Everyone is having their say on Martin Amis; I’ve had mine — got my little social media bounce. Perhaps I should leave it at that.
On his writing, Amis himself said the most useful but also critical thing. He said it elsewhere, too, but here it’s in an interview with Jon Cook for Pretext magazine:
MA: In my case the great break was between Other People and Money where I realized, again to my alarm, that I’d put all the eggs in the basket of the voice. As I read it through before handing it in I was assailed by feelings of great physical discomfort and I thought, ‘Have I been out of my mind for the last three years? Does that explain it?’ I think I was just reacting as a reader to the insane riskiness of this gamble. But I hadn’t had any doubts about writing the book and it wouldn’t alarm me now because I’d crossed that bridge. That it is something, to trust the voice, and just to catch-as-catch-can from thereon in - but it was very liberating. Craig Raine said to me around this time: ‘Form is easy - anyone can do form up to a point. You begin a novel with birth and you end it with a funeral.’ ‘You begin with a marriage and you end with a marriage - or a divorce[.]’ Anthony Burgess says, ‘That’s how you do form.’ You have your colour schemes, you have your décor, and that was a liberating remark, I thought. When you trust the voice, you trust to your individuality and, it has to be said, your talent. I described Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March to my first wife as a talent novel and she says, ‘Oh you mean a babble novel!’ That’s what they are really - they’re babble novels, but it’s such a marvellous thing to be writing one of those, it feels that you’re much more untrammelled, you don’t have these architectural drawings in your mind - you aren’t dotting i’s and crossing t’s and getting it all meticulously worked up. You’re letting something come through you and that is a dangerous but higher undertaking.
(Jon Cook, Interview with Martin Amis, Pretext, pg 67)
For this, for his addiction to babble, Amis takes his dispensation from - among others, but first among equals - Saul Bellow. Here’s Bellow’s Paris Review interview, which you can clearly make out behind every word of Amis’s:
BELLOW: My first two books are well made. I wrote the first quickly but took great pains with it. I labored with the second and tried to make it letter-perfect. In writing The Victim I accepted a Flaubertian standard. Not a bad standard, to be sure, but one which, in the end, I found repressive - repressive because of the circumstances of my life and because of my upbringing in Chicago as the son of immigrants. I could not, with such an instrument as I developed in the first two books, express a variety of things I knew intimately. Those books, though useful, did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable. A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form which frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities? With a borrowed sensibility? With the desire to be “correct”? Why should I force myself to write like an Englishman or a contributor to The New Yorker? I soon saw that it was simply not in me to be a mandarin. I should add that for a young man in my position there were social inhibitions too. I had good reason to fear that I would be put down as a foreigner, an interloper. It was made clear to me when I studied literature in the university that as a Jew and the son of Russian Jews I would probably never have the right feeling for Anglo-Saxon traditions, for English words. I realized even in college that the people who told me this were not necessarily disinterested friends. But they had an effect on me, nevertheless. This was something from which I had to free myself. I fought free because I had to.
(Saul Bellow, Paris Review Interviews, 3rd Series, pg 183, Penguin.)
With Amis, an Englishman, the question has to be, ‘Did he have to? Did he have to babble?’ It was an obviously Oedipal struggle, but also - I think - dependent on his realisation that the UK had decisively lost out to America in literary terms. Far better to be mid-Atlantic, and heading Westwards, than parochial, and sinking into the English Channel. Better, in other words, to be a second-rate Saul Bellow than a first-rate Angus Wilson.
‘You’re letting something come through you and that is a dangerous but higher undertaking.’
I think it was the right move; a very brave move; a greater risk than almost all his contemporaries (by which I mean everyone alive at the same time) has been prepared to take.
Amis stuck to his babble with passion, and benefited from it, and suffered for it.
He - his reputation - is still doing so.