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Friday 5 December 2008

Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations

Not a decent book

Sam Leith on a joint critical study of Kingsley and Martin Amis

It all begs the question I asked at the outset. Why dedicate 400-odd pages to two writers one of whose work you think slight if not outright bad, and another whose work you think thoroughly bad? Do they deserve it? Do they, in literary-historical terms, merit it?

Sometimes, the bones of this project show through the skin. Powell is insistent — and for all I know dead right, but that’s hardly the point — that Kingsley was a sufferer from depression. Of the last sentence of The Anti-Death League, (‘There isn’t anywhere to be.’), he writes: ‘This — the last sentence especially — is the authentic voice of depression, and only a depressive could have written it.’ You may wonder where that untestable assertion gets us. It’s too late to prescribe Kingers a course of cheer-up pills, he being dead. And our reading of the fiction isn’t expanded by deciding its author was a depressive rather than, say, an alcoholic — or both (they call them ‘wine glums’ in rehab).

But the question is not where this untestable assertion gets us. It’s where it gets Neil Powell, as becomes clear in his book’s gatheringly weird back half. Powell was, as he tells us in his preface, ‘born a year before Martin Amis’. Powell’s own father, we learn when he throws in an unoccasioned three-page reminiscence towards the end, suffered from ‘something worse than Kingsley’s phobias: from clinical depression’. He also worked as a glass importer — ‘the identical trade to J. J. Amis’ [Kingsley’s grandfather].

There’s a reflex touchiness when he insists (for nobody was suggesting otherwise):

Nevertheless, he was as complex and interesting a father as Kingsley Amis and I can’t help regarding his unliterariness as something of a blessing. For the artificial tone that mars Experience stems from Martin’s assumption that being a writer is the centrally defining factor about Kingsley-as-father . . .

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