Martin Amis, writer, 1949-2023
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Sir Salman Rushdie has led the tributes to Martin Amis, who has died aged 73 following a battle with cancer.
The author redefined British fiction during the 1980s, pioneering “a high style for writing about low things – fast food, sex shows, nude mags”, as he put it in an interview with the New York Times Book Review in 1984 (or "breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself”, as his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, once suggested).
It was a style that reached its apogee in Money, the novel named by the Guardian’s Robert McCrum as among the 100 best novels written in English. Never mind “fast food, sex shows, nude mags” — in Money, everything got the treatment, from hotels (“Sodden”), and window-panes (“Double-glazed with dirt… the glass looks like the Fiasco windscreen after a thousand-mile drive, stained with the blackened blood of insects nine hundred miles ago, the dottings of soot, the fingerprints of filthy phantoms”), through to an impeccably grey sky (“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”), and even, in one particularly memorable passage, a beggar in a run down liqueur store (“An an old head presaged by spores of woodrot breath came rearing up at me like a sudden salamander of fire and blood. Dah! In his idling voice he used distant tones of entreaty and self-exculpation, pointing to the recent scar that split his heat-bubbled cheek”). Dottings, fingerprints, curlicues, spores, heat-bubbled cheeks: “Even dirt,” as John Self, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, reminds us, “has its patterns and seeks its forms”.
Sir Salman paid tribute to Amis, telling the New Yorker: “He used to say that what he wanted to do was leave behind a shelf of books – to be able to say, ‘From here to here, it's me.’ His voice is silent now. But we have the shelf.” Amis’s UK editor, Michal Shavit, said: “He will be remembered as one of the greatest writers of his time and his books will stand the test of time alongside some of his favourite writers: Saul Bellow, John Updike and Vladimir Nabokov.”
It would be stretching the truth to portray Amis as a champion of freedom of expression in the mould of, say, Salman Rushdie or Susan Sontag. But he had his moments, and never more so than when it came to defending art, the realm of the aesthetic, from timebound politicised moralising.
There was, for instance, the dinner party contretemps with the then Prince of Wales over the latter’s refusal to support Salman Rushdie after the Ayatollah issued a fatwa against him in 1989. The Satanic Verses had insulted the deepest convictions of those who adhere to the Islamic faith, Charles said, and it followed that the author of such a book deserved very little sympathy. “A novel doesn’t set out to insult anyone,” Amis shot back. “It sets out to give pleasure to its readers. A novel is an essentially playful undertaking, and this is an exceedingly playful novel.”
Amis was also quick to defend Philip Larkin back in the 1990s, when the founding fathers of what we now call cancel culture were hellbent on posthumously cancelling the poet for alleged “racism”, “misogyny”, and “quasi-fascist views”. “A foul-mouthed bigot”, sniffed Peter Ackroyd in the Times, while dismissing him as “essentially a minor poet who for purely local and temporary reasons, acquired a large reputation”. The “really rather nasty” Larkin “seems to me more and more minor”, A.N. Wilson observed, in a piece graciously titled: “Larkin: the old friend I never liked.” “It sometimes seems,” Amis said, “that the basis of the vexation is that Larkin was born in 1922, rather than more recently.”
In 2020, Amis also joined other notable literary figures – including Margaret Attwood, Salman Rushdie and JK Rowling – in signing an open letter published in Harper’s Magazine that defended freedom of expression against the censorious woke mob.
The letter warned of an increasingly “intolerant climate” that was “stifling” the “free exchange of information and ideas” in liberal societies. “The way to defeat bad ideas,” the letter continued, “is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away."
The heated reaction to the letter among the puritanical commentariat was grimly predictable. Neatly serving to prove the letter’s point, many rushed to assert that cancel culture didn’t exist, while at the same time implying that the letter’s signatories should now be, er, cancelled, for associating themselves with figures like JK Rowling – or, as Vox journalist Emily VanDerWerff put it, “anti trans voices”.
Would this backlash have surprised Martin Amis? It seems unlikely.
“What we eventually run up against,” he told his audience during a 1997 lecture on political correctness at Harvard University, “are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don’t just not know what's funny, they don't know what’s serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn’t be trusted with anything.”
Rest in peace, Martin.
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