By the way, did I mention I was going to Ireland for a few weeks and wouldn’t be posting? No? That’s because you might be a thief and break into my flat while I’m away.
Anyway, I’m back again now. I’ll try to post more on The Pregnant Widow soon. Summary: woeful in places, bearable in others.
Oh! Been meaning to say - glad to see John Self on board w/ the Jocelyn Brooke Apprctn Society. It’s a shame that plans for proper republication went nowhere; Faber Finds has managed to get itself a piss poor rep over the last few years, & it just feels a bit sad to see a book confined there, like the look of them already generates the same ‘not interested’ vibe as a 5-for-a-pound pile of Pelicans and Penguin Modern Poets in a provincial second-hand bookshop.
Going pretty slowly with The Pregnant Widow, read another chunk of Diarmaid MacCullough’s history of the Reformation instead. Now there’s a real book.
I don’t feel bad about this. You’re not paying me. And you know what? If you did offer to pay me, I’d refuse. It would compromise my independence. I get my loving on the run.
All I’ll say for now is that Amis has mentioned Islam in The Pregnant Widow for the first time. But you know what? I am absolutely certain that he will not mention it again, nor make any ill-informed generalisations about the religion of 1.5bn people, nor introduce any two-dimensional characters just to show us HOW IT IS with Islam and allow other characters to pontificate on HOW IT IS with Islam.
Yeah, lying. You got me. It’s an article on the Guardian Books Blog, of course it ain’t interesting (apols to Billy Mills, he’s alright). Journalistic, ploddy, doesn’t really know its stuff (eg “Flannery O’Connor, the only Catholic writer acclaimed by American critics in the 20th Century”. Gotcha game’s too easy with a survey article but I think Walker Percy would break that claim) Was, however, thinking about some of this shit myself, so let’s pretend.
I find it completely strange that the operation of grace – and I mean that in a pretty limited Christian Catholic sense – in a secular world is a major theme of maybe the top three midcentury British novelists. I dig Spark and Waugh a lot, Greene not so much; but it’s odd, and frankly unhealthy, that being taken seriously in mid-century Britain did seem bound up with adopting an extreme, rigorous and kitschy form of a fading religion.
Also feel that any religious-with-a-dash-of-doubt poet automatically got taken quite seriously; fair in some cases, overestimated worth in others. CH Sisson, RS Thomas, etc. This might have happened anyway, but the Eliotic climate must’ve made it fester.
Increasingly thinking that Empson was right when he was banging on about neo-Christians – which takes in ostensibly secular authors and critics iirc– running the show and kicking hard against them. Just coz yr themes are suffering, redemption, sacrifice, doubt, doesn’t automatically make you profound or serious. You just end up puzzling and silly if there’s no gift backing it up & the reader’s going ‘jeez don’t sweat it you aren’t really going to hell’.
Is this what The Movement was for? Maybe I’ve underestimated them a little.
This might not be news to anyone. Just me wondering why swathes of the lit of mid-century Britain are so not all that.
I’m trying to help you here, Mr Amis. We’re creating buzz! Everyone’s talking about me talking about you! (I have no evidence to back that up). You look all cool and onliney, like Johnny Mnemonic, because I’m writing about you.
I really do like your work. The Pregnant Widow opens strongly; your style’s still good. But ok look, when you decide it’s time to spice up conversation with a Science Fact, even if it’s a light and jolly one, you’ve got to be careful.
‘I read something the other day,’ said Whittaker, ‘that made me warm to breasts. It made me see them in a different light. In evolutionary terms, this guy says, the breasts are there to imitate the arse.’
‘The arse?’
‘The breasts ape the arse. As an inducement to having sex face to face[…]’
It’s not your fault, since I imagine you don’t watch much TV, but it’s a really bad sign when your character’s talking points are the same as, well, 1:20 in this:
People have been worrying that there’s a conflict of interest in my Martin Amis series. “The Midnight Bell,” they say, “The Midnight Bell you conducted one of the most in-depth interviews with Amis on record; anyone can see that a close personal bond developed between the two of you over the course of it. You’re too personally invested in his to work to be a just critic.”
Now, I can see where you’re coming from. It was an important interview (I’m duklaprague, as if you needed reminding), and we were close afterwards, certainly for the rest of 95. He never really got in touch, but I always knew what he was thinking using my magic brain.
However, I believe I have always separated the man and the art (made ‘m’ and ‘art’ from Mart, if you will); and I have been among his harshest critics whenever he’s written anything substandard since, which has happened yknow let’s all be cool here but you’d have to put the dot on the graph somewhere between ‘quite often’ and ‘always’.
Wow that was a long time ago. 15 years! We were both such computer naifs then! Now, now I have a little blog and he ‘logs on’ to read Nemi each morning. How things change.
Here’s C Hitchens defending Amis from the charge of misogyny:
So far from being some jaded Casanova, Martin possesses the rare gift — enviable if potentially time-consuming — of being able to find something attractive in almost any woman. If this be misogyny, then give us increase of it.
Yeah, no. ‘He can’t be a misogynist - he wants to fuck ‘em all!’ is up there with ‘I’m not a homophobe - I’m not scared of gays’ in the annals of shit arguing.
Now, ‘misogynist’ is a bit unnuanced, but it’s still the closest thing to what we want. He’s a shockingly bad writer of women: he doesn’t seem to hate them, he just doesn’t take them very seriously as real people with wants and desires that are different from but equal to the wants and desires of a normal human being, ie a white middle-class intellectual male who likes snooker and Nabokov and is mates with James Fenton.
Amis female characters, the creative process, my best guess: “So, she’s clever. Should I give her great tits? Well, I’ve given the not-as-clever girl great tits; so naturally the cleverer girl should have worse tits. Not bad tits. That would be overdoing it. Maybe just plain good tits? For realism. No. The deep literary move is to give the cleverer girl greater tits, even though she’s not as pretty. Maybe the best tits in the world! Yes! I give her world-beating tits, a degree in moleculologic computing and she wants a baby!! EAT IT BELLOW!!! ”
Faint virtue in this: he doesn’t think women are men in disguise. Problem: not sure he thinks they’re human.
He does try, but there’s also bit of the classic misogynist-lite pattern in there, I think: start off dismissive of women, get to some point later on where you’re praising woman (essentialism!) as the great & pure nurturing principle of the universe, so much better than brutish men, etc, etc, – all the while, of c., not wondering what individual women want, enjoy, etc
The thing is, he often doesn’t seem to understand how complicated, unbasic and sophisticated the desires of men are either. He’s very good on a narrow range of male thought - let’s call it ‘thinking about tits and arses’, tataa, that’s nice - but falls back on it too much, overestimates its place in life.
Now this is sort of a tricky area, because when you say ‘no look rly, that is not what all men think about all the time’, women are justifiably ‘o yes i have heard that 1 before’, and some men are like that all the time and think you are running a number to cock-block them on that blonde (what if I am bud). AND YET I hold to the position that this is but one part of life; Amis is good at playing with it, but the obsession distorts him. Again, we’re looking at a specialist - a strong minor artist (with one masterpiece, Money that he very nearly manages to fuck with metafictional tosh).
So this part of the floorplan just says “Look, I know, agree he’s terrible at women. He’s not that great at men. He does have virtues, but if you want to ignore him, I wouldn’t say you’ll miss out on too much. I find him fascinating, but I don’t take him too seriously.”
An aside. The HOW-IT-ISism of Amis actually adds some fun to his novels for the engaged reader. Use one of the following phrases each time he makes a HOW-IT-IS observation:
• Really Mart?
• Is that so?
• You don’t say.
• What a world!
• How interesting.
• You learn something new every day.
• Nowt so queer as folk.
• lol u wise
• wat
Alternatively, treat the maxim as testable - think of counterexamples, or supporting evidence.
So, we probably need to get a few things straight if we’re talking about Martin Amis. I haven’t started reading the book yet, but I’ll spread out my general thinking-about-Mart grundrisses here.
First up, I like his novels. He’s more fun and interesting than his contemporaries. One of the best here and now.
We’ll qualify that. I don’t think it’s an impressive time or place to be a big man:
1) We’re at the arse end of the novel. tbh after I publish mine, there probably won’t be that much left to do with the form, so if anyone else out there’s written one & you’re dropping after me, might be best to rethink (maybe turn it into a tapestry? Suspect that will be the new glamour form).
2) I don’t think Britain in particular has been in great shape post-1950 or so. Minor writers abound.
So a strong, limited talent, who looks better or worse than he is depending how you squint at him.
A word on his limits. I’d say – to put it in a old-fashioned way – he has trouble reconciling the general and particular. he’s very good at the specific & the grotesque. It’s not just the characters he draws - he also likes lists, strange words, odd names, lots of environmental detail. Not terrific on visual images, but metaphorically inventive. He’s an absolutely rotten generaliser, though, a rotten generaliser who just can’t stop pontificating and pronouncing. He tries to shift it off onto his characters, but you know he just loves telling you HOW IT IS. Sometimes it’s funny; sometimes it’s a bit airline-peanuts; sometimes it’s a flat bore.
The vice, as ever, is related to a virtue – the confidence behind the opining bolsters or drives his style. Really, it’s just what you’d call ‘having a strong voice’. But it also cripples his range. He doesn’t really have an imagination for other people because he want to think of HOW-IT-IS things to say about them as soon as he’s imagined them.
His characters tend to come from a limited palette - clever oik, stupid oik, 2-D cruel posh boy, supersexygirl, sexygirl w/ degree (it seems to be built from a simple arithmetic of class/sex/brains) - and they tend to turn out either HOW-IT-IS maxims or dinner-party gobbets from the last issue of New Scientist when given space on the page.
The lust for HOW-IT-ISism leaves him very prone to ‘men drive like this, women drive like this’ essentialism.
