First thoughts on Martin Amis (1949-2023)
Tracking him in life and death for the New Statesman, Harper’s, and Vinduet
“The only way I can regain credit for my early work is – to die.” Vonnegut to MA, 1983
“You know you’re getting old when you’re being written about by people called Leo.” MA, 2010
When I learned that Martin Amis had died, I was sitting in a pub off Ladbroke Grove, in Notting Hill, West London. It was an Amis-y location, virtually midway, in fact, between the flat in Kensington Gardens Square where he moved in the 1970s (rent: £12 per week); the five-storey house on Chesterton Road where he lived with Antonia Phillips from 1983, shortly before they married, until 1993, when they separated; and the studio flat on Leamington Road Villas where – from 8:30 until 6 or so every weekday plus the occasional Saturday, and apart from breaks to play pinball and excursions to the pool hall and the Paddington Tennis Club on Castellain Road across the Harrow Road, in Maida Vale – he read Bellow, Nabokov, Updike, Milton, Rushdie, Kafka, Ballard, Jonathan Schell, Primo Levi, Joachim Fest, Simon Wiesenthal, Henry Orenstein, Nora Waln, Robert Jay Lifton, Lawrence Shainberg, Martin Gilbert, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Arno Mayer, Erich Fromm, and Gitta Sereny, and from those spurs and influences, wrote the five stories in Einstein’s Monsters (1987) and the novels London Fields (1989), Time’s Arrow (1991), and The Information (1995), as well as a lot of journalism. The area first made its presence felt in Amis’s third – and, I would argue, most consistently successful – novel Success, which appeared in 1977, where it is cancellably evoked by Terence Service, who shares a flat with his sort-of-brother Gregory Riding:
We live in Bayswater – district of the transients. Nearly everywhere is a hotel now; their porches teem like Foreign Legion garrisons; a fucked-up Arab comes here and is an automatic success. (The local boys are taking over, too. They work the streets, roping off the bits they want. They’re winning. I feel that I could join them if I could just wire my nerves up tight.) But I can’t. I try to like the way the world is changing, but there seems to be no extra room for me inside. I hate this daily ten-minute walk, along the outlines of the cold squares, past dark shopfronts where cats claw at the window panes, then into the tingling strip of Queensway, through shuddering traffic and the sweet smell of yesterday’s trash. I look at girls, of course, watch aeroplanes (take me to America), buy a paper and lots more cigarettes on the way, but I don’t think I’m convincing anyone by all this. No one senses my presence; they walk on by (you might pass me one of these days; you wouldn’t know it. Why should you?).
That part of West London changed during Amis’s time there. It was convenient, or canny, that when he left the area, he moved to an area of North-West London – specifically, 5 Regent’s Park Road, purchased for a now remarkable-seeming £715,000 – which offered similarly delightful housing stock while retaining an air of roughness, as presented, in the imperfect Yellow Dog (2003), via another central character’s wandering:
The rink of Britannia Junction: Parkway and Camden Lock and Camden High Street, the dozen black frames of the traffic lights, the slum of cars. Certain sights had to be got out of the way: that heap – no, that stack – of dogshit; that avalanche of vomit; that drunk on the pavement with a face like a baboon’s rear; that old chancer who had clearly been incredibly beaten up in the last five or six hours – and, just as incredibly, the eyes that lurked among those knucklestamps and bootprints harboured no grievance, sought no redress ...)
Though I was in a pub not far from where Amis spent a lot of time sleeping, writing, and looking around, I wasn’t in a Martin Amis novel: no one was playing darts or selling knock-off Prada handbags, and while two of the three women I was with were smoking cigarettes, and one of them did – I believe still does – possess alliterative initials, none of them was engaging in an act of wanton self-destruction or suffering an inexplicable meltdown. When the news came, I frustratingly wasn’t free to write a piece. I was off-line and had an existing – outstanding – professional commitment. But I wonder if it was also because he was a writer whose work, as I once put it, meant – or, at least, had once meant – more to me than almost any other. I used that phrase in January 2010, about four months after leaving university, in the final paragraph of the first and probably most readable of six Amis pieces I published over the course of around a decade. (The first five appeared in the New Statesman, where he worked for a while, and wrote a lot of good pieces.)
I realise now that the articles, responding to The Pregnant Widow; Richard Bradford’s weird biography; Lionel Asbo; The Zone of Interest; The Rub of Time; and Inside Story, handily cover what are probably the key Amisian topics:
i) style and social comedy;
ii) personal mythology;
iii) his English inheritances (more central than the American);
iv) his relationship to history and science;
v) literary aesthetics;
vi) the myopia that came with his confidence, or belief in rationality.
I have now written a seventh piece for the Norwegian literary journal Vinduet, edited by Simen Gonsholt and Ola Morris Innset, which may well be available in English at a later date:
https://www.vinduet.no/essayistikk/a-faa-taket-paa-martin-amis-av-leo-robson/