I’m inspired to write this post not so much by the death four days ago of acclaimed English novelist Martin Amis, at the age of 73 from oesophagus cancer, as by the obituary published in El Confidencial by Alberto Olmos, “Olvido y muerte de Martin Amis, el escritor que lo tuvo todo”. Amis (1949-2023), known mainly for his London trilogy Money (1984), London Fields (1989) and The Information (1995), was a novelist I studiously avoided, and Olmos nails it when he says that what complicates his literary legacy is his “overwhelming masculinity” (“apabullante musculinidad”). The obituaries I am reading these days are all indeed by male critics, writers and readers. They are celebratory of the author’s achievement, but also nostalgic of a past time: that in which, as Olmos notes, rock-star male writers were treated as literary royalty in ways they no longer are. Olmos concludes that Martin Amis will be less revered in the literary history books than his father and oedipal literary rival, Kingsley Amis (1922-95), but I think he is wrong: both will be forgotten eventually, for the literary world no longer belongs to men.
Amis was involved in a number of literary scandals, but one that seems most significant in gender terms is his being denied a place in the Booker Prize shortlist of 1989 because fellow novelists Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, both members of the jury, strongly objected to the treatment of the female characters in London Fields. According to the prize director then, Martyn Goff, Gee and McNeil were outnumbered two to three but their point of view prevailed against the wishes of the jury’s chairman, David Lodge. “Maggie and Helen”, Goff recalls, “felt that Amis treated women appallingly in the book. That is not to say they thought books which treated women badly couldn’t be good, they simply felt that the author should make it clear he didn’t favour or bless that sort of treatment”. I understand their position (unfair as it is) but I should clarify that what has always put me off reading Amis’s work are not the female characters but the impression gathered from the reviews that his treatment of the male characters is even worse. His protagonist in Money is a man called John Self, do I need to say more? I thank male novelists for being so candid about the worst excesses of men’s nature, but their novels are no longer my first reading option and I don’t think they are for many readers today.
The only novel I have read by Amis is Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence (1991), which caught my attention when I was looking for human monsters for a chapter in my doctoral dissertation. This is a short, compact, astonishing novel which tells backwards the life of one Odilo Unverdorben (‘unspoilt’), whom me meet as a retired doctor in the USA. The novel which relentlessly leads towards Unverdorben’s birth as an innocent baby is very powerful in that it forces you to consider when exactly a man may take the wrong turn and end up aiding a villain like Dr. Mengele.
My copy of Time’s Arrow is signed, which I treasure. That’s a book I will not give away as I have done with so many others. I attended more than two decades ago a presentation of one of Amis’s books, I forget which one, at the British Council in Barcelona, the place where publisher Jorge Herralde would parade his Anagrama ‘dream team’. Amis spent the whole presentation insisting that there were no interesting novelists any more and we should read the classics. I was puzzled by why a writer trying to sell his own book would berate his peers in a such a thorough way, and very cheekily I asked him as he signed my copy of Time’s Arrow, “Mr. Amis, if, as you say, we should only read the classics, why should I buy your books?” Accepting graciously my stupefying impertinence, he replied “you look like a gambler, I’m sure you like taking chances” (or similar words, I’m sure he used the word ‘gambler’). Until this day, whenever I select a new book I think back to that moment and tell myself, ‘ok, let’s gamble’, this is what Amis told me I like. I certainly do. With him, I gambled again in two more occasions: I loved his short story collection Einstein’s Monsters (1987), on the risk of nuclear warfare, and his review collection The War Against Cliché (2001), one of the best books of its type I’ve ever read. Amis had an amazingly lucid mind.
I’ve mentioned Anagrama and Jorge Herralde (1935-), the man who gave us, Spanish readers, the ‘dream team’. In a piece published in Lateral (2001), Herralde recalls that he borrowed the nickname of the 1992 US Olympic basketball team (later applied to Johann Cruyff’s Barça football team), to apply it to a group of brilliant English novelists: Julian Barnes (1946), Ian McEwan (1948), Martin Amis (1949), Graham Swift (1949), Kazuo Ishiguro (1954) and Hanif Kureishi (1954). He started publishing them in 1980 (Ian McEwan’s First Love/Primer amor), adding the last name to the team in 1992 (with Swift’s Waterland/El país del agua). Herralde explains he knew about all these writers through British magazine Granta, famous for having launched the idea of the Granta generation of writers (the ‘dream team’ were, Kureishi excepted, part of the 1983 generation). Herralde does mention the Instituto Británico as the place where their presentations would happen. He mentions as the ‘younger brothers’ of the dream team six other male British authors: Nick Hornby (1958), Michael Faber (1960), Jonathan Coe (1961), Irvine Welsh (1961), John Lanchester (1962) and Lawrence Norfolk (1963). And, yes, I was there to listen to all of them, and have signed copies of some of their books. Amis is the first of the dream team to pass away, and I feel with Alberto Olmos that this is meaningful beyond the author’s career.
Herralde invented a concept that shaped the way English fiction was understood in Spain. His instincts were right (Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017), but I see in retrospect that his author selection is, quoting Olmos again, overwhelmingly male. And Martin Amis was a central part of that discourse (or approach), being a writer struggling to outdo his highly respected novelist father, Kingsley. When I was an undergrad, we were all taught about Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, developed in his eponymous 1973 volume. According to Bloom, all writers fought to overcome the crippling anxiety felt when they compared themselves to the writers of the past they most admired. Martin Amis seemed to be a total embodiment of this anxiety as a writer trying to escape his father’s formidable shadow (and I know I’m not 100% fair, as his vocation was awakened by reading Jane Austen). Somehow, I find it harder to connect the anxiety of influence to women writers. Nor can I think of a female author reacting to her daughter’s work as negatively as Kingsley reacted to Martin’s.
I believe that this anxiety of influence is gone but I’m not sure this is good. I miss the literary ambition that the ‘dream team’ symbolized and, excuse me, the very masculine energy that goes with it. Today’s literary world is bland, geared towards social media impact, massive sales, awards that no longer mean anything and works that are transient. I’m not saying that writers should become martyrs to the cause of literature (I’m writing this a few days after Salman Rushdie’s reappearance after the assault that almost cost him his life), but that Amis and company pushed the envelope individually and as a group as few writers are doing today of any gender description.
Or maybe this is all just personal nostalgia. And a bit of regret. Herralde once told me I could invite any of his writers for a session in my university, but I never did. I was mortally afraid that we would bring these luminaries and nobody would turn up, or even worse, students would find them uninteresting if we inserted them in one of our classes as guests. I did that with Monica Ali (part of Granta’s 2003 generation) and it went very well, but I’ve never had any other guest writer in my class. I wonder now what Amis would have said to our students as, although he was a teacher of Creative Writing (at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester from 2007 until 2011), I don’t quite see him interacting with undergrads. There are moments when there seems to be an infinite distance between the living authors and the students, perhaps because we are so used to dealing with dead authors.
Amis has crossed that finish line now and here begins the delicate operation of checking whether his books will endure the test of time. It seems he told Ian McEwan (I think) that he wanted to leave behind a shelf full of his books, and here they are, together with my very personal impression that we still need writers of his kind: less tame, unafraid to take risks, ambitious, outspoken, great critics who know how to read their peers, demanding but also generous. Perhaps just better, if they are men, at building female characters.
Will I finally read now Money and face John Self? I don’t think so, but I’ll keep on gambling. Thank you Martin Amis.