Postscript: Martin Amis 1949 - 2023

Martin Amis (Photo by Jennifer S. Altman)

I see in the Times that Martin Amis has died. He’s likely best known as a novelist. But, for me, his criticism is what matters. Dwight Garner, in his “Martin Amis, Acclaimed Author of Bleakly Comic Novels, Dies at 73” (The New York Times, May 20, 2023), writes,

He also demonstrated, in the reviews and essays collected in “The War Against Cliché” (2001), that he was among the fiercest and most intelligent literary critics of his time. His reviews were an important part of his reputation.

I agree. My favourite Amis critical piece is “Don Juan in Hull” (The New Yorker, July 12, 1993), a passionate defence of Philip Larkin. At the time it appeared, Larkin was under savage posthumous attack, largely because of revelations of his politically incorrect prejudices. Amis based his defence on Larkin’s work:

The recent attempts, by Motion and others, to pass judgment on Larkin look awfully green and pale compared with the self-examinations of the poetry. They think they judge him? No. He judges them. His indivisibility judges their hedging and trimming. His honesty judges their watchfulness.

James Wood, in his tribute (“Martin Amis’s Comic Music,” newyorker.com, May 20, 2023), praises Amis’s comedy. He says,

Amis’s style combined many of the classic elements of English literary comedy: exaggeration, and its dry parent, understatement; picaresque farce; caustic authorial intervention; caricature and grotesquerie; a wonderful ear for ironic registration.

This is well said. But what I relate to isn’t Amis’s comedy; it’s his anger. Anger powers some of his best writing. For example, in his brilliant Koba the Dread (2002), he included a letter to his friend Christopher Hitchens, questioning Hitchen’s admiration for Trotsky, calling Trotsky “a murderous bastard and a fucking liar.” The letter goes on:

Let us laboriously imagine that the “paradise” Trotsky promised to “build” suddenly appeared on the bulldozed site of 1921. Knowing that 15 million lives had been sacrificed to its creation, would you want to live in it? A paradise so bought is no paradise. I take it you would not want to second Eric Hobsbawm’s disgraceful “Yes” to a paradise so bought.

Whatever his subject – Stalin, Nabokov, Trump, Updike, Princess Diana, Osama bin Laden, the list goes on and on – Amis wrote freshly, zestfully, beautifully. Recall the inspired final paragraph of his “Véra and Vladimir: Letters to Véra” (included in his 2017 collection The Rub of Time):

It is the prose itself that provides the permanent affirmation. The unresting responsiveness; the exquisite evocations of animals and of children (wholly unsinister, though the prototype of Lolita, The Enchanter, dates from 1939); the way that everyone he comes across is minutely individualized (a butler, a bureaucrat, a conductor on the Métro); the detailed visualizations of soirees and street scenes; the raw-nerved susceptibility to weather (he is the supreme poet of the skyscape); and underlying it all the lavishness, the freely offered gift, of his sublime energy.

I love that “unresting responsiveness.” It applies to Amis’s writing, too.