Martin Amis was undoubtedly a hero of my young adulthood and literary apprenticeship. But unlike the other heroes of that time in my life—Orwell, Koestler, Hazlitt, say—it wasn't because I sensed any deep kinship with Amis in his moral and political sensibilities. To the contrary, I often felt far removed from him in those domains. The main reason he became a paragon to me was simply that he is such outrageous good fun to read.
I couldn't explain the science behind it, but for some reason every page of prose Amis ever wrote sends reward chemicals directly into my brain. Which is partly why I haven't read every one of those pages yet—I have to save something to tide me over in my old age.
Partly because I found Amis at that earlier time in my life, I will always think of him as a young man's author; indeed, as a young man himself—even though he died two years ago at the age of 73. And "with [him] went / large part of my / youth," to borrow a phrase from Bukowski.
Part of the reason Amis is such an emblem of my youth and young adulthood is his direct lineal kinship to that other literary titan of my teenage years: Kingsley Amis, Amis père—specifically the Kingsley Amis of the Lucky Jim phase of his career.
The works of the later stages of the elder Amis's evolution—after his reactionary turn—were forbidden to me at that time, of course; I was at an age when I tended to divide authors into sheep and goats based solely on their politics (a strategy that helped me greatly to winnow down what was otherwise becoming an unwieldy reading list). And so—the later phase of Kingsley's career was out—but Lucky Jim, written when he was still a Communist Party member in good standing, was in.
And the narrator of Lucky Jim seemed to offer me a stance, an attitude—a paradoxical mix of intellectual philistinism and left-wing boorishness—that struck me at the time as exactly the pose I wanted to take to life, as I both sought to embark upon an intellectual career and hold myself above the rest of the tribe. Like many young people, I felt myself the only authentic one in a world of insincere toffs—the one Jim Dixon surrounded by hordes of Bertrands.
(This pose—as I have remarked before somewhere—did not last for long. Eventually I was forced to concede that I was one of the toffs and always had been.)
So, in my literary apprenticeship—of the two Amises, Kingsley came first. And it was in part because of his politics (at least the politics he professed as a young man).
His son Martin Amis came later for me—and, in his case, it was not because of his politics but in spite of them. After all, probably the first thing I ever knew about Martin Amis came from an unfortunate incident in the Bush years, when he made some crudely sweeping, unfair, and racist comment about Muslims in the wake of 9/11. Terry Eagleton denounced him for it, and Amis later sort-of-kind-of walked back the remarks.
Anyone might think this was a one-off; but I increasingly think it's indicative of Amis's whole political stance. I don't just mean that the racist comment was characteristic of Amis; but the desire to apologize for it and tuck it away was too.
Reading his collection of journalism and literary interviews from the 1980s, The Moronic Inferno, this past week, I came across an incident involving Diana Trilling that seemed to prefigure his later encounter with Eagleton. Amis confesses that, when seated at table next to her, he made "an incautious remark—illiberal in tendency—an undergraduate remark," which provokes Trilling to slam down her tea cup in disgust and outrage.
Amis doesn't tell us what the remark was; but he confesses that he was clearly in the wrong. He says that Trilling gave him the impression—not of someone who was over-sensitive to breaches of political correctness—but simply of someone who was "intellectually vigilant."
"In her company you are obliged to move up a gear," writes Amis. "[Y]ou must weed out your lazier, sloppier thoughts (like the one that had briefly incensed her[).]"
It seems, then, that we are beginning to discern a pattern. Amis feels the need to let slip certain "illiberal" remarks from time to time—but he also admits that they are "lazy" and "sloppy" once he is called out on them; he is not prepared to defend them overtly. This seems to be precisely what happened again decades later—in his encounter with Eagleton.
In his work—Amis often seems to find himself in this role; indeed, it may be his defining one. He is someone who—by virtue of education, upbringing in the bosom of literary Bohemia, and social position—writer of literary articles for the New Statesman and the Observer, etc.—must by default be on the Left. Yet, he gives the impression of someone who is always trying to squirm and wriggle out of the stifling embrace of the Left as much as possible. He is constantly pushing boundaries to see how much he can get away with, without being disowned. But he also does not want to be rejected entirely; he will always come home, if actual banishment threatens.
As Amis's protagonist Richard Tull explains his attitude to politics in The Information:
Yeah: of course Gwyn was Labour. It was obvious. [...] Obvious because Gwyn was what he was, a writer, in England, at the end of the twentieth century. There was nothing else for such a person to be. Richard was Labour, equally obviously. It often seemed to him, moving in the circles he moved in and reading what he read, that everyone in England was Labour, except the government.
And in his role of satirist, Amis often has fun poking at the discomforts and awkwardnesses that come from being a person with the occasional, stray conservative or un-PC thought living in a social world that is liberal, Labour, and leftist by default.
A characteristic scene that comes to mind: In his various attempts to destroy his literary rival in The Information, Richard Tull resorts at one point to trying to badmouth him in front of a scholar of criminal justice reform, who is serving as judge at a literary prize-giving ceremony. The scholar in question is a man of impeccable liberal credentials—a man who believes in rehabilitation rather than retribution, and all the rest of it. So, Tull thinks that, by insinuating that his literary rival holds reactionary views on the subject, he can torpedo his reputation in this scholar's eyes.
But what Tull doesn't realize is that this scholar—despite his public liberal pose—secretly yearns for the brutal punishment of criminals, the return of the stocks and the whipping post; and so—Tull's words backfire, and only manage to succeed in further endearing his literary rival to the scholar.
How often was Amis himself in the role of that scholar; to what extent was he talking about his own political Id—trapped in an officially left-leaning pose, but always looking for ways to rattle the bars of the cage?
By the looks of the essays in The Moronic Inferno, the answer is: quite a lot. Indeed, Amis's standard approach to social issues in these essays is to declare his loyalty to some liberal piety, then mock it lightly, then admit some of the sneaking ways in which he doesn't actually believe in it.
In his essay on Gloria Steinem, for instance—he doesn't really even attempt to hide his discomfort with the feminist movement. Yet—at the same time—he remains officially open to the possibility that the ambivalence is due to a failing in him, rather than in the subject of his profile. He admits that actively opposing feminism, no matter how uncomfortable it makes him, would be to "disqualify [him]self as a moral contender"—on the order of "espousing a return to slavery."
Likewise—in his essays on Reagan and the Evangelical Right—he knows he has to sneer at the Falwell brigade. And he does not disappoint—he gives us many good chuckles at the expense of their philistinism and ignorance. But then, at end of the essay, he reveals that he sees where they're coming from. He can't get behind their Bronze Age theology; but he also admits that he shares their disapproval of a great deal of what's happening in modern urban society, and does not find the "humanist package" of modern liberalism a fully satisfying solution to it.
Indeed, it's interesting to see how often in these early essays Amis comes across as something of a moralist. We tend to think of him as a rather louche character—a great excavator and chronicler of seediness and depravity—a modern-day boulevardier who gave us that inimitable creation "John Self," after all. But it seems from these essays that this obsession with the modern urban demimonde was motivated as much by disgust as by fascination.
(Perhaps this paradoxical attitude is no more than typical of the young; just look at that early work of Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero—in which the supposed arch-chronicler of '80s decadence actually comes across as a nostalgic sentimentalist. Or watch a movie like 1999's Cruel Intentions—denounced in its era for its supposed debauchery, but which comes across to us now as crudely moralistic, in a typically black-and-white adolescent style.)
Much as with his attitude to feminism, Martin Amis knows that his position within the literary intelligentsia prescribes that he has to be publicly tolerant of homosexuality (he profiles Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, in this essay collection, after all.) But he also makes clear that his heart is not entirely in the same place as his head on this issue. I believe him when he tells us that his essay on the AIDs crisis was well-received in the gay community. No doubt, it was more sympathetic and less alarmist than a great deal else that was being written on the subject at the time. But, reading it today, the essay is more revealing for what it shows about Amis's ambivalence toward gay people than for his empathy with them. Amis also seems to plump for since-discarded theories of the disease, which see it as at least in part exacerbated by gay lifestyles (a debunked conspiracy theory that our current HHS director appears to want to rehabilitate).
Indeed, Amis's real cultural affinities seem to lie with Saul Bellow's almost-apocalyptic vision of moral decay and social degeneration. He believes in the Decline of the West; even as he knows there is good reason not to. He consciously rejects the "myth of decline—the elegiac vision"—while simultaneously saying it "has never looked less like a myth and more like reality."
It seems doubly unfair, then, when he criticizes Joan Didion (whom he contemptuously and patronizingly insists on referring to as "Miss Didion," even though he does not bestow a title or form of address on any other writer he is reviewing) for adopting the same attitude. He notes that she takes the title of her essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem from Yeats's apocalyptic vision, "The Second Coming," and then sneers at Didion for supposedly not realizing that Yeats cannot have been right—since he penned the poem decades earlier, and the world had not yet imploded. "The center hasn't been holding for quite some time now," Amis scolds. But the same rejoinder could be offered to his own view—which he admittedly advances only surreptitiously and with public disavowals as he does so—that the world of the 1980s had become uniquely decadent and depraved.
(This essay is just one of several places in the collection in which Amis—in his criticisms of other authors and artists—seems subtly to be telling on himself. In a critical essay on the films of Brian De Palma—for instance—he writes that "Style will always convince cinematic purists that the surface they admire contains depth," which is a fair point as applied to De Palma (many of whose Hitchcockian thrillers are deeply silly, despite looking gorgeous). But has the same not been suspected of Amis himself—that is, has his incredible verbal dexterity not likewise been said to belie a fundamental lack of seriousness or of having anything actually important to say in his fiction? That mere "patina of smartness" that Amis attributes to De Palma has certainly been attributed to Amis in turn.)
Is all of this ambivalence on Amis's part a bad thing? Or is it a relatively honest way of being, in the modern world? Amis—like the rest of us—had a political Id. Maybe it was even a worse Id than many possess; and he often did not trouble to hide it. He let it show—in various of those "incautious remarks—illiberal in tendency" that Diana Trilling had no trouble scenting out for what they were.
But Amis also had a political superego. He knew that many of the liberal pieties had become orthodox because they were morally and logically correct. However annoying and unforgiving in their correctness they might be—the fact of their correctness was inescapable. And Amis didn't try to escape them either, as we have seen. He was always willing to have his Id reined in at the right moment by the Diana Trillings or Terry Eagletons of the world.
It seems to me that this is a better way of navigating the moral ambivalence of modern life than the more recent approaches we have adopted as a society. Surely we all learned from the experience of peak cancel culture in 2020—and from the subsequent hijacking of our public culture by the fascist reaction to this period—that simply trying to suppress and stifle the political Id does not work. The Id does not disappear under this treatment. It merely retreats underground—where it mutates in order to survive.
An intellectual atmosphere of the one Amis occupied in the 1980s—by contrast—where the Id can be acknowledged, trotted out, glibly apologized for, disavowed in moments of high-minded lucidity, but also admitted to have its say for the element of truth (and there always is such an element) it contains—seems far healthier than what happened to us in the early 2020s.
Amis's ambivalent moralism is particularly refreshing when he comes to survey the unsavory aspects of the personal histories of some of the American literary giants of the mid-to-late twentieth century. The Moronic Inferno collection is, among other things, a grab-bag of literary gossip from the period. All the famous tabloid moments of the lives of the famous authors of the era make an appearance—William F. Buckley's threat to "sock" Gore Vidal in the face (after using a slur); the Hellman-McCarthy feud, etc.
And what becomes dreary and awful about these episodes—all gathered together in one place—is how monotonous they actually are: Norman Mailer stabbing his wife; William Burroughs killing his own with a William Tell–game gone wrong. The attitude of the hip intellectuals at the time to these misogynistic atrocities was supposed to be one of trend-setting amoralism; the prerogative of the artist knows no bounds.
Amis's willingness, by contrast, to admit that he is appalled, serves—in such a context—as a refreshing antidote to this hipster callousness. He doesn't let it pass unnoticed that a worshipful literary study of William S. Burroughs consigns the death—possibly murder—of his wife to a mere parenthesis. Nor does he fail to notice when another literary hipster seeks to enlist our sympathies for the knife-wielding Mailer, saying that the incident "almost killed him—or actually, Adele."
With examples like these before us, we begin to understand that perhaps Amis was right to feel ambivalent about some of the hipster-left excesses of his age. There was enough depravity going around that one can indeed understand why Amis would feel some repugnance toward "radical chic" and the "sophistries of the Sixties"—as he denounces them in these pages; and why the program of cultural progressives in the late twentieth century—the mantra that one need only loosen all restraints and inhibitions and repressions, in order for a great flowering of eros and love to sweep away all injustice—would strike him as inadequate; indeed, perhaps, "moronic".
It strikes us today that way too—and indeed, much of the Left of the Sixties now seems as alien and incomprehensible to the Left of today—if not more so—than the hesitating and questioning conservative impulses that Amis occasionally allowed himself to entertain.
I don't regret his political Id, then. I'm glad he was willing to show it to us.
I'm just also glad he was willing in good faith to accept correction from the Diana Trillings of the world. That second piece of the inner dialectic is the one in which our modern-day self-declared "contrarians"—and supposed "heterodox" intellectuals of our age—so often seem to be missing. The Id may have its place; but the Id without a liberal Superego to superintend it is how we get unmixed political evil—of the sort that now occupies the White House.
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