going.
Hitchens held back for a short while, but as the evening went on, and his drinking presumably did as well, he let himself go, using his friendship with Edward Said as a pretext for a fight over Israel and Palestine.
Amis writes: “Saul, packed down over the table, shoulders forward, legs tensed beneath his chair, became more laconic in his contributions, steadily submitting to a cataract of pure reason, matter-of-fact chapter and verse, with its interjected historical precedents, its high-decibel statistics, its fortissimo fine distinctions—Christopher’s cerebral stampede.”
“The silence still felt like a gnat in my ear.”
“‘Well,” [Hitchens] said. ‘I’m sorry if I went on a bit. But Edward is a friend of mine. And if I hadn’t defended him … I would have felt bad.’”
“‘How d’you feel now?’ said Saul.
The description of the aftermath of that incident (they have a huge fight which breaks into a laughing fit) is probably my favorite part of Experience, it depicts the end of young manhood in a very understated but moving way. Probably just resonated w/ where I'm at in my own life. Have you read Mortality? None of Hitchens' later stuff interests me except that. Looking back on it as a whole it's quite interesting how death-obsessed this whole generation was (thinking also of writers like Ishiguro). Obviously it's as basic a subject as it gets but there's probably something to be said about post Cold War aimlessness and spiritual vacancy etc.
I'm interested in your take on him, I'll have to read your book sometime soon! You've lived many lives as a writer.
Excellent, thought-provoking, I have little to immediately add after reading except that I would love to read your proposed part 2 (Rachel Papers/Money/Inside Story) and in case you’ve never seen it before, this hilarious (and, though I’m not a huge fan of the novel, hilariously uncharitable) review of “The Information” by none other than Iain Sinclair.
https://martinamisweb.com/pre_2006/sinclaironamis.htm
I’ve never really gotten into Amis. When he died I picked up “The Pregnant Widow” from a used bookstore and read a bit but gave up on it. I gather this is not one of his more well regarded novels so perhaps a poor choice from me, but it also confirmed some of my suspicions about him: the prose was very showy, as if he was trying to impress the reader, and I found that grating. My dad swears by him so I feel like I should give him a chance, maybe by trying his criticism or his memoirs rather than his fiction.
There definitely is a good bit of that – I suppose it depends on whether or not you're impressed. I'd try the War Against Cliche and skip the first few pieces. If you don't like the long essay on Philip Larkin then you definitely don't like him.
This is great! I've always remembered that passage you cite from The War Against Cliche, it haunts me whenever I have to revise something I've written myself. And yet—is "standing on the landing" really so bad?
iirc Henry James once wrote the phrase "I went over to Dover" in a letter and then mused that if Flaubert had had to write in English it would have made him an even greater maniac than his own language had.
Lol right, and do we really ascribe it to "mandarin unconcern" when Anthony Powell does it? In Experience he talks about how you should never start subsequent paragraphs with the same word (at this point I looked over at the draft of this essay and realized every paragraph started with "The"), but is that really a big deal? Surely tons of brilliant writers do it.
But that being said his central points about cliche were so incredibly helpful to me as a writer. Particularly in critical or essayistic writing it's so, so easy to fill sentences with received wisdom, and then suddenly you find yourself just not thinking at all, just doing a parody of thinking really, filling valuable server space with more useless cruft. It's why I admire the few people who are able to write about current events with flair (and why 99.9% of op-eds are horrible) – could you imagine trying to write something about say, the healthcare CEO assassin w/o resorting to banality and piffle? Even the Amis stuff about Mitt Romney or nukes or whatever isn't very good.
Amis's whole generation had a massive blind spot about Powell.
As to current affairs writing, it doesn't always need to be stylish, although I do like the fact that The Economist at least tries. A jazzy style can even be an impediment in nonfiction prose. As a critic and journalist Amis is always writing advertisements for himself himself. Coetzee has a more restrained style, when he wrote literary criticism for the NYRB you wouldn't necessarily guess the author without his byline. I checked an article Coetzee wrote about Mandela in the 1980s and sure enough two paragraphs in a row start with "in." Yet Coetzee is a far better writer than Amis was!
The real question is, is the cliche “War Against” employed here ironically or not. One of Amis’s flaws is how open he was to unintentional self-satire. Is this an example?
Fantastic, very well written.
You hit on something with Bellow as forefather, or better yet, literary legal guardian. I don't think Amis the Younger ever matured out of being literary prince to "the King," Amis the Elder. When Kingsley died, according to Inside Story (and I think this is even hinted at in Experience), one of the first things Martin did was phone Bellow and lay the flat of the sword upon his shoulders. "You are my father now." Bellow accepted.
Martin could not withstand being a literary orphan. This ties in with your personality construction precis. His works immediately following Kingsley's death suffer for his. The first novel he wrote post-mortem was a genre novel, Night Train. (Kingsley had stated in his last decades that he would never read another novel again that didn't start with, "A shot rang out." I.e. genre novels. Kingsley also did not read Martin's novels. As a noir (unthrilling) thriller, Night Train is the Martin novel Kingsley WOULD have read.)
After being adopted by Bellow, he pays him too deep a debt: what is The Pregnant Widow, a long tangential social realist novel in which nothing really happens, if not Bellow at his best and worst? He also begins here his self-titled phase of "philosemitism." Nearly every novel beginning with The House of Meetings involves obsession and infatuation with a beautiful Jewish woman. This is obviously not a flaw for a single novel, but an expression of gentile writer's block when it stretches on for so long without variation. (If we believe Amis's biography, when Hitchens told Martin that he had just learned he was a quarter Jewish, Martin actually had to sit down in silence before admitting he was very jealous. I may be misremembering this, but I believe Martin also cried.) He just could not think of anything else -- just like with the "lower class" ruffians in The Information. We'd already seen them in Success, The Other People, Money, London Fields -- by The Information they're just stale and unnecessary. By Lionel Asbo they're just simply too much.
Some of his early, pre-midlife crisis novels are superb, but I don't think Amis the Younger recovered from orphanhood artistically until The Zone of Interest. The film adaptation's achievement was Amis's, solely Amis's: novelizing the actual events and evil of the concentration camp THIS side of the camp walls. It shows just how human and quotidian (and thus all the more evil and terrifying) the Holocaust truly was. It being rendered in an English dialect, though perhaps at first odd (effete Nazi officers saying, "In for a penny in for a pound"), renders the Holocaust in our language (or close to it), and hints at just how real, just how potential genocide and antisemitism is. Reading the Holocaust in English challenges the Anglo feeling, "Well, it could never have happened here" or "Something like this will NEVER happen here." I consider it a masterwork.
I suggest you reread some of his early novels, half of which are not flawed. It's not true to say his non-fiction unequivocally predominate over his fiction. The Rachel Papers is flawed only in the way that every debut ought to be -- in that sense, it is perfect. Leapfrog to Success, then to Money. London Fields is also about 75% full of perhaps his best writing ever, and works. The Information is Amis approaching his nadir, one step removed. Experience, being written about the death of his father, shows the last pure flourishes of that parental era. It's not until Inside Story, which is written to a young anonymous acolyte, literary ward, that he truly steps into being his own man.
Some of his novels are most certainly the equal of his essays.
But that's just my rambling two sense. I don't tend to psycho-analyze art, but when the artist shares so much of their personal life, it's hard not to drawn conclusions.
Well done!
Yeah that episode with Bellow is in Experience too, I thought it was kind of an absurd bit of ego-stroking haha, but you're right the way his psychological needs played out in public and in his writing is part of what makes it so fascinating. The philosemitism stuff (as an american jew myself) is fascinating and something I wish I could have gotten into -- there are some... interesting passages to that effect in Experience. Thanks for your insights on the other novels! I'm sure I'll return to him soon, there's lots to wrestle with.
So good. Two lines in particular stood out for me, and I will reflect upon them some more: "The dominant style of critical writing today is hedging." and "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..." Both of which we see frequently here on Substack - people who hedge, and people who post polemics such that if you dare to disagree, you are an evil racist/homophobic/genocide supporter, etc.
I've never been a fan of Amis style of writing, opinionated, masculine, leaning into the mode, in the 80s and the 90s held up by folks who looked like Amis, undergirded by the belief in their intellectual and philosophical superiority, and now feeling threatened enough to become a neoliberal shrill. His takes on gender and race are such that his writing is simply unpleasant for me to read - Hanif Kureishi, he who ends long-term relationships with ease) ended a friendship with Amis because of Amis anti-Muslim rhetoric as well as the gender takes you included in your piece.
Thanks! Yes I happen to like that jazzy, daring style but it certainly carries the risk (particularly if you're as feted by the establishment as Amis was in his time) of believing your own bullshit.
Great essay. I don't have very much to add except for
1) a compliment: You and Victoria Moul are both unnervingly successful at making me want to read the books you endorse.
and
2) a quotation, from Borges: "Like Chesterton, like Lang, like Boswell, Wilde is one of the fortunates who can forego the approval of critics and even, at times, of the reader, because the delight we derive from his company is constant and irresistible."
Thanks! That is a brilliant quote, he is right on about both Wilde and Amis (I just bought Inside Story yesterday, with most other authors I would need a serious break). I need to read more of Borges' nonfiction.