Martin Amis and the Changing of the Guard

   Like so many others I first encountered Martin Amis in 1983, in the famous issue of Granta, the Best of Young British Novelists, which opened with the first pages of his masterpiece, Money: A Suicide Note (1984), and included work by Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. They were all in their late 20s and early 30s, born in the decade after the war. A new generation was in town, and ten years later the editor of Granta, Bill Buford, wrote about them as follows:

I’m convinced that had it been organized even three years before, it would have flopped: there was too little to promote. … The novel belonged not to the young authors but to another, older generation: Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Barbara Pym, Paul Scott, Stanley Middleton…

But not for long. In January of 1980, the beginning of the decade, I read a short story that was good, but, for reasons that must have been persuasive at the time, not good enough to publish, although apparently good enough for me to want to contact the writer and urge hm to send us something else, resulting in a series of phone calls – to Norwich, London, Guildford – until finally I reached an unknown Kazuo Ishiguro in a bed-sit in Cardiff; the pay-phone was in the hall. Three months later, Adam Mars-Jones published his first story; two months later, Salman Rushdie completed Midnight’s Children.

Both the issue of Granta and these new novels caught the public imagination. Midnight’s Children sold over one million copies in the UK alone and not only won the 1981 Booker Prize but was awarded the ‘Booker of Bookers’ Prize in 1993 and 2008 to celebrate the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the Booker Prize. Amis’s Money, his breakthrough novel, sold 40,000 copies in hardback and nearly a quarter of a million copies in paperback. Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day sold over a million copies and was of course made into a brilliant film by Merchant-Ivory, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

But, above all, it was Amis’s voice which stood out. His piece in Granta begins in New York, “off FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds…. [A] low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane, sliding off to the right across our bows.” Say what you like about Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson and Penelope Fitzgerald (all born before 1920), but they didn’t write much about “low-slung Tomahawks full of black guys.” With Amis came a new kind of literary voice, and a public whose taste for it was rapidly inspired.

This voice spoke of damage (“Damage is waiting. Soon, damage is going to stop waiting – any day now”), fear (“One of these days I’m going to walk right up to fear”), booze, junk food, pornography, bodily functions (“As I emerged from some X-certificate work in the equatorial bathroom”), dental mayhem (“various pains have taken up residence in various parts of my face”), and an intense alertness to the passage of time (“I’ve got to grow up. It’s time”).

Perhaps above all it spoke of a new kind of modern culture, “The Moronic Inferno,” a phrase Amis took from Saul Bellow, who in turn took it from Wyndham Lewis. It was the title of a book of essays about contemporary America Amis published in 1986, essays about “The Killings in Atlanta,” “The Case of Claus von Bulow,” “Double Jeopardy: Making Sense of AIDS,” but also about Bellow’s Chicago and a dozen or more major American writers and public figures. The Moronic Inferno, wrote Amis, was “a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy,” a new culture that “will become a reality: the only reality.”

Twelve years before that issue of Granta, in 1971, Amis’s friend and literary father-figure, Saul Bellow was one of the judges of Britain’s leading literary prize, the Booker. The two main contenders that year were VS Naipaul, for In a Free State, and Elizabeth Taylor, whose novel Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, was favoured by two of the judges, the popular historian Antonia Fraser and John Gross, later editor of The Times Literary Supplement. As Gross later recalled, it was Bellow who “pretty much blew her [Taylor] out of the water. He said when the first round came … ‘This is an elegant tinkling teacup novel of the kind that you Brits do very well, but it’s not serious stuff!” One way of summing up the impact of that issue of Granta and of Amis’s Money was that it marked the end of the British “elegant tinkling teacup novel.” Lisa Allardice wrote in her obituary of Amis last year, “Where the literary world had been grey and tweedy, presided over by ageing grandees (Amis Sr, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Iris Murdoch), now it was young and outrageously brash, and Amis was the frontman.”

At an event in 2020 with Salman Rushdie, Rushdie asked Amis if, back in those heady days, he felt part of a gang. “That’s the way ‘movements’ start,” Amis replied. “Ambitious young drunks, late at night, saying, ‘We’re not going to do that any more. We’re going to do this instead.’” “There was a feeling,” he said of this time, “that there were places to go that the English novel didn’t go, and was being too fastidious about.” The word “generation” echoed through many of the tributes to Amis when he died in May 2023. As the British critic Geoff Dyer wrote in The Observer, for a long time the home of Amis’s journalism, “I suspect it’s difficult for anyone under the age of … what? 30? 40? to comprehend the thrall Martin Amis exerted on writers now in their 50s or above.”

Of course, it was not just writers in their 50s or above who felt the impact of Amis’s writing. Readers did too. More than any of that extraordinary group of writers who exploded on the scene in the Eighties, Amis spoke to his generation. He mixed high and low culture, absorbed uncultured yobs like Keith Talent and John Self, but also great writers like Bellow and Nabokov. He captured the new feel of Thatcher’s London and of the new virulent media. What one obituary called “his obvious intelligence and wit, delivered in an improbable baritone drawl,” was made for TV, and during the Eighties and Nineties Amis often appeared on The South Bank Show, Channel 4 programmes and The Late Show. I produced several programmes with Amis during his heyday in those decades, and as Boyd Tonkin wrote in his obituary in The Guardian, Amis was part of “a new, media-savvy and PR-friendly, literary wave.” It is perhaps no coincidence that Amis’s reputation reached its peak at the time when a whole number of news arts and talks programmes on the BBC, ITV and the new kid on the block, Channel 4, seemed to have hours to fill with interviews and profiles of leading arts figures. Amis was perfect, which is to say, already famous, young, and often with a cigarette to hand. No wonder there were endless comparisons with Mick Jagger. As Ian McEwan said on the BBC’s Radio 4, “Martin ranged with even more riffs than Keith Richards and Mick Jagger put together.”

Another aspect of Amis’s appeal, especially in the Eighties, was the fascination of his generation with America, with its writers and popular culture, but also with the American post-war sense of sheer abundance and plenitude. Nearly all of the British writers who broke through in the Eighties were born just after the war – Rushdie in 1947, McEwan in 1948, Amis and Christopher Hitchens in 1949. They came of age in the Sixties, the American decade between the assassination of Kennedy and Watergate.

American writers spoke to this generation in a way that they didn’t speak to Iris Murdoch, Anthony Powell or William Golding. Amis and Hitchens both wrote “Introductions” to editions of Bellow’s Augie March, Rushdie gave a talk on Bellow for PBS. All three ended up living in America.

In his Introduction to the Penguin edition of Augie March in 2001, Hitchens quotes his friend Amis, who had written in 1987, soon after Money appeared, “for all its marvels, Augie March, like Henderson the Rain King, often resembles a lecture on destiny fed through a thesaurus of low-life patois.” Elsewhere Amis wrote, “Augie March is all about life; it brings you up against the dead-end of life. Bellow’s novel … is above all free – without inhibition. An epic about the so-called ordinary, it is a marvel of remorseless spontaneity.”

You can see the appeal of Bellow in an interview Amis gave to Paris Review soon afterwards, in 1998. “Much modern prose,” Amis said, “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.”

That pretty much sums up Amis’s prose, the fabulous energy of those long sentences, the sense of risk and abundance. Not surprising that in his view the twentieth-century novel belongs to America, “… almost as surely as the nineteenth-century novel belonged to England and to Russia.” In particular, he was aware, unlike many non-Jewish British writers, “that American fiction is itself dominated by Jewish-American fiction,” in ways complicated and mysterious. Though not all Jewish-American writers filled him with the same excitement. He could respond—why not?—to the “intimidating illumination” of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal, with its aging and lecherous David Kepesh, and yet he felt that Roth’s “eloquence” was sparked only by certain subjects, and that in sum he lacked the “sheer visionary affect,” the style-as-morality dazzle to be found in Nabokov’s famous King, Queen, Knave train platform or along Bellow’s Napoleon Street.

It’s worth noting that Amis’s love for America and for American writers was not reciprocated by American critics. He never received the same acclaim in America as he did in the UK. The critics (and readers) for whom Amis mattered most were British, including literary journalists like James Wood, Jason Cowley (onetime editor of Granta and now The New Statesman), Sam Leith, and Boyd Tonkin.

It’s well known, certainly in British literary circles, that Amis wanted a literary father—not his own Kingsley—and that he chose Bellow. And so we might ask: What was wrong with Kingsley Amis as a literary father? Crucially, he was very English and middlebrow. Consider too an amusing passage in Kingsley’s novel, Stanley and the Women: “Before I had solved it there was a tearing sound and I saw that Steve was in fact tearing the cover off a book. I shouted out to him. Having got rid of the cover he tried to tear the pages across but they were too tough and he put the remains of the book down on a cushion on the back of a chair. By the time I went over there he had gone. The book was Herzog, by Saul Bellow.”

But think too of Englishness, a term Amis engages in his memoir, Inside Story. Mainly it comes up in relation to Larkin and Hitchens, the other two main figures in the memoir. Amis and Hitchens are discussing Larkin’s Letters to Monica (which Hitchens was about to review in the Atlantic and which Amis had already reviewed in the Guardian). “‘[Y]ou like all that Middle England stuff that gives me the horrors,’” Amis says. “‘And by Middle England I mean anywhere that’s not in central London. Rustic towns, country houses, weekend cottages.’” “‘And Larkin,’” Amis goes on to say, “‘was its poet.’” No taste there, in Amis, for that sort of Englishness.

And yet at first glance, Amis was himself very English. His father, obviously, was one of the best-known post-war English writers. Both father and son went to Oxford. So did their best friends, Larkin and Hitchens. After Oxford Amis lived in posh parts of London: Notting Hill, then Primrose Hill. Of course the England of his literary imagination could not have been more different than his father’s England. It was the hip world of Notting Hill, then very fashionable, a mix of posh and yobbish, rather like his prose. In the early and mid-Eighties, when Rushdie was writing about the birth of modern India and Julian Barnes was writing his best book (Flaubert’s Parrot), Amis was writing about Keith Talent and John Self, the central character in Money. Money was the first novel in his “London Trilogy,” which examines the lives of middle-aged men, exploring the sordid, debauched, and post-apocalyptic undercurrents of life in late 20th-century Britain. Amis’s London protagonists are anti-heroes, the characters engaged in what Amis himself called “vigorous wrongdoing,” figures unlikable, described by readers—including those who couldn’t have enough of them– as unforgivably misanthropic and misogynistic. An appetite in Amis for the grotesque and the extreme, with an audience grateful for the fact, as he said, that “in the study some sort of demon takes over.”

Arguably, money was the great subject of Eighties Britain. Thatcherism was all about privatisation and the financial Big Bang. The hugely popular TV comedian Harry Enfield revelled in having “Loadsamoney.” One of the biggest hits of the early Eighties was “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)” by The Pet Shop Boys (“I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks/Let’s make lots of money”). In 1987 Caryl Churchill wrote one of her best plays, Serious Money. Amis’s most famous novel had its finger on the pulse. One of the best reviews of Money appeared in The New York Times, which hailed its “rollicking, repulsive picture of London and New York in the late 20th century, awash in cash, corruption, pornography, junk food, junk art, self-promotion and wretched excess of every imaginable variety,” all told in a nonstop flow of virtuosic sentences.

What set Amis apart from his contemporaries was his ability to find a voice for his times. No one did it better. This is what won him so many young admirers. James Wood argued that Amis’s “word-coining power” and “verbal and formal ambition” were crucial forces in the revitalisation of the novel in English. In an essay called How Good is Martin Amis? Jason Cowley agreed: “His early preference for writing about low-life in a high style, his blokey banter and cool, languorous wit, and his fascination with porn and junk culture, meant that, for better or worse, he was for a long period the commanding presence of English fiction, the one the new literary lads jostled to imitate, the writer-as-celebrity, the main man.” Forty years later, the critic Boyd Tonkin, in his obituary of Amis for The Guardian, wrote, “In 1984, the pyrotechnic satire and narrative trickery of the sensational Money both skewered an era of greed and glitz and, typically, embodied its appeal in the razzle-dazzle of its prose.” That prose, needless to say, created an appetite for just that accent and made Amis famous. “I almost try and avoid form,” he said. “What I’m interested in is trying to get more truthful about what it’s like to be alive now…” Though also he said, again and again, that he was intent on creating “a new rhythm.”

That “rhythm” included swerves into idioms and sentence constructions that could seem—to some readers surely—refreshingly free. Some of his humor was inspired by his affinity for things Jewish and his relation to Bellow. In the memoir he recalls a Christmas Day visit to his father in 1961: “After a four-hour lunch I am playing Scrabble with Kingsley and Theo Richmond (an innermost family friend). My father takes two tiles from his rack and for a teasing moment, before withdrawing them, forms the words YID. I am twelve.”

Almost fifty years later, Martin writes in Inside Story about a conversation with his wife. “‘Did you ring the Jews?’” he asks her. “‘Yes,’ said Elena [his wife]. “And they’re all right?” “They’re fine.” The Jews were their daughters. Apart from matters of style and idiom, Amis never really explained why Jewishness was so important to him, or for that matter to his friend Hitchens.

There’s something striking—though not really surprising– about the cover of Inside Story, a photo of Amis and Hitchens, then around thirty or perhaps even younger. The photo of Amis on the cover of Experience shows him as a young boy, though he was already fifty when Experience appeared and he was over seventy when Inside Story was published. Why these Peter Pan photos of eternal youth? There was always something boyish about Amis and Hitchens, though Inside Story is full of old men and women: Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley, Kingsley, of course, and his old friends Robert Conquest (born 1917) and Philip Larkin (like Kingsley born in 1922), Bellow, Updike and Roth, the grand old men of American literature. But then Amis and Hitchens always seemed so much younger, with their addiction to smoking and their irrepressible banter about sex, drink and adventure. No doubt Amis also seemed eternally youthful because of his scintillating verbal artistry, satirical audacity and sheer imaginative verve.

And yet Amis the taste-maker who so provoked and inspired the writers coming of age when he first hit the scene was not much admired at all by a younger generation of critics, who were notably unkind to his later works. He did seem, to many of them, to have lost his mojo, and even his books on contentious issues struck them as oddly irrelevant. Never a father-figure to the younger British writers, who didn’t much care for his tendency as an older writer to take on big issues, the growing sense of historical evil in his writing, what Amis called “the modern infamies, the twentieth-century sins,” in particular, the Holocaust and Stalinism, and then 9/11 and all that followed. This historical turn began with one of his best short stories, Bujak and the Strong Force (1985, republished in Einstein’s Monsters in 1987), a book full of references to the Holocaust. But this stage in Amis’s trajectory continued with a series of books about Hitler and Stalin, including Time’s Arrow (1991), Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002), his first book on Stalin, House of Meetings (2006) and The Zone of Interest (2014), his second novel to tackle the Holocaust and recently adapted as a successful film.

In a tribute to Amis in The Irish Times, Kevin Power wrote, “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.” “Someone is no longer here,” Amis wrote, in the opening pages of his first memoir, Experience (2000), published soon after his father’s death. “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.”

 

In 2020 I heard him on the radio. How old he sounded and how posh. Less like Mick Jagger and more like Somerset Maugham or Maurice Bowra, someone from sixty or seventy years ago. He seemed to be saying bye to us, his readers. His last great subject was not London or low-lifes, nor the Holocaust but simply the losses, partings and deaths. Amis died fifty years after the publication of his first novel. But just as he found the right voice for the Eighties, he never quite found the right voice for his last great subject. At least so it seemed to me.

Of course Amis’s impact on the taste of a generation in Britain is indisputable. Zadie Smith spoke of worshipping Amis “like a cult follower” in her youth, and later, when they became friends, she remembered that he continued to have the capacity to “deliberately rile [her] up with questions like: ‘Women not funny. Discuss.’” No small thing to have affected the tone and appetites of a literary generation, and even in the United States there were plenty of admirers willing to swoon, at least a little, about what Dwight Garner called “his swagger, his good looks” and his uninhibited gift for profanity and brio. Ian McEwan described him as “the funniest man I ever met,” though it’s fair to say that humor doesn’t quite seem to have become a standard feature of the writing we most admire these days. What remains is something Garner noted even in Amis’s late essays on mostly literary subjects, which felt like “hurtling down a black diamond ski run.” Most other writers could only envy that quality in Amis’s best writing, and many suffered what Garner calls “an innate desire to hurl themselves against Amis…to knock the imaginary chip off his shoulder.” Amis himself thought that as the years went on he had settled into “decline,” but there’s no question that his career embodies, or exemplifies, the way that a single writer can drive, inspire, and color the works and ambitions of his contemporaries.