Martin Amis died in Florida on Friday, of oesophageal cancer at the age of 73. Some of The Spectator’s best writers praised, reviled, laughed at and scorned Amis throughout his career. Here’s some extracts from our archive:
The Rachel Papers
‘The narrative is often very funny indeed, but I suspect that Martin Amis is getting the last laugh. Charles Highway is so much the archetypal youth, of a certain time and a certain class, that he is necessarily a comic creation. Sex is nowadays the vox populi, and almost vox dei if certain clergymen have anything to do with it, but for Highway it is a road paved with bad intentions. Although his descriptions are lurid and mechanical to the point of nausea, he has all the fascination and prurience of a naughty little boy who has been caught doing something nasty. There is, in fact, a little boy struggling to get out of Highway’s gawky frame – no more so than in the remarkable passages of adolescent angst and nostalgia. Martin Amis has fashioned a substantial character out of the rag-ends of our frantic contemporaries, and he has done so without any facile commitment to their means and ends.’
Peter Ackroyd, ‘Highway of good intentions’, 24 November 1973
Dead Babies
‘Mr Amis doesn’t create a particularly complex story, nor does he take his plots very far or very fast, and the brunt of his comedy lies in the clever manipulation of language and the general sharpness of his descriptions. All human aspirations, all of Man’s little decencies, the dignity of our procreative functions, the life of our souls, the wealth of inter-personal relations, the facilities of human expression, all of them come under Amis’s hammer.’
Peter Ackroyd, ‘Tirades’, 25 October 1975
Success
‘This schoolboy flaunting of ‘rude words’ is distressing, and not merely as a symptom of imaginative poverty or poor taste. The right to use such words in literature has been laboriously won over centuries. Success is the kind of novel that gives libertarianism a bad name. If the puritan backlash, clearly gathering strength, should succeed in once more muzzling writers, it will be this kind of self-indulgence that will be partly responsible and Mr Amis may find that the characters in his next book are only f….d up or even, admittedly no great literary loss, mucked up.’
Paul Ableman, ‘Sub-texts’, 15 April 1978
Other People
‘Reviewing Martin Amis is like trying to hear a bird sing in the midst of an artillery duel. ‘Most powerful, wonderful, titanic English novelist alive’ boom the guns of one side. ‘Talentless, jumped-up, nepotistic little nobody’ comes the answering fire.’
Paul Ableman, ‘Fairies and violence’, 21 March 1981
Money
‘In the last ten years, I have missed only one masterpiece, but it eats me that I did so. This was when I was sent Martin Amis’s Money and told to produce 900 words as soon as I could. I am now ashamed of my fundamentally stupid reaction to a very clever, and more than clever, novel. The first things which struck me about the book were its obscenity and its multiplicity of in-jokes, and these were things I chose to dwell upon when I went upstairs to the electric typewriter. But, since then, the book has haunted me. I had completely failed to see its bigness, its linguistic richness, its extraordinary cohesiveness, its moral weight. It is a terrible, serious book, much the best novel to be written by any of my contemporaries, and one which – if the peace holds, will last, and still be read, when most of us have been forgotten. But its density was not to be grasped all at once. I did not, to use the Amis phrase, crap all over it, but – more annoyingly to me – I missed the point.’
A.N. Wilson, ‘Goodbye to Grub Street’, 31 May 1986
London Fields
‘I wonder if I was alone in detecting a note of desperation in teh text of the advertisement for Martin Amis’s new novel which occupied a full page of the Independent on Saturday. Over a picture of office workers swarming across Waterloo Bridge at rush hour we read: Today, in London, the average man will think about sex 20 times. One man in three will masturbate. One person will be murdered within three days. A woman will be sexually assaulted every three hours. And five children will die from parental abuse within the week. LONDON FIELDS by Martin Amis was published on September 21st by Jonathan Cape. It’s a novel about ordinary, everyday life.
Amis can speak for himself and his friends, but I refuse to believe that one man in three of my acquaintance masturbates every day or that all masturbate once every three days. If the 31.5 million males in London all think of sex 20 times a day (how can he possibly know?) it is a miracle there is only one sexual assault every three hours. This is not ordinary, everyday life. It is heated minority fantasy, and none the worse for that.’
Auberon Waugh, ‘On the things which are really important to the ordinary person’, 30 September 1989
Time’s Arrow
‘The notion that a crime can be reversed by reversing time is banal in the extreme, tautologous or nonsensical, (I wonder if Martin Amis possesses a VCR). The backwards-time method merely allows Amis to exploit the horror and glamour of Auschwitz without the bother of confronting the conundrum of the place, which is the why of it.. I know the Derrida mob will gasp and clap their hands but I find it creepy to see Primo Levi — his suffering, his calm — rearranged for literary fun and profit. Even old Kurt Vonnegut: the speculations about time in Slaughterhouse 5 are no less nonsensical than in Time’s Arrow, but at least he was writing from an actual, unmediated experience of war. I feel as perplexed by Time’s Arrow as by Ian McEwan’s The Innocent. Who are these guys? Why do they mug up the recent history of Germany to commit acts of literary sadism? What do they do with their time except read and, I suppose, do sports? Listen: Auschwitz is not just about style. It is about aberrant behaviour by people in mass which is hard to understand even with great thought and study. Martin Amis is just about style.’
James Buchan, ‘The return of Dr Death’, 28 September 1991
‘I feel particularly teed off by Martin Amis choosing to perform his latest party trick on top of a mountain of skulls. (I also consider it a major social gaffe to hold the launch ‘party’ of a book about Auschwitz at the Polish Hearth Club, of all places, but we’ll let that pass.) There, last week, my young friend Tom Shone, who has suggested that perhaps Time’s Arrow isn’t the greatest book since The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was told that El Petito himself wanted a word in his ear. After a ladder was brought up from the library, those words turned out to be a surly, ‘You’ll grow up, sonny.’ As Tom is a cool six two and Amis comes up to his armpit, we thought this was a hoot.’
Julie Burchill, ‘Diary’, 5 October 1991
Amis turns 50
‘Why, just the other day Martin Amis was being called a ‘literary bad boy’, the Mick Jagger of Grub Street. If you looked up ‘precocious’ in the dictionary, there was a picture of him, his curly lips fixed in a characteristic expression of disdain: half sneer, half smirk. My, how time flies. He still looks like Mick Jagger. That’s the bad news. The good news is that he is still the leader of the pack.’
Toby Young, ‘The six-million-dollar man’, 28 August 1999
The war against cliché
‘It is characteristic that what he loves best is the single, surprising, right word; the ‘goblin’ atmosphere of America in Updike, or the ‘troubled and rocky’ woman in Saul Bellow. He likes small, inconspicuous, resonant things. The great virtue of Amis as a critic is that he sees, I think, that nothing in a novel matters more than prose; indeed, there is nothing else there.’
Philip Hensher, ‘Nothing matters more than prose’, 21 April 2001
On decline
‘Martin’s comic genius… collapsed into crepuscular plotting and page upon page of prose poetry. The victory of his dark, serious side was complete. There had been warning signs. During the 1980s he had been worrying about seriousness, in the same way that Diana, Princess of Wales worried about her hair. It was something they had to get right if the public was to see them in the right way. Martin’s chosen field of anxiety was nuclear warfare. He was against it. In the preface to Einstein’s Monsters he reflected on what he would have to do if war broke out. ‘I must find my wife and children,’ he said, ‘and kill them.’ There is something unshirkably comic (a phrase we’ll return to) in that idea. Was this a unilateral idea? Had he consulted Mrs Amis? Or perhaps Mrs Amis had come to the same conclusion? Were they both to be wandering through the nuclear rubble trying to kill each other for their own good? The fact is that he had no talent for the task of being our generation’s guide to moral seriousness. His instincts aren’t up to it.’
Simon Carr, ‘Stalin was bad – shock’, 24 August 2002
On fame
‘The phenomenon of Martin Amis puzzles and intrigues me. He seems to arouse a passion and hostility based on envy that are quite incommensurate with his literary importance or success or genius – or the absence of it. He figures constantly in the gossip columns or pseudo-news stories, never without a note of malice. The reviews of his latest novel, some of which I have read, seem animated by systematic hatred or malign delight at his supposedly failing powers. How is it that so many denizens of that panier de crabes, the London literary world, want to dig their pincers into him? He has obviously earned too much money for them to stomach, pulled too many beauties, rated too many headlines, and has had far more fun than patience will allow, And now, the time being ripe, the cowardly pack has closed in for the kill.’
Paul Johnson, ‘Savaging the author is replacing hunting the fox’, 13 September 2003
Yellow Dog
‘I kept wondering what one would think of Yellow Dog if one knew nothing about Amis. I think it would look like an unusually promising first attempt at a novel: unsuccessfully put together, and indulgent towards some very weak material, but all the same capable of flourishes of great energy and comic exuberance. Perhaps one shouldn’t judge it against his splendid novels of the 1970s and 1980s; but all the same, those novels established Amis as a figure of such authority, the tendency can hardly be avoided.’
Philip Hensher, ‘Treasures buried in the mud’, 6 September 2003
Meeting Amis
‘D and I go on to the secret sun terrace where The Mart is having his quiet coffee and fag and we pretend to be surprised to see him. ‘Martin,’ I say, greeting him like an old friend. ‘Your talk was great last night…’ (He nods graciously. Quick. Quick. Think of something less fan-ish!) ‘…and Isabel. We so totally love Isabel. You really lucked out there. She is amazing.’ Yes she is, The Mart agrees. ‘So hey, is it OK if we join you for coffee?’ ‘Actually,’ says The Mart. ‘I was just about to leave.’ And after just enough shifty page-turning and final-dregs-of-sipping to let us know it’s not about us or anything, he does.’
James Delingpole, ‘I’ve never met a girl who hero-worships Martin Amis as I do – except maybe his wife’, 20 March 2010
‘Grabbing a copy to use as my credentials for an introduction, I presented it to him and pleaded, ‘Give us a fag, Mart.’ ‘I’ve only got roll-ups,’ he said. I mimed joy and relief. With a wry, almost pained smile he took his pouch of Golden Virginia out of his jacket pocket and put it in my hand kindly. Inside the pouch there were half a dozen cigarettes — flattened and bent and mixed up with the tobacco — that he’d made earlier. He uses slim filters. I ignored the ready-rolled ones and made one of my own. As soon as I was ready, he smartly proffered his black disposable lighter. A gentleman. There was none of this getting revenge on a tiresome mendicant by making him plead for a flame.’
Jeremy Clarke, ‘Spirit of reconciliation’, 17 July 2010
Lionel Asbo
‘Amis’s depiction of the strange moral damage that has been done to, and by, a whole class of people interestingly and repeatedly echoes many observations of the great Theodore Dalrymple. Not least in the devastating portrayal of people who understand themselves by curiously separating their selves from their actions (and the consequences of those actions). So the title character, a violent lout who wins the lottery, tells his nephew early in the novel, ‘I’m not going to stand there at the gates for a fucking fortnight, am I. Think of the effect that’d have on me temper.’ As though he and his temper are two different things and the temper, over which he can have no control, is something with absolute control over him.’
Douglas Murray, ‘Martin Amis and the underclass’, 16 June 2012
On unpopularity
‘The trouble is that Amis isn’t as chummy as our other soi-disant public intellectuals. He takes himself seriously enough to come across as a bit of a prat, isn’t given to self-deprecation and doesn’t do Have I Got News for You. But whatever you think of his books or views on yob culture, you’d be hard-pushed to claim he didn’t liven up the books pages; what other writer could follow up a novel as harrowing as Other People with a manual on how to master Space Invaders? Or, for that matter, get into top-class public spats with everyone from Terry Eagleton to Katie Price?’
Digby Warde-Aldam, ‘Martin Amis may be a pompous arse, but he’s our pompous arse’, 24 April 2014
Inside Story
‘The heart of this book is in his relationship with Christopher Hitchens, and you can tell how much love there was between them. (Their dust-up in 2002 about Amis’s book on Stalin is kept out of here, as is Amis’s right.) Their dialogue, to use a reviewer’s miserable cliché, sparkles; it has the feel of truth, too, and one of the reasons Amis calls this a novel is that it frees him from recalling their chats — or indeed his chats with anyone else — verbatim. It gives him room. And there is much love here for other people too: his children, his wife, Saul Bellow (whose dementia he describes with great tenderness and sorrow). He gives other people than himself some of the best lines; there’s a zinger from Isabel/Elena on p. 179 which explains everything you need to know about Martin Amis. Novel, shmovel. It works.’
Nicholas Lezard, ‘Tenderness and sorrow’, 26 September 2020
Death
‘The prose was always, always there. Once, looking back on the defects of one of his own early novels, he noted with a wondering satisfaction that the writing, even then, was ‘terribly alive’. When he was on song, nobody was as inventive, as surprising, or as damned funny at the level of the sentence as Amis. And off song? Well, the same pretty much holds.’
Sam Leith, ‘Martin Amis: 1949-2023’, 20 May 2023