So that’s it: the full stop at the end of Inside Story, his novel from 2020, is the final full stop. It seemed as if that torrent of prose would continue forever; that he would keep on speaking to us, in the accents of intimate friendship, for the rest of our reading lives.
The strangest thing about Martin Amis’s death, for those of us who love his books, is that Martin Amis isn’t around to write about it. Because it turns out that I don’t want anyone else’s take on the death of Martin Amis. I want Amis’s own report. I want another Amisian dispatch from the front lines of experience.
[ Martin Amis, era-defining British novelist, dies aged 73Opens in new window ]
Writers fear death for all the usual reasons. But they also fear it for an additional, and perhaps not wholly selfish, reason: death is the one thing in life that you can’t write about afterward – write about and therefore make sense of. Amis once called death “the information” – the basic bit of news that we all must hear – and went on to say that the information is really “nothing”. Death is therefore literature’s opposite. Death is nothing: no shape, no form. And literature is (Amis again) “patterned artifice”: all shape, all form.
Martin Amis couldn’t plot to save his life; the endings of his novels were often a mess. But you didn’t read him for his plots. You read him for his turns of phrase
In his critical prose Amis returned often to Philip Larkin’s great poem Aubade, from 1977, with its vision of death as nothingness: “this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,/ No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,/ Nothing to love or link with,/ The anaesthetic from which none come round.” But Amis was also fond of quoting Saul Bellow’s line to the effect that death is “the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see anything”. Death is nothing, but it is also the context we cannot do without. (Why is there something rather than nothing? Trick question: there’s both.)
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Death gives us, suddenly, the life entire. And, for a writer, the career entire. Contemplating Philip Roth’s By the Same Author page in 1995, Amis called it “a sturdy pillar of high achievement”. We can now scan Amis’s bibliography and say the same thing.
Amis’s By the Same Author page lists at least six masterpieces (yes, let’s use the word): Money (1984), London Fields (1989), Time’s Arrow (1992), The Information (1995), House of Meetings (2006) and the memoir Experience (2000). It also lists one of the best volumes of literary criticism ever published, The War Against Cliché (2001). It lists the exemplary volumes of journalism The Moronic Inferno (1986) and Visiting Mrs Nabokov (1993). And it lists the late novel about Auschwitz, The Zone of Interest (2012) – perhaps another masterpiece, or almost.
But every one of his books absorbs and fascinates; yes, even the wayward Yellow Dog (2003); yes, even the spectral The Pregnant Widow (2010); yes, even the creepy Lionel Asbo (2012). He couldn’t plot to save his life; the endings of his novels were often a mess. (What the hell happens in the final pages of Yellow Dog? I still have no idea.) But you didn’t read him for his plots. You read him for his turns of phrase.
[ Martin Amis: all 14 novels rankedOpens in new window ]
What is literature made of if not turns of phrase? Nobody did it better. He returned the world to you, its fleeting details perceived afresh. A few moments’ thought gives me the “packety sound” of a nurse’s uniform in Time’s Arrow; the flies in The Pregnant Widow with their “gasmask faces”; the “very slightly adhesive sound of bare feet” on floorboards, in The Zone of Interest. And I should perhaps point out that the phrase with which I began this sentence – “A few moments’ thought gives me...” – is not mine; it’s Amis’s. (He was writing about Vladimir Nabokov.)
“Much modern prose,” Amis told the Paris Review in 1998, “is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, et cetera […] Once, I called it ‘vow-of-poverty prose.’ No, give me the king in his countinghouse.” Amis might also have complained that much modern prose is void of humour. But his wasn’t. The extended joke was his characteristic prose move. This might be why prize juries and middlebrow critics failed to take him seriously. (If you want to be taken seriously, be serious all the time.) “My teeth made headlines”: that’s from Experience. A throwaway gag. But Amis paid that kind of close attention to every sentence he ever published.
Jokes on the page are a form of generosity – and a form of intimacy. Who do we share jokes with? Our friends. Amis’s jokes, like the jokes of my friends, are lodged in my memory. Getting my kids ready for creche in the morning, I remember Richard Tull, the failed writer, doing the same in The Information: “Now came the boys – in what you would call a flurry if it didn’t go on so long and involve so much inanely grooved detail.” When my daughter was sojourning through the terrible twos I remembered Marmaduke, the nightmare toddler from London Fields: “Up until now, Guy and Hope’s relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke’s renaissance, it became, well – you wouldn’t say paramilitary. You’d say military.” The king in his countinghouse.
Martin’s father, of course, was also the King. Asked what it was like to be the famous-novelist son of a famous novelist, Amis said: “It’s just like taking over the family pub.” (This joke appears in Money, the one novel of Amis’s that even his detractors concede is great.) Snarky journalists made much of Kingsley’s remark that he had thrown Money across the room as soon as a character named Martin Amis appeared in its pages. (This, Kingsley said, was “buggering the reader about”.) But Experience shows us a Martin-Kingsley relationship that was as much convivial as filial. They were father and son; they were also friends.
The critic James Wood complained that Amis’s style was marred by “knowingness”. Amis, Wood wrote, was “always an adjective ahead of his subjects; always an adjective ahead of wonderment”. There is something to this (though you might also say that the adjective, in Amis as in other great writers, is often precisely the location of wonderment); Amis seldom resisted the temptation to be cleverer than whatever he was writing about. But the portrait of Kingsley in Experience eschews knowingness; or perhaps what it eschews is cynicism – because Martin was always a writer, and the writer, as he said, is never entirely innocent, never entirely unknowing; even in extremis, the writer always sees through the omni-inquisitive eyes of literature.
“Someone is no longer here,” Amis wrote, in the opening pages of Experience. “The intercessionary figure, the father, the man who stands between the son and death, is no longer here; and it won’t ever be the same.” Three hundred and fifty pages later, Amis is in hospital, at his father’s deathbed. “My father has turned away, on his side. He is showing me how you do it. You turn away, on your side, and do the dying.”
Amis leaves it up to us to remember that this is also how Ivan Ilych dies, in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, from 1886: by turning on his side. But the literary allusion, the literary parallel, is, in Amis’s paragraphs, always there, enriching the prose, expanding the range of his, and our, perceptions. Amis once praised a novelist (it was Nicholson Baker) for writing prose beneath which “the engine-room of English Literature confidently thrums”. When writers praise, they often say the things that they would like to hear said about themselves. Amis’s prose, like John Self, gobbled up contemporary junk food. But its standards of nutrition were literary, first and always.
Saying goodbye to Kingsley, in Experience, Amis wrote: “Now it is 1999, four years on to the day, and his books are all over my room, on the desk, on the table, on the floor, on the shelves […] What a lot of books you wrote, Dad, and what a lot of work you did. These are your last words […] All of this is you and is the best of you, and it is still here and I still have it.”
I met Martin Amis briefly a handful of times, at book signings and literary festivals. He was, on each occasion, kind but guarded. He once wrote, not unaffectionately, about the “wild-eyed sleazebags” who tended to turn up in his signing queues. I probably made a better impression than that, whenever I approached him – at least I hope I did. But it took me a long time to work out why he might have found it prudent to stay aloof. He had put so much of himself in his books; and in doing so proffered the sort of intimacy that leaves you vulnerable, even to the attentions of the well-meaning.
I have his books. They are all over my office, on the desk, on the bookshelf, on the floor. Within reach of my hand as I type are signed first editions of House of Meetings and Experience, an American hardback of Koba the Dread, and a creased Penguin edition of Other People; stacked at my feet are Heavy Water and Night Train and The Rachel Papers and Success ... It is the best of him. And it is still here. And I – we – still have it.
Kevin Power is assistant professor of literary practice at the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College Dublin
