Martin Amis is tired of London. He is emigrating to America again – this time for good, probably. In an interview with Ginny Dougary in last Saturday’s Times, Amis explained that his reasons are personal. There was a mournful tone to his answers, a sighing resignation that contrasts with the verve of those he gave at his zenith, such as these to the Paris Review.
Amis may be a balding controversialist, whose chutzpah and cocksure vanity graze the self-regarding. But if he is through with Britain, then that is our funeral because we would have lost the most singular stylist of the post-war era.
By his own admission, Amis is a ‘voice writer’. Plot, form and character are secondary to register. He is always striving to ‘stretch’ language, and the reader with it. He once told the Paris Review:
‘When I am stuck with a sentence that isn’t fully born, it isn’t yet there, I sometimes think, How would Dickens go at this sentence, how would Bellow or Nabokov go at this sentence? What you hope to emerge with is how you would go at that sentence, but you get a little shove in the back by thinking about writers you admire. I was once winding up a telephone conversation with Saul Bellow and he said, Well you go back to work now, and I said, All right, and he said, Give ’em hell. And it’s Dickens saying, Give ’em hell. Give the reader hell. Stretch the reader.’
Certainly, he has shunned the craze for circumspection. He is the master of the cold quip. Take this from House of Meetings:
‘Oppression lays down bloodlust. It lays it down like a wine.’
And he can introduce a theme and elaborate on it at length. The Information is an extended, very extended, journey into envy, bursting with original imagery for that most ancient of sins. His non-fiction is equally agile. Take this passage from his memoir, Experience:
‘The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you’re bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover,
might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.’
Elegant is not the word to describe this literary circus act. The range of imagery stretches the reader, but its clarity is such that you expand with the enthusiasm of new elastic. So he is not a
‘difficult novelist’, certainly by the standards of literary fiction.
Amis’ critics, particularly of the arch feminist variety, condemn his work as fundamentally amoral. But his pretty words serve a greater god than pleasure. As he once put it, ‘Style is not neutral; it gives moral direction.’ To an extent, Money: A Suicide Note is a morality tale. Without the post-modern twists and experiments with form, it is the story of an avaricious glutton’s fall. Beneath the orgiastic account of John Self’s bacchanal, the narration is coloured with moral disgust, a fact often overlooked by wild-eyed literary critics – a testament to Amis’ total stylistic achievement in that book.
‘When the sky is as grey as this – impeccably grey, a denial, really of the very concept of colour – and the stooped millions lift their heads, it’s hard to tell the air from the
impurities in our human eyes, as if the sinking climbing paisley curlicues of grit were part of the element itself, rain, spores, tears, film, dirt. Perhaps, at such moments, the sky is no more
then the sum of the dirt that lives in our human eyes.’
There’s an emerging school of thought that says Amis is in decline. Yellow Dog was
uniformly panned and the plot-less and self-indulgent
The Pregnant Widow was a slog for this Amis devotee. But both books are bejewelled with occassional brilliance. Amis’ description of Keith Nearing’s reaction to the death
of his wasted sister is among the most poignant:
‘Yes, Violet looked forceful. For the first time in her life, she seemed to be someone it would be foolish to treat lightly or underestimate, ridge-faced, totemic, like a squaw queen with orange hair.
‘She’s gone’, said the doctor and pointed with her hand. The wavering line had levelled out. ‘She’s still breathing,’ said Keith. But of course it was the machine that was still breathing. He stood over a breathless corpse, the chest filling, heaving, and he thought of her running and running, flying over the fields.’
Amis has always said that a writer is never stationary, never complete. Perhaps the highly autobiographical the Pregnant Widow, which begins as the Rachel Papers and ends as Experience, marks a new direction for the onetime enfant terrible. I hope the New England air unsettles the dust of the old country, because I doubt that Martin Amis is tired of life.
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