Richard Bradford styled his biography of Martin Amis as ‘The biography’, an odious gesture that would tempt fate on even the busiest day.
Are there any scoops?
With the exception of a few mild indiscretions from Christopher Hitchens — no, there are not. Early in the piece, Bradford thanks Amis for his ‘co-operation’, which amounted to five face-to-face interviews. That spirit of co-operation dissolved into acrimony at some stage, and the publication of this book has been marred by difficulties and delays.
What are the critics saying?
It’s a stinker, they say as one.
On these pages, Sam Leith observed that Bradford struggles to describe Amis’ writing, which is a drawback for a literary biography.
‘The real trouble is, Bradford seems to be defeated by Amis’s writing. He struggles to explain it, and the opacities of his style (his usages of words such as ‘hypothesis’, ‘amanuensis’, ‘vortex’, ‘reproachful’, ‘impresario’, ‘synoptic’ and ‘momentously’ are at best eccentric) — mean that even when he seems to know what he’s saying the reader doesn’t. He makes what seems to be a spirited case for the much-reviled Yellow Dog being a misunderstood ‘work of genius’, for instance, but it’s hard to follow exactly what that case is.’
Tom Lamont (Guardian) found Bradford strangely gauche:
‘Bradford makes a clumsy host. A story from Experience, about Amis’s younger sister, Sally, and the family nanny, Eva, is rehashed here (fairly), and embellished (fatally). The nanny is mischievously trying to get Sally to look on the scene of a car crash, something everybody else wants to prevent. Experience: “We seemed to be safely past when Eva propped Sally up on the back seat and said, ‘Look at him, Sall. Writhing in agony, he is.'” Bradford: “Eva seemed to feel it her duty to have her charge, then barely three, behold the sight of a man […] twitching either from terrible pain or as a last concession to mortal existence. She announced, rather in the manner of the Satanic nanny in The Omen…”‘
The award for Most Visceral Review goes to David Sexton (Evening Standard), whose contempt was unrestrained:
‘You can’t tell a book from its cover? This time you can. The cover of this hopeless hagiography features a picture of Martin Amis in which careful cropping, plus the artful use of deep shadow and inky clothes, makes this notorious midget look not just a giant, practically an Arnie, but such a towering figure he cannot possibly be contained on the page. And that’s a pretty fair picture of the grovelling contents, as it happens.’
That is one of Sexton’s lighter salvos.
Meanwhile, Geoff Dyer (Financial Times) theorised about why Amis has disowned Bradford’s book:
‘…my own guess is that it was Bradford’s prose that did for Amis. Amis is hyper-allergic to bad writing and seeing his life half-swaddled in Bradford’s sentences must have induced anaphylactic shock. Jeez, they gave me a shock – though with its suggestion of brevity, as in “short, sharp”, it is not the right word, for the sense that this is shockingly bad writing deepens with exposure. This shock came as a bit of a surprise, so to speak, since the late Humphrey Carpenter is quoted as saying that Bradford, in his Kingsley biography, rose “to Amis’s stylistic level” – enormously consoling news for those of us who have never been persuaded to read Amis the elder. Either that or, since Martin has spoken warmly of Bradford’s trawl through his father’s life, the present book represents a precipitous decline in quality.’
Lynn Barber (Sunday Times) was the kindest of Fleet Street’s wolves on this occasion, although her conclusion inclines more to criticism than praise.
‘This is a frustrating biography in that, in exchange for Martin’s co-operation, Bradford obviously had to keep him sweet. Thus he quotes Martin saying that Kingsley was not an alcoholic without so much as a batsqueak of protest. And often — especially apropos of the break-up of his first marriage — one feels one is not being told the full story. The last chapter is a quite egregious piece of flattery that claims that Amis is “the most important British novelist of his generation” and that, compared to him, the influence of Barnes, McEwan, Rushdie and co “has been negligible”. Nevertheless, Bradford has done the proper job of a literary biographer in using the life to illuminate the work, and his book will certainly be of use to Amis scholars.’
The verdict?
Reading should be for amusement only.
Martin Amis: The Biography, by Richard Bradford is published by Constable.
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