The present tense was heartening. Maybe I’d been seeing things. Then I clicked through to the full wiki,which began:“Martin Amis was an English novelist …”
So it was true. Wikipedia had absorbed the news and moved on,but Google’s webcrawler was still in denial. I therefore had one last chance to think of Amis as a living presence,before watching him vanish for good into the past tense. The effect was like the moment of whiplash Amis had once evoked himself,when describing the sudden braking of a car:that moment when your body jackknifes forward against the seatbelt,and is “then,even more horribly,twanged back into its bucket.”
The late British novelist Martin Amis.AP
Until he died,Amis was my favourite living writer. The relationship went back more than 30 years,to the start of my serious reading life. SinceLondon Fields,in 1989,I’d bought every new book of his on publication. I never met him,never saw him in the flesh at any reading or festival. But all my reading life he’d been around,elsewhere on the planet,working on new stuff.
And now he wasn’t. In his superb memoirExperience,Amis describes how we engage with our favourite books. We have “a conversation” with them,“an intense argument.” We read them “frowning,nodding,withholding,qualifying,objecting,conceding – and smiling,smiling first with reluctant admiration,then smiling with unreluctant admiration.”
That’s how I’d always felt reading Amis. Now that he was dead,an unfamiliar ingredient was added to the brew:trepidation. How does it feel to read your favourite living writer when that writer stops being alive? I didn’t want it to feel any different,but I feared it was going to.
One change was apparent straight away. The things about Amis that once made me frown or object seemed suddenly unimportant. Losing a favourite writer is like losing any loved one. You forget the valleys and think about the peaks. You see the life whole. In the shadow of Amis’s death,I had no urge to revisit his lesser works. I wanted to go back to the masterpieces.
Martin Amis (right) with friends Ian McEwan (left) and Christopher Hitchens (centre).
In my view,Amis wrote at least three of those:Money (1984),The Information (1995) andExperience (2000). Amis started off being a purely comic novelist,like his father Kingsley.Money was the culmination of that early phase. If it isn’t the funniest novel in the language,it runs a close second to Kingsley’sLucky Jim.
Amis’s prose,in those early novels,was lush and slangy and vivid,packed with startlingly funny word combinations. The influence of Vladimir Nabokov was palpable.
By the time he wroteThe Information,Amis had another stylistic guru:Saul Bellow. The quality Amis most admired in Bellow was “weight of voice.” InThe Information,you felt Amis lowering the verbal treble and boosting the existential bass. It was still a wickedly funny book,but the comedy was darkened by an undertow of angst.
Published when Amis was 46,The Information was about middle age and mortality. That’s what “the information” is:the news that you’re going to die. The novel was written in the third person,but sometimes Amis stepped into the text to speak in his own voice. “The information is telling me to stop sayinghi and to start sayingbye,” he wrote.
Martin Amis in 2014.Toni Wilkinson
That always struck me as a throwaway line,when Amis was alive. He was only 46,for Christ’s sake. He seemed a bit young to be so stridently worried about death.
But the cold facts now say that Amis never made it past the age of 73. At 46,he had every right to believe he was on the back nine of his life – just as Spike Milligan,in middle age,had every right to insist that his gravestone would one day be chiselled with the wordsI told you I was ill.
“Death,” said Saul Bellow,“is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.” Backed by the dark fact of his death,Amis’s books have acquired new and deeper resonances. There are beautiful effects in them I never properly heard before,until his death threw them into relief.
Experience is full of such effects. The book opened up an autobiographical seam in Amis’s work that proved richly productive. His novels,for my money,got less vital after the turn of the millennium. His non-fiction – his journalism and literary criticism,his life-writing – increasingly became the main event.
Experience was a book about several deaths in Amis’s family,including that of his father – “the intercessionary figure,” as Martin called him,“the man who stands between the son and death.” When that figure goes,“there is nobody there between you and extinction.”
That’s another line that sounds crucially different now its author is dead. As long as he was alive,Amis was an intercessionary figure himself. He could write about his own mortality and you could kid yourself that he wasn’t really writing about yours.
That fact can no longer be dodged. The conversation with Amis goes on,but his side of it sounds more urgent and authoritative,now that he’s had the ultimate experience. He’s got weight of voice now,all right.
One of the most moving lines inExperience is spoken by Martin’s mother,Hilly,at Kingsley’s deathbed. “You can go to sleep now,darling,” she says. “You’ve done everything you needed to do … You’ve done all your work.”
Sadly,that is now true of the son as well as the father. The work is all done;there won’t be any more of it. As long as our favourite writers are alive,we cling to the hope that there will be more masterpieces.Why can’t they write like that all the time? we think. When they die,our quibbles give way to an overwhelming gratitude. They wrote like that some of the time,and that’s everything they needed to do.
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