Martin Amis: Mirror As Well as Lamp
The enduring legacy of Martin Amis would be inventing a new style of fiction, making it more spunky, revelatory, chaotic, and roaring. His turn of phrase and imagery is first-rate originality that remains hard to follow.
As Salman Rushdie said 'Only Martin Amis could write like Martin Amis'. He had the peculiar writer's voice, verve, and style.
Amis was in tabloid pages often for being an enfant terrible and literary provocateur.
Through his works, I got to know of the great literary critics, FR Leavis, CP Snow, and Northrop Frye, whose writings he devoured like a devotee.
The mix of high-brow culture, learning and erudition with everyday heady consumerism and pop fripperies and trivialities, turned him into a stylish London chronicler.
His famous friendship with Christopher Hitchens, formed in their New Statesman days during mid 1970s, thrived for decades.
Martin was in awe of his friend’s debating genius and the dialectical knack more than his writing talent( Sr. Amis once rebuffed Hitchens 'He can talk but he can’t write’.)
In today’s era of pulling up everyone from pedestal, and subjecting literary greats to microscopic scrutiny for their foibles, flaws, behaviour, and other oddball issues, Amis always paid sincere homage to his inspirations — Saul Bellow, Nabokov, as well as his father’s friend Philip Larkin (the original Lucky(Un) Jim).
The pathos, striking insight, and tenderness with which he wrote about other great writers, from Ballard to Mailer, Roth to Updike, shows that while retaining the finely discerning mind, journalistic judgment and novelistic vanity, he had no scruples in paying tribute to literary luminaries, his predecessors as well as contemporaries.
Hitchens and Amis panned each other in print but that didn’t affect their friendship the slightest. This is an admirable trait when relationships breakdown at the most tenuous deviation from a particularly hazy ideological line.
Social satire and humor is a familiar British landscape that has been over-extracted. It comes with fabricated templates that have become predictably trite – the anxious coy damsels, squires in their shires, the liveried butlers, eccentric lords, clannish intrigues, artful snobbery, or later a provincial university lecturer raging against everything around him.
Trailing behind Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, and his own father, Sir Kingsley, it was exceedingly difficult to make a mark in this genre.
Yet combining his sharp observations, rapier wit, blending the mores of 70s rock & roll culture, and abrupt social changes with his own swaggering style, and borrowing the best from his literary 'twin peaks' – Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow – he created some uniquely imaginative works.
Amis wasn't just a novelist, but an inimitable journalist, non-fiction writer, commentator, and literary critic.
At 27, he became the literary editor of New Statesman, the high-brow publication of the day.
After that, he quit journalism and didn't hold any regular job, but some of his most dazzling works include interviews and profiles, ranging from Gloria Steinem and Diana Trilling, to Truman Capote, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Stephen Spielberg, and Brian Del Palma.
He's written with a distinct panache about Madonna as well as Maradona.
Amis captured the essence of his generation and portrayed it like a rollicking roller-coaster ride that can crash any moment.
The title of his collection of essays and reviews 'War Against Cliché' serves as a clarion call to cut the clutter and emphasize on clarity, precision, and candidness.
In a 1997 obituary of Princess Diana for Time magazine, Amis wrote:
Diana was a mirror, not a lamp. You looked at her and saw your own ordinary humanity, written in lights.
Martin Amis himself was a radiant literary lamp, as well as a spotless mirror.