What will time take from me? Has it taken anything from me already? How will I know?
-- Martin Amis, "Inside Story"
The thing I don't want to do as a columnist is take over the dead people beat.
Sometimes it's tempting. You start looking around for something to write about and wow, Jim Brown dies. Maybe the greatest male athlete ever. Someone you have thoughts about, who impinged upon your childhood. It wouldn't be hard to write a column about Jim Brown.
As I write this, the news is breaking that underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger died on May 11. I could write about the aptly named Anger, who made the aesthetically and legally groundbreaking "Scorpio Rising," wrote the pernicious "Hollywood Babylon," and provided the template for 80 percent of all popular music videos ever made. Half an hour's research on the Internet ought to suffice.
Maybe I could ask ChatGPT to sum up his career.
But I don't want to take over the dead people's beat, even though it might be a good career move. Willie Mays is 92 years old. Jimmy Carter is in hospice. They'd make for easy columns (and I reserve the right to write about them if they go). For an obituary writer, the world is a target-rich environment.
Just now--1:52 p.m. May 24--I learn Tina Turner has died. She deserves a moment of reflection she won't get in this space.
Still, I have to say something about Martin Amis.
His death last week came as a minor shock. He was older than me, but I considered him a permanently young man, a literary enfant terrible, still the junior Amis, though his father Kingsley had been dead for 25 years.
Writers are different than other notable people with whom we might develop parasocial relationships. When we are reading them, we have a genuinely intimate relationship with a writer. We are reading their minds at the moment their words were set down. I never met Martin, but I've heard his voice in my head. It is a young voice, a snotty punk voice. A voice that presumed a little too much, too often.
Amis is, like most writers who become famous, better known as a celebrity. Were he not quite so celebrated, he might well be considered one of the finest writers of his or any recent generation. He was a British subject, but his fame and part-time residence in Brooklyn allows us to consider him, and the greater part of his work, as part of American culture. Like Harry Potter, Martin Amis grew too big for Britain.
Amis was a "nepo baby," the son of Kingsley Amis. Kingsley never approached his son's level of infamy on this side of the Atlantic, but he wrote very well. Still, he--like J.D. Salinger--never completely escaped from the shadow of his first novel. "Lucky Jim" it was for Kingsley, a send-up of life at a remote British university, that pegged him as one of the "angry young men" of British letters to emerge after World War II.
In 1963, British critic and novelist David Lodge wrote a remarkable essay called "The Modern, the Contemporary and the Importance of Being Amis," in which he pointed out that most contemporary novels that do well when they are first published will fade to near-unreadability in a matter of a few years.
Lodge made an exception for Kingsley:
"The importance of being Amis ... is in a sense greater than the sum of his works, individually considered as autotelic works of art," Lodge wrote. "His novels, stories, poems, reviews, even his obiter dicta reported in the newspapers, have focused in a very precise way a number of possible attitudes which a great many middle-class intellectuals of the postwar period find useful for the purposes of self-definition."
Kingsley went on to write many novels and a fabulously entertaining memoir. Then he died.
But not before siring Martin, whose career and life rhymed with Kingsley's. A bad boy of English letters in the '70s and '80s, Martin wrote of nervy, caustic books that satirize the English and American condition.
The family resemblance is strong, though Martin's work is more adventurous, tarted up with postmodernism and surrealism, and certainly more self-referential.
Like his father, he works a depleted English landscape, studded with degenerates and dotty intellectual pretenders. Martin is more savage and misanthropic, and understands Americans better.
He wrote 15 novels. I have read them all. I've read all four of his short-story collections, five of his eight non-fiction collections, and have seen both films to which he contributed screenplays.
Amis has spent a lot of time in my head. I am already missing his next book.
That's not to say I loved his work. I found a lot of it interesting, some of it dense, and a portion of it cruel. Had Martin not been Kingsley's son, it would have been more difficult for him to find a publisher for "The Rachel Papers," which is a good enough first novel but not compellingly better than a lot of books by young men who, for a time, dated out of their league.
But, as they say in Hollywood, nepotism only gets you so far; and Martin's oeuvre is arguably deeper than his father's (though the best novel by an Amis remains "Lord Jim").
I came to appreciate him more as a critic than as a novelist. He provided one of my mottoes when he asserted that writing was a "campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart." There was genuine courage in his non-fiction, especially his literary criticism.
Amis' final novel, the overtly autobiographical (and strategically unreliable) "Inside Story: A Novel," hints Amis' real father may have been poet Philip Larkin, a detail that feels both wishful and tantalizing. Larkin was a great love poet, though in real life a mean bachelor who detested children and figured peripherally in Martin's childhood before becoming the subject of some of his most lucid and empathetic criticism.
"Inside Story" is in many ways about dying; about the realization most of us eventually suffer that we are moving toward death at, as Nabokov put it, "5,000 heartbeats an hour."
When it was published, Amis warned it was probably his last "long" novel.
I didn't believe that any more than the Larkin rumor.
Anyway, I don't want the dead beat. Most of us will eventually reach a point where we are full of eulogies, where they feel cheap. We can perceive our old world being undone at an unseemly pace. All those people in those old movies, where have they gone?
What's the poet say? "It is the blight man was born for."
It's ourselves we mourn for.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com